I’ve never worked in this flat. I’ve done the dishes – there is no dishwasher or freezer, but there is a compact fridge, which I’ve heard groaning when the night is thin and I can’t sleep and Leo sleeps – and I’ve done the washing. I’ve scrubbed down the walls of the white-tiled bathroom, which some would say looks like the lavatory of a psychiatric hospital, but I quite like it. Though work-work – I’ve never once sat down to do that here.
I think a lot about my acts around the house. If I do the dishes, does it mean I am starting a pattern that will be hard to break later? If I do the shopping, will that be mine to do next week and the week after that? People don’t talk about these things when they move in together. We haven’t. They – meaning we – just do things as they come. Colette once said the most important thing in a relationship is to have good manners and to treat each other as though you don’t live together.
We wake up. Leo makes coffee on the stove. We drink it in the front room by the large open window that is also a door, so that we’re inside and outside at the same time. It’s warm enough for that, but only just. Then Leo starts working at the dining table that overlooks the terrace, though he sits facing the wall. I wouldn’t do that if I were working. I would face the swaying tops of the trees visible through a narrow interstice in the concrete wall. You can’t see the water below from there, but something about the manner of the trees gives it away. I think Leo could work facing anything: work is a switch he turns on, which has sometimes seemed to me threatening. He can work there, face against the wall, for five hours straight. He hardly moves. We break for lunch if I’m there, and usually I am, and then he continues until the evening, at which point I will have done the shopping.
–
Leo’s being here means many things to me, and one of them is that I want to fuck during the day. This is not a system I can impose. In the face of Leo’s concentration, my time, whether spent idling on the sofa or not, feels stolen. The thing is – or another thing is – that if I were to sit down and work here at the dining table beside Leo, we’d be facing each other. That’s not a way I can work. I could go to the library, hauling all my things there and back, but I did that for years. I can’t muster even the idea of it. I lie down on the floor. I stand back up, looking out the interstice in the wall. I go stand in the kitchen. Everything has been cleaned already; there is nothing to clean here. Leo is a messy chef. He cuts vegetables in a way that, if they’re peppers, pips are strewn all over the place, and if they’re tomatoes, juice bleeds thin and coagulated down the counter.
For a moment I’m happy that he’s not here today but away at some conference in Liverpool. The boy, though, is here. I look at him across the room, the top of his head is visible over the back of the sofa. From here it could be a grown person’s head, though he’s only three. The boy likes looking through the interstice too. Sometimes a heron passes, seen as through a pair of rectangular binoculars. I think of the time I saw a hammer lying by the coffee machine in my mum’s kitchen, and all the daycare children were sitting with their soft skulls eating cut fruit from little flower plates. I wonder when skulls reach their full size, and just then the boy turns as though registering the discomfort of my thinking.
the boy: Where’s daddy?
me: At the conference, remember?
the boy: Right.
me: But that’s okay. We can take the train just fine on our own, can’t we?
He’s looking at me directly now, his eyes a colour I can’t name. I feel a blend of care and worry swell in my chest. I think of soil and cut straw. I swallow. The boy directs his eyes at the interstice again. I wonder what he will look like when he’s five, ten, twenty.
me: Do you like the flat?
I regret the question immediately. The boy turns his head and looks at me. I look at the boy. We blink.
the boy: I like the windows that are also doors.
This pleases me.
–
On the platform the boy’s hand is warm in mine, a little clammy. He goes in front and picks two seats by the window. He knows his way around the carriage, or carriages like it. I sit down across from him and watch him watching trees flick past. His eyes are lighter than his father’s, the pupils noticeably small. They dart from point to point. I don’t want him to feel observed – I look away.
How can we be equals, I think. How can I be older, earn his respect, but also have him not loathe me. I wonder if he’s hungry, but perhaps by not asking he will see me as more of an equal. Would he tell me if he were, hungry? I have a banana in my bag, but thinking about it makes me feel guilty, like I’m treating the child as an animal. A feeling of abandonment rushes through me. How could Leo have me take this trip on my own when it’s the first time I go there? Is everything you do in a child’s life about reacting, solving sudden logistical hurdles in sequence? The boy sneezes, surprising himself. He smiles at me, watery eyes. He has one crooked tooth in front of the other like a toe poking out of a sock.
–
He walks ahead on a gravel path that turns into pavement. There aren’t any birds in the trees, which have dark brown leaves, unseasonably still attached. The boy pretend-whistles. I can’t whistle either and I think that I love him. Will this feeling fester? I wonder. He stops in front of the door of number six, whose number – font, size, placement – suggests precisely door number 6, like in some game show. Did I not dream this once, walking a tapering path with a small boy, opening doors?
I feel my stomach turn, picturing a leaden figure inside, rows of family and individual portraits on walls, contemptible flowery dresses and chins on folded hands. With his hand already pressed to the door, which has neither knob nor handle, the boy peers over his shoulder at me, his flat palm seemingly saying: help, I can’t get in. He looks at me. I signal for him to wait, I don’t know how, but it works. I think of trees communicating below ground through spidery strings.
The boy waits, nothing on him budges, the hand placed flat against door number six says: this is the door I want. Some people have a calm about them. Do I? Probably not these days, an edge of tension comes with not working, a certain lethargy. I walk up near the boy. Be the one who knows, I think, or at least the one who is calm about not knowing. I knock on the door. For a moment nothing, but a thick nothing. Then a soft rustling, like a chiffon shawl being pulled through a keyhole. The boy removes his hand from the door and folds it into mine. It’s warm, small, a little clammy still. Is he taking care of me, or is he nervous? We wait. The knocks have activated movement inside, which we listen to.
–
The woman has put out biscuits that I’m trying not to judge. Who would buy these dry, flavourless lumps of flour and oil, I think, and I think of my grandmother, who might have when she was alive. I think of death. The air in the place is dense and I think that sitting down was a mistake. Did I ask if I could, or did she direct me to this seat. I already can’t remember. There’s a lot of saliva in my mouth. My hands feel like dry, itchy gloves. My eyes are dry too, and when I blink they smudge up. I know her nails from photos. They’re long and ladylike, the kind that would try to scratch a sticker off the back of a CD case. I take some pride in my lack of ladylikeness. It’s a thick felt vest I can put on. Wearing dresses makes me feel like a woman, which I am, but I prefer not to think about that whenever I move my legs. To have long nails . . .
The boy sips his lemonade or whatever she’s poured in his little plastic cup. From the wet look in his eyes it’s something fizzy. My tendency to judge is something that’s developed out of an aversion to my own childhood, or the middle part, the beginning was good. We lived by a lake then and had a nanny, it was my brief Fleur Jaeggy period. It meant my parents were earning money and wanted us in or near the house rather than sending us off to state-run institutions, the worst in the country, that would later break us. You can be such a snob, Leo told me once. This did not hurt me, because I knew it’s not my soul that is. It’s much more surface level than that, more recent.
She hasn’t looked at me yet, and by not looking she’s looking piercingly. I let her not look which means not looking at her either. It’s difficult to keep finding new places to rest my eyes. I don’t want to look at what’s on the walls. I want to not know. I want to not see the wiry lamp in the ceiling that casts a web-like reflection on the table between us, but now I’ve seen it. I want to not see the cumbersome piece of Edwardian furniture behind her with a fruit bowl holding just one blighted orange, but now I’ve seen it. I want to not see the long, painted fingernails tuck a tuft of hair behind a fleshy ear. Is anyone going to speak? I think. I look at the boy, who is in his childhood home. I look to my right at the garden door. I think of a board with many latches, unilateral latches, which my brother made for his son because he loves latches, opening things, turning keys inside locks, clasping. This is what some fathers do for their sons. The boy looks at me, as if to ask what I’m doing here, but then speaks:
the boy: The sideways door in Mara’s flat is a window.
the fingernailed woman: –
me: –
the fingernailed woman: Biscuit?
I remember that I love him. We are something too – it’s lesser, but we are it. The woman hands me the plate of biscuits; this is her power. The boy crawls down from his stool and walks over to me. He takes a biscuit, puts the plate on the table where it was. I look at the woman for the first time, worried about the boy’s gesture. Then he crawls onto my thighs, something he’s never done before – we’ve been so separate in the flat.
the boy: Here.
me: –
the fingernailed woman: –
the boy: (to convince me) They’re good.
It would be mean not to touch him. Sitting there with a baby animal on my lap. I put a hand on his side not to support him in his seat so much as to indicate to him that there is support there if he needs it. Her eyes are on us. Now it looks like we’re this intimate all the time, which we’re not, have never been. Maybe it was the train journey. Maybe it’s the look on my face. What do I look like? Something smells like basement. It’s the house. I stroke the boy’s hair with a flat hand, the way you feed a horse.
Women with long fingernails want children before thirty-five, I think. Women with short fingernails don’t know. They’ve had a sustained tomboy period as children that they never grew out of and which gradually took the shape of a suspicion about motherhood and even coupledom. Women with long fingernails like flowery dresses; women with short fingernails dress monochrome. Women with long fingernails don’t want anal. Women with short fingernails like it when men come on their backs. Women with short fingernails have seen the scared eyes of men when they come, seen in their eyes, the moment they do, flashing images of their future children walking down corridors. I blink hard to stop my thoughts. The boy is on me. I look at her looking at the boy, I no longer care where she looks. His little cup is empty; he’s holding it upside down above his face to catch a final drop. She picks up her phone – the case shows a floral painting, a Monet or something stupid like that, probably bought in the V & A.
–
On the way back I take the seat facing away from the direction of travel, though I know it will make me a bit sick. The flat is dark and the skylight in the kitchen is dark. I will never work in this flat, I can see that now. No word from Leo since he messaged asking if his red notebook was on the desk. It wasn’t. I’ve only ever seen him with blue notebooks, always the same kind. Am I supposed to see that as a seed he’s planting, wanting to plant concern about some notebook, in me? I turn on the faucet. I drink from it. I look at the water. I turn it off. I go and sit on the dining table, because I can. I turn on the TV. Hanif Kureishi is saying that liberalism is not strong enough to handle powerful individuals who truly want something. I turn off the TV. I go and lie on the bed. I sit up and look out at the lamps of the opposing building that glow in the windows like blurred traffic lights.
The building is loud in my head, maybe it’s the silence, the gurgling pipes and even the carpet. I think of the tank above my head that holds the tub water. I was told when moving in that you shouldn’t drink from the sink in the bathroom as the water comes directly from the tank. Did I one night climb a four-rung steel ladder to see the tank for myself, or did I dream it? I stand up. I go to the sitting room to throw my phone at the sofa. I lie down where it lands, remove it from beneath me, hold it near my heart.
When I open my eyes the phone is pinging on the floor. There’s a text from the fingernailed woman. Can I pick up the boy from nursery today? He is ill. Leo is not picking up his phone, and she’s just about to chair a meeting. I text her yes. She tells me where to find the spare key. I leave the flat. I don’t shower.
–
The boy is standing outside the nursery in the pouring rain. There is a nursery worker by his side. I don’t know what to call her – where I’m from pedagogue is the word, but I think that’s derogatory in this country.
the boy: You’re late.
me: I’m here now.
the boy: Where are we going?
me: To the flat, I thought. Or where do you want to go?
We go to the station. It’s local in the way of bus stations. Something about ratios and colours of cladding. We board a train. We share yesterday’s banana. Still no word from Leo. The only voice answering me here is the boy. He lifts his chin about two finger widths to look at something out the window. I eat my share of the fruit in silence.
At Kings Cross, we exit the train and board another. The train stops too many times. The boy draws. It is important to not merely be absorbed into his life, that wouldn’t be right. The landscape changes. I grew up in a country with no mountains, this is a lot for me. My stomach responds in a way that feels like hunger but more of a stabbing. The train doors swoosh open. Empty purple platform. Dusk. I sit facing the swaying tops of trees that are visible through the narrowing space between the doors. Is there a lake nearby? I hear the boy swallow. Our heads lean against the window.
Image © Yichen Wang
The post Groan appeared first on Granta.