The Boy Who Could See Death

by Salley Vickers

  Squatting on the floor she read on. ‘When I was a boy, walking to school down the country lanes, I would imagine all the little hedge creatures my special friends. That is how I see you – shy and retiring, known truly to no one but me.’

  It was terrible how nauseatingly this read now, when once it had thrilled her. Punishing herself, she read more. ‘Darling creature, I shall only treat you with the gentleness your loving timid nature deserves –’

  Sentimental garbage written by a man who had dumped her only two years after writing it, two years during which, progressively, she had felt as if her skin were being peeled back layer by layer. But of course, all sentimentalists are sadists. She knew that; had always known it. Suddenly, unnervingly, she began to cry.

  The box was full of hundreds of such communications, letters, notes, cards she had faithfully, insanely, stored away. Desperately she opened another long white envelope.

  ‘Beloved Sah, what would I do without you?’

  Clearly very well was the short answer to this. Should she torch the whole horrible collection and thus put it out of her mind, which it wouldn’t? Or should she make herself read his filthy fickle words and cure herself by despising him into oblivion? Putting on her boots, she left the cottage with wet cheeks and walked determinedly down the lane to the river.

  A heron stood staring aloofly into the water. She was past wanting to throw herself in but how convenient to be a bird without a heart to be broken. Not broken, she corrected. Paltered with. Worse than broken.

  Back at the cottage the open box greeted her balefully. Picking it up, she carried it outside to the garden, where a shed housed a washing machine and a tumble dryer, no longer functioning. ‘You can stay there, pig face,’ she said and kicked the box hard.

  The moonlight didn’t waken her that night but towards dawn she was roused by a cry outside. Perhaps an animal in its death throes caught by the churchyard cat? The clock on the church had chimed. Light was pearling hazily through the window, and she got up more for the pleasure of watching the coming dawn than to check the time.

  And there he was. Standing, quite visibly this time, by Charles Blakey, with his head bowed as if paying his respects.

  Very quietly Sarah opened the window. The man didn’t look up, and she heard that he was weeping. Harsh raw sobs. Deeply shocking. Instinctively she called out, ‘Please don’t cry.’

  He looked up then and she had an image of a white face and dark hair and dark, dark eyes. For a long moment he held her in his gaze before she turned and ran downstairs. But when she reached the kitchen window to look again he had gone.

  The following morning, when Clovissa Jenkins was passing, Sarah asked if there were anywhere she might make a bonfire.

  ‘Not in the garden, please. It’s far too small.’ For once her landlady sounded sharp.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Sarah hurried to reassure. ‘I wondered if at the end of your garden, maybe.’ She had seen an old dustbin there that looked as if it served as an incinerator.

  ‘If you give me whatever it is, I’ll see to it.’

  But of course she couldn’t do that. The box would have to stay in the shed until she found some means to dispose of it.

  But its presence pricked her attention viciously so that she couldn’t settle. She set off in her car to tour the nearby villages, pretending to be on a mission to find a suitable place to move. But it was hopeless. Until she had dealt with Phillip she would never be able to contemplate being settled. And soon she would have to look for a job. The money he had tossed at her was running out. Frugal as she’d been, she would have to earn a living again soon.

  By the time she got back to the cottage she was worn to a ravelling and only a bath in the regal tub offered remedy. Well soaked and wrapped in a towel, she opened a bottle of wine, determined to get soaked in that other sense. She had missed the TV news so she turned on the radio. But as she adjusted the dial she heard a noise outside.

  Opening the front door, she saw the shed door was ajar. A wave of anger engulfed her. Clovissa. No doubt seeking to ‘help’ by removing her papers. Oblivious to the towel, which was all that covered her, she stormed into the shed.

  The man was bending over the box.

  ‘Shall I take these?’ His voice had a quiet country burr.

  ‘Why not?’ she found herself saying. It seemed so easy to let him.

  ‘Better they’re gone.’

  She wondered if she should ask him in for a drink – but that seemed somehow impertinent. ‘Is there anything –’ she began to ask but he forestalled her.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, and looked at her as if he were someone who had known her, loved her even. ‘Nothing more to be done now.’

  She saw he was looking towards the door that led from the garden into the churchyard and she went to open it. ‘Shall I see you again?’ she couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, it depends.’ His smile was gently respectful.

  Looking after him through the open door, she saw nothing more than Charles Blakey’s solitary stone.

  The next morning two men were there. Loud men, smoking and laughing, with diggers. How dare they. How dare they molest his resting place. Opening the door to the churchyard, still in her dressing gown, she shouted, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Only their business.’ It was her landlady with eggs. ‘The Blakey family is burying their son.’

  ‘Charles Blakey of this parish?’

  ‘His great-great-grandchild. Quite a young man but his wife had left him, apparently, and one doesn’t like to speculate but the means of death hasn’t been …’ Too well bred to spell out the regrettable, her landlady faded into silence.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Peter. No, Phillip. Yes, Phillip. Not an attractive name but then I’m so lucky with mine.’

  Sarah watched the funeral from the kitchen window. When the last of the mourners left she saw that the mistle thrush had returned to the rowan and was busily devouring the last few mizzle drops of berries.

  Kleptomania

  (for Rowan)

  Having Cousin Francesca to stay was a mixed blessing. Not that she was exactly a cousin – rather, one of those offspring of some past cousin whose precise relationship it was always hard to fathom, if, indeed, it was ever rightly known. The best that could be said was that at some point, sometime, some members of the family had been cousins and Cousin Francesca was a surviving twig off this branch.

  Some version of the above was coursing through Peter Verney’s mind as he walked through Mulberry House (where his family traditionally spent Easter) removing the obviously portable items, all very familiar to him after so many years of staying there. For whatever blessings issued from Francesca, her propensity to pilfer was not one of them. Kleptomania his wife, Kay, called it.

  But Francesca, whatever her precise relation to him, was blood, which was said to be thicker than water (if not obviously the better for that), and in Peter’s view kleptomania was too harsh a verdict – more a characteristic eccentricity, he would call it, as she rarely took anything of value – though, as Kay had remarked, a medical diagnosis had the virtue of removing any suggestion of moral turpitude. Kay, not unreasonably, was less indulgent of his relative’s failings. On the other hand, his wife was fair-minded, one of the several reasons for marrying her, and admitted that Francesca was wonderful with the children.

  The children, of whom there were five (Peter liked to say that, while they had ‘practised’ contraception, they had never quite got the hang of it, a ‘witticism’ which made Kay wince), found no admixture in the blessings of Cousin Francesca. They referred to her uninhibitedly as ‘Fran’ and looked forward to her visits with an enthusiasm that might have made a less fair-minded mother jealous. It had long been established that Fran would sleep in the attic alongside the three girls.

  The four beds were ranged as in an army-hospital ward, and even resembled something milita
ry in being made of iron. The boys, James and Tobias, as the eldest and youngest respectively of the Verney family, had individual rooms. The girls, Judith, Clara and Winifred, had all arrived barely a year apart; almost indecently close together. This had resulted in their being brought up pretty much as triplets, which had produced what could be a formidable group personality.

  The boys, as is often the way, were made of less stern stuff. James, the elder boy, had a stammer, which no one could attribute to any emotional mismanagement by his parents and of which he seemed to be almost proud. Francesca, in fact, had had more than a minor role in James’s way of taking on an apparent impediment, having pointed out to him, when he was still very young, that a stammer was ripe to be exploited. People, she counselled her young nephew, were nervous of stammerers, and James might usefully consider the bar as a profession when the time for such decisions came.

  Tobias had nothing to exploit other than his undeniably red hair. The hair was also the subject of his father’s heavy humour. There was no red hair in either side of the family, and Peter liked to refer to a red-headed mechanic who had mended the family car around the time of Tobias’s birth. Many people found this joke embarrassing, because they were unsure how much truth there might be in it, which added to Peter’s amusement and to his wife’s irritation.

  Cousin Francesca arrived later that day with a number of brilliantly coloured scarves wound about her neck, a straw sunhat, with a green-feathered budgie enlivening its brim, and a live Pekinese with a blue-spangled collar and a crimson lead.

  The Peke had not been expected. Indeed, its existence was news to the Verneys and the children swooped on it with delight.

  ‘Can she stay in our room?’ the youngest girl, Winifred, pleaded.

  ‘Freddie, darling, no pets, you know the house rules.’

  ‘But that’s not fair. You said Toby could have his snake!’

  ‘It’s not a snake, it’s a slow worm,’ Tobias protested. ‘And they’re an endangered species.’

  ‘Worm, then. But please, Daddy, please, she’s only little.’

  ‘Actually,’ Cousin Francesca corrected, ‘Ho Chi Minh is a boy.’ Among Francesca’s more annoying affectations, in Peter’s view, was her posture of ardent socialist.

  ‘Please, please, please, Daddy, can’t Ho Chi Minh sleep in our room?’ This time it was Judith, known to be her father’s pet. The other two girls didn’t mind this too much, as Judith could often wangle benefits to suit them all. But on this occasion the plea was fruitless.

  ‘No, he can’t. You know how fussy Mrs Bramling is about pets. Ho Chi Minh will have to sleep in the woodshed.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Cousin Francesca pronounced. ‘Ho Chi Minh is highly strung.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy, look he’s hurt. You’ve hurt him.’

  The dog was staring up at Peter with bulging brown marble eyes.

  ‘He will sleep in his basket, as usual, beside me.’ Cousin Francesca indicated a round shopping basket of the sort found in the illustrations to old-fashioned children’s books.

  Kay raised her eyes to heaven, recognizing defeat in her husband’s ‘Well, on your head be it, Francesca, if we are forbidden to come here again.’

  As Peter was later to say, ‘The holiday was all right as holidays go, and, as holidays go, it went’, a line borrowed without Peter comprehending its point from a satirist introduced to him, as it happened, by Cousin Francesca. Perhaps that in itself was an ominous sign. Nothing especially untoward occurred during her stay. Francesca spent quite a bit of time down the lane with Mrs Bramling, who didn’t get about as much as she used to on account of her legs, comparing methods of pickling and the medicinal powers of herbs. Ho Chi Minh achieved added glory with the children by seeing off Mrs Bramling’s big tomcat, Angus, who had been staking out a family of young robins being raised in the woodshed.

  The weather was unseasonably hot. Extra supplies of beer and water were ordered in from the Dorchester Waitrose, and Cousin Francesca, flirting outrageously with the deliveryman, was overheard asking him back to ‘partake of some of the beer one evening’. The children waited for some hours on the wall at the end of the lane, where she had made the appointment to meet, and were bitterly disappointed when he didn’t turn up. ‘We hoped you’d marry him, Fran,’ Winifred lamented.

  ‘Not my type, Freddie. I never like a man with dyed hair.’

  ‘But why did you ask him, then? Why did you ask him to “partake”? What is “partake”?’

  ‘The fun of it, Fred. You’ll find out one day. To tell you the truth, I knew he wouldn’t come. He’d a swocking great ring on his left hand. I never care for that in a man either.’

  ‘But what does “partake” mean?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to marry him,’ Tobias said. ‘He had hair coming down his nose. Loads of it.’

  ‘Ugh, how uncool,’ was Judith’s verdict and it was generally agreed that ‘partake’ was a silly word and Fran must on no account marry anyone with nasal hair.

  The baby robins emerged unscathed and were accordingly named Freckles, Clown Mouth, Red Admiral, Fluffy and Norman. (‘Why “Norman”, Freddie?’ ‘He’s my bestest friend at school and his feathers look like Norm’s hair after PE.’ ‘He isn’t really Norman,’ Clara confided. ‘But he doesn’t like his real name.’) Supervised by their fretting parents, the robin siblings tottered and swayed gingerly on the snowy branches of the blossoming blackthorn. Under Cousin Francesca’s instruction, and rewarded generously with custard creams, Ho Chi Minh was taught by the children to jump through a hoop and, also under her generalship, they organized a ceremonial burial of their father in the sands of Weymouth. During the entombment his new sunglasses were first mislaid and then found to be irreparably broken. This relatively minor mishap was followed by Tobias floating out to sea on a blow-up crocodile that Francesca, behind their parents’ backs, had bought for the children.

  Kay, when this act of disloyalty was discovered, had attempted to get Francesca to return this to the beach shop where she had bought it but was thwarted by the children, who had already blown it up with a pump lent to them by the man hiring out deck chairs.

  (‘What about him, Fran? He hasn’t got any nasal hair.’

  ‘He hasn’t got any hair on his head either. Or not enough. I’m not on for bald men.’)

  Happily, Toby was rescued by an elderly gay couple in a pedalo and towed back to shore, where he was heartily congratulated by his siblings.

  ‘Well done, Tobe, we thought you were off for F-F-France.’ James, who could feel outnumbered by the girls, was proud that his little brother was keeping up the male side.

  Toby, who had been scared by his adventure, became cocky. ‘I would’ve done if those men hadn’t catched me.’

  Tobias was heartily scolded by his mother, who also scolded her husband for attempting a joke about pedalos and paedophiles. (‘Very feeble but also offensive, Peter. You can’t say things like that these days, for God’s sake.’) This, while assuredly deserved, was really in lieu of scolding Cousin Francesca, who was chatting roguishly with the rescuers.

  (‘Fran,’ Clara whispering, ‘you can’t marry either of them. They’re married to each other.’

  ‘I know. A pity. I quite fancy the tall, skinny one with the neat beard.’

  ‘You said you didn’t like beards when we suggested the puppet man. Are we going to see them? Only Mummy never lets us see Punch because he’s violent.’

  ‘It depends on the beard, Clara. You’ll find out. Don’t worry. I’ll give your parents the money for the puppet show.’)

  The only other regrettable event was Cousin Francesca’s all-round purchase of candy-floss. Kay, who was keen on health foods, had already relaxed sufficiently, in her eyes, by allowing fish and chips for lunch. To have this followed by a gross sugar excess was clear treachery on her husband’s relative’s part.

  ‘She’ll be gone tomorrow and anyway we always had candy-floss as kids and –’

  �
�It never did you any harm? Only rotten teeth and a pot belly.’

  ‘Hey, steady on!’ Peter, unhardened to such attacks from a usually tolerant wife, was hurt.

  ‘Sorry, but she’s such a shit stirrer. She knows I don’t approve of Punch and Judy, and she’s gone and told the children that we’ll take them to it when she’s gone.’

  ‘Why didn’t she take them herself?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Some nonsense about a beard, Freddie says. To be honest I didn’t really listen. It was obviously Francesca being fanciful.’

  ‘It’s just her way of having fun.’

  ‘It’s just her way of being perverse, you mean.’

  Peter sighed. He tended to sigh during Francesca’s visits. ‘I know. But she does love the kids and tomorrow she’ll be gone and it’ll just be us. Can you hang on, darling?’

  Kay was mostly a rational woman and she gamely hung on and waved Cousin Francesca off with smiles and fickle promises to enjoy the Punch and Judy.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said, collapsing dramatically on to Mrs Bramling’s chintz-covered Chesterfield.

  ‘Why are you saying “Thank God”?’ Winifred asked.

  ‘Mummy’s just pleased to have you to ourselves, Freddie,’ Peter suggested.

  ‘We like it so so so much better when Fran’s here,’ was the ungrateful response.

  And, indeed, the children played less harmoniously and declared themselves more often bored in the absence of their large playmate. Judith announced she was too old to play with her sisters now, Winifred broke Tobias’s walk-down-the-wall Spiderman, which, as he indignantly protested, he’d bought with his own money, James developed a nasty sty on his eye, and Clara found Fluffy dead and impaled on a blackthorn twig and became inconsolable.

  ‘It’s ’cos Ho Chi Minh wasn’t here to defend her.’

  ‘But how do you know it’s Fluffy, darling? It could be one of the others.’

  ‘Oh, great, Mum. So are you saying it wouldn’t matter if Red Admiral had d-d-died?’

  ‘Of course not, James. It’s just that baby robins look very much alike.’