Crustaceans

 

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Acknowledgements

Also by Andrew Cowan

Copyright

 

Lynne

ONE

December and one foot of snow. The thaw in the towns is becoming contagious now, spreading out by these roads to the coast. People are working. I saw a man beating the tyres of his tractor, clumps of ice falling. A boy with a shovel tramped into a barn. The farm-truck ahead is piled with beets. I suppose they are beets. I raise a finger from the wheel and glance in the rear-view to find you. Sugar beets, I say. Can you see?

But you wouldn't be interested. You'd be watching these fields, kneeling out of your strap like you mustn't, and your breath would be misting the window. I'd scold you of course, and you'd offer this view, the black-bordered whiteness, as though for me too it was some kind of gift.
See the snow, Daddy!
you'd say. After which we would argue. You'd whine and I'd shout. Even today I would shout – because I don't want you falling, because I've told you before … Ach.

I sneeze and switch on the radio and tune it to nothing. White noise seeps into the car. Cold air from the coast rushes the windscreen. The land here is so flat, the snow covers everything. It's forgetful and simplifying, though I know that somewhere beneath there are seeds and tubers and stalks, tediously waiting – only sleeping – and soon enough there'll be too much again. These days there is always too much.

I ease down on the accelerator. The wheels of the farm-truck slick through the wet on the road. A solitary beet stirs from the pile then tumbles. In another few yards we'll be bumper-to-tail – the bolts on the drop-gate are rattling – and when at last I pull out to pass I glance again in the mirror and for a moment there's no one behind me, and nothing ahead, but even that emptiness crowds me and again I am breaking, I am crying, and it seems there's no point in continuing. I don't know where I'm going, or what I am doing. The car slews and steadies and I bring it to a halt in the verge. Beads of meltwater roll down the windscreen; the farm-truck grows small in the distance. I turn off the engine. I clear my nose. In the ticking silence that follows I take out my tobacco, I whisper your name. Are you listening, Euan? I say. Can you hear me? I remember the cold hard press of your bedframe, the sunburn on your shoulders. Shall I tell you a story? I say. Euan? Is that what I should be doing now?

TWO

It begins with Ruth and December and one foot of snow. This is twelve years ago. We were art students then, not yet twenty, and hundreds of miles from home. Ruth came to my flat-warming with a tin of white gloss. She was the only guest I'd invited and she stayed for five days. She stayed, in a way, for twelve years.

The college was small, red-brick and provincial. Its only advantage was to be so close to the seaside. When finally I told my father – the sculptor, your grandpa – that this was where I'd be going he thought I was joking, or foolish. He doubted my seriousness. With his name, and his contacts, he could have helped me find better. He said this with a frown, uselessly prowling his studio, touching things, moving things, not daring to face me. Strands of smoke curled in the sunshine. He lit a second cigarette, the first still burning in the bowl he used as an ashtray. The bowl was a gallery piece, a gift from the potter, but my father was always brutal about potters' pretensions: a bowl was a bowl. And this school, he exhaled, was only good for
ceramics;
they would turn
me
into a potter; or worse, a pottery teacher. And then, for the first time, grinding out both cigarettes, he shrugged and told me I had talent. I could take my pick, anywhere would have me. But of course I didn't believe him; I doubted his honesty. I thought he was embarrassed to have suggested using his influence and would rather praise me than allow that to stand. So when suddenly his eyes flared out at me, his sculptor's eyes, as if I too were a piece of metal he could twist into shape, I let myself slouch back on the wall and gazed idly past him. He gave a tight shake of his head. He had nothing more to say to me.

I didn't send him my new address. He never wrote anyway and wouldn't have used it. The flat was in an attic, six flights of steep narrow steps to reach it. The stairs had no carpets, and neither did my two rooms. I moved in the day our first term ended, impatient to be free of my lodgings and the scrutiny of my landlady, her constant fussing around me. Now I paid rent to an agency, and could wash my own clothes, cook my own meals. I had no need of mothering. I had no need, I'd decided, of anything much. Before Ruth arrived that first evening I took down the curtains and threw out the lampshades. Whatever couldn't be hidden – packed into cupboards or pushed under the bed – went downstairs to the bins. Then I began on the painting. I wanted everything white – the skirting, ceiling, doors, walls and window-frames; all of it white. Ruth said it would look like a prison cell, which wasn't what I intended. More the opposite, I said.

The smaller of my two rooms was the bathroom. On our first morning we woke to find whorls of fern-frost on the inside of the windows, thin platelets of ice in the toilet, three inches of water in the bathtub. It had seeped up through the plughole. When later I heated the boiler, the pressure on the hot tap was so low, and the enamel in the bath already so cold, that the water barely rose above tepid. The tub was anyway too small to submerge in, and not nearly big enough to share, so we washed instead from a plastic bowl in front of the living-room fire, and shivered even there.

My kitchen – a sink, drainer and Baby Belling cooker – was built into a recess to the left of the chimney-breast, a slatted partition to hide it. The pillow end of the bed occupied the alcove to the right, a wall-mounted cupboard above it, a foldaway table and chairs underneath, and each morning for five days I dragged out this table and set it next to the window, then cooked up some breakfast and coaxed Ruth from the bed with a blue-hooped mug of black coffee. She sat wrapped in a blanket, her head just touching the slope of the ceiling, and smiled as I served her. The sea was grey in the distance, the snow softly falling, and afterwards we made love until lunchtime.

In the afternoons we decorated, and as we worked we listened to music. Ruth had brought a bundle of tapes in her rucksack, their plastic cases discarded. It was classical stuff mostly, and cinema soundtracks, and very old jazz; nothing I liked much. She'd made the recordings at home, with a microphone propped to the solitary speaker of her record player, and I could hear her feet as she crossed her bedroom, the door opening and closing, her footsteps returning. Sometimes there were voices, buses passing under her window, small shufflings and knocks, and always the hum of the speaker. It was this background noise that I listened to, as if pressing my ear to a wall, attentive to a life I couldn't see, trying to imagine. Then came the fumble and click at the end of each tape, when the Ruth at my side would lay down her brush and say, Fag-break, and we'd sit facing each other in front of the fire, our fingers spattered with paint, her tobacco and papers between us. She was teaching me how to roll cigarettes. We placed them on the hearth in two separate lines, hers smooth and regular, mine too fat or too thin, always lumpy or conical. The work was absorbing, compulsive, and we didn't say much. We didn't smoke, either. Smoking for me was secondary to learning to make them, whilst Ruth rarely lit hers till the evening, when we'd sit up on the mattress, our backs to the wall of the alcove, and talk.

There was a television. It stood on a trolley at the foot of the bed, the dull grey of its screen showing our reflection, a faint furring of dust on the glass. The set was dead, and eventually I'd wheel it out to the landing, but for those first few evenings we gazed at it anyway, and gossiped, and told funny stories, and compared our likes and dislikes, and nosed into each other's childhood. Ruth was reticent, but I learned of a mother she said she disliked, and a guiltily indulgent father she seemed to despise. He had left them for another woman when Ruth was thirteen, and was now, for a second time, unhappily married. She had no brothers or sisters, and neither of her parents, she implied, was interesting to her; she yawned when I pressed her, or became flippant, or changed the subject to me.

She had a way of asking me questions. Her eyes were huge, the blue-green of the irises almost entirely encircled by white. With the arch of her eyebrows, she often looked startled, or dazzled. But when she focused her gaze, as she had done the first time we spoke in the college canteen, the effect was unnerving – too keenly interested, too brightly attentive, and although this was flattering, and arousing, it also made me self-conscious. I stumbled over the simplest words. And yet, as she pried her way into my past on that bed, Ruth lowered her gaze, lowered her eyelids, and concentrated instead on her cigarette, the flecks of paint on her overalls, the weave of the bedspread beneath us. She doodled absently with a fingernail on my thigh, my arm, the back of my hand. Sometimes she took both my hands in hers and stroked them. She laid her head on my shoulder. And her voice was tentative, small, gently guiding me to say more than I intended, more than I thought I remembered. She wasn't the first girl I had slept with, but she was the first I'd described myself to in such detail.

We were discussing my mother – speculating, supposing – when finally I smoked my first cigarette. I asked Ruth to light one, and she casually passed me her own, then lit up another. But I couldn't decide how to hold it, and in my awkwardness I recalled something more: an argument and the slam of a door, the chill of our staircase as I descended, and my mother standing alone in our kitchen, trembling, one arm poised as though lifting a glass, tilting her chin as if something might spill, but this time not drinking. She was smoking a cigarette, one of my father's, and it seemed misplaced in her fingers. She inhaled sharply, defiantly, three or four draws, then stubbed out what remained with an agitated flap of her hand, dispersing the smoke as she hurried towards me. Her eyes were raw – she was starting to cry – but I wasn't to worry; she cupped her hands round my face and said I wasn't to worry. I must have been five – no older than five – and I wouldn't see her smoking again.

As I told this to Ruth I felt my forehead and chest prickling with sweat. My heart, I realised, was racing, and suddenly in that white room the light was too bright, there was too much to see. I lay flat on the bed and closed my eyes. I thought I was going to be sick and when I got to my feet the giddiness made me lurch sideways. Ruth took the cigarette from my hand and followed me through to the bathroom. She sat on the rim of the tub. Nicotine, she explained; it's a poison. But you'll get used to it. Which I did, soon enough.