Free Nutshell by Ian McEwan Page A

lavatory bowl.
    “Lift the seat,” Trudy shouts.
    Silence, then it comes, in hard-won dribbles. But he’s loud. A long shout truncated, as though a football fan has been stabbed in the back midchant.
    By seven they’re asleep. Not me. My thoughts turn with my mother’s world. My father’s rejection of me, his possible fate, my responsibility for it, then my own fate, my inability to warn or act. And my bedfellows. Too damaged to make the attempt? Or worse, to do it badly, be caught and sent down. Hence the spectral prison that’s lately haunted me. To start life in a cell, bliss unknown, boredom a fought-for privilege. And if they succeed—then it’s
the Vale of Swat. I see no scheme, no plausible route to any conceivable happiness. I wish never to be born…
    *
    I overslept. I’m woken by a shout and a violent, arrhythmic jigging. My mother on the Wall of Death. Not so. Or not that one. This is her descending the stairs too fast, her careless hand barely trailing the banister. Here’s how it could end, the loose carpet rod or curling threadbare carpet edge, the head-first downward pitch, then my private gloom lost to eternal darkness. I’ve nothing to hold on to but hope. The shout was from my uncle. He calls out again.
    “I’ve been out for the drink. We’ve got twenty minutes. Make the coffee. I’ll do the rest.”
    His dim Shoreditch plans have been ditched by my mother’s lust for speed. John Cairncross is not her fool after all. He’ll kick her out, and soon. She must act today. No time to tend her plaits. She’s given hospitality to her husband’s lover—dumped before she could dump, as they say on the afternoon agony-aunt shows. (Teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.) Trudy’s anger is oceanic—vast and deep, it’s her medium, her selfhood. I know it in her altered blood as it washes through me, in the granular discomfort where cells are bothered and compressed, the platelets cracked and chipped. My heart is struggling with my mother’s angry blood.
    We’re safely on the ground floor, among the busy morning hum of flies that cruise the hallway’s garbage. To them the untied plastic bags rise like shining residential towers with rooftop gardens. The flies go there to graze and vomit at their ease. Their general bloated laziness invokes a society of mellow recreation, communal purpose, mutual tolerance. This somnolent, non-chordate crew is at one with the world, it loves rich life in all its putrefaction. Whereas we’re a lower form, fearful and in constant discord. We’ve got the jitters, we’re going too fast.
    Trudy’s trailing hand grips the newel post and we swing through a speedy U-turn. Ten steps and we’re at the head of the kitchen stairs. No handrail to guide us down. It fell off the wall, I heard, in a burst of dust and horsehair, before my time, if this is my time. Only irregular holes remain. The treads are bare pine, with slick and greasy knots, palimpsests of forgotten spills, downtrodden meat and fat, and molten butter sliding off the toast my father used to carry to the library without a plate. Again, she’s going at speed, and this could be it, the headlong launch. Hardly has the thought illuminated my fears when I sense a backwards-sliding foot, a forward lurch, an urge to flight, countered at once by a panicky tightening of the muscles in her lower back and from behind my shoulder I hear a wrenching sound of tendons stretching and testing their anchors on the bone.
    “My back,” she growls. “My fucking back.”
    But it’s worth her pain, for she’s steadied herself and takes the remaining steps with care. Claude, busy by the kitchen sink, pauses to make a sympathetic sound, then continues with his tasks. Time waits for no man, as he might say.
    She’s at his side. “My head,” she whispers.
    “And mine.” Then he shows her. “I think it’s his favourite. Bananas, pineapple, apple, mint, wheat germ.”
    “Tropical