Authors: Araminta Hall
Dot (13 page)
So, Tony has just left and I probably should go and find Alice in whatever corner of the house she is hiding, but, truth be told, I can’t face it. I have received the third truly shocking news of my life; first my mother, second Howie and now Alice. I suppose you could say Jack’s death was shocking, but I was too young and besides he’d been ill for about a year before he died. And after Mother I was always waiting for the news about Father. Really I shouldn’t lump Alice’s news in with all this death, but that’s what it feels like: the end of her life, except she doesn’t even realise it. The people l love always seem to let me down one way or another; or maybe I should look at it from a different viewpoint, maybe there’s some intrinsic fault in me that makes them want to let me down.
I saw Alice’s face when she was telling me and I am sure I am not wrong to say that she enjoyed hurting me. Not the way that young girls so often come up against their mothers, because we never do any of the usual screaming and shouting and door slamming. More that it gave her a ghastly pleasure to cause me pain. That’s almost the worst of it, actually: that I could have done such a terrible job of being her mother as I have so obviously done. Of course I know that I’ve been far from perfect, but I do love her and I obviously haven’t managed to convey that at all. How did Howie do it? That’s what I’d like to know. How did he make it always look so easy? How did he have the courage to kiss her and bounce her and tell her he loved her? How did it not terrify him to his very bowels to give so much of himself to someone else, to invest all his happiness in another fragile human being?
I went to stand by the window when they were telling me as I needed to see a marker, like the rose bushes, to make sense of it all. The light was on the window, but I swear I saw myself skipping down the path at the bottom of the garden. I was even wearing my favourite blue dress from when I was, what, twelve, and my hair was streaming behind me. I had to dance when Father told me about Mother, there didn’t seem to be any other appropriate reaction. I went into the garden and danced under her window, trying to feel my way around the thought that I was never going to see her again. Of course it seemed impossible; I always presumed it was too big a concept for my young mind, until the police told me about Howie and I realised it had nothing to do with being a child. Because trying to understand that particular thought is the worst thing about death, the desperate scrabble the brain makes of trying to fit the pieces together, as if you could dip your hand into time like it was a pond and fish out the bits you need to make a whole. People talk about waking up after someone they love has died and forgetting for a second, and then the awful business of remembering, but I don’t think I ever forgot, I think I awoke with the desperate impression that I could change it.
Her hair was still in her brush when I was allowed into her room after the body had been removed. I took it and held it as though it was the most precious thing I would ever own, but of course hair is dead even when it is on your head and nothing to get excited about. Alice looks so like Mother. She looked like her the moment she was born. I never told Howie that, it seemed too dangerous to say out loud, but I wish I had now, I wish I had shared some of the things I know with at least one other person. Because what if looks signify more than genetic alignment? What if my mother’s character has seeped through the generations as well? What if I am no more than a conduit of her, sandwiched between two women unable to love me as I love them? Certainly Alice has my mother’s distance, that disconcerting way of looking through you, as if there’s always someone more interesting over your shoulder. They both have the same icy blue eyes that stare when they don’t understand something, as if ordinary life is too banal for goddesses like them. They are dangerous women.
To think that when they first walked in I presumed she was parading an unsuitable boyfriend before me and I felt a stab of excitement as I thought we might be moving on to a more normal footing. I allowed myself whole minutes of fantasy in which we raised our voices and came to agreements and learnt how to live with each other. But of course Alice had done something spectacular, how could I ever have imagined otherwise?
I can’t remember much of our conversation, I lost all sense of myself when she told me that she was pregnant. She wanted to leave me though, I do remember that, as distinctly as I know every word on Howie’s grave. She thought they could go and live in Cartertown in one room and live off – what? – love, I suppose. You know nothing about love, she said to me and she is quite possibly right.
At least Tony seems to have his head screwed on. I can see what she likes about him. He is obviously good-looking, although I don’t like his long hair or his tight jeans, but that is nothing. He also seems to be more than the sum of his parts. When he sat opposite me and said that Alice could not live in some room in Cartertown, I saw that he understood her. And more than that, he cared for her. He had weighed up the situation and made a choice, the right choice if you ask me. Of course they must live here and, who knows, maybe it will all turn out fine. Maybe a baby will be the making of Alice. I was having a hard time imagining what she might do with her life and maybe this is a good solution. We do not live in a world of nannies and entertaining like when my mother had me and so Alice will have to take on these responsibilities and maybe she’ll be good at it?
The problem is that he is scared. I saw his eyes flicking over everything when he walked in; I heard the stammer in his voice when he spoke to me. And scared is not the best way to enter a marriage. It is hard enough to get right when you are as in love as Howie and I were, but when you are scared and bemused and feeling inferior it stands little to no chance.
Howie used to laugh at me when I insisted on things being right, as I so stupidly called the traditions we pass down through the generations. But he understood what I meant. He could find me amusing because his mother had been almost the same person as me and so I was easy to love. But Tony will be lost in Alice and she in him. They will speak words in the same language and yet their meaning will be obscured by their experience.
It’s strange because when I couldn’t get pregnant I don’t think Howie was really that bothered. He worried for me because I was so desperate, but if it had turned out that we never had children I don’t think he would have been heartbroken. But then when Alice came along he fell in love with her so easily and readily. I think with men it is always the actuality, whereas women prefer ideas. Women can live whole lives in ideas, create realities out of nothing. Oh Howie, what would you make of this? The best, I imagine, although if you were still here, no doubt she wouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place.
You know, Howie, sometimes I hate you for leaving me. Often I hate you, Mother. Someone, I forget who, once said that love and hate are very similar emotions and they are so, so right. Why did you go out in that storm? The coastguard at the inquest said that it had been fine when you left, but you must have seen the storm approaching. You used to tell me how that was one of your favourite aspects of sailing, how you could look across the sea and see the weather approaching, like different seasons in the same day. If you saw that storm, why did you carry on? Or maybe you didn’t, maybe you turned back, that’s what the coastguard said was most likely. Of course your boat was so broken up it was impossible to tell what you had been doing, but I’m sure you headed for home. I’m sure you tutted at the wind in your pragmatic way. I hope to God you never even saw the boom coming, never felt a thing. You were there one minute and not the next; that’s all there is, that’s all there is for anyone. A ceaseless journey from one breath to the next, until it stops and we become nothing more than blood, flesh and bone. Except we were denied even that of you. Oh God, Howie, please come home. Please don’t leave me alone any more.
Everything changes and yet it stays the same. I am not shocked any more by the poll tax riots on the television or striking miners with starving children or continents baking in a relentless heat that deprives the land of food and water. I have realised that the only truly shocking things to me concern the people I love. If I was an African mother or a miner’s child, I would feel shock for these things, but they would look at me and feel nothing. This world we fight our way through is only personal and I think maybe I have realised that too late.
Clive Buzzard liked to think he knew things. And one of the things of which he was most sure was the accrued worth of him and Debbie in Druith. He and Debbie made a fine couple, they were like the Posh and Becks of their moment, except cooler and more relevant.
Clive liked to say that he was all about rap music. His father was Druith’s parish priest and his mother ran the Sunday school and battered women’s shelter in Cartertown, but Clive liked to dream that he had been born in downtown Harlem and that if only Public Enemy could meet him they’d embrace him as a true brother. His family lacked imagination, that was their problem. His sister liked to please, doing well at school, getting into university, never staying out past twelve and seemingly had little or no interest in boys. Clive wanted to keep it real, hardly understanding that real is whatever you deem it to be and that Public Enemy’s reality was irrelevant to him.
Clive dreamt of being a rapper and moving to London and making millions like Eminem. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t grown up in a trailer park with a drug-addled mother, married too young and lost everything he had to gambling. He could still feel their pain and reckoned he could still be a cultural marker of his generation. So he wore his trousers low, his baseball cap backwards and walked as if one leg had been shot and had to be propelled round his body as a stiff entity. Debbie followed suit, pushing her breasts up to her chin, bleaching her hair, shortening her skirts and exaggerating her make-up. They’d even had matching tattoos, which hovered above the crack of their bottoms, predictably a decorated D for him and a C for her. And they spoke in a gangsta slang, sucking on their teeth and using words they sometimes barely understood.
It wasn’t only their words that confused them, but also often the ideas they attempted to express which were as mixed and murky as a sludgy pond. He had an intense desire to ‘be someone’ and to have lots of money, although both ambitions were as flimsy as the miniscule lace underwear Debbie wore. Life, to Clive, was all about what you had and what people thought of you and it didn’t matter how you got there, as long as you didn’t have to work too hard. Open any of the magazines that littered the floor of Debbie’s pink bedroom and you’d see people exactly like him or her whose lives were followed in minute detail from year to year without any real reason. But reasons had ceased to matter a long time ago; for Clive and his people everything was about the here and now, the immediacy of existence.
Occasionally Clive would watch the news with his parents and see pictures of boys his age who had died fighting in a country he would be hard pressed to find on a map. Suckers, he would think to himself, as his father offered up silent prayers that you only knew he was making because his lips were moving. It wasn’t even as if soldiers got paid much and the only way they got their faces in the papers was once they’d died and what the hell was the point of that? His father often talked about the value of money and the pleasure of a good day’s work or a job well done but Clive would only roll his eyes into his head. It’s all bullshit, was one of his favourite phrases, something he and his friends would say to each other about any and everything. They were against the system, but never even considered that when something is knocked down something else has to be put in its place. A sense of righteousness and being owed pervaded them like the cheap aftershave they had recently taken to wearing.
Clive’s sister, Natalie, made no attempt to hide her disdain for her brother and his girlfriend, but his parents were annoyingly tolerant. They liked to talk about things like self-expression and individuality and respect for teenage boundaries, which made Clive bubble over with rage at the lack of things he had to fight against in his life. Not that he fully understood that this was the reason for the rage which seemed to overtake him so frequently. He could only identify his malaise in the simplest terms, by looking at those of his classmates who lived on the Cartertown estate or had only had one parent; a few had even been arrested. Clive found it stomach-churningly unfair that they should be given the opportunity of a life worth exploiting in song, whilst he had to put up with a vicarage, of all places, as well as understanding parents.
His parents’ understanding, however, crashed into a brick wall when they came back from the last parents’ evening of the lower sixth to be told that he was probably on course to fail maths A Level. Clive never should have taken maths, but his father had balked at politics, saying it wasn’t a proper subject, and Clive had relented and now it looked as though he’d only be getting two A Levels, which wouldn’t even get him into an ex-poly. We’ll have to get you a tutor, said his father, but Clive had stood up at this, twisting his baseball cap on his head; No man, he’d said, I’ll sort it, promise I will. And no more MTV Base or Xbox till your exams are over, his father had shouted as he’d stormed out of the room. Even Clive thought maybe he should cut down on the incessant porn he watched on the laptop in his bedroom if he was going to stand any chance of passing his exams.
Mavis Loveridge was easily the cleverest person in their year and maths was her specialist subject. Plus she was a geek, which meant she didn’t speak to any of his friends and so wouldn’t tell, and no doubt was in love with him, so would lick the gob off his shoe if he asked her to. Clive knew he had been right in his estimation when he cornered her in the playing fields one lunchtime and the look of exhilaration on her face had been impossible for her to hide in time. Of course she agreed to give him a few lessons, at her house, for free, no questions asked and telling no one.