by Tracy Hope
The face cream, cold at first, warms under her fingertips as she soothes circles into her cheeks. Her skin smooth and soft, even at eighty, even when there’s no one to touch her face but her. She never steps outside without putting on her face. The pressed powder and its thin fuzzy pad, the blush pink lipstick, applied the same way she has applied it for decades. A brush through fine spun-sugar hair, the familiar waves around her ears.
Fay slides on shoes and tucks her purse under her arm, secure. In her right hand, the plastic supermarket bag filled with hardcover books, wrapped in their own plastic shells, slip against each other as she lifts them from the coffee table. She uses one elbow to pry open the front door and her other hand, arm rigid against her side so her purse doesn’t drop, to close the door and test the lock.
Her house is near, but not too near, a cliff that overlooks the rail line and the sea, a pebbly unvisited beach below. She has emerged into grey: October drizzle has rolled in and she can hear waves but not see them through the damp air. Skittering, scrabbling sounds come from under the house; the saucer of wet food for the feral kittens has not yet been licked clean by cats – or rats. She steps through the gate and starts down the hill past the other council flats with their council-cut lawns and council-cleaned windows. Unlike her neighbours who twitch curtains at her passing, Fay has family that helps, mowing her lawn and cleaning her kitchen. Her daughter or her grandson will come this weekend, her grandson who waves to her through the window as he mows but does not come inside. He has other things to do; he is always in a hurry. He’s a busy boy with his sports and his friends.
Past the hospital’s peeled paint and potholed parking, she turns left. Fay walks with intent. She can feel the moisture in her hair. She should wear a hat but never does. Her foster parents called her Fairy, her pale, flossy ringlets evoking fantasy creatures as she was laid in a drawer that in her remembrances or imagination hung open and sagging like a hungry mouth.
She crosses the avenue, trees along the centre older than she is but not by much, planted by some Englishman in the early days of this town and marking straight, civilised lines from one end to the other. Two dogs run under them, their owner laughing and calling their names as they leap at each other. She could turn left and then right and be at her daughter’s house but does not. She doesn’t like to impose. Her visits always impose. She is greeted with smiles and a cup of tea, but within minutes, her grandchildren vanish, her daughter finding reasons to move her along, offering her a ride home.
She trundles along, crossing side streets and reaching the indoor swimming pool – the shouts of a classroom’s worth of children ripple out – and then picks up the pace. She keeps her purse clenched between her upper arm and chest like she is trying to keep it from escaping. She lowers her head as she hurries past the basilica, the biggest building in town, and the Catholic school next door. There are other ways she can go, parallel streets, more scenic or safer, but this is her way, and she is too old to change. It doesn’t even occur to her to change. She bends her shoulders as the plastic bag of books gets heavier, adjusting her grip on the thin handle.
She thinks about crossing the street away from the school, but it’s quiet. The kids are in class. She maintains her brisk walk anyway, tucking the purse and her books tighter still, step by step by step to get past.
Oi! Old Ma! The voice emanates through the drizzle and she can’t possibly walk any faster. A thin voice, a young boy. A voice she has heard often as she passed this hedge. Sometimes a lone voice, sometimes one of a chorus.
Where you off to, Old Ma? Going to bet on the geegees? Off to the pub? You smell, Old Ma. Oink! What, you deaf? Come back, Old Ma!
His voice fades. She puts one foot in front of the other, telling herself she didn’t hear anything, the same way she won’t hear the comments her grandchildren make from across the room, from one room over, from right beside her, thinking she can’t hear them. Deafness is a mask she has worn for years, a convenient way to avoid confrontations, conversations, the arguments or accusations she doesn’t want to hear. She has pretended deafness for so long that sometimes she thinks it’s real, that she truly can’t hear the doorbell, or the telephone, or her grandson pushing the mower, cheerily waving through glass.
She hurries onto the bypass road, breathless, trucks roaring through gears beside her to manage the steep downhill and the immediate ascent that follows. While they climb, she veers away onto the street that curves from perpendicular to parallel, with the library neatly placed in the middle of a green lawn. She enters and her purse slips from under her arm to dangle by its shoulder strap, and the hand clutching her plastic bag relaxes. The staff call her Mrs F and help her return her James Pattersons and Lee Childs, bring her the latest on-holds, and refill her supermarket bag with this week’s loans. The books will pile up on the far end of her couch, almost as tall as a sitting child, almost as if she has real company.
She stays in the library for a while, roams the shelves in search of a new author. But today she sticks to predictable favourites, the formula she knows, same and safe.
Now to the pet shop to get food for the feral kittens, and the bakery for a cream bun to enjoy at home, a little reward. She adds these to her bag of books. She checks the clock on the council building: lunchtime. Maybe she can stay in town a little while, even if she has the newest Jeffery Deaver waiting to be cracked open. The drizzle isn’t so heavy, she tells herself, she can wait until it stops. She walks the length of the main street and watches TV through the security bars of the repair shop on the hill. It’s a soap opera she has seen before. Not her favourite but she watches their mouths move anyway.
The drizzle doesn’t stop, and now it’s past one. People have returned to work from their lunch breaks; children will be back in their classrooms. Pedestrians shuffle over the pedestrian crossings, which the council decorated with smooth pavers that, it turns out, are as slippery as soap when it rains.
Back to the bypass as a milk tanker blows by, spraying water from its tyres into the air. They always drive too fast through here, she thinks, rushing off to the cows. No dogs on the avenue this time, only a cat that dashes out just before another tanker. The tanker doesn’t brake, but the cat makes it across and streaks through the park on the far side. She was holding her breath and now she releases it in a gust. She keeps walking. Here’s the school.
She thought she had timed it right. But she hears his voice.
There she is, Old Ma! How was the pub Old Ma? Didya have a few sherries? Oink, oink!
This time she sees him too. He’s not even on the school grounds but on the footpath in front of her, facing her. He’s small and weedy, like his voice, a scrawny, pinched little thing. Smaller than her grandson.
The boy grins, friendly but somehow mocking. He walks towards her. Maybe he wants to go past her and into the school, but maybe he wants to do something else.
When he is near enough to touch, the bag of books swings out in a heavy arc. The bag swings as if of its own volition, but she has been thinking about swinging it, pulling it back and up and then letting the weight of the books fall, for a long time. Her arm’s movement is graceful even if she isn’t sure she has ever been.
The boy yelps and raises his knee, clutching his bare leg, grey school shorts bunching around the joint of his hip, hopping comically on one foot. What the fuck! he shouts.
You’re, she starts, shaky, you’re a little shit.
She lowers the bag of books. Her cream bun might be squashed.
The boy has tears in his eyes. They’re red. His nose too. A little line of blood dribbles down his shinbone.
She adds, And you should be nicer.
He runs into the school. A man driving past looks her way.
She stands straighter and walks on, bag of books in one hand, purse hanging free from her shoulder.
Tracy Hope is a literacy educator, writer, and previously co-editor of the Keeping It Under Wraps series of non-fiction anthologies. Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, she lives in Switzerland where she drinks a lot of coffee and reads just the right amount (because there’s no such thing as too much). You might also find her pretending to hike, pretending to write, or pretending to be a social person.
