At the same time, in Aberalaw, Siân was trying to apply foundation, squinting at her reflection in the mirror nailed under the open stairs. It was the only mirror in the house, something James had made at nursery. He’d painted pasta shells gold and silver and glued them messily around the oval frame. Siân cherished everything the kids made, but between the three of them it amounted to fifteen crayon drawings a day. One time she’d tried to slip a stack into the transparent recycling bag, hiding them between two cereal boxes. Immediately she was overwhelmed with guilt. She’d pulled them out again, filing them neatly on the shelf under the coffee table by subject: cats, Daddy, guns and houses.
She squeezed a splodge of the gooey, honey-coloured make-up on to her palm and tilted her head towards the light. She almost didn’t recognize her reflection, had always imagined herself as the blurred, worried-looking image she saw in Niall’s pupils; a doting, fretting mother, clammy red cheeks, a band of sweat at her hairline. But in the mirror she looked close to human. She brushed mascara on her lashes with brisk strokes, stabbing herself in the eyeball when she heard her daughter shriek.
‘Angharad!’ she bellowed, flinging the kitchen door open, the mascara wand still clenched in her fist. Her adrenal glands opened, her heartbeat hopping. ‘Angharad? What’s wrong?’
James was sitting at his plastic drum-kit, pounding on the bass pedal, the force of each blow sending his orange fringe into the air. He was four years old, a sober child. When he was newborn, Siân worried he was mute. He lay in his cot, staring at the Artex ceiling, no reaction to touch or to noise. Infancy brought an occasional scrap of conservative speech.
Angharad was leaning against the edge of the table, slugging cherryade, one of the legs of her sky-blue dungarees rolled up to her knee, an impish glint in her emerald eyes. A robust and outgoing three-year-old. When the social worker called on her at two years, asking about her speech patterns, Angharad pointed at the bar of Dairy Milk poking out of the woman’s satchel. ‘Come on, lady,’ she said, licking her lips, ‘everyone has to share.’ She put the cherryade down on the table and let go of a long burp, stared brazenly at Siân. ‘James punched me,’ she said.
Siân reached for the kitchen roll and broke a sheaf away, dabbing it against her streaming eye. The shock was wearing off, the pain returning, like a hot poker stabbing into her pupil. ‘I think you’re lying again,’ she said, though she couldn’t quite remember the last time her daughter had lied. There were no lies in Siân’s house. There were fibs, like when Auntie Rhiannon came around in a miniskirt that didn’t hide her saggy, orange-peel skin, and they all told her she looked very nice. Siân threw the tissue in the broken pedal bin. ‘I don’t think James hit you,’ she said. ‘He’s been drumming nonstop. I was listening to him. I think you’re after attention again.’ Since Griff had gone to Scotland, Angharad had become abnormally clingy, unwilling to let her mother leave the room.
Siân opened the fridge door and glanced over the contents: Chantenay carrots and florets of broccoli stacked neatly in the glass vegetable box. There were six cans of Coca-Cola lined up on the top shelf, faces forward, a gap the width of a centimetre separating each. She placed the tip of her index finger into one of the lovely spaces and ran it along the edge of the cold aluminium. It gave her an immense sense of satisfaction, doing that, knowing something was in order. She had no control over the mountains of clutter in the rest of the house. However early she got up to polish and organize, Griff and the kids were always a step ahead of her; frenzied mounds of greying underwear on the bedroom floor, rowdy torrents of toys jumping out of their numerous toy-boxes. Secretly, she envied Rhiannon, who had lie-ins on Sundays and went for aromatherapy massages in white-walled beauty parlours. What it was, Siân had never had a massage, and God knows she deserved one.
There was half a bottle of Chardonnay next to the huge carton of skimmed milk, something Rhiannon had left behind. Rhiannon made a quick exit whenever the kids were about because Rhiannon hated kids. Siân poured some of the wine into a beaker and lifted it absently to her mouth. ‘Come in the living room with Mammy and Niall,’ she said, offering Angharad her spare hand.
Angharad leapt to catch it, springing over the tiles as though over some imagined jungle ravine. Siân stood in front of the mirror again and wiped her left eye clean. She reapplied the makeup, sweeping at her lashes with the mascara brush. She popped the top off a brand-new scarlet lipstick.
‘What are you doing, chick?’ Griff said. He was standing in the doorway, a black silhouette blocking the sunlight from the street. He came into the house, scratching his head with the stem of his van key.
Siân stood still, the red lipstick frozen in mid-air. She wasn’t sure how long he’d been there watching her. ‘I’m getting ready,’ she said, ‘for work,’ though she knew it was more than that. She’d woken in the morning with a sudden craving to look like a glamorous mother, like the ones she saw every day in the films. It was pressing on her like an iron. There was a time when every man in Aberalaw noticed her. At eighteen she could stroll across the square in a shift dress and a pair of slingbacks and the boys outside the Pump House turned to stone. Only their eyes moved, like the eyes in old oil paintings. Now she could probably run through the town in her nightdress and no one would bat an eyelid. She was 28, but she could have been 82. On her way home from the school she’d nipped into the chemist on the High Street and bought the lipstick. She nearly didn’t, because it cost four pounds, and a mouth her size needed a lot of lipstick, but the name of the shade was Desire, and that seemed right. ‘Did the van pass the MOT?’ she said. She ran the colour across her lips quickly, like a tick.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘just. I saw Marc in the garage. He was buying a tartan blanket. He said Rhiannon’s organizing a picnic on Saturday. He asked me if you’d bring a few things from the takeaway.’
Siân groaned. She’d be able to get some things, cold curry samosas and pancake rolls, but she’d need to buy the salad and bread rolls. She’d need to sterilize the plastic Tupperware too. ‘Like I haven’t got enough to do,’ she said.
Griff shrugged, paused, said, ‘You don’t usually dress up to go to work, do you?’ He picked Niall up and held him to his chest, breathing in the yeasty smell of his skin. Angharad slipped her hands around Griff’s waist, still vying for some affection. They were a tangle of different-sized limbs, three pairs of the same sea-green eyes, all staring at Siân. She wished the kids had inherited her complexion. They were all freckles and sunburn. In this weather she was always smearing their shoulders with tomato guts because she couldn’t afford factor fifteen lotion. They smelled like jars of chutney. She shrugged. ‘Just wanted to see what I looked like with lipstick on,’ she said.
‘You know what you look like with lipstick on,’ Griff said. He looked at the lipstick on her mouth and then the lipstick smudge on her glass. ‘Is that wine?’ he said.
Siân looked at the amber liquid in the glass. It looked like wine.
She knew it was wine but couldn’t actually remember pouring it. She ran her tongue around her mouth, tasting it for the first time. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s wine.’
He put Niall on the settee and went into the kitchen, huffing as he brushed past Siân. She heard the breath of the kettle as he switched it on. She followed him and stood in the doorway, a deluge of contempt streaming through her waters as she watched him set two mugs on the counter and spoon instant coffee granules into them, the metal clattering against the china. Whilst attempting domestic chores, he made a lot of mess and a lot of noise, deliberately performing