Antarctica (6 page)

‘Do ya come here often?’ he says.

‘I do when the ewes aren’t lambing.’

‘Do ya live in a disadvantaged area?’ He belches.

‘Yeah, I get the subsidy.’

‘God, you’re lovely. There’s nothing like the smell of a hogget ewe.’

He breathes me in with his sherry breath. We move with the squeal and squeeze of the uileann pipes, we are pulled in with the bellows. The quavering lilt and sway of a tin whistle curls through the darkness. The long swath of hair that covers Da’s bald patch falls down and
almost touches his shoulder. Ma pulls off her roll-on and swings it like a hula hoop on her index finger, keeping her left hand at her waist. The last picture I remember is the roll-on flying across the room with the snap of elastic and Eugene asking, ‘Can I interest you in a snog at the gable wall?’ as he swings me in a perfect twist.

My mother dreamt things before they happened and found things in her dreams. That morning she came down all dreamy, sleepy, saying, ‘I know where the old slash-hook is now.’ She pulled her boots on and I
followed
her up the bog. She stopped under a sycamore, and pointed to where a clump of briars choked the
limestone
wall.

‘It’s in there,’ she said.

And sure enough, she was right. We chopped through those briars with our new slash-hook and found the old.

The dairy was a dark, damp place my parents filled with the things they seldom used. From the time before me. Yellow paint bubbled on the walls and flagstones shone across the floor. Bridles hung stiff on the beams, their bits dusty. The churn was still there and the smell of the sour milk still in it, the wood smooth but riddled with
woodworm
, the paddles long since lost. I never remember glass in those windows, only rusted bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing in through the trees.

Someone shoved the old incubator and run in there too, a rusted, metal affair that used to shine like
teaspoons
. We would put new chickens in there, scoop
them up in our hands like yellow petals and drop them into that heat, the fluffy balls with legs always moving, taking in that warmth as their own. Warmth keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow moving balls fell down, the cold outside winning over, the feet like orange arrows pointing down. My father’s hand chucked them out like young weeds. My mother’s picked them gently; inspecting those yellow bodies for some sign of life, and finding none, she’d say: ‘My poor chicken,’ and smile at me as she slid them down the shoot.

The milk strainers were still there too, the old gauze hanging in dirty clumps on a fraying thread. And the jars of gooseberry jam that smelled like sherry, shrunken in the glass with the whisker of mould. We used to make crab-apple jelly, quarter those sour fruits and boil them to a pulp, cores and seeds and all. Poured the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase, a corner on each leg of a stool turned upside-down. Drip. Drip. Drip. Into the preserving pot all night.

I went into the dairy when I was sent: for a pot of
varnish
, six-inch nails, a bridle for a mare whose head was big. The latch was too high. I had to stand on a can of creosote to reach up and the metal round I pressed on was leaf-thin. When I went there of my own accord, it was to look into the chest, a big metal, rusted box, a pirate’s suitcase to a child. So old that if you emptied it out and held it up to the light, it would be like looking through a colander. There was nothing in it I liked – old books stuck together with damp, no pictures, brown
maps and some prayer-books. ‘It all belonged to yer father’s people,’ my mother told me, using the voice he was not supposed to hear. The chest was just as long as me and half as tall, with a tight lid and no handles. I would open it and look at those things, finger the books with their fractured spines, the missing covers, slam the lid down hard, make that metal screech.

Then the dream came and changed everything. My mother dreaming of her mother, dead. Her wailing in the kitchen waking me in the middle of the night.
Banging
the kitchen table. Me standing in my turtle pyjamas at the end of the stairs, watching through the dark. My mother curling up on the floor, my father who never spoke a tender word, speaking tender words. Coaxing her, saying her name. Mary, Mayree, ah Maayree. The two people who never touched, whose fingers left the gravy jug before the other’s clasp, touching. I crept back upstairs and listened as those tender words changed into something else.

Morning brought the telegram. My mother rolled it between her fingers like a cigarette paper. My father made arrangements. A neighbouring woman’s hand slapped mine when it turned the wireless on. My
grandmother
, the woman with the purple rash patching her body, the old, blue-veined breasts sagging, the
jaundiced
skin we had washed like a painting, came home stiff in a frill-lined box and we put her in the cool of the parlour.

Neighbours came in a convoy after the funeral, cars
bumper-to-bumper in the lane. I sat on strangers’ laps. They passed me around like the tobacco pouch and I drank three big bottles of lemonade. My aunt stood guarding the ham. ‘Who’s for another nice bit of centre cut then?’ the carving knife deadly in her hand.

My mother sat staring into the fire and never said a word. Not even when the sheep-dog got up on the chaise longue and licked himself.

Mother took to cleaning out the cow-house, even though we sold the cows years back. She went out with the yard brush and the bucket, scrubbed the stalls, the aisle, even shone the old hubcap we used to pour frothy milk into for the cats. And then she’d come inside and speak to the statues until dinner-time. She imagined storms. Locked herself under the stairs when she heard wind, put cotton wool in her ears when the thunder came. Hid under the table with the dogs. Once my father and I, rolling barley in the loft, watched her calling up the field to the cows. ‘Chuck! Chuck! Hersey! Chuck! Hersey!’ Her rattling the handle on the zinc bucket to bring those imaginary cows down. My father gentled her indoors. And that was when she started
living
upstairs.

So when summer came, I was the one who carried out the big teapot to the men, the spout plugged with a page from
The Farmer’
s
Journal
. The men sucked their
tráithníns
and watched me and told my father with full mouths that I would soon be old enough.

She came for me in the middle of the night, wearing a
powder-blue nightdress I had never seen before. She pulled me out of bed, down the stairs in the dark and out through the mown meadow, past the cocks of hay, our bare feet picking up the seed. Up and up we went through the stubble fields, her hand a vice grip. The tail of her nightie whipping out behind her in the wind. And then we reached the top of the top and laid down on our backs, watching the stars, she with her brassy hair and mad words, not senseless at all, but sensing what we couldn’t. The way the dog hears the car in the lane first.

She pointed out what she called the saucepan, a bunch of stars huddled over the treetops, and told me how it came to be there. How animals parched with thirst had no water. Giraffes’ necks bending with the drought, sheep losing wool, snakes’ bodies too dry to bend; but a young sow found a saucepan full of water and gave them all a drink to tide them over until the clouds wrung themselves out. The saucepan had a crooked handle and when the animals had drunk, the stars took on its shape and that’s what was up there. And I could see it too, joining the white dots in the sky, feeling the turtles on my pyjamas start to crawl along my legs, under my armpits.

We stayed there until dawn, the smell of hay coming up on the wind. Her telling me the way my father’s hands bruised her for fifteen years, the difference between
loving
and liking somebody. How she didn’t like me any more than him because I had the same cruel eyes.

That’s when I started going into the dairy without reason. It was a quiet enough room, nothing only the wind and the gurgling of the water-tank overhead. The hole in the ceiling between the beams showed the babby-house, a place my sisters used to take their dolls and hit their heads on the sloping roof.

They were long gone the time the van came to take her away. My father said she was hurting, but it wasn’t anything you could see. I asked him if he meant she was bleeding on the inside.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

I thought of the Sacred Heart picture over the sink, the red heart lit by the red light that never went out.

I open the metal chest and look inside. I pick up a prayer-book and finger the leaves. They are tan and smooth like my mother’s arm. I open one of the torn, brown maps and, until I find a place I recognise, I cannot discern which is the land, and which the sea. The wing of an insect is stuck to Norway. I can hear my parents
talking
in the next room. I open another book and look for pictures, but there are none. I get into the chest, squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what has become my mother’s voice rises to a near-cry. Something falls. I pull the tin roof, let that metal fall in over me with a rusty, tightening screech. Everything turns black. It is as if I no longer exist. It is not me sitting on the damp books inside a big, black tin. The smell is old and musty like the smell in the bread-bin or the back of the
cupboard
where the cake-crumbs stay. A smell that’s a
century 
tury old. I remember rats ate through the grid of the incubator once. They got at the chickens and we found pieces of fluff everywhere with legs attached, the fleshy bodies eaten out. We found others terrified, exhausted and hiding between cans of paint or rolls of sheepwire, unable as yet to fly away. We picked them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, tiny bellows gone mad.

The last man who said I was old enough got scalded. My mother always said there was nothing as bad as a burn. And she was right. It’s turning out that I’m taking no nonsense from anybody. They leave their
wellingtons
outside the door now. And I haven’t heard them say the spuds are hard in the middle. I’d swat them with the serving spoon. They know that too.

I visit her on Sundays, but she doesn’t know where she is or who I am.

‘It’s me, Mam,’ I say.

‘I never could stand the smell of fish,’ she says. ‘Him and his herrings.’

‘Do you not know me? It’s Ellen.’

‘Ellen of Troy! Get on yer horse!’ she says.

She’s a right hand at cards, cheats the other ones out of their pocket-money every week and the matron has to go and fish it out of her shoes while she’s in the bath.

But I keep going back there to that loony bin. I like the smell of disinfectant in the corridors, the nurses’
rubber-soled
shoes, the quarrelling over Sunday papers. What does that say about me? Mother always said madness
ran in families and I have it from the two sides. I suppose I’ve my own reasons for going there. Maybe I’m getting used to it. Just a little, taking a small share of it for my own protection. Like a vaccination. You have to face the worst possible scenario, then you’ll be able for anything.

Smethers, the postman, that greasy fuck with his brown letters. Here he comes in his proud-blue uniform. It’s another day, another dense, bright space to blacken in. He strides up the street to our porch, slicks his hair back underneath his cap and talks in through the letter-box.

‘Morning, girls!’

The voice is treacle-sweet, reaching down the hall as if to grope us. He lives next to a distant cousin of ours who owns a fresh-fish caravan up past the Mormon Road, brings us cod or lemon sole or whiting wrapped in newspaper.

‘Yoo-hoo, ladies! Oh, girls!’

The stink of him. The come-and-get-me voice on him. Something’s not right. We had fish three times last week. Fresh salmon once and this cousin’s someone we hardly know, a woman with a van Mam mentioned.

‘Yoo-hoo! Ladies!’

My sister Cora doesn’t budge. She leans her elbow on the corner of the gas cooker and pulls on her morning cigarette, exhaling thin little beams of smoke. She never talks until that fag’s stubbed out. Behind our kitchen wall the quick snorts of a knitting machine that wake us up continue. When our neighbours first moved in we
thought it was him snoring, that their headboard was against our wall; but we were wrong. Here we do not know our next-door neighbours. Mam used to talk about neighbours. People playing poker until all hours, men raising a huge tent together for a marquee on the Square, pulling the ropes down tight around the stakes.

Cora takes a last pull, squashes out the butt and
tightens
the belt of her lilac dressing gown. I watch her bare footprints fade on the lino as she opens the door and lets him in.

‘A vision in the mornings,’ he says, his eyes starting at her bare feet and travelling up like she’s something he could sketch. His lips are shiny with his own spit. ‘Oh, the versatility of the postal system. The service! Where would you girls be without us?’ He hands over the
parcel
, marches in, plomps his satchel down on the
hall-stand
. A little rub of the hands, a glance round. ‘Well, Cora, a cup a tea would be sweet.’

Rewards for the messenger.

My no-nonsense sister puts up with him. She needs his greasy parcels, I suppose, and cups of tea are cheap enough. She stares into the fridge, inventing breakfast. There’s two eggs, a tub of Flora margarine, a wilted head of lettuce, the bright light showing up the
emptiness
. She shuts the door and plugs the kettle in. It’s Wednesday and we’re down to the last few teabags, so the cups will be peppered with dust today. Smethers sits down snug in the armchair. Cora turns on the radio, tunes into Jimmy Young who’s giving things away.
Then she wriggles a coin out of her purse and hands it over.

‘Will you go down and get me a box of matches?’

‘Matches? But there’s –’

‘Piss off now, there’s a love.’

She gives me the ‘Just do it’ look, so I stomp down to the newsagent’s in Breswill Street, a good ten-minute walk each way, but I come home too soon and notice Smethers’ belt is notched up tight and Cora’s nightdress is inside-out, her hands fidgeting with the fuzz around her slipper. And the smell, like sleep gone sticky.
Oatmeal
boiled over.

Now I’m wise. I take my time. I dawdle to the shops and back, steal a bottle of milk from a blue door’s step and sip it all the way into town, small creamy sips that thin down and get sickening towards the bottom. I buy a box of matches or whatever Cora asks for in the shops so we’ll never have to talk. Through the jeweller’s window I watch ladies trying on rings with big, precious stones, the Scottish assistant coaxing them up over their
knuckles
and prising them off again.

The wind accumulates in this town, cold gusts trapped by the rows of identical red-brick houses, some built in crescents like they’re competing for the sunshine and the air. I stand out here among the pre-schoolers and the café women, sharing their gossip and ashtrays. Other girls my age are in school, wearing scratchy, plaid uniforms and swotting over O-Levels. I had enough of
that and Cora didn’t seem to mind, said it was up to me. I burned my schoolbooks slowly in a barrel out the yard, pages of algebra, home economics, continents curling up in flame and diminishing to ash. But now sometimes I miss it ’cos there’s nothing else to do, nobody my own age, just the soaps and pay day and whatever
brainwave
Cora thinks up in the days before she gets her period.

Going home, I trail my hands along the railings until the railings disappear and the pavement gets uneven. Sometimes Smethers leaves the gate open and the dogs get in and cock their legs on the hydrangea, but I always wait in the porch and listen, just in case. Our porch is
littered
with warped plaster slabs, dried-out putty tins, things we never bothered to clear out after Dad.

Cora sings. She comes home from work and says, ‘They’re starting to call me the singing cashier down Tesco’s. They’re all saying how nice it is to hear
somebody
happy.’

‘And are you?’

‘Am I what?’ she asks.

‘Happy.’

‘Happy? Happy?’ She pats my head, and laughs. ‘Put the kettle on, ya daft love.’

She drinks it black, holds the cup up close to her face and blows out small breaths against the steam. I love her like this. When she sits and thinks up ways to keep us safe from the outside world. Ways to keep this dingy
house insulated from the coppers and the gasman, the TV licence woman with her sturdy little clipboard.

The photo of our father has fallen off the wall, but his frame leans against the skirting board, determined. It’s a picture taken at Pembroke Dock with a trucker’s meaty arm around each shoulder. A lorry-load of construction men packed up for the crossing and the duty-free. His eyes are dark and feisty. Neither one of us has bothered to replace the nail, to hang that bastard back up in our lives.

Upstairs, Cora showers, getting ready to go out with the other Tesco girls. She sings a song from her new Tori Amos album, her voice high and brittle as a boy’s.

‘Make sure the iron’s not too hot!’ she shouts down.

In rainy months like these we air our clothes by
ironing
them. Last time I scorched the backside of her
polyester
nightdress, leaving a triangular patch of brown. I don’t like to think these things might be deliberate.

Outside, in a house opposite ours, lights come on; Japanese lanterns hang like fake moons in the windows. They are pretty shades of blush-pink and curd-yellow.

And that’s the last good night of sleep we had because of what it said in the newspapers. Smethers comes early and uses the bell for once.

‘Open up!’

Newspaper but no fish today. His cap is off and I think the distant cousin with the caravan must be dead. But it’s worse than that.
NIGHTMARE
ON CROMWELL STREET
, the
headline reads. Cora sucks in breath and lights a Rothman’s off the gas. Slowly, we take it all in. Young girls found under the floorboards. Buried in the garden. The happy couple with the heinous appetite arrested. Plans for an excavation.

The very first thought that comes into my mind is milk. That door was blue. I examine the unsuspicious terrace house in the photo, with number 25 hung in
trellis
on the dash, and then I know it’s true: I drank Fred West’s milk while my sister was fucking the postman.

My father knew him. Fred West came here, ate supper in our house. A brickie on the river side, his shoes were big and glossy black. A hairy man with a beard and dark eyebrows feeding into one another. Hairy. Like you’d have to blow on him to find out where his eyes were, but the papers show him clean-shaven with a reckless look, a savagery made noticeable by truth. I sat up on his lap and, united, we played against my sister in a game of drafts. I remember his big fingers clasping the pieces, jumping hers, doubling them into kings at the far side of the board and turning back again, taking more.

This morning Cora does not tell me to go out. Instead I am to put the kettle on. She leads Smethers down the hall, pushes his back against the wall. I hear her voice but not the words and a few minutes later he’s slithering off down the street without a word, moving out of our lives. Finally he brought something she could not
stomach
. Those girls were my age. It could have been me. Cora sent me out to run fake errands on what must have
been the most dangerous street in England so she could shag a man for the sake of a few fishy parcels. Suddenly I wish Mam was alive. I wish my mother was alive so Cora wouldn’t have to mother me, feed me.

‘That’s the end of him,’ she says, gathering up the paper again.

‘I was tired of fish anyway. Maybe you’ll shag a butcher next.’

She doesn’t smile. Perhaps she cannot. She just sits under the window with her ankles tucked in under her backside and turns the pages of the newspaper. Behind her the sun is rising, gathering strength over the houses. In the morning light her hair looks dry and broken at the ends. She looks old today, not tired, but less ambitious, like somebody who’s quit so she can move on.

I crack two eggs into the frying pan and watch their edges whiten.

‘Dad knew him,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

I tip the pan so the oil cooks the whites into a shape. Throw a couple of bread slices into the fat.

‘They built that porch together. Jesus.’

‘Hard or runny?’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Your egg. Hard or runny?’

‘Runny.’

She’s looking at the photograph of Dad with his trucker friends. For a moment I think she may pick it up, but she doesn’t. She looks down, continues to read the
newspaper. She has my father’s jaw, a squareness to her face I never noticed until now, determination, but her eyes say otherwise. My sister, the singing cashier, looks ready to cry.

‘One runny egg,’ I say, sliding the yellow eye and the fried bread on to a chipped plate, a little border of
forget-me-nots
growing in a blue snarl around its edge.

‘Get that down you,’ I say. ‘You’ll feel better.’