Dignity Read online

  I can’t count the times I’ve found them sitting in their own mess because we can’t stay long enough or visit them often enough to properly keep them clean.

  ‘The word “anger” isn’t very vivid,’ said my tutor at college, ‘as an abstract noun.’ But abstract nouns don’t seem that fucking abstract when it’s you feeling them.

  I look in the fridge to see what else Henry has, but there’s nothing in there, nothing at all. I hold my breath for five seconds and name it in my head. Anger.

  It makes me want to be the kind of person who’d break things. Riot.

  Henry sits down hard, in the one comfy chair.

  ‘Bloody knees,’ he says. He’s been on a waiting list for replacements ever since I’ve known him.

  But despite the knees, and the legs that bow out now to breaking point, he can do most things himself still; no need for changing or getting him up. But he can’t cook. His wife always did that, and Henry’s ninety and not about to learn now. I give him a smile to say I’m sorry for his sore knees and empty fridge, and he sighs and shakes his head, rubbing his knee where it hurts.

  Her picture’s on the sideboard, his wife. The picture of the two of them, getting married. One of those black and white photos that’s been coloured in – half a photo, half a painting. She’s a pretty brunette in a simple white dress with a bunch of pink flowers and the unreal rosy cheeks the colourer’s given her; Henry, sixty-odd years ago, and in a nice suit, his hair in a careful side parting, isn’t so bad himself.

  Looking at Henry’s wedding photograph, and the way he holds her, so gently, by the arm, I feel the gap in him where she used to be, and the gap in me that makes the shape of Ewan.

  I look at Henry, and want to tell him about Ewan and how he’s disappeared for three days; three days of going to his flat, three days of calling into the flat, and hearing it echo emptiness back. I want to tell Henry how I’ve only had one message, from his friend Darren, saying just Ewan’s safe. Which is never really fucking true.

  But today Henry’s got the snooker repeats coming on at 9 and I’ve got to get out of here within the half-hour. I set him up with that, with the remote to hand, the eggs and a cup of tea steaming on the little table just within reach. As I leave, I stroke the back of his cool, freckled hand. He looks up at me, startled, and, when I turn at the door to check the room before I close it behind me, he’s staring down at his own hand, resting on the remote, and it’s like my touch has left some kind of lettering on it that he can’t quite read.

  The last time I held Ewan’s hand, we walked up the bluff. Our palms were gripped together, like one of us was hanging off a cliff. We tried to walk each other straight, but the paths we took kept making us collide, and then pulling us apart.

  We’d taken cheese slices, some thin ham, mayo, and bread rolls to put them in, a couple of beers to have on the top where we’d stopped with that wide view below us, the huge grey sea. From up there you see the Bay’s Mouth seafront for what it is: a thin cover for the messier town that stretches behind it, thick with streets and buildings and growing almost by mistake. The hotels along the front are like a flimsy barricade keeping the town and the sea apart.

  We’d eaten our rolls, cracked open the beers. Ewan put his arm round me then. He was warm, some scratchy stubble on his chin and the smell of the workshop on him. I didn’t want the clouds gathering to mean rain.

  But they did, and we put on our coats, and maybe it was the bad weather and the thick coat that took him off to that place where I can’t get to him, but on the way down, we walked far apart. His eyes had that hooded, dark look.

  Before Magda, there’s Mrs Jenkins, just two floors down from Henry but as lonely as Pluto, who always talks to me in Welsh till I remind her again I don’t speak it and she giggles and says, ‘Oh yes, you’re the Pakistani, aren’t you?’

  She’s sweet, old Mrs Jenkins, and today she hasn’t had any major mix-ups so I just sit with her for a few minutes and explain again that I’ve got family from West Bengal but I’m from just up the road.

  ‘Fascinating. Fascinating,’ she says, shaking her head in a bewildered way.

  ‘Desh,’ Mum used to say to me. ‘That’s something we all need.’

  Mum’d been looking for the English for her beloved Bangla word for years, and not found it. She’d looked so pleased with herself as she said it. ‘You need to connect with your desh,’ she said.

  Desh was belonging. The place you belong to. ‘The where that’s who you are,’ Mum said once, smiling. The where that’s who you are.

  ‘I’m from Bay’s Mouth,’ I tell Mrs Jenkins again, in a bit of a pissed-off way now. ‘Born here.’

  She gets something, in my tone of voice, and nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We have a word in Welsh for that. Bro.’ The wide, open O at the end of the word opens a space for us in her kitchen.

  ‘It’s … what do you call it?’ she says. ‘Your square mile, but not quite.’ She searches the countertops with her eyes. ‘It’s your place – you know?’ She looks lost for a few seconds, far from her bro.

  This is mine. Its pretend seafront with all its messed-up pomp, and then, when you burrow down, into the deep town, with the sound of the ship-ride tannoy and the sea fading, there’s the messy, familiar streets, the bingo halls, closed cinemas, the pound shops and charity bazaars, the strange empty exits from the new roundabout – where they didn’t build an industrial park – the new flats – which they did build but didn’t manage to sell – the three bookies where people leak their money, and the working men’s club where they drink it away. Bay’s Mouth proper. My desh; my bro.

  Without Bay’s Mouth, I’d be free-floating, turning in zero gravity. Lying in bed last night, the voices of those idiots outside the pub last week played back their fucked-up insults, and I had what Mum’d call ‘vertigo’.

  It’s a difficult thing for Mrs Jenkins, having a stranger in the house.

  ‘Never had a servant in my life,’ she says, trying to stop me from helping her with the dishes although she’s not safe to stand for long. ‘Embarrassing it is. Always knew how to do for myself.’

  Standing at her sink, made into servant, I start to feel really sick. Even the clean, lemony scent of the washing-up liquid and the slosh of water in the sink make my insides curdle. I have to get out of here, away from sweet Mrs Jenkins and her closed-up smell.

  Round the corner from the flats, I stop and stand and hold the railings, feeling the sick surge. I stand and wait for it to pass.

  ‘I can’t deal with this right now.’ I say it out loud. I can’t bloody deal with this.

  I get to Magda’s late. Bad start. Her house, as I’m walking up the driveway, stands looking out over Bay’s Mouth, its hands practically on its hips. To get to her you have to pick your way up a path threatened by brambles, up to the black full stop of the door. You have to find the key between the cobwebs behind the empty flowerpots in the porch (she won’t let us have our own), struggle with it in the old lock, and then shove and shove to get the stuck door open. The damp, autumn smell of her house swells out to you as the door creaks. You walk past the old boots and coats and through another door to a dark hallway, then another to the lounge, like peeling back the layers of a huge, dark fruit, until you find her, a seed in the middle of it all, small and uppity in her chair. As soon as I’m in her house, the sickness goes. She’s the middle of it all here. You have to watch her carefully.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, brushing some crumbs off her lap and wrinkling her nose slightly as I walk into the lounge. ‘You, is it?’

  I don’t think she knows what time it is. She doesn’t say anything about the lateness. But then she rarely does say much to me.

  The house smells dead. Of old wood and polish and evaporated eau de cologne. The smell doesn’t make me feel sick exactly; it’s an empty feeling. What can she do in a big dead house except slowly die too?

  The girls have been complaining that Magda can’t get to her feet any more at all, not
even to move between the seat and the wheelchair. They keep saying she’ll need two people to come to her every time, she’ll need a hoist, but the office keeps putting it off because it costs and everything’s been cut back. Magda acts rich, but they say she hasn’t got a penny to her name except this house.

  We try the manoeuvre between her seat and the wheelchair using the Zimmer as a rail. Holding it, she counts to three with crazy authority, but on three there’s nothing but a slight impulse in her body upwards. A bird not managing to take off. I hold her, and I think what’s the weight like – stone, bone, sadness? I lug her onto the frame. So tiny, and so fucking heavy. How do they get that way? My back groans. I can hear by her breath that she’s still trying her best to use her own strength to stand but her legs are worse and worse. She sinks back to the same chair, failed. Her mood’s like something under the earth, boiling. Eventually it’s being so pissed off that stands her up and shifts her in a heap from one chair to the other. It takes us both a minute to get our breath.

  I’m working her out, slowly, like doing some kind of forensics. How did she wash up like this? Like Henry, she wants to think she doesn’t need us, but she’s actually frantic with need, so she pretends harder and keeps us further away, like we’re some kind of toxic chemical. If you try to talk to her, you just get peppery insults. Magda hates sympathy more than anything. She’s not like Henry; she’s not looking for a friend.

  The other girls hate her:

  ‘She’s rude.’

  ‘She’s obnoxious.’

  ‘She’s a stupid old cow.’

  But she isn’t that. She’s far from stupid, with her sharp tongue and don’t-fuck-with-me eyes. Magda knows how to press their buttons. She runs rings round any of them. I like Magda. I fucking do.

  Perhaps because we accomplished the first manoeuvre, she lets me take her to the loo. (No, to ‘the lavatory’, with its mosaic of royal blue tiles, its brass taps, its tall, elegant toilet, and its freestanding bath; even with the limescale, grime and the tap that drips and drips, left to fall apart like everything else around here, it’s definitely a ‘lavatory’, not a loo.) I had the feeling she was desperate to go when I was here last time, but didn’t want me to do it. I wouldn’t want to go in front of someone else either. The girls say she sometimes wets herself instead of going with us, then she blames the wet clothes on the last one to be here.

  Every small step is a tiny win with Magda, and this is a dangerous honour. In the loo, she asks my name for the first time.

  Sure enough, afterwards she gets all stroppy about the coffee, and then throws one of her insults at me in a hot, angry splash:

  ‘And are you of any importance?’ Stuck-up as anything.

  I breathe in, hold it for two seconds, like Mum taught me, like water simmering down.

  I can take Magda’s insult, from a woman the world’s left to rot. So I just leave her to her own devices in the lounge for a bit, make myself a cheeky cup of tea in the kitchen, and wait for her to call and ask for whatever it is she wants next. Although my paid time’s pretty much up already, I’m not in a rush; there are two hours until I have to be at college. I go through to the kitchen.

  My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I reach for it, quick, like pulling a gun from its holster.

  Ewan.

  I read the words one by one.

  I read them again.

  A fucking text message?

  The words float around me, detached, no sense to them.

  I stand, watching the fear and anger of it rolling towards me, like a huge wave, barrelling.

  When it arrives it throws my insides around until everything’s unhinged, and I need to hold on to the counter, need to puke again. I’m retching at Magda’s sink, and I don’t care where I am. I don’t care that this bloody house hasn’t seen real feelings for years. I’m just crying and crying. Because I know. I just fucking know.

  Chapter Four

  For now hath time made me his numbering clock.

  Richard II, William Shakespeare

  Damn, where is the girl? Coffee, she said. She has to finish her shift at least, doesn’t she? Give me my pills? A nagging, sinking feeling. No sound from the kitchen. Maybe she’s left already. I thought there was more mettle to her than that. And I thought she was more of a woman than the other one.

  I’m thirsty. And I need a drink anyway for these tablets. I see now, she’s put them out, on the sideboard just beside me. A pink one for the angina, a white one for my digestion, and the big one, Valium, for the pain. The big one I want. I need it sharpish.

  I’m not going to sit here bellowing for her like some kind of goat. Calling at my hollow house. Perfectly capable of getting myself to the kitchen. Of getting a drink.

  Damn this deep-pile rug. Damn its fibres, which make the wheels so slow and heavy. Damn the corner of the doorway, which is so narrow it bruises my knuckles as I try to wheel myself through. I have to stop. The air is thick coming in and out of me. I can hear my own breath, like a slow gale. Across the hallway I turn the wheels an inch at a time. My right side is stronger than my left now so I start to swivel, and have to stop and just do left left left to get straight. Damn this chair, this body, this house, damn the girl. So breathless there’s darkness closing in for a few seconds, but when I stop to rest, it lifts.

  Through the doorway again. No bruising door-posts this time. I’m careful.

  Damn it, she’s drinking tea! In my kitchen. In my house. Who does she think she is? Sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning against the wall, her knees hunched up to her face and a cup of tea beside her.

  She’s so pale. Shaking. She’s too pale, slumped against my wall. The house is uncomfortable with it, but it gives, it gives slightly for her.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Her low voice trembles through the house.

  Something real has come in.

  Why is she telling me this? The old fear. Fear of wombs and bleeding and pain. It pulls at my guts. Damn it. We’re both silent a long while.

  ‘Is that a problem?’ My voice is full of breath but it’s steady. It is still steady.

  ‘He’s left me.’ She says it in a bare way, looking at her phone. ‘He’s just left me. He just bloody sent me a message.’ It’s the pale disbelief of abandonment, the slow awful dawning of it. A cold recognition.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Why am I even asking her? Why is she in my kitchen?

  She shrugs dumbly. There’s a long silence. She looks at me with raw eyes. So young.

  ‘I meant the pregnancy. Have you tested?’ The sound of my own voice, expressing such practical concerns, is a surprise – to me, to her, to the house.

  Her head shakes. ‘I just know,’ she says.

  ‘Well make me a coffee before you go to the chemist and get a test.’ Best to be firm and directive on these occasions, although my voice is hoarse with breath now. ‘I need a drink. My pains are back with a vengeance.’

  That works. She nods. She slowly gets up, and collects herself enough to pour water from the kettle into the coffee pot. I sit and watch her from my chair. Her hands are shaking. I find myself wondering about her. What will she do? Oh the world is rushing in through the cracks in the windows. Oh the world is beckoning and drawing at me.

  When she’s given me my pills and three or four sips of hot, sweet coffee, I say it. Why on earth do I say it?

  ‘Come back here to do the test, young lady, or I tell you right now, I’ll be putting in a complaint.’

  But she’s already on her way out of the door.

  ‘I’ll do you for negligence!’ Calling to the hollow house.

  The house is the most important of all. Now Susheela’s gone the house should begin to settle. What was I thinking, putting it in jeopardy like that? The walls will need weeks of steadying now.

  Yes. The walls are uncertain again. Sitting in my chair, I’m holding on to the parameters of the room, but the walls begin to shrink back, and back. I try to hold them togethe
r, but my arms are too weak, too tenuous to be a scaffold. There’s a window open here somewhere, letting the world in. I’m left open. The paraphernalia of the house is pouring into me: stamps, doilies, paperclips and other detritus mixing into my body, breaking me into pieces. The house mottles and crumbles too, carpets and blinds moth-eaten by the sky. Shards of blue cut me up. I’ve got on the wrong side of the house, come unstuck. I’m inside out. The world grows up and up from my floorboards, from behind my skirtings, architraves, the creases of my house, its elbows.

  Hear the birds! The birds. They’re calling down through the unbared roof. Yes. Perhaps the roof slates are peeling off? Perhaps there are fronds of growth poking through the floor? I have let the wildness in. There are insects crawling across my feet. Hear the birds! Oh! Hear the birds!

  Turning my chair, turning in the house, forest walls around me. Can I find traces of plaster and mortar? Can I find the boundaries again, camouflaged by the trees? The songs of the white ghosts are playing from a gramophone somewhere in the wood, and yet I haven’t wound it. Who’s coiling me up and up until I unravel like a spool? I am unhappy. I am unhappy. I am unhappy.

  I stagger from my chair, and fall against something that is a table, or a branch. I’m dancing my distress in the wood. I am unhappy. Tears are spooled up, and wound away from me into the wood like a string of pearls that I’m to follow. Follow the tears like stepping stones. This tear is sadness. This tear is joy. And this tear is anger baked in a pie.

  The branches knot in a lattice around me. My skin is cross-hatched like a thicket. Veins are hard as twigs. Breath is forgotten in the wood and I’m caught by the net of my dead limbs. I must leave.

  But where is the door in this forest house? Where is the door in this lattice of branches? I listen for the clock. The clock. The clock.

  The clock. I hear it in the wood, listen until the walls settle again around me, grinding their heels into the earth and standing tall, listen to the regular tick and tock of it until the house has refound its axis and once again I am sitting in my chair, and impervious to change.