Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  Charles is sitting at the table, tucking into a plate of bacon, scrambled eggs and fried mushrooms. Somebody says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and Charles looks up and, smiling through a mouthful of fried bread, says, ‘I think I’ll have coffee, please.’ Very gently, I push the door open a bit wider. Vinny is laminating toast with butter and marmalade. She looks more or less the same as usual, which is no surprise.

  The table is covered in a thick white cloth and the Widow’s silver is out, as well as her flower-sprigged china, all reconstituted from its broken pieces. The Widow’s chrome teapot sits as usual in the middle of the table, clean and polished and wearing a newly knitted cosy in brown and yellow. The Widow herself (‘Surprise!’) is sitting next to Vinny, almost as spruce as her teapot, her grey hair in a tidy bun, her spectacles perched on the edge of her nose. She looks in remarkably good shape for one so old – certainly the Widow looks in very good shape for someone who’s dead … this is, as usual, all very confusing. There’s to be no more dying then?

  A hand reaches over the table and takes a piece of toast. I open the door a fraction more to see who the hand belongs to. Gordon. Not the usual careworn Gordon, but a cheerful Gordon, grown slightly plump around the jowls and the waistline as might befit a prosperous grocer. He turns to Charles and says, ‘Sure you don’t want any more bacon, old chap?’ and Charles mumbles through a mouthful of egg, ‘No thanks.’

  I could swear that Charles looks taller, but then he is sitting down so I can’t really be sure. He certainly looks less spotty, less miserable, less idiotic. There’s somebody else at the table, sitting next to Gordon, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Gordon turns to this invisible person and pours them another cup of coffee without asking, or being asked. I can see a hand belonging to this person – pale skin and long, thin fingers that end in scarlet nails.

  I have to push the door open further to see who this person is – too far, for Gordon looks up and says, ‘Hello, old thing, I thought you were never going to wake up. Come and have some breakfast.’

  And the invisible person – who is now visible – says, Darling, come in and sit down. What do you want for breakfast?

  I am a radiant being, I rise up and float for happiness, float round the dining-table, past my brother who has grown almost handsome now, past Vinny and the Widow, rest as lightly as a butterfly on the carpet and kiss Eliza on the cheek. Merry Christmas, darling. On her finger, a ring sparkles, emeralds and diamonds catching lights off the fire in the hearth. This is neither past nor future – this, surely, must be my parallel life, the one where everything goes right. The one where real, right justice prevails (the one with no pain). The one that should only exist in fiction.

  And so the day goes on, every moment another gift unwrapped. ‘What are you so cheerful about?’ Vinny says and I laugh and plant a kiss on her withered-apple cheek and exclaim, ‘Oh, Vinny – I love you!’ and catch Charles’ comic face, cross-eyed with horror.

  The Christmas dinner is everything you would expect from such a day, the goose as fat and succulent as a goose raised by a genuine goosegirl, the roasted potatoes as crisp as crackling on the outside, as soft as clouds on the inside. ‘This is nice apple sauce,’ Gordon says and the Widow replies, ‘From our own apples.’

  Gordon brings in the pudding, flaming like a dragon, and the Widow picks up a silver sauce-boat and says, ‘Now – who’s for rum and butter sauce?’

  When we’re as stuffed as Christmas geese ourselves we play a quiet hand of rummy in the living-room, to the accompaniment of Christmas carols on a record the Widow brings out. Once we’ve begun to digest our dinner we play a noisy game of Racing Demon and then a hilarious game of Charades at which Eliza proves particularly talented. Someone should go and fetch Mrs Baxter, this is just the kind of Christmas she would love.

  It’s dark outside, but inside everything glows with its own inner light – the Widow’s poinsettias, the polished mahogany of the table, the tinsel and Christmas cards, the holly with its red berries, the sprig of mistletoe hanging from the Widow’s chandelier, beneath which Gordon is even at this moment kissing Eliza so fiercely that the Widow can’t resist a little tutting.

  Then it’s time for more food, here is the Widow already with a big wooden tray piled high with mince pies and Christmas cake, turkey sandwiches and sticks of celery in the engraved celery glass. We eat sitting round the fire, then Gordon says, ‘Let’s have a sing-song, eh, Vin?’ and we sing lustily, ‘Early One Morning’, ‘Polly-Wolly-Doodle’ and ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’ to which (miraculously) I find I know all the words.

  Then Gordon is prompted to sing ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ which he does beautifully and follows it up with ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ which brings tears to Eliza’s eyes. We finish up with ‘One Fish Ball’ and ‘Some Folks Do’ and even Vinny is inclined to cheer the merry, merry heart that laughs by night and day. This is pure wish fulfilment. We are an ideal family. We are a happy family. I am living the perfect plot, but what will the ending be like?

  Is this real? Or am I imagining it? And what is the difference? If I imagine a Christmas table groaning under fatted goose and flaming pudding, why isn’t it as real as one that really happened? How is an imagined Christmas different from a remembered one?

  We’ve just embarked on another round of mince pies and pot of tea when a car horn hoots outside. Eliza pulls the curtain at the window aside and says (to me), It’s for you, darling, it’s your boyfriend.

  My boyfriend – what a wonderful phrase. But who will my boyfriend be? ‘Here’s Malcolm,’ Gordon says, striding towards him and shaking his hand as Vinny lets him in. ‘Happy Christmas, Malcolm!’

  ‘Happy Christmas, sir,’ Malcolm Lovat says and goes around the room exchanging the season’s greetings with everyone. He blushes when Eliza murmurs, Happy Christmas, darling, and kisses him full on the lips but Gordon laughs and says, ‘You’ll have to excuse my wife, Malcolm, she actually invented flirting, you know. We’re trying to persuade her to take out the patent and make us lots of money!’

  Oh, that’s not fair, darling, Eliza says, we were standing under the mistletoe – that’s allowed.

  How long can this last? What if it could go on for ever?

  We’re going to visit Malcolm’s parents apparently.

  ‘Your mother too?’ I ask cautiously, trying not to let the knowledge of the past cloud this wonderful present.

  ‘Of course,’ he grins, ‘she’s one of my parents, after all.’

  ‘And she’s quite well?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Perhaps nobody in the world is dead or dying? Perhaps everybody is alive and well – and happy, I muse, as I follow Malcolm out into the hallway. Perhaps there is no sickness or famine or war. A chorus of Goodbyes! echoes behind us and I pause abruptly on the front doorstep – of course! This is heaven. I have died and gone to heaven. I had died in the car crash – so has Malcolm and we’re in heaven where our families have been waiting for us – but then they’d all be dead too. Has everyone died? Everyone in the whole world? Perhaps this is the Day of Judgment and the unnamed dead, those who the flood did and the fire shall – are risen up and reformed from the dust that they have been.

  Isobel?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m coming,’ I reply hastily and pull the front door shut behind me. As I climb into the car I glance back uneasily at the door and its magnificent, ideal, holly wreath – what if I have just shut myself out of heaven? What a ghastly thought. But the engine is running, my handsome boyfriend is waiting for me and so away we go down the drive.

  ‘I thought’, Malcolm grins (this is a more cheerful and carefree Malcolm than I’ve seen of late. Hardly the same person at all, in fact), ‘that we might go for a little spin first? Get some time on our own.’ Does he mean sex? At the very least he must mean kissing surely?

  ‘Yes, why not? Sounds like a good idea to me.’ This is a dream, a very good one, and I may as well make the best of it.

  I catch a g
limpse of Audrey at the front window of Sithean, her hair returned, a cloud of fire around her head. In every window we pass, a Christmas tree displays its cheerful lights. How strange to think that all the houses on the streets of trees are full of happy, not-dead people. Perhaps the turkeys and geese and ducks and chickens on the Christmas tables are also rising up and their bones are knitting together and their flesh is being regurgitated and reforming and their feathers are flying backwards and sticking into their bodies like arrows and any moment now they will fly out of the suburban windows and up into the night sky.

  ‘Isobel?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I was thinking, why don’t we get engaged in the New Year? I mean I know I’m still at med school and everything, and I know you’re only sixteen and you want to go to art college – and there’s no way I would stand in your way, I think women should be more than housewives if they want to and would respect any decision you make …’ (This is definitely, without any shadow of a doubt, a dream.)

  It starts to snow, great flurries that hit the windscreen as if someone had thrown them from a bucket, like pantomime glitter. Hang on, something’s wrong here. ‘Hang on a minute …’

  ‘What?’ Malcolm laughs.

  ‘Are we going to Boscrambe Woods?’

  ‘I thought so, why not?’

  ‘You’re Malcolm Lovat!’ I say to him accusingly. He laughs uproariously. ‘Guilty,’ he says, taking his hands off the wheel and holding them above his head.

  ‘Don’t!’ I yell at him. ‘Don’t do that, we could have an accident. We’re going to have an accident anyway. Don’t you understand? Stop the car!’

  ‘OK, OK, keep your shirt on.’ He stops laughing and says softly, ‘Izzie, what’s the matter?’ But it’s too late – another car is careering down the hill from Boscrambe Woods, skidding helplessly on the ice. I’m dazzled by the headlights, a dozen suns in my eyes. ‘Christ!’ Malcolm Lovat cries and pushes me over to the car door, trying to cover me with his body, trying to push me out, but it’s too late and the other car hits us with an explosive bang, followed by an infernal shrieking and grinding of metal as it shoves us along, off the road and down an embankment.

  An avalanche of white snow seems to envelop the car and we’re plunged into a white world of silence, the silence of absolute deafness. I am doomed to relive this experience again and again, each time the details are different, but the ending is always the same.

  Perhaps this is an ordeal I have been set – perhaps I am Janet to Malcolm Lovat’s Tam Lin. Perhaps the Queen of Elfland – instead of turning him into a snake in my arms, or a lion or a red hot bar of iron – is trying to wrest away her human tithe from me by constantly killing him. Again and again.

  But it’s no enchantment. Flights of invisible angels crowd the car-crash scene waiting impatiently. Malcolm Lovat’s skin is as white as the snow, his lips as blue as ice. They open slowly, an ice hole from which emerges the only words possible. Tears are streaming down my cheeks, freezing as they leave my eyes, hanging on my cheeks like chandelier drops. ‘Help me,’ he says, refusing to be silent. ‘Help me.’ But I am helpless to help, this story must always, always, end badly.

  A pair of warm lips cover my own icy ones. Someone begins to kiss me, but then I’m washed over by the cold, cold wave and dragged down, under the thick-ribbed ice and into the watery world below. Here is an iceberg as big as a cathedral, here are the long-dead bones of ships crushed by pack-ice. Shoals of silver fish shimmer and flicker and whales like great stately barques pass overhead as black shadows.

  I pop up suddenly, like a cork through a hole in the ice. In the arctic world above it is snowing, the grey sky is full of snow. Mother Carey’s chickens flock overhead, polar bears pad softly on the ice, but I don’t stop, I carry on rising upwards, flying over the ice-cap on the top of the world, higher and higher, set free of gravity, set free of everything.

  I am circling the globe of the world, I am visiting the round earth’s imagined corners, the ice-locked northern wastes, the Lithuanian Forests, the great Tibetan Plateau, the cold deserts of Asia and the hot deserts of Arabia, lifted on thermals above the steaming jungles of Africa, skimming above the South China Seas like a flying fish, skating the endless Pacific blue that floods the southern hemisphere, racing the sunset to the Bermudas, down the spine of the Andes, down to the bottom of the world, and more ice, ice so clean and blue that it must have been frozen at the beginning of time when everything was new.

  But I am leaving the earth, higher still, up into the inkiness of night, leaving the earth spinning down below, a blue and green ball. Now I am a new constellation in the night sky, spread across the northern hemisphere, Sagittarius on my left shoulder, Scorpio rising on my right – the metamorphosis of yet another hapless girl into something rich and strange. Blessed Isobel full of light, as bright as a million diamonds, soon I will turn into a supernova and explode in glittering fragments and spread to the edges of the universe. I am as full of ecstasy as an archangel – I am my true self. For a long time …

  … then something dark and painful begins to pull me back to earth. I close my eyes.

  When I open them I am in the fearful place, the heart of the heart of the forest. It isn’t very good in the middle of the wood. Not very good at all. Twigs snap under the weight of unseen feet. Leaves rustle like predatory wings. Invisible claws flex, inches away from my skin. I can smell the mould of the forest floor and the blackness of night. I know I will never find my way out of the forest, never find the path that will take me back to the lit-up windows of the village; the friendly gossip of the Thursday marketplace; the village virgins in their tablecloth-checked dresses, gathered around the well; the handsome rustic youths in their leather jerkins; the brave woodcutter dressed for best in green velvet and silver buckles; the honking of the geese as the goosegirl harries them up the hill.

  The only path I will find will be the one that leads deeper and deeper into the wilderness of fear. I lie down at the foot of a tree and close my eyes. Leaves drift down and cover my face. Small animals scrabble, digging up the soil and burying me, hiding me from the terror of the wood. I cannot open my eyes, my eyelids are the lead lids of coffins, soldered shut, I am buried in the deep in the cold ground, earth stops up my nostrils, gathers in my ears, my mouth is full of sour soil.

  Something is pecking at my skin, someone is digging me up, pulling me up from my earth tomb, into the light. People loom in and out of focus, they seem to be aliens, white and fuzzy – spacemen without faces. They are experimenting on me, poking me with needles and sticking tubes in and out of me, probing me to discover my secrets. They are obsessed with my name, ‘Isobel, Isobel,’ they call out to me softly, urgently – stroking my cheek, pinching the skin on the back of my hand, ‘Isobel, Isobel,’ moving my toes and tapping my wrist, ‘Isobel, Isobel.’ They are trying to make me myself by naming me. But then I will disappear. I keep my eyes closed. Tightly.

  One day, one of them acquires a face, a human face. Soon they all have faces and then they lose their alien nature and turn into nurses in blue-and-white stripes and frilled caps, serious doctors with coats and stethoscopes who swim in and out of focus.

  My head hurts. My head feels as if someone’s blown it up with a bicycle pump. It throbs dangerously, someone has cut the top off my skull and scooped out my brains and replaced them with a bag of tangled and frayed nerves, but I can’t tell anyone because I have been robbed of the power of speech. I don’t want to be in this metallic world of pain, I want to go back to the cold Antarctic and play with the mermaid seals.

  And here is Gordon, leaning over me, whispering in my ear, holding my hand, ‘Isobel, Isobel.’ And Vinny, poker-backed on a hospital chair, saying, ‘Better yet?’ impatiently. ‘Orite?’ Debbie asks, worry creasing her eyes so that they almost disappear. And Eunice and Mrs Primrose with grapes and white chrysanthemums – the flowers of death, Mrs Primrose saying anxiously. ‘Can she hear us, do you suppose?’ and Eunice saying, ‘
Hearing’s the last sense to go.’ And Carmen munching her way through the box of Maltesers she’s brought with her. Mrs Baxter and Audrey, Mrs Baxter dabbing her eyes with a tissue from my locker and Audrey saying, ‘It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it, Izzie?’ and kissing my forehead, her breath smelling of the Parma violets she’s been eating and her rope of hair falling on the sheets. I want to ask about Mr Baxter, is he dead or alive? But my tongue is like a roll of carpet in my mouth and all I can move is an eyelid that flutters and shakes.

  ‘Izzie? Izzie?’ Charles says, his face oddly solemn so that I feel like cracking a joke to make him put on his clown-face.

  ‘There,’ Mrs Baxter beams, ‘you look so much better!’

  ‘Where is Mr Baxter?’ Mrs Baxter’s face clouds over and she gathers herself to say, ‘He’s no longer with us, I’m afraid, Isobel.’

  But where is he?

  Slowly, slowly, everything begins to fall back into shape, like a kaleidoscope at rest, a jigsaw finished. The lips that came and kissed me, that felt like the kiss of death, were really the kiss of life. The first time I was ever kissed by a man must have been by the resuscitating lips of an ambulanceman, fighting to keep me alive. The cosmic journey I took was the world of the comatose.

  The pain is better now that I’m in the soft poppy world of morphia. Everything is very white, the sheets, the walls, the starched nurses’ aprons. There is another white bed in the white room, the sheets are fields of snow, the pillows crackling with ice. On the edge of my field of vision I can see that there is someone in the bed. Nurses come and go and talk to the other patient, their voices boom and fade. ‘Just a minor wee op,’ a nurse says smiling, as if the woman is being given a treat.

  I know this other patient from somewhere. I hear her voice, strange and hypnotic, weaving its way through the white cotton wool that they’ve wrapped my glass body in. Her voice fills in the intervals between nurses and consultant’s rounds, visitors and sleep. After days, possibly weeks, maybe years, I realize that she’s telling me a story. She is my own Scheherazade, she knows everything, she must be the storyteller from the end of the world. But how does it begin? Why it begins, as it must, she says, with the arrival of the baby –