‘I think you’re sick,’ she said.
He shook his head. His stomach felt ready to disgorge, as if he’d swallowed a mugful of old blood. He was cold.
Katharine touched the back of her hand to his forehead. He could feel her thin skin vibrating. She was shaking.
‘Bit hot,’ she said.
He took a mouthful of tea and left his porridge untouched.
‘I’ll be in the garage.’
He felt her eyes on the back of his head as he walked to the back door.
Katharine sat watching a skin harden over the porridge in her bowl. It was, she decided, the exact colour of the poo that had come out of her children when they were breastfeeding — a wheaty shit with the sweet smell of just-turning milk. She dropped her spoon with a deliberate clatter.
‘Fine,’ she said to herself.
You bring these creatures into the world. You guide their little, darting dumb heads onto your swollen-then-aching-then-numb nipples, you change ten thousand nappies. . but what does that guarantee? That they will love you? That they will talk with you? That they will be good?
No. No. No.
She was angry. And her anger stayed on a slow simmer because it fed itself; she didn’t quite know why. Everything had been so normal a few weeks ago. Deliciously boring. A warm, smooth-sided routine. She could step from the shower and loll into every day: breakfast, tidying, check the last firing, discard the breakages, peel the thick plastic off the clay, boil the kettle, wet the wheel. . and then it was dinner time and the possibility of a phone call from Sydney or London. But now. . now things had changed very fast. Old things had reappeared; feelings and fears that she’d thought were long disposed of. It was like coming suddenly across the image of the man who’d dumped you in a stack of fading, happy photographs.
Oh, but it’s so much more than that, she thought. He’s brought death to your doorstep.
She set her jaw and stared at her tea. Whose fault was that? She didn’t want to think about it, and busied herself sprinkling sugar over the gelatinous surface of her cooling porridge.
That’s what happens, isn’t it? Things are hot and dangerous for a while, then they cool, and you form a skin, a hide that keeps things nice and separate. Like keeping the practicalities of gas bills and leaking toilet cisterns — real-life stuff — from the dreaminess, the otherworldliness, that used to hover around Don like the scents of Arabia around a plodding climbing jasmine. That dreaminess was what had charmed her so many years ago, then alarmed her, then infuriated her. And now she saw it in her children and it infuriated her still. It was alien.
The answer was to ignore it and get on with the day, and so she started eating the lukewarm gruel, relishing that despite the fact it should be dumped, she refused to let it go to waste.
She was finishing the sweet, milky dregs when Suzette shuffled into the kitchen. Katharine nodded at the saucepan on the stove. Suzette nodded and pulled back her hair. Katharine felt the twin forks of pride and jealousy: pride that she had brought such a confident, good-looking person into the world; and an instinctive, primordial antagonism to another female in her space. A younger one at that.
‘Your brother’s sick.’
Suzette yawned and poured tea. ‘I’m not surprised.’
Not surprised — was that a bait? Did Suzette expect her to ask: What do you mean? Why aren’t you surprised? What do you know?
But to ask was to acknowledge foolishness, and she would not be party to that.
She pushed her cup towards Suzette’s, and her daughter refreshed it. ‘Ta,’ said Katharine.
For a while, they sat in silence. It was Suzette who broke it.
‘Do you remember the seamstress down the road, Mum?’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘The seamstress at Jay Jay’s? Mrs Quill?’
Katharine felt her bladder go as loose as a hung bedsheet in the wind. It took all her concentration to clench and hold. Her expression didn’t change.
‘Quill? Not really. Quill. . the old woman? She’s been dead for years. Do you need something mended?’
She saw Suzette’s eyes rise and lock onto hers.
She knows I’m lying.
But still the iron spike inside her refused to bend, and she met her daughter’s stare.
‘No,’ replied Suzette. ‘Never mind.’
The chamferboard sides of the garage were once white but decades of grinding sun and mindless rain had grubbied them to a weary grey that was flaking off dispiritedly, revealing tiny continents of bilious green undercoat. Its single window of four dusty panes stared darkly out at the lush garden that flanked the building. Lush monstera bushes with their broad, perforated leaves squatted around the outside, and Rangoon creeper snaked up the jagged timbers. The unused driveway, twin rails of concrete veined with cracks from which emerged tiny lava flows of moss, ran up to two wooden bifold doors that sagged, their tops meeting in the middle like the leaning foreheads of exhausted, clinching boxers. Nicholas slipped an old nickel-plated key into the lock of the right-hand bifold. It gave a desiccated groan as he drew it open.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
Inside was dark and familiar as a lover’s bedroom. There was no electric bulb; milky light trickled through the grime-fogged window.
Something was rattling. No wind shook the window; the dust motes hardly stirred. He realised the sound was his teeth. He bit down hard to stop them.
He inhaled. The taste of the still air was tinted with engine oil, with the scent of earth as fine and barren as desert sand, with dry rot. . and underneath it all, as faint as a whisper, the sickly aroma of rum. Because here was where he drank, thought Nicholas. His mother had cleaned out the bottles after she kicked her husband out, but the smell of the booze lingered like a slow cancer. He walked across to the bench and pulled open the drawer. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find half a dozen of the two hundred millilitre bottles his father preferred — but the drawer was empty except for dust and cockroach shells. He closed it.
It had been decades since he’d stood in here; yet the sight and smell of it had not changed. Time meant nothing. The thought sank like a slow blade into his gut. Those intervening years had been worthless. Twenty years of heartbeats, of travel, of conversations and work and sleep and wishes and laughter were dust. Cate had lived and died, and now existed only in his mind and in some cruel lantern show in the bathroom of a small flat in Ealing. This building was as much a crypt as any stone chamber in Newham Cemetery. Time was interred here.
He was tempted to step back out, return to bed and pray that his chill was something grave like pneumonia or dengue fever. Yet he knew he had to stay. He had an inkling. Something in here was waiting to be found.
His eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He craned his head back.
Between the trusses overhead were strung side by side two old wood painter’s planks, each thick as his wrist and grey with age, spattered with a muted rainbow of paints that had dried before Nixon resigned. Stacked on the planks were his father’s suitcases.
Leaning against the rear wall was a timber stepladder, also speckled with paint. Loops of gritty cobweb hung between the treads like hammocks in a sunken ship. Nicholas drew in a deep breath — the effort set him shaking harder — and blew what dust he could off the ladder and pulled it from the wall. He set it below the planks, and climbed.
His head drew level with the first suitcase; inches from his face, a spider the size of a coaster hung from the plastic handle. He instinctively jumped back, and only stopped himself falling by grabbing the red hardwood truss. A splinter drove deep into the soft web of flesh between his finger and thumb. He steadied himself. The spider bobbed in the disturbed air, light as tissue. It was a carapace, hanging empty by a silk thread. Nicholas felt his heart fluttering like a trapped sparrow; he flicked the spider shell away and started carrying the suitcases down to the earth floor.