Wolves by Simon Ings Page A

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    My feet were tangled up in the woollen web. Women dragged me from Mum’s lair and the web followed me, tugging the branches towards me, shredding leaves into a green rain. Hands grabbed for me, but I was too heavy for them. Down I went.
    ‘What did you do?’ Hands tilted my head back. Blood ran into the back of my mouth. Through a pink mist, figures flitted back and forth. My feet were entangled. I couldn’t get them free.
    ‘Now calm down,’ someone snapped, as to a child.
    Dad brought home the remains of Mum’s camping kit. The tent he’d bought her had vanished. Her sleeping bag was damp and smelly and there were green stains on it that would not lift. I laid the bag across the lawn to dry. Her aluminium cooker was more or less complete. I set the pieces out in a row along the conservatory steps and cleaned each in turn with soapy water and a wire brush. Just above me, behind glass doors, a serviceman wandered to and fro, eyes hidden behind black glasses. He put me in mind of an animal kept too long in a cage. Dad watched him from his desk, a dispassionate lion tamer.
    That evening Dad and I drove to the hospital where Mum lay recuperating from a lung infection. The hospital was built on a chalk hill overlooking the port. Old barracks and defensive structures had been torn down and ground under to make room for the hospital which, from the sea, had all the appearance of a bigger, better fortification.
    Dad went inside, leaving me to wander round the weedy paths, the flights of cracked concrete steps, the pot-holed roads. You needed first gear to reach the car park here, so there was this constant whine in the air – a common mechanical labour renewed again and again and again. In the dusty banks and verges that bordered every metal-railed stairway, I found nubs and flecks of red-pink brick – remains of the old fortress – and in between were thready weeds with bright blue, pink and yellow flowers.
    From this high vantage, I could see how the port city had been constructed over a network of mudflats and channels. In between there were islands, but they were bridged over in too many places to really count as islands any more. In fact the whole estuary was so heavily built upon that roads and waterways blended in the eye, and it took an effort to pick them apart. I looked at my watch. Dad was taking a long time. I went inside to look for him.
    I hadn’t seen Mum since I’d tried to visit her incognito in the camp. Dad had warned me that the sight of me would upset her, but my nose was already healed, more or less. If Dad had let me, it would have been the work of a moment for me to hide the bruising with make-up.
    The hospital floor was a mottled red vinyl that looked as though it had been poured and left to set. Every few yards, at a stairwell or junction, there was a vending machine. I tried to get a carton of drink. I put in my money, typed the code. The metal coil shuddered, turned, stuck. There was a notice, red capitals on white self-stick plastic, telling me not to rock the machine, which anyway didn’t help and set off an alarm that everybody ignored.
    Mum’s ward had this easy to miss open-plan arrangement – impossible to say where the corridor left off and the ward began. Mum was alone, lying with her back to me. I watched her a while, not saying anything, then I went away and looked for some magazines to flick through. My emotions were so mixed up, my attention so fractured, the articles might as well have been written in a foreign language.
    Dad turned up eventually, approaching from the wrong direction.
    ‘Where’ve you been?’
    Dad told me Mum was ‘on the mend’.
    ‘When’s she coming home?’
    ‘Have you been in to see her?’
    ‘She was sleeping.’ Of course, she might not have been sleeping at all. She could have been just lying there.
    I wanted to go see her again but Dad was keen to get going. ‘School tomorrow.’ As though my bedtime were any different from his.
    It