Ever afterwards May had berated herself for not having had the nerve to shout up the stairs after the well-dressed woman that she should sack that insolent receptionist first chance she got.
The longer-term outcome of it, though, was this. May would know she was dead for definite when she no longer remembered to think to herself: I would rather die and go to hell than wake up one day and find myself an inmate in that guesthouse of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission.
For the well-dressed woman had been right about some things. There were things that did have to be settled up in a life. Mastercard, Visa, if only.
There was the rabbit. No amount of Mastercard or Visa would settle the rabbit May’d shot, got first time too, with Philip’s old air rifle.
It was a wild rabbit that had taken to coming to visit the back garden. It wasn’t even as if that rabbit was doing any harm. It sat and nibbled prettily among the flowers.
One day May had seen it there again and, without taking her eye off it, had stood in the kitchen and slipped off her shoes. She had backed away from the window and gone as quietly as she could through the first door, then the next door and into the garage. She’d persuaded the top off the rusty tin where Philip had kept the pellets. She’d cleaned the dust off the gun barrel with her apron and picked a fiddly pellet up and thumbed it into the little hole in the broken-open gun, then again with another, and she’d shut the gun and gone back through the house on quiet stockinged feet to the open kitchen window.
She held it, sighted it, pulled the trigger.
The gun didn’t even kick. It was more a toy than a gun. But all the same the rabbit fell on its side, lay still on its side.
When she got her shoes back on and went out to look at it, it was still alive. She’d hit it in the fleshy part. Its furred back feet were neat one on top of the other. It lay in the soil of the flowerbed by the side of the lawn and it made no noise at all. It was as if it were dead. But when she looked down at it, it looked right back up at her, right at her with its brown eye in its head as if to say: well, you, you can just go and get lost.
You don’t have to worry, Mum, Eleanor had said. They’ve recarpeted, it’s the first thing I asked. They’ve actually recarpeted twice since the time of Mrs. Masters.
She meant well, Eleanor.
But May Young (who had stopped speaking out loud, and the blue of whose own eyes had iced over, the colour of them paler, behind a kind of frost on the day they’d told her, Harbour House when well enough, incontinent, probable onset of mild dementia, danger to self, the kind of looking-after that can’t be done at anyone’s actual home) thought to herself now that the leaving of life, when it came, might well be accompanied by a different seeing, maybe something akin to that rabbit’s seeing.
That’s what the babies did, after all, when they were born. They looked a look at the world as if they could see something that your own eyes couldn’t, or had forgotten how to. That’s what all three of them, Eleanor, Patrick, Jennifer, had done.
If the beginning was like that, chances were the end would be like that too.
Well, I’m in for it now, whatever it is.
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
Well, I wish, though, I really wish I hadn’t done that thing to that rabbit.
Out loud? No. That girl who was in the room, whoever she was, hadn’t moved. She didn’t even glance up from her phone she was looking at or whatever the thing they all have in their hands and press the buttons on was. That was them these days, spending all their time looking up things on the intimate. The great-grandchildren, even, and them hardly past babies, spent their time on the intimate. It was all the intimate, and answerphones and things you had to speak at rather than to. Nobody there.
Don’t just say nobody there all the time when you phone, Mum, Eleanor said one day. Say, hello, it’s me, then leave your message. It’s distressing for us, it’s distressing for the kids, it’s distressing pressing the answerphone message button and hearing you on there, I mean seven times yesterday, and each time saying nothing but the thing’s not working or nobody there. It’s creepy, Mum. And the thing is working. Leave a message, like a normal person.
I say nobody there because when I phone up there’s nobody there, May had said.
We are here, Eleanor said. We’re just choosing not to answer the phone.
This beggared belief. What were phones for?
Why would anybody have a phone and then choose not to answer it? May had said.
Touché. That got her. Touché Turtle away! That was a turtle that used to be on TV, a cartoon with a French hat on like a musketeer that they used to watch, and Jennifer used to wear her old Wrens cap and play at being the turtle in the garden.
It’s always Jennifer, was what Eleanor said once. She was angry. She was crying. This was years ago, ten years ago. May had made Eleanor cry by remembering something incorrectly. Eleanor was forty-five. She should have known better by then, a mother herself, with grown children herself, dear God and all the angels, than to have been standing crying at the sideboard about what got remembered and what got forgotten.
I know it was awful, Mum. I know how awful it was. But that time it was me. It wasn’t her, it was me. It was me you painted with the paintbrush and the calamine. Nothing ever bit her. It was me who was always bitten. You said it was because I tasted so sweet. That’s what you said at the time. Nothing ever bit her. It was always me who got bitten. I still get bitten. I still do. I’m still the one who gets bitten.
It was possible May had misremembered on purpose to annoy Eleanor. It was possible she knew exactly which child it had been, bare-backed, folded into herself like a paperclip on the little bed in the girls’ room with the bites coming up red all over her shoulderblades and the tops of her arms, flinching away from the cold of the lotion on the bristles of the painting-by-numbers paintbrush.
That girl there on the chair looked to be about the age of Jennifer. She looked about the age.
Jennifer’s dates: 4.4.63, 29.1.79.
They’d been watching an Alf Garnett film the night before on the TV. It had been quite a sad film for something supposed to be funny. Till Death Us Do Part. It was the film-length version of the TV programme. It was one of life’s cruel ironies, is what Philip had said after, that that’s what they’d been watching that night. January, taker of children into the ground. When she was two months shy of sixteen Jennifer’s heart had had a problem in it that nobody knew about.
Such elegant narrow feet, she’d had. Like her father’s feet. His feet, too, were narrow, that’s where she’d got it from. Philip had had unexpectedly girlish feet, pretty feet.
Well, feet in the end all went the same way, six feet down, ha, and that was life.
You had to count your blessings, Philip always said. He always said it when he was disappointed. It was how you knew he was disappointed.
Well, it was all right for him. At least he had the words for it. May had spent the years considering the sharpness and smallness and perfection of the fingernails on the hands, the toenails on the feet of every grandchild born, with a sadness she did not have words for.
(Jennifer comes into the kitchen. She is eight years old and very angry. She is holding a book she’s found in the pile of books on the table in the upstairs toilet. On the front it has a picture of a man on fire, his arms and legs stretched out inside what looks like a wheel of flames.