SAM WINCED AS SHE STOOD UP, LISTENING TO HER KNEES CRACK, WATCHING the black circles give her momentary tunnel vision for rising too quickly, and gripped the cistern for support. The toilet flushed by accident. She was a bit shocked by her sudden apparent decrepitude, but she had, after all, spent a full hour kneeling on the bathroom floor, stooped forward in concentration in a mound of crumpled wrapping paper. Enough to give anyone tunnel vision. She rubbed her cold nose.
“Who is it?” she asked, and the knocking came again.
Rapid, impatient knocking; a child’s, but that could mean Sally or Mark, really. Sam had been enjoying her peace. The heating had just come on, shuddering through the old radiator, seeping in waves through the carpet. The only carpet with decent pile in the whole flat. The heat brought out a faint aroma of piss. Why can’t men aim properly? she wondered.
“Mam, it’s me.”
Sam opened the door and Sally shot in, slamming it behind her.
“He didn’t hear me come in, I don’t think.”
Sitting back on the carpet, Sam rested herself against the side of the bath. “What have you got there?” she asked.
Sam detested that tone in her own voice when she spoke to Sally, whenever mother and daughter were together. It was part parodic baby talk, part wearied rhetoric, as if she could barely conceive of this being before her as capable of replying. Indeed the logic of it seemed absurd; it was like addressing one of her own hands or feet and expecting an answer. This set up a tension whenever they were on their own together. A tension that Sally responded to by casting down her eyes and mumbling. Not shyness, exactly, but in sympathetic appreciation of the absurdity of her speaking.
“I need help. Wrapping this for Dad.”
And she held up for Sam’s inspection a cellophane bar of pink soap from the Body Shop. Sam sniffed. Strawberries.
“Do you think he’s dirty?” Sam asked with a laugh, pleased with the easy naturalness of her question, but thinking at the same time, Has she bought me something too? Is this where Sally declares her allegiances?
“We can’t tell if he’s dirty or not,” Sally said. “Because of his make-up.”
“Tattoos,” Sam corrected, reaching for an appropriate scrap of paper and the roll of tape.
“Do tattoos mean you don’t have to wash?”
Biting tape, Sam shook her head. “Your dad is the most obsessively clean person I’ve met. It’s a wonder he hasn’t washed himself white again. But you would never be able to tell if he was dirty, would you?”
“Turtles are dirty. They bask in mud at school.”
Sam was about to ask one of those adult-to-child questions which flatter the child with a semblance of genuine interest. She was going to ask, “Would you like to be a turtle, Sally?” but she ditched this and asked instead, “Would you like to have tattoos when you grow up?”
“Do girls have tattoos?”
“Some girls do. They don’t show them off as much, I don’t think, as men do.”
“Dad has them all over.”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t like that. He stands out.”
Sally was looking past her mother now, at the carefully stacked wrapped presents. She said, “I like that idea. The bows. Making them out of toilet paper.”
Surprised, Sam looked at the bows she had spent ages fiddling with, folding and securing with tape. Now they looked tatty and, where they had been somehow splashed with water, ripped through.
“Oh, it was just an idea I had.” She shrugged.
Turning to her mother, Sally smiled. “I’ve got a very clever mam,” she said, stepped forward and hugged Sam. A chill ran through the mother, as if she had bumped into something fragile, realising too late.
PEGGY WAS REASSURED BY THE FACT THAT SHE AND IRIS WERE WALKING in step, although wordlessly. The brisk scrape of their heels sounded on the tarmac. They both knew the way to Sam’s flat, even though the paths on the estate twisted, turned, doubled back, and they had only come this way a handful of times. It was as if they had separately rehearsed this walk in their minds’ eyes and now when it came to it, the evening of reconciliation, their feet carried them firmly, deftly, almost instinctively. Peggy stole the occasional glance backwards, to see their footprints etched black in the sleet. This feeble deposit was both the colour and texture of pepper. As the council streetlights popped on, one by one, the air changed to the shade of bruised lemons.
Their footsteps carried out a calm and measured conversation, it seemed to Peggy. Iris’s, of course, resounded more earnestly, as if her reverberations were felt more deeply into the earth beneath the tarmac, as if her musing simply went further down. Was this because she really was, as she claimed, about nine times as old as Peggy? Or was it because her shoes were patent leather? Peggy’s had rubber soles.
But this was ridiculous. Peggy was all for a little mystery, a little light romance to perk up life together. Iris had gone too far, though, this time. She had had her joke, made herself a tad glamorous with all that talk of Orlando, but ever since then she had been sunk in what seemed to Peggy suspiciously like gloom. The atmosphere between them sagged with an indulgence on Iris’s part. Since that particular conversation they hadn’t touched at all. Iris had swanned off upstairs, leaving Peggy to
