Chapter 3 #2
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of what looks like the corner of a pinball machine outside the shed’s back door.
It must be wrecked to be this far back in the yard, with the half bikes and the bashed lampshades, but I clamber over to check it out anyway.
It was always like this: down the rabbit hole, glimpse by glimpse, until you end up . . .
All the way back among the living room units, once someone’s ultra-modern pride and joy, now with their shelves collapsing behind the smoked-glass doors and the veneer lifting on their ash or teak or beech finish.
Back here with the deep, flimsy cabinets for old-style tellies and the moulded MDF headboards that turn into a table on each side like the curled horns on rams’ skulls.
And I am fine. I’m not scared, not shaking, not crying, not praying for help. It’s nothing more than kind of depressing. And I’m so steeped in sadness anyway that the sight of something depressing can’t touch me.
The smell touches me all right. It’s faint but it’s there, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it.
Of course, Lord’s Yard always smells a bit, always did: of dust and must and mould; of mushrooms growing in soaked wood and leaves rotting in the shallow pools that form in tilted sinks and on buckled tabletops; of slow decay and what we used to call disco decay—the way cheap carpet, discarded dirty, ferments when it sits in the rain.
There’s not another smell like it. But all those smells are vegetative and harmless.
They come and they go. This smell is animal in origin, an unmistakable trace of dead rodent or bird blooming somewhere.
Once a bat got stuck in the outflow pipe of a water butt it had fallen into. It might be that again.
I retreat until it’s gone and, on the way, something catches my eye.
Against all the odds, I find myself smiling.
In a faded milk crate, so brittle from the sun and rain that it’s starting to crumble, there’s what must be a reproduction Victorian jubilee biscuit tin.
I edge over that way and pluck it out of the jumble of pillowcases and dust busters where it’s ended up.
That kind old lady who found me crying by the pillar box had completely slipped my mind, but I think I’ll drive over there and see if she’s in, show her my find, disapprove of the fakeness along with her.
It’s a pretty good attempt, mind you; much better than all those distressed Guinness signs that were once so treasured and are now stacked dozens deep in Lord’s Yard, never to be chosen, never to be bought for so much as a penny.
“What you after, Linds?” John’s voice makes me jump. He must have come round the outside edge somehow. There must be a straight path to here these days, where before we always had to thread a way through the aisles in the sheds and climb over the collapsing piles between them.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Just wombling.” That was what we always called wandering the yard, seeing what we tripped over. John’s face is blank, as if he’s forgotten, or at least as if he doesn’t want to share a happy memory with me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to gloss over things.”
He shrugs at me as if he doesn’t understand this either.
“What are you doing away back here?” I ask. “Playing hunt the smell? Because something certainly whiffs a bit.”
He pinches up his eyes and shakes his head at me.
No way he’s forgotten that. When we were wee, my dad would often have to track down a dead mouse or even a rabbit and “hunt the smell” was what he called it.
Is this how John has managed to live here?
Has he buried everything so deep that he can’t even remember what I’m referring to?
“I was checking you’re okay,” he says. So he does know I might not be. “What makes you think you need a mattress?”
It takes me a moment to change tracks. “Right,” I say, thinking, okay, surface it is. “You got my texts? I’ll pay for it, obviously, but if I give the other bits back when my stuff arrives—”
“But you’re staying here,” he says. “You’re staying here with us.”
“I’m not moving today,” I agree, “but I need to get back to work. So I need somewhere to work. So I need somewhere to live.”
“Do you though?” he says, sharp looking suddenly. “Are you short of money? I thought—”
As if he’s nothing but my father’s son. Or maybe it comes with the job. Maybe you can’t be in the house-clearance business without seeing death in pound signs.
“Not for income so much as for . . .”
“Would the boxroom be big enough?” John says. “We can easy clear it.”
“I wasn’t hinting.”
“Yeah but,” he says, sounding awkward. “Oh you know, Linds. I’m not sure you should be on your own, not this soon.”
I give him a quick hug with one arm, the only kind of hug he’ll put up with. I’ll check it out later to be polite but I’m pretty sure John’s work set-up, Shelley’s big screen, and the boys’ games have the bandwidth tapped out already without me siphoning. Still, I appreciate the offer.
“So long as you’re okay,” he says, turning to leave. “We worry about you.”
“John, I can’t interpret any of this,” I tell him.
“You assure me it’s fine here now, encourage me to come back.
Then you act like you don’t know why it wouldn’t be.
And you didn’t exactly fall on my neck when I got here, by the way.
Then you check whether I’m coping, like you know damn well I might not. You’re making me dizzy.”
His face is a mask. “We’re worried about you because you’re grieving,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “Got it. We know, but we can’t know, so we don’t know, though we do.”
“Talking utter bollocks doesn’t exactly help us not worry.”
I stare at him. There’s no way on earth he can have forgotten the Lord family motto. He invented it. I open my mouth but, before I can chip away at even a tiny corner of this, the fight goes out of me.
“Don’t you need to go and open up?” I say.
“Not today. We’ve had a big clearance over . . . well, down Stirling way, and we need to sort it out. So we’re closed to walk-ins.” He hesitates. “Just . . . Mind how you go, away back here, eh?”
Which makes no sense whatsoever. Because either he’s really talking to me after all, in which case, as we both know, there’s nothing to be scared of now.
Or he’s making out that we didn’t play all over this bit when we were kids.
We were never told to stay away from tyres or broken glass, not to climb on the Les Mis mountains of semidigested broken things.
We were only warned away from what was clean and new, in case we scuffed or dented something that could make our mum and dad some actual money. It was always okay to be this far back.
Then I catch myself. How did John know where I was?
Is there security away back here these days?
High-tech surveillance of the broken television cabinets and the rusted space heaters?
I dismiss the idea, tuck the biscuit tin under my arm and start edging through the beds shed towards my hire car and my new friend.
Just the once, I have to stop and close my eyes when that visual glitch turns the world flat and false on me, but still.
I’ve got a feeling inside about seeing Mrs. .
. . I wish I could remember her name . .
. that feels almost like optimism. I’ve given John lip.
I’ve taken a funny picture to send to Chloe.
Maybe it was the round-the-clock sleep, or maybe I was right to come home.
Shelley’s out on the step when I finally make it back to the house. “You okay?” she says.
“Jesus, not you too.”
“You seem . . .” Shelley says.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, deciding not to mention how my eyesight’s gone wonky four times now.
“You should get yourself a doctor sometime soon,” Shelley says. “Our practice in Alva is pretty good.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” I say. “I thought it was America that medicalised grief and us that just got on with it?”
“I don’t mean happy pills,” Shelley says, frowning. “Lindsay, I’m worried about you.”
“Both of you, eh?” I say. “Did John just text you or something?”
“No,” she says, but she turns bright red and she knows I saw it happen.
“I’m fine,” I say again and leave her.