“My husband the thief.”
“I thought it might make a change. I thought it might cheer you up.”
“Everything costs summat.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
“It’s made a show of us in front of everyone!”
Mam’s bottom lip practically touched her nose. With a visible effort, she controlled herself. “Lower your heads,” she said. “Pair of yous.”
“Why?” said Lawrence. His dad still wouldn’t look at him.
“Just do it,” Mam said. “As I need to check.”
“For what?”
“Infection,” Mam spat. She strode forward and grabbed Lawrence by his head.
2
IT FELT GOOD to be alone.
Shell sat in the kitchen staring at the light. On the counter was Arthur’s dinner: a can of spaghetti hoops set next to a plate of thawing fish fingers and chips. The frozen food landing on the china plate as she emptied it from its packet an hour ago had been the only sound in the house, and since then she had sat.
The familiar whirr of the airing cupboard. Shell had found the note after putting the food out. It said to wait a while, come meet them at Litten Hill. Arthur had specified to come at ‘tea time’ which might have sounded fine but Shell hadn’t been able to work out when was best to leave, and realised it was so typically unspecific an instruction that she could barely give voice to her frustration.
She’d waited on the lip of the bath, firing tepid soap suds down her naked back. She’d waited in the bedroom, towel-drying her hair and letting it hang, and now she waited in the kitchen with her husband’s dinner defrosting by her side. The hulking sky spread robustly outside the painted-shut kitchen window.
She made a final patrol of the house. The smell of disinfectant and bleach hugged everything. It was over a couple of weeks since she’d burned the gifts, but vividly Shell recalled the bubbling of the carriage clock, its varnish peeling like skin from a lesion in a fingerprint. Dying time becoming visible through that strange ripple in perspective that heat causes.
The rug took longer to disappear. Shell left Lawrence alone while she went to the garage to fetch the petrol. She’d expected him to have scarpered when she returned, or at least to be pulling his clothes on, but he’d stayed where he was, her son, desolate in underpants and trainers.
She’d emptied the jerry can and tossed the match and as the rug took flame, saw how ashamed Lawrence was, although whether it was for infesting their home, being in thrall to his useless dad, bunking off school or being a party to lying and embarrassing her in front of the whole town, Shell wasn’t sure. He was probably just upset at being caught out. The second liar in a house of liars◦– you’d think he’d been dragged up.
Together they watched the rug burn. Shell thought she’d seen the moths ablaze, rising like scraps of confetti. Again she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps dead moths were what she wanted to see. Those itinerant specks of insignificance symbolising the things that plagued her home, all the things that bothered her; the things that weighed her down.
Although burning the rug hadn’t ended the infestation, because every day since Shell had vacuumed. Every day she had polished and prodded the crannies with the duster. She had washed the settee covers and the curtains and she had sprayed all the surfaces until they ran slick with detergent, but the insects clung on as stubbornly to things as she did.
There was one now, fluttering towards the light. Shell went for it, missed. Those two were waiting; she didn’t want to join them. Lawrence, that teen. Arthur, that husband. It was hard to know how to deal with them. She had nothing much to say to either one.
Especially Lawrence. An accidental birth, was there any other kind? So she hadn’t breastfed him and maybe that was why they weren’t close. His pincer lips made her sore so she’d used formula milk and become callous with the bottle. Lawrence gorged himself like a little piglet. Shell had watched the milk dribble down his double-chin.
Although she knew she was being irrational, it niggled Shell, not breastfeeding her son. It niggled her every time he puked after he’d been fed, and the memories of how it was always Arthur who rose at night to quell the baby’s tears, Arthur who boiled the nappies clean in the saucepan while Shell could only think of shouting to make Lawrence stop crying rather than burp him, take him for a walk or have a bash at a lullaby, all that niggled her, too.
And she wondered about herself, why she behaved this way. Never playing dress-up. Never doing drawing with Lawrence or telling him stories, failing to coax him from his shyness the way the other women did with their children. Things just never occurred to Shell, and going back to crouch in front of her son in the playground, putting her hands on his shoulders and saying, ‘Don’t worry, you go play,’ felt like too much of a climb-down once she’d realised her mistake.
Probably Lawrence thought about this stuff too.
She hunted for her jacket, scaling the stairs and carefully avoiding the scrub marks staining the wall. Her house felt that cheap sometimes. The mounted ornamental plates Arthur bought from the car boot sale, the minibar he’d insisted on in the living room, with its platter for mixing the drinks, all of it made Shell cringe.
Boss-eyed walls. Lightweight doors. Shell entered the spare room and looked at the blow-up bed, which was semi-deflated. There was her jacket lying next to it. Arthur had taken the spare change from her pockets.
She swept downstairs, forcing her arms through the sleeves and that bastard from her head. She’d cut Arthur’s bloody hair off the other week. Had to. Fingers like crabs’ legs along his and Lawrence’s scalps. As soon as she found the moth in Lawrence’s hair, she’d crumbled the thing to nothing. There had been no choice but to react after what her family had done, and by that logic if she was going to react in the first place it was better to do it thoroughly if she was going to do it at all. Liars and cheats needed telling.
Gripped by what you might call a fugue, Shell took the kitchen scissors to the main bit of Lawrence’s fringe where the moth had been. She disposed of the hair in the brazier then promptly found more hidden moths, snipping where they had been too.
After that she cut the lot off, using the razor while she was at it. She’d get that scalp smooth-bald rather than pie-bald, give Lawrence a head like a light bulb rather than a globe where the stubble formed into misshapen continents, reminders of what she couldn’t quite remove with the scissors. Arthur was next; Shell wasn’t nearly so gentle, snapping at his hair, focusing in particular on the grey strands shaped like zigs of electric wire, while Arthur stared churlishly at the limp and sooty clothing strung along the washing line. A solitary red tear had dribbled down his forehead.
Shell locked the front door. Yes, she remembered Litten. She remembered her youth, making her way down this same route, glistening today, some parts still cobbled, past the allotments with its plots and its vista of plants and bamboo canes, its benches and sheds, the rectangles of soil looking like recently filled-in graves.
She sparked a fag, sucked as much nicotine back as she could. She’d never been a drinker; she’d always smoked. She liked the kick of it. She liked forcing the fumes out of each nostril. Arthur thought she’d quit long ago. She hadn’t. Shell felt like she’d been a smoker long before she ever tried it. Her grandparents had smoked; her dad, Lee◦– pomade in the hair and Sinatra down the pub◦– he’d smoked; so did her mother. Shell had always liked the smell. Taking up the habit felt so natural. There is such a thing as fate; it’s called being pre-disposed.