I thought a lot, too, about our last trip together, across Bohemia, the warm wind in the open windows, the lunch outside Zlín, Dad being so amused by the waiter who was a fan of Ivana Trump but not Tom Stoppard; his theory, expressed in a handful of mangled consonants, about Ivana and her leather waterfall – that it had something to do, perhaps, with coming from a town that made shoes.
At work I was becoming more and more useless. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone or speak to anyone. I couldn’t write an email, or type a word. One Thursday morning my editor told me she was worried about me, that it might be a good idea for me at this point, to see a doctor. With a slightly harder edge to her voice she said that if I wasn’t going to produce anything again today, I might as well go home.
I went down to Dad’s. I footled about, walked round the garden, came back in, did nothing very much, spent a bit of time in the shoe cupboard, looked at things. More and more I found myself thinking about how anxious Dad had been about leaving me by myself, and what he’d said on his final afternoon, that he would worry about me when he was dead and how I’d told him not to be anxious because I’d be fine. In the hall I sat down at the little telephone table near the front door and picked up his huge perspex magnifying glass. I recalled an occasion when he’d tried to make a phone call by speaking into the giant glass instead of into the telephone receiver – I’d found him with it pressed against his hearing aid, shouting into the long perspex handle that came down just below his chin, Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? and then inquiring eventually, in a thin uncertain voice into the void, Is anyone there?
I held it up now in front of my eyes. Everything was blurry, the shapes and colours of the furniture and the carpet swam like things underwater and as I looked, very softly, very faintly, as if from another world, The Bartered Bride began to play.
My heart paused. I put the magnifying glass down and walked across the hall into the sitting room where the hi-fi was but the room was silent and cold-looking and exactly as I’d left it the Saturday before. I put my hand on the newel post of the banister and looked up into the stairwell. I went upstairs onto the landing. His bedroom door was closed. Beyond it, the music played.
‘Dad?’
I stood with my palm on the fingerplate. My heart galloped, waited. I wanted so much to see him on the other side, sitting on his bed with his feet crossed at the ankles, eyes closed, left arm conducting. I turned the doorknob and stepped into the room and there was his cleaning lady. She shrieked, dropped her duster, her can of Mr Sheen. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
Her name was Vladeˇna, I knew that.
The day Dad went into hospital I’d left a note for her on the kitchen table so she’d know the reason for his absence when she came. I told her now that Dad had died just over a month ago. I apologised that I hadn’t thought of letting her know.
She looked cross, offended, upset. She picked up her duster and the can of Mr Sheen and snapped the lid back on it. ‘I think he is still in the hospital. I am taking key from under pot.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
It seemed rude to say I hadn’t noticed that she’d come between my visits, that the house had always looked the same to me, as clean and tidy as it had always been. ‘I’m Philip,’ I said.
She had dry plum-coloured hair and wore a pair of blue towelling mules and grey tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt with some writing on it, a pair of yellow rubber gloves. I had always imagined, I suppose, a small elderly lady in a housecoat.
I pointed to the little CD machine on Dad’s bedside table where The Bartered Bride had come to an end.
‘Do you like Smetana?’
‘Yes, I like.’
Downstairs I made us some tea and paid her for the hours she’d spent in the house since Dad died. I told her how much my father had liked having her come and clean the house. I didn’t know if this was true but it seemed to me he would have enjoyed the scent of Cif and Windex and Mr Sheen. In his darkened and deadened world those things would have been a pleasure to him.
I confessed to having always assumed she was a little old lady.
‘I am little old lady. Forty-three in one month. Can I smoke? Can we go outside?’
In the garden she said Dad was a very nice gentleman. She was sorry to know he’d died. She called him Mr Alan. Her English was thickly accented, her voice raspy. I remembered she’d been the one who’d told Dad about the shoe museum in Zlín. Had she ever been to Zlín?
‘Zlín?’ She blew out a long rough plume of smoke. ‘I am born in Zlín.’ Crooked, slightly stained teeth. Maroon hair bright and harsh in the sun.
Had she been to the museum herself?
‘Of course. Many time.’
I asked her about the factory, the shop. I asked her about the Communist shoes. ‘Bad?’
She pulled a face. ‘Very bad.’
Did she know if Smetana’s slippers were elasticated? She shook her head. She wasn’t sure. Maybe.
‘My father wanted to see them. And King Wencelas’s riding boots. But when we got there the museum was closed.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He tell me.’ She said it was a big shame. ‘Bad timing, I think.’
I told her I’d been steeling myself to sort through the house. ‘You know – one pile Keep, one pile Throw. Charity Shop. House Clearance.’
‘Difficult,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
We walked through the rooms together. I showed her Dad’s violin.
‘Keep,’ she said.
‘Yes. Keep.’
In the dining room she pointed to a blue-and-white jasperware vase on the mantlepiece. ‘Also keep.’
‘No, you have it,’ I said.
‘Oh no, no. No, Mr Philip. No.’
‘No really. I want you to.’
I gestured around and said she could have other things too if she liked them. My heart after all its pausing and galloping and waiting was beating fast again. I wondered if it showed. Vladeˇna seemed reluctant to accept anything. She seemed embarrassed by the idea. She tipped her head on one side, like a bird, as if scrutinising me, as if trying to figure out exactly what was going on.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes,’ and although she still seemed uncomfortable she eventually let me, after a lot of persuasion, draw up a list: the vase and the small television from his bedroom and the computer. His kettle and his Morphy Richards blender, a canteen of Arthur Price stainless steel cutlery, his Bialetti coffee-maker, a set of felt-backed table mats with pictures of Welsh castles on them, a seagrass laundry hamper, his Dyson vacuum cleaner, a pair of 1960s Danish kitchen chairs. Some napkins and some tablecloths, some towels and linens and various terracotta plant pots from the back garden. We would meet here again at the end of the following week. She would bring a car.
It was weird, I said, that our paths had never crossed till now. Her Thursdays and my Saturdays. She laughed.
‘Weird, yes. Crazy.’
All I can say is that I liked her straightaway.
I liked her raspy voice and her gaudy hair, I liked the loudness of her shriek when I walked into the bedroom, I liked how cross she’d been that I hadn’t told her about Dad. I liked the short choppy way she spoke and the way she’d called herself a little old lady and had to be cajoled into accepting the things from the house. All I can say is, I was really looking forward to seeing her again.
I had the best week since before Dad died. I went into work. I made calls, I sent emails, I talked to people. I filed my first story in over a month. People said I looked like I was doing well, and I said, yes, I was doing a lot better, and when I said it, I thought about my last day with Dad in the hospital, his barmy last-minute attempts at matchmaking and I know this sounds mad but it seemed to me that in all his anxious confusion he’d managed somehow to leave me a sort of meandering breadcrumb trail that I’d been supposed to find and follow.
The day before I was due to meet Vladeˇna again, I got my ha
ir cut, I went shopping: I bought a new sweater, new socks, new jeans. In the men’s department at John Lewis, for £98.99, I replaced my old loafers with a pair of brown Timberland Earthkeepers® Stormbuck plain toe lace-up shoes. At the last minute, from the flower stand at Victoria, I bought a bunch of yellow tulips.
She was early, waiting when I arrived.
She was smoking, her hair was tied up in a high ponytail, she wore a white padded coat like a duvet. She smiled curtly at me and seemed embarrassed all over again about what we were doing here. Everything about her was awkward and prickly and self-conscious and shy and whatever connection I’d thought had sprung up between us a week ago had somehow vanished and I felt foolish in my new clothes. I moved the yellow tulips behind my back and if Vladeˇna saw them, she didn’t say anything. She dropped her cigarette and ground it with her heel and lit another and in between she cocked her head over towards the battered pale blue Peugeot in the driveway and the serious-faced man inside it with black hair and a large moustache I hadn’t seen till now.
‘Jakub,’ she said in her short choppy way. ‘Very shy. Very awful English.’
Jakub. Oh.
I hadn’t ever imagined there would be a Jakub; instead I had wrapped the kitchen utensils she’d chosen in tissue paper and swathed the computer and the television in a pair of velvet curtains because even though we hadn’t included them on her list, I thought she might like them.
I’d packed the other things into cardboard boxes and plastic crates and put them in the hall next to the front door ready for her to take away. I now wheeled the Dyson vacuum cleaner out from under the stairs to join them and brought down the piles of towels and bedlinen that had been set aside upstairs. I went round the garden and gathered up the plant pots she’d eventually agreed to accept. In the driveway I could see Jakub putting down the back seat of their car to make room for everything while at the door I took off my now slightly muddy new shoes and went into the kitchen. At the sink I brushed off the cobwebs and dried leaves and bits of loose earth from the pots and pushed them into the waste disposal and ran the water on top of them. Through the window I watched Jakub moving to and fro between the front door and the car. Vladeˇna stood silently behind me and I handed her the clean pots to take out. She smelled nice, a mixture of smoke and a powdery scent.
When everything was out of the hall and off the front step and into their delapidated car Jakub roped the tailgate to the back bumper so it was pulled down over all the stuff piled into the back, and when he’d secured the kitchen chairs to the roof-rack with an arrangement of bungee cords, the two of them drove away.
I stood at the open door and watched them go. Jakub took the speed bumps carefully. One, two, three, four. The chairs bounced a little. I could see Vladeˇna’s garish hair, the shoulders of her puffy white coat. Briefly they waited at the flashing lights of the Pelican crossing and then Jakub steered them around the curve in the road and their pale blue car disappeared and I turned back into the clean and silent house, which was where I discovered that along with the vase and the electrical goods and the kitchen utensils, the chairs and the curtains and the laundry hamper, the towels and linens and the plant pots and various other miscellaneous objects I’d added onto the original list and put into the boxes at the door for Vladeˇna, she and Jakub had also taken my brand new size 11 Timberland Earthkeepers® Stormbuck plain toe lace-up shoes.
In the quiet and emptied hallway of my father’s house I stood in my seven-league socks. I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. I went into every room. I looked in the kitchen, the sitting room, the dining room, the study, the small laundry, both bathrooms, all the bedrooms. I went back to the front door. I even went outside and walked into the street and stood in the traffic, scanning the tarmac, the four evenly spaced brick-coloured speed bumps, the Pelican crossing up ahead but there was nothing.
I put the tulips in a jug and took them upstairs to Dad’s bedroom.
In my stockinged feet I lay down on his bed and in the bright daylight I folded my arms across my chest and closed my eyes. Behind the lids, in the darkness, I could see the orange rectangle of his window, the black bars of the small individual panes and in the blotchy dark it felt like everything, absolutely everything in my whole entire life, had been leading me to this exact moment – Helen, and Dave Crater, and all the big and small surprises of the last few strange weeks in Zlín and Norman Park and the hospital and the house had somehow produced it, and none of it had been a breadcrumb trail, it had all been a slowly advancing length of horrible tangled knitting, impossible for me now to go anywhere or do anything; as if I had lost, not just my shoes, but everything.
In one of the neighbouring gardens a lawnmower hummed and from somewhere farther away the slightly creepy chimes of an ice-cream van floated closer. I wondered miserably if there was any way I could cram my feet into any of Dad’s shoes and make it home, maybe the grey nylon webbing of his Clarks Wayfarers would be stretchy enough for me to get them part of the way on and I could stamp down the heels and wear them like a kind of synthetic clog and shuffle up the road to the station. Even more miserably I wondered how things would feel if I went to work in the morning and sat down at my desk and prepared to begin the day, and then through the hum of the lawnmower and the weird off-kilter tinkling of the ice-cream van there came the ringing of Dad’s phone from downstairs in the hall where a week ago I’d picked up his bat-sized magnifying glass and peered through it at the world, and it was Jakub.
‘Mr Philip, sorry.
‘Mistake.
‘Shoes stuffed in box with kettle. I am work now with car but OK, sister take train. She have shoes. Vladeˇna, yes. She very hurry, ask me call you. Tell you stay there please.
‘One half-hour only, Mr Philip. Vladeˇna promise, she with you.’
LEVITATION, 1969
Jo Mazelis
Rising up in the air, the dead girl feels … dead. Her eyes are closed; for a moment she has forgotten everything. She is dead.
Then alive again. They have set her down on the concrete wall and the ceremony is over. They do not misuse the levitation game – weeks and even months go by and they don’t do it or even think of doing it – as if it’s a dream that occasionally reoccurs, but is forgotten when the sleeper awakens. Then at some point in time it stops. They never perform the act of levitation again.
The game arrived in their lives after the circle games of ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’ and ‘Oranges and Lemons’ had fallen away, but before the long passage of no-games-at-all enveloped them forever.
The reign of levitation is also that of puberty. Is it not said that pubescent girls and boys, those on the cusp of change, are the most vulnerable and attractive to the spirit world? That in homes where poltergeists are active there is usually in residence a child in their early teens?
The dead girl (who is not really dead) lives in a home with such a poltergeist. Objects are broken; china smashed into many pieces, the old black Bakelite telephone – the one whose weight and heft suggested unalienable permanence – is suddenly and mysteriously transformed. It catches her eye when she comes home from school. It is in its usual place by the front door, but something is different about it. She looks closely, sees an intricate pattern of lines and cracks all over it and, in places, evidence of glue. The phone has somehow been broken into a hundred jagged shards and then someone (she knows who) has painstakingly, with his Araldite and magnifier, tweezers and spent matches, put it back together again.
Such an event should come up in conversation in a small family like theirs, but no one says a word. The destruction was the work of an angry spirit; the reconstruction was performed by her father, who is often to be found with a soldering iron in his hand, or a pair of needle-nose pliers, an axe or hammer.
One autumn day years before, she came across him in the garden, tending a fire of fallen leaves. Such a fire is always an event for a child of eight or nine, so she stands at a safe distance to watch how he rakes and prod
s it, how the flames change colour from red to blue to white to yellow.
He stirs his pyre of smoking leaves and suddenly the centre gives way and something hidden is revealed: first, brown paper that flares away to black tissuey fragments, then white fabric pads, some folded in upon themselves, others that boldly show their faces with their Rorschach-test ink blots of red and rust-coloured blood. Her mother’s blood, her mother’s sanitary towels – which belong to the secret places of locked bathrooms – are out here being burned by her father in the front garden of their home where any neighbour or passer-by might see.
Behind her father is the oak tree and behind that the ivy-covered low stone wall, and in the earth just in front is a bamboo pole that she has topped with a bird’s skull – a totem she had made to ward off danger.
This was long ago, before the poltergeist and the angry words that echo through the house late at night to infiltrate her dreams, turning them into nightmares.
New Welsh Short Stories Page 5
