In White Ink Read online

  *

  Today Joanna is particularly quiet in the car. She is not replying to her DVD. As Valerie brakes at the lights, it dawns on her with irritating obviousness that the child could be choking on the raisins, and she twists her head around to check. But the raisins are forgotten. Joanna is occupied by the handbag. In all the flurry of fixing herself, Valerie left it in a mess on the back seat. Nothing has been put away in the designated pouches. It’s all lying on top: the gold-smeared tissue, blush-stained powder sheets, the tube of Barely Lipstick. The bag from the hardware shop is billowing messily through the zip-trimmed gash.

  ‘What did you buy, Mummy?’

  It still surprises Valerie to hear Joanna speak. It began suddenly, when she was eighteen months old. There was no evident process to it, no first word. She hadn’t even said Mama. Then after her first week at crèche, Joanna began to talk. A little lisp at first, but she spoke in slow, correct sentences, and she was polite – always please and thank you and pardon. Now, at two and a half, she speaks like an adult. On hearing the child request her teddy last night – ‘Mummy, please may I have Lucy Bunny? Thank you very much, Mummy’ – Martin gave a satisfied, nasal chuckle.

  ‘Glad we’re getting our money’s worth! The price of that place...’

  But this sudden articulacy, these precocious manners, only make Valerie feel separate from the child, wary of her, and sorry for her willingness to learn the rules.

  Valerie tilts the rear-view mirror to look at Joanna more comfortably. Her daughter straightens herself into her default position: ankles crossed, shoulders back. She is small for her age with a straight, flat fringe and sweeping lashes; an eerily dainty creature. Valerie allows her gaze to travel up her daughter’s body – the waxy nubs of knees, the boxy pinafore, the too-fine hands resting one on top of the other on her lap, her whole presence dispassionately tidy and compact. She is an unusual sort of child certainly, not boisterous or messy like other toddlers. If you didn’t like her, thinks Valerie, you might call her prissy.

  ‘They’re for Toby,’ says Valerie. ‘Treats for Toby.’

  ‘Oh.’ The child nods, but after a pause she says, ‘Please did you get me a treat please, Mummy?’

  ‘No darling. Not today.’

  This morning, Valerie parked beside a lovely Mini – brand new, bright yellow, glossy and neat as a boiled sweet against the landscape of silver Land Rovers and smog-grey vans. She drove up beside it on purpose, aligning her car in one steady swoop. There was a box of lavender tissues on the dashboard, and, hanging from the mirror, a small teddy bear in a ballerina costume. The type of young woman who might drive about in that car would be efficient and fit, independent and busy. She would have hair sleeked back into a satiny ponytail. It would be nice to buy a car like that for Joanna someday.

  ‘What treats for Toby, Mummy?’

  ‘Treats, Joanna. Just treats, darling.’

  ‘For good Toby.’

  The child loves Toby, a dense package of heat and breath, flat, wiry fur, and foxy snout. Sometimes she sits beside him on the floor, curves her arm over his stiff back and tilts her head towards him. ‘Toby,’ she sighs, patting him lightly with parted fingers. ‘Good Toby.’ His back is a dirty white with grey flecks and one big splotch of rust, but when Joanna talks about him she says she has an ‘orange dog called Toby’. His tail has been docked but a good three inches of it remain, so he sits all day wagging the sad little stump – too short for a tail and too long for the neat nubbin that tradition demands – waiting for Martin, his beloved master, to come home and pat him on the head. Martin will be at after-work drinks tonight, so Toby will sit and sit until it’s dark, banging that blunt stub on the tiled porch floor.

  ‘Why do they dock the tails?’ Valerie asked her husband once, ‘and why are they still born with tails, after all the breeding? Why do the tails remain?’ The reason mustn’t have been very satisfying, because Valerie can’t remember it now.

  She never liked the dog. She should have said it when Martin first came home with the puppy – she should have made him get rid of it, but it was after her third miscarriage, and she was still cautious then, grateful and glad to be a wife, determined to rise to the role. Making a marriage work, her mother had told her, was largely about learning to like things that might at first seem tiresome. ‘And the secret,’ she said, ‘to a really happy marriage is to make him believe he is in control.’ When her mother said that she winked in that elegant, warming way she could. ‘But of course, darling, it’s you who is in control.’

  Valerie buys Martin’s shirts for him, and his socks and his underpants even; she sends him out every day to work and then she buys the things she wants – that new coffee table; the wooden mini kitchen for Joanna. Joanna; she even named the child. Why, then, does it feel not at all like her mother’s victorious, conspiratorial wink?

  She was right, though; Valerie has learned to like being a homemaker. There is a delicious guilt, now, in leafing through interior design catalogues, fantasizing about all the different ways she might redecorate the dining room. But Toby is nearly five, and she still doesn’t like him. As time goes on, he only smells worse; his lopsided gallop grows only more irksome. It’s a secret she hardly admits to herself: that she hates to be greeted by Toby, hates the pleasure Toby takes in Martin’s return or her daughter’s head-tilt, the way Toby laps up the meaningless words of praise, ‘Good Toby.’

  In the evening while she waits for Martin, Valerie often allows herself a gin and tonic, and as she drinks, she listens to the steady tap of Toby’s half-tail on the tiles, faster and harder as the moment approaches, the sharp yelps of excitement when the car swings into view, the scuffle and bump as he leaps at the porch door because he can’t contain his excitement, and then his panting joy – pure dumb doggy joy – when Martin pats him on the head.

  *

  As an afterthought Valerie tilts her chin up and says, ‘I’ll get you a treat tomorrow, Joanna,’ but the child is asleep, her head flopped to the side, the soft peaked mouth drooling onto the seatbelt. Valerie almost doesn’t notice it – she is about to turn back but then she looks again and there it is – the familiar fleck perched insolently on the curve of her daughter’s cheek, and Valerie’s breath hooks high in her chest.

  HROOOOO – it’s the four-by-four behind her, a man at the wheel wearing an ill-fitting suit jacket. He honks again, longer this time: HRNMOOOOO. The lights are green and she must go. Oh and God, what is she like? There are tears now; her eyes are watering, liquid seeping out like the ooze and split of an overripe fruit because her daughter, Valerie’s own and only child, is asleep with fleas hopping over her skin. She is a ridiculous woman and everyone knows it; a mush of a face pasted over with make-up, hobbling the streets with the hair of a pretty child and fleas in her expensive handbag; weeping at the wheel, holding up traffic. That hairdresser today – the way he ran his eyes over her; he knew she was a joke. And that stupid teenager, handing her the plastic bag, smiling and smiling at her like a hungry pup and laughing behind the smile. She can feel the creatures under her clothes, burying into her, creeping around in her nostrils. She will poison them, but will it even work? The bug bombs, the spray, the vacuuming. Or are fleas forever part of her now?

  One of the women on the Internet said that she still had fleas after a thirty-year battle. ‘Will I ever feel clean again?’ she blogged.

  *

  Toby is already frantic at the porch door – he always knows when Joanna is coming home. Valerie opens the back door of the car very slowly and crouches, her stub heels sinking into the plush gravel. If she presses down on the flea, she will wake Joanna. She will have to pluck it off. She needs to be careful and deft. She brings her thumb and forefinger together on either side, but her nails are too long, the acrylic lacquer too thick. The flea drops immediately onto her daughter’s hand. Valerie lowers her head to assess the angle but – Ha! She feels the skin pleating around her lips as she huffs a quiet laugh, the tightness springs
from her chest – it’s just a fleck of cut hair! She licks her finger, touches the speck, and lifts it gently away.

  *

  Valerie leaves her handbag in the back seat for now and brings in only the plastic bag with the things from the hardware shop. Toby knows better than to jump up on her nice skirt. While she moves to the kitchen, he orbits her like a satellite, leaping into the air, trembling with all the tempered aggression he has been bred for.

  The kitchen is immaculate but for a mug in the sink with a ring of tea dried into the base. Dolores always does that – leaves the house spotless except for some tell-tale sign of her passing-through. Valerie has spoken to her about it several times.

  With relish she removes her purchases from the hardware-shop bag and lays them out in a straight row. What pleases her is the variety of sizes and shapes – the tall can of spray, the tiny bug bomb, the pillow-shaped bag of dog treats.

  Toby begins to nose at the bag and Valerie pulls it out of reach. Then she notices a few of the bone shapes at the bottom. The packet of treats must have split. Toby’s paws skitter on the floor as he resists the urge to jump. ‘Sit!’ says Valerie. The dog lowers his hind quarters, quivering in a half-squat.

  Valerie slips her shoes off. The underfloor heating makes the soles of her feet tingle as she lowers the bag to Toby’s height. Toby hurls his weight into the suffocating plastic, nosing blindly around the bottom of the bag in a frenzy of snuffing and licking. He inhales nostrilfuls of the stuff, misses the treats and tries again, his tongue dark through the plastic, claws skating coolly on the hardwood floor.

  Valerie’s mother – Mummy – must have her handbag by her at all times now. For hours sometimes, her fingers scurry and scrape at the lining, searching. She is getting worse. That’s what Valerie thought last time she visited – she is drawing further into that terrible mindscape of pretty napkins and perfume bottles, staring out at Valerie through shrinking, pinkening eyes.

  The bag could smother Toby. Stupid creature. The sharpness of his claws makes her think of the hairdresser again, the metal in his flaccid brow, how it must have hurt and how the man wore his mutilation like victory. Valerie tries to pull it off him but he pushes in, all snorts and huffs, so that she has to put her palm on his spine and push down. ‘Sit, Toby.’ Toby can’t resist the order. His bony haunches collapse, the little peaks of his pelvic bones hiccupping with desire for his bag of doggie treats. He raises his rear again, and lowers, hovering, awaiting permission to move. Valerie puts a hand on the rough, oily sack of his neck. Inside the loose skin there is something craggy and solid – his voice box; his throat. As she peels the bag down off his nose, she notices, flapping at the edge of her vision, his docked tail – that mutilated knob of gristle, wagging and wagging and wagging for approval.

  ‘Why are you wagging, Toby? Stupid creature, why are you wagging?’

  Poor dumb Toby; pleased with his treats. Toby, waiting for Martin’s pat, waiting for some orders to obey. Poor mutt. He thinks he’s pleased with his draughty porch, his Sunday walks, his treats and that amputated appendage.

  ‘What a life, Toby. What a joke.’

  Valerie draws the bag tight around the dog’s head, stretching the plastic thin over the shape of his muzzle and his long skull. Watching the suck of the plastic catch and tug on his loose eyelids, she thinks of the day her ears were pierced. It was her mother who brought her. The jeweller used a red pen to make a dot on each lobe. The quick stamp of pain and the victory of no tears.

  Face low with his now, Valerie can smell the oily sleek of Toby’s coat, the hot, healthy sweat, the sandy traces of excrement on his scraggle-bearded belly. She is on top of him now, her skirt hitched up and her legs pressing on Toby’s stringy muscles, the slosh of his stomach, the graceful chains of bones. Valerie retches loudly, for she can feel the greasy heat of him shifting on her groin. He bucks, but she has him, her knee jabbing into his neck, so he lowers his head silently. With both knees on Toby’s sharp shoulder blades, Valerie reaches for the handle of the built-in rubbish bin, pulls it outwards, and grabs the new sack that the cleaner has put in it – a heavy black one. She pushes one knee down on Toby’s head; his eye. Toby whimpers, that is all. Weakly, hopelessly, he shows her his teeth. Poor Toby. Stupid docile creature. With his head twisted on the ground, she opens the sack over his wincing face, scrunching it closed at his throat. Toby begins to growl now. He scrambles for some kind of leverage on the glossy floor. His hind legs kick and scratch. He jerks, and the force of it draws streaks of pain through her. She clasps and pulls until the bag is over the whole rat-like bulk of him. Because of the closing fan of her daughter’s cool, small hand in hers, the bones like quills and the flesh like fruit – because of Joanna she knows she can’t let go now, for she can see how the fleas would infest the delicate curls of her ears, how his filth would ruin her winter coat. In one snap he could remove the dimple-knuckled hands that like to pat his stinking hide, sever clean the soft bones and supple nails. Valerie heaves the bag up and is proud of her strength as she gets some swing on it and smacks it down, lifts it again as he whimpers and sags, and she heaves and smacks heaves and smacks and there are distant crackles like dry leaves being trodden down, then a fainter, daintier snap, but she will not stop until the bag is heavy and still and her shoulders ache and she knows it is done.

  Slowly, painfully, she straightens her back and opens her jaw to the ceiling. The smell must have been here for some time – maybe even before the black bag, because the shit is on her arms in foamy globs and smeared with curious greasiness over her thighs, and she realizes that must be why she retched. She hears her own voice, soft and adult and reassuring. ‘There,’ it says. ‘Now. There.’

  *

  In the shower, Valerie makes the water as hot as she can bear. She uses soap, an exfoliator, then shower gel with a loofah.

  She must visit her mother tomorrow. She would rather not. Last time she went, things were worse. Her mother’s hand scuttled like a sea crab across the floor of her empty handbag. ‘My powder,’ she said, ‘someone has taken my powder.’ She had that look Valerie had caught on her once before. It was when Valerie was a child – maybe eight or nine – at a dinner party. Her father’s work colleagues were there, and their wives, and some other important friends of her parents, and everything was going well. There was a fire crackling in the good room, and Valerie knew it was a success by the way the men nodded genially at each other, and the women admired each other’s dresses. It must have been the start of the evening, because Valerie had been asked to offer around the snacks and then to play the piano and everyone had clapped, but afterwards she found herself standing useless in the room of beautiful dresses and mahogany furniture, all the strangers looking at her back and her front, and smiling, and she had gone in search of her mother. She found her in the kitchen, arranging canapés on the oval silver platter that Valerie had always longed to touch. Her mother cut a beautiful shape – her head was bent, her neck arcing in that way that made Valerie think, always, of waterfalls. Suddenly she was a singular thing, where before she had been all of it – the food and the fire and the floor polish and the rhythm of the house. Valerie approached her quietly, needing to be near her, but finding no excuse for leaving the party. Her mother didn’t notice her, and when she raised her head, about to lift the plate, she was wearing a private face. Her lips had dropped to a lax pout, grave tightness at their edges and – the part that sent a ripple of terror through Valerie – her hooded eyes were round and bewildered beneath a twisting brow. When she saw Valerie watching she pulled her face into place – the dusky eye-sockets, the muscular cheeks. She pushed the tray into Valerie’s hand and told her to take it around the guests. All evening, Valerie felt the roundness of her mother’s eyes, the ugliness of her mouth.

  That was the look her mother’s face had the last time Valerie saw it. Valerie made only a short visit, for she had Joanna with her. When she turned to leave, though, the old woman clutched Joanna weakly by the
shoulders.

  ‘Vilie,’ she said, ‘my little Vilie Vie.’ It was a pet name she had used for Valerie when she was a child, but her voice was hateful and flat. ‘My silly little Vilie. You think I made the whole world, don’t you?’

  The child stood very tense, her cheeks wrinkling, perhaps about to cry. Her grandmother shook a finger close to her face.

  ‘No, no, little Vilie. Don’t come to me with your tears, darling. I only tried to help you live in it, my darling. It was the other girls and boys made it, you silly goose you, and you thought it was me made it all.’

  Valerie will not bring Joanna there again.

  *

  She hurries into her clothes – her jogging gear seems the only thing at this late stage in the evening.

  Downstairs is fine except for the smell of bleach. The cleaner might be responsible for that, for all Martin knows. First she closes the French doors that look onto the night; the flat lawn and the discreet line of wheelie bins pushed against the wall. As she bolts the top latch she hears a gentle rustle beneath the silence outside, but she will not look at the big black bin. Her mind is playing tricks; she knows that. She hurries all the same, and is glad to twist the key and pull the heavy curtains shut.

  Because of the shower, her body is hot to the night air that has gushed in noisily through all the open windows. She imagines steam lifting off the back of her neck as she moves from room to room, closing the big double doors of the breakfast lounge and the small window of the under-the-stairs lavatory. She imagines how her body must look to the fleas huddled in the chill upholstery – streaks of red and yellow, a whirl of nourishing blood moving in the dead atmosphere.

  In the car, Joanna is still dribbling soundly onto the harness. She hasn’t had her dinner; there’s a risk she’ll wake hungry in the night, but Valerie will take the chance. Joanna begins to stir against her mother’s shoulder, but Valerie rubs her back and shushes her, ‘There now, there...’ Valerie puts her on the toilet upstairs and runs the tap to make her pee so that there are no accidents in the night. Then she lifts her into bed. She can sleep in her pinafore just this once. The cleaner has changed the sheets and Valerie wonders if Joanna is old enough to appreciate the pleasure of crisp cotton against her cheek. She pulls the duvet to her daughter’s chin and pries open the plaits, spreading the child’s bright hair over the pink Egyptian-cotton pillow case.