A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  Chapter 13

  Guy was upstairs working. The room that had once been the bedroom that he shared with Susannah was turning into an overflow study. He had a study as well, a tiny bedroom that was once ‘the baby’s bedroom’, kept as a halfway house nursery for a while, and then turned by degrees into a study when it seemed that Felix was to be the only one. Would he really have been the only one? Guy wondered now. They had stopped talking about babies. Perhaps they should have had investigations. Perhaps that would have changed things. Actually, he realised, anything at all might have changed things. Just the tiniest thing would have been all it took. A phone call from a fitted kitchens company, someone pressing the button on a pedestrian crossing just in time to halt the car by a few seconds, a colleague of Susannah’s at the library delaying her leaving by even the tiniest amount; anything at all might have saved her. But then if something had been happening with that man (Guy could still hardly bear to think his name), maybe Susannah would have left and taken Felix with her. He would never know. If only, if only, what if, what if. The words must be almost visible as they circled his head like flies or moths, or even bats. He was trying to ignore these thoughts to work on an article on variation in leaf unfurling rates in ferns. He could half hear the video downstairs. Felix had long since tired of Atlantis. (A pity. How cheered Guy had been to discover that the hero was a bespectacled academic.) He was watching the Disney Alice in Wonderland again.

  Felix had read the book, the real thing, again and again. Perhaps, thought Guy, Felix liked to be baffled. He could hear the video, but he couldn’t hear Felix laughing in all the usual places. He hoped that Felix hadn’t fallen asleep. It was much too early. It would disrupt his pattern and make him wake up at 5 a.m. the next day.

  Downstairs Felix wasn’t really watching Alice in Wonderland and he wasn’t asleep. He was looking at photos.

  Here he was when he had just been born. That was his mummy and there was Dad. All his relatives must have come to visit him. There were lots of flowers in vases. He turned the pages. Here he was in a car seat, and a yellow chair, and a pram. Here he was eating a bit of toast that looked disgusting, and chewing a wooden thing with bells on. That thing was still in his socks and pants drawer. And then here he was with Marmalade, when Marmalade was new. Here he was on a mat on the floor. Those, those must have been Mummy’s feet when she was taking the photo, pink feet with pink nails. But there were stripes on her feet. Felix didn’t understand that these were tan lines from her sandals – they looked silly. Her feet looked like tapirs. He turned the page quickly. Perhaps those were somebody else’s feet. He didn’t want his mummy to have had silly feet. There were pages and pages of him being a baby, lots with Dad and only a few with Mum. She was beautiful. She had long fair hair like Alice. Now he had learned to walk, but he was still wearing baby shoes. He had little boots made out of jeans material. On the next page he had shoes with yellow diggers on. There was a photo of just his shoes. He wasn’t interested in his baby shoes. On he went. He stopped every time he found one of her, and looked and looked. If he stared hard enough he might hear her voice.

  He had seen other people’s parents at school assemblies with video cameras. If only they’d had a video camera. He went to the box of videos and pulled them all out on the floor and read their backs. Perhaps they used to have a video camera and his dad had just forgotten. But there was nothing. He turned them over and over. Nothing but proper videos and on the tapes you make yourself, well, he knew what was on those, The Life of Plants and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was all.

  He went back to the photos. Here was one that he liked. They were on the beach. Mummy was smiling so much that she had creases near her eyes. She was holding both of his hands. His arms were up and he was swinging in the waves. He was wearing some trunks that he still had but they would be much too small now, blue trunks with stars on. Mummy was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. Her shorts had splashes on them. He was smiling too. Then there was another one of just her face. He slipped his finger into the plastic pocket that held the photo. When he slid his finger out, the photo came too. He smiled and slipped it up inside his school sweatshirt. It was his now. He could keep it in the Black n’ Red book.

  Alice in Wonderland was nearly finished. He put the photo albums back so that Dad would not know what he had been doing. He piled up the videos and put them back in the box. He could feel the photo prickling his chest. His dad was coming back down the stairs saying, ‘Time for bed, Felix.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. He didn’t even ask to watch the end of the film.

  When Dad came in to say goodnight he asked, ‘Dad, did we used to have a video camera and you forgot about it?’

  ‘No, sorry, Felix. We haven’t ever had one.’

  ‘What if you could get one and make videos of things in your head that you had forgotten?’

  ‘That would be good, wouldn’t it? Maybe one will be invented one day.’ Dad kissed the top of his head. Felix didn’t notice him looking at the suspicious specks in it. Then sighing and smiling when he realised that they were grains of sand.

  ‘Can I have the light on to draw in bed?’

  ‘OK. Night, night.’

  Guy went back to the ferns. Felix drew in his notebook, pictures of the beach. He looked at the photo until he fell asleep. In the morning he found that he had cleverly managed to hide it in his notebook under his pillow.

  When Guy had put Felix’s light out, and put the photo and notebook away for him, he sat on the stairs and drank a can of beer. He never went out. Sometimes it would have been good just to go to the pub, like a normal person. He could, he supposed, it wouldn’t be that hard to arrange, but somehow it wasn’t worth the trouble. It would seem so fake, so forced, like some sort of holiday camp activity. But if he did, maybe he could find a new mother for Felix, someone to help look after him. Perhaps Felix was right about Miss Block. Perhaps he should ask her out. Would she have him? It would be great for Felix. Would he be able to ensnare her? It would all be trickery, and quite unfair on the poor woman. He was damaged goods, too old, the leftovers at a car boot sale, the stuff that nobody would ever want, fit only to be flung in a skip or stuffed in a recycling bin. Somebody could prop him up in a wheelbarrow. Penny for the Guy. He knew that he couldn’t make it through even one date with Miss Block or anybody else, let alone go any further. All that part of him had died with Susannah.

  A few days later Felix glued the photo of Susannah into his special notebook. He drew it a border of kisses. It didn’t look right. He realised that all the joined-up kisses looked like a fence, the sort of wire fence that has sharp spikes on it. There didn’t seem to be much he could do to get rid of the horrible border without ruining either the photo or the notebook. It made him feel sadder every time he looked at it now, and stupid. A week or so later he had the good idea of making another border. He traced the edges of the photo and then cut the right shape out of a plain piece of paper. He knew it would be safest to leave this one blank, he didn’t want to muck up another one, but you could still see the wire fence kisses through the paper. He decorated the new border with regiments of coloured squares. It ran out some of his felt pens, but he didn’t mind.

  Felix didn’t really write that much in his notebooks. He liked gluing things in, pictures that he found, or stamps or beautiful leaves.

  He also wrote lists:

  People at school who do and don’t like me.

  Countries where I have relations.

  Birds and animals I have seen.

  Books that I like that I have read.

  Things I would like for Christmas or Birthday.

  Places I would like to go one day.

  Chapter 14

  Judy had been about to eat breakfast in her kitchen. She was enjoying the colour that the rays of sunshine made as they shone through the jar of marmalade on the table. Should she have that or strawberry jam on her bagel? Perhaps jam. Her sister Peggy had made it. Stupidly she picked up the newspaper and turne
d on the radio.

  ‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me,’ the radio told her.

  Except that they could, she thought, and they did. In today’s paper were photos from Iraq – sprawled naked bodies piled up, the Americans with smiles as wide as pieces of apple pie, Iraqi men hanging, handcuffed, to the doors of cells; another man, hands up in surrender, smeared with something unspeakable; the snarling dogs, straining at their leashes – yes, it seemed that they could and did take everything away from some people. On another page was a photograph of an Iraqi professor who had died suddenly in custody of compression of the brain stem, whatever that was. It seemed it was often caused by a blow to the head.

  She turned the paper over, but it was too late. The images were there now – once seen, never erasable. What, she wondered, had led those Americans to behave like that? Had they seen pictures of the Holocaust as college kids and been impressed? She carried her coffee and her breakfast into the next room, but a fat American bagel smeared with strawberry jam was not so appealing now.

  Of course, her thoughts were now on Eduardo. Had torture methods changed much in thirty years? Surely there was a limit to the imagination, to the number of ways in which one human being could torture another? The Americans were calling it ‘abuse’. Abuse and humiliation. As if what they had been doing was not actual torture, not that bad. They were saying already, just days after the story had, as they put it, broken, that it was time to move on and draw a line under it.

  What had happened to Eduardo? Where was he, or what was left of him now? They had taken that away from her.

  There was a song that she could not listen to, Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘I Gotta Have My Baby Back’. Eduardo had never known the last chapter of his love affair with Judy. A few weeks after he had gone Judy, stricken with worry and longing, had realised that she must be pregnant. She did not mention it in her letters. It seemed too careless, and perhaps undignified, and who knew where the letters might end up, who might read them, what it might do to Eduardo in whatever situation he was in, how they might torment him with it. It occurred to her that some secret police might come after her and the baby. But it was still early days. She was still hoping. Maybe he was in hiding.

  Perhaps, she thought, he might have a wife. Judy imagined somebody beautiful and clever and sparky, probably called something wonderful like Conchita. And if he was wilfully leaving her behind for ever, then perhaps she didn’t want him to know about the baby at all.

  She carried the secret close to her heart. There was no question of not keeping the baby; somehow she would manage. She told nobody. The weeks passed. The nausea faded, but too early. One night she woke at 3 a.m., that terrifying dark hour, her abdomen turning to iron. Each wave was like the aftermath of a steel-capped boot in her back. She tried to lie very still, then curled up to try to avoid the blows. Soon she was lying in a pool of red and black, the sheets stained into a terrible flag. She crawled across the room to the phone. An ambulance arrived and the uniformed men took her away. It seemed that she had lost them both.

  Can’t sleep,

  Can’t eat,

  Because I lost my sweet baby, sweet.

  I just gotta, I just gotta, I gotta have my baby back.

  That was how the song went.

  Her sisters were very kind.

  Judy sat in the botanical garden, on the bench underneath the banana tree, wondering why she didn’t come here more often. What a strange and neglected place it was. Really, the university and the students were missing out. Here it was, a beautiful little oasis of tranquillity, completely silent apart from the birds and really only yards from the campus. She should encourage the nicer ones of her students to come here, but not too many of them. How easily it could be spoilt if it turned into a place to chat on one’s mobile, or to party, or if the university realised the wonderful asset it had, and started to use it for receptions and so on.

  She remembered coming here with Eduardo. It had been a much more popular place when she was young. Eduardo had been disappointed by the campus. She thought that he must have been expecting something a bit more historic, at least a few dreaming spires and some punts, a river for late night naked swimming. The best they could offer him here was some redbrick buildings, some interesting 1950s architecture and good train links to London. The botanical garden made up for the rest of the place, at least a little.

  The lightest of winds made the bamboo whisper and creak, and lifted the corners of the essays that she was pretending to grade. She had on her tinted spectacles. The air was very warm for October. She was sitting between two hawthorn trees, and trying to remember which one of them was pink and which one white.

  Judy could never decide which she liked better, the pink May blossom or the white. The same went for lilac; purple or white? But then why should one have to decide? Why, she wondered, had it been considered such bad luck to bring lilac into the house, also cow parsley? Both were supposed to portend a death, or even to cause one. She would look it up.

  She knew that if she closed her eyes she would be instantly asleep.

  She sat so still that the frogs in the pond returned to the surface, and remained there. A pair of goldfinches were already feeding on the niger seed she had put on the bird table. She had bought it at the hardware shop for her own garden. It had seemed selfish not to bring some in her pocket and put it out here. Now she would feel it necessary to return regularly to replenish it. How warm the sun was. She would just close her eyes for a moment …

  She felt a very slight chill, a shadow passing across her papers. She opened her eyes and a boy was standing there. For a moment she thought that he might be a shade of some sort, a ghost. He was very pale, and he must have come up to her so silently that the frogs had not noticed his approach and plopped back below the surface. Judy saw that if this were a ghost, it was one with rather grubby knees. He was wearing a school sweatshirt, the cuffs of which were frayed and hung in damp and stringy fringes around his bony wrists. His hair was a bit stringy around the ears too, in need of a good trim. He was carrying a long stick of bamboo.

  ‘Hello,’ said Judy. The boy smiled. Judy knew that smile. It seemed to stop her heart for a moment. This, she thought, must be Susannah and Guy Misselthwaite’s little boy.

  ‘Would you like to see the newts?’

  ‘Yes please.’ She was glad to see that he hadn’t come armed with a jam jar on a string. She could not possibly have condoned newt-catching, even temporary newt-catching, even for a school project. He led her down a very small path into the copse, ignoring the notices warning that this area was crumbling, and that there was a danger of further landslips, past some rather nasty azaleas, and then across a little stream where some of the pebbles were coated with a coppery deposit. Here was the pool.

  ‘Here,’ said Felix, ‘this is where they live. Nobody knows except me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘I shan’t tell anybody.’

  ‘You have to keep very still, and then you will see them.’ They squatted down and kept very still. There were oak leaves in the pool, water boatmen, some unusual-looking snails (she would have to look those up too) and there, with their tails looking as though they had been snipped from some of the fallen oak leaves, were the newts.

  ‘Wow,’ she whispered, ‘I have never seen so many together before.’

  ‘Even my dad doesn’t know they’re here. I don’t think anyone does.’

  They watched in silence for a while as the newts went about their business.

  ‘When I was a little girl we sometimes had newts in a tank at school, but they are very rare now. I think we should leave them alone, don’t you?’ Judy was very against the modern practice known as ‘pond-dipping’ whereby children were encouraged to scoop out anything they could, plonk it in some shallow plastic tray where the water temperature would quickly rise beyond that of the pond, leave the creatures there for as long as they liked, to be prodded and remarked upon, and then perhaps tip the water and m
ost of its inhabitants back. Who knew what tinies might be left behind, their element evaporating for ever? ‘He who torments the chafer’s sprite weaves a bower in endless night,’ she told herself.

  ‘I’m not gonna catch them,’ said Felix.

  ‘Neither am I.’

  They watched the newts for some more minutes.

  ‘I’ve seen you in the garden before,’ Felix told her.

  ‘Well, you are very clever,’ said Judy, ‘because I have never seen you.’

  ‘I can climb very tall trees, and I know secret places, but I’m usually at school.’

  ‘Does anybody know you are here?’ Judy couldn’t stop herself from asking. Perhaps the boy had absconded from the After-School Club to find his dad. She had seen the children being shepherded (rather carelessly, she thought) from the school to the church hall by some students in nasty maroon polo shirts. Perhaps he was on the run from some team games, perhaps from some after-school bullies. You had to take your hat off to him really.

  ‘My dad is in charge of the garden,’ Felix told her.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she replied. ‘It is such a lovely garden. I wasn’t sure that anyone was in charge of it at all. He is certainly doing a very good job. What’s his name?’

  ‘Guy,’ said Felix.

  ‘My name is Judy Lovage. What’s your name?’

  ‘Felix Pieter Misselthwaite. Pieter is spelt in Swedish. My mum was half-Swedish.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Judy. ‘Well, Felix Pieter Misselthwaite, I’m very, very pleased to meet you.’

  She extended her hand and smiled. Felix looked at it for a second and then realised that he was meant to shake it. ‘I knew your mummy,’ said Judy. ‘I thought she was very beautiful and kind.’