Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.
A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.
Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A.M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.
ALSO BY DAISY JOHNSON
Fen
For my grandmothers, Christine and Cedar
The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognise us but we will always recognise them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.
It is hard, even now, to know where to start. For you memory is not a line but a series of baffling circles, drawing in and then receding. At times I come close to violence. If you were the woman you were sixteen years ago I think I could do it: beat the truth clean out of you. Now it is not possible. You are too old to beat anything out of. The memories flash like broken wine glasses in the dark and then are gone.
There is a degeneration at work. You forget where you have left your shoes when they are on your feet. You look at me five or six times a day and ask who I am or tell me to get out, get out. You want to know how you got here, in my house. I tell you over and over. You forget your name or where the bathroom is. I start keeping clean underwear in the kitchen drawer with the cutlery. When I open the fridge my laptop is in there; the phone, the television remote. You shout for me in the middle of the night and when I come running you ask what I’m doing there. You are not Gretel, you say. My daughter Gretel was wild and beautiful. You are not her.
Some mornings you know exactly who we both are. You get out as many kitchen implements as you can fit on the counter and cook great breakfast feasts, four cloves of garlic in everything, as much cheese as possible. You order me around my own kitchen, tell me to do the washing-up or clean the windows, for god’s sake. The decay comes, on these days, slowly. You forget a pan on the stove and burn the pancakes, the sink overflows onto the floor, a word becomes trapped in your mouth and you hack at it, trying and failing to spit it out. I run the bath for you and we go hand in hand up the stairs. These are small moments of peace, almost unbearable.
If I really cared about you I would put you in a home for your own good. Floral curtains, meals at the same time every day, others of your kind. Old people are a species all of their own. If I really still loved you I would have left you where you were, not carted you here, where the days are so short they are barely worth talking about and where we endlessly, excavate, exhume what should remain buried.
Occasionally we find those old words sneaking back in and we are undone by them. It’s as if nothing has ever changed, as if time doesn’t mean a jot. We have gone back and I am thirteen years old and you are my awful, wonderful, terrifying mother. We live on a boat on the river and we have words that no one else does. We have a whole language all our own. You tell me that you can hear the water effing along; I answer that we are far from any river but that I sometimes hear it too. You tell me you need me to leave, you need some sheesh time. I tell you that you are a harpiedoodle and you grow enraged or laugh so hard you cry.
One night I wake and you are screaming and screaming. I skid along the corridor, knock your door open, put on the light. You are sitting up in the narrow spare bed with the sheets pulled to your chin and your mouth open, weeping.
What is it? What’s wrong?
You look at me. The Bonak is here, you say, and for a moment – because it is night and I am only just awake – I feel a rise of sickening panic. I shake it away. Open the wardrobe and show you the empty inside; help you out of bed so we can crouch together and look beneath, stand at the window and peer out into the black.
There’s nothing there. You have to sleep now.
It’s here, you say. The Bonak is here.
Most of the time you sit stonily in the armchair regarding me. You have a bad case of eczema on your hands that was never there before and you scratch it with your teeth bared. I try to make you comfortable, but – and I remember this about you now – you find comfort an annoyance. You refuse the tea I bring you, won’t eat, barely drink. You swat me away when I approach with pillows. Leave it, you’re fussing, give it a rest. So I do. I sit at the small wooden table facing you in the armchair and I listen to you talk. You have an aggressive stamina that carries us through whole nights with barely a pause. Occasionally you’ll say, I’m going to the bathroom and rise out of your chair like a mourner from the side of a grave, your hands brushing invisible dust from the front of the trousers I lent you. I’m going now, you’ll say and approach the stairs with gravitas, turning back to glare at me as if to say that I cannot continue without you, it is not my story and I must wait until you have returned. Halfway up the stairs you tell me that a person has to own their mistakes, live with them. I open one of the notebooks I’ve bought and write down everything I can remember. Your words are almost peaceful on the page, somehow disarmed.
I’ve been thinking about the trace of our memories, whether the trace stays the same or changes as we rewrite them over time. If they are stable as houses and cliffs or decay fast and are replaced, overlaid. Everything we remember is passed down, thought over, is never the way that it was in reality. It makes me fraught, restless. I will never really know what happened.
When you are well enough I take you out to the fields. There were sheep here once but now there is only grass so thin the chalk shows through, lumpy hills rising from the ribs of the ground, a thin stream that burps out of the dirt and sidles down the slope. Every couple of days I declare exercise a cure and we march to the top of the hill, stand sweating and puffing at the top, and then cross down to the stream. Only then do you stop complaining. You crouch by the water and drop your hands into its cold rush until you touch the stony bottom. People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people.
What do you mean by that? I say. But you won’t answer or have forgotten you said anything to begin with. Still, the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.
You hit a bad mood. You sulk until it gets dark and then rattle through the house trying to find something to drink stronger than water. Where is it? you shout. Where is it? I do not tell you that I emptied the cupboards when I first found you on the river and brought you here and that you will have to do without. You flop into the armchair and glower. I make you toast, which you upend off the plate onto the floor. I find a pack of cards in one of the drawers and you look at me as if I’m mad.
I don’t know, I say. What do you want?
You get out of the chair and point at it. I can see your arms shaking with exhaustion or anger. It’s not always going to be my fucking turn, you say. I’ve told you enough. All of that stuff. All of that shit about me. You jab your splayed hand at the chair. It’s your turn.
Fine. What do you want to know? I sit in the armchair. It’s burning with your leftover heat. You skulk near the wall, pulling at the sleeves of the waxed jacket you’ve taken to wearing inside.
Tell me how you found me, you say.
I put my head back, hold my hands so tightly together I can feel the blood booming. It is almost a relief to hear you asking.
This is your story – some lies, some fabrications – and this is the story of the man who was not my father and of Marcus, who was, to begin with, Margot – again, hearsay, guesswork – and this story, finally, is – worst of all – mine. This beginning I lay claim to. This is how, a month ago, I found you.
It had been sixteen years since I last saw you, as I was getting on that bus. At the start of the summer the potholes in the track up to the cottage filled with frogspawn but it was nearly halfway through August and nothing much grew there any more. This place was a boat in another life. That month there were seams of damp around all the walls; in the sudden hill-winds the chimney coughed down bird’s nests, shards of eggshell, balls of owl pellet. The floor in the tiny kitchen had a slant that rolled a ball from one end to the other. None of the doors quite fitted. I was thirty-two years old and had been there for seven years. In Australia they spoke about being beyond the black stump. In America they called it in the backwoods or past the jerkwater. These were words which meant: I do not want anyone to find me. I understood that this was a trait I had got from you. I understood that you were always trying to bury yourself so deep even I wouldn’t unearth you. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was an hour and a half from Oxford, where I worked, on the bus. No one but the postman knew I was here. I was protective of my solitude. I gave it space the way others gave space to their religion or politics; I owed nothing to either of those.
For a living I updated dictionary entries. I had been working on break all week. There were index cards spread across the table and some on the floor. The word was tricky and defied simple definition. These were the ones I liked best. They were the same as an earworm, a song that became stuck in your head. Often I would find myself sliding them into sentences where they did not belong. To decipher a code. To break a note. To interrupt. I would work my way through the alphabet, and by the time I had reached the end it would have changed, shifted even a little. The memories I had of you were the same. When I was younger I went over and over them, trying to pick out details, specific colours or sounds. Except each time I revisited one it would be slightly different and I’d realise that I couldn’t tell what I’d made up and what had really happened. After that I stopped remembering and tried forgetting instead. I was always much more competent at that.
Every few months I rang the hospitals, the morgues, the police stations and asked if anyone had seen you. Twice in the last sixteen years there had been a flurry of possibility: a raided boating community with a woman matching the description I gave; a couple of kids who said they saw a body in the woods but turned out to be lying. I no longer saw you on other women’s faces in the street, but ringing morgues had become a habit. Sometimes I thought that I kept doing it to make sure you were not coming back.
That morning I’d been in the office. The air conditioning was turned up so high everyone was in jumpers and scarves, fingerless gloves. Lexicographers are a singular breed. Cold-blooded, slow-thinking, careful with our sentences. At my desk – shuffling index cards – I realised it had been nearly five months since I’d looked for you. The longest gap for a while. I took my phone into the bathroom and called the old places. I had adapted your physical description to allow for passing time. White female, mid-sixties, dark- to grey-haired, five feet one, twelve stone, birthmark on left shoulder, tattoo on ankle.
I was wondering, he said in the last morgue I phoned, if we might get this call.
You always seemed forceful, without end, deathless. I left work early. There were road works at the roundabouts and the bus took a long time to get out of the city. I had never looked much like you but in the reflection of the dirty window I saw you in the angles of my face. Closed my fists over the bar of the seat in front. That evening I would pack a bag, book a rental car, turn off the water. In the morning I would drive to identify your body.
It was dark by the time I got home. I went to turn the light on in the kitchen and found myself afraid – in a way I had not been for years – in case you were standing there. I ran the tap over my hands until the water was steaming. You were shorter than I was, wide around the hips, feet so small you sometimes joked they’d been bound when you were a child. You did not cut your hair, and it was long and dark, coarse at the top. Now and then you’d have me plait it. Gretel, Gretel, you have fast fingers. You would laugh. I had not remembered that for a long time. What it felt like to touch your hair. Can you make a mermaid tail? No, not like that, try again. One more time.
I tried to work. Break. To separate into pieces. To make or become inoperative. I would finally see you again at the morgue in the morning. Dread was a word that could be used also to describe flocks of birds taking off into the sky. The mass of birds rose up my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw. I broke my own rule. There was a bottle of gin wedged between the fridge and the wall. I wrangled it out. Poured a treble into a glass. Raised the glass to you. Your voice talked inside my head, on and on. I couldn’t make out the words, only that it was you speaking; the sentences had your inflections, the words were simple and hard. I gritted my teeth around the edge of the glass. I closed my eyes. There was a loud clap and I felt the wind of it on my face. When I looked you were in the low doorway to the yard. You were wearing that old orange dress, pulled tight around your waist, your legs breaking out from the bottom. You were holding your hands out to me and they were full of mud. The river was connected to your left shoulder and widened out behind you. It was the way it was when we lived there: thick, nearly opaque. Except, on the kitchen tiles, I could see the shadows of creatures ducking and diving, swimming. I ran the tap again and held both hands under the hot water. When I looked back you had sidled closer, weed wrapped in the drags of black hair either side of your face, your old-cigarette smell filling the kitchen from top to bottom. I could feel you examining my life. Even in my imagination you were opinionated, critical. You peeled an egg, skinning the shell off the smooth white globe. You chased me with the hose until the ground was so sodden with mud that we fell, were coated as if bulbs just born. You looked at me out of the mouth of my kitchen with the river crashing behind you. What are you doing? you said. Is this where you’ve ended up? Just effing along.
I put on my boots, a coat and hat and went out so fast I barely closed the door behind me. There was a crust of light pollution and a sliver-moon. I walked so hard I had to stop after a bit, puffing. When I looked back there was a single square of light from the kitchen window of the cottage. A yellow socket in the hill. I couldn’t remember if I was the one who’d left it on.
I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all those years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left.
The rental car was red and the hospital seemed to be mostly a long corridor. I walked past entrances to gynaecology, respiratory health, private. It smelled of soup warmed up in the staff microwave, burned toast, bleach. The morgue was three floors down. I lingered outside, not wanting to go in. There was a board with advertisements for dog walkers, free hamster, new bike only £100. The air conditioning was broken, and when people got up from chairs they left sweat stains behind. The orderlies came and went with trolleys, plugged into headphones or talking on their mobiles. I rarely remembered faces or bodies. I thought of words you used to say: hooch, radiant, sludge. What had you smelled like? I put my wrist against my nose. You had been jealous, selfish with your time and space. Even after sixteen years of living without you, even going to see your body I was trying not to step on your toes. An orderly pushed a trolley in through the swing doors and they opened enough for me to see a triangle of the room beyond, the glare of fluorescents.
I’d spoken to the morgue attendant a handful of times on the phone over the years. His sentences were smattered with hesitation and question marks at the end of statements. He was bald, a shiny pate. He said that I looked the way my voice sounded. I was not sure what that meant. I did not look much like you. You had a stone-edged attractiveness that frightened everyone I saw you meet. There were cut-outs of cactuses pinned up on the board. He shrugged when he saw me looking at them.
Something about them, don’t you think? They don’t need anyone. They store water inside them.
I was not certain how I’d got into the room. There were metal doors set into the walls and the radio on low in the background, a song I did not recognise. He swung one of the doors open and pulled a tray out. There was a blue sheet over the top of you. All of the air was gone. I could see shapes under the sheet: a nose, a hip bone. The feet sticking out at one end looked waxy. There was a tag attached to one of the toes and, on another, a bell.
What’s that for? I asked.
He palmed a hand across his scalp. His hands were very clean but there was some food at the corner of his thin mouth. It’s unnecessary, he said, a foible really. Before heart monitors it was to make sure the dead were really dead. I retain a sense of tradition.
That must be where dead ringer comes from, I said, and he looked at me the way people sometimes did when I talked like a dictionary. I wanted to tell him about all the beautiful words I’d thought of during the drive for the places we keep our dead: charnel house, ossuary, sepulchre.
Do you want a countdown? Three, two, one? he asked. Some people do.
No.
He pulled back the blue sheet so it rested just below the shoulders. I felt pain in my stomach, along my hairline, a shock of cold. It was you. A second later I saw my mistake. Her hair was – it was true – the same colour as yours and there was something about the lines around her eyes and mouth that brought you to mind, the shape of her forehead. But she did not have your broad nose – the bridge twisted from a break before I was even born – and the birthmark on her shoulder was not the same colour as yours, that almost sickly purple.
Are you sure? He sounded disappointed. They must have had as many lost bodies at the morgue as there used to be in the canal, swollen, rising in the low season. He lifted the sheet at the base to show me the tattoo, but it was new, still a little sore-looking from where the needle had sunk in: an off-centre star, a map of an unidentifiable country. I’d never been certain what yours was and you would not tell me. Even mothers need to have secrets.
Yes, I’m sure, I said.
On the way back from the morgue I stopped for petrol and then sat on a wooden picnic bench by the stacks of newspapers and BBQ charcoal. Everything seemed aligned wrong: the metal of car doors shimmering against the hot flow from the motorway. My mouth tasted sour, unwashed. I felt as if the skin had been rubbed off my hands and cheeks. I was exhausted, as if I’d lived that moment ten times over, as if there was never anywhere I was going to end up except for there: at a petrol station in the heat after seeing a dead body that was not you. It was a mistake to ring around looking for you. There were cranks and dials in a person’s head that were best left alone. I got the map out of the glove compartment. I thought maybe I’d recognised some of the road signs (written words stuck with me) and looking I realised it was because I was near the stables. I’d thought they would be hours away, an overnight trip, but they were not far, an hour or less. It unnerved me. That all along I had been so close to that place. I bought a bar of chocolate and sat in the car trying to decide what to do. The chocolate melted before I could even open the packet. It did not – the blue sheet pulled back over that face – seem possible to go home.
On a tight corner I almost hit something that came haring across, flat on the road, a slip of colour. My foot mashed the brake down. I bit my tongue, shouted. Certain I’d gone over it. Whatever it was. I got out. It was hot. Too hot for any of it. I squatted to look under the car. When I straightened there was a woman in a purple mackintosh running towards me.
Did you hit my dog? The right side of her face was shrugged down – from a stroke perhaps – and her words were a little unclear. I wanted to drive on but she grabbed my arm. Did you hit my dog?
I don’t know, I said.
Her mackintosh was zipped all the way to her chin despite the heat. We looked for the dog together under the car and then in the bushes on either side of the road. She did not call its name only whistled badly and to no effect.
He can’t eat anything, she said, he’s on a very strict diet. We need to find him before he eats something. He’s always running away. She spoke as if we were old friends. He was a runner even when he was a puppy.
A car came round the corner and almost collided with mine, stopped in the middle of the road.
I can’t see him. Can I give you a lift somewhere?
But she was gone, pushing through the tough hedge and into the ditch beyond. I could feel the words for gatherings of the dead in my mouth. I was still expecting to find you somewhere, crumpled up, cold to the touch, your feet facing in different directions.
There was a steep, potholed road that went down towards the stables, a double-barred gate which two girls in tight trousers were climbing over and, beyond, a car park. The stables were the last place I ever lived with you, the last room I shared with you. Do you remember how the girls who worked at weekends used to leave their half-drunk bottles of Coca-Cola lined up against the wall, stand with their faces close together; how there were a couple of them we could never tell the difference between? A lot of them had a strange roiling Essex accent that I could never quite understand, lengthened words heavy with extra o’s and u’s.
At first I just poked around, didn’t announce myself. There was a lesson going on in the arena, four kids on fat ponies. The teacher who’d been there at the same time we were was tall with straightened brown hair and long painted fingernails. A voice like a foghorn but fragile, often wearing casts, slings tied around her neck. She wasn’t there any more.
I sneaked down the side of the arena. Some of the rungs of the stairs up to the room we had lived in were broken. I remembered that narrow alley between arena and stable block because I would often sit at the top of the steps and watch for you coming, tripping over the rough earth, swearing and grabbing for the wall. I must have known, really, that you would leave, always expected that you wouldn’t come home. You’re waiting up for me? That’s sweet, you’d say though your face always said otherwise, closing in around the words like scaffolding.
I went back to the car park. The lesson was finished, and the teacher came over and asked if I had a kid or wanted to learn myself. Fourteen pounds a go. More if it was for me. I told her I’d lived there when I was a teenager but she only looked blank, searched over my shoulder for escape.
We rented the room up there.
She shrugged. They don’t do that any more.
Also, I’m interested in lessons for my niece, I said. Can I have a look at the rest of the yard?
I went around the back and up towards the fields. A little way up there was someone bent, working at the ground. I went under the electric fencing and towards her. She was picking up sharp stones and throwing them out of the field.
Help you? She wiped her hand on the back of her trousers. There was a small silver cross around her neck that fell forward each time she moved. She was older than the woman who’d been teaching, her hair losing its orange dye at the parting. I showed her the photo of you.
I’m looking for this woman, she lived here for a couple of years. In the room above the arena.
She wiped her hands a second time. Took it. Peered. Maybe. She held it out towards me, pushing out her lips. I’m not sure.
Can you look again?
Above the arena?
In that room. She did some mucking out. There was a girl with her. Her daughter. She was thirteen or so when they first arrived. Didn’t go to school. Hung around a lot.
I do.
What?
Yes. She was looking down the rise to the ugly buildings, the square arena and chunky stable block. I remember her. Both of them. Why do you want to know?
I’m her niece. She hasn’t seen any family for a long time. She got some money in a will. I need to find her.
She gestured with her square chin, smudged with dirt, and we went down the hill and into the Portakabin kitchen. She leaned against the counter while the kettle boiled. I let her talk about what she remembered of you and of the girl she did not know was me. In the sink there were cups filled with green mould. On the sofa a teenage girl was reading a magazine and drinking Lucozade. There were some things she said that I did not remember though I thought I’d remembered everything about that time. The noise of music that used to come from the room above the arena, how you sometimes taught lessons or drove the horsebox to shows. It unnerved me. Even the history I thought I’d kept was wrong. I knocked my fist against the counter.
She poured the boiling water onto instant coffee granules. We don’t have any sugar but there are some Pop-Tarts.
I’m fine. Did you see her again? I said, clipping the cup against my teeth when I went to drink it. After she left? Did she come back? My pulse thudded in my temples.
I don’t know.
Maybe?
I could see by the way she was looking at me that my voice was too loud. The girl on the sofa had put down her magazine and was staring.
People come and go. Let me see the photo again. She held it between finger and thumb, careful so as not to bend the edges. Melanie? she said to the girl. Aren’t there stables left to clean?
They’re done, Melanie said.
Don’t just say things if they’re not true.
She waited until Melanie was gone and then she gave the photo back. There was a woman a few years ago. I’m not sure. She shook her head.
Go on, I said.
I don’t know. It might have been her. She hung around for a couple of hours and no one really noticed. I saw her on my lunch break. She’d wandered out to the field where we just were. When I spoke to her she wasn’t quite right.
What do you mean?
She inclined her head as if she didn’t want to say. I mean she wasn’t quite there. She missed words out, didn’t seem to know where she was or what she was doing here. There’s an old people’s home not far away and I thought maybe she’d come from there so I called the police. Except by the time they got here it was dark and she was gone, and when I rang the home no one was missing anyway. It might not have been her. People get lost, you know. She looked at me. People come and go. It might not even have been the person you’re looking for.
As I was driving back along the road away from the stable I saw the dog. Sat on the verge. Not sweet-looking, some kind of mutt, odd features, bald patches. I almost didn’t stop, and when I did there was a disagreement, the dog pacing back and forth out of reach, showing me its white gums. Once I got him in the car he seemed merry enough. I watched him in my mirror, sitting upright on the middle seat, looking back at me. I don’t like animals, you said in my head. As loud as if you were in the passenger seat. Put that thing back where you found it.
I don’t like dogs much either, I told him, and he closed his eyes as if exhausted by the conversation already.
I drove up and down the road searching for his owner, but there was no sign and no one answered at any of the houses. I was supposed to be on my way back. I was supposed to be at home already and at work the next day.
I kept going until I hit a motorway. The dog made a noise in the back of his throat that was so like a word I nearly hit the brakes. He paced the back seat, lifted his leg and put it back down. I took the next exit. Lights from Little Chef, Burger King, Subway. The dog pissed in the car park of the Travelodge. I was so hungry I bought chips, ate them leaning against the car. I remembered a story I’d heard about a child finding a lizard in her Happy Meal, deep fried. The sort of story I might once have told you to watch you laugh. I watched a couple having an argument in the entrance to the Travelodge, their wide mouths and waving arms. I followed them in and asked how much a room was. Twenty-five pounds, no breakfast but a vending machine at the end of the corridor. I was inside the room before I could think what I might be doing. The smell of petrol through the window. The triangular pattern of yellow and black on the carpet. Someone else’s hair in the plughole of the sink.
A creature paddled through the summer-hot air, crawled up the corridors, dug its way through the door to my room and under the duvet, put its head on my pillow. I clenched my eyes shut. There was the smell of its slow, almost-bovine digestion. The mattress was sodden, starting to shred. I opened my eyes again, filled the narrow bath almost to the top, locked the dog out, got in. I must have dozed because when I woke I was underwater. There were blurred magnolia tiles above, the grim metal shower head craning down. I’d tried to sit up but there was a weight on my chest. I watched the air rise from my nose and mouth, pressed my hands down onto the gritty base of the bath, felt that weight holding me down. In the spare white of no-oxygen I’d known what it was. It was what I’d promised I would never think of again. It was what had been there on the river in that final month. The word felt wrong in my mouth. I saw white stars, a terrible cold in my throat.
The weight was gone. I came out choking, the water crashing onto the floor and flooding out beyond the closed door. I sucked in so much air it burned, clambered out and landed hard on my knees. The dog was howling. I put my cheek against the chilly floor and lay there for a long time.
What I always go back to – of course – is how you left me. This is because, you say from your armchair, I am selfish and clingy. You tell me I was always this way. You tell me that on the river I clung to you like a limpet and howled until the trees fell. You are liable to exaggeration. Telling your story seems an act of mining rather than simply recording. At times you listen quietly. At times you interrupt and our two tellings cluster together, overlap.
I don’t remember much of what happened on the river. Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection. I know that we left the place we’d been moored since I was born and that Marcus was not with us. I know that we drove the boat down the river and away, moored in a city where the bells chimed the hour. Stayed there for, maybe, a week; no longer. One day when I woke you’d packed a rucksack and a couple of plastic bags. I don’t think you even bothered to lock the boat. I understood then we were not going back. I was thirteen years old and everything I’d ever known was on that boat. Everything besides you.
We sat on the first bench we came to and you plaited my hair into a tight, painful braid and then I plaited yours. As if we were going to war. I could feel you humming beneath your skin, the electricity of pylons or power stations coursing through you. You were small – though now, over sixty, you are even more so – but you let me clamber onto your back and cling there as we walked.
For a couple of months we trawled hostels and B & Bs, people’s sofas they were renting for cheap. We never stayed very long. We couldn’t afford it. Towards the end we rode the buses, dozing against greasy windows, waking when the driver came to tell us we had to leave.
overnight