Limestone and Clay (4 page)

It had never been a baby in his mind. It had been the threat of chains. There had been the flicker of pleasure in the proof that he was fertile – though it had never seriously crossed his mind that he might not be. Apart from that the whole episode had been a narrow squeak, a door flung open at the last minute, a reprieve. Now that he wants a baby, experiences a foolish almost-broodiness when he sees little boys with their kites in the park, little girls on swings, he thinks for the first time of that problem as a child who could have been. Who would be thirteen now. He doesn't regret what happened, it is simply that his imagination has only just caught up with it. He has only just grasped what it meant.

Simon gets swiftly up, sickened by this sleepy emotional soup. He stands under the hot needles of the shower thinking of clean uncomplicated things: rocks and water and sky. There is a week of work to get through – five days of geography: meanders and oxbow lakes, contour lines and gross national products – and then the trip.

When Simon has gone, Nadia goes back into the bathroom. She cleans her teeth, watching herself in the mirror, wiping off the toothpaste spatters. In the early days, when she first moved in with Simon, Nadia would stand like this, brushing her teeth, her face reflected near the bottom of the mirror, imagining Celia's face, slightly higher up, overlapping. For Celia had lived briefly with Simon in this flat too. And then Nadia would see, like tissue-paper masks, the faces of all the lovers that had ever been here, brushing their teeth in front of this mirror. And she had bought a new mirror and smashed the old one before she threw it away.

Nadia opens the window to breathe in the fresh air and sees the woman from the bottom flat outside, sweeping the steps to the front door. There is just the round grey circle that is the top of her head and beneath it the shoulders and arms, solid in a blue nylon housecoat, moving in and out with the rhythm of her sweeping. The broom makes a shushing sound on the step. Nadia closes the window quietly, feeling guilty. She never sweeps the step or cleans the communal staircase. But it is Simon's flat, after all, and neither does he. She has never spoken to the woman downstairs, only nodded in passing.

‘She talks,' Simon had warned. ‘And talks and talks and talks. Steer clear.' And so Nadia had contrived to avoid her, listened on the landing for a moment before going down, retreating if there was a sound until the door banged shut.

Nadia makes herself a cup of peppermint tea and, sighing, carries it to her studio. She cannot put it off any longer. She must work, point or no point. She makes her living selling pots at craft fairs. The masks sell well, and the mugs and the candlesticks. There are rows of them, leather-hard clay, waiting to be fired. Spring is a slow time. In the autumn and up to Christmas she can sell hundreds of pots, as many as she can make. At first this was a thrill. It was all that she had ever wanted – to make money from her craft. Now … she watches the light on the rows of dull things. Tired shapes, easy, repetitive. She should make another batch before she fires them. Bored, she thinks. Is that what I am? It is just a job. Simon is bored with his job too – trying to cram adolescent heads with maps and charts. But then he has his caving. That is his challenge. And this is not supposed to be just a job, it is supposed to be her life, all she ever wanted. She remembers the excitement when the kiln arrived, how she hardly left her studio for weeks, how Simon had to come and find her at bedtime, how they made love, her hands on his flesh, her head full of clay so that the glistening slickness between them became confused in her mind with the act of her creation. When did that leak away?

She opens the lid of the plastic-lined dustbin where she keeps her clay, looks at the cold, inert mass. She has not the heart for it today. Instead she cleans the basin, which is pocked and smeared with clay splashes. She begins to clean the window, which is almost obscured to half-way up by splashes from the wheel, and as she stretches and rubs she feels a familiar sensation. She stops. No. It cannot be. Let it not be. She feels the pulling ache in her belly that heralds the onset of her period.

Nadia curls in bed, her breasts pressed against her knees. One hand is clamped between her thighs against the pad, pressing as if forcing back the flow. There was blood, not bright, but old. Not much, but the sight of the brownness made her weak. There's nothing you can do. That's what the doctor would say if she was to ring. Go to bed and wait, he'd say, and it is true. No power on earth can alter what is happening. She has been here so many times before, in this bed, in this position, experiencing the seeping-away of her hope. The other times are there in bed beside her. They curl like the petals of a rose behind her, each folded into each, all the memories, all her babies. The taste of tears is in her mouth, a salt-sea taste. She closes her eyes, each in turn, and the colour of the curtains changes, the colour of the light itself. With the left eye it is bluish and sharp, with the right, pink and soft. Which is correct? She closes them both.

The sea-taste of unspent tears brings her the memory of a beach, somewhere in Wales. It was a summer holiday, her mother and father were sitting on towels beside a blue-and-orange-striped windbreak. There was a thermos flask and sandwiches crunchy with sand. The beach stretched long and wide, the sea was miles away, a flat distant glint. The sand was licked and carved into shallow hollows and ridges like a giant map, sprawling, textured with ripples, shards of shells and the curly casts of sand-worms. When the tide turned, the sea just rolled in, unimaginably, just rolled in, no indeterminate lapping forward and back. No warning. It rolled in, wafers of water, deceptively shallow and inviting, a thin shiny skin, warm from the warmth of the sunny sand. It didn't come in evenly but followed the ways it had carved, stealthily filling the hollows, making long tentacles of water that could creep round an unwary paddling child, wrap around and join and tighten and deepen until the child found itself stranded. And then the sand could give way, simply fall away beneath the feet of the child, dissolve, sand that had seemed so solid a moment before. Most years a child was drowned, Nadia's mother warned. And Nadia wondered why they had come here in that case, and watched, anxiously, her brother with his fishing net, a tiny distant figure, smaller than her little finger if she held it up to measure.

The telephone rings. Nadia is shaken from her memory by its rude double blurt. She almost doesn't answer, but it does not give up and she hauls herself up to answer it.

‘Hello stranger,' Sue says accusingly. ‘I thought I'd see you at the weekend.'

Nadia is pleased to hear her voice. She is pulled out of herself. ‘Sorry,' she says.

‘Have you done another firing yet? Someone from the council rang and asked if we wanted to do a stall at some function. Could you manage some egg-cups?'

Nadia laughs. ‘Yes, I expect so. Oh, it's nice to hear your voice. How about lunch, Sue?'

‘Oh I'd love to, Nad, but … is everything all right?'

‘Oh, fine.'

‘It's just that you sound a bit … Simon all right?'

‘Fine. Tomorrow?'

‘Oh Nad, we're off to Devon tomorrow to stay with Matthew's shitty uncle.'

‘I forgot.'

‘
Sure
you're all right? I could nip out for an hour tonight, get someone to sit.'

‘No.'

‘Sure?' Sue sounds relieved. ‘I'll send you a postcard.'

‘Love to the kids. Have a good holiday.' Nadia puts down the phone and looks at it resentfully. Talking to a friend would lift the lid off her box now, but then she has talked and talked. Sue has heard this story so often, listened to her cry. What else could she say? She must be tired of Nadia's misery. She's got enough of her own to deal with, with the doings of her soddish husband and three rumbustious kids. This time it is not up to her friends, it is up to Nadia.

On the hills mist thickens and clings. Cumulonimbus, the rain-bearing cloud, drags its heavy belly through the heather. Sheep the colour of rocks, the colour of cloud, huddle close in the wetness. Drips hang from the wizened fingertips of stunted trees. In burrows newborn rabbits curl blindly in the dim, grey-furred warmth. And through the spongy earth there is the probing of furled fronds, obedient to the season, pushing up out of the darkness into the heavy grey light.

Noodles

It is dark. There is red flock wallpaper but it is flaking into velvet feathers. There is a churning, a grumbling, a low threat. Reptiles fighting, scaly skull pressed against scaly skull, flat teeth grinding. Nadia wakes. The dream lurks in her pillow and she pulls her head out of it – a terrible, squashing, dissolving dream. And now there is fresh blood. And it is over, if ever there was anything more than imagination.

She washes and puts the kettle on for tea. There is a dark murmurous pain in the small of her back. She swallows paracetamol with water. Simon has gone to work, left a note:
Didn't want to wake you, see you, love Si
. Nadia pulls up the blind. Cherry petals blown by the wind are splattered on the windowpane. Rain pelts, the petals slide. There is the sound of her dream, which has become the faint blustery moan of the wind. The shiny branches of the trees lash and struggle. If there was sunshine, perhaps, she could cope. The kettle switches itself off and falls quiet. She makes tea with a bag in a cup. Something about the ordinary process of fishing the wet brown teabag out of the cup, the useless wodge leaking thick brown onto the silver surface of the draining-board, causes her to moan. She listens as if outside herself to the animal sound, sadness that any creature would recognise. She lets her head hang back and howls, thinking of the soft tube of a howling dog's muzzle, the full-throated, heart-rending sound. Is this madness? the detached part of her wonders. But she need not do it, would not do it if Simon, if anyone, was here. She wonders if she is audible in the flat below, and stops. She drinks her tea, still standing, watching the dismal spring weather. She feels blood flowing and soaking her pad. Inside, the wings of hope shrivel as if they have flapped against a flame. All the silly bubbles burst and she lets her legs go, she actually sinks to the floor, feeling ridiculous and melodramatic. She lies for a short time on the cork tiles. It is a reasonably clean kitchen but under the refrigerator and the cupboards she can see dark bits and pieces, movements even, dust-clogged webs. In such small spaces whole worlds are living, feeding on crumbs and fat splashes, living and breeding. Whole worlds of life underneath the refrigerator, and yet no life in Nadia's womb.

It is cold lying on the floor. It needs sweeping and washing. Nadia thinks of a bright housewife in an advertisement with her mop and detergent, cutting hygienic swathes through the grease, a shiny smile upon her face. It would be children's footprints she'd be mopping up, and the muddy skids of a puppy-dog's paws. There is a wine cork under the fridge and some once-frozen peas. She gets up, shivering, and goes back to bed.

Nadia lies curled and dozing, thinking of yesterday, when she lay like this and there was still some hope. She would ring Sue if she were not off to Devon. If she could have seen her yesterday and talked, she might have gained some perspective. Sue is good at putting things in perspective, and Nadia likes listening to Sue's stories of muddly family life with unreliable Matthew. Instead she'd stayed at home and thrown some silly egg-cups on the wheel. She had moulded little chicken's beaks onto some of them, and ducks' on the others, and given them quirky expressions on their faces, and outsize feet. And now they must wait for the firing.

She could ring someone else. There are other friends – even Miles – who would be glad to help. But why should anyone want to know? Why spread the misery? She can manage it, swaddle it and stow it away. It only needs time. She cannot bear the thought of pity; there is enough of that in herself.

She gets up and changes her pad, averting her eyes from the dark clotted wetness. She opens the bathroom window. The rain has paused and the wind dropped. A rag of blue shows in the sky, a handkerchief waving. Below the window are greenish daffodils almost open; one blast of sunshine and they'll ripen and split, yell out their colour.

The doorbell rings. Nadia hesitates. She fluffs up her hair with her fingers and presses her lips together to give them colour. She goes to the door and looks through the peephole. She sees the distorted fishy face of the woman from downstairs swimming through the glass. Curious, she opens the door.

The woman looks surprised and clears her throat. ‘Good-morning,' she says, ‘I'm your local Intrigue representative. I wonder if I could interest you …' She thrusts forth a rain-spattered cosmetics catalogue.

‘Oh, no thanks,' says Nadia and begins to close the door.

‘Bugger it,' the woman says. ‘Pardon me. I knew I wouldn't be any good at this.'

Nadia smiles and pauses, her interest caught. ‘Just started?'

‘Yes, thought it might be a good side-line, but I haven't mastered my “sales technique”.' The woman regards her closely. ‘Didn't think you'd be in, duck. Been all down the street. Haven't sold a sodding thing. Are you all right?' She has odd-coloured eyes, one brown, one blue, and a cheerful doughy face.

‘Fine …' Nadia falters under her scrutiny.

‘Only you don't look it. Have I got you out of bed?'

‘Oh no …'

‘Why don't you let me in duck, and have a look at my samples? There might be something to bring a bit of colour to your cheeks. There's all sorts in here …' She flicks through the pages of lipsticks and creams. ‘Some of them aren't too bad. Go on … be a devil.'

‘Oh all right then,' says Nadia. After all she has nothing else to do but mope and mourn.

‘Have you a dog?' the woman asks, looking past her into the hall.

‘No … it's no pets allowed, isn't it?'