‘I think we should go,’ I said. ‘I think we should come back another time.’
My daughters looked more uncertain still.
‘Why?’ they said.
Their response surprised me. Could they not see for themselves that things were not right? The man groaned and bellowed down the hall. Was this what a world run by women looked like? A woman, I thought, should be more than a mere impersonator. My daughters’ anxious faces, the groaning man, the deserted reception desk in the shadowy waiting room: in the presence of these things I felt the presence of failure. It was I who had brought them here, who had made the appointment; now I was saying we had to go.
‘There’s been a mix-up,’ I said. ‘I was sure the appointment was today but they haven’t got it written down.’
‘Oh,’ they said.
‘Perhaps we’ll find a different dentist,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this one isn’t very well organised.’
They looked a little suspicious — after all, I had made much of the proximity of this dentist to our house. What was going on here? Out in the shadowy hall, we met the dentist herself, hastening from her room. She looked flushed and harried; she had her coat on with the collar turned up. Behind her the man still lay splayed in the chair, groaning dreadfully. The nurse appeared in another doorway.
‘Is he all right?’ she said.
‘He’ll live,’ said the dentist harshly. ‘He feels a bit sick, that’s all. I’m just going to buy him a can of Coke.’
She pushed past us, closing her collar around her throat with a flash of red-painted fingernails. I smelled her perfume, heard the jingle of coins in her pocket. She tick-tacked away down the stairs.
COUPLES
Everywhere people are in couples. On the corner of my road I pass a man and a woman, kissing in the passing traffic. I pass a heavily tattooed couple coming back side by side from the shops, their arms full of purchases, their children in a line behind them like ducklings. I pass a man and a woman with Down’s Syndrome, holding hands. They make it seem so easy, to love.
The weather is fine for the time of year. In the mornings the sun streams through the windows into the half-empty rooms, like sun falling on a ruin. The timbers creak with the unaccustomed warmth, sending the sound of footfalls around the house. They travel eerily up and down the stairs and across the ceilings overhead, as though there were someone in the room above who had crossed to the window to look out. The water mutters in the pipes; periodically the boiler ignites, choking and grumbling cholerically in the basement. One day it finally falls silent; the dishwasher breaks, the drains clog, the knobs of doors and cupboards come away unexpectedly in the hand. There is the sound of dripping water, and a dark stain spreads across the kitchen wall, the plaster bulging and flaking like afflicted skin. The children’s hamsters scuttle in their separate cages, oblivious. They can’t live together, for as a species they are too irascible. They condemn themselves to solitude, immersed in their routines of sleeping and gnawing and burrowing. Sometimes they climb the bars at the sides of the cages and look out with inquisitive bead-bright eyes, as though, having issued from their self-absorption, they now expect something to happen. In a way they are too trusting, for no one notices their changes of circumstance. At night the high-pitched sound of them running on their separate wheels fills the dark silent house.
A man comes to look at the spare room. He is pale and flaxen-haired, with small, almost colourless eyes and sharp little wolverine teeth. He has a tiny battered car he parks in the street outside. Every now and then he goes to the sitting-room window to check for traffic wardens. The room was advertised for rent in the local paper: the phone has rung and rung every day for a week. As soon as I replace the receiver it rings again; I go out and return to find the answering machine full, the red light blinking. Nearly all the calls are from men, men from everywhere and nowhere, men of all kinds: young men and old, foreign and local, gruff and loquacious, determined and indifferent, and all apparently untethered, alone, briefly circling the fixed point of my house while held at some unbreachable distance, like barren planets orbiting a star in the blackness of outer space. Sometimes there is interference on the line, crackling, the sound of windy mountaintops. I am calling about the room. I am calling to enquire about the room. Once or twice a woman has rung: she is looking for somewhere for herself and her boyfriend. She is part of a couple — do I have a problem with that? Her boyfriend works at the bar, the casino, the club down at the marina. Her boyfriend works nights: he likes to sleep during the day. She herself wants to do a course, in aromatherapy, nutrition, languages; she’s thinking about asking at the university; she isn’t quite sure. She and her boyfriend are very relaxed. They are very chilled. They like relaxed, chilled people, people with no worries. They don’t like to get stressed. Do I have a problem with that? I’m sorry, I say. I live here with my children. It’s their home. I’m sorry.
Then one afternoon a man rings sounding anxious and purposeful, as though he’s lost something but is certain to find it again at any moment. His voice suggests neither need nor imposition: this is the man who now stands in my house, looking anxiously and purposefully out of the window at his car. His name is Rupert. For three years he has been living on the other side of the city with his girlfriend, but the relationship has come to an end and he wants somewhere to stay short-term while he looks for a more permanent home. He works long hours for an energy supply company up in town; he needs somewhere to sleep, to hang his suits, to house his television — apparently it’s quite large. While he speaks he looks at me fixedly with his small pale eyes, but whenever I reply he looks shyly down and away to the side. With his fine, almost white hair and his downcast eyes he looks either innocent or guilty, I can’t tell.
The clocks have gone forward and now the evenings are long and as blank as paper. People stay out late on the streets calling and shouting, music pouring from open windows, cars revving and honking in the dusk. Someone new has moved in next door and erected his sound system on the other side of my bedroom wall. All night the electronic pulses probe and torment the space between us. I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all. We are a house of women and children, but I wonder whether our vulnerability is anything more than something invented to make men feel brave. When there’s a war men go off to it, leaving the women and children behind, and when they return perhaps it is to find that they have made themselves dispensable, like Agamemnon returning to Argos from Troy. I wonder whether we will be safer with Rupert in the house or more at risk. There is a space here, an impression, like a footprint in the sand or a cast, a male declivity in the shape of my husband. Vaguely I try to fit Rupert into it. I imagine him fixing the drains, the door handles, having a look inside the dishwasher to see what’s wrong. Man is either protector or predator, I can’t quite remember which.
Rupert is efficient with his paperwork, his deposit, his references. He brings his iron and his humorous posters, his suits. He brings his television, which stands on a plinth in his room like a vast black blinking god. I give him two shelves in the fridge and he fills them with ready meals for one, the plastic containers neatly stacked in the cold lit chamber like things in a morgue. My husband comes to collect something while Rupert is in the hall and the two of them shake hands.