“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked.”
“Asked what? ‘Has Mum gone crazy?’ ”
“She’s not crazy and you never asked about anything.”
The argument is unexpectedly satisfying, like getting a ruler under a plaster and scratching the itchy, unwashed flesh. “This is not about scoring points. This is about our mother who is sleeping on the floor in a house full of shit.”
“You didn’t come back when Dad was dying.”
“We were in Minnesota. We were in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t get your message till we got back to Boston. You know that.”
“You didn’t come to his funeral.”
Carol knows she should let it go. Her life has exceeded Robyn’s in so many ways that her sister deserves this small moral victory, but it niggles, because the story is true. She remembers it so clearly. There were eagles above the lake and chipmunks skittering over the roof of the cabin. Every room smelt of cedar. Down at the lakeside a red boat was roped to a wooden quay. She can still hear the putter of the outboard and the slap of waves against the aluminium hull. “How often does she get out?”
“I pop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and do her a Sainsbury’s shop on Saturday morning.”
“So she never goes out?”
“I make sure she doesn’t starve to death.” Robyn looks at her for a long moment. “How’s Aysha, Carol?”
How can Robyn tell? This X-ray vision, her ability to home in on a weakness. Is it being a mother, spending your life servicing other people’s needs? “Aysha’s fine. As far as I know.”
Robyn nods but doesn’t offer any sisterly consolation. “Secondaries in his lungs and bone marrow. They sewed him up and sent him to the hospice.”
“I know.”
“No, Carol. You don’t know.” Robyn picks out three pairs of socks and drapes them over the radiator below the window. “He collapsed in the bathroom, his trousers round his ankles.”
“You don’t need to do this.”
“The doctor was amazed he’d managed to keep it hidden for so long.” She takes a deep breath. “I’ve always pictured you sitting in the corner of the kitchen with your hands over your ears while the phone rings and rings and rings.” The dining table is covered in half-made Christmas cards, glitter glue and safety scissors and cardboard Santas. “Sometimes people need you,” says Robyn. “It might be inconvenient and unpleasant but you just do it.”
She books into the Premier Inn and eats a sub-standard lasagne. Her body is still on Eastern Standard Time so she sits in her tiny room and tries to read the Sarah Waters she bought at the airport but finds herself thinking instead about her father’s last days, that short steep slope from diagnosis to death.
Lake Toba in Sumatra used to be a volcano. When it erupted 70,000 years ago the planet was plunged into winter for a decade and human beings nearly died out. The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was only six miles across. The flu epidemic at the end of the First World War killed 5 percent of the world’s population. Some fathers told their little girls about Goldilocks and Jack and the Beanstalk, but what use were stories? These were facts. We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth and there was nowhere else to go in spite of the messages you might have picked up from Star Trek and Doctor Who. She remembers Robyn weeping and running from the room.
He left school at sixteen then spent thirty years building and decorating. Damp rot, loft conversions, engineered wood flooring. He liked poetry that rhymed and novels with plots and pop science with no maths. He hated politicians and refused to watch television. He said, “Your mother and your sister believe the world’s problems could be solved if people were polite to one another.”
Which is why he didn’t want her to leave, of course. He was terrified that she’d get far enough away to look back and see how small he was, a bullying, bar-room philosopher not brave enough to go back to college for fear he might get into an argument with people who knew more than he did.
Pancreatic cancer at fifty-seven. “All that anger. It turns on you in the end,” was Aysha’s posthumous diagnosis and for once Carol was tempted to agree with what she’d normally dismiss as hippy bullshit.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, when worlds overlap, she slips back forty years and sees the sun-shaped, bronze-effect wall clock over the fireplace and feels the warmth of brushed cotton pyjamas straight from the airing cupboard and her heart goes over a humpbacked bridge. Then she remembers the smell of fried food and the small-mindedness and her desperation to be gone.
She presses her forehead against the cold glass of the hotel window and looks down into the car park where rain is pouring through cones of orange light below the streetlamps. She is back in one of the distant outposts of the empire, roughnecks and strange gods and the trade routes petering out.
She abandoned her mother. That hideous house. She has to make amends somehow.
She climbs into bed and floats for eight hours in a great darkness lit every so often by bright little dreams in which Aysha looms large. The dimples at the base of her spine, the oniony sweat which Carol hated then found intoxicating then hated once more, the way she held Carol’s wrists a little too tight when they were making love.
They met at an alumni fund-raiser about which she remembered very little apart from the short, muscular woman with four silver rings in the rim of her ear and a tight white T-shirt who materialised in front of her with a tray of canapés and a scowl, after which all other details of the evening were burned away.
She had the air of someone walking coolly away from an explosion, all shoulder roll and flames in the background. A brief marriage to the alcoholic Tyler. RIP, thank God. Three years on the USS John C. Stennis—seaman recruit E-1, culinary specialist, honourable discharge. A mother who spoke in actual tongues at a Baptist church in Oklahoma. Somewhere in the background, the Choctaw Trail of Tears, the Irish potato famine and the slave ports of Senegambia if Aysha’s account of her heritage was to be believed, which it probably wasn’t, though she had the hardscrabble mongrel look. And if the powers that be had tried to wipe out your history you probably deserved to rewrite some of it yourself. She was self-educated, with more enthusiasm than focus. Evening classes in philosophy, Dan Brown and Andrea Dworkin actually touching on the bookshelf, a box set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
Two months later they were in the Hotel de la Bretonnerie in the Marais, Aysha’s first time outside the States unprotected by fighter aircraft. Aysha had gone sufficiently native to swap Marlboro for Gitanes but she was sticking to the Diet Coke. They were sitting outside a little café near the Musée Carnavalet.
Aysha said, “Thank you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Carol.
“Hey, lover.” Aysha held her eye. “Loosen up.”
The following morning she hires a Renault Clio and drives to the house via B&Q and Sainsbury’s. Her mother is awake but doesn’t recognise Carol at first and seems to have forgotten their meeting of the previous day, but perhaps the back foot is a good place for her to be on this particular morning. Carol dumps her suitcases in the hall, turns the heating on and bleeds the radiators with the little brass key which, thirty years on, still lies in the basket on top of the fridge. The stinky hiss of the long-trapped air, the oily water clanking and gurgling its way up through the house.
“What are you doing?” asks her mother.
“Making you a little warmer.”
She rings a glazier for the broken window.