Free Nutshell by Ian McEwan

with their fate. The voices rise and fall. When they don’t accuse or wrangle, they conspire. What’s said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog.
    It will end badly, and the house feels the ruin too. In high summer, the February gale twists and breaks the icicles hanging from the gutters, scours the unpointed brickwork of the gable ends, rips the slates—those blank slates—from the pitching roofs. This chill works its fingers past the rotted putty of the unwashed panes, it backs up through the kitchen drains. I’m shivering in here. But it won’t end, the bad will be endless, until ending badly will seem a blessing. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing flushed away. Foul matter lingers in unseen bends beyond the plumber’s reach, it hangs in the wardrobes with Trudy’s winter coats. This too solid stench feeds the timid mice behind the skirting and swells them to rats. We hear their gnawing and mutinous curses, but no one is surprised. At intervals, my mother and I retire so she may squat and copiously piss and groan. Against my skull I feel her bladder shrink, and I’m relieved. Back to the table, to more scheming and long harangues. It was my uncle cursing, not the rats. That gnawing was my mother at the salted nuts. Incessantly, she eats for me.
    In here, I dream of my entitlement—security, weightless peace, no tasks, no crime or guilt. I’m thinking about what should have been mine in my confinement. Two opposing notions haunt me. I heard about them in a podcast my mother left running while talking on the phone. We were on the couch in my father’s library, windows wide open to another sultry midday. Boredom, said this Monsieur Barthes, is not far from bliss; one regards boredom from the shores of pleasure. Exactly so. The condition of the modern foetus. Just think: nothing to do but be and grow, where growing is hardly a conscious act. The joy of pure existence, the tedium of undifferentiated days. Extended bliss is boredom of the existential kind. This confinement shouldn’t be a prison. In here I’m owed the privilege and luxury of solitude. I speak as an innocent, but I conjure an orgasm prolonged into eternity—there’s boredom for you, in the realm of the sublime.
    This was my patrimony, until my mother wished my father dead. Now I live inside a story and fret about its outcome. Where’s boredom or bliss in that?
    My uncle rises from the kitchen table, lurches towards the wall to turn off the lights and reveal the dawn. If he’d been my father, he might have recited an aubade. But now there’s only a practical concern—it’s time for bed. What deliverance, that they’re too drunk for sex. Trudy stands, together we sway. If I could be upright for one minute I’d feel less sick. How I miss my spacious days of ocean-tumbling.
    With one foot on the first tread, she halts to gauge the climb ahead. It rises severely and recedes, as though to the moon. I feel her grip the banister on my account. I still love her, I’d like her to know, but if she falls backwards, I die. Now we’re going mostly up. Mostly, Claude is ahead of us. We should be roped. Grip tighter, Mother! It’s an effort and no one speaks. After many minutes, many sighs and moans, we gain the second-floor landing, and the rest, the last twelve feet, though level, is also tough.
    She sits on her side of the bed to remove a sandal, topples sideways with it in her hand, and falls asleep. Claude shakes her awake. Together they fumble in the bathroom, through the spilling drawers, in search of two grams each of paracetamol, a means to hold a hangover at bay.
    Claude notes, “Tomorrow’s a busy day.”
    He means today. My father is due at ten, now it’s almost six. Finally, we’re all in bed. My mother complains that the world, her world, spins when she closes her eyes. I thought Claude might be more stoical, made, as he might say, of sterner stuff. Not so. Within minutes he’s hurried next door to fall to his knees and embrace the