by Jill Dawson
‘Get him away from here? Are you mad? We need to phone someone. Tell someone what happened. Are you sure he’s—’
And, for the first time, she crawls on her hands and knees towards Gerald and peers closely at his face. She extends a finger towards his cheek as if she was poking it towards a flame. She puts her face close to his mouth. She pats his back, lifts his wrist, lets it drop.
‘Strange. It’s cool. He was always such a hot person.’
Her voice curls. It’s not like a voice of Sam’s I’ve ever heard before. She kneels beside Gerald and seems to have no idea where she is.
‘Honey – drink this!’ I say.
I open the bottle and pour her another good measure of brandy. I cradle the back of her head while she sips. But now she’s not crying; she’s not really looking at me, at anything at all.
‘Oh, why didn’t you have a telephone in the house?’ she says softly. ‘Isn’t there one outside?’
I hold her in my arms, stroking her hair. I hope that my heartbeat so close to hers doesn’t give me away but I know I sound divinely calm and reasonable. The fisherman’s sweater has that sour smell of wool that didn’t dry properly, or air out.
‘We need to move him, sweetie. It might be possible to put him in the car. I’ll drive his; you drive mine. You think you can drive mine? We’ll drive to – to Aldeburgh. Think you can do that? Follow the taillights of my car . . . and then, honey, then it will soon be over.’
How simple it sounds! I couldn’t have planned it better. I didn’t plan it, it was an aberration: it formed of its own accord, shaping and patterning off stage, or above and behind me, while I went about the business of living, but now it’s done, and the shape of it can be seen, emerging from the vagueness with a dark clarity, its inevitability beautifully clear.
I search the room for Gerald’s car keys, then steel myself to feel for them in the pockets of his pants. Then I remember he had a jacket, draped over the arm of the sofa. I find the keys: a door key and a car key attached to a mustard-leather fob, in the breast pocket. How he liked that detestable colour! My eyes rest on a stain, a snail trail of slime on my good Turkish rug, beside his groin.
I give Sam another slug of brandy before returning to Gerald and trying to lift him by placing my hands under his shoulders. ‘You hold the legs,’ I say. Sam glances at her husband’s legs and collapses on the rug, weeping.
‘Sam. Do you want me to go to prison? Is that what you want? The newspapers, the scandal, for ever more?’ I try to sound gentle rather than hectoring but my voice comes out sharp.
‘It’s a scandal already! It will always be a scandal – Gerald . . .’
I’m finding his shoes and shoving them on his revolting feet. Doing up the laces. Holding him by each cold bony ankle to do this; 3.30 a.m., still time, still time. He seems paper thin suddenly but, of course, once we try again to lift him, he’s heavy, truly heavy.
I grasp the shoulders; his arms droop beside him, hands dragging on the floor, like a monkey’s; his head hangs against me, blood smearing my shirt. Sam grips his legs at the ankles, presses the dirty soles of his shoes against her thick wool sweater. We buffet him towards the door, like a battering ram; we pause while I manage to open it a little, glancing both ways along the road, sniffing the air, like a dog. (Ha! You’d think I’d done this a thousand times: a pro, I tell myself.) We lay him back down on the floor – his face horribly rested against the prickly WELCOME of the front-door mat – while I run to the kitchen for my shoes, for all the things he left: his pipe, his tin of Golden Virginia tobacco, his jacket, his leather billfold. Then we try again. A flashlight seems risky – someone might spot the beam as it flits around – so we do it with only the light from the standard lamp in the living room behind us and that seems too much, too shockingly bright, so I close the door to almost a crack.
We rest him against the car; Sam holds him there with one hand on his chest while I open the door with his keys, then run back to the passenger side before he slides to the ground. Sam wedges the passenger door open with her knee, while I try to haul his stupid trousered thighs into place. At any moment I fear she might throw up her hands and wail that she can’t go through with it, so I’m saying over and over, ‘OK, honey, sure, nearly done . . .’ There is a moment when his head wobbles over and I think he might open his eyes and grin at me; the yellow interior light flashes over his cheeks as we are bending him at the waist and shoving him into the seat. The interior of his car smells of Gerald, of course: pipe smoke and tweed and grass cuttings and mustard-coloured socks. The human body is awfully heavy, unwieldy. We are both sweating with the effort.
Sam flings his jacket into the back and closes the car door, too gently, and has to reopen it and give a slightly louder slam. Gerald is inside. I look up and down the street: what on earth to say if anyone sees us? He’s drunk, we’re driving him home? And then later, when he’s found, how to explain that? I run inside to fetch a dishcloth from the kitchen (sad that it’s a new one, pure white and soft) and wedge it behind his head so that no blood reaches the seat-back. There are no lights on in any of the windows of the cottages in Earl Soham. I run back one last time to get my own car key for Sam to drive my car, and I close the front door to Bridge Cottage as soundlessly as I can.
‘They’ll never believe you,’ he says.
He forms a dark profile beside me, stares at the road ahead; are his eyes open? I slide my eyes a little to the side to look but can’t tell. The country lanes are mostly unlit, the car a warm fug and my heartbeat louder than any radio. ‘I was a pretty lad, married at eighteen,’ says a male voice. Something Ronnie said once. Something Ronnie is working on; listening to. Voices, always voices, with Ronnie. That’s all he does all day. Talk to farmers, John Grout, eighty-eight: I was a pretty lad. Samuel Gissing, eighty years: ‘It all goes so fast. But a school morning was a whole lifetime.’
True enough. A school morning. Who can remember them now? Tadpoles in a jar, a caterpillar with a face like a little train, black dots for eyes, mouldering in a matchbox.
A low, inelegant shape darts across the road. Muntjac deer. I remember Ronnie telling me they were released long ago from a zoo or park or something and now they’re everywhere. Aldeburgh is only half an hour away and a quick glance in the rear-view mirror tells me Sam is still following. The eyes of her car, white and bright, tailing Gerald’s.
‘There is nobody can say that you have killed a man.’ Another line from Ronnie’s notes. ‘You got very frightened of the murdering and you did sometimes think, What is this about? What is this for? But the more the killing, the more you thought about living.’
That was the war he was talking about, at any rate. And I need to pull myself together; I need to think. It’s so smotheringly dark in this car. There is no radio; that was another car, long ago. Gerald is smoking his pipe; I can hear his little sucks, smell the powerful choking tobacco. On his knee a map, an AA map of the local roads. And now he is chuckling: Think you’d killed me, huh? Think it could be that easy? And what now, how will you cover your tracks? Should have shoved me in the pond, like you meant to. Won’t that old bitch Ingham have seen me, seen my arrival, heard the car? Won’t there be finger-prints? Blood on the rug, blood on this car seat. And then there’s Sam. How’s she going to keep mum about it? You’re an amateur here, for all your thinking, all your planning, all those years. You know nothing about it; you could never achieve it, no matter how many times you’ve imagined it, written it. Where are all your musings now? It’s beyond you.
The car cruises along the loamy flats and Gerald’s head lolls in my direction, emanating his dark, threatening smell. He is not hammering at me, no, no, it’s fine, he’s wordless again. He’s deader than a shoe, deader than a pencil stub, deader than a cold Black & Decker drill neatly packed in its box. In a moment he might stretch out his hand and take the wheel but just now he is dead. He will say, as Mother did, ‘Are you crazy? Are you ready for the booby hatch? Don’t look at me like
that! You’re nuts, you know that, Patsy!’ And that slap she always gave me, maybe Gerald would do it now, quick and hard across the face.
‘Well, you old bastard, you finally got what was coming,’ I say, out loud.
I’m driving, and I’m thinking not of Gerald, not of Mother, but of him, of long ago. Stanley. A sense of relief, of pleasure, is starting to steal through my blood and I want to laugh. I long to lean over and tap him on the shoulder and say: ‘You know, you should have been nicer to me. You could have protected me from Mom, not taken her side all the time.’
Stanley, crouching to be the same height as me, his severe, Serious Father face, after I’d accused him of cruelty, after listening to the lobster screaming in its pot: ‘You know, Pats, little girls don’t know too much. They should never get their heads swelled, or think they know more than the grown-ups.’ And I’d stood, hands on hips, roaring, ‘I’m not a little girl!’ and that made him smirk and bat my mother with his hat, saying, ‘Ain’t she just the funniest thing?’ That other time, he snatched away my favourite words, telling me I was pronouncing them wrong. Open Sesame! The magic of it for ever spoiled, destroyed because of his crushing need to ‘put you to rights about a few things’. Humiliate me, is what he meant. And that day, hopping between him and my mother at the park, they sharing an ice-cream cone over my head – Give me some! What about me!, one white blob splatting the sidewalk – and Stanley so tall, so way out of reach, laughing when I stretched for it, swinging the cone above my head and laughing again, but then saying, ‘Aw, honey, you need a sense of humour,’ when he finally quit, reached down to offer it, and I refused.
The sound of my childhood: jerky, angry voices coming from the hall while I tried to sleep. I would leap up and kick my door closed, but it never shut them out. ‘I didn’t say that!’ Mother’s voice. And then Stanley: ‘You calling me a liar?’ Doors slamming.
Car journeys: no wonder I think of him now. The metal and the plastic and the chrome, no way to escape that little hell, trapped with the beasts inside the walls. The explosive rows when Mother couldn’t map-read – she couldn’t ever – and Stanley took a wrong turn. The time he pulled over, dragged her out and punched her once on the side of her head, then shoved her back into her side of the car.
I held my breath on the back seat; I opened my mouth to scream but didn’t. I wondered if I was even alive, put my hand to my heart to see if it was beating and, sure, there it was, skittering like a mouse. The engine growling and the sound of Mother softly sobbing, her face pressed against the window. I leaned forward to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged me off. I stared at the back of Stanley’s neck as he drove, at the red and the white of his skin, at the tiny new black hairs growing. My whole body was trembling; I realised my teeth were chattering. If only she would leave him like she threatened, like she promised! If only, if only . . . One day he might really do something terrible to her.
One time, one night like no other, it had a different flavour and colour and taste from every other night, had fixed in my memory like a horrible work of art; that time the noises got too frightening, after I heard her hectoring voice and then her screaming, Stanley, don’t, don’t, please, and I’d run from my bedroom with such a torrent of terror in my heart and bellowed at him that I was going to tell Granny Mae, that I was going to tell my cousin Dan what a bad man Stanley was, and he put his face close to mine and my six-year-old pride and power exploded as he said: ‘OK, I’m a bum, so what? You’re just a little girl. They’ll never believe you.’
And so in the back of the car, as a little girl, I nursed it. And when the little mouse of my heart calmed down, I thought: Not only am I alive but I’m more alive than before: this is what being alive is. That’s how it began, the monster. The heat in the car, sullen and cruel. For six whole hours, my bladder full to bursting, I simmered and swelled behind Stanley’s long, dark head with my big idea: how to murder Stanley.
Some little things must be the cause of me, bad seed that I am; a multitude of tiny things, like sand grains to a dune. But those years, those years with Mother and Stanley, those millions of minutes of a child’s life, car journeys and vacations and that low, grim hum of constant quarrelling, that’s when the piling up of grains began.
Aldeburgh at night reveals not a single cottage with a light on. It’s just after 4 a.m. We might be in luck. I park down Crabbe Street, a narrow unlit road, a gull greeting me with a long cry as the car door is opened. There is only one van parked here: Ray Felton Chimney Sweep. The sea-wall is just about in view next to some Tudor building that Ronnie pointed out to me – Moot Hall. I can’t see the sea but I smell the tang and hear it: a regular great shudder, like an elephant harrumphing. In the night air the sailboats’ masts tinkle, like someone jingling change in a pocket.
Sam pulls up just behind me in the Anglia and hurries round to my side of the car, tapping on the window, her face pale as the moon or a white balloon with blackened eyes. She’s wearing only the long sweater over the silky nightdress and her black suede pumps without stockings, her legs white as uncooked spaghetti. She hasn’t seemed to notice the cold. I can see that she’s still in shock; that I have perhaps an hour before reality defrosts her, and after that, I will not be able to rely on her.
‘Help me get him out. Make it look like we’re helping a drunk,’ I whisper, opening the car door.
There is no one: no lights, no late-night dog-walkers.
I glance up and down over the frosted pastel lozenges – the sleepy cottages – in the moonlight, then to the sea-wall that edges the beach. Again, no one, and coming around to his side and reaching into the car, I put my arms under the slumped Gerald and haul him out, his feet catching a little and having to be lifted one at a time. Then I lean him against the side and hold him there with the flat of one casual hand. If anyone were to look, they need to think we’re two women friends helping a filthy drunk to stand up. But there is no one, only the briny scent of the sea, the waves rolling as if someone is exhaling loudly beside me.
So between us we begin walking him to the beach, draping one of his disgusting arms around each of our necks. We climb easily over the low sea-wall and the sea arrives in grey frills atop the black. Gerald’s head sags against my shoulder. The crunch of pebbles is a sudden, shockingly loud sound – I have a horrifying sensation, as if I’m stepping onto the shells of snails.
We drag him across the shingle, past Moot Hall – one fat gull with its rump stuck inside a chimney, as if jammed there – and the black lumps of the fishermen’s empty huts, Fresh fish, crab for sale. Fishy smells waft our way. Gulls squeak occasionally, like creaking doors suddenly opening. One of us on each side of Gerald, his flaccid weight lugged between us like an effigy, like the penny-for-the-guy that Sam once told me about, her English childhood of burnings and bonfires. It’s harder than I imagined, our toes sometimes finding an indentation, kicking up a pebble or slipping, the skinny, feeble Gerald an awkward weight, and sweat is starting to pool in the narrow of my back with the effort. The desire to glance over my shoulder and make sure no one is following is strong. Up to the pearly edge of the water we go. And now the sound of sea grows closer, very close and intimate, like a dog lapping at a bowl.
I whisper to Sam: ‘Go back to his car now. Wipe all the handles and the gear stick and everything you can find in the car with that dishcloth I brought. Check for a bloodstain on the passenger seat. Get rid of the dishcloth – bring it to me. Then lock the car and wipe the key fob too.’
But, hey, fingerprints. How likely is it that the police would be looking for fingerprints, or anyone else, in what is patently a suicide? Fingerprints have to be anticipated, dusted, there have to be suspicions. A long glance up and down the beach: what if someone has a notion to take an early-hours stroll, an insomniac, or just the usual crackpot? And should I have brought a liquor bottle, make it look like he needed one last drink? Too late. Nobody.
Gerald lies at my feet now, like a stupid doll, pointed-toe brogues sti
cking up to the sky. The sea rolls in and away, like a restless sculptor, over the stones, and I think of Ronnie briefly, Ronnie’s stories of herring days in Lowestoft and his way of describing his friend Britten as ‘oceanic from the start’. Waves, he says, make land seem like a very trivial business. The sea inside us, tidal pulls. Yes, yes. I’m doing you a favour, Gerald: returning you to the sea.
I watch Sam’s dark figure stumbling a little as her foot kicks an abandoned lobster pot, going back to the car. Better she doesn’t watch me undress him. Hear the clanking buckle of his belt hit shingle. Better not to see the pitiful white body; the foolish, floppy, ghastly white appendage wilting over to one side like a dead fish.
I pile clothes, shoes, billfold on top of the jacket on the pebbles near to the water’s edge. It needs to look deliberate, but not too controlled. I try to think how a man would do this. Would he place pants folded under shorts? Would he hide the billfold inside a shoe? Would he coil his belt neatly? That’s too neat. I kick it to make the snake-shape spring open. How calm is a suicide? Calm enough to go through with it. Not so calm or considered that it actually looks as if someone else did it, as an afterthought. A noise makes me turn my head sharply, but it’s only the scrape of stones scuffing together by my walking on them.
Then I think: If I get rid of the billfold it will take them longer to identify him accurately. It will give us a few hours. So I pick it out from inside the shoe and hurl it as far out to the black sea as I can. I’m too far away to hear the splash when it lands.
I glance up and down the beach. Darkness. A few pricked lights of cottages far away; they might even be stars. Occasional white frills on the black waves. And the water is icy, bracingly cold, as I go in with my shoes on and drag this naked white man with me. My arms around his chest, the wet curls of his chest hair flattening in streaks, like bits of seaweed, his body limp, like a rubber doll, his flesh yellow where the water shades it. No signs of rigor mortis yet. Perhaps it’s too early? Don’t corpses get gas in them and bob around? All that research on the progress of a corpse, where is that knowledge now when I need it?
