Field Study (4 page)

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Kim is back at home now, back at school. Weeks have passed already, but Alice still sees the first days in the hospital with her daughter. The pictures come at her from nowhere. When she is doing the books, while she is cutting, shopping, walking, on her way home.

From her bedroom window, Kim watches her mother in the dusk light, coming up the road. She walks with her coat unbuttoned and sometimes she stops, head down, hands deep in her pockets. Stays like that for a minute or two on the pavement before walking on.

The nurses held Kim’s body curled and still and Alice watched. Daughter’s spine turned towards her, small feet pulled up below her bum. Brown iodine swirled on to her skin, and then her toes splayed as the needle went in: five separate soft pads on each foot, reaching.

They had a bed free for Alice in a room down the hall, but she stayed in the chair by her daughter’s bed and didn’t sleep much. Awake when Kim’s temperature rose again and she swallowed her tongue. The doctors drew the curtain round the bed and the fitting girl while they worked. So Alice couldn’t see what they were doing any longer but still she didn’t move. Stayed put, listening,
while they made the hole for the tube in her daughter’s neck, and took her temperature down with wet sheets around her legs. No one asked Alice to leave and she sat in the chair, shoes off, coat on, pulled tight around her chest.

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Kim has headaches, too.

Joseph watches while his sister ties the belt round her head. One of Granddad’s old ones. Big buckle, cracked leather, round her forehead, over her temples. He pulls it tight for her and then she lies down, head under the blankets, nose showing. Brows pulled into a frown by the belt, jaw clenching, neck held taut against the pain.

Kim’s drinks have to be warm because her teeth feel everything, and she is clumsy. Legs bruised from falls and corners, clothes stained colourful by spills. Kim has no sense of edges these days; where a glass can be placed safely, where her body can pass without damage. She creates noise and mess and the mumbling speech that the doctor said should improve quickly takes weeks to go away.

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The school calls Alice in again. No parents’ evening this time: a meeting with Kim’s class teacher and headmistress, attendance register open on the desk between them.

– When does Kim leave the house, Mrs Bell?

– Quarter to nine. With her brother.

– Every morning?

Alice nods, doesn’t tell them that she leaves the house at eight twenty to open the salon. Thinks they are doubtless capable of working that one out. She reminds them.

– My daughter has been very ill.

– Yes.

They are writing things down and Alice is remembering again. That Kim couldn’t stop herself looking at her tracheotomy wound. That the peeled ends of the dressing curled up off her neck, giving her away, gathering dust like magnets, tacky traces on her skin turning black. Alice visited her at visiting time, whispered: it’ll get infected. She smiled when she said it. Didn’t want to tell her daughter off; just to tell her. Let her know that she had noticed. That she understood it, her curiosity.

Kim looked at her. Skin under her eyes flushing. Hands moving up to cover the dressing. Alice didn’t know what that meant: whether her daughter was surprised or pleased or angry.

– Kim is what we call On Report now, Mrs Bell.

– She could have died.

– Yes.

They blink at her across the desk. Sympathetic, insistent.

– I’m afraid her attendance record has to improve.

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Kim finds different places to spend her days. Sometimes the coast path over the headland where the wind cuts into her legs. Sometimes the burnt stubble of the fields inland, where she flies her kites made out of plastic bags. Most days it is the beach, though, where she lies down under the old pier. On her back on the cracking shingle, waves at her feet, sea wall behind her. Sodden wood, salt, seaweed and litter.

Above her, she can see the gulls’ flapping battles through the gappy planks of the old walkway. Lies still, watching the starlings fly their swooping arcs around the splintered columns and rails. Cloud and wind over the water. Storm of black beak and wing reeling above her head.

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Alice shuts the salon early and is home before her children. Joseph acts as though it is normal for his mother to open the door for him; Kim steps into the hallway, clutching her school bag as if it were proof of something, tell-tale damp of the day in her clothes and hair. Joseph slips upstairs to his bedroom, Kim stays silent, eyes on the wallpaper while Alice asks her where she has been, and why. She watches Kim’s face for a reaction but cannot read anything from her daughter’s expression.

– Whatever. You’ll be leaving the house with me from now on.

– No.

Later Alice goes over the scene again. In bed, light out, eyes open. Feels something closing down, tight around her ribs. Remembers the screaming battles they had when Kim was three, four, five. Doesn’t want to repeat those years again. Her daughter smelled of sea and air this afternoon, it filled the corridor. Alice didn’t know what to do, what to say, so she said nothing. An almost eight year old stranger standing in front of her. Mouth open, breath passing audibly over her small, wet teeth.

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Kim doesn’t know it, but the school keeps close tabs on her. Her teachers know she comes for registration and then dodges out of the gate behind the playing fields. They don’t confront her; instead they call her mother and then Alice hangs up the phone in the back room of the salon, behind the closed curtain, under the noise of the dryers, and cries.

Alice doesn’t know it, but some mornings her daughter comes down to the front. The smell leads her there: hot air, warm skin and hair, shampoo. She doesn’t go in; instead she watches her mother’s face at the salon window. Eyes and cheekbones amongst the reflections. Blank sky, cold sea, ragged palms. Her mother’s eyes
blinking, face not moving. Lamp-posts with lights strung between, rocking in the breeze.

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Another Wednesday, another week or two later, and Kim stands in the salon doorway. Alice has had the phone call already. Knows her daughter hasn’t been to school, didn’t expect her to show up here. The rain slides down the windowpane and, through the open shop door, she can hear it singing in the drains.

Alice takes her daughter’s coat from her, sits her down in an empty chair. The salon is quiet and Kim spends the next few minutes watching her mother working in the mirror. She sees that Alice doesn’t look at her, only out of the window, or down at her fingers, turning grey hair around the pastel shades of the plastic rollers, pink and yellow and green. Her mother’s cheeks are flushed, lips drawn in, and the skin around her eyes pulled taut.

When Alice steps over to her, Kim looks away. Sees the old lady’s eyes on them, under the dryer. Alice knows she is watching them, too. Has felt her customers observing her ever since Kim was ill, has grown accustomed to the scrutiny. She stands behind her daughter now. A second or two passes, and she finds herself still there. Not shouting, not angry. Just looking at the slope of her daughter’s shoulders, the nape of her neck, her sodden hair.

Alice gets a clean towel from the shelves at the back and then plugs in a dryer, sets to work. At first Kim watches the rain, the gulls fighting on the rail outside, but soon she closes her eyes. Feels the pressure of her mother’s fingers, how strong her hands are, how warm the air is, the low noise of the dryer.

The boy is carsick. After the journey backwards along the motorway and then through the pines. In the back of the long family car, between the cool box and the beach towels, staring at the white stripes on black tarmac receding, the corners and trees of the sandy track to the beach.

Parked under high pines on needles and springy ground, doors open to the sound of waves and smell of outside. The dunes give way under the feet of the boy’s mother, father, his two brothers, his sister. He is the youngest and his hands are clasped by his parents on the walk to the beach from the car. One on either side, they pull his arms high above his head.

The family reaches the top of the rise together, all six stopping a moment at the highest point of the rolling dune. The wind is blowing in off the sea and pastes their summer clothes to their skin. The parents swing their youngest up over the tough grass tufts. Small feet lifting off the shifting sands, the lurching belly feeling a happy one now, nausea driven back to the car by the wind, the wet salt and tree smell out here.

Before them are the three stripes of sky, sea and sand. Powder blue, slate and then brown. Indian summer, week-day, they are alone. Save a kite-flyer and two dog-walkers plus collie, barking at the retreating surf. Snout snaps shut in silence and the sound reaches the family, their youngest son, late. Carried on detours by the wind,
across the flat sands up the rise of the dune, to their ears.

They scaled it on their toes and descend now, heels sinking deep into the pale gold slope. The mother is breathless, father frowning, and they let go of their youngest boy, attention turned fully to their ungainly struggle down the dune with the picnic box. The older boys throw themselves forward and land on the beach first, rolling and kicking. Laughing and throwing fists of sand after each other, running away to the water.

The sister, the eldest, walks slowly, keeps a few paces between herself and her parents. With her face turned out to sea, she avoids the sight of her father’s bald spot, her mother’s wide-legged walk, the fact that they link arms, pointing out birds to one another, hopping at the water’s edge. She keeps her own arms folded square across her chest.

Her youngest brother skips awhile somewhere behind her, then runs full pelt past her and past their parents, out into the middle of the wide sands.

The father spreads the towels out in front of the wind-breaker and the mother lies down. Almost on one side, knees bent, one foot planted firmly on the ground. She sleeps briefly, chest rising and falling with her breath. Breasts large again, belly facing out to sea, a huge, firm curve under the wide material of her dress. The breeze blows a dusting of sand across her strong feet, their high arches and prominent veins. They run dark blue under her
pale skin, from the tops of her feet to her calves, the backs of her knees.

The sister lays her towel a couple of metres away and reads. Earphones leaking tinny whispers back to her little brother, who sits by their parents, shovelling sand from hand to hand. His father unpacks a carton of juice for himself, for the boy.

– Shall we go and find your brothers then?

His small son sucks red drink up through the straw and nods. His wife sits up, half-way, propped on her elbows.

– You stay here, love. Rest.

He puts a hand on her belly, a kiss on the top of her head.

The father walks bare-footed, trousers rolled up. His legs are white and his toes pink, soft from their sock casing. He leaves heavy prints on the wet sand, which soften and fill with water after he has passed.

– I’ve brought you an extra man.

The boy’s brothers stand in the shallows and scowl.

– Come on. Play something where he can join in.

And they do for a while, but it is no fun and so soon turns into piggy in the middle, with a new rule. If the ball goes in the water, piggy has to fetch it, and before long the small boy’s shorts are wet through. After that it just makes sense to throw him in a little deeper, especially because he
laughs such a lot when they swing him. One holding his shoulders, the other his legs.

The water is cold, though, and salty. Catches at the back of his throat and brings back the sick feeling of this morning in the car. He cries, and so they have to take him back up the beach to their mother, who frowns and says do they have to be so rough with him and they may as well stay here now and eat some lunch.

The youngest boy is undressed and wrapped in a large towel, hair rubbed spiky and half-dry by a smaller one. He eats his sandwich slowly, crust first, sitting close to the bulging stripes of the windbreak, silently regarding the frayed tops of its wooden posts.

His father spreads the boy’s shorts and T-shirt out on the sand to dry, weighted down with stones from the tide-line, corners flapping in the breeze. He takes off his own shirt for his son to wear, sleeves turned all the way up in fat rolls, tails trailing to the boy’s ankles. The father sits in his vest and gives his children riddles to solve over their sandwiches. They roll their eyes, but venture answers all the same. He is delighted when they solve them, even more so when he can explain the solutions to them. Using gestures for emphasis, and enigmatic diagrams drawn with his fingers in the sand.

– Mum can I go down there?

The youngest son stands in his father’s shirt and points
down the beach to the far headland. His father’s riddles mean nothing to him, his explanations even less. His mother blinks, sleepy again.

– What’s down there, love?

He shrugs.

– I want to see.

– Maybe in a bit, sweetheart. Have you finished your lunch?

He sighs, kicks his feet about in the sand. His father and brothers have moved a little way from the patch of towels, are drawing in the sand with sticks now. But what the picture is of, the youngest boy can’t make out.

– I’ll go with him.

The sister is embarrassed by her father’s behaviour, by her brothers, even though there is no one else on the beach now to see them. Her mother smiles, tired, grateful.

– Thank you, love. I’ll join you in a while, then.

The girl walks just fast enough so that her little brother has to skip occasionally to keep up. A slim pack of ten is pulled out of her waistband once they have got enough beach between them and their parents. Flick-flick noise of the cigarette lighter repeating behind her hand, she crouches down, gets the small boy to shield her from the wind.

– Pretend you’ve found a shell.

She instructs and he mimes dutifully, picking up nothing and placing it on her outstretched hand. Her other is held stiff to her side, cigarette hidden from distant parents’ eyes by her body, smoke kicked this way and that, quickly invisible in the wind. A swift, checking glance back to the parents and sister stands again.