The Servants (14 page)

“Because it’s heavy,” David said.

“What?”

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h

“It’s
heavy
. Your mother drinks a lot of water. The stuff

out of the taps here doesn’t taste so good. She doesn’t like it, anyway. So every time I go to the supermarket I cart back about ten big bottles of mineral water. Plus food. Plus the other things we need. It’s hell to park, so I walk. I bring as much Diet Coke as I can carry.”

“Rubbish,” Mark said. “You just don’t think I should drink it.”

“Mark, I don’t give a damn about you drinking Coke. Your mother’s not too keen on it, as a matter of fact, but I figure whatever, so it’s got aspartame in it, big deal—far as I know that never actually
killed
anyone. Fruit juice is more natural, but it’s full of sugar and will rot your teeth, and I have no idea which is worse in the long term. I didn’t have time to take a parenting course before all this happened and so I’m vague on that stuff. Probably you should be drinking bottled water too, if anything, but you’re a kid and so you’re going to drink whatever you want, and frankly . . . I
just don’t care
.”

Mark stared at him, not knowing whether to believe this, and feeling he’d somehow ended up way off track, that David had lured him away from what was important.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You want more soda, I’ll bring more soda. It’s not high on the list of things I’m prepared to worry about right now.”

“Yes,” Mark said, seeing his opportunity. “You should be worrying about how to get her into the hospital. So they can make her well.”

David bit his lip, and looked out at the sea for a moment.

  

t h e s e r va n t s

Something softened in the set of his shoulders. When he turned to look at Mark, the cast in David’s eyes caused the words to clog in Mark’s throat.

“Your mother’s got cancer,” David said.

Mark listened, without saying anything, as David explained his mother had something very serious, a disease down in her lungs. She wasn’t just sick. This wasn’t something like a cold, or a stomach bug, which you withstood for a while and then it went away, like the sun came up in the morning, no matter how long the night had seemed. This was something that could make the night come and stay.

“She doesn’t want to go to the hospital again,” David said.

“If she did, we’d be back in London, not down here. The hospitals are better up there. Especially for this. But that’s not what she wants.”

Mark didn’t believe him. “But
why
? If she’s so sick?”

“Because of what they would do.”

“What do you mean? They’d make her better.”

“They’d try, yes. That’s their job. But they only have one way to do these things, and it’s like dropping a house on a dog to try to cure its fleas. You may kill the fleas, but maybe not—they’re tough, and they’re small, and they’re hard to catch. And the dog—” He shrugged.

Mark didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. He just knew that it sounded completely stupid. Hospitals were where you went when you had something wrong with you. They made you better. That’s what they were
for
.

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h

“I told you, Mark, it’s her dec—”

“Where do you even
come
from, anyway?” Mark said, suddenly incoherent with frustration. He pushed away from David, a couple of feet away across the pebbles. “What are you
doing
here? Nine months ago it was just me and her, and then suddenly you appear from
nowhere
and
everything
changes.”

“From the past,” David said. “That’s where I’m from.”

“Is that supposed to
mean
something?”

“I knew your mother a long time ago. We were at university together. We were friends. Then I got a job and moved to America. It was supposed to be a short job. It turned into a long one. Too long.”

“So why did you come back?”

“I wanted to come home.”

“This
isn’t
your home. You don’t even
know
Brighton. We’re not your home either. We were a
family,
me and Mum and Dad.”

“I understand.”

“You’re not a part of that and you never will be.”

“I know that too.”

The man was like a beach, Mark realized furiously. You could keep throwing tides up at it, but he just sat there, patiently waiting for the water to roll back again.

“My dad would have made her go to the hospital!” he shouted. “He would have known what was the right thing to do. If something bad was wrong with her, he would have made her go.”

“Well maybe he should have done it a year ago,” David muttered tightly. “When it might have made—”

  

t h e s e r va n t s

He stopped suddenly, turned away. Let out a long, slow breath.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” David said, his voice calm again. “You’re right. Your dad probably would make her go to the hospital. Maybe you should phone him.”

“Maybe I will,” Mark said, leaping to his feet. “Maybe I’ll go and do it
right now
.”

“Great,” David said quietly. “And if you do manage to track him down, tell him to at least give her a call.”

“He’ll do
what he wants
!” Mark yelled, his voice cracking. “You’re always trying to say who gets to talk to her, who does what. He doesn’t need your permission to do
any-
thing
.”

“That’s not what I meant,” David said.

“She’s my mother. She belongs to
me,
not you.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Yes she
does
.”

“She doesn’t belong to either of us, Mark. Yes, she’s your mother. She’s my wife. She was your dad’s wife too. But really she doesn’t belong to any of us. She’s who she is.”

“She’s
my mother
.”

“She’s a girl called Yvonne, Mark. Before she met me, before you were born,
that’s
who she was. Who she always will be, when she wakes up, when she goes to sleep. The rest of it is just in our heads.”

“You talk so much
crap,
” Mark snarled, and stormed away up the beach. Before he’d gone twenty feet, he heard David calling after him.

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Mark whirled around.
“What?”
he shouted, very close to being out of control. “What is your problem
now
?”

“I can’t make her better,” David said. “I’m sorry. I’m doing what I can.”

“It’s not enough,” Mark said, and carried on walking.

  

sixteen

He didn’t return to the house for lunch. He didn’t want to go back and see her still sitting up in her room, pretending she was doing what she wanted when it was David who was keeping her trapped in there—by agreeing with what she
thought
she wanted to say when it was what he wanted all along. It was always him who chose in the end. If she said she wanted to go shopping, he talked about the weather. If she said she wanted to go out to dinner, it was the same. Sure, his mother said she felt tired or just didn’t feel like it, but Mark knew David would have been at her before, suggesting things, making her see everything his way, seeming to agree—when he’d already made the decision in the first place. Mark walked farther along the beach than he ever had in his life. Past the new pier. Along a strip of parking on the other side, to where the old railway ran sometimes. It was raining, of course. It always rained down here now. He turned back and crossed the main road into the old part of town. He walked around the Lanes by himself, looking in the shops he should have been in with his mother, m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h even if he would have found them boring. He walked fast, head down—in and out of the narrow, twisting alleyways. He pushed past people in their rustling raincoats, glaring at anyone who got in his way. He went into The Witch Ball and stood, rain dripping off his coat onto the floor, looking at pictures from long ago. He didn’t have the money to buy one and take it back to her. He went back out and kept walking faster and faster, until he seemed to get lost. The little houses loomed over him, the alleys turning back on each other. People kept appearing from shops, bundled so deeply into their coats that you couldn’t see their faces, only their hands, clogging the alleyways, stopping him getting by. He knew there was a turn somewhere that would get him where he was supposed to be, but he couldn’t seem to find it. He started to feel hot, breathless, as if his head was expanding, close to bursting, and as if he could no longer feel his feet. He had to keep looking down to check they were still propelling him, that he wasn’t just being dragged up and down by the wind.

This time they served him in the big hotel. Partly, probably, because he lied: said something that wasn’t true, deliberately. When the waitress came over to him, he said right away that he was staying in room twenty-four and his parents would be down in a minute—but he wanted to pay himself, anyway, he had money his dad had given him, look, here it was. The waitress smiled in a way that suggested he might have provided her with too much information. She came back five minutes later with a shiny tray. It had a

  

t h e s e r va n t s

white china cup on it, a little china teapot, a small white jug full of milk, and a tiny white china bowl with four different types of things to make the tea sweet. Mark left the teabag in for a long, long time, but the tea still seemed weak in the end.

Now that his initial fury had begun to abate, he felt very tired. For a while, had he come upon David when he was storming up the seafront, he knew that he could have just socked him one. Now he wasn’t sure what he thought. He knew David was wrong about some things, as wrong as he always was.

But on other things . . .

Yes, his mother drank a lot of water. Maybe she didn’t need quite so many bottles every day, but . . . Mark didn’t really
need
the Coke either. He could live without it. So maybe David hadn’t been making a point with it. Mark was annoyed that he hadn’t thought to bring up the fact he’d bought the same book twice, which was a much more solid thing to hit him with. Maybe next time. Because there
would
be a next time, Mark knew. A fight which up until now had been conducted in shadows, in what was
not
said, was now being pulled out into the open. Not in front of Mark’s mother, of course—David didn’t have the balls for that—but at least it had coalesced into real words. Some of which . . . some of which had yet to quite make sense.

As Mark sat cocooned in the soft lilt of music and the low murmur of business conversations at nearby tables, there was one thing that nagged at him. Something David had said,

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h and then tried to unsay, and which Mark felt he should have thought about before.

Something about what his dad could have done. Now he thought about it, his mother
had
been ill for longer than he’d been remembering. Mark’s last birthday had been six weeks ago, a fortnight before they left London. The one before that, the family had still been together, and his dad had been there. It was when Mark had been given his skateboard. They’d all gone out for lunch together at a restaurant near Piccadilly Circus that was like a rain forest inside. Mark’s dad had been in a funny mood, though, and at one point he’d left for a long time to make a phone call. While they waited for him to come back, Mark and his mother sat and ate. Mark finished up his entire ParrotBurger and onion rings and fries. His mother—the name “Yvonne” popped into his head, suddenly, but sounded exotic and strange and unrelated to what the word “mother” meant—hadn’t eaten much at all. When Mark asked if she was okay, she said yes, of course, just a little tired.

Now he thought about it, that was strange. His mother hadn’t got tired, not before that. She was always doing stuff, always making lists, always onto the next thing . . . she had never got “just a little tired.”

But if she’d been ill back
then,
if it really had started so far back, then . . .

Then Mark’s father had gone away knowing she was sick. Mark pushed the thought away hurriedly. It didn’t fit. He picked up the teapot and tried to get another cup out of it, tipping it up until the lid fell out and landed on the tray

  

t h e s e r va n t s

with a loud clang. People looked up at the next table, and Mark felt himself blushing.

“Look,” someone said loudly, and at first he thought they were talking about him—that this person wanted everyone in the hotel to hear about what Mark had done. “Oh, there it is.”

But then he realized people were looking upward, and pointing.

He started to hear a noise, very faint, and for a terrible second he wondered if he’d started to hear things, as if what had happened to his grandmother ran in families and he was going to lose his mind, to start hearing flapping sounds everywhere he went.

“Someone should do something,” a voice said. Someone else laughed.

Mark saw they were looking up at the glass ceiling of the atrium. A small bird had got in from the outside, perhaps trying to get out of the rain, and had become trapped. It was flying into the roof again and again, smashing its head against the glass, trying to get out.

Feeling as if he might throw up, Mark got up quickly, threw some money down, and ran out of the hotel. It had stopped raining, but the wind was brisk. Mark hurried across the busy road to the promenade and stood leaning against the rail, sucking in lungfuls of air until he felt less queasy.

Below him was the area where the old boats were pulled up onto the pebbles—the fishing museum—and he went down

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h the steps to it. He tried to imagine a time when the area was thronged with men yanking big baskets of fish around, and could not. If that had ever really happened, it was now sealed off on the other side of too many years, plastered over with images of people walking up and down in shorts, eating ice cream, or wrapped up in coats and driving forward against the wind. Events piled up like bags of refuse, obscuring what had gone before.