The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Nurture

Every day, Mark swims a mile of front crawl. He swallows a lot of swimming pool water and gets out with chlorine in his gut, his bladder bursting. There used to be disinfectant to paddle through on the way to the changing room, but that has gone. He takes a hot shower before heading home.

As a child, he took himself to the pool on Saturday mornings, leaving his mum and dad and sister on the sofa in front of the TV. By the time he got back, his dad was starting in the garden. Even now, the smell of chlorine brings to mind his dad standing in the middle of his imperfect lawn holding a spray gun full of weedkiller.

Under the grass, there were dozens of bulbs, and every spring, the green shoots pushed through. Mark’s dad glared at the unwelcome buds which ravaged his lawn. They were pests, like the slugs which ruined the marigolds, and the maggots which bred in the vegetable patch. He kept on digging them out, and they kept on coming up. Mark’s mum said could he not just leave them be?

The bulbs had been planted before they lived there. Mark’s mum and dad and sister had lived somewhere else before Mark was born. It seemed to Mark that they had been happier in this other place than they were now, and he wondered why they didn’t still live there, why they couldn’t go back; he would have liked to live there too.

He begged his mum to take him there, to see this house in which he did not exist, where they lived their lives without him. In the end, she took him. They went on a bus whose windows looked as if they had not been washed or even rained on in weeks, and the world Mark saw through them seemed dirty.

They got off at a bus shelter whose glass had been smashed. They walked the few metres to the mouth of a dingy alleyway where his mum stopped. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, holding on to a street sign as if someone were going to make her. She stood, grim-faced, staring into the alleyway as if there were something dreadful down there, amid the stink of bins, even though Mark could see nothing but shadows.

She turned away, returning them to the bus stop to wait for another grimy bus which would take them back to where they had got on.

Walking home from their stop, it seemed like it might rain soon, and Mark’s mum hurried them along, looking anxiously at the sky, at the clouds’ swollen underbellies, not wanting to get caught in a downpour.

‘Don’t tell your dad we went there,’ she said, and Mark promised, even though he thought that surely they hadn’t been there after all.

Sometimes his dad, objecting to Mark’s language or to a look, snatched him up by his collar, gathering shirt and skin and hair in his fist, and carried him out into the garden. Then Mark, feeling like an animal picked up and dropped by a tornado, was deposited into the flowerbed. He felt his dad’s big, warm hand on the back of his neck, pushing him down until the turned soil pressed against his mouth, getting in between his lips and into his nostrils. Grit crunched between his teeth. He tasted the dirt on his tongue, felt it in his throat, felt all the things which crawled in it crawling in him, crawling and shitting and breeding in him.

They went on holiday one summer to a converted barn on a French farm. Mark found ants living under the porch and was playing with them when the farmer’s big boots stopped beside him. Mark looked up. The farmer, whose smell reminded Mark of the beer in which his dad drowned slugs, said something, but in French, and Mark did not understand. The farmer gestured: Come with me.

Mark followed the farmer across the yard and into a corrugated-iron cow shed which smelt of metal and piss and warm animal breath. At the far end of the shed, they stopped and the farmer nodded towards a dim corner. Mark saw a dog in the damp and stinking straw, straining, its body trembling, a bitch with something between her legs, something slipping wetly out of her. He heard mewling.

He showed his sister the puppies in the cow shed and the ants under the house. They gave the ants some sugar and watched them carry it away.

One morning, when the others went out walking, Mark stayed behind in the house. It was a warm day. He had the back door wide open for the breeze and was getting himself a cold drink from the fridge when he heard whimpering behind him. Turning, he saw a dog in the doorway, one of the farm dogs standing just inside the kitchen, dripping blood. Mark narrowed his eyes. He shut the fridge and opened a drawer. Approaching the dog, he raised his arm and brought a wooden rolling pin down hard on the dog’s black nose. He banged it down again and then again until the dog finally dropped the savaged puppy from between its jaws. Mark released the rolling pin and crouched down, bending over the small, ruined body. He moved to touch it and the dog snapped its empty and blood-wet jaws around his hand, its teeth breaking the skin, sinking into the flesh.

Mark did not hear himself shouting, but he supposed that he must have done, that between them they must have made enough noise to bring the farmer’s wife running.

The farmer’s wife tied the dog up outside and inspected Mark’s wounds. She did not seem surprised by the sight of the puppy lying on the floor; she just seemed disappointed.

She spoke to Mark in English and he asked her why the dog had done that to its puppy. ‘That’s not one of his,’ she said, and Mark thought about nature programmes he’d seen in which dominant lions kill the young which aren’t theirs.

The farmer’s wife went for a first-aid kit and while she was gone Mark’s parents and sister returned from their walk. Mark met them in the hallway and told them what had happened.

‘Jesus,’ said his mum, seeing the blood leaking from him, dripping from his fingertips. ‘Get off the carpet.’ She steered him back into the kitchen. The puppy was still there but she did not look at it. Fetching a cloth from the sink, she returned to the hallway and tried to clean the blood off the carpet but a stain remained. She moved the doormat to cover it, and meanwhile Mark’s dad was boiling water to pour under the porch.

The dog bite healed, with Mark doing his best not to pick at the scabs. When they came away, they left behind patches of new pink skin which were not quite smooth to the touch.

Mark’s voice deepened. Dark hairs sprouted on his weak chin. He grew tall, filling doorways, startling his mum on the landing.

His teachers talked to him about his falling grades. He was warned about antisocial behaviour, and then suspended. Mark took his exams but was not encouraged to stay on for the sixth form.

Abroad again that summer, they stayed in a hotel with a pool and sun loungers on which they lay in their swimwear, Mark dripping wet from the lengths he swam, his sister dozing in a bikini, his mum with a beach towel wrapped around her, her eyes closed although she was awake, swatting at invisible insects. His dad sat upright in a plastic chair, his eyes open. Mark’s mum suddenly said brightly, looking at her grown-up daughter and her school-leaver son, ‘I suppose this could be our last ever holiday together.’

Mark got an interview for a job with the council and his mum ironed a shirt for him to wear. His dad, finding him waiting bare-chested in the living room doorway, said Mark ought to be ironing his own shirt, not standing there watching her do it.

‘Leave him be,’ said his mum. ‘It’s only a shirt.’

‘If you get this job,’ she said to Mark, finishing the shirt and holding it out to him, ‘you could get a place of your own.’

When Mark returned from his interview, he found his mum still ironing. She ironed everything, even underwear and sheets. His dad was in his armchair, reading the paper. Mark, shrugging off his jacket as he came into the living room, said, ‘I got it.’

‘Oh good,’ said his mum with relief. ‘That’s really good.’ She put down the iron and held out a hand, perhaps for his jacket, while Mark, coming towards her, responded with an awkward hug, feeling her stiffen.

‘I thought I’d fucked it up,’ he said, pulling away again, his mum turning to her ironing pile. Going on to explain about ‘a bastard of a question’ he’d been asked, he felt his dad’s hand at the back of his neck, going for his collar. Mark swung around and pushed his dad away, shoving him backwards into the ironing board. His dad, as he lost his balance, snatched at Mark’s shirt, whose little white buttons scattered around them like seeds being sown. His mum steadied the ironing board, but his dad, falling, trying to hold on to something, grabbed the iron’s cord and brought the burning-hot, three-pound appliance down on his head. On the floor, holding a hand to his wound, to the place where it hurt, he said to Mark’s mum, ‘You should have had it aborted.’

Mark’s sister, looking out of the window, puts on a raincoat. Her mum, going with her to the door, says, ‘Give him my love.’ Her dad is sitting in his chair, staring at the TV, at some old programme. He says nothing.

She takes a bus to the park and then walks between waterlogged flowerbeds to the pond. She finds Mark waiting on a damp bench. He smells of chlorine. In one hand he is holding a bag of bread for the ducks. His other hand is empty and she can see the pattern in his skin, a join-the-dots puzzle of pale blemishes in the shape of a smile, the shape of a jaw. Sitting down on that side, she reaches for his hand. Telling him, ‘Mum sends her love,’ she touches his scars.