The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  ‘She’s looking down on you,’ said Hilary Hawkins.

  Is she? I thought.

  The vicar said he didn’t know if she was or she wasn’t.

  Nobody knows.

  This is the one thing nobody knows, although we think we know everything.

  We released the dove she loved most, the one with the Z-shaped ruffle of feathers on her head.

  We looked up.

  Then down.

  A tremor started to run up my leg.

  It ran around my body, stopping where it couldn’t move through, there at that place at the base of my spine, where the fear had gathered in a huge knot.

  Everyone was staring at the ground. They couldn’t bear to look. They couldn’t bear, especially, to look at me. To look at my mother. To look at my father. To look at Diego.

  My father was embarrassed by what he’d become.

  So was I.

  I didn’t want to be an object of pity, talked about behind net curtains.

  I didn’t want these people here watching me.

  I didn’t want them to see my fear.

  Or my shaking legs.

  You don’t invite people to funerals; they just come.

  So, at this most private of moments, as your sister is lowered into a hole in the ground, there are people there you didn’t choose and you didn’t invite and you didn’t want.

  Watching you.

  People like Robin Fox, with some girl you’ve never met, in a black dress, and neither of them giving a shit.

  Talking about you afterwards.

  When you wanted to be invisible.

  My mother pushed my father in his wheelchair.

  ‘Let me,’ I said.

  ‘He’s my husband,’ she said.

  So I stepped to one side, and I felt unwelcome, and I remembered my mother saying to Barbara Cook, ‘She’s such a perfect daughter.’

  I don’t measure up, I thought, like my mother.

  My grandmother didn’t come – she said she was coming down with something.

  And down she went.

  Down we all went.

  My mother’s face had sort of imploded inwards. She’d covered it in white powder and chosen a hat with a black veil, which gave me the horrible feeling that her face was dissolving behind it. She said nothing. She gripped the handles of the wheelchair.

  She clenched and she clenched and she gritted and held on. And then, in the silence, she couldn’t stop herself, she let out a long low moan, which felt to me as if it would never stop.

  A long low moan like a cow in calf.

  Cards fell through the letterbox, making the faintest of sounds as they hit the wire bristles of the mat which said WELCOME.

  ‘Thinking of you,’ they said.

  And sometimes they were.

  And sometimes they weren’t.

  I heard a man enquiring about condolence cards in the newsagent by the station.

  ‘I think we’ve run out,’ said a girl chewing gum.

  They would be restocked, she assured him, there’d been a lot of demand for them recently.

  New condolence cards would arrive, which would sit waiting for the next name, right next to the birth cards.

  Lola Alvárez gave me an old book by Francis of Assisi, sepia-coloured and slightly falling apart.

  I leafed through it. All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle, that’s what it said.

  But it wasn’t true – two candles had already been extinguished.

  And before we knew it, another one was.

  The third candle was Graham Cook.

  I ordered a bus made of red roses, and Jim and Barbara put it on his coffin with their own. I was his only friend. His girlfriend. Though they didn’t say that any more. Words are unpredictable. You never know how they’ll be received. And that makes me nervous as I write. But, most of all, I rehearsed all the words I’d ever said to Julia. They gathered in a cloud above my head, and rained on me, constantly, so that I was always covered in a damp film of regret.

  I shouldn’t have said that.

  I should have said this.

  This particular word, phrase, sentence might have stopped her.

  Why, and how, didn’t I notice how bad she was feeling?

  Why didn’t I realise when she handed over the newspaper cutting outside the party shop? When she told me about the hand out at sea?

  It felt like the ultimate and most terrible failure, and it followed me like a ghost.

  Two funerals in fairly quick succession underneath the doves at the church on Higgots Close. I guess that’s what churches are for. The ordinary business of dying.

  Not so many people came to Graham’s funeral, though most of those who were there had never taken a second’s notice of him in his life.

  My grandmother rallied herself for this one.

  ‘It’s not the same with Graham,’ she said.

  ‘They always said he’d die young,’ said my mother, nodding.

  ‘It is the same,’ my father wrote in biro on the spiral pad.

  My mother cried.

  I cried.

  Because Stanley Hope, in all his hopelessness, made me feel more hopeful these days. We took my mother’s scones to the Cooks. Barbara made ginger cake, and my mother reciprocated with coffee and walnut sponge.

  Our grieving was an exchange of cakes through the winter because sometimes the only things you can do in response to big things are small things.

  There aren’t big enough big things.

  Diego and I would go for walks and remember Julia, telling each other new stories about her, ones that the other didn’t know. Then the stories ran out, and there was no more new.

  She was lying in the ground with the worms, her skin was drying to parchment, she would soon be dust.

  I listened to voicemails that I hadn’t deleted.

  And winced at the sound of her undusty voice.

  And wondered where her life had gone – the warm livingness of her.

  I dreamt she was a butterfly.

  I caught her in a net.

  She had wings and her own face.

  And somehow, by mistake, I let her fly out.

  I raced around with the net.

  ‘You’ll never catch her,’ said my mother.

  It was winter.

  The wintriest winter.

  There were no butterflies.

  I read poetry.

  Frantically.

  They looked for me in cafés, in cemeteries, in churches,

  But they didn’t find me.

  They never found me.

  No.

  They never found me.

  Diego went with his family to La Higuera for the Living Nativity – horses on the beach, camels in the square and a real baby in the manger, so they said.

  Parfait

  I watched the Advent celebrations in La Higuera from the roof of my coach with Antonio, Paco and Luis, who’d come over from Tarifa. I liked the way it felt – sitting up there, the four of us, together. On my patch. I had a patch. I had friends.

  Mary and Joseph left Nazareth and started their journey up the beach, crowds of people following them.

  Throughout December, the festivities continued, with real shepherds coming down from the hills with their sheep, robed travellers from the surrounding villages descending on the square in a great brouhaha of eating and drinking for the census, and, by Christmas Eve, Mary was coming into the square on a donkey, and people from all along the coast gathered, cheering in Christmas.

  I’d persuaded the priest to put a Refugee Tree outside the church, where the four of us were standing.

  ‘What if no one comes forward?’ I said to Antonio, suddenly anxious.

  ‘What if people don’t want to pay for the gold stars?’

  ‘What if the whole thing bombs?’

  The huge fir tree towered over the Nativity stable – and just before midnight, I took my place at the microphone, nervous as anything, wa
iting for the crowd to stop talking, not sure what I’d do if they didn’t.

  But they did.

  I invited the people who’d gathered in the square to buy a gold star and name it for a lost loved one. I said there was a star for each one of the refugees who’d drowned at sea this year, and that all donations would be going to those who’d made it, but had lost family, home, pretty much everything, in fact.

  ‘I would be so grateful if you could help,’ I said into the microphone.

  Paco was first in the queue to remember his mother.

  Then Antonio, to remember his.

  Luis bought two stars, but wouldn’t talk about either of them.

  Then everyone else seemed to surge forward: old ladies with sticks, old men in caps, small children running.

  The donation bowl overflowed.

  I flicked the switch.

  The tree trembled with light.

  A baby cried in the stable.

  The new year dawned, and the wise men came on camels.

  Augusta

  Barbara made us fruit cake and mince pies, and my mother and father and I fled to a wet cottage in Wales with pink acrylic curtains which let in the light, where the three of us did jigsaws together, not talking.

  We returned to Willow Crescent, and the exchange of cakes began again between number 1 and number 2.

  Spring came, and we went to Diego and Julia’s maisonette in Higgots Close and mowed the lawn. The coral bark Japanese maple had pinkish green leaves growing on its branches, and underneath it grew circles of daffodils, with their trumpets for announcing extraordinary things and new beginnings. We picked them and put them around the window sills in little jugs.

  Diego moved back in with his parents and resigned from his job. The council said they’d keep it open for him. He told them not to bother.

  We put Julia’s clothes in suitcases and wheeled them round to number 1, as if we were all going on a jolly holiday.

  ‘We must take these to the charity shop,’ I said.

  ‘That would be horrible,’ said my mother. ‘Seeing the neighbours walking around in her clothes.’

  ‘Janice Brown can put them in her plastic sacks and send them on to Africa,’ I said.

  ‘I want to put them back in your wardrobe,’ said my mother, and her voice was breaking, and a little hair above her lip was trembling.

  ‘I really don’t want them in my wardrobe.’

  ‘Then they will stay in the cases,’ said my mother. ‘We don’t need the cases any more.’

  I looked at her.

  I would always need cases.

  I wish I lived in a caravan.

  I could hear my own breathing.

  We put the cases on the landing, and Diego moved the dovecote he’d built for Julia into my parents’ garden.

  I went back to the station and squeezed between the barbed wire. The glade seemed to have shrunk in on itself, all its dimensions had changed and the bluebells were bowed down, staring at the ground.

  I looked at the flat branch where we used to sit together.

  I closed my eyes and walked away.

  I didn’t ever want to come here again.

  I wanted to move on.

  Somehow.

  Somewhere.

  When I got home, Jim and Barbara Cook were drinking tea with my mother and father, and my father was sitting in his wheelchair staring at the doves through the glass doors he’d once smashed with his chair.

  ‘We need to have some new dreams, all of us,’ I said to them. ‘Did you have any dreams when you were young?’

  My mother looked around her, as if she might be able to find some dreams above the sofa.

  ‘Or maybe this was your dream,’ I said. ‘The house.’

  ‘The house and the family,’ said my mother.

  And we found that we couldn’t speak.

  ‘I wanted my own steam train when I was a boy,’ said Jim Cook into the silence, a resistant kind of silence, which made talking much harder than normal, as if you had to push your words through it. ‘Or a barge. I think I got the idea from reading Wind in the Willows. How about you, Augusta?’

  ‘Let me tell you my poem,’ I said.

  My mother looked nervous.

  ‘It’s more of a nursery rhyme, Mum,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Not like those awful poems of yours?’ she said.

  ‘It’s called The Pedlar’s Caravan.’

  After I’d stopped saying the poem, they looked awkward.

  Except Jim Cook didn’t look awkward.

  He looked slightly flushed.

  The poem was my way of broaching the subject.

  That I was going.

  That I couldn’t stay.

  That I wished I lived in a caravan with a horse to drive like the pedlar man.

  That I wished I didn’t live here.

  That I couldn’t live here any longer.

  Parfait

  I sat high up in the hills above Tarifa, and I painted the storks as they arrived in their millions, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa all through the early spring, petering out as the sun got hotter and the days got longer and people started building chiringuito beach bars out of wood and thatch on the sand.

  Summer was coming.

  Augusta

  The daffodils died, and the bluebells died, and I was quietly dying too as summer came and my parents sat staring into the back garden with their cups of tea. I sat staring with them. In the evenings and at weekends. They didn’t like to leave the house any more.

  Sometimes Diego joined us.

  But that didn’t help.

  ‘Your parents are not your responsibility,’ Barbara Cook said to me when she came to see me in the library. ‘You have your life to lead, Augusta, and you always wanted to get away.’

  ‘How can I possibly now?’ I said.

  ‘We need to get your mum and dad out of the house,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling a bit better since I started doing things. And I’ve got an idea. They’re holding a steam fair on Tattershall Common on the fifth of July.’

  ‘That’ll be eight months to the day since she died,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to get them there, whatever it takes,’ she said.

  And she did.

  As we got out of the car, you could smell roasted chestnuts and candy floss. There was an old-fashioned merry-go-round, which I couldn’t bear to think about, with that same organ music and palomino ponies with leather stirrups. There were steam yachts and swing boats in swirling red-and-yellow patterns. Look, Julia, look. We went over to the far side of the fairground which had a sign saying VINTAGE CARAVANS FOR SALE. There were rows of them called Small Southern, Royal Windsor, Proctor, Vosper and Brayshaw. But I had eyes for only one.

  ‘100 years old, living wagon belonging to fairground people in the age of horse-drawn vehicles.’

  It was old and wooden, its paint peeling off, its wheels bare and flaking. Jim Cook and I climbed inside. There was a little card fixed to the wooden slats, giving the caravan’s dimensions – external length 3.9 m, width 2 m, height 3.25 m (excluding mollycroft). Mollycroft – I nearly shrieked with pleasure. A new word! They didn’t come along so often nowadays. Jim was staring at the shabby wooden interior.

  ‘Julia said she’d buy me a gypsy caravan if she ever got rich,’ I said as we climbed down the steps to meet the others.

  Nobody answered.

  It was the sound made by her name.

  Such an ordinary sound all those years.

  But now you had to force yourself to say it.

  For a fraction of a second, I saw her, as she was, and the leaves stopped blowing in the trees, the fair music paused, the birds stilled up above.

  Her dove was on her hand.

  But it all re-started.

  Jim Cook re-started. He made a little stamp with his foot, and then his foot kept on tapping, as if his body was filling with energy, as if he was being unleashed.

  ‘I ran out of money
,’ said the pale man who was selling the caravan. ‘It will be beautiful once it’s restored. It’s sad, but there we are.’

  ‘Tell us about its history,’ said Jim, foot tapping away, as if, if we weren’t careful, he would start involuntarily dancing a jig, like some kind of Victorian gypsy-man.

  ‘Built in 1914. Made by F. J. Thomas of Chertsey, who also made hooplas and roundabouts. Used by travellers. England, Belgium, France, possibly Spain,’ said the pale man gloomily, pulling the plaited end of his beard.

  ‘Spain?’ I said. ‘Whereabouts?’

  He shook his head.

  Gypsies who danced flamenco?

  It was possible.

  Parked up in the shadows of Seville or Córdoba or Granada. Flagons of wine and fires under the stars. When Lorca was still alive.

  ‘Did people live in this caravan?’ I asked.

  ‘Gypsy people,’ said the man. ‘They raised their kids in it. Six of them.’

  ‘I’ll have it,’ said Jim Cook.

  Everyone gasped.

  ‘You and me, Stan,’ Jim said to my father in the wheelchair. ‘Restoration job. That’ll keep our mind off things.’

  The gypsy caravan was delivered on a trailer to the paved drive of number 2, and, after the Cooks’ holiday in August, restoration began.

  It sat looking hopeful.

  My father was commissioned to do the paintwork, from his wheelchair, using his dextrous right hand, and he started studying the intricate patterns in the old photographs which the owner of the caravan had handed over, as well as the watercolour illustration in my W. B. Rands book, peering through a black plastic magnifying glass which was kept on his study desk.

  Parfait

  I phoned Víctor from the roof of the coach to ask what had happened in the election.

  ‘The opposition boycotted the vote because they said it was illegal,’ said Víctor. ‘And Nkurunziza has been restored to power.’

  I noticed how tired Víctor sounded.

  How unlike himself.

  ‘What’s the atmosphere like?’ I said.

  ‘Chaos,’ said Víctor.

  He never said chaos.

  Even when it was.

  ‘Violent?’ I asked.