Bright Burning Things(8)
Tommy is pinching the skin on the back of my hand, twisting it. ‘Yaya, wake up, wake up, stop talking to yourself.’ I jolt fully awake and see my son’s face, wet and hot. Herbie is panting heavily, his filthy breath hawing on me. Push myself to sitting and take in the scene around me: the cold congealed final fish finger, the carpet strewn with clothes and wrapping and crumbs and muck. ‘A rat would have a party in here.’ I can see my father’s face, his nostrils flared, his body hard and brittle as if it could hardly contain all the disappointment I have heaped on him, as if it might break with the shame. His only daughter, first treading the boards, exposing her madness to the world, then hiding out, a single mother, a common layabout on benefits. There was no pride for my father in my unexpected talent on the stage. He didn’t want that path for me, and he certainly didn’t want this one.
These moments of lucidity are the worst, when the fog has cleared and cold reality lays claim to me, nipping at my heels, making me need to run again, and fast. Can’t sit with this laying-bare of my failings, and again I find myself in the kitchen opening another bottle, Tommy looking in at me from the living room. ‘Are you still thirsty, Yaya?’ This is unquenchable, sweetheart. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I can’t do it any other way. I drive the bottle opener too deep into the cork so it crumbles and splinters. Next time I’ll make sure they’re screw-tops. Next time… There won’t be a next time. I manage, I swallow, I soothe, I sleep, my boys climbing on top of me.
Sunlight pours through the window and stabs me with its edges. I draw Tommy to me, cuddling his warm, sleepy body.
‘Mr Sunshine has slept enough, Yaya, he’s come out to play.’
Little fingers drum on my head, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum.
‘Shh, little man, come here and let’s sleep a little longer.’ I hold his hands, kiss his fingers. Little torturers.
‘Up, Yaya, up.’
Tommy pulls the duvet off the three of us and runs around the bedroom chasing and cupping the light with his hands. I don’t remember going from the couch to the bed. Pity I can’t block out other unwanted memories. ‘Tommy, pull the blind down, there’s a good boy,’ I manage, my voice catching and breaking on every syllable. ‘Can you get water?’ He nods, goes into the kitchen, pours a glass, brings it back and holds it to my mouth, then to Herbie’s. ‘Unhygienic…’ I try, but it’s too much effort. Tommy puts a towel over my eyes and strokes my hair until I go under again.
‘Tommy?’ The TV is on; I can hear shouting and booing, probably one of those daytime therapy circuses that Tommy loves. Jeremy Kyle is his favourite. He’s kind, Yaya. He wants to make the peoples stop screaming. We’d make great fodder, top-rating viewing. I crave my son’s snug little body and the heft of Herbie, so I call out to the dog, who doesn’t come. The door is closed to the living room, which I’ve told them is strictly forbidden. We have nothing to hide from each other, not even number-twosies, which Tommy finds brilliantly funny. Closed doors make me panic, so I heave myself to the side of the bed, head spinning, sick rising, place my feet on the carpet and haul myself to standing, open the connecting door and find Tommy curled up in Herbie’s belly on the couch, the two of them locked in a circle of love, the dog snoring, the little boy’s arms draped around his neck. The picture is of such tenderness that my breath catches and I have to sit, my vision blurred. When did I become such a crier? Everything these days brings on the waterworks, everything beautiful and everything cruel, and this scene seems to contain it all.
My stomach is raw and distended. Run my hands across my belly and imagine an alien life form in there, eating me from the inside out. Some otherworldly force has made its headquarters inside me and is issuing instructions I’m powerless to resist. I look above the mantelpiece at my reflection in the mirror and see a bloated face, red, mascara-streaked (when did I bother to apply the last slick from my dried-out wand?), blackened lines running in rivulets down my cheeks, evidence of my tears inked in black. My eyes move to the form of my little boy, his trousers smeared with ice cream, his T-shirt rumpled and grimy at the neck, odd socks, one of them mine, his tiny foot swimming in all that space. I sit at the edge of the couch. Herbie’s eyes open and his big tongue reaches out to lick my hand. ‘What are we going to do, Woofter?’ His head tilts to the side, his eyes huge and shining. I imagine myself reflected in them, in a much more favourable light than the mirror’s cold glass. In his eyes I am goodness incarnate, his life prior to coming to me one of neglect and wilful cruelty. Oh, Herbie, old boy, I don’t know if I’m up to the job. I can still see the scars underneath his thick coat, the round cigarette burns on his neck, hidden by his collar. What kind of a person, what kind of a world—?
‘You need to learn to control yourself,’ my father used to say after my mother died, when I’d taken to slamming doors just to get some kind of a reaction, a habit that was resurrected with great gusto in my teenage years, after Lara came to live with us. ‘I hate…’ my favourite starting point for any sentence, followed by ‘I love…’ ‘There is somewhere in between, Sonya. You just need to learn to calm yourself down, be less extreme.’
Tommy turns himself in his sleep and I hear him muttering gibberish interspersed with some intelligible words: Herbie, Yaya, Herbie, Yaya, on a loop. He’s holding his stomach in his sleep and I wonder if his is sore too. I reach out a hand to lay on it and feel a bloating, bend to kiss him lightly on his belly button and go into the bathroom, where I step into a scalding shower, full of resolve. I can do this. I rub Clarins body lotion on my skin, a present from Howard four Christmases ago, just before he left for good, and step into a long-sleeved below-the-knee dress that’s only been worn once, a cardigan that’s fraying at the seams and pumps that are seven years old but have held their shape. Relics from a former life: an outfit for an audition for the ‘demure’ part. I towel-dry my hair, smear some cold cream on my face and neck and curl my eyelashes with a metal contraption I’d forgotten I had. It doesn’t take much. I wink at myself in the mirror, run my hands over my hips.