Crustaceans (3 page)

It was always my habit to use too much water when throwing. The clay became liquid, a wet glove to each wrist, and as the moisture evaporated it left behind a grey sediment, pallid and papery, which broke as it dried along the grain of my skin. Even after I'd washed, the grey would remain. And as you looked now at those lines, something occurred to you. What is it? I said, and you asked me my age. You were by then not merely four, but four and three-quarters, and age was important. Just as each house must have a number, so too must people, and mine was a three and a nought. Did that mean, you wanted to know, that I was going to die soon? No, not for a long time, I promised; not till I was very much older. But I was already old, you informed me, still holding my hand. You offered it up to me. See the lines, Daddy, you said. See the grey? Your voice was concerned, but consoling, and I wasn't to worry. It's only
quite
old, you told me, not
really
old. I think you're right, I smiled, and cupped both my hands round your face. My mother was twenty-five when she died. It was only a number. I patted your arm and said we ought to clear up: Ruth would be expecting us home soon.

More than a year has now passed since that afternoon, half a year since I last worked in my studio, and my hands are once again empty – idle, redundant – but for this one simple routine: I reach for my tobacco and papers. I hold the pouch in my left palm and pinch out some fibres. I draw them down the V of a Rizla, spreading and tamping, untangling the knots. I nip away the excess and return it to the packet. I put the packet aside. I roll the tobacco in its channel of paper, my hands almost touching, my head bowed and steady, as close here to the posture of prayer as I will now ever come. Then the momentary pause, and the tuck of my thumbs as I fold the Rizla in on itself and quickly smooth it out to a cylinder. I lick and seal the gum, fit the cigarette to my mouth and reach for my lighter. I touch the flame to the tip and breathe down the first smoke, then slowly exhale. And I wonder, would these hands seem older or younger to you now, Euan; nearer or further from dying? No trace of clay-dust remains, no layer of grey, but there are stains – amber-brown and persistent – on the pads of my thumbs, at the tips of my first two fingers, in between each of the knuckles. Which is something, at least, I never meant you to see, that your father never intended to show you. And one promise I failed to keep.

I glance up through the smoke at the mirror and turn the key in the ignition. The seaside is less than thirty minutes away.

FIVE

My mother was leading me to my grandparents' house. It was summer and the pavements were chalky, the hedges swollen in sunshine. I noticed the moss dividing the paving slabs, scuff-marks on my sandals, tiny insects. I picked up an Embassy coupon to give to my father, and paused by the wreck of an abandoned ice-cream van. All four of its tyres were flat. It had been there for months, a familiar landmark, more visible to me then than the tower blocks around it. The clack of my mother's heels drew me on. We were in a hurry, it seemed, though she never once said so. I ran to catch up with her, but she remained always ahead of me, hardly even aware of me. When finally we came to a main road – heavy trucks streaming past us and a smell of exhaust, streets of older housing beyond – she forgot to offer her hand. I had to remind her. As we stepped from the kerb I noticed the scrubbed rawness of her knuckles and the mauve indentation where her ring should have been. Her grip briefly tightened and I looked up to her face. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She wore a polka-dot headscarf, pink lipstick. When we reached the far side she released me.

My grandmother, tall and thin and wearing an apron, was cleaning the outside of her windows. Stretching upwards, she looked over her shoulder and made a face of surprise, more puzzled than pleased. She came to meet us at the gate and I went straight indoors to her living room. The darkly varnished door of the sideboard was slightly ajar, inside a smell of tobacco and beeswax. I found the biscuit tin and took it through to the kitchen, where I sat at the table and waited, the blue-painted wall directly before me, my grandparents' chairs to each side. After a while I arranged the sauce bottles on the oilcloth to hide the blemishes and stains. Beneath my elbows the pattern of flowers was fading, almost scrubbed out. Eventually I heard voices approaching around the side of house. The doorway darkened as they came in, and then my mother bent to embrace me. She kissed the top of my head and quietly said, I'll come for you later, be a good boy; and I nodded. After she'd gone my grandmother gave me a biscuit and poured out a beaker of barley water. She watched as I drank it. Then she went back to her chores and I played alone at the rear of the house, the upstairs windows blankly reflecting the sky.

It was several days before I saw my mother again. I remember the green of the hospital gardens, the lawns close-cropped and spongy, the hedges as tall as my father. He stood near my grandad in the shade of a tree, the soil bare beneath them, their shoes darkly polished. They were smoking, facing away from each other. Two of my aunts and my grandma sat on a bench in the sunshine, speaking in murmurs. A cream-coloured ambulance was parked by the flower-beds. The driver wound down his window and took off his cap, raked a hand back through his hair. The red-brick of the hospital buildings resembled the bay-fronted terrace where my grandparents lived. Above the orange roof-tiles the sky was cloudless and blue. For some minutes I searched the shadowed interior of the hedges for insects, and found instead the denser mass of a bird's nest. When I lifted it out I scratched the back of my hand. Inside were a few fluffs of down, but no eggs, and I carefully replaced it. A couple of nurses strolled past me, smelling of perfume, their watches pinned upside down to their tunics. They smiled. My father stamped out his cigarette. He called me to follow him.

The light inside the hospital was gauzy, the walls painted white and pale green. A nurse strode ahead of us, splay-footed, her shoes as clumpy and black as a man's. I noticed red buckets of sand, rows of metal pans in a storeroom. A tall bony man in pyjamas shuffled to a halt in the corridor and waited until I had passed him. A woman in slacks and white clogs touched my head as she stepped round me. Then we entered a ward of elderly men and I heard a voice calling, Here she comes now, everyone rise! The nurse said something short in reply, and one of the men gave me a wink. He was laughing. The blue cast of his cheeks turned a shade darker and he folded his arms on his chest. I stalled by the foot of his bed and he reached to his side for a bag of boiled sweets. I went cautiously towards him, and heard another voice say, He's come over all shy. The old man shook a sweet by the twist of its wrapper, and when I snatched it away his laugh came as a wheeze, then he started to cough. The nurse and my father were waiting by the next double doors. The floor squeaked as I ran.

My mother had a room to herself, wide and tall-ceilinged, cool and uncluttered. A large enamel sink stood by the window. A block of bright sunlight fell just short of the bed. She smiled weakly across the distance between us and extended an arm, inviting me closer. I felt the pressure of my father's hand on my shoulder. Her nightdress was pale blue and puffed at the sleeves, scooped low at the front. Her wrists seemed too puny, her chest too exposed. There were flakes of dry white skin on her lips. My father began talking, and though she appeared to be listening, her attention never once left me. Her gaze was kindly but feeble, like an old lady's, and I stood where she wouldn't be able to touch me. My father mentioned the sweet I'd been given, and I opened my mouth to show her, but she didn't respond. She stared at the scratch on my hand, and frowned as though confused or annoyed, a single sharp crease in her forehead. Then came the slow pooling of her tears. She turned her cheek to her pillows and looked at the wall. It was time to withdraw. My father led me back through the door.

In the weeks that followed I went with my grandparents to the seaside, and visited London with my father, and spent several days more in the company of Rene, his sister, until finally, one afternoon, I came home to find my mother again in our kitchen, a patterned pink blouse knotted under her ribs, rubber gloves on her hands, and the washing-machine churning. It was as though she had never been away, or at least, never would again. Yet I know, because I've been told, that she was to return to the hospital within a few days, her fourth time in less than a year. And on that last occasion, too, there was sunshine and I played unconcerned in the gardens, exploring the hedges, watching the nurses, though I didn't accompany my father indoors. When eventually he emerged from one of the buildings, seeming dazed by the sunlight and walking forgetfully, my uncle Ron came up behind him and placed one hand round his shoulder, the other supporting his elbow. I remember we filed in procession past the signboards, the porters' lodge and the flower-beds, and as we came through the main gates I saw the stalls of the market ahead of us, the council buildings beyond that, and complained we were going the wrong way, I'd been promised we would go to the park. My aunt Rene had lifted me into her arms and from the height of her shoulder I saw the blankness and bewilderment in the faces around me, my grandfather supporting my grandma, my uncle guiding my father, and I asked, Where's Mummy, when is she coming? To which there was no answer then, and for weeks and months afterwards, no answer from anyone.

SIX

I was warned about driving, cautioned against it. The mind wanders. For twenty miles this road to the coast meets no obstructions, no complications. It goes only there. But then come the trailers and chalets, the camping and caravan parks, and I took a right turn, came out where I hadn't intended to be. We're still heading for the sea, but the wrong side of the resort, towards my flat and the art school, away from our caravan.

I have come this way too often before. The town is fringed here by marshes, allotments, donkeys and ponies in ramshackle stables. A black-girdered bridge takes us over the river, quayside derricks in the distance, the flourmill and brewery. I accelerate past warehouses, squat industrial sheds, and arrive at the racetrack. Outside the stadium are hoardings of stock cars and bangers. The colours are gaudy, surprising. A grey canvas banner says
CANCELLED.
Fifty yards further on I turn left off a roundabout and ascend towards bungalows, pampas grass in the gardens, trees and hedges made blotty with snow. An old man walks with one hand outstretched for a fall, touching the lampposts, the railings. A car pulls cautiously out from a driveway. I pass turnings for crescents and closes, ice corrugating the road at the junctions, and come alongside a playground, where I slow without thinking, to avoid or see what I don't know. The pavements are empty, the wire enclosure deserted. A solitary gull heads for the roofs of the old town.

Near the crest of the rise are the houses with portholes, pink and blue walls, and a sign for the college, which is five streets below. Descending, I recognise everything sharply, the upward tilt of the sea, half-timbered hotels with fibreglass awnings, the pubs. At night, unable to sleep, I have traced the map of this route in my mind, the exact sequence of shopfronts. On the next corner comes the laundromat, its green conical roof sprouting a weathervane, a fat metal artichoke, and there I indicate left and follow a dark twist in the road, flint walls on both sides, and emerge to a car-park where a digger stands idle in a space marked by bollards. The gravel is swollen with ice. I make a wide circle and stop a yard short of the boundary trench, directly facing the college. In your first summer we came here, took photos of you in my lap on those steps, in your buggy with Ruth on that corner. Carved over the entrance in blocks of blackening sandstone are the words
T.E.C.H.N.I.C.A.L. I.N.S.T.I.T.U.T.E.
and the date
1906.
The high narrow windows, barred now at street level, were always that grimy. I work my arms into my coat and gather up my tobacco and papers; my hat, scarf and gloves. From here I will walk. I push open my door to the cold, and remember my tissues, my cough sweets. I leave the car without locking it.

The college of course proved no better than my father had said it would be. To his mind, I knew, this town would always mean holidays, deckchairs and beachballs, frivolity. Nowhere so marginal, so close to the sea, could lead to anything solid or lasting. But most things about me then seemed to provoke him, testing his patience, his comprehension. Nothing I ever said could change that. I hardly bothered to try. I was putting myself out of his reach, the weight of his expectations. I had no other ambitions.

The engineering departments – marine, mechanical, agricultural – occupied most of this building, the wide flagstoned corridors smelling of oil and burnt gases. Art was taught in a wing at the back, and although the students there were visibly different, and kept themselves separate, the courses they followed were no less applied or vocational. The prize for best work in graphic design was sponsored by a greetings-card company. The ceramics department, where I spent my three years, was run along factory lines. It occupied four rooms in the basement, giving on to a courtyard, whilst sculpture, for which Ruth had enrolled, was dispersed throughout the building and its prefab extensions, never finding space enough anywhere. We met daily in the canteen, in the long queue for lunch, and always sat as a couple. That anyway seemed to be solid, and lasting.

Soon after our first Christmas apart, sitting knees touching in the clatter of pans from the kitchens, a tin-foil ashtray between us, I said, I've got something for you, and slid a Yale doorkey towards her. Ruth watched it approach, let it remain where it lay. It's a key, I said, and she nodded. You don't have to take it, I said; not if you don't want to, but I'd like you to have it. The brass teeth and notches were shiny. Only if you want to, I said. She drew on her cigarette, narrowing her eyes at the smoke, and then slowly, exhaling, she picked it up from the table. Thank you, she said, and shifted around in her chair. She crossed her legs and tucked the key in the back pocket of her overalls. Her knees had left me, but she was smiling, and I talked excitedly then about nothing in particular, what I'd been doing that morning, who I had seen, all the while hoping she'd speak, say something to stop me. But she did no more than smile, and the key wasn't mentioned again until she used it, four or five days after that.