(2016)The Tidal Zone Page 4

  ‘Miriam would rather see you. And all of us. She’s very bored there, Rose. She likes it when you go and play with her.’

  She pulled her knees further up to her chest. ‘If she’s all that bored, she could just come home.’

  ‘You know she can’t. We talked about it. Didn’t you and Mum talk about it? She has to stay there until we know what happened and how to stop it happening again.’

  ‘It’s taking ages.’

  I risked patting her shoulder again. ‘I know. It’s really hard. It will be easier when we know, at least then we’ll be able to make a plan.’

  ‘And bring her home?’

  ‘Yes. And bring her home.’

  I heard the question hanging in the air: what if she never comes back? What if we never know what happened?

  Rose uncurled enough to look over her shoulder. ‘What did happen?’

  Another plane began to bisect the window. I knew Emma had already told her this.

  ‘Mimi was on the playing field. At school, at the end of lunchtime. She says she was running because she’d got all the way back to the classroom and then realised she’d left her phone under the tree where she’d been showing her friends some photos, so she rushed back to get it as the bell went. And while she was running she started to feel odd but she was in a big hurry and you know she’s not supposed to have her phone out at school so she was probably worried about being caught. Mostly when people run, their muscles need more oxygen and more sugar so their breathing speeds up and their hearts beat faster and their body makes the chemicals it needs to move quickly, but very rarely that doesn’t work, and then the person has to stop running and sometimes to lie down. Miriam had to lie down, and Mr Stanton found her lying down and feeling very ill. He called an ambulance and while it came he had to help her with her breathing. So we’re very grateful to Mr Stanton. And when the ambulance came, the paramedics were able to help Mimi’s heart to work better so she felt well quite quickly and you know she’s all right now, you’ve seen her. But we need to know why her body made the wrong chemicals and why her heart and her breathing went a bit wrong so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again, because it’s very unusual.’

  I paused. She was still looking at me, as if I hadn’t finished.

  ‘That’s all we know, love. At the moment. But she’s all right now, and she’s safe. They’re looking after her very carefully, aren’t they?’

  She nodded and rolled over again. ‘I just think she should come home.’

  I swallowed. ‘We all do, sweetie. She will. But meanwhile, we have to go and see her where she is.’

  ‘I’ll go, but I don’t want to.’

  I kissed her hair. ‘That’s very grown-up. Thank you.’

  I went downstairs and put the radio on. The American police had shot another child for being black and outside, and the child had died, there on the pavement in the company only of his killers. Blood spreading across the tarmac, and in the child’s head pain and fear and a final, wondering realisation that no-one was going to help him. And the parents, hours later: there’s been an incident. I would kill my child’s killers, I thought, I would go out and look them in the eye and kill them quite slowly and fuck all the consequences.

  But of course I had no-one to kill. And of course Miriam was alive.

  I took the damp laundry out of the machine and carried it up to the bathroom, where I dumped it in the bath while I set up the two clothes-airers. I picked up each garment, shook and smoothed it and arranged them for maximum exposure to the radiator. Women’s pants in three sizes, Miriam’s unsuitable black nylon bra, thickly padded so that it looked like a surreal pair of breasts hanging off the white plastic rods, Emma’s plain now-off-white cotton sprouting tendrils of elastic from its worn straps. Rose’s purple flowery socks, previously worn by Mimi and going at the heels. My own boxer shorts, sombre flags among the pastel wisps of women’s underwear. Miriam’s T-shirt and cardigan, Emma’s floppy grey top, Rose’s striped leggings. A weekend wash. I pulled more clothes out of the laundry basket, leaning over the smell of feet and deodorant. My old tracksuit, now hospital pyjamas and smelling of hand sanitiser and plastic. Miriam’s school uniform, the shirt muddy and missing buttons where they’d torn it open to position the defibrillator pads. No need, I thought, to mend it, they’re cheap enough, let’s just – I put it back, pushed it down to the bottom underneath Emma’s hand-wash cardigan and a bathmat for which there was no hurry.

  Downstairs, the radio had moved on to a lively discussion of the culinary habits of second-generation immigrants, featuring the sounds of wooden spoons beating eggs into flour and people enthusing with their mouths full. I could bake, I thought, if we still have eggs I could make some muesli muffins which would be portable and give Mimi and Emma some fibre and vitamins in an easy form. Sunflower seeds, dried apricots and flaked almonds, olive oil and wholemeal flour, use up the yogurt before it goes off and Rose can have one for breakfast as a treat. I turned up the radio to mask the silence. Emma, after all, would have called me if there was anything wrong. I’d had my phone in my pocket all evening.

  *

  I’d thought that after two nights on the fold-out chair beside Miriam’s bed, I might sleep well in my own bed, might crash through all the levels of fear to oblivion, but I was wrong. I missed Emma. It was months since we’d last slept apart, not since she’d been in London for a GP training event early in the spring. I tried to spread out, to use the space, but that only reminded me that she wasn’t there. I pulled her pillow into the place where she lies, so that it wasn’t empty, and turned away. It would have been easier to be in the hospital, to be beside Mim and watching her breathe, watching the monitors scrawl the beating of the heart that could no longer be trusted to continue unheard and unseen. I thought for the first time of Emma at home that first night, lying where I lay now in the fresh knowledge that Miriam had been well at lunchtime and clinically dead half an hour later. And the second night too, I’d said I’ll stay, you go home and get some rest, my stuff’s already here and Rose is expecting it to be you at the school gates. Look, I had not said, this is where you pay the price, love. For fifteen years you go off every morning in your nice clothes and you get to say actually I’m a doctor and you come home late to find your clothes clean in your drawers, your dinner in the oven and the girls in their pyjamas with their homework done. I’m the primary carer, the one whose name and number are first on the forms. I’m the one they call when there’s an incident and I’m the one who got here first so go home, Emma, go click your heels and earn your money. Our money. The money that pays for the roof over all of our heads and the food on all of our plates, the shoes on our feet and the books on our shelves. I am not, I hope, ungrateful. My resentment is occasional and not her fault. I should not have sent her away the second time. I was sorry. I turned over and brushed against the pillow impersonating my wife.

  Outside, the sky was orange. Cars passed.

  Don’t go check Rose, I told myself, if you wake her, if she senses your presence, she’ll learn that her body’s not to be trusted either, you’ll teach her fear. If Mim had been at home when it happened, if she’d been upstairs in her bed, she would have had time to call out, to summon us. Probably. There is no need to admit the possibility that a silent child is in fact a dying child, that from now on we might reasonably believe that only when we can see the girls’ oxygen levels and heartbeats on a screen do we know them to be likely to live. Do not go check on Rose, she is asleep and she is oxygenating and circulating her blood, growing and healing and making memories, just as she always has, just as almost everyone always does.

  I got up and went to check on Rose. Did not pause at Miriam’s open door, nor look at the duvet still thrown back and the imprint of her head still on the pillow, the nightdress still lying in a circle on the floor, from before.

  I went downstairs and opened my laptop.

  arts and crafts

  I probably shouldn’t really be doing the Cov
entry Cathedral project. It’s probably no more than a distraction from the attempt I should be making to revive, or more truthfully to inaugurate, a serious academic career. But the truth is that it’s too late for me to have a serious academic career, or indeed a serious career of any kind. Fifteen years out from my PhD, with one book and some odds and ends of hourly-paid teaching on my CV, geographically tethered to the West Midlands by Emma’s job and the girls’ schools, I still keep an eye on the adverts for permanent academic jobs but it’s not going to happen. British higher education in general is running on casual labour, on people like me who ran themselves into debt doing PhDs and then found that the old-fashioned jobs with permanent contracts and time for research were all but gone and also that they were now too old and over-qualified for the things they might have done in their twenties, law conversion courses and management trainee schemes and internships in journalism and the arts. I know, what happened to working-class jobs a generation ago is now hitting the professions; I’m not claiming to deserve sympathy, or at least no more than anyone else in the mess of England today. So we go cap-in-hand to heads of department every summer: please sir, give us some work? Not much work, for me, just a couple of hours a week in the classroom, not so much that it interferes with the school run or the laundry or the baking of sourdough bread, with cycling to the next town where the wholefood shop sells the only kind of sunscreen to which Rose is not allergic, with taking the car to the garage and the girls to the dentist and Emma’s suits to the dry-cleaners.

  And they do give us work. Not in the summer, when they say no, there’s nothing at the moment, the department generally aims to meet teaching needs with full-time staff, but in September. The academic awkward squad, which is about a third of the department, spends the summer arguing about what they will and won’t do the following year. It’s not fair, he’s got more than me. I did that last year. But I’m special, I have a book to write. No, I’m special, I have mental health problems. (In academia, this does not make you special.) I’m even more special, I might leave and take my research funding with me if you don’t give me what I want. I don’t know what they pay the head of department but it should include danger money. He’s a glorified dinner lady, arbitrating playground brawls and trying to forestall the worst outrages of bullying and provocation. When arguing time runs out, he calls on the likes of me, the unemployed with PhDs, to come in and mop up. First-year stuff, mostly, the introductory courses for which the awkward squad consider themselves too important, but occasionally someone’s sabbatical leaves a more specialised option for one of us. I like both, I don’t mind. If I’m not too important to wash pants and buy Christmas presents for nursery staff, I’m not too important to teach an eager eighteen-year-old how to look at a painting. It must, I sometimes think, be exhausting for the awkward squad, for Professor Troublemaker and his henchmen, to maintain their relentless superiority at all times and in all places. They must long, sometimes, to sit on the grass or lick an ice-cream, to fall off something or to be able to offer a casual apology for unintended harm.

  I looked up and saw myself reflected in the French doors of our one downstairs room. Hair on end, baggy old sweatshirt over pyjama bottoms with a hole in the knee, face lit by the screen in front of me. Cars passed outside, not often. The neighbours had left their landing light on. My heart lurched: Miriam. Miriam had nearly died. Miriam’s heart had stopped. I met my own blurred gaze in the glass and looked away.

  Anyway. My hourly-paid teaching is not research, and it’s research that leads to jobs, when there are any jobs, which there aren’t. It gets me out of the house, brings in pin-money, enough that I don’t have to use Emma’s earnings to buy her birthday presents, gives me people to talk to. It’s not wholly implausible to suggest that the Cathedral project could lead to something else, since the ability to write audio-guides could be a skill with more applications than the ability to teach undergraduates to understand the role and limitations of the Arts and Crafts movement in shaping the nation, but I doubt that there is somewhere a recruitment website bursting with adverts for the writers of scripts for old buildings. Not audioguides, sorry. Geolocative media apps, which are audio-guides in a higher-tech form that will defeat and annoy the generation who visit cathedrals. Not my idea, I’m just following my instructions, in this case from Prof. Simon Godnestone (pronounced Gunston, obviously), who has a research grant of half a million pounds contingent upon ‘impact’. ‘Impact’ means that academic research has to be offered to the general public in a form believed by the Research Council to be accessible and engaging, which means dumbed-down and digital. You get extra points for using mobile phones and social media, regardless of the probable audience; there seems to be an idea that Young People Nowadays will flock to cathedrals if promised an experience involving the use of selfie-sticks and Twitter, and no awareness that the beige-clad pensioners who do in fact come off the tour buses and up the ramps two by two do not want a geolocative media app but a knowledgeable guide in a silly hat and a nice cup of tea in the café afterwards. Anyway, even geolocative media apps start, it appears, with words on a page, and that’s what they’re paying me for. Only carrying out orders, see?

  flock of birds

  I had begun by going to the Cathedral. I had been before, once accompanying Rose’s Year 1 school trip – they like to have a father along so someone can take the boys to the loo – and once to a carol service, when Emma discovered that the girls didn’t know any Christmas carols and were mildly disbelieving about her claim that the baby in the manger at Christmas was the same person as the man on the cross. We should Google it, Rose said, that doesn’t sound right. This time I went alone, a daytime outing that felt mildly transgressive even though I knew it was work and I was being paid. You should go to the theatre, Emma always says, put Rose in after-school care and take yourself to a matinée at Stratford, you used to love live Shakespeare and here we are with it on our doorstep, you do know that I would actually like to think of you sitting there watching Hamlet while I’m at work, you do know that it would make me smile when I think about you during the day. A stay-at-home mum, she says, would do such a thing, would take the odd day off, so why don’t you? Because I have something to prove, I think. Because despite the joint account and the rhetoric, it’s not our money but hers, and even in the kindest version of the story of my unemployment, I’m supposed to be looking after the girls and the house and the laundry, not taking myself to matinées.

  Emma had the car that day so I took the bus, and sat upstairs at the front; there is no need to outgrow small pleasures. I looked down into gardens where wet brown leaves stuck to bright grass and caught the occasional glimpse of unmade beds and open wardrobes, a student picking his nose while sitting at a desk in a first-floor bay window. Rose would like this, I thought, I should take her on buses, make sure she knows how it works before she has to get herself to the High School because Miriam won’t always want to be looking after her. Although by then, if the government has its way which it will, the High School will be the Jobz-R-Us Academy specialising in hairdressing and mindless obedience, and Emma will overcome two sets of principles and allow her father to rescue his granddaughters from the consequences of her error of judgement in marrying me by paying private school fees which he has already more than once offered to do. It’s only, he said, that one doesn’t like to think of one’s grandchildren facing greater disadvantages than one’s children. Well then stop voting Tory, you prick, Emma did not say.

  I remembered my own school bus. I’d been scared by the prospect of being the youngest in a lawless community of teenagers in transit, but in fact we were a deeply conservative bunch. Big bad boys sat upstairs at the back with big bad girls, the moral tone rising towards the seat in which I now sat. Younger bad boys sat at the back downstairs and the rest of us sorted ourselves nearer the driver, sole and unwilling representative of adulthood and the law. The bus was too big for the winding lanes and high hedges of West Cornwall, so that branches
hurled themselves into the windows and it was impossible not to duck. We teetered around corners, were often late because of stand-offs with on-coming tractors, once got stuck under a bridge. I was, at least in relation to school, where standards were lower than at Bryher Farm, a good boy, but I tended to sit in the middle and hope no-one noticed.

  Coventry is not a planned city in the way that Milton Keynes and Letchworth are planned, but even so I had thought that from the top of a bus I might see a logic invisible from the streets. Much of the ring-road is set up on stilts like a spiral slide at an outdoor swimming pool. There are outcrops of medieval houses and shops, dwarfed and implausible as sandstone pebbles on a granite beach. They look fake, Tudorbethan, chip shops with slanting oak beams and white plaster walls leaning over the pavement, posters for pay-day loans in the slanting windows of buildings made of small red bricks, smoothed as if by the sea, where low timber doorways force overgrown humans to duck and shimmy. More fibreglass heritage, you think, but it’s real, poking up between disintegrating post-war concrete and 1980s brick facings, stained by exhaust smoke and graffiti. It is cheating to find beauty by picking out the old buildings and softening the focus on the rest. There is no obvious reason why older buildings should be more beautiful, although it seems that we have always thought so. Many contemporary poets and writers were horrified by the crescents and terraces of John Wood’s eighteenth-century Bath, mourning the organic beauty of the ancient village houses demolished to make way for miles of uniform pale stone. Vulgar and ostentatious buildings for tasteless new money, hundreds of houses all the same, piled on top of each other with no gentlemanly privacy. Huge, brutal windows, all very well for those looking out but glaring and inhumanly geometric for passers-by. I used to tease my friends by suggesting that the domestic architecture of the ’60s and ’70s would also have its day, and I was right, but it’s still hard to imagine anyone wanting to venerate much built in British cities in the 1980s.