Free Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam

were all on her left hand, the burn marks on her right. Her inner right arm had a four-inch burn scar from the iron. The burn-blister puckered and swelled with water like syrup in a balloon, till it burst. Alec had enjoyed kissing that scar, which, untypically, she would allow. Perhaps she thought all that education was making a healer of him. It was like kissing a flattened mouth, puckered and thin-skinned.
    Her cleaning habits led to fingers fraught with hangnails and a right index-finger bent over in a curve from rubbing and rubbing the washing up and down the drubbing board, the polish cloth over the stairs and down in under the banisters. The cleaning she gave to it was more dignified than the house itself, the gardens of crystals diluted and sluiced down the tremulous plumbing and over the thinning linoleum, the creamy cakes of beeswax smoothed over and fed into the few limping chairs.
    Furnished in the fifties, the house contained a random sample of the design tics of those dingy-fancy years. Geometric but disunited, cocktail-hour shapes, nothing to do with his parents’ way of life, lay in chips on floor-coverings, floated on the fabric of curtains, encountered one another in indifferent swarms on the paper coating the walls. Whatever the materials might have been, his mother did not question. She cleaned. For her the essence of things was what counted. The appearance was of little consequence. By cleaning she made the house good. She fed the household gods with Chemico and Parazone and spirit vinegar.
    The oblivious are blessed, being in a state of nature. Alec lost this grace and emerged into the open-eyed struggle at the age of five.
    They were in the fish van, all three, the family. Alec was comfortable in the back, sitting wedged between the slatted shelves with his arms around his knees. It was early evening, rainy, the street lights burrs in a mist that was an atomised dampness berried by the fat warm raindrops. The ceaseless windscreen wipers making gulls’ wings on the screen, the van’s heater, the road sign that told him it was five miles till they were back in the city, all held him in a rich suspension. He rocked with the movement of his father’s decorous but over-careful corner-braking. He looked out through the back windows of the van, two squares of night decorated with a few distant lights making ribbons. They had been at the sea, which exhausts small children and rocks them down to sleep.
    Alec must have looked as though he were asleep. His mother turned to look at him and for once allowed her face to pour love. Her profile was rueful, as though she had put someone dear out to sea on a bad night in an open boat. He tried to introduce a holy look to his, he knew, already appealing features. I may have let a tear swell between my lashes, he thought, tasting his behaviour as the dusty flake of stale croissant.
    He enjoyed her access of love that was worship, almost. He had not yet come to mind being claimed. He liked being nowhere, enclosed, unheld but cared for, being driven from somewhere to somewhere in the warm, distantly fishy back of the van repeatedly but irregularly rocked without risk as the gears and brakes engaged and bit. From within his own piece of darkness he liked seeing without being seen, knew that he liked it, knew that for the present he should hide how much. He stood outside himself as though he had unzipped and stepped out of it. The sense of separation from part of himself was satisfactory. He felt like the golden entire yolk that has been scooped free of the clinging indefinite albumen.
     
    Elspeth had finished beating the matting over the side of Ardent Spirit . She chose the side off which the wind was blowing so that no dust blew on to the hull. She swept the boat below, having first dusted, though it seemed to her that salt was the dust of the sea more than dust itself, and set the matting down again. Being a woman who preferred large cooking implements and a kitchen