The Little Death

by Sarah Till

  The DI came in and told me that as the bodies hadn’t been located, all that was in the corn chute was clothes and belongings, still formally unidentified, the search area would be widened. They would search further up the moor, and David’s car was being examined to see if he had moved the bodies. The question that hung on my lips was a rerun of Polly’s: what will happen if you don’t find a body? Will David be freed? Will Uncle Trevor and Aunty Jean, and Samantha’s parents join the ranks of thousands of families whose children go missing, and are never found? Grief without a body. Polly’s cycle of searching would start again, for other families.

  Gabriel’s mother and father arrived the day before I left, shaking hands stiffly with me, unable to look me in the eye, some uncertainly around my part in his death so obviously playing in their minds. They hugged, Sarah, who had dressed for the occasion in a Laura Ashley smock and red velvet pumps, her long hair flowing behind her. I was surplus to requirements. I didn’t have their grandchild.

  Somewhere, deep down in my soul, I had hoped beyond hope that Gabriel had planted himself inside me, a child made with real love, real want, a child that would be loved forever. But that morning brought the warm flush of blood and a slight cramp, and I knew it wasn’t to be.

  Later that day, I moved the hives to the side of the moor and opened up the nesting boxes. I couldn’t stay, it was impossible, and my research would remain unfinished. The bees and the birds would go on as if nothing had happened, they didn’t need me. I sat on the damp tufts of scrub on the edge of the heather and mourned the loss of years of my life. Why had I ever been scared of the moor? Why had I been so scared of something that happened in the past? It held such freedom. I sighed and thought that life was strange. My research, in fact, my whole existence, had heavily relied on asking why.

  Aetiology involves assigning causation and, in my world, everything must have a reason. The dredging up of facts and truths about all kinds of effects, then hanging a process on it, ever to remain replicable and repeatable. This is how it’s done. My earlier work on bees had fitted into this, with a simple cause and effect process; after all, bees collect pollen and nectar, build a hive, and make honey. Similarly with the birds. They make a nest, court, migrate, reproduce, a fairly obvious procedure in order to propagate the species. Seeing is believing.

  It was becoming more and more clear that life wasn’t like that. The little unexplainable foibles of nature. The deviation from the stated procedure without obvious rhyme or reason, like the cuckoo bee, the cuckoo. The heath fires and the climate changes that affect the heather, none of them make immediate sense. They were complex, containing lots of different pieces that. If one or two failed, the whole lot would crumble. It stuck me that morning that I had perhaps been seeking only the altruistic line, the goodness in everything; life clearly wasn’t like that.

  I sat for hours, until it began to rain, trying to find an example of altruism, and found none. Nor was there a reason for everything, as I had naively thought. Polly was right. Some things have no answers. It was almost as if each layer of life was like tiny petals unfolding, each one revealing something more challenging, but willing you to go on. No matter what. And that was what I was going to do.

  I’d packed a case and left for Polly’s. Just before I went, I took the baby clothes from the bulging drawer in Gabriel’s room and placed them ever so gently in a cardboard box. Clothes for my baby. My reason for living, carrying on with David, my hope for the future. I tie it with a yellow ribbon and make a big bow. I put the scan pictures in my handbag, evidence that I once was nearly a mother, but not quite. Not yet. I cross the moor, to Sarah’s house, and I see Gabriel’s parents sitting in Sarah’s lounge. I leave the box in the doorstep, no need for words, a gift to my lover’s child.

  I didn’t know what to expect, a packed-up house, empty and unwelcoming. When I turned the key in the lock that day, I felt like I had come home. Polly had left the television on, and, apart from the boxes, everything was exactly how she had described it. It was almost as if I’d walked back into the nineteen sixties, with a faux Jackson Pollock Formica table and a big oak sideboard in the same room. The wallpaper was completely browned with nicotine staining, and the carpet was dusty with ash. A pile of cigarette dimps lay in the middle of the table in a Fray Bentos Pie tin. I panicked for a moment, wondering if Polly had changed her mind and would walk in at any moment. I heard a rustling in the kitchen and found six birds hopping on the stainless-steel draining board, pecking at a large pile of crackers, the kitchen window open just enough. I tried the back door and it was open. Just in case Jimmy came back.

  All the boxes were clearly labelled, charity shop, second hand books, Manchester United Football Club. I opened the corrugated cardboard slightly and saw the pendants and posters, each one marked in thick black pencil. Col. They’d lived here, Polly and Colin. I piled the boxes near the door and switched on the electric fire. The birds left while I made a cup of tea, loitering on the windowsill to see if I was good or bad, and then a cheeky one hopping back in. It made me smile, something that was scarce and painful, and I stood watching them for a long time.

  Later on, I looked in the box. It was marked Gabriel Smythe, but it was mine now. He was gone and the box was mine. I’m tearful; she’d told him to help me, and this was how he could do that. I knew for sure when I saw that Polly had kept detailed notes of the moor and its conditions for the past ten years. Complete with intricate drawings of birds, insects and animals, which increased in skill as the years progress, Polly had built up a portrait of the place where she believed her Jimmy was sleeping.

  The notebooks completed my study. I’d been so shocked when I saw them that I’d cried. For the first time since I’d found out my parents were dead, I’d let go of something that was deep inside, something encased by the boundary of my skin, keeping me from the world. I guess this is what Polly meant by her shell, the hardness she had built around herself, and had never managed to dissolve.

  I called all the local hospitals and hospices. I needed to know what had happened to her. I needed to know. If she was still alive I would visit her. I would be there for her. But it was too late. The hospice nurse told me that she was gone. That she had died in her sleep. Was I a relative? Her funeral had taken place days later, arranged by the Council as she had no living relatives. Guilt bit at me, but I reminded myself that it was what she wanted.

  I spoke to the vicar at the local church and arranged a memorial service to her. I lied to him and told him that she’d died suddenly, the words winding in the air between us in a shared understanding of what had really happened. I placed an obituary in the Ashton Reporter, and the Manchester Evening News, so that anyone who knew Polly could come to pay their respects. On the day I’d decorated the church with daisies and forget-me-nots and designed an order of service embossed with little birds and bees. My mind had been engrossed in the service, and I hadn’t really thought about David until I received a telephone call from the police telling me that he had been formally charged with abduction of Samantha. And grievous bodily harm of myself and a police officer. It was enough to keep him in custody. He’d asked to see me and I told them I wasn’t interested. Already, the whole deranged situation was distant, far removed from the terraces of Lee Street and the coolness of the evening in Polly’s yard.

  The first day that I’d sat in the yard the birds had been scared of me, hopping up and down, backing away. I’d stood in the doorway at first, not really knowing what to expect, but the yard was very different from the house. In every space there was a ruff of heather, all different colours, shimmering in the urban glow. Small shrubs and towering foxgloves pushed their heads out of an alcove, and I saw a tiny lizard dart through the scrub at the sides of the path.

  It was almost as if Polly had transplanted a small patch of moor here, in the middle of her yard. I sat out there in the evenings, drawing picture of my memories, of my mother and father, of Polly, and pinned them on the kitchen wall. And Gabrie
l. Not what he seemed, contrary, like Polly had said, and now gone. But he lingered somewhere in my mind, the promise of something new, a possibly future, that all wasn’t lost, that I would carry on. Hope and beauty. I sat there night after night, and eventually the birds ventured nearer. I’d hold out the bread and say, ‘Come on then, Come and get it.’ They liked me talking to them, perhaps she had told them everything she had written down, after all, she had no one else to talk to. Soon they would take the bread out of my hand, and after a couple of days they were flying in and out of the window again. It was almost as if she was still here, and I could have easily just carried on if it hadn’t been for the memorial.

  The service had been quiet, attended by a few people. Although my primary purpose had been to find Jimmy, to let him know, if he was still alive, that she had had died, on the day I hadn’t been able to ask anyone their names. It would have seemed like the ultimate betrayal. Strangers at a funeral and acknowledgement of Polly’s lonely existence. I’d seen an elderly lady with her three sons and their wives file in, and sit at the back, and I guessed this was a fellow crash family. There were three women who I recognised as neighbours from the street, they’d probably known her for most of her life. I thought I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a tall grey-haired man move through the shadows of the Georgian arches, but when I turned he was gone. During the morbid prayers and dour rendition of ‘Coming Home’ sung acapella, as it was the organist’s day off, something inside me settled. A vague feeling of redress, of the fracture of not being there for my parents was eased back into place and splinted, as I sung out for Polly, sung her home to wherever that was.

  It was all over quickly and I’d arranged sandwiches and coffee at the back of the church instead of a wake. The whole point of a wake, in the past, was to give the dead person a chance to wake up, to stand around an open coffin in case the person was merely in a coma. Polly’s whole life had been a wake, waiting for Jimmy to come back, and I wasn’t about to extend it. I shook everyone’s hand and smiled and looked out into the distance to see if anyone was loitering outside. No one was there.

  I’d spent the next days going through the books and writing up the rest of my thesis. All the information to compliment what I already had about the moor was there, as if I had collected it myself, described in detail and available for my use. I worked day and night to finish the work, stopping only to eat and to sit outside in the yard feeding the birds. I’d look up in the evenings and see the starlings flying in unison over the little patch of sky between the cramped terraced houses. I’d lean back and watch the patterns they made, twisting and turning in the air and then dipping out of sight. They’d land in the rooftops and chimneys, chattering to each other, maybe telling the way to the new place. I wished they’d tell me.

  I went to the town hall to get a copy of her death certificate. Polly had left an envelope for her solicitor with a faded yellow post-it note attached telling Gabriel to send the certificate. I popped it in and sealed it, and put it behind the clock on the mantelpiece, where I knew the post belonged.

  I go to collect her ashes. I take the death certificate with me and tell them I am a long-lost niece. It’s a long shot but it works.

  So I shut the door now and look at the box for a while, then I take it and my car keys and drive to the Moor. The weather is good and as I lie on the grass, looking at the clouds, I think I could see an elephant, then an ice cream. A man walks past with his dog and stares at me, knees in the air, hands behind head, but I don’t care. He was probably wondering why I was lying there, in the heather next to the ancient wreckage of a plane, but does there really have to be a reason?

  I sprinkle a little of the black powder onto the grass, and some in the heather. I walk away slowly, knowing I will be a regular visitor here. I walk over the ridge and by the reservoir. How clearer things are now than the last time I was up here. I marvel at how I hadn’t seen what was going on, but again, it seems like a carpet had unrolled, secrets emerging with every turn and release. I climbed the stile and the ground underfoot is springy and moist. It looks bleak in the distance, but I know it’s alive, producing the element of life that we need and nourishing its surroundings. How does it do that? That’s the real question.

  I walk over the moss and through the heather, pollen clouds billowing and birds fleeing. The bees buzz around me, ignoring my step and they bounce from tiny bloom to tiny bloom. In the distance I can see my house, dark and imposing, no lights in the early evening light. I focus on the white tent the police have erected around David’s workshop while they pull it to pieces and dig underneath. The white cloth is bellowing in the wind and I think of Polly, and the net curtain sails on her back windows at Lee Street that she said push the world round. I stare for a moment, wondering if they are pushing my life forward, away from the house and away from here, back into life and away from the death tourists.

  Sarah’s kitchen light is a pinprick in the distance, matching the faint light of the emerging stars in the navy sky. I feel a stab of familiarity and sorrow for our friendship. She hasn’t really done anything wrong to me, she just hasn’t listened to life; perhaps she couldn’t, because her loss had deafened her. I want to run over and bang on her door to ease her loneliness, but I know that if I do, I’ll see the crib and the baby clothes, and I can’t bear it. Not yet.

  I walk past the heather and up to the hives. I can see the nesting boxes from here and all is well, with the birds flying to and from. The hives are thriving, and it wouldn’t be long now until the little death of hibernation would be upon them, allowing them to sleep in the waxy warmth until spring. The bees would swarm and some would leave forever and the birds would migrate for the winter. All the animals and insects would retreat into nature’s coma until next time, and the heath would rest.

  All is well, as it should be, and I walk back to the lower ground to where Polly had been digging. It’s hardly visible now, a small tear in the ground covered by scrub and heather, but, like any scar, if you examine the damaged area you will find the nub of an anomaly, a story waiting to be told. I run my fingers over the bumpy earth and, as I listen to the echo of the moor, I hear a cuckoo call in the distance. The earth has tipped over from day, sweeping me through the ether with it, and the moon is big and beautiful, waning in its final phase.

  Pox-marked with a dimpled pattern, its longevity is a full stop in the aetiology of the universe; if we all disappeared tomorrow, the moon would still endure. It’s a clear evening and the silver crescent is low in the sky, overlooking the moor and gifting me a short shadow. I stand with my back to the wind and open the box. The black powder blows through the air and some of it rests on a patch of nearby ground, sprinkling a startled bird, who carries it to who-knows-where. Most of it is blown away, but a small stream makes its way to the ground beneath my feet and into the moor.

  THE END

  READ AN EXCLUSIVE CHAPTER OF SARAH TILLS NEXT BOOK - Chapter One of The Tintagel Secret

  It's just like any other day. Any other day for me, anyway. My life has hit rock bottom and, as I stand in the garden feeding the birds, I see it. A yellow tent, blurry at the other side of the bay. Tiny figures rush around and I can see the letters and numbers on the top of the police car parked nearby. I dress quickly. My American Tan stockings, the mark of old lady chic despite my not being there yet, are baggy around my ankles and I can feel the air on my legs. I'm in my layers, each one covering a hole in a different garment, and out of the gate, grabbing Macy as I charge down the hill.

  When I reach the High Street I shuffle along the pavement with the sound of the sea behind me. I take care not to catch the eye of people who pass me in the opposite direction. They veer towards the road before they get too near and this used to bother me, but I can understand it now. Always judge a book by its cover. Anyway, I've made a habit of looking shabby. No need to brush my hair or think about matching colours. No fussing over make-up or nail polish. My nails are hard and yellow now, and, even with the palest
pink hue, they would not improve my otherwise ragged appearance. I expect that people assume my odour before they get to it and avoid me.

  In less than ten minutes I'm past the High Street, rounding the bay, skirting the police cordon and standing behind a huge oak tree. I know the terrain so well, and I know this place better than my own soul. Most of the village is gathered behind the yellow tape, waiting to see what happens next. My heart beats faster and faster, until I realise that this isn't what I think it is. My secret's still safe. I feel a little pang of sorrow, as if I wanted someone to find out. So then the words would flow and maybe, just maybe, I could have my family back.

  The flaps of the tent blow open and from where I am, closer than anyone else, I see a woman lying twisted on the rocks. There's a flash of red hair and pale skin then she's hidden again. The blue glare of police lights alerts against the dim morning light makes the whole place look even more eerie than normal. I think about that night, all those years ago, and momentarily lose myself in Tintagel, until a long black car arrives and a stretcher is wheeled to the tent. There's a body bag and I can see the outline of the woman being lifted against the side of the tent as the sun peeks inappropriately from behind a cloud.

  One of the policemen walks over to the yellow crime scene tape and shouts into the crowd.

  'Nothing here to see. I'm sure you've all got homes to go to.'

  I'm still thinking about having a home to go to, a never-ending problem for me, when I see Julia Scholes in the crowd. And she sees me. She’s pointing at me and waving people back to the cordon.

  'Oh, I might have known. Here she is. Lizzie Nelson. I knew she'd have something to do with this.'

  The police turn to look at me as I step out from behind the tree. Julia's reaching fever pitch already.

  'She's up here all the time. I saw her here last night. Wouldn't be surprised if she has something to do with this. What's she doing behind the cordon? Caught in the act, were you Lizzie?'