Every Day Is Mother's Day

the house; the urge to confess was becoming almost unbearable. He took a deep breath of the foul air of the coming week, and began his matutinal wrestle with the damp-swollen garage door.

Muriel had taken to getting up early. Hearing the creak of the floorboards underfoot, Evelyn woke and lay stiff with alarm. Along the passage…“Muriel? Muriel?” Evelyn called hoarsely, her voice weak with apprehension. Muriel’s grinning head appeared around the door, dimly outlined in the half-light. Evelyn rolled her head around on the pillow, clutching up to her throat the old cardigan she wore at night for warmth. Her face had the look of thin old paper.

“Muriel?”

Why, she would brew her some tea, Muriel said. Brew her some coffee, brew her some milk.

“What are you doing up at this time? Are you sick?”

Muriel was not sick. She had never been sick at all during the course of her pregnancy. It had not incommoded her at all, except for the increased clumsiness of her swollen body. It was as if, Evelyn thought, the child was withdrawn and inert as its mother. A thing. A lump. Perhaps it was dead. Oh God. She struggled to sit up in momentary panic. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder. Let it not be dead. It was more than the house could contain. A ghost carrying a ghost.

“Muriel? Muriel?”

Muriel had gone downstairs. Why doesn’t she put on the lights? How does it come about that she can see in the dark?

Muriel opened each door in turn. The shiny leather parlour shrouded in shadow. The cramped back room where they sat during the day. The furniture had not moved itself. There was no material change. Muriel could never feel sure about things like this. Paper might walk and wood might laugh; and how was it possible to know whether anything existed, when you were out of the room? Very well, she thought reasonably, now I am here, now the house is playing dead. Now I turn, I turn my head, I watch out of the corner of my eye. Now I go out…she slammed the door behind her then thrust it open again as quickly as she could, propelling herself back into the room. The tables and chairs, unmoved, smirked at her knowingly. She looked at them in a passion of enmity. Once she had been at their mercy, but now she was learning how to go about things. Now she was making progress every day.

In the kitchen drawer was a ball of string. A ball of string and a knife to cut. Back to the front parlour. With savage tightness she knotted the string to the back of one of the dining chairs, and looped it round the door handle. She passed it around the back again, and pulled, the rough fibres burning her fingers; round the handle, and back a third time, lifting the chair off its back legs. She went out into the hall and dragged the door shut behind her. An example to the rest.

And back to the kitchen. She opened a cupboard and took out her breakfast egg. She balanced it on her palm for a moment and then allowed it to roll off and shatter on the floor. The result was gratifying. Evelyn made such strange noises when she bent down to clean the floor. “You’re a useless lump,” she would squall. “You never do a hand’s turn.” Useless lump, used to a bump. Muriel patted her body confidently. She thought she would go out to play.

It was very cold in the lean-to, but the cold was something that had never bothered Muriel. Over the last few weeks, when Evelyn had sternly forbidden her to go out of the house, she had taken to spending more and more time there, delving more deeply into the rotten cardboard boxes, shaking out the rusted tins and heaving aside planks of wood to see what was underneath. The recent wet weather had made it a musty, fungal place, with a private and unpleasant smell. Water was getting under the doors and soaking into Clifford’s collection of newspapers.

There seemed no likely end to the pleasures of the boxes. Here were images, for instance of people in strange clothes; furry little brown-and-white images, creased and smudged. And keys, for doors, a great bunch of them tied together. Locking doors, now there was a thing to do. And this fine garment.

An overcoat, Muriel thought. She could walk out in it. Promenade. She made a verse. An overcoat, across the moat, a man to dote, costs but a groat. It touched some chord in her heart, brushed some faint memory. She held up the coat and shook it out. It was thick and heavy, its dark wool mildewed but intact. Muriel wrinkled her nose at its ancient and complex smells. At first she wondered whether it had been left there by one of the corpses under the stones outside the door of the lean-to. Then her eye caught some writing. Writing in a coat? Who would want to write in a coat? She sniggered. She carried the coat over to the light to make sure. Yes, there was a kind of tape sewn into it, yellow and frayed, and faint grey letters on the tape. This coat had a name. Or its owner had a name. It would be pleasant to find out who was under the stones. Evidently corpses wrote in their clothes; evidently they had a strong sense of private property.

She spelled it out for herself. CLIFFORD F. AXON. Here was another matter. She smiled gently, and began to scrape with her fingernails at the mould which speckled the collar.

Colin had the third period free. It helped, this small oasis so soon after the dire start of the working week.

Frank O’Dwyer, his Head of Department, was coming out of the staffroom.

“Any change for the phone, Frank?” Change had become his obsession, lately.

“You may be the lucky one.”

They stood opposite each other digging into their pockets, like gunslingers in difficulty.

“What’s the magic of this telephone?” Frank enquired. “You spend half your working day on it.”

“I want to ring my sister.”

O’Dwyer produced a handful of loose change and decanted it into Colin’s palm.

“Did you run me off those copies?”

“5B’s exam? Yes…only twenty-five. Will that do? Bloody machine’s knackered again.”

“It always picks its time,” Frank said. “Twenty-five will suffice, they look over each other’s shoulders anyway, miserable little sods. Once we get the exams over it puts itself right during the night, do you notice? If it went to Lourdes, it would be called a miracle.”

Colin grinned weakly. He wanted to get away, but it was not possible to have a short conversation with O’Dwyer. He was a large lanky, charming man, with heavy glasses which slipped down his nose and needed continual readjustment. His breath smelled faintly of the nip of whisky which he took to get himself started each