MARIA ROBERTS

Broken Bits

Richard has left for work Alfie is at school. I plan to spend the day naked. I’m going to undress and wander round the house naked. Tidy up, read a book, that sort of thing. I’ve wanted to do it for ages. Last month I was on a language course in Barcelona and there was a thin Norwegian lad who sat next to me everyday. He told me he never wore clothes at home. He cooked naked, watched television naked, ate naked, it was naked this, naked that, naked everything – he said that’s what they do in Norway. He asked me if I wanted to pop round his flat for lunch before I had to fly back to England. But I never did. I fancied him, a little. We met for lunch at a crumbling tapas bar off the Ramblas. I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, he wore a vest and some very short yellow shorts. I was less keen on him after that. Richard quizzed me in the hall. I’d only just walked through the door fists full with my suitcase, my coat and a bag of presents for him and Alfie. I hadn’t even had chance to have a cup of tea. I told Richard it was all study and not much else. Which wasn’t true at all. 

I close the curtains. The living room is tricky because there is a triangle at the top where the curtains don’t meet. Over at the house opposite, if you are in the bedroom, you can look down and see in. I know because I was over there last week helping Dorothy move a wardrobe. It’s not so much cold as breezy. I tug my jeans down over my hips. They’ve shrunk. I yank off my socks, wobbling from side to side. I pull off my T-shirt, whirl it round my head and toss it to the floor. I unclip my bra and fling it on a chair. I’m giggling like an idiot. Idiotic giggling. Snorting and laughing stupidly. I imagine myself as a stripper. Dancing. I’m looking at myself. Looking at my body printed with red tracks where my clothes are too tight. All out of proportion, all over the place. Saddlebags for thighs. My breasts hang to the side and down, instead of up and pointing straight ahead. My knees are podgy. My arms chubby. There is a faint line of  hair running down the centre of my belly, and there are grey hairs elsewhere. I haven’t seen myself naked, not properly anyway, for a while. I sprawl myself across the sofa, I feel grand and chubby. I pose like that woman in the Rubens painting, Angelica and the Hermit. I don’t expect Richard will walk in and ravish me. I go over and sit on Richard’s leather chair and read his newspaper. It’s cold on my bottom and every time I move it squeaks. When I get up there are misty bum prints left behind. I sit on the floor, legs crossed and watch a makeover programme. I make myself some lunch: turkey on rye bread, with salad and tarragon mayonnaise. Lettuce falls everywhere. I send a couple of emails. I send an email to the Norwegian lad. He doesn’t reply. I fill in an online application form for a care worker position at the nursing home in Eccles, near where Richard works. I nap naked on the sofa. At three o’clock I dress and open the curtains.   

I grab my bike from the back garden and cycle off to get Alfie. Great news I tell him, the birds have migrated to our house from next door. They like the luxury bird table we erected at the weekend. When I left to collect Alfie from school there were just ten or so lined up on the fence, now we have returned there are thirty or more: some on the fence some on the shed.

By five around a hundred birds have landed in the garden. At around six o’clock I notice a pelican and then at seven o’clock, a stork.

*

Late evening: Alfie is in bed, I look out and see an owl standing proud on the highest spot on the shed and a murder of crows balancing worryingly on the washing line. I call Richard at work. He doesn’t believe me. But when he arrives home after eleven he looks out the window and sees the chaos for himself. He asks, “Why haven’t you put the bikes away?” I say, “At first the birds were larking around, cooling down their wings in the soil, playing in the pond.” I think: But then more dropped by, I’m too scared to go into the garden, I am too scared even to open the door. I almost say, You know, like Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. But Richard would shrug blankly. He hates women writers. Richard says, “I’ll shoo them away, get me the keys.” I say “No, leave it until tomorrow.” I’m flattered that they have chosen our garden. Richard and I, who are pretty unspectacular most of the time.

We weren’t always unspectacular. Once we were activists. When Alfie was nine months old we lived in a tree by the M60, protesting as they cut away hedgerows to widen the motorway. Busybodies hung about yelling on and on what a careless bitch I was. Some poky-nosed neighbours called social services. Photographs of Richard hanging bare-chested, upside down, appeared in the Mirror. My father said we were a disgrace. A woman who lived close by, off Dane Road, brought us a tent and a travel cot. On cold days she brought us a flask of hot tea and each week she dropped off a food parcel containing Rusks and a couple of jars of baby food. One day I was snapped breastfeeding Alfie against a backdrop of traffic. The picture was posted online. Pro-breastfeeding groups heralded my actions as a brave display of  ‘a woman’s right to breastfeed in public’. I was embarrassed that my fat veined breast made it into a women’s magazine. I was embarrassed that Alfie's head looked so big. A health visitor’s report stated that Alfie seemed healthy and happy. There were hundreds of children growing up next to the motorway. That was the point, we argued, why pick on ours? 

All that seems a lifetime ago now.    

Richard whines: “The birds will eat all the worms that turn over the soil, then what’ll we do? The flowers will die. We won’t have tulips in May. You love tulips.” “The birds are here for a reason,” I say. “Leave them be.” I want to add: Don’t you remember how we were?

We go to bed. We make love. Richard changes in bed, he becomes someone else. Desperate almost, as though he is grabbing on to something and won’t let go, strangling it, blocking my air. I usually feel shell-shocked.

*

Morning: the birds, even the owl, are still in the garden. Alfie and I went out the front and walked to school. The birds were there when I made lunch. There were there when I collected Alfie. They are still there when Richard comes home. I have watched them for hours. Sometimes they fly around in circles. Other times they perch still, listening, waiting, chunnering to the pelican and cajoling him. For a while, the owl sleeps.

*

Saturday morning: Richard wakes me by leaning over me so I can’t see anything of the day. He props himself up on his elbows and leans right over me, kissing me, and talking to me. I can taste his breath. His teeth almost touch my nose. I can see the fur on his tongue. I try to push him off, but he keeps on doing it again and again. He is pestering: Can we make love? Make love to me, make love, make love. I say, No I don’t want to, over and over, but I give in. Throughout, I am thinking about the Norwegian lad. I’m wondering what he might be like in bed. He looked so serious most of the time. Richard makes this sound and screws up his face. I know he’s almost done so I return it with a gawrrrrr and open my mouth wide. He falls off me. Goes downstairs to make a pot of tea. Today we plan to go shopping. We spend so much on food we haven’t enough money to buy new shoes.

Richard is in the kitchen making pancakes. Alfie is sitting by the window eating a plate of pancakes soaked in lemon and sugar. He watches Tim, the boy from around the corner, larking around outside our window. Tim and Alfie play together from time to time. Tim has a learning disability, and Tourette's, he’s much older than he seems. He isn’t the easiest child to play with. Tim is standing on our part of the communal garden, whacking a stick against our cherry tree. I bang on the window and tell him to shift. I am heading out of the room when I hear screams and shouts coming from further down the road. Kids round here are always screaming about something. The mothers are always telling them to fucking shut it, shut the fuck up, that kind of thing. If it’s not the mothers hitting the kids,  the fellas are hitting the mothers, shouting fucking shut up, fucking shut up, shut it. Always, always outside our house. I’m the only woman on this street who doesn’t land a good hiding from time to time. These houses are so full of violence Richard and I have become immune to it. At first we wanted to change it, but it doesn’t do to impose your views on everyone else.

I am watching some band thrashing about with guitars on television when the teenage boy from over the road runs over and grabs Tim by the neck. He looks like he is going to say hello, but then he squashes Tim’s head against his hip. Tim is laughing like it’s a joke. Now the boy is dragging Tim over to beneath our window. Are they playing? The boy kicks Tim’s feet from under him. Tim is lying on the grass, he looks terrified. My arms are making strange motions. I can’t hear the television because my ears are rushing with blood. I’m going to panic. I know I am. I am shouting, “Let go of him, let go of him.” Alfie is tucking into his pancakes. Watching television. Ignoring the whole thing. Then the older boy’s father rushes out with a yard brush egging his son on. He’s waving the brush high in the air. He’s shouting:  Kick him in the head.  Kick him in the fucking head. Do him in. Do him in. The son is kicking Tim in the head. Where is Tim’s mother? Where is she. I feel sick. Breathless. Sick. Like I am going to pass out. Tim is screaming. Now the teenage boy’s mother is out. She is going to sort this out, I think, But she circles Tim. Neighbours are stepping cautiously from their doors. Looking. I’m thinking, what has Tim done?

The younger sister runs from the house, she is about seven, very cute, blonde, nice plaits. Is she crying or laughing? What is that in her hands? The brother follows. He has a petrol can. I look at Tim, he is saying something to me. The father is looking right at me. The eldest son douses Tim in petrol. The mother hits Tim on the head with a spade. I am screaming, Take Alfie upstairs –  I am punching in 99… when Tim goes up in flames. Alfie is on Richard’s chair, watching television, tearing away at his pancakes.

Then the birds come, carrying water in plant pots and carrier bags, and cups and broken bits from other gardens. Tim is burning. Richard is tugging the throws from the sofa, but they won’t give. He is frantically searching for something to wrap around the child. Birds are flying and swooping from every direction. Alfie is shovelling food into his mouth. The family walk back to their house. Black steam rises from Tim. The sound of flapping is deafening. At first I could hear Tim screaming. I can’t hear anything now. A burning smell is slipping though the cracks in the walls. People are throwing whatever comes to hand at the birds. Alfie is shouting, Mum, Mum, can I have more pancakes, Mum can I have more pancakes? I’m saying: What love? What love? Everywhere I look there are birds, large birds and small birds, taking it in turns to see who can lift the boy and carry him home.

* * *

CHRIS KILLEN

The Day of Moustaches

A photo of a man and woman, laminated against expensive off-white card: Frank and Maureen, surrounded by their relatives. They squint at the camera and smile. August, 1984. Bright, clean skin. New haircuts. A sunny day.

Something dark is looming over the picture, though – not a rain cloud but a big black permanent marker pen. Its thick nib hovers above Maureen. It hovers there a long time. Then it touches against the paper, drawing a small and curling thing on her face. A moustache. The pen moves to Frank. It draws one on him, too. It goes round the relatives, impassively, moustaching each with a surgical precision.

The page is turned. Just him and Maureen, outside the church. On go the moustaches.

Maureen and her sisters. Moustache, moustache, moustache.

All the men. Moustaches.

Then the reception, in that hotel whose name he’s forgotten. He draws one on himself, one on Maureen, one on the waste-of-money cake she wouldn’t shut up about.

Frank closes the wedding album. He draws a moustache on its cover, over where it says ‘Our Special Day’ in sunken gold type. His trousers are round his ankles. He waddles to the middle of the room, kneels down, and draws a two-metre-long Salvador Dali moustache on the carpet. It looks good. So do the little bird-like ones he’s drawn all over the wallpaper.

Gone half four in the afternoon, and like most days Frank has gotten drunk, watched Countdown, and had a wank. But today is different, too: today is the Day of Moustaches, so for once Frank is feeling happy. Benevolent.

A moustache, he thinks, for everything.

Next he stands in front of the mirror, grinning at himself with yellow teeth and red, blistered gums. This is the best bit. He presses the pen against his curling upper lip, drawing a wide black arc high up onto his florid left cheek. The ink smells dangerous, acidy. He gives it a little spiral, at the end, for good measure. He does the same with his right side. Great. It is the finest moustache of them all.

Maybe it’s a disease, he thinks. The moustache disease. Moustaches formositas.

He feels fantastic.

In the kitchen there is nothing in the fridge except for a half can of gone-green baked beans and a stick of grey, fluffy celery. There is the rest of a pint of milk in there, too, from last week, which he pours in lumps on the floor and skates around in for a while in his bare feet. It goes in his trousers, soaking them. He’s singing to himself.

Frank waddles to the phone to dial a number.

It rings.

It rings.

It you have reached the automated answer phone of-s.

No second wank for Frank today, then.

So he pulls up his trousers, buckles them, and goes to the window. The sky is the colour of wet ash. It has veins of white in it. He can feel milk against his groin, cooling it. He tries to peer in the window of the house across the road. Where is everyone, he thinks.

They’re all somewhere else, Frank. They’re indoors, watching telly together, eating fish and chips, fucking, being in love.

Bollocks, thinks Frank. Moustaches to them.

A woman comes along, carrying shopping. She has grey hair, cropped sensibly, and a pale papery face. Her face is like the first sheet in a drawing book. She pauses on the pavement, directly in line with Frank-in-the-window, sets down her shopping, and rubs the red handle-marks on her palms. Frank has that marker in his hand. He brings it quickly to the window and dashes a little Hitler ‘tache directly in line with her upper lip. Oh, it is perfect, perfect. If only she’d stay there forever: rubbing her hands, with her bags on the pavement. But soon she’s picked them up off the floor, moved off down the street, and left the small rectangle of black hovering absently over number 33’s blue Vauxhall.

Moustaches to that, too, he thinks. Moustaches to everything.

Frank goes outside, stands in the street. It is spotting with rain. He’s looking up at his house with his hands on his hips. He is considering using that paint they’d bought to do up the bathroom with, to paint a massive aquamarine moustache gateway above the door. There’s a For Sale sign stuck in the front lawn. It would look good with a moustache drawn onto it. There is overgrown grass just waiting to have a moustache mown into it. Now if only he could somehow tattoo an indelible, piss-black moustache onto the sky, which they could see all the way from space …

When David started doing his paper-round, this is what his mum told him: Go slow. There’s no hurry. And be careful. If anyone tries to talk to you, or invite you in, just say no politely and ride away. Just ride straight home, okay? No one will be angry with you if you leave the rest of the papers. Okay, David? Just ride straight home.

David nodded, like a good little boy.

It is spotting with rain. David has his hood up. He is sticking a paper through the letterbox of number thirty, and a little dog in the porch is growling at him. The paper falls onto the mat. The dog leaps on it, shaking it in its mouth.

He picks up his bike and wheels it down the drive. A man is standing outside the house next door. That’s fine. Men stand outside their houses all the time. They wash cars and mow their gardens and say Good evening to him. And he says Good evening back, and nothing happens. David feels the man notice him. It should be fine but it isn’t.

Just go slow, and ride straight home, he thinks.

The man is smiling. The man is coming towards him. The man isn’t saying anything. He isn’t saying Good evening or inviting David in, but he has something in his hand and something drawn on his face. He isn’t wearing any shoes or socks. There are wet patches on his trousers. David’s knees feel weak and sick.

Mummy, something is going to happen.

He climbs onto his bike – slowly at first, carefully – as the man steps the chain link fence that separates the drives. And then David panics and slams his foot down hard on the pedal, wanting to ride straight home. Something clatters loose. The pedal judders beneath his foot. Shit. The chain.

David got this bike for Christmas. It has sixteen gears and those buffalo handlebars and a big black water bottle. It is a brilliant red, with flames up the crossbar. No one knows, but he calls it Firebird in his head. He calls it her. She is the best thing in the world, and now the man is almost upon him, grinning, yellow-toothed, as David drops Firebird, hearing her crash on the slabs, and turns to run in the direction of home.

He hears his trainers slap on the pavement and bounce off the houses.

It is like a dream.

He hears the man running behind him, too: wheezing, muttering something, and he feels a heavy hand on his shoulder. He feels fingers dig into his shoulder blade. He feels himself go over, tripping forwards and then his cheek slamming into the tarmac and stinging with grit. The hands of the man turn him roughly onto his back. David has started to cry. He wriggles. The man holds something sharp and black in his hand.

 ‘Keep still,’ he hisses, moving it towards David’s face.

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