Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Lake Toba in Sumatra used to be a volcano. When it erupted 70,000 years ago the planet was plunged into winter for a decade and human beings nearly died out. The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was only six miles across. The flu epidemic at the end of the First World War killed 5 percent of the world’s population. Some fathers told their little girls about Goldilocks and Jack and the Beanstalk, but what use were stories? These were facts. We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth and there was nowhere else to go in spite of the messages you might have picked up from Star Trek and Doctor Who . She remembers Robyn weeping and running from the room.

He left school at sixteen then spent thirty years building and decorating. Damp rot, loft conversions, engineered wood flooring. He liked poetry that rhymed and novels with plots and pop science with no maths. He hated politicians and refused to watch television. He said, “Your mother and your sister believe the world’s problems could be solved if people were polite to one another.”

Which is why he didn’t want her to leave, of course. He was terrified that she’d get far enough away to look back and see how small he was, a bullying, bar-room philosopher not brave enough to go back to college for fear he might get into an argument with people who knew more than he did.

Pancreatic cancer at fifty-seven. “All that anger. It turns on you in the end,” was Aysha’s posthumous diagnosis and for once Carol was tempted to agree with what she’d normally dismiss as hippy bullshit.

Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, when worlds overlap, she slips back forty years and sees the sun-shaped, bronze-effect wall clock over the fireplace and feels the warmth of brushed cotton pyjamas straight from the airing cupboard and her heart goes over a humpbacked bridge. Then she remembers the smell of fried food and the small-mindedness and her desperation to be gone.

She presses her forehead against the cold glass of the hotel window and looks down into the car park where rain is pouring through cones of orange light below the streetlamps. She is back in one of the distant outposts of the empire, roughnecks and strange gods and the trade routes petering out.

She abandoned her mother. That hideous house. She has to make amends somehow.

She climbs into bed and floats for eight hours in a great darkness lit every so often by bright little dreams in which Aysha looms large. The dimples at the base of her spine, the oniony sweat which Carol hated then found intoxicating then hated once more, the way she held Carol’s wrists a little too tight when they were making love.

They met at an alumni fund-raiser about which she remembered very little apart from the short, muscular woman with four silver rings in the rim of her ear and a tight white T-shirt who materialised in front of her with a tray of canapés and a scowl, after which all other details of the evening were burned away.

She had the air of someone walking coolly away from an explosion, all shoulder roll and flames in the background. A brief marriage to the alcoholic Tyler. RIP, thank God. Three years on the USS John C. Stennis —seaman recruit E-1, culinary specialist, honourable discharge. A mother who spoke in actual tongues at a Baptist church in Oklahoma. Somewhere in the background, the Choctaw Trail of Tears, the Irish potato famine and the slave ports of Senegambia if Aysha’s account of her heritage was to be believed, which it probably wasn’t, though she had the hardscrabble mongrel look. And if the powers that be had tried to wipe out your history you probably deserved to rewrite some of it yourself. She was self-educated, with more enthusiasm than focus. Evening classes in philosophy, Dan Brown and Andrea Dworkin actually touching on the bookshelf, a box set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos .

Two months later they were in the Hotel de la Bretonnerie in the Marais, Aysha’s first time outside the States unprotected by fighter aircraft. Aysha had gone sufficiently native to swap Marlboro for Gitanes but she was sticking to the Diet Coke. They were sitting outside a little café near the Musée Carnavalet.

Aysha said, “Thank you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” said Carol.

“Hey, lover.” Aysha held her eye. “Loosen up.”

The following morning she hires a Renault Clio and drives to the house via B&Q and Sainsbury’s. Her mother is awake but doesn’t recognise Carol at first and seems to have forgotten their meeting of the previous day, but perhaps the back foot is a good place for her to be on this particular morning. Carol dumps her suitcases in the hall, turns the heating on and bleeds the radiators with the little brass key which, thirty years on, still lies in the basket on top of the fridge. The stinky hiss of the long-trapped air, the oily water clanking and gurgling its way up through the house.

“What are you doing?” asks her mother.

“Making you a little warmer.”

She rings a glazier for the broken window.

“I’ve changed my mind,” says her mother. “I don’t like you being here.”

“Trust me.” She can’t bring herself to touch the dirty cardigan. “It’s going to be OK.”

The noises are coming from the built-in cupboard in the bedroom she and Robyn once shared. Scratching, cooing. She shuts the landing door, opens the windows and arms herself with a broom. When she pulls the handle back they explode into the room, filling the air with wings and claws and machine-gun clatter. She covers her face but one of them still gashes her neck in passing. She swings the broom. “Fuck…!” They bang against the dirty glass. One finds the open window, then another. She hits a third and it spins on the ground, its wing broken. She throws a pillow over it, stamps on the pillow till it stops moving then pushes pillow and bird out of the window into the garden.

She boards up the hole in the wall where they have scratched their way in, takes two dead birds to the bin outside then stands in the silence and the fresh air, waiting for the adrenaline to ebb.

Back inside, the radiators are hot and the house is drying out, clicking and creaking like a galleon adjusting to a new wind. A damp jungle smell hangs in the air. Plaster, paper, wood, steam, fungus.

“This is my home,” her mother says. “You cannot do this.”

“You’ll get an infection,” says Carol. “You’ll get hypothermia. You’ll have a fall. And I don’t want to explain to a doctor why I did nothing to stop it happening.”

She puts the curtains into the washing machine. She drags a damp mattress down the stairs and out onto the front lawn. Half the slats of the bed are broken so she takes it apart and dumps it on top of the mattress. She has momentum now. The carpet is mossy and green near the external wall so she pulls it up and cuts it into squares with blunt scissors. The underlay is powdery and makes her cough and coats her sweaty hands with a brown film. She levers up the wooden tack strips using a claw hammer. She adds everything to the growing pile outside. She sweeps and hoovers till the bare boards are clean, then takes the curtains out of the washing machine and hangs them over the banisters to dry.

She sponges the surface of the dining table and they eat lunch together on it, a steak-and-ale puff-pastry pie and a microwaved bag of pre-cut vegetables. Her mother’s anger has melted away. The lunchtime TV news is on in the background. “ Who Wants to Be This and Get Me Out of That ,” says her mother. “All those women with plastic faces. Terrorists and paedophiles. We called it ‘interfering with children.’ Frank, who worked in Everley’s, the shoe shop, he was one. I’m certain of that.” She stares into her plate for a long time. “A woman drowned herself in the canal last month. That little bridge on Jerusalem Street? Jackie Bolton. It was in the paper. You were at school with her daughter. Milly, I think her name was.” Carol has no memory of a Milly. “I’d go out more if I still lived in the countryside. There was a flagpole by the pond in the centre of the village. They put it up for the coronation. Your uncle Jack climbed all the way to the top and fell off and broke his collarbone.”