Chain Reaction (2 page)

What did she mean by ‘services’?—the hospital? The clinic? The off-licence was more relevant, but there was no need for her daughter to know that.

Irene was used to better.

She’d been so damn down then she’d been easily persuaded, but funnily enough Frankie had been right. The bungalow was too full of memories of William. She couldn’t bear to stay there, even to cook with the same view from the kitchen window as if she could call him in from the garden when tea was ready and he’d come, easing his boots off at the door. All that sickness. Sweat, wood and lilies and the grey light of so many dawns through bay windows. It took her a while to stop calling out and following men in the street who looked like him.

‘You’ll be nearer to me and the kids—there’s that to consider,’ said Frankie.

But Irene didn’t approve of the flat. ‘Far too pokey,’ she’d sniffed. ‘What about all my things? And there’s no airing cupboard.’

‘You don’t need all that stuff any more, Mum. Not now. You want somewhere small you can cope with.’

And so she had finally been persuaded—and it had worked very well, she conceded. Although to be honest she didn’t see more of Frankie and the kids because the flat was too small for all of them to fit in comfortably. If she saw them it was when she was invited to lunch at their house, or for Christmas or a birthday party. Frankie worked hard, a woman on her own since the divorce. Irene had always been proud of her.

And so, gradually, Irene mended the texture of her life which had been so roughly torn. Lord, it was an uphill struggle.

It worked the same way when she went to Greylands for the first time. She’d had a fall going round the shops, caused by a loose pavement so it wasn’t her fault, nothing life-threatening, but she’d broken her leg and needed to be cared for. ‘It’ll only be for a month or so,’ said Frankie encouragingly, ‘just till you’re back on your pins. You can’t manage at home alone, not any more, Mum. You’re beginning to forget things, aren’t you? And you went calling for tea at Miss Benson’s last week when you hadn’t been asked. Miss Benson is worried about you. We are
all
worried about you. And look what has happened now… you can’t even walk with two sticks.’

Irene considered Miss Benson a traitor of the very worst kind.

‘Oh God—look at it, Frankie!’ Greylands horrified Irene, although it was not unpleasant in appearance—white and lofty, with hedges clipped into tidy shapes, raked gravel paths and wisteria trailing over the door. There was even a full-length conservatory where they propped the old ones out in all weathers along with the geraniums. It was the knowledge of what it was and
what it housed
that upset her.

Even then she felt afraid that once she set foot inside that place, she would never get out again.

Inside, in the sleepy heat, it smelled of food and urine and strong arthritis unguents.

Frankie was servile before the matron. Funny, there was something disturbingly similar about them both, apart from the fact that each woman wore an Aran sweater with pockets and wooden buttons.

Afterwards Frankie said, ‘Never mind what it smells like. It’s only temporary, you’ll soon be back home again. Somebody’s got to look after you, Mum, and I can’t.’ Frankie was getting in one of her states and making Irene ashamed of her selfishness. ‘You know it’s impossible for me to take time off school.’

So it seemed like the only safe thing to do.

It just goes to show: you should always follow your initial instincts, no matter what the odds against you.

Now, back in the beloved safety of her small flat, Irene looks round. She swallows. People have been here while she’s been gone, and not just Frankie either. Things are slightly out of line where strangers have pushed past, and someone has piled the post on the windowsill, not the mantelpiece where Frankie usually leaves it. The washing-up bowl has been turned upside down, a sure sign of somebody not coming back. She daren’t look in the bedroom drawers in case she finds them empty. She is too frightened to move from her chair for the moment. The flat gave her life a structure, an aim, and now she is loose like a ship on the sea with no rudder and a black storm rushing towards her… and it’s all very well for Thatcher to say that it all depends on which way you steer.

She is sitting there on the lav of all places when she hears the chink of the front door.

She jumps.
Damn, damn.
Frankie is right—she
is
getting confused, having periods of forgetfulness, else why didn’t she think to lock it?

With a thumping heart Irene pushes the toilet door shut with the end of her stick and lies low like Brer Fox.

‘Mum? Mum! Are you all right? It’s me, Frankie.’

Well, I know it’s you, thinks Irene crossly. Who else would call me ‘Mother’?

Her daughter’s voice has a spiky edge. ‘Miss Blennerhasset is with me…’

Matron—that unholy cow? The keeper of the keys? She would be! As Irene struggles forward to pull up her knickers, the stick falls against the door. It is William’s stick which gives her away.

‘Irene, dear,’ calls Miss Blennerhasset, and Irene can hear her large sandalled feet squeaking across the kitchen floor. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’

‘Having a pee, since you ask,’ snaps Irene, fighting for breath. ‘And I would like some privacy—surely that’s not too much to ask? You can’t get in anyway,’ she adds with some triumph. ‘The stick has wedged across the door.’

‘Then I’ll stand out here and wait for you,’ says Miss Blennerhasset, rattling the door knob like a bulldog which won’t let go, ‘while Frankie makes us all a nice cup of tea.’

‘You have surpassed yourself this time, Mother. We’ll be lucky if they take you back.’

Hopeless to try and hurry. ‘There’s milk in my bag,’ calls Irene, quite forgetting she’s stolen it, giving herself away again, asking for trouble. But a question bubbles to the surface of her mind—
Hang on a minute—
it’s not her who deserves a good talking to this time, it’s them. It’s these devious conspirators who have put her flat up for sale behind her back and now they’ve got to answer to her, the rightful owner. From the kitchen she hears the rattle of crocks, but she’s miles away now, thinking about feeding the geese in the park with Frankie when she was little. You try to do something kind with the bits of bread in your paper bag, and how do they react? They overwhelm you, demanding more, pricking at you with their sharp yellow beaks, shrieking and squealing and beating their wings till you wish you’d never come in the first place. Till you vow you’ll never feed them again.

Gobble, gobble gobble, the devils. They don’t love you after all. They hate you.
They are coming to eat you all up.

J
OY IS TOO YOUNG
to have benefited from the pious verse of Faith Steadfast and anyway, women had ceased endeavouring to be steadfast long before the poet’s demise. All Joy knows is that they are conspiring to drive her mad. Total strangers with fine drizzle on their hair known only by surname and briefly introduced by the agent, come with their swivelling eyes, their cold and greedy eyes, and sometimes their extended families to sneer at Joy’s airing cupboard and to take note of the state of her lavatory bowls.

Blue water, pink water, green water… out of the colours of the rainbow, Lord which is the most hygienic?

She’ll soon close the door on another lot.

They tread mud through on the carpet but still she must be deferential. If they delve hard enough, they might uncover some private life hidden deceitfully from view. Is it through the mirror? Is it under the stairs?

The bathroom glistens and glows and smells like a perpetual garden. It is nobody’s smell in particular, Joy has made certain of that. What would it smell like if left to itself—decomposition? Surely not as bad as that! Their lives might have changed for the worse, but they’re still alive and in with a chance, aren’t they?

If only…

‘And this is the en suite bathroom,’ she gushes. Oh, when did life cease to be fun and turn into one uphill struggle?

And why is Vernon never around when she has to endure this ordeal?

Domestos sits like silk on the water, a layer of hygiene laid across by a loving hand like a sheet over a sleeping child. On guard against germs. Perhaps if the water was black they’d be more impressed? She’d like to do something nasty in it, like drop a fag-end down, a fag-end that shreds and won’t flush away. No, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bear them to think of her like that.

She doesn’t even smoke. Nobody does, these days.

Nobody moves house these days either, not unless they jolly well have to. That’s what everyone says, so reasoning otherwise sounds suspicious. You might as well just come clean and admit, ‘We’ve run out of money so we’ve got to sell or the bank will sell it over our heads.’

As soon as she’d seen them, these latest viewers, these people from Lancashire with their northern accents, she’d quenched a flicker of disappointment, assuming they were not the ones.
‘You don’t like this house, I can tell you don’t like it. You are wasting my time and yours, so why don’t you just go away?’

If only Joy could be honest and say that, instead of playing these mind-games. But rather than be honest that way with anyone, Joy Marsh would bite through her lip, gnash right through it, sharp white enamel through soft pink flesh. Self-mutilation. She’d abuse herself and anyone else if they started being honest like that.

She was brought up as a good woman, not to be honest.

She had crushed a garlic clove in the kitchen the moment she heard the doorbell chime, her shoulders raised in anticipation. Another lie, suggesting she cooks with garlic and herbs although she does, sometimes. Truth be told, she might as well leave out the old frying pan full of Vernon’s bacon butty fat. He’s taken to bacon butties in the mornings, flying in the face of the health warnings, flying in the face of all sorts of warnings because what does it matter now?

Might as well leave his seat belt off. I mean, it hardly goes round his waist any more, he has put on so much weight. Some people eat when they are depressed. They eat and gorge and grunt grunt grunt. While others starve themselves into shrunken relics. Might as well cut the lawn with the safety catch off the electric mower, might as well leave the door unlocked so that burglars can get in. Oh, it’s all so puny, so hopeless these days to do anything
COURAGEOUS
or
CARELESS.
You can’t ride your horse over dangerous hedges till it drops and breaks its neck and yours, or wage war, or throw down a challenge to Norman Mycroft at the bank, slap his baby face with a glove.
Y
OU CAN’T FIGHT BACK.

So what does anything matter if you have to go on being meek?

She and Vernon have lost everything, haven’t they?

Everything they fought for.

What a good thing the chickens have flown the coop. She couldn’t have stood all this humiliation in front of the children.

‘And this is the master bedroom,’ she smiles, softly leading the way and surreptitiously squeezing the tiny white linen bag full of rose pot pourri—to cover what, the smell of sex? A seasidey, weedy, frondy smell, or is that just the smell of woman? She can hardly remember, it is so long since sex was anything more than a scuffle… but she thinks that hot men smell of sex and apples. She knows these people don’t like ‘Joyvern’ but still Joy is anxious to please, keen to impress. She can’t help it.

‘Master bedroom?’ So what is that supposed to mean? That it’s owned by the master of the house, or that this bedroom, because of its size, dominates the three others by wielding the stick. A bully bedroom. How absurd is this estate agents’ language and how pitiful that she is forced to use it.

A fungal colour? She never thought of it that way when she ordered the Laura Ashley beige, when she considered that beige gloss would offset the bedspread of dusky apricot. The inside of a mushroom? Very tasteful, with bits of burnt bacon rind blazed into the colour of the rug.

Vernon’s alarm clock set at seven-thirty, seven-thirty all his life.

Carefully placed books on the two bedside tables are false as the garlic in the kitchen.
Sacred Hunger—
she hopes there is no bedroom message in the title that these—what are their names?—that these Middletons might pick up and misinterpret. They probably won’t, for these people clearly have no taste. Joy never managed actually to get into the book although she was gullible enough to buy it when she saw it on special display in Smiths. That’s partly why they are in this mess, because of her endless shopping, because she’s attracted to display like a dowdy female peacock. Or a jackdaw with a nest to feather. A craving for brightness. For owning things. An illness, some people say. There’s counselling groups in America. Wardrobes for His and Hers, only Hers runs along 90 per cent of the wall space while his is a humble single unit filled from Marks & Spencer. On Vernon’s side sits a Kingsley Amis which someone gave him one Christmas. It dryly covers a temptingly fat Jilly Cooper.

A tense and nervous woman somewhere in her forties, Mrs Middleton’s pink lipstick spiders into the lines round her mouth. ‘Not much of a view,’ she says from the window, her face gone an unhealthy green from the wet and leafy reflection there.

It creates such a shocking lack of privacy, this showing people round. The bedroom is full of sleeping breath like evening shadows. There must be hidden toenail cuttings splintering over the carpet. ‘We get the view in the winter,’ says Joy in her most genteel tones, ‘when that tree is dead.’

‘Hum,’ says Mr Middleton, stooping, viewing himself through the dressing-table mirror and smoothing back his hair. That mirror must be shocked, it’s so long since it has seen anyone else’s reflection but hers, and there was a time just lately when she pressed her lips hard against it, and her nipples, too, squashed and cooled like the blunt, soft noses of puppies. Lips and nipples, both left smudges of cloud on the glass. This was when she was trying to find herself after learning of their financial predicament, so totally disorientated she was trying to rediscover herself physically. Joy is a small, dumpy woman with rounded features and bright blue eyes. Homely, she supposes, homely, nuzzling and familiar. Thousands of women look like Joy, but not many dress with her kind of style. Her haircut is short and sensible with a short and sensible fringe. She’s a busy person, only just turning grey at the edges.