Our Picnics in the Sun (6 page)

I opened my eyes at the sound of Digger scraping his feet over the threshold. I glanced at the sitting room; Howard hadn’t moved and was watching a cartoon now. Digger waited, chewing on a blister he’d got from the sheep clippers and watching me as I bent down to the fridge and brought out cans of beer. He drank one leaning against the sink, set it down empty, wiped his mouth, and said he’d be off. I didn’t try to persuade him to have another. For every one of his unkind remarks there seemed to be another that he turned into a look of disdain instead of speaking aloud, and I couldn’t bear his presence another moment. His contempt for us, the doomed, naïve, arrogant Londoners who thought they could make a go of it on Exmoor, he had once tried to hide; now that he believed he’d been proved right he extended to us—between threats about our tenancy—a kind of snide pity. After he left, all I wanted to do was get in a bath, wash off the whole filthy day, and sleep. Instead I loaded up a tray with Howard’s supper and took it into the sitting room.

He wasn’t watching the television at all. He was crying. His good hand, the fingers still crooked in the scissor handles, lay shaking in his lap, half-buried under drifts of his silky hair and darker curls from his beard. What was left of the hair on his head fell across his brow and stood up around his ears in chopped tufts, and the remains of his beard looked like torn patches of matting glued to his cheeks. He lifted his face, soaked in tears and sweat and now falling in folds to the papery-white, naked wattle under his chin. His weeping came
more from his mouth than his eyes; his newly exposed lips were pink and quivering and the bottom one was cut and swollen. It struck me that I had never properly seen his mouth—indeed his face—before.

“For God’s sake, Howard, what have you done? What the hell have you done?” I said. Above the television my voice was hard and flat as if I were testing it for an echo against the walls of an empty room. I turned and switched off the television. And as I often did, I also flicked a switch in my mind. I began to imagine the amusing, valiant email I would try to write to Adam about what was happening, reaching for phrases that would convince him, and thereby myself, that we were coping all right. It was one of the ways I kept going, by summoning quite unreal and sudden surges of spirit and energy so that later I could report to my son another of my plucky little retaliations against circumstance.

“Really, Howard, what on earth did you think you were doing? Don’t cry. Never mind, it’ll grow back. For God’s sake, Howard, please don’t cry!”

He held out the scissors, mumbling something I didn’t understand. As he did so, some skeins of hair in his lap slipped to the floor. I picked them up in my hands and brought them to my face; his hair was warm, the cut ends like tiny needle pricks against my cheeks. It smelled of him.

But it was only hair. Howard stripped of nothing more important than hair, but humiliated and transformed, not so much denuded as defused—the charge dead, the power gone. The pity of it, the misery and foolishness in his eyes. I reminded myself that beneath his disguise of beard and hair, nothing had in fact altered for a very long time. I took the scissors and finished the job.

T
he heat was unbearable. Already the day was unbearable. He should not have been left alone with Digger and yet she’d gone, disappeared upstairs. He glared at him but must have failed to convey anger, because Digger shook his head and murmured, “You poor old bugger,” and wandered back outside.

And because the breakfast routine was upset, all that followed was upset. When she came back downstairs dressed she didn’t help him to his usual chair in the sitting room. Hadn’t time, she told him, and he was supposed to walk by himself with the frame as much as he could, that’s what they said at Stroke Club. She forgot about his tablets and he had to mouth at her and point at the cupboard where they were kept. Digger was loitering at the open door, the dog jumping and barking behind him. She rattled the tablets on to his plate next to his cup of milk and he lifted them one by one to his mouth; as soon as he had taken the last and brought the cup down from his lips, she pulled it away. Then she left, telling him she wouldn’t be long and he’d be fine.

She didn’t tell him to finish the milk or wipe his mouth. She didn’t wait to see that he’d managed to swallow the pills. When the dog’s barking at last grew faint, Howard emptied the bitter, chalky spittle into his hand and wiped it down his thigh. He ate the last piece of banana on his plate and finished the milk: children’s food. In the quiet of the kitchen, the empty space of the morning ahead opened up, wide and uncrossable. He heaved himself up to his walking frame and pushed it along toward the sitting room. Behind him, the clock spat out a tick between each shuffling step. Between each step he
stopped and waited, longer each time; with every tick and every step, he wanted to be dead.

When she came in later she stank of sheep. He wouldn’t look at her and wouldn’t eat the sandwich she made for his lunch, because it also stank of sheep. She told him he was tired and helped him to bed. He could tell she was excited about something; there was life in her, maybe because today she was doing what she liked doing, keeping away from him. More and more, she wanted to keep away from him. He lay awake on his bed while the sun’s blaze filtered through the drawn curtains and his lips worked in silence, forming unsayable words of pleading. A memory of his own voice droned in the warm air over his head. A little later when she looked in on him he pretended to be asleep, and after a while he heard the back door shutting and the van starting up in the yard.

There must have been a time that afternoon when he did fall asleep, and there was a time when she came back and got him up and fretted around him and made him another sandwich, which he ate. He couldn’t be sure of the order of those times or how long any of them took. Later, he was back in his chair in the sitting room, that much he knew; also that she switched on the television and went out again.

The room was stifling and dark. Noise, color, and also, it seemed to him, heat radiated from the television. Since the bedroom partition had gone up there was only one window in the sitting room and he’d wanted it opened but hadn’t been able to say so. Why hadn’t she opened it before she left? She knew he couldn’t do it; it took two good arms to lift the sash. He could die in here like a dog in a car. She was trying to kill him. If he could hurl a shoe far enough to break the glass, he would. He’d enjoy the sound of shattering glass. He remembered that she’d promised that morning to trim his hair; that, too, she had forgotten. It was simple fury that gave him the strength to grasp hold of his frame and go to the kitchen drawer where the scissors were kept.

Deborah always cut his hair in the kitchen, so he would not; besides, he didn’t want her or Digger barging in on him before he’d finished. For no reason but to hear the words aloud, he tried, and
managed, to call out “Cut hair!” and then his voice cracked with laughter. “Too hot, cut off!” he cried, but on the
ff
he bit down on the moist flap of bottom lip that was caught between his teeth and drew blood.

Sucking on his mouth, he shuffled back to his chair in the sitting room. He turned up the volume on the television—it was necessary to create a distraction of some kind, he felt, from his act of self-sabotage—and began to cut.

The first snip of the scissors loosed and let fall a shockingly large amount of hair. He lifted out another handful from his head and snipped again; the dry whisper of the blades right next to his ear was beautiful. He began to cry, and went on cutting, and cutting.

Much later, when she came in and said, “For God’s sake, Howard, what have you done? What the hell have you done?” he could not begin to speak of his gratitude for her return.

She prised his fingers from the scissors calmly and snapped them twice in the air. With a touch that made his neck tingle she pulled the tufts of hair that were left through her fingers, drawing them out straight.

“Oh God,” she said softly, “what a mess. You only had to wait, you know, I would have done it for you.” She sighed. “You’ve made such a hash of it, all I can do is cut the rest off. Finish the job.” She sighed again; she was considering the risks of cutting it, he knew, so close to his head. Then she began to make her way, it seemed by feel more than sight, scraping her nails gently across his temples, ruffling the clinging hair free from his damp skull, and raising the overripe smell of skin and sweat. She laid the scissor blades close, metal against scalp, and snipped. She pulled the cut fronds away with her other hand and opened her fingers. With solemn slowness, his hair fell in strands to the floor. She clipped again. Howard sat up very straight, swaying with each push of her hands, while from his mouth issued small noises he could not control. She shushed him and began to work faster, as if hurrying to outdistance a rising desire to hurt. He thought he heard a sob, and fancied that a mild trickling sensation might be not a bead of sweat but a tear dropping on the crown
of his head. Nothing was said. After a while she put down the scissors and sank into the chair opposite.

Drifts of Howard’s hair sparkled unevenly on the floor between them, where the setting sun, slanting through the window behind her, caught the copper and silver strands among the dark. With her back to the light Deborah appeared to him black and solid, a rounded, human wall between him and the burning bright outdoors. Although he could not make out her face he knew from her perfect stillness that she was gazing at him, and could not bring himself to wonder what she saw. He could feel the beat of his own blood in his fingertips, in his throat and his sore lip, as if it were her eyes fixed upon him that kept his heart pumping. He felt himself aging before her, as if time itself, with infinitesimal, delicate footstamps, were crossing the room and entering his body.

Deborah stood up, scraping the scissor blades clean along the edge of her thumb. “Well, that’s that,” she said. “Here’s supper. You must be hungry now.” She placed the remote for the television in his hand and moved across to the tray she’d brought in. She started talking in a casual, wavery voice about the food: cheese and ham, tomatoes and mustard, what did he want?

So this was how they were to go on. She had decided that nothing had changed. But Howard knew that something had happened, beyond a mere haircut and the removal of a beard, although not something sudden—for all that it had been accomplished in a few minutes with the scissors—but no, it was something gradual, working between them perhaps from the very beginning, out of focus but present nonetheless. Something that had been happening for years had been brought into the light, maybe at last its time had come, this shared dread—eventually a realization—that one day she would see him for what he was. Howard stroked his good hand across his forehead and back over the new stubble on his skull, and switched on the television.