Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.

The ‘papers’ were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bank books. And they had to go through the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she’d been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.

Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.

Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.

It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm. Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he’d played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he was trying to cram himself into clothes he’d outworn.

They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon’s old home seemed stranded.

Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.

Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother’s eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. ‘She’s got a lot to put up with, always did.’ Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgement. Simon’s siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.

She asked nothing about his own life.

Later, she prepared the evening meal.

As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his emails. He worked for a biotech start-up that specialised in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright Captain Nemo colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could ‘paint’ their own fish designs.

That was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon’s career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with ‘Happy Birthday Julie’ written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.

His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing emails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.

Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.

Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother’s news.

‘She’s fine in herself. She’s cooking supper right now… Yes, she’s keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we’ll have to think about that… I’ll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder…

‘Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.’ Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary’s ferocious commitment to her bridge club – ‘They can’t have a match if I don’t turn up, you know!’ Peter’s endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an ageing dreamer’s continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.

Simon didn’t particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they had to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.

Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.

She’d once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.

After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon’s childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.

The evening was very, very long, in the silence of the room with a blank telly screen, the time stretched out by the ticks of Uncle Billy’s carriage clock.

In the morning he came out of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjama bottoms, heading for the bathroom.

Father Gabriel Nolan was coming up the stairs with a cup of tea on a saucer. He gave Simon a sort of thin-lipped smile. In the bright morning light Simon saw that dried mucus clung to the hairs protruding from his fleshy nose.

‘She’s taken a turn for the worse in the night,’ said the priest. ‘A stroke, perhaps. It’s all very sudden.’ And he bustled into Mother’s bedroom.

Simon just stood there.

He quickly used the bathroom. He went back to his bedroom and put on his pants and yesterday’s shirt.

Then, in his socks, he went into Mother’s bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the only light a ghostly blue glow soaking through the curtains. It was like walking into an aquarium. She was lying on the right-hand side of the double bed she had shared with Simon’s father for so long. She was flat on her back, staring up. Her arms were outside the sheets, which were neatly tucked in. The cup of tea sat on her bedside cabinet. Father Nolan sat at her bedside, holding her hand.

Her eyes flickered towards Simon.

Simon, frightened, distressed, was angry to find this smut-nosed, biscuit-crumby priest in his mother’s bedroom. ‘Have you called the doctor?’

Mother murmured something, at the back of her throat.

‘No doctor,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Is that a decision for you to make?’

‘It’s a decision for her,’ said the priest, gravely, not unkindly, firmly. ‘She wants to go downstairs. The lounge.’

‘She’s better off in bed.’

‘Let her see the garden.’

Father Nolan’s calm, unctuous tone was grating. Simon snapped, ‘How are we going to get her down the stairs?’

‘We’ll manage.’

They lifted Mother up from the bed, and wrapped her in blankets. Simon saw there was a bedpan, sticking out from under the bed. It was actually a plastic potty, a horrible dirty old pink thing he remembered from his own childhood. It was full of thick yellow pee. Father Nolan must have helped her use it.

They carried her down the stairs together, Simon holding her under the arms, the priest taking her legs.

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it went dark on the landing above. Simon looked up. The stairs seemed very tall and high, the landing quite black. ‘Maybe a bulb blew,’ he said. But the lights hadn’t been on, the landing illuminated by daylight.

Father Nolan said, ‘She doesn’t need to go upstairs again.’