If You Believe in Fairies…
There was some illness in the table, she thought: it would not go right, however much she scrubbed it. She breathed out, and the anger did not leave her with the air. It burnt a hostile rhythm in her heart and left her feeling sullen and empty. She thought she should probably eat something. Her eyes glanced over to the kitchen counter, where she’d put that food the two nice boys from round the corner had got her (now what were their names…?). She wasn’t hungry, though.
What was there to do? What did she usually do all day? She didn’t know. She couldn’t think. It was as though something hard and blunt were battering at her brain and shoving all thoughts down into the empty darkness that was her mind.
Holly. The name caught bland in her throat. She shrugged it off her and bent down under the kitchen sink to get out a rag, wincing at her back. She got it out, wet it slightly, and turned to dusting the house, sniffing at the mould sitting hollow in the corner. She dusted the dresser, and turned her face to the grey-painted walls as she dusted the old photographs where the dirt accumulated like time. She ran her damp dusting-cloth along the skirting boards, though her knees complained at her, and she turned to her clutter-filled desk. What was here? Old things, empty things, useless half-finished things she’d started once and never would finish. What was this? Half a poem? What good was that to anyone? Why’d she thought to start writing poetry anyway, at her age? Stupid romantic notions. Into the bin they went.
And drawings. Scribbled dreams, cartoony things, lacking in number and (she thought) in quality. What rubbish they all were! Why she couldn’t just stick at one thing, and be good at that, she didn’t know. And what use was art to anyone, anyhow? She reckoned it had never done anyone any good. Into the paper recycling.
She dusted the keys of her old computer. It was a sturdy thing, reliable. Not like her. So much dust accumulated, if one wasn’t careful. It was dreadful, really it was. She should dust more often. Then again, as soon as you’d finished, it just got dusty again. What was the point, really? What was the point in doing anything?
She put the duster down, and went out into the garden. She had remembered that she had to water the roses what Phoebe Mulholland that ran the corner shop had gotten her for her birthday. She didn’t really know Phoebe, so she’d thought it had been a nice gesture. She’d been awfully excited, she remembered as she turned on the outside tap, to see how the rose grew, and then she’d forgotten to water it for two weeks and now it was dying. Wasn’t that just like her, now? Wasn’t it just bloody like her?
Feeling horrendously old, she bent over to water it, and something in its browning leaves caught her eye. She laughed as she remembered how on the first week she had written a little note to tuck into the plant just in case a flower fairy should happen to come along and see it. She laughed at the stupidity of it all, at the silly childishness, but there was no humour in the laugh. How stupid she was, she thought. What was she doing with her life? What had she done with her life? It was nearly all gone now, and what had been the point in it?
The water fell from the rusting can to the dying rose.
Maria remembered that the lady who looked after Jacob – now what was her name… Naomi? Something like that – had said that he was out of milk, so she thought that she would pop round to the corner shop and get some, then take it over to him. She came back inside, closed the door, and immediately saw the table again. That blasted table…! It would be the death of her. She took again a dishrag in her hand and started to scrub it, but the stain was resolute; it would not move. Her hands were red and her lungs seemed to rupture with the effort; no effort would change it, nor tears; it was unaffected by any emotion but rather seemed to downplay the veracity of the emotion outpoured, leaving nothing but a strange kind of furious emptiness. It was only a table, but it became the world in her eyes. She stared at it, and remembered Jacob, and the milk.
Oh, she thought, I should get my keys.
She did not want to get her keys or go out, but got up anyway, because it had to be done. The keys lay on the dresser. She picked them up, put on her shoes, and opened the door, locking it behind her. Outside were two boys cycling up and down the road; an older and a younger, brothers, she thought. The older was teasing the younger, out of malice or playfulness, and the younger kept trying to keep up on his little bike.
She sighed, and walked in the other direction, over to the intersection with Beverly Avenue, over the dirt-covered fag ends and the molten-earth chewing gum to the corner shop. They’d been shut down the year before, for refurbishments, so they said, but Maria knew that it was because they had rat problems; she’d seen the EHO lady talking with them. Well, such was life.
The bell rang as she opened the door.
“Oh, hello!” said Phoebe Mulholland, cheerfully. “How are you?”
The woman was plagued with cheerfulness; she could burn the feet off a kangaroo with that smile, so Maria thought.
“Oh, you know,” she replied, “Can’t complain.”
She looked aimlessly about, and wandered over to where she knew the milk was stored. She did not pay much attention to anything, but dithered a little over which to buy. She went for the one that was cheapest per litre, in the end, and brought it over to the counter, where the funny woman was waiting. Then again, Maria mused, she was something of a funny woman herself.
Phoebe Mulholland had a strange look about her that Maria could not place; some sort of ethereal sense to her, or a sense of great religious fervour. It seemed directed in her direction, however, which didn’t make her the most comfortable. How on earth was one supposed to react to these things? God, she didn’t know. She put the milk up on the counter, and the woman’s eyes did not leave her own.
Maria hoped that the woman would speak, soon, or else scan the milk bottle and tell her the price she already knew so that she could pay it; anything would surely be better than this purgatory where nothing was said and everything hung briefly in silent equipoise before the fatal fall.
Phoebe Mulholland spoke.
“Do you believe in fairies?” she asked.
Maria stopped, and looked at her. She had not been doing anything to stop in the first place, but nonetheless she stopped.
“What?” she said, more out of a lack of anything else to say than a burning need for clarification. What did one reply to that? Heaven only knew.
The other woman seemed to collect herself then.
“Right,” she said. “Yes. Sorry, sorry – I – I shouldn’t have said anything… it’s…”
“No, no,” Maria assured her, in a neutral tone, “It’s fine, fine, absolutely fine.”
“Right, good, yes,” said Phoebe, and smiled. “Milk,” she said, and scanned the item.
Maria exited the shop one bottle of milk richer and considerably more confused than she had entered it. She fumbled in her handbag for her mobile to see what the time was. Quarter past three, so that was… fifteen minutes until the bus into town. Well, perhaps she’d just have a quick cup of tea first, then pop off. The bus stop was only just around the corner.
Back into the house she went, over to the kettle, filled it up and stood waiting by the counter while it boiled. She tried not to think of anything as the steam filled the room. God, she was tired. She gripped the mug in both hands, clutched it to herself and felt its warmth seep into her and thaw slightly the ice gripping in crystals about her middle. She was too old for this, she thought. An image came sudden to her mind like a turned-on light in a dark room, of Holly standing opposite where she now was, leaning on the counter, and listening wryly to some animated story from herself, and how she had laughed and said something pretty. She couldn’t remember what. She could barely remember anything, now. It was funny. All that was left of her was memories and memories were so effusive. There was a cold empty dread lingering heavy in Maria’s stomach, a clammy hand coiling and grasping at her insides, despite the warmth of the tea. She felt like crying, but couldn’t.
She gulped down the last of the tea, and, shrugging off the cold memories, realised that she hadn’t much time. She grabbed her handbag and the milk and headed quickly out of the door and down the road to the bus stop. The bus came, and she pulled herself up onto it. Opening her handbag, she fumbled with her bus pass, it beeped, and she went and sat next to the grimy window. The bus smelt of piss. Her feet trailed idly in the dirt on the floor as the dilapidated red-brick Victorian terraces passed by the windows like a loop of film. She thought of little; few things concerned her. She cared for nothing, her existence included. There was only the whining and inconsistent roaring of the bus and the rattle of the windows as it moved through the town. Every so often it would stop, and the vibrations would get a little more intense, and run the whole way through her as though she were a part of its engine. These vibrations pleased her; she could lose herself in them and become nothing but gentle sound, grey against the grey sky and the grey floor.
She looked at the bright pink rails rising up from the seats, each adorned with a little red button vignetted in yellow informing all and sundry that its purpose was to “stop”. She thought they would be rather gaudy were the paint not cracking and peeling off like a snakeskin and showing the grey metalwork beneath. They were a grey sort of pink, anyway, somehow. She didn’t know how pink could be grey, but they managed it.
The bus rumbled up the hill, past the community centre up Oldwick way. She thought she should probably go back to that yoga class she’d been going to. It had been quite nice, she had thought, to get some exercise. It was so hard to actually work up the courage to go in, though. Not that she had any doubts as to whether people would be nice to her – they always were – but… There was something. She wasn’t sure what. She didn’t really know anyone. Nobody really knew her, she thought. Not really. There was nothing in the world but the great grey sea and the great grey sky and she.
She looked down the hill to the waiting sea, which with its white-breasted waves seemed to want to swallow up the sky and the land and everything, as it had once done to Atlantis and to the land of Noah. She half-wished that it would.
She looked the opposite way, the direction in which the bus was going. This street she recognised, she thought. She looked ahead at nothing in particular, and suddenly caught a glimpse of something. She looked again, and there was nothing. It had been something, certainly, a strange flash of light in the road, like a sort of mirage, or the afterimage of a bright light, but flesh in the air. She dismissed it as nothing.
Now, how many roads was it to Barnaby Street? Not many now. She tried to remember if there were any bus stops between here and there. She thought there might be one, so waited for the bus to turn left, and then right, and then – ah, there was another one. Good thing she hadn’t stopped the bus. Now she was certain there were no more, and so pushed the button, which made a pretty little ding sound that once would have delighted her rather but now held only a hollow echo of joy.
It was not long afterwards that the bus reached the stop. She alighted, and walked along the side of the road by the verge, feeling the wind of the passing cars. It was silly there wasn’t a pavement here, she thought. It was a busy road, and there was the nursing home just there, for Christ’s sake! And the bus stop a good two, three hundred metres away…! But then you never could trust people to think through the practicalities of these things.
Looking at the cars zipping by her ears like shooting stars, she wondered what it would feel like to put herself in front of one of them so that she were hit. She wondered what the collision would feel like. Probably better than how she felt as it was. She saw a world where she threw herself under the wheels of one of them. They had to be going at what, forty, fifty miles an hour? Plenty enough to kill a person. Dying might be nice, she thought. Living hadn’t gotten her all that far. She wondered what it would be like, to die. The curiosity consumed her, it gnawed at her insides like an invisible beast of electricity and wires. But no, she thought, she couldn’t do that, it’d be terribly inconsiderate to the poor driver who would have to hit her. And she could cause a collision, too, people could get hurt. No, no, that wouldn’t do at all.
She turned into the drive. An old man whom she vaguely recognised smiled and waved at her. Weakly, she smiled and waved back. Passing the privet hedges, she went over the door in the red brick building, pushed the button to open it (everything opened with buttons, these days!), and got into the blank metal lift. Lifts were so very unfriendly, she thought, but they were at least better than the stairs. She felt herself rubbing her eyes. God, how much sleep had she had last night? Not a lot, she thought. She told herself that she really had to get some sleep, at some point. She didn’t like going to sleep, there was so much palaver one had to go through beforehand, so many rituals and what had you. It was all such a terrible hassle. Why did one bother with anything? Why did she bother with anything?
There was the familiar lurching sensation in her stomach, which she had always quite liked, but it rang empty in her hollow inside. It was nice, to be tired, to experience the world at such a strange angle. Everything became like a dream, as clichéd as it felt to think that. Nothing was real, and at the same time everything was so viscerally real that one could reach out with one’s fingers and mould reality as through it were half-dry cement mix.
She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t think she could face it.
She looked at the milk in her hand. She supposed she had to; she didn’t drink milk, and it had to go somewhere.
Picking herself up, she squared her shoulders and her demeanour and opened the door.
“Jacob!” she called, “I’ve got the milk.”
She looked at the dresser. Upon it were photographs in frames, any number of them. Jacob’s two children and three grandchildren; various aunts and uncles, some of whom she barely remembered; several of him and Jacqueline who had been his wife; and a large one, in the middle, of their parents, and, as children, Jacob, herself, and Holly. At that last familiar face she felt a dreadful sickness overcome her in a wave, threatening to overturn her and send her tumbling to the ground like some incapable geriatric. She remembered when that photo was taken – no, that was a lie. She remembered the place that photograph had been taken: the old barn up in Scotland where their grandmother had kept the hay for the cows in the winter, and they had played, as children, up in the rafters, until she had fallen and broken her arm and their mother had banned them from going in there.
Too was there a picture of their grandmother herself on that dresser, Maria knew, but she did not want to look at the dresser again. Instead she moved on into the living room.
It was nice, objectively; which was to say, there was nothing unpleasant about it, nothing you could place your finger on; but it was too clean whilst having too much dust about to call it that. Sterile, that was the word she might use. There wasn’t a sense of home to it. It smelt of disinfectant and old carpet, like the stench of death. It pricked at her skin like a persistent cold pricked at the throat, and she felt an overwhelming urge to escape.
Jacob was sitting in a chair, staring off into space as he so often seemed to be these days. She always wondered what he was thinking about. She thought that it must be so funny, forgetting everything. Like walking blind down a twisting road that fell away at your feet. Perhaps it was better not knowing.
Perhaps it was better to forget.
“Did you hear, you daft old thing?” she said, “I’ve got the milk!”
He looked at her, and suddenly he seemed as a child again. She had not seen that look in sixty years. It was so dreadfully confused and lonely that she had to look away.
“Who’re you?” he asked.
She was trying very hard not to cry. She wouldn’t, she wouldn’t.
“I’m your sister,” she said, “Remember me?”
Something seemed to twist in his mind, and something approaching recognisance sparked in his eyes.
“Holly?” he said plaintively, “Is that you?”
She couldn’t. She wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t going to cry. She spun around like a sort of novelty jack-in-the-box and seemed to make her way over to the window. She looked out of it at the bleak November air and the clouds massing for gloomy congregation and the bare black trees silhouetted against the sky. She thought nothing. She felt nothing. She couldn’t breathe. She was drowning. She was drowning in some terrible nightmare and now she was going to die of suffocation.
She walked gently over to the counter and placed the milk on it. She walked over to Jacob and kissed him on the head.
“I’ll see you later,” she told him, and walked over to the door. Maria Evans opened the door, went outside, closed the door, and walked over to the lift. She stared at her own reflection. What a sad old woman stood there! How alien her face seemed now, like some strange animal out of a sci-fi movie. She wished it wouldn’t. So many lines, like a strange mountainous continent viewed from the sky. And her nose. She’d never liked her nose. It always threw her face a bit skewiff. She thought she should probably eat something. Her stomach felt wanting but it wasn’t important. What a pain everything was! Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to do anything at all?
Back over to the bus stop she walked, back past the cars, and time became an uncertain blur as she sat on the cold metal of the bench and waited. Stupid Maria, she could have waited inside in the warm. What’d she have to come and sit out in the cold and the cloying drizzle for? Every car that passed seemed that it could be the bus, and every car left her disappointed. She wished she’d brought some knitting. She wondered when the last time was she had knit anything. A while ago, certainly. She’d dropped it, like she did everything else, like life had fallen from her, and any chance of her doing anything useful, or productive, or kind, had long since faded.
The bus came, she fiddled with her bus pass, she got on, and she waited again for her stop to come around. Life was just a whole load of waiting, really. That Beckett guy had known that. Waiting for Godot, she’d loved that play when she was younger. She’d been Lucci, or whatever his name was. It was stupidly bleak and stupidly funny. She’d found it compelling, like watching a car crash slowly unfurl before her. So prettily-written. God, it’d been years since she’d thought about that play. Perhaps she should come back to it.
And bring some rope, she thought with a grim smile.
Down the hill went the bus, past Oldwick, along by the empty waiting sea with all its drowned sailors and siren cries, through the darkening grey streets of the town that would never let her go. She had always thought that she would end up living abroad somewhere. Being a fashionable lady in New York, or a shopkeeper in Paris, or a leopard-hunter in the deepest Amazon. Funny to think now, when she’d been here all her life. Stuck in a lousy dead-end town with a minging life having contributed nothing of worth to anything or anyone ever. Some folks’ idea of fun, she was sure. Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
She got off at her stop without issue, and suddenly remembered that she needed more eggs. Stupid, she should’ve gotten some earlier. Over to the corner-shop she went in the dimming light, and opened the door to the mournful tingling of the bell. Phoebe Mulholland was sat at the desk, looking at something on her mobile. She suddenly remembered the first time they’d met; it’d been over fifty years since, when she was working at the greengrocer’s down in Henning Street whilst in her final year of school. The girl had come in looking so wild and desperate, hair tumbling messy down her face.
“What’s wrong?” Maria had asked.
“They’re after me,” the girl had replied.
She had seen the look in her eyes, and, with all the theatrics of one who feels that this is a dreadfully exciting thing to happen, hidden the girl under the counter. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been being practical, as such, moreso that the practicality came second to the drama of the thing. And she had hidden the girl, and when, much to her surprise, it had not been a ruddy policeman brandishing helmet and truncheon that entered the shop enquiring as to whether she had seen a girl about her age around, but instead a balding, mousy-looking man in a worn-down suit looking somewhat tired, she had done her duty as a self-respecting young woman and told him that she hadn’t seen anyone of that description about, but would sir like to buy some cabbages – and on cabbages she had looked so deliciously innocent and sweet that one would have thought the cabbages in question had been the finest in the land, she thought (in fact they were slightly over), and the man had glanced briefly at the brassicas out of politeness, then said no thank you, and he really had to be on his way. She had followed the man out of the shop, at some distance, and looked up and down to the street to make quite sure that he was gone. This fact ascertained, she had moved back over to the counter, and helped the girl up, and she had thought the girl looked awfully pretty, standing there, with that doe-eyed face looking at her. She had asked her name, she recalled, and got it. But it hadn’t been until this moment that she recalled that she had met Phoebe Mulholland, who had taken over the old corner shop some five years ago and always seemed so nice, and had gotten her those roses for her birthday, some fifty-odd years earlier. Here was the same face, the same eyes, that had stared at her from beneath the counter back at the end of the 1960s, where the world had seemed as if it could end at the drop of a pin and life was good, staring back at her. Here was the same face, cloaked in some strange veil of wrinkles and old skin and aches and pains that seemed as beautiful and as distant as mountains to her. How funny it was, how things came back and back again.
Phoebe Mulholland saw her, and her face seemed to lighten. Maria couldn’t keep her eyes away from hers. She had never seen them before in such a light as this. It was such a strange light, with the last of the sun filtered through half a cloud in the dark grey overhung sky and the grime-coated windows.
“I forgot I needed eggs,” she said, which seemed an awfully inadequate thing to say. She wasn’t sure why, it just did.
“Good,” said Phoebe, as if that were a reply, “I mean – I see.”
Maria made a show of looking at the eggboxes, and picking between the grey and the green, the half-dozen and the dozen. She didn’t care, but she somehow still had to choose between them. Thinking was hard; her brain was made of fluff, which was a pity. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to fall down in the aisle between the overpriced cereal and the baked beans and lie on the floor and do nothing forever and ever. She stared at the eggboxes. They didn’t move. She hadn’t particularly been expecting them to, but nonetheless it seemed a touch boring. What was there to do?
She picked the green half-dozen box, in the end, and took it over to the counter. Phoebe smiled at her.
“Just that?” she said, suddenly cheery.
Maria nodded.
Phoebe did the thing with the scanner, and passed her the eggs. Maria handed over the money, and took the eggs. She looked at Phoebe. Phoebe looked at her.
“Bye, then,” said Maria, smiling slightly. It wasn’t a good smile, but it did the job.
“Bye,” said Phoebe, and her smile was even slighter.
Maria walked out the door, and she didn’t see the look on the face of Phoebe Mulholland following behind her.
Through the gathering dark she walked, through the street lamps like Greek columns holding up the darkening sky she walked, back to the old front door that frowned disconsolately at her with a familiar frown that had never seemed so deep-set. Sighing, she opened it, and went inside. The hallway was unfamiliar to her, though through its boughs she had crossed a thousand times. It seemed to loom at her, rise like some great green lumbering beast from her mind. What horrible walls they seemed! She wished they would go away.
She closed her eyes to the world and walked through to the kitchen, where she put the eggs on the shelf where she always had put eggs. They looked down comfortingly at her. There. That was nice, wasn’t it? Everything’d be right. Things were all in their place.
She looked through the kitchen door and saw the table again. What was wrong with it? Why would it not go right? Why would nothing in her life go right?
As if in a dream Maria walked back through the open door, and, trembling, took up the rag. Up, down, up, down, went her hand on the smooth wood surface. It seemed to mock her with its jaunty angle. Up, down, up, down. She could thinking of nothing but the movement of her hand. She could see nothing but the ugly, ugly table in her hands. Up and down and up and down went her hand. It was hurting but she didn’t notice. She just kept on scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing until the tears pricking at the corner of her eyelids worked their way out of her eyes and down her calloused cheeks. Then she stopped and stared at the wood of the table. There was a curious sickness pounding at her heart, that seemed somehow to mirror that in the table. She felt almost as if she would throw up, but it was a phantom bile that hung in her throat.
It seemed as if there were some obstruction in her trachea, but there was none. She was breathing very heavily. She stared at the table.
Quivering, she walked back through into the kitchen, and slid open the cutlery drawer that she had slid open so many times before. The cutlery shone bright inside, strange under the kitchen light. She wondered when she had turned it on. No matter. As if possessed by some strange ghost, she picked up the large knife that she used for aubergines and meat and suchlike. She stared at it. It shone so brilliantly along its silver blade. The black wide hilt felt heavy in her hand, reassuring. She walked somehow back over to the table, though she didn’t feel it. No thought crossed her mind, no thought at all. It felt as if no thought had ever crossed her mind. There was the illness in the table, lying before her eyes shamelessly, like a parade of sinners on Judgement Day. She had never been religious, not now, not when she was younger, but her movements had the reverence of a bishop at a baptism. She raised the knife over the table, and put her whole self behind it. It stabbed down into the table once, twice, thrice, then all was silent.
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