She was born in 1918. She was four years older than Ruby when The Great Gatsby was published. She was a nurse during the Blitz. She was middle-aged when The Beatles were formed and already old when the Berlin Wall came down. She was sipping tea. His tea was untouched on the side. He hated being there. It was always so hot. Everything was dirty. He didn’t want to touch anything. He compiled a list of things that hadn’t existed when she was born. Televisions, toasters, central heating, credit cards, ballpoint pens, radios. Computers obviously. A world without computers. And mobile phones. Or any phones. The microwave, penicillin, nuclear bombs, spaceships. What would her teenage self, skipping along the hills of the south coast in the pre-war years, have said if someone had told her men would fly into space? And what else?
‘I wish I’d had more sex,’ she said suddenly. The pill. That was something else that was new. She said things like that now and then. Small voices from the ghost of the young person she’d once been. Her watery eyes fixed on him, recognising him. ‘I mustn’t complain. I’ve had a good run.’ It must be lonely. To be a stranger to the people closest to you. Not the person she was. But the person she had been. More than half her life had been lived doing things that nobody who knew her now knew anything about.
He stopped again at the door. It was a strange sight, watching a living thing settle into a stillness as still as the dead things around it. The candleholders on the windowsill. The dusty shelf cluttered with photographs and ornaments that someone soon would have to sort through. The old radio tilting precariously on the floor, its aerial against the wall holding it half upright. He waited there behind the half-closed door. One minute, two minutes. She’d always been, to use the vernacular of her day, a hardy woman. Solid. Solid in a way that made you think of a thick tree trunk undisturbed by the storm raging around it. He remembered bouncing off her when he was very young. Matron. That was a good word for her. Now the high back of the chair dwarfed her sloping shoulders, and when he hugged her goodbye, he felt her dried out bones pressing through the wool.
He presumed she must be frightened. But she never appeared frightened. She was the last one left. Her husband had gone decades before. As a young boy he’d stood in the hallway late one evening listening to his mother sobbing uncontrollably in the next room. His father’s low voice had filled the gaps between her gasps, but she’d kept on crying until he was too tired to listen. If Tim had been sad about his first real brush with mortality he couldn’t remember being sad, and if his mother grieved longer than that single, fraught night he didn’t notice that either. It was only in later years that he realised that there must have been many such nights for his mother, and it was only in his recollections that they merged into one.
Outside, he stopped on the path and sat down on his haunches. He felt like he’d been awake for a million years.
When he arrived home he entered a house that sounded unlived in. He wandered from room to room until he finally came upon Beth upstairs, sitting on their bed, doing nothing at all. Ruby was on the carpet in front of her with her colouring books. Neither had heard him return and he was afforded an unobserved moment to watch them objectively. Something about what he saw saddened him. Again, he wondered what would be left behind if he went. Only a week ago they’d been close. Cocooned in that intimate, blue-hued world of the tent, he’d imagined fresh starts and new beginnings and all other such hopeful things. But these things have nothing to do with where you are and everything to do with who you are, and he realised then, with the effect of something heavy falling through his body and landing like a new weight in his stomach, that they were still the same people.
He forced a smile. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said lightly. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
They both turned. ‘Have you?’ Beth said. She pulled her shoulders back a little. He was looking at Ruby.
‘This little lady here,’ he said, kneeling down. Ruby was already clambering to her feet and she ran to him and jumped into his arms, making him rock back on his heels. ‘Steady,’ he said with a laugh. He held her out in front of him, staring at her seriously. ‘We have a hot date, you and I. I hope you’ve not forgotten.’ The child squealed in delight. Eventually he looked over his daughter’s shoulder at Beth.
‘Hello. I missed you today,’ he said.
‘You talk such rubbish sometimes.’
He put Ruby down and walked to the window. ‘That man is still there.’
‘What? Which man?’
‘Him. He was there when I got home, just hanging about over there.’ Beth walked over and stood at his shoulder. ‘See him?’ Tim glanced at her, then looked at her again, longer. ‘What's wrong with you? You've gone pale. Do you know him?’
Beth's phone vibrated in her pocket. She put her hand over it to dull the sound. Tim was still looking at her and she tried on different expressions but none felt natural. He started to say something, then stopped and walked past her out of the room. She heard him descending the stairs. ‘I’m going to speak to him,’ he called back.
‘Wait! Just leave it, Tim!’ She ran to the landing and looked over the rail in time to see the top of his head disappear. She could hear him crossing the floor. ‘Fuck,’ she said. She turned quickly to see if Ruby had overheard, but Ruby wasn’t there. The front door opened and she ran back to the window. Tim was crossing the road with that odd shuffle of his. The world slowed down, like in an accident. She put her fingers on the glass. The two men were speaking now. Kyle, standing casually on the pavement, almost a full head taller than Tim, was grinning. He was wearing a suit that looked out of place in this parochial setting. Something shattered somewhere. She registered the noise absently. She took her phone out of her pocket and quickly read the message.
Reykjavík is beautiful. I missed you, though.
Tim had his back turned to her and was looking up into Kyle’s face. From this distance and height she could clearly see his bald spot. As if feeling her gaze on him, he put a hand up and touched it. She could break down now. She knew that. A deep well inside her was pressing up, waiting to surge, she had only to exhale and let it come. She pressed down on it. Suddenly Kyle pointed up at her. She gasped and slipped deeper behind the curtain. He stepped past Tim, who had turned to look also, but wasn’t following. She could see him talking to Kyle’s back. Kyle was halfway across the road now, still peering up at her window. He reached inside his pocket and took something out. It was a sheet of paper. Her mind raced. Had she sent him any letters? No. She thought of the boarding pass and note in her purse. She must burn them. But even as she thought it she knew that she wouldn’t, that somehow she had to let this play out. Forests grow anew after wildfire. It couldn’t continue as it was, whatever was to come after. Kyle, still holding the paper, stopped and turned around. He returned to where Tim was still standing and handed it to him. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and she saw him squinting in that mole-like way of his. He turned the paper over a few times and then handed it back to Kyle, who folded it up and replaced it in his jacket pocket. Then both men turned to look in her direction.
Beth realised that Ruby was crying. She hissed at her to shut up. Kyle slapped Tim on the shoulder, not in an unfriendly way. Tim staggered sideways a little, but smiled up at Kyle and shrugged. It occurred to her suddenly that he must know. Maybe not the details, but he must know. The thought angered her. He’d said nothing. Done nothing. He worked himself up into a rage about missing socks and unmade beds and all other pointless shit, but did nothing about this. He was a fake, that’s what he was. He was a fake, or he was weak. Or he was both. He was probably both. She despised each equally. Ruby was at her legs now, whining, pulling on the hem of her T-shirt – why was she so small, so impossibly small?
‘What do you want?’ she snapped, still fixed on the scene outside. Kyle’s suit was navy. His trousers were tight-fitting and from the photos he’d sent she knew what was beneath them. She pictured it.
‘It hurts, Mummy.’
Beth looked down to see Ruby balancing on one leg. She was holding her foot and there was blood on it.
‘Jesus, what now?’ she asked. A glass had been dropped on the kitchen floor. She sighed. She remembered hearing it. Ruby had walked in the broken bits. Behind her on the carpet red smears marked her footprints. Beth picked her up and carried her into the bathroom. She plonked her daughter in the bath and knelt down. Holding Ruby by the calf, she began to examine the underside of her foot. There were three cuts, two in the heel and one in the arch. One still had a tiny splinter of glass in it. None was very deep.
She heard the front door open and shut, and then his footsteps were coming up the stairs. She pulled the single bit of glass free and washed it down the plug. The footsteps stopped in the doorway behind her. She could hear him breathing. He was breathing through his nose. Her daughter’s foot was still in her hand. She was staring at it. Her daughter was staring at her.
‘She cut her foot,’ she said to the slender limb in her hands. She didn’t turn around. She continued to wipe and dab, wipe and dab, wipe and dab. He said nothing. She couldn’t hear his breathing now. She began to wonder if he was still there. But which he did she mean? She wondered at her own mischief. She preferred to call it mischief than duplicity.
‘It’s okay, Mummy.’ Ruby pulled her leg free and climbed out of the tub. Beth heard her hopping out of the bathroom. Still she didn’t turn around.
‘Get your shoes on, Ruby,’ Tim said. So he was still there, just a few paces behind her. ‘We're going soon.’ She tried to gauge his tone. His voice sounded forced, thick, or had she just read in books that voices sound thick. He touched her lightly and she started. ‘Are you coming?’ he asked. ‘I don't mind if you want to stay here. Take some time.’
‘Really?’ He didn’t answer her. He must not care at all, not even a little bit. ‘Yes, fine,’ she said, ‘I’ll stay.’
CHAPTER TEN
She waited until the bathroom door closed and then she waited until the front door closed and then she waited until she heard the car reversing out of the driveway. Then she sprung up and rushed back to the bedroom window. The pavement opposite was deserted. She looked both ways down the road. He was gone. She freely admitted to herself that she was disappointed. She took her phone out of her pocket again but there were no more messages. She began to type. What did… She paused, then deleted it. Where are… She deleted it again. She looked up. He was there again now. On the pavement. He was looking directly at her.
He lifted his phone to his ear. A moment later hers rang. ‘You’re all alone,’ he said.
‘They won’t be gone long. What did you say to him?’
‘I just told him some story. I’m good at stories.’
‘What story? Did he believe you?’
‘I think so. Don’t worry. Did he say anything to you?’
‘No, not really.’
‘And now he’s gone out. So he can’t be worried. He’s crazy leaving you at home by yourself.’
‘Why? Are there bad men around?’
‘Yes. There are. Open the curtain so I can see you completely.’
