Into Suez Read Free Page A

stopped dead. She wanted Ailsa back now, this minute, more than anything in the world. To embrace her, in every sense.
    ‘And how’s the lovely Poppy?’
    ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Got it in one.’ They’d been on another march against the invasion of Iraq last week, walking hand in hand. In her own time, your child circled back to you and linked arms as an equal. It was a miracle.
    ‘How’s the poetry going, Toph?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’
    Was that an answer? He seemed to think so. Topher nodded his head; started constructing a roll-up, pinching up the tobacco, daintily licking along the paper. His teeth were stained brown. He offered her the joint, between thumb and forefinger. She shook her head. Topher’s poetry, a wild and snarling animal in the sixties, had been tamed into a pussy cat of verbose affectation. But then, what did Nia know? She’d never seen the point of poetry.
    Tim said he’d bring down the box.
    He came crashing down the stairs two at a time and placed a cardboard crate on the table. They all threelooked at it. Nia’s full name was printed in block capitals on each of the four sides. Once it had held Archie’s new-laid free range eggs: ‘Lyth Clee Farm, Best Salop Eggs’. They didn’t sell eggs any more: the few chickens laid enough for the household and friends in Wenlock. Why had Ailsa stored the box with her friend rather than leaving it with Archie? There it had remained in Irene’s attic gathering dust while Nia had aged to nearly her mother’s final age, fifty-seven.
    ‘Right then,’ Nia said. ‘Thanks for that, both of you. I’ll be on my way – leave you guys to get on.’
    ‘Don’t go, Nia,’ said Topher.
    But she made her excuses and left, eyes smarting with Topher’s smoke. She had the feeling she’d been smoked over in her crib, both parents pouring out their toxins.
    Starting the engine, relieved to be on the road, Nia remembered her mother’s intensely secret world. Ailsa lighting up, for instance: she could never kick the habit, though she pretended to have done so. Nia knew that Archie knew. Like a teenager, Ailsa would smoke out of the dormer window, looking over to the mountain, stubbing out the fags in an ashtray she kept in a shoe box. Did she really imagine it was a secret? Nia, prowling her mother’s terrain, would count the lipstick-stained butts in the ashtray, poke at them with her finger. Always a little apart, Mami was a figure in green wellies digging in her market garden. Or crouching in the small barn with the vintage motor bikes she collected and never rode but tinkered with and polished up, humming all the while. Happy with her head in a book, she was always, as Nia put it to herself, over there . Her mother would take off with no notice when the spirit took her, letting herselfslyly out of the far gate where the ground began to sweep up towards the Long Mynd. Sometimes she’d let Les tag along, the younger brother who was ‘no trouble’ and did not disturb her reverie. Nia would see Ailsa framed in the lattice window, striding off to where the turf was emerald in the low western light, becoming a stick figure, as she began to climb the purple Mynd. Always at heart alone.
    Archie would know to let Ailsa be. When Mami went on one of her wanders, he’d lay a hand on Nia’s arm to detain her, diverting her attention to some project of his own, helping with the calves, cleaning Mami’s tools so they’d be shiny for her. Now, driving along the bridleway to Lyth Clee, Nia saw her mother as doubly recessive, walking away into the wilderness of death.
    And Nia, from her earliest days at the farm, would cycle off alone through the mighty landscape, singing at the top of her voice, on her own adventure. But this was a different matter, apparently. Going AWOL, normal for Ailsa, counted as incorrigible naughtiness in Nia.
    She set the box on the floor by the dead grate at Lyth Clee; cut through the tape and string and peered