The Living. Anjali Joseph
I needed to go to the shops and buy food. Buy food, I thought. That was one thing. And get up and move a bit. Move. That was another.
Should I call someone, I asked myself. Arrange to meet for a coffee? Too late notice. Weekend. Are you depressed? I feel uneasy with things. You’re not getting younger. You look relatively all right now. You’re relatively young. Shouldn’t things be happening? Isn’t this when things should happen? Is there something you forgot to do to make them start?
But the quiet part of me said there was no point forcing anything. It wouldn’t work. Then what should I do? Shouldn’t I do something? Is this all you want from me? I nagged. But it didn’t want me to do anything. Why is everything so fucking simple? I asked, then wanted to laugh.
Jason came back in. Kick-off’s in an hour! he said.
Did you look in your bag? I said.
He went away. Got it! I heard.
By the way there’s no food, he said when he came back in, wearing his tracksuit, bag slung over his shoulder. I had cereal. I’m just telling you. I can go to the shop on my way back but it’ll be later. Text me if you want me to. Bye Mum.
Bye, I said, and I went back to trying to understand something about the day, and what it wanted.
The hardest times passed like fire. I don’t remember much till Jason was two. Till he was at school. I used to think of this documentary they showed when we were in school. It was a woman talking about World War Two. Her hair was set in white curls like Nan’s, her face a map of wrinkles. You saw a photograph of her before, a young woman, round-cheeked, wearing lipstick, and wondered how she’d let herself get old.
The door again, he was back. I heard coughing panting kicking off his trainers and chucking his keys on the counter.
The old lady said something, her eyes sparkling. About the war. Ooh it was a difficult time but a wonderful time. There were love affairs. You never knew what was going to happen so you didn’t think about tomorrow. You just lived. Her face shone.
That was how it was when Jason was a baby or I first started work or looked after him when he was ill. There wasn’t that terrible sadness I used to feel when I was a girl standing on the common knee-deep in grass on a cloudy summer day looking at a line of trees waiting just waiting for something to happen.
In the other room he was breathing lighting up putting on the kettle. His phone beeped. Sometimes I think if I had long enough to sit and think I’d understand what to do, how to get out of the grass and move ahead.
We still hadn’t talked about it properly, college, and next year – what he was going to do.
All right, he said, when I went into the kitchen. He didn’t look up from putting peanut butter on his toast. The knife went down on the counter. I imagined picking it up later, wiping the counter, washing the knife. Getting the kitchen clean, which it wouldn’t stay.
Jason, have you had a chance to think about college? I said. I picked up the knife and laid it across the open jar.
He breathed out harder and put down the plate. I’m just having some food, he said.
I know you are, I said. He leaned back against the counter and stared at the wall.
I don’t want you to miss out, I said.
No chance of that, he said.
I’m not having a go, I said. Sound of him chomping, crumbs everywhere. He finished the toast and put in another slice.
I might not want to go to college, he said. I might get a job.
Oh Jason, I said. If you don’t go to college you’re just stupid.
He yanked up the toaster lever and the bread popped. He walked out. That didn’t come out right. I stood there buzzing with things I wanted to explain, waiting for him to return. Music came out of the closed door of his room, something thumping. After a bit I washed the knife, wiped up the crumbs and the peanut butter, disliked myself for doing it.
People want everything to look perfect
The curtains at work are striped, ticking I think Nan would have called it: light blue with a few other colours, yellow, white, navy, pink. Pretty. The windows on our side face west. The morning light comes in the other side. I was spraying the heels on a stand of wedding shoes, covering my face because the spray catches in your throat, and when I looked up sunlight was coming through a window on to the trolley, and the spray was caught in a cloud, slowly dancing.
It’s always warm on the floor, and in summer it’s sweaty. The compressor stopped working because of a fault. While we waited for them to fix it we became slower, like bumble bees on a hot afternoon. We did what we could by hand. Tom worked on his lasts. He smiled. You know, lass, this is how we used to do it, he said, in the old days. And we’d be fast.
I know, I said. It was piecework.
It was piecework, he said.
That’s what Nan used to talk about, I said. No time to hang about.
I never took any days’ leave, do you know that? he said. Maybe three or four in thirty years of piecework. There was a week when I started. I think it was the chemicals. I got really sick but I didn’t take a day off. I was going in with a fever.
His hands were working while he talked, pulling tight the leather around the last, hammering it in place. What is it, I thought, about this work; the same thing, over and over, it takes your life but in the process it gives you this quietness, it takes away the struggle. Or maybe that’s just Tom. Or what I see of Tom from the outside.
You’re quiet today, Claire, John said. He smiled at me. I smiled back. He’s a bit older than me, John, but probably not much. He’s nice, too – smiles, and follows me with his eyes. We don’t talk a lot, except if we’re outside smoking. He always looks the same: jeans and t-shirts, his hair cut like it probably was twenty years ago, close and smooth.
Just checking what I can do till the compressor starts, I said. I like talking to Tom, and I don’t like it when people come along. It’s not even that I’m telling Tom private things. It’s just a way of being.
John smiled and went back to his work. He was using his hands too, but more slowly than Tom. It would mostly have been machines when he started.
I went to see Derek at the heel attacher. He was hammering in nails by hand to fix the heels on Eveliina, a red high heel, strappy. One I’d almost wear, if I had somewhere to wear it. Maybe I’ll try it in the factory shop. But what for?
Jane had sent down six boxes of handbags to have them checked and freshened up. We don’t make them, but we sell them as part of the line. The girls and I opened the plastic, took out the bags, checked them for marks, and stuffed them with tissue so they didn’t look crushed. In the shop, people want everything to look perfect.
Does that even look better? I asked Ellie. I held out the bag, plumped out. That looks the same, doesn’t it?
But she said that looked better.
Just before lunch the compressor started again and we all stopped doing the things we’d been doing to keep busy and we worked and worked. It was the busyness again the radio the noise of