Rocks in the Belly (29 page)

I put my hands in my pockets to stop them shaking, the scratches hurting me. There isn't much in my head and I rummage around for a feeling. There should be lots of them but there's emptiness, the odd thought bubbling up out of the numb. Mainly of them burying her in that mucky outfit. Her rotting like that. One slipper on, one slipper off.

I meander down the side of the house and start rolling a cigarette in the shed, the birds chirruping, the bicycle overhead.

I can smoke in the house now so I walk in, the cigarette smoking into one closed eye. I stand looking at her shape. She's mine now,
finally. I can get as close to her as I like. I can
touch
her all I want. Yet I can also feel the same forcefield around her.

I take swig after swig of drink, chuck the cigarette in the sink, put the bottle down — standing here breathing through the anxiety and the chemical sharpness of the vodka.

I hold her under the armpits and lift, her head lolling back, her mouth open — her eyes. I set her down again, her feet parting outwards. With an uncertain hand I close her eyes, then take her in my arms, not looking at her face, my head turned. Looking away and yet greedy for the looking. Having to turn side-on to fit us through doorways.

At the bottom of the stairs I'm tempted to carry her out into the street and roar at everyone to wake up and see what's happened. My mum's dead and they're sleeping.

I place her at the foot of the stairs and sit panting, staring, my eyes unfocused, such a final silence gathered around us. The vodka clogging my head.

I scoop her up in my arms and strain to a standing position again, her head lolling and mine brimming with bursting at the strain.

I take the fourth step, the fifth, each footfall an uncertain thud as I carry her up, my innards held taut against this proximity. The early morning light changing quickly now, colour filling the house, altering the atmosphere. The sound of birdsong such a gentle unkindness.

I stagger across the landing but can't hold her anymore, putting her as carefully as possible onto the floor.

In the bathroom I turn on the bath taps and sit on the edge, letting the cold water run down over my wrists and hands, a little of my blood colouring the water.

The temperature starts to warm and I adjust the taps to get it just right for my dead mother. I leave it running and go out and kneel in front of her on the landing, her chest seeming to move for
a second again. My brain playing with me. The taps thundering into the bath.

‘Let's get you cleaned up, Mum.' I lift her, struggling to stand, pivoting her on her legs, both of us teetering towards toppling down the staircase but my shoulder braces against the wall and I lurch us into the bathroom, setting her down again beside the bath, the windows fogged over. My own chest going up and down.

I turn off the taps and there's that silence again, louder somehow because I'm sharing it with this absent presence. I wipe my eyes, wiping away tears I'm still not attached to. I'm dreading the ones I'll be attached to.

Sitting on the bath edge, leaning over her again, my arms hooking her armpits. I haul her up onto my knees and then have to slide out from under, holding her torso on the side of the bath, her shoulder blades catching on the edge and keeping her there, my hand pushing into her stomach to hold her. Her body not yet cooled. I hurry around to lift her legs, cradling the head as she slips in, her foot clattering across the taps and turning one to a trickle — my face and chest covered with water as it seesaws back and forth in the bath, licking right up the walls on one side, then thumping onto me and the lino on the other. The spillage spreading silently across the floor and darkening the hallway carpet.

I hold her head above the water, her clothes wanting to float up away, her eyes open again. I close them then pull my other hand from behind her head and stand.

She stays there, her head squashed a little awkwardly against the end of the bath, perpendicular to her body so that her chin is on her chest, staring at her belly. Checking for meningitis. And I can't help but mimic it, taking me back to the day when she was that butter colour in hospital. Robert sitting on her bed looking like he was loving her so hard, when actually he was just trying so hard to be loved.

I traipse downstairs for the vodka, wincing at the taste but savouring something clean. Me and the bottle heading back up a heavy step at a time, her engagement ring left behind on the carpet halfway up.

Back in the bathroom I get a jolt when I see her. A swig from the bottle tries to wash it away. I turn the dripping tap, hating the quiet that comes after.

With finger and thumb I take the one slipper off her and help that foot slide off the side of the bath and into the water. Her ankle such a raw rainbow of bruising. My hands shaking again.

I go to her bedroom and start rifling through her wardrobe for an outfit she might think elegant. I pull out clothes and throw them onto the carpet. Take a dress and hold it up against me for size — toss it aside, open a bottom drawer but there's just a large dress box, clothes behind it. I go to bring the box closer and it's heavier than it should be so I lift its lid enough for a peek, then take the whole thing out.

Inside is my childhood. Every picture, every school report, even the bad ones, a baby book with its sections filled in — records of my growth rate and first solids and first crawling, a lock of baby hair. Pictures of me in the crib. It looks like me. A picture of that big rock in the cemetery too, just like that black chunk of it we still have downstairs. Here's some milk teeth.

She's caught every drop of my childhood. My Alonely poem, the creases still in it from where she screwed it up. Ribbons from sports day. I move more paintings and scribbles and homespun birthday cards aside and there's a travel book on Canada that opens naturally to my town. Even a brochure about a career in the prison service here.

I can't help but let out a sound at the thought of her trying to understand my life. And the idea of her living over here alone, sad. Me over there, alone and sad. And sulking.

There's the beginning of a letter to me too — many stalled beginnings, words crossed out and written over. I can read as far as the first sentence before the paper blurs and I have to replace the lid for now. Her half-written letter slipping into my wet pocket.

I go to return the box but at the back of the drawer is that video of Robert. I sit and look at it, the spools of tape showing through the plastic window, then I stand and carry it with me, putting it at the top of the stairs.

Back in the bathroom I get a stronger jolt, her face under the water, eyes open and staring again, a few bubbles trickling out of her nose. I get on my knees in the wet, pierce the water with my arms and lift her back above the surface — brush her hair aside, some water running from her mouth.

Tugging the bathroom curtains shut to hide the morning light, I swig from the bottle then begin to undress her.

By the time I've finished the water is cold and discoloured and I've put a big dent in the contents of the vodka bottle. I reach between her feet to pull up the plug and then can't help but watch as the water slips away, the plughole slurping desperately, her body crumpling slowly in on itself. Deflating. One of her fists clenched tight.

I lay a towel over her then go downstairs with the vodka and the video, switch on the radio for company, run the hot tap into a bucket in the sink. I turn off the radio again, wake up the old video player and slip the tape in.

I mop the kitchen floor, going to the TV occasionally and watching the footage of Robert sat there on the edge of all that sky, his hair fluttering madly in the rush of air.

‘
1
'

Such unbridled happiness for such a tragic life.

‘
2
'

Me having to mop round Mum's single slipper left here, before finally giving in and taking it out, chucking it onto the back lawn, the sound of Robert's recorded squeals coming at me from inside the house. As if it's back in the days when he was still alive. When we all were.

I add bleach to a final bucket, starting to feel a kindling of warmth inside me — some illusion of regained control, that I'm finally doing right by her, even if it feels too late.

I stop in the twilight of the kitchen and the smell of bleach, my chin on the top of the mop handle, the video ended, just static on the screen, my eyes staring out the windows. Slow tears running like somebody else's tears.

I take a cloth, dipping a corner of it in bleach and go through to the bathroom and the faded ochre stain on the wall-side of the U-bend. Grandma's stain.

My dad got down on his knees in this tight space and cleaned up all her blood rather than let Mum face the reality. Or to save him facing hers. I kneel where he knelt in this small, tight space and finish the job for him, the old blood stain resisting for a while then lifting in granular stages.

I wash my hands for about the thirtieth time today, my skin creased as if from a long, luxurious bath.

Upstairs again I stand in the bathroom doorway, expecting to see goosebumps on her skin but there's no such life on it, only that slowly dimming colour. The house clogged full of silence.

Getting her out the bath is harder. Especially now she's heavier, the sound of water sloshing inside her every time I pause for breath. Reminding me of when I was a boy, filling up on water so I could hear it slop about inside me when I wriggled my belly.

By the time she's dressed and in bed I'm drenched, Mum's outfit not sitting on her right. She looks worse now somehow, like waxwork.

And although she's in bed, she doesn't look like she's in bed. She's there and the bed's there too, that's all.

I perch on the edge for a second, then rush downstairs, hit the eject button on the video player but it gets the tape caught in its throat. I bang the top over and over, pushing the eject button, the old motors whining. Out it comes and I hold it against me, walking back to the stairs but catch sight of the mica rock sat there on the windowsill. I collect that too and go up to her, lay the rock and the video on the bed — tease that fist of hers out into a hand.

It feels good seeing her with these important artefacts of her life. I smooth the care out of her forehead and lie down beside her.

Her body smells clean and smooth. My head in near her shoulder but frightened to burrow right into that neck — the sounds of activity beginning outside. Me lying here, never closer to her even though she's never been further away. The room still and quiet and restful, the pictures of family on the walls — sunlit sunshine days shining out from the frames, full of airborne confetti and smiles and teeth. The captured moments we put up to make life look comprehensible. Palatable. Celebrated.

I lie here with her in this certain type of silence, an unfamiliar quiet inside me now too. Only the occasional car and voice outside puncturing the sense that the world has stopped.

Eventually I go downstairs and out into the back garden, dropping her soiled clothes on the grass. I come back from the front dragging hedge debris with me, dumping it in a heap next to her wet clothes, then going back for more hedge.

When I've finished there's a trail of leaves from the front garden to the back. I pile it all up then get an old, empty cardboard box of fertiliser from the shed and tear it into strips still greasy from the chemicals. Chemicals which glow blue-green when I light them.

The hedge won't go up though, it just pops and smokes so I'm
back in the shed kicking around until I find a faded red petrol can with a little left inside it for the lawnmower. The vodka making me stagger and stumble.

I douse the bonfire then add the best part of a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen to slow it down. A swig from the vodka then I empty that on too, disgusted at the taste and my drinking and hiding.

I take a stick from the pile and light the petrol and oil mixture covering the end of it — chuck it on and whoof! I smile at that. Start adding the stolen pictures of the families and brides and couples, their faces burning slowly away and the fake gold on the frames peeling off in a green flame. Fool's gold, like family is.

I use another stick to pick Mum's wet clothes up, putting them on the fire where they hiss and complain. Another link with her going. Her slipper smoking on top of it all.

As the fire starts to struggle I head indoors looking for more to burn. Gathering up our real family pictures — the one of Robert in those orange overalls. Everyone loves this picture, from that day he had — the one in the video. I grab the photo of me and my new bike on the front path. Me and my first day at school. Broken Robert strapped into his chair, chocolate cake all over his mouth. The other Robert, dressed in his new school uniform on his birthday, Mum's arm around him and both their heads chopped off. That picture of Dad doting on Mum while she's just looking brightly, confidently into the camera lens. And the one of us at the photographer's, that eight-year-old in his scratchiest clothes, a swirly oil backdrop behind him.

I touch a blackened finger to his face. That boy is running around inside me somewhere still, his head comically oversized for his body. He's the little fuse in our family that snapped. The most sensitive part of the circuitry, so that the whole family stopped working afterwards. He was the only one expressing that which was
otherwise unexpressed in the family. So that he is our family's anger. Its brokenness. Its neglect.

What am I then?

And I don't know. Except that I'm all that's left.

I get out of my wet clothes and put them on the fire too. The morning sun feeling kind on my skin but I can only think that she can't feel it. That she'll never see another dawn. She can't smell this smoke, the way it takes me back to autumnal Sundays and sweaters and dusk. Dad sweeping leaves then using his hand along with the rake to dump them on the fire, almost choking it out. Having to stagger away from the smoke, his cheeks puffed out, eyes clamped shut. Swearing under his breath, laughing. The sound of dishes clattering in the sink and the feel of Monday morning and school already in my stomach.