Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  Then Mum excused herself, politely. This was the first time that she had ever been polite to me apart from after my appendectomy, when I had come around from the anaesthetic to hear her formal enquiry, How are you? As if my stitches had somehow placed me beyond her, or made me into someone new. Now, in the hallway, she explained politely that she had other people to tell, to phone: Dad, who was at work, and Grandma, and a lot of aunties and uncles, the whole family; the whole caboodle, she said, strangely, inappropriately, but she had always had problems with words when she was under stress. I went back into the living-room, and resumed watching television. Because I did not know what else to do. Eventually I became hungry, but did not know if I should eat. I did not want to think of food, or even to be hungry; I did not want to think or feel anything that was not focused upon Uncle Robbie. My gaze slid around The Young Doctors and I listened to Mum, to her repetition, to the syncopated rhythm of story and silence, the gaps in her delivery which were Dad, Grandma, the aunties and uncles. In a sense, she was telling them what they already knew, because they had always said that Uncle Robbie would come to a bad end. And surely there is no worse end than the back of a tanker. The tanker, I simply could not find my way beyond that tanker; I wanted Uncle Robbie, I trawled my mind for a sense of him, but I kept coming up against the tanker. What I did not understand was that I did not yet miss him. That to miss someone takes time.

  Later that day, there was distant lightning. Mum called to me to turn off the television, her usual precaution: her fear was that the television would channel the chaos of the sky into our house. I obeyed, then went into the garden, to watch. I saw the sudden bone-china cracks on the black-lacquered horizon. Then I heard Mum’s voice, flying from a doorway: ‘What are you doing out there? It’s dangerous! Come back!’

  As I came towards her, she complained, savagely, ‘Don’t I have enough worries?’

  She was cooking, and I sat down in the kitchen to watch her work on the pizza dough. She massaged the warm brown bundle, which was then thrown around and slapped like a newborn and stubbornly lifeless baby. At one point, she paused, almost smiled and exclaimed, almost apologetically, ‘So much kneading.’

  The pizza was for Auntie Helen, who arrived a few hours later. The mystery, to me, was what she been doing for those hours. Crying, by the look of her eyes. She was going to stay with us; because, Mum had explained to me, she could not simply be left. Mum did not seem to know how long Auntie Helen planned to stay. Nor did Auntie Helen. Or, she had no plans. And of course she had no plans. In fact, she did not even have an overnight bag. When Mum asked, ‘Where are your things?’ she wailed, ‘Don’t bother me with details.’ Mum offered her own clothes, but Auntie Helen said that she would prefer to borrow mine. Her professed reason was that she was closer in age to me than to Mum. As if we were children, as if our clothes were children’s clothes, 24 yrs, 31 yrs, 45 yrs. Dad was home from work by the time that she arrived, and I heard him whisper to Mum, ‘She’s half-cut.’ After that day, not only did I never see her drunk again, but I never even saw her with a drink.

  After her first few days of stunned near-silence, Auntie Helen leaked details for weeks. She had tapped the paramedics, the police, the firemen, and the coroner for their versions. So I learned that Uncle Robbie had died, desperately, in the ambulance; the siren bawling, and the thick, low sky scoured by the rotating beacon of antiseptic toilet-cleaner blue. The tanker had borne the word Non-hazardous. I knew that it was odd for Uncle Robbie to have hit the tanker because if there is something that a Lagonda can do apart from speed, it is stop: the brakes, like everything else, are extremely powerful. But, in the end, weather conditions are everything: the stains on the road were blacker and hotter than blood, they were skid marks. Uncle Robbie held on long enough for the paramedics to reach him, but then they could not hold him together. His liberated blood filled both airways, his own and then their plastic version. He flickered, occasionally, with so much needing that his hands and mouth and eyes reached for lifelines but pulled too hard. So that the paramedics had to fight him back down. In the end, he filled with his own blood, drowned in his own blood. Filled: Auntie Helen seemed to want to impress upon us how terrible his death was, but we already knew. During the weeks that she stayed with us, I left a lot of meals half-eaten.

  But often I simply had to sit and listen; someone had to sit and listen, and everyone else was busy with arrangements. Her principal complaint was that, It was not supposed to end like this. I was amazed that she should have had an end in mind, I was too young for endings, I was unable to think that far – I had no vision of the future that was not a remnant from childhood day-dreams. I did not know what to say to her, but I sympathized, my gaze gloved her cold hands on their sweeps through her unwashed hair – increasingly unwashed – and in their clasps of her arms and shoulders, their search for memories of him. In my clothes. I did love her, but it was hard for me to see her crying in my clothes, because I felt that, in the words of the song, It should have been me. All this time, I could not speak my story, my version: he had been my first love, my first ambition in love. I had been so much younger, so I had put up with the inevitable procession of clammy boys, which was far from exciting (although sometimes, in desperation, I had found ways to liven up the proceedings). And sometimes, only sometimes, my heart had been shot down by one of those silly boys. All this, I did for him. I had been waiting for him. I had never quite given up on him, I had been certain that our time would come. All those wasted years, and now no hope of redemption. I had decided that it was permissible to have such intentions for him because he was not blood. And he was not married to Auntie Helen, not really, not any more: she had had what she had wanted of him, and she had had enough. I had a habit of saying to my friends, I love him to death. This was slightly flamboyant, only slightly, but nevertheless his untimely death was my comeuppance: my words had been prophetic, I had been punished, I had killed him with my deadly, incestuous intentions.

  I was twenty-four and a mess. I had grown up and stopped, and started going nowhere. I had lost my job, recently, and left my boyfriend. Of course, I had not been expecting Uncle Robbie to sort out my life for me; but had I got around to ringing him, I would have expected sympathy, empathy, solidarity, or something. Because we were kindred spirits. Now I was going to have to do this on my own. He was thirty-three and very much more of a mess. Throughout the funeral, my eyes returned from the many young women in little black dresses to the coffin, which seemed suspiciously small for him. Uncle Robbie, large as life. I thought of plane crashes, bodies largely unrecovered and coffins filled with sand. And, in a sense, this was a comfort: the thought of him not inside the neat pine box, not held down by his own dead body.

  Mourning is a dreary business. Chronic, like drizzle. Physical, like a stitch. And lonely. I held no hope of recovery, nor any memory of happiness: no way forward, no way back, I was nowhere. And I was weary with computations: a week since he died, ten days, five weeks, four months, an obsession with distance which was, I suppose, on the contrary, a way to hold on to him. I saw bits of him sometimes in the streets, in other people, and followed them: his eyes, almost, his smile, but not quite. Never the whole of him. Simply to see him would have been enough, if only for a moment. Was this too much to ask? Eventually I worked out how to do so: if I could travel far enough into space, to a star, and then look back to earth, I would see nothing but our old starlight; and so, from the correct distance, with the appropriate telescope, I could see into the past and find him. This stood to reason.

  When I began to feel better, my improvement was unpredictable – a good day followed by a bad day – and therefore demoralizing. I spent my evenings frowning at stars, pondering distances, and no one ever talked to me about it. And why should they? Who was I? I was his niece-in-law, or something, someone. I was no one, I did not matter, I had no grounds to miss him. Eventually, I was left with the odd prospect of growing older than he had ever been, and a longing to meet him occas
ionally for lunch. Gradually I realized that it was this that he should have been to me: someone with whom I could have lunched; or not simply someone, he should have been my lunch date throughout my life. We would have met regularly to chew the cud (upmarket cud, of course).

  Then, one day, years later, when I was nearly as old as he had ever been, I walked through Piccadilly on my way home from the National Portrait Gallery, dropped into Boots to buy throat pastilles, and saw him.

  ‘Goodness,’ he exclaimed.

  I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ That was all, these were the only words that came, this was exactly what I needed to know: what was he doing here? What I noticed was that his face was unscarred: that face, which had always been too good to be true, now seemed even better.

  I heard the woman on the till say, ‘Forty-five, please,’ and, ‘do you need a bag?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, but without turning towards her. Then I remembered to add, ‘Thanks,’ and to force a smile, but unfortunately I forgot to turn to face her. The coins went from my hand, the packet of pastilles returned, but my gaze never moved from Uncle Robbie. His eyes, mouth, hair, hairline: a photofit in which, for once, at last, everything fitted perfectly. No, there was a scar; but there had always been this scar, tiny and faint, close to one eye, a detail which I had forgotten, which I had never remembered. The scar twinkled in his pink skin, then the photofit slipped into a smile. Something which never comes with a photofit: a real, live smile. He continued, ‘Haven’t you grown!’ Typical Uncle Robbie.

  I demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

  And then he announced, ‘Well, I’d like to take you to lunch.’

  I followed him onto the street. Followed the precision haircut. The dull-ditchwater sheen of his raincoat, the very colour of confidence, quiet confidence, old money. In the open air, I could not see the whole of him: my eyes scrimped, as if I was trying to look into the sun and they were trying to save me. But I was no more confounded than when I had been told that he had died. What was odd was to have seen him in Boots in Piccadilly, but this had nothing to do with his supposed death, this would have been just as odd if he were alive. Because he was Kensington, through and through. I did not think that he was alive, but I did not know what to think. For a moment, following him through the shoppers, I wondered if I had died. What is the phrase, Died and gone to Heaven? I-thought-I’d-died-and-gone-to-Heaven. But then we reached the street and I knew that this was not Heaven because this was Piccadilly, and Piccadilly is not Heaven, not by any stretch of the imagination, anyone’s imagination, believer or non-believer.

  So I asked him, ‘What were you doing in there?’

  I was talking to the high collar, before he turned around. His shrug was stiff, because his hands were deep in his pockets. But the smile was loose, loopy, was definitely his smile.

  ‘Waiting for you,’ he replied.

  ‘No, what were you doing in there?’

  He reiterated, ‘Waiting, for, you,’ and exhaled exasperation, I mean, ‘you were in there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ of course, ‘but …’ but how to explain? ‘… that was just fate.’

  He raised an eyebrow, for some reason.

  And for some reason I flinched, and hurried, ‘What I mean is that I’m not usually in there; I don’t think that I’ve ever been in there, before today.’

  ‘Well,’ he concluded, lightly, pleasantly, quickly, ‘that makes two of us,’ before checking, ‘how’s the old throat?’

  ‘Fine,’ I replied on cue, before my whole body frowned with suspicion. ‘How do you know about my throat?’

  He paused for long enough and raised enough eyebrow to imply, paranoid? Then he nodded towards one of my pockets. ‘Your purchase.’

  ‘Oh.’ My hands slunk into my pockets, one hand squeezed the packet, and my shoulders rose and clenched into a small shrug.

  ‘I do hope that you don’t mind about this.’

  ‘Mind?’ I could have chosen many words for how I was feeling, but mind was not one of them.

  ‘But I couldn’t wait any longer.’ He smiled, briefly, slightly, ruefully.

  I surprised myself by saying simply, ‘You waited seven years.’ And I had not had to think; the date had grown with me like a pin in a bone.

  He chose not to respond to this, glossed over this with a nod towards the shop. ‘In there, I wasn’t entirely truthful with you, I’m afraid. Because although I’d like nothing better, lunch is impossible.’

  Why? And an answer washed through me: fallen-on-hard-times. But what was I saying? He was supposed to be dead: hard to imagine harder times. ‘That’s okay,’ I hurried, ‘we can walk in the park.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured, appreciatively, ‘the park, excellent,’ before he turned and wobbled from the kerb into the path of the traffic.

  In the same second, my hand went for him and he stepped back up to safety. My hand stayed in the air; my hand had gone to him but gone through him. So then I knew.

  When he was back beside me, and when my breath was back, I dared to ask, ‘Would you have been hurt?’

  He smiled his sinking smile and ran a hand up through his hair.

  I watched the hair shift and settle; shivered to realize that this was something that my own hand could not do.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’m quite beyond hurt, but …’, his gaze sloshed around the crowds, ‘… it’s important to keep up appearances.’

  I ventured, ‘And is that why …?’

  He understood, smiled down onto me, confirmed, ‘Yes: I am no longer so constituted as to be able to partake of lunch, shall we say.’

  As he would say; as only Uncle Robbie would say.

  Unfortunately, I was not so constituted, and I was starving. So, I went back into Boots to buy a sandwich. This time, he waited on the street, and I watched him. He looked oddly uncomfortable for someone in such a comfortable coat. But I turned a blind eye and hurried back, already munching, sparky with blood sugar and bouncy with the fierce bubbling in my heart, to joke, ‘I’d kiss your cheek, if I could.’

  He made a show of recoiling: ‘Ugh! – mayo mouth.’

  ‘Mayo mouth?’ This, from Uncle Robbie, and when he had been in purgatory for the last seven years?

  We met regularly throughout the summer, always on Wednesdays and always in the park. I did not know where he had been, where he had come from, or where he went for the rest of the week, and for some reason I did not dare to ask. Which was not so very different from when he had been alive. I suppose that I did not dare to risk breaking the spell.

  On the first few occasions, I forgot about food and was faint, fuzzy-headed, for much of the time. Eventually I learned to eat before I went to see him: surreptitious take-away pastries in Pall Mall.

  The summer was soggy, nothing like a summer, but I barely noticed. Because I was happy. Because I had Uncle Robbie. I would have been even happier if I could have had his raincoat; but the raincoat, like lunch, was impossible. The park, in bad weather, was perfect for us: people passed through at quite a pace, wrapped in their dowdy coats, their eyes the colour of the sky, and they seemed oblivious to us. But perhaps no one looks at anyone else in London, not really, and not even in the parks. Perhaps especially not in the parks.

  What did we talk about, during those afternoons? I soon learned that the simplest questions were the most difficult: How are you? How have you been? I had no notion of his life, if he even had a life. And I assumed that he would know nothing of mine or anyone else’s, so gossip would have been one-sided and no fun. But the big topics were better: we caught up on seven years of abstraction, of arts and politics, making up for the seven lost years of chatter that had been the ingredient missing from the lunches of my late twenties.

  But I was thirty-one. I had begun to live alone, having split up with my lover of many years. The timing of the split was odd, out of sync with the bust-ups of our friends, coming years behind the first wave of youthful mistakes and years before the mid
-life crises. At this time, I did not seem to see my friends except for dinner in their homes. To me, when I had been a few years younger, to be grown-up was to have dinners with bottles of wine effortlessly produced from racks, to have real coffee, and central heating, and central heating on, and an open fire in a surround of original tiles. I had mistaken grown-up for middle class, but, in any case, I had become both, I had arrived, so why did I sometimes feel that I had crash-landed? Whenever I tried to talk to my friends, their noses were in wine glasses or wine guides, and the conversation was obliterated by the grinding of coffee beans. We were in the late eighties and their talk was of shares, which were anything but. There was a sprinkling of children, too, which seemed to eclipse whole lives.

  So I told no one about Uncle Robbie, but not simply because there was no one to tell. I filled with my secret and the overspill became a docile little shadow, a comfort to me. With so much secrecy, I developed a slippery smile, dropping unspoken hints from the corners of my mouth as if I had had a stroke. Which, I suppose, in a sense, I had: a stroke of luck. A stroke which cut me loose from the ordinary, everyday world. I spent the days waiting for darkness, for sleep, when I could be alone with my secret. The moment I woke, every day, I knew that something was different, that I knew something that no one else knew, that I was living something that no one else was living. Which is exactly what love or the death of a loved one will do, and in my case I was living a unique combination.

  Whenever I met up with him, I had a desire to explore London, to retrace footsteps that I was not quite sure I had ever taken: from landmark to landmark – the Tower, Monument, Big Ben, the Drury Lane Ghost, or Dick Whittington’s cat, and the man in Petticoat Lane who made a living from selling photos to people who had posed with his two tiny monkeys which were dressed as babies. I could not quite tell if these were my own memories: my family had been a London family, with a London house. Then Grandpa had died and Grandma sold up, moved out, pensioned herself off to a bungalow in the country and sent us to the suburbs. London had been denied me. Or, London as home had been denied me: grown-up, I rented. I had grown up in a family that had remained oriented towards London: Town meant London. My father commuted, often came home late complaining of a body on the line. He blamed Grandma for losing London for us, or for losing the money that would have come into the family if she had waited for property prices to rocket; and she blamed Grandpa, but for dying: a chain of blame, one of our stronger family ties.