Anticipation (14 page)

We’d have a problem. Because I couldn’t leave, which means he’d have to go. And I’ve come to like our Friday nights. Drinking alone has never bothered me, but now and again it’s nice to have a change.

I
n my first year of high school, I learn a new word. Ataxia. I can even use it in a sentence:
Nanny Biggs fell over because she suffers
from ataxia.
Turns out it wasn’t the gin after all. And Sarah has other problems. She is
dystonic, diplopic
and
dysphagic. Spastic
is a word I’m already familiar with, but Maggie doesn’t like that one, and Joelle Adams got sent to the flagpole once for using it at school.

Nanny has a neurological disorder
. It’s another impressive phrase, but if, like my mother, you demand to know which one, the answer is disappointing.

‘They don’t really know,’ she reports, cross-browed, after Grandpa William’s announcement phone call. ‘They’re saying it looks like Parkinson’s, but they won’t be able to tell until they see how it progresses.’

It sounds a genial sort of disease. I imagine it welcoming symptoms in — to white-coated applause and a jaunty theme — with a tan and a Yorkshire accent.

‘Don’t worry,’ Maggie tells me redundantly. ‘I’m sure Nanny will be fine.’

A remarkable claim, in retrospect. But at Bradbury Street, belief always did run along the line of least resistance.

‘You’re sure?’ I hear her ask Grandpa William on the phone. ‘You don’t want me to come up for a few days?’

No, William and Sarah are fine. They really are. And besides, there’s nothing we can do.

‘All right then. If you’re certain.’

It’s good that we don’t have to go to Nelson. Annabel and I already have the weekend planned. It involves the roller-skating
rink, a packet of Winfield Red and, we hope, Wayne McKenzie.

And yet, even at this safe distance, life in Bradbury Street is not entirely undisrupted. Grandpa takes to ringing us. About five o’clock, usually, just as Maggie’s stirring something on the stove.

‘Heaven knows what time they eat,’ she grumbles, and makes me answer the phone. She’s been more snappish than usual of late.

‘Mum’s just cooking dinner,’ I tell him, night after night.

‘Oh,’ he says, never failing to sound surprised. ‘Well. Tell her I took Nanny back to the hospital today.’ And away he goes with his report, so neat and methodical I wonder sometimes if he’s reading it from notes.

Aphasia. Asthenia. Anhedonia.

I am the receptacle for William Biggs’ new language. When it’s over, silence rolls down the line. I can feel him backing up, trying to find a way out. An ending. Some days it goes on so long I imagine he’s simply left the room, the receiver twirling slowly in empty space.

‘Grandpa?’

‘Yes!’

‘My dinner’s ready now.’

I never ask how he is.

In May, the doctors’ continued prodding of Sarah Biggs dislodges an unlikely nugget of memory.

‘Did she ever mention it,’ Grandpa William asks, somewhat rhetorically, ‘to you or your mother?’

‘I don’t think so.’ In fact, I’m sure.

‘Ask your mother, would you? They think it’s important, you see.’

‘Mum!’ I yell from the hall doorway. ‘Did Nanny ever say anything about her dad having ataxia?’

‘What?’ Maggie stares at me, momentarily torn. Then she puts her wooden spoon down, takes the half-cooked bolognaise off the ring and comes to the phone.

‘He died of pneumonia,’ I hear her tell Grandpa William. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Her voice is quick and cross, full of ruining sauce. ‘I saw his death certificate in London.’

A pause.

‘Well, don’t you remember?’ She sits down next to the phone. ‘Yes, of course. Nineteen thirty-something. Years before you met.’

‘You don’t think,’ she suggests, moments later, ‘she’s just confused?’

I know the answer to that one myself — there’s nothing wrong with Nanny’s mind, the doctors say.

‘Yes, I know they say that.’

Apart from the fact that chunks of it are dying.

‘No … She never told me anything about her father. Well, except —’ Maggie catches my eye. Soft-eared creatures lollop gingerly across the air between us. ‘Oh, nothing that matters. Some silly story about rabbits. I thought at the time she was —’

My mother bites her lip.

What? Losing her mind?

Still, some nights, I construct a narrow Arts and Crafts sitting room, the glow of a coal fire. Synthesise, molecule by expanding molecule from that long-banned smoke, a fantasy of rabbits.

‘What’s its name?’ little Sarah asks, as one hops across the rug and stands up to nibble, deferentially, on the piping of the sofa.

‘Why!’ says her father in pleasing astonishment, ‘you know, I don’t believe she has one.’

‘I know, Daddy — let’s call her June!’

‘Why June?’

‘Because,’ Sarah raises her eyes to the ceiling, above which her youngest sister is at last asleep, ‘she came right after May!’

She scoops the white rabbit up. It fits neatly in her cupped palms.

‘What have you done to your arm, Daddy?’

‘Oh.’ Her father glances down at the neat square of gauze
peeping out under his left shirt-cuff. ‘It’s nothing. A little burn, that’s all.’

‘Were you playing with matches?’

‘Certainly not. Only very silly people do that.’ (He’s telling the wrong daughter.)

Sarah turns the rabbit on its back, cradling it in the crook of her arm like a baby. It doesn’t seem to object. ‘How did you burn yourself, then?’

She waits. It seems to take her father a moment to remember. ‘I dropped something on it at work.’

She’s not surprised. Daddy is always dropping things. He’s very clumsy. ‘What kind of a thing?’

‘Sarah, play with your rabbit and leave your father alone.’ Her mother sweeps in, a wave of efficiency and hairspray. ‘He didn’t come all the way home to play twenty questions.’

These are the two things she remembers, ten years later, standing quietly in her parents’ bedroom. June-rabbit and the burn. The latter’s slow dwindling, as the weekends passed, to this salt-
and-pepper
scar, a sprinkling of wine on her father’s magnolia skin. One remaining point of reference.

Ted Harding’s eyes are closed, their muscles motionless at last. His stillness has spread through the house, smoothing the early morning air, relieving tics and tremors, the contortions of the night, so that already the occupants of 7 Kings Close begin to uncurl, blinking in the light, stretching back into the shapes they used to inhabit.

Under the door of Sarah’s own room, where her mother sleeps soundly and fully clothed on Betty’s bed — downstairs in the kitchen where Betty, lost in the act of making tea, watches the bare branches of the pear tree drip — in the front room where Eddie sits back on the chesterfield, smoking and staring at sports results, oblivious to nibbled corners — there is quiet.

Ted himself, limbs easy and straight, face calm and undistorted, has turned into someone else. He’s not rabbit-Daddy of a decade
ago. All those years, behind the façade of the disease, her father must have been changing. Growing into this old man no one ever knew, elegant and svelte, with his white hair brushed and oiled just so, and his pianist’s hands neatly clasped, the fingers long and tapered and true.

It seems a shame, now he’s fixed at last, that they can’t keep him. Sarah would like to take him out, introduce him to her friends, show him off to the neighbours. She’d like that steady hand on her arm in years to come when she walks down the aisle.

The doctor is taking a long time to come back. But then, there really isn’t any hurry. She reaches out, strokes her finger lightly over the burn. Her father’s skin is neither warm nor cold.

They bury Ted at eleven o’clock on a Thursday, the scrubby oaks of Wimbledon Common rising around them through the rain. But it’s not the last Sarah sees of the scar.

It’s there in a club off Leicester Square in 1939, on the sunburnt hand of a gunner from the Souths.

‘Mustard gas,’ he explains, matter-of-factly. ‘Funny story. Just after we joined up, me and me mate, this sergeant comes by, asks if anyone’s up for some extra dosh. We were a bit skint, so we go and stick our hands up. Next thing we know we’re bloody lab rats up at Porton. They paid us a shilling to drop mustard gas on our skin so the boffins could watch it burn. Typical bloody army.’ He raises his glass, sucks whisky through his teeth. ‘Me Uncle Bert were gassed in France. By the bloody RAF, not the sodding Germans.’ He smacks his lips. ‘Scariest place I ever been, Porton Down. Nasty bastards the lot of them. I don’t care if they are on our side.’

Of course, I don’t know that it happened that way. But Sarah must have found out somehow, mustn’t she? Put rabbits and chemists together? She couldn’t have lived her whole life not knowing.

An ambulance screams onto the causeway, and I watch it cross, the flash of red light, the sound of the siren rolling and dying on
the water. A fading race of hope against time, moving off until it’s gone.

I can’t pretend to tell you, sitting here on my island in the dark, where the gene for secrecy lies, though it seems safe to assume that it, at least, was passed down from Ted to Sarah, Sarah to Maggie, Maggie to me, intact. But mustard gas seeks out our most intimate places, groins and armpits, corneas and mucous membranes, the sticky sugars of our DNA. It locks up the double helix, hides the codes. Our cells do the best they can, but without full information things get lost, misarranged, deleted. How many CAGs in ATXN3 again? Forty-eight? Eighty-four? Fifty?

It’s a slow death, sulphur mustard. Your blistered lungs fill up with fluid until you can’t breathe. Drowning and burning all at once. It’s quite an achievement.

Of course there were other things, too. My great-grandfather didn’t spend twenty years making just one gas. There was phosgene, chlorine, diphosgene, hydrogen cyanide. Ted was a busy man, Monday to Friday down on Salisbury Plain, bringing tears to the lower ranks’ eyes, piping the scent of new-mown hay into twitching noses.

It could all have begun right there, with a sherry-coloured mutagen and a chest full of environmental toxins. No need to look further back for the root of Sarah’s problems. It seems fitting that they should have left their mark in our blood, a souvenir of the Hardings’ great leap forward to mass destruction.

It’s something to think about, when my fingers won’t work quite right, when I just can’t thread the screw-cap back on the chardonnay.

Of course, Aunt Marguerite had already racked up a cricket score, on the body count front, sixty years before Ted was born. But it wasn’t something she worked towards — it was never the goal. Like accidentally hoovering a spider up, sometimes you just forget to think about what’s in your way.

Intent. Surely that should count for something?

I suppose one might argue — if one chose — that Ted wasn’t entirely responsible either. He didn’t invent the gases, after all. He
was just a jobbing chemist. A man of moderate talent, his service records reveal.

But it takes a special kind of man — don’t you think? — to do that kind of work. To watch, while a rabbit’s skin burns. To hurt, so you can study the wound. It has to be something you’re born with.

Jake thinks I should get out more.

He didn’t put it quite that way, to be fair. He’s trying to get me to go into town. Pretending he owes me dinner. Fuck him, and his muscular arms and his easy smile and his builder’s body. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.

I’ve conducted experiments enough of my own over the years. Dropped irritants into tender places, watched them blister. Left my scars. Right now, if you went to a house in North Invercargill, slipped in through the feature entrance and tiptoed upstairs to the master suite, turned back the sheet, you’d see them, the marks I left on my husband’s thick pink skin. At least, I think so. It took me long enough to work a way under there — surely something on the surface must still show.

If I’m honest, I’m not even sure how sorry I am. If I want them to heal completely. There’s immortality, of a kind, in what I’ve left behind.
Janine waz here
. Do I really want to be wiped out? Erased by Cheryl’s soothing, stubby fingers?

‘I’m sick of you,’ Maggie used to say to me, sometimes, as people did to their kids back then. ‘For heaven’s sake, just go away.’