John didn’t come back from his break. Becca watched his office from her tiny desk—it wasn’t a proper desk, just a table set up for her. From where she was seated, she could see the steam rising from the coffee, and then, after a little while, there was no steam.
He didn’t come back after lunch either, and when Becca went to do the afternoon copying, the coffee was still sitting there, untouched. It had to be quite cold. It had been several hours. But she didn’t want to give John cold coffee, did she? What if he thought she did it on purpose? What if he got back in the afternoon from an important meeting with his divorce lawyer and he found a cup of cold coffee? She used to drop off coffee, he would think to himself, my wife, Laura, whatever her name was, she used to drop off coffee and now I won’t ever have a hot coffee in my life, only cold coffees for me from now on. As if a broken heart wasn’t enough.
That would be a little bit cruel, a little bit sad. And Becca wanted him to be happy. John deserved to be happy. He was a good man, a kind man, the kind of man you ought never to leave. And so she left the copying to go, and she went back into the office.
She just meant to grab the coffee. Just the coffee and that was it. But then she couldn’t help it, she saw on his desk a photo—a photo of a woman smiling. Laura. Or whatever her name was. His wife. The picture didn’t look old. It looked quite recent, and she was smiling at the photographer, really smiling, not the kind of fake smiles that most people did for cameras. It was a real smile, and there was so much love in it, more love than Becca had ever put into a smile before. Most of her smiles were littler things than that, she didn’t show her teeth ever, she thought they were big and horsey. But Laura had nice teeth. Nice little even rows of super-clean, white teeth.
Becca found herself hating that picture. Why would he even have the picture up still, when Laura, or whatever her name was, had left him—had just up and vanished? She picked up the picture, and she slipped it out of the frame. There it was, on the back: Laura. That was her name after all. Laura. No date, no other words, just Laura. Laura was a bitch, Becca thought, how could she have left him? She was a slut. Becca didn’t like the word, would never say it out loud, but somehow it seemed right. Becca picked up a magic marker, and she wrote across the back of the photo SLUT in wobbly writing. Then she put it back into the frame, but you could see the word, SLUT, all across that smiling, perfect face. And then in the corner, Laura. Just a name, nothing more.
Becca picked up the coffee cup. It was cold. She sipped it, and the coffee was sweet, too sweet for her, but it was just how John liked it. She drank the entire cup.
She couldn’t leave the picture there. How would John like it if he were to come back to his office and find the word SLUT across his picture? The ink was starting to bleed through, black smudges growing darker and darker across Laura’s face. Becca slipped the picture frame into her purse, and she went out to the copy machine.
It was quite close to closing now, and Becca was looking forward to getting out—light and sunshine, bottles of wine, a quaint European hotel room. . . .
The tourists had trickled off but John’s enthusiasm hadn’t. Not even a little. Row on row of the faceless heads and he snapped away, merrily click-click-clicking. “It’s strange,” John said, as he rounded a pillar composed entirely of femurs. “No names. Six million people but not a single one has a name. There should be a list of them somewhere—do you think there is, in the hall of records? I once did a shot of The Wall in Washington, you know, the big one. All those people running their fingers alone as if it was Braille. But it was just names.
“There was this kid there—” Snap snap, he was snapping away quite urgently now. “—and I thought his grandfather must have died, and he’s crying as if it just happened, as if it were a tombstone. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just a list of names, and he’s crying and so I put my hand on his shoulder and I ask him why he’s crying. You know what he says? He says his girlfriend just broke up with him.” John shook his head in disbelief, but he stopped snapping very suddenly, and he clenched Becca’s hand hard.
“I think I’d like to go now,” Becca said. She could smell the hint of fresh air. She almost ran toward it. In fact, she did jolt forward, but John was still holding her hand and she was yanked back a pace.
“What’s the rush?” he asked. And his eyes said, please say this is great. But he wasn’t smiling. There was something wrong with his smile.
She tried that ooh-aah trick again, just let her mouth make a series of encouraging sounds that weren’t quite words. He seemed to brighten up. What she was really thinking was that it was just bones. Rooms and rooms of them, skulls mounted on piles of tibias, giant circular ossuaries. Sometimes they would be artistically arranged—a line of skulls outlining a block of thighbones, with all the knobby ends pointed outwards. In one place, a giant stone cross was set in the middle. As if people didn’t get the point. STOP! THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF DEATH! It was all a bit melodramatic, wasn’t it? A thousand skulls would have been enough, but six million? Six million was overdoing it a bit. Six million was too many, they stopped being people at that point, they were just bits of debris, bits of things that had died.
“We can’t go yet,” John said softly, and there was something in his voice, something edging toward desperation. He tugged on her hand and it might have been playful, but maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t. “What about that chapel, that was pretty good, wasn’t it? And the light—the light didn’t do it justice. I want to try again. I think I could make it work if I gave it another go.”
Becca felt something inside her crawling. She didn’t want to go. It was awful, the chapel was awful, and she just wanted to get out. But John tugged again on her hand, drawing her back, and he smiled that smile of his—the one that was mostly happy, but maybe just a little bit sad.
Becca was returning with coffee for her boss when she had her first, real conversation with John. They were both waiting for the elevator, standing awkwardly next to each other in the lobby of the building. His eyes flicked up and then away. She almost thought he didn’t recognize her, but then they flicked back. A hint of a smile. Did he know her? She couldn’t be sure. She tried smiling back, but he had already looked away. She bit her lip, waited, tried smiling again but now he was looking at his shoes, and then the floor display, and then he was pressing the button again impatiently.
“Coffee?” she asked. It was her boss’s coffee—black, the way she liked it. He wouldn’t like it though, that wasn’t how he took his coffee.
At first, he didn’t respond. Nothing. Eyes on the floor. Then, as if the words had taken a long time to penetrate, he turned to her and blinked once. “Yes, thanks,” he said, and then that hint of a smile became an actual smile, a real one. Not as real as the one in the picture, not as full or as genuine or as happy as that one, but maybe it had a little of that in it. She handed him the coffee. She had no coffee to bring her boss now, but that was all right, she was doing good for the firm, keeping up morale. She dug into her pockets.
“Two sugars, right?” She produced them, and he smiled a little more, so she ripped the tops of the packages, both at the same time, and she dumped the sugar in. “Sorry,” she said, “no spoons on me.”
He took the coffee. The elevator door opened, and they both stepped inside. “You’re Becca, aren’t you?” he asked. “Beth’s new intern.”
Becca nodded. He sipped the coffee, smiled again, sipped again. Silence.
It was the sugar, Becca thought, a good thing I brought the sugar. He wouldn’t like it black, and then we wouldn’tbe talking now. And she smiled back, and she surreptitiously patted the pocket of her jacket, crammed full of sugar packages.
But now John wasn’t talking and the elevator was moving inexorably toward the top floor. Becca counted out the floors as they passed them—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. John sipped. Becca fidgeted. She tried to look at him out of the corner of her eye, squinted so he couldn’t see h
er doing it. Seventeen, eighteen. She was looking at his hand, his left hand, ringless, like there had never been a ring. Twenty.
“Where did she go?” She didn’t mean to say it. John looked surprised at first, his mouth went through a little series of silent ohs, before it bunched up into a look of intense pain.
“I don’t know,” he said. His eyes dropped. “I really don’t. They ask me sometimes, ask about the ring. I don’t know. One day she was there, and then suddenly, she wasn’t anymore. Pieces of her started to go missing. First it was an eye. Her hand. The whole left side of her body. No one noticed except me, but I could see her slipping away, a little bit at a time. And then she was gone. And then the ring was gone. And then . . . her things. The clothes in her drawer . . . her picture on my desk. . . .” he turned and he looked at her, but he wasn’t really looking at her, he was looking past her, not seeing her. “I think I might be going mad.”
Becca didn’t say anything, he looked so sad right then, so terribly, terribly sad. She put her hand on his, touched him very, very lightly, so lightly she didn’t know if he could feel it.
“You’re not going mad,” she said. “Shhhhh, it’s alright. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Inside, though, she was thinking, she’s gone, she’s really gone, you never had a wife, John. You never knew her, you never loved her.
He looked up, very tentatively, met her eyes for the first time, smiled. The door opened with a cheery bing and he startled guiltily. Half-jumped out of the elevator. But then he paused, turned and put a hand across the door. “This coffee wasn’t for me, was it? I haven’t gotten you into trouble?”
“It’s your coffee now,” she said. “Just for you.” And saying it she felt happy, just happy, and solid. Like he could see her at last. Like she was real to him.
“Right,” he said. “Thanks.” But as the doors closed again, she saw that look in his eyes, something speculative, something wondering a little bit—who was the girl in the elevator?—but a happy kind of wondering, a curious sort of wondering, a maybe-maybe sort full of hope and excitement. She saw it there, in the eyes, in the smile. And then elevator began to drop away underneath her with a feeling that might have been a little like love.
And now she felt anger, just the barest hint of anger that he should be sad, here, in Paris, the city of lovers, la Ville-Lumière. He was the one who had wanted all these fucking bones, these fucking dead Frenchman, what right did he have to be unhappy? He should be smiling, he should be smiling, and she should be smiling, like in the picture. But he wasn’t. There was something missing from his face, some part of him that wasn’t quite there, wasn’t quite with her. He should have been smiling.
John was snapping away furiously now, and Becca wanted to go. She didn’t want to be in this dank dark place any more, she wanted to be where there was light, where there were bottles of wine.
“There’s supposed to be something here,” he said, and he was staring at a place in the wall where an ancient skeleton had been composed on a little shelf. “A name. There’s supposed to be a name here.” Becca looked at John, looked at that handsome face, but the eyes were wrong, they were wide and staring. She wanted to be kissing John, but he was interested in all those bones, all those stupid, fucking bones. They weren’t people anymore, they couldn’t be. They couldn’t talk, they couldn’t fuck, they certainly couldn’t love you anymore. Dead people couldn’t love you. That was the point, why didn’t he understand that? Dead people were gone, they were vanished forever.
John was muttering something now, and his breathing was hoarse. “I can’t find any names, there must be names here, mustn’t there? Who were all these people? Where did they come from? Where?”
“John,” she said, “we’re going now.”
And he took a picture. And another picture. And another picture. So many goddamn pictures. And then he wasn’t taking pictures anymore, he was putting away the camera, and Becca thought, thank god, at last, he’s done with it. He doesn’t need pictures anymore, he can just have me. But he was picking up the skull, he was staring at it.
“It’s Laura,” he whispered, and his face made a thousand silent, painful ohs. “I think it’s Laura.” He paused, and he was rubbing his ring finger then, and Becca stared at it, the band of light, untanned skin where that ring used to sit. In the washed-out light, he seemed to be a stranger. She didn’t recognize him anymore, there were dark smudges across his face, the eyeholes deep and sunken. And full of something. Wonder. Love.
“She’s here—she always said . . . Paris . . . she wanted to go to Paris. La Ville-Lumière. She wanted to make love in Montmartre. She wanted to stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower and see all those lights, all those little lights winking at her. She wanted to . . .”
And he was looking at Becca now, and he was holding the skull in his hand, and suddenly Becca could see it too, it was Laura, it had the same loving smile, and it was looking at him, and the word SLUT was written across it in large wobbly writing. And she was angry. You don’t exist, she thought, you never existed. You weren’t real. He never loved you.
“I remember. I remember her, she was there, and then she . . . Why are we here?” he asked, and he was staring, and his eyes were wide and dark as caverns. “Why are we in this fucking place? Why did you—?”
Becca found that she didn’t want him to be there anymore, he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t kind, he wasn’t the kind of man you ought never to leave. Because he was leaving her. She knew it, she could see it, she could feel the little pieces of herself disappearing. He was leaving her, and all for his wife, for his dead wife. She wasn’t a person, she wasn’t anything. There were six million dead people buried here, six million, and how many more? How many more everywhere? Throughout all of time? The dead are nothing, she wanted to scream at him, they aren’t anything at all, just a little whiff of air, a thing that was there and then gone. She was nothing. She was a stone. She was a memory. She was band of white flesh wrapped around his finger.
“She’s dead, John, she’s just fucking dead!” And Becca felt it happening, felt that look in his eyes, felt the darkness of those caverns swallowing her up.
And he kissed the skull, he leaned over and he planted his lips on it, the warm flesh ones against cold, hard, gleaming bone. He didn’t shiver. She thought he should be shivering, that he should be cold, that it would be awful to kiss a dead person but it wasn’t. There was a look on his face. Happy. A smile that was a real smile, and the skull was smiling too. Nice little even rows of super-clean, white teeth.
Why are you doing this, John? she wanted to scream. Why are you doing this? Why can’t you just love me, why am I not enough, why am I not real to you? All those skulls, all those skulls around her were laughing now, they were saying, “You mocked us but you are one of us. You are one of us, you are dead, you are among the dead and now we shall have you.” The teeth. All those dark eye holes and smiles full of teeth.
And then John was looking at her again, really looking. Becca felt herself falling into pieces under John’s terrible stare. And maybe it was a bit like love, that feeling of dropping away.
[ hand ]
NO GHOSTS IN LONDON
This is a sad story, best beloved, one of the few stories you don’t know, one of the few stories which I have kept to myself, locked up tight between cheek and tongue. Not a rainy-day story, no, not a bedtime story, but another kind of story: a sad story, as I said, but also a happy story, a story that is not all one thing at once and so, in the way of these things, a true story. And I have not told you one of those before. So hush up, and listen.
Gwendolyn had worked for the old manor house, Hardwick Hall, ever since her mum died. She knew all the stones in the manor house by heart, the ones kept rough and out of the reach of tourists, the ones smoothed by feet or hands, the uneven bits of the floor underneath the woven rush mat, the inward curves on the stairs; she knew the ghosts who had taken up residence in the abandoned upstairs rooms—dead sons
and murdered lovers, a suicide or two, and the children who had died before reaching the age of ten. It was her home in many ways, the manor where her mum had worked. Her home. And though she longed to go off to university in the Great City of London, since childhood she had felt the Hall’s relentless drawstrings tugging tight as chain-iron around her. The kind, best beloved, that all young people feel in a place that is very, very old.
There was duty, of course. The old duchess’s bones creaked like a badly set floorboard when winter came to Derbyshire, and she was wary of strangers, wary of people since her brother’s sons had died in the war, wary of everyone except for the sad-eyed, long-jowled bulldog, Montague, who would sit by her side and snuffle against her ancient brocade skirt as she sewed. The duchess’s memory was moth-eaten with age, and the only faces that made sense to her were those that had been in her company for some time. As her mother had. As Gwendolyn had. And Gwendolyn found it easy to love the old woman, to love her pink-tongued companion. To love Hardwick Hall.
So there was love as well, which as we all know, best beloved, is as tight a drawstring as any. But love is not always happiness, particularly when you are young, and lovely, and just a bit lonely.
After she buried her mum in the spring in a ceremony that was sweet and sad and comforting with all the manor staff in attendance, Gwendolyn put on her mum’s apron and she tended the gardens and organized the servants, keeping them straight, letting them know there was still a firm hand about the place. Yes, my love, this is one of the sad bits but, hush, it was not so very sad as it might have been, for Gwendolyn had been loved by her mother very much, and, in the way of these things, that matters.
So. Gwendolyn stayed, and she minded the manor and all was well for the most part. The servants came to respect her, as they had her mum, to mind what she told them. The only people who didn’t attend to her properly were the ghosts. Oh, Gwendolyn would cajole, she would bribe, she would beg, she would order. But hers was a young face, and she was not a blood relation to them. She was a servant herself, and lacked, at that stage, a servant’s proper knowledge of how to subtly, secretly, put the screws to her master. Her mum had known how it was done—but her mum had kept many secrets to herself, as all mothers do, sure in the knowledge that there would be time later to pass them on.
Hair Side, Flesh Side Page 7
