“Mum…!” Briefly she is nine again, wearing a green duffel coat and those crappy socks which slid down under your heel inside your Wellingtons. She raps the letter box for a third time. “Hello…?”
She checks that no one is watching then breaks the glass with her elbow, the way it’s done in films. She reaches through the broken pane and feels a shiver of fear that someone or something is going to grab her hand from inside. She slips off the safety chain and turns the latch.
The smell is stronger in the hallway, damp, unclean. There is a fallen pagoda of post on the phone table and grey fluff packs out the angle between the carpet and the skirting board. Here and there wallpaper has come away from the damp plaster. Can she hear something moving upstairs or is it her imagination?
“Mum…?”
The only light in the living room is a thin blade of weak sun that cuts between the curtains. She stops on the threshold. A body is lying on the floor. It is too small to be her mother, the clothes too ragged. She has never seen a corpse before. To her surprise what she feels, mostly, is anger, that someone has been squatting in her mother’s house and that she now has to sort out the resulting mess. She covers her nose and mouth with her sleeve, walks around the room and crouches for a closer look. The woman is older than she expects. She lies on a stained mattress, knotted grey hair, dirty nails, a soiled blue cardigan and a long skirt in heavy green corduroy. Only when she recognises the skirt does she realise that she is looking at her mother.
“Oh Jesus.”
She wants to run away, to pretend that she was never here, that this never happened. But she has to inform the police. She has to ring her sister. She crouches, waiting for her pulse to slow and the dizziness to pass. As she is getting to her feet, however, her mother’s eyes spring open like the wooden eyes of a puppet.
“Holy fuck!” She falls backwards, catching her foot and cracking her head against the fire surround.
“Who are you?” says her mother, panicking, eyes wide.
She can’t speak.
“I haven’t got anything worth stealing.” Her mother stops and narrows her eyes. “Do I know you?”
She has to call an ambulance but her mind has gone blank and she can’t remember the emergency number in the UK.
“It’s Carol, isn’t it?” Her mother grips the arm of the sofa and lifts herself slowly onto her knees. “You’ve changed your hair.” She gathers herself and stands up. “You’re meant to be in America.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I was asleep.”
“You were on the floor.” The back of her head is throbbing.
“I was on the mattress.”
“It’s the middle of the day.”
“I have trouble with the stairs.”
Dust lies thick on every horizontal surface. The framed Constable poster is propped beneath the rectangle of unbleached wallpaper where it used to hang, the glass cracked across the middle.
“I thought you hated us,” says her mother. “I thought you were going to stay away forever.”
This is the room where she and Robyn ate tomato soup and toast fingers in front of Magpie and Ace of Wands. This was where they played Mousetrap and threw a sheet over the coffee table to make a cave. “What happened?”
“I was asleep.”
“To the house. To you.”
“Your father died.”
“And then what?”
There was a lime tree just beyond the back fence. It filled the side window and when the wind gusted all the leaves flipped and changed colour like a shoal of fish. The window is now covered with a sheet of plywood.
“How did you get in?” says her mother.
“Mum, when did you last have a bath?”
“I spent forty-three years looking after your father.”
“I can actually smell you.”
“Enough housework to last a lifetime.”
“Does Robyn know about all this?”
“Then I no longer had to keep him happy. Not that I ever succeeded in keeping your father happy.”
“She never said anything.”
“I prefer not to go out. Everyone is so fat. They have electric signs that tell you when the next bus is coming. I should make you a cup of tea.” And with that she is gone, off to make God alone knows what bacterial concoction.
Carol picks the papier-mâché giraffe from the windowsill and blows the dust off. She can still feel the dry warmth of Miss Calloway’s hands wrapped around her own as they shaped the coat-hanger skeleton with the red pliers, coffee and biscuits on her breath from the staffroom at break. “Come on, squeeze.”
She asks the woman behind the till in the Nisa for the number of a local taxi firm and rings from a call box. Sitting on a bench waiting for the cab she remembers the street party they held to celebrate the wedding of Charles and Diana in July of 1981, everyone getting drunk and dancing to Kim Wilde and the Specials on a crappy PA in the bus shelter. This town…is coming like a ghost town.
There were trestle tables down the centre of Maillard Road but no timetable beyond a rendition of “God Save the Queen” and a half-hearted speech by a local councillor which was rapidly drowned out by catcalls. The atmosphere became rowdier as the day went on, the older people dispersing around nightfall when the air of carnival turned sinister. She remembers a woman sitting on the grass and weeping openly. She remembers Yamin’s terrifying older brother having sex with Tracey Hollywood on the roundabout while his mates whooped and spun it as fast as they could. She remembers the Sheehan twins firing rockets across the field until the police arrived, then starting up again when they left. For months afterwards you would find little plastic Union Jacks and lager cans and serviettes bearing pictures of the royal couple wedged into the nettles at the edge of the football pitch and stuck behind the chicken-wire fence around Leadbitter’s Bakery.
She remembers how Helen Weller’s brother jumped from a seventh-floor balcony in Cavendish Tower one Christmas while high on mushrooms, equipped only with a Spider-Man bedsheet. She remembers Cacharel and strawberry Nesquik and Boney M singing “Ra Ra Rasputin.” She remembers how her father would stand at the front window staring out on all of this and say, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Only many years later did she realise that he hadn’t made the phrase up himself, though whether he was pretending to be Shelley or Ozymandias she still doesn’t know.
Robyn is taking wet washing from the machine. The dryer churns and rumbles. Through the half-opened concertina doors Carol can see the children watching Futurama. Fergal, Clare and Libby. She can never remember which girl is which. There are crayon pictures in cheap clip frames. There are five tennis rackets and a space hopper and a dead rubber plant and two cats. The clutter makes Carol feel ill. “Jesus, Robyn, how did you let it happen?”
“I didn’t let anything happen.”
“I’m pretty certain she’d wet herself.”
“So you got her undressed and put her into the bath and helped her into some clean clothes?”
Robyn has put on two stone at least. She seems fuzzier, less distinct.
“Six years. Shit, Carol. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”
“She’s my mother, too.”
“Christmas cards, the odd email.” Robyn slams the washing-machine door and hefts the laundry basket onto a chair.
“Let’s not do this.”
“Do what? Draw attention to the fact that you waltzed off into the sunset?”