Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

I read his notebooks, and saw what he had done to my mother. He had removed the darker shades and the grey from her hair; he had grown her blond hair long again, pinning it neatly on top of her head. He had stitched up the tear in her skirt. And he had removed her child. He had made her as she used to be; he had made her young and smart and childless, and still in love with him.

He discarded things which belonged to my sister and me, as if we were no longer there. Our belongings went missing and turned up in the dustbin. We found our wardrobes empty, the hangers bare, our clothes put out on the front step for charity, waiting to be taken away. We brought these things inside again, put them back where they belonged, and if my father looked he would find them still there, returning and returning like the endlessly blooming bluebells and the endlessly breeding insects.

Sitting at the kitchen table marking essays, one-thousand-word assignments summarising the conclusion of one war and the beginnings of the next, I watch the stretched-tight skin of my distended belly pulsating, the baby moving inside me. The rhythmic kicks, or maybe hiccups, feel and look like an enormous heart beating in my stomach. Now and again, something comes to the surface, the shape of an elbow or a knee beneath my skin, pushing up inside me.

I remember the nausea, like seasickness, the barely-there watery vomit spat into the toilet bowl, my bare knees on the cold linoleum.

I have heard a heartbeat, beating fast like a bird or a mouse.

‘No,’ I said.

Susan stood in the bedroom doorway. There was a boy behind her, on the landing. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy. And I was here first.’ I was reading, something for school. I could have read downstairs, and there was nobody down there — our father was out and our grandmother was quiet, probably napping, in her attic room — but I didn’t like the boy my sister was with. I had met him in the kitchen once — he came in through the back door, bringing with him a cloying smell of weed. I didn’t like his lingering, clinging look, his long fingers stroking the roll-up he was making, bits of tobacco dropping onto the kitchen floor.

‘All right then,’ she said, and went back out onto the landing, pulling the door to behind her. I listened for the sound of their footsteps on the stairs, my sister and this boy going down to the kitchen or the living room, but instead I heard the sound of my father’s bedroom door opening, and closing.

I sat on my bed, staring at my book, reading the same page over and over again to the heartbeat thump of the headboard against the wall.

After about an hour, they came out and went downstairs. They had picked up their clothes and their cigarettes; they had made the bed. They had left the room just as it was, except perhaps for the stray brown curls on the bedding, and that pervading smell of smoke.

It is late now. I open the back door for some night air before locking up. There is a full moon, hanging heavy and milky in the dark sky. It lights the snow on the lawn and the ice on the path and the high, white walls of this pre-war house.

In the snow I see my footprints, and a bluebell, the tips of its strong, green leaves just poking through, emerging into the cold night. I imagine my father standing over his lawn, amazed to see them still coming through after all that.

I’m blooming, apparently. You’re blooming, they say, as if I am a seasonal shrub.

I swear I can smell the barberry bush and the wild flowers, the weeds, all the way from the end of the garden.

From time to time, my father found my sister loitering in the town centre with her friends, with boys, during the day, during the week, when she should have been at school or coming home. What was she doing, he wanted to know, hanging about in the street like a stray cat, with all these randy toms sniffing around her. Well what was he doing there, she said, spying on her, bothering her, when he should have been at work. And what’s more he stank, she said, he reeked.

He tried to keep her in the house in the evenings, but he couldn’t make her stay; she kept slipping away.

He smelt the smoke on her breath and in our bedroom. He found dog-ends in her pockets. Well, what was he doing looking, she asked; what was he doing going through her pockets; what was he doing in her bedroom? What had she been doing, he replied, in his bedroom? She smoked in the house and in the street, and she looked, said our father, like a slut.

They sat across the kitchen table from one another, my father and my sister. Every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner, my father sat opposite my sister and saw my mother glaring at him through my sister’s cold blue eyes. He saw Barbara twenty years younger, before us, before him; he saw Barbara with her good figure and the bad skin of her adolescence; he saw Barbara in her youth, stinking of smoke and going with boys and telling him to go to hell.

He washed out her filthy mouth with tar soap, with his hand squeezing the back of her neck, holding her hard, pushing her head forward over the sink. The smell of that tar soap was like tasting it, that thick, burnt smell in my nostrils, in my throat, in my stomach. And when he let her go, or when she struggled free, there were red marks where he had held her, the imprints of his fingers on her skin.

Sometimes, when I try to picture my sister, when I try to see her face, all I can see is those cold, blue eyes. And sometimes I don’t see her face at all — I see her lying on her side, turned to the wall, the blood vessels in her neck broken.

My father cleaned his car as fastidiously as he cleaned the house. His car was gunmetal grey, with immaculate bodywork which he washed every week in the driveway, chasing away the warm, dirty suds with cold, clean water, chasing them over the roof and the bonnet and down the sides of the car, down the driveway, over the pavement, into the gutter and down the drain. He cleaned the inside of the car, polishing the dashboard and the windscreen and the mirrors, and hoovering the carpeting and the upholstery, pushing the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner into the corners and crannies and sucking out the dirt, and taking out the odd empty bottle which rolled about under his seat, on the floor of his clean car, and putting it in the dustbin.

There was often a bottle or two under the sink, with the cleaning products, behind the bleach.

There were bottles in the garden shed. We were not allowed to go in my father’s shed, but I did. Inside, his garden tools hung spick and span from nails on the walls; he always cleaned his tools after using them, and then hung the right tool back up on the right nail. There were magazines, in a neat pile on a high shelf. There was a bicycle, my mother’s old bicycle, dirty and rusting, its tyres deflated, under an old sheet. And there were bottles, half-full or empty, up on the shelf next to the magazines.

There were bottles in his bedroom, under his bed and on his windowsill, behind the curtain. They rattled when my father moved about at night, trembling on the floorboards and against the cold window.

My father’s breath over the breakfast table smelt bad, like something dead or dying. It seeped from his skin, that death or dying; it seeped from his pores and from the rims of his discoloured eyes.

I can see the garden shed from the window of my old bedroom. Even the shed is empty now, everything has been packed up or thrown away. There is ivy, though, growing through the roof, pushing its way beneath the roofing felt and between the planks, pushing through the webs the spiders have made.

I lay a clean double sheet over the mattress of my old single bed. I haven’t brought a pillow so I use the one I found in my grandmother’s room. Lying down, breathing in, trying to smell a laundry smell, I smell my grandmother, vinegar and dust.