Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference: Stories

Gan on, she said, and slapped its rump. Heels down, Kathleen.

She was the one who fed the dogs at night and cured illness in the beings under her care. She was like that with her children too. She tended to them without complaint, with a kind of haughty devotion. The old man shouted at the hooligan lads to fucking grit down when they wrestled too near his showcase. He beat them for their cheek and backchat. But Vivian let them tussle and scrap for as long as it took them to thrash it out, until their raised blood got settled. She cleared up after them, wadded lint for the busted noses, collected the smashed plates strewn about the dining-room floor. From time to time she stood in court, in her tweed tack-suits and silk scarves, defending an accused son with that pure stare of hers. She had a gannan pride that told the judge he could never undo what she had instilled in her brood, that all the laws of the town, the curfews and fines, the borstal and jail time, mattered not.

But when she did light out towards her own in anger she damaged them badly. Not a one of them ever fought back the way the boys challenged Geordie for supremacy, on and off, if the chance came to them. She could turn loose a blue cruelty, and perhaps they all realised she was capable any day of murder. If she backed up her husband, an argument was immediately lost.

Get out and sarra them hosses, he might say to Aaron or Rob, lazy with whisky, from his armchair in the corner.

The lad in question would chunter on about watching the footie, hating Geordie’s cocksure orders. Then Vivian Slessor would brush a hand lightly down the back of her son’s head and he’d rise up and put on his boots and go to the stables. It was a household of managed tension, and she was at its core. Vivian had a liking for modern things; kitchen appliances, music centres, cars; the sauna was built because she wanted scorching coals without having to go to a public gym. But she was a superstitious woman. Once I saw her take a set of metal tongs from the hearth and beat her eldest across his back for fumbling with her glass Luck. There was some old almanac to her world I didn’t understand — belief in plant lore, ritual and sign, maybe some part of it Romany. Come All Hallows she hung dobby stones in the byres to keep the animals safe. She’d put up the roof of her convertible in clear blue skies if there’d been a kessen moon the night before. And she was careful where she’d allow the horse trailers to be parked in a town for the common ridings — never on a gallows hill, which was forbidden, though the horses were allowed to graze there.

I was fascinated to see the parents together. My mother had died when I was eight and my dad never had another woman in his life, so it was an unusual thing, adult intimacy. There was something out of balance in the cottage where I lived, something steeply slanted. My dad had more heaviness to him than in just his arms and legs and the big belly where he rested his glass after dinner. But he was light compared to my mother’s leftovers; her wardrobe of sour-smelling clothes, the elasticated jam-jars and dusty talcums. When I lay in bed at night and heard him grizzling I could feel the building pitch, trying to upend itself, and I’d brace my feet against the bottom of the bed.

The Slessors were even-weighted and indestructible. They’d paired by feral instinct, like wolves among us. If either of them stepped outside the marriage to a different bed — and there were those who gossiped about Geordie’s liking for young stable hands, his chance bairns — then it did not threaten the union. They had produced between them three boys and a girl, all fit, all feisty. And there was a sense there might have been more, they had it in them still, he at almost seventy, she at almost fifty. The children bound them, but the two had bindings before, and bindings after. They belonged in the pairing. Even when you saw them singly in the house or around town you knew there must be another half, a mate. Neither went into it for money, for when they began courting there was none. Vivian had owned one dress that would serve for the wedding. All Geordie had possessed were a few tons of salvaged pipe and lead shingle.

For all his anger and brash, I never saw him raise a hand to his wife. He could have tried to brutalise her, the way he rode roughshod over everything else in life until it obeyed or broke. But he adored her, this rectifying woman. And he would, in any case, have met his match. He knew it. And, moreover, she knew it. If the man feared anything, it was his wife’s genes, her cuntish atoms. I used to watch as she diced up chicken — the knife would slice and slice, clear of her fingertips, but she’d be watching him as he poured his Scotch. Though he’d likely never been near a history book in his life, it was as if Geordie Slessor knew the old region’s legacy of women riding alongside men up to the Border, their babies twined across their backs in sacking. She would have taken those fists into her soft flesh, and even worn his black temper on her face in public for a while. Then in the night she would have slit him wide open, balls to bellybutton. She would’ve stemmed the blood with secret plant medicine, a draught to make the red come slower, and given him the guttings of his prize colt in exchange for his own liver. Or she’d have granted him something from her domestic realm of keeping the big house; a dinner of ground glass, meat frozen and thawed repeatedly, bannock of foxglove.

She was a handsome woman. Her brow was cross-hatched, but lively. Years before she’d had gorgeous tumbling locks, brown and gleaming in their wedding photographs. Perhaps it had thinned or greyed, for she now wore the unwilling bob of a woman proud for most of her life of her hair’s beauty, and she’d still sweep it back, invisibly, off her shoulders. Manda got her full chest from her mam. Vivian was voluptuous, but bone-sculpted at her collar and her jaw. Men opened doors for her. And it was obvious when Geordie wanted her, for he made no game of it, he did not care who witnessed his desire. He’d come at her and grasp her waist. He might even have lifted up her skirts were she not to take it upon herself at these moments to move them both into a private space. Even then their sounds could be heard. After they were done they’d come back into the room easily, unashamed. Everyone knew when they were at it — High Setterah took on a different atmosphere. The smell of the horse sweat grew gamier. The boys became edgy and would take to drinking or baiting the dogs. Manda turned up the stereo.

But it was their tender moments that intrigued me most, the brisk expressions of what I took to be love, that would have been mistaken for ordinary occurrences or arguments by anyone not watching them as hard as I watched. Him pulling a spelk out of her hand, pinning her to the table with an elbow and twisting her arm behind her so she couldn’t pull away while he doctored her. Him shouting at her from the car window for walking behind a reversing trailer.

Blind bloody bint! he spluttered. But it was panic in his voice, not anger.

And I saw her take out her husband’s cock and hold it when he came home so drunk from the rugby club that he started to piss himself in the porch of High Setterah.

Of the two of them I preferred her, and this surprised me because women could make me uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to talk to them about. But I would have eaten out of her hand without much fuss. Geordie, in a good mood, would flirt with me, and that I could take as acceptance of a kind, mortifying though it was.

Look at the lass, she’s full up, is she not, he’d say, when Manda and I dressed to go out on a Friday night. Vivian often said nothing when I was in the room, but she’d sing songs with my name in.