Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Carol must have heard the story twenty times. It is oddly comforting.

Her mother leans over and takes Carol’s hand. “I thought I might never see you again.”

Her skin has a sticky patina, like an old leather glove. “We need to get you into the bath.”

She is compliant until halfway up the stairs when she looks through the banisters and sees the uncarpeted boards in the bedroom. “You’re selling the house.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Carol laughs. “It’s not mine to sell.” She doesn’t say how little she thinks it would fetch, in this state, on this road.

“That’s why Robyn hates you being here.”

“Jesus Christ, Mum.” Carol is surprised by how angry she feels. “I could be in California, I could be working, but I’m stuck here on a shitty estate in the middle of nowhere trying to turn this dump back into a house before it kills you.”

“You thieving little…” She slaps Carol’s face with her free hand, loses her footing and for a second she is falling backwards down the stairs until Carol grabs her and hauls her upright.

“Shit.” Carol’s heart is hammering. In her mind’s eye her mother is lying folded and broken by the front door. She loosens her grip on the bony wrist. “Mum…?”

Her mother doesn’t reply. She is suddenly blank and distant. Carol should take her downstairs and sit her on the sofa but she might not get this chance again. She puts her hands on her mother’s arms and guides her gently up the last few steps.

She removes her mother’s shoes and socks. She peels off the soiled blue cardigan and unzips the dirty green corduroy skirt. Both are heavily stained and patched with compacted food. She takes off her mother’s blouse, unclips the grey bra and kicks all the clothing into the corner of the room. Her mother’s skin is busy with blotches and lesions in winey purples and toffee browns, the soft machinery of veins and tendons visible under the skin where it is stretched thin around her neck, at her elbows, above her breasts. The smell is rich and heady. Carol tries to imagine that she is dealing with an animal. She takes off her mother’s slip and knickers, perches her on the rim of the bath, lifts her legs in one by one then lowers her mother into the hot, soapy water. She flips the corduroy skirt over the pile of discarded clothing so she can’t see the brown streaks on the knickers then sits on the toilet seat. She’ll bin them later. “Hey. We did it.”

Her mother is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Mum filled a tin bath once a week. Dad got it first, then Delia, then me.” She is staring at something way beyond the wall of dirty white tiles. “There was a sampler over the dining table. Gran made it when she was a girl. ‘I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’ The angel locks the dragon in a pit for a thousand years. After that he must be ‘loosed a little season.’ ” She looks at Carol and smiles for the first time since she arrived. “Are you going to wash my hair?”

Carol makes them each a mug of coffee. Now that her mother is clean the room looks even more squalid. Old birthday cards, a china bulldog with a missing leg, mould in the ceiling corners, one of those houses cleared out post-mortem by operatives in boiler suits and paper masks.

They hear the click and twist of a key in the front door. Robyn is in the hallway. “There’s a pile of stuff outside.”

“I know.”

She steps into the living room and looks around. “What the hell are you doing, Carol?”

“Something you should have done a long time ago.”

“You can’t just ride in here like the fucking cavalry.” Robyn silently mouths the word fucking .

“What’s going on?” says her mother.

“There were pigeons in the bedroom,” says Carol.

“How long are you staying?” asks Robyn. “A week? Two weeks?”

“Carol?” says her mother. “What are you two arguing about?”

“Jesus,” says Robyn. “Fucking up your life doesn’t mean you can take over someone else’s instead.” This time she says the word out loud.

“Carol gave me a bath,” says her mother.

“Did you hurt her?”

It is too stupid a question to answer.

“Aysha rang me.” Robyn holds her eye for a long time. “Sounds like you left a trail of destruction in your wake.”

Carol assumes at first that she has misheard. Aysha talking to Robyn is inconceivable.

“She wanted to check you hadn’t killed yourself or been sectioned. I’m giving you the highlights. Some of the other stuff you probably don’t want to hear.”

“How did she get your number?” asks Carol.

“I presumed you’d given it to her in case of emergencies. Her being your partner.”

There is something barbed about the word partner but Carol isn’t sure who or what is being mocked.

“We’d have come to the wedding,” says Robyn. “I like weddings. I like America.”

“What are you both talking about?” says her mother.

“I’m taking Mum out for dinner,” says Carol, though the thought had not occurred to her until that moment.

Robyn stands close enough so that their mother can’t hear. “She’s not a toy, Carol. You can’t do this. You just can’t.”

Then she is gone.

“There’s too much going on.”

Carol looks around the half-empty Pizza Express.

“Too much noise,” says her mother. “Too many people.”

There is a low buzz of conversation, some cutlery-clatter. Rod Stewart is singing “Ruby Tuesday” faintly from the speaker above their heads. She rubs her mother’s arm. “I’m here and you’re safe.” She wonders if her sister’s apparent care disguises something more sinister, her mother’s supposed fear of the outside world a fiction Robyn uses to keep her in the house. But her mother is becoming increasingly agitated and when the food arrives she says, “I really don’t feel very well.”

“Come on. That pasta looks fantastic. When was the last time you had a treat?”

Her mother stands up, knocking a water glass to the floor where it shatters. Carol grabs her mother’s arm but there is no way she can hang on to it without making the scene look ugly. She lets her mother go, puts thirty pounds on the table, runs for the door and finds her sitting at a bus stop, crying and saying, “Why did you bring me here? I want to go home.”

When they pull up outside the house her mother says, “I don’t want you to come inside.”

She could throw her bags into the car and go, to London, to Edinburgh, to anywhere in the world, leaving her mother to live the narrow and grubby life to which she has become addicted. But the phrase anywhere in the world gives her that queasy shiver she’s been experiencing on and off since Aysha left, the sudden conviction that everything is fake, the fear that she could step through any of these doors and find herself on some blasted heath with night coming down, the world nothing more than a load of plywood flats collapsing behind her. “I’m staying. I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

“One night.”

She lies in a sleeping bag on the blow-up mattress, orange streetlight bleeding through the cheap curtains, sirens in the distance. It is thirty years since she last slept in this room. For a brief moment those intervening years seem like nothing more than a vivid daydream of escape. She’d got into Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, driven in equal parts by a fascination with the subject and a desperation to put as much distance as possible between herself and this place. A doctorate at Imperial and a postdoc in Adelaide. Jobs in Heidelberg, Stockholm…working her way slowly up the ladder towards Full Professor. Four years max in any one country had been the rule. Out of restlessness, partly, though it was true that she ruffled feathers, and ruffled feathers were easier to live with if they were on a continent where you no longer lived.