Home Fires (25 page)

Her mother glares at her. ‘Ooh, all hoity toity now, aren’t we?’ Her mouth is set in a defiant line and she fumbles with the pack of cigarettes and takes one out, slipping it between her lips. ‘I’ll have a smoke when I want one, thank you very much. You can’t tell me what to do, young lady.’ She flicks the lighter, the flame shooting up to the tip of the cigarette and she sucks in loudly, watching the ash blacken, inhaling a lungful. Then her mother meets Caroline’s eye. ‘Look at the bloody state of you,’ she says and she starts to laugh, a spluttering sound that turns into a cough.

The coil of fear that has been in Caroline’s stomach unspools. She lunges forward, wanting to grip her mother by the throat and squeeze out the breath in her veins, but the movement propels her into space and her fingers grasp wildly at nothing, and she collapses on to the floor, catching her knee on the edge of the coffee table as she loses balance.

She stays on the floor for several minutes, listening to the television. She digs her fingernails into the palm of each hand.

She misses Andrew.

She is alone.

Day after day, the same loneliness.

She feels in her dressing-gown pocket, tracing the brushed cotton lining with the tip of her finger until it pushes against a small, hard circle.

A pill. Relief.

She takes it out, cups it in the palm of her hand. She realises she has nothing to wash it down with and although she is capable of swallowing it dry, she remembers the drinks shelf in the corner of the room. Easing herself up on to all fours, Caroline crawls across and takes down a bottle of gin, the green glass muddied by dinner party thumbprints. She unscrews the cap, lifts the lip of the neck up to her mouth and knocks it back. A pleasurable light-headedness envelops her.

There is a crashing sound from down the corridor. She is so dazed that for a brief second she wonders if she has imagined it. But then there is another noise, a kind of shouted whimper, and she remembers that she is not alone in the house after all. There is Elsa. Always Elsa. She had forgotten, momentarily, that the carer had called in sick this morning. Andrew is coming back at lunch. Until then, Caroline is in charge.

She puts the bottle back and stands up. She finds her way along the hallway to Elsa’s bedroom, keeping the palm of one hand flat against the wall to steady herself.

She pushes open the door. The table lamp that normally stands on the bedside table is lying on the floor, its wire tangled around the shattered base. Shards of turquoise-patterned china are scattered across the carpet and the shade is lying at an odd angle against the skirting board, where it must have made the first impact as it fell.

It is a lamp that Max gave Caroline for her fiftieth birthday two years ago. He had asked her what she wanted over email and Caroline had sent him the link for this lamp from an online furniture shop. She had loved the colour of it: the delicate swirls of lace-white against the vivid hues of greenish blue. She had initially given it pride of place in the sitting room, on the table where she kept all the silver-framed family photos. But then Andrew had moved it into Elsa’s room so that she could see better at night and Caroline had not thought to protest. Looking at the lamp, now broken, irretrievable, Caroline feels a pain in her. Nothing more can happen, she thinks to herself. Nothing.

She looks up from the broken china to see Elsa, propped up in bed, her shoulders sagging forward because the pillows that Andrew plumped up behind her this morning are now bunched in a bundle in the small of her back. Elsa moves her eyes when she hears Caroline approach but does not lift her head. Caroline is left with the curious impression that she is pleased with herself, that she is hiding her face like an unrepentant child.

Some force presses against the inside of Caroline’s cheeks, pushing the capillaries to the surface so that she can feel her face burning. She senses that time has been brought to a temporary standstill. She feels, in this second, a strange kind of detachment. Her sensations seem to untether themselves, one by one. She takes a deep breath. It feels good to hear the air being drawn into her.

And then, as Caroline exhales, there is a sound in her ears, a sucking noise as though a stretched piece of cling-film has been pierced. She glances at Elsa and she sees that the old woman is laughing. At first, Caroline cannot believe it. She stands stock-still. Elsa’s face is immobile, her lips open only by a millimetre but she is smiling, making a mumbling-grunting sound, her shoulders shaking with unexplained mirth. She is laughing, Caroline thinks to herself. She is laughing at me.

She takes two steps forward and raises her arm high above her head, bringing her hand down swiftly, sharply against Elsa’s cheek. The swipe across Elsa’s face knocks her skull to one side, the sound of the slap reverberating across the room. Caroline is panting, her breaths crowding in on each other.

Elsa shrieks. A red patch spreads across her cheek. She looks at Caroline wildly, her pupils bullet-hole black. But instead of fear and apology, Caroline sees nothing but indignation in Elsa’s expression. She brings her face right up close to Elsa’s so that she can feel the warmth of the old lady’s breath on her cheek.

‘Don’t . . .’ Caroline starts, hoarsely. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at me.’

Elsa shifts her head to one side, refusing to look. Gently, Caroline places her thumb and forefinger in a V shape on Elsa’s chin and turns her head back to face her. She pushes down with the tips of her fingers, feeling Elsa’s puckered flesh smooth out underneath the pressure of her grip. Her mother-in-law blinks. A thin string of saliva is trickling down from one corner of her mouth.

Caroline takes her hand away, letting Elsa’s head loll back on the pillow. There is a shadow of a fingered mark just above the ridge of her jawline. For a few seconds, Caroline stays there, inches away from Elsa’s face, resting her head next to hers and she has a sense of perfect calm, of having taken control. The rage she had felt moments earlier begins to subside. She doesn’t even feel surprised by what she has done.

Elsa closes her eyes. After several minutes, her breathing becomes slower, more wheezy. Asleep, she looks so harmless and fragile, her face small and soft, her eyelids quivering like the wings of pale moths.

As Elsa dozes, Caroline begins to shiver, each tiny muscle and synapse twitching and trembling from her toes right up to her temples. Her teeth start to chatter. All at once, the horror of what just happened sweeps over her, swift and cold.

Had it really happened? She feels her head spin with the weight of her calculations.

Is she drunk?

Has she taken too many pills?

She is scared of the answers. She forces herself to close off her thoughts. She concentrates solely on practicalities: on placing one hand on the top of the bedside table to steady herself as she stands; on walking out of the room and closing the door behind her; on finding her way to the cupboard underneath the stairs; on reaching for the dustpan and brush amid the bottles of bleach and the packets of vacuum cleaner bags. She steels herself to go back into Elsa’s room, because she does not want to face her again, because she is afraid of what she will find.

She bends down to brush away the broken china, sliding the dustpan underneath the scattered fragments. The smaller ones get caught in the brush, bright turquoise specks against the dull green bristles. She wraps the detritus in an old newspaper, scrunching it up into a bundle and then flipping open the kitchen bin and letting it fall, removing her foot from the pedal as quickly as possible so that the lid slams down and she does not have to think about it any more. She can pretend it never happened.

Automatically, she fills the kettle and puts it on to boil.

In the midst of this strangeness, Caroline finds she is thinking about what she can cook Andrew for dinner. She walks across to the pile of recipe books and takes out a dog-eared favourite, a long-ago Christmas present with the smiling features of a glamorous female celebrity chef on the cover. It falls open at the page for a spinach and feta frittata. She is seized by an unfamiliar enthusiasm. As she skims through the ingredients, she can taste the saltiness of the cheese, the richness of the spinach, the melting warmth of the eggs. She realises she is hungry; hungrier than she has been for months. She tears a scrap of paper from the calendar on the wall and starts jotting down a shopping list. Yes, Caroline thinks to herself, why not? I can go out and get in the car and put the key in the ignition and drive myself to the supermarket. I can buy all these things and I can follow the recipe and I can make something for supper that Andrew will like. Adrenalin surges through her and then, once the curious excitement has subsided, she feels calm, as if order has been restored. It is as though, after a period of absence, she has woken to find that she still exists, as though she has opened a window and let the breeze into a stuffy room.

The rest of it – the unanswered questions; the greyness around the edges – she pushes away, parcelling up the unpleasantness so that she does not have to look at it. It does not exist. Not if she chooses to ignore it. Not if she chooses to carry on as if nothing had happened. Not if she tries hard – very, very hard – to believe that she can be a good person after all.

She goes upstairs to get dressed and, as she passes Elsa’s door, she pulls it firmly to, hearing the lip of the lock click into place. When she comes back down, wearing a pale pink T-shirt and jeans, she sees the package containing Max’s tags still on the kitchen table. She looks at it and remembers the letters Max’s army colleagues had written to her – the Dans, the Robbies, the Johnnos, the Eds – their names always shortened, their emotions concealed on the page, the rawness of them masked by the expression of careful, decent thoughts. She remembers they had tried, some of them, to tell her what had happened that day.

Did they know, when they got to him, that Max was going to die?

Would Max have known?

She hears the thrumming of rotary blades, the sound of it so clear she can, for a moment, believe a helicopter is landing right next door.

She stops. The supermarket, she thinks, let me just concentrate on that. And before she has a chance to change her mind, Caroline walks out of the door to the car, pressing down on the key fob so that it unlocks with a beep and a flash of its lights. She starts the engine, turns on the radio and rotates the volume dial as far as it will go.

Max

Hard-baked by the sun, the earth crackles underfoot like tinder. The rainy season has long passed. The riverbeds have receded, the muddied tracks have dried out and the earth has formed itself into strange eddying patterns so that the ground rises and falls in whipped peaks like freshly baked meringues. As he trudges forward, his boots crunch against the parched brown soil.

The strap of Max’s helmet scratches the roughness of his stubble. Sweat drenches his hair. Rivulets of it trickle down his forehead, into the corner of his eye sockets, down the side of his nose and then slip across the cleft of his lip into the corner of his mouth.

Johnno, the ‘Vallon Man’, is way out at the front of the patrol, sliding his metal detector left and right and left and right over the ground. Vallon is the name of the metal detector used to sweep for bombs. So Johnno, inevitably, is known as the Vallon Man. The army isn’t, after all, to be congratulated for its originality with nicknames.

It is just after
10
am in Upper Nile State, South Sudan and here he is, an insignificant stick man in uniform in the middle of Africa, part of an eleven-strong search team, criss-crossing back and forth to clear a strategic mound of mines left scattered across the barren fields by insurgents. Every step they take is a step closer to getting it over with.

There is an abandoned village to the left of them, the ground blackened with the remnants of a recent fire. The huts are in varying states of collapse: one of them has lost its roof and half its external wall. The tightly padded clumps of straw and mud have started to disintegrate, leaving the half-formed hut standing like a rotten tooth against the low horizon. A goat lies dead underneath a mango tree, its scrawny neck still tethered to the trunk. A cloud of flies has formed around the animal’s stomach. There is an unmistakable stench of putrid flesh.

There are no children. No shouts or giggles or scamperings to alleviate the density of the silence, the thickness of the air around them. Normally, when they come to a village like this one, the wheels of their armoured vehicles throwing up clouds of dust as they approach, the children run out to meet them. They come with big smiles and pipe-cleaner legs, their feet bare, their bodies swathed in a raggedy array of clothes donated by faraway Western families: football strips torn and dirtied with age; a too-small T-shirt emblazoned with an image of SpongeBob SquarePants. They run up to the soldiers in a sudden swarm and ask for pens or chewing gum or packets of cigarettes they are too young to smoke. Usually, Max will drop to his haunches and laugh. He allows them to try on his helmet and gives them a few biros he has stashed in his pockets for just such an eventuality.

He is good with children. They like him; gravitate naturally towards him.

Hearts and minds, the army calls it. As though the two could be distinctly separated.

The children have no mistrust in their eyes. It is the adults who are wary: the village elders who hang back in the shadows with scowling faces and shifting gazes, attempting to work out what these foreigners want from them.