Run, Mummy, Run (22 page)

S
hirts. She had never seen so many shirts and most of them were brand new! Half a dozen were still in their cellophane wrappers, with matching ties laid diagonally across the chest. There was every shade of blue, grey and beige, to match his suits and casual jackets. The ones Mark had worn had been washed, pressed and folded, and looked as new as those in the packets. ‘I wonder what silly sod spent hours ironing these,’ Aisha said out loud. And a now familiar voice came back:
You did. You stupid fool. Repeatedly. Because, as usual, you could never get it right.

Aisha yanked out the drawer as far as it would and, scooping up the shirts, dumped them in the bin liner. It was already half-full and was going to the charity shop, together with the two bin liners she’d already filled. She hadn’t intended clearing his things out now, it had happened as a result of looking for his car insurance, her licence, and hopefully his will. But far from giving her some relief as she hoped it might, being in his bedroom and going through his belongings had made her grow increasingly agitated and angry, as though in disturbing Mark’s clothes she was disturbing him.

Closing this drawer she opened the one below. She gazed at the meticulously neat piles of underpants, which had been bought by his mother from Marks and Spencer and sent in the post each Christmas. Although Mark hardly saw his parents, his mother still sent him pants and socks every year. Aisha received a headscarf and the children a ten-pound note each, which had been a lifesaver and went on food.

‘As if you weren’t old enough to buy your own sodding pants!’ Aisha cried out loud, tearing off another bin liner. ‘Allowing your mother to buy you pants at your age! That’s weird.’ She grabbed the pants in handfuls and stuffed them in the bin liner.

In the same drawer, to the right, lay piles of his white cotton handkerchiefs. Dozens and dozens, starched and ironed to perfection. Three piles were perfect triangles with points so sharp you could cut yourself. The other two piles were squares, with their edges exactly aligned. Mark always had three clean handkerchiefs each and every day, triangles in the jacket pockets – breast and inside pocket, and a square one in his trouser pocket ready to shake out if he sneezed. Three a day, every day, rarely used, but crumpled and left for her to wash and iron, just the same. Careful not to disturb their shape, for she hadn’t wasted hours to have them creased now, she took them out and laid them in the rubbish sack, on top of his underwear. And as she did she remembered the handkerchief he’d used to mop the droplets of rainwater from his face on their first date. It cut through her like a knife, for to think of the Mark she had met and loved was more than she could bear.

Closing this drawer, Aisha slowly stood, and then went to the double wardrobe, which was solely Mark’s. It was crammed full of his suits, hanging lifeless in their polythene jackets like Bluebeard’s women. Mark liked his suits, he thought he cut a dash in his suits; a ladies’ man, a man about town: a cad, Aisha thought. He wore his suits in strict rotation, a new one every weekday. He took them to the dry-cleaner on a Saturday morning and he collected the five from the previous week at the same time. A wardrobe full of suits. Twenty-five? Thirty? She’d no idea. Unhooking them from the rail a couple at a time, Aisha folded them in half and laid them in bags for the charity shop. Soon, another three bags were full.

With the rail in the wardrobe clear, she could now see the full extent of his footwear: a four-tiered rack of shiny leather shoes, sitting obediently in pairs as though under starter’s orders. ‘Four racks, each containing six pairs of shoes,’ she counted out loud. ‘That makes twenty-four. And not your mass-produced, high-street rubbish either. Oh no, yours had to be handmade by a cobbler in the City.’ Aisha had no idea how much they’d cost, and it was probably better she didn’t know. She reached in and took out the first pair and ran her hands over the smooth soft leather. You could tell they were good quality by their rich, deep shine, and their suppleness. She bent the toe up and watched it spring back, unmarked, without a crease.

‘How many pairs did the children and I have?’ she said, stuffing the shoes into another bag. ‘One each. That’s all. And even those, we couldn’t afford to have repaired. Fuck you! You bastard. Well, you won’t be needing your precious shoes now. Not in the state you’re in!’

With the shoe rack clear, she tied the tops of the bags, sat back on her haunches and surveyed them. Some lucky bargain hunter was going to find a real prize in the charity shop. Then it occurred to her that Mark owned a newer, more expensive piece of footwear – the boots he’d been wearing at the time of the accident. She wondered if they were still on his feet. Did they put corpses in the morgue with boots on? She didn’t know. But even if they didn’t, no one was going to be interested in bloodstained boots, even if they were expensive and had only been worn for a few hours. Stacking the bags along the landing, she returned to the bedroom and looked around. She was doing well, progressing quickly, though she admitted it helped not having the children home. It was surprising, she thought, how little time it took to remove someone from a room when you put your mind to it and got down to the job in hand. A good deal less time than it took to remove them from your life, she thought.

Ignoring the small cabinet which contained her own meagre assortment of clothes, she opened the door to the large built-in cupboard. Like all the other drawers and cupboards in the bedroom it had been Mark’s and he had told her to keep out. Aisha remembered how she’d obeyed Mark’s order as though the doors might have been booby-trapped.
Don’t you dare go in there! No dear, I won’t.
And she hadn’t, ever, even when he was out of the house, so great was his power. Inside the cupboard a matching set of empty suitcases was stacked at the bottom, and Aisha thought they may as well stay there for now. Beside the cases was a brand new set of golf clubs and two similarly pristine squash rackets. She remembered they had ‘taken Mark’s fancy’ years ago so he had treated himself, but they’d never been used. Aisha thought she might be able to sell them later, and raise some much-needed cash. She moved them to one side and revealed a box of Christmas decorations – bought for their first Christmas together and untouched ever since.
Christmas
, she thought bitterly,
some joke Christmas was. There wasn’t much peace on earth in their house.
On the top shelf was another cardboard box and it looked vaguely familiar. Aisha reached up and carefully slid it down.

Squatting on the floor, she peeled off the browned Sellotape and lifted the lid. With a flash of recognition, almost déjà vu in its intensity, she realized it was her box, one of the ones she’d packed when she’d left home and had moved in with Mark after their marriage. She took the top item and unwrapped it from the old newspaper, and discovered Tina, her favourite doll. The next parcel contained half a dozen little china elephants she had collected as a child, and the next a babushka doll her father had given her. Aisha delved deeper and found some old paperwork: greeting cards – twenty-first birthday and graduation – bank statements from years ago, her birth certificate, and postcards from India tied with a ribbon. And yes! Eureka! Here was her driving licence! It was the old-style paper type, and she unfolded it and read the print. She had passed her test when she was eighteen and of course it was still valid, it ran until she was seventy!
Terrific
, she thought,
that should keep the inspector partially happy at least. Thank goodness.

Closing the flaps on the box (she hadn’t time for a trip down memory lane now), she tucked the licence into her pocket, and leaving this box to one side, returned to the built-in wardrobe. There was a new digital radio still in its box on the shelf – another ‘it took my fancy’ purchase of Mark’s, and a Nike bag with new sports towels in it, but no file, box or folder that could conceivably contain his paperwork. Closing the door to the wardrobe, and buoyed up by the discovery of one essential item, Aisha tore off another bin liner and went through to the bathroom. She didn’t expect to find the car’s insurance in the bathroom, obviously, but she wanted to clear it of his things while she was still in the mood. There was too much of him in the bathroom, too many personal items; Mark had been clean if nothing else. And the smell of his damn aftershave and deodorant still pervaded the house as though he was there and using it.
Well, not anymore
, she thought.

The mirrored wall cabinet was too high for her to see in properly – it had also been banned from her use too – but it was where most of his toiletries were. Aisha stood on tiptoe, slid open the doors and peered in. It was stacked to overflowing with deodorants, aftershaves, colognes, and a very expensive male French perfume which Mark had bought from Harrods when he’d felt like treating himself. No wonder the house reeked of his aftershave with this lot in the cupboard, she thought. Holding the rubbish sack open with one hand, Aisha ran her other hand behind the neat lines of bottles, aerosol cans and jars, and flipped them forwards. Metal collided with glass as they landed in the bag, making a merry tune, and one she found quite satisfying.

On top of the cabinet, Aisha could see two electric shavers, still in their boxes and hardly used. Why Mark had needed two electric shavers when he mostly wet-shaved, she had never understood, but like everything he bought for himself, it had to be the latest and the best. Jumping up she flipped them down and caught them in mid-air. They were impersonal enough to be given away, or even sold if she knew someone who would buy them. She placed them on the floor beside the bin bag and then turned to the towel rail. It contained his towels, bath and hand, folded precisely in half and half again, deep blue and luxuriously soft. She and the children had never been allowed to use his towels and had had to make do with an old one – one shared between three – which was so old that it would have been relegated to the dog’s basket, if they’d been allowed a dog. Aisha tugged his towels off the rail and stuffed them into the rubbish bag. A waste, but she could never have brought herself to use them, even if they were thoroughly laundered. Last but not least was his electric toothbrush, mounted on the wall to the side of the washbasin. She lifted it from its stand and dropped it into the bag, knotting it securely. She would have to find a screwdriver and remove the wall bracket later.

Straightening, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over the hand basin. God, she looked a mess, no wonder her parents and the inspector had done a double take when they’d first seen her. Her hair, which she hadn’t brushed since the accident, was now straggled half in and half out of the plait. And her eyes, sunken from lack of sleep, were circled by dark rings and seemed to stare, almost deranged. The skin on her cheeks was taut and dry, and lighter than it should be – she looked ill. And her clothes, which she’d been wearing for days, were now so crumpled that they looked as if she had been sleeping in them, which come to think of, she had. As Aisha stood mesmerized and slightly unnerved by what stared back, she felt again the uncomfortable sensation that she was not alone. The shadow that seemed to form at the corner of her vision, the brief movement behind her in the mirror, and still the smell of his aftershave, so that it seemed Mark was still there and watching her.

She spun round, threw the bin bag out of the bathroom and onto the landing, then hurried downstairs. In a frenzy, she tore around the lounge, seizing everything of Mark’s that came to sight. Once she had removed all his possessions from the house it would empty itself of him, she thought. The gold carriage clock, the crystal glass vase, his umbrella, and a collection of Reader’s Digest short stories. She darted round and dumped them in a pile in the middle of the lounge floor; then racing through to the kitchen, she flung open the drawers and cupboards. She stopped. Everything in the kitchen was his, as was the furniture, linen and electrical appliances. For despite Mark’s initial promises of the two of them choosing some replacements together, they never had, and she couldn’t throw out all the crockery, pans and cooking utensils, never mind the sofa and dinning table – she and the children would have nothing left. Seething with her anger and resentment, she kicked shut the lower cupboard doors, then went back into the lounge. She paused. Tucked down beside the sofa she saw his briefcase, sitting where he must have left it on Friday. Grabbing it with both hands, she pressed the lock: no combination, that was lucky, and it sprung open. Wrenching the two sides of the briefcase apart, she turned it upside down and shook it hard. The contents cascaded down onto the carpet in a waterfall of pens, papers, envelopes, and sweet wrappers.

‘Sweet wrappers!’ She dropped the briefcase and stared in disbelief. Toffees, bon-bons, chocolate éclairs, aniseed twists, handfuls of wrappers from a mixed assortment which Mark must have bought and eaten in secret. Aisha stared, incredulous, then dropped to her knees and began picking the wrappers over, examining them closely as if they were a rare species of insect which, at any moment, might develop legs and scuttle off.

‘How could you?’ she said. ‘How could you? When you forbade the children sweets even on their birthdays and at Christmas? You said you never ate sweets, which was why your teeth were so good. You bastard! You fucking hypocrite! I hope you rot in hell.’

And the voice, with its confident assurance, answered back as she thought it might:
You’re wrong again. What I said was I didn’t eat sweets as a child, which is why my teeth were perfect.

‘No you didn’t!’ she cried. ‘I heard you, I know what you said, so did the children. You’re a liar! Liar! Liar!’

Anyone chancing to peep in through the window would have seen a woman on her knees laughing and crying hysterically, and shouting into an empty room. But no one did. And the retired couple next door simply raised their eyes knowingly, and talked of something else, as they had done every other time they’d heard a disturbance from their neighbours’ house.