Jo Jakeman

I.

The chimney stack collapses like an aged torso, weary flesh colliding with an unforgiving earth. Budding appendages of rubble thrust outward from the now-shattered brick core. These gray, dusty arms and legs strain in a violent spurt of adolescent growth. Taut ligaments flex against the edge of Jen’s small television screen, but ultimately bow to the insistence of a disseminating gust.

Some of the soot, in a naive attempt at rebellion, billows in the wind. Jen knows that it has reached into the anemic sky for too long not to try again today, before it is swallowed by an obscuring column of dust. Later, she thinks that she hears the dust scratching against her kitchen window, youthful, playful in the way it tickles her reflection. Yet, when she turns all she sees is grime on the glass and a film of fusty powder  on the windowsill.

And then her daughter waddles over on the heels of her long feet and declares: “There’s bits on my toes.”  Her attention appears focused on maintaining balance atop the moaning linoleum, but when she reaches the table she relaxes her splayed toes, leans into Jen’s lap, and gazes up at the bottom of a porcelain mug.

“There’s bits,” Emma says again, pushing her elbows deep into soft thighs.

Shifting beneath the girl’s angular bones Jen places the mug on its stained coaster, presses the remote’s tacky off button, and looks into the face she can’t remember not knowing. “What bits?”

“Right there,” Emma replies, supporting her weight with one arm and pointing with the other to the surface of her largest toenail, coated in some pink sparkly stuff that must have been on special. The death her mother has just witnessed seems of little consequence; her ruined nail polish appears the sole focus of Emma’s five-year old intensity.

“You’re hurting me!” Jen says. “I told you to sit still. If you’d listened, there wouldn’t be any bits.”

“I did, Mummy,” Emma whines. She drapes her arms over the sides of Jen’s wide legs and drops her head with too much force.

Jen recognizes the dramatic attempt gone wrong, and runs her hand along Emma’s smooth ponytail.

“I saw them flying through the air,” Emma says, calmed. “They landed on my toes.” Jen tugs at a curl caught in her daughter’s earring, pushing the coil behind a small, warm ear. “Well it’s dry now, so there’s nothing we can do,” she says. “We’ll try again later.”

The girl lifts her head. Jen leans down, until their noses meet. “Go find your shoes.”Emma hobbles off.

“They’re dry. You can walk properly,” Jen calls. Gulping the last of the warm tea she allows the sludgy mixture to explore her uneven bottom teeth. When the sweetness finds a nerve, she runs her tongue over sensitive gums and walks to the routinely half-full sink of dishes. Up close the smoothness of the stoor blanketing the sill—above the plastic cups and plates stained with orange juice and hardened egg yolk—surprises her.

She runs her index finger along the frame where glass meets wood, the coldness making it feel wet. She rubs her fingertip against her thumb and holds both to her nose. They don’t smell of coal. They don’t smell of the soot that was expelled when the murdered pit sputtered its last breath earlier in the morning. They smell of ordinary dust, and she sneezes.

“Bless you,” she says to Emma. “Need your nose wiped?” The girl shakes her head no and purses her lips, but sneezes again and, this time, isn’t able to stop a no-doubt warm and salty bubble of mucus from forming.

Jen crouches in front of Emma at the bus stop, aware that she’s likely revealing more of the marbled flesh on her hips and back than the pensioner waiting in line want to see. She tells the girl to blow in a tone they both know well, a reminder that Granny doesn’t like to see a runny nose.

They sit in Emma’s favorite spot: the middle two seats of the last row, up the high step. The trip is short, fifteen minutes, but before Emma’s eyelids become heavy as the bus bumps around tight roundabouts she points to the sticker on the window and asks what it says.

Instead of telling her the truth—that it warns against spitting at the driver—Jen says it reminds passengers not to leave anything behind. The girl uses both hands to grip her crusty-patched, stuffed toy mouse. Jen swallows hard against the dryness at the back of her throat, imagining the DNA kit hidden somewhere behind the driver’s protective glass and how its long cotton bud would chafe her tender skin.

But it’s the dampness that most offends Jen’s throat when they get off the bus. Every uphill step towards her mother’s house forces moist air into her acrid mouth, stabbing at what she feels are swollen tonsils. The morning’s dankness hasn’t done anything to calm the angry heat lurking around her temples, either; it makes her head feel heavy with phlegm.

She stops for a smoke. It wasn’t her intention but a man approaches, making his way towards them on the rough pavement in short strides, lighting up as he mutters under his breath. The act is enough for Jen’s hand to move to her mouth. He acknowledges the involuntary gesture and hands her a fag as he passes. She nods her appreciation; she’s not sure she would have done the same, with the cost of them these days. He stops walking and turns to face her, patting his jacket pockets no doubt in search of his lighter. She raises her hand, this time waving no thanks.

The silent intimacy they’re sharing could all too easily become more but despite scenarios she relies upon to fall asleep at night, Jen can’t be bothered. The man shrugs, picking up his pace as he heads in the direction of the bookie’s.
Emma sits on the kerb and waits, tracing figures of eight on the tarmac with her index finger. Jen wonders whether the girl’s cough was bad enough to warrant keeping her home from school.

The rest of their walk is slow, the wind probing their clothing and lifting the smell of smoke from Jen’s hair. As they arrive Rona is locking the front door and grumbling to herself, no doubt about the rise in council taxes. Managing little more than a nod in Jen’s direction she asks Emma for a cuddle, before bending over and straightening the girl’s woolen hat.

Her mother’s Peugeot trails crawling traffic over the suspension bridge while Jen leans her head against the side-window. She thinks about the pings that the engineering experts have recorded with their equipment, how a cable could snap at any time and send them all hurtling into the knife-like waters below. Even the car with the “Tiny Human on Board” sign displayed in its rear window. Especially that car.

The cavalcade manages, though, to find the city on the other side of the Forth, seeping through its congested lanes. But if Edinburgh’s streets are concerned, they don’t show it. Their dourness is dignified. Even the columns fronting aged facades appear morose: the threat of crumbling, of dissolution, carved into the stone.

A little traffic is nothing.

Jen’s gaze falls upon a woman escaping from one of the doorways, fag in hand. She looks to be in her sixties, wearing a red dress with a matching fringed shawl. Even her lipstick is red, staining the cigarette as she draws its smoke into her chest. Against the Scottish gloom that has crept downwards like a mold from the sky she somehow looks unreal, garish.

When they arrive at the assisted-living home the modern building is uglier than anything Jen could have expected—an affront to the skyline, and the woman who stands like a blot somewhere in the distance. Whereas stone endures, this concrete molders.

“A bloody eyesore,” Rona says, as she spins the wheel of the car to angle it into a tight parking space.

The force rotates Jen’s neck and sweeps Emma, mouth frozen in the shape of an O, into her peripheral vision. Mrs. Mouse is lying on the floor. Reaching behind Rona’s seat for the girl’s toy Jen lingers, the seatbelt cutting into her twisted body. A damp shoe makes contact with her temple. “Don’t kick!” she hisses, thrusting the toy into Emma’s lap.

Small lips lose their round shape, crumple.

“And don’t even think about being naughty,” Jen whispers, releasing the girl from her car seat with an abrupt snap. There’s no or else this afternoon.

By the time Jen positions Emma on the kerb, Rona leans against the car and is looking up at grimy windows. “Don’t let me end up in a place like this,” she says.

Fine you know I will, Jen thinks.

Fiona is seated in a wheelchair, between two sets of automatic glass doors, watching for faces she’ll probably not recognize. A girl dressed in tie-dyed scrubs that make her look like an exploding firework pushes the old woman towards them. The aide gushes, tells them that she knows Fiona will enjoy a day out with her family. It sounds to Jen like an apology in advance. Ruffling her spiky hair as she walks away, the girl is free from incontinence and sour body odor for a few hours.

Fiona is maneuvered into the car’s back seat with some fuss, Jen’s arms around the old woman’s waist. The limp hand that was affected by the stroke hangs like a chick fallen from the nest, struggling to rise without the use of wings. Rona’s in charge of moving her mother’s legs, angling them into the narrow space one at a time. But when the engine starts the old woman manages to pull her swollen feet from her shoes, pushing unpolished toes that come to calloused points against the back of Jen’s seat.

Rona tries to catch her mother’s attention in the rearview mirror in warning, but gives up and mumbles something that Jen can’t make out. Emma hums and bounces Mrs. Mouse on her knees, its flaccid felt tail bobbing against the rough pink corduroy of her trousers. Fiona’s gaze is transfixed by the toy, on the spot where a polished black nose used to be.

It isn’t where Jen remembered it. The last time she stood on this mound, sporadic headstones dotted the cemetery in topographic loops. Today the ground is heavily dimpled with burial plots sweeping across the craggy landscape. Each headstone is like a button in the quilt of grass that has been dropped over the hilly land, projecting outwards in heavy folds.

At her great-grandmother’s funeral Jen hadn’t been able to visualize the number of lairs beneath her feet, but she also didn’t foresee that someday she’d have a partner who would shout words like lithification and permafrost over a raging stream of urine when he returned from night classes, giddy with caffeine and the idea that he was going somewhere.

Jen stoops on the gravel in front of the open car door and crams her grandmother’s limp feet back into her navy slip-ons. Fiona’s veins look stringy, loose. Jen longs to press them, pinch them, wrap them around her fingers and pull, but instead settles for their compression inside rigid shoes.

Rona is helping Emma pick daffodils on the other side of the stone wall. It’s the time of year when bulbs planted seasons ago make their presence felt, sprouting in a mocking show of life. Grandmother and granddaughter walk along the path beyond a line of newer, shiny headstones with teddy bears and angels carved into the granite. Emma’s small hands aren’t able to stop from tugging at the bright yellow petals; she holds her bouquet like a bridesmaid, mouthing words that aren’t yet he loves me…

When Rona reaches for the flowers Emma runs away, back through the low gate. Her protest is fleeting, silent—the only effective form of expression for a girl who has long been aware that she’s no longer the baby of the family. But Emma’s apparent unease at her younger sister’s continued presence no longer stirs the same feelings of guilt in Jen. Someday the girl’s discomfort might make for a funny story, the kind told when parents are dead and siblings get together out of a shared sense of responsibility.

Jen watches as Emma rushes towards her. The girl swings the flowers as she runs, disturbed petals spiraling, despite their weight, like miniature helicopter propellers to the ground. Jen assumes the coastal wind must have something to do with it. Fiona is staring at the shoes on her feet. Jen thinks she looks surprised and can’t imagine that the old woman is bothered by the crushed stems in Emma’s grip. She has always liked to believe that old people have given up on disappointment altogether, that after seventy things start sorting themselves out.

Rona still has a way to go, though, striding over to them as the hair around her face lifts with every rigid step. Shielding the stalks, Jen lets Emma hide behind her. Without a word Rona leads Fiona in the direction of the plot, watching as her mother taps the ground with pointed toes because her eyes have long since given up on focusing. Yet, the old woman’s face falls when she reaches the foot of her own mother’s neglected grave.

Whereas Jen remembers the headstone’s rich gray tone set off by lush grass it now looks washed out, the lettering worn away too soon. The stones on either side are older, but in better shape; the bulbs don’t hurt, she reasons.

Fiona starts to sob, but Jen assumes that it isn’t for the clumps of grass still struggling in the inconsiderate earth: a school bell has rung somewhere in town.

Rona reaches for Fiona’s limp hand, clasps a wavering arm. Emma stares up at her great-grandmother but Jen is unable to look at Fiona—wracked with grief, it seems, over the fact that for so many children lunchtime has ended. Jen’s hand finds her neck. It happens almost unconsciously, the same way Rona said her fingers traced the lump beneath her skin. The left side of Jen’s hot throat itches so she tries to push her tongue to the back of her mouth to scratch, but this just irritates her more.

She lowers her head and parts her lips, clicking her throat in a way that she couldn’t describe if asked. It feels good, but she wants another smoke; it has been over two hours. Pressing her thumbs into stony, inflamed glands. Jen swallows hard and tastes hot rust.

“It was bound to happen,” Rona says, looking over at Jen while still gripping the now-reticent Fiona. “I keep telling you to dress warmer…this weather. You shouldn’t be out without something covering your ears.”

Jen’s hands drop to the waist of her jeans, a move she has made since her teen years. Only now when she tugs it’s to cover the exposed gap of loose, doughy flesh that didn’t exist before Emma. Yet, Rona doesn’t seem to notice. The wind has made her eyes water so she rubs the outside corners with the back of her hand. Jen shivers at the thought of moisture resting along the edges of her mother’s ears, waiting to drip inside.

“She shouldn’t be out here,” Rona says, nodding in Fiona’s direction but watching as Jen forces her hands into her tight denim pockets. “She said if the pit was ever gone the cemetery is where we’d come to mourn, but that was before she got like this.”

If the old woman hears, she doesn’t let on. She seems to have forgotten her grief and is watching a wheaten dog roll around on the grass, tongue flopping and back arching at the next outcropping of death.

Two old men are scrubbing a headstone, plunging soapy sponges into a plastic bucket and talking, Jen assumes, about the razed mine. A bloody shame, they agree. The sight of these pensioners, not quite clean or warmly enough dressed, prompts Jen again to cover her bare midriff with her arms. “Well, we came.”

Fiona starts to laugh, a soft snorting at first. She drops Rona’s hand and wriggles free from her grip. For a woman needing help lifting her hairbrush, this sudden burst of strength is enough to take Rona by surprise. The men, and the dog, also watch.

Fiona’s high-pitched twitters become so excitable that Emma joins in. The girl passes the daffodil stalks to her great-grandmother and laughs harder as the old woman throws them to the ground, stands on them, and then proceeds to lift her skirt.

Above Fiona’s loose stockings is grimy underwear that has a stain of what might be iodine over the right hip. The men look away and even the dog focuses its attention on snuffling a beetle that crosses her path. Somewhere behind them all, where land has been designated for future plots, they hear a council-worker’s spade strike rock.

Rona reaches again for her mother’s hands and wrenches the skirt fabric. From between her gnarled fingers. Fiona makes a bleating noise, but it is Only when Rona screams For God’s sake! that she stops struggling and allows herself to be lead away.

Rona spends most of the return trip talking about the closure of the cemetery’s church, and the twelve parishioners who will now have to travel to the next town; how the building will likely be sold off to the highest bidder.

By the time they arrive at Fiona’s old-age home, the woman is subdued. A different aide with bleached blonde hair gives them a grateful smile. Jen stares at the woman’s dark roots as she crouches and wrestles Fiona into the wheelchair.

Rona starts the car before the door is gently pressed shut, explaining over her shoulder to the assistant that her mother had an exhausting morning and will need to rest.