Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

When he was done, when he was certain that every last bulb was out, that nothing remained, he levelled the earth and replaced the turf and made his lawn immaculate again. He stood back, resting his spade and his aching body, the light going, his sweat turning cold.

But he left alone that part of the garden which my mother once took for herself; he didn’t go digging there, removing the turf and turning over the earth beneath the end wall. That shady patch he just kept as neat as he could, keeping the grass clipped short and that resilient barberry bush cut down to the ground.

In the spring, cabbage maggots hatched from their overwintering cocoons and laid eggs in my father’s vegetable patch, and he pored through the soil, hunting out these nests and crushing the small, white eggs. Slug eggs laid in the autumn hatched, and he found holes in the leaves of new plants, seedlings ruined. He buried beer traps in the ground, jars in which to drown the slugs which ate their way through his garden at night. I stood nearby, watching, and he turned to me and said, ‘We used to drown kittens, the unwanted litters of cats on heat.’

Bluebells still come up, every spring. They are not yet out this year, but the bulbs are down there, deep in the earth, their green shoots aching for the daylight.

And there are eggs, buried in the soil, waiting for warmer weather, when they will hatch.

My grandmother sat in her armchair keeping her hands busy with knitting, keeping her tongue busy with boiled sweets. When she wasn’t knitting, her hands trembled, and when she wasn’t sucking on sweets, her tongue loosened.

She always gave up sweets for the forty days of Lent. It made her feel good, she said; it made her feel clean.

‘Your father too,’ she said. ‘He won’t have sweets now until Easter.’ We were sitting in the living room and she had her knitting basket out. She was unpicking an old blue jumper for the wool. Taking her little scissors to where it had been bound off, and cutting through, she said, ‘Your mother, on the other hand, she just ate whatever she liked; she never gave up anything.’ She pulled at the neat rows of stitching, pulling the wool loose. ‘Always did just as she pleased,’ she said. ‘And what your father gave up for her. When your father met your mother, he was engaged to a lovely girl.’

While she talked, I gathered up the unravelling wool, balling it, trying to keep it neat. My grandmother unpicked a white button at the neck, and I realised that this was my mother’s blue jumper, losing its shape and coming apart in her hands.

‘There,’ she said, ‘all done,’ and we sat there holding my mother’s jumper, which was just a ball of second-hand wool in my hands, and a loose button placed in a box in my grandmother’s knitting basket, beside her sharp little scissors.

It is the first day of Lent today. I don’t know what I would give up. I have never drunk much, though sometimes I still find the reek in my nostrils. I don’t smoke, though as I say, sometimes I do like the smell — but I have seen the pictures of lungs coated with tar, stained black, suffocating; I have seen the yellowing skin.

I could give up the sugar I take in my tea, but I won’t. I drop a sugar cube into the cup, into the hot tea, and stir it until it dissolves.

‘Stop looking at me,’ said Susan.

‘I wasn’t looking at you,’ I said, ‘I was looking out of the window.’

We were in our bedroom, lying on our beds. Susan’s bed was right underneath the window, and mine was opposite. I had been looking out of the window, at Sunday’s steady rainfall, but I had also been looking at her. Not having a picture of our mother — the few there had been having gone — I sometimes tried to catch a glimpse of her by looking at my sister.

‘Stop it,’ she said, wafting her hand, as if she could feel my eyes crawling over her face. She turned onto her side, away from me, and as she turned I saw a red mark, a bruise on her neck, blood vessels burst beneath her skin, a love-bite. And then, with her face to the wall, she said, ‘Your eyes are weird.’

The rain hammered down outside.

She wanted her own bedroom; she said so all the time, even though there was no spare room, and even though I always left when she wanted the room to herself, and sat downstairs while her friends sat on my bed and touched and used my things. When they left, when I returned to my room, I found my bedding crumpled, and the shape of someone’s bottom or evidence of feet on my pillow; I found brown curls of tobacco on the covers of my books, and the corners of pages, neat little rectangles, torn out, and the air smelt like my father’s bonfires, his piles of burning leaves.

I run the vacuum cleaner into my father’s bedroom, sucking dust from the spaces between the bare floorboards.

I hoover through into our old bedroom, pushing the nose of the vacuum cleaner underneath my sister’s bed, and it strains into the empty corners like a bloodhound on a leash, recognising a scent which is scarcely there. Her bare mattress sags in the middle, the broken springs forming a hollow which remembers the shape of her, the weight of her.

There was blood on my pyjama bottoms, on the yellow cotton bed sheet, on the mattress underneath.

My grandmother told me not to wash my hair or have a bath for a week. I was unclean, like an Old Testament woman who was not allowed to touch food because she would contaminate it, the bread and butter and fruit she touched spoiling, the meat rotting and the wine turning to vinegar.

I was a young woman now, she said, and must be careful. She said this to my sister too, ‘You have to be careful.’

I studied my face in the mirror, looking for my mother but not finding her, looking for my father, but my bones were not his. I peered, looking for eyebrows which met in the middle, looking at my weird eyes staring back.

I ate more, eating between meals, a habit of which my father disapproved; it showed a lack of discipline. He found me in the kitchen, and looked at me as if I were a pest he had found in his cupboards, getting at his food.

I clean the kitchen floor, scrubbing at the tiles which are not really dirty, scrubbing away footprints which aren’t there.

I pour my bucket of water down the drain by the back door, empty the vacuum cleaner’s dust bag, and take the rubbish out down the side of the house to the dustbin at the front.

I wash my hands with the foul tar soap and put the kettle on. In the bare kitchen, I sit down at the small table and eat my sandwiches, and the bread and butter and tomatoes do not spoil at my touch and the meat does not rot, and the water comes to a furious boil in the corner.

Most of the time, my father was out, at work or in the garden; or he was busy in some quiet part of the house, cleaning or writing in his notebooks; or he was sleeping.

Sometimes he slept during the day when he was supposed to be at work. And sometimes he stayed awake at night — I heard him downstairs, in the kitchen, looking for mice, or saw him standing in the garden, down by the end wall, in the moonlight.

Either way, we hardly saw him, apart from at mealtimes, when he looked at my sister and me the same way he looked at his vegetable patch in the spring, as if there might be something unpleasant in there, some unwanted interloper; the same way he looked at the skins of the vegetables on his plate, as if they were unclean.

‘You,’ he said, over dinner, ‘do not have good bones.’ It was not clear whether he meant me or Susan or both of us. We all kept eating. ‘You,’ he continued, pointing his knife at my sister, ‘are all Barbara. You,’ he said, pivoting the knife slowly like a sniper’s rifle, turning the blade towards me, ‘I don’t know.’