The Night Following (31 page)

   All is quiet. Arthur is turned away from me, on his side. Now and again his hand flutters on his hip and a soft whistle or scraping noise emerges from his throat. I lie awake in the stained glow through the curtained glass and think of the shimmering sky and the surface of life beyond the strange warm altar of our mattress. Around me the air ripens with heat, and atoms of dust spin and glitter in it, and I sense a thousand secret quickenings in our attic universe of abandoned things and all their gummy folds and crannies and crumbling fibers, all the microscopic barbs of disintegrating matter on which the tiniest living things will catch and cling. Below me the house sighs with solitary, daylong weariness.

So we sleep, or wake and lie looking at the slopes of the roof, and turn to each other sometimes, and twice we stir ourselves as if by agreement and sit up and eat together, shyly at first and then with the silent, slight formality of people accustomed to sharing food but a little reticent and tongue-tied about the sharing of pleasure.

Arthur and Ruth conduct themselves over their meals with the same good manners that would attend all their mutual habits, with a decorum that, whether governed by constraint or by orchestration, is certainly consensual. She unpacks everything and arranges it on the mattress. He looks to her to preside. He waits while she chooses what he is to have and passes it to him. He starts to eat before she has arranged food for herself, this being a picnic after all, but he waits until she has finished before he judges it not inconvenient for her to provide him with what he wants next. He points to this and that—another sandwich, a tomato, a cracker with cheese—and eats them in that order. At the right moment he leans across and takes charge of the flask and cups. His fingers cannot grip properly. He brushes his hands across his chest several times and shakes them and blows on them to get rid of the pins and needles, and tries again to unscrew the top. He can’t see to pour properly, either, and a considerable amount of tea falls on the mattress and wets his clothes, which he dabs with a napkin. I am watching anxiously but I don’t interfere, any more than Ruth would step forward and relieve a tremulous priest of the Communion cup and bless the wine herself.

We sleep again, and later I wake to a darkness that presses on my eyes. Even though I think Arthur is still asleep I whisper to him to lie still until I come back. I clamber over the floor, lift the trapdoor, and send the ladder down on its squealing metal slope to the landing. I hear the thud as the feet hit the carpet but I can’t see anything clearly. I wait for a moment before launching myself down, each tread heaving a creaky sigh. From the bedroom window I see that lights are on in most of the houses in the road. It’s not nearly as late as it seemed to be in the attic. The sky is a milky violet and the trees along the avenue are restless in a breeze. A few doors down a woman comes out with a watering can for the hanging basket on her porch. A young man walks past under a lamppost, hands pushed hard into the pockets of his short jacket. Mrs. M has not drawn her curtains.

By now I can work well enough in the dark. I start to search out heavy warm things. Ruth of course keeps a methodical eye on the storage of clothing and when I reach deep into the shelves in the spare bedroom wardrobe I find paired thick socks, woolen sweaters put away for the summer, and winter blankets folded in plastic bags. I pack as if we were about to depart for another time and season which, in truth, we are; perhaps something different, something tenuous and icy and autumnal, has entered the wind tonight.

Arthur doesn’t wait for me. I hear him lurching down the ladder and meet him on the landing. Down here, he looks worse. His hair is swirled and matted as if he’s been half drowned. When I approach and press my lips to his cheek, he trembles, and his skin is sweaty and sharp with salt and a trace of vomit. His mouth harbors a sour, flyblown smell and would be dark and sticky inside. One of his eyes wants to close. He wants to speak, I think, but he has trouble controlling his tongue and so lifts a hand into the air instead. He is listing a little to one side and stays on his feet as if standing up were a painfully achieved trick of balance.

But he nods at me and turns away to the spare room and soon I hear him paddling around among books and papers. He comes out with an untidy bundle and holds it out to me, mumbling. A string of saliva wets his bottom lip and descends in a slow cascade to his chest. He wipes at it with the papers in his hands and that’s when I see that he’s holding pages of maps, and when I take them from him I discover there’s also a battered paper folder.

He manages to say, Just to be on the safe side.

The folder is labeled Group Leaders Information Pack: Overdale Outdoor Education Center. I open it and find a mass of photocopied drawings of birds waiting to be colored in, some homemade booklets, loose pages, and stapled sheets. Arthur starts sifting through it all. He lifts out a sheet headed
Directions to Overdale
and waves it at me. I close the folder and hand it back to him.

Arthur moves off down the stairs. He hasn’t finished; I hear his feet sifting through the papers littering the hall and sitting room. When I’ve finished packing I follow, bumping the luggage down the stairs. There is a note for us in the kitchen. I find it on the floor; it must have been swept off the table in a draft from the door.

ARTHER
PHONE ME WHEN YOU GET THIS (07834 793922) OR BETTER COME AND KNOCK ON MY DOOR, I’LL BE IN.
V worried to know you are alright. Couldn’t find you and doctor wasn’t notified so Tony called police. They sent someone but as no sign of forced entry they can’t do anything. Told them you NEVER go out but they say adults entitled to leave own home without notice and to wait another 24 hours. Tried to make doctor talk to them re yr mobility, legs etc. but no go. Well later on nurse turned up for yr legs, she said not to worry as it’s not Alzhimers, you’re a bit confused but still independent, also they’ve been encouraging you to get out so you probably have.
ARTHUR WE WANT TO KNOW YOU’RE ALRIGHT, IT WILL WASTE POLICE TIME IF YOU DON’T LET US KNOW, I’M SUPPOSED TO LET THEM KNOW IF YOUR STILL AWAY BY TOMORROW. WILL KEEP EYE OUT FOR YOU.
HOPING YOUR ALRIGHT Rosemary (Mrs. M)
Arthur has nodded off, waiting for me in the conservatory. While I was packing he has been round the house collecting up more papers, and now he sits with them clutched against his chest; clearly he won’t be parted from them. Even asleep he looks fierce, like a little boy ready to put up a fight if the adults try to say it isn’t sensible to bring his stamp album to the seaside.
I’ve never touched the car keys but I know they’re hanging on the line of hooks just inside the kitchen door. We leave by the conservatory and enter the garage from the back garden. There’s an old-fashioned mechanical smell of oil and linseed and rags and grass. When I’ve loaded the trunk Arthur lets me help him into the passenger seat. There isn’t enough room to open the door properly and several parts of his body encumber him. His left leg is uncooperative; once he is seated half in, sideways, he drags it after himself as if it were made of wood. The shin scrapes slow and hard against the door edge and his foot flaps about uselessly, but he doesn’t flinch.
I’m trying to think methodically. The car hasn’t been driven for months. What if it won’t start? I climb in and turn the ignition, and it does. With the engine running, I get out again and open each of the garage doors as quietly as I can. But the bottom of the first one screeches in its worn semicircle in the tar of the drive, loud enough, possibly, for people to hear. Now there is no time to waste. I don’t bother fiddling with the hooks and brackets in the ground that hold the doors open, so I shove them back as far as they’ll go and throw myself back into the driver’s seat. Before I can move forward they are already shuddering and swinging back on us but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Our departure is announced by two loud
thwack
s as the garage doors glance off the sides of the car. All I can do is keep going. I drag the gear lever into second, then third, and we roar off the drive, straight toward the garbage can that’s standing at the far end, slap bang in the middle under the trees. Those bastards. I forgot today was garbage day. It’s too late to stop and move it, and it’s also far too late to miss it. My hands turn numb and over it goes with a bang. The car veers into the wall with a horrible rasping noise but I grip the wheel and swing us past the splintered can and pell-mell into the avenue. My left-hand turn is more of a swerve and isn’t tight enough, so we clip the side of a car parked invisibly on the far side of the road; the other thing I’ve forgotten is to put headlights on. I can’t slow down to find where the switch is, so we have to lurch along for now, avoiding obstacles if possible. The trick is to keep going. Arthur tips back his head and lets out a whoop that scratches his throat and turns into a fit of coughing. He stamps his feet on the floor and turns to me with a mad spark in his eyes. Then he starts to clap one hand down against the other that lies dead in his lap.

   Four hours later we drive into the canopied artificial daylight of a service station on the M6. As I fill up the tank I study the docile shuffling of people inside, queuing at the registers and swaying among the shelves and cabinets. I wonder that they seem unembarrassed to be so lumpy and dark and heavy in a place so garish and streamlined. They appear quite undisturbed by the lights, and I want to learn how they do it so that I will look, when the time comes for me to go in, not as though I belong there (because none of them manages that) but just enough like one of them to pass without notice.

But before I’m ready, Arthur is wheezing his way out of the car. He needs a bathroom, he says, and sets off across the forecourt in a bizarrely careful way as if he thinks he is elsewhere, perhaps walking sideways down a flight of stairs. He’s lost one of his slippers. I retrieve it from the foot-well of the car and catch up with him at the entrance and we go in together. He halts, flinching, overawed by the piped music and excruciating light. He seems about to collapse under the glare. The toilets are at the back. Once I’ve got his slipper back on I steer him across the floor, concentrating on finding the shortest route between the stands of magazines and banks of candy and bins of DVDs and thermos flasks on special offer. Through the music and the plopping of the cash registers I sense people in mid-transaction going quiet and turning their eyes on us, but maybe I am only imagining it.

I push Arthur in the direction of his place and take myself to the ladies’room. There’s a long mirror at the entrance that I can’t avoid, and that’s when I realize I probably wasn’t imagining that people were staring. I haven’t seen my own reflection in a while. I’ve changed. My face has puckered and turned a bready white, and my eyes are different, too, both faded and darkened. Rings have appeared around the irises, which are now a filmy watercolor blue. The pupils are sunk and tiny, like punctured holes. My mouth has the clamped, institutional look of someone whose incarceration, wherever it is, is chronic but no longer open to question, like a sanatorium patient or a life prisoner. Most dramatic though, is my hair. It’s grown, of course, and looks like gray, drought-stricken grass, but I hadn’t realized how flatly it sticks to my skull or how it sprouts up at the ends for being left unbrushed. The clothes could be better, too. They are plain enough and should not attract attention in themselves, but I am now aware my proportions have changed. The trousers flap at half-mast and the sweater seems empty in front and the sleeves hang over my hands to my fingertips. I see that I am wearing earrings, and the very idea of a surface such as mine being decorated in any way is preposterous. And being indoors so much has made me careless about footwear; the sandals don’t fit and never would have fitted, and the brown socks practical enough for an evening in the house seem here both to demand and to defy explanation.

Arthur’s getup, as I notice when I come out and find him leaning for support on the plastic dome of a pay phone bolted to the wall, is filthy. In this light I see that his purple sweatshirt with
Let’s Cruise
emblazoned on the chest is crisscrossed with stains from our picnic in the attic, and his trousers are spotted with the dribbles and spills of innumerable little accidents of one kind or another.

His free hand is fumbling with his trouser front and he’s oblivious to all else. I grab his other hand and pull him away, and he sets his eyes firmly on his feet and concentrates on getting them to move. We’re conspicuously slow. The attention we’re attracting is unmistakable now, and all I want is to get us through the door and back into darkness where the car is waiting. I’m trying unsuccessfully not to drag Arthur faster than he can go. We very nearly make it.

Hey!

I look up and see that the boy in the red T-shirt behind the register is talking to us. He has cinnamon skin and lustrous eyes. He can’t mean any harm.

Yes, what? I say pleasantly.

’Scuse me a minute!

Now the whole queue is turning to look at us—why? We’re not doing anything wrong, I know that, so the best thing we can do is ignore them. I grip Arthur’s arm and tug at him so hard he nearly falls over, but I have to get us out of this place.

The boy glances over his shoulder and calls into a little office behind the counter. Another man in a red T-shirt appears and swiftly crosses the floor in front of us. When he’s in position between us and the door, the boy speaks again. His eyes gleam like wet plums.

’Scuse me, madam, these premises are protected by surveillance cameras. I have to inform you that you and your car—

What? What’s the matter?

He pats a few computer keys and his machine makes some pucking and scratching noises.

I have to inform you that you have been recorded on the company’s CCTV security equipment getting gas. Pump number 8, right? That’s twenty-six pounds eighty-seven, please. The company operates a strict zero tolerance policy with regards to nonpayment. Cash or credit, madam?