Commencing Our Descent

Suzannah Dunn

EPIGRAPH

Flying too high

With some guy

In the sky

Is my idea

Of nothing to do.

Yet I get a kick

Out of you.

‘I Get a Kick Out of You’

Cole Porter

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Things which are Not

A Weep from a Wound

Treaclier

Quick, Slow

Dead Give-Aways

Tripwire Tense

Ruinous Blue

Waylaid

Wish

Make No Bones

Good as Gold

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

THINGS WHICH ARE NOT

‘Decisions? Don’t look at me.’

But this is exactly what he does: he stops sawing through the thin copper pipe as I reach the top stair, he turns around and looks. And when he has looked for several seconds, he says, ‘You’re so pale, you know, Sadie.’

Jason’s own hair and eyes are the colour of charcoal, perhaps a touch warmer, closer to burned wood, scorches on wood.

‘Yes, thanks, I do know.’

My pallor is more than compensated for by hair the colour of pomegranate pulp. I am a lucky redhead, if that is not a contradiction in terms: none of the legendary temper, no incendiary freckles, and my skin lacks that blue tint of exposed bone. Philip says that my skin is the colour of Chardonnay; but he is kind, he is my husband. He says that I caramelise to muscat whenever I catch the sun.

Jason says, ‘But because you’re pale, you’ll always look young. Younger than me, anyway.’

‘I am younger than you.’

He is thirty-five, I am thirty-one. Earlier in our lives, when we had had fewer years, four of them would have made the difference of a generation: he would have been playing rugby on Saturday mornings when I was playing with my dolls; he would have been into punk when I was impressed by Genesis; smoking dope when I was sipping Pernod-and-black. Nowadays, four years is no time at all, but our lives are incomparable for other reasons. He is a father of four, the eldest of whom is fifteen.

‘Decision number one: I want to know where you’d prefer me to run this pipe. You have two options: beneath these floorboards here, or …’ he swivels, to point, ‘along this wall, which is less pretty but less work for me, less of a bill for you.’

I sit down on the top stair. ‘Give me a moment.’

He resumes his sawing: a sound effect for a music hall magician. ‘Enjoy your walk?’

Hal’s walk. Before Hal came, four months ago, I rarely walked as far as the local shops. When I agreed to take him on, I read in a book that a Labrador should have an hour each day off the lead. And I do everything by the book. He lives for his trips to the park, which seems very little to ask. So I take him twice each day. Between these excursions, he dozes on his bed, slumped or curled but somehow tuned in for the sound of my arm slithering into a sleeve or for the change in tempo of my movements that implies that I am going to leave the house. Sometimes he knows before I do that I am thinking of leaving. I have had to become careful, self-conscious of my signals, because I hate to turn him down, to have to watch the droop of his ears, those blond velvet triangles. Whenever I do leave the house without him, his stare – sideways, heavily-lidded – seems to accuse me of going alone to the park.

During our walk this morning, the clear sky was punctured by a knuckle of half-moon. Leaf-laden trees made a foreshortened horizon of green thunderclouds. The hedgerows were scattered with convolvulus flowers like washed but un-ironed hankerchiefs. Hal and I encountered other regulars. Firstly, the childminders: a bespectacled, tattooed man and a hennaed woman with their two battalions. Childminders, surely, because the children are too numerous, too similarly-aged and dissimilarly dressed to be their own. Four toddlers were strapped into two double buggies. Others were on foot, on small and unsteady feet, taking small and sometimes reluctant, even petulant, steps.

Further on, I exchanged nods and smiles with the polite middle-aged couple as he, with her support, was venturing from his wheelchair; he managed a little more than last week. Then we passed the elderly, hobbling man and woman, both of them as arthritic as their dogs, her Alsatian and his dachshund. We were passed in turn by the cheerful, late-thirties mum who strides behind her baby’s plush pushchair and kicks a tennis ball ahead for her puppy to chase. We avoided the wrinkled but elaborately made-up woman who throws a small plastic naked doll for her miniature dog to fetch. Today, there were irregulars too: one of the benches was occupied by a canoodling couple of kids with masses of matted hair and layers of army surplus clothing. They were sharing a bottle of vodka for their elevenses. As Hal neared, they bellowed to their dog to ‘Play nicely’.

None of them will be there when we go back this afternoon: by four o’clock the day will have drained from the park. Even the groundsmen will have stopped work and gone home. Hal and I, too, fail to take the afternoons as seriously as the mornings: in our half-hour we will manage a lap rather than a lap and a half. A mere break, a breath of fresh air. Hal will be contemplative, his nose close to the ground, his concentration as thorough as that of an avid reader.

‘Anyway, this pipe. Oh, don’t pull that face, Sadie. And don’t tell me that I’ll have to wait for the man of the house to come home before I can have a decision.’

‘You could build an Eiffel Tower from these pipes before he comes home.’

‘Still working hard?’

‘Still working hard.’

‘Still at the hostel?’

‘Manager now.’

‘And how is he?’

‘The same. Fine. Thriving. Busy.’

‘Good. Let’s give the Eiffel Tower a miss and hurry up with this.’ He brandishes the sawn-off pipe.

‘I’m a Libran.’

‘So?’

‘So, I can’t make decisions.’

‘You believe in all that?’

‘No. Just happens to be true, in my case.’

Hal is coming up behind me. He is only ever inelegant when on the stairs, his four legs encountering something designed for two. Determinedly digging his way up the steps, plucky but gawky, he looks like a puppy.

‘Hal’s a Taurus.’

‘Hal’s a dog.’

‘He’s a typical Taurus.’

‘He’s a typical dog, Sadie.’

While I rub Hal’s head, his ears, he is butting my hands. I am perversely proud of his prettiness. Would I love him quite so much if he were plain? I did adopt him unseen. His previous owners, friends of friends, were going to live abroad for several years. Having been persuaded to take him, I drove the two hundred miles to fetch him. I had been told that he was a Labrador cross: the look of a Labrador, but smaller. I had not been told that he had the slender face of a deer, that he was all cheekbones.

‘You spoil that mutt.’

‘So? Isn’t life hard enough without a bit of spoiling? And he’s four. Didn’t people spoil you when you were four?’

‘I was a person.’

‘When you were four? You sure, Jason?’

Hal, with his impeccable manners, his love of home and liking for everything to be just so, seems human. He is more domesticated than I am.

Jason’s mobile phone screams from the tool box. During all the years that he has been coming here, he has carried this particular prop: a workhorse of a mobile phone, antiquated and bulky.

He tells me, ‘I’m not answering.’

‘Mobiles are for answering; that’s what they’re for.’

Despairing of me, he snatches the phone from the box, stops the noise, listens intently.

‘Yep. Okay. Six-ish. In a while, crocodile.’

He slots down the aerial, and I think of the shop on the way to the park: For all your satellite and aerial needs. Needs that I do not know that I have. Every day, I resist the urge to go in there and ask, All my satellite and aerial needs?

Jason says, ‘My eldest: could I pick her up from rehearsal on my way home.’

I am awed by his daughters’ social schedules, by their mother’s fixing of old-fashioned girlhoods for them: stage school, horse-riding, hockey club and music lessons. The household seems to run like a finishing school, but the finish is a tough one: from what Jason says, the activities do not revolve around an aim to become accomplished, to learn, but a desire to be equipped: with competitiveness and a sense of fair play, improved posture and strengthened bones.

As a child, I had no place in any world apart from that of my mother’s. Unless I was in school, I went everywhere with her, which was nowhere: the park, the shops. The only advice that I remember from her was that there is nothing more important than a good marriage, but she never told me how to make one because she did not know. Odd to think of my parents now, in early retirement, relatively companionable, apparently having reached some kind of truce.

‘Just one more year of school for my eldest.’

‘And then?’

‘Wants to work in a shoe shop. Says she loves shoes.’ He frowns into the tool box. ‘Does that mean that I love power showers and central heating systems? Suppose I do, though.’ He looks up at me. ‘Do you think you’ll have kids, now?’

‘I have to find a job first: that’s the plan.’ Instantly, I realise how ridiculous this must sound to him. I try to explain, ‘I need a life, Jason.’

‘You have a life, don’t you?’ He is genuinely puzzled.

I used to be a carer: that is the currently favoured term. Caring is the buzz word for what I did, here, at home, for eight years. So perhaps, now that it is all over, I should turn professional. There is nothing professional, though, about the jobs in nursing homes that are advertised every week in our local newspaper. Unsociable hours and low pay. If I had such a job, I would see even less of Philip. Hard work for very little money, he says, and we have no real need of the money, so why work simply for the sake of working? He says that I should do something that I want to do. But this is exactly my problem: what do I want to do? What can I do? I have a sense that I should train for something, learn something, but training is extensive, expensive, and I have no experience of anything, so no one would want me for their oversubscribed courses. And even if I did train, would there be a job for me? My problem is that I have been away from the world for too long. I cannot imagine how other people cope with the power struggles, timetables, deadlines, and expectations, not least the expectation that they will leave the house every day, for most of the day. No, I do not want to do anything. But I know that I cannot stay as I am.

‘You’re looking for a job?’

I wrinkle my nose: ambivalent confirmation. This morning’s cursory look through the newspaper ended prematurely in a perusal of adverts, one of which was entitled, Impotence problems?

Impotence problems? Problems over and above the impotence?

There were other adverts: Hair loss?, Flabby belly?, Panic attacks?

And I thought that I had problems.

‘Coffee?’

‘Wonderful.’

As soon as I move, Hal whips from his prone position. He is due his lunch. What would he have done if I had forgotten? I love to watch him with his food. Fast but fastidious, he laps up the gravy before beginning on the biscuits. His tail, usually wagging, will droop: serious happiness.

I am a couple of stairs down when Jason calls, ‘You love piano music, don’t you. What’s playing, now, downstairs? Scott Joplin?’

‘No, but you’re close. It’s a …’ I flinch from using the word pastiche, ‘… fake, a modern fake.’

Will he ask why a fake, when we can have the real Scott Joplin? Could I explain that but for the work of this particular, later composer, William Bolcom, there would have been no Scott Joplin? No Scott Joplin as we know him. He would have been unknown; dead and unknown.

‘Would you rather hear something else?’ Philip says that my listening to piano music is pathological. He reels from Czerny, Nancarrow. ‘Because I can play you … oh, I don’t know’ … – what was I playing earlier? – ‘The Au Pairs?’

He laughs. ‘Seriously? The Au Pairs?’

‘An old tape.’

‘A very old tape, I imagine. No, this is nice. What’s it called?’

‘Graceful Ghost.’

I am half-way down the stairs when I hear him say, ‘Your theme tune.’ He says it lightly, without irony or reservation.

Glancing upwards, I see that he is already busy again; absorbed.

I love the word grace, how it seems to elude definition. I would love to be graceful. Perhaps I would be, if not for the dead weight of my left foot.

Coming down into the hallway, I sense the house recovering from the presence of Annie, living poltergeist. She had said that she would pop over, but she never pops, she takes root. Arriving on Saturday afternoon, she stayed overnight and until mid-afternoon yesterday. A whole weekend. Just as she did on the weekend before last. The current problem is the break-up, a month or so ago, with her latest: someone called Pete, who, she told us, had been around for three or four months.

When she arrived, she laughed, ‘No one as beautiful and talented as I am should have to stay home alone on a Saturday night.’

While she was upstairs, unpacking, Philip said, ‘She’s harmless.’

He could have said, She’s your friend.

He says that we should have her to stay because she has a flat in London; we have a Victorian terraced house with a garden, close to the countryside, and she has a ‘sixties studio on an estate in a backwater of Edmonton. Perhaps, to Philip, this counts as a kind of homelessness; perhaps I misheard, perhaps he said homeless rather than harmless.

When she had unpacked she came downstairs cooing to Hal, ‘How’s my favourite, then?’

I said, ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Oh, you,’ she derided.

She likes Hal, and Hal likes her. But Hal likes anyone who likes him.

As she passed me, I detected the usual pot-pourri of cosmetics: perfume and deodorant, soap and shampoo, lotions and fabric conditioner. As ever, her breath was scented with garlic, alcohol and chocolate. Perhaps she breathes harder than other people. Perhaps she stands closer.

With the slightest turn of her head, her long, sleek brown hair becomes a blade. On the rare occasions during her visits when she moves from my settee, the cushions are more crushed than anyone else would leave them. In her pillow, in the mornings, there is a hollow of awesome proportions and duration: eerily suggestive, somehow, of a catastrophe. And for days after she has gone home, I come across crockery in unnerving places: a cup in a soap dish, this morning.

All weekend I worried that she would stay and call in sick this morning. She takes lots of sick leave – a couple of days every couple of weeks – despite burgeoning health. In her manager’s office is a folder labelled The sick and late book, in which she stars. She works in her local library, on general desk duties, but also with responsibility for activities, which is ironic in view of her own stupendous inertia. She organises occasional storytelling sessions for children, and a talk or two each month with a display of books on a subject chosen by the Chief Librarian. Alpines last month. She has had this job for a while now – six months or more? – so she is due for the usual dismissal or resignation. She has had so many jobs during the twelve years that I have known her. Once, for almost a year, she was a croupier, and this is the job which she cites whenever complaining of her current situation: Look how I’ve come down in the world.

When we met, fourteen years ago, we were working in a garden centre on Saturdays. Most of those Saturdays are boiled down in my memory to one never-ending queue of customers and an overloaded till drawer. There were days which were different, though, during the few months of the year when business was slack. We had two winters of Saturdays, when we were stationed alone together in the chillier of the two vast greenhouses, a crystalline enclave which smelled of old, cold water in potted soil. With our hands idle but ostensibly ready for work in fingerless gloves, we spent the empty days speculating on the excitement of the coming evening, the coming years. Whenever the screech of the sliding door signalled a customer, Annie would turn, slowly, stately, so that her face was visible only to me, and complain in a fervent whisper, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard …’, an incantation which would continue until she turned back around with impeccable timing and a winning smile. She was as irresistible to me as to those hapless customers. I would never have stuck those winters of Saturdays without her.

Of all my friends, she is the only one who has always been utterly uninvolved in her work, having always purposefully chosen utterly uninvolving work. All that she ever takes home of her work is her name badge, which she tends to forget to remove: Rhiannon Ritchie. We both revelled in her disaffection when we were seventeen, but she has become too old for this. We both know that this lassitude is bad for her. But if and when I find a job, how will I be any different from her? How unlike Philip, who lives for work: in all the years that I have known him, he has never taken a day of sick leave. His stated reason is that someone else would have to cover for him. He is needed; nothing is more important to him.

This weekend, he and I were Annie’s audience once again. We spent most of our time in the garden, Annie and I sitting in sunshine and shade respectively, while Philip was weeding, digging, planting, pruning. Annie’s sunburn was slapped with strap marks and cropped by hem lines. Her skin swelled around the straps of her sandals, her watch strap, the shoulder straps which were in turn shadowed by black bra straps. On her thighs, a strip of pallor blazed beneath her hem whenever she slithered lower in her chair. She looked frighteningly robust; the chair, worryingly less so.

For a while, early on the Saturday evening, she talked about her latest ex-, concluding, ‘He thinks with his cock.’

Philip was crouching on the far border of the lawn, snipping with a pair of shears, and the rhythm was faultless, crisp: either he did not hear, or he was lying low.

‘And that’s fine,’ Annie boomed, ‘when you’re on the receiving end of his attention. The problem is that the attention span of that kind of bloke tends to be short …’

The regular chirp of the shears’ blades sounded like a slow walk on stiletto heels.

‘What am I saying? All men are like that. Slaves to testosterone, and they have the cheek to imply that we women are heavy on the hormones.’ She added, ‘Men are dogs.’

‘Annie,’ I countered, ‘dogs are loyal.’

‘You’re thinking of Hal, and Hal’s a eunuch.’ She reached to stroke him. Even her hands provided no rest for the eye, demanded attention: her fingernails were scarlet. ‘Ah, Hal,’ she purred, ‘life is simple, for you, eh?’

‘But short,’ I qualified.

‘But sweet,’ she enthused.

‘And of course: with only twelve years or so to live, he should have nothing but pleasure.’

‘Hal, you hear that? Don’t you have a good deal.’

‘Twelve years is a good deal?’

Suddenly, she said, ‘You’ve had a bad couple of years.’ And then, looking across the garden at Philip, ‘You’re so lucky, to have him.’

He was lunging into the long grass with each snap of the steel jaws as if he were trying to catch something.

‘I know, I know.’

Closing my eyes, I detected the scent of the honeysuckle that Philip had planted for me. The white wisteria had finished flowering; Philip planted that for me as well. Opening my eyes, I saw the pastel Icelandic poppies that were mine too. And behind, indoors, at the south-facing sash window, my terracotta-potted banana tree: a present from Philip. I had wanted that plant not for bananas, of course, but for the leaves: the broad, thick, bottle-green leaves typical of a tropical plant, but with irregular marks that look so endearingly artificial they could have come from brushstrokes.

It was midsummer’s eve, but suddenly I was thinking of its shadow, the winter solstice; some lines from a Donne poem:

He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

Philip rose, with more of a bounce than an unfolding. Rubbing his head, he probably smeared soil on to his bristly hair, dulling the grey. He had his back turned to us, and seemed to be puzzling over something in the flowerbed, but I knew that whatever his expression, his face would bear the impression of a smile: even his frowns are teased by smile lines. Earlier, he had told me that he was going to cook my favourite risotto for our evening meal: my compensation, he had whispered, for having to cope with Annie.

I knew, and he knew, that he was the one who would have to cope with her for hours while she scraped the remains from each bowl and confided in her captive audience. He tolerates her very well. He tolerates anyone and everyone: his tolerance is diligent, perhaps even enthusiastic, if that is not a contradiction in terms; certainly practised, because of his job. Watching him focusing on his flowers, I was struck that his relation to the social world is primarily one of tolerance: he deals with the world, and then he comes home.

Often he says to me, At the end of the day, all that I want is you.

And, always, I wonder why; why me?

Annie mused, ‘He’s good-looking … funny … kind …’ This lacked envy: her kind of man is a rogue; she is that kind of woman. She decided, ‘He’s perfect.’

I laughed. ‘If he’s perfect, why is he married to me?’

‘Oh, he loves you to death.’

Do I want to be loved to death?

‘Annie, you said that all men are dogs.’

She prepared to concede, ‘Well, of course, you know him better than I do …’

‘No, he is perfect.’

‘So: the exception that proves the rule. You’re very lucky.’

‘Yes.’ Perfect husband, perfect marriage.

Whatever is wrong, is wrong with me.

The first time I ran away from Philip, I went to Venice: Venice, late last November. Venice, on the brink of winter. I told him that I was going away for the weekend with an old but rarely-seen friend, Lizzie, to her parents’ cottage in Dorset: she had been low, lately, I said. The truth was that she was in Dublin with her new lover.

Ran away? I flew. I have been flying since before I can remember, and have seen so many changes: year by year, there is more of everything. Except propellers. And accidents. The only problem with flying, nowadays, is the boredom. Airports are purgatory. I hate that they have so little sky: so few windows, none of which open. The air sticks to my skin as a thin, burning layer. Too many smokers savour a last cigarette in the queues for check-in and passport control; again, as they sprawl in the departure lounge; again, as they pace before boarding.