As Far as You Can Go (38 page)

Graham wipes his brush on his sweater. Knee-length woollen thing, holey and paint-smeared, more paint than wool, Cassie says. On the canvas: red ridges, deep crimson tinged blue, thick; the delicious oily stink of linseed in his nose; fag pinched in his mouth; excitement unfurling in him as the colours work. The pebble in his pocket – he can feel it like a throb – as his hand, his eyes, his arm, build and thicken the land, feel of the land, the bush. The light is bad. Snow blotting the skylight but the light he needs is burnt into his brain. And though it’s cold, the paraffin heater not doing more than taking the edge off the chill, he’s as hot as he works as if toiling under the blazing sun.

He sucks in the last wet smoke from his dog-end and grinds it out. Stops himself immediately rolling another. But he does paint better with one in his mouth so he gives in, rolls it, lights it, breathes in the fresh hot smoke. Takes a swig of the cold coffee. Good sign when you forget to drink your coffee.

He squeezes out a worm of cobalt, dips in the edge of a palette knife to bruise the crimson lake before he wedges it on. Will take an age to dry. Satisfaction, this is. Coffee, fag, quiet, work. Nothing like it when work is a part of you. Without it a part of you missing. Which it has been. On the plane home he’d written to his parents, just a scribble on a card. Not said much,
just Happy Christmas, let’s be in touch. Given them his number and in a few days, whenever the phone rings he’ll be on edge, he knows it. Hoping.

He can hear Cassie moving about downstairs, the toilet flushing. He feels wary of her, as if he doesn’t quite know her any more. Always thought her soft. Softer than himself. An image keeps coming back to him unsettlingly: her face by that fire. And her face on the plane had been
steely
almost. Deep frets between her nose and lip, her sun-bleached eyebrows. ‘We have to
forget,’
she’d said, ‘and get on with our life.’
Our life
. He’d looked out of the window at the coast of Western Australia and his eye had snagged on a hook of land, a sand bar, dots on it tiny, too tiny to make out. Maybe people, maybe animals, maybe cars.

Cassie and Larry, did they, did they? He shakes the question from his head. He will never know and she will never know about Mara and what the hell should it matter now?

Brilliant red snaking through the blue. Colour practically hissing off the canvas. It’s
something
. Can’t wait to show it to his mates, to Jas. Last night, when Cassie had finally got off the phone from Patsy and her mum, he’d rung Jas. ‘Did it work out then, Cassie’s ultimatum?’ she’d asked.

‘Not sure.’

‘Guess what!’

‘What?’

‘Guess.’

‘What?

‘OK. I’ll give you a clue. Think of the L-word.’

‘Lampshade?’ he’d guessed. ‘Linguine?’

She’d laughed. ‘No, you prat.
Love.’
And she’d told him about a guy she’d met at an exhibition and how they’d clicked just like that. Jas in love. A complicated feeling had spread through him, hearing that. She’d sounded quite unlike herself. But he is glad for her. He
is
. He needs to move a bit, come to
think of it, it’s
freezing
. Not just the fag making his breath come out as smoke.

He goes downstairs, shoves his feet into the boots by the door and scrunches out into the snow, sending the birds from the feeder scattering.

*

Cassie pulls the last few things from the rucksack. Tomorrow Patsy’s coming to stay and bringing Cat back. Then she’ll feel properly at home. And she’s got something to tell Patsy, something big. She hopes she’s got the will power to keep it to herself for one more day. She wants to tell her face to face. She tips out the empty mirror frame – must get that fixed – and something else rattles in the bottom. She reaches in. A phial of pills. She frowns. A sensation like a big cold fingertip traces down her spine. She sits on the bed, turns the phial in her hand and watches the pills tumble. It’s like something carried out of a dream and over into the real, solid, world.

She hears Graham running down the stairs, banging out of the door. Smell of smoke, well, he will smoke when he paints and he
is
painting. They’ve been home forty-eight hours and she’s hardly seen him. She looks at the pills. Did she really consider –? No. No, that’s all over. She takes them into the bathroom, unscrews the lid and watches them trickle out into the toilet. They do dissolve easily, just like Larry said, a brief fizzing and then nothing, nothing but clear water, but still she flushes the toilet just to know that they have really gone. That that is
over
.

She goes downstairs and puts another log in the stove. It’s
so
cold.
You will acclimatise
floats to her from somewhere and she shivers. She makes a cup of peppermint tea and picks up her notebook. She’s been planning a new layout for the garden, started it on the plane. And she’s planning new sessions on composting and mulching. Work to do. She curls up on the
window seat. No birds on the feeder – Graham’s scared them off.

She looks through a frame of ivy leaves at the garden, at Graham, who is staring up at something. She looks but can see nothing. Oh, she is fat with news. Not told him yet, can’t tell him till she’s told Patsy. She likes the feeling of it, like a secret sweet hidden in her cheek. She wants to suck it a bit longer.

The phone rings and she gets up to answer it, carries it back to the window seat.

‘Are you pregnant?’ Patsy says and Cassie is stung with irritation. ‘Only I woke up this morning with that feeling and it’s certainly not me.’

Cassie can hear Katie babbling. Outside, Graham is kicking scuffs of snow away from a patch of lawn. What’s he doing? She frowns.

‘Say something then!’ Patsy says.

‘Sorry, I’m a bit dopey.’

‘Jetlag.’

‘Yeah. You OK?’

Graham has brought the ladder out of the shed. He carries it on to the green oval he’s cleared.

‘More to the point –?’ Patsy waits a moment then sighs.
‘Be
like that then.’

Cassie hugs her knees, the phone jammed into the crook of her neck. She watches Graham hold the ladder in both hands and tilt his head back. The streaks of paint, scarlet, orange, yellow, vivid blue on his sweater, sizzle against the snow. A streak of red in his hair. He’s got a fag pinched in the corner of his mouth and his eyes squint against the smoke, squint in concentration as he steps up on to the bottom rung.

‘You’re right, of course,’ Cassie says. ‘Did a test this morning. I
am
pregnant. Wanted to tell you tomorrow.’

Patsy shrieks. ‘I knew it.
Fantastic
. Oh that’s fantastic. And I
knew.’

‘Well, you would!’

‘What does Graham say?’

Cassie swallows. ‘Haven’t exactly told him yet. Look, got to go, Pats,’ she says. ‘See you tomorrow. Don’t forget Cat.’

‘Course not! Get that champagne in the fridge. Oh Cass, I’m
so
glad you’re back. We were
so
worried. Spoken to Mum again? She was all for phoning the police you know – if you hadn’t got in touch soon –’

‘She told me. But we’re OK. We’re
fine
. See you tomorrow, Pats.’

Cassie puts down the phone. Now she’s told Patsy she must tell Graham. She goes upstairs to the bathroom and retrieves the pregnancy-testing kit from the bin. She looks again at the white stick: in the little plastic window, a blue ring. Positive. For definite. Should go out and tell him. Shout it up the ladder at him. But there’s a little shadow fluttering above her pleasure. Just a small cloud, smudge of doubt. ‘No,’ she says aloud. No
way
it could be anyone else’s, no
way
. She will
not
think that, will never, ever entertain that thought again.

Ivy leaves are crammed up against the tiny bathroom window, each one cupping a tiny frill of snow. She peers out between them. Graham has reached the top of the ladder now. He looks so small from here, hair black against the snow, sweater brilliant: her man at the top of his ladder, swaying.

In the hospital lobby, Graham waits by the coffee machine for a fawn stream to fill a plastic cup. Bright out here after the subdued lighting of the birthing room. A buzzing neon tube. Green carpet stained with slops. He carries the cup outside, settles on a concrete wall, rolls himself a fag. Yeah, yeah, he will give up but if a guy can’t have a fag after – he frowns at the hundreds of fag-ends on the ground.

Smoke hot, dirty in his lungs, great hit of nicotine. Coffee tastes like shit though. A car drives past, grey growl of engine. Ordinary. A pigeon with a withered scarlet stump pegs up to him but he has nothing to give. It pecks amongst the fag-ends, gives up and flings itself upwards. Graham puts his head back and blows a ring of smoke. The sky is like lemon sorbet, a pinkish weal where a plane has been.

Wishes he could get back to work. Soon as Patsy turns up he will. Cassie won’t mind. Exhibition coming up. He runs his hand through his tangled hair, breathes in the sour whiff of fag-ends, exhaust fumes, his own sweat. Baby here now. Should he ring his dad and say, ‘Hey Grandpa’? Can he say, his son? When she’d told him she was pregnant there was a question he should have asked but didn’t. And it’s too late now. But he’d seen the flinch of irises round inky pupils as she looked straight back. They’d held the gaze a moment and she had broken it.
Looked down. He’d noticed the fan of white creases where her squint lines had escaped the sun.

And now. Where are the feelings he should be feeling? They say your child’s birth is the greatest thing you ever see. But he was – will never admit it to her or anyone – repulsed by the pain, the blood, the smell, the sound of tearing flesh. No. It’s just that he’s exhausted, shagged, knackered, wiped out and nothing much is happening where his heart is. Once
Larry
was born, he thinks. Once
I
was. He looks at the palms of his hand, each line ingrained with paint, deep red and umber, two maps of a burning land.

He takes a last deep suck and drops his dog-end on the ground among the others.

*

Cassie sits in a side ward eating rice crispies with cold milk and white sugar. Not something she would ever usually eat, a thick frosting of crunchy white sugar on the crispy hollow grains, but at that moment, a moment of stillness, leaning back against her pillows, listening to the snap, crackle and pop, it seems like the best thing, the most perfect food ever.

She shifts on the tight soreness of her stitches. It’s getting light. Soon the rest of the ward will wake and start its day. Other babies will be born. And hers will not be the newest any more. And elsewhere in the hospital, probably, people will die. She swallows sweet milk, puts down her spoon, listens to the crackling of her cereal. She can’t hear the breath of her baby in the plastic cot beside her but she can see the slight rise and fall of his chest. People will die, people do die and whether it is in hospital or whether it is somewhere else, it is all the same in the end. She frowns the thought away. She’s good at frowning things away, two lines have grown between her eyes, she sees in the mirror every day, with the effort of the frown.

She looks at the tiny face, head the size of a grapefruit, the
flutter of a delicate nostril. She searches the features for a look of Graham but he looks like nobody, just a newborn baby. Just himself. Her heart lifts. Because whatever happened happened in the past and this is
now
. The past is dead and this new person, this baby boy, he is
alive
.

*

The early morning traffic starts to thicken. An ambulance stops outside. Graham gets up, walks a little in the strange light. Cassie will be cleaned up and stitched by now. In the birthing-room, her need and pain had overwhelmed his own. That’s all it was. Not that he can’t feel. He turns back. Nothing open yet so he can’t buy flowers. Doesn’t matter, Patsy will be here soon enough with lorry-loads. He goes back into the hospital, back up the stairs.

Cassie is sitting up in bed with a bowl of cereal. Beside her a transparent plastic cot. She looks done in but kind of radiant, her hair brushed back from her damp face. He bends and kisses her.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she says.

‘Just needed a, you know, moment.’

‘Yeah.’

There is an aching pause. Obvious to both of them that he hasn’t properly looked at the baby. Hasn’t held him. She searches his face and opens her mouth as if she’s got something big to say. His heart almost stops.

‘Graham –’

‘Let’s have a shooftie then,’ he says, fast.

He hears her trembly outbreath. They wait and listen to the moment pass. He bends over the cot.

‘Why don’t you pick him up?’ she says.

‘Can I?’

‘Course you bloody can!’

He lifts the baby up. Afraid to look at the face. It, he, is a soft warm
minute
weight in his arms.

‘He weighs – nothing.’

A tiny hand flails, baggy skin, fingers like bird claws. He lets it clutch his painty finger. Such a
grip
. Looks at the nails, ragged, papery sharp. He carries the baby over to the window, takes a breath and looks down into the red screwed-up secret of a face.

I would like to thank Bill Hamilton, Alexandra Pringle,
Liz Calder and Andrew Greig for their editorial advice.
This novel was completed while I was Writer in
Residence at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature
and the University of Gloucestershire.

Lesley Glaister teaches a Master’s degree in Writing
at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of
nine novels which include
Honour Thy Father
,
winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize and a Betty
Trask award,
Easy Peasy, Sheer Blue Bliss
and
most recently
Now You See Me
.

Honour Thy Father

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