Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Fourteen
When I get home from work today, I’m met by a full house and the smell of hot tea and freshly sliced cucumber. The sound of the strumming of a bass guitar emanates through the floorboards and Ian sits eating a triangular half of a ham sandwich at the kitchen table, reading out loud about Veganism. It reminds me of what it used to be like, a few years ago. When Dilly was at home, when Ian lived next door, when there was always someone whisking in, whisking out, the kettle working itself to the bone.
‘I just couldn’t do it, Ian,’ Mum is saying, as Ian stares down at his iPad. ‘I couldn’t give up my crumpets and butter.’
‘Mm.’ Ian nods. ‘Although I’m not quite sure all crumpets fall under the animal product umbrella, Belinda.’
‘Oh,’ says Mum, her new hospital-prescribed crutch leaning against the kitchen counter. ‘But then what about bacon – oh, Noelle, hello, darling. We’re just having a cuppa and a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich? Ian got some lovely ham, didn’t you? From that meat man on the corner.’
‘Colin,’ he says. ‘The owner of Meat Man Plc. And good afternoon, Noelle.’
‘Hiya. And I will actually,’ I say, taking a seat at the table, shrugging off my denim jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. ‘But are you sure you’re OK to do it? Your leg …’
‘No, no,’ Mum says. ‘It’s good to move it, they say, or it gets all stiff, and Christ knows, I have enough trouble as it is. I don’t want to be going back, all seized up, God knows what they’d do with me then …’
Since the hospital, Ian has been coming round more and more and I’ve loved so much, having him here again. The other day, he even stayed until nine and helped Mum up to bed for me, and I watched the pair of them slowly taking the narrow steps of our little two-up-two-down, Ian’s arm lovingly holding Mum, and felt a tug at my heart. Ed’s right. Ian does love Mum. And I often wonder whether Mum has no idea, or if she has in fact every idea but is too frightened to look it in the eye – this person who loves her for everything she is – not everything she was, or the idea of who she could become. When Ian sat us down and told us about Pam, I thought she’d tell him – because I really do think that she loves him too. Except she didn’t. She clapped her hands together, she beamed like a quiz-show host, she strangled a tea-towel in her hand as if it was the neck of a mortal enemy, then told him how happy she was for him. Then she denied the floods of tears she cried while watching Coronation Street later that night and the six slices of toast she stress-ate while she did were for any reason but the excellent script-writing and ‘can’t a woman eat bloody toast in her own home without being psychoanalysed?’
‘He’s a trained botanist, would you believe,’ Ian continues now, placing a crust of bread on the plate in front of him. ‘But working with meat – he said it was one of the only things he felt he could do. Once he got out of prison.’
‘Sorry – who?’
‘Colin.’
I look blankly at him, and Mum says, ‘The man we got the ham from.’
‘Meat Man Plc,’ adds Ian.
Ian knows everyone and everything in this little town. He’s lived here his whole life. Even worked here, at a local secondary school as a geography teacher before he retired early and then filled his time with the Neighbourhood Watch forums and watching YouTube tutorials on anything from pruning cucumber plants to asserting yourself when making a complaint in a luxury hotel, despite having not actually stayed in a hotel for twenty-two years. I honestly never thought he’d move from next door – leave his little pride and joy of an immaculate everything-in-its-place house. I didn’t think he’d leave Mum, either, of course. But then, what is it Ed said? You can’t wait around forever. And maybe Pam turned up just as he’d given up waiting.
‘I don’t know what he was in prison for,’ Ian continues, as the low buzz of bass guitar upstairs comes to an abrupt stop. ‘But I said to Belinda, your Mum’ – Ian always says this, as if I need reminding of who my mother is – ‘If I was a betting man, I would put a small sum of money on burglary. Looks the sort, you know. Eyes far too close together.’
Mum nods seriously, buttering two slices of bread at the counter, as the clomp of feet pummel the stairs. ‘Oh, that’s true that is,’ she says.
‘I don’t think it is,’ I laugh. ‘I mean, if you think about it, Dilly’s eyes are actually––’
‘Uh? What’s this about my pork pies?’ Dilly arrives in the doorway, his drummer, Dwayne following dutifully behind him, a black woolly hat pulled down to his eyelids. ‘Oh, and is that ham? We’ll take one of those, won’t we, mate? The Storm loves a sandwich.’
And as if on the set of an advert, to my surprise and apparently nobody else’s, Dwayne says, ‘Ham from Meat Man Plc? Good stuff, that. I’ll happily take one.’
The two of them barrel into the room, plonk themselves on a kitchen chair each, and Mum frantically butters bread. Dilly and Dwayne (or The Storm since he’s gone ‘method’ slash mad) have been in what must be close to a hundred bands together now, since secondary school. Five Catastrophes is their latest project. And surprisingly, they’re good. Really good. I suppose that’s what years of absolute obsession, practice and crying during rock concerts does. Dilly fasted once, for thirty-six hours, ‘like Gandhi’, he said, but for the cause of Iron Maiden.
‘Oh,’ says Mum. ‘Noelle, Ian has something to ask you. Don’t you, Ian?’
Dilly takes the plate from Mum before I can even raise a hand to take it myself. Then he smirks and slides it over to me, his eyebrows wiggling ‘gotcha’ at me across the table. But suddenly I don’t want it. I know that face of Mum’s – the eager eyes, the big gaps between blinks.
‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ Ian interlaces his fingers together like a newsreader. ‘Are you familiar with Farthing Heights, Noelle?’
‘No,’ I say at the same time Dwayne says through a mouth full of bread, ‘Great book.’
‘No,’ says Ian. ‘No, that’s Wuthering Heights. No, see, Farthing Heights is the estate on the way to Newham Park, and I play squash with a man called George who says his neighbour, Frank, is looking for a cleaner, for his flat there. And of course, I thought of you.’
Mum’s eyes are fixed on me. I nod, my hands at the plate in front of me, but my heart sinks like a stone in a tank at those final words. Because I’m already working a lot, and when I’m not working, I’m running errands for Mum, and since Mum’s leg, so much more of the housework. I wanted to start a video course I’ve found online, about making table arrangements, but I’ve barely found the time. I wanted to meet with Candice, at a wedding fair last week, but couldn’t fit it in. Charlie and I were also meant to go to the cinema last week to see an old black-and-white film at the Tivoli, but we ended up cancelling because I’d got home too late from Jetson’s. My own time – it’s running from me, at the moment, like a downhill stream.
‘And I’m not exactly sure what’s happened, Noelle,’ Ian carries on, ‘but this man needs to move, and before he moves, he requires a cleaner to aid him in clearing his home. He’s elderly.’
‘You’re used to the elderly, aren’t you, darling?’ says Mum hopefully. ‘What with Betty, the old lady you sometimes clean for. She’s good with them, aren’t you?’
Dilly laughs to himself, mouth jammed with sandwich. ‘Good with them,’ he says under his breath.
‘I said I know just the woman,’ Ian says excitedly. ‘I said, you won’t find a more trustworthy and more diligent cleaner, even if you searched the whole of England.’
‘Oh.’ I smile weakly. ‘Thanks, Ian. And I’m … it’s not that I’m not happy that you thought of me …’
‘Of course.’
‘But my time is so … I mean, I only really have Tuesday afternoons and Sundays free at the moment.’
‘Yes.’ Ian considers these words and nods, slowly, his round little head bobbing like a balloon in the breeze. ‘Hm. Yes. I can’t say I don’t understand that, Noelle. Well. Never mind.’
Mum doesn’t say anything, but she turns, twists the tap, starts filling the sink with water. And I can feel it swelling in the air, like a thick cloud, threatening to burst and pour down upon us all. The worry. The expectation. The unspoken words of ‘But we’re struggling with money. But I’m up at night worrying, and I’m not sleeping and there’s a job, Noelle. A job that pays money.’ And I wish she’d look at Dilly like this. But she won’t because he’s Dilly. Dilly, her baby, Dilly the bloody walnut, and she wouldn’t want to worry him. Plus, he’s following his dream. The touring, the music. What am I doing? Besides fannying about with cut-price flowers and scaring away mountaineers in waiting rooms anyway.
‘Did they say when they needed a cleaner by?’ I ask eventually.
Ian looks up from his iPad, surprised. ‘Oh. Yes. As soon as humanly possible, George said.’ He chuckles to himself.
‘Tell him I might be interested,’ I say, as Dwayne and Dilly tear into their sandwiches like hyenas, both scrolling on their phones.
‘I’ll enquire with George again tomorrow.’ Ian taps away on his iPad. ‘There we are. I’ve even set an alarm. This reminder, which is linked also to my smart watch, will tell me to speak to him just as we’re having our post-match elevenses.’
Mum smiles at him. ‘Clever,’ she says. ‘And the sandwiches are all right, are they, boys?’
‘Stellar, Mum.’ Dilly chews. ‘Mad to think he was in the nick, that butcher.’
‘Burgled a pub,’ adds Dwayne, and at that Ian yelps, as if he’s just got four corners in bingo. ‘Burglary!’ he exclaims. ‘I can’t believe I just did that. I was right, Belinda. Right on the nose.’