The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

BREATHE

She leaves the institute, takes the Red Line to Davis and walks back home. She stands in the empty house and feels sick in the pit of her stomach. And then it comes to her. There is nothing keeping her here anymore. She can go, just go, leave everything behind. She packs two bags, leaves the keys in the mailbox and takes a taxi to Logan where the next BA departure has a last-minute seat in club class going for a song. An omen maybe, if she believed in such things.

She nurses an espresso in Starbucks and imagines the sour little woman from Fernandez & Charles standing in the living room wondering what the fuck to do with the exercise ball and the Balinese shadow puppet and the armchairs from Crate and Barrel. On the table to her right two Mormons sit side by side, strapping farm boys in black suits, Elders Thorsted and Bell, the names on their badges as big as signs on office doors. On her left an ebony-skinned man in an intricately embroidered white djellaba is reading a book called The New Financial Order. There are four messages on her phone. She pops the back off, drags the SIM card out with her fingernail and flips both phone and card into the waste bin.

Her flight comes up and she boards. A glass of complimentary champagne, pull back from the stand, a short taxi, those big turbines kick in and she is lifted from the surface of the earth. An hour later she is eating corn-fed chicken, wild-mushroom sauce and baby fennel as night streams past outside. She falls into a deep sleep where she dreams not the old dream of crashing and burning but a new dream of cruising forever in the radiation and the hard light and the deep cold and when she wakes they are banking over the reservoirs of Hertfordshire on their descent into Heathrow.

The train clatters north from Euston. The deep chime of the familiar. Chained dogs in scrapyards, level crossings, countryside like a postcard, all her history lessons written on the landscape, Maundy money and “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” She should have called ahead. At least this way she can creep up on the place from downwind, see what it looks like when it doesn’t know she’s watching then turn round and move on if that’s what feels right.

She gets out of the taxi and stands on Grace Road, looking across the big grass triangle that sits at the centre of the estate, tower blocks on two sides, a row of shops on the third, a playground in the centre, the kind of place which must have looked fantastic as an architectural model before it got built and real human beings moved in.

There is a Nisa Local, there is chip shop called the Frying Squad. Between the two is the Bernie Cavell Advice Centre. Two boys are doing BMX stunts on the big rock in the centre of the pedestrian precinct which they used to call the Meteorite. She turns left and walks past Franklin Tower, the smell from the bins still rancid in the December chill.

17 Watts Road. A shattered slate lies on the path in front of the house. It’s mid-afternoon but behind the dirty glass all the curtains are closed. The bell isn’t working. She raps the letter box, waits then raps it again but gets no reply. Something passes through her. Despair or relief, she can’t tell. She crouches and looks through the slot. It is dark and cold in the hallway, some faint urinous scent.

“Mum…!” Briefly she is nine again, wearing a green duffel coat and those crappy socks which slid down under your heel inside your Wellingtons. She raps the letter box for a third time. “Hello…?”

She checks that no one is watching then breaks the glass with her elbow, the way it’s done in films. She reaches through the broken pane and feels a shiver of fear that someone or something is going to grab her hand from inside. She slips off the safety chain and turns the latch.

The smell is stronger in the hallway, damp, unclean. There is a fallen pagoda of post on the phone table and grey fluff packs out the angle between the carpet and the skirting board. Here and there wallpaper has come away from the damp plaster. Can she hear something moving upstairs or is it her imagination?

“Mum…?”

The only light in the living room is a thin blade of weak sun that cuts between the curtains. She stops on the threshold. A body is lying on the floor. It is too small to be her mother, the clothes too ragged. She has never seen a corpse before. To her surprise what she feels, mostly, is anger, that someone has been squatting in her mother’s house and that she now has to sort out the resulting mess. She covers her nose and mouth with her sleeve, walks around the room and crouches for a closer look. The woman is older than she expects. She lies on a stained mattress, knotted grey hair, dirty nails, a soiled blue cardigan and a long skirt in heavy green corduroy. Only when she recognises the skirt does she realise that she is looking at her mother.

“Oh Jesus.”

She wants to run away, to pretend that she was never here, that this never happened. But she has to inform the police. She has to ring her sister. She crouches, waiting for her pulse to slow and the dizziness to pass. As she is getting to her feet, however, her mother’s eyes spring open like the wooden eyes of a puppet.

“Holy fuck!” She falls backwards, catching her foot and cracking her head against the fire surround.

“Who are you?” says her mother, panicking, eyes wide.

She can’t speak.

“I haven’t got anything worth stealing.” Her mother stops and narrows her eyes. “Do I know you?”

She has to call an ambulance but her mind has gone blank and she can’t remember the emergency number in the UK.

“It’s Carol, isn’t it?” Her mother grips the arm of the sofa and lifts herself slowly onto her knees. “You’ve changed your hair.” She gathers herself and stands up. “You’re meant to be in America.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I was asleep.”

“You were on the floor.” The back of her head is throbbing.

“I was on the mattress.”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“I have trouble with the stairs.”

Dust lies thick on every horizontal surface. The framed Constable poster is propped beneath the rectangle of unbleached wallpaper where it used to hang, the glass cracked across the middle.

“I thought you hated us,” says her mother. “I thought you were going to stay away forever.”

This is the room where she and Robyn ate tomato soup and toast fingers in front of Magpie and Ace of Wands. This was where they played Mousetrap and threw a sheet over the coffee table to make a cave. “What happened?”

“I was asleep.”

“To the house. To you.”

“Your father died.”

“And then what?”

There was a lime tree just beyond the back fence. It filled the side window and when the wind gusted all the leaves flipped and changed colour like a shoal of fish. The window is now covered with a sheet of plywood.

“How did you get in?” says her mother.

“Mum, when did you last have a bath?”

“I spent forty-three years looking after your father.”

“I can actually smell you.”

“Enough housework to last a lifetime.”

“Does Robyn know about all this?”

“Then I no longer had to keep him happy. Not that I ever succeeded in keeping your father happy.”

“She never said anything.”

“I prefer not to go out. Everyone is so fat. They have electric signs that tell you when the next bus is coming. I should make you a cup of tea.” And with that she is gone, off to make God alone knows what bacterial concoction.

Carol picks the papier-mâché giraffe from the windowsill and blows the dust off. She can still feel the dry warmth of Miss Calloway’s hands wrapped around her own as they shaped the coat-hanger skeleton with the red pliers, coffee and biscuits on her breath from the staffroom at break. “Come on, squeeze.”

She asks the woman behind the till in the Nisa for the number of a local taxi firm and rings from a call box. Sitting on a bench waiting for the cab she remembers the street party they held to celebrate the wedding of Charles and Diana in July of 1981, everyone getting drunk and dancing to Kim Wilde and the Specials on a crappy PA in the bus shelter. This town…is coming like a ghost town.

There were trestle tables down the centre of Maillard Road but no timetable beyond a rendition of “God Save the Queen” and a half-hearted speech by a local councillor which was rapidly drowned out by catcalls. The atmosphere became rowdier as the day went on, the older people dispersing around nightfall when the air of carnival turned sinister. She remembers a woman sitting on the grass and weeping openly. She remembers Yamin’s terrifying older brother having sex with Tracey Hollywood on the roundabout while his mates whooped and spun it as fast as they could. She remembers the Sheehan twins firing rockets across the field until the police arrived, then starting up again when they left. For months afterwards you would find little plastic Union Jacks and lager cans and serviettes bearing pictures of the royal couple wedged into the nettles at the edge of the football pitch and stuck behind the chicken-wire fence around Leadbitter’s Bakery.

She remembers how Helen Weller’s brother jumped from a seventh-floor balcony in Cavendish Tower one Christmas while high on mushrooms, equipped only with a Spider-Man bedsheet. She remembers Cacharel and strawberry Nesquik and Boney M singing “Ra Ra Rasputin.” She remembers how her father would stand at the front window staring out on all of this and say, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Only many years later did she realise that he hadn’t made the phrase up himself, though whether he was pretending to be Shelley or Ozymandias she still doesn’t know.

Robyn is taking wet washing from the machine. The dryer churns and rumbles. Through the half-opened concertina doors Carol can see the children watching Futurama. Fergal, Clare and Libby. She can never remember which girl is which. There are crayon pictures in cheap clip frames. There are five tennis rackets and a space hopper and a dead rubber plant and two cats. The clutter makes Carol feel ill. “Jesus, Robyn, how did you let it happen?”

“I didn’t let anything happen.”

“I’m pretty certain she’d wet herself.”

“So you got her undressed and put her into the bath and helped her into some clean clothes?”

Robyn has put on two stone at least. She seems fuzzier, less distinct.

“Six years. Shit, Carol. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

“She’s my mother, too.”

“Christmas cards, the odd email.” Robyn slams the washing-machine door and hefts the laundry basket onto a chair.

“Let’s not do this.”

“Do what? Draw attention to the fact that you waltzed off into the sunset?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked.”

“Asked what? ‘Has Mum gone crazy?’ ”

“She’s not crazy and you never asked about anything.”

The argument is unexpectedly satisfying, like getting a ruler under a plaster and scratching the itchy, unwashed flesh. “This is not about scoring points. This is about our mother who is sleeping on the floor in a house full of shit.”

“You didn’t come back when Dad was dying.”

“We were in Minnesota. We were in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t get your message till we got back to Boston. You know that.”

“You didn’t come to his funeral.”

Carol knows she should let it go. Her life has exceeded Robyn’s in so many ways that her sister deserves this small moral victory, but it niggles, because the story is true. She remembers it so clearly. There were eagles above the lake and chipmunks skittering over the roof of the cabin. Every room smelt of cedar. Down at the lakeside a red boat was roped to a wooden quay. She can still hear the putter of the outboard and the slap of waves against the aluminium hull. “How often does she get out?”

“I pop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and do her a Sainsbury’s shop on Saturday morning.”

“So she never goes out?”

“I make sure she doesn’t starve to death.” Robyn looks at her for a long moment. “How’s Aysha, Carol?”

How can Robyn tell? This X-ray vision, her ability to home in on a weakness. Is it being a mother, spending your life servicing other people’s needs? “Aysha’s fine. As far as I know.”

Robyn nods but doesn’t offer any sisterly consolation. “Secondaries in his lungs and bone marrow. They sewed him up and sent him to the hospice.”

“I know.”

“No, Carol. You don’t know.” Robyn picks out three pairs of socks and drapes them over the radiator below the window. “He collapsed in the bathroom, his trousers round his ankles.”

“You don’t need to do this.”

“The doctor was amazed he’d managed to keep it hidden for so long.” She takes a deep breath. “I’ve always pictured you sitting in the corner of the kitchen with your hands over your ears while the phone rings and rings and rings.” The dining table is covered in half-made Christmas cards, glitter glue and safety scissors and cardboard Santas. “Sometimes people need you,” says Robyn. “It might be inconvenient and unpleasant but you just do it.”

She books into the Premier Inn and eats a sub-standard lasagne. Her body is still on Eastern Standard Time so she sits in her tiny room and tries to read the Sarah Waters she bought at the airport but finds herself thinking instead about her father’s last days, that short steep slope from diagnosis to death.

Lake Toba in Sumatra used to be a volcano. When it erupted 70,000 years ago the planet was plunged into winter for a decade and human beings nearly died out. The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was only six miles across. The flu epidemic at the end of the First World War killed 5 percent of the world’s population. Some fathers told their little girls about Goldilocks and Jack and the Beanstalk, but what use were stories? These were facts. We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth and there was nowhere else to go in spite of the messages you might have picked up from Star Trek and Doctor Who. She remembers Robyn weeping and running from the room.

He left school at sixteen then spent thirty years building and decorating. Damp rot, loft conversions, engineered wood flooring. He liked poetry that rhymed and novels with plots and pop science with no maths. He hated politicians and refused to watch television. He said, “Your mother and your sister believe the world’s problems could be solved if people were polite to one another.”

Which is why he didn’t want her to leave, of course. He was terrified that she’d get far enough away to look back and see how small he was, a bullying, bar-room philosopher not brave enough to go back to college for fear he might get into an argument with people who knew more than he did.

Pancreatic cancer at fifty-seven. “All that anger. It turns on you in the end,” was Aysha’s posthumous diagnosis and for once Carol was tempted to agree with what she’d normally dismiss as hippy bullshit.

Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, when worlds overlap, she slips back forty years and sees the sun-shaped, bronze-effect wall clock over the fireplace and feels the warmth of brushed cotton pyjamas straight from the airing cupboard and her heart goes over a humpbacked bridge. Then she remembers the smell of fried food and the small-mindedness and her desperation to be gone.

She presses her forehead against the cold glass of the hotel window and looks down into the car park where rain is pouring through cones of orange light below the streetlamps. She is back in one of the distant outposts of the empire, roughnecks and strange gods and the trade routes petering out.

She abandoned her mother. That hideous house. She has to make amends somehow.

She climbs into bed and floats for eight hours in a great darkness lit every so often by bright little dreams in which Aysha looms large. The dimples at the base of her spine, the oniony sweat which Carol hated then found intoxicating then hated once more, the way she held Carol’s wrists a little too tight when they were making love.

They met at an alumni fund-raiser about which she remembered very little apart from the short, muscular woman with four silver rings in the rim of her ear and a tight white T-shirt who materialised in front of her with a tray of canapés and a scowl, after which all other details of the evening were burned away.

She had the air of someone walking coolly away from an explosion, all shoulder roll and flames in the background. A brief marriage to the alcoholic Tyler. RIP, thank God. Three years on the USS John C. Stennis—seaman recruit E-1, culinary specialist, honourable discharge. A mother who spoke in actual tongues at a Baptist church in Oklahoma. Somewhere in the background, the Choctaw Trail of Tears, the Irish potato famine and the slave ports of Senegambia if Aysha’s account of her heritage was to be believed, which it probably wasn’t, though she had the hardscrabble mongrel look. And if the powers that be had tried to wipe out your history you probably deserved to rewrite some of it yourself. She was self-educated, with more enthusiasm than focus. Evening classes in philosophy, Dan Brown and Andrea Dworkin actually touching on the bookshelf, a box set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Two months later they were in the Hotel de la Bretonnerie in the Marais, Aysha’s first time outside the States unprotected by fighter aircraft. Aysha had gone sufficiently native to swap Marlboro for Gitanes but she was sticking to the Diet Coke. They were sitting outside a little café near the Musée Carnavalet.

Aysha said, “Thank you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” said Carol.

“Hey, lover.” Aysha held her eye. “Loosen up.”

The following morning she hires a Renault Clio and drives to the house via B&Q and Sainsbury’s. Her mother is awake but doesn’t recognise Carol at first and seems to have forgotten their meeting of the previous day, but perhaps the back foot is a good place for her to be on this particular morning. Carol dumps her suitcases in the hall, turns the heating on and bleeds the radiators with the little brass key which, thirty years on, still lies in the basket on top of the fridge. The stinky hiss of the long-trapped air, the oily water clanking and gurgling its way up through the house.

“What are you doing?” asks her mother.

“Making you a little warmer.”

She rings a glazier for the broken window.

“I’ve changed my mind,” says her mother. “I don’t like you being here.”

“Trust me.” She can’t bring herself to touch the dirty cardigan. “It’s going to be OK.”

The noises are coming from the built-in cupboard in the bedroom she and Robyn once shared. Scratching, cooing. She shuts the landing door, opens the windows and arms herself with a broom. When she pulls the handle back they explode into the room, filling the air with wings and claws and machine-gun clatter. She covers her face but one of them still gashes her neck in passing. She swings the broom. “Fuck…!” They bang against the dirty glass. One finds the open window, then another. She hits a third and it spins on the ground, its wing broken. She throws a pillow over it, stamps on the pillow till it stops moving then pushes pillow and bird out of the window into the garden.

She boards up the hole in the wall where they have scratched their way in, takes two dead birds to the bin outside then stands in the silence and the fresh air, waiting for the adrenaline to ebb.

Back inside, the radiators are hot and the house is drying out, clicking and creaking like a galleon adjusting to a new wind. A damp jungle smell hangs in the air. Plaster, paper, wood, steam, fungus.

“This is my home,” her mother says. “You cannot do this.”

“You’ll get an infection,” says Carol. “You’ll get hypothermia. You’ll have a fall. And I don’t want to explain to a doctor why I did nothing to stop it happening.”

She puts the curtains into the washing machine. She drags a damp mattress down the stairs and out onto the front lawn. Half the slats of the bed are broken so she takes it apart and dumps it on top of the mattress. She has momentum now. The carpet is mossy and green near the external wall so she pulls it up and cuts it into squares with blunt scissors. The underlay is powdery and makes her cough and coats her sweaty hands with a brown film. She levers up the wooden tack strips using a claw hammer. She adds everything to the growing pile outside. She sweeps and hoovers till the bare boards are clean, then takes the curtains out of the washing machine and hangs them over the banisters to dry.

She sponges the surface of the dining table and they eat lunch together on it, a steak-and-ale puff-pastry pie and a microwaved bag of pre-cut vegetables. Her mother’s anger has melted away. The lunchtime TV news is on in the background. “Who Wants to Be This and Get Me Out of That,” says her mother. “All those women with plastic faces. Terrorists and paedophiles. We called it ‘interfering with children.’ Frank, who worked in Everley’s, the shoe shop, he was one. I’m certain of that.” She stares into her plate for a long time. “A woman drowned herself in the canal last month. That little bridge on Jerusalem Street? Jackie Bolton. It was in the paper. You were at school with her daughter. Milly, I think her name was.” Carol has no memory of a Milly. “I’d go out more if I still lived in the countryside. There was a flagpole by the pond in the centre of the village. They put it up for the coronation. Your uncle Jack climbed all the way to the top and fell off and broke his collarbone.”

Carol must have heard the story twenty times. It is oddly comforting.

Her mother leans over and takes Carol’s hand. “I thought I might never see you again.”

Her skin has a sticky patina, like an old leather glove. “We need to get you into the bath.”

She is compliant until halfway up the stairs when she looks through the banisters and sees the uncarpeted boards in the bedroom. “You’re selling the house.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Carol laughs. “It’s not mine to sell.” She doesn’t say how little she thinks it would fetch, in this state, on this road.

“That’s why Robyn hates you being here.”

“Jesus Christ, Mum.” Carol is surprised by how angry she feels. “I could be in California, I could be working, but I’m stuck here on a shitty estate in the middle of nowhere trying to turn this dump back into a house before it kills you.”

“You thieving little…” She slaps Carol’s face with her free hand, loses her footing and for a second she is falling backwards down the stairs until Carol grabs her and hauls her upright.

“Shit.” Carol’s heart is hammering. In her mind’s eye her mother is lying folded and broken by the front door. She loosens her grip on the bony wrist. “Mum…?”

Her mother doesn’t reply. She is suddenly blank and distant. Carol should take her downstairs and sit her on the sofa but she might not get this chance again. She puts her hands on her mother’s arms and guides her gently up the last few steps.

She removes her mother’s shoes and socks. She peels off the soiled blue cardigan and unzips the dirty green corduroy skirt. Both are heavily stained and patched with compacted food. She takes off her mother’s blouse, unclips the grey bra and kicks all the clothing into the corner of the room. Her mother’s skin is busy with blotches and lesions in winey purples and toffee browns, the soft machinery of veins and tendons visible under the skin where it is stretched thin around her neck, at her elbows, above her breasts. The smell is rich and heady. Carol tries to imagine that she is dealing with an animal. She takes off her mother’s slip and knickers, perches her on the rim of the bath, lifts her legs in one by one then lowers her mother into the hot, soapy water. She flips the corduroy skirt over the pile of discarded clothing so she can’t see the brown streaks on the knickers then sits on the toilet seat. She’ll bin them later. “Hey. We did it.”

Her mother is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Mum filled a tin bath once a week. Dad got it first, then Delia, then me.” She is staring at something way beyond the wall of dirty white tiles. “There was a sampler over the dining table. Gran made it when she was a girl. ‘I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’ The angel locks the dragon in a pit for a thousand years. After that he must be ‘loosed a little season.’ ” She looks at Carol and smiles for the first time since she arrived. “Are you going to wash my hair?”

Carol makes them each a mug of coffee. Now that her mother is clean the room looks even more squalid. Old birthday cards, a china bulldog with a missing leg, mould in the ceiling corners, one of those houses cleared out post-mortem by operatives in boiler suits and paper masks.

They hear the click and twist of a key in the front door. Robyn is in the hallway. “There’s a pile of stuff outside.”

“I know.”

She steps into the living room and looks around. “What the hell are you doing, Carol?”

“Something you should have done a long time ago.”

“You can’t just ride in here like the fucking cavalry.” Robyn silently mouths the word fucking.

“What’s going on?” says her mother.

“There were pigeons in the bedroom,” says Carol.

“How long are you staying?” asks Robyn. “A week? Two weeks?”

“Carol?” says her mother. “What are you two arguing about?”

“Jesus,” says Robyn. “Fucking up your life doesn’t mean you can take over someone else’s instead.” This time she says the word out loud.

“Carol gave me a bath,” says her mother.

“Did you hurt her?”

It is too stupid a question to answer.

“Aysha rang me.” Robyn holds her eye for a long time. “Sounds like you left a trail of destruction in your wake.”

Carol assumes at first that she has misheard. Aysha talking to Robyn is inconceivable.

“She wanted to check you hadn’t killed yourself or been sectioned. I’m giving you the highlights. Some of the other stuff you probably don’t want to hear.”

“How did she get your number?” asks Carol.

“I presumed you’d given it to her in case of emergencies. Her being your partner.”

There is something barbed about the word partner but Carol isn’t sure who or what is being mocked.

“We’d have come to the wedding,” says Robyn. “I like weddings. I like America.”

“What are you both talking about?” says her mother.

“I’m taking Mum out for dinner,” says Carol, though the thought had not occurred to her until that moment.

Robyn stands close enough so that their mother can’t hear. “She’s not a toy, Carol. You can’t do this. You just can’t.”

Then she is gone.

“There’s too much going on.”

Carol looks around the half-empty Pizza Express.

“Too much noise,” says her mother. “Too many people.”

There is a low buzz of conversation, some cutlery-clatter. Rod Stewart is singing “Ruby Tuesday” faintly from the speaker above their heads. She rubs her mother’s arm. “I’m here and you’re safe.” She wonders if her sister’s apparent care disguises something more sinister, her mother’s supposed fear of the outside world a fiction Robyn uses to keep her in the house. But her mother is becoming increasingly agitated and when the food arrives she says, “I really don’t feel very well.”

“Come on. That pasta looks fantastic. When was the last time you had a treat?”

Her mother stands up, knocking a water glass to the floor where it shatters. Carol grabs her mother’s arm but there is no way she can hang on to it without making the scene look ugly. She lets her mother go, puts thirty pounds on the table, runs for the door and finds her sitting at a bus stop, crying and saying, “Why did you bring me here? I want to go home.”

When they pull up outside the house her mother says, “I don’t want you to come inside.”

She could throw her bags into the car and go, to London, to Edinburgh, to anywhere in the world, leaving her mother to live the narrow and grubby life to which she has become addicted. But the phrase anywhere in the world gives her that queasy shiver she’s been experiencing on and off since Aysha left, the sudden conviction that everything is fake, the fear that she could step through any of these doors and find herself on some blasted heath with night coming down, the world nothing more than a load of plywood flats collapsing behind her. “I’m staying. I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

“One night.”

She lies in a sleeping bag on the blow-up mattress, orange streetlight bleeding through the cheap curtains, sirens in the distance. It is thirty years since she last slept in this room. For a brief moment those intervening years seem like nothing more than a vivid daydream of escape. She’d got into Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, driven in equal parts by a fascination with the subject and a desperation to put as much distance as possible between herself and this place. A doctorate at Imperial and a postdoc in Adelaide. Jobs in Heidelberg, Stockholm…working her way slowly up the ladder towards Full Professor. Four years max in any one country had been the rule. Out of restlessness, partly, though it was true that she ruffled feathers, and ruffled feathers were easier to live with if they were on a continent where you no longer lived.

She is not a team player, so she has been told on more than one occasion, usually by men who were quite happy to stab someone else in the back so long as the victim wasn’t a member of whatever unspoken brotherhood they all belonged to. But she has run successful groups and the grants have followed her and in the end the world doesn’t give a damn about a few cuts and bruises if it gets a firmer grip on ageing or diabetes, or a clearer picture of how one cell swallowed another and ended up flying to the moon.

Boston was her fourth position as a group leader, running a lab working on the mammalian target of rapamycin complex. Two years in, however, Paul Bachman became the institute’s new director and everything started to turn sour. He brought with him a blank cheque from Khalid bin Mahfouz and instead of supporting the existing faculty went on a global hiring spree. Enter the Golden Boys who deigned sometimes to attend faculty meetings or listen to sub-stellar visiting academics but only as a favour. Paul himself had a house in Bar Harbor and a yacht called Emmeline and a younger wife with a breathtakingly low IQ. Feeling at home wasn’t Carol’s strong suit but under the new dispensation she started to feel like a junior member of the golf club.

In other circumstances she’d have put out feelers, quietly letting colleagues elsewhere know that she had itchy feet. But she’d just met Aysha and, to her astonishment, they were sharing a house, so she knuckled down and put up with the Cinderella treatment.

Eighteen months later, out of nowhere, Aysha said she wanted to get married. Because that’s what loving someone meant, apparently, gathering your families and friends from the four corners of the globe, dressing up, making public vows, getting a signed certificate. Like you hadn’t proved it already by putting up with the subterfuge and the vilification. Carol didn’t understand. The straight world shut you out for two thousand years, the door opened a crack and you were meant to run in and curl up by the fire like grateful dogs. What was wrong with being an outsider? Why this desperate urge to belong to a world which had rejected you?

A year later she and Aysha were no longer sharing a house because…the truth was that she was still not entirely sure. It was the kind of puzzle there was no point trying to solve, the kind of puzzle you didn’t have to solve if you sloughed off all the human mess every few years, trimmed your life down to a few suitcases and headed off for a new skyline, new food, a new language.

Two months of panic and claustrophobia came to an end when Daniel Seghatchian from Berkeley threw her a lifeline, asking if she’d come over and give a chalk talk, meet the faculty, meet the postdocs. Just getting off the plane in California was a relief. Space and sunlight and opportunity. The Q&As were tough but they felt like the respectful aggression meted out to a worthy opponent and by the end of three days the position seemed pretty much in the bag.

She wonders now if the whole thing had been a trap of some kind. Is that possible? Or was it merely her blindness to the allegiances and loyalties and lines of communication upon which others built whole careers?

Her first morning back in Boston she was summoned by Paul who asked what she had against the institute. He didn’t explain how he’d heard the news so quickly. Only later did she realise that he wasn’t asking her what they could do to persuade her to stay. He was giving her enough rope to hang herself. He listened to her diatribe and if she had been a little less exhausted by three days of non-stop thinking she might have asked herself why he seemed untroubled, pleased even. He waited for her to finish then leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll miss you, Carol.” And only walking away from his office, thinking back to this obvious lie, did she wonder what unseen wheels were turning.

Three days later she got a call from Daniel Seghatchian saying that there was a problem with funding.

“Three minutes of grovelling,” Suzanne said, sitting in her office that lunchtime. “You won’t really mean it. Everyone else will know you don’t really mean it. Paul will know you don’t really mean it. Or, shit, maybe you will mean it. Either way, you go through a little ceremony of obeisance. Kneel before the king. Ask for a pardon. He loves all that stuff.”

Why had that seemed such an impossible thing to do?

After talking to Suzanne she went to the regular meeting with her three postdocs working on the PKCa project. They were in the room that looked onto the little quadrangle with the faux-Japanese garden. Minimal concrete benches, rectangular pond, lilac and callery pear, wind roughening the surface of the water. She was finding it hard to concentrate on what was being said. She was thinking about the last walk she took on Head of the Meadow Beach in Provincetown with Aysha. She was thinking about the humpbacks out on the Stellwagen Bank. Three thousand miles a year, permanent night at forty fathoms, cruising like barrage balloons above the undersea ranges.

Suddenly the room was full of water. Shafts of sunlight hung like white needles from the surface high above her head. Darkness under her feet, darkness all around. Ivan was talking but his voice was tinny and unreal as if he were on a radio link from a long way away. “Breathe,” he was saying. “You have to breathe.” But she couldn’t breathe because if she opened her mouth the water would rush in and flood her lungs.

Finally, despite these churning thoughts she passes into shallow sleep until she comes round just after three on the tail end of a scratchy, anxious dream in which she hears someone entering the house. Unable to sleep without reassuring herself she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to find the living room empty and her mother gone. She runs into the street but it is silent and still. She puts her shoes on, checks the garden then jogs once round the estate’s central triangle calling, “Mum…? Mum…?” as if her mother is a lost dog.

A pack of hooded teenage boys cycle past, slowing to examine her, then sweeping silently onward. She comes to a halt at the junction of Eddar and Grace Roads where the taxi dropped her off forty-eight hours ago. A scatter of lights still burn in Cavendish and Franklin Towers like the open doors in two black Advent calendars. The cherry-red wing tip of a plane flashes slowly across the dirty, starless sky. A dog is barking somewhere. Yap…yap…yap…It is a couple of degrees above freezing, not a good night for an old woman to be outside.

She returns to the house and as she puts the key into the lock she remembers her mother’s story of Jackie Bolton drowning herself in the canal. She puts the key back into her pocket and starts to run. Harrow Road, Eliza Road. A milk float buzzes and tinkles to a halt on Greener Crescent. She is flying, the surface of the world millpond-smooth while everyone sleeps. A fox trots casually out of a gateway and watches her, unfazed. Jerusalem Road. She stops on the little bridge and looks up and down the oily ribbon of stagnant water. Nothing. “Shitting shit.” She walks down the steps onto the gravelled towpath and sees her mother standing on the little strip of weeds and rubble on the far side of the canal. It is like seeing a ghost. The blankness of her mother’s stare, the black water separating them.

“Don’t move.”

She runs down the towpath to a decayed cantilever footbridge. She heaves on the blocky, counterweighted arm and it comes free of the ground, the span bumping down onto the far side of the little bottleneck in the stream. She steps gingerly across the mossy slats, squeezes round a fence of corrugated iron and kicks aside an angry swirl of barbed wire.

She comes to a halt a little way away, not wanting to wake her mother abruptly. “Mum…?”

Her mother turns and narrows her eyes. “You’ve always hated me.”

“Mum, it’s Carol.”

“I know exactly who you are.” It is a voice Carol has not heard before. “But I look at you and all I see is your father.”

Her mother is tiny and cold and she is wearing a thick skirt and a heavy jumper which would become rapidly waterlogged. How long would it take? And who would know? The thought passes through her mind and is gone.

Her mother’s glare holds firm for several seconds then her face crumples and she begins to cry. Carol takes her hand. “Let’s get you home.”

The registrar says they are keeping her in overnight. Carol leaves a message for Robyn. On the ward her mother is unconscious so she drinks a styrofoam cup of bitter coffee in the hospital café, doing the quick crossword in The Times to distract herself from something gathering at the edge of her imagination. Whales cruising in the dark, right now, just round the corner of the world. The sheer size of the ocean, crashed planes and sunken ships lost until the earth’s end. Serpentine vents where everything began. Images from a magazine article she’d read years ago of the Trieste six miles down in the Mariana Trench, steel crying under the pressure, a ton of water on every postage stamp of metal.

Robyn sits down opposite her.

“She walked out of the house in the middle of the night.”

“Sweet Jesus, Carol. You’ve only been here two days.”

She stops herself saying, “It wasn’t my fault,” because it probably is, isn’t it? She can see that now.

“You’re just like Dad. You think everyone else is an idiot.”

“She’s going to be OK.”

“Really?”

“She had a shock. She’s exhausted.”

“You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.” She sounds more exasperated than angry, as if Carol is a tiresome child. “Some people’s minds are very fragile.”

The doctor is plump and keen and seems more like a schoolboy prodigy than a medical professional. “Dr. Ahluwalia.” He shakes their hands in turn. “I will try to be quick and painless.” He takes a pencil from his pocket and asks Carol’s mother if she knows what it is.

She looks at Carol and Robyn as if she suspects the doctor of being out of his mind.

“Humour me,” says Dr. Ahluwalia.

“It’s a pencil,” says her mother.

“That is excellent.” He repockets the pencil. “I’m going to say three words. I want you to repeat them after me and to remember them.”

“OK.”

“Apple. Car. Fork.”

“Apple. Car. Fork.”

“Seven times nine?”

“My goodness, I was never any good at mental arithmetic.”

“Fair enough,” says Dr. Ahluwalia, laughing gently along with her.

Carol can see her mother warming to this man and is suddenly worried that she can’t see the trap which is being laid for her. Her mother tells the doctor the date and her address. “But you’ll have to ask my daughter for the phone number. I don’t ring myself very often.”

Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can repeat the phrase “Do as you would be done by.”

“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby.” Her mother smiles, the way she smiled in the bath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.” She drifts away with the memory.

“Mum…?”

Dr. Ahluwalia glances at Carol and raises an eyebrow, the mildest of rebukes.

“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby,” says her mother, “and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.”

Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can make up a sentence. “About anything.”

“It’s from The Water Babies,” says her mother. “We read it at school. Ellie is very well-to-do and Tom is a chimney sweep.” She closes her eyes. “ ‘Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.’ ” She is happy, the bright pupil who had pleased a favourite teacher.

“Excellent.” Dr. Ahluwalia takes a notepad from his pocket and draws a pentagon on the top sheet. He tears it off and hands it to her mother. Every page is inscribed with the words Wellbutrin — First Line Treatment of Depression. “I wonder if you could copy that shape for me.”

She seems unaware of how little resemblance her battered star bears to its original but Dr. Ahluwalia says, “Lovely,” using the same bright tone. “Now, I wonder if you can tell me those three objects whose names I asked you to remember.”

Her mother closes her eyes for a second time and says, slowly and confidently, “Fire…clock…candle…”

The empty house scares her. Carol tries reading but her eyes keep sliding off the page. She needs something trashy and moreish on the television but she can’t bring herself to sit in a room surrounded by so much crap so she starts cleaning and tidying and it is the sedative of physical work that finally comforts her. She ties the old newspapers in bundles and puts them outside the front door. She stands the mattress against a radiator in the hall to air and dry. She puts the cushion covers on a wool cycle and dusts and hoovers. She cleans the windows. She rehangs the Constable poster and puts a new bulb into the standard lamp.

She finishes her work long after midnight then goes upstairs and falls into a long blank sleep which is broken by a phone call from Robyn at ten the following morning saying that she and John will bring their mother home from hospital later in the day.

She digs her trainers from the bottom of her suitcase and puts on the rest of her running gear. She drives out to Henshall, parks by the Bellmakers Arms and runs out of the village onto the old sheep road where their father sometimes took them to fly the kite when they were little. It’s good to be outside under a big sky in clear, bright air away from that godforsaken estate, the effort and the rhythm hammering her thoughts into something small and simple. Twenty minutes later she is standing in the centre of the stone circle, just like she and Robyn did when they were girls, hoping desperately for a sign of some kind. And this time something happens. It may be nothing more than a dimming in the light, but she feels suddenly exposed and vulnerable. It’s not real, she knows that, just some trait selected thousands of years ago, the memory of being prey coded into the genome, but she runs back fast, a sense of something malign at her heels the whole way, and she doesn’t feel safe until she gets into the car and turns the radio on.

She paces the living room, a knot tightening in the base of her stomach. She dreads her mother coming home in need of constant care and Robyn saying, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” She dreads her mother coming home in full possession of her senses and ordering her to leave. She dreads the car not turning up at all and afternoon turning to evening and evening turning to night. And then there is no more time to think because her mother is standing in the doorway saying, “This is not my house.”

“Don’t be silly.” Carol shows her the papier-mâché giraffe. “Look.”

“This is definitely someone else’s house.” She seems very calm for someone in such a disconcerting situation.

Robyn steps round her mother and into the room. “What did you do, Carol?”

“I cleaned and tidied.”

“This is her home, Carol. For fuck’s sake.”

“You can’t make me stay here,” says her mother.

“Mum…” Carol blocks her way. “Look at the curtains. You must remember the curtains. Look at the sideboard. Look at the picture.”

“Let me go.” Her mother pushes her aside and runs.

Robyn says, “Are you happy now?”

Carol can’t think of an answer. She’s lost confidence in the rightness of her actions and opinions. She feels seasick.

“I hope you have nightmares about this,” says Robyn, then she turns and leaves.

She drives to the off-licence and returns with a bottle of vodka and a half-litre of tonic water. She pours herself a big glass and sits in front of the television, scrolling through the channels in search of programmes from her childhood. She finds The Waltons. She finds Gunsmoke. She watches for two hours then rings Robyn.

“I don’t think I want to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not, Carol. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

It strikes her that this might be true. “Where’s Mum?”

“Back on the ward. They still had a bed, thank God.”

“And what’s going to happen to her?”

“You mean, what am I going to do now that you’ve smashed her life to pieces?”

Was it really possible to destroy someone’s life by giving them a bath and cleaning their house? Could a life really be held together by dirt and disorder?

“Have you been drinking?”

She can’t think of a reply. Perhaps she really is drunk. The line goes dead.

She returns to the television. Columbo, Friends. It is dark outside now and being drunk isn’t having the anaesthetic effect she hoped. She watches a documentary about the jungles of Madagascar. She sleeps and wakes and sleeps and wakes and somewhere in between the two states it becomes clear how much she loved Aysha, how much she still loves her, and how it is the strength of those feelings which terrifies her. Then she sleeps and wakes again and it is no longer clear.

She comes round with a grinding headache and sour sunlight pouring through the gap in the curtains. She rifles through the kitchen drawers and finds some antique ibuprofen and washes down two tablets with tonic water. She remembers how the cleaning and tidying of yesterday calmed her mind. So she takes a collection of planks from the broken bed in front of the house and stacks them in the centre of the lawn at the back, then breaks the rusty padlock from the shed door with a chunk of paving stone. Inside, everything is exactly as her father left it, concertinas of clay pots, jars of nails and screws, balls of twine, envelopes of seeds (Stupice early vine tomatoes, Lisse de Meaux carrots…), a fork, a spade…The lighter fuel is sitting in a little yellow can on the top shelf. She sprinkles it on the pyramid of wood and sets it alight. When it is blazing she drags the mattress outside and folds it over the flames. Through a gap in the fence a tiny woman in a pink shalwar kameez and headscarf is watching her, but when Carol catches her eye she melts away. There were twins there once, two scrawny boys with some developmental problem. Donny and Cameron, was it? Their mother worked in the Co-op.

The mattress catches. The smell is tart and chemical, the smoke thick and black. She takes the sofa cushions outside and adds them to the pyre. Then, one by one, the dining chairs. She hasn’t been this close to big unguarded flames since she was a child. She’s forgotten how thrilling it is. And out of nowhere she remembers. It was the one public-spirited thing her father did, building and watching over the estate’s bonfire in the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night. Perhaps being an outsider was a part of it. Ferrymen, rat catchers and executioners, intermediaries between here and the other place. Or perhaps her father was simply scary enough to stop the more wayward kids starting the celebrations with a can of petrol in mid-October. She remembers how he drove out to the woods behind the car plant and brought back a bag of earth from the mouth of a fox’s den then built the fire round it so that the scent would keep hedgehogs and cats and mice from making a home inside. It is a tenderness she can’t remember him ever showing to another human being.

She goes back inside the house. Someone is knocking at the front door. Then they are knocking on the front window. Shaved head, Arsenal shirt. “You’re a fucking headcase, you are. I’m calling the council.”

She burns the poster, the glass shattering in the heat. She hasn’t sweated like this in a long time. It feels good. She burns the ornaments and the knick-knacks and the bundles of newspapers. She stares into the heart of the fire as light drains slowly from the sky.

It starts to rain so she goes indoors. She rips up the carpet and the tack strips just like she’s done upstairs. She cuts the carpet into squares and throws them into the garden. The black wreckage of the bonfire steams and smokes. She sweeps and hoovers the floorboards. The TV and the curtains are the only remaining objects in the room.

She is too tired to do any more work but she is frightened of silence. She makes herself a large vodka and tonic. She sits with her back against the wall and scrolls through the channels until she finds a band of white noise in the mid-eighties. She turns the volume up so that the room is filled with grey light and white noise. She lies down and closes her eyes.

The phone is ringing. She has no idea what time it is. She lies motionless just inside the border of sleep, like a small animal in long grass waiting for the circling hawk to ride a thermal to some new pasture. The phone stops.

She dreams that she is a little girl standing in the stone circle. She dreams that she is flying over mountains. She dreams that she is looking down into a pit containing a dragon. She hears someone saying, over and over, “The fire, the clock and the candle,” but she doesn’t know what it means.

“Carol…?”

She opens her eyes and sees that dawn is coming up.

“Carol…?”

The TV screen fizzes on the far side of the room. Her hip and shoulder hurt where they were pressed against the hard, wooden floor. Why does the person calling her name not come through to the living room to find her? She gets slowly to her feet, flexing her stiff joints. She squats for a few seconds until the room stops swaying.

“Carol…?”

She thinks about slipping out the back door but it seems important that she doesn’t run away. Has she perhaps run away on a previous occasion with dire consequences? She can’t remember. Steadying herself with a hand on the wall she steps into the hall but sees only two blank rectangles of frosted daylight hanging in the gloom.

“Carol…?”

She turns. An old man is standing in the kitchen doorway. He is wearing pyjamas and there is a battered yellow tank strapped to an old-fashioned porter’s trolley at his side. He presses a mask to his face and takes a long, hissy breath. “It’s good to see you.” His voice is raspy and small. She half recognises him and this reassures her somewhat but she has no idea where she has seen him before and doesn’t want to appear foolish by asking.

He presses the mask to his face, takes a second hissy breath, drapes the rubber tube over the handle of the trolley and rolls it past her towards the front door. He stops on the mat and holds out his hand. “Come.”

She is nervous of going with this man but the thought of staying here on her own is worse. She takes his hand. He opens the door and Carol sees, not the houses on Watts Road but long grass and foliage shifting in a breeze. He takes another breath through his mask and bumps the trolley wheels over the threshold. They step into cold, clear winter light. He leads her slowly down a cinder path into a stand of trees. She can feel how weak he is and how much effort he is making not to let this show. She moves closer so that she can share more of his weight without this being obvious. He takes nine steps then stops to breathe through the mask, then eight more steps, then another breath.

They are among the trees now, dancing submarine light and coins of sun like fish around a reef. The trees are birch, mostly, bark curling off the creamy flesh like wallpaper in a long-abandoned house. She wonders what will happen when the oxygen runs out. The tank is clearly very old, the yellow paint so chipped that it has become a map of a ragged imaginary coastline.

They enter a large clearing. It is hard to see precisely how big the clearing is because it is occupied almost entirely by a great mound of logs and branches and sticks, woven like a laid winter hedge in places and in other places simply heaped up higgledy-piggledy. The whole edifice rises steeply in front of them, curving away so that it is impossible to tell whether the summit is fifty or a hundred and fifty feet high.

The man squeezes her hand and moves gingerly forward again. They enter a narrow corridor in the structure, like the tunnel leading to the burial chamber of a pyramid. He is her father, she remembers now. There is something not right about him being here but she doesn’t know what. She is tired, her head hurts and she slept badly. Perhaps that is the problem.

Her eyes become accustomed to the low light and she can make out the monumental fretwork of beams and branches which surrounds them. Here and there shafts of sunlight cut across the bark-brown gloaming. Little twigs crunch underfoot and the poorly oiled wheels of her father’s trolley squeak. There is dust in the air and the smell of fox.

Now they are standing in the central chamber, a rough half-dome of interwoven sticks some eight or nine feet high, the tonnage above their heads supported by a central column as thick and straight as a telegraph pole.

“Carol…?”

The voice is muffled and distant. It is a woman’s voice and it is coming from outside. Only now does she realise that it was not her father who was calling her name when she woke. Was she wrong to follow him? He takes a little yellow can from his pocket, unscrews the top and pours the contents all over his pyjamas. The smell is potent and familiar but Carol can’t give it a name and there is not enough light to read the writing on the label.

“Carol…?” The voice is more urgent now.

Her father puts the can back into his pocket and lifts something from the other pocket. Only when he spins the flint does she realise what it is. The flame leaps the gap between his hand and his pyjama jacket, spreading quickly across his torso, climbing upwards over his face and digging its long violet fingers into his hair.

“Carol…? For God’s sake…”

She spins round looking for the corridor down which they came. It should be easy to spot for the latticed dome of sticks is now lit up in the jittery light but she can see no opening. Has the wood collapsed, blocking off her exit? Could such a thing happen without her hearing or feeling it?

If she were a cat or a dog or a rabbit she might be able to squirm her way out but the gaps between the branches of which the structure is made are too small for a human being. She grabs a long pole in the least dense part of the pyre and starts to pull but as she does so she feels a great shifting in the spars above. She tries doing the same thing on the opposite side of the chamber but it has the same effect. She turns back to her father. His face is alight now, flesh spitting like meat on a barbecue, lips gone, teeth snapping in the heat. The wood above his head is ablaze and the flames are running like excited children outwards and upwards through all the airways in the great wooden maze.

“Carol…?”

She can feel her hands and face blistering. She is going to die in here. Her father takes a couple of frail steps in her direction and lifts the oxygen mask towards her face. “Breathe. Trust me. Just breathe.”