Field Study (3 page)

He leans towards her. But Ewa catches him.

– No.

One hand on each of his shoulders, she holds him at arms’ length. Martin blinks.

An empty wine glass rolls on the table. Ewa shakes her head.

– Sorry, no.

She smiles and then Martin sits back in his chair again, sunburn itching, sweat prickling in his scalp.

He doesn’t look at her and for a minute or so they sit in silence. Jacek’s even breathing in the room and the church bells sounding again outside. When Martin looks up, Ewa is blinking, smiling at him.

– I am sorry.

She rights the glass on the table, then covers her mouth with her hand and laughs.

__

In the morning there is a fax from the department lab. Martin has a hangover, asks for coffee and water to be sent up to his room. His eyes skim the figures, cannot settle. He boots up the laptop, plots the lab’s figures onto his graph, though he already sees the disparity between the last set of results and his predictions. Days one and two show serious levels of contamination in mud and water, and correspond with Martin’s own data. Day three’s samples, however, are almost low enough to be considered clear.

Martin sits on the narrow bed a while, trying to decide if he is relieved or disappointed. The weedy water, the pool under the waterfall:
Clean. As good as
. But the premise of his paper:
Void
. His headache is bad, the day hot already, the shame of yesterday evening still fresh. Martin presses the heels of his palms against his eyes.

He wants to go home, he needs to get dressed. He goes to the bathroom where the window is open, the air much cooler than in his room. He stands under the shower a long time, warm flow on face and shoulders taking the edge off his headache, filling his ears, closing his eyes, replacing Ewa and her laughter with water falling on tile.

The room he returns to is strewn with papers and clothes.
Martin works his way round it methodically, folding and sorting into piles. Before he packs, he checks through the lab technician’s tidy columns once more, notes the memo at the end of the fax: the weed sample has been sent on to botany.

On the way downstairs, he reasons with himself: if the weed results are interesting, he can propose to further investigate the river fauna in the conclusion to his paper. Over breakfast, he thinks he could propose a joint venture with botany, perhaps. Something to please the department. Zoology might even be interested: the weed may be thriving, but crowding other species out. At the very least, it is good news for Ewa. She is not working this morning, but Martin thinks he will leave a note for her, tell her it’s okay to take Jacek swimming again. He finishes his roll. Thinks he made a mess of the field study, the week in general, but there are still ways to make amends.

Martin stands in the narrow reception hall with his bags, sees Ewa happy by the waterfall while he waits for her sister to calculate his bill. Then he remembers how sad she looked the day she came with Jacek to the river, and he is shocked at the satisfaction the memory gives him.

There is paper on the counter in front of him. He has a pencil in his back pocket, but he doesn’t get it out. He pays and picks up his bags. While he loads up the car he tells himself it is too soon to know for certain. He has yet to test all his samples, examine all the possibilities;
swimming at the waterfall could still be dangerous.

On the road out of town, he sees Ewa’s hand over her mouth, her eyes pressed shut, Jacek woken by her laughter and staring at him.

At the border, the road runs parallel with the river for a kilometre or so, and the traffic moves slowly. To his right, trees grow tall along the riverbanks and in his rear-view mirror Martin can see the rest of the country spread out behind him, dry and flat. His chest is tight with shame, but the border guard is waving him through now, and he is driving on again.

Wednesday and Kim’s mother goes up to the school for parents’ evening.

– She’s doing badly, then.

– Well, no, not exactly. She can read and write. Quite well for a seven year old, as it happens.

Her daughter’s class teacher pushes Kim’s report around on the desk with her fingertips and Alice waits for her to pull the words together.

– She’s just not an easy child to reach, Mrs Bell.

__

Home is the end house of the terrace above the seafront. From her bedroom window, Kim can see over the rooftops to the old pier and, beyond it, the last curve of sand before the headland. Seagulls hover on thermals, suspended, and Kim watches them at the window, swaying, waiting. From here she will see her mother when she comes home from the school.

In the door and then chopping, no sitting down between and no hello either. But this is not unusual. Kim’s description of her mother in one of her schoolbooks: she always cooks with her coat on.

Kim waits after her mother has passed along the path beneath her windowsill to the back door and the kitchen. Face still pressed to the wall, and so still hidden from the
street below, Kim listens a while to the pot and pan noises, then goes downstairs to find Alice. Early evening, getting dark, her mother is working by the blue light of the grill-flame, chops spitting underneath. Kim stands in the doorway a minute or so, but Alice does not turn. An evening like any other: potato peelings on the counter, mother’s back at the sink. Kim wonders briefly if she got the day right, if Alice has been to the parents’ evening after all, but decides against mentioning it. Joins her brother in the sitting room instead, watches TV with Joseph until dinner.

If she’s staying, Alice will take her coat off and eat with her children. Tonight, she has a cup of tea and makes sure the washing-up is underway before she heads off out to work again. A reminder of bedtimes and a brisk kiss each on her way to the door. This too is normal, so Kim breathes a little easier, dries the plates slowly that Joseph washes fast. Watches the familiar sight of her mother’s back receding down the garden path. She can close her eyes and see Alice making her way down the hill to the seafront. Keys gripped in her right hand, left holding her collar together against the wind.

Kim’s eyes are sore tonight, scratchy, her lids heavy. She keeps them closed, keeps her mind’s eye on her mother a little longer. Imagines the sea flat behind Alice as she opens the salon door, surface skimmed into ripples by the wind. She knows her mother chose the shop for its view across the beach, along the seafront. Has heard her telling the customers, watched her polish the wide glass window
clean of rain and salt. Alice plays no music in her salon, she does not talk much. There is calm when she cuts and sets hair. In the summer with the door open and the sea air. In the winter with the hum of the dryers and the wide window misted against the dark afternoons.

Kim opens her eyes again at the kitchen window, her mother long gone, brother back in front of the television. She dries her hands on the damp tea towel, flicks the last crumbs of dinner off the kitchen table. Kim tries to rest her forehead on the cool surface, but can’t; her neck stiff, resisting, caught somehow by her shoulders. The days before the parents’ evening have been edgy, and she can’t relax now, not sure what to do with all the worry.

__

When Alice is asked about her business, she says she makes a decent living for her family. Margins are tight with debts like hers, but she has no gaps in her appointment book to speak of, few concerns to raise with her accountant.

When Alice thinks about her daughter, as she does this evening, she sees her pale eyes and paler hair, the solid flesh of her face with its closed, impassive expression. Stubby thumbs sucked white and soft and drawn into tight, damp fists.

Alice has long fingers and strong nails: neat ovals without cuticles. She does them last thing before she leaves the salon, after the work is done. Alone with her thoughts and
files. Rubbing the cream in, hand over hand over hand.

She didn’t argue with what the teacher said this afternoon.
Not an easy child
. Alice has heard those words before now: from different sources, in different disguises, so many times she has come to expect them. Would never say so, but she agrees.

With Joseph it was simple: love arrived with him. Fury when the midwife carried him away from her across the delivery room to be washed and weighed. Kim was early. Only a few weeks after Frank had gone. Gas and air, and Alice kept telling the midwife she wasn’t ready for the baby, but she came anyway. No tears and not much pain either. And then it took Alice years to get used to her: her rare smiles, her uncooperative arms and legs.

Alice hears the pigeons shuffling in the eaves above the doorway as she locks up. The soft, quivering noise they make in their throats. The water behind her is calm, just a slight breeze coming in across the sands. Breaking up the surface a little, touching her cheek as she turns the key in the lock and up the street towards home.

__

Thursday and Kim is ill.

She vomits once at school. A pile of sawdust and a smell in the corridor. Again when she gets home. Joseph heats the dinner Alice has left in the fridge for them, and when
Kim throws up a third time, he phones the shop.

– Can you come home now, Mum?

– Run her a bath and put her to bed, love. Please. I’ll not be late. Make sure she drinks something.

Joseph does as he is told, and his sister is silent, compliant. When Alice comes home it is dark and Kim is running a fever: dry heat and then sudden sweats which glue her pale hair to her forehead.

Friday morning, Kim can’t stand up to walk to the toilet, and so when she needs to throw up again, her mother finds her crawling out into the bright hall.

– No school for you, then.

An unwieldy dead weight with limbs, Alice carries her daughter to the bathroom.

__

Cold black tea. Chalky taste of the aspirin mashed into jam and eaten with a teaspoon. Alice is home for fifteen minutes at lunchtime, keeps her coat on. Stands her daughter naked by the radiator, washes her down with a flannel and hot water in a red plastic bowl. Kneeling next to her clammy body, its awkward joints and dimples, soft belly. Kim’s eyes are half-closed and she sways as Alice works. Hot cloth on face and neck, round ears, down spine, between toes and fingers. Skin turning cool where the flannel has been.

Kim lies in new pyjamas when Alice leaves for work again. Under new sheets and tucked blankets, curtains drawn against the day. The slats of the bunk above her shift and birds’ eyes peep from the mattress. Beaks and wings. Kim calls for her mum, but she’s gone now, back down the road. The hairspray smell of Alice left with her, and Kim is alone with the birds again. They fly out from between the slats, grey wings beating the hot air against her cheeks.

__

Alice always hoped it would come. Read about it in the leaflets she got from the midwives and the library. You will not always bond with your baby immediately, but this is normal and no cause for worry.

Kim arrived and Alice had two to care for. Frank gone and only one of her: didn’t seem nearly enough. Joseph was four then and she would pick him up from nursery school early. To feel his hand holding her skirt as they walked home along the seafront, to have his arms fold around her neck when she lifted him up.

Alice tried holding Kim after her evening bottle, after Joseph was asleep and they could have some quiet time together, like it said in the leaflets. But it was hard and sometimes it frightened her: sitting with her baby and still feeling so little.

__

Red-brown spots gather in the afternoon. On the soles of Kim’s feet, behind her ears, inside her eyelids. Joseph sees them when the doctor shines his torch in his sister’s dark bedroom. He pulls the girl’s eyelids down with his thumbs.

– I’ll need to use your telephone. Call an ambulance and your mother.

Joseph tells Kim later that they drove away with the siren on, but Kim remembers silence inside the ambulance. Looking at her mother and then following Alice’s gaze to the trees and lamp-posts passing. The strip of world visible through the slit of clear window above the milk-glass in the doors.

__

Alice Bell’s girl had meningitis and nearly died
.

The customers in the salon ask concerned questions, and Alice gets a call from the health visitor, too. The woman has a good look at the clean hall, the tidy kitchen Alice leads her to. The grass in the garden is long, falls this way and that, but Alice is sure that everything else is in good order. Thinks she recognises the health visitor, too; that she has maybe cut her hair before.

Alice gets more leaflets from her. Is told about the tumbler test: roll a glass against the rash, she says. Alice thanks the woman, but thinks it’s not really any good to her, this
information. It’s happened now, over; Kim will be home again soon.

The house is quiet after the health visitor leaves. Small. Alice sweeps her leaflets off the kitchen table, dumps them in the bin on the front on her way back to the salon.

__

Kim has scars. A tiny, round wound in the small of her back, where they tapped the fluid from her spine. And one on the back of her hand from the drip: skin and vein still slightly raised, puncture-mark already healing, fading with the black-turning-yellow bruise. She has fine, white scratch-lines on the soles of her feet, too, but these are more memory than reality. Pin-tip traces to check for sensation, pricks in the tops of her toes that drew blood-drops, which later become blood-spots on the hospital sheets.

The real scar is at her throat. Tracheotomy. Kim can’t say the word, but this is where her fingers go at night in her hospital bed, and when she wakes. To feel the way the skin is pulled over, small folds overlapping and grown together. Like melted plastic, the beaker which fell in on itself when Joseph left it on the stove. At first the hairy ends of the stitches are there too. Six black bristles for Kim’s fingertips to brush against under the dressing, to investigate in the bathroom mirror when no one else is there to be looking. One hand on the wheely drip, the
other pushing herself up on the sink, closer to the long, clean mirror and the grey-pink pucker of skin in her reflection.