Chapter 6
He cannot sleep properly. Each of the next few nights he wakes in the dark, sweating, the settee hot and clammy against his skin. Staring at the display clock on the video player, waiting for it to be morning. When the dawn does come, and all the familiar shapes in the room start becoming visible, he is up quickly, a restless energy about him. He moves back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, getting the kettle on, both TVs, opening cupboards, then no minding what he’s looking for, shutting them again.
By the afternoons, he’s tired out. No hungry still either. When it gets dark outside again he forces himself to grill up a waffle, but otherwise he doesn’t eat. He stays in front of the television in the living room, not so much looking at the programmes as at the set itself, how familiar it is: the dusty top of the video player; the wee carpet troughs just in front of the broken rollers where it used to stand years ago, before Robbie spilled a Coke bottle over the whole area.
One morning, he gets up off the settee and goes straight upstairs. He strips the walls in the boys’ room of the few dog-eared photos stuck above the beds. Then into the bathroom for the framed one above the lavvy; the staircase; the lobby; the photo packets in the kitchen drawer.
He begins piling them in rows on the floor in front of the television, like an audience.
After half an hour, the collection has spread to the settee — a crowd of Cathys laughing and posing, the head always turned a touch the left of the camera. Himself in a lot of them too, stiffly smiling next to her. There are more still with the boys in as he selects through the packets: quite a few from when they were schoolweans, trips to the theme park, the pair of them tired and wet in their macs, or chasing about in their first Rangers kits. One of these, he takes out and puts on the floor with the others. It’s of the four of them all together, sat on a bench eating open bags of chips, Craig squeezed in next to Cathy, clung to her like a little demon. He can mind the day still. The first time they’d let the boys on the rides, Robbie biting his ear the whole afternoon for a handful of smash to go on the arcades, and some poor wee lassie boaking up on the rollercoaster, these long tendrils of vomit flying past their faces.
He can’t get a fix on her. Even if he stares for minutes at each one, trying to mind what the occasion was, what she’d been saying as the picture was took, it’s no use. And anyway, all this, it’s just confusing matters, because these photographs cover years, decades, and she looks different from each one to the next. They are all of her, clearly — the pretty, smiling teenager, or here with the gelled fringe and blonde bubble perm — but when does the picture stop changing so that he might get a final hold on who she is? Not at the thin, sagging shape that she’d become, no danger. Even if he could pick out an image and say, aye, that’s her, that is her, it wouldn’t fucking be that one.
There aren’t any photos of her like that though. The collection stops a few years back, when the camera seized up. The last one is Robbie’s wedding. Himself, Cathy and Craig stood in their best, sweating in the sun under this giant tree and looking pure uncomfortable, done up hot and greasy as fish suppers.
It’s no doing any good, this. He should leave it by. Plus he needs to get something to eat. The stomach is spitting tacks, and he’s got to get something down him. Hard to move but. To get out the room and stop staring at all these pictures laid out on the floor. Each time he thinks he’s going to get leaving a new photo will catch his eye and he’ll crouch down in front of it trying to remember, trying to be inside it. One here that normally hangs in the lobby near where the coat hooks are. Port Melbourne. Cathy is knelt in her shorts battling on at the garden, her forearms stained up to the elbows in dark, red soil. She never could make anything grow. It was too hot and dry for all the wee shrubs and flowers that she fussed and footered over. In seven years, the only thing he can mind growing in that small, square garden was a single yellow dahlia. The rest the time it was full of balding lilac bushes and brown dead things. She is smiling but, in the photo, ever hopeful. Smooth plump arms. The tan line on her chest as she arches over, going at the ground with a trowel. Was it already in her then? Dormant. Waiting. How could you know? You couldn’t. She looks the picture of health here, that’s what anybody would think, and Craig’s babby toys are there in one corner of the garden so this is past thirty years ago, but it’s possible it was in her even then. Probably it was. They’re saying now it can be forty years, the incubation period, hidden away inside the body, inactive, until the moment it decides to crawl out and stiffen you. He peers in closer, even though he knows there is nothing to look for. And even if they had known, even then, would it have been any the better? Would the doctors have been able to stop it? Would they hell. Once it was in, it was in, like Thatcher. The end inevitable, no matter how long and hard the struggle. Better never knowing, is the truth. Better sudden and final.
Stupit, but he studies the other photos, looking for signs, anything. Something they should have spotted at the time. Obviously there’s nothing but. Nothing. Only her getting older: smile creases around the eyes; the body a wee helping heavier; grey seams developing in the hair, until for a whole packet it’s brown again, and then she lets it have its way and the grey returns.
Enough of this. He needs something to eat.
He goes in the kitchen and keeks warily at the fridge-freezer, and he is about to go toward it, but instead he starts scanning round the shelves and the cupboard tops. He opens a drawer and takes out the cookbooks and then the messy pile of gossip magazines, putting the lot in a pile on the counter. Then he’s into the cupboards, taking out a mug, the biscuit tin, a handful of teacloths from another drawer, even a fish magnet from the fridge together with the faded offie coupon underneath. He brings it all through into the living room. He works quickly, too quickly to get thinking about what he’s doing and stop himself for being a complete fucking eejit. He goes up the stair to the bathroom. There are things in here too. Her books: she kept the Barbaras in here for some reason he’d never been able to fathom, stacked by the door next to the wash basket, the covers curling over at the corners from damp. He picks up an armful and hurries them down the stair.
As he comes out of the living room again he sees the front door mat and pulls it out from under the post. He stares at it a moment. Then he puts it in the living room with the rest, and goes back up for her lotions and potions — all of it still there untouched — shower cap, lady razor, her bloody toothbrush even, dried out now as a thistle.
He stands by the television and looks out over what he’s done. The settee covered with all this stuff, a wet patch on the arm under the shower cap. Nothing. It looks like a bloody jumble sale.
He needs suddenly to be out of there, out of the house. The heart is going like the clappers and he can feel panic taking a grip of him, this sense that somebody’s going to come in any moment and see what he’s done.