Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

When nobody said anything, we could just hear ourselves eating, our cutlery against our plates, and my grandmother’s jaw clicking. Sometimes my mother looked like she was going to speak, but then just raised her eyebrows instead. Sometimes my father said something like, ‘A very nice piece of meat, Barbara.’ And sometimes my grandmother said something like, ‘Barbara’s friend was here again today.’

My mother’s knife squealed against her china plate.

‘Barbara’s friend?’ said my father.

‘Her friend with the motorbike,’ said my grandmother.

My sister and I looked at one another, our cutlery frozen in midair, the click of our grandmother’s jaw counting out the seconds like a metronome.

My father continued eating for a moment, picking away at the inside of his jacket potato, leaving its dirty skin. And then he put down his cutlery and looked at my mother, on whose clean, pink cheek I could almost see that black, oily fingerprint. He put his knife and fork together on his plate, stood up, pushed his chair under the table, and left the room.

We sat there for a while, the four of us. Only my grandmother was still eating. My mother sat opposite her, with her elbows on the table and her hands clasped together like somebody praying — Dear God and In the name of Jesus Christ — with her eyebrows raised at my grandmother, who was concentrating on her dinner, finishing off the nice piece of meat.

My mother pushed her chair back and left the kitchen. Following our father into the living room, she found him writing in one of his notebooks. Their voices carried through that quiet house, into the echoey kitchen. He said, ‘I thought we agreed… ’ and, ‘You did promise me, Barbara… ’ And she told him what she thought about his weird little stories, which, yes, she had read; she told him what she thought about his weird little notebook wife and his weird little notebook daughter who lived in his weird little notebook world; and my father gathered up his violated notebooks, his spoiled stories, and went upstairs.

Our mother returned to the kitchen and cleared our father’s place, scraping the scraps he had left into the bin, while we ate the cold remains of our dinner.

In the kitchen, sitting alone at the table, finishing my tea, I think I hear that metronomic clicking of my grandmother’s jaw, but it is just the clock ticking in a box in the hallway.

That year, my sister suddenly grew in all directions. She grew tall, taller than me and nearly as tall as our father. Breasts swelled beneath her T-shirt; blocked pores swelled beneath her skin. She was blossoming, said our mother. Our father looked at her disapprovingly, as if she were something overgrown in his carefully tended garden, a corner found going wild; as if she were something overripe in his vegetable plot, with a distasteful maturing pungency which got right up his nose.

She became mouthy and surly, arguing with him and not laughing at his jokes. She skipped meals and slammed doors, played loud music and smelt of cigarettes. She went out with boys, or brought them home. Our father would have said no, no boys, but our mother said of course there would be boys; his little girl was growing up, she said, and there would be boys.

There was no star-gazing now, through a broken telescope. My father viewed her from a distance, narrowing his eyes as if she were something unknown. He would have liked to glue her like the coming-away wallpaper, to fix her like the mind-of-its-own clock.

I don’t know which was worse for him, to think that she was out there, after dark, with these boys — these boys whose bodies were pulsing with adolescent hormones, testosterone stimulating their glands, their skin erupting, their voices breaking, deepening; these boys with one-track minds and wandering hands — or to know that these boys were in his house, their enormous shoes in his hallway.

Susan and I shared a bedroom. When she had friends round, I sat in the living room with my father and my grandmother, doing homework or reading in dimming light or beneath the fringed and floral standard lamp, listening to the clicking of my grandmother’s knitting needles, and, through the ceiling, the bass beat, the heartbeat thump, of Susan’s music, and the deeper tones of a boy’s voice. My mother did not sit with us. She moved about the house, singing to herself, or she went out. My father sat in his armchair, waiting for bedtime, trying not to think about the boys and their hormones and their wandering hands, waiting for his wife to come home.

My mother often came home smelling of smoke. It clung to her coat and her clothes; it clung to her hair and her night-air-flushed skin and her breath. It followed her in through the kitchen door and crept through the house.

I stand on the doorstep, letting in some fresh air. It is icy out. I can see my breath, like when we used to hold imaginary cigarettes between our fingers and pretend we were puffing out smoke, when we were little, when it was cold.

I don’t smoke, but sometimes I like the smell of it, the smell of my sister’s skin, the smell of my mother coming home.

Spring spoiled my father’s garden with beautiful weeds. The Spanish bluebells erupted from the earth, worming up into the light, a bank of them invading and desecrating his flawless lawn. Even as my mother admired them, my father pulled them up, though the fecund bulbs remained, deep down in the soil.

Where the bluebells had been, there were holes and bare patches, and my father cut the grass brutally short, punishing his ravaged lawn.

In his vegetable patch, he found his neat rows of seedlings turned over and broken beneath the weight of cat shit, turds planted and raked over as if they might bloom come summer. He found cabbage maggot pupae in the soil around his leaf vegetables, and moth larvae eggs between the leaves of his good lettuces, and he crushed them between his fingers to stop them hatching.

He found oily fingerprints on the wallpaper, and tiny woodworm holes in the skirting boards, small piles of frass beneath them, and in one corner of the kitchen he found the little black droppings of a rodent. In the cupboard, there was a cereal packet with a hole in the side, cornflakes spilling out. He put these things in the bin: the insect shit and the rodent shit and the spoiled cereal packet at which sharp little teeth had gnawed, the tiny evidence of intrusion and contamination. The oily fingerprints remained, ingrained.

He set a trap, an old-fashioned mouse-trap with a sprung metal jaw. At night, I heard the little scrabbling sounds of something ferreting about in the kitchen, and silence, such tiny silences, and I stiffened, imagining the baited jaw, waiting for the snap of the trap, the damage.

In the morning, my father stood in the middle of the kitchen, beneath the strip light, holding the mouse, which he had found caught in his trap, lying bloody and broken and struggling on his kitchen floor, its smooth, pink tail writhing like a worm.

My grandmother sat at the table, eating her breakfast and eyeing the mouse. ‘That won’t be it,’ she said. ‘That won’t be all. There’ll be a nest somewhere.’ Once again, the trap was set, the sprung metal jaw baited, tense, and once again, I held my breath.

My father took the mouse out to the dustbin, and stood there for a minute, with the chill of early spring, the chill of the outside world, on his skin and in his lungs and beneath his slippered feet, its brightness in his eyes. There was fresh oil on the driveway, new dark puddles next to the stains he had tried to scrub away.

It is February now, and there are no doubt grubs in my father’s vegetable plot; the insects have no doubt been making themselves at home, the females laying their eggs in his soil, the maggots hatching and burrowing down and eating through the roots of the cabbages he planted in the autumn, the pupae overwintering underground, waiting to emerge as flies in the spring.