My mother is also anxious to know. If she wasn’t drinking for two, if I wasn’t sharing the load, she’d be on the floor. After twenty minutes we go indoors and make our way across the library, then upstairs towards the bedroom. One should be careful, going barefoot through this house. My mother yelps as something crunches underfoot, we pitch and yaw as she lunges at the banister. Then we’re steady while she pauses to inspect her sole. Her curse is muttered calmly, so there must be blood, but not too much. She hobbles through the bedroom, leaving a trail perhaps on what I know to be a filthy off-white carpet strewn with discarded clothes and shoes and suitcases half unpacked from journeys that pre-date my time.
We reach the echoey bathroom, a large and filthy shambles, from what I’ve heard. She pulls open a drawer, impatiently stirs its rattling, rustling contents, tries another, and in the third locates the plaster for her cut. She sits on the edge of the bath and rests her poor foot across her knee. Little grunts and gasps of exasperation suggest her cut’s in a place that’s hard to reach. If only I could kneel before her and help. Even though she’s young and slim, it’s not easy leaning forwards with my impeding bulk. Better then, she decides, more stable, to clear a space and sit down on the hard tiled floor. But that’s not easy either. It’s all my fault.
This is where we are and what we’re doing when we hear Claude’s voice, a shout from down the stairs.
‘Trudy! Oh my God. Trudy!’
The thump of rapid footsteps, and he shouts her name again. Then, his heavy breathing in the bathroom.
‘I cut my foot on a stupid piece of glass.’
‘There’s blood all through the bedroom. I thought …’ He doesn’t tell us that he hoped for my demise. Instead he says, ‘Let me do it. Shouldn’t we clean it first?’
‘Stick it on.’
‘Hold still.’ Now his turn to grunt and gasp. And then, ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Fuck off. Stick it on.’
At last it’s done and he helps her to her feet. Together we sway.
‘Christ! How much did you have?’
‘Just a glass.’
She rests again on the bathtub’s rim.
He steps away, into the bedroom, and returns a minute later. ‘We’ll never get that blood off the carpet.’
‘Try rubbing it with something.’
‘I’m telling you, it won’t come out. Look. Here’s a spot. Try it yourself.’
I’ve rarely heard Claude so forthright. Not since ‘We can.’
My mother too hears the difference and says, ‘What happened?’
Now there’s a whine of complaint in his voice.
‘He took the money, didn’t thank me for it. And get this. He’s given his notice on the Shoreditch place. He’s moving back in here. He says you need him, however much you say you don’t.’
The bathroom echoes die away. But for their breathing, there’s silence while they consider. My guess is they’re looking at each other, into each other, a long, eloquent stare.
‘There it is,’ he says at last, in his familiar, empty way. He waits, then adds, ‘So?’
At this my mother’s heart begins a steady acceleration. Not just faster, but louder, like the hollow knocking sound of faulty plumbing. Something is also happening in her gut. Her bowels are loosening, with a squeaky stretching sound, and higher up, somewhere above my feet, juices race down winding tubes to unknown destinations. Her diaphragm heaves. I’m pressing my ear more tightly to the wall. Against this crescendo, it would be too easy to miss a vital fact.
The body cannot lie, but the mind is another country, for when my mother speaks at last, her tone is smooth, nicely in control. ‘I agree.’
Claude comes closer, speaks softly, almost at a whisper. ‘But. What do you think?’
They kiss and she starts to tremble. I feel his arms move round her waist. They kiss again with soundless tongues.
She says, ‘Scary.’
And responding to a private joke he replies, ‘Hairy.’
But they fail to laugh. I feel Claude push his groin into hers. That they should be aroused at such a time! How little I know. She finds his zip, tugs downwards, caresses, while his index finger curls under her cut-offs. I feel its recurrent pressure on my forehead. Might we go to bed? But no, thank God, he pursues his question.
‘Decide.’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘But remember. Six months ahead. In my house, seven million in the bank. And we’ve placed the baby somewhere. But. What’s it to. Erm. Be?’
His own practical question calms him, allows him to withdraw his finger. But her pulse, which had begun to settle, leaps at his question. Not sex but danger. Her blood beats through me in thuds like distant artillery fire and I can feel her struggling with a choice. I’m an organ in her body, not separate from her thoughts. I’m party to what she’s about to do. When it comes at last, her decision, her whispered command, her single treacherous utterance, appears to issue from my own untried mouth. As they kiss again she says it into her lover’s mouth. Baby’s first word.
‘Poison.’
FIVE
HOW SOLIPSISM BECOMES the unborn. While barefoot Trudy sleeps off our five glasses on the sitting-room couch and our dirty house rolls eastwards into thick night, I dwell as much on my uncle’s placed as my mother’s poison. Like a DJ hunched over his turntable, I scratchily sample the line. And … we’ve placed the baby somewhere. With repetition, the words are rubbed clean as truth and my intended future shines clear. Placed is but the lying cognate of dumped. As the baby is of me. Somewhere is a liar too. Ruthless mother! This will be an undoing, my fall, for only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards. The Duchess of Cambridge will not be taking me on. My solo flight of self-pity settles me somewhere on the thirteenth floor of the brutal tower block my mother says she sometimes gazes on sadly from an upper bedroom window. She gazes and thinks, So close, yet remote as the Vale of Swat. Fancy living there.
Quite so. Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head. Swat indeed. No bedtime stories to nourish my toddler brain’s plasticity. The curiosity-free mindscape of the modern English peasantry. What then of maggot farming in Utah? Poor me, poor buzz-cut, barrel-chested three-year-old boy in camouflage trousers, lost in a haze of TV noise and secondary smoke. His adoptive mother’s tattooed and swollen ankles totter past, followed by her labile boyfriend’s pungent dog. Beloved father, rescue me from this Vale of Despond. Take me down with you. Let me be poisoned at your side rather than placed somewhere.
Typical third-term self-indulgence. All I know of the English poor has come to me by way of TV and reviews of novelistic mockery. I know nothing. But my reasonable suspicion is that poverty is deprivation on all levels. No harpsichord lessons on the thirteenth floor. If hypocrisy’s the only price, I’ll buy the bourgeois life and consider it cheap. And more, I’ll hoard grain, be rich, have a coat of arms. NON SANZ DROICT, and mine is to a mother’s love and is absolute. To her schemes of abandonment I deny consent. I won’t be exiled, but she will be. I’ll bind her with this slimy rope, press-gang her on my birthday with one groggy, newborn stare, one lonesome seagull wail to harpoon her heart. Then, indentured by strong-armed love to become my constant nurse, her freedom but a retreating homeland shore, Trudy will be mine, not Claude’s, as able to dump me as tear her breasts from her ribcage and toss them overboard. I can be ruthless too.
*
And so I went on, drunkenly, I suppose, expansive and irrelevant, until she woke with several groans and fumbled for her sandals under the couch. Together we descend, limping, to the humid kitchen, where, in the semi-darkness that might almost hide the squalor, she bends to drink at length from the cold-water tap. Still in her beachwear. She turns on the lights. No sign of Claude, no note. We go to the fridge and hopefully she looks in. I see – I imagine I see on an untested retina – her pale, indecisive arm hovering in the cold light. I love her beautiful arm. On a lower shelf something once living, now purulent, appears to stir in its paper bag, drawing from her a reverential gasp, forcing her to close the door. So we cross the room to the dry-goods cupboard and there she finds a bag of salted nuts. Shortly, I hear her dial her lover.
‘Are you still at home?’
I can’t hear him for her crunching.