Local Poet

by Paul Trembling

  “Sorry,” I said round a lump in my own throat.

  “It’s all right. It’s just that…” She put the tissue to use, wiping her eyes, before continuing. “Laney used to send me bits of her work all the time. She liked me to read them over, give her feedback. I helped her put things together for publication, researched possible markets, set up the website. It was one of the best times of my life, seeing this wonderful talent blossoming and maturing – and being able to be part of it. Hours we spent together, talking poetry. Then, when I heard about the accident…”

  She went silent again. I joined in.

  “My turn to say sorry.” She glanced at me. “This must bring it back for you.”

  “It does,” I admitted. “But I need to go there. I can’t deal with it by hiding from it. And I need to get to know her. To understand who she was and what she was like, so that it might make some sort of sense. Because if she was just a… a random person, just a figure I knocked down, then it doesn’t mean anything. But she wasn’t; she was real and unique and special, and I have to get hold of that to give it some sort of value.” I stopped, bemused by what had just tumbled out of my mouth. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Sandra gave me a gentle smile. “Actually, it does. So then, I was saying… The day after the accident, an envelope arrived here for me. Laney’s handwriting. But I didn’t open it. I couldn’t. Not for several days. Because I knew it was the last one I’d ever get from her, and when I opened it she really would be gone. And that doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  “Of course it does.”

  “I only opened it yesterday, and it was a new poem. About a black gull.”

  She got up and went over to a filing cabinet behind the reception desk. After a brief rummage she was back with a large brown envelope.

  “What do you make of this?” She handed it to me, but then headed back to deal with another customer, leaving me alone with Laney’s last words.

  The envelope had been neatly slit open. I reached in and hesitantly withdrew the single sheet of lined paper inside.

  I hadn’t seen Laney’s handwriting before. She wrote large. Clear, bold italics that filled the paper. There was no title; she just launched into it.

  Whilst grey gulls soar free above salt water,

  And send their cry across the shifting valleys,

  The Black Gull makes its nest in darker places,

  Deep in the grave of a forgotten past,

  Once resplendent for all to see,

  Now cast down, its glory tarnished.

  There it lays its doom-full eggs,

  And hatches its poisonous brood,

  Of unnatural heaven,

  And guards it well,

  Secure behind an armoured web.

  Which does not,

  yield,

  Save to the knowing hand,

  That which is empty.

  I will not share its bitterness

  I will not live in its shadow

  I will take its gift and find a cleaner peace.

  “What do you think?” Sandra had come back and was reading over my shoulder.

  “It’s a suicide note,” I said without thinking.

  Sandra gasped. “You think she killed herself?”

  I mentally took myself outside, gave myself a good kicking, and reminded myself that most of the things June had told me were not yet public knowledge. Such as the fact that she’d committed suicide while high on La Paz. Looking, perhaps, for a cleaner peace – but I couldn’t tell Sandra that.

  Instead, I shook my head vigorously. “No, it’s just this bit about finding peace. That’s the first thing that came to mind. But you know how Laney always had several layers of meaning. What was she actually saying here?”

  “That’s just it. I’m really not sure. It’s somehow different from her other writing. There’s things in it that I just don’t get at all. These odd lines in the middle, for one thing: ‘Which does not/ yield’. Why does she break it up like that?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said, this time in complete honesty. Nothing June had told me shed any light there. “How does the black gull thing fit in, do you think?”

  “Well – as I said – for Laney it was a symbol of the dark side of life. So perhaps that fits with seeking peace. You know, I wonder if you might be right about it being a suicide note. Because she was going through a difficult time. The last few weeks – she wasn’t herself. She was so withdrawn. Well, she’d always had this way of retreating inside herself while she thought about something. You could tell when she’d slipped into deep-thought mode. But this was different. It was more worried. Fearful, even. And she’d lost all her brightness and humour. It was like a shadow was on her.”

  “Or a black gull.” I patted Sandra’s arm, awkwardly. “Didn’t she say anything about what was troubling her?”

  “No. She shut me out. In fact, I hadn’t even seen her for over a week when… when it happened.” She picked up the poem. “Then this. Laney’s last work. And it feels so sad. Yes, perhaps it is a suicide note. But why?” She choked back a sob, and we sat silently for a moment.

  I glanced at the envelope. Same handwriting, of course, but different pen. Black ink instead of blue. Thick brown paper, oversized for the single sheet of paper it had contained. I picked it up, looked at the postmark.

  “Sandra,” I asked slowly, “do you know if there’s a post office in the Plaza?”

  She nodded. “About halfway down.” Her eyes widened as she made the connection. “That’s just near where it happened!”

  “Yes. And look at the date it was stamped. The same day!”

  “She wrote this in her notebook.” Sandra’s voice had sunk to a whisper. “She always carried one with her. And a pen. Always jotting things down as they came to her. But then she ripped out the page, went into the post office, and sent it to me. And after that…”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “I never even thought of looking at the postmark.”

  “Why would you? Who ever bothers to do that?”

  “I suppose. Rob – do you think I should tell the police?”

  I shrugged. “I expect so. I doubt if it’ll tell them anything they don’t already know, but it might help them dot some ‘i’s.” And it might get Mickey Fayden off my back for a while, I added mentally. “Could I get a copy of the poem?”

  “Take that one if you like. I’ve made copies.”

  “Really? But… it’s the original. The last one she actually wrote.”

  Sandra smiled, and touched my arm. “Yes, I know. And because you know that, it feels right that you should have it. I think she’d like that as well.”

  She went back to work, and I sat puzzling over the poem for another ten minutes. The references to La Paz were clear enough, but most of it was still obscure.

  And the timing of it had to be significant. Posting it to Sandra must have been almost the last thing Laney ever did. Which meant that it was important. Stuffed full of chemical peace, she was thinking calmly, unemotionally. Planning every action. The poem was a suicide note, as I’d first said, but I was more and more certain that there was more to it than that. I even had the glimmering of an idea about what it might be.

  But I needed more information to be sure. And I could think of only one place where I might find it. I folded the poem away in a pocket and headed for the door.

  “Let me know if you have any ideas about it,” Sandra called as I passed her.

  “I will. Ah – if you do tell the police, you don’t have to mention that I’ve got a copy, OK?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not asking you to lie if they ask you,” I assured her. “It’s just that I’ve had far too much connection with this already. I’d rather they didn’t have another little snippet to perhaps leak to the press.”

  “I can understand that. I’ll keep you out of it.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to go, then another thought struck me. “Oh, Sandra
– I meant to check up on something before I got sidetracked by your post. What happened when Laney was fourteen?”

  She smiled. “That was her big year. The first great success she had. That was when she won the National Schools Poetry Competition.” Her smile turned to a frown. “That was the good thing that happened. The bad thing…”

  “I know. Her father came home.”

  There was only one Willdyne Street in England, according to all the search engines I’d tried, and it was ten minutes’ walk from the library. A quiet suburban backwater no different from hundreds of others – except that Laney Grey had once called it home.

  It hadn’t changed much from the description in her poem. The street name had been relocated and was now twenty feet up on the wall. It hadn’t kept it from being defaced in just the same way as its predecessors. The “d”, the “n”, and the “e” had been spray-painted out, no doubt to the vast amusement of the kids who did it. Old jokes don’t die; they are just disinterred and resurrected by each new generation.

  The corner shop had reopened as a mini-market. But the rest of the street seemed unchanged. Even number 15 still had its blue door and brass knocker, with a doorbell to the side.

  I used the knocker.

  There was a long pause, during which I debated knocking again or hurrying away. Before I came to a decision, a lock clicked and the door opened a short distance. There was a chain on it, I saw, and not far above the chain a clear brown eye.

  “Is that the police again?” An old lady’s voice, warm with Caribbean tones but shaded with apprehension.

  “No, I’m not the police.” It must have been a copper who had told her about Laney. Perhaps she feared that there was more bad news; I hastened to reassure her. “I only want to talk with you for a minute. You won’t know me, but my name’s Robert Seaton.”

  There was a pause while the eye looked me up and down. “I do know you, boy.” The door closed, the chain rattled off, and it opened again, but wider.

  She was a small woman, not much over five feet high and fine boned with it. Or you might say skinny, if you were being blunt. Neat dark clothing, dark wrinkled skin beneath crinkled grey hair, and a gentle smile that I couldn’t understand if she was a relative of Laney’s and if she did know who I was. I felt it had to be spelled out, in case some misunderstanding now made things worse later on. “I’m the person who was driving the van that –”

  She stopped me with a raised hand. “The van that killed Laney. Yes, I know. I’m Roshawn Skerrit. Her grandmother. You’d better come in, Mr Seaton.”

  She led the way into the room next to the front door. It was as small and neat as she was herself, though with a slightly formal feel to it. As with many people in this part of town, she probably did most of her living in the kitchen and dining room at the back of the house, reserving the “living” room for special guests and formal occasions.

  Paradoxically, this made me feel more at ease, since I’d been raised in a similar tradition. I wasn’t surprised when she announced that she was going to make some tea, without asking if I would like any. It was part of the ritual, a recognized way of dealing with awkward situations that gave us all some common ground, no matter what our background or experience of life was.

  While water boiled and spoons tinkled on china in the back of the house, I looked round the room, and especially at the photographs, which covered the walls and stood on shelves and the mantelpiece. Many were of Laney. Some were quite recent, colour pictures of her holding up her books (I recognized the covers), talking to groups of people, shaking hands, or hugging friends. I recognized Sandra in one shot, which looked to have been taken in the library.

  Others were of a much younger Laney, sometimes in school uniform, and often with a strikingly attractive woman whom I supposed to be her mother. Finally, I discovered a family group: Laney, in school uniform, holding a plaque, flanked by her (supposed) mother and a much younger-looking Roshawn Skerrit.

  “That was a special time for us.” She had come into the room very quietly, in spite of the tray she was carrying. I had been peering closely at the photo, trying to read the inscription on the plaque. Putting the tray down on a coffee table, she came to stand next to me.

  “Was that when she won the competition?”

  “That’s right. A proud day for us all. We all knew that Laney had a great gift, but that was when the world knew it as well.”

  “Then that’s her mother with you?”

  “Yes, that’s my girl, Elizabeth.”

  In my quick scan of all the photographs, I’d seen very few men. One old black and white was probably of Laney’s grandma and grandad on their wedding day, but there was no similar picture of Elizabeth Grey, née Skerrit, and Andrew Grey.

  “Laney’s father isn’t here, is he?”

  Roshawn Skerrit turned away abruptly. “You’ll find no picture of that man in this household.” Surprisingly, there was no anger or bitterness in her voice. Just sorrow and regret. “Sit yourself, Mr Seaton. Will you take milk and sugar in your tea?”

  “Yes please.”

  We sat in silence as she poured then handed me a cup. She sipped at her own, then offered me a plate of biscuits. “I’m glad you came, Mr Seaton,” she said abruptly. “I wasn’t sure if I should. I was afraid that I might be, well, would likely be unwelcome. Under the circumstances.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “I understand the circumstances. The police explained things quite well, and I know that you weren’t to blame. It was a terrible thing that happened, for you as much as for anyone.”

  Her insight and empathy caught me by surprise. “Not everyone gets that,” I muttered.

  “Well, I’m an old woman, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years, it’s that tragedies aren’t ours alone. There are always others caught up in these things, and their pain is just as real.”

  I thought of the shockwave that had expanded outwards from the moment of Laney’s death, of all the people who had been touched by the hurt of it, and nodded slowly.

  “Clinging to our own pain helps no one,” Roshawn continued. “Keeping others in mind helps put it in perspective, at least. So I was praying for you, soon as I knew what had occurred, and then when that awful newspaper report came out, I thought how you must feel.”

  “Pretty bad,” I admitted.

  “Well, I supposed so. I wanted to speak to you then and tell you I laid no blame on you, but I then thought that it might make things worse if I did. But I have prayed that I would get a chance to speak to you, and it seems like the good Lord heard my prayer, for here you are.”

  I was surprised to find my eyes were stinging. “Thank you for that,” I mumbled past the lump in my throat. “That’s – it means a lot. Coming from you.”

  She nodded, and passed me a box of tissues. “No shame in tears,” she admonished gently when I hesitated.

  I let it all out. Being so emotional in front of a stranger wasn’t something I could have imagined happening before. But just then it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “There’s healing in tears,” she said as I came to the end of it, and indeed I felt as if a burden had been eased, if not entirely lifted. “Do you want another cup of tea? That one may be getting cool by now.”

  It was, but I drank it anyway. “I’m OK, thanks.”

  “Well then, Mr Seaton, why don’t you tell me why you came?”

  “I’ve been trying to find out more about Laney. I wanted to know who she was. I’ve read her poems, the published ones. And looked on her website. But there’s still so much I haven’t really understood – can’t understand – without knowing more of her life. And who she was. So I came here, because this was where she came, in her poem, when she came home.”

  Roshawn nodded. Her eyes had drifted away from me, staring over my shoulder and back in time. “Oh, but that was a wonderful day! When I opened the door and saw her standing there – it was the first time I had laid my eyes on her for five
years.”

  “Five years? Where had she been?”

  “Here and there. Travelling, always moving. Hiding.”

  “Hiding?”

  “From her father.”

  And suddenly, it came into focus. That was what her first book had been about. All that loneliness, that lack of involvement, the standing outside of life, looking in – it was being on the run, always hiding, never at home.

  “Postcards to Myself!” I said.

  Roshawn smiled. “Yes. While she was away, she would send me postcards. That was all the contact we had in those years, but it let me know that she was OK. I kept them, of course, and showed them to her when she came home. When she decided to publish the poems she had written during that time, she thought of the postcards, and that gave her the title.”

  “But why did she do that? Hide, I mean.”

  “Well…” She shook her head. “Where should I start?”

  “Where does it begin?”

  She put down her cup, stood up, and began to walk round the room, looking at the photographs.

  “You’ve asked the right question, Mr Seaton.” Pausing by her wedding picture, she stared at it for a moment, then shook her head. “No, it was after he’d gone. He was a good man, and if he’d been here it would have been different. But he died too young, too soon.” She touched the frame gently, then opened the drawer beneath it and took out a small object, which she brought over to show me.

  “A wedding ring?”

  “Elizabeth’s.” A plain gold band, unremarkable to the eye, full of meaning to her. “Things hadn’t been easy for her, with her father gone. We got by, but we didn’t have a lot. No jewellery, no smart clothes, not many friends. She was beautiful – you can see how beautiful! – but she was always a little shy, a little awkward with people. When she met Andrew Grey… he was like something from another world. Good-looking, confident – and charming as well. Funny. He could always make her laugh. She was just nineteen; he was ten years older and once he set himself to it, she had no chance at all. Of course, we didn’t know what he really was.”

  “A criminal, you mean?”