by Rosie Chard
I let my knees slip beneath the water line, covered my stomach with my hands and thought of the other bathroom. Was he brushing his teeth at the sink? Was he pulling a shirt up over his head? Or was he lying naked in the bath, his hands folded across his belly? Just like me.
51
It was the last day of June when I glimpsed my mother. Grinder had agreed to go for a walk and the usual battle with the lead ensued: the lunge for the collar, the snap of metal clasps, the fur-clad knees locked into position, but suddenly the dog took a spirited interest in exercise and I managed to get him outside.
There was debris on the front path, twigs and leaves and an apple core — half-eaten and brown on the edges. I picked it up and, examining the bite marks in one side, drew up a quick inventory of the teeth I knew: Vivian’s tombstones, my father’s neat squares, and Archie’s rocks, which constantly flaked and split along fault lines. Yet none matched the marks cut into the apple. I slipped it beneath a pile of leaves and continued up the front garden.
The fox had been through during the night. I could see that before I reached the end of the path. Edward Black’s dustbin, horizontal and helpless, rocked in the breeze of the street, rolling back and forth with a metallic growl that sounded like ‘help.’ There was something unsettling about the tongue of half-rotted rubbish lying on the pavement and as I walked by I found myself memorizing the discarded objects, the teabags, the banana skins, the plant labels, the wrapper peeled from a bar of chocolate. Chocolate? I picked up a foil of silver and slipped it into my pocket before moving off down the hill. I held my hand in there too.
The street was deserted and I felt relief at being able to avoid the humiliation of persuading a reluctant dog to walk with me. By observing other dog-walkers I had deduced that ‘heel’ was the magic word, universally understood by all members of the breed. But Grinder had a language of his own, responding only to a narrow range of sounds: the jangle of the ice cream van trundling round the corner, the click of my father’s key in the door, and the rustle of silver foil as Vivian unwrapped a marshmallow. To my voice he was deaf and any progress up the street was made on his terms. He decided which tree trunk to sniff, he decided which dogs to pick a fight with, and he decided when it was time to go home.
We sped up as we went down the hill, past the shop, across the zebra crossing on the High Street and up into Watson Avenue, that area of town where houses changed to factories and the streets were dotted, not with cars under plastic sheets and children on tricycles, but grimy delivery vans and rubbish beached round blocked drains. The dog’s nostrils led the way; they quivered an inch above the pavement as he padded from kerb to tree trunk and tree trunk to kerb. Then he spotted the gates of the factory ahead and the lead shot from my hands.
I glimpsed the sign fixed above the entrance as I rushed after him, Witheringtons. Established 1894. Everyone in Billingsford knew someone who spent their days with their hands inside shoes. But Grinder had no interest in shoemaking. Without so much as a cursory sniff of the doormat he ran through the door and disappeared down a side corridor. Hurrying to keep up, I followed him, past cardboard-coloured walls, past floors wet with recent mops, until we arrived at the entrance to a small office. The door was open. My father sat at his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He looked as he always did: same black cowlick, same shoebrush eyebrows. Yet there was something.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to catch the dog’s collar, “he just came in.”
“You have to control him,” he said. “Tell him what to do.”
He made a noise in his throat and Grinder sidled over to the desk and sat down. “As you’re here you might as well tidy my desk,” my father said.
“These?” I placed my hand on a pile of papers.
“Yes, those.”
I moved to the edge of his desk and tried to look purposeful but it was hard to sort the well-ordered stack or organize the perfectly sharpened mug of pencils.
“Shall I tidy the drawers?” I said.
“Alright,” he replied, not looking up.
I pulled out a bundle of papers and leafed through.
“Those can go in date order.” He still didn’t look up.
I flicked through; ‘One hundred Oxford brogues; three hundred plain black Derbys; two hundred tan Bleasdales.’ I noticed my father’s feet beneath his desk, heels together, toes pointing outwards, like those of a child at a party.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Have you finished?”
“Yes, I’ll put the papers away.”
I gathered up the sheaves and slipped them back inside the drawer. But just as I straightened out the ‘W’s something caught my eye: a faded Polaroid photograph wedged inside the edge of a file hanger. A woman.
“That’ll do,” said my father, suddenly close.
“I need to put in the ‘Z’s,” I said.
“The ‘Z’s can wait,” he replied, sliding the drawer shut.
The walk home was slow. Grinder insisted on carrying out a detailed inspection of everything growing by the roadside and the pursuit of squirrels added minutes to the journey. But I didn’t care. I needed a few moments to think. Green eyes, auburn hair, pale gray mole.
If I leave
No trace behind
In this fleeting world
what then could you
reproach?
I loved the poem on page four hundred and twelve. It made me think of my mother. Sometimes I wondered what my father had done with her things. I imagined him guiding a skip lorry up to the front of the house, walking back and forth with her clothes in his arms, the sleeve of a dress hanging over his arm, the toe of a stocking stuffed into his pocket. I wondered where her possessions were now. Did they lie in a landfill site, compacted inside an unmarked seam of rubbish miles from anywhere? I pictured my mother’s bra pressed beneath a layer of decomposing milk cartons. And where was she? The person. Had she been stored in a jar and placed on a secret shelf or had she been scattered on the ground and carried away by ants?
My mother had left few marks. Yet I held her constantly in my mind, every minute of every day, the dearth of real memories replaced by a crumpled tissue of fantasies that I could pull out at will, fold back its corners and smooth out its creases until I could feel love for the person who brought me into the world then inexplicably left, before I even had time to memorize her face.
52
Harold’s kitchen was not where I expected it to be. The bookshop occupied the front room; the kitchen was now his living room, and the actual kitchen, if one could call it such, was nothing more than a Baby Belling and tiny sink crushed behind the sofa. But he loved it all the same. He seemed completely satisfied with the way he lived his life round the edge of his bookshop, a large bowl of words, as he liked to call it, in which he would happily stumble many times during the day. I’d visited the shop several times now and it hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything unusual about sharing a fried egg sandwich with a middle-aged man at the end of the afternoon until he said something. “Do you have many friends, Edith?”
“Some, there’s Una, and there’s Archie and Dotty.”
“A couple, are they?”
I smiled. “I suppose they might be, if there wasn’t a twenty-year age gap.”
“How old is Archie?”
“He doesn’t celebrate birthdays anymore, he thinks it stops him getting any older, but I know he’s seventy-five.”
“Dotty’s the younger of the pair?” Harold said, hopefully.
“Yes, but she’s quite old too, about fifty, I think.”
“I don’t mean to pry, but what about friends your own age?”
For the first time I noticed the clock. It had an identical face to the one in my kitchen, but there was something different, it was slower perhaps. “There’s Una, but she moved away to University in the autumn. There don’t seem to be many others. . . at the moment.”
&nb
sp; “Didn’t you want to go to University?”
Had the clock stopped? I couldn’t hear the tick anymore. “I might go one day.”
“Why not now? Is there something you’re waiting for?”
“I. . . don’t know.”
He smiled, the sort that might sit well on a mother’s face. “I’m sorry, Edith, it’s none of my business. But to be honest, I realize I don’t know you very well, but I’d like you to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“Right. So tell me about Archie.”
“He’s my neighbour.”
“Ah, I think your mother talked about him. She and your father were great friends with him and his wife. Black was the name, wasn’t it?”
“Archie never married.”
“Edith, is something wrong?”
“Did you say my mother and father were friends with a man named Black?”
“Yes, I’m fairly sure that was the name.”
“I think you must be mistaken.”
“What’s the matter, Edith?”
“My parents were never friends with a man named Black.”
“Edith, what is it? Don’t you like him?”
Three in the morning: blanket up to my chin: eyelids like lead. Learning the poem had been difficult, but after turning the words around on my tongue I had embedded the lines in my memory. Now the words were up in my bedroom, filling the air as I spoke them aloud. “Come slowly, Eden! Lips unused to thee. Bashful, sip thy jasmines, as the fainting bee. . .”
I didn’t understand some of the poems in my mother’s boxes. They confused me with their unexpected rhythms and obscure use of words yet often a line would stay in my thoughts for days. There it would either grow into a new thought or fade away and die. The ‘fainting bee’ had gestated and woken, flying through my mind on tiny wings, unearthing buried thoughts, buried hopes, that churned into unspecified feelings of confusion and wanting something. Had my parents and Edward Black been friends? Why did my father build the wall?
53
Cow parsley slunk into my garden without permission. At first I didn’t notice the thick clumps pressed up against the high wall until white, lacy umbels rose up on square stems and I began to suspect what it was to be in love. No scent was more evocative, more in tune with the rising pulse of summer and I inspected the tiny flowers under the slimmest of pretenses, reveling in the unfolding of a new season. A dance had begun outside my back door: Allium globes swayed inside an invisible breeze, poppies shuddered, and broken buds were ferried across the soil on the backs of beetles. Geranium sanguineum lived up to its reputation as a beauty, if petals stained with watery paint were anything to go by. I picked a single flower as I began my morning inspection of the plants but when I held it up to examine its furry stamens I noticed a blot of red behind the flower. Vivian was in the distance, her head hidden from view but the hem of her skirt dancing round the edge of the flower like a fresh set of petals. I pulled it closer, blocking out the figure advancing towards me but still it came, closer and closer, until I dropped my hand to my side and beheld my aunt.
“What have you done with the washing line?” she said.
I glanced to my left. I had moved it two days earlier. I had hurt my back lifting up the heavy pole, but it was worth it, just to open up more space for another flowerbed free of dripping washing and pegger’s feet. “I moved it.” I held her gaze.
“Well, move it back,” she said.
I slipped the geranium into my pocket. “I’ve planted some seeds in that spot. . .”
“Move it back,” Vivian said again.
How my arms pricked. And a weight, it seemed to press down my shoulders. “I can easily use the washing line where it is.”
She fixed me in her sights. “I don’t like that tone. Move it back.”
I didn’t move. I wanted to walk up to her, not in a roundabout way, not slowly, not hanging back, postponing the moment, but straight there, to get up close and look her in the eye, no blinks, not dropping my gaze and I would stop my heart from racing and keep the shake from my voice and the volume of my words would be loud, not quiet, my hands steady, like little rocks and explain, not shouting, not fumbling for thoughts in the heat of the moment, but gently and confidently, as a kind teacher might, explain that I loved every one of those seeds and this was not fair, not right.
The pain jumped into exactly the same place in my back when I heaved out the pole and dragged it back to its original spot. Vivian’s shadow lay flat on the soil, and I churned up its edges as I dug out the posthole, then before I knew what I did, I lifted my trowel and stabbed into its heart.
Vivian went through the mangle that night. It started innocently. She stood in the corner of the scullery watching me work. But she had to interfere. She just couldn’t resist pushing a shirtsleeve into the rollers as it turned. Her fingers were caught, first one then two. She began to scream but the rollers kept rolling. She screamed again but the rollers still kept on rolling as bones cracked and blood ran down onto the freshly washed floor. It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized. I was the one turning the handle.
54
“She had green eyes.”
“Who had green eyes?”
“My mother.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw a photograph in my father’s drawer.”
“What drawer?”
“The one at the factory, in his office. I was tidying his desk.”
“Do you have it on you?”
“No, it’s still there.”
“You didn’t pick it up?”
“No.”
Jean zapped a price onto the back of a banana. The sound of the price gun was rhythmic, a soothing contrast to the bell above the door, which jangled my nerves every time it shook.
“Did your father say anything?”
“No.”
The shop bell rang and a man, wider than he was tall, squeezed into the shop.
Jean sighed. “Got to stop that man tickling my chin.”
“Who. . . him?”
“Yes, him, Walter Wrigley — black dog, custard creams every Tuesday.”
I smiled. Jean smiled back. “I’m not the only one with an admirer, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Young lad in the other day spent ten minutes reading the ingredients on a tin of soup.”
“I don’t think that means anything.”
Jean looked full of wisdom, her eyebrows raised into a well-plucked arc, but before she could speak, the shop bell shook again.
“Who’s that old boy?” she hissed.
A belt of anxiety squeezed my waist. “It’s my father.”
I lifted my hands out of the box I’d been unpacking and watched him make his way towards me. He didn’t seem to fit the shop. He caught his heel in the closing door and he knocked a packet of biscuits ninety degrees to the shelf as he made his way up the aisle. The belt was up a notch by the time he reached the till.
“I didn’t know you worked this late,” he said.
“I don’t normally, Jean needed help with a large delivery.” I held my hand towards Jean. “This is Mrs. Wordsworth, my employer.”
My father nodded, the movement barely there. Jean held up a clean, straightforward smile.
“I’m going to need you back soon, there’s a crack beside the oak tree,” he said.
“She’ll be finished within the hour, Mr. Stoker.”
He nodded again, then without further comment left the shop, knocking the biscuits back into line as he turned the corner.
Jean turned towards me. “A crack beside the oak tree?”
I sighed. “Our garden wall needs a bit of work. I. . . offered to help.”
“Is he always like that?”
I felt a needle somewhere inside my chest. “Like what?”
“Not many words in his dictionary.”
I picked up the price gun, held it against a tin and squeezed the trigger. “He’s a quiet man.”
“Your house must be like a morgue on a slow day,” said Jean. She nudged my elbow; it hurt. I laughed.
“Still, it was nice of him to come and see you.”
I sighed. “He didn’t come to see me,” I said, “he came to fetch —”
Jean picked up another tin, took the gun out of my hand and held it against the metal. “Edith,” she said, “Tell me it’s none of my business, but maybe it’s not green eyes that you should be worrying about.”
Walter Wrigley laid two packets of shortbread on the counter. “For Billingford’s loveliest proprietor,” he said with great ceremony, pushing one of them in Jean’s direction. I waited for him to pay, a drawn-out saga of trouser-searching and coin-counting, and then I bought a bar of chocolate and slipped it onto my pocket. My father might like it. Or he might not.
34 Ethrington Street
Billingsford,
Northamptonshire
June 24th 1969
Dear Gillian,
I met him at last. Yes, Edith’s old dad. Although it turns out he’s not as old as I’d thought, but he was a bit run down. I’d been itching to catch sight of him ever since I’d met his sister. Wondered if he’d be decked out in red too but he blundered into the shop looking like one of those tramps from up on Market Street. Honestly he did, his buttons were in the wrong holes and he had wax in his ear. But Gill, the really odd thing was Edith. She changed. It’s hard to explain but she spoke in a tone I‘d never heard before. And he didn’t talk how I’d imagined either. Now I’m wondering if I’m getting the picture straight. Maybe I’ll ask Archie, see if he’s got one of his theories on the go. Wish you lived closer Gill and we could go and get our hair done together like we used to and chew it all over under the dryers.
