The Night Following (13 page)

That wasn’t all. It wasn’t exactly a worry now, because with her in the family way Stan never laid a finger on her, but what about afterward, with Mrs. Ashworth sleeping next door and the walls so thin? They should be looking to find a place of their own. But Stan wouldn’t face that, either. Soon they’d be able to manage the rent on a small place, she kept telling him, but he wouldn’t listen, or he’d start spouting rubbish picked up from his daft meetings. He’d showed her a pamphlet written by Alan O’Reilly and a few others. She hadn’t understood a word of it, so Stan had explained. All that wanting a house and a few sticks of furniture to call your own was being oppressed, apparently. As long as she allowed herself to be manipulated into aping bourgeois materialist values, especially notions of private ownership, all she was doing was colluding in her own subjugation. It was capitalist forces, whose sole purpose was to bolster the bosses’and the landlords’and the government’s profits, that were manipulating her into thinking she had to sell her labor in order to acquire personal goods and live according to repressive bourgeois norms, forever yoked to the system. It wasn’t what she really wanted.

Well, she really had switched off when he’d come out with all that, but not before saying that in her opinion it was a lot of nonsense, just a lot of big words trying to tell her she didn’t know her own mind, and if Stan was falling for all that he was a bigger fool than she’d taken him for. Not that she’d lost her temper. In a quiet voice, just before he had stormed off to the pub, she had added that she didn’t recall agreeing to join any ruddy class struggle, least of all on Alan O’Reilly’s side of it, and that was her last word on the subject.

She was roused suddenly from her thoughts by noise and shouting, and rushed downstairs.

Mrs. Ashworth was a heavy woman. When her foot had landed on the parcel of sausages on the floor of the passage, she’d skidded and fallen and twisted her ankle. Evelyn helped Stan get her up and seated in the front room, trying to close her ears to the tirade of complaints flowing between the pair of them. Stan went off to get Mrs. Flint four doors down, who worked at the Infirmary, to come and have a look at the injury, while Evelyn, with a sinking heart, went to scrape the squashed raw sausages off the linoleum in the hallway.

   I made the shed mine. I brought blankets and cushions, enough to keep me quite comfortable, though not so comfortable that I might fall asleep. I liked the walls of the place, the hard beads of pine amber and the scorched gashes and knots in the wood, and I liked Ruth’s damp floral folding chairs hung on hooks and her spidery gardening gloves discarded and hardened into casts of her tired, curved hands. But the resiny smell of the timbers and the candle-smoky damp that made its way into the peppery blankets felt like mine. There was an outside tap nearby, so I considered getting a little spirit stove and a kettle, and perhaps one of those camping heaters, but then I realized that these would make the place too bright. Sometimes I lit a tea light or two but, like Arthur, I was happiest sitting in the dark.

He never drew a curtain at the back of the house, nor pulled a blind nor closed doors between rooms. He spent a lot of time upstairs, moving clothes and books and bundles of paper around. Then he started going up and down to the attic, too, via a folding ladder hauled down from the ceiling onto the landing. I could see the bottom of it slanting across the doorway of the bedroom that was full of luggage and clothes. That was a worry to me. Whenever I saw his feet, one splayed on the ladder and the other swimming in midair trying to make the next rung, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. My heart would pound while I counted the seconds; sometimes it would take him four minutes to manage the first three steps. It was worse when he got higher and disappeared altogether. All I could do then was watch the foot of the ladder, dreading that the next thing I would see would be a flailing bundle of limbs tumbling down into a broken heap. Even if I could have heard him call out I wouldn’t have been in time to prevent that.

So I would wait, counting, and there were times I was out of my chair ready to go to him—once I was even setting out across the grass—before I would see a pale blue flash from the attic skylight. Then at least I knew he had made it as far as the light switch. The strip of fluorescent light would tremble and blink and grow steady, and I would settle down to watch.

But that he had got himself up there was all I knew. I had to carry on watching because what I couldn’t tell from the shadows as they moved across the skylight was whether he was clambering around on a solid floor or wobbling from joist to joist on those spindly legs of his. I was afraid if I let my attention falter his whole weight might land on some frail partition of gypsum and plaster and he would plunge to the floor below.

I did wonder what was up there that could occupy him for two and three hours at a time. I imagined an Aladdin’s cave where he went to gloat every night, but it could hold only a hoarded treasure of sorts; I couldn’t believe that any attic of Ruth’s would harbor secrets, not of any priceless or desperate kind, anyway. Probably there was just the usual junk: broken furniture, pictures and ornaments out of favor, and the props of outgrown hobbies and earlier lives: books, busted rackets, albums, photographs. Whatever it was, he seemed to be going through it all, though he seemed only to bring down papers and books. Or to be more accurate, threw, from the top of the ladder onto the landing. I was relieved he didn’t try to climb down with his arms full.

I would worry that in such a confined space he might have only something precarious to sit on, and what if he fell asleep and slid off his chair and hurt himself that way? Or I worried that he would fatigue himself and set off down the ladder too worn out to be careful, his joints stiff and his eyes dim after reading under that brash light. And what if he was sitting up there hour after hour, crying? What if he fell down the ladder and broke in pieces because his eyes were sore and blinded by tears?

I was always relieved when I saw the attic light go out and his legs appearing at the base of the ladder. He would straighten and steady himself on the floor. Then he would move, shuffling and hesitating in one doorway or another, a silhouette of a man stranded on thresholds he no longer knew. Most often he would wander into the luggage room, lifting a hand to the switch as he entered and turning off the light so that he walked into blackness. Even though I would be expecting it, I always felt abruptly shut out when the house went dark like that. If I had a tea light burning I immediately blew it out so that my darkness was the same as his. I liked the paraffin smell of the first curls of smoke from the snuffed wick.

And I would carry on watching the black window because I knew he would be standing there, looking out. Few sounds reached into the shed from outside, so I would hear my chair creak as I pulled a blanket around myself, and settled. Arthur would be listening, too, I was certain, to his own breathing. His house would be quietly alive with the noises all houses make, and maybe the place seemed to him bigger and emptier, and those distant, lapping sounds from walls and pipes and floors louder, because she was no longer there. Perhaps he talked to her while he stood at the window. I wondered if he sensed her still in the house, or beyond it, somewhere out in the darkness. It was possible, of course, that he considered that the burial of her body really was the end of it. But if she was simply perished, and nowhere at all, would that mean she was now free, or somehow exiled? I would have liked to know if he pictured her still as she used to be, or if he imagined a changed appearance for her in some new existence as a spirit; there’s all the difference in the world.

Why is it easier to imagine that the dead might be waiting for us in darkness rather than in the light? For a while after my great-uncle died I cried every bedtime, terrified to go to sleep in case he was now a ghost and came visiting to take me to task for my part in his death. My grandmother told me that all you had to do to get rid of a ghost was to make a loud noise. She would make me cry “Away with you!”and clap my hands until I laughed.
She
had never been frightened of ghosts, she said, and I knew from the way she could smile in an empty room that that was true. But I also knew something she didn’t: that the dead never are quite away, never absolutely gone. They’re still there, caught in the very act of parting from us, betrayed by a swaying curtain of falling snow, by a movement behind a white sheet, by some trickery of sunlight and shadow. And imperfectly though their leave-taking may be enacted, yet it is quiet and quick and you could miss it in the taking of a breath, and then you wouldn’t know the road they took for they leave no clue where they are going; you would be left staring, hoping for a single last trace. But I clapped my hands and laughed just the same, and watched my grandmother smile.

Soon enough, anyway, I was burdened by other knowledge, on top of the shoplifting and the ghosts, that I couldn’t let my grandmother share. She knitted every afternoon for the Society for the Relief of Blind Orphans Overseas. I didn’t understand why the blind orphans overseas should find relief in socks and scarves and mittens particularly, though I worked out for myself that it must be for reasons to do with blindness or orphanhood that were more compelling than the overseas-ness; overseas meant a hot climate, surely too hot for hand-knitted woollies. I also wondered how she knew their sizes, and her telling me the things were sent off to Sales of Work never quite explained it.

One day she finished another baby matinée set—jacket, bonnet, and bootees—in a rather upsetting brown flecked with green, a color difficult to imagine on any baby but since the blind orphan one overseas couldn’t mind I supposed the people looking after him wouldn’t, either. On my way upstairs a day or two later, I passed my mother’s bedroom. The door was ajar; I glanced in and saw, facedown on the bed, a human head. I let out a shriek, but I couldn’t drag my eyes away. It couldn’t be a head! I stared, and after a moment I could see that it wasn’t. It was a wig, an ugly, dark, curly wig. But before I’d begun to ask myself why my mother would have such a thing, I took a step nearer and saw what it really was: a heap of brown wool flecked with green. A single strand snaked out of it and wiggled across the bed into what was left of a forlorn and tiny sleeve.

Why hadn’t I noticed? I’d seen the color before; the wool had been socks to begin with, at least twice. My mother was unraveling the orphans’knitting and giving my grandmother the same yarn back to knit up again. I didn’t know why, and in the rush of sadness I felt for the orphans (and not for my grandmother, who seemed to blame, somehow) I didn’t really wonder. How long had they been going without? was all I could think. What would become of them now, orphaned, blind, overseas, and suddenly without their woollies?

After that I would come home from school to find my grandmother knitting the same thing she had made the week before and the week before that. I said nothing. Not knowing the point of my mother’s trickery deprived me of a good reason for exposing it, and as time went on and my curiosity grew, so did my fear of asking for an explanation. At some point I must have concluded that my mother was simply saving herself the cost of new yarn, but by then it was too late. Her deception had become mine also, and I sustained it with fervent and egotistical guilt.

When my grandmother’s memory for complicated stitchwork abandoned her and she grew impatient with the intricacies of sleeves and heels and collars, she turned to knitting scarves. My mother would give her the “new”wool in two or three bags, telling her it was red and green and yellow or blue and yellow and pink. Good, everyone likes stripes, my grandmother would say. She would work twenty rows from each bag in turn, smiling as a monotone gray or brown scarf grew from her waggling needles. She would let me choose the color for the fringe, and in a loud, formal voice I would pretend to consider the green, the yellow, or the pink, my heart lopsided with tenderness and shame.

By the time I was nine I was concealing so much that keeping even direr truths from her was routine. I covered my mother’s increasingly prolonged absences by mentioning in passing that she was very tired again, just resting in bed. When she sobered up enough to put in bilious and remorseful appearances at mealtimes I unleashed irritating streams of talk to hide the fact that she was too hungover to speak. Sitting between them, I looked from my mother’s pouchy, stupefied face to my grandmother’s, beaming sightlessly upon her golden girl, and I’d prattle on about nothing. When I came across empty bottles I got them past my grandmother and out to the bin quietly, without one ticking against another. Whatever the weather, every morning I opened windows all over the house hoping that enough new air would freeze out the pall of drink.

After a time the reasons for trying to keep my mother’s condition secret didn’t cross my mind. Concealment of one kind or another was to me by then a form of good manners, a necessary protective kindness; it progressed from being second nature to becoming my very nature. Because of it, I never could have grown up to be anything other than watchful and cautious. I never could have done otherwise than keep the distance from other people that enabled me to see dangers that they, more engaged in events, might not, and to prevent scenes that would upset them. This was the person I was, or believed myself to be, until that day in April.

Eventually, as I watched, poor Arthur would leave the bedroom window and wander downstairs, through the kitchen and into the conservatory. Once or twice early on he watered the plants there, stroking their leaves and inclining his head to them as if he were petting small living creatures. For a while after that he took to just sitting on a wicker chair, staring, and soon he was bringing papers in with him and would sit reading for hours at a time. I had the impression he read the same things over and over again. Sometimes he wrote.

He ate and drank, although very little. He would swallow milk straight from the carton, and then leave it half-full on the conservatory ledge where the sun would beat down on it all the following day. The next night or two nights later he might stir from his reading, wander across, and down whatever was left. I saw him bring in food and stand there eating with both hands. He seldom used a plate, but if he did he’d leave it behind. If he was forking something into his mouth out of a can, he would drop both can and fork on the floor when he had finished, as if he’d forgotten he was holding them. It mattered to me to know if he was eating canned food cold that should have been heated up, such as baked beans or soup, or if he was not neglecting himself quite so badly and was gorging on something like tuna or sweet corn. Once I saw him, in silhouette, digging with his fingers into something very small and oblong; it must have been a can of sardines. When he’d sucked each finger one by one he lifted the can to his lips and tipped his head back. My stomach heaved at the thought of his tongue questing into the corners. Those edges are lethal. I started to my feet and moaned, feeling the metal slice into his tongue, seeing bright red marbling appear across its coating of thick yellow oil, and run down and stain his lips. I could taste the tinny little plumes of blood mixing with his mouth juices all cloudy with fish scales and crumbs of bone as soft as pumice. I waited to hear him cry out. But all he did was drop the can and calmly wipe his mouth on his sleeve.