Leah has been in the bathroom for upward of two hours, running the taps and listening to her sound machine, which fills the flat with a foaming swell of noise. I haven’t asked her to come out this morning; I rolled over and refused to get up when I heard her at the sink at quarter past six. Only today, I told myself, pulled the pillow over my face and promised I would get up and help tomorrow. I have yet to get used to the spare room, puddle my clothes on the carpet with the affect of one returned to a childhood home for Christmas and reluctant to do any washing. There are glasses piled on the table beside the bed, sour with nighttime water, dust, drowned spiders. I have taken several books from their old spot in the bedroom and use them to hold the door ajar at night. I didn’t take possession of the spare room immediately on Leah’s return but rather moved across in a strop one night when Leah had kept me awake sleepwalking back and forth between bedroom and bathroom, lying down only to get up again. I had intended to stay in the spare room only one night and yet somehow never moved back. This is something I am, for the moment, not willing to examine too closely. Sometimes in the dark, I imagine I hear Leah knocking on the wall that separates us, neat little knocks that request not entry but only conversation. Not real, of course, but something to occupy my mind when my home seems to fill with water and I find myself without the correct materials to plug the gaps.
I have read the majority of the book on anatomy by the time I hear the bath begin to drain, the door open, and Leah padding out and back into the bedroom—wet feet on carpet, door click, and then quiet. I get up, the way I always do, and move across the corridor to scrub at the bath with the sponge I keep beneath the sink. I have found that since returning, Leah is prone to ring the bath with a scrim of some curiously viscous material, oddly gritty when rolled between finger and thumb and pinkish in the white bathroom light. When I look at it, I think of tide pools filled with spiny creatures, scrub at it before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rock pool remains of something that might be shell or might be skin or might be something else entirely. I squeeze the sponge out in the sink and stow it, wander back to the spare room, and think about doing some work.
* * *
People grow odd when there’s too much sky—they lose the sense of land around them, think themselves into floating away. When my mother was dying I wanted her moved somewhere other than where she was, wished her away from the wide bright vista that spilled into her room every morning, sending her—as I felt at the time—undeniably mad.
The house was built into a cliffside over the water, offering wide-open views across the tops, from the Dufflin copse that covered the headland to the Davey Elms that lined the ridge. The trees around her house were always bent down, stomach-ached in the wind, her windows smeared with the bodies of insects that hurled themselves against the glass in search of respite from the weather. She had lived by the sea for some seventeen years, largely alone except for when the nurse became essential. The medication eased involuntary movements, but increasingly there arose a danger of choking, of falling, of not being able to climb the stairs. She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility. Patronizing, my mother used to say, when her hairdresser made a joke that veered toward the familiar, when a friend invited her to join her divorcees’ coffee morning—so she’s saying I’m the kind of sad act who needs to hang around with other sad acts and weep into my tea until it’s time to go home? Well, no thank you, chum, I’m quite happy on my own. It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it’s very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable. Visiting her brought with it the implication that you regarded her as lonely, failing to visit her was an insult all its own. Birthday presents bore about a fifty-fifty chance of misconstrual. My mother: poring over a book on French revolutionary history, pulling a pair of jade earrings from a box, pursing her lips for a second and nodding—I see, as though she quite understands the insult.
Typically, when I visited, we spoke on only very general topics: my hair, the weather, what it was exactly that I did for work again. I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did. She was ill for a long time—a white-knuckled, unbecoming illness that is also, as it happens, frequently passed down from parent to child. I sent my mother flowers and boxes of Jaffa Cakes and visited her less often than was kind. Toward the end of her illness, it became too difficult for her to live on her own and she was moved into full-time hospice care. I remember the day I moved her out—a sky like scalded milk, the smell of something burning. I remember the slip of skin between her knuckles, her white-blond hair, the heavy jewelry of bones too clear beneath the surface.