“I’ve changed my mind,” says her mother. “I don’t like you being here.”
“Trust me.” She can’t bring herself to touch the dirty cardigan. “It’s going to be OK.”
The noises are coming from the built-in cupboard in the bedroom she and Robyn once shared. Scratching, cooing. She shuts the landing door, opens the windows and arms herself with a broom. When she pulls the handle back they explode into the room, filling the air with wings and claws and machine-gun clatter. She covers her face but one of them still gashes her neck in passing. She swings the broom. “Fuck…!” They bang against the dirty glass. One finds the open window, then another. She hits a third and it spins on the ground, its wing broken. She throws a pillow over it, stamps on the pillow till it stops moving then pushes pillow and bird out of the window into the garden.
She boards up the hole in the wall where they have scratched their way in, takes two dead birds to the bin outside then stands in the silence and the fresh air, waiting for the adrenaline to ebb.
Back inside, the radiators are hot and the house is drying out, clicking and creaking like a galleon adjusting to a new wind. A damp jungle smell hangs in the air. Plaster, paper, wood, steam, fungus.
“This is my home,” her mother says. “You cannot do this.”
“You’ll get an infection,” says Carol. “You’ll get hypothermia. You’ll have a fall. And I don’t want to explain to a doctor why I did nothing to stop it happening.”
She puts the curtains into the washing machine. She drags a damp mattress down the stairs and out onto the front lawn. Half the slats of the bed are broken so she takes it apart and dumps it on top of the mattress. She has momentum now. The carpet is mossy and green near the external wall so she pulls it up and cuts it into squares with blunt scissors. The underlay is powdery and makes her cough and coats her sweaty hands with a brown film. She levers up the wooden tack strips using a claw hammer. She adds everything to the growing pile outside. She sweeps and hoovers till the bare boards are clean, then takes the curtains out of the washing machine and hangs them over the banisters to dry.
She sponges the surface of the dining table and they eat lunch together on it, a steak-and-ale puff-pastry pie and a microwaved bag of pre-cut vegetables. Her mother’s anger has melted away. The lunchtime TV news is on in the background. “Who Wants to Be This and Get Me Out of That,” says her mother. “All those women with plastic faces. Terrorists and paedophiles. We called it ‘interfering with children.’ Frank, who worked in Everley’s, the shoe shop, he was one. I’m certain of that.” She stares into her plate for a long time. “A woman drowned herself in the canal last month. That little bridge on Jerusalem Street? Jackie Bolton. It was in the paper. You were at school with her daughter. Milly, I think her name was.” Carol has no memory of a Milly. “I’d go out more if I still lived in the countryside. There was a flagpole by the pond in the centre of the village. They put it up for the coronation. Your uncle Jack climbed all the way to the top and fell off and broke his collarbone.”
Carol must have heard the story twenty times. It is oddly comforting.
Her mother leans over and takes Carol’s hand. “I thought I might never see you again.”
Her skin has a sticky patina, like an old leather glove. “We need to get you into the bath.”
She is compliant until halfway up the stairs when she looks through the banisters and sees the uncarpeted boards in the bedroom. “You’re selling the house.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Carol laughs. “It’s not mine to sell.” She doesn’t say how little she thinks it would fetch, in this state, on this road.
“That’s why Robyn hates you being here.”
“Jesus Christ, Mum.” Carol is surprised by how angry she feels. “I could be in California, I could be working, but I’m stuck here on a shitty estate in the middle of nowhere trying to turn this dump back into a house before it kills you.”
“You thieving little…” She slaps Carol’s face with her free hand, loses her footing and for a second she is falling backwards down the stairs until Carol grabs her and hauls her upright.
“Shit.” Carol’s heart is hammering. In her mind’s eye her mother is lying folded and broken by the front door. She loosens her grip on the bony wrist. “Mum…?”
Her mother doesn’t reply. She is suddenly blank and distant. Carol should take her downstairs and sit her on the sofa but she might not get this chance again. She puts her hands on her mother’s arms and guides her gently up the last few steps.
She removes her mother’s shoes and socks. She peels off the soiled blue cardigan and unzips the dirty green corduroy skirt. Both are heavily stained and patched with compacted food. She takes off her mother’s blouse, unclips the grey bra and kicks all the clothing into the corner of the room. Her mother’s skin is busy with blotches and lesions in winey purples and toffee browns, the soft machinery of veins and tendons visible under the skin where it is stretched thin around her neck, at her elbows, above her breasts. The smell is rich and heady. Carol tries to imagine that she is dealing with an animal. She takes off her mother’s slip and knickers, perches her on the rim of the bath, lifts her legs in one by one then lowers her mother into the hot, soapy water. She flips the corduroy skirt over the pile of discarded clothing so she can’t see the brown streaks on the knickers then sits on the toilet seat. She’ll bin them later. “Hey. We did it.”
Her mother is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Mum filled a tin bath once a week. Dad got it first, then Delia, then me.” She is staring at something way beyond the wall of dirty white tiles. “There was a sampler over the dining table. Gran made it when she was a girl. ‘I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’ The angel locks the dragon in a pit for a thousand years. After that he must be ‘loosed a little season.’ ” She looks at Carol and smiles for the first time since she arrived. “Are you going to wash my hair?”
Carol makes them each a mug of coffee. Now that her mother is clean the room looks even more squalid. Old birthday cards, a china bulldog with a missing leg, mould in the ceiling corners, one of those houses cleared out post-mortem by operatives in boiler suits and paper masks.
They hear the click and twist of a key in the front door. Robyn is in the hallway. “There’s a pile of stuff outside.”
“I know.”
She steps into the living room and looks around. “What the hell are you doing, Carol?”
“Something you should have done a long time ago.”
“You can’t just ride in here like the fucking cavalry.” Robyn silently mouths the word fucking.
“What’s going on?” says her mother.
“There were pigeons in the bedroom,” says Carol.
“How long are you staying?” asks Robyn. “A week? Two weeks?”
“Carol?” says her mother. “What are you two arguing about?”
“Jesus,” says Robyn. “Fucking up your life doesn’t mean you can take over someone else’s instead.” This time she says the word out loud.
“Carol gave me a bath,” says her mother.
“Did you hurt her?”
It is too stupid a question to answer.
“Aysha rang me.” Robyn holds her eye for a long time. “Sounds like you left a trail of destruction in your wake.”
Carol assumes at first that she has misheard. Aysha talking to Robyn is inconceivable.
“She wanted to check you hadn’t killed yourself or been sectioned. I’m giving you the highlights. Some of the other stuff you probably don’t want to hear.”
“How did she get your number?” asks Carol.