Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,5
cleverer one’ would have been more accurate. My thesis, hubristically entitled ‘Culture and Cognition in Language Evolution’, was proving beyond me. Deadlines were already being missed, emergency meetings made and ducked. I slunk home, resentfully watched Faith pack her bags for a new life in Brighton, while secretly nursing relief. If my mother was insufficiently grateful for my sacrifice, it suited me to resent that, too. I continued to resent it for twenty years, to blame her for the jobs I took, initially at the library, which didn’t go well (the chief librarian hated me, and there were too many children) and then in the Leisure and Culture department at the council – where I was just as miserable. I harboured this resentment, like a trusted old rotting skiff, throughout the last decade, when I have been happily employed as freelance assistant editor to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I have Fred Pullen, an old university friend, to thank for recommending me for this post, and it suits me down to the ground. It’s a big old project we have embarked upon, the updating of the dictionary. It started in 1999 and goodness knows when it will be finished. Never, probably, which as far as I’m concerned would be convenient. Basically I re-write the existing entries; other teams are in charge of the neologisms. I help revise the old definitions and, with the help of newly available sources online, update the quotation paragraphs (the ‘QPs’, as we call them) where necessary. It’s ponderous work, sometimes thrilling, often dull. I find it satisfying.
She’s out of the bath now. I can hear the thunder of water overhead, the clanking of the old iron pipes. That was a short dip even for her. It’s the metallic rusty streak on the enamel she hates. She says it looks like blood. Nothing about my house pleases her. She can’t help comparing it to the light, empty, knocked-through open spaces of next door: the reclaimed wooden floors, the steel framed industrial-style doors, the curated combination of old and new. My rooms are a hodgepodge in comparison. She used to care about sorting it out. She’s given up on that now. My house is no longer a project, and nor am I. She has more serious things to worry about.
Tonight, I must keep her off her phone. She has a compulsion to look at Instagram, but it’s her own feed she constantly scrolls through, revisiting happier days – her cakes, her house, her children, Tom. It’s very sad. Other people’s pictures are supposed to make you feel inadequate, not your own. I might try to get her to read one of the books I got for her out of the library: the thrillers she likes. There was a whole row of them on the ‘just published’ shelf. They seemed all to be about women who discover their husbands are psychopaths, but what can you do? Just reading this stuff doesn’t turn you into a killer.
At the pub quiz last night, Maeve asked if I wasn’t scared having Ailsa here. ‘You don’t know what she might do. What if she loses her temper? What if she turns on you?’
I smiled. ‘We’re friends.’
‘How do you know? You’re too . . .’
She didn’t finish what she was going to say but I knew what she was thinking. I looked around the table, at the motley crew who come together at the Dog and Fox once a week, and saw it in all their eyes: that I was too trusting, too lonely, that I would take in anyone to keep the darkness from pressing in.
The bathroom door just rattled; I can hear the creak of floorboards. She has crossed the landing and is standing at the top of the stairs. If I listen carefully I’ll know if she goes into Mother’s bedroom. She started in there a few days ago, systematically working her way through the tallboy. I don’t know what she was looking for. She got angry when I asked. No, she hasn’t gone in there. Her steps are coming down; I can tell from the tentative rhythm of her tread. She says my stairs are dangerous.
I must make sure she eats.
I’ll put this away now. I don’t want her to know what I’ve been doing. And anyway, I’ve written enough about myself. I can see, reading back, that I quite ‘got into it’. That’s the problem with human nature. We all think our own stories are fascinating,