Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

‘You going to Bath, by any chance?’

The pregnant woman was no more than a shivering girl, with large, greenish eyes. She was trying to sound and look casual, standing with one knee bent and her arms crossed. But she had pulled her clothes tightly round herself and over the impertinent bump, which seemed to Michael oddly prominent. It was all out in front, as if the baby had not filled out her sides at all. There was little difference between the colour of her skin and hair, which, in a spectrum between olive and dark gold, might have been striking if she had been warmer and healthier. As it was, she looked yellow in the wrong places, across her forehead and round her mouth, and greenish at the roots of her hair and under the eyes. She was small-boned and long bodied; she brought to mind a snake that has swallowed a watermelon. He tried not to look at her stomach but found himself imagining that she would be very slim after the baby was born. And here she was offering him a lift. He could leave the van here and get them to fix it when they had time, surely in a few days. In the meantime it could be pushed round the back out of sight of the road. He beamed Jeff Stevenson’s smile at her.

‘Yes! Yes, I am! You can give me a lift? How wonderful, thank you! Anywhere in Bath’s fine- drop me anywhere- how kind!’

The girl was taken aback. ‘What, isn’t that your van? I thought that was your van. I thought you might be going to Bath, that’s all. I’m looking for a lift.’

Michael stared at her and saw his own dismay in her face. ‘It is. It’s broken down. I thought you were offering me a lift. Is there something wrong with your car as well, then?’

‘No. Anyway, it’s not mine.’ She did not pretend to find the confusion amusing, or try to dislodge the disappointment that now sat on her mouth. She motioned towards the garage shop, where the boyfriend, or whoever he was, was just emerging. ‘It’s his,’ she said. ‘Him over there.’

‘Oh, I see. I see, you’re hitching, are you? That was your last lift? I thought you were with him.’

‘I am, I was, I mean- I’m not hitching,’ she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears and shaking her head. ‘Mind you, maybe I am, now.’ She tried a smile that turned out to be more a wrinkle of her nose, which was red with cold. She sniffed. ‘I just thought you was going to Bath, that’s all.’

‘Well, I am. Or I will be, but I’ve got to get the van towed back.’

‘Oh, well. Never mind.’

‘But isn’t that your car? I saw you getting out.’

The boyfriend had stopped at the door of his car and was lighting a cigarette. The girl watched him and said dully, ‘No. It’s his.’ With his hands on his hips, he scowled in her direction. She looked away. He shouted something mocking, which Michael did not quite hear. The girl turned, shook her head and the man swore, got in and turned the ignition. Loud and aggressive music pulsed from the car as he drove off with a deliberate scream of the tyres.

The girl watched until the car had disappeared. ‘Can’t I get a lift with the tow?’ she asked.

Michael could not begin to ask what it all meant, for fear that the girl, who was now looking at him with an expectant half-smile, might tell him. Something in the eyes, or perhaps in the droop of the shoulders, or the ripe bulge, or the way she shivered in her inadequate clothing, was crying out to him. Slightly flattered as Michael was by the thought that anyone could turn to him for anything, he was also bewildered and appalled. Big eyes or not, she was another thing he did not need, and already she had confused him to the point that he was no longer sure whether he was Jeff Stevenson or Michael. But it was Michael who was stuck with two stolen church effigies in the back of the useless van, the sight of which could get him picked up by the police at any minute. It was Michael who had not been alone in the company of a woman for so long it felt like years, Michael who wanted only to sink into the dark bedroom of his flat. So it was Michael who said, ‘Can’t help you, sorry. Got to make a phone call,’ and strode away. Feeling stupid, he changed his mind, walked back to the van and took the backpack from the back, glaring at Steph as he lifted it over one shoulder and made for the shop.

It crossed Steph’s mind that it was not very clever of this man to refuse her a lift and then walk off leaving the van unlocked like that. Not that she made a habit of assessing men’s intelligence. She did not assess men at all (except to wonder if and for how long they might be nice to her) so much as react to them. So as she watched Michael’s progress across the forecourt, she shivered, wondering if he, with his dark eyes, might turn out to be nice. She was often wrong. Jace had been nice to her for quite a long time before he changed. It had been after about three months that Jace had first muttered in her ear that she was so great, he was dead carried away and he couldn’t stop, she didn’t want him to stop, did she, not to put on a stupid condom, did she? The truth was that she hadn’t. So Steph had spent a lot of time thinking that it was at least partly her fault that when she got pregnant he had stopped thinking she was great, which made it partly her fault that he hit her. And he had only ever taken the back of his hand to her, never his fists. She had spent an equal amount of time hoping that after the baby was born things would change.

A waste of time, she knew. Jace had turned out to be one of those people who did nothing for your loneliness. In fact she had felt lonelier when she was with him than when she was on her own in her Nan’s empty house; lonelier even than she was now, stuck at this freezing garage in the middle of nowhere. She stared up the road where Jace had burned out of sight. Had she dumped him or he her? She could have got back in the car. Jace had not stopped her from getting back in the car, but still, he must have dumped her, because she felt so miserable. If she had done the dumping it would be Jace who was in a mess, stuck with no transport and no money. But she had noticed already that Michael’s skin was as smooth as bone and there was no threat in his eyes. When she had looked at him, perhaps she had felt a little less lonely. He was out of sight now, in the shop. She opened the van door. There was a solid wall between the van’s interior and the seats in front, and no windows in the sides. It would have been nice to find a blanket, but there were dustsheets and a couple of flattened cardboard boxes. Steph clambered in awkwardly, holding her stomach, and pulled the door shut behind her.

It was the day after the Dutch couple came that I noticed the buddleias in the garden. I must have seen them before, there were four of them and they were such huge ones, how could I not have seen them? But it was not until that afternoon that I really took them in. Perhaps until then they were simply waiting for me to pay attention to them. Perhaps it was the talk of Mother, combined with the brighter weather that day. Or perhaps it was just that the buddleias’ time had come. I had already begun to think of things coming round in their own time.

Anyway, I had allowed myself a little rest after lunch, feeling rather tired by the strain of my unexpected visitors the day before. I had got up about three o’clock and was looking down at the garden from my bedroom window, and in the sunshine and a brisk wind there they were, four enormous buddleias, waving those disgusting dead blooms at me.

In an instant I was back in Oakfield Avenue on that day eighteen years ago, in Mother’s room, the ground floor bedroom behind the kitchen that she took when she moved downstairs after Father died. She was lying in bed on her side waiting to be wiped, as usual saying nothing and with the butter-wouldn’t-melt face on her. I was trying not to look at her backside or think about her face. In fact I was trying not to be there, I suppose, because through her bedroom window I was concentrating on watching the buddleia in our back garden. It was February then, too, and I remember thinking suddenly that that buddleia out there in the garden should not be allowed to get away with it. It should not be allowed to go on waving its branches of dead flowers that looked like Mother’s long pointy turds (not a word I like, but there is no other somehow) at me. I cast my mind back to the summer before and it seemed a poor bargain, this plant trading an unreliable memory of a short season, a mere month of butterflies fluttering at its purple flowers, for its intolerable appearance now and for most of the rest of the year. Between a finger and thumb I was holding Mother’s big pants that I’d just hoicked off her, and the pad which contained the awful wobbly chocolate-coloured rope that she had squeezed out in the night and whose precise shape and colour I saw replicated on the buddleia bush swaying in the wind. The room was full of our silence, and of the familiar smell like vinegar and lavender mixed with dirt and that particular human clay. Outside, the buddleia waved its thousand old lady’s turd-tipped branches and I looked back at Mother’s offering in my hand and I thought, oh God, how many more of these, as many as wave at me from the buddleia bush? How many more squalid little starts to how many more squalid little days with me looking through a window onto a view of dead flowers?