Touch (8 page)

When she'd read those emails and found out about Charlotte – Charlotte Hamilton, of all the stupid, gormless women he had to fuck! – Des had brought her white lilies and asked for forgiveness, crying like a little boy, saying how much he loved her. The flowers had seemed shameless, like exposed pudenda. Their hypocritical whiteness and their faint scent of corruption set off a deep rage in Mary. She'd made up her mind there and then, stuffing the flowers head first into the swing bin in their kitchen. Mark had watched them, wide-eyed. Des took to the spare room, sleeping on the fold-down bed and adopting a bewildered expression whenever they passed in the hallway or she found him waiting for the bathroom in the morning as she hurried to get Mark ready for school.

 
Before she left, she took a pair of pinking shears and cut the arms from every shirt and every suit jacket in his wardrobe. Then she paired up all his beautiful shoes and recycled them into the Help Africa bin at Oxfam. It was a vulgar cliché – like the emails she'd read – but deeply satisfying. Like writing
Taser
across the bathroom mirror in lipstick then slashing a line through it. Just one small act of revenge that stood for everything that was too huge to heave into words. There was sweetness in it, just as the proverb said.

Mary had already found the furnished flat. She'd packed her clothes and Mark's and a few toys and moved there in a taxi. Then she'd met Mark from school and taken another direction home. She'd led him away to another life, answering all his questions calmly. She'd explained most things. Not everything, of course. And that had felt good, fuelled by the purest rage. But now Mark was sick and there was this other thing. She didn't feel strong any more. Not even anger could last for ever. Not even the satisfaction of revenge, which had just diminished her in the end.

It was almost dark outside. The whole town had lit up into interlocking patterns of lights. Meaningless patterns. And a meaningless thought – as if they could have a purpose or ought to have. Whatever had made her think that? No wonder she was beginning to feel trapped. She'd sent Des the address on a strip of paper. No message. Because after all he was Mark's father. But in two weeks he hadn't been in touch. Not unless there were messages on her mobile that she couldn't retrieve. Today was the first time they'd had any contact. The first time she'd heard his voice. She wondered if he was still seeing Charlotte.

 
The sunset was extinguishing behind a bank of cloud. It resembled a burning slagheap. Mary couldn't get the other man out of her mind. The pale hair on the back of his hands. Hands that had held her, or rather steered her. His blunt features and cleft chin, his green eyes, his teeth glinting. The way his shoulders tapered to a thick waist and muscular legs. They'd had a nodding acquaintance until that afternoon in the Byron precinct. She'd picked Mark up from school and was heading home when some lads on skateboards had surrounded them. They'd found it funny to circle them, make them huddle against the precinct wall, performing their stupid stunts and laughing.

Then Steve, the caretaker, had appeared. He'd hardly spoken. It was as if the lads recognised him or knew him by reputation. Somehow he'd drawn them into a circle and whatever he'd said or done had sent the lads grovelling to apologise. She'd seen him take the ringleader in his hoodie to one side, gripping his arm above the elbow. The boy had seemed scared. Then the caretaker had walked her home, polite to a fault, solicitous, helpful. He'd called by the day after to see if she was ok, and then the day after that. Then he'd had to check the fuse box or repair the intercom and Mary had offered him a cup of tea. One day, he'd played chess with Mark, as if remembering the moves from childhood. After that, he seemed possessed of some indelible loyalty. Now Mary didn't know what to do. She rose to draw the curtains. It was five-thirty and soon he'd be here again, asking about the boy. Enquiring in his low, insinuating voice. Touching her arm in the way that made her afraid.

Mary went into the kitchen and reached above the gas cooker for a box of matches. She took a packet of cigarettes from the back of the cupboard and lit one, switching on the kitchen ventilator. Thin strands of smoke swirled and were sucked out through its plastic visor into the night. Cars went by outside, changing gear as they took on the hill where slush was freezing to the road. She threw her cigarette butt into the sink and turned on the waste shredder. The noise was sudden, shocking, a harsh metallic outburst. How easily the blades might take in a hand or arm. It was hard not to imagine that. Faint footsteps went into the flat above. Then a voice on the radio. Somebody had come home. She wouldn't know them. She hardly knew anybody.

It was days since she'd left the flats. In fact it was hard to remember exactly when. Mary went back to the living room and stared out through a gap in the curtains. From the road, headlights flashed up against the windows. The layer of slush had frozen hard. Now and again a car would skid on its way down the hill, veering into the kerb or towards the centre of the road. From behind, a whimper warned her that Mark was about to wake. She took a glass of water from the kitchen and went to him. He was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes against the light. Mary offered him the drink. His lips were parched and flaking. The boy took the glass and drank in little self-absorbed gulps.

‘Is that better, darling?'

He nodded. His brown eyes seemed huge. They were hooded with drowsiness.

‘Try and sleep again, hey?'

He nodded again and she tucked him in, kissing his temple, placing the bedside lamp on the floor to dim the light. There was a soft knocking on the door. She caught her breath, looking down at her son. He didn't seem to have heard. He was sinking back into sleep.

 
From the corridor Mary could see the outline of a figure waiting outside. Shadowy behind the reinforced glass. It was the way he looked behind the glass door of his office down there in the foyer, the room lit like a chrysalis with something inside waiting to emerge. She paused at the door, her hand on the chain.

‘Who is it?'

As if there could be any doubt.

‘It's me of course! Steve.'

It was the caretaker's voice. Of course. Courteous and considerate, his impatience a faraway suggestion. Mary unbolted the door and slipped the chain. He came in at once, carrying a large paper carrier bag, brushing past her, stocky as a bulldog. He was still wearing the rugby shirt with its dark-green stripes.

‘Warm up some plates, eh?'

She went to the kitchen, realising how hungry she was.

Maybe he could smell the cigarette. Hard to tell. The fan was still on. Today he might notice but say nothing. Or he might sniff the air in that quizzical way. You couldn't predict. You could never predict. The caretaker followed her in, unpacking some foil cartons with cardboard lids from the brown-paper carrier.

‘Here we are. Fried rice for two, one chicken Chow Mein and one fried beef in black bean sauce!'

He seemed cheerful tonight. Mary tried to look pleased. There was a little vacuum of dread in her chest as she gathered cutlery and plates.

She opened the cartons. They were surprisingly hot. He must have gone for the food in his car. The blue Datsun.

‘How's the boy? Better? Asleep?'

His hand brushed her arm and she shuddered slightly. She couldn't help it.

‘Better, I think. He's stopped being sick.'

‘That's good. Poor little lad, he's had a bad time, hasn't he?'

Mary tipped the food onto the warm plates. In the silence she knew his green eyes were on her. Looking, absorbing her. Sometimes she wondered if he was simple. Unformed in some way. It was the way he'd let his gaze rest on hers without any inhibition. She couldn't discuss Mark with him. He'd offer more help. More ways to make her grateful. Always insinuating. Sometimes asking questions about Des. Why their marriage had broken up, what kind of food or TV programmes she liked. Innocent questions, but with an edge, an undertone. Leading questions that went in a certain direction. Though she never quite knew what that was.

‘Here you are.'

She handed him his plate and they sat down to eat in armchairs in the living room. He reached down into the carrier bag and brought out two cans of pale ale.

‘I nearly forgot! Got a glass?'

Mary shook her head.

‘Never mind. Drink it out of the can. Like football sup-porters, eh? Lager louts!'

It was cheap pale ale, not lager. But he laughed anyway, balancing the meal on his knees, pulling the ring-pull from his can and folding it neatly before dropping it into the bag at his feet. He tilted his head so that the light fell across sparse hair, taking a long draught of the beer. Then he sighed and put the can down, opening one for Mary and handing it across. It was gassy and metallic, but she drank it. She needed its chill to quell the fluttering in her stomach.

 
The caretaker ate rapidly, dipping his head down to the fork rather than raising it up to his mouth, and swigging beer from the can. When he had finished, he laid the plate on the floor and rested his hands on his knees. She could see the hairs glistening there like strands of glass.

‘I'll just take a peep at the boy.'

Mary opened her mouth to speak. She couldn't. It was hard to get her breath. The man was already rising from his chair, padding softly to the bedroom to look down at the sleeping child. When he returned to the living room Mary was gathering up the plates and the empty beer cans. The caretaker looked at her. Green eyes, like a cat.

‘I'll fetch it then, shall I?'

Mary nodded, running the hot tap to wash the plates, squirting washing up liquid into the sink. That smell and the spicy food made her feel sick again. She turned on the fan again to get rid of the steam, rinsing the plates and stacking them. They'd have coffee later. That was the usual way of it. But not until he asked her.

The man returned, carrying a chequered board and a box. He set up the board on the table and laid out the chess set, carefully positioning each piece. It'd started as a joke, a way of passing the time. He played chess impulsively, making bold and foolish sallies with his pieces to capture a pawn but sacrifice a bishop or knight. It was as if he had no subterfuge. Mary sat down opposite him. He took a black pawn and a white one, mixing them together behind his back and holding out his clenched fists. She chose the right hand and he held out a white pawn.

‘Lucky! You go first.'

Mary said nothing. The chequered board made her dizzy. She was short of breath again, moving her king's pawn two squares forward with an effort. The caretaker took his knight and moved it into the centre of the board, taking command. Mary let her fingers stray towards her queen's pawn and then paused. He was looking at her, watching every move, examining her motives. She broke out her own knight. He stared at the board. The hands of the electric clock jerked silently forward on the wall. He leaned over to move a pawn and the intercom gave a screech in the corridor like the scream of a caged bird. She had a visitor. Down in the foyer someone had come for her, someone was waiting to be let in.

Neither of them moved. Mary let her hands fall into her lap. The intercom went off again. She rose to her feet, but the caretaker was quicker, getting between her and the door. She sat down again at once and looked up at him.

‘It'll wake the boy.'

The man said nothing. He bit his lip, looking puzzled, uncomprehending. Again the screech, two short ones this time, followed by a whimper from Mark's room. Mary moved forward but the caretaker caught her wrist, his fingernails scraping into her skin. Then Mark was there, framed in the doorway of the bedroom, his eyes glazed and unfocused, unaware of the man.

‘Mummy! Mummy!'

She broke free to go to him, but the caretaker got there first, taking him up and hugging him to his chest.

 
Mary ran to the corridor, pressing the switch that would allow her to speak and release the lock on the main door. The mouthpiece swallowed her cry. It flew out of the room, down the black lift-shaft to the man below. The lock clicked and gave. She waited for the sounds of the lift, for footsteps on the landing. From behind her came the muffled, almost sobbing words of the caretaker as he comforted the boy. She could hear Mark asking for her over and over.

‘Where's Mummy? Where's Mummy?'

The man, in a dazed voice, repeating, ‘It's alright, she's here, it's alright.'

Their voices meshed. Like the cries of gulls that circled the flats each morning. Mary imagined Des pounding up the stairs with his bald head gleaming and his jacket and shirt sleeves flapping at the elbows. Jack-the-Lad with his arms full of lilies.
Taser
. That was hysterical. But she didn't laugh. She watched the glitter of lights that lay beyond the window, mapping each street. The earth she stood on was slowly turning. Here she was, upright, clinging to the wall. Beyond a single sheet of glass lay the long fall. Glass that was neither a liquid nor a solid, but something in between. Indeterminate, even by the reasoning of molecular dynamics. Glass that had been a mountain, an ocean, a tide of sand washed onto a beach on one day of history. Glass that had been changed by fire, incandescent in an iron crucible, in furnace heat. Now here it was, cool, between her and everything. There was the game of chess, unfinished, each piece staring into battle. There was the lift, rising with her husband inside. There was that stranger cradling their child. And outside was the world. All that treachery. The night.

I've always loved fishmongers. Ever since I was a child and stood in front of their windows in the town where there was a row of fish shops following the hill down to the market square. I love the red, honest hands of fishmongers and their smeared white aprons. I love the fishy smell of them. And I love their thin, worn-away knives that are so very sharp. The way they slide them along the spine of a mackerel or herring. The way they lift the backbone clean out.

There's something infinitely treasurable to me about the grotto of a fishmonger's window, its cornucopia of the sea. And let me tell you, I hate the bloody mess of butchers' shops. The butcher is a crude mechanic by comparison with the fishmonger's artistry. He shows only parts of an animal: their rib-joints, loins, neck, legs, kidneys, livers and lungs. But the fishmonger offers you the whole creature you're about to devour: head, tail and fins. Though they're dead on his slab you can imagine their lives in the rivers and the seas so easily. You can see them leaping from the phosphorescence of the fishing boat's bow-wave or hurling themselves upwards over the sheet silver of a weir.

I love fishmongers and the clean, hygienic windows of their shops. Their piles of ice like the jewellery of a snow queen, their heaps of winkles and mussels and oysters with sequined shells. Their fans of herring and trout, skate wings and sea-bass, red and grey mullet, the fillets of hake and cod and huss, the fat coils of conger eel or the dull red meat of shark steaks cut from behind a staring, savage head. Silvery mounds of sprats and sardines, sliced whiting and coley, hake and halibut and the slack, gaping mouths of codfish. Lastly the shells of live crabs or lobsters, those anachronistic war machines of rusted iron. They way they stalk blindly about their tanks, the armoured, predatory spiders of the sea.

Let me tell you that this is a love affair that will not go away. Each night I dream of fishmongers unpacking their crates of ice, lifting out the slender, delicate bodies of fish under the moon. Cradling them tenderly in their mercurial slime and bearing them away like lovers.

My father never touched me until I was eleven years old. Then we had a secret and my mother's eyes behind her smudged spectacles stopped seeing. Let's be clear: my father was never a fishmonger and he disliked eating fish, though he spent hours trying to catch them. I remember him choking on a fish bone when I was very small. I held onto my little sister and watched him go blue as my mother pounded his back and the meal went cold. Whenever we had fish after that my mother had to search through it for bones and my father would search after her, probing it with his fork until we felt sick watching him. Sometimes it was cod or haddock rolled in breadcrumbs and fried, but usually it was grilled mackerel that my mother brought home fresh from the market.

Much later, I remember my mother buying fish fingers and cooking them for tea. My father came home and said,
What
on earth are these?
and when my mother explained that it was fish with the bones taken out he was delighted. It was a long time before my mother tired of the blandness of fish fingers and we had real fish again. Even tins of pilchards had a spiny piece of bone that caught in your teeth and had to be lifted out carefully from the little fish. I remember how the cat loved those bones especially, mewing like a crazy thing and rubbing against my legs with her ecstatic, hypocritical fondness.

Sometimes we caught sticklebacks in the stream below the house and kept them at home until the water went foul and they died, belly-up and stinking like the worst cowards.

My father came to me at bedtime when my sister was safely asleep in the next room and my mother was busy over the ironing board, pressing his white shirts for work. When he touched me it was like opening the pink gills of a fish and I caught the faint smell of saltwater as if there was an ocean or estuary inside me. Afterwards I could feel it washing backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards inside me like a wave over strands of slippery weed.

 
I've got a seashell here in my hand. Faintly pink with dull purples and blues. They lie sleeping in the rough surface until water lights them and they glint with memories of the sea. My little sister found this shell on the beach and gave it to me because I was crying over something. Because my father in his swimming trunks and long arms and hairy belly had got too close and hurt me. The shell whorls into a tunnel like the inside of someone's ear. I called into it for help or for sheer love of the sea where it swayed in green glassy waves. Inside the sea and inside me tiny fish were darting, silvery as those shoals of stars that turn the sky to milk at night.

I remember the first time I put my ear to the ear of the shell and we heard the sound of the sea in each other. The shell pink and clean as the inside of my body, gleaming when it was wet in a hundred subtle colours, which I learned to call
hues
. He'd spidered his arms around me under the water where no one could see the hurt, just our heads bobbing like corks. It was no use calling out because everyone yells with cold or surprise when they enter the sea.

 
A fishmonger must lead a strange and beautiful life. Rising early from sleep to drive off and collect his boxes of treasure from the wholesale market. Inside them, on ice, lie the closely packed bodies, the blinded eyes of fishes. Or perhaps he rises even earlier, before dawn tinges the sky. Driving all the way from our town to the coast, walking the quayside, waiting for the fishing boats to come home, standing where the fishermen's wives wait fearfully near an angry sea. There he can choose from the open crates of freshly landed fish, bear witness to the strange, deformed monsters that the sea has made inside itself. Deep down, away from the light that we take for granted but which never reaches the ocean depths.

I can't bear the thought of a polluted sea, its poisons twisting the exquisite bodies of fish that gather there under the waves like dreams. Under the waves where the light of day is only a faint green glow. I can't stand the thought of what we're doing to the oceans and long for the purity of saltwater and wind and passing time.

I've seen my own body like that in other dreams. Tangled in a fisherman's net and dragged out from the deep with my long dark hair wrapped around my waist, my cunt salty with days in the sea, my nipples icy from freezing water. Each time I'm hauled ashore onto seaweed and shingle one kiss on my cold lips would wake me, but no one dares. Instead the fisherman gather and mutter in foreign tongues: Portuguese or Spanish, the exotic vowels of Welsh or Gaelic. They stump around angrily in their sea boots, trying to make a decision, until I'm thrown back into the breakers. Another useless deformity of the deep.

 
My father kept a fishing rod and a creel of bait and hooks in the garden shed. On Saturdays he went fishing in the canal after his week in the factory office where he added up the company figures and did complicated sums. He spent his days submerged in the teeming shoals of mathematics. Sometimes I or my sister or both went with him at weekends, staring into the water where factory chimneys wobbled in wintry light. Down in his keep-net we'd see the pale flicker of a roach or the dangerous spine of a perch. Their lives so secretive, so different from our own. Their fixed stares, their mouths opening and closing, trying to catch something just out of reach or understanding.

Sometimes my father would take a small fish for live bait, dragging a hook into its body right along the spine, fixing it there as it writhed in his hand, choking on air. The scales would come away on his fingers and he'd wipe them carelessly on his thigh and go piking in the reed beds. I'd watch the poor fish fade and glimmer in the water until it died on the hook, its silvery gleam growing fainter and duller like an electric light flickering into darkness when the current fails. Though sometimes there were monstrous pike stalking that glimmer, seizing it then being hooked on the end of the line, dragging down the red-tipped float.

My father would play them so calmly and cunningly. Giving them line, deceiving them into thinking they'd broken free, then almost imperceptibly reeling them in. Inch by inch, foot by foot. Until he pulled their long, reptilian bodies from the water. Their ugly mouths lined with sloping teeth yanked sideways by the cruel hook. Their bellies sagging and struggling and their goggle eyes glittering with an ancient greed. My father would drag them in with the gaff hook and finish them off on the bank with sharp blows to the head. He'd tell me how the female pike sometimes ate the male after mating and I'd gladly watch her striped body thresh at the end of the gleaming, almost invisible line.

 
One year at Christmas my father came to my room smelling of beer and cigarettes. He sat on my bed and told me a story about a lost boy. Long ago and far away in the Old World this boy had chased a runaway kid goat onto a mountain and then had lost himself as darkness fell. He'd heard the goat bleating and found it on a rocky ledge and stayed with it all night singing, hugging it for warmth and playing his flute until the moon had risen in the east to light the pathway home to his mother and father.

Ever after, the goat had been his special friend and people began to think that the boy himself was only half human. His long hair was tied back with a leather thong and the notes that came from his flute were like the bleating cries of a lost kid. When a drought struck the village, withering all the crops, the villagers suspected the boy of sorcery and decided to cut his throat to end their bad luck. But as the angry mob surrounded him and as the headman raised his knife, the boy bounded away from them in the shape of a goat and was never seen again. As my father told me the story I thought of the boy's wicked yellow eyes smiling at me through his words.

After the story, when the goat-boy's eyes faded into the darkness of long ago, my father touched me for the first time so that I wriggled like a fish and loved him for it and would keep the secret forever. My mother would never understand our love, even though she slept with him and knew his warm tobacco and sweat smell, the touch of his lips and rough cheeks. Sometimes I thought about her breasts and I envied them above all else. The breasts I didn't yet have. I imagined them iridescent, like fish scales in the moonlight under the song of the little goatherd, imagined that this was what drew my father to her bed when he left me each night, kissing me on the forehead and asking me to promise never to tell.

 
Never is deep and final. It rolls in your head in waves that get higher and higher but never break. That day at the seaside I had sand in my nails and he touched me clumsily under the water and hurt me for the first time in my blue swimming costume. Perhaps not meaning to, under the water where no one could see. Just two heads bobbing in that swaying green and the sun glaring on white cliffs and the gulls screaming close, telling everybody who would not hear. That day I found a huge crab on the shingle and dropped a stone onto it, smashing its shell. All week it rotted and stank in the sun and I felt such terrible guilt that I'd killed it. Years later I realised that it was already dead, already scuttling along the floor of some ghostly ocean, its pincers stretched out to grab whatever spectral prey was there.

Some nights I dream of nets wrapping around me like wet hair, of my father's drowned face found under the canal bridge where the tench swam, deep and secretive. That long fish with its thick, rubbery lips. My father had never caught one, his clever hooks sliding empty in water that was shaken by traffic and reflected the sky. Rain breaking those pictures of the world above, pelting onto the surface when they found him near the lock's falling tons of water. My father wanting to be a fish, wanting to breathe water instead of air, his fingernails torn off from so suddenly leaving life. Or from finding out that he was not watery-lunged or cold blooded or fishy enough to live in that sly, suffocating element.

Never is a word without depth or fathom. I wanted them to throw him back into that trembling water-sky to try again. But my mother kept his body in the air and blubbered over his blue face and salted it with tears.

 
Now I have a glass of water in my hand and on the plate in front of me are three sardines fried quickly in olive oil with a handful of green capers and black peppercorns. I've dashed the vinegar bottle across them and squeezed out a yellow crescent of lemon. I'll eat them with slices of German rye bread and a glass of spring-water from a source in Scotland where the rain still runs pure over the granite and heather of the moor. I picture this with each mouthful of hot fish, each time my teeth meet to crush their bones.

 
Today the fishmonger smiled at me as he looked up from filleting a brown trout on his cutting block. He threw the guts away and held its skin in his hands and smiled at me and I knew that he was thinking of the countless shoals of fish that dart in rivers and rivulets and oceans. I knew that in the night he would dream of fish as I would. Their golden eyes, their mouths bulging with the purest water, their gills coaxing out its difficult oxygen. That was a trick my father never learned and trying to learn it cost him his life. That the fishmonger had learned it, I knew for sure. He'd smile the same smile as each gleaming fin stroked his face where he lay staring upwards through weed and water at a thin moon polishing the pebbles of the riverbed.

I count out silver coins from my purse into the fishmonger's hand. The irises of his eyes are pale grey, the colour of watered silk. I give him the exact price of the fish, coin by coin. The fishmonger smiles and turns to his window, tipping a bucket of mackerel into trays of ice, lifting a salmon onto its crystal throne. The fishmonger's wife comes to the doorway and scowls, watching us together as if she knows everything. But the fishmonger still wears that secret smile as I put the sardines into my shopping bag. He shows it again as we say goodbye, subtle as a glimmer of sun on water.

Tonight he and I will glide from saltwater ocean to the river's mouth. We'll swim upstream to the foaming edge of a waterfall, smelling out the peaty stream where we were born together as sister and brother. Tonight my breasts will stand out, cold and taut in their nickel skin of fish scales and I'll arch out in ecstasy, leaping above the ocean and the river to fall back gladly into their depth. I'll leave saltwater for fresh, swim in the milt of my lover's sperm, letting out orgasms of fabulous, jewelled eggs as his flanks stroke mine. No fingers or panting breath or hot skin, no secrets to keep or lies to hold. But coming again and again with that electrical pleasure, the shuddering beauty of his touch.