by Wyl Menmuir
‘Timothy, he’s gone.’
He had taken his wife’s words in silence.
‘Can you come, Timothy, please?’
There is nothing for a while then, save a few shards; seeing himself standing on his neighbour’s doorstep knocking, hoping they are in, and would they do him a favour and drive him over to the hospital; staring out of the windscreen as the red lights stretch out along the road in front of him and asking himself what he can do to make this right.
When he arrives at the hospital, there is a midwife waiting for him in the hallway and in the tiny room by which she stands he finds Lauren with a doctor explaining what will happen next, handing them both forms to sign, consent for procedures only some of which he has heard of.
The delivery room is dimmed and the midwife busies herself in the corner, filling in forms, moving papers from one pile to another. They have been there for hours now, maybe. Timothy is at his wife’s head whispering he does not know what, smoothing her hair with one hand, his other clutched tight in hers. The midwife only raises her head when Lauren’s breathing becomes laboured and, when she looks up at them, he wonders what it is she sees.
The room is quiet and in between contractions Lauren tries to sleep, though he sees the morphine is making her too sick to close her eyes for long. In one hand she has the controls for the drug and in the other she holds his hand and compresses each from time to time as if to check they are both still there. She talks to him, though what she says he does not remember and he knows his words back to her are just a voice that she recognises. He thinks they are telling each other stories, stories with different endings, stories that confirm and console.
‘It’s a boy.’
The midwife’s accent is soft, Spanish or Latin American, and Timothy has the urge to tell her he has always wanted to visit Colombia or Bolivia. He smiles, though it is a smile he has not known before: a boy. The midwife offers him the scissors and stretches the cord a little for him to cut. He is a father again and he smiles and asks to hold his son.
Outside the window is a courtyard, though it is empty of patients, a small area for smokers with a bench beneath a bare tree.
When the midwife returns with Perran, they have dressed him in blue, with a hat pulled down over his head and secured with a blue ribbon tied beneath his chin, blue to match the dark blue of his lips. It is not what he would have chosen for his son, too fussy.
Later, while Lauren sleeps, he picks Perran out of the crib they have arranged for him and holds him to his chest. He tells him stories about his mother and then he sleeps a little in the chair in the corner of the room and when he wakes, he watches his wife and son through long hours.
There are more forms, a birth certificate, a death certificate, an apologetic doctor with a stack of papers that need to be read and processed, signed and dated, but mostly long periods of waiting. He sees the word autopsy and knows they are going to ask them to hand over their son though not yet – when you are ready. He signs and dates, signs and dates and then the doctor is gone for a while.
Lauren asks can their son stay with them overnight and the nurse looks pained and she says no, that is not possible, but they will bring him back up to the room in the morning.
Lauren lies back on the thin hospital bed and Timothy tries to make himself comfortable on the armchair in the corner of the room. The chair has a small brass plaque attached to it that says it was donated by a patient some years ago. It is a model that reclines, though the mechanism is broken and throughout the night the chair tries to return itself to its upright position and he gives up trying to sleep on it.
In the morning, they ask for their son back after a night of sleep and no sleep, a night listening to the muffled sounds from the ward outside and the tapping of a bare branch against the window. They wait for what seems an age and when the nurses bring Perran in Timothy takes him from the plastic crib and touches his son’s forehead. It is ice cold, as are the tiny feet he can feel against his arm. He holds his son to his chest for a while, though whether this is to take away some of the cold or to pass over his own warmth he does not know.
Later still, a midwife returns and tells them they can have all the time they need, though when she leaves, she stays in the corridor outside the room, which means there is less time. He feels something stretch as he hands Perran over and it is all he can do not to take him back. The best he can do is to ask them to treat him with compassion. The midwife promises – they always do, she says – and he watches her retreat along the corridor until she turns off the ward with their son.
Timothy taps the fuel gauge. The needle rests on a pin below the empty line and does not respond to his tapping, and he wonders how far the car will get him. He shuts off the engine and returns to the house.
The funeral director’s parlour is little more than a shack in the heart of a sprawling housing estate. Timothy and Lauren drive past it twice and have to stop for directions, though no one seems to have heard of it. They find it eventually, wedged between a used car lot and a general store that has crates piled up outside it, crates overflowing with vegetables, boxes of cleaning utensils, cloths, tins, and children’s watering cans in the shape of elephants. The building itself is a prefabricated hut that looks as though it may once have been a car dealership; they can see, beneath the newer lettering, the evidence of its past life. The hut is raised up on breezeblocks and enclosed within a small compound with a high metal gate and fences topped with barbed wire. After they have parked the car they walk up the metal steps into a small waiting area, where a receptionist tells them Bob will be with them soon. They sit on moulded plastic chairs that look as though they have been requisitioned from a school and try not to listen in to the conversation they can hear going on behind the inner door. The receptionist smiles at them over the counter.
Five minutes later, the door opens and a couple walks out. Lauren and Timothy have to stand to allow them to manoeuvre around them to leave. Through the open door, the funeral director ushers them into his office. He is overweight, and sits behind a desk around which it looks as though he has trouble navigating. On their way through, the floor sways slightly beneath their feet and Timothy notices they have passed across a divide where two parts of the hut have been bolted together. While the funeral director talks to them, Timothy finds he cannot take his attention away from a stain on the man’s white shirt, the remains of a lunch he ate at the desk perhaps. The strip lighting above them buzzes loudly and when they are ushered out, Timothy is aware of arrangements having been made, but he cannot bring any of the details to mind. He asks the girl sitting behind the desk in the cramped reception area if she will send him a copy of what they have agreed and she nods and smiles as though it’s a common request. Outside, the remainder of the day’s light has faded, and when they get beyond the boundary of the small compound, someone closes the heavy metal gate behind them. The yellow light flooding onto the pavement from the shop next door mingles with the music the shopkeeper in the general store has put on since they arrived.
22
Ethan
ETHAN TRIES TO ignore the lines. At first, he rubs at his eyes and hopes, when the water clears from them, that the cracks will be gone. But they remain. The lines run in all directions where they emerge from the sea. At first it seems to Ethan as though they do not intersect – that they run parallel to each other, but gradually they grow in number and he sees the lines start to splinter soon after the point at which they leave the water and cross each other, over and again as if they are multiplying before him. The lines run up through the stones on the beach and into the village, hairline fractures that run and spread throughout the fabric of the whole place. He is not sure why, but he feels sure that, thin as they are, these cracks are signs of fissures too deep to contemplate. Down by the water’s edge they now resemble a tangle of incredibly fine gill nets laid one on top of the other. Ethan retreats up off the beach
and across into the village and for a while finds peace, though it is not long before he sees the first cracks appearing in the walls and ceiling of the pub.
He can feel the village starting to break up. He knows for sure, too, that the cracks run through the decks and the holds of the container ships on the horizon and that thought gives him some comfort. He tries to talk with the others about it, wants to point them out to Rab or Jory, but he finds, when he tries, the words will not form in his mouth and he must keep them to himself, since no one else talks of them either.
The lines proliferate. Dark and thin scars on the sand, the concrete, running through windows and doors. Over the course of the day they spread from the land onto the villagers themselves, across the bodies and faces of everyone around him. In a fit of panic, Ethan pulls at his sleeves and sees the white scars on his forearms have spread too, and now run the length of his arms and he knows without looking they now spread across his skin. He can feel them spread inside him too, through his muscles and bones and all his tissues until his body is alive with lines. They spread through what dreams he has when he manages to sleep and after a while they are all he sees, criss-cross scars running through the fabric of everything, running through all the seen and the unseen.
The only place that is free of the cracks is the sea itself, as though it is somehow immune to them, as if, even though they emanate from the sea, they are not of the sea. He takes to looking at the water for longer and longer periods, trying to calm himself, though the lines are now starting to cover the lenses of his eyes and no amount of blinking or rubbing at them makes a difference. Towards the end of the day he starts to hear a sound coming from within the fissures, though it is faint and whispered and if he stares at the sea hard enough, he is able to block out the noise for a while. And faint though it is, he recognises the sound, recognises it as a voice he knows almost as well as he knows his own. He strains to hear the words the voice is speaking but it is too distant for him to make anything out, too deep within the cracks.
He stays on the beach looking at the water until darkness falls hard enough to mask the lines on his skin and on the stones. As it gets later, he realises all there is to tell him they are still there is the faint sound that is so soft yet can be heard above the white noise of the waves.
He puts his ear to the ground and listens and after a while the sound of the waves ceases entirely and he is able to hear the voice from within the cracks clearly then. Soft and insistent as the moving of the air, though there are still no words that form, and he presses his ear to the cold ground hard. As he does so, Timothy’s question comes back to him, ‘Who was Perran?’ And the feeling he cannot answer this question is one he is unable to describe, but now he has thought it, it seems to come, too, from the cracks in the surface of everything.
23
Timothy
THEIR SON ARRIVES in a small black people carrier, accompanied by a man and a woman, who, in any other setting, would look like bankers or lawyers. Timothy approaches the car as it pulls up beneath the overhanging roof by the chapel door. The pair get out of the car and open the car boot and when he sees them waiting there and looking over at him, Timothy comes round to join them at the back of the car. He is surprised when the man asks if he wants to carry the coffin into the chapel. It is not something he had considered before this moment and the men have already made a space for him at the car’s open boot. He nods, and a few minutes later, when both his and Lauren’s families have gathered, he takes the small coffin from the waiting man and carries it in his arms to where a chaplain he has not seen before is standing by the open door to the chapel.
When they emerge from the service, Timothy looks around him and blinks in the hard light. To one side the chimney and red-brick sharpness of the crematorium walls, to the other silver and bronze plaques which run the length of a low wall on which another family are already sitting, waiting their turn. Beyond the wall the uniformity of the memorial garden stretches out. Small white markers, regimented and even, lead his eyes to a dark line of trees, which mark the boundary of the cemetery. The chaplain leads them through the garden to a small clearing, at the centre of which is a larger white memorial. Laid around it are toy bears, plastic toys, cards, flowers, all wrapped in cellophane against the rain. As they head towards it, Timothy holds back from the rest of the gathering and the chaplain slows his pace a little.
‘Will there be any ashes for us to scatter?’ he asks.
‘No. I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ the chaplain replies. ‘Not with a child that small. It’s not possible.’
The chaplain continues talking to him and Timothy tries to concentrate on what he is saying but cannot block out the low roar of the motorway beyond the trees and cannot fix the words being spoken to him and they drift away.
Later, back at home, he tries to bring to mind his son, but all his memory can return for him is the sight of the crematorium tower, the dull roar of the motorway like surf on the sand, and the sense of being hemmed in on all sides.
Timothy walks through the house and removes the dustsheets from the furniture and the carpets. It does not surprise him somehow that the damage he should expect to see, that was so viscerally present only hours earlier, has gone, that the house has reclaimed itself even from this attack. He walks up the stairs and again it is no surprise to him that the plasterwork on the walls all the way up the stairs has reverted to how it was when he first arrived. The same watermarks show through on the walls and ceilings. He has the sensation that when he walks away from the house for the final time, any memory he currently holds of it will fade completely and he will be unable to describe it to Lauren at all, what it was like to be here, to live in this place for so long. He wonders whether the same will be true of his memories of the village as a whole, that all that has taken place since he arrived would fade. As he looks out of the window in the small bedroom towards the sea, he runs his fingers along the windowpane and flecks of dried paint peel off beneath his fingertips.
It’s hard to get rid of fresh cut flowers. They come in waves after the first couple of days, as news gets round. They arrive in bunches of bunches, and each delivery driver who knocks greets them with a smile and congratulates them as they open the door to receive yet more. More cut flowers than he has ever seen in one place outside a florist’s. After the spare shelves and windowsills are taken, the kitchen units fill, the sink, and eventually two buckets on the kitchen floor. They are crowded in by the flowers and thoughts of people they know well and those they barely know, by relatives neither of them has spoken to in years and by neighbours who bring plates of food and yet more flowers.
When the flowers get too much, Timothy looks up the addresses of all the local care homes and notes them down on the back of an envelope. He waits until the majority of their neighbours have left for work, and fills the car with the flowers, still in their cellophane collars and coloured paper wrappings. He has tried to make sure he has removed all the little cards that accompany each of the bouquets, and he checks each of them in turn as he lays them in the boot and, when the boot is full, the back seats and the front passenger seat of the car. He follows a route that takes him in a circle around the edge of the town, stopping at each of the addresses he has listed on the envelope in turn. A man stops him as he is walking up the driveway of one of the smaller care homes with several bunches in his hands, and Timothy is surprised when he asks how much he wants for the flowers. When Timothy replies he is giving them away, the man looks at him with suspicion and says he will only take one bunch, as though he imagines an invoice will be pushed through the door later. As he returns home, there are still several bouquets in the boot of the car and he drops them off outside a small and deserted Catholic church at the turning into his road. The church is a modern one and the entrance is all plate glass with light wood for the window frames and the desk in the entrance hall. In the hall stands a faded plaster Virgin Mary, who looks out of
place standing alone on the expanse of office carpet in the vestibule, looking as though she belongs in another place altogether. She stares out into the empty car park with sad eyes. He leaves the remaining bunches of flowers outside the locked door, though he is sure, when they are discovered, they will be swept up into a bin, but he is too tired of the flowers to return with them.
The village is quiet, and the sun is just starting to set, the fullness of its orb just beginning to flatten at the bottom against the horizon. Timothy can make out, over the rooftops and twisting streets that run down to the water below, dark specks on the water that are the boats of the fleet, spread out across the sea. He looks out beyond the boats to where the sun’s light is brightest on the water, and it takes a while for him to realise the container ships punctuating the horizon seem more distant now, further away than they had been before. He wonders whether perhaps they will continue to drift out and eventually they will drop off the edge altogether. Or whether perhaps they will return later in greater numbers.
He looks around at the front room and it occurs to him again that the house is as unfamiliar to him now as it was when he arrived, as strange and unforgiving as it has been to him all along. And he is certain, when he leaves, this space will change again. It will change again beyond his recognition, and if he was to return to the house at some point in his future, he knows it would not be the same place in which he stands now. The coals in the grate are glowing their last and he uses an iron poker to move them around and help them on their way, and he feels beneath his thin socks the frayed carpet where the fire must have spat out hot embers. He does and does not want to leave this place. But Lauren is not coming. He has been talking to her at a distance for weeks, but it is only now he registers what she has been saying to him. That she is waiting for him at the home they share.
