Everything Under: A Novel Page 2

  I’d spoken to the morgue attendant a handful of times on the phone over the years. His sentences were smattered with hesitation and question marks at the end of statements. He was bald, a shiny pate. He said that I looked the way my voice sounded. I was not sure what that meant. I did not look much like you. You had a stone-edged attractiveness that frightened everyone I saw you meet. There were cut-outs of cactuses pinned up on the board. He shrugged when he saw me looking at them.

  Something about them, don’t you think? They don’t need anyone. They store water inside them.

  I was not certain how I’d got into the room. There were metal doors set into the walls and the radio on low in the background, a song I did not recognise. He swung one of the doors open and pulled a tray out. There was a blue sheet over the top of you. All of the air was gone. I could see shapes under the sheet: a nose, a hip bone. The feet sticking out at one end looked waxy. There was a tag attached to one of the toes and, on another, a bell.

  What’s that for? I asked.

  He palmed a hand across his scalp. His hands were very clean but there was some food at the corner of his thin mouth. It’s unnecessary, he said, a foible really. Before heart monitors it was to make sure the dead were really dead. I retain a sense of tradition.

  That must be where dead ringer comes from, I said, and he looked at me the way people sometimes did when I talked like a dictionary. I wanted to tell him about all the beautiful words I’d thought of during the drive for the places we keep our dead: charnel house, ossuary, sepulchre.

  Do you want a countdown? Three, two, one? he asked. Some people do.

  No.

  He pulled back the blue sheet so it rested just below the shoulders. I felt pain in my stomach, along my hairline, a shock of cold. It was you. A second later I saw my mistake. Her hair was – it was true – the same colour as yours and there was something about the lines around her eyes and mouth that brought you to mind, the shape of her forehead. But she did not have your broad nose – the bridge twisted from a break before I was even born – and the birthmark on her shoulder was not the same colour as yours, that almost sickly purple.

  Are you sure? He sounded disappointed. They must have had as many lost bodies at the morgue as there used to be in the canal, swollen, rising in the low season. He lifted the sheet at the base to show me the tattoo, but it was new, still a little sore-looking from where the needle had sunk in: an off-centre star, a map of an unidentifiable country. I’d never been certain what yours was and you would not tell me. Even mothers need to have secrets.

  Yes, I’m sure, I said.

  On the way back from the morgue I stopped for petrol and then sat on a wooden picnic bench by the stacks of newspapers and BBQ charcoal. Everything seemed aligned wrong: the metal of car doors shimmering against the hot flow from the motorway. My mouth tasted sour, unwashed. I felt as if the skin had been rubbed off my hands and cheeks. I was exhausted, as if I’d lived that moment ten times over, as if there was never anywhere I was going to end up except for there: at a petrol station in the heat after seeing a dead body that was not you. It was a mistake to ring around looking for you. There were cranks and dials in a person’s head that were best left alone. I got the map out of the glove compartment. I thought maybe I’d recognised some of the road signs (written words stuck with me) and looking I realised it was because I was near the stables. I’d thought they would be hours away, an overnight trip, but they were not far, an hour or less. It unnerved me. That all along I had been so close to that place. I bought a bar of chocolate and sat in the car trying to decide what to do. The chocolate melted before I could even open the packet. It did not – the blue sheet pulled back over that face – seem possible to go home.

  On a tight corner I almost hit something that came haring across, flat on the road, a slip of colour. My foot mashed the brake down. I bit my tongue, shouted. Certain I’d gone over it. Whatever it was. I got out. It was hot. Too hot for any of it. I squatted to look under the car. When I straightened there was a woman in a purple mackintosh running towards me.

  Did you hit my dog? The right side of her face was shrugged down – from a stroke perhaps – and her words were a little unclear. I wanted to drive on but she grabbed my arm. Did you hit my dog?

  I don’t know, I said.

  Her mackintosh was zipped all the way to her chin despite the heat. We looked for the dog together under the car and then in the bushes on either side of the road. She did not call its name only whistled badly and to no effect.

  He can’t eat anything, she said, he’s on a very strict diet. We need to find him before he eats something. He’s always running away. She spoke as if we were old friends. He was a runner even when he was a puppy.

  A car came round the corner and almost collided with mine, stopped in the middle of the road.

  I can’t see him. Can I give you a lift somewhere?

  But she was gone, pushing through the tough hedge and into the ditch beyond. I could feel the words for gatherings of the dead in my mouth. I was still expecting to find you somewhere, crumpled up, cold to the touch, your feet facing in different directions.

  There was a steep, potholed road that went down towards the stables, a double-barred gate which two girls in tight trousers were climbing over and, beyond, a car park. The stables were the last place I ever lived with you, the last room I shared with you. Do you remember how the girls who worked at weekends used to leave their half-drunk bottles of Coca-Cola lined up against the wall, stand with their faces close together; how there were a couple of them we could never tell the difference between? A lot of them had a strange roiling Essex accent that I could never quite understand, lengthened words heavy with extra o’s and u’s.

  At first I just poked around, didn’t announce myself. There was a lesson going on in the arena, four kids on fat ponies. The teacher who’d been there at the same time we were was tall with straightened brown hair and long painted fingernails. A voice like a foghorn but fragile, often wearing casts, slings tied around her neck. She wasn’t there any more.

  I sneaked down the side of the arena. Some of the rungs of the stairs up to the room we had lived in were broken. I remembered that narrow alley between arena and stable block because I would often sit at the top of the steps and watch for you coming, tripping over the rough earth, swearing and grabbing for the wall. I must have known, really, that you would leave, always expected that you wouldn’t come home. You’re waiting up for me? That’s sweet, you’d say though your face always said otherwise, closing in around the words like scaffolding.

  I went back to the car park. The lesson was finished, and the teacher came over and asked if I had a kid or wanted to learn myself. Fourteen pounds a go. More if it was for me. I told her I’d lived there when I was a teenager but she only looked blank, searched over my shoulder for escape.

  We rented the room up there.

  She shrugged. They don’t do that any more.

  Also, I’m interested in lessons for my niece, I said. Can I have a look at the rest of the yard?

  I went around the back and up towards the fields. A little way up there was someone bent, working at the ground. I went under the electric fencing and towards her. She was picking up sharp stones and throwing them out of the field.

  Help you? She wiped her hand on the back of her trousers. There was a small silver cross around her neck that fell forward each time she moved. She was older than the woman who’d been teaching, her hair losing its orange dye at the parting. I showed her the photo of you.

  I’m looking for this woman, she lived here for a couple of years. In the room above the arena.

  She wiped her hands a second time. Took it. Peered. Maybe. She held it out towards me, pushing out her lips. I’m not sure.

  Can you look again?

  Above the arena?

  In that room. She did some mucking out. There was a girl with her. Her daughter. She was thirteen or so when they first arrived. Didn’t go to school. Hung aro
und a lot.

  I do.

  What?

  Yes. She was looking down the rise to the ugly buildings, the square arena and chunky stable block. I remember her. Both of them. Why do you want to know?

  I’m her niece. She hasn’t seen any family for a long time. She got some money in a will. I need to find her.

  She gestured with her square chin, smudged with dirt, and we went down the hill and into the Portakabin kitchen. She leaned against the counter while the kettle boiled. I let her talk about what she remembered of you and of the girl she did not know was me. In the sink there were cups filled with green mould. On the sofa a teenage girl was reading a magazine and drinking Lucozade. There were some things she said that I did not remember though I thought I’d remembered everything about that time. The noise of music that used to come from the room above the arena, how you sometimes taught lessons or drove the horsebox to shows. It unnerved me. Even the history I thought I’d kept was wrong. I knocked my fist against the counter.

  She poured the boiling water onto instant coffee granules. We don’t have any sugar but there are some Pop-Tarts.

  I’m fine. Did you see her again? I said, clipping the cup against my teeth when I went to drink it. After she left? Did she come back? My pulse thudded in my temples.

  I don’t know.

  Maybe?

  I could see by the way she was looking at me that my voice was too loud. The girl on the sofa had put down her magazine and was staring.

  People come and go. Let me see the photo again. She held it between finger and thumb, careful so as not to bend the edges. Melanie? she said to the girl. Aren’t there stables left to clean?

  They’re done, Melanie said.

  Don’t just say things if they’re not true.

  She waited until Melanie was gone and then she gave the photo back. There was a woman a few years ago. I’m not sure. She shook her head.

  Go on, I said.

  I don’t know. It might have been her. She hung around for a couple of hours and no one really noticed. I saw her on my lunch break. She’d wandered out to the field where we just were. When I spoke to her she wasn’t quite right.

  What do you mean?

  She inclined her head as if she didn’t want to say. I mean she wasn’t quite there. She missed words out, didn’t seem to know where she was or what she was doing here. There’s an old people’s home not far away and I thought maybe she’d come from there so I called the police. Except by the time they got here it was dark and she was gone, and when I rang the home no one was missing anyway. It might not have been her. People get lost, you know. She looked at me. People come and go. It might not even have been the person you’re looking for.

  As I was driving back along the road away from the stable I saw the dog. Sat on the verge. Not sweet-looking, some kind of mutt, odd features, bald patches. I almost didn’t stop, and when I did there was a disagreement, the dog pacing back and forth out of reach, showing me its white gums. Once I got him in the car he seemed merry enough. I watched him in my mirror, sitting upright on the middle seat, looking back at me. I don’t like animals, you said in my head. As loud as if you were in the passenger seat. Put that thing back where you found it.

  I don’t like dogs much either, I told him, and he closed his eyes as if exhausted by the conversation already.

  I drove up and down the road searching for his owner, but there was no sign and no one answered at any of the houses. I was supposed to be on my way back. I was supposed to be at home already and at work the next day.

  I kept going until I hit a motorway. The dog made a noise in the back of his throat that was so like a word I nearly hit the brakes. He paced the back seat, lifted his leg and put it back down. I took the next exit. Lights from Little Chef, Burger King, Subway. The dog pissed in the car park of the Travelodge. I was so hungry I bought chips, ate them leaning against the car. I remembered a story I’d heard about a child finding a lizard in her Happy Meal, deep fried. The sort of story I might once have told you to watch you laugh. I watched a couple having an argument in the entrance to the Travelodge, their wide mouths and waving arms. I followed them in and asked how much a room was. Twenty-five pounds, no breakfast but a vending machine at the end of the corridor. I was inside the room before I could think what I might be doing. The smell of petrol through the window. The triangular pattern of yellow and black on the carpet. Someone else’s hair in the plughole of the sink.

  A creature paddled through the summer-hot air, crawled up the corridors, dug its way through the door to my room and under the duvet, put its head on my pillow. I clenched my eyes shut. There was the smell of its slow, almost-bovine digestion. The mattress was sodden, starting to shred. I opened my eyes again, filled the narrow bath almost to the top, locked the dog out, got in. I must have dozed because when I woke I was underwater. There were blurred magnolia tiles above, the grim metal shower head craning down. I’d tried to sit up but there was a weight on my chest. I watched the air rise from my nose and mouth, pressed my hands down onto the gritty base of the bath, felt that weight holding me down. In the spare white of no-oxygen I’d known what it was. It was what I’d promised I would never think of again. It was what had been there on the river in that final month. The word felt wrong in my mouth. I saw white stars, a terrible cold in my throat.

  The weight was gone. I came out choking, the water crashing onto the floor and flooding out beyond the closed door. I sucked in so much air it burned, clambered out and landed hard on my knees. The dog was howling. I put my cheek against the chilly floor and lay there for a long time.

  The Cottage

  What I always go back to – of course – is how you left me. This is because, you say from your armchair, I am selfish and clingy. You tell me I was always this way. You tell me that on the river I clung to you like a limpet and howled until the trees fell. You are liable to exaggeration. Telling your story seems an act of mining rather than simply recording. At times you listen quietly. At times you interrupt and our two tellings cluster together, overlap.

  I don’t remember much of what happened on the river. Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection. I know that we left the place we’d been moored since I was born and that Marcus was not with us. I know that we drove the boat down the river and away, moored in a city where the bells chimed the hour. Stayed there for, maybe, a week; no longer. One day when I woke you’d packed a rucksack and a couple of plastic bags. I don’t think you even bothered to lock the boat. I understood then we were not going back. I was thirteen years old and everything I’d ever known was on that boat. Everything besides you.

  We sat on the first bench we came to and you plaited my hair into a tight, painful braid and then I plaited yours. As if we were going to war. I could feel you humming beneath your skin, the electricity of pylons or power stations coursing through you. You were small – though now, over sixty, you are even more so – but you let me clamber onto your back and cling there as we walked.

  For a couple of months we trawled hostels and B & Bs, people’s sofas they were renting for cheap. We never stayed very long. We couldn’t afford it. Towards the end we rode the buses, dozing against greasy windows, waking when the driver came to tell us we had to leave.

  We were at the stable for three or so years. You’d grown brave, I think, with desperation. We got off a bus and you’d gone knocking on doors. Someone told us the woman who ran the yard sometimes let out the space above the arena, and we’d found the place and asked about the room. I remember the way they looked you over. We were both the worse for wear from a month of little sleep or food. You lit one cigarette from the end of another. You’d been drinking, carrying around a bottle, wiping your hand across your mouth so hard sometimes your lips bled. They let us stay there and in return we mucked out the stables. Sneaked into a nearby gym to shower. You worked the occasional shift at a Greggs, came home with old pasties. The horses cropped the dry grass with their thick yellow teeth. You drank and drank and in
the mornings you stumbled around hunting for a hair-band that was already in your hair; clicked your fingers as you tried to remember the names of the horses, the children, the days of the week. Occasionally I hid the flask and there would be a fight. How dare you, you would say, how dare you. I drank whatever was in it to stop you from doing the same but you only refilled it, letting the liquid fall in a long, splashing stream. You turned grey overnight. They asked how long we’d be there, but you told them you didn’t know. I was not embarrassed by you then. I think I was still somewhat enthralled. You were like a preacher or the leader of a cult. You had a wide ray of power that sucked people in, your small hands moving as you talked.

  The last evening we spent together you told me we were going out. I’d never been to a restaurant before. You ordered wine, gave me some and yourself some more. You were heavy around the eyes and wrinkled all across your face, down your neck and on your hands. I don’t know where you’d found the dress you were wearing.

  When you said happy birthday I looked at you to see if you were joking, and you met my gaze over the edge of your glass.

  It’s not my birthday.

  You rolled your shoulders, not a shrug, more sullen than that. It doesn’t matter. It’s always someone’s birthday, isn’t it? There’s something I need to talk to you about.

  I was only just sixteen. We’d argued often, a few times I hit you or you me. We were a rock and a hard place. Perhaps that was why you left. I don’t think you ever believed that family was enough of a tie to hold people to one another. I didn’t know what was coming though perhaps I should have. You’d been hinting about it for weeks, talking about men and their apparatus, laughing.

  You have to be careful, you said. You don’t want to make mistakes that you’ll regret. Do you understand?

  I nodded though I don’t think I did. I didn’t know anything about sex then besides the skinny men you sometimes brought back to the room, the noises I heard them make, the silence from you.