There are ridges under the cloth.
Here’s real. Cold trickling walls, your flat rags.
He always loved touch. Hands. Lips. Hair. His face now is anybody’s, all skulls are the same. Where’ve you gone? You great fool, the greatest fool that ever lived. How could you? Now, idiot, look, just look at you.
I couldn’t bear it so I turned off the torch light.
*
I think I’ve been here a long time. In the dark there’s nothing. Time’s gone. Maybe I’m not even here. Floating off on nothing, dipping and falling and rising again. Not even thinking. Maybe I slept. Anyway, there I was sitting upright, and he was still there with me because he was breathing, sussussussuroo in the dark. The light. The button you push up. Click. There you are! We have to go. I won’t leave you here any more. It’s not fair. You’ll fall to pieces if I’m not careful. So, crawling like a worm I brought you out, slow inch by inch, rolling the rug along, the light before me showing that this is hell indeed, this wet slime of a place, crawling on my belly through the earth, and all the years fell away till I was there again, hauling and hauling, deep in the earth where I was no one and he, in death, was more alive than I ever knew him. I saw his face when it was lovely, his dark eyes and hair. God, he was gorgeous. I used to look at him and think, Lord have mercy, all my dreams came true. And what did he do? Turned it all to shit. Mud on the road. I remember I wrote at my lowest point, with a pen that broke the paper, stabbed it: Make my body mud on the road, let the wheels roll over it till I’m crushed in the ruts. My lowest point. All that sweetness came to that in the end. But I got you back. Didn’t see that coming, did you? That’s what I said to him. Do you know the nights I lay awake hour after hour in the long dark, and every instant was impossible, every second hurt. What happened, it served you right, oh God it served you right. You made that happen. Lily and that poor boy, thick as a plank, should have been the old bag, the cow, the evil cunt, ugly evil cunt, ugly evil withered vile old bag of a cunt. She’s dead now, you’ll be glad to know. Such a miserable existence the sour old creature had. In the end she took pills and ended it. Well, no wonder. What did she have? Money. But that’s all.
The light shows strange walls, complex, striated. Above, a smotheringly close roof of dirty strings that threatens death. Is this what it comes to? This pinpoint of a moment in the middle of eternity, me in this place?
But you know, one thing I’ve found out. Nothing goes away, not one little thing. Takes a slight thing sometimes to press that button, click on that link and suddenly, hey, there it all is replaying like an old film you saw years ago on the TV when you shouldn’t have been up and watching. And the way it curdled your blood and shrunk your bones then when you were a child, it all comes back.
42
He was out by the beehives, late on in the next afternoon, when his phone rang. Jesus Christ, he was going to have to do something about that stupid ring tone. Driving him mad. His back was aching and the late sun streamed down through the tree trunks and fell on a lacy thickness of undergrowth.
‘Hello?’
‘Dan, it’s Madeleine. Just thought I’d better update you on the Lorna Gilder situation.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, basically it’s all sorted.’
‘Good.’
‘Basically…’
‘Yeah.’
‘You weren’t in this morning, were you? We knocked on your door.’
‘Yeah.’
Banging and ringing for ages, what did they think? That he was suddenly going to materialise after ignoring them for the past twenty minutes? Lying with the pillow on his head. Cats. Still in. The place was beginning to smell, he’d have to do something. Whoever you are you can fuck off. I don’t want to know.
‘No, so we thought she might be there but obviously not, so we went into the woods and there she was at her little place just sitting there waiting for us basically. It was really unliveable, you know. Soaking wet. Really horrible old rags that had got wet and not dried properly because you couldn’t, could you? So most of it was so awful we had to leave it behind. She was OK with it. And she was absolutely filthy. I mean, not just a little bit but like, you know, as if she’d fallen in mud and just let it dry on her. We couldn’t leave her like that. I mean. Can you imagine? If it was your mother’ – a slight miss there as the awkward presence of his mother arose between them – ‘but she didn’t seem to mind anyway. Came quiet as a lamb.’
‘Her pills are here,’ he said.
‘Oh. Well, she’s got some more now, so it’s OK. Do you want me to pick them up and get them back to a pharmacist for you?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’
‘OK.’
‘So – where’s she gone then?’
‘Same place she was before. Her daughter was on the phone all afternoon to them. It was some sort of semi-sheltered thing, they know her there and she’ll be fine. They’ve been very good. And she knows people there.’
So that was that.
Over, thank God.
‘Her daughter took her back in the car. Down south. Nice woman but a bit brisk and detached I thought. If that was my mother. Still, she
