Diving Belles (6 page)

As you reach the landing, you hear her in the bathroom. She is talking to herself. She has done this as far back as you can remember – you hardly even notice it any more. You are thinking of the best way to announce yourself, something exuberant and witty, something to really make her day. What you want to do is banish all those lonely, quiet moments that you imagine are like cobwebs nestling in every corner of the house. What would be the best way? When you were six, you used to forward-roll through doorways and clatter heavily into her legs, or you would creep forwards across the shiny kitchen lino and wrap yourself around her feet. Sometimes, she would start walking over to the dishwasher, dragging you along slowly behind her like a mop, pretending that she didn’t notice you were there.

You move forwards until you can see through the open bathroom door. There is your mother, leaning over the sink. She is wearing her gardening clothes – the baggy jeans with the damp brown knees and the red checked shirt that feels rough and scratchy against your cheek. Looking at your mother, you see her in smells and in touch, but really, you haven’t touched her properly for years. You are always rushing as you leave, hugging her loosely and briefly, so that, later on in the car, you only have a faint impression of her small body against yours.

Now you are standing right in the doorway but she hasn’t seen you. She has taken a small blue pot from inside the cupboard and is unscrewing the lid. She is absorbed – you don’t think she would notice you if you coughed. You have seen this pot before. It was always kept on the highest shelf along with her razor and her prescriptions. You watch as she scoops out some thick cream and rubs it slowly over her eyelids. The cream leaves a strange, bluish shimmer over them, like the shimmer of fish scales or oil rainbowing a puddle. She rubs until all the cream has vanished, wincing as she does it. When she opens her eyes, you imagine for a second that the whites have been stained a pale green, but almost immediately they are white again. She blinks into the mirror and when she finally turns round and sees you, she doesn’t even jump. ‘Here you are,’ she says. You nod to confirm it, suddenly feeling big and invasive in her bathroom doorway. When she places her hand on the small of your back to guide you downstairs, towards the kettle, towards your favourite biscuits, you feel your own loneliness banished, you feel saved, which you don’t think is exactly the right way around. It isn’t exactly as you planned it. But in any case, you have arrived.

It is still warm enough to sit in the garden. You tip up the plastic chairs to drain the water off the seats and flick off the maple leaves. The garden is small and yellow and brown and red. It drips with leftovers from the last shower of rain. The smell of wet soil in this garden is as familiar to you as the smell of your own hair. You can smell the sea here too, spreading its salty hands through the air. You tell your mother how strange it is to be somewhere so quiet. In your flat in the city, cars and trains bellow past without cease. You don’t have a garden, but once or twice, you and Barnaby have crawled out of the window on to next door’s roof and lain there like children gaping up at the sky.

Your mother asks about your job. She is always interested in it. She works part-time in a bakery and has never used a computer. She thinks that the internet is a dangerous device for social control. You told that to your boss, Rachel. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘That’s really sweet. She reminds me of my mother. She doesn’t think you can microwave cling film, isn’t that crazy?’

You tell her about the project you have just finished working on. You had to compile a report about customer satisfaction for a range of hotels. Many of the customers did not enjoy their stay. Some got locked in their rooms and had to bang on the door for help. Others found someone else’s crisps or socks or clumps of hair. They did not like the view out of the window or the self-service breakfast. ‘Your toaster does not toast!’ they wrote on the questionnaires. ‘I had to put the slice through four times!’ Every year, you make action plans for the hotel chain. In the action plan last year you suggested new toasters. This year, you suggested new toasters. It is in these small moments that you doubt the value of your work. This is a secret fear and one that you do not tell your mother. Perhaps you almost have, once or twice, but she has seemed distracted at those moments, shifting on her seat, rubbing her shoulder or the back of her neck. Anyway, you are generous, you do not want to burden her with your worries and leave her with them once you have driven away.

‘Work is A-OK,’ you say (you only ever say ‘A-OK’ around your mother. You also say ‘okey-dokey’ a lot and ‘Brillopads!’). ‘I got a new chair and a phone that says good morning to me when I come in.’

‘The chair says good morning?’ she asks.

‘Only the phone says that,’ you say. ‘The chair is just a normal chair.’ She shakes her head, amazed at a talking phone or disappointed in the chair, you can’t really tell. ‘Although, when the chair swivels it squeaks and sounds as if it’s talking sometimes, and, get this, Barnaby makes up this mouse voice and he . . .’ You trail off, realising that your mother wouldn’t get the joke. The trees bend and shiver; they sound as though they are rifling through their own leaves for something lost.

You’re about to tell your mother this but then a neighbour whose name you have forgotten walks past the fence and leans over. He smiles at your mother and laughs a lot. He has thick white hair and one of those ruddy glows which mean he is either outdoorsy or drunk. You wonder whether he will ask her out. Maybe he already has, although as far as you are aware, she has not been with anybody since your father left nine years ago. Now your father is getting married to a woman called Rhea he met at the aquarium. Rhea works at the aquarium, your father explained when he phoned you about it. She has a thing about fish. ‘What about my mother?’ you shouted at him, about seven years too late.

‘Myopia?’ he asked. The phone line buzzed with static – it’s a bad connection, you always mishear each other on it, your conversations full of gaps and holes that you spend hours trying to fill in later.

You were worried about how to tell your mother, but when you finally did, she invited them over for a celebration lunch. This is why you are back this weekend. The lunch is tomorrow and, thankfully, you are between projects. You assume that she needs moral support – the invitation must be some kind of complicated, masochistic act. He left her! She shouldn’t cook for him; she should at least buy in some kind of ready meal. You are ready to fight some kind of battle. ‘You should get a date for this lunch,’ you tell her once the neighbour has left. Your mother says something inaudible and starts to clear the table. The cold and damp in the air have turned the high points in her cheeks and the tip of her nose a dark pink. To you, your mother is still the most beautiful person who ever lived. You don’t say this. Instead you say, ‘If you squint, that man could almost definitely be attractive. Almost like Steve Martin.’
Roxanne
is her favourite film. She swats at you with a tea-towel. When you’re back inside, you show her the ready-made Yorkshire puddings you have brought along to help out.

You cook dinner together – something with spaghetti and cream and lots of garlic bread. ‘Customers say their dinners are sixty-eight per cent more enjoyable if they include garlic bread,’ you tell your mother. There is a film on TV that you both want to watch so you curl your legs up underneath you and share a blanket on the sofa. Your toes are almost touching. The film is not as good as you remembered. The happy ending is forecast from the very first scene. You drift off but your mother gets caught up in it and tries not to cry at the end. You remembered it being more realistic. There should be more films where couples drift apart slowly and without properly noticing until it’s too late, when they say things to each other like, ‘Which one of us bought that extension lead? No seriously, did you buy that extension lead or did I, because we’re both going to need that.’

The film makes you feel morose and lonely, but then you remember you’ve got Barnaby. You haven’t told your mother about him yet. You’re not sure how to talk about your relationship; whenever you think about it you feel confused and bored, as if you were trying to do a cryptic crossword. Either talk to her about Barnaby now or don’t. If you do, she will ask what he is like. Think for a while. Say he has the softest back you have ever felt; say he likes to answer his mobile as if his answerphone has picked up, so that you start to leave a message then realise it’s been him all along. Tell her how he really, really likes to do that.

‘Home?’ Barnaby said when you told him your weekend plans. You were lying in bed, his lips grazing your ear. ‘Going home?’ he said again. ‘What do you call this place then?’ And you just shrugged, suddenly unsure, feeling yourself in-between: the empty corridors of it, the neither-here-nor-there of it.

Once your mother has gone to bed, you prowl around the house. You have a few glasses of various drinks you find in the cupboard. You used to sit under the kitchen table for hours as a child, so you get in there and sit cross-legged with your head bowed down. It isn’t as relaxing as you remember so you unfold, crawl out and go upstairs to the bathroom. Your mother’s dressing-gown is on the back of the door and you put it on. The sleeves are too short for you. It is an old dressing-gown and it smells of that smell your mother has which you cannot place – some flowers you don’t recognise, or a perfume that she doesn’t seem to actually wear. Her things are scattered all around the bathroom and you look through them. There are shampoos and soaps and creams. This is your mother, here, in products. You rub her hand cream into your hands and you brush your teeth with her toothpaste. At one point, you take out that blue pot of cream and open the lid. You smell it, but it doesn’t smell of anything. You scoop some out and rub it over your eyes, hoping for the lovely blue shimmer it left on her lids. When you open them, there is a sudden sharp pain. Your eyes stream. Your eyelashes seem to be tightening. In a panic, you splash water all over your face and after a while the stinging goes away and you can open your eyes. They seem to turn pale green for a second, and then white again. You must be allergic to the ingredients; maybe there is orange extract in there, or walnuts. You look for the label but there isn’t one.

You decide to go to bed. In the hallway, you pass one of her empty vases, except that it isn’t empty any more. The whole vase is bursting with bright leaves. You must have drunk more than you thought. Drinking has never agreed with you, and you keep telling yourself this when you check the other vases and see that they too are filled with leaves and flowers and that there is now ivy curling over the banister.

The sheets on your single bed are your old favourites: Aladdin and Jasmine kneeling on a magic carpet. Their faces are faded and grey, the colours all washed out. You get underneath the covers and ring Barnaby on your mobile. The green light makes it look like you’re in an underwater cave. His phone rings and the answerphone beeps in. Wait for the beep and say hello and wait for him to reply. ‘Hello?’ you say. ‘Hellooo?’ But it’s his actual answerphone this time and your message will sound like you are lost, and somewhere very far away.

In the morning, you resolve to tell your mother to throw out that face cream. It has probably gone off – your mother never throws anything away. Rifling through the medicine box early on to get some paracetamol, you find cough linctus that is seven years past its use-by date and an old, dry packet of foot powder with a price label that is pre-decimal. You go back upstairs and sit in bed, waiting for her to get up. You have never liked houses early in the morning when no one else is around. They all have that still coldness that reminds you of museums, or the bright silence of empty swimming pools. She comes downstairs and pads into the kitchen. She switches on the kettle and you hear the clatter of cups and teaspoons, her quiet, early morning noises.

You pull on a jumper and go downstairs into the kitchen. You stop in the doorway. She is stirring tea with her back to you. There is a hand on her shoulder and it is not your hand. There is a man in the kitchen with his hand on your mother’s shoulder. He is shorter than her and has dark, curly hair. He is wearing a waistcoat. His clothes are made from a strange material that sometimes looks green and sometimes looks silver.

You make some sort of sound and they both turn around to look at you. Your mother smiles her normal smile and asks if you would like tea. She asks how you slept. She is making two cups, not three: one for her and one for you. You wait for her to say something. You wait for him to say something. She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. The man isn’t even looking at you any more. You fiddle with your sleeves, your ears; you tie and re-tie your pyjama ribbon. Your mother hands you a cup of tea. You drink a big gulp straight away and burn the inside of your mouth and your lips. Your mother is acting as if the man isn’t there so she obviously can’t see him, and so you are obviously going mad, or something has damaged part of your brain. You have only taken drugs once, in fear of this, and so for it to have happened anyway seems a waste – you might as well have taken more. The man stays close to your mother as she tells you all about the lunch she is going to cook. Without pausing, she puts her arm behind her back and the man in the green waistcoat holds it. She does this so smoothly, so naturally, that you realise it is something she has been doing for a long time.

You are not sure if it takes seconds or minutes, but it suddenly strikes you that it is all to do with the cream. This man has always been there, right there, with your mother. He has appeared in front of your eyes like a slap in the face, like catching Santa outside the grotto reading
FHM
. You go upstairs and have a shower and get dressed. When you come back downstairs, your mother is standing at the oven cutting apples into a pan. The man in the green waistcoat is behind her with a hand on her hip. Her hip! You try not to stare. You try to act normally. You don’t want them to know that you know.