The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Late

As the door slams shut, she wonders if she has her keys. Putting her hand in her pocket, wrapping her fingers around them, she thinks of the cold key her mother used to cure hiccups. She recalls the chill of it on her skin, going down her spine, stopping her breath.

Her head is aching but not as much as it might be and she wonders if she is still drunk. She is late. She needs to be at a meeting which has already started. Her alarm clock didn’t wake her. She hasn’t showered or had her breakfast. She hasn’t even brushed her teeth and is wearing yesterday’s clothes.

She hesitates on the doorstep, squinting in the sunshine like some subterranean creature suddenly finding itself in daylight, missing her bedroom, the darkness under the duvet. She takes the few steps to her car, the key in her hand. She can feel her organs shuddering, riddled with toxins. She knows that her breath must reek of alcohol. Unlocking the car, she gets into the driver’s seat and puts her face in her hands, her fingertips touching her eyelids, her breath warming her palms.

After a minute, she puts the key in the ignition and turns it but the engine only wheezes. She tries again but it will not start, and she tries again and again and again but still it will not start and once more she puts her head in her hands.

She gets out of the car, glancing up at the bedroom window, at the closed curtains. She goes to the bonnet and opens it up, looking hopelessly at the engine.

When she hears her neighbour’s front door opening, she turns around. He is in his dressing gown, fetching his milk from the doorstep. He calls out to her, ‘All right, Janie, love?’ She opens her mouth — she might say something, tell him what has happened, ask for his help, but her tongue feels like a pound of raw liver in her mouth, and already he is shutting the door again, not waiting for an answer, no longer looking her way.

As she closes the bonnet, she notices the dirt and oil on her hands and a stain on her blouse. She is right outside her house — she could go inside and wash her hands and change her clothes but she doesn’t. She locks her car and walks towards the bus stop. She is so late.

The bus, when it comes, is packed. She puts her fare in the driver’s tray and he prints out her ticket and drives off before she has found a vacant seat. A large man squeezes up to make space for her, if not enough. He smiles at her as she sits down and she hopes he will not try to start a conversation.

Every time the bus turns a corner, their bodies touch, bumping against one another while she looks straight ahead. People are talking and the noise of it makes her head throb. There is a hand on her arm and someone says, ‘Are you all right, dear?’ but she does not look to see who has spoken and after a moment the hand is withdrawn.

She feels wretched. She drank a vast amount, working her way, with Eric, through the little recipe book which came with his fiftieth-birthday cocktail shaker. She can’t begin to think how many units the two of them must have put away before she went into the bedroom and lay down without undressing. She has no idea what time that was but she knows Eric didn’t come with her.

The man beside her says, ‘Excuse me,’ and she thinks he is going to engage her in some way, but he wants to get past her, to get off the bus. She stands and lets him out and then, worried that she might be sick, goes down to the front of the bus herself, deciding to walk the last stop, hoping that fresh air and exercise will help.

She is halfway between bus stops when she remembers her presentation. It is in her briefcase, which is still on the kitchen table where she left it the evening before. She needs it, but does not turn back.

In the foyer of the building in which she works, someone she knows holds the lift open but she takes the stairs, climbing steadily up to the fourth floor. The oily black marks have spread from her hands to her coat. She wonders whether she has touched her face and whether that is streaked too. But she does not stop at the toilets to wash her hands and check her face in the mirror and smooth her sleep-crumpled clothes. She does not stop to talk to anyone.

Going straight to the meeting room, she takes a deep breath and opens the door. There are a dozen people in there, sitting around a table, turning to look as she comes in. The door closes behind her. In the small and overheated room, she is hit by the stink of the lilies in the vase in the middle of the table, brown pollen dropping from their stamens and falling between the sections of the table onto the cream carpet. The warm stench makes her feel ill. Turning around, she hurries back out into the corridor.

She runs to the toilets and into an empty cubicle where she retches into the bowl. She stays there for a while, shaking, with her knees on cold linoleum, her hands clinging to cold porcelain.

When she comes out, the girl who takes minutes is standing there saying, ‘Are you all right?’ Nodding, walking past the girl, past the mirrors and the sinks, she goes out into the corridor again.

She does not go back to the meeting room but upstairs to the staff room. She rinses her mouth out in the sink and then lies down on the sofa and closes her eyes.

She hears the door opening, and someone saying, ‘I think you’ve got the right idea, Janie.’ It is a man’s voice but she can’t place it. She does not open her eyes. She hears him going to the little kitchen area, filling the kettle and switching it on, getting a mug from the cupboard, a teaspoon from the drawer, tapping the teaspoon against the work surface. She feels him looking at her and then he says, ‘I might join you.’ She doesn’t respond. He says, ‘Everyone’s tired these days. Everyone’s tired all the time. It’s our environment, Janie — computers, strip lights, mobile phones. I’m tired all day but I can’t sleep at night. It’s light pollution and aeroplanes and all that. Can I make you a cup of tea, Janie?’ After a minute, she hears him leave.

She wants to sleep but it’s too bright and the fridge is noisy and the sofa is uncomfortable. She can’t stop thinking about the darkened bedroom she just left.

She can still smell vomit.

There are footsteps on the stairs. When the door opens, she recognises Teresa’s voice. She is saying to someone, ‘Oh God, did you see that programme last night about that creature that latches onto a fish’s tongue and sucks out all the blood? The tongue shrinks to nothing and the creature grows until it fills the fish’s mouth. It’s really grim.’

Teresa is standing near her now, standing over her, touching her shoulder and saying, ‘Janie, love, are you OK? People are talking about you.’ When she opens her eyes she sees that the person Teresa has come into the room with is one of the new employees, a young man. He is eating something meaty which smells bad and she begins to feel sick again.

Teresa says, ‘Are you poorly?’

The young man says, ‘The menopause made my mum feel tired, a bit sick.’

Janie closes her eyes again.

‘And moody,’ he says. ‘Crabby.’

After a while, they leave.

Alone again on the sagging sofa, listening to the hum of the fridge, she has just begun to doze when the shutting door startles her.

‘Janie,’ says Pete, ‘is everything all right? Teresa said it was the menopause.’

She has known Pete for years. He and Eric used to work together somewhere else. When they were both made redundant at the same time, Janie recommended them for positions here. Pete was hired but Eric was not.

Eric didn’t really bother after that. He neither worked nor signed on. The two of them lived on her salary, and he did nothing around the house either, although he offered her endless cups of tea as if that were enough, as if that were what she wanted from him. ‘If I wanted so much tea,’ she said, ‘I’d buy a frigging teasmade.’ He got used to sleeping late and then getting slowly and cheaply drunk in front of daytime TV. When, one evening, he suggested that her hormones might be making her irritable, she said to him, ‘It’s not my hormones running up the heating bill. It’s not my hormones stinking of cider.’ At first she told him not to drink so much, not to eat so much crap, to take some exercise. ‘You’ve already had one heart attack,’ she told him. ‘Are you after another?’ It is a long time now, though, since she reminded him to take care of himself.

She remembers waking in the morning, reaching for him before opening her eyes, to touch his warm body.

It is, she thinks, as if a stranger came home one day instead of her husband. He wore her husband’s clothes but they did not fit him and he sat on the sofa all day long with his trousers undone, and he showed little interest in sex. Their last quickie on the sofa, fuelled by cheap red wine, is more than a month old, more like two. She has become used to going to bed alone, her sleep disturbed only by the sound of the TV still on in the living room, the sound of his stumbling around or his snoring; and going to work while he is still in bed, and in the evening coming home and finding him on the sofa in front of the TV again, asking her about her day, asking her if she wants a cup of tea, touching her gently and saying, ‘Janie, love, is everything all right?’

‘Hey,’ says Pete, sitting down on the end of the sofa, lifting up her feet and laying them in his lap, ‘did you see on the telly last night about that thing that lives in snappers’ mouths? That’s a strange one.’

The TV was on when she got in from work. She put her briefcase down on the kitchen table, noticing the cocktail shaker and all the bottles which were out on the side. She went into the living room, where Eric was waiting with sunset-coloured cocktails. She took the glass he offered her — ‘An Alabama Slammer,’ he said — took a sip, ate the cherry, complimented him. Sitting down, she picked up the recipe book and leafed through it. When she finished her Alabama Slammer, she went to the kitchen and made them each a Cosmopolitan. When they’d drunk these, Eric manufactured a strong Daiquiri. She made a Gin Fizz and he made a Kamikaze. She made a Malibu Woo Woo and he made a Mojito, and at some point, perhaps after the Piña Colada, she started hurting him. Every time she opened her mouth, something horrible came out. When she went to bed, she left him in the living room surrounded by the debris of their cocktail evening.

‘Janie,’ says Pete, ‘I think you should go home.’

She nods.

‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ he asks, already on his way to the kitchen. Emptying the still-warm kettle into two mugs, he says, ‘Is Eric home? Why don’t you call him, ask him to come and get you.’ He puts the tea down on the coffee table and says, ‘I’ll call him for you.’ He speed-dials her home phone number on his mobile and passes it to her.

She listens to it ringing and then hears Eric’s voice saying, ‘We can’t come to the phone right now.’ Still she listens, and only when the recorded message ends and the answerphone beeps does she shake her head at Pete.

‘We’ll have our tea,’ says Pete, ‘and then I’m putting you in a taxi.’

She leaves her tea to go cold and refuses a taxi, but she does let Pete walk her to the bus stop. He waits with her until the bus comes and watches her get on, waving her off as if she were a brave little evacuee travelling alone for the first time in her life.

When the bus has gone three stops and is in the city centre, when she is still two miles from home, she gets off. She walks to a café she knows, somewhere she has been before with Eric.

She takes a bottle of water from the fridge, pays for it and chooses a seat by the window, looking out. It is quiet. She does not talk to anyone. There are newspapers on the tables but she does not read them. When the café begins to close, she leaves her untouched bottle of water and wanders slowly home.

Closing the front door behind her and hanging up her coat, she goes to the foot of the stairs. She does not turn to look through the living room doorway at the dirty glasses on the coffee table, at the empty sofa and the television’s black screen. She climbs the stairs and enters the bedroom.

It is dark, just as it was when she left it, the curtains closed. She can still see everything though. She gets into bed. When she is ready, she reaches out. She touches Eric, his bare skin, his body, which was already cold when she woke that morning.

She closes her eyes.

No one disturbs her attempt to sleep. No one comes in asking if she wants a cup of tea. No one touches her gently and says, ‘Janie, love, is everything all right?’