by Louise Dean
‘Mustn’t she?’
‘I don’t know.’
* * *
Nick had had great difficulty bringing himself to speak when she answered, and the first word was hardest of all.
‘Mum?’
‘Who is it?’ she’d said harshly.
‘Mum. It’s me, Nick.’
There had been a silence, like a pit.
‘How are you getting on?’ he’d gone on, heart sinking. There was a silence, then after a moment she said, ‘Hello, darling.’
And he could have wept to hear her voice soften that way. ‘Hello, darling.’ A capsizing. After all the years. ‘Hello, darling.’ He fell right back into his childhood. No one had ever said that word ‘darling’ the way she did. She didn’t use it casually the way other women did; she reserved it for him. Goodnight, darling, she used to say when she put him to sleep with a kiss.
He let himself into his father’s house that morning. The door was ajar and he’d had to bite off his own grin at the eaves-dropped sound of his father, singing, ‘I believe in angels . . .’
His father was in the living room with cardboard boxes, packing up June’s belongings to send to her. His old man didn’t say hello when Nick came in, he merely continued a conversation he must have started some other time.
‘A waste of the years, when I look at all of this.’ He showed Nick a Whimsie piece, a King Charles Cavalier. ‘What a load of tosh.’ He proffered the box; in it were handfuls of Wade Whimsies. ‘That’s not even counting the bleeding toby jugs.’ He gestured to the other boxes stacked by the window. ‘Or the shepherdesses. Your mother would never have given this lot ’ouse room.’
He was wearing pyjama bottoms and a vest. He stood in the middle of the room, in bare feet, and faced his son. He slapped his chest with his hand, hard. On his face was excruciation.
‘It ’urts, Nick. It ’urts ’ere.’ And Ken’s face, usually tight with spite, collapsed and his mouth seemed to burst and gape with pain. Nick put his arms around him and his father wept.
Then they finished the packing; more or less everything in the house, he said, belonged to June and he could not help exclaiming over every item, sometimes in high spirits, sometimes angrily. ‘A toothpaste squeezer! Coo dear, what next? And you should see under the bed, what I found there. She was a dark ’orse, I can tell you.’
Nick recalled Natasha finding his porn magazines under the bed when packing for his departure.
‘Waders! A pair of brand-new waders! I told her not to get ’em!’
With Nick about to tape up the last box, Ken suddenly cried out for him to stop. He took off into the kitchen and came back with a frozen pizza. ‘Look at it, son. Meatfeast. She’ll be glad of that.’
And so they put that on top and closed the box, with Ken getting his fingers in the way of the tape and remonstrating with Nick for being ‘cack-’anded’.
They bought a tub of jellied eels at the stand next to Rock-a-Nore and stood leaning with their backs against the counter, looking over at the fishermen’s huts, with Nick dropping the occasional chunk for Roy’s delectation.
‘Funny,’ said Ken.
‘What is?’
‘How one day you can see everything clear and the day before you don’t.’
‘Yes.’
‘That June. She didn’t have what you call breeding. Not to my mind. She was common as muck. She was very money-minded. In a greedy sort o’ way.’
‘Was she?’
‘Oh yes. Look at all that stuff ! A hoarder. Told me they was investments. My arse. She can have the lot. And I shall send her her ’alf the money too, by the way. I’ll follow your advice on that. Just to be fair and square and done with it. To wash my ’ands of it all.’
‘Well, that should be acceptable to her. That’s fair, Dad.’
‘Course I got a lot more than that she don’t know about,’ he whispered, nudging Nick and causing him to drop another chunk of eel for Roy’s panicked gobbling.
‘Never marry a foreigner! You can’t understand each other proper. Oh, it seems fancy at first. But it don’t work. Your mother, she weren’t anything but ’erself. Didn’t give a shit what people thought of her. And the best thing about her was . . .’
‘Her integrity?’
‘Well, yes, son, you’re right. I grant you that and that’s a nice word for it. But what I was going to say was she was tight-fisted, and I like that in a woman. She didn’t like to spend money; she used her loaf more.’ He pointed to his temple, then startled and stiffened. ‘Blimey!’ Nick followed his eyes. He was looking at a couple peering into the windows of a fish seller opposite. ‘Now there’s a woman! That’s my Audrey that is! Audrey Bury. Beautiful gel. A proper angel.’
Nick looked at the near-obese middle-aged woman holding hands with a grossly overweight middle-aged man.
‘She’s a sweetheart. That woman there, she done something for me no one else could ever do, Nick. She got me to face reality. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Did she?’ Nick tipped the polystyrene tub and dropped the remaining jellied eels down to Roy.
‘She runs the funeral parlour what did your Auntie Pat’s do. She got me to face things I never could of done before. And she taught me something about ’ow strong a good woman is.’ He winced so heavily as he said this, it was as if he were watching a woman pulling a lorry along with a strap between her teeth before them. ‘Strong. I spent a lot of time with her.’
‘Did you?’
‘Listen, if anyfing, well, what I mean to say is when it ’appens, you know, when I get my call-up papers, I want you to make sure it’s ’er who’s called, right away. No one else. Just ’er. First thing you do. Before the doc and that. I told Dave the same thing.’
‘OK.’
‘You listen to your old man and do one thing right by him.’
‘All right.’
‘So, what reality did she introduce you to, Dad?’
The couple strolled off, hand in hand, down the pebble alley and on to the beach, where they disappeared behind boats and nets.
‘Well . . .’ he said, evasively. Roy jumped up and took the last chunk of jellied eel from Ken’s cocktail stick. ‘The little perisher.’ He put the tub back on to the counter. ‘Among other things,’ his father looked uneasy, ‘among other things, she made me realize, son, that I’m too old to be of any real use to a woman. Know what I mean?’
Nick grinned.
‘Never mind laughing, you’ll be in my shoes one day.’ He pulled on his lapels. He smiled down at the dog, who sat looking up at them in adoration. ‘Nice little boy, innie? Nice little thing.’
Chapter 40
On the news the top story is that the World Health Organization has raised the pandemic warning to level five. This is what Audrey has prepared for, what Audrey has warned others about, and what her business is singularly ready to meet. And yet Audrey’s not going into work today, neither did she go in yesterday.
‘Funny,’ Audrey says to him. It’s all come at the same time:
love and disaster, Roger and a pandemic. She doesn’t dare move.
They spent the afternoon, yesterday, in bed in a guest house. This is something they could never have expected and so they lay in hiding. Outside, at the window, the weather changed for the worse and the seagulls, like joyriders on the coming storm, wheeled and moaned and whooped and jeered. And the two of them lay together and watched the gulls mix the paint of sky and cloud with their claws.
Today they are holidaying in their hometown. The noise of it is new to them, it crawls up their ankles and makes them tread with a tingle: the crunching of the pebbles on the beach, the chiming of the fruit machines, the chit-chat at coffee tables, the murmur of tipsy pensioners singing at a pub table. Down to the beach for lunch they go and in their carrier bags they have tins of beer and cockles and mackerel and bread. He carries in one hand a large portion of chips. They sit on stones and watch the frothy palaver of the sea skittering on shingle. Roger begin
s by throwing chips one at a time up into the sky, and then he chucks the lot sky high and the seagulls scream in from all quarters of the earth and pluck the chips from thin air so that in seconds only an empty bag settles on the beach.
‘Don’t the gulls look like old men, all puffed up, ready to give someone a telling off ?’ Roger says. ‘Look like your friend, Ken.’
‘You’ve come on all talkative.’
He smiles ruefully. They kiss, and the gulls turn the world again with their claws, pedalling the globe, faster, faster and the wind comes up with the night bringing more bad news, more deaths.
Filling in for them at work, Andy is more than obliging, ready to take up the call, ready for Christ’s victory, ready to be the last man standing, shepherding them through the valley of the shadow of death to the green and pleasant land, while the two undertakers do their loving.
That night she startles and finds him. ‘Roger, tell me I’m not dead.’
‘You’re not dead.’
A man of few words, he has just enough to save her.
Chapter 41
Dave creeps upstairs with the tray, his broad feet taking the strain as he goes up the groaning stairs. He goes carefully, mouth cracked. He pauses midway to let the trembling knife settle on the plate. On his tray is a midnight feast of breakfast sundries. They are either way ahead of the game or way behind it, he thinks to himself as he pads along the hallway, passing by the children’s rooms soft of foot.
‘Marmite for me, marmalade for Marina,’ he sings in a Louis Armstrong voice, kicking the door open with his toes. He sets the tray down on the bench at the end of the bed. His nightgown opens and his tackle sways free. He completes his burlesque with a hip thrust, sending his sack south circular, and she tells him to put it away. But he doesn’t, not until he gets a laugh from her.
Slipping in bed with their plates, he takes his slice and she takes hers and they savour them in quiet for a few minutes until the plates bear nothing but crumbs and he takes hers from her and puts both on the night table next to him. Marmalade meets Marmite when they kiss. ‘I love you,’ he says and Marina shifts a little bit beside him. It is her sign and he knows it well. He rolls on to his side, kisses her again and then moves on top of her. She can see stubble, the thinnest of horizons on the side of his face, and she places her hands on each of his shoulder blades. This is not new. They have been here a thousand times before. It doesn’t need to be new.
Afterwards, holding hands, they float on a raft into dreams of a velvet quality, action-packed, of derring-do and yet familiar too. Their eyelids flicker. He lies on his side and she lies behind him, nose to his back, then she turns over on to her other side and he turns and lies behind her, nose to her back, and so they follow each other on the path of the moon.
They grew up in the same village until they were eight and then his family moved away. Both of their mothers picked fruit in the fields – blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries, apples. When they first met it might have been at school, but she likes to think it was when she was sitting on her big frilly bum in her pram and the boy pushed a strawberry into her mouth. Or it might have been that they walked the length of a strawberry field on a warm day in June or July with red pulp, dirt and straw on their knees from where they’d knelt to take the smallest tastiest fruit from under the leaves.
Then they were greedy and dirty and happy and their mothers weren’t far away, busty and coarse, laying into each other roundly and raucously, and enjoying most of all slandering and deriding their men. Suddenly a mum would stand upright and call out a name and they’d both run back, hell for leather.
Marina’s mother, Lynn, was in a nursing home. She went to see her the week before, and spent an hour with her, the old girl in her armchair from home, sitting in the sunny part of the room, in wool hat and anorak, looking at the light and shadow on the wall. From her old mother’s bifocals came a glinting light, drawing from the open window to give a message in semaphore: I am nearly gone, goodbye, goodbye, farewell . . .
Marina wakes and sleeps and wakes, turns and finds sleep at last in a small space on the right of the pillow, just an inch square, and she passes through the gap in the hedge into the fields again and finds Davie already there, filthy. No one else is there, not even their children exist in that place. They spend the rest of the night there together.
Matt hates waiting for them to rise. He yearns. He yearns particularly on Sunday mornings and finds no solace in television or computer games. He wanders the house disconsolately, sitting in the cold kitchen looking at the mess his dad left behind the night before: breadboard sticky, crumbs underfoot, jars unlidded. He kicks the kitchen table and scowls at the clock, and goes back upstairs to fire up his computer and gets to work on his project for his granddad. ‘Project Death’, as he likes to call it, and he checks his MySpace messages from people all over the world, but mostly from the USA.
It seems there is a form of arsenic that is easy to take and can be purchased online, so he prints out the information. And it’s as the printer whirrs at seven in the morning, shuddering and clattering, that his father comes in, disgruntled, his eyes barely open, and he puts a hand on Matt’s chair and leans forward to squint at the computer screen. Matt can’t shut it down in time.
‘DIY Death? You what, Matt?’
So Matt has to tell him how Ken asked him to help him out of the world.
‘You what?’ says Dave again, coming to. And Matt’s unsure whether his father is slow, or whether he’s tired, or whether he’s in disbelief so the only thing he can do is put it simply.
‘He wants to die.’
‘You what?’
‘He doesn’t want to go into a home.’
‘I tell you what, M-M-Matt, this is absolutely beyond belief, isn’t it? M-m-my old man’s having my son buy him poison, lethal poison, online on the flaming Internet? What do you think you’re doing, killing your grandfather?’
Marina comes in. ‘What’s going on in here?’
‘He,’ says Dave, pointing at the son behind the fringe, ‘is only helping his grandfather top ’imself.’
The mother looks her son in the eyes as if to absorb the entire story in one look, so as to go ahead and protect him from his father’s anger; she steps between them. ‘It’s just the Internet, Dave.’
‘I could . . . I could . . . I mean . . . you couldn’t . . .’
‘Calm down. It’s just kids. Just a game. Isn’t it, Matt? They all do this sort of thing these days, Dave,’ she says with warm condescension. ‘It’s just . . . role play,’ she says finding a term she’s heard on the television. ‘It’s because of the Internet. They all do it. They all look up these things. Kids do.’
‘What – killing your grandfather?’
‘He asked me to.’
‘Things are going to change round here. The-the-that thing, that computer, right, that’s finished, done with, gone! And we’re going to get your hair cut!’
‘Oh fine. Sure! What’s that going to do? God, Dad, you’re so illogical.’
‘Turn that thing off. Right now!’
‘It’s not evil.’
‘That thing is bringing you up to be some sort of weirdo, some sort of . . . I don’t know. He sounds American, don’ ’e, Marina? I said to you, He sounds American. We need to get him a part-time job delivering the papers, or something. On a bicycle. So he can see a bit of the real world.’
Matt closes his eyes: Zen, think Zen. His MySpace name is ‘Zendudehastings’. The first part of it is massively hard to live up to at times.
‘OK. Let me explain it to you both. Granddad is scared of going into a home. He’s seen what you did to Granny Lynn and he’s worried about it. I don’t blame him. He’d rather die than go in one of those places.’
‘Granny Lynn is off her rocker!’
‘Well, you say the same about him.’
‘Only as a joke! Fuck me, this is like having some sort of double agent living in your own home.’
; ‘I believe in individual liberties,’ he stammers, borrowing something from school.
‘Oh, shit me, Marina. Do you hear this? It’s Che Flaming Guevara now!’
‘Look. Someone’s got to stand up for him, for his human rights.’ Matt catches sight of his father’s expression, and his mother stepping back, and he folds. ‘I was going to tell you about it at some point. I was just doing the research.’
‘See-ee,’ says Marina quickly, using the ‘e’s in the word to sound peace. ‘He was going to tell us about it!’
It’s clear that Che has left the room. Matt’s knees collide as he uses the chair’s pedestal, swaying left and right. ‘I said to him, They’ll find you somewhere nice. Mum and Dad will.’ He lifts his long-lashed eyes to them and throws his fringe back, and Marina’s heart lurches at the sight of his beautiful freckled face and perfect nose; its innocence decries the would-be goth and deathmonger. ‘And we looked some up but, Dad, honestly they’re really the pits . . .’ He checks the American inflection.
‘They’re shitholes, Dad. But even if they weren’t, it’s not what he wants and why should he have to go into one? He doesn’t want to die in a home or hospital; he just wants to go naturally. He wants to die his way. What’s wrong with that? Is it so much to ask?’
‘No, Matt,’ Marina moves forward to touch him. ‘No, of course it’s not but, love, you shouldn’t be looking up lethal poison on the Internet. Anyway. Anyway.’ She turns to flash fierce eyes at Dave. ‘It’s Ken who’s to blame, not Matt. It’s like what they call grooming. He shouldn’t have asked a child to do this.’
‘He’s daft in the head. Matt’s not.’
‘See! See! That’s what I mean!’
Having stood with a hand up at his head to shield her from his vision, Dave drops his hands and catches sight of Marina’s look now, and grunts. ‘I don’t mean he should be locked up or done away with, do I? He’s just old, Matt. And nutty. Gordon Bennett.’
