Kay sat by the window, looking down at the bowl, smiling at it. It was worth a lot, she was sure. She shouldn’t really be using it as an ashtray. If she took it on the Antiques Roadshow she would be the last one on, the high value surprise that drew a gasp from the crowd when the expert revealed the price at auction, just for insurance purposes.
She sighed and looked out over the gray city. Castlemilk was built on a hillside that afforded a view of the whole of Glasgow. In any other city that view would have been reserved for the rich, the Cathkin hillside would be scattered with big houses and fancy gardens, but not here. She never really understood that. Too far out of the town maybe.
The city looked gray from the window, street lights were starting to blink on, dirty yellow, but maybe it wasn’t the city that was gray. The kitchen window was gray, a sheen of dirt she could never wash off because it was on the outside of the glass on a window that didn’t open far enough. She often looked up to the windows as she hurried up the hill from the bus stop and saw the matte coating on the glass and wondered at windows that could never be washed. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? On a good day it was an oversight by the planners. On a bad day they hated the would-be residents, thought them filthy and low and beneath having clean windows, begrudged them the greatest view in the whole city.
She tapped the ash from her cigarette, slow, tap-tap-tap, punctuation points in a conversation with an invisible adversary across the table. Two seats, one on either side of the table top. Five of them in the house and table space for two.
She took a deep draw of her cigarette, felt it scratch down her throat and fill her lungs, and smiled to herself, realizing that it was the one. Every day, twenty cigarettes a day, six, maybe seven, draws in each and she only ever enjoyed one of them. One draw out of a hundred and twenty every day. It was a smoking cessation exercise, to show her how little she enjoyed smoking and how pointless it was. It wasn’t working. She just enjoyed that one draw all the more for knowing how rare it was. Tap-tap-tap. She smiled at the ashtray. Tap-tap. A bit of burning red tobacco fell off and she stopped, rolled the tip into a neat little cone around the gilded silver slope.
The doors were hanging off the cupboards, the chipboard worktop swollen with water where the plastic had come off. They’d been promised a new kitchen, had been down to the housing office and picked out the worktop and doors from a choice of three, but that was months ago.
Kay heard a bedroom door open in the hall. Marie stepped over to the kitchen, looking away from Kay, as if she happened to be passing. At thirteen, Marie was so self-conscious she was almost housebound. She was wearing yet more nail varnish, blue this time, and a matching hair band. Her cheeks shone, pink circles on her chubby face.
“Have you got make-up on, pet?”
Marie was suddenly, inexplicably embarrassed. “Shut up.” And she stormed back into her bedroom.
Kay bit her lip to stop herself laughing. Marie once cried with shame because Kay said she liked Ribena in front of a boy from her class.
“Darlin’,” she shouted, “we’ve crisps.”
Marie hesitated, strode back across the hall with her head down, looking away from her mother. Feeling blindly on the worktop she found the multipack somehow, took out a packet of salt and vinegar.
“Like your nail varnish.”
Marie glared at her. “Well, then, I don’t.”
Kay sighed, “Give us a fucking break, Marie. Or my crisps back.”
Marie resisted a laugh, snorting through her nose with a bit of snotty follow-through. Shocked, she touched her wet top lip and looked at her mother accusingly. “For God’s sake.”
She left in a huff, remembering to take the crisps with her.
Kay took another draw. A bad one, sour, sore. One of the ones that made her wish she didn’t smoke.
“Where’s my trainers?” Joe was standing in the doorway, his skinny frame in silhouette. “Is that crisps?”
Without waiting for an answer he padded into the gloomy kitchen, rummaged in the multipack bag and pulled out two packets of cheese and onion.
“ONE!”
He dropped one packet on the counter. “Where’s my trainers?”
“Why don’t you look with your eyes.”
“Because it’s easier to look with my mum.” He opened the packet of crisps, took some out and shoved them into his mouth.
Joe was charming, that was his trouble; he charmed people into doing things for him all the time. Kay didn’t want to encourage it. “Fuck off, I’m having a menopause.”
“Seriously, where’s my trainers?”
She turned back to the filthy window.
“Mum?”
She slumped over the table, defeated. “Where did you take them off?”
“At the door.”
“Have you looked at the door?”
“No. Will I?”
She didn’t answer.
He turned and looked at the laundry bin that sat behind the front door. She kept it there to put in all the shit they dropped. It was clear plastic and she could see the trainers smashed into the side.
He spotted them too, grunted, and padded over to the bin.
He’d be out for hours now. He was that age where standing on a street corner was irresistible, fascinating, the company of his pals hypnotic. Kay remembered that herself. It wasn’t even that far in the past, four kids ago, but still not beyond her memory to recall the excitement of it, the pull of it. Hormones. Now she had four kids, all steps and stairs, all of them hitting their teens at the same time. They were all bouncing off the walls.
“Hey,” Joe called to her from the hall. She looked and found him sitting on the floor, pulling his trainers on, legs sprawled.
“What?”
“You look fed up sitting there in the dark.”
Blindsided by his charm yet again, she brightened. “I’m all right, son. Just chilling.”
“Sure? I’ll bring you in a bag of chips if ye like.”
“Nah, I’m all right.”
She watched him pull his jacket out of the laundry bin. He slipped it on in one of his improbable moments of grace, and opened the front door, stepping out to the yellow gloom on the landing, leaving a puff of cold drafting through the hall.
She liked Joe best. It was wrong to have favorites but she did. They were all teenagers but he was the only one who noticed she had feelings. He tried to cheer her up sometimes.
Kay took another draw. It was getting dark outside the windows but she couldn’t be bothered getting up to put the light on, so she sat in the gathering gloom, enjoying the quiet pause before starting the tea and the next round of chores. Down on the street she heard the noise of boys shouting and running, the leather slap of a football. She imagined an audience of girls clustered to the side of the concrete. Out beyond that she saw the city, the barrier of tall flats in the Gorbals, the bright city center and the jagged tower of the university.
The light from the hall caught the side of the ashtray, the red enamel petals glinting, catching the snake of coiled silver wire that master craftsman’s hands had formed in Moscow. She sighed, savoring the colors. Gustav Klingert—she’d checked the hallmark on the internet; 1880-ish.
Kay sat back to see it better. It was a small bowl, tucked in tight around the rim. The inside was gilded silver, slightly worn so that the watery sheen of the cold silver showed through the warm glow of gold. On the outside the enamel background was yellow, with red flowers and white and blue leaves picked out in wire. A small line of blue dots articulated the rim and base.
She reached forward and touched it with her fingertip, feeling the rims of the twisted wire around the little pools of luminous enamel. It was the red that caught her the most. The red enamel was clear, transparent, like the inside of a fruit jelly. She didn’t even know how to say the name of the style, Ros-tov fin-ift. She liked that it was unpronounceable. It made it feel as if it came from another universe, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
It was not for the likes of her at all. But the patterns of Russian enameling came from peasant embroidery. Poor women had designed those patterns and the color schemes, they sewed them onto their own tablecloths and the hems of their clothes, working hard in cold, dark houses, pricking their fingers. They were poor women with a deep aching need for beauty to keep them moving through the dark, make them feel alive.
And then, hundreds of years later, jewelers took their designs and made them into expensive things like this bowl, clasps for belts, tea caddies when tea was a luxury, items so expensive the sewing women could never afford them. She was one of those women, those sewing women, sitting in the gloom, and the intricate patterns spoke to her of the beauty to be made from nothing, of the importance of seeing the beauty in things and appreciating it, even through a dirty window.
Kay knew that of all the people who had owned or used or seen this bowl in the last one hundred and thirty years, none of them had loved it as much as she had, stroked it in the long dark nights when she couldn’t sleep, tracing the little coils of silver wire snaking through the pools of brilliant color.