The Story of My Face (28 page)

He goes back to the pink and green room. It is, he can see now, a girl's room, the colours intended to be both bright and delicate. And also, he can see it is a kind of idolatrous shrine. The ironing-board, the geraniums in winter are superfluous to its deeper purpose. He wonders, exactly how does his mother look at the photograph? Does she sit down on the bed at some quiet time during the day? Does she even kneel on the floor, the testament open, the picture on the page? How often does she come? In the day or during the night, perhaps when everyone else is asleep? Has she ever looked at the picture while he and his father were close by? How often does she open the envelope? Every year? Every week? Every day?

He walks quickly over to the bedside chair, removes the envelope again, and puts it into the pocket at the back of his shorts. It fits exactly. He fastens the button and leaves the room.

The landing is dark now, only a faint shred of indirect and dusky light coming from the half-open doors of the rooms. The stairs are a kind of limbo: he goes down them quickly, into the living-room. There are more things downstairs, and despite knowing what to expect, the sight is even more shocking than it was in the bedroom. The armchairs and sofa lie on their backs, cushions off, springs exposed. The alcove shelves are empty. The shiny LP records are out of their plain white sleeves, stacked, heedless of scratches. Balls of wool from his mother's sewing-box have unravelled. And everywhere are buttons, scattered like confetti or fallen petals on a lawn. He remembers that first day when I came and said that the carpet was like grass, and even now in the midst of the dismantling of his home, his skin bristles at the thought of my skin.

‘Well?' his father asks. He's trying to pull up the carpet at the fireplace edge. Dust has stuck to the sweat on his face. One of his hands is bleeding. Without answering, Mark leaves the room, goes back through the hall and through the front door, just in time to see his mother unhitch the gate. He runs towards her.

‘He's rolling back the carpets,' he tells her, ‘undoing the beds, chucking stuff around!'

‘Something's not right there,' she tells him, pushing his news aside. ‘Her mother didn't seem to know anything. There was a terrible mess in the kitchen. I tried to explain –'

‘Barbara!' John Hern shouts from the porch. He is holding a vase, one of the pair with the pale glaze that came from Elojoki. ‘Barbara, can you not save us all and tell me where it is –'

‘I don't want it destroyed,' she calls back.

‘You'll not come in this house until that image is found.'

‘I don't
want
to come in!'

‘Mark –' he calls.

‘I'll stay with her, Dad,' Mark calls back, closing his ears so hard against any answer that he doesn't know whether there is one or not. ‘We'll get in the van, Mum,' he tells her.

They sit on the fold-down seats in the caravan and watch lights go on and off in the house.

‘He won't find it, Mum,' Mark says, groping for a box of matches.

‘He might,' she tells him. ‘But it's that poor child I'm thinking of. “So you're back, are you?” the mother said. “Who the hell are you?” she asked me. I think she'd been drinking. She obviously hadn't got the letters I sent. The man she lives with isn't Natalie's father. He wasn't there, in any case. I should do something, but I don't know what –' She stares intently out of the window. From the direction of the house comes the sound of something shattering, dropped or thrown, broken in any case.

‘Your father will never get over this,' she says. ‘You know you can go in the house if you want. I don't want to come between you. I'm looking for my knitting –' ‘I'll be all right,' she says once Mark has found it in the locker under his own bunk. ‘I don't mind being on my own.' She pulls the needles from the ball of wool, makes a few busy stitches. Then her hand finds a steady rhythm and the needles begin to click relentlessly on, only the faintest variation, not enough for a pause, at the end of the row.

‘Your father is such a strong-willed man.' There's a catch to her breath as she inhales.

‘But he could have made an exception –' A few tears slip under the rims of her glasses, over the planes of her cheeks, turning inwards and down towards her mouth. In an oddly childish gesture, she pokes her tongue out and licks her upper lip.

‘I found your photograph. I found the envelope.' Mark says. She looks up at him to check what she's heard.

‘I don't think he should have shouted at me like that,' she says. ‘After all, in the end they'll decide to give in over the passports.'

‘It's in my pocket,' he tells her.

‘Truly?' she asks. ‘Which one? No, don't tell me. I'd rather not know!' Her voice lifts, gathering them both up into some kind of release: ‘So he won't be coming out for a while, then!' she says. She puts the knitting down.

‘Maybe by now he's digging under the floor!'

‘Maybe he'll get to Australia!'

The caravan shifts as his mother moves over to the kitchen area. ‘We can have tinned supper in here. I'll see what there is. BB?' she calls out, holding the shiny, label-less tins aloft one in each hand, wiggling them at the wrists, ‘and CB? After, there are peaches. There's probably some of that cream.'

Mark loves her for her gaiety in that moment, however false it is. He helps to reconnect the gas bottle and they stand side by side at the tiny hot-plate while baked beans heat up in the pan and the slices of meat warm under the grill. At some point, he knows, he will see the photograph inside the envelope that sits in his pocket, stiffening the cloth just enough for him not to forget it. At some point, all of this will be over, and they will live a different kind of life. He spoons the steaming beans next to the slices of heat-softened corned beef.

‘I'll close the curtains,' his mother says. ‘I'm going to put the latch on, just in case.' They sit opposite each other, and eat hungrily.

‘Natalie didn't tell her mother the first thing about us, nothing at all –' she says after a while, ‘that's what I think. Can you believe it?'

‘What will Dad do when he can't find it?' Mark asks.

‘I don't know,' she says.

Sandra is sitting upright on the sofa while I, buried in the furthest armchair, finish my toast and jam. ‘I should have known,' she says. ‘I went like a fool and reported you missing yesterday. I knew you weren't really gone but Luke made me. Now I'll have to tell them you've turned up. But it can wait till morning. In fact, you can bloody well go yourself, and tell them you're back. That'd be a laugh – they won't ask you whether you're married or not.'

‘It was supposed to be for a week,' I say. ‘But there was an argument so we came back early.' I'm still very hungry; it's a bottomless kind of feeling. I return to the kitchen, search the cupboards and find an open packet of ginger biscuits. Suppose, I think, tipping them onto a plate, the person you want to hurt just doesn't seem to feel it, but they might just be pretending? How will you ever know? How could you ever forgive them, even though it was that you most wanted? What is left to do, now?

‘You could have
said
,' Sandra continues when I'm back. ‘I wouldn't have stopped you, for heaven's sake. Did she do that to your hair? It's tight enough to cut your circulation off. Come here, I'll get it out.'

‘No,' I tell her, sitting back in the armchair. A loose spring digs into me from underneath. ‘No thanks, I like it this way.' I'm damp and chilly and look around for something to cover up with.

‘
No thanks
,' Sandra repeats, raising her eyebrows, studying me a moment or two with the beginnings of curiosity. ‘Well, the TV broke, but we're getting it fixed, and you can have it in your room. There'll be a bigger one for down here come Friday.'

‘I don't watch TV any more.' I know even as I say this that it is not a position I'll be able to sustain, not here, a place which somehow, despite the pitch of my desire and the ingenuity of my efforts, I've neither managed to leave behind nor to make any different. It's fortunate that the spent bulbs in the front room have still not been replaced; there's just the lamp with a scarf draped over, so it doesn't show when the heaviness that has been filling me up all the way down the A1 and into the increasingly familiar landscape spills over, a little, at the eyes – oh,
Mum
, I'd like to call out, raising my arms blindly, and let that be the end of it –

‘What was it like, then?' Sandra asks, pushing her hair from her face and lighting another cigarette. ‘What did you do all day?'

‘Just cooking and things,' I tell her. ‘Cricket. We went on a long walk to the beach –' Briefly, I contemplate telling her what I did with Mark, which might interest her, decide no, continue instead with ‘Singing, praying, and stuff like that.'

‘
Praying?
' Sandra says. ‘Christ! I thought there was something odd about that woman. Praying! What for? More pocket money? Which reminds me, that twenty quid you took out of my bag –' I pick at a loose thread on the check dress.

‘I gave it to them for my keep,' I explain.

‘Well, you can get it back,' Sandra says, ‘that's another thing you can do in the morning. You can go round there and ask for it back and I'll come with you to make sure you do.'

I huddle in the depths of the armchair, saying nothing.

‘Where do they live?' she asks, and when there's still no reply, she picks up the ashtray she's been using, a bright-yellow one from the pub, empties it over the coffee table, then leans forward and hurls it across the space between us: it misses me by a long way, but all the same I flinch when it hits the wall, and then the floor. This isn't something that's happened before. It's a path I don't want to take. I get up, leave the room.

‘Go to bed,' I hear her say as I close the door behind me, which somehow makes it impossible, despite how exhausted I feel, to climb the stairs. Instead, I slide back the latch on the front door, close it noiselessly behind me. No doubt she's still sitting there, glowering at the wall while I do the same with the gate. I start to run, and keep it up all the way back to the Avenues.

The Herns' front door is open, just as if they were expecting me, but the only light on is a lamp in the front room, where Mr Hern sits with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed, though clearly not asleep, amidst a sea of buttons and records. It's none of my business and anyway, everything will be all right in the morning, when we will all get up and have breakfast together, just as I've imagined it. . . . I climb the stairs and turn at last into the room that I've wanted, since that first afternoon, to be mine. I pull the door almost closed behind me, take the sheets and blankets from the pile on the chair, make up the bed, climb in. It's soft and cool. There's a light pull above the bed, and I plunge the room into darkness. I have the feeling of being suspended in something between water and air, almost exactly the temperature of my skin. It's a pure and perfect, utterly physical happiness, something I'll remember always, and need to. A few more breaths, and I'm completely dissolved.

31

At eight, the sun is still high and shines through the trees so white and bright that it could be lunchtime. We have to close the venetian blinds on two sides of the community hall. I am to speak from a raised platform, on which stands a chair, a lectern and a small table for my papers and water. Seating is arranged in rows of ten, four blocks of three: I can't see us filling them – but, as Heikki points out, a party of students is coming from the university at Oulu. Then there's the historian from Helsinki, at least eight from the Board of Antiquities, plus, very likely, some partners. At least three ministers of religion, then the town itself – ‘It adds up,' he says.

And we stand close, though not touching; perfectly proper, but as unlike colleagues as it is possible to feel. My mother, on the phone, keeps asking me, ‘Has something happened?' She, of course, is not coming to hear me speak: ‘Just get this over with, Natty, and come home!' And my Dean of Studies has cancelled at the last minute and couldn't find a replacement, so I'm here all on my own. . . . I've been warned that even if they're not actually hostile or indifferent, the audience will probably seem that way: this is a cultural thing, not to be taken personally. And of course, though no one has said this, leaving aside any reaction to the content of what I say, they still have to deal with the way I look.

And now they're starting to come in; they choose wine or juice or water from the table at the side, then take their seats. The ordinary villagers and the guests, by virtue of dressing up and dressing down, and my own ignorance of how to read appearances here, seem oddly indistinguishable.