He never understood why people said they should do things when they meant him. “I’m hungry,” he said, not least in case he might be, and covered a plate with some of the remains of the buffet before sitting on a chair that protested like all his grandmother’s furniture. When he’d managed to clear almost half of the plate, his mother intervened. “Don’t stuff yourself for the sake of it or you won’t be able to sleep.”
That was something else to dread. He could only climb the stairs that were wider than his arms could stretch, and too dim under the yellowish chandelier, and creaked one by one as if they were playing a funeral tune. Until now he hadn’t minded that the bathroom, which was almost big enough to be public and just as whitely tiled, echoed all his noises as if someone thinner than himself was hiding in it. He rushed through a token version of everything he had to do and fled next door to his bedroom.
Why did it need to be so big? It was at least twice the size of his room in the house where he’d lived with his parents until his grandmother had to be looked after at night - sometimes she’d prayed without seeming to breathe, and sometimes she’d wanted his mother to remember everything they’d done together and agree there had never been any bad times. Jonathan tried to feel grateful for the room, though it shrank his bed to a cot and his desk to a toddler’s surrounded at a distance by furniture so gloomy - dressing-table, wardrobe, chest of drawers - he imagined it was waiting for him to misbehave. The books his grandmother had given him because she’d thought them suitable failed to welcome him; they just helped darken the room. The only one he could bring to mind concerned some children who made everyone believe an old lady was a witch, and it was too late for them to be sorry when she killed herself and couldn’t go to heaven. He struggled to forget it as he inched under the bedclothes without pulling them free of the mattress, but already knew what the story brought back to him.
“Never speak ill of the dead,” his grandmother used to warn him, “or they’ll come back and haunt you.” She’d gone into worse detail, especially during her last weeks. He would never say anything hurtful about her, and surely he needn’t be afraid his mother had wanted him out of the way so that she could. She and Trudy were climbing the stairs now and saying nothing at all.
Trudy placed a moist kiss on top of the one his mother left on his forehead. The women moved to either side of the bed to tighten the sheets over him, then retreated to the door. “Sweet dreams or none at all,” Trudy said, resting one black-varnished nail on the light switch. “Do we have the light out, Esther? I expect a big boy like Jonathan must.”
“We won’t be long. Trudy’s staying over. I know,” his mother said. “You have the light off and we’ll come up and talk in my room.”
He was afraid to aggravate her concern for him. “All right,” he mumbled and turned his back.
The dark fell on him at once. He made himself wait until their footsteps began imitating one another on the stairs, then he twisted face up and jabbed his fingers together on his chest. What was he expected to say? He’d only started praying when his grandmother had assumed he did and asked him to on her behalf. Every night before he went to sleep he’d implored God not to take her away, but the idea of pleading for her to return terrified him. “Please God take care of my grandma,” he muttered as he thought of it. “Please tell her she was the best grandma ever. And the best mum too,” he felt compelled to blurt.
Surely that would make up for any criticisms his mother might let drop. She and Trudy were laughing in the kitchen, but that could hardly be about his grandmother. He was unable to think how long it was since he’d heard his mother laugh. He remembered the night his grandmother had emitted a snore so loud it had made him giggle in bed. “Mother?” his mother had called, though she was beside her, and more loudly “Mother?” suggesting that his grandmother had been retreating into the distance of the room. Then there was silence until she’d said “Oh” as if what she was seeing had almost robbed her of breath.
She and Trudy had finished laughing, perhaps because the house made them sound too small and shrill. Now they were lowering their voices as they came upstairs. They weren’t scared to be overheard by anyone who’d been up here with him, he told himself: they were showing respect for his grandmother or trying not to waken him. Creaks marked their progress to his mother’s room. Her door hadn’t quite closed when he heard Trudy murmur “You say whatever you need to, Esther. It’s part of dealing with your loss.”
He couldn’t distinguish what his mother said, even once he dragged himself free of the, bedclothes and crouched against the headboard. When he lowered one reluctant foot, it was greeted with a creak by the floor, which felt as chill as his grandmother’s face had last time he’d touched her. More than a dozen hasty paces took him through the dimness thick as the musty curtains, past the audience of hulking half-seen furniture, to the door. He inched it ajar and was confronted by his grandmother’s room.
Her door was shut. That managed to seem reassuring until he thought of the darkness beyond it, even vaster than the dark behind him. Suppose that as he’d ventured to his door, his grandmother had reached hers with far longer strides of her spidery legs and was pressing her face against an upper panel? He was trying to find his next breath when he heard his mother say “I hate to admit it, but Lawrence was right. She was never happy till you knew how much everything she had was worth.”
Jonathan sucked in air so that he could whisper “You were just proud of it, weren’t you, grandma? I expect you still are. You should be, because it’s so nice.”
He was frightened to raise his voice, but equally frightened by the possibility that she was close enough to hear his whisper. He didn’t realise he’d flinched from the prospect that her door might jerk open until the floor creaked beneath him. “Is that you, Jonathan?” his mother called.
He hung onto the door while he closed it as swiftly as he could without making a sound, then had to let go and turn to the glimmering slab of his bed. “I didn’t hear anything. Have a top up so you sleep as well,” he heard Trudy say, and a clink of glass. The creaks of his retreat obscured what the women said next, and once he was huddled in bed he couldn’t understand them. “Please God don’t let my grandma hear anything bad about her,” he began to whisper, interspersed with words to her. “Mum thinks you were the best mum. She’s just talking because she’s upset like her friend said.”
Soon the only word he was aware of uttering was mum. It must have lulled him to sleep, because he was awakened by his name creeping like a draught into his ear. A face was looming almost into his. He shrank across the mattress, dragging the bedclothes free, before he realised that daylight was showing him Trudy. “Shush now,” she murmured. “We’ll have to do something about those nerves of yours. Get up quietly and get ready and I’ll run you to school. Esther’s catching up on her sleep.”
Once dressed, he found that Trudy had readied a bowl of cereal and some bread and jam, presumably because cookery might rouse his mother. Trudy watched with tentative fondness as he did his duty by the breakfast, then stopped just short of touching him while ushering him out to her car, which had front seats but no rear. Its smallness was a relief from the house, but drew the amusement of dozens of boys on the way to his school. The massive houses split amoeba-like along the route, and the school had undergone even more fission, separating into six unequal buildings that felt like a test the place was setting him. He was halfway through his first term, but the school still overwhelmed him. When Trudy left him at the gates with a wave of her fingertips that bore a kiss, he would have lost himself in the enormous crowded schoolyard if two boys a head taller than himself hadn’t stopped him. “She your girlfriend?” said the one with a moustache or grime occupying sections of his upper lip.
“Could be his new ma,” said his crony, the left side of whose chin boasted a single black curly hair.
“Gently now, gentlemen.” This was Mr Foster, the long-faced English teacher who wore his greying hair in a p
onytail. He pinched or massaged the backs of their necks until he’d finished saying “We don’t harass our new fellows, do we? Especially when they’ve just lost a member of the family.”
“Never mind touching us,” one boy muttered as Mr Foster steered Jonathan away by an elbow to enquire “Are you fit to come back to school, Hastings?”
Being addressed by his surname was yet another aspect of the place Jonathan had still to accept. “I think so, sir,” he said.
He’d hoped school would take his mind off his grandmother, but now he felt that anybody there might bring her up. Suppose she proved to be the theme of the morning assembly? Once the pupils had been herded into the main building, however, and the staff had taken their seats onstage in the assembly hall, the headmaster lectured about the football team and how their performance should inspire the other pupils to try harder. Jonathan was trying to keep that in mind when Mr Foster singled him out at the beginning of the English lesson. “Is there anything you’d like to share with us, Hastings?”
“Like what, sir?”
“Such as, I believe you mean. About your bereavement.”
“Such as what, sir?” Jonathan wished he didn’t feel bound to ask.
“Forgive me if you think I’m prying.” The teacher’s face had managed to lengthen itself, and looked capable of pouting when Jonathan failed to answer. “Recollect in tranquillity,” Mr Foster told himself, and seemed inspired. “That can be your subject for homework, all of you. Write about a loss, whatever it may be.”
Could Jonathan’s grandmother read what he wrote about her? In at least one way writing was different from talking - it was even harder - but surely it would give him more to say aloud about her. The trouble was that the prospect of writing drove all his thoughts for it out of his head. His skull felt emptied throughout the English lesson and the other classes, interrupted by lunch and larking in the schoolyard, activities that came no nearer reaching him than the questions teachers aimed at him. He assumed they toned down their responses to his uselessness because they knew about his grandmother.
None of the boys he’d made any kind of friends with lived near him. Soon his route home left him alone with the November dark, which he could have imagined the houses were hauling down from the sky. The dark had moved into his grandmother’s house. The faltering light of the streetlamp beyond the unreasonably long drive showed him the key in his hand. The jerky shadow of a branch of the tree that hid the house from passers-by clawed at his wrist as he unlocked the front door.
Like his grandmother, it was half as tall again as Jonathan. The dimmest stretch of the glow from the streetlamp twitched underfoot as he sprinted to turn on the jangling chandelier. Its grudging illumination lent him the courage to shut himself in before dashing to switch on the kitchen light. He dropped his schoolbag on the table with a thump that seemed both too loud and dwarfed by the room, and hauled open the refrigerator to pour himself a drink. At once he knew what he could write.
He spread his books across the table and sat on the least creaky chair. “I’m going to say some nice things about you, grandma,” he murmured. “I’ll read you them when I’ve finished.”
* * *
He wished he hadn’t thought of that - it made him nervous of the silence around him and behind him. Having ceased its mousy scurrying across the page, the nib emitted a blot like an emphatic full stop. He crossed out the sentence that seemed eager to complete itself. Mr Foster said you had to show your first draft as well as your finished work, though Jonathan’s grandmother had kept saying it looked untidy. The idea of her prowling soundlessly behind him to crane over his shoulder made him feel steeped in the lurking chill of the house. “I’ll read you what I’ve written,” he said as loudly as he dared.
He wanted to believe she was at least as distant as her room. He raised his voice so that it would be audible up there, and didn’t realise it was deafening him to any sounds until he was asked “Have you brought someone home, Jonathan?”
“Just doing my homework,” he found the breath to tell his mother as she and Trudy marched along the hall.
“Why, do you have to read it to your class?” She kissed his forehead before stooping to examine his homework while Trudy looked uncertain whether to do either. Eventually his mother straightened up and blinked at his forehead as though she had a mind to take back the kiss. “Well, if that’s how you remember it, Jonathan.”
“That’s how grandma was.”
“No need to shout. We’re only here.” He was hoping she would leave it at that when she said “I’d like to be home when you come in, you know, even if I mightn’t give you snacks so close to dinner. Unfortunately I have to earn a living, particularly since my mother’s attitudes got to be too much for your father. And by the way, I don’t think you need to upset yourself over the fridge. If you can open it she could. Most of the time she wasn’t quite as feeble as she liked to pretend.”
* * *
“Go on, Esther, let it all come out.” To Jonathan Trudy said “People have different ways of grieving, and this is how your mother has to. Are you finding yours?”
“I’ve got to go upstairs now.”
“You can work better there, I expect,” his mother said. “We’ll call you when it’s dinner.”
He could tell she wanted to believe she hadn’t distressed him, while Trudy thought he was off to grieve. Neither was the case. He loaded his schoolbag and climbed into the dimness that hung around the chandelier. Even when he switched on the upstairs light, gloom seemed to cling to the landing and the corridor. He felt as if his grandmother’s disapproval had been roused: she used to say you shouldn’t have more than one light on at a time. She’d just been trying to save money for her family, he told himself. “Mum only meant she wished she could be more like you, grandma,” he muttered. “I expect that means she will be.”
His voice faltered as he saw his blurred shadow growing smaller on a lower panel of his grandmother’s door. Either he was unaware of shrinking from the notion that she was within arm’s reach of the other side or the door was creeping open. The voice that made him see it lurch backwards because he had was his mother’s. “Is that Jonathan talking to himself? What’s wrong with him?”
“Will it be his way of coping, do you think?”
He should have closed the kitchen door. He shut himself in his room and moved his desk away from the wall so that he could sit facing the room with surely no space for anyone, no matter how thin, to sidle behind him. He didn’t need to finish his English homework until the weekend. Instead he applied himself to sums that he was supposed to call arithmetic now that he’d changed schools. He was feeling sure enough of his pencilled answers to commit ink to them when Trudy called “It’s waiting for you, Jonathan.”
He left his bedroom light on so that it would be there for him, his mother’s phrase that finally conveyed some meaning, and hurried to the dining-room. His mother was ladling out a lamb casserole as Trudy filled glasses with wine and his with juice while the sideboard and dresser kept their distance from the table yet helped it aggravate the disapproving sombreness. “Did you get much done?” his mother asked him.
“I won’t do it about grandma after all.”
“I hope that’s not because of me.” When he failed to think of a safe reply she said “What does your subject have to be?”
“Losing something.”
“What else can you say you’ve lost beside your grandmother? Unless you’re intending to tell your teacher how your father absconded.”
Jonathan wasn’t sure of the last word, but otherwise his thoughts seemed not to be hidden from anyone. “Are you still unhappy about him, Jonathan?” Trudy said, stroking his arm.
“Sometimes.”
“Doesn’t seeing him every week help?” Having watched until Jonathan repeated his nod, she said “Give it time and maybe there’ll be someone extra in your life if that’s what you’d like.”
Just now he felt he had to concentrate a
ll his liking on his grandmother. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
Rather less than a look passed between Trudy and his mother. He could have done without the impression that another secret was at large in the house. Once dinner was finished he would have watched the Tuesday quiz shows with his mother, but their guest had to see a programme she’d told her history students to watch. The documentary about people being tortured by the Inquisition until they believed they were as bad as they were told only sharpened his unease. As soon as the credits began to crawl up the screen he retreated upstairs to talk to God and his grandmother.
He hadn’t been in bed long when his mother came to give his forehead a lingering kiss, which she used to say was putting good dreams in. “Not asleep yet? I expect having the light off will help,” she said. “Don’t be surprised if you hear someone else upstairs.”
“Who?” Jonathan gasped, scarcely a word.
“Trudy, of course. She’ll be staying.”
Since she would hardly be sleeping in his grandmother’s old bed, presumably she would share his mother’s - had shared it last night too. He wished he’d asked to sleep there instead of alone in the dark. Once his mother left him in it he found a solitary sentence to repeat. “Please God let my grandmother hear just nice things about her.”
Shouldn’t that settle everything? At last it let him sleep. He lurched awake, anxious not to be confronted by Trudy’s face again, but only daylight had stolen into his room. While he was in the bathroom Trudy and his mother collaborated on breakfast before running him to school in his mother’s car, which had space for all of them. Outside the school gates, as he leaned forward from the back seat to deliver a kiss he hoped would be too swift for his schoolfellows to see, both women turned to him. Their cheeks brushed together, and they exchanged smiles not unlike shy kisses, magnifying his awkwardness as he stumbled into the yard.
Yesterday’s tormentors converged on him. “Found them yet?” said the boy with the tidemarked upper lip.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 142
