‘Alternative Units’ by Jan Carson

‘Hey Liz,’ you say, ‘did you see the house is up for sale again?’

You have purposefully waited ’til my mouth is full of sandwich to say this.

‘Hrmmm,’ I say through bacon, lettuce, tomato and artisan rye. Bread is not a slow chew like rice or pasta. You have at least ninety seconds of my silence in which to present your argument. It is an argument I have heard many times before. In the past I’ve always said, ‘no,’ and, ‘definitely not,’ and other stronger sentiments, usually with swearing.

I will not be swearing today. Freddy is with us. He is here beneath the tablecloth, twisting himself round the legs of the restaurant chairs. I can feel the heat of his small body sweating against my shins as he winds his way from one end of the table to the other. The brush of him, barely there and then gone, makes me think of little fish flitting beneath boats and ocean swimmers. On the other side of the table an untouched toastie marks the place where he should be sitting. Melted cheese drips from the bread like tears turning solid as they cool. You say I need to stop ordering food for Freddy in restaurants. It is a waste of money. We do not have money to waste. I can see the waitresses thinking this with their eyes when they come to lift the plates and Freddy’s is untouched.

‘Finished with this?’ they’ll ask. I’ll say, ‘uh huh, he’s not that hungry today,’ and you’ll catch the waitress, knowingly, by the eye, and maybe, if you think I’m not looking, chance a shoulder shrug.

I find this very offensive, John. It is like you are making a team with the waitress and I am not on this team even though I should be. We are still married. Despite everything, we are still Freddy’s parents. I have told you more times than I can remember that we need to operate as a unit. You cannot be making other, alternative units with waitresses or sisters or, for that matter, therapists. I have used various metaphors to explain this to you: for example, singing from the same hymn sheet, presenting a joint front and being in it together, for the long run (which is actually two separate sayings pressed together for effect).

You always tell me that this is different. That this is not about working together or not working together. This is just about being sensible.

‘Sensible!’ I fire back at you, my voice coming dangerously close to shattering. ‘You want to talk about sensible? Tell me, John, is it sensible to make your family move out of the house they love, all the way across town, to a rickety old house you haven’t lived in since you were ten?’

‘I was happy in that house,’ you say. ‘I think we could be happy in that house again.

I ignore you every time you talk about happiness. Your idea of happiness is like the outline of a circle. My idea of happiness is all the parts huddled together in the middle. We used to complement each other perfectly. Since Freddy, we don’t.

‘It’s only you that wants to move,’ I say. ‘I’m quite happy where I am and I’m certain Freddy doesn’t want to move either. He might not even come with us if we left our house. It’s not sensible, John. It’s just plain selfish.’ This will be the final word in the argument about houses, until the next time you bring it up.

Last Friday the house went up for sale again.

Straight away I knew this had happened. It was all in the way you walked into the kitchen after work. Your voice was going, ‘things are looking up,’ and, ‘it’s getting better all the time,’ but your mouth wasn’t buying any of its bullshit.

You are not subtle when you want something, John. If you don’t ask outright you make it clear with your feet. Once, you stomped round the house so loudly I phoned the Internet company and paid for Super Speed Broadband before you even had the chance to ask for it. Another time I let you get me pregnant though I did not want another baby in the house. Freddy is enough for me. But your hands, and the way they touched me – like tiny cattle prods, pushing, pushing, pushing – made it quite clear he was not enough for you.

Oh, you are definitely not subtle when you want something.

When we first met I could not get enough of this. The way you looked at me as if I was something to be eaten or unpeeled. Now I am tired and wish to be held like a hardboiled egg still in its shell. You do not want me like this. You do not even want to eat me or unpeel me anymore. You only want me to be sensible like the wives of your colleagues and brothers.

‘Why can’t you be sensible about this, Liz?’ you ask, ‘it’s been four years now.’

You mean everything from the house to the way I wear my hair and all my grandmother’s jewelry at once. You mostly mean how I am with Freddy.

You think the house will help with Freddy. You think it will be a new start for the two of us and the baby which you put inside me. These are the out-loud reasons you give me for moving. Inside, I know you are hoping we can leave Freddy behind. You are hoping that the new baby will be Freddy without any of the unfortunate parts. You are not a bad man. You may not even realise that you are thinking these terrible thoughts. But I know you are.

I have seen the Property News circled on your desk and the brochure from the estate agent which you have left by the downstairs toilet, waiting for me to find it there, smirking. Now, we are in a lunch place about to have the house argument again and I am using my ninety seconds of chewing to remind myself not to cause a scene, or swear in front of Freddy. It is important not to upset him. He is always with me but even now, after four years, I still worry that he will tire of me and leave. I am his mother. We should be like magnets (joined at the hip, peas in a pod, Tweedledum and Tweedledee). When he was very little we were inseparable. I wore him bandaged against my chest and when he cried, felt the sob of it in my lungs, like a kind of premonition. I cannot be sure how close we are now. Do magnets lose their pull with time? This is a serious question I am asking you, John. You have always been more scientific than me.

Freddy is not listening to us this afternoon. He is under the table making small mountains of other people’s crumbs. He likes to do this in restaurants. I should stop him. It’s unhygienic. But he tells me it is just like building sandcastles and, as we do not have a beach in this town, or even a sandpit at the park, I say, ‘what the hell, let the child play with other people’s crumbs. There are worse things he could be doing.’

While I am chewing I peek under the table and smile at him. He is using the corner of his hand as a shovel, scraping pizza crusts, breadcrumbs and tiny slivers of grated cheese into a pile. He smiles back at me and gives me a thumbs up. Freddy no longer speaks but I understand what he means. I do telepathy on him with my mind. ‘Do you want to go and live in Gran Gran’s old house?’ I ask him and he replies, ‘no way, José. I like our house just fine.’ I am glad that we can talk to each other without words. It is perfect for situations like this, when my mouth is full.

You do not talk to Freddy any more. At first you did. You were better at the talking than I was. You called him, ‘wee mate,’ and ‘bud.’ You told him he was breaking your heart and also breaking my heart; both our hearts really, because back then our hearts could not be separated out. You were usually crying when you talked to Freddy. The therapist said crying was good and extremely healthy. She also said writing things down was good. Then, after a year, she said that it would be good to start thinking about the future. ‘No thank you,’ I said, but you stopped crying and you stopped writing things down. Then you stopped talking to Freddy altogether. You asked the hairdresser to cut your hair differently. This was how normal people showed the world they were making a new start. I had not seen any of this coming. It was like a car accident.

‘What’s the point in talking to him?’ you asked, ‘it’s not like he hears me. It’s not like he ever replies.’

You wouldn’t even say his name out loud.

It wasn’t just Freddy you stopped speaking to. You barely had anything to say to me: only bills and if we were running low on milk, or bread. We kept acting the part of two people who were leaning against each other. This was easier than telling our friends we were over. We fell asleep side by side in the same bed. When I woke up you were always on the sofa and I’d wonder how long you’d waited before leaving me. You went back to work and I didn’t. You started jogging, stopped drinking, looked up package holidays on the Internet. I didn’t. I hated you for thinking about the future. I couldn’t say this without leaving you. Leaving you was not an option. There was Freddy to consider and I had no money of my own. You were the one with the proper job.

I swallow the chewed up sandwich. It sticks in my throat and I take a mouthful of water to shift it.

‘Freddy’s under the table building Crummy Castles,’ I say. (Crummy Castles is a phrase we came up with years ago, when Freddy was just a toddler and already making piles out of other people’s food. It used to make you smile. Sometimes you even laughed. You are not laughing now).

‘Don’t be cross,’ I say. ‘I know it’s unhygienic. I’ll make him wash his hands before we leave.’

‘Freddy doesn’t want to move house,’ I say.

It’s as if you have been waiting for me to say the third of these sentences. It is like we are reading from a kind of script. Now it is your turn to respond.

‘Freddy’s not under the table,’ you say.

‘He is. I can feel him leaning against my ankles.’

‘Freddy’s dead, Liz,’ you say. You used to say this kindly. Now you say it like a hammer. You are loud. You are very very loud and people at other tables are turning to look at us.

‘Shhh,’ I whisper, ‘I know that Freddy’s dead. We’ve been over this a hundred times. He’s still here though. Look under the table, John. See for yourself.’

You refuse to look. You refuse to admit that our son is still here, building sandcastles and running through the sprinkler in the backyard, watching cartoons on the living room sofa and crawling into bed between us when he cannot sleep. It is easier for you to say he is dead than lift the tablecloth and look at him down there, grinning.

‘Jesus, Liz, you have to give this up. ‘

‘Don’t swear,’ I say, ‘not in front of Freddy.’

We have made a pact not to swear or shout at one another in his presence. It is a pact from the time before, but I have insisted that it still holds. Mostly we manage to keep to the no shouting rule or, if we can’t keep our mouths kind, I put him to bed early and we go at each other as quietly as possible in the kitchen, with the door pulled shut. When we are having our ‘Freddy might hear’ arguments our voices are like water forced down a tube; which is to say, they are strong and insistent, capable of lifting skin.

You are holding your head in your hands now, leaning your elbows on the tablecloth. A smudge of relish has attached itself to the cuff of your shirt. It is brown and a little lumpy. I should reach over and wipe it off with a napkin or at very least tell you it is there. I don’t. It makes me feel superior to look at the stain and know you have not yet noticed it. I’m not sure why I feel like this. It will be me who washes your shirt later and that stain will need bleaching.

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I didn’t ask for a ghost child. It’s not an ideal situation. But you’re still his father. I’m still his mother and I don’t think I have it in me to turn my back on him.’

You don’t reply. Your face is moving up and down slowly inside your hands. At first I think you are chewing a bite of hamburger, but you have no hamburger left to eat. Then I notice that there is water on your plate, puddling through the crumbs and the greased streaks of burger relish. You are crying. This is a new thing. You don’t allow yourself to cry anymore.

I reach across the table, past the menu holder and the condiment bottles. I put my hand on your hand. It is colder than I’d expected. Our hands lying on the table look like the hands of dead people, folded across dead people’s chests. You do not move your hand. In the past you have pulled away when I try to touch you. Today you don’t.

‘Look, John I’ll move,’ I say. ‘If it’s this important to you then sell the house and buy your old one. I’ll go with you, under one condition.’

You raise your head and look straight at me. I can see where the tears have left lines on your cheeks. Your skin is dry these days and there are tiny circles of eczema in the hinged part of your elbows. This is from the stress. (I have stomach cramps and the hair is thin enough on my crown to see scalp pinking below). You are still handsome even when you are crying, even when you have eczema. You are handsome and sad like Eastern European men in movies. You look at me hard. Your eyebrows are all up at the edges as if you are asking me a question.

‘What’s the condition?’ you ask.

‘You need to get Freddy to move with us.’

‘Liz, please.’

‘That’s my only condition.’

‘Freddy’s dead.’

‘That may be, John, but he’s still with us and I’m not moving anywhere without him.’

You take your hand back. You look at the palm of it, then the fingers and the fingernails. Eventually you shrug and say, ‘okay, if that’s what it takes, I’ll ask Freddy if he wants to move with us.’

You look like a man who has been driving a truck all night by himself. You go to stand up, unhooking your jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Do it now,’ I say.

‘Here, in the restaurant?’

‘No time like the present.’

‘People might hear.’

‘People be damned. People don’t have to deal with the kind of shit we have to deal with every day. Ask him right now.’

‘Freddy do you want to move house with us?’ you mumble into the napkin dispenser.

‘He’s not at the table, John. He’s under the table,’ I say. I make a pointing finger and use it to point towards the place where Freddy is making his Crummy Castle beneath the tablecloth. I am kind of enjoying this. I am hating every minute of it.

You swear under your breath, something vaguely Catholic. Then, you lift the edge of the tablecloth and duck your head under the table as if you are looking for a dropped phone.

‘Freddy,’ you say, ‘do you want to move to a new house with us?’ I can hear you through the table and the tablecloth. I can hear your disbelief louder than your words. You are not even using the right voice for children. You are using a voice for people with learning difficulties or grandparents just before they die. 

You lift your head. The tablecloth is caught on the back of your neck so you are wearing it like a shroud, like the Virgin Mary. I reach across the table and gently detach it. You are crying again.

‘Well?’ I ask.

‘He says yes,’ you reply. ‘He says he’ll move house with us.’ (I know this is a lie because Freddy does not say anything anymore, but I haven’t the stomach for another argument.)

Then, the waitress is here beside us. She asks, ‘is everything alright?’ and you say, ‘yes, I just dropped my mobile.’ When she lifts Freddy’s untouched toastie you say, ‘sorry, he’s not that hungry today,’ and I feel like something has come between us again and it is a kind of glue. I do not want to move into the house where you grew up but I will if it means we can be a team again and Freddy can be part of this team too.

‘I think the new house will be good for us,’ I say. This is what you really want to hear. I offer you my hand and you take it. Under the table I am reaching for Freddy’s hand. We are all three joined together in a chain but you cannot see Freddy and Freddy cannot see you.

By the time you get round to bidding on the house it has already gone out of our price range.

You call the estate agent yourself and make a point of saying, ‘I grew up in that house. It’s special to me.’ Special means nothing to the estate agent. He only speaks money and we do not have the extra ten thousand required to outbid our rivals. When you start talking about how important the house is and how it will be a new start for us after a very hard time, it is like you are speaking French and the estate agent cannot understand a word of it. I can hear his silence from the other side of the kitchen. He is trying to make you hang up with his mind.

After you hang up the telephone you go sit in the corner of the kitchen, hunkered down between the fridge and the back door. You hold your head in both your hands as if it is too heavy for your shoulders. I am afraid to touch you. This is not the fear of being hit. It is more like the fear of being stung.

‘Oh well,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t meant to be.’

I make you Magic Pie for dinner. This has been your favourite dinner since you were around eight years old and your mother invented it from leftover sausages and mashed potato. The Magic Pie is a bad idea. It reminds you of the house you grew up in and the way you used to sit at the kitchen table, picking the beans out with a teaspoon so they lasted longer.

You are very angry in a quiet way. Your anger is like clean drinking glasses stacked top to bottom in a tower. It is shrill. I am afraid to brush against your anger. I am afraid to make even the smallest noise in its presence.

Freddy is in the utility room going through the laundry basket for odd socks. He likes to stuff eggs into the toes of each sock. He has been doing this for years now, hoping the heat will hatch a chicken. He knows there is a link between chickens and keeping an egg warm. This is your fault for borrowing that book about farm animals from the library; the one which was intended for adults, not small children. For a city kid, Freddy has always known far too much about livestock. I was afraid he’d turn out to be a vegetarian. This is not the worst thing a person can become but is sometimes awkward at dinner parties. Now he is dead I do not have to worry about this or about keeping him clean or well-slept. Having a ghost child is about fifty percent less work than having a real child. No one told me this at the funeral. It wouldn’t have been appropriate.

I go into the utility room and close the door gently behind me.

‘Daddy’s having a bad day,’ I say, ‘we should probably just stay in here and keep quiet ’til he feels better.’

Freddy smiles at me. He is no different than he was before. I’d always imagined ghosts as pale creatures but he is, if anything, the brightest he’s ever been. He still has the tan lines and freckles from our holiday in France and his hair is almost white blonde with the sun. He is always wearing the same outfit: red shorts and a blue shirt with thin black lines hooping around his belly. He does not wear shoes and his feet are without lines or flaws of any kind. He is like a postcard from our last good holiday. We have not taken any holidays since; we have not even been to the beach. You find the ocean too much water to manage in one place.

Freddy shuffles over to make room for me on the floor. He hands me a sports sock, greying at the toe and heel. I hunker down beside him on the cold lino. It smells of laundry in this room. It always does. I reach for an egg from the carton and carefully palm it into my sock, doubling the cuff over so it cannot slip out. Freddy is doing the same with a black, dress sock. We line our socks up next to each other on a folded over towel. Gently, gently so the shells do not crack. It is a kind of surgery. We are happy to do this without talking. Sometimes my hand catches against Freddy’s hand and it is not cold like the hand of a corpse. It is lukewarm like water coming out of a tap last thing at night.

While we are wrapping our eggs and I am humming a kind of work song, (possibly Elton John, possibly Radiohead), you are in the kitchen ruining everything. You are phoning up the estate agent and saying, ‘look here, if we can’t buy the special house, the one I grew up in, then what’s the closest house to it that we can buy?’

The estate agent is speaking the same language as you now. He says, ‘I understand, sir. It’s a great neighbourhood isn’t it? There are good schools in the area too. For your ten thousand less than the original house I could easily sell you the house next door.’

‘Done,’ you say. You are so desperate to be close to the place you want to live that you do not even ask what sort of a house you are buying.

It will turn out to be a small white house with a swing in the back garden and three bedrooms: one for us, one for the new baby and one which I will call Freddy’s room and you will call the guest room as if our son is an old college friend you have invited to stay for the weekend. You will pace the fence of this house nightly, watching the lights blond off and on in the house where you grew up. You will imagine they are laughing at you.

‘We could have been happy again in that house,’ you will say. The near-miss of this will be your excuse for ignoring the young couple who live in the house now. You will also ignore their dogs and their cats and their happy, future children. You will pretend not to see them in the drive when you are backing the car out. You will throw their undelivered Amazon parcels in the bin, despite what you promised the postman. You will not blow their leaves. You will not lend them milk. You will not trim their side of the hedge, though it is an effort on your part to leave their bit untidy.

You will go through their rubbish at night with a torch; separating scraps of wallpaper, taps, bathroom tiles, lampshades and door handles from the everyday detritus of their life. You will keep these items, carefully labeled in plastic tubs which you will buy from Ikea particularly for this purpose.

‘Someday,’ you will say, ‘those dreadful people will move out. Then we can buy the house I grew up in. Then we can be happy again.’

I will nod towards the Ikea tubs stacked in the corner of the utility room. ‘Are you planning on putting all those handles and windows and rusty kitchen taps back into the house?’ I’ll ask.

You will look at me like we are on the same team again and say, ‘it’s got to be exactly the same as it used to be, Liz.’ You might even rest your hand on the round of my belly where the next baby is starting to swell. This will feel like the kind of bandage which has been put on too tight.

I will stand in the kitchen of our new, white house, beside the sink, where I can clearly see the house you grew up in. Freddy might be here with us, beneath the table or under one of the chairs, because being under things will make him feel safer in the new house.

‘This is not the place I want to be,’ I will say and you will reply, ‘this is not the place I want to be, either.’ If Freddy is still with us he will be saying exactly the same thing from his spot, beneath the table. He won’t be using out-loud words but I will still be able to hear him with my mind.

I will wonder how we got here and how long we’ll have to stay in this place which is like a motorway service station, which is like a not very good compromise, which is like a thing you say at the end of an argument when you are too tired and should not be saying anything at all.

But, all of this is many, many months away. Right now, you are still on the phone with the estate agent, ruining everything.

With one hand I am holding the door closed between us. I do not want you in here with Freddy and me; you, and your stupid trying to move on. I am quite content to stay here. On our side of the door everything is not ruined yet. On our side of the door we are putting eggs inside socks as we often do at the weekend.

We are concentrating. We are quiet in each other’s company. We are brave and happy. Then, you shout through from the kitchen, ‘Liz, come out here. We’ve bought a house.’ Freddy drops the sock he is holding and the egg cracks as it hits the floor. He makes a little noise like air settling in a radiator and a thing comes between us like magnets turning against each other.

Tomorrow morning there will be a shiny mark on the lino where the egg white has crusted over. I will peel it off with the edge of my fingernails. It will come away in flakes. As I am scraping at the egg white I will think, here is a mark which my son has left on this house. It is not a permanent mark. There is nothing to tell his presence after we leave. Then, I will take the edge of a cheese knife and carve the height of him into the doorframe. I will rest the knife’s handle against the bone of his head and wonder if this will be the last time I feel Freddy solid beneath my hand, like a thing I cannot pass through.

From issue #2: spring/summer 2016

About the Author
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts development officer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published by Liberties Press in 2014. Her short story collection, Children’s Children, was published in 2016.