Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

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Zoe rang the bell while she paid off the taxi; then she had to hunt in her bag for her key. The front door opened directly off the terraced street, whose length was only punctuated by streetlamps (the tree that had been put in on the corner had died). Of course there was no reason to expect Pearl to be at home. She might be at a friend’s; she might be at her grandmother’s (Joyce was supposed to be keeping an eye on her). The front-room curtains were drawn across. They must have been drawn across all day; perhaps for the whole four days that Zoe had been away.

— Pearl? Sweetheart? I’m back! Zoe called, into the darkness of the narrow hall. The light didn’t seem to work; the bulb must have gone.

She hardly thought about her house while she was away. It was her shell, her refuge to crawl into and be private; she loved it but took no interest in it beyond keeping it clean and tidy. Joyce itched for her to move the kitchen out of its little scullery space into the back room or build a second bathroom upstairs. (“What for?” asked Zoe.)

— In here, came a muffled voice from the front room.

Pearl must be watching television with the curtains drawn, something Grandfather Deare used to do on weekend afternoons. In the dark, Zoe was taking in some surprises: a mess underfoot she couldn’t quite see, as if she was treading on gritty cloths, and a pall of soured (forbidden) cigarette smoke. She pushed the front room door open with some momentary difficulty (more cloth); the gas fire was on full and the room was stiff with heat. Pearl with bright pink cheeks was on the sofa in her pajamas, wrapped up in Nana Deare’s old green silk eiderdown, which was filthy and leaked feathers and ought to be thrown out. Zoe looked around and saw that the cloth she was trampling underfoot was, in fact, a tangle of clothes, mostly Pearl’s clothes and unidentifiable others, but some of them Zoe’s own (that cream cardigan with the roses; that denim jacket).

— Why didn’t you answer the bell?

— I’m really ill, Pearl said.

— What kind of ill?

— My head hurts, I feel sick, and all kind of weird and shivery.

Zoe was filled with apprehension; her heart contracted to stone in her chest.

— Does the light hurt your head? Is that why you’ve got the curtains closed?

Pearl glanced at them in surprise.

— Not really. I think they were just like that.

Zoe put a hand on her forehead; it was hot, but then the room was very hot. Pearl’s cheeks were wet.

— My love. My precious girl, are you crying? Is it that bad? Tell me exactly where it hurts. She sat down beside her on the sofa, holding her tightly in her arms, drinking in her smell (unwashed, with notes of last night’s perfume and the stale gray of fags, but behind them the incorruptible sweetness of her youth). She kissed her hair (that horrible dyed color, instead of her own rare strawberry!), her cheeks, her forehead. She became aware of Pearl ducking the kisses and rearranging herself inside the embrace so as not to miss a moment of what passed on the television screen. She was watching her video of Truly, Madly, Deeply.

— Mum, get it in perspective. I’m not crying because I’m ill. I’m just crying at the film.

— I don’t know how you can. Haven’t you seen it a hundred times already?

— You’ve got no imagination.

— It strikes me that there are some rather more serious things worth crying about just at the moment.

— You would say that.

— There seems to be quite a mess in here.

— I was going to clear it up, but then I got ill.

— And there’s been smoking. I thought we were agreed that you’d confine it to your room.

— Mum! (Real indignation.) Get off my case! You’ve only been back two seconds and you’ve started nagging me.

— All right, I’m sorry. But you did promise. Remember, this was supposed to be a test of whether I could trust you to be left while I’m away. After last time.

— We’ve been really, really good. We’ve watered all your plants. And we made flapjacks, only they’re all gone, because everyone thought they were so brilliant.

Zoe wanted to ask, We? Who’s we? Who’s everyone? Who’s been here?

But she went instead into the kitchen to make a pot of tea and find the Tylenol and the thermometer. Pearl’s illness probably wasn’t anything alarming. You wouldn’t cry at Truly, Madly, Deeply if you were that bad. She stared around her. The house was in a foul mess. Dishes were piled high in the sink and all over the surfaces, including the bowls and baking tins from the flapjack making, not dealt with yet, even though it looked as though the only flapjack left uneaten was the one trodden into the Portuguese rag rug in the kitchen. There were clothes in here too, all over the back-room floor, including a pair of tights half balled up and inside out, one foot snagged on the end of the bookshelf and the leg stretched around the cane chair as if they were scrambling to get away. There was a heap of blankets tangled with a sleeping bag in one corner. Everywhere there were ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and roaches and bits of torn-up fag papers. Actually, Zoe didn’t own any ashtrays; they had used jam jar lids and plastic bottle tops and her pretty little Moroccan bowls and the blue glass flower vase she had from Grandma Lil, and then in other places they had stubbed the cigarettes out directly on the end of the bookshelf and onto the tiled floor and into the arms of the cane chair. Someone had indeed watered her houseplants, but it looked as though they had done it with the big watering can from the garden, so that earth had splashed out of the pots and up the wall. The door to one of the kitchen units was pulled off its hinges.

— Oh, called Pearl from the front room, the reason for all the washing up is there’s something wrong with the dishwasher. We think a fork’s stuck in it or something.

Zoe went upstairs. Her bed had been slept in, no effort made even to straighten the duvet and cover their traces. Her scarves and jewelry were pulled out and strewn across the top of her chest of drawers, and there were beer cans and Bacardi Breezer bottles and fag ends in here too. In the bathroom a cold and scummy tub hadn’t been emptied, and it looked as though someone had been sick in the toilet; it had been flushed but was still filthy round the rim. She didn’t even venture into Pearl’s room. From the doorway it appeared a dark and roiling sea of bedding with a flotsam and jetsam of bottles, fag ends, discarded food, magazines, makeup, and miscellaneous items (the peacock feathers from the vase on the piano, for example). She went back downstairs and into the front room, where she planted herself in front of the television screen.

— How can you? she said. How can you sit there, knowing I was coming home, while the house is in this state?

Pearl tried to see the picture round her, turned up the sound with the remote.

— Like I told you, I was going to clear up, only then I was ill. Anyway, I thought I could put everything in the dishwasher, but there’s this fork or something. It’s making an awful noise.

— No. That won’t do. I’m afraid I don’t buy that. This isn’t just a matter of not having cleared up yet. Quite apart from the fact that there are hours, hours, of serious cleaning work to do to get this house back to the way it was when I left. I’m talking about what happened here in the first place. This is an abuse of my home and my trust. We said, No parties.

— Mum, like, get it in proportion? It’s not like anyone’s died or anything.

— And as for you being ill, I should think the only thing that’s wrong with you is a serious hangover, judging by the bottles left lying around the place.