The eulogy and the hymns, the big stuff I suppose, I’m not sure I took those in. I remember a line or a phrase. ‘A much loved wife and mother and daughter, taken from us too early.’ That came through. I watched dust particles drift through the air and felt like my body wasn’t mine any more.
I remember what my mum said: ‘I wouldn’t want to be buried, stuck in a wooden box with worms eating my eyes. Burn me up! Turn me into ash and throw me into the sea. We’ll all be thrown into the sea when we’re dead and then one day, sometime, somewhere, before the earth dies we’ll all be swept together again as we pass each other on different tides.’
She laughed and me and Dad laughed with her. She would know she was sounding a little manic, but it was only a little and she could be like this for weeks before it got worse, and sometimes it never did. Sometimes she was just exuberant.
My mum loved the sea. She told me that two-thirds of the planet is under the sea. ‘Think about it Luke, think about all the places man hasn’t discovered on earth and then think what must be down there. There are mountains and deep, deep hidden seabeds no human eye will ever see. There are continents of undiscovered land under water. Vast areas of blackness, beautiful creatures and secrets we will never know. That’s where I want to end up.’
So we didn’t have to bury her. It made me think: Why would anyone lower the body of a loved one into the cold ground? Throw some mud on them and let them slowly rot? I don’t believe in God and heaven and hell but I did care what happened to her and I much preferred the thought of her remains being at sea. Being tossed and turned in a wild black storm at three o’clock in the morning or being sunned and rocked gently on a calm afternoon. That seemed more like my mum.
Afterwards everyone spoke about how busy it had been. There wasn’t enough room on the pews, people had to stand at the back. I wasn’t aware of that. My grandparents had taken charge – my dad’s parents. Me and dad were ushered into the car, into the church, up to the front pew and then back out into the bright sun. We didn’t have to do anything. People came across to us, shook our hands, kissed us, hugged us, offered condolences. We nodded and let them do what they had to do.
Everyone was invited back to my grandparents’ house. Dad and me went too but after a few minutes he took me by the shoulders and steered me out of the hushed house. We went home. Our house was empty and silent. My dad sat in his chair to drink and I went to my room and sat down and had the thought: What are you supposed to do on the afternoon of the day you’ve cremated your mum?
His name is Jon
The first time I met Jon Mansfield was 7.30 on a Thursday morning. It was the day after I’d found the envelope tucked into the rocks and I’d been asleep for fourteen hours. I didn’t hear the knocking on the front door but I did hear my dad yelling up the stairs. Eventually. I think they probably heard on the other side of the fell. He was shouting that I had a visitor, that I should get out of my pit. I was too tired to be confused by the fact that someone was here to see me in a town where I hadn’t met a soul.
I stumbled down the stairs and remembered the note from the day before. The memory was a punch in the stomach and I wanted to go back to bed, to give up on the day already, but I felt the fresh air rushing up the stairs to greet me and I knew someone was waiting. I reached the door and Dad stepped aside and my eyes met the bright morning. I blinked and squinted and saw that I was facing the boy in the road for a second time. Even in the early-morning sunshine he looked unusual. He had on the same granddad clothes: brown shoes, grey trousers and a dark-green knitted jumper. He was even wearing a bloody tie. He had a side parting that revealed a thin white line of scalp on the left-hand side of his head and each strand of hair looked separate and solid like it was being held in place by glue. He looked like it was 1945 and he was on his way to church. My dad had left us to it and we just stood looking at each other. For a long time. I squinted at him and didn’t know what to do. He had a coughing fit. He recovered himself. Eventually he spoke. ‘Your eyes are very green. Emerald green. Did you get my note?’
I was angry first. When I read it – stood out in the wind, high on the hill – it felt like a message from my mum, a hug I never expected to feel again. Then I’d shaken sense into myself. It wasn’t from my mum. She was dead. I didn’t think she was just around the corner. I didn’t think she was watching me. I thought she was killed in a massive car crash and we turned her into ash eight days later. I felt stupid. And it was this boy’s fault. Standing outside our crumbling, shit, house at 7.31 in the morning in stupid clothes with a stupid haircut. ‘That was you.’ He nodded that it was. I turned and walked down the hall and into the kitchen and dropped myself into one of the Thornbers’ old chairs. I felt exhausted. I felt like I could sleep another fourteen hours straight.
He’d followed and sat down at the other side of the kitchen table. Neither of us spoke. His right leg tapped and his neck twitched and he stared at the kitchen wall like there was something there that only he could see. He coughed a dry hard cough every few seconds, his skinny chest nearly jumping out of his jumper like it was trying to escape. I’m not sure he could even tell that I was annoyed with him, that I wanted him out of the house. I thought he might be retarded. Eventually, he started talking. He spoke quickly, in machine-gun rounds. Leg still tapping, neck still twitching.
His name was Jon Mansfield and he went to Duerdale High School. The head of year told them that I would be starting next term and she’d told them about my mum. She wanted everyone to be ‘supportive and welcoming in a difficult time’. He said he knew it was me when we nearly killed him, that nobody moves to Duerdale, most people try to leave, so it had to be me. He lived in a house further down the fell with his grandparents and had seen me painting on the top of the hill. He pushed the envelope into the rocks for me to find. He thought it would be a supportive and welcoming thing to do. He told me that the passage was written by Canon Henry Scott-Holland. That he had been a canon of Christ Church Oxford and he’d formed the Christian Social Union. He said that it’s one of the most popular readings at funerals. ‘I thought you might like it – someone gave it to me when my mum died.’ He came to a halt, he was finished. He’d tried to be kind, so I tried to swallow my anger, looked at the strange creature sat opposite and asked if he wanted a cup of tea.
He just started showing up
The rest of the summer holidays began to follow a pattern. Dad let Jon in every morning at around 7.30 and shouted me out of sleep. I stumbled down the stairs and into the kitchen and into a chair opposite an already seated Jon. I would be a bit useless for the first few minutes as I tried to shake my head awake and steer my thoughts from dreams back to reality. Even before my mum died I’d had horrible nightmares that hung around the corners of my mind for hours, colouring the whole day. My currrent nightmares involved a lion, loose in the house, hunting me, eating and clawing its way through doors. It always ended the same way: paws on my chest, mane tickling my face, teeth bearing down. Even in daylight the memory made me shiver. Dad would put the kettle on and disappear to his workroom and I would make me and Jon a cup of tea and after what could be a few seconds or a few minutes, Jon would start talking. As he spoke I watched him, his twitches and tics, his jerks and shudders. He was like a small, wild animal. One at the bottom of the food pile with the most predators, never relaxing, sleeping with an eye open. His eyes constantly darted around the room and he was always tapping one part of his body against another. He was thirteen like me but looked at least two years younger. He only stood as high as my shoulder and his tiny wrist looked like it would snap with the weight of lifting the cup of tea from the table to his mouth.
It was one of the first mornings Jon visited and I was stood by the kettle, squeezing a tea bag against the side of a cup and watching the water turn dead-leaf brown. I was still half asleep and only half listening to him rattle on. He was telling me that he lived with his grandparents. That they don’t have a TV and have lived in the same house all their
lives. They used to be friends with Mr and Mrs Thornber, he said, but they fell out in a dispute over who owned a corner of a field. He told me that they don’t like strangers or incomers. I couldn’t help thinking as I passed him his tea that they sounded like a pair of miserable bastards. He took the cup and put it down on the table, blew on it and said, ‘My mum died when I was six but I remember loads about her. I never met my dad. Do you know about Duerdale?’
I told him I didn’t and tried to concentrate as he reeled off the facts.
‘It’s an old mill town, situated in the base of the Bowland Valley. Most of the houses are terraced houses, back to back, set out in grid form …’
I sipped from my tea and he told me that the cotton-mill owners built the houses and that when you started working at one of the mills you would be given a terraced house to live in. He said that all the houses are very close to the mills so that the workers didn’t have far to go, but it was also so the mill owner could keep an eye on his workers. They were built during the Industrial Revolution, he said, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in a lot of places they’ve been knocked down because they aren’t considered suitable for modern living. He said in some towns they knocked down terraced houses and put up flats instead and moved everyone from the houses to the flats. He looked amazed as he considered this and said wasn’t it ridiculous. I’d never thought about it and I didn’t care but I nodded that it was anyway.
He looked up at the ceiling, rocked his head from left to right and carried on. ‘We live on Bowland Fell which has mainly been used for sheep and dairy farming in the past but there aren’t as many farms now because of foot and mouth and supermarkets.’
He came to a halt. He’d finished. I passed him the biscuit tin, but he’d already stood up. He walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and the front door banged closed behind him. The tea sat on the table, still steaming, untouched. I considered him for a moment. He was weird. Mum would have liked him.
Whisky in the Jar
It took me a while to notice how bad it had become. I don’t think either of us saw each other clearly for a few months. And it wasn’t easy to tell what the grief was responsible for and what to blame the drink for. They seemed inseparable to me. I only know which came first.
He’d lost more weight. I saw bones in his face I’d never seen before. Everything about him was harder, sharper and smaller. He looked like he’d almost halved in size and now his beard seemed too big for his face, like it had started to take over. He wore the same clothes most days: a pair of old blue jeans with holes that were eating the rest of the material and a dirty green jumper. I shouldn’t say but he smelt. We communicated in grunts and nods and shakes of the head most of the time but every few days he would react like he’d remembered something important. His head would shoot up, or he would spin around quickly and ask me something like, ‘Have you got your lunch money?’ or ‘Have you cleaned your teeth?’ I would nod and he would look relieved and say, ‘Good … good.’ He didn’t clean his though. I touched his toothbrush each morning as I cleaned mine and it was always dry.
I don’t remember when I started noticing but it got to be that there was always a glass of whisky in his right hand. He held it low and to his side, almost behind his back, so that maybe I wouldn’t notice. When Mum was alive he used to buy bottles of beer, different brews with silly names, ‘Blond Witch’ or ‘Bowden’s Bathwater’, but he never came back with those now, just the whisky.
He didn’t neglect me. He always made sure there was food. He would ask what I wanted from the supermarket and I tried to be sensible. I asked for stuff I knew Mum approved of: carrots, peas, lettuce, leeks. It’s just that chips are easier. We didn’t eat together. I never really saw him eat much at all – a bite of bread or a handful of cereal. He did sit with me while I ate though: two fingers of whisky to my fish fingers and chips.
It wasn’t like I was invisible, he was trying, I could see him trying. See him mustering the effort from somewhere. He would shake himself together when I walked in the room and I would watch him try to pull all the threads together and attempt to focus. I could see him try and quell the steel splitting headache and swallow the queasiness away. He would lift his head and peer through the fog and try to arrange a smile. He still hugged me sometimes. It was great. Even with the smell. I don’t know how often he made it upstairs to bed. He never made the bed so it was hard to tell if it had been slept in. I saw him a few times, late at night, asleep at the kitchen table with a drop of whisky left at the bottom of the glass and his head on the table.
He was still always up before me, no matter how bad he looked. He would be sat in his chair at the kitchen table with the morning sun streaking through the greasy windows, spotlighting his grey face and bloodshot eyes. His shaky hands were always wrapped around a cup of thick black coffee and if his hands were trembling too much he would leave the room and come back a couple of minutes later, less jumpy. I knew he went for a drink and he must have known that, but neither of us let on. He didn’t want me to see him drinking too early that was all.
Panthers and Pluto
It turns out that Jon wasn’t retarded. He was massively strange but not even slightly stupid. He knew facts about things I didn’t know existed. He spent a lot of time at Duerdale Library and had his own corner there. He didn’t read any fiction though; it was all cold hard fact. He could usually be found upstairs in the reference room, with the encyclopedias and dictionaries piled high around him. He had a photographic memory and if he read about something it stuck. It wasn’t a magic power or anything; he just remembered things. And I enjoyed testing him. Our early-morning meetings would consist of me throwing random words at him: ‘electricity’, ‘Jupiter’, ‘Islam’. Occasionally he wouldn’t have read about one of the subjects, so I would try another word and off he would go. He wasn’t showing off, it was just how we began to communicate. Early-morning lessons in whatever.
It was a good way for me to begin the day, it would slowly clear my mind of the dreams and nightmares. I would wake up over a cup of tea, and listen to Jon chatter about the different types of eagles found in north-west Scotland, their wing spans, colouring and diet. He would explain why Pluto is no longer considered a planet: ‘It’s too small, it doesn’t dominate the neighbourhood around its orbit so it’s called a dwarf planet now. They’ve given it the number 134340. Some astronomers cried when it lost its official planet status.’ He would tell me that a wild panther can run at 35 mph and can be seven feet long from nose to tip of tail: ‘If it stood on its hind legs it would be taller than your dad.’ His eyes were wide as he considered this fact. He looked across at me to see if this information had really sunk in. I nodded quickly, to show him I was impressed too.
I would occasionally ask him about school or friends or his grandparents but he never said much and just kept on tapping his leg. So I would throw another subject at him, take a sip of my tea and watch him go.
His silence about school frustrated me. I wanted to know about Duerdale High, what to expect, what the teachers were like. When we went to buy the uniform my dad asked if I was nervous and I shrugged and told him I wasn’t bothered, and part of me really wasn’t. But occasionally, at unguarded moments, I would be hit with a slice of fear. In the middle of a painting or just before falling asleep the unease would shoot through my belly or skate across my spine. My mum always told me to confront my fears. She said that things are rarely as bad as your imagination makes them. So I tried with Jon again.
‘Jon, what’s Duerdale High like?’
Silence.
‘Jon, what are the teachers like?’
Silence, leg starts tapping.
‘Jon, what are the other kids like?’
Silence and leg tapping and neck twitching.
He looked uncomfortable and I felt mean. I let it go.
Dad and Jon
He seemed to like Jon. I think he saw, like I did, that Jon was th
e kind of stray my mum was drawn to. She was always on the side of the dismissed or the fragile. When we went to choose a cat from the RSPCA she chose the oldest, and scruffiest, the one that no one else wanted. She even asked which cat had been there the longest. Me and Dad laughed when they showed us. He was an old, ugly, ginger tabby that spat and snarled when you went near. One ear half bitten off and a mean face. My mum insisted we would have him. She said that he spat and snarled because he had to spit and snarl to survive, that he just needed somebody to care for him. She was kind of right; he eventually stopped scratching. He would find my mum as soon as she walked through the door and fall asleep on her all the time. We called him Rasputin. He never liked me and Dad though.
Anyway, we were the kind of family that welcomed … outsiders, I suppose. Having Jon around made us both make more of an effort. One thing we were never allowed to be when Mum was alive was rude. Rudeness and dropping litter were up there with grievous bodily harm in her book. With Jon in the house my dad had to speak now and again. Or at least grunt.
Jon was fascinated with my dad’s toys. I remember his face the first time he walked in the workroom. He looked like he had woken up on the moon. His eyes were popping, big and wide, and his mouth dropped open and didn’t close all the time he was in there. He walked the perimeter and let his arm reach out and hang over all the toys. He didn’t touch any of them, his left hand just hovered above cars, soldiers, trains and boats, following their contours, shapes and lines. After his first visit he was hooked. He started going there every day.
The workroom was an outbuilding, just a few steps from the back door. It must have been used for cattle when the house was a working farm and there was still a warm animal smell sometimes, just for a few seconds. On a couple of his better days my dad had whitewashed the inside walls and fitted work surfaces. It was just like his room at our old house except much bigger. On three of the surfaces were rows of toys he was making, each row at the same stage of completion. He did each step for each range of toys at the same time, so all morning he would be painting all the car bodies red or sanding all the feet of the soldiers. It saved time and made sense but sometimes he joked that it was like working in a factory. The fourth work surface was empty. At our old house he used this for his wood carvings and sculptures. He laughed when he called it ‘my creative space’ but I knew he meant it. It was the desk where he enjoyed the work the most. It was where he made the stuff he wanted to make, the pieces that never sold at the markets because they were too expensive or too weird, or both. The fourth desk was still empty here though. There were no strange and ugly carvings of bizarre, angry creatures or giant men, carved out of wood and painted steel silver.
Luke and Jon Page 3
