Elizabeth Day - Home Fires

She had spent years refurbishing the house, stripping back the damp, acrid-smelling carpets, sanding the floorboards and covering them artfully with thick, woven rugs. She had painted every single wall and skirting board herself, from the duck-egg blue of the downstairs bathroom to the delicate ivory hues of their bedroom, offset by the wrought-iron bed frame and the dark, almost blackened wood of the wardrobe. She had discovered that you can learn taste quite easily. The home she had created for her family bore little relation to the Artex tiles and pebble dash of her youth.

There was one room she left untouched so that, now, still, after everything that has happened, the walls are magnolia, the floor is carpeted in a brownish-grey that does not show up the dirt. There are two stripped-pine bookcases on either side of the fireplace, the shelves devoid of books so that they stand empty as a toothless mouth. The wardrobe door bears the pitted marks of blu-tack and the shallow black dots of drawing pins withdrawn. The sheetless single bed, covered by a thin, tartan blanket, looks hollow. In this room, it is only the spaces that have been left behind.

Sometimes, when she passes the door, she thinks she sees him there in a lump beneath the blankets, sleeping in, wasting half the day, snoring gently. But it is always a trick of the light, or of the mind. And then she is forced to remember, all over again.

‘Caroline!’ Andrew’s voice resurfaces, this time more impatient. She knows she should answer but she thinks hazily that if it is important, he will come upstairs to find her. She stays sheltered underneath the duvet, numbed against any sense of time by those oblong white pills the doctor has given her to blot out the sharpest edges of her grief. Xanax, they are called, and the name makes her think of a creature from science fiction, an alien being burrowing away inside her, reshaping her internal moonscape.

‘These should make you feel a bit better,’ the doctor had said, in an attempt to be reassuring. But they do not make her feel better so much as remove the need to feel in the first place, so that her distress becomes strangely separated from her sense of self. The pain is still there but it begins to exist almost as a curiosity, a thing to be looked at and acknowledged rather than the awfulness that envelops her, that makes existing on any sort of practical level seem impossible.

Most of the time these days, she finds that the best way of dispersing the encroaching shadow, the slow puddle that spreads across her consciousness like spilt ink, is to take another pill. She is aware that she is ignoring the doctor’s advice. The printed label on the front of the brown plastic bottle tells her she is allowed a maximum of four over a period of twenty-four hours. Yesterday, Caroline took six, convincing herself that she needed them, craving the consolation. Also, if she is truly honest, part of her likes the thought that she is deliberately causing herself harm. There is something so comforting in the thought of self-destruction, in the thought of painting herself out altogether.

‘Caroline! Where are you?’

But there is Andrew to think about, of course. There is always him. Always, always Andrew . . . She hears him bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time and the mere thought of this makes her feel exhausted. She is mystified that he can still possess so much energy. There is something unseemly about it, she thinks, something untrustworthy about his absurd good health. His hair has turned grey in the last twelve weeks but oddly this change appears to suit him, emphasising the prominent incline of his cheekbones and the dark hazel of his wide-set eyes. He has grown into his looks, the weathering of his flesh lending him an air of self-contained purpose.

By contrast, Caroline’s looks have been slipping away from her, as though her physical appearance is no longer under her control. Her skin, once fair and smooth, has turned sallow. She has dark circles under her eyes and a delicate web of faint wrinkles at each corner, radiating outwards. Her lips have narrowed and dried so that she finds herself licking them without thinking, running the tip of her tongue across the surface, feeling the sticky bits of skin dislodge as she does so. She has lost weight and although she has always disliked being plump in the past, has always tried to shift the extra heaviness around her belly and thighs, this new thinness does not suit her: her arms poke out of T-shirts and her hair has got thinner at the ends, sparse as straw.

She is not yet so far gone that she does not care about these changes. She has never been enamoured by her own appearance but these days it makes her sad to look at herself in the mirror. She sees an image of a face reflected but it does not seem to be her. There is no recognition at the image in the glass. There is nothing there, just emptiness, a lack of expression.

She feels defeated.

She senses Andrew sitting down on the edge of the bed, his weight causing her to roll slightly towards him. She thinks: why can’t he just leave me alone?

‘How long have you been in bed for?’ he asks and she hears in his voice the tone of disapproval. In fact, she does not know the answer. Her sense of time has become rather elastic but she knows she must offer him something concrete, so she lies.

‘About forty minutes or so,’ she says, choosing a number that is long enough to convince him she is telling the truth and yet short enough still to be within the realms of respectability.

He nods his head once, satisfied, and then he reaches out and strokes her hair softly. She has not had a shower for days and for a brief moment she worries that Andrew will notice the grease, coating the palm of his hand.

‘Darling, you must try and keep going,’ he says.

He is a good man, her husband. She knows this. He is good in spite of her badness, in spite of her being unable to pull herself together. He loves her still, even though he knows her love has gone somewhere else, has been lost and cannot find its way back.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ Andrew continues and she notices there is a small note of hesitation in his voice. She can still read him so precisely, so intimately. This knowledge, which used to provide her with such a sense of security, now seems only to frustrate her. She hates the thought that they have become so dependent on each other, moulding their shapes and their silences around the solidifying shadows cast by the other person.

‘It’s about my mother.’ Andrew’s voice drifts back. ‘She’s taken a turn for the worse. Mrs Carswell called up this morning and said she’d found her in her nightdress, lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. We don’t know how long she’d been there but she wasn’t making much sense, apparently.’ Andrew breaks off, waiting for a response. She opens her eyes lazily and meets his gaze. He looks sad and confused: a small boy. ‘It was already hard enough understanding her on the phone so goodness knows what state she’s in now.’ He shakes his head. Caroline sits up, propping the pillow against the curved bars of the bed frame so that the coldness of the iron does not press through her cotton nightdress. The effort of this single movement leaves her momentarily dizzy and unable to speak. She touches Andrew’s wrist lightly. He grabs hold of her hand too eagerly and lifts it up to his lips, brushing a kiss against her knuckles. She lets him hold her hand for a few moments longer and then slips it back down to the mattress.

‘Poor Elsa,’ she says and she can hear that the words are slurred. She tries to remember how many pills she’s taken today but she can’t. Not a good sign.

Andrew looks at her quizzically. ‘How are you feeling?’