Debris

I leave my boyfriend on a Saturday while he’s out playing golf. I pack my suitcase. I knew I would leave him. I had decided but not planned the particulars around it, and I don’t know where to go.  

I call my mother from the supermarket to ask if I can come over and stay with her for a few days. I call her from the supermarket because I know she will ask me to bring something. 

My mother has changed a great deal in the last five years since my father died. She’s like a completely different person now. Before, she was an anxious being, she didn’t like going out alone, taking the train or sitting by herself in cafés and restaurants. She was cautious of travel and afraid of flying. She did not like cities. She didn’t wear make-up or bright colours. She never had too much of anything and had never had a puff of a cigarette.  

Now she smokes excessively. She doesn’t stick to one brand, she has row after row of different cigarettes lined up on a shelf in her bookcase: black Virginia Slims, white Virginia Slims, Cheyenne, Camel, Panter Mignons, Davidoff cigarillos, Pianissimo menthols, Lady, and Lucky Strikes for rainy days. She drinks wine every day, she’s a regular at several cafés, an acquaintance of the owners. Every time I talk to her, there’s a new friend in her life. She talks to everybody. She travels by train to Italy and France, Milan and Paris. She flies to India in the wet season.  

She asks me to bring a bottle of red wine and some cocoa powder, the kind you mix with cold milk and then drink. 

*          *          *

My father died in a solo car crash. His car drove off the road in a bend at 7.45 in the morning. The car rolled down a steep, rocky hill. It never became clear if it was a suicide or just some random accident. These things happen.  

My father wasn’t a sad man, but I think he was a little disappointed in life, even though he probably didn’t admit it to himself in his conscious mind. He worked as an accountant. He wanted to have been something grand, he wanted to have travelled and lived in strange parts of the world. I’m not sure he would actually have liked it. I sometimes wonder if he would have been happier with my mother the way she is now.  

“No,” my mother would say. “Hell yes,” she says now. There is no middle ground.  

*          *          *

A few days after my father died, my boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, now, drove me to the place of the crash. We parked in a layby just before the curve in the road. We walked along the road in rough gravel. We skidded down the rocky hill and stopped on the small area of level ground where my father’s car had come to a rest. The ledge continued in a steep cliff, almost straight down, ending in a dry valley.  

We stood amongst the spread leftovers of debris. I started searching the ground. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. If there had been anything of any interest, the police would have taken it, examined it, and given it to my mother by that time. There was broken red, white, and orange glass on the ground, bits of melted black plastic. I kicked loosely around in the ground with my shoe, and dust rose around my feet. My boyfriend stood at the edge of the cliff facing the valley, he had picked up a piece of red glass. He held it up and turned it in the sun.  

I expected something, an eagle to fly by, a snake to appear and raise its head, but nothing like that happened.  

On our way back to the car, we stopped by a dark stain on the ground. I know we both thought it was my father’s blood, but we didn’t say it, we just stood next to each other and looked at it. I thought of picking some of it up and eating it, but I didn’t do that either.  

*          *          *

Walking up the stairs to my mother’s flat, I hear her voice and then a man’s voice. When I reach her floor, my mother is hugging the man. They are standing on the landing in front of her door. He’s wearing a long, grey trench coat. “Hello,” he says to me when they’re done hugging; he bows lightly. On the stairs, he turns and waves to my mother. 

She lets me into her flat. She’s wearing a flowered silk kimono, one I haven’t seen before. She has tons of them, one for each of her male acquaintances, I guess. 

I go through to sit in her living room. I can hear her in the kitchen, she’s making tea. I go to her bookcase and choose a cigarette from her collection on the shelf, a Cheyenne. I light it and take a deep drag. It’s a great satisfaction. I’m not really a smoker. I smoke it standing by her window. I feel so loose, so pleasantly disconnected.  

I watch the flat across the street from my mother’s. When we’re on the phone, she often talks about the couple living there. They have a lot of company. The woman goes through periods of pudding making. Sometimes at their parties, all they have are puddings, tall, green jellies, layered wedding-like cakes, chocolate fountains. The man tries on different ties or bowties in the bedroom, changing them at least ten times before the guests arrive. He throws the rejected ones on the bed. Next to the bedroom is the living room and, in continuation of that, the kitchen, the windows facing the street and my mother’s flat. The woman walks back and forth, arranging all the puddings on the dining table. 

Once they had a very heated argument. The woman picked up a stack of dinner plates and threw them one after the other on the floor. Then she walked to the living room. He followed her, grabbed her arms, and shook her. I wish I could have seen her face. Their mouths opened in yells and hard words. My mother opened her window to see if she could hear what they were yelling.  

She called me back later that night to tell me they had made up. Now they were on the couch, the woman was lying with her head in his lap. “They are very passionate,” my mother said. 

 *          *          *

“They are not home.” My mother puts the tray on the coffee table: tea, figs, and port. She lights a Cheyenne herself.  

She doesn’t ask me why I’m there. 

We stay in her living room most of the day. We read interior design magazines, we watch two movies, Chinatown and All about Eve. My mother has a weak spot for Bette Davis. That’s a new thing too. Before, she didn’t even know the names of any actors. Late afternoon, we go out to pick up éclairs—my mother orders four from the baker for every Saturday afternoon—and steaks. We walk along the canal. Runners and people with white poodles pass us.  

*          *          *

My steak is much too rare for my taste, but my mother refused to cook it for longer. “No mediums in my house,” she said. 

After dinner, my boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, calls, I see his name on the display. I don’t pick up. Then he calls my mother, and she picks up even though I say no and throw a cookie at her. I don’t laugh. I act differently around her now, as well. We are all not the same as we were.  

She hands me the phone. 

“What’s going on, Rose?” he says. He has noticed my suitcase missing, most of my clothes, and my toothbrush. I think of his green toothbrush lonely in the mug in our bathroom. It makes me smile, and then it makes me sad, too.  

“Rose,” he says.  

“What?” I say.   

“What is it, Rose?”  

“I don’t know. Nothing really.” 

“Nothing really, you just left. Nothing really. Of any goddamn real importance.” Then I can hear him trying to control himself, he breathes in and holds it and then breathes out slowly. I wish he wouldn’t.  

“Maybe we should talk tomorrow,” I say.  

“Well, maybe I don’t have time tomorrow.” 

I don’t say anything. 

“Rose?”  

Normally he’s careful not to use my name. I have never liked my name. Maybe it’s because I know my mother doesn’t like roses. She doesn’t seem to mind me, though. 

“Are you okay, Rose?” 

“Yes,” I say. 

Three days before my father died, he took me out for lunch. He did that sometimes. We both had marinated herrings. I remember the feeling of the fish in my mouth, its pneumatic flesh. It was a fancy but homely restaurant, old mixed with new, and sawdust on the floor. Before we left, my father looked into my eyes while he squeezed both my hands with his, and he never used to do that. “Don’t settle for anything, Rose,” he said.  

I didn’t tell anybody, and why would I? 

My mother didn’t leave their house for three months after he died. She just left everything as it was, coffee cups, newspapers, plates with leftovers in the kitchen. She wouldn’t let me touch anything. Everything started to smell. As soon as you opened the door, this wall of aged, sour decay hit you. She didn’t shower, her unwashed hair hung in greasy wisps around her head. She walked so slowly, she kept drinking coffee, even though she couldn’t sleep.  

Then one day, I went over to see her. I was met by a smell of detergent, a mixture of synthetic tropical flowers and ammonia.   

“Hello, Rose,” she yelled when she saw me. She wore a flowered dress I had never seen, it moved around her in a flimsy, distressed way. She had a glass of wine in her hand. She had sold the house. A young couple had shown interest in the house for months, but every time I had mentioned it, she indifferently turned away, and now she had sold the house to them. Then she bought this flat in the city, moved in, and became so self-contained. 

“Okay, we will just talk tomorrow then, right, Rose?” he says on the phone. 

“We will see,” I say. 

*          *          *

My mother sits and looks out the window to the flat across the street. She has turned off the lights in the living room. She’s a silhouette against the window. When she moves, the street light makes her silk kimono shine in patches. She smokes menthol cigarettes at night; they keep the coughs away in the mornings, she says. The smoke rises in the air in front of her like a frail pillar.  

They are home now across the street. The woman is combing her hair by the mirror in the hallway, we can see her through their open kitchen door. Her hair is long and red. When she’s done combing one part, she runs her hand slowly over it.  

He’s in the bedroom, undressing, opening the buttons in his shirt, pulling it loose from the waistband. He stands sideways to us, then he pulls his stomach in and out a few times. He lifts his head as if he has heard something, he smiles, his lips form a word. The woman is not to be seen anywhere now. He lifts the mattress off the bed, pulls it through to the living room, and puts it down there on the floor.  

“They do that sometimes,” my mother says, “sleep in the living room.” 

He gets the duvet.  

“A little like camping maybe,” my mother says.  

The woman appears naked in the doorway and walks into the living room. There’s something peach-like about her, her skin smooth, fresh, and calm. 

They lay down on the mattress, and then the lights turn off. 

*          *          *

On Sunday, I meet up with a girlfriend. We sit outside at a café. She holds her coffee cup with both hands.  

“Good, you finally got rid of him.” I don’t know why she says that, he’s a perfectly nice guy.  

He hums in the mornings in the bathroom. Sometimes he stops in the middle of brushing his teeth and taps a rhythm with his toothbrush on the edge of the sink, with foam around his mouth. 

He goes grocery shopping on his way home from work, he puts the shopping bags down on the worktop in the kitchen, and we empty them, putting everything where it’s supposed to be. I have asked him not to tell me about what he got on sale, all the deals, half-price meat close to the sell-by date, three bags of oranges for the price of two.  

We eat our dinner in the kitchen, we chatter about things we have read in the newspaper, work stuff, phone calls with friends and family, neighbours we met on the street. I want to talk with him about something bigger, something crucial and mind-altering, but I don’t know what or how.  

“Do you think there is some kind of physical string that connects us to everybody we know and have ever known on earth?” 

“What?” he says. 

We go on holidays in warm places and stroll the beachfront avenues in light clothes.  

He has this habit of saying to people that annoy him that they look like or remind him of somebody, somebody they absolutely don’t want to look like, resemble, or even appear in the same sentence as. I like that about him. 

When he can sense I’m low in spirit, he puts on Julie London’s Cry Me a River because he knows I like it. Then he lets me sit on the couch with my legs up without ruining my sad face with talk.   

I have looked for evil in him with a desire for evil, but I have found none.  

“Can I give you a lift to somewhere?” my friend asks when we have finished our coffee, but I choose to walk. 

*          *          *

Sunday night, my mother seems impatient. I’m not sure she likes having me around for too long.  

“We’re going out,” she says. 

I watch her secretly before we go, putting on her coral lipstick by the mirror in the hallway. She applies it carefully, then smacks her lips and smiles at herself.  

She takes me to one of her cafés. People greet us when we walk in. The man in the grey trench coat is there. I don’t know if it’s random or something they have planned. We join him at the table. He orders us three tequila/cranberry with little chunks of fruit in them.  

“It’s called a Leonard Cohen,” he says. He starts playing with my mother’s hands on the table. I feel quite uncomfortable. He asks me questions, what was my boyfriend’s name again, have I found a job that suits me, how are the plans for the shop coming along? I can hear my mother’s been telling him about me.  

I try not to listen to them talking about near-future plans, newly grounded memories, mutual friends, and dinners with music and spontaneous dancing in somebody’s bohemian-decorated living room.  

I look at the other guests sitting in pairs or groups, their faces lit up by calm happiness and the orange glow of candlelight. I look at the trench coat in conversation with my mother. I try to focus on falling in love with him. I used to get these rushes of falling in love, but I don’t anymore.  

I feel so much like a child, though I try very hard not to.  

I consider asking them when they are getting married, if they have planned an intimate beach wedding in Barbados or a quick trip to Las Vegas. Instead, I hardly speak all night. We’re quiet when we walk home. 

*          *          *

My father didn’t want a gravestone. I found it all written down on a piece of paper in his desk. He was burned and buried in the graves of the unknown. It’s just a big lawn. People are cremated and then buried there, under the grass, without any kind of marker or sign. The lawn spreads out to the left when you enter the graveyard. On one side, tall copper beeches shelter the area, and when the sun is out, patches of shade and light spot the grass. Sometimes there are flowers and lit candles put randomly on the lawn.  

I have tried to place myself on different spots on that lawn, focused and with my eyes closed tightly, to see if I would feel something special standing on a certain spot. It hasn’t happened yet.  

I go there every year on the anniversary of his death, and Monday morning, I ask my mother if she wants to come. I don’t think she’s ever been, not that I know of anyway, but an image flickers past me of her kneeling on this lawn in the orange midnight light from the city, her hands touching the grass, her head bent.  

“Do you want to come, Mum?” I say in a loud voice. She’s in the kitchen. 

“What, Rose? I can’t hear you.” 

“Are you coming with me, Mum?” 

She doesn’t answer.  

I watch the flat across the street. The man is in the kitchen in his overcoat, he’s got a mug in one hand and a piece of toast in the other. He takes a bite of the toast and then a sip from the mug like he’s in a hurry. The woman opens the door to the kitchen, she says something, he puts the mug on the worktop, and they leave the flat together. 

I put my coat on in the hallway. “That’s me. I’ll be back later.” 

She sticks her head out of the kitchen doorway. “Yes, Rose, later.” Her eyes are red. 

 *          *          *

Outside everything is so normal. It’s Monday morning, people are on their way to work. Kids push each other on the sidewalk on their way to school. A spring haze hangs over the canal. 

The bus goes all the way through town; the changing morning light touches old spires and modern buildings of glass. I ring the bell and get off by the graveyard. I nod at the driver as I leave the bus.  

I stand in front of the open gates by the main entrance for a while, looking down the grand avenue of large-leaved lindens that runs down the middle of the graveyard. I can see all the way through to the other end. Then I walk in and turn left.  

The lawn spreads out in front of me, so plain and timid. I step onto the grass, and exhaustion rises in me as if I had some insurmountable task in front of me. I refuse to move any further, this indifferent, selfish lawn, and then it’s like something wild grabs me, as if an enraged creature lying dormant somewhere inside me has woken and wants out. I need to let it out before it splits me open. I start running over the lawn, stomping hard with my feet like an angry child. From one of the pent- roof sheds with gardening tools, I grab a shovel. With firm steps, I approach, and I start digging up the lawn. My arms are so strong. I force the shovel into the ground with great power. The dark earth appears under the green grass. I dig fast. I am a furious digger, the earth flies past my ears. I dig a little one place, then move a few yards and start digging again. I’m digging little holes all over the lawn. I topple candles, cover several flower bouquets with soil. Now there are little piles of ground all over the broken lawn.  

I’m still digging when I hear a voice near me.  

“Stop,” it says, “well, stop this now.” Then somebody pulls my sleeve.  

I turn my head. A little old lady stands behind me.  

“You stop now.” She looks at me angrily and a little frightened.  

I just turn away from her, I won’t stop, I keep digging. I can hear her move away behind me. “Hah,” I say as if I had won some childish argument. I dig on. 

After a while, I can feel something behind me again. I look up over my shoulder, and there is the old lady, she’s coming back with some kind of cemetery officer. I see them moving towards me. The old lady walks in front of the officer, pointing at me.  

“Give me the shovel.” They are standing next to me now, the officer’s hands reach out towards me and the shovel. The copper beeches rattle their leaves.  

“No,” I say. I hold on tight to the shovel. His hands launch out and get a hold of the shovel too, and there we stand, both of us pulling at the shovel, back and forth. Then I lose my grip and fall backwards, down onto the lawn. I look up into the sky. The clouds are moving so fast up there, down here so close to the ground everything seems so slow. The copper beech leaves blink in the sun above me. I hear the wind blow in my ears, feel it pass over my face and gently touch my skin. The lawn softly grabs me from underneath, holds me. 

And lying here, I suddenly remember a day long ago that I haven’t thought of for years.  

It’s late summer, I have taken the train to see my parents and spend the night there. I get off the train at the small station and walk down the road towards their house. On one side of the road, horses are grazing in a field; on the other side, my parents’ house appears behind a tall hedge of walnut trees. I can see my mother vaguely between the branches. She’s standing on their lawn in a mid-length beige dress, her hands resting on her hips. She’s waiting for me. She knows a train has just arrived at the station and is wondering if I might have been on that train. She will have gone out into the garden to keep watch, to wait for me. She always did that. She sees me come walking down the road, waves and smiles, lowers her hand and walks down through their garden towards me. We lean into a stiff hug. There’s a strong smell of jasmine.  

“How was your train journey, Rose?” 

“Fine,” I say. Behind her, the sun is bright, she’s just a reflection of something. I want to get past her. “Where’s Dad?” I ask. I go to see him in the garage, and she disappears into the house, to the kitchen or bedroom or the ironing room with no windows.  

Later, I’m standing alone in the garden, looking towards the house and the plum tree whose branches are heavy with fruit. A dragonfly flies close by in front of my face, and then another one. I follow them with my eyes. They fly heavy and clumsy, stand still in the air, hovering, then they fly forward in jerky motions and up and down, and they shine and glisten in the sun. Another dragonfly appears, and one more and one more. When I have counted fifteen, I give up, more and more just keep coming. They hover in front of the plum tree, a large cloud of dragonflies. I call my father, he appears in the open doorway and walks out on the terrace in his socks. He’s a man who likes to seem unimpressed but he comes all the way out into the grass in his socks. “Oh, well, no,” he says, “we have never seen that before.” He goes inside to get his camera, and I pray that the dragonflies won’t fly away while he’s inside. Now he has put his clogs on. Standing in the grass in front of the plum tree, he takes picture after picture. We also call my mother, but she doesn’t come out, just shouts something we can’t hear from inside the house. 

“This we have never seen before.” He lowers his camera. Never have we seen so many dragonflies. A whole flock. A whole cloud under the plum tree. Then they start disappearing, little by little, one by one they disappear, you can’t follow them with your eyes, they glitter and then they are gone. 

When my mother comes out, there are only three left. “Well, dragonflies,” she says, “yes.” Now she didn’t see them, now she will never understand what we saw. 

That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I just stood in my bedroom in my parents’ house and kept looking out through the window into the dark and empty garden. 

*          *          *

He’s waiting for me by the gates in front of the cemetery. I asked the cemetery officer to tell him to pick me up there.  He has already collected my suitcase at my mother’s. I get into the car, and we drive off. On the way home, he keeps looking at me when he thinks I don’t notice. 

We have Chinese takeaway for dinner. Afterwards, he takes the leftovers to the bin in the courtyard. He says they smell, he’s so correct in that way. And I call my mother. 

The neighbours in the flat across from hers got a piano. It arrived in the afternoon carried by two removal men, held up by straps on their shoulders. Now the man and the woman sit beside each other on the piano stool, playing with their windows open. My mother has opened her windows too. “Listen,” she says. I picture her holding the phone out through her window towards their flat. I don’t know the song they are playing, but the notes are so fine and clear. “Did you hear it?” she asks me.  

I have opened the windows in our living room too, and the spring night is right there, it’s coming in through our windows. He’s in the courtyard, and I’m here, and my mother’s in her flat at the other end of town. 

Then I ask her about the trench coat, what his name is.  

EA ANDERSON

Ea Anderson is originally from Denmark. She is a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and holds an MSc in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh. Some of Ea’s recent work can be found in The West Trade Review. She lives in the south of France and is working on a novel. For more information visit: ea-anderson.com.