Instructions for a Heatwave (6 page)

Monica stopped dabbing at her forehead with a hankie, aghast. “You mean kill it? But you have to make it better, you
have to … My stepdaughters, they’ll … You have to fix this cat. Please.”

“Um …” The vet floundered, diverted from his usual script. Then he rallied himself. “It’s a very quick, very peaceful procedure,” he said uncertainly. “Well. Some people like to stay with the animal while it happens.”

Monica looked down at the cat, which was making a terrible scrabbling motion with its front paws, trying to crawl back inside the cardboard box. It had taken her a good ten minutes to get it into the box—it hadn’t wanted to go in, not at all, had fought and struggled with desperate, froglike movements. And now, here, all it wanted was to get back inside. Did it somehow know? Did it realize they were discussing its imminent death? No, it seemed to be saying, not now, not yet, there are many more things I need to do. Monica thought suddenly of Aoife. How she’d cried and cried when that kitten died. Her knees raw above her school socks as she stood in the garden. The tiny form, wrapped up in an old towel, cradled in her arms. Their father digging a hole in the earth. Make it deep, now, Robert, won’t you, their mother had whispered, then pressed Aoife to her pinny. It was the kitten’s time, she’d said to her, that’s what it was. But Aoife cried, couldn’t stop. A sickly thing, the kitten had been, right from the start, but she had cried and cried.

Monica had her hands on the cat, in the fur of its shoulders. She could feel the raised beads of its spine, the triangles of its shoulder blades. Taken aback, as always, at how frail its bones felt. It seemed such a solid, large creature, this cat, but when you actually had it in your hands, it felt birdlike, insubstantial, hardly there at all. Surprisingly warm, too. It was purring now, rubbing its face into her fingers, in a way she’d never allowed before, and it was looking up at her and its expression was reassured, trusting. As long as you’re here, it seemed to be saying, then everything is going to be all right. Monica couldn’t look away, couldn’t break
the gaze between her and the cat, even though she was aware of the vet filling his syringe, sliding a treacherous length of silver into the cat’s fur; even though she knew this, she kept looking at the cat, she kept talking to it. The cat purred, she ran her hands over the herringbone marks of its fur, and then it was as if the cat was struck by a preoccupying thought, as if it had just remembered something important, and Monica was wondering what it might be, what cats think about, when she realized its head was slack in her hands, its eyes were no longer looking at her, but past her, as if it could see something behind her, something coming towards her, something bad, something she didn’t know about.

“Oh,” she said, at the same time as the vet said: “That’s it now.”

The speed of it was horrifying. That slippage from life so easy. There one moment and not there the next. Monica had to fight the urge to look about her. Where, where had the cat gone? It must be here somewhere. It couldn’t have just vanished like that.

Aoife, strangely, surfaced in her mind again. Grown up, now, no longer in school socks. In the hospital that time: Aoife leaning over the dish, before the nurse came to take it away.

Monica bowed her head, wanting to shake the cat, to rouse it back to life, desperate for it to stretch out its paws and claw at her sleeve. You’d have thought such a passing would involve a struggle, a fight, a battle between states. But perhaps not. Perhaps it was always such a drift, such a slide.

Terrible to think it could happen with such ease.

It was Aoife who had leaned over and looked in the dish. She, Monica, had said: Oh, don’t, Aoife, it’s bad luck. But Aoife hadn’t listened, of course. She’d looked at it for a long time.

Monica kept her fingers under the cat’s jaw, which was fragile as a wishbone; the other hand touched the fur behind the cat’s
ear, the very softest fur of all, she’d always thought, impossibly soft, like dandelion down.

How quickly it had happened, Aoife growing up. It seemed to Monica that one day Aoife was a child, with dragging shoelaces and plaits that undid themselves, and the next, she was a woman with draped clothes and numerous necklaces, standing beside Monica’s hospital bed, not listening when she’d said: Aoife, don’t look. Her hair slid over her face so Monica couldn’t read her expression. A long time it was that she looked. And then she said, in a low sort of voice: It died before it could even live. And she, Monica, sitting up in the bed, had banged her fist on her knee and said, No, not at all. It had lived. She had felt it live, for all those weeks. Felt its presence running through her veins, felt its existence undeniably in the odd dizziness of the mornings, in the nausea induced by cigarettes and exhaust fumes and furniture polish. It had lived, she’d said to her sister. Aoife raised her head then and said, Of course it did, I’m sorry, Mon, I’m so sorry.

It would have been almost three, that child.

There was no use in thinking these things. Monica took her hands off the cat’s body. She turned away. She blew her nose. She pulled her bag higher onto her shoulder. She thanked the vet. She paid at the reception desk. She took the cardboard box, which felt peculiarly light (was it the soul, she wondered, that carried all the weight?). She went out onto the pavement. She looked up and down the high street for a moment. She walked to the bus stop.

Back at the house, Monica went around opening the windows. Let some air in, for God’s sake. But there seemed to be no air, inside or out. Heat seemed to reach in through the narrow gaps, like smoke under a door. Monica slammed the windows shut again, dabbed some cologne on her wrists, her temples, redid her hair. Gretta and Aoife had thick hair that grew in all directions but hers was gossamer-thin, straight as straight, once
pale but now a kind of washed-out mouse. There was nothing to be done with it. Just have it set at the hairdresser’s every week and use a net at night.

Monica strode across the landing and into the bathroom. She looked around her wildly, ripped some tissue paper off its roll, pressed it to her nose. Her throat was raw and sore—hay fever, maybe?—her eyes smarting. She flung the tissue paper down the loo and began to pull at the zip on her dress. She had to freshen herself for Peter, who would be home soon; it was important to keep your husband interested, everyone said that.

She was going to have a bath. Yes, she was.

She didn’t care about the bloody water ban—she needed a bath, she had to have one. To hell with the government and their miserly quotas, to hell with everyone. She pushed in the plug and opened both taps. Water gushed forth. She was, for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of it, frothing, shivering, at the bottom of the bath. The zip was stuck halfway down; Monica swore and tugged at it and didn’t even care when she heard the sharp sound of fabric tearing; she had to get out of this dress, she had to bathe, she had to be looking nice, seeming calm, for when she told Peter about the cat, for when she asked him to say that it was him who’d had it put down. She had to make him see that this was the only way, to tell the girls that it was him who had found the cat, that it was him there with it at the end. But would he lie to them for her? She had no idea.

The dress fell at last in a pool of heated cotton around her ankles. Monica upended the box of bath salts Peter’s mother had given her for Christmas—and what kind of a present was that to give your daughter-in-law, anyway? Monica had said nothing when Jessica had let slip that Granny had given Jenny a cashmere scarf, but it had hurt. It had hurt a great deal.

Monica stepped into the illegal water. She’d got it just right. A lovely, reviving tepid. She slipped her body under the silken
water, feeling the grit and rasp of undissolved crystals, not unpleasant, beneath her.

There had been no word from Aoife, again, at Christmas. Whereas she, Monica, had sent a card to her place of work. Some things needed to be observed, no matter what. Her mother had had a card, of sorts, from Aoife, she’d noticed. And Michael Francis, too. But she’d said nothing.

The bathtub was cast-iron, large enough to lie down in. She would have liked to put in a new suite but Peter, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. That was what came of marrying an antiques dealer. Peter went on and on about—how did he put it?—the integrity of houses. It’s an early-Victorian farmhouse, he would say, why confuse the place with horrible, modern tat? She would have liked to ask how a house could possibly be confused. And why couldn’t she have a bathroom carpet? But she kept her counsel. She had a suspicion that his reluctance to change a single thing about the house had more to do with wanting it to be the same as when the children were living there all the time, in Jenny’s era, to foster the illusion that nothing had changed. As Gretta always said: some things were better left alone.

So she had a bathroom with a flaking iron bathtub that stood on lion’s feet. A toilet with a peeling wooden seat and a pull chain that constantly broke. Shelves that should have held bath foam and shampoo bottles but instead displayed some of Peter’s collection of nineteenth-century medicine bottles. Their bed had a sagging feather mattress, which made her sneeze, and a rusting iron frame. She wasn’t allowed a nice electric oven, like everyone else, but had to struggle away with the range that Peter had found on some wasteland, dragged home and done up, blackening it himself, and most of the floor, in the process. The thing ate wood like a great, fiery-mouthed monster and the effort involved in rustling up dinner when the girls were hungry was unbelievable. The hallway and driveway and barn and backyard were forever
jammed with stacked chairs, tatty sofas, tabletops that Peter was “in the middle” of doing up for the shop. It was beyond Monica why anyone would want to buy this stuff. But buy it they did.

Monica sat up when she heard the phone ring. Could it be Jenny? No. Those weeping phone calls seemed to have stopped recently. Peter? Her mother again? She contemplated the bathmat, the distance to the towel. She wasn’t ready to have the conversation about the cat yet. Her throat closed again at the thought of it, the drifting look in its eyes, that cardboard box waiting in the barn. What on earth was the matter with her?

It would have been three this coming autumn.

She sloshed back down into the water, closing her eyes as the phone continued to ring, only opening them again when the house was silent.

It had been an antique necklace that had started everything between her and Peter. She’d been temping for a few weeks at a school in Bermondsey, typing letters to parents about sports day, about uniform requirements, tallying up the registers, writing out the teachers’ pay slips. Those first few months after Joe had left, after what had happened in the hospital, with the bills to pay and the rent mounting up and the flat so dreadful and empty and the whole thing with Aoife: Monica hated to think about that time. She had, that morning, put on the emerald necklace Joe’s grandmother had given her when they’d got married. It wasn’t something she wore often but Joe had taken her rings, the pendant he’d bought her for her twenty-first. To sell, she supposed. They had always been short of money.

So she had put on the emerald necklace, not something she’d ever particularly liked. Too ornate, too old-looking for her taste. But she’d thought it would go with the green belt on her skirt. She’d been on the bus taking her south of the river, standing up on the running board because those early-morning routes were always jam-packed, when a man had offered her his seat.
It always made her think of Aoife, whenever this happened. Because they’d been on the tube together once and a man, not old, middle-aged perhaps, had stood up for them and just at the moment where she’d been saying, Thank you so much, and moving forward, Aoife had caught her by the arm and said, No, thank you, to the man, it’s not necessary.

Anyway, so the man had offered her his seat and she had accepted with a nod—shutting her mind to Aoife and her principles—and lowered herself onto the seat and, as she did so, the man had exclaimed, “What a beautiful necklace.”

She had turned, surprised, ticket in hand. The man was leaning with one hand on the rail, examining her throat area, his eyes intent, his face absorbed. It seemed extraordinary to be looked at like that, with such attention, such concentration. So when the man had asked if she was fond of early-Edwardian filigree, she had breathed, “Oh, yes.” And he had taken the seat next to her, when it became vacant, and talked about metalworking and artisans and Venetian influence, and she had looked up at him, eyes wide, and when he asked if he could touch the “piece,” as he called it, she’d said, “Of course.”

She should dig out that necklace, Monica thought, as she soaped her shoulders. The phone rang again, more briefly this time, and Monica turned on the tap to top up the water, looking down at her body. Not bad, she decided, for someone approaching her mid-thirties. She still had a waist, which was more than could be said for most women her age. She was still trim; she was careful about what she ate, these days. She kept celery on hand in the kitchen for those moments of hunger. There was the sense that everything was being pulled downwards a touch, as if her flesh had suddenly become aware of gravity. The last time she’d seen Aoife—how long ago was it now, three years, almost four?—she’d been struck by her youth. The flawless, taut skin of her face, the way the flesh clung to the bone, the smoothness of her
throat, her chest, the supple flex of her arms. It had given Monica a shock; everyone said they looked alike but Monica had never seen it, not at all. As children, they couldn’t have been more different, Aoife so dark and she, Monica, so fair. But she suddenly saw that, the older they got, the more similar they became, as if they were converging on a single destiny, a unified identity. Monica felt herself to be so clearly separate from Aoife, so different in every conceivable way, but looking at her that day, that day in the kitchen, she could see herself ten years previously.

When Peter had told her, the second time they’d met—he’d taken her to a pub in Holborn, a dark-walled place with the severed heads of deer mounted on the walls—that he had children, Monica had felt a jolt that wasn’t entirely disagreeable. Of course, she’d put down her drink and gathered up her bag, saying that she was not the sort of girl who went out with married men. Because she wasn’t, not at all. She was, she knew, the sort of girl who went out with a nice boy, then married him and lived above a shop with him and stayed married to him forever. That was who she was. The question, however, was what did that sort of girl do when this destiny, decreed from a very young age, went awry, went horribly, horribly wrong?