Читать книгу Homemaking for the Down-At-Heart - Finuala Dowling - Страница 6

In the tall, narrow house, pain woke Zoe. It lodged in her hip and shot down her left leg. Bella licked the old woman’s hand sympathetically as she fumbled for the light switch and struggled out of bed. Among the cluttered objects on her bedside table – photographs of Pia and Margot, jars of pills she couldn’t open, her reading glasses – was a silver bell with a wooden handle. She did not know why it was there. She took small steps that propelled her unsteadily towards the door. At least there was not a vast surface area to cover before she reached something she could clasp for support. This bedroom was smaller than the one she’d had before, closer to the bathroom. But it wasn’t the bathroom that she needed; she’d already used her potty. With her palms against the walls, Zoe made her way up to the top landing, past the closed doors of her daughter’s and granddaughter’s bedrooms and into the enclosed balcony that served as TV room and general lookout. Mr Morland was asleep in his La-Z-Boy, an empty bottle of beer and his failed Lotto numbers beside him.

Zoe stood staring over Mr Morland until he started awake. “I’m looking for a box of matches,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” said Mr Morland. “Probably something else. Tissues? A blanket?”

Zoe thought as hard as she could. The thing she wanted was a picture, but the matching word had gone away behind a hedgerow. The vessels in her brain were jammed with backed-up traffic. Some of the highways were narrowed with orange cones; other roads had become sinkholes, and no traffic could pass. But her mind was not easily defeated. It had marshals – disaster-management officers in high-visibility bibs – who redirected Zoe’s thought processes down little-known back roads, scenic detours with backdrops painted by Escher or Dali. These byways took her exhilaratingly close to her destination.

“It is a little communion wafer that takes my leg away.”

“Ah,” said Mr Morland. “Disprin.”

“I could take a lot now and kill myself.”

“I’ll give you one,” said Mr Morland.

“Will that do the trick?”

“Maybe,” said Mr Morland. “Just wait here while I fetch it.”

He settled her into his La-Z-Boy and covered her with his blanket.

Mr Morland stared into the bathroom cabinet. He could see people milling about on the other side of a river. They seemed to know Zoe and be ready for her. One of the cohort looked like his own mother. She beckoned Zoe, but then dropped her arm as if she accepted that her old friend was not coming immediately.

He brought Zoe a painkiller.

“You’re very kind – who are you?” asked Zoe, as Mr Morland handed her a plastic cup.

“I’m Percy. Do you remember, your friend Esther’s boy?”

“Ah. I inherited you. But your name is actually Mr Morland.”

“Yes, you call me that.”

“Esther used to wonder why you never married. Do you bat for the other side?”

“No way! I’d like to marry. Maybe a Chinese girl.”

He replaced the CD in his player with Tibetan meditation music and pressed play. Zoe closed her eyes. When she was asleep, he lifted her up and carried her back to her own bed. He was a burly man, and used to this pietà in reverse.

Mr Morland was hungry now. Whenever he came back to his body after an encounter with the spirits, he needed fuel. He padded downstairs to the kitchen, took a wad of bread slices and spread them with butter. He stood in front of the open fridge door for a moment before locating his polony roll. Some with thickly cut polony and some with Marmite. The Marmite jar was down to its last eighth. Mr Morland preferred the look and taste of things in a newly opened jar. He found the new one in the grocery cupboard, unscrewed its lid and stuck his buttery knife into the glossy paste. He was never quite sure what to do with his knife afterwards, so he placed it gently on a clean tea towel that lay folded on the kitchen table.

He liked the way the kitchen table looked now that Curtis had sanded it down and oiled it. He’d watched Curtis using a glass shard to remove the paint. The house had definitely changed for the better in the two years since Margot’s boyfriend moved in. Sash windows, once jammed shut with layers of enamel paint, now slid open with ease. Beetle-eaten cupboard doors had become winter firewood as Curtis slowly fixed the neglected house. But there was always more to do.

“The front door is jamming again,” he’d said to Curtis recently. “We should do something about it.” That very evening he’d come home after doing a reading for the wealthy Cleatons and found Curtis with sandpaper in hand.

Margot was more peaceful with Curtis here. She was difficult to live with at the best of times, though; got het up over small things. She complained about his polony roll in the fridge. Why, he did not know. If she would only slow down, sit quietly, then he could put his hand on her shoulder and absorb some of her negative energy into himself. But she walked fast through the house, picking up newspapers and mugs with an aura that said, Don’t touch me.

Mr Morland did not believe that Curtis would stay. He had heard Curtis recite “The Song of Wandering Aengus”. That was a poem for a man who liked sleeping under the stars. Mr Morland had read Curtis’s palm and had seen its wavering heart line. Curtis had a craftsman’s hands: tanned, calloused, nicked. One of his fingers was lame, its top joint permanently bent down and the nail missing, though not from woodworking gone wrong. An old snake injury, apparently. Mr Morland stretched out his own left hand: it was cool, slender and white, with thin, tapering digits. At this very moment, his index finger was tipped with butter. He wiped it on the tea towel.

Since he was the only one awake in the sleeping house, Mr Morland went into the study to use Margot’s computer. He sucked on a toothpick while he looked up his favourite Internet sites. He liked the thought of an Asian girlfriend. She would understand him, and not mind about wet bath mats or large plastic-wrapped polony rolls. She would hang out the former, and replace the latter with tasty stir-fries. Or, if he didn’t want to give up polony, she would understand. He typed in “Thai dating” and Google returned hundreds of thousands of results. The girls were pretty; they were innocent-looking but also quite naughty. He watched a clip of two girls massaging each other with oil. He felt that they wanted him to watch, and to derive pleasure from watching, which he did.