The Pull of the Moon

by Diane Janes

  I should have wept for her then, but the tears didn’t come – just an increasing sense of hopelessness and with it a raging thirst which I tried to ignore; but as I tossed from side to side I became increasingly desperate for a cool drink. I wished Danny would wake up so that I could send him downstairs on my behalf, but he was dead to the world. He had closed the bedroom door, but when I lifted my head I could see the telltale chink of light in the gap at the bottom which meant the landing was still lit up. I stared at this sliver of light for a long time, telling myself that it would only take a few seconds to run down for a glass of water. Eventually I was so desperate that I slipped out of bed and switched on the lamp: partly in order to locate my dressing gown and partly in the vain hope of accidentally waking Danny. He shifted in his sleep, but nothing more, not even flinching when I opened the door and the light from the landing shone directly into his face.

  I closed the bedroom door before tiptoeing to the stairs. The house was still swathed in dusty heat. The floorboards grumbled as I passed over them and each stair creaked on a different note, like a badly tuned instrument. My bare feet made a soft, sticky sound on the hall floor.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Simon’s voice stopped me dead. I hadn’t realized he was still in the kitchen. It was too late to turn back now.

  ‘It’s me – Katy,’ I croaked out the words. The fear and tension in his voice were more unnerving than the shock of encountering him. He was sitting at the kitchen table exactly where we had left him. He stared at me with bloodshot eyes that seemed to expect someone else.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the alcohol,’ he said.

  I didn’t bother to remind him that I hadn’t partaken. ‘It’s supposed to make you sleep.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t,’ he said, grimly. ‘It just gives you a headache and messes with your mind.’

  ‘Danny’s asleep,’ I said – not exactly to dispute the point, more for something to say.

  ‘Lucky Danny,’ said Simon. Then he folded his arms on the table, put his head on to them and began to cry. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d never seen a man cry before. I filled a glass with water, while trying to decide whether it was better to pretend not to notice. I drank the water at one go and refilled the glass. Simon’s shoulders continued to heave. His sobs were faint but audible.

  ‘Is there something I can get you, Si?’ I asked nervously.

  He raised his head and rubbed a bare forearm across his face. It took him a moment before he said: ‘Do you really think what we’ve done is wrong?’

  I was taken aback. To start with, I hadn’t expected a direct question, and secondly I was confused by the note of accusation in his voice. There was a long pause. When I realized Simon wasn’t going to fill it, I said, ‘Of course it was wrong – but Trudie was dead when we found her. Nothing could alter that. . .’

  ‘We were supposed to be her friends,’ said Simon. ‘But we didn’t stop it from happening.’ His face looked ashen, the way it had when I first told him the police had arrived. He must be very drunk, I thought.

  ‘We couldn’t stop it,’ I said, in my best reassuring-a-child voice. ‘It was an accident. It wasn’t our fault.’ In my head I heard myself calling out his name and his answer receding into the distance – then footsteps running back along the path. I told myself not to be an idiot. He was probably thinking cause and effect – that if only we had taken more care not to get separated, she might never have dropped her torch and become fatally entangled in the wires; or maybe he was taking it back a stage further and thinking we should never have gone down to the woods at all. I found myself unexpectedly flaring with anger against Trudie. It wasn’t our fault, I thought; it was hers. She shouldn’t have gone on ahead like that. None of this would have happened if we’d stayed at the house. It was all Trudie’s stupid fault for insisting we go into Bettis Wood after dark in the first place. Trudie and all her nonsense about bloody Murdered Agnes. Now the rest of us were stuck with the guilt and uncertainty, and those terrible images which were never going to go away. ‘It’s not our fault,’ I said, robustly. ‘We were in a difficult situation and we had to make a choice.’ It was true that I might not have agreed with the choice we had made; but we were stuck with it now.

  ‘A choice.’ He echoed my words, adopting a strangely ironical note. ‘We made our choice.’

  ‘You should go to bed,’ I said. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

  He gave a hollow laugh. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again. Not now . . . not after today . . .’

  ‘What’s this – a midnight conference?’ Danny’s voice made us both jump.

  ‘I came down to get a drink – and Simon hasn’t been to bed at all.’

  Danny regarded us irritably. ‘Better go to bed, man,’ he said to Simon. ‘That concrete guy’s due here at half eight.’ To me he merely said, ‘Come on,’ and jerked his head towards the stairs. He was right of course. We had to try to get some sleep.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Every picture tells a story. Here I am, just as the fat-bottomed nurse marches in, sitting at Mrs Ivaniso-vic’s bedside examining her valuables while she sleeps. The nurse’s face registers an obvious reaction. We gape at one another – her wondering how to handle a visitor who has apparently turned up at the deathbed to indulge in a bit of pilfering, me trying to find the best words to explain.

  I open the case and hold it out for her inspection – that way she can see it isn’t a diamond bracelet. ‘She signalled for me to get it out,’ I say. ‘I think she wanted to look at it. It belonged to her son.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had a son.’ She sounds doubtful.

  ‘He’s been dead a long time.’

  She glances across at the ranks of framed photographs and light dawns. ‘Danny,’ she murmurs. ‘Of course – she did have a son, now you mention it. That’s him in the photographs, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She hands back the box and I snap it shut.

  ‘What happened to him, then? Motorbike accident, was it?’

  ‘Suicide.’ My voice has dropped to a whisper. It isn’t deliberate.

  I can see she is intrigued, her original suspicions subsumed by the possibility of some gossip about a patient’s family. Suicide has potential connotations of tragedy and drama above and beyond a mere road accident. She leans across me to check the fit of the oxygen mask, a manoeuvre which brings her large bosom into the space which I had thought to claim as mine. I lean back into my chair, enveloped in an aroma of antiseptic handwash and spring-fresh fabric conditioner.

  ‘How long ago was all this then?’ Her accent tends toward the sing-song I associate with Newcastle. It reminds me of Josser.

  ‘1972.’

  ‘By – that is a long while. It must have broke her heart, poor soul.’ She nods in my direction, trying to imply that state of mutual understanding which encourages shared confidences – in no hurry to get down to the nitty-gritty of patient care while something so interesting is on the conversational menu. ‘Why did he kill himself?’

  I glance at Mrs Ivanisovic. She appears to be asleep, but how can one really tell? ‘No one knows,’ I say. ‘At the inquest they hinted that it might have been something to do with his being gay.’

  ‘Oh.’ She hesitates. ‘Did she know he was gay?’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ I said. ‘He had a friend who was, which is why some people might have thought that – but he wasn’t gay himself.’

  ‘Aah.’ She looks smugly knowing. ‘Well, maybe he was but he hadn’t come out. Lads didn’t in them days. Maybe that’s why he killed himself – you know – couldn’t face telling folk.’

  Normally I just keep quiet. Let people think what they want: but something in her tone grates. How dare she think she has it cracked – she who only heard of Danny’s death half a minute ago.

  ‘He wasn’t gay,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you never know—’

  ‘ I know. I was engaged to b
e married to him when he died.’

  As her face reddens in embarrassment, I feel instantly ashamed of myself. She has taken in my ringless wedding finger, my presence at his mother’s bedside, and is mortified by the innocent trampling she has done. Moreover I was not even telling the truth. I was not engaged to Danny, whatever he or his parents may have thought – whatever I may have said to score a cheap point over the fat-bottomed nurse, no such arrangement ever existed between us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, sounding it, ‘but I’ll have to ask you to wait outside for a couple of minutes while I see to Mrs Ivanisovic’

  I leave the room feeling that it is me who should be sorry. The woman with the pink rock chippings round her neck is just crossing the hall.

  ‘Are you popping out for a breather?’ she asks. ‘I think it’s stopped raining.’

  ‘I’ll just wait here, thanks. The nurse is in there at the moment.’

  Pink Rocks lingers, nodding sympathetically. ‘She’s a remarkable old lady, isn’t she?’

  I opt for safe agreement, uncertain precisely what it is about Mrs I that she is referring to.

  ‘Every day this week, Dr Brownlow has come out from seeing her, saying he doesn’t expect her to be with us by morning.’ While I stand in the hall, wondering if Dr Brownlow is generally noted for such a cheering line in optimism, Pink Rocks twits on about how some people have this remarkable will to live. Maybe she thinks I can derive some comfort from this – or maybe she secretly suspects that I’m a frustrated beneficiary, wondering how much longer Mrs Ivanisovic is going to lie here in Broadoaks, depleting her estate to the tune of a hundred pounds or so with every passing day. I remember the situation we faced with my own mother – the pressure on hospital beds, the wait for suitable nursing-home places. No doubt some other rich old lady is already waiting somewhere – her name down against Mrs Ivanisovic’s place – that nice room with its big bay window, so handy for the garden. Her family may have been told that a room will shortly be available. They will be longing for the vacancy to occur – no one actually admitting that this entails the hope of another’s swift demise.

  Does the nurse think about this as she ministers to her dying patient – wondering who will be the next occupant? Or maybe she is pondering another contradiction – that of the healthy young son who couldn’t wait to leave life behind, set against the ancient mother who is holding on to it so tenaciously.

  So many people all waiting for one old lady to die. A life flickering to its close. A faltering flame that could be snuffed out in an instant.

  When I am allowed to return, I find Mrs Ivanisovic is awake. Her eyes follow my progress from the door to the bedside chair. I notice she is propped a fraction more upright and has a writing pad and pen to hand on the bed. She must have signalled for the nurse to get them out. She appears more alert – I wonder if the nurse has administered something.

  ‘You’re looking a little better,’ I say.

  She raises her eyebrows – a little better, a little worse, what does it matter? She applies pen to pad. The pad has been folded open at a clean page and the pen top has been taken off, so she is free to start writing, but when she begins her efforts are feeble. She takes an age to produce a single word: Why. The letters are oversized and uneven. She doesn’t bother with a question mark.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I say, shaking my head, affecting to be at a loss, while employing a version of the double speak with which children were taught to respond in wartime. It is a piece of evasion which has amused me ever since I first read about it – a carefully engineered, typically British loophole. I think about this as Mrs Ivanisovic struggles to manipulate her pen. How during the war, when signposts were taken down to foil the expected invasion, children were instructed to respond to enquiries from strangers seeking directions with the cosy middle class expression ‘I cannot say’ – thus avoiding the words ‘I don’t know’, which would have been a lie. Thus was the enemy to be thwarted without anyone breaching the commandments.

  Mrs Ivanisovic is not going to be put off so easily. She is no mere German paratrooper disguised as a nun; Mrs Ivanisovic is a remarkable woman – hasn’t Pink Rocks said so? She is determined not to give up her hold on life until she has winkled out the truth. Now she has completed her next effort and holds up the pad. The letters weave across the page; some look as if they are trying to clamber over others in a general rush for the edge of the paper. Did you quarrel.

  ‘Of course we quarrelled sometimes.’

  She jabs her pen at the page, her frustration boiling over.

  ‘Please, Mrs Ivanisovic. I have told you everything I can tell you. If you are asking me whether Danny killed himself because we quarrelled, then I can assure you that wasn’t the case. If something like that happened, don’t you think I would have said so at the inquest?’

  She leans back against the pillows. The whisper of her breathing pulses gently across the room, mingled with the soft slow tick of the bedside clock. Another shower patters against the window panes. All these years she has been pondering the question, wondering how it could possibly have come about that her clever, witty, talented son – a handsome young man on the brink of a successful life, last seen in an ebullient mood, happy and in love – could have taken his own life, without a word of explanation or a note of farewell. I reassure myself that she has no answers. Her theories rely on no more than wild guesswork: she imagines that we quarrelled and Danny took his life – in a misguided fit of pique after a lovers’ tiff. Or can she do better than this?

  I notice that my fingers are hurting. My hands have been resting in my lap and without realizing it I have been clenching my fingers, the nails digging into my palms. I imagine her voice, asking him question after question. ‘Was it something to do with Katy? Was it something to do with Trudie?’ Some idiosyncrasy in the Broadoaks air conditioning sends a chilly draught across the back of my neck.

  She leans forward and works the pen again. It threatens to escape her fingers, wobbles and tracks across the page, as if tempted to express ideas of its own. I watch as she forms the letters, coaxing the pen into the track of an S, then an I. The M is pitiful, shambolic.

  ‘Simon?’ I ask.

  She nods. I pause, trying to recall her words during my last visit. How some fellow student of Danny’s had visited, but been shown the door. The nurse has already brought Josser unbidden into my mind. Was it he who intruded upon the Ivanisovics? It would be just like Josser to imagine there could be capital to be made from feigning close acquaintance with Simon and Danny. When that failed he might have fallen back on innuendo. Before the inquest I hadn’t known that Simon’s homosexuality was a secret shared by some of his peers at university. I suppose I imagined them all as slow on the uptake as I had been myself.

  ‘It was true what people said about Simon.’ I proceed carefully. I don’t want to distress her. ‘And also – and also that he loved Danny – but he loved him as a friend – not in a sexual way.’

  I try to read her expression from what little I can see of her face. She affords me the movement which passes for a nod. She understands and more importantly believes what I am saying. I see that she is drifting again. Her hands slip away from the writing implements, so I remove them. Watch the rain making patterns on the window. After a while the nurse enters to ask if I would like some tea. When I say I would, she nods and vanishes, neither of us alluding to anything which has passed between us previously. She returns with a tray containing not only the necessary accoutrements to provide several cups of tea, but also a plate containing four triangles of egg and cress sandwich and a slice of Madeira cake, all neatly arranged under a sheet of clingfilm.

  ‘How about Mrs Ivanisovic?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m sure she won’t want anything.’

  I survey this unexpected bounty, remembering just in time to say, ‘Thank you very much.’

  Once she’s gone, I reach into my bag in search of a foil of paracetamol tablets. It’s rather clos
e in Mrs Ivanisovic’s room and I feel a touch headachy. Time was when you could buy a decent-size bottle of painkillers to meet your needs through the whole winter, but now the nanny state will barely allow you a sufficient quantity to see you through a dose of flu. I press the pills upwards until they break through the foil, extracting them slowly and placing them on the bedside table, not taking my eyes off the figure in the bed. Does she know something or doesn’t she? How can I be sure? Mrs Ivanisovic makes a small sound – nothing so overt that it could qualify as a snore. Everything about her is fading: the flame which once burned so brightly has grown dim. In my mind’s eye I imagine a column of smoke rising from a snuffed-out candle. I realize that I’ve forgotten what I was doing – continued to absentmindedly liberate the tablets from their packaging until a small group of them has accumulated on the bedside table.

  I take two of the paracetamol with my first cup of tea. The second cup accompanies the sandwich and a third helps wash down the cake. Soon after I’ve finished, a minion I haven’t seen before – a pretty girl with auburn hair and a mint green overall – appears to collect the tray. I am only just quick enough to palm the little collection of white tablets, which has been sitting all this time alongside Mrs I’s plastic dispenser of sweeteners.

  ‘When you want another cup of tea or anything, you just ring the bell,’ the girl says.

  It is evidently assumed that I am going to be here for some time.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The ‘concrete guy’, as Danny called him, showed up promptly at half past eight. I was halfway downstairs when I heard his pick-up arrive, but Simon got to the door ahead of me. I had only expected one workman, but the concrete guy was accompanied by a youth who was perhaps a couple of years younger than myself, and a little terrier dog which ran across to nose about under the lilac. The older man had thinning auburn hair, a check shirt, and trousers whose original colour was now indeterminate, being so spattered with the skimmings of jobs long past. His skin had been reddened by years of exposure to the sun and was dotted with a thousand pale brown freckles. His companion wore workman’s jeans and a Rod Stewart T-shirt, so well washed that its lettering had faded to a ghostly grey. They appeared to be perfectly ordinary and could not possibly have imagined the dread with which we shuffled out to greet them, exhibiting all the unwillingness of bad boys sent to the headmaster for the cane. Nobody managed to smile.