Common decency, p.1
Common Decency, page 1
Susannah Dickey
* * *
COMMON DECENCY
Contents
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Lily
Siobhán
Epilogue: Caroline
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Susannah Dickey was born in Belfast and grew up in Derry. She is the author of three poetry pamphlets: I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018) and bloodthirsty for marriage (2020). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry London, The Dublin Review and The White Review, and her fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Tennis Lessons, was published in July 2020. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing and lives in London.
Also by Susannah Dickey
TENNIS LESSONS
For S.D.
‘Life becomes actual only when it is identified with ourselves.’
– William Carlos Williams
‘As if what we did next were given with the mere act of naming. As if there were only one thing called “talking about a thing”. Whereas in fact we do the most various things with our sentences.’
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
‘And taking a look at the long-range forecast, continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold.’
– Dinosaurs (American sitcom, 1991–4)
Lily
She leaves her flat at 3.30 p.m. and idles to the supermarket around the corner. The day is giving off its last vestiges of bright and the Belfast sky is like Peach Melba. A person in a floral dress passes her on the footpath, taking wide, load-bearing steps to accommodate an enormous box of Heineken. In the supermarket she buys a packet of rectangular caramel shortbread. Each comes in a pink paper casing – they look like artisanal sex toys. She takes them home and eats them in bed. She feels the sun go down.
Siobhán
She tries for a prurient whisper, conjuring mental images of Scandinavian women from crime dramas for inspiration. She imagines herself as elusive and leggy; she has poreless skin, possibly a motorcycle.
‘Fuck me,’ she says, huskily. He takes a breath.
‘I will,’ he says, then pauses. ‘In a minute.’ His expression is tortured. She rolls on to her back and stares at the ceiling.
Lily
She was born with unusually long fingernails. ‘You were this soft ball of a thing, with these sudden sharp surprises – like finding bits of eggshell in your omelette,’ her mother said once. A nurse offered to trim them, but she declined. ‘I liked that you were born capable of inflicting damage,’ she said. ‘In my post-labour fugue state it made me less anxious, less worried about my own competency.’
She presses one thumbnail into the skin behind the other until red appears under the nail’s crescent, like a slow geyser of tomato juice. She peels the nails off, one by one, then arranges them in a spherical cluster on the bedsheet in front of her. They look like an astrolabe. When she’s finished she deposits them into a mug. The empty plastic box from the shortbreads sits on the counter, the shed pink skins susurrating against one another as she flips the pages of a calendar. It is the first Saturday in February, and her mother has been dead for seven months.
Earlier, on her way in from the supermarket, she encountered Siobhán in the foyer of their building. Siobhán was standing by the noticeboard, which looks like a steamrollered tennis ball. She was staring fixedly at her phone, ignoring the flyer for the dehumidifier for sale, the notice of roadworks scheduled for March and the handwritten, cloying request for people to stop overfilling the bins. She had a shopping bag on the floor next to her, bottles of red wine visible inside. Her feet were positioned in a stance of indecipherable intent, as though in the next moment she was as likely to sit down as she was to perform an emergency tracheotomy.
Lily pulled the front door closed behind her and strode past, steeling herself for a relaxed interaction. She’d been preparing for this moment. At the entrance to the stairwell she turned.
‘Are you coming this way?’ she asked. She hadn’t spoken to anyone that day, and her voice crackled like timber, expanding in the heat. Siobhán looked up, frowning, and Lily blushed from bungling her delivery.
‘Sorry?’ Siobhán said.
Lily tried to avoid sounding impatient. Siobhán ought not to be held accountable for her malfunctions.
‘Upstairs,’ she said, more clearly this time. ‘Are you coming upstairs?’ She jiggled the door a little, to emphasize the relative time-sensitivity of the question. Siobhán looked at the door as though it was her first time seeing a door.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yeah, sorry, in a sec. You go ahead.’
‘I can wait,’ Lily said.
‘Oh,’ Siobhán said again. She put her phone in her pocket and picked up the shopping. The carrier bag clinked. ‘Thanks,’ she said, as she reached out to assume the weight of the door.
‘That’s all right,’ Lily said. She smiled widely. Siobhán smiled back. A pause as they showed their teeth to each other.
‘Do you live in the building?’ Siobhán said.
The building is officially listed as Benson Tower, but the first E and the second O from the signage have been missing for as long as Lily has lived there. The remaining letters are stuck, tarnished and worn, above the doorway, sandwiching the faint echoes of their former colleagues and listing slightly, as though with survivor’s guilt. They spell out Bnson Twer. Her mother would have liked this – she liked playing with the phonetics of acronyms, typos, numerals. MRSA was ‘Morrissey’; the IV full of chemicals was her ‘four’.
The foyer is tiled with black and white and the occasional aberrant triangle of matte grey where they’ve chipped to reveal the grout. There are burgundy-coloured mailboxes with patinas around their keyholes and two thick-trunked artificial ficus plants in orange-brown planters. The colour scheme is like standing in a Tupperware lunchbox that once, however briefly, housed leftover Bolognese.
The day before she moved in, when she was still sleeping in a sleeping bag on the undressed mattress of her mother’s erstwhile bed, she brought two final suitcases’ worth of saucepans and towels and Pyrex dishes and long-handled rubber spoons to Bnson Twer. She slid two postcards into her postbox and tried to forget having done so. The next day, after trotting upstairs, opening the windows and boiling the kettle, she returned to the postbox with her newly acquired key. There were two postcards waiting for her, one a print of Brian Ballard’s Flower and Skull, the other a print of John Luke’s The Three Dancers. In one, thick brushstrokes in gloomy blues and greys capture light landing on bone and porcelain. Six angular blooms in coral and umber sit in a vase alongside, perforating the dusk. In the other, three people balance on their toes and cock their arms in a sloping, layered valley. The precarious balancing of the triumvirate seems to imply something about their dependences upon one another. She stared at the A6 Luke print and felt herself transposed into its language; she was flat and rampant on the matte background of her new existence.
On the back of the Ballard postcard it said, ‘Congratulations on your new job,’ and on the back of the Luke, ‘Welcome to your new home.’ Both messages were written in her handwriting. She took them upstairs and secured them to the fridge with a magnet. She made a cup of tea and suppressed the reflex to call out, ‘You want tea?’
She had actually met Siobhán three times already. The first time, she had approached her from behind. Siobhán was standing in the doorway of the building, looking out. Lily had at that point already lurked for too long in the stairwell, having watched Siobhán’s head bob down and around each landing, not wanting to risk the awkwardness of Siobhán turning around, spotting Lily looming above her like a buzzard over some carrion, of them having to exchange small talk from different vantage points. In the foyer, there was nowhere to go but forward, so she proceeded quietly, and then they were side by side, watching the December rain and the cars and the sporadic people, stationary and mobile. Siobhán’s head came up to Lily’s chin, and Lily tried to draw her arms into her torso to seem smaller.
‘It’s raining,’ Lily said, and Siobhán said, ‘Not even the rain has such small hands.’ She laughed brusquely, then drew her scarf over her head – it was thin, silky, maroon – and walked out. Her tan-coloured ankle boots had wide openings and no zips, and Lily wondered if they would fill with water, like novelty flowerpots.
The second time they met was unavoidably in the stairwell. Lily was descending, Siobhán ascending. Before Siobhán looked up Lily watched the top of her head growing steadily in her field of vision, her centre pa rting and thick hair that fell in waves, its thickness such that it sat up from her scalp in a plume. Lily wondered if she ever worried about losing it, if she considered her beauty a fragile thing to be clung to as it risked erosion by time. She wondered if Siobhán worried about the precariousness of good things, and she felt an impulse to tell Siobhán about the time she had sinusitis for five days; how she sipped Sprite through a straw and whimpered at intervals like a lame sheep; how when it finally dissipated she vowed to never take a painless face for granted. She retreated into the banister and allowed Siobhán to pass. Her scarf this time had an art deco print, geometric zigzags overlaid with gold-beige deltas that matched the coppery strands of hair around her face. Without looking up, eyes fixed on her phone, Siobhán intoned, ‘Thanks,’ to Lily’s feet. Lily glanced into the canvas tote bag suspended by one strap from Siobhán’s shoulder – it was filled with small, pale blue exercise books. Lily said, ‘No problem,’ and once past Siobhán said, ‘They could do with fixing that, couldn’t they?’ and gestured vaguely with her free hand at the flickering tube of electrical light protruding from the wall. Lily nodded, but Siobhán wasn’t looking. ‘Maybe I’ll email the estate agents,’ she muttered, then walked on. The bulb is still flickering, Morse-coding something indecipherable.
The third time they met was last week. Siobhán was trying to forcibly inject her key into the crusty lock of her postbox. Lily wanted to tell her that sometimes it helps to jerk it once in an anticlockwise direction, then once in a clockwise, like starting a car. She said nothing. One of the ficus plants had a Santa hat perched on top – a lingering side effect of December. ‘The Venn diagram of days before Christmas and days after Christmas is a circle,’ her mother said once.
Siobhán rattled the key, swearing under her breath, then gave up. She began searching in her bag, and without looking up propelled herself forward. Her shoulder collided with Lily’s chest and Lily made an oooft noise. ‘Oh God, sorry,’ Siobhán said. Lily said, ‘That’s all right,’ and Siobhán, still fixated on her bag, muttered, ‘One of those days,’ then performed an apologetic shrug with her shoulders. She disappeared into the stairwell and Lily stood, watching the spaces she no longer occupied.
It was in this moment that an idea began to assemble itself in the fraying distortion of her mind – the idea that Siobhán could help her. Siobhán’s concurrence with her surroundings, the ease with which even her transgressions and apologies seemed to occur, the way their innocuous interactions had almost managed, for a few, fleeting instances, to concretize Lily. Although still an ersatz person, for a moment she felt realer. Her blood, which had become mulchy and frozen, seemed capable of thawing. She went to Siobhán’s postbox that wouldn’t open and forcibly extricated the envelope that was half in, half out of the slot. She opened it. It was from the Student Loan Company, and Lily decided that this was the first thing she could do for Siobhán: remove this gloomy portent of debt. She took the letter upstairs and hid it in her wardrobe. She spent the rest of the week feeling like this was a beginning, as if the vapour of grief could maybe be compressed, made to share her mind with something else.
‘Do you live in the building?’ Siobhán said as they exchanged the stairwell door. For a moment Lily said nothing. Clearly, Siobhán thought they were meeting for the first time. Lily’s cheeks went hot. To ascribe undue weight to an interaction is so much more shameful than to have forgotten the interaction, she realized. Forgetfulness is the luxury of a rich existence. She wanted to redress the balance. She wanted to say, ‘We’ve actually met multiple times,’ and for Siobhán to say, ‘I’m so sorry it’s just—’, which Lily could interrupt with, ‘Personal occupation doesn’t absolve you of poor manners.’ She wanted Siobhán to blush, then apologize profusely, till her apologies reached the ceiling of their intensity, wilted under their own mass.
She said nothing, though, and nodded, and Siobhán said, ‘Me too. See you about.’ She commenced climbing the stairs, and Lily once again hung back, watching the muscles in Siobhán’s legs tauten and slacken in her tights as she ascended. Back in her flat, she took the caramel shortbreads from her bag and ate them without tasting.
‘Common decency’ was a phrase her mother had used often. She had been a Biology teacher at one of Derry’s more pernicious secondary schools, and after an especially challenging day she was prone to say that common decency ought to be taught to teenagers, rather than cellular meiosis. Lily wasn’t sure what impact this model would have had upon her job – if all disciplines would get subsumed into a more generalized intent to bestow good manners, or if it was just Biology. She forgot to ask.
One night, years ago, when Lily was a teenager, her mother sat on the blue, sausagey sofa in the living room, eating yoghurt-covered raisins. Lily had been in the park, pulling blackberries off bushes in anticipation of jam. Each removal involved the same stretching out of the floricane, then its pinging back as the fruit came loose. As the incorrigible evening oozed in she sat on a swing and ate some. There were three boys lolling on the climbing frame, and the low-slungness of their jeans made them look like walruses. Lily heard one say, ‘Watch this,’ and a moment later a pebble bit her on the shin. She looked up and they averted their eyes, laughing. A moment later another pebble landed next to her feet and she heard the first boy say, ‘Nice shot, spastic,’ and another respond, ‘Fuck off.’ A third stone hit her on the hand and she dropped the box of blackberries. They bounced on to the spongy black terrain – that material ubiquitous in children’s play parks. The boys laughed again, and when she looked up they held her gaze, their expressions goading. She bent over and salvaged a few of the berries, sad and pearlescent on the ground. She got up and left, the skin on her leg stinging.
She spent the drive home imagining progressively more violent methods of retaliation. Her mother was on the sofa when she got in, dressed in her greying T-shirt that had a drawing of breasts on it in an anatomically incorrect place. She had a stack of exams on her lap and a red biro in her hand, the raisins next to her. Lily relayed some of her revenge fantasies: knotted electrical wire and garrotes and barrels of water. Her mother placed a hand on her knee and rubbed, saying nothing for a moment. Finally she said, ‘Revenge is like cleaning your bathroom to impress a ghost.’
Lily sighed and put her fingers to her temple. ‘What does that even mean?’ she said. This was a common inversion of their prescribed dynamic – Lily as exasperated guardian, her mother boisterous theorist.
‘Ghosts don’t care if there’s hair in the drain,’ her mother said. Lily frowned at her, then took a raisin, chewed, contemplative.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Wait, no. Wait – what?’
‘Damn,’ her mother said. ‘I thought maybe I’d got away with it.’
‘No,’ Lily said. ‘Explain.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling my way through the thought.’ There was a companionable silence, then: ‘Maybe people perceive revenge differently from cruelty, because it’s in retaliation to a wrong, but actually both are teleological. Perhaps cruelty isn’t altered by its motivating factor. Perhaps revenge is just cruelty with a hat on.’
‘Oh.’
‘You get it?’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘What?’
‘I think you just reinvented, through gross overcomplication, the very familiar concept of “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”’
Her mother laughed.
‘Plus,’ Lily said.
‘What?’
‘Maybe it’s easy to frame revenge that way if you have the luxury of neutrality. Maybe revenge and cruelty only seem synonymous—’
‘Good word.’
‘Shut up. I’m just saying,’ Lily said, ‘seems like this perspective might be enabled by a position of lofty detachment.’
Her mother laughed again.
‘And also,’ Lily said, ‘what does any of this have to do with ghosts?’
‘I feel silly postulating, now you’ve put me so firmly in my place.’
