Mother, Still

Chapter 1: The Shape of a Week

Monday was tinned soup—tomato, always tomato—eaten at her desk at precisely twelve fifteen. Tuesday was the same soup but with a single slice of buttered bread, white, crusts on. Wednesday she allowed herself a biscuit after dinner, one digestive, while watching a property programme she'd been following since it first aired, though she couldn't have told you the name of a single presenter. Thursday was leftover soup, reheated once. Friday she left work at five on the dot, walked to the off-licence on Cromer Road, and bought one bottle of Shiraz—always the same label, always the mid-shelf one with the blue kangaroo on it—and drank exactly half that evening, saving the rest for Saturday.

Sunday she cleaned. Not because anything was dirty, but because the act of cleaning was itself a kind of prayer, a devotion to the idea that if everything was in its right place, nothing terrible could happen.

Moira Gatlin was forty-one years old, and she had not deviated from this routine in nine years.

She worked at the Brockton Municipal Water Authority, a squat, grey building on the industrial estate between the ring road and the canal. Her job title was Data Entry Clerk, Grade Two, which meant she sat at a desk in an open-plan office on the second floor and typed numbers from paper forms into a database that was, by the standards of modern software, already obsolete. The forms came in manila folders. She processed between forty and sixty per day, depending on the season. Water usage spiked in summer. She knew this the way she knew most things—not because anyone had told her, but because she had observed the pattern and filed it away.

Her desk was the third from the window, second row back. She had not chosen it. It had been assigned to her when she started, and she had never asked to move. The desk was clean. There was a computer, a keyboard with the letters worn smooth on the most-used keys, a pot of pens she never lent out, and a small cactus in a terracotta pot that someone had left there before she arrived. She watered it once a week, on Mondays, with exactly two tablespoons of water measured in the kitchen.

The cactus had never bloomed. She respected it for that.

Her colleagues—there were eleven others in the open-plan section—had long since stopped trying to draw her into conversation. In the early days, nine years ago, there had been invitations. Drinks after work. A birthday collection for someone she'd never met in Accounts. A Secret Santa that she'd participated in once, buying a generic box of chocolates and receiving, in return, a scented candle that she'd put in the bin on the walk home. Not out of unkindness, but because she could not imagine lighting it. The flame would have been too much.

Now they left her alone, which was what she wanted. Or rather, it was what she had arranged, and she no longer questioned whether wanting and arranging were the same thing.

She was polite. She was precise. She said good morning when she arrived and good evening when she left, and in between she typed and typed and typed, and the numbers flowed from paper to screen like water through a pipe, which was, she supposed, appropriate.

On this particular Monday in early October, the morning had proceeded exactly as expected. She had arrived at eight forty-five, hung her coat on the hook behind her chair (not on the communal rack by the door—she had never used the communal rack), logged into her computer, and begun processing the first folder. The office hummed with its usual sounds: keyboards, the photocopier's asthmatic wheezing, the low murmur of people who had things to say to each other.

Moira did not have things to say.

At twelve fifteen, she opened the Tupperware container she'd packed that morning, removed the thermos of tomato soup, poured it into the lid that doubled as a cup, and ate at her desk. She did not go to the break room. The break room had a microwave that smelled of other people's meals and a noticeboard covered in flyers for fun runs and charity bake sales, and the whole place thrummed with an energy she found unbearable—not hostile, just alive in a way that made her aware of how still she was.

She was finishing the last spoonful when she heard the rattle of the bin trolley.

This was unusual. The bins were normally emptied between three and four in the afternoon. She knew this because she had observed the pattern. The previous janitor—a silent, efficient man named Doug who had worked there for six years—had always come at three fifteen, give or take ten minutes. He would empty the bins, wipe down the kitchen surfaces, and leave without a word. Moira had appreciated Doug. Doug understood the value of not speaking.

But Doug, she had heard through the ambient office chatter she absorbed without meaning to, had retired. And now there was someone new.

The someone new was making noise.

Not just the rattle of the trolley, but actual human noise—a tuneless whistle, a murmured comment to himself, and then, as he reached her row of desks, a voice directed outward, at her, specifically at her, because she was the only one still at her desk during the lunch hour.

"Alright there? Just grabbing your bin. Don't mind me."

She minded him.

He was perhaps fifty, with a broad, weathered face and the kind of build that suggested a life spent doing things with his hands. His hair was grey at the temples and brown everywhere else, cut short but not neatly, as though he'd done it himself with kitchen scissors. He wore the standard-issue navy polo shirt of the facilities team, but he'd rolled the sleeves up past his elbows, revealing forearms covered in faded tattoos—a ship's anchor on one, something illegible on the other.

"Perry," he said, tapping his name badge as if she might have missed it. "Perry Nichols. Just started last week. Still learning where everything goes, to be honest. Doug left a manual, but it's mostly just pictures of fuse boxes."

He laughed at his own observation. Moira did not.

"The bin is under the desk," she said.

"Right you are." He crouched down, pulled the bin out, tipped its contents—two used tissues and a soup-stained napkin—into the bag on his trolley, and replaced the bin. Then, instead of moving on, he straightened up and looked at her desk.

"That's a hardy little thing," he said, nodding at the cactus. "My ex-wife had one of those. Killed it, mind. Overwatered it. She was like that—too much of everything."

He said this without bitterness, almost fondly, as if overwatering cacti were an endearing character trait.

Moira said nothing.

"Right then," Perry said, apparently unbothered by the silence. "I'll let you get back to it. Cheers."

He moved on to the next desk, whistling again, and Moira sat very still for a moment, her spoon suspended over the empty thermos lid. She felt something she couldn't immediately identify—a low hum of irritation, yes, but also something else, something underneath it, like a note struck on a piano in another room.

She put the spoon down, sealed the thermos, and returned to her keyboard.

The numbers were waiting. They were always waiting.

She typed until five o'clock, said good evening to no one in particular, collected her coat from the hook, and walked to the bus stop. The bus came at five twelve. She sat in the same seat—fourth row, left side, window—and watched the streets of Brockton slide past. Terraced houses gave way to the high street, then the park, then the estate where she lived: a cluster of low-rise blocks built in the seventies, functional and unremarkable, the kind of place that existed to house people who needed housing and nothing more.

Her flat was on the second floor. Number 14. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her.

The flat was clean. The flat was always clean.

There was a kitchen with a small table and one chair. A sitting room with a sofa she never sat on and a television she watched only on Wednesdays. A bedroom with a single bed, tightly made, and a wardrobe containing seven identical sets of work clothes—grey trousers, white blouses—and two sets of weekend clothes: jeans and a navy jumper, jeans and a green jumper. A bathroom with a single towel on the rail and a bar of soap that she replaced every three weeks.

There were no photographs on the walls. No pictures of any kind. No books on the shelf—there was no shelf. No magnets on the fridge. The only decoration, if it could be called that, was a calendar pinned to the kitchen wall, the kind given away free by estate agents, with a different photograph of the local coastline for each month. October showed a grey beach under a grey sky. It was accurate, at least.

Moira heated her soup—she made it in batches on Sunday, enough for the week—and ate it at the small table, in the one chair, looking at the wall. The wall was magnolia. Everything was magnolia. She had not painted when she moved in because the landlord had not asked her to, and she had not asked the landlord if she could, because choosing a colour would have required wanting something, and wanting things was dangerous.

*You'd only make a mess of it anyway.*

The thought arrived without invitation, as it always did, in a voice that was not quite her own. It was her mother's voice—Lorraine's voice—and it lived in the back of her skull like a tenant who had never signed a lease but could not be evicted.

*You've got no taste. Never did. Remember when you tried to draw that picture at school? The teacher had to throw it away. She didn't even put it on the wall with the others. That's how bad it was.*

Moira washed her bowl, dried it, put it back in the cupboard. She wiped down the table, wrung out the cloth, draped it over the tap.

*Good girl. At least you can clean. That's something, I suppose.*

She went to bed at nine thirty. She set her alarm for six forty-five. She lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of the building—a door closing somewhere, the muffled bass of a television through the floor, the occasional car on the road outside—and she thought about the janitor, Perry Nichols, and his dead cactus, and his ex-wife who gave too much water, and she thought: I will not think about this.

And then she didn't.

Tuesday was the same. Wednesday was the same. Thursday was the same.

On Friday, she left work at five, walked to the off-licence on Cromer Road, and bought one bottle of Shiraz with the blue kangaroo on it. The man behind the counter—she didn't know his name, had never asked—put it in a bag and said, "Have a good weekend," and she said, "Thank you," and walked home.

She drank half the bottle with her dinner, which on Fridays was pasta with jarred sauce, the only meal in her rotation that could be called indulgent. She watched nothing on television. She sat in her one chair and drank her wine and looked at the wall and listened to the building breathe.

At nine thirty, she went to bed.

The week was complete. The shape held.

Monday came again, as it always did, and Moira was at her desk at eight forty-five, typing, when Perry Nichols appeared with his trolley at twelve twenty—five minutes later than last week, she noted—and said, "Alright there? Soup again, is it?"

She looked up. He was grinning at her, not mockingly, just grinning, the way some people grinned at the world as though the world might grin back.

"Yes," she said.

"Tomato?"

"Yes."

"My daughter loves tomato soup. Can't get enough of it. She's nine. Well, nearly ten—birthday's in two weeks. I've got no idea what to get her. Last year her mum handled it. This year—" He shrugged. "This year it's on me."

Moira looked at him. She could feel the edges of a response forming, something about how she was not the right person to ask, something deflecting and final, but before she could speak, he had already moved on, emptying the next bin, whistling, and the moment passed.

She went back to her numbers.

But that evening, in her flat, eating her soup, she found herself thinking about a nine-year-old girl who liked tomato soup and was about to turn ten, and she thought: I was ten once.

And then she thought: Don't.

And then she stopped.