CAROLINE HELD THE door open, listening to the keys make that gentle clink-clank as they hung from the lock. He pushed past her and she could smell the peculiar odour he gave off now: puberty and a state institution. As he crossed the threshold, his too-small shoes leaving mud on the new welcome mat (she’d thrown out the one exhorting a universal power to “Bless this mess”), the house seemed to sigh.
Then again, maybe it was her, but she couldn’t remember the air leaving her lungs.
Then again it might have been the heating system as it puffed out warmth.
“Coke?” she asked, following him down the long hallway. “Or hot chocolate? Crisps? Marshmallows? I baked your favourite biscuits. They’re not hot but I can warm them in the microwave. There’s a cake, too. Banana. Or—or—what would you like?”
She knew she was overcompensating, had schooled herself not to during the weeks and months, but he was back in the house not five minutes and already she was failing. She reached out and touched his face.
It was a mistake. The feeling against her palm, the slight sweatiness, the burgeoning pimples beneath the skin, combined to make her shudder. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“It’s fine, Mum. I’m going to my room.”
Simon hadn’t called her that in months, not since the trial started. Not since Geoffrey had his heart attack and told her as she sat by his hospital bed that he didn’t think he could continue with, well, everything. Turning up at the court every day, dodging and weaving reporters and cameras, listening to their son’s legal reps talk and excuse and obfuscate. It was all lies, he’d said. They both knew it.
She could have the house. And the money.
(It’s mine anyway, she wanted to say, but didn’t. It always was.)
He had to go, he’d said. For his health.
Then she had to tell their son what his father had decided—that he was opting out of the family. Men never like to clean up their own mess, she’d thought at the time as she’d watched a light go out in him. His answers had whittled themselves down to monosyllables. He stopped referring to his father. Stopped calling her “Mum”, or indeed anything but “her”.
Ask her, he’d say to the barrister. Avoiding her gaze.
Caroline thought her eyes should probably be misty, a little heated with some kind of emotional response, but there was nothing. Oh well. Perhaps it would come later, when they got used to each other once more.
“Okay,” she said belatedly. He was already gone, disappeared up the stairs, closing the door. She walked into the sitting room, which was directly beneath his room and listened.
A few steps as he walked from one wall to the next, stopped at the desk, the bookshelves, the wardrobe (she heard the creak of its hinges), then to his bed. She’d left his presents on the duvet, neatly stacked—he’d missed his thirteenth birthday in all the chaos. There was the whump as he sat down, then the double thud of his shoes hitting the floor. Then a steady series of noises as each carefully wrapped gift followed the footwear. Finally, silence.
She stood beneath him for a while, then turned to one of the front windows and tweaked back the edge of the long cream-coloured curtains. Through the wrought bars of the fence she couldn’t see anything but cars parked in the street, the houses opposite, each like hers, tidy, fenced, tall, manicured gardens, quietly comfortable. No one. No reporters. No yelling at the house, no trying to get into the yard, no knocking at the door, no flashbulbs blinding Caroline before she learned not to open it for them. In a deep, damned part of her soul she was grateful for the bombings that had made her son old news.
She took a deep breath and headed towards the kitchen.
The frozen foods aisle seemed colder than usual. Or maybe it was the collection of eyes boring into her back that were giving Caroline the chills. She reached into the freezer and pulled out ice cream (vanilla), a chicken (medium), then packets of peas, beans, carrots and chips. They all made a metallic sound as they hit the bottom of the trolley.
She’d left Simon sleeping; a note on the table gave him strict instructions not to leave the house and not to open the door to anyone. But she’d had to go out, had to stock up—two days home and he’d eaten most everything she had. That was what he did now: eat and play computer games in his room. Soon she would have to talk to him about school. He’d have to return to the world, but that was fraught with complications. They would have to move, she thought. A new house, a new town, a new life. Maybe she’d dye his hair, have it cut so he didn’t look like the boy on the news reports. Mind you, if he kept eating this way, it wouldn’t be an issue. Her son would disappear beneath layers of fat and be cleverly camouflaged by his own body.
She couldn’t think about all those details now, so she did what she could, which was to reach out and load up on cheeses, yoghurt, custard and milk. As she turned, fighting the trolley’s recalcitrant wheels, she looked up and saw them. The herd.
Twelve housewives, nearly identicaclass="underline" corduroy trousers in greens and browns, sharply pressed collared shirts under V-neck sweaters in various hues, with barely-worn Barbour jackets and scarves hanging loose around necks that showed signs of wrinkling. Caroline knew them—she’d been one of them herself, once.
It wasn’t hatred, precisely, that they were staring at her, nothing so strong, nothing so moral. It was just a kind of intense distaste: her dirty laundry had been aired very publicly. All the nasty domestic worms had poked their heads out of the shit-stirred soil of her home. They could look down on her…but it was something more. She made them nervous. She’d been a carbon copy—her fall made them feel exposed, vulnerable. There but for the grace of God go I and so on. Caroline’s son had made them afraid of their own children.
Now, people stared at them and associated them with her. Their neat, tidy houses, highly financial husbands, over-achieving children, all held up to scrutiny by the lower orders. Caroline almost smiled; then did. Waved and resisted the urge to walk up to them and chatter inanely about scone recipes or some such. She knew she looked manic, the smile pinned to her lips, eyes fever-bright.
She made her way to the junk food aisle and began to stack brightly packaged carbohydrates and preservatives into the trolley. The more she bought now, she reasoned, the less often she’d have to come back.
At the checkout, the spotty teen ignored her for a while, grabbing items in a podgy hand with chewed nails and chipped pink polish and dragging them over the scanner, then tossing them behind where an equally spotty boy jammed the items into bags. Eggs beneath tins of ham and tomatoes, bread beneath frozen things. When the girl finally looked up to mumble the total, Caroline could almost see the cogs in the brain wake and haltingly turn themselves; could almost hear the grinding. She watched as the blood-shot eyes widened and the lips trembled, the bottom one dropping open like a drawbridge on a slow timer. The girl stammered; she fumbled with Caroline’s credit card; dropped the docket; stared and stared and stared.
The bag boy didn’t look up.
As Caroline packed the food into the back of the Land Rover, she felt as if she was being watched. Expecting one of the mums brigade, she straightened and looked around.
A dishevelled figure stood motionless in the corner of the parking lot. Scuffed boots, thick trousers; bulked up by a couple of men’s coats and a disreputable sweater, the figure removed its bright pink beanie only when it met Caroline’s eyes.