Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

There are pillows and a blanket on the sofa bed. I know the desk drawer will be locked, although I haven’t tried it. I know how to pick the lock now, but I don’t do it. There is a photograph in there which I don’t want to see — the picture Donna found of a little girl sitting on my dad’s lap, a paper hat on her head; a little girl who could have been me, but wasn’t.

At number twenty, in the space where Mr Batten used to live, the turf is being unrolled like a new carpet over the dirt. It will be a garden and people will be quiet there.

I go down to the kitchen and watch my mother draping pastry over her pie, trimming the surplus, her knife scraping around the rim of the dish, and my tongue keeps straying to the strange gaps where my milk teeth used to be.

‘Most of our DNA is actually obsolete… composed largely of sequences for dead genes — for the fins we once had, for webbed feet, for a tail that had thrashed.

‘Three hundred millennia on, our blood is mainly, stubbornly, salt water.’

ALISON MACLEOD, ‘Pilot’

Beside a crumbling cliff path, an old house faces the creeping sea. An upstairs window has been opened a crack, and a breeze enters, shifting the heavy curtains and stirring the musty air. Daylight penetrates, illuminating treasure and junk and teeth and bone.

Down the corridor, the sunless back bedroom has space rocket wallpaper and ‘JULES VERNE’S EVER POPULAR BOOKS FOR BOYS’ on dusty shelves.

Downstairs, the kitchen radio has been left on. The breakfast things are still out. There is a china cup on the table, used by the nameless dead. There is sand in the butter and driftwood in the sink.

The rising tide approaches the cliffs.

He is in a stifling classroom, pushing at the painted-shut windows. There are fingermarks on the warm panes and in the sun-softened putty. His skin feels grubby in the heat. His tired eyes, blinking behind thick lenses, feel gritty in the dry air.

He has his back to his students, who yawn when he talks about the demise of the Phoenicians, the Sea People; they are bored by the collapse of empires. They could not care less about the ancient art which he holds in his hands, these faded fragments of another world. A bead of sweat runs down to the corner of his mouth and he tastes its salt.

On his way home, he stops at a second-hand bookshop. On a shelf near the back, he finds Victorian pornography — photographs of pale women, naked except for their hats and laced-up boots, staring into the camera so that when he gazes at them, they, long gone now, gaze back. He puts the book back on the shelf but his hand lingers on the bare and disintegrating spine, the dust of old leather clinging to his fingertips. He leaves with a brown-paper bulge in his pocket.

He peers through the window of the deserted charity shop, squinting through his own reflection, eyeing the cast-offs. His mother used to bring his father’s old clothes here — jackets whose arms were too short, shoes whose soles were wearing thin. His father, finding his things missing, would go down to the charity shop and fetch them back. She would find his wretched shoes in the hallway again, like something thrown into the sea and washed right back onto the beach, lying forlornly at her feet.

He moves on, towards the collapsing cliffs and home, pausing on the doorstep to sniff at the sea before going inside.

In the fusty hallway, he slips off his shoes. On the wall, there is a ship’s clock and a family portrait of his ancestors in sepia. He comes from a long line of Cornish tin miners, who worked deep below sea level, in the cold, in the dark, in torchlight. The mines were always in danger of flooding, of being reclaimed by the water. His father was the first not to go into mining. The tin miners — and their language — have all but gone now.

He rinses the china cup and picks the sand out of the butter. Before supper, he takes a walk on the dunes, on this peninsula which is an ophiolite — he is walking on the ocean floor. The sand is dry and hot.

There are centuries-old skeletons in the dunes — the remains of sailors who washed ashore, lay unclaimed and were anonymously interred above the high-water mark.

When ships are wrecked, his mother said, mermaids claim the drowned sailors. The sailors become mermen. She touched his cheek with cool fingers and leant close to kiss him, smelling of sea salt. He imagined these shipwrecked sailors sinking down with hopeful smiles on their faces, anticipating dewy eyes and cool hands and the kiss of life. But what, he wondered, if the mermaids did not want them?

He was born here, pushed out of the womb with a residue of amniotic fluid in his lungs.

His father was an archaeologist, coming home with traces of ancient graves on the soles of his boots, and souvenirs in his pockets, Palaeolithic treasures: necklaces and bracelets, snail shells and ivory beads, teeth and bone. His father was interested in stone-age art and cave paintings — the handprints and fingermarks made by humans reaching out through the cave walls to the spirit realm; images of spirit animals, and part-human, part-animal figures depicting men in altered states of consciousness (experiencing weightlessness and bleeding from the nose) travelling to the spirit world.

He remembers his mother’s exasperation at the prehistoric dirt his father walked into the house and into the carpet, the fragments of anonymous skeletons he left on the kitchen table, his absorption in his work and his squirming with excitement over dead things. He remembers her cursing the damp walls which crumbled in her hands, the damp nooks and crannies where the silverfish thrived, the beams salvaged from the seabed rotting in the ceiling, and the sand which just kept coming in.

He remembers her at bedtime, her weight shifting on the edge of his mattress. He remembers Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , in which Captain Nemo takes a walk on the seabed, through a submarine forest and submarine coalmines and the flooded remains of Atlantis; and Round the Moon , in which men travel with dogs to the lunar continent and finish up in the sea, and the illustrations were of scuba divers and submarines. He remembers the wounded dog: ‘ They had merely to drop him into space, in the same way that sailors drop a body into the sea… ’ He remembers the rhythm of her reading and her breathing, her voice rising and falling, her chest rising and falling, and her reaching the end of the chapter and closing the book without marking the page, and in the morning she was gone. He remembers her cool touch, her cool kiss, and salt.

He was seven years old when the Russians launched a dog into space. Lying in bed at night, surrounded by space rockets and distant planets and desolate moons, he imagined those bewildered canine travellers: Satellite with his broken skull and Laika who could not come home.

His mother had left behind most of her things, amongst them a record player, and singles which he played too slowly so that they sounded like a man singing love songs sadly underwater.

His father bought a television, on which they watched the first Doctor Who , and Stingray , and Jacques Cousteau documentaries.

Alongside his father’s archaeology magazines, diving magazines appeared, one of which carried a transcript of Cousteau’s ‘Homo Aquaticus’ speech predicting men with gills. He learnt about partial pressures; oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis; the altered states of mind experienced at depth: trances and hallucinations, confusion — the diver thinking he is surfacing when in fact he is diving deeper — and stupor. The deep sea sounded awesome, a wonderful and terrible place, full of hazards with beautiful names, like exotic flowers: embolisms, emphysema, hypoxia and cyanosis.