31_days | [SEPT 17] [ORIGINAL] CRINOLINE

Title: Crinoline
Day/Theme: September 17: 'violence you can see and violence that hides’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: G; reference to alcoholism.

Graham Service walked to and fro across the old pine floorboards, dark and glossy with age, knotted and intricate under his feet. Coarse and grey and hung with webby clags of dust underneath: they had taken them up when they had installed the new heating.

Almost fourteen years ago, now. Claudia had been almost four and she had caught her hand on a nail when Theresa had brought her over to see the new house. He had baked little coconut macaroons in the beige seventies oven, with perky glacé cherries as the nipples, and Claudia had laughed with them, uncertainly, holding her bandaged hand under her other arm, mouth rimed with coconut flakes.

She was so beautiful, now, Claudia, living her life between the tangle of bikes at the front of the house and her room, floor tiled with plates of biscuits, girls with long hair leaning over textbooks, magazines, Theresa’s old books from the seventies, glossy sans-serif feminism now a little brittle at the spine.

Claudia had once spent a dinner cataloguing their failings over the risotto, so naive, how could parents take a child to an exhibition like that. What would happen if they talked about it at school, afterwards?

Yes, one could certainly look back on the books with fondness. Hell, you shook them and the joss fell out.

It was Alison who was the problem, upstairs Alison, Claudia called her.

He had once heard her explaining to a friend, leaning down over the banister. Alison is here to write a masterpiece about the drink, she said. How sorry she is about the alcohol. Ah, said the friend wisely. She is reclaiming her voice. I think she should just start a blog, said Claudia, she doesn’t even have a contract yet.

They had clattered off to the pub, fake ids and iphones in hand, still wearing the grubby plastic wristlets from the summer festivals, fluorescent talismans. We’re going to get drunk and talk about Plato, dad. Don’t wait up. Oh of course my dear make sure to behave disgracefully. Playing it cool for seventeen-year-olds, such indignity.

He had waited over wine, the streetlight turning the Japonica petals outside the window black as soot, until they spilled back down the road at half-past-eleven, swooping down past the tall red brick houses on their bikes, stork-legged in the streetlights.

Hi, dad, no after all that we talked about Nietzsche, it was awful. Hurrying up the stairs in a whip of black hair, fizzy with cheap lager and smoke, has she been smoking? He goes to watch her friend biking off through the window.

Yes, it is upstairs Alison who is the problem, with her seven-year-old Compaq with the keys outlined in greyish muck, her cloud of thick, crosshatched black hair, her nails painted in one layer of red varnish so that they always chip.

She even dresses as if she’s still as young as they used to be, big necklaces, wide boots, the long skirt with yellow stitching. Blowsy. When she arrived with her two black nylon holdalls and asked for sanctuary, Theresa said yes of course and so Graham did as well; such a leap of faith, she needs a place of her own. She has the spare bedroom, up the stairs to the left, where Theresa’s old harp lurks black and triangular in a corner and all the unwanted books live, a wall lined with liver-spotted encyclopaedias, dust-grained volumes of Leavis, Gibson and Gubar, Greenblatt.

They never even took up the carpet, and its ridges, he imagines, feel like horsehair. What they stuffed sofas with, puffy glossy armchairs, doublets. Or perhaps that last was sawdust, a belly full of hamster-bedding. They used it for crinolines, to stiffen the fabric. Crinis, linum. Hair-thread.

Alison is bent over her keyboard, her head haloed by the screen. It has a sepulchral glow, Claudia would have told them eight months ago, when she still wore black lipstick and kept her nails like little plugs of liquorice. You had to buy special varnish to put on top to make them matte, she had told him, unless you wanted to spend exorbitant amounts on stuff that was dull to start with. Exooorbitant, a new word.

Piles of books, double-spaced printouts surround Alison. Above her, lines of post-it notes are pinned in blobby rows on the corkboard. At the top of each line there is a card with a title in thick marker. Childhood, scholarship, uni, abt, schlshp, prs, ldn, first nvl groucho, boyfr. first year second year relapse third year. Fourth year. Recov. It was like the little line of pencil marks tracking Claudia’s height on the kitchen wall, turned sideways.

Alison raises a hand, the other one still jabbing at the keys. Give me a minute, sweetie. Of course, she thinks it is Theresa, coming up with a mug of greasy cocoa, red pen in hand, to illuminate the proofs with editorial sigils. Paragraph paragraph missed space blank spot. Giggling together like thirties schoolgirls with a pash.

Alison rattles her way to the end of a line, sighs. Tilts her head, he doesn’t even breathe like Theresa does. Have you got to the juicy stuff, yet, he asks her.

Oh, and what would that be?

Well, me of course. Naturally. Behaving disgracefully.

Alison tips herself round in her chair, gives him the kohl-lined eye. Sweetie, she says, you have no idea. Really, for years you were my benchmark, Graham. My benchmark. She jumps up (has she been smoking?) and plucks down boyfr. Sticks it to the front of his grey wool jersey. My little grammar school boy, she says into his ear.

She leans back, oh Claudia told me today she thinks medicine, of all things. But last week she was sure about anthropology, so, really. Who can say. You should really talk to her, I think she’s making herself quite unhappy.

The post-it note flutters down. He takes it out of the air. Perhaps he should put it on her chest, or, no, on the computer. On the bookshelf. But instead he folds it into a tight little square in one hand, like a sweet-wrapper.

Maybe he’ll do that, he says, talk to Claudia, that is. University is the real deal, after all. He wonders how he could be more predictable. Buy a motorbike, perhaps. A big Harley with an engine like a rock-drill. He laughs, and Alison, though a little uncertainly, laughs too, the computer glowing behind her. He folds up his hand around the square of paper, picks up a used coffee-mug, promises a refill.

As he backs himself out of the door, it feels as if he will hardly fit himself through the frame, his past sticking out stiff as horsehair around him. But he makes it anyway, heads down to the kitchen. Waits for the kettle to bubble and boil and click, snapping the water out into steam, shading it out around him like the most gracious white organdie. Ready for the big man, the big moment.