“Probably not, Barry.” I deliver this in the tone of a doctor breaking the bad news to a terminally ill patient. “Look after yourself, yeah?”
He approaches me for a hug, so I do a neat little side step, close the door in his face, and stand with my back against it. When I hear his door close—with more force than is strictly necessary—I flick on the light and turn to double-lock my own. Once I’m sure it’s secure, I turn to survey the flat.
It is, to the casual observer, underwhelming. More so now it’s been stripped of most of my possessions. A deep crack runs down the hallway from the kitchen to the bedroom. The ceiling in the living room sags ominously. A damp stain is spreading from the corner of the bathroom and mingling almost artistically with the creeping black mold in the center of the room. To me, though, it’s independence. Even the mold has become part of the furniture, though not through lack of trying on my part to remove it. It doesn’t bother me as much as you mightthink. The house I grew up in looked more like a pigsty than a family home by the time I left. Perhaps because of that, I am anal to the point of obsessiveness about the cleanliness of my own flat. I hoover daily, wash my sheets twice a week, mop the floors, and scrub the shower until the air is spiced with lemon and just a hint of bleach.
I need to be out of here in good time tomorrow, so I don’t linger in the hallway. I’ve done most of the packing already, but I’m in a nostalgic mood, and there’s one task I’ve been putting off since I made the decision to take my chances living with my mother over the mildly less desirable threat of contracting a vicious STD.
I keep Freddie’s things in a shoebox at the bottom of the wardrobe. He’d have laughed to see me handling it like an easily triggered bomb. It was weeks before I could even bring myself to look at it, many more before I was able to lift the lid on all the memories it contained. But I’m stronger now. I place it gingerly on the floor, wriggle the top free. My chest pangs. Inside, there is a tortoiseshell comb that still has little speckles of dandruff between each tooth, a pair of red plaid pajama bottoms that I’ve never washed, the key to Freddie’s flat. The necklace that always sends an eclectic cocktail of emotions zipping through me. Not all of them are positive, but grief will do that to you.
I lift the pajamas to my nose, and there it is. That unique smell. Freddie’s distinct, woody musk layered through the material.
He always looked so peaceful when he slept. Those long nights are some of my favorite memories of him. I loved watching him sleep. His small, guttural exhales. Sometimes, I’d place my hand on his chest and feel such an intense rush of attraction I truly thought I’d never feel that way about another person. Tonight proved me wrong. It does happen, sometimes.
I inhale deeply one more time, then fold the pajamas and place them back in the box. I close the lid, then place the box at the top of one of the three plastic containers I’m taking with me to Mum’s. I sanitize.
And then, because the thought of my mother, and returning to that house, sends a shiver of revulsion up my spine, I distract myself by preparing Barry’s leaving gift.
I spent, admittedly, more time than was healthy pondering this particular present. I pictured him, within two minutes of my departure, snuffling around the flat like a truffle pig, hunting for a stray pair of underwear he could bury his pockmarked nose in. I considered, seriously, leaving a decoy pair poking out from beneath the sofa, covered in all sorts of unsanitary substances. But my tastes run to the highbrow, and frankly, I wasn’t sure that even some of my more deplorable ideas would be enough to put him off. I settled, instead, for a book.
I leave the copy ofMen Who Hate Womenby Laura Bates in the kitchen, where I know he will spot it. Lest he be in any doubt over the intended recipient, I’ve written a dedication on the flyleaf.
Barry,
Thought you might get some use out of this.
Iris x
Four
I was not, obviously,compos mentis at my birth, but I would imagine the look my mother is giving me now is not too dissimilar to the one she gave me when she first laid eyes on her wrinkled, scrunched newborn. Our first meeting was not, by all accounts, the joyous occasion that is written about in novels. Birth rarely is. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there were two of us.
For nine months, my sister Marcie and I shared a womb. Squashed together in our amniotic fluid, we divided everything: Every morsel of food was halved, every toxin from the illicit cigarettes Mum would sneak in the back garden divvied up between us. Marcie came out within twenty minutes of Mum going into labor: dark blond, easy smile already plastered to her pretty face. Forty hours later, after near-fatal complications, I emerged: black-haired, blue-tinged, with a head misshapen by the birth canal.
“They told me they’d never seen such an angry baby. Well, ‘vocal’ was the word they used. But I knew they meant angry. Couldn’t shut you up,” Mum told me when I was eight. The words she refrained from saying sat heavy between us anyway: “Not like your sister.”
Mum was still covered in her own bodily fluids when she was handed the babies she’d birthed. Marcie had been cleaned up by that point. She was wearing a one-piece that had been gifted by my grandparents. A cashmere hat was placed delicately over her downy head. And I was naked. Still wrinkled from the birthing fluid and smeared with blood. In the picture my father took of the happy moment, Mum—looking exhausted—cradles a child in each arm. But it’s Marcie she’s staring at. Marcie who was the recipient of that unique, adoring motherly gaze. We’d divided everything up until that point, but now we’d emerged it was clear there was not enough love for both of us.
Mum, who had never experienced that maternal ache for a child, fell hard and fast for Marcie. Prior to giving birth, she viewed babies with the sort of clinical apathy that Victorian doctors had toward women with hysteria: a necessary evil bestowed upon the female sex that—once acquired—was difficult to shift. Ironically, her choice to have us was one of the most rational decisions she ever made. Children were a nonnegotiable for my father, and—like with most things he desired—she bent over backward (perhaps literally in this case) to give them to him. She went above and beyond, as usual. Provided him with two for the price of one. She never did quite master the art of compromise.
So she allowed her belly to balloon and her hormones to spike and counted every new stretch mark that appeared as the months passed. “Thirty, Iris. You gave me thirty stretch marks. Your father never looked at me the same way afterward,” she told me when I was ten.
My father was a kind man who took an impressively hands-off approach to child-rearing. Two, as it turned out, was a bit more than he’d bargained for. For the first three years, home was a chaotic mess of nappies and formula and sick and poo, and Dad took refuge in the office. I think he viewed himself as some sort of jovial, benevolent Santa Claus. A judicial figure, a connoisseur of punishment and reward, who appeared at the end of the evening to review the evidence presented bymy mother and make a final judgment on whether we’d been naughty or nice. I can’t help but feel that the ruling was never quite weighted in my favor.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d emerged first. How life might have turned out differently. Because there is another photo of Mum with her newborns. This one was tucked away in the back of a cupboard for years. It can’t have been taken long after the first one, but the difference is stark. For one thing, Mum’s looking at me. Her expression, laden with love when directed at Marcie, is now one of mild distaste. She could have pretended, I suppose, but I suspect her acting skills weren’t up to par after two days of labor. Weakened, filthy, and deflating like an old balloon as she was, her indifference toward this spare child was obvious.
—
It certainly isnow.
“I nearly forgot you were coming!” She delivers this from the doorway with a casual flick of her hand.
I smile thinly in response, in the way you might at a child who has just told a blatant lie. It is blatant: The net curtain in her bedroom had twitched as I struggled down the street with my boxes and bags, and, unless she’s found a man who can tolerate her frankly disgusting habits (unlikely), she’s been watching for me. I don’t bother to catch her out: It’s too early for that, and I didn’t sleep well last night.
She doesn’t allow me in immediately. Her eye travels the length of me, lips lightly pursed. I’ve dressed down for the occasion: I’m wearing my oldest pair of joggers and—as much as it pained me—I didn’t wash my hair last night, so it falls in lank, greasy curtains. She must be satisfied, because she gives a sharp nod of approval and steps back to allow me to pass her.
In the hallway, there’s a brief moment of awkwardness. We bothknow how weshouldact, were this a traditional mother-daughter relationship, but that’s not really our style. It’s a question of whether we bother to pretend before slipping back into the familiar, serrated roles we’re more comfortable with. Clearly—tediously—she feels we should. I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes as she steps forward and wraps her bony arms round my waist. I pat her stiffly on the protruding notches of her spine. She stinks of last night’s indulgences: stale booze and too many cigarettes. I let go as quickly as is polite and wonder how she’d react if I applied my sanitizer. Probably best not to risk it.
“Well?” She steps back and bares her teeth in what I can only assume is her attempt at a smile. “How does it feel to be home?”
