Mercy Seat (3 page)

What are you thinking? she said.

Nothing bad.

Then tell me.

Well, I'm thinking I don't mind. I'll help you, I said.

You don't mind, she breathed into my shoulder. I could feel the words on my bare skin.

You know what I mean, I said. I mean I'm happy about it.

Is that what you meant?

Yes. That's what I meant.

I wanted to rub my shoulder where her breathing was tickling it. I lifted my other arm across my chest and put the back of my hand between my shoulder and her breath, and I remember her kissing the knuckles in the silence, very lightly, each in turn.

Two

I wake sweating from a dream of drowning under waves.

I close my mouth and wait for my heart to settle. The room's already warm and half-lit by the early sun. I glance sideways at the clock. It's just before five. Jenny lies like a dead thing on my right and I turn my head to look at her. It seems a long time since I saw her so deep in sleep.

I try to relax myself – knotted shoulders, arms and legs – then peel the sheet from my wet skin and roll carefully out of bed. I pad across the thin carpet to the window. The yellow curtains make the light inside seem late and warm, but when I shift them there's a dead white sky. Down below the tide is right up, glutting in and out of the big grey boulders along the prom. The boulders look new and fresh-cut. They've been there a few years now but nothing sticks to them, no seaweed or limpets, except maybe on the undersides where it stays cool and damp. They stretch out in a long, clean curve all the way up to the sands and the pier. I stand there for a while against the windowsill and watch the water slip in and out between them, slow and smooth like oil. The prom and the road are still littered with debris from the storm three nights before, scraps of dried out seaweed and long snakes of gravel. The last day Christine woke in this room, and stood at this window, I can't help thinking, and feel the familiar twist in my stomach. It's calm outside now – not even a ripple on the sea – and any sounds from the water down below
are too soft to carry up to the window. The sweat prickles as it dries on my bare back and a sudden, deep shiver works out from my shoulder blades and along my arms. I press my palms against the sill as if I could earth the tremor through the wood. After a while Jenny mumbles something, but when I turn she's still sleeping blind and I cross the room quietly to the door.

Outside, the landing and stairs are much darker than the room and there's a stale biscuity scent coming up off the carpet. It's a smell that builds every night but vanishes during the day. In the stillness I can hear the hot water pipes sounding through the depths of the building: a faint rattle way down on the ground floor, rising to a solid knocking behind the wall across the stairwell. It's a tall, narrow guest house – a slice of what must have been a fairly grand hotel when it was still joined to the guest houses either side – thrown up in a rush for Victorian trippers when the town was briefly fashionable, and getting cranky in its old age now. Almost any time I see Mr Clement, the landlord, he's carrying his handyman's bag of tools, off to crouch stiffly in front of another leaking cast-iron radiator, or blocked waste pipe – a long, losing battle. The bathroom is up another short flight of stairs. I slip along the passage, past the half-open door of Alex, the young student teacher, then onto the stairs and up.

In the bathroom I lift the gluey toilet seat with the back of my thumbnail, noticing the bath tub at my side is still full of greyish, used water from the night before. When I finish I drain the bath as well as flushing the toilet. I find myself watching the water level drop with absolute attention, as if there were secrets at the grimy bottom of it. The small window above the sink is jammed open and in
the yard below, five floors down, Clement's Alsatian starts barking, snapping me out of my trance. Maybe it's heard the water emptying through the pipes. I decide not to go back to bed. I think of Jenny's warm body turning to me, stale with sleep, and it feels a relief to be naked and cold instead, hearing the dog – alert, and with no thought at all in its animal head – barking out its place in the world far down in the yard.

Back in the bedroom I manage to dress without waking Jenny, then go through to the sitting room. Michael lies sprawled belly-up in the cot, his wide head tilted back, eyelids sunk. I know he'll wake crying. It seems strange to see the cot back in here now Christine has gone. I cover Michael with a knitted blanket he's kicked halfway through the little wooden bars. He doesn't stir, and I'm grateful. I look over at the sofa. In the gloom I half expect Christine's shape to be still curled under sheets just a step away. Then I concentrate on what I'm doing, which is covering Michael with a second blanket, stupidly, because he'll be too hot and wake, but I do it anyway before going through to the box-room to study.

When we moved here, Jenny persuaded me to start a few courses with the Open University. You can't keep working in that warehouse all your life, she said, reasonably enough, and it was true I was getting bored, slowly but surely, with a life that was purely physical, other than when I escaped into the novels she'd kept from her student days.

As soon as I began studying again I understood that what I'd hated about school wasn't the learning after all, but just the awful sociability of school life – the constant, sparrow-like jostling and pecking that left me numb at the
end of every weekday afternoon. Maybe if I'd been brought up in a younger household it would have been different; but the contrast between my grandparents' lives – they were old even for grandparents – and the lives of everyone else around me seemed to coat my schooldays in a thin wash of unreality. It was chronic loneliness I suppose, or rather chronic aloneness – I didn't think of myself as lonely because the last thing I wanted was company. There must have been others around me who felt the same way, but I never met them, or never recognized meeting them.

I chose options in History for my university courses, just because it was the subject that had held my attention best at school. It didn't matter to Jenny that I wasn't studying anything vocational, something that might spring me out of Anzani's warehouse: I think she believed that study was an end in itself and one day soon, somehow, it would begin to change my life.

If I wasn't at the warehouse or looking after Michael, the study packs that arrived every few weeks in the post took up my full attention, almost to the point of obsession, though now I remember almost nothing of what I learned. It belonged purely to that time, maybe, and once it was over, all that knowledge, all those facts and stories, dissolved into a kind of ghostliness along with everything else.

At half past six I stop what I'm doing, which isn't much apart from staring into space and thinking, and decide to go and buy milk from the nearby newsagent's on the corner. I know it'll be open by now – the paper boys trailing in to collect their heavy sacks before school. I like slipping out this early, unnoticed. It reminds me of my time on Pugh's farm, that other world, when the days started with
the light and ended with the dark. It feels like a life I read about, and imagined as vividly as a child, rather than lived in the flesh.

On the way downstairs the rest of the guesthouse is still quiet, but when I get to the ground floor I hear Clement's daughter, a heavy, dour woman in her twenties, saying something behind the closed door of their shared flat. Then her own child, a plump blond toddler I sometimes catch sight of in the hall, answers back with a petulant yell. I take the front door off the latch and open it carefully, not wanting to be heard. The air's still and heavy-feeling, and I wonder if more storms are on the way.

Down on the pavement there are still a few fragments of starfish littered around, left over from the last blow-up. They get washed over the wall sometimes this time of year, hundreds of them, then dry out on the prom where kids use them like frisbees, though they only last one throw. I cross the road and head up towards the town, every now and again glancing down over the sea wall. For a while a small flatfish cruises along the same way, following the line of the stones, then one of the sunken boulders blocks it and it turns lazily back out to sea.

When I get back with the rolls Jenny's still sleeping, and suddenly I wonder if she's taken anything. She used to like to knock herself out when things got bad, but stopped after she knew she was pregnant. I decide to let her sleep till the alarm, then if that doesn't work, take another look. Michael looks very still too, though while I was out he's turned to lie flat on his stomach, head twisted to one side. I put the milk in the mini fridge then close myself in the box-room and stare at the latest of my study packs. Something about Russia, my topic for that term: these days, if I ever read
anything about the czars, the Moscow winters or the big, empty steppe, I'm always reminded incongruously of that summer, and the wife and child I had so briefly, and the small, musty rooms we lived in looking out over the sea.

Michael wakes and cries just before eight. I finish the paragraph I'm reading and get up, but just as I move from the small desk I hear Jenny walking through from the bedroom to lift him up. I stay where I am and listen to her comforting him. Luke? she says, in a voice that seems to come from miles away. Luke? Are you in there? It's already a familiar tone now, that flat, far-off note in the way she calls my name, though I couldn't have said that before Christine arrived, hardly more than a week ago. I wait a moment then say, I'm here, and open the door.

While we eat breakfast Jenny tells me about her dream – Christine climbing through the window, though we're sixty feet up, getting into bed and crouching on her chest. Then Chris was a cat, Jenny says, and she was so heavy I couldn't breathe.

I nod, force myself to spoon in a mouthful of cereal.

She was this cat called Max we used to have when we were girls.

She pauses to wipe a slick of dribble from Michael's chin. The cat was on my chest but over at the wash-basin in the corner of the room at the same time, she says, watching my face as she speaks. It was sucking at the tap, which made me panic for some reason, and in the dream I was crying because Max had turned against me. I was upset about Max, not Christine, she says, as if that's the key point she wants me to understand.

She concentrates on working some softened rusk into
Michael's mouth. I notice how her own mouth opens in sympathy with his.

I don't say anything. I don't want to eat, but I chew another spoonful down.

I haven't thought about Max for years and years, Jenny goes on. He was never even there, around the house. She scoops a drool of paste from Michael's bottom lip, then feeds it back to him. Max was a real tomcat. He was never about. She scrapes around the Tupperware bowl with the spoon. He was a big ginger tom, she says.

She doesn't mention Christine apart from her being in the dream, before she became Max, but not Max, and we finish breakfast in silence. That's where the last two weeks belong now, she wants me to understand; in a bad dream that doesn't make any sense, in a story that she can end.

By the time she leaves for work Michael's calm again and I can read while he dozes in his cot. My mind won't settle though and all I find myself doing for the next hour or so is making endless rounds of the living room, like a fish in a bowl, stopping each time at Michael's cot to check on him.

Finally, as if he can sense me looming there, Michael's eyelids snap open. He fixes me for a second with an alert, adult stare, then bawls.

For once I'm glad of the chance to pick him up and hush him. I take him with me around the room a few times and when he's quietened down I take him to the window and try to interest him in the gulls and pigeons down below us on the seafront.

The inside sill is just wide enough for him to be rested on. The sun's much stronger now and I have to squint to bear the dazzle off the sea. The tide's already well out.
It must have been on the turn when I saw it lapping the wall just after dawn. The hours seem to have accumulated rather than passed, building up like a gradual, physical weight in my blood and brain, and I feel a deep sinking tiredness spread through me. Far out in the bay there's a small motorboat heading south along the coast. It's too early for paddlers or swimmers yet, and it's a weekday morning anyway, but a few early sunbathers are lying half-dressed on the sand and shingle between the boulders and the sea-line.

I look down at Michael. He's reaching for a crisp dead fly lying belly-up at the corner of the sill. It's well out of his reach so I don't need to bother with it. I yawn, then yawn again, helplessly. The boat's almost disappeared now, into the haze around the headland.

Though he can't have the fly, Michael seems peaceful enough. I take a last look out of the window, down at the pensioners, dog walkers and mothers with baby-buggies all wandering the prom. Then I take Michael over to the sofa with me, to Christine's bed when she was here, just a bare few days ago, and lay my face on the cushion – her pillow for the nights she stayed – and half believe the dusty scent I'm inhaling is part of her. I hold Michael against my chest and we sleep facing the blue sky beyond the window.

Late in the morning the shared phone in the corridor wakes me, my heart racing, and I realise that even in my sleep I was alert and listening for this, for Christine. Somehow, I stop myself going to it. Having Michael beside me, still sleeping, helps. I know there's no one else on the floor at this time of the day and soon it'll have to stop. Michael's face is turned to mine. In his open mouth I can see the
smooth doll's teeth and where they haven't come yet I see the pink, smoothly swollen gums. The ringing makes me feel nauseous and for an instant I imagine Michael's milk-teeth mashing the fly on the sill. I close my eyes and wait, watching little scars of light float across the insides of my lids. I try to concentrate on them, on their jumps and drifts, and finally the ringing stops and I touch my face to the back of Michael's head.