After a while, Keith put his arm round her shoulder and rubbed the top of her head with his chin and said, ‘I do love you, baby, you know that, don’t you?’ and it would have been quite a nice moment if it hadn’t been raining and the bug-baby hadn’t started crying again.
Michelle had been brought up in a chaotic house in Fen Ditton, one of the dreary satellite villages that the poor of Cambridge were banished to. Her father was a drinker and ‘a waste of space’ according to Michelle’s mother but nonetheless she had stayed with him because she didn’t want to be on her own, which Michelle and her sister agreed was pathetic. Their mother drank too but at least she didn’t get violent. Michelle’s sister, Shirley, was fifteen and still at home and Michelle wished she could come and live with them but they didn’t have the room. She missed Shirley, she really did. Shirley wanted to be a doctor, she was very clever, everyone said she was going ‘to make something of herself’. They used to say that about Michelle, before Keith, before the bug was born. Now it seemed she had managed to make nothing of herself.
The cottage was tiny. Their bedroom was squashed into the eaves and the baby’s bedroom was more like a cupboard, although it spent hardly any time in its room, in its cot, where it should be sleeping peacefully instead of always wanting to be picked up and lugged around. She hadn’t read a book since the baby was born. She had tried, a novel propped awkwardly on a pillow while she breastfed, but the baby wouldn’t suck properly if it thought her attention was elsewhere. And then when she had to give up the breastfeeding (thank goodness) because her milk ran out (‘You have to try and relax and enjoy the baby,’ the midwife said but what exactly was there to enjoy?) and manoeuvring a bottle and a book and a baby would have needed three pairs of hands. Which would be another way of getting more time.
Michelle had put a lot of effort into decorating the baby’s room when she was pregnant. She’d painted the walls egg-yolk yellow and stencilled a frieze of ducklings and lambs and sewn cheerful yellow-and-white gingham curtains for the tiny window so that the whole place had been like a box of sunshine. Michelle had always done things properly. From an early age she’d been neat and tidy, and her mother used to laugh and say, ‘I don’t know where she gets it from, not from me’ (and how true that was). She’d been the same at school, her work books were never smudged, her illustrations and maps were always finely drawn, everything underlined and tabulated and indexed, and she’d worked so hard and so methodically that even when the quality of her work hadn’t been up to scratch her teachers gave her good marks. And she was supposed to go to university, to break free, and instead she’d been diverted, by someone with an HNC from agricultural college who worked on an estate farm and didn’t have two beans to rub together.
She started going out with Keith Fletcher when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one and nearly everyone she knew had been jealous because he was older and had a motorbike and was just this incredibly sexy, handsome guy, with an earring and black hair and that foxy smile so that she used to think of him as a gypsy, which seemed very romantic but of course an earring and a foxy smile didn’t make you into a gypsy. Didn’t make you into anything in particular. And now he didn’t even have the motorbike because he’d got rid of it and bought an old van instead.
And way back then, when all Michelle had to worry about was whether she could get an essay in on time or whether she had a decent pair of tights, back in that other time when she was young, she had thought that a country cottage was also romantic and when she’d first seen the cottage she thought it was the quaintest, prettiest thing ever because it was so small and so old, more than two hundred years old, built of brick with patterns of flint bedded around the lintels and sills, and it had once been – yes – the forester’s cottage, and the estate had given it to them to live in when they got married. It was a ‘tied’ cottage and Michelle thought that was funny (but not in a way that made her laugh) because it wasn’t the cottage that was tied, it was her.
She’d had a glimpse of a possible future – the pretty cottage, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, bread in the oven, a bowl of strawberries on the table, the happy baby hitched on her hip while she threw corn to the chickens. It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.
When she married, already six months pregnant, she left school and quit her out-of-school-hours job in a café and Keith said, ‘It’s OK, after the baby comes you can still go to college and everything,’ although they both knew it would no longer be a good university but some crappy polytechnic in some crappy town (probably Cambridge, God help her) where she would end up doing an HND in business studies or hotel management. Nonetheless Michelle thought, yes, I will do that, of course I will, but in the meantime if she was going to be a wife and mother she was going to do it properly, which was why she spent all her days cleaning and scrubbing and baking and cooking, and assiduously reading housekeeping books, continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making ‘a lovely home’ – the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb you could make into jam, the icing-sugar decorations you could create for your Christmas cake – which you were supposed to make in September at the latest (for heaven’s sake) – and at the same time remember to plant your indoor bulbs so they would also be ready for ‘the festive season’, and it just went on and on, every month a list of tasks that would have defeated Hercules and that was without the everyday preparation of meals, which was doubly difficult now that the baby was weaned.
When her mother saw her pureeing cooked carrot and baking egg custards for the baby, she said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Michelle, just give her a jar of Heinz baby food,’ but if she bought her jars of food she would eat them out of house and home, she was so greedy, fattening herself up like a pupa. She was always hungry, you could never give her enough. And anyway jars were cheating, you had to do things properly, although even Shirley, who was usually on her side, said, ‘Michelle, you don’t have to put so much effort into everything.’ But she did because she was driven by something, only she didn’t know what it was but she was sure that if one day she could get everything finished then she’d be free of whatever it was that was driving her. ‘You’ll never get everything perfect, Michelle,’ Shirley said. ‘That’s impossible.’ But it wasn’t, given enough time you could make anything perfect.
She thought they should get some chickens of their own and perhaps a goat to milk, because maybe something was missing – maybe it would just take one fat white Wyandotte to make the idyll possible. Or a Sicilian Buttercup. Really, chickens had the prettiest names – the Brahma and the Marsh Daisy and the Faverolles. She had a book from the library. She’d stolen the book because she hardly ever got the chance to get into town to go to the library. She didn’t believe in stealing, but she didn’t believe in being ignorant, like a peasant, either. Or perhaps a goat – a LaMancha or a Biondo dell’Adamello. The goat book was stolen too. Country life had turned her into a common thief. Goats had ridiculous names – the West African Dwarf and the Tennessee Fainting Goat. Or perhaps it would take a perfect strawberry patch, a wigwam of runner beans or a row of marrows and then, suddenly, like finding a magic key, it would all work. She hadn’t mentioned the Marsh Daisy or the West African Dwarf to Keith, because although he was country born and bred he’d rather go to a supermarket any day than raise livestock. And anyway, he wasn’t really speaking to her because every time he reached for her in bed she pushed him away and rolled over with her cold back to him and thought, so this is what it’s like to fall out of love with someone.
Sometimes Michelle tried to remember what it was like before the baby came, when it had been just the two of them and they could lie in bed all day, and have feverish, exhausting sex and then eat toast and jam and watch television on the tiny black-and-white set that they used to have at the foot of the bed until Michelle knocked it over because Keith was watching the snooker (on a black-and-white set, what was t
he point of that?) and the baby was screaming and she just couldn’t do it any more.
She did love them, she really did. She just couldn’t feel it.
They weren’t bonded together, they were like molecules, molecules that couldn’t bond together into stable elements and instead bounced around like bingo balls. She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
And then she started getting up even earlier because if she wanted to get out of this mess she was going to have to study for her A levels. If she got up at four in the morning – when everything was miraculously peaceful, even the birds and the baby – then she could prepare the evening meal, tidy the kitchen and get a wash on and then, if she was lucky, she could get her old school books out and take up her education again where she had left it off. Because you couldn’t make time, she’d been deluded about that. Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it back.
It was just a normal day (normal for Michelle, anyway). It was a Saturday, and Michelle had been up since half-past three and was feeling particularly satisfied with her strategy. A dish of lasagne, neatly clingfilmed, was sitting in the fridge, waiting to be heated up later, and she had made a chocolate cake – Shirley’s favourite, because her sister often took the bus and came to visit on a Saturday. She had read three chapters of Mowat’s Britain between the Wars and had made notes for an essay on King Lear. The baby was fed, washed and dressed in the nice blue-and-white-striped OshKosh dungarees that Shirley had bought. Michelle washed the windows while the baby amused itself in the playpen. The sky was blue and the breeze was fresh and Michelle could see green shoots appearing in the vegetable plot, even the coriander had germinated.
After a while she glanced at the baby and saw that it was asleep, curled up like a bug on the floor of the playpen, and Michelle thought she could use the opportunity to get on with her geography and at that moment Keith lumbered into the house with a pile of logs he’d just chopped and he dropped the logs on to the hearth with a great clatter, making the baby wake up with a start. Automatically, like a switch thrown, the baby began to scream and Michelle began to scream as well, just standing there in the middle of the room, with her arms by her side, screaming, until Keith slapped her on the face, hard, so that her cheek felt as if it had been branded.
Her throat was very sore from the screaming and she felt weak as if she was going to drop to the floor and what should have happened at that moment – because, let’s face it, they had been here before (although not the slapping) – was that she would burst into tears and Keith would put his arms round her and say, ‘It’s OK, baby, it’s OK,’ and she would sob until she felt better and they would cuddle the baby between them until it felt better too.
Then they could have made a fire with the logs, because it was still chilly in the evenings, and heated up the lasagne and settled down to watch some rubbish on the new colour television they’d bought to replace the old black-and-white one. They would have gone to bed with full stomachs and had sex to make up and slept well so that they would be ready for another day of the same life, but what actually happened was that Keith made a move to put his arms round her and she spat at him, which was something new as well, and then she ran outside and got the axe from where it was stuck in a log beside the sawhorse, and then she ran back inside with it.
It was very cold, because of course the fire had never been lit. Michelle was sitting on the floor. The baby was asleep again, she looked exhausted the way she did when she was left to cry herself to sleep and every so often she gave a tiny little hiccup of grief. Michelle felt as if she had a stone inside her, something hard and unyielding that was making her feel sick. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel this bad. She looked at Keith and felt sorry for him. When you chopped logs with the axe and they split open they smelt beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone’s head open it smelt like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you’d cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.
If she could have had one wish – if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted – Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again.
She wondered if she should get up from the floor and clean up a bit but she felt so tired that she thought she might just stay there and wait until the police came. She had all the time in the world now.
4
Jackson
JACKSON SWITCHED ON THE RADIO AND LISTENED TO THE reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence he’d taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn’t have to smoke his way through the packet but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn’t high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 which he’d bought second-hand four years ago for £13,000 and was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (with the proviso that she didn’t cycle on the road until she was at least forty).
When he’d come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife had taken one dismissive look at it and said, ‘You bought a policeman’s car then.’ Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a ‘Child on Board’ sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relationship and the smug git’s need to show the world that he was protecting another man’s child. Jackson hated those signs.
He was a born-again smoker, only starting up again six months ago. Jackson hadn’t touched a cigarette for fifteen years and now it was as if he’d never been off them. And for no reason. ‘Just like that,’ he said, doing an unenthusiastic Tommy Cooper impression to his reflection in the rear-view mirror. Of course it wasn’t ‘just like that’, nothing ever was.
She’d better hurry up. Her front door remained determinedly closed. It was made of cheap varnished wood, with a mock-Georgian fanlight, and was the spit of every other door on the estate in Cherry Hinton. Jackson could have kicked it in without breaking a sweat. She was late. Her flight was at one and she should have been on her way to the airport by now. Jackson cracked the car window to let in some air and let out some smoke. She was always late.
Coffee was no good for punctuating the tedium, unless he was prepared to piss into a bottle, which he wasn’t. Now that he was divorced he was free to use words like ‘piss’ and ‘shit’ – elements of his vocabulary almost eliminated by Josie. She was a primary-school teacher and spent much of her working day modifying the behaviour of five-year-old boys. When they were married she would come home and do the same to Jackson (‘For God’s sake, Jackson, use the proper word, it’s a penis’) during their evenings together, cooking pasta and yawning their way through crap on television. She wanted their daughter, Marlee, to grow up ‘using the correct anatomical language for genitalia’. Jackson would rather Marlee grew up without knowing genitalia even existed, let alone informing him that she had been ‘made’ when he ‘put his penis in Mummy’s vagina’, an oddly clinical description for an urgent, sweatily precipitate event that had taken place in a field somewhere off the A1066 between Thetford and Diss, an acrobatic coupling in his old F Reg BMW (320i, two-door, definitely a policeman’s car, much missed, RIP). That was in the days when a sudden desperate need to have sex was commonplace between them and
the only thing that had made this particular incidence memorable had been Josie’s uncharacteristically-Russian-roulette attitude to birth control.
Later she blamed the consequence (Marlee) on his own unpreparedness but Jackson thought Marlee was a winning result, and anyway what did Josie expect if she started fondling his – and let’s be anatomically correct here – penis while all he was trying to do was get to Diss, although for what reason was now lost to time. Jackson himself was conceived during the course of a guest-house holiday in Ayrshire, a fact that his father had always found inexplicably amusing.
He shouldn’t have thought about coffee because now there was a dull ache in his bladder. When Woman’s Hour finished he put Allison Moorer’s Alabama Song on the CD player, an album which he found comfortingly melancholic. Bonjour Tristesse. Jackson was going to French classes with a view to the day when he could sell up and move abroad and do whatever people did when they retired early. Golf? Did the French play golf? Jackson couldn’t think of the names of any French golfers so that was a good sign because Jackson hated golf. Maybe he could just play boules and smoke himself to death. The French were good at smoking.
Jackson had never felt at home in Cambridge, never felt at home in the south of England if it came to that. He had come here more or less by accident, following a girlfriend and staying for a wife. For years he had thought about moving back north, but he knew he never would. There was nothing there for him, just bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway when France was laid out on the other side of the Channel like an exotic patchwork of sunflowers and grapevines and little cafés where he could sit all afternoon drinking local wine and bitter espressos and smoking Gitanes, where everyone would say, Bonjour, Jackson, except they would pronounce it ‘zhaksong’, and he would be happy. Which was exactly the opposite of how he felt now.