Her mother closes her eyes for a second time and says, slowly and confidently, “Fire…clock…candle…”
The empty house scares her. Carol tries reading but her eyes keep sliding off the page. She needs something trashy and moreish on the television but she can’t bring herself to sit in a room surrounded by so much crap so she starts cleaning and tidying and it is the sedative of physical work that finally comforts her. She ties the old newspapers in bundles and puts them outside the front door. She stands the mattress against a radiator in the hall to air and dry. She puts the cushion covers on a wool cycle and dusts and hoovers. She cleans the windows. She rehangs the Constable poster and puts a new bulb into the standard lamp.
She finishes her work long after midnight then goes upstairs and falls into a long blank sleep which is broken by a phone call from Robyn at ten the following morning saying that she and John will bring their mother home from hospital later in the day.
She digs her trainers from the bottom of her suitcase and puts on the rest of her running gear. She drives out to Henshall, parks by the Bellmakers Arms and runs out of the village onto the old sheep road where their father sometimes took them to fly the kite when they were little. It’s good to be outside under a big sky in clear, bright air away from that godforsaken estate, the effort and the rhythm hammering her thoughts into something small and simple. Twenty minutes later she is standing in the centre of the stone circle, just like she and Robyn did when they were girls, hoping desperately for a sign of some kind. And this time something happens. It may be nothing more than a dimming in the light, but she feels suddenly exposed and vulnerable. It’s not real, she knows that, just some trait selected thousands of years ago, the memory of being prey coded into the genome, but she runs back fast, a sense of something malign at her heels the whole way, and she doesn’t feel safe until she gets into the car and turns the radio on.
She paces the living room, a knot tightening in the base of her stomach. She dreads her mother coming home in need of constant care and Robyn saying, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” She dreads her mother coming home in full possession of her senses and ordering her to leave. She dreads the car not turning up at all and afternoon turning to evening and evening turning to night. And then there is no more time to think because her mother is standing in the doorway saying, “This is not my house.”
“Don’t be silly.” Carol shows her the papier-mâché giraffe. “Look.”
“This is definitely someone else’s house.” She seems very calm for someone in such a disconcerting situation.
Robyn steps round her mother and into the room. “What did you do, Carol?”
“I cleaned and tidied.”
“This is her home, Carol. For fuck’s sake.”
“You can’t make me stay here,” says her mother.
“Mum…” Carol blocks her way. “Look at the curtains. You must remember the curtains. Look at the sideboard. Look at the picture.”
“Let me go.” Her mother pushes her aside and runs.
Robyn says, “Are you happy now?”
Carol can’t think of an answer. She’s lost confidence in the rightness of her actions and opinions. She feels seasick.
“I hope you have nightmares about this,” says Robyn, then she turns and leaves.
She drives to the off-licence and returns with a bottle of vodka and a half-litre of tonic water. She pours herself a big glass and sits in front of the television, scrolling through the channels in search of programmes from her childhood. She finds The Waltons. She finds Gunsmoke. She watches for two hours then rings Robyn.
“I don’t think I want to talk to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not, Carol. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”
It strikes her that this might be true. “Where’s Mum?”
“Back on the ward. They still had a bed, thank God.”
“And what’s going to happen to her?”
“You mean, what am I going to do now that you’ve smashed her life to pieces?”
Was it really possible to destroy someone’s life by giving them a bath and cleaning their house? Could a life really be held together by dirt and disorder?
“Have you been drinking?”
She can’t think of a reply. Perhaps she really is drunk. The line goes dead.
She returns to the television. Columbo, Friends. It is dark outside now and being drunk isn’t having the anaesthetic effect she hoped. She watches a documentary about the jungles of Madagascar. She sleeps and wakes and sleeps and wakes and somewhere in between the two states it becomes clear how much she loved Aysha, how much she still loves her, and how it is the strength of those feelings which terrifies her. Then she sleeps and wakes again and it is no longer clear.
She comes round with a grinding headache and sour sunlight pouring through the gap in the curtains. She rifles through the kitchen drawers and finds some antique ibuprofen and washes down two tablets with tonic water. She remembers how the cleaning and tidying of yesterday calmed her mind. So she takes a collection of planks from the broken bed in front of the house and stacks them in the centre of the lawn at the back, then breaks the rusty padlock from the shed door with a chunk of paving stone. Inside, everything is exactly as her father left it, concertinas of clay pots, jars of nails and screws, balls of twine, envelopes of seeds (Stupice early vine tomatoes, Lisse de Meaux carrots…), a fork, a spade…The lighter fuel is sitting in a little yellow can on the top shelf. She sprinkles it on the pyramid of wood and sets it alight. When it is blazing she drags the mattress outside and folds it over the flames. Through a gap in the fence a tiny woman in a pink shalwar kameez and headscarf is watching her, but when Carol catches her eye she melts away. There were twins there once, two scrawny boys with some developmental problem. Donny and Cameron, was it? Their mother worked in the Co-op.
The mattress catches. The smell is tart and chemical, the smoke thick and black. She takes the sofa cushions outside and adds them to the pyre. Then, one by one, the dining chairs. She hasn’t been this close to big unguarded flames since she was a child. She’s forgotten how thrilling it is. And out of nowhere she remembers. It was the one public-spirited thing her father did, building and watching over the estate’s bonfire in the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night. Perhaps being an outsider was a part of it. Ferrymen, rat catchers and executioners, intermediaries between here and the other place. Or perhaps her father was simply scary enough to stop the more wayward kids starting the celebrations with a can of petrol in mid-October. She remembers how he drove out to the woods behind the car plant and brought back a bag of earth from the mouth of a fox’s den then built the fire round it so that the scent would keep hedgehogs and cats and mice from making a home inside. It is a tenderness she can’t remember him ever showing to another human being.
She goes back inside the house. Someone is knocking at the front door. Then they are knocking on the front window. Shaved head, Arsenal shirt. “You’re a fucking headcase, you are. I’m calling the council.”
She burns the poster, the glass shattering in the heat. She hasn’t sweated like this in a long time. It feels good. She burns the ornaments and the knick-knacks and the bundles of newspapers. She stares into the heart of the fire as light drains slowly from the sky.
It starts to rain so she goes indoors. She rips up the carpet and the tack strips just like she’s done upstairs. She cuts the carpet into squares and throws them into the garden. The black wreckage of the bonfire steams and smokes. She sweeps and hoovers the floorboards. The TV and the curtains are the only remaining objects in the room.