by Louise Dean
‘Don’t upset yourself, Pearl,’ he says. He feels for her hand on the sheets. She lets him hold it but looks away.
‘Mother you used to call me. Mother! Oh, look at Mother in a temper. Ooo’s upset Mother now . . .? Oy, Mother, where’s my shirt? Mother! Dogsbody, more like.’
He squeezes her hand, hopeful for a change of subject.
‘What’s the matter with you anyway, Pearl? Why’re you in here?’
‘Broke my leg on the back path.’
‘I always said we should get some nice big modern paving slabs out there.’
‘That’s right, chuck away them bricks that’s been there hundreds of years. That’s you all over. Make a parking lot out of the garden. Cover the flowers in cement. No, thank you.’
‘You got your own way in the end, though.’
‘Yes, I did. My own way.’ She throws his hand aside. ‘Well, here we are now, Ken. You’re an old man and I’m an old woman. Neither of us thought it would work out like this, did we? Still, you’ve got some daft cow to do your washing, I expect. You and the boys, you’ll all have found someone else to pick up after you.’ Her eyes, he sees, are wet. ‘I never thought it would end like this.’
‘It ain’t the end, Pearl.’
‘Ha.’
He takes a handkerchief from his pocket, white with black trim, and hands it to her. ‘Here. Here you go, Pearl. You can hang on to that, if you want.’
She lets it lie in her hand. ‘Thanks.’
‘I’m sorry, Pearl.’
She doesn’t reply; her fingers twitch at the handkerchief. He stands up. ‘See you then.’
She is staring into the mid-distance, head on one side.
‘Shall I come see you again?’ She doesn’t answer.
After a while, seeing the black woman looking at him, he goes off round the end of the bed and is about to turn the corner of the ward when she calls out. ‘Ken?’
‘Yes?’
He turns.
‘If you see Gary, tell him he can call me. If he wants.’
‘All right, Pearl. I will. Cheerio then, Pearl.’
And all the way down the corridor towards the main entrance he says to himself, I’ll do that for her. I’ll do that for Pearl.’
And when he rejoins Roger at the van, and sees the big fellow leaning against it, sucking a sweet and looking up at the sky, he says to him, ‘That was my old missus, that was.’
He stands opposite Roger, with his hands in his pockets. He sniffs a couple of times, clears his throat, rises on the balls of his feet. ‘Fancy them women in there carrying on that way!’
Roger moves the sweet to his other cheek.
‘Cor, she can’t half give a man a tongue-lashing, my Pearl. And all them women – ears flapping! You should have ’eard it, mate.’
Roger pops the door locks with the key.
‘I tell you what, mate, I never bin so insulted in all my life.’
‘You need to get out more then,’ says Roger implacably. And all the way along the Ridge and down through to Silver-
hill, Ken’s wheezing and exclaiming, ‘You could say that, Rodge, you could say that,’ and he starts up one of his own jokes in retaliation, ‘’Ere, what about that woman in there, old Peg the Leg? Reminds me of the one – how does it go? Listen to this . . .’ave you heard the one about the lady with half-a-knicker? That’s the punchline, innit? How does it go? That one.’
Chapter 23
Poor old Pearl. Ken is sitting in reception with his hands together between his knees. He is remembering when he met Pearl, in
1960. Things are coming back to him he’d not thought of since: the smell of the creamery, Jepson’s, as you went through the door, sweet and suffocating in a way, and the steam rising while the old girl poured from one pot into something like eight cuppas; and the slops going down the steel griddle, the dumb-waiter going up, shouts of warning, a wet cloth going round an ashtray and on to the next, the ashtray spinning, making wet rings on the table; and her sitting there in a tight frock with her sister’s cardie on her shoulders, one button done up, trying to talk big, finishing every sentence ‘I’m sure’.
Audrey’s at the computer doing a name plaque. She gets Roger to check the details for her against the sheet of paper in her ring binder. Roger slips a pocketful of wrappers from his sweatpants into the wastepaper basket, sideways. He stops at the little printer tucked away on the rolling shelf behind the reception, gives it a little chuck under the chin as it obediently engraves the plastic faux-brass plaque. Then he disappears through the double doors into the great beyond, the mortuary.
Audrey squints at the computer screen and taps it.
‘We had John Hickmott’s family in today, Ken. They said they had a reading but no music chosen, then the young lad pipes up, What about “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”? He loved that one. Dear God, I said, don’t you think it’s a bit inappropriate? Mind you, if I had a penny for all the times it’s “All Things Bright And Beautiful”.’ She shakes her head. ‘That John Hickmott, now he had a good death, like your Pat. His last words, according to his wife, were: “I feel like shit.” He went off to make them a cup of tea and she found him ten minutes later, sitting at the kitchen table, dead, and the kettle boiled. Lovely way to go, that.’
‘“All Things Bright And Beautiful”,’ he repeats grimly, shaking his head. ‘That’s no good. You want to get it right. You only die once. Some are more rousing than others. “At The Name Of Jesus” or “Onward Christian Soldiers”; they’re stirring. But what you’re after is something on the way it goes – a man’s life, you know – how quick it goes.’
‘I could murder a cuppa, couldn’t you?’ Audrey says. ‘Where’s that Andy? He’s supposed to be on teas today. It’s gone eleven. I said to him, to Andy, You were friends with John Hickmott; why don’t you say something at the crem? They haven’t got a vicar of their own. He loves it, does our Andy. He’s what you call a lay preacher. Loves it. This one time, Ken, he was warming up for the service and he came down the stairs here, just above where we’re sitting, reading from his booklet, and he reads ever so slowly, a word with every footstep, and he’s saying very solemnly, “For . . . the . . . Lord . . . himself . . . shall . . . descend . . . from . . . heaven . . . with . . . the . . . voice . . . of . . . the . . . archangel . . . and with . . . the . . . trumpet . . . of . . . God . . . and with a shout . . .” when all of a sudden Roger, Roger of all people, bursts out, If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club! She leans forward on her elbows and whispers, ‘I think it gives him the willies – the death thing – and sometimes he just sort of breaks loose.’
Ken cocks his head. ‘Thinking about it, Audrey, make sure you’ve got on my plan that I don’t want no embalming, ta. Put that down, will ya? Be just like them lot to have me done. I’ll have Psalm 90 read out, though, if you could put that. “You bring our years to an end, as if it were a tale that is told.” That’s a good one, that is.’ He stands painfully, putting a hand to his lower waist and grimacing. ‘Just going for a jimmy, if you don’t mind.’
‘You help yourself, Ken.’
Passing by, he touches her shoulder. He can feel the thick bra strap through her blouse.
Poor old Pearl, he thinks to himself as he staggers into the toilet. He wrenches the door closed behind him as he squeezes into the confined space. In a moment of panic, in the dark, he loses his footing and scrabbles with his hands for the light. And as he does, he says to himself, Dear God, don’t let my boys turn out like me.
When the light comes on, he looks into the mirror at the face which surprises him daily; only the eyes give back any of his idea of himself.
He doesn’t stand to pee any more; he undoes his trousers, lets them slide and lowers himself down to sit and enjoy come what may. Dribs and drabs. Ah, for the days of pissing a bottle over like knocking down a skittle with a bowling ball. He is sitting there like Max Wall, shoulders back, chest out, gripping his lapels and straining. He lets one fly
and it’s more than air. Never mind. He likes a wooden toilet seat.
We must have a water closet indoors, Pat said, and she saved up and got them one. It was sandwiches for dinner, toast for breakfast and cake for tea. A bit of ham from time to time, Shippam’s paste and the occasional boiled egg. The only downside to it all was the constipation.
When he was seeing Pearl, he used to go home with a quarter of liver pâté for Pat. He didn’t dare tell her he was seeing someone. You’re not leaving me, are you? she said, when he told her they were getting married. He was thirty-eight then. You want children, I expect. I never had none. I couldn’t, could I? Had to look after you, didn’t I? She had a knack for making you feel bad. Women did. She used to say, So long as you’re happy, in that way of hers.
He looks left and right, to the side, on the floor, and over to the vanity stand. No bleeding paper! He sighs.
‘You all right in there, Ken?’ comes Audrey’s voice. He leans forward to seek the roll.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says. All he needs is her forcing the door to find him arse in the air, scavenging. With his trousers around his knees, he leans towards the slatted door of the long cupboard to the right of the sink unit and yanks it open by the brass knob. It’s shelved and inside, side by side, are dark brown plastic containers, row upon row of them stickered with names. Christ All Sodding Mighty! There are dead people in the lav.
‘Did you say something, Ken?’
There are also a couple of toilet rolls, mercifully. He unwinds, bandages his hand, wipes his behind in a sawing motion. He looks. He jettisons. He starts unwinding and bandaging again, staring gloomily ahead; there are Jeans and Joans and Grahams in there. He closes the door with his foot and sits there, shaking his head, saying to himself, Dead people in jam jars! And then he thinks to himself, Christ, that’ll be me, Ken Goodyew. And out of nowhere comes another trickle of wee. The miserable little sound says it all.
He emerges sideways, like he’s hiding something. One shoulder is higher than the other. He clears his throat to get her attention.
‘I shall have meself a burial, Audrey, if you could write that down an’ all.’
She offers him a finger of her KitKat. ‘Any reason, Ken?’
‘I’m a Christian. I believe in the Resurrection, don’ I?’
‘That’s cool, Ken. That’s cool. Fair enough.’ She looks at him contemplatively.
‘Just going to have a sit-down in the family room, being as no one’s in there. I feel a bit outta sorts. It takes it out of you, dunnit?’
‘You go ahead, sweetheart. Help yourself.’
Like a dog on wheels being pulled in fits and starts, he goes mechanically along the corridor past the two chapels of rest. He peeps into the maroon of one of them. It’s a narrow room, just big enough for a coffin lengthways and a person at each side with one or two more at the foot. It’s carpeted in dark red and the point of focus, behind the head of the coffin, is a stained-glass window with a brass crucifix on its ledge and, on a lower shelf, the alternative option, a white porcelain dove.
‘I’ll have the cross,’ he says wearily. ‘Stuff the dove.’
The family room beyond is rustic with leather sofas and a fireplace. He drops himself on to the sofa, nodding along the items on the far ledge under the two frosted windows: the dried flowers, the box of tissues, the Bible. Yes, this is where they will sit when Audrey says to them, in her matter-of-fact sort of way,
‘It’s all been arranged and paid for by your father.’ He couldn’t even trust you not to cock that up.
He wipes his eyes with his cuffs, one by one. It feels as if there’s the weight of a hand on either of his shoulders, pressing down on him. He starts, and his neck jars trying to see who’s there, behind him.
It’s his old dad in his string vest, braces down, with a tea towel around his neck, as he used to look when he shaved at the kitchen sink.
‘Cor dear, scared the living daylights out of me. What you doin’ behind me like that?’
I always was, son. I always was right behind you.
Chapter 24
That evening Nick opens a bottle and makes a fire, and sits drinking the red wine and stirring the fire. His eyes cross and his vision blurs. In the blaze he sees them again, his mother and father in the garden at midnight, down on the front path, between the rose trellises. He and Dave are kneeling up on his bed at the window, and he’s holding the curtains shut, not letting Davie look. ‘It sounds like someone’s murdering someone, don’ it?’ Davie said, thrilled and horrified and proud.
Their dad said that he didn’t like coming home to find another bloke in the house. But she didn’t care at all. Her hair was cut serviceably short and mannish. Her forearms were strong and scarified from the thorns and brambles of the garden with the thinnest knotted threads of a vermilion hue. And, indeed, this was her only jewellery now. She wore a woolly hat in winter and summer, pulled down low on her brow, which, combined with her perpetual frown, gave her the look of a day-release patient, and she wore shapeless sweatshirts and mens’ cords, clogs in the summer and lace-up working man’s boots in the winter. Nick squirmed to see her feet up of an evening, with her hairy legs and thick socks crackling on the dry skin of her feet as she rubbed them together.
The boys didn’t understand. She didn’t come to meet them from school. She didn’t make their lunches. She didn’t come to school plays or sports days, and they didn’t ask her – because, if she came, she wouldn’t be wearing a dress or do the right things. She’d embarrass them. She seemed to find it funny when Nick took her to task: ‘You’re not like other mothers.’
She mimicked him. ‘Because I’m not like other mothers . . .’ she’d say over and over again in mock-posh elocution, apparently very pleased. He couldn’t for the life of him see why she was not ashamed of the indictment. He had meant to bring her to heel, for all of their sakes.
She crooned and broke her heart over the animals. Formally there was a menagerie of rather overindulged animals: chickens, cats, a disturbed mongrel, cross German shepherd and Dobermann, and a wilful and highly strung male goat. Informally this extended to itinerant toads, rabbits, pheasants, foxes, even voles, shrews and field mice. Yet she was harsh with the boys. She made them do their own washing by hand in the sink. Nick paid Davie to do his on occasion, and then welshed on the deal. They were to cook their own teas when they came home from school and it was Nick who fried the half-moon Findus Pancakes and Davie who boiled the kettle for Pot Noodles, with much equivocation about the precise location of the ‘fill to’ level.
Whenever the old man came in, they traded insults in the kitchen. He took an aspirin or two from the boiler cupboard, slammed other doors for good measure, then tiptoed up to the bedroom to change his clothes and go out again. But Pearl spoke tenderly when she came upon the pair of them standing upstairs at the bathroom window, watching his van go down the dirt track. ‘Come away from the window, my lambs,’ she said.
She took to the garden. She had her realm; the woman in the woods. The brick house was three-quarters surrounded by woodland, and to the front its view gave on to steep fields which rose up to hide it, and it stood in its own magical fiefdom like something Hansel and Gretel might have stumbled upon. It had been built on a great estate, to house the gamekeeper, and the sheds when they moved in were full of traps and snares and baskets left behind. It was typically Victorian, with its triple-hipped roof, three windows up, two down and a middle front door. A craftsman had given the windows brows of alternating yellow and red brick. A brick path went up from its front door to the gate, and across the front of the gate there ran a small stream – thus the house’s ingress resembled a moat, and it was across this that he and David went to school of a morning. He went the virtuous path to the grammar and David went off at an aside to the comprehensive, and both of them set out in the mornings to the twentieth century, leaving the nineteenth behind them.
Their mother would scarcely accommodate modern facilities in the house
. The shower was a miserable wee down your back, and she wouldn’t have central heating. There was just a single wood-burning stove. The boys slept in their clothes. The house was cold even in summer, so they spent a great deal of time outdoors, he and Davie making camps in the woods and sneaking off without being made to help her in the garden.
When she first dug the vegetable garden, she pulled out of the black earth bottles with marbles in their necks, earthenware jars and broken china, and she urged the boys to come and dig for treasure with her – and that was a thrilling afternoon, to be filthy with their mother, flinging about them plump worms, grasping and tearing at roots, in a state of wanton greed to unearth, perhaps, something whole.
‘A teapot, a teapot! Without a spout!’
And how complicit they were then, thick as thieves the three of them, with their arms plunging into the past.
‘It’s something you plunder,’ she said, about the past, about the dirt.
She was either dull or dazzling. Bad news, bills and matters relating to Ken, were related with a loose mouth, often chewing something, with her lazy eye off looking elsewhere. Surprises, first fruits from the garden and the goings-on of the critters were delivered with eyes that could make yours glisten too, so pleased they were.
This wilful woman, whose delights were cheap or free, this woman who pulled things from the ground that no one else wanted, this was the mother who gave him life. But there was another mother, the one who wanted to put him back where she’d got him from and bury with him the father she said he was like.
