Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She lifts the sleeping child from his car seat and puts him over her shoulder. Peter retrieves a key from his pocket and lets them into a hallway empty except for six wooden pigeonholes of post, a vase of paper tulips and a framed sepia photograph of the lakefront at the beginning of the last century. The stairs echo under their feet. Peter takes the child. Three flights. She has to wait and get her breath back after each one.

They step into the apartment. He doesn’t turn the lights on. He closes the door behind them. The darkness is almost complete. The cool air smells of beeswax and vanilla. “Stand there.” She hears a triple squeak of rusty handles and hinges being turned and the shutters are swung open. It does not matter what is in the room. It is merely a frame for this extraordinary view. She walks out onto the balcony. The flotilla is spread out now, white sails tacking one by one around a yellow buoy. It flows over her, this greenery, this life, this light. Peter stands beside her holding the sleeping child. She runs her fingers over the grain of the wooden rail, every line a summer long gone. She looks beyond the lake to the mountainside forests where it was cut down fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago.

There is something wrong with all of this but she cannot put her finger on what it might be.

Peter says, “Tomorrow afternoon we will go sailing on the lake.”

She leaves the institute, takes the Red Line to Davis and walks back home. She stands in the empty house and feels sick in the pit of her stomach. And then it comes to her. There is nothing keeping her here anymore. She can go, just go, leave everything behind. She packs two bags, leaves the keys in the mailbox and takes a taxi to Logan where the next BA departure has a last-minute seat in club class going for a song. An omen maybe, if she believed in such things.

She nurses an espresso in Starbucks and imagines the sour little woman from Fernandez & Charles standing in the living room wondering what the fuck to do with the exercise ball and the Balinese shadow puppet and the armchairs from Crate and Barrel. On the table to her right two Mormons sit side by side, strapping farm boys in black suits, Elders Thorsted and Bell, the names on their badges as big as signs on office doors. On her left an ebony-skinned man in an intricately embroidered white djellaba is reading a book called The New Financial Order . There are four messages on her phone. She pops the back off, drags the SIM card out with her fingernail and flips both phone and card into the waste bin.

Her flight comes up and she boards. A glass of complimentary champagne, pull back from the stand, a short taxi, those big turbines kick in and she is lifted from the surface of the earth. An hour later she is eating corn-fed chicken, wild-mushroom sauce and baby fennel as night streams past outside. She falls into a deep sleep where she dreams not the old dream of crashing and burning but a new dream of cruising forever in the radiation and the hard light and the deep cold and when she wakes they are banking over the reservoirs of Hertfordshire on their descent into Heathrow.

The train clatters north from Euston. The deep chime of the familiar. Chained dogs in scrapyards, level crossings, countryside like a postcard, all her history lessons written on the landscape, Maundy money and “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” She should have called ahead. At least this way she can creep up on the place from downwind, see what it looks like when it doesn’t know she’s watching then turn round and move on if that’s what feels right.

She gets out of the taxi and stands on Grace Road, looking across the big grass triangle that sits at the centre of the estate, tower blocks on two sides, a row of shops on the third, a playground in the centre, the kind of place which must have looked fantastic as an architectural model before it got built and real human beings moved in.

There is a Nisa Local, there is chip shop called the Frying Squad. Between the two is the Bernie Cavell Advice Centre. Two boys are doing BMX stunts on the big rock in the centre of the pedestrian precinct which they used to call the Meteorite. She turns left and walks past Franklin Tower, the smell from the bins still rancid in the December chill.

17 Watts Road. A shattered slate lies on the path in front of the house. It’s mid-afternoon but behind the dirty glass all the curtains are closed. The bell isn’t working. She raps the letter box, waits then raps it again but gets no reply. Something passes through her. Despair or relief, she can’t tell. She crouches and looks through the slot. It is dark and cold in the hallway, some faint urinous scent.

“Mum…!” Briefly she is nine again, wearing a green duffel coat and those crappy socks which slid down under your heel inside your Wellingtons. She raps the letter box for a third time. “Hello…?”

She checks that no one is watching then breaks the glass with her elbow, the way it’s done in films. She reaches through the broken pane and feels a shiver of fear that someone or something is going to grab her hand from inside. She slips off the safety chain and turns the latch.

The smell is stronger in the hallway, damp, unclean. There is a fallen pagoda of post on the phone table and grey fluff packs out the angle between the carpet and the skirting board. Here and there wallpaper has come away from the damp plaster. Can she hear something moving upstairs or is it her imagination?

“Mum…?”

The only light in the living room is a thin blade of weak sun that cuts between the curtains. She stops on the threshold. A body is lying on the floor. It is too small to be her mother, the clothes too ragged. She has never seen a corpse before. To her surprise what she feels, mostly, is anger, that someone has been squatting in her mother’s house and that she now has to sort out the resulting mess. She covers her nose and mouth with her sleeve, walks around the room and crouches for a closer look. The woman is older than she expects. She lies on a stained mattress, knotted grey hair, dirty nails, a soiled blue cardigan and a long skirt in heavy green corduroy. Only when she recognises the skirt does she realise that she is looking at her mother.

“Oh Jesus.”

She wants to run away, to pretend that she was never here, that this never happened. But she has to inform the police. She has to ring her sister. She crouches, waiting for her pulse to slow and the dizziness to pass. As she is getting to her feet, however, her mother’s eyes spring open like the wooden eyes of a puppet.

“Holy fuck!” She falls backwards, catching her foot and cracking her head against the fire surround.

“Who are you?” says her mother, panicking, eyes wide.

She can’t speak.

“I haven’t got anything worth stealing.” Her mother stops and narrows her eyes. “Do I know you?”

She has to call an ambulance but her mind has gone blank and she can’t remember the emergency number in the UK.

“It’s Carol, isn’t it?” Her mother grips the arm of the sofa and lifts herself slowly onto her knees. “You’ve changed your hair.” She gathers herself and stands up. “You’re meant to be in America.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I was asleep.”

“You were on the floor.” The back of her head is throbbing.

“I was on the mattress.”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“I have trouble with the stairs.”

Dust lies thick on every horizontal surface. The framed Constable poster is propped beneath the rectangle of unbleached wallpaper where it used to hang, the glass cracked across the middle.

“I thought you hated us,” says her mother. “I thought you were going to stay away forever.”