the waste. Maybe I’d been wrong. Change could be good.
My body felt looser, from having rested, from breathing properly again, but also from something deeper and more fundamental. I thought about the birth, and the death; the tiny body; and I felt pain, but love too. Ailsa had called it a loss. A loss. I felt the enormity of what had happened, the relief of finally letting something go.
My clothes were folded neatly on the chair and I dressed and opened the bedroom door. Noises rose from the kitchen; the suck of the fridge door, the whoosh of the boiling-water tap, a murmur of voices. Tom was still in the house. I’d managed to avoid him the previous evening; like a child, I’d been put to bed at seven. Maybe I should wait until he left for Paris before I went down. But Maudie stretched and nosed my knee, and I stepped out onto the landing.
Ailsa’s voice was at the back end of the kitchen, but Tom was closer to the kitchen door. I caught the odd tense word – ‘disinfectant’; ‘Eurostar’. He came out of the kitchen, and his voice got louder. He was a few feet below on the other side of the bannisters. I held Maudie by the collar, and shrank back against the wall. The scrape of wood, the brush of fabric, as he opened the cupboard under the stairs. He said: ‘The dog stinks. Tell Max not to get any ideas.’
I got myself back up the two steps and into the bedroom. I sunk onto the floor, the door behind me. Maudie pushed her muzzle into my hand, and I stroked her head, which felt uneven and bony. Tom came up the stairs, inches from my face on the other side of the door, and climbed the next flight, and then up one more. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath, two sibilants, two hard ‘k’s: a double-headed snake and the aggression of the voiceless velar stop. On Maudie’s haunches I felt a couple of lumps. Fatty tissue – I’d Googled; idiopathic, age-related. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.
A door opened above my head, and his footsteps crossed the ceiling. A scuffle, the thump of feet, a heavy object falling with a clunk, Tom’s voice, stifled but still distinct through the lathe and the plaster. ‘Mud everywhere . . . Tidy up. Now.’ A door slammed, and his footsteps clonked back down the stairs – that heavy tread I could hear through the walls in my own house – past my door and onwards, his hand banging on top of the bannister, down the staircase to the hall. Ailsa’s voice, soothing. ‘Have you got everything? Passport? Tickets? Phone? Calm down. I’ll wash them.’ The front door opened. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she called. And finally the front door closed.
Did she lean against it with her eyes shut, feeling the relief of his departure? The house had held its breath and let it go. The walls relaxed. The joists loosened. Upstairs, in the room above, I felt vibrations of steps, the sash thrown open, the closed air freed, and out of the window a high-pitched shout – a release of tension.
I splashed water on my face, took a puff from my inhaler and left the room.
Ailsa was in the kitchen, her laptop open in front of her. She was wearing pale-blue cotton pyjamas, with navy piping on the collar. The sun was throwing small box-like flickering shapes across the wall behind her. Maudie ran out through the open doors and crouched to relieve herself in the middle of the grass. On the terrace sat three black bin bags, bulbous with soil, spikes of green emerging from their gathered tops. You could hear the growl of next door’s lawnmower. Andrew Dawson already preparing his betrayal.
She looked up when she saw me standing in the doorway. ‘I’ve found a new website – Fat Flavours, Thin Thighs; this Indian guy was a serial dieter for years until he discovered an ancient Ayurvedic system which uses low-fat, high-protein superfoods – spices, which have natural anti-oxidising qualities, apparently also speed up your metabolism.’ She tapped her stomach twice and inhaled deeply, squeezing it in. ‘Chicken, with ginger, coriander and turmeric – my supper tonight. The kids won’t touch it, but I’ll make a big pot and batch it into portions and freeze them. I’m turning over a new leaf, starting today.’