I know what a real true empty face shows – there’s usually too much teeth, plus no eyes you can figure on. And I don’t mean it didn’t mean anything to me – because it did, else I wouldn’t be forever harking back and going from one detail – creased mouth – to the next – half-wide eyes – to the next – eye-wrinkles not happy or sad – and thinking: but what does it add up to?
No, the problem about your last look was – I’m still not big enough to read it. That’s the law of faces: you can read kids younger, but older kids get hard. Adults, even harder still. If you get words as well, that can help – except when the look is sarcasm, which doesn’t go true and has no law.
But you didn’t give me any words – just a look, which might be somewhere between surprise, or all-time giving in, or not caring, or caring too much.
So I’m trying to work it out. Hopefully I get there before the time I’ve got runs out.
And now that I’ve told you that one thing – now that we’re back on talking terms – I need to ask a favour.
If you are in heaven, and seeing everything – like the crumbs at the bottom of my sleeping bag, like the gorse spread around the room or the sea’s sparkle in the window – then you need to blur your eyes for once. Stop paying attention to stuff that doesn’t matter.
Instead: help my friends.
This morning I noticed Elizabeth’s rainbow. She put water in a saucer on the windowsill, then a mirror in the water. I didn’t think it’d work, but then saw that it did.
It’s on the wall, beside the cereal boxes we taped over the big skylight. It wobbles a bit like the sea, disappears with the wind, comes back when the air is still. Just now it reminds me of a puddle with petrol spilt on it.
Elizabeth is still in bed. She’s looking towards me with her eyes open. I give her a wave but she looks like right through, like she’s thinking about the way things were before, which she usually is.
I hear a yowling noise from out on the street: one of the cats, or their kittens. They still roam around, for all days mainly, only now the bigger group is broken up into just a few stragglers who feed on rubbish like the gulls.
Saw two of the kittens taken by an eagle. The MacNeil brothers saw the rest go. Saw a crumple of fur and bones on the shore-walk next to the sculpture of the seal. The cats stayed in their house for a while after that, but I guess they got their courage working again.
Elizabeth gets up and begins to ribbon my hair without saying anything. Alex sits forward, rubs sleep from his eyes. His trousers are damp. Elizabeth gets him to stand and strips his sheets, tumbling them into a ball to be put in the garden.
Alex washes himself with a flannel then says, ‘You get up?’ His voice is dry and croaky; Elizabeth recognises the warning signs so plonks a bowl of cereal in his lap and orders him to eat. She pours ten toty cartons of cream in a glass, adds yellow sterilised water, pours the lot on top and hey presto – he’s got a normal breakfast.
Our clothes are already in three piles. Elizabeth puts on a CD – Winnie the Pooh, which we listen to while getting dressed. Then she takes the balled-up sheets and puts them in the garden beside all the others.
Alex: ‘It’s only sweat. I just sweat the bed.’
Me: ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Alex: ‘I just have a weakness for sweating …’
Me: ‘OK, I believe you.’
He’s scared of going to the toilet alone, so I take his hand and go with. The flies on the ceiling do their mad angry dance when the door opens and closes. The porch door’s stiff, not broken like the one to the kitchen.
Outside, there’s the smell of dewy grass and moss in the sun. I jump over the screeching fence, do my daily business. Alex is about to go by the door when I warn him to come away a good bit: ‘Stop being too close,’ I hiss. ‘You’re always too close. Come over by the fence.’
He comes in by the fence, pees. He looks around – to the street, to the bay, to the road going west and to Beinn Tangabhal, our big hill at the far end of town.
Alex: ‘Is it smoke?’
He’s pointing at the hill. It’s only cloud. I tell him.
‘Cloud isn’t smoke then?’
I think about it, then decide I don’t know the answer. I’m pretty sure I used to know the answer. Or maybe he’s half asleep, and it’s a kid’s question.
He’s less bleary when we get back in. By now Elizabeth is doing her routine. She turns the two radios on. One has a dial which she circles all the way, going through the stations. The other has buttons. She takes her time, slowing on the dial at the places we marked with gold stars. Then she gives Alex his injection. He already has his jumper up ready, so it’s done quick.
She holds up his pen and looks in carefully at the glass window on the inside of it.
‘Just half of this one left,’ she says.
After this Elizabeth writes our shopping list: Sheets – for 1 week. Breakfast. Batteries. Bags. Tins. Hearing a noise, she turns down the CD. We all listen. But it’s only coming from the street, a lot of yowling and screeching – it’s from the House of Cats. She turns the CD up again.
We’ve finished the funny milk that doesn’t need a fridge, so I have cartons too, and they’re not bad. There’s apricot jam after this. We dip pink wafer biscuits in, rather than using our spoons and having to wash up. Then there’s digestive biscuits, toasted over the gas-burner flame, then hint-of-mint hot chocolate.
I comb Alex’s hair. He doesn’t like wiping his face, plus he always forgets to wash his hair, so I take him to the mirror to show him how it looks and the damage it does to his appearance.
I get the toothbrushes out, brush mine. ‘Dreamt I had a wobbly tooth last night,’ I say, remembering.
Elizabeth is cleaning our cups in the bowl. ‘You missing any new ones? Or old ones, mean to say?’
I put a finger in to test: ‘All just the same.’
‘Why do we brush our teeth again? Can anybody remember?’
‘Oh not this again …’
Alex wrinkles his face at our talk of teeth. He doesn’t like having his brushed. He had a sore tooth when it was still dark and stormy, and his face went big for a week. After that he lost four of his baby teeth, all at once. He cried a lot, and it took him ages to get better. Now he has a big gap in his top teeth, with no adult ones in yet.
Me: ‘Remember all the good reasons?’
Alex: ‘Elizabeth says gum disease means sickness going in the blood. Plus, if you swallow a tooth then you don’t get a coin.’ He sighs and looks around for his clothes, which
