nerve endings
I THINK IT’S ready, Ellie says. Her hair, pale, silky, swings over her face as she peers into the oven. You get the plates, Dad. You’ll need the oven gloves, Rob hears himself say, and she sighs, as he knew she would. No, really, I thought it would be more fun to get like sixth-degree burns and spend the next four hours screaming in agony in the waiting room at A and E. Fourth degree, he says, there’s nothing after that.
Fourth-degree burns go through skin and underlying tissue to muscle and bone, and are usually painless because the nerve endings are destroyed. You wouldn’t get them from picking up an oven tray. He doesn’t say that. Also, even under current conditions a child with fourth- or even third-degree burns would be seen immediately, though however bad the injury he’d drive her to hospital because ambulance response times are buggered. He doesn’t say that either. The oven gloves need a wash. Will you have my mushrooms and give me your olives, Ellie says, sliding the pizza perfectly competently from the tray to the plate, using the oven gloves to put the tray into the sink where it hisses a little. He likes olives. Of course I will, love, he says. It’s his weekend for giving her whatever she wants, except that they’ve only just swapped toppings, he’s only about to take the first bite, when his phone goes, and he knows before he looks, because it always happens when you don’t want it to – as well as sometimes when you do – which call it is, and he knows he could say no, you can always say no, and he knows he won’t, because you never do, not unless you’ve drunk too much to drive which he hasn’t because he never does, not these days. She looks at him, at the phone vibrating on the counter, threatening to jump, and he walks away from her as he picks it up.
the fourteen days
MATT STANDS BACK to the wall, on the corner, safety off and fingers on the trigger. He won’t see nightfall but he’s going to take Jake down with him if no one else. That fucker. The air around him sucks in, a change in pressure that’s also a sound, and then the bridge at the end of the street implodes gracefully, as if a black hole opened in the river below and pulled it in. Dust boils into the dimming sky. It’s never fully light here. You can never see far enough. There are no shadows to warn you of what’s coming – and here he is, right now; Matt takes aim, waits until the crosshairs are on his friend’s chest, pisses a stream of ammo into Jake as he feels his own strength fade.
He sits back, rolls his shoulders. The light’s changed. He really needs to pee. He’s hungry. He reaches for his phone and messages Jake. Later, yeah? Gotta go. He picks up the phone and on second thoughts leaves it on his desk. It doesn’t have to be in the same room as him, not all the time. He’s not dependent. There’s something weird going on with his neck when he stands up. He winces, stretches until stuff clunks.
It’s when he comes downstairs that he realises he’s the only one in the house. The cat’s sitting on the stairs, waiting, the way that she does when there’s nothing going on. He’s always thought it would be useful at school, to be able to switch yourself off like that, to be either so deep in thought that the total lack of event in your immediate environment is hardly noticeable or so dim that it doesn’t bother you, not that being dim seems to help people tolerate school. When he used to leave in the mornings he often wanted to swap with the cat, spend the day dozing and eating and trotting off to menace other cats in the garden, let the cat sit through assembly and Maths, see how long it takes anyone to notice. There’s a stillness in the house he hasn’t known for weeks, a sense of space that used to be normal after school or if Mum was out in the evening, the place to himself to play his music and fry eggs and cheese sandwiches and sometimes boxes of frozen burgers from the village shop without her on at him to open the windows and wash up before he’s even eaten and she doesn’t understand how he can not think about the cows and the workers in the abattoir who all get PTSD because you would, wouldn’t you, killing animals all day, not to mention if people didn’t eat meat we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place and can’t he at least put the extractor fan on. Hope rises for a moment, that he can maybe at least make a toastie and put some music on, not that he can’t do those things when she’s around but he could do them better, more peacefully, if she’s out, though of course she can’t be out, not even for a walk, not for another six days, seven hours and twenty minutes. Give or take. The fourteen days, he heard her ask on the phone, what time does it end, is it noon or midnight or from when I last saw my colleague, which would have been about five o’clock on Thursday? She’ll be in the garden, must have managed to go out there and get on with something instead of wandering in and out the way she has the last few days, starting what she calls tidying up only the effect is more like messing up and five minutes later stopping to water the plants or put the wash on but not finishing anything and then she can’t find the watering can because she left it on the windowsill, and she put the laundry in the machine two days ago but didn’t start it so now they’re out of towels and she can’t have a bath, which is what she used to do to relax when she was all wound up after a gig or tired after a long shift at the café. Use a dirty one, he said, having never really seen why towels that by definition have been used only to dry newly washed skin can be dirty. You don’t have a bath and then use a dirty towel, she said, and anyway we don’t have money to waste on the hot water, it doesn’t matter. He started the machine – they’re low on washing powder – and decided he’ll just deal with the laundry himself for now. He saw her out by the shed before breakfast yesterday, skipping, like with an actual skipping rope, one he vaguely remembers from years ago with blue-painted smiley-face handles, still in her pyjamas and no socks with her trainers, hair and – other things – bouncing, and she kept getting it wrong, tangling and tripping, until she threw the rope across the patio and thumped her own head with her fists. He knew when the call came that he’d be fine, two weeks of lie-ins and gaming, no sweat, not as if the weather this time of year makes you want to go out anyway even if there was anywhere to go, and he knew it would be harder for her but you don’t expect, he didn’t expect, to see your mum basically losing it, hours spent pacing from the front gate through the house to the bottom of the garden and back, followed by the cat who is interested by people coming in and going out and apparently gratified to have the process on repeat. Try an on-line workout, he said, I’ll help you move the coffee table. You could make bread, couldn’t you, or try knitting again. I know, she kept saying, I know, I should, I just can’t bear – I don’t think I’ve ever spent a whole day inside in my life. You must have done, he said, you’ve been ill, haven’t you? What about when I was born? But neither of them can remember her being ill, not enough to stay in bed, and she says that actually she spent most of her labour with him under an apple tree in the garden of Dad’s parents’ house, that it was helpful to hang on to the branches. Yeah, he said, ew, thanks Mum, so do some more gardening, you know you’re allowed in the garden as long as you don’t come within two metres of the neighbours and they won’t be out there this time of year. I know, she said, I’m making a fuss, I just find this really hard, I knew I would. Not, he thought, as hard as getting sick, not as hard as Deepak’s dad who was in Intensive Care for three weeks or the grandparents of kids in his class who’ve died this year or his Maths teacher who’s back at work but can’t get enough breath for a sentence half the time, compared to that doing the garden instead of going up the fells is actually quite manageable, so how about he games and she does yoga in the garden and they hope neither of them starts with the fever and loss of taste and smell. He takes the mustard from the fridge, opens the jar to make sure he can still smell it, which he can even though there’s barely a scrape left. He’s going to make that toastie, and if she comes in and starts on about washing up and not eating everything when they can’t get to the shops he’ll just make one for her, quarter it on a plate with a sliced apple the way she likes, say nothing. There are crumbs underfoot, he can feel them sticking to his socks. He’ll even sweep the floor, once he’s eaten. He butters the last few slices of bread, finds there isn’t really enough cheese either but it’ll have to do, sets the pan to warm and goes up to get his phone for something to look at while he eats.
He starts his music, hearing it properly and not through his crappy cheap earbuds for the first time in days, though come to think of it Mum hasn’t been playing her own stuff either. He turns it up and then remembers that Samira next door is working nights and turns it down again. The cat sits on the counter and watches as he puts his plate in the dishwasher, singing along, drinks the last of the milk out of the carton and rinses it and puts it in the recycling, plastic lid and cardboard separated the way Mum likes. He might, he thinks, even wash the frying pan, while the music plays, but he leaves it in the sink for now, where there’s a puddle of tea leaves over the plug. It’s not as if Mum’s perfect herself, she must know the tea leaves don’t go down the drain and actually you don’t want them to, which doesn’t mean you want them sitting there, someone’s going to have to deal with it, aren’t they? He taps the strainer into the compost bin, which is overflowing with tea and onion skins and apple cores because it always is. He’s not going to deal with that now either – if she’s in the garden he’s all for leaving her there in peace – but he does fold the laundry he hung yesterday on the rack positioned against the radiator even though Mum still hasn’t turned the heating on. Let’s see if we can hold out even into December, she says, what with how warm it is now, we used to get the first frosts in September, do you remember? And though he usually points out that the relationship between the name of the month and the indoor temperature of a limestone terraced house halfway up a hill in the Peak District is at best variable, usually doesn’t point out that he knows they can’t afford the heating and she doesn’t have to jolly him along, so far she’s been more or less right. The heavier clothes, his jeans and her hoody, aren’t exactly dry but close enough, wearing them would be bad only for the first few minutes. Four of seven socks are hers, how is he still losing socks when he hasn’t left the house for a week? He slings his own stuff over his shoulder, drapes hers over the other arm, takes it all upstairs escorted by the cat.
He doesn’t like seeing Mum’s room so tidy. He thinks of her fridge magnet A Tidy House is the Sign of an Empty Mind. She’s been making her bed every morning this week, which never used to happen, spreading out the patchwork quilt that’s lived in the bottom of the wardrobe since Grandma died, leaving one of Grandma’s lumpy tapestry cushions on the pillow, after all the times she found him watching those house renovation programmes and asked him why people put cushions and covers on beds just to come back sixteen hours later and take them off again. How would he know about cushions, it’s the architecture he likes, the way the architect imagines what doesn’t exist but it’s not like drawing or films or even most games where you can make light without shade or muck about with gravity, the maths and physics have to work and the architects have to think of materials that do what they want or think of what they want to do with the materials they’ve got and there’s something about that he loves, the limits and the inventing and then seeing it made in real life. He hasn’t said it to anyone, might not say it to anyone, but maybe he’ll find out how you learn to do architecture, though it’s probably a university thing and he’s not sure about that, the debt and all those years and not many kids from his school go and he’s probably not clever enough anyway— The pile of clothes by Mum’s window, things not clean enough to put away and not dirty enough to wash, is just the striped woolly jumper and the scarf Kiran knitted for her. He dumps the clean clothes on her bed, glances out at the garden but he can’t see her, must be doing something in the shed, potting seeds or whatever, has to be a winter job because you plant them out in spring. Come on then, he says to the cat, but she’s arranging herself on the bed and ignores him. Wind blows through the ash tree outside, through the leaky window to his skin. Houses need to breathe, Mum says, who wants to live in a sealed box?
His own room is not tidy. You don’t have to look, he says, if you don’t like it, that’s why I keep the door closed. You keep the door closed, she says, so I can’t be judgey about your games. Well it doesn’t work then, does it, he says, and then they have the one where she says how games turn you into a psychopath and he says young men have always engaged in ritual violence and would she rather he was getting brain damage in a boxing ring or hunting with spears in the woods and she says spears in the woods, definitely, at least you’d get some fresh air and exercise. He puts his socks in the drawer, squashes everything down so he can close it, takes off the jeans he’s wearing and puts on the clean ones to dry them with his body-heat before they develop that smell. He checks his phone. May as well go back to the game, but he doesn’t feel like it. He might actually do some Maths, work through the textbook a bit. You have to pretend you think the exams will happen, that you’re going to get qualifications and a job, you’d go mad else. He balances the keyboard on the hard drive purring at his feet and pushes some stuff to the side of his desk, finds his textbook and then his calculator under some of the stuff. He needs the light on. It’s not as if it would be out of character for Mum to stay out gardening in the dark, she often goes night-walking. She used to take him out before bed when he was little, into the woods to see badgers and up the hill for stars, not that she can go into the woods or up the hill at the moment. Everything’s different, she says, in the dark, you hear better, you realise it’s not all about what you can see. She’ll just be out there watching the dusk. Listening to the dusk. And raking leaves, or whatever, still.
air-kissing
THERE’S A QUIET on the wind, she sings, there’s a silence in the air, name it if you dare, yeah, name it if you care. Silent spring, silent spring. Alice catches a glimpse of herself reflected in the framed map on the wall. Oh, so what? She boogies around a kitchen chair, dips to peer into the oven. The cookies want another minute. Funny how Janie Maddock – very young Janie Maddock, all cheekbones and ironed hair – giggles at the end of what you’d think is a protest song but is weirdly sweet and chirpy. Oh, and now Daniel Silvermann, Alice isn’t sure she feels like this, you can’t dance to Daniel Silvermann. I remember you there with the rose in your hair. Wasn’t there a story about someone holding a gun to his head to make him sing in tune, and he still couldn’t? Makes sense, really, you wouldn’t sing off-key on purpose even without the gun. I remember you laughed at the flames. Lugubrious, that’s the word. Skip! Springsteen, she can dance to that all right. She saw him live once, London, early seventies, she was pregnant with Susie and secretly worried that somehow the loud music would harm the baby but she knew Mark would make her feel stupid if she said anything and she did want to go. Born to Run! Cookies, there’s less than a minute between perfect and crunchy, if you’re going to eat all that butter and sugar it better be good. Not that she is going to eat all that butter and sugar – well, maybe a couple after dinner, with a very moderate spoonful of ice cream – doesn’t seem to have occurred to the government that the Extremely Vulnerable will be Extra Specially Extremely Vulnerable after months without outdoor exercise, dancing’s not going to burn off many cookies. She’s going to send them Special Delivery tomorrow morning, the cookies, ask Matt next door to take them to the post office and give him a few for his trouble, he can always use some feeding up, Kate keeps him on rabbit food. Not that they haven’t been very kind, both of them, all the way through this, doing her shopping when she couldn’t get a delivery and recently they’ve been walking or on bikes, even with the milk and tins, coming up the hill. The car insurance ran out, Kate said when she asked, and it’s not as if we’re going anywhere anyway, only she couldn’t ask them for the things she really wants, salt and vinegar Hula Hoops and the expensive Bittermints, not with Kate working at Shoots and Leaves and growing her own lentils or whatever, probably hasn’t eaten a Hula Hoop in decades. It’s infantilising, that’s what it is, having to have other people bring you food. Not that it isn’t probably good for her, to feel a bit policed, borrow a sense of shame since her own seems weaker by the day and after all why shouldn’t she have crisps and chocolate if she wants them, all those years of watching her weight and she still got cancer, it’s not as if anyone cares now if a woman who never leaves her house weighs nine stone or ten. Or ten and a half. At least she’s not drinking, or only the occasional sherry at weekends, have to mark the days somehow. Mm, this is a good batch. They’re so much nicer fresh. Just one more, that big one with all the chocolate. The good thing about baking – apart from being able to send home-made treats to the grandchildren she hasn’t seen for months, of course – is that they can’t count her biscuit consumption, Matt can’t, for example, remark to Kate that she’s getting through two packets a week and half a pound of chocolate all on her own, not that he notices or cares, probably, not that a teenaged boy doesn’t have better things to think about than his neighbour’s diet. It’s just that since Mark died she’s got used to privacy, buying what she fancies – which actually used to be mostly pots of soup and remarkably expensive bread from the nice deli by the station – and eating it when she likes and none of anyone else’s business, no need for ancestral voices in her head scolding about making her own soup which obviously she could, did for years, and now doesn’t, so there. She’d probably better go into another room while the cookies cool. Or put the rack in the sitting room, that’s a better idea, while she clears up. Newspaper on the coffee table in case of crumbs – oh hell but they’re in isolation, aren’t they, Matt and Kate, what do they call it, self-isolating, one of those horrible new nonsensical phrases. Social distancing, whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them are and there’s no way of knowing. Medical distance, they should call it, or why not just safe distance, and when did ‘distance’ become a verb? Language is also infected. Return, George Orwell, England has need of thee. So Matt can’t go to the post office tomorrow, and the grandchildren won’t get the cookies, and it’s Matt’s friend not Matt coming over on Friday with her shopping. Nice lad, turns out, though he looks – well, a bit dodgy, really, hood up and eyes down but she should know better than that, to judge by appearances, only appearances are a choice, aren’t they, he could decide to look less – anyway, he can take some cookies too, she hates the way they won’t let her pay them or do anything at all really. Very generous, of course, but there’s a limit to how grateful you want to be, how helpless you want to feel, and she passed it a while ago. I was a whole person, she wants to say, I worked my way up, managed a team and a budget, I volunteered, in this and that, most of my life, I was bossy and still could be, given anyone to boss. Extremely Vulnerable. Laura says bossy is gendered, no one calls a man bossy, they either take it for granted that men are like that or they say authoritative or a good leader. She picks up another cookie, some days you have to take comfort where you find it. Puts the kettle on for a cup of tea to go with it.
She wanders over to the window. How did she forget that? Poor Matt and especially poor Kate, she’ll be going mad shut up in the house. She forgot because it was just a text message, that’s why, because your mind and memory can’t get much purchase on pixels on a screen, because nothing feels real any more. That’s probably why she’s baking, to make something that wasn’t there before, so there’s a new thing in her house. Making friends with a biscuit, she’s going to be befriending mice at this rate, like a prisoner in an old story, and it’s the time of year, isn’t it, the mice come in from the cold. Lots of people are getting dogs, worrying the sheep all summer and leaving mess everywhere, the farmers fuming though farmers do fume, their natural state, too much time alone, probably, and no rest, but they’re quite right about the sheep and it’ll be worse come lambing time, doesn’t bear thinking about, what a dog will do to a field of pregnant ewes and panicky lambs. She leans her face against the glass, to feel it cold and hard. No one’s touched her in months, not since she had that last lunch with Sheila back in March at the garden centre and they did the air-kissing thing they learnt late in life. No one’s ever going to do that again, are they? Maybe she’ll die without ever touching another human, maybe she’s had her last hug, handshake, air-kiss. She realised – at the funeral, in fact, standing there singing next to Susie – that she’d almost certainly had the last sex of her life, she’s come to terms with that, mostly, sorts herself out when she needs it, but you can’t hug yourself or pat your own shoulder. Well, the shoulder – no, that doesn’t work at all. Oh shut up, she thinks, pull yourself together, here you are warm and comfortable in your nice house with your nice neighbours arranging for their nice friends to bring you nice food and there are people dying out there, children hungry and women locked up with men who beat them and nurses working twenty-eight hours a day, you just shut up. And wash up. Stop patting yourself and put those cookies somewhere you’re not going to eat them all. More Springsteen, there’s a reason they don’t write protest anthems about well-off retired people feeling a bit sad. What is it they say, check your privilege, and there it is, her privilege, in plain sight as always. But she’s still leaning against the window, watching her breath mist the glass, thinking outrageously that at least the condensation is material evidence that she’s alive, is in a body making heat and carbon dioxide – as if baking cookies weren’t better evidence – when she sees Kate coming down the garden path next door, glancing left and right before she opens the gate, and striding off up the lane. Hiking boots, backpack, no pretending she’s just taking a breath of air or rushing to the doctor, even supposing you’re allowed to see a doctor while self-isolating. I should stop her, Alice thinks, she’s breaking the law, but Kate’s moving fast and Alice just stands there, cheek to cheek with her window, watching.
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Moss
