It’s fifteen-plus years later and there’s no way of knowing it – the bench has long rotted away, and not been replaced – but Abigail has found the spot, the exact spot, where her mother was when she realised she’d lost her daughter. When she’d slowly turned to gaze at the sea and knew what had happened to her little girl, her Abbie. That she’d drowned. Known she’d drowned and couldn’t imagine she’d ever come back, the stuff in the Bible or other fairy tales never happening in real life. This is the place. Abigail – grown up now, soon to be a mother herself – has brought her girlfriend to see. Her leather jacket draped over Abigail’s shoulders, Bex’s hand rests protectively – it seems always to be there, lately – on Abigail’s huge, baby-rounded tummy, slowing swelling like the rise of a morning’s tide.
The caravan site closed down years ago, leaving no trace; a new development, posh flats it looks like, is under construction in the little bay. Abigail remembers these – what are they, hillocks? – these rocky heaps that run along the coast here, grassy piles of sandy rock, though predictably they’re smaller than she recalls: in her head she sees looming cliffs – beetling cliffs, maybe, if she could remember what the word meant. It’s silly, but she doesn’t want to go down to the beach itself, where the waves might try to get her again. As if she were still only little, as if she didn’t have Bex to anchor her. This rainy autumn feels strangely like it could be the rainy summer she drowned in, those fifteen-and-more years ago.
Bex is only half-listening to Abigail talk now, she’s fiddling with her mobile instead – and if they’d had them back then, would little Abbie’s father have called someone for help?
‘Come on,’ says Abigail. ‘Put that away, can’t you? This is where I died when I was a kid.’
‘I know. I’m tweeting that you’re visiting your own grave.’
‘I drowned.’
‘Your watery grave.’
‘You can laugh, but I was clinically dead for like twenty minutes. My mum told me.’
‘Yeah but clinically dead doesn’t mean very dead, like people pretend it does. It means kind-of-but-not-necessarily dead, otherwise you’d be in the ground. Obviously. Or fed on by fishes.’
‘God, you just have to argue with everything I say, don’t you?’
‘Fine, fine – you were dead. So tell me, what’d you see? On the other side, like? Beyond the light at the end of the tunnel.’
Abigail smiles at last. ‘Don’t take the piss.’
Nothing magical under these waves. The water is grey, opaque, stone turned liquid but colder than any stone. The weight of it unimaginable, pressing on her from all directions. Her mind nothing but blank terror as implacable currents tugged her into still deeper darkness, as she knew for the first time in her life – just six years old – that she was going to die. That it was happening right now, in fact—
‘You’re, like, romanticising it or whatever,’ says Bex. She runs a hand over her head’s gelled spikes; they spring back perfectly into place. ‘I mean, blank terror – cliché much? Plus, implacable currents? Come off it. It was just a stupid accident. You’re all right now.’
All right? She was dead. Though it’s true her head did break water at last – must’ve done, or else she couldn’t be standing here now, growing a new life inside her – her little arm had flailed into the air and been distantly spotted by kindly strangers. An elderly couple walking their dog on the sand had seen her hand’s drowning wave, amid the sea’s greater waves, and her coat’s small splash of colour. But out there in the water she’d been so tiny, so helpless. The vastness of the sky deranging. Her head barely above the surface, she’d kept dipping under again, swallowing more water. Even now she can’t have salt on her food (Bex snorts a laugh at that). The land had disappeared, as if it’d never existed. The whole world was sky and water, each as grey as the other, the emptiness infinite, and she felt – she swears she felt – her soul being pulled out into it, out of her body and into the air.
‘What, so is all this childhood trauma why you’re a wee bit mad?’ says Bex.
‘No,’ says Abigail, snuggling her face into her girlfriend’s neck, the leather jacket around her creaking like a ship’s rigging. ‘It’s you drives me mental.’
How long she’d been in the water was difficult to guess. It might’ve been an eternity, or two.
‘Feels like I’m still in there, sometimes,’ she tells Bex, her unborn baby’s other mother. ‘Under the waves.’
‘Don’t be daft. It must’ve been – what, a few minutes, tops.’
‘It’s like I’m looking at all the world through thick grey walls of water.’
‘Don’t know who you’re talking about but it’s not you.’
Because of course she was saved eventually. The lifeboat came, strong hands pulled her from the sea and brought her briskly, professionally back to life. She puked out seawater, gulped in air; her heart thudded again, louder than ever. An ambulance was waiting for her at the dock – no rescue helicopter winching her from the waves, to Bex’s disappointment – to hurry her to hospital. She was treated for hypothermia and shock, stuff like that, though she’s no memory of this part; there’s only a vague vision of waking up in a perfectly white, rainbow-laced dream of a room (‘What?’ says Bex. ‘The kids’ ward in the hospital,’ says Abigail, ‘had loads of cartoon characters and clowns and colourful stuff painted on the walls. It was kind of freaky, actually’), with her mother by her bedside and her father nowhere to be seen, not ever again.
‘All this just before my dad ran off.’
‘That bastard.’
‘No, don’t say that. You didn’t know him.’
‘Neither did you,’ says Bex, ‘ ’cause he fucked off – that’s the point.’
‘Oh, whatever. But listen, they told me I’d been dead, clinically dead, and I remember wondering if that made me a ghost. I should’ve just asked my mum, so she could tell me no, but I was too scared of what the answer might be. I bottled it up, I guess. I was only a little girl, remember. And so I can’t help but keep thinking, am I still one? A ghost, I mean. Because you can figure out the medical view of it, it’s in the textbooks, but how does a soul reattach itself once you’ve died and it’s been torn from its flesh? So am I a ghost, or what? Or am I, like, just an empty shell – my soul already off God knows where?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ says Bex. ‘You’re just being weird for the sake of being weird, and you’re no good at it. Come on, it’s getting cold. Let’s get back to the hotel, so I can screw your pregnant brains out all over again.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
But first from her pocket Abigail draws a dark disc of translucent green. A crystal ball, only not exactly crystal. A circle of misted emerald. An eye. A magician’s scrying stone, like from olden days. She holds it up to her face, looks deeply into it, but can’t see a thing – no images of the future, or of the past. It’s just a bit of glass, really – the base of a bottle, worn smooth by the sea. She draws back her arm, Bex watching her, and throws it back into the water.
PAPER CHAINS
Rebecca F. John
Artwork by Carla Busuttil
PAPER CHAINS
Rebecca F. John
I remember asking my grandmother why she was bald. It was the summer Trevor Mason went missing and, though I was already too big for it at six, I was tucked in her lap, staring deep into her furrowed face. Grandma Small had eyes like amber beads: the honey irises speckled with deepest brown. Her lips, thin and faded by then, were forever painted a rich cardinal red.
‘Because,’ she answered, ‘one of my hairs fell out for every good memory I ever made.’
‘But,’ I said, running my hand over her smooth skull. It was warm to the touch. ‘How many hairs did you have?’
‘Oh, thousands and thousands, I’d imagine,’ Grandma Small replied. ‘Far too many to count.’
‘And they came out one by one?’
‘Of course. Sometimes as many as twenty in one morning.’
‘That many?’
‘Yes.’ She tapped my leg; it was time to stand up and get on with the day. Grandma Small never could tolerate sitting idle for long.
‘But,’ I pushed as we unfolded ourselves from the chair. ‘What if your hairs hadn’t fallen out? How would you have kept track of your memories then?’
Grandma Small smiled and huffed and looked sad all at once. ‘Then . . .’ she replied. ‘I’d have put them all in a jar on the windowsill, where the sunlight could catch them.’
‘And the bad ones?’
She scrunched up her nose and flipped a hand over her shoulder. Rose-petal perfume pulsed from her wrist. ‘The bad ones aren’t for keeping.’
Grandma Small and I made paper chains. Hundreds of them. People, ducks, ghosts, trees, witches – Grandma Small knew how to cut them all. There didn’t need to be a reason. On heavy summer days, we’d sit out on the garden bench and chop and snick, stopping occasionally to rearrange the sun umbrella or take a sip of lemonade. In winter, we’d kneel near the fire and push our chins over our scarves to better see our designs, our cheeks crisping from leaning too close to the flames.
I don’t know where any of those paper chains went – into the fire, probably. But each time my mother took me to Grandma Small’s, the ones we’d made would have vanished, and we’d have to start again. It became a ritual. Grandma Small would begin the cutting and I, unable to endure the beating silence of the house, would talk and talk.
‘Where’s Grandpa Small?’ I asked as we began a long line of top-hatted men one cloud-greyed day.
‘There was no Grandpa Small,’ Grandma Small answered. ‘My surname isn’t Small. You only call me Small because I am small, remember.’
‘Then what was Grandpa’s surname?’
‘Hopkins. Same as yours.’
‘Then where is Grandpa Hopkins?’
‘He died, before you were born. A long while before.’
‘Did you have hair then?’
It became an obsession for me, her hair. My own was thick and gold and corkscrew-curled. My mother’s, too. I didn’t understand why Grandma Small’s was different. All the other grandmas on the street had white cotton-puffs of hair, which they pressed under rain hats before venturing outside, whether it was raining or not.
‘Yes,’ Grandma Small replied. ‘I had hair then. I was pretty then.’
I snipped at the arm of our figure, leaving him lopsided, and stopped. ‘What did you look like?’ I asked.
‘An awful lot like you,’ Grandma Small answered.
‘Does that mean, one day, I’ll look an awful lot like you?’
Grandma Small laughed. ‘I hope not, child.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘I’m nothing to aspire to.’ And I hadn’t understood the words then, but if I had, I would have told her that I wanted nothing more than to be like her. My Grandma Small was brave. She didn’t need anyone but herself.
When the cold-punch winter thawed and my seventh summer pink-skied in, Trevor Mason was still missing. My mother and I walked past talk of it on our way to Grandma Small’s house on Sydney Street, where everyone knew everyone else’s name. Grandma Small did not join in with their doorstep tattling. It was morbid, she said; the boy was long gone.
Besides, Grandma Small did not venture through the front door of number five Sydney Street. In all my life, I only ever knew her within those narrow walls where, when we tired of making paper chains, we played dress-up with her old clothes and jewellery.
‘What do you think of me?’ Grandma Small asked, sweeping out of her bedroom in a black dress so long it dragged across the carpet. With a flick of her hand, she swung a fur stole over her shoulder and tossed back her head.
I laughed and fiddled with the pearls dangling down to my knees.
‘I think we look like a pair of film starlets,’ she said, grabbing a cloche hat from the shelf and plopping it over my head. I pushed it back so I could see past the brim and, peering up, caught Grandma Small admiring herself in the mirror.
She’d glimpsed someone, I’m sure, who she used to be.
I was just nine when a storm tore in so recklessly that the schools were closed and the shops shut up and the whole town rushed inside, pulled on an extra jumper, and locked the doors to wait it out. I stayed at Grandma Small’s and we cradled mugs of hot chocolate and watched snowflakes pile up on the windowsills, the pavements, the shoulders of men returning from work. Everything was black or white, and I wanted it to stay that way.
‘Ah, but what would the world be without some colour?’ Grandma Small asked.
‘Clearer,’ I replied. I wasn’t sure what I meant, but it was the only way to describe what I saw through the glass. It was all crisper, now the snow had chalk-written the night.
‘Is there nothing you don’t understand?’ Grandma Small said, grinning.
‘Hundreds of things.’
‘Name one.’
‘I don’t understand why you only smile when you’re looking straight at people.’
Grandma Small raised the bumps of her hairless eyebrows, set down her mug and, hooking a hand around my shoulders, pulled me towards her. I was nearing her height by then and when she spoke the words blew into my hair.
‘Oh, you clever girl,’ she said. ‘I always knew you were clever. Now, what are we going to cut our paper chains into tonight?’
‘Snowmen, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Grandma Small answered and, turning, she disappeared in search of the paper and scissors. Her hot chocolate went cold at the window. She’d forgotten to pick up her mug.
Trevor Mason had transformed into legend by my tenth jelly-and-ice-cream birthday. At school, children taunted each other with sworn sightings of his ghost. In the streets, those people who’d run short of gossip steered their words back towards ‘the trouble’. They remembered and misremembered his freckled nose, his gap-toothed grin, his wayward hair.
Grandma Small and I cut paper chains in the shape of galloping horses and ignored them.
‘Horses,’ I told her, ‘are my favourite animal.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re the most graceful. It’s like they’re always dancing.’
Grandma Small leaned close to whisper. ‘They’re my favourite animal, too, you know.’
I smiled. Perhaps, given this similarity, I would grow up to be as patient and funny and bold as my Grandma Small. ‘Why?’
‘Because when I had my little boy, I gave him a stuffed horse, and it was the only present I ever gave him.’
‘You don’t have a little boy,’ I said, levelling the hooves of the paper horses with a long-considered snip.
‘Not any more,’ Grandma Small answered.
‘Then where did he go?’
Grandma Small sighed. ‘He went with your Grandpa Hopkins. He just went first.’
I kept my eyes on my hands. I was suddenly desperate to get the horses shaped right. Somehow, at that precocious age, I knew that she was finally telling me the truth.
‘And was it him who made your hair fall out?’ I asked, cutting carefully, carefully.
Grandma Small nodded.
‘Then . . .’
‘Then what?’
‘Then he must have been your happiest memory,’ I said.
And Grandma Small gave a little laugh. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think he must.’
I was slicking on a stolen flamingo lipstick, to match the dress I’d discovered in Grandma Small’s wardrobe, when my mother returned early from work to collect me. The dress was high-necked and fastened down the spine by a line of buttons, and suddenly I was a grown-up in the mirror. Grandma Small had fallen asleep in her cup of sweet tea.
She woke only when my mother splashed inside and shook off her umbrella. There was news, she breathed, relating to the trouble. The whole village was out, combing the woodlands, the rattling river, the blackened smirches at the mouths of the old mines. A scrabbling dog had u
nearthed a child’s shoe on the riverbank, and the owner had presented it directly to Trevor’s mother, seeking confirmation of her worst fears. Four years on, she’d said – or so my mother claimed – and she was as certain as her soul that the shoe was his.
‘And why should it be his?’ Grandma Small asked.
‘Why not?’ my mother replied.
Grandma Small pressed her cardinal lips together. ‘I’ll bet it’s not.’
And, staring as I was at her amber-bead eyes, I saw that as she spoke, they turned to coal. It was as if a cloud had passed over and cooled their speckled warmth. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew then that Grandma Small didn’t want that shoe to belong to Trevor Mason.
The next night, when I asked if we could cut our paper chains into shoes, Grandma Small shook her head and, creaking up the stairs, gathered herself into bed without another word.
The last time Grandma Small and I cut paper chains, we trimmed them into bobbing ships.
‘Why ships?’ I asked, since it had been Grandma Small’s turn to choose the shape.
‘So we can sail away on them,’ Grandma Small answered.
‘We could hang them in the window,’ I suggested, ‘and the reflection of the rain can be like the waves.’
‘That’s a clever idea.’ Grandma Small tried to crinkle into a smile, but it flopped short of her eyes. ‘There you go again, being so clever.’
‘Isn’t it good to be clever?’
‘Oh, yes. Sometimes. But not, perhaps, when there are too many secrets flitting about.’
I laid my paper ships over my knees and looked up. ‘Secrets like what happened to Trevor Mason?’ I asked. There had been an article in the newspaper about Trevor. I’d read it off my mother’s lap one night after she’d sewed herself to sleep. I didn’t know whether I remembered the ‘talented sportsman’ who had sat two desks behind me at school, or whether I only remembered the words people used to describe him, but it didn’t seem to matter now. They’d found a skeleton that day the village had stepped the mountains small. They’d called it Trevor Mason and promised to bury it next Monday morning.
A Short Affair Page 15
