77

The taxi driver who drove me from the airport to my home didn’t ask me about Mal. Time had erased me a little, rubbed me out. I had faded like a photograph buried under soil. I was tanned and older, weathered and experienced and fat. I was what we all become, a by-product of the torture of ourselves.

As I passed the trailer, I thought of Norma Bee on her own, about the food that must have been going to waste.

Lou’s tent was unloved on the lawn, torn and faded but secure where Dad had nailed it down. I opened my suitcase, took out the painting of the two of us and placed it inside. It didn’t smell of her any more. It smelled of dust and heat and the humid summers I had missed. I wondered if I should climb in, run the zip up behind me and lie in wait, a mousetrap primed and ready, a tasty chunk of cheese sat invitingly on the edge. Instead I left the portrait there, propped against the side, and headed into the house.

Home was always the same inside. Its exterior grew and shrank depending upon how long I’d been away but indoors it was a precise mould. There were turns I could make in the dark, that smell of food and perfume and linen and Mal. Creams and sweat. Creaks that the walls always made, the clanking of badly tuned pipes in the cavities. Home was always the same temperature. It always had the same map. It always welcomed me in the same way.

What greeted me when I pushed open the bedroom door scooped my foundations from underneath me and I collapsed, compacted floor by floor into the carpet. Mal. Huge. The folds in his skin were blistered red eclipses. The sores that peeked from his underside shimmered with clear secretions that glossed his sodden bed sheets. In the middle of the day he was asleep. Drowning in his own fluids, a chicken slowly turning on a spit. The walls were lined with newspaper cuttings and randomly apportioned piles of his post. There was box upon packet upon plate. There was Mum, who slept in a chair in the corner. She had more colour than I recalled, glowing cheeks and rosiness. There was the display on the wall.

Dizzied, I staggered backwards to where Dad’s ladder’s black rubber feet met the carpet. Stepping aboard the first rung, I gave the hatch a tap with a pointed knuckle. There was the clatter and movement I expected and remembered, and then it opened to Dad’s face, older yet more fatherly, surprised and pleased.

‘Ha!’ he shouted, jumping down and tossing his arms around my middle, pinning mine to my sides. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘you’re home!’ Then he moved away, saw that the look on my browned face didn’t match his. ‘She didn’t come back with you?’ he asked.

‘No.’

I’d not known how much I’d missed him. His hair was a wise grey and wild, his face full of movement and his eyes wider. They glinted like underwater coins. He looked how I’d imagined Einstein did in the flesh, crackling with energy. He was charged up, new.

We woke Mum. She hugged and she kissed me, and when I was close to her it didn’t feel frail as it once had but warm and soulful. A grand emotional renaissance had taken place. As separate as their lives were, happiness was upon them.

Mal opened an eye, set back on a thick cheek like a button buried in the wool of a winter jumper.

‘Hello,’ he said.

In the furrow that indented trenches in his chubby misshapen brow, I saw that he knew I was not here through choice.

I leant my suitcase against my bed – it was still there next to his – and with a sigh and the thick stink of malaise clouding any way out which might have existed, I resigned myself to the fact that perhaps, just perhaps, neither Mal nor I was ever supposed to leave this house.

‘Do you want to talk?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘All right,’ he said.

I looked at him in bed and was lulled temporarily by the unspoken logic of it all. He might be right, I wondered. What life is this, giving you the wonder of a heart that beats and then smashing it to a million tiny pieces? When everything you’re taught to expect comes to nothing? If this is life, then why get out of bed?

Like an old pet dog, my mattress remembered my scent and my shape and it welcomed me with indiscriminate affection. I slept for days, my great escape aborted.