Now the portfolio lay unzipped and wide open on the unmade bed. The drawing’s heavy pencil lines captured the likeness of some kind of troll or sprite, some devilish-looking creature. This was not something she had drawn, surely. Her own work had been much more conventional. She did not remember making this picture; it did not look like her work. She touched it, as if she might be able to feel those textures suggested by the pencil lines: the roughness, the hairiness. When she looked very closely, at details rather than at the whole thing in one go, perhaps there was something familiar about it; and whether or not it had come out of her, it did speak to her in some way.
The graphite had come away on her fingers; her fingerprints made an ellipsis at the edge of the paper.
Her father’s funeral took place on a Wednesday. Peter could not be there as he had to be at work, and it was necessary for Ailsa to take the baby with her to the crematorium. Peter needed the car, and anyway, he did not like her to drive it: she had once scraped a wing, scratched the paintwork, and she had a bad habit of letting the windscreen washer reservoir run dry. He accused her of not looking after it properly. Ailsa thought he was being unfair. In recent years, she had taken a car maintenance class for beginners, and she had been a good student—she had paid attention and made careful notes, which she kept in order in a ring binder. On the other hand, it was true that she was sometimes careless with that old car of his.
She caught the bus to the crematorium, with the baby strapped to her chest. It was a cold midwinter day, but fresh and rather lovely, and as she walked through the gates of the crematorium the sun emerged briefly.
She sat at the front, and as the curtains closed around the coffin a distant relative leaned close, laid a hand on Ailsa’s and said, as if to soothe her, though she was not crying, “That’s just his body going. He doesn’t want it any more. He’s free now.” Ailsa looked at the relative’s hand pressing down on her own; it looked like her father’s.
“Out,” said Peter. He reached back into the cardboard box. “Out.” The discard pile in the flat’s narrow hallway reminded Ailsa of the bonfires they used to have in their back garden when she was little. She always made a Guy to put on top of it, with an old pillowcase for a face and her mother’s tights for limbs, all stuffed with her father’s newspaper. Her father, approaching the bonfire with a box of matches, said that if any hedgehogs were hibernating in there they’d better get out now, and then he lit the twists of paper he’d screwed into the gaps, and Ailsa watched the Guy. She imagined, as the flames rose higher, the Guy’s felt-tipped face turning towards her, seeking her out in the dark, in the firelight, his overlong limbs twitching and shifting away from the heat. Then the nylon and the paper would catch and the Guy would flare and—so soon, so quickly, considering the time and care that had been put into making him—be gone, apart from the fragments that, still burning, blew towards her, and she had to step back so that she would not get holes in her winter coat.
“Keep,” said Peter, putting aside the canvas of tiny handprints and footprints, done when Bella was only a few weeks old.
“Out,” said Peter. He was holding Ailsa’s portfolio. It had not sounded like a question, but Ailsa said, as she came forward and took the portfolio from his hands, “I’m not sure.”
“You can’t hang on to all this stuff,” he said. “We don’t have space for it here.”
“I don’t see how we’re going to manage in this little flat,” said Ailsa. “Not with the baby.”
“We have no choice,” said Peter. “You know that. We have to downsize.”
“All my drawings are in here,” she said.
“But what would you need to keep them for?” asked Peter.
“I might want to look at them,” said Ailsa.
Peter, delving back into the box, adding sheaves of old paperwork to the pile, said, “You haven’t looked at them in twenty years.”
“I looked at them yesterday,” said Ailsa. “There was one drawing in there that I don’t even remember doing. It’s nothing like the others. It’s peculiar, rather horrid, but I think in a way it’s better—more vivid and realistic and affecting— than anything else I’ve done. It looked like if I touched it, I’d be able to feel the textures—dirty hair and stubble and ragged nails. And its eyes look right back at you, I swear they do. I’m going to show you.” She went to the kitchen table, moving the baby’s things to make space for her portfolio. She opened it up. “It’s here,” she said, “in amongst the self-portraits, just under these heads.”
Peter came and stood at her shoulder, waiting.
“It’s here,” she said again, “somewhere…”
“Ailsa,” said Peter.
She rummaged through the sheets of paper, going all the way down to the bottom of the pile. “It was…”
“Ailsa,” said Peter. “We’re all having to make sacrifices. Even Bella is having to make sacrifices. She’ll have to manage with less stuff, less space, no garden.”
Ailsa looked at Bella, who everyone said had her eyes, but the baby’s eyes were blue while Ailsa’s were dark. Perhaps the baby’s eyes would change; Ailsa expected that they would, in due course. Bella was still so young—too young, Ailsa thought, to even see her across a room, to see anything more than a murky blur where Ailsa was standing.
The picture of the troll, the sprite—the devilish-looking whatever-it-was—was not there. She would swear that she had put it back inside the portfolio, but now it was gone. In between the heads and the fruit, she found a sheet of paper that was blank except for the fingerprints at the edge, one so clear that you could see the pattern, like ripples in water. She tried to match it to her own. The others were just smudges.
Ailsa saw Peter’s face contort; she watched him spit his tea back into his mug. Holding it at a distance, he said, “Is there salt in this?”
“There shouldn’t be,” she said.
“I know there shouldn’t be,” he said, “but is there?”
“Mine’s fine,” said Ailsa, but she did not take sugar anyway; she drank her tea black, with lemon. “Perhaps the sugar and salt got mixed up during the move.”
“And the mug’s dirty,” complained Peter, putting it down heavily and pushing himself away from the kitchen table. Ailsa looked and saw that the mug was indeed dirty: there was a smudge on the side, just where it said BEST DAD. She wondered who had bought that mug. She had not bought it for him, and of course the baby had not; had he bought it for himself? As a joke, perhaps.
When she had cleared the breakfast table and given Bella her milk, she went to look for her portfolio. She had to make some decisions today; she had to decide which of her belongings to keep and which to discard. She called to Peter, “Where’s my portfolio?”
“I put it out,” said Peter.
Ailsa looked at the pile that remained in the hallway. “Out where?”
“I put it out for the dustmen,” said Peter.
Still in her dressing gown, Ailsa hurried out of the flat and down the stairs. At the bottom, she pushed open the front door. The world was bitterly cold.
The bins had been emptied. Ailsa heard the distant screech of the bin lorry.
There was a lot of work to be done on the flat, to make it habitable. The kitchen in particular was disgusting. Ailsa remembered her mother saying that the kitchen was the most important room in a home; the kitchen was its heart.
Ailsa sat the baby in a rocker in the doorway and set to tearing up the old lino, which she despised—it looked like a vast and foul chessboard. She was halfway through the task before it struck her that the tiles revealed beneath were just the same as they’d had at home when she was young. For a moment, looking at these childhood tiles, it was as if it might be possible to go back and start over again, make a fresh start, have another go. Then she saw the dirty marks on the doorframe, and she thought of her father, home from the workshop, slouching in the doorway, a small man with grime on his hands, in the whorls of his skin, oil under his fingernails.