by Alison Moore
Jessie’s most recently completed translation project was a novella, which had now been published, but she was not sure that anyone at all had bought the translation. She had not seen it in any bookshops, although she did look. She had not seen it reviewed anywhere, nor even rated online. All those months of fretting over this word or that word, deliberating over this or that turn of phrase, had been for no one but herself. She was reminded of the complicated dishes that her mother used to put together on special occasions, the hours devoted to fancy concoctions that no one had really wanted. For Jessie, in childhood, the real treats had been in tins: alphabet soup, or spaghetti hoops, which were like alphabet pasta but just the Os, the language of ghosts.
Now, she was translating a collection of short stories, some of which she found rather painful to read. In the first story, a woman begins a conversation with an unnamed man in an unnamed country immediately before he is knocked down by a car. He spends the rest of the story in a coma, while the woman visits him and imagines the life they might have together. When, at the end of the story, the woman is on the verge of accepting that there will not be a relationship between them, when she is poised to leave the hospital room for the final time, abandoning the man to his coma, it is not at all clear whether she really will walk away or whether, pausing and looking back, she will give in and return. Jessie had put the question to the author, who might eventually reply and who would no doubt say that not knowing was the whole point.
Another story was about a prize-winning photographer who is invited to an artist’s studio to have his portrait painted. ‘Bring your camera,’ says the artist, so the photographer takes his camera and goes to the address that the artist has given him, and when he gets there he knocks on the door. The artist has pinned a note to his door asking the photographer to let himself in, asking him to take photographs of what he finds there. What he is expected to find and document is the artist’s suicide. But the photographer is knocking at a different door, because the artist has given the photographer the wrong address, or because the photographer has written down the wrong address. Whoever’s fault it is, the photographer is half a mile away, knocking and ringing and wondering why no one is answering, knocking and ringing, before eventually turning around and going home.
In each of the stories – not only in these two but in all of them – there was a failure to connect, and the endings seemed to hang in the air; they were barely endings at all. She did not know the writer; they had never met. Jessie had sent her a number of emails containing various queries about the work, but she had not heard back.
There were a number of ghost stories as well. In one, a child was seen falling into a well, night after night. That was the thing about ghosts: she had heard someone on the radio saying that the ghost of a monk did not just go up the stairs and disappear through the wall – it did it over and over and over again. Sometimes, Jessie thought that she liked the ghost stories the best – she had read them the most – and at other times she could not bear them. She wanted the ghosts to find peace, but they did not.
Jessie had her office in the little room between her bedroom and the spare room. It was neither well heated nor well soundproofed, but it seemed the best choice. She had read that it was a bad idea to have one’s desk in the same room as one’s bed because then work and sleep became entangled, making it hard to switch off at night. When she brought her work into her bed late at night, she did so guiltily and, when she then could not sleep, she knew that it was her own fault. She could not work in the spare room, which could get awfully cold, and – perhaps even more distracting than the sudden drops in temperature and the draughts that could give you a stiff neck – there were the noises. She was not sure where they came from. She supposed it was Isla banging about next door; the houses, though solidly built, were adjoining. On the other hand, when, one evening, Jessie heard what sounded like someone shifting around upstairs, Isla was with Jessie in the kitchen. Jessie knew that Isla had heard it too when she asked if Jessie had someone staying in her spare room. ‘Or is that someone in your own bed, Jessie?’ she asked, nudging an elbow into Jessie’s side. ‘Is that a man you’ve got up there?’
‘It’s not a man,’ replied Jessie, her eyes on the ceiling, as if she might be able to see right through it. ‘I don’t have visitors. I always thought it might be you making that noise, the sound coming through the wall, you know.’
‘It must be Andy,’ said Isla.
‘Yes,’ said Jessie.
‘Otherwise you’ve got a ghost!’ said Isla.
Jessie laughed and said, ‘Yes, I think so!’
Some weeks after that visit, sitting at Isla’s kitchen table, surrounded by the comforting smell of home baking, Jessie said to Isla, ‘I wanted to ask you about the elderly lady who lived in my house before me.’
‘Mrs Moffat,’ said Isla, opening the oven to check on her rock cakes.
‘That’s right,’ said Jessie, who had dealt with Mrs Moffat’s daughter over the sale of the house. She had been aware of the homeowner’s age – she had wondered whether she was perhaps the same woman she had seen at the sash window the day they drove home from Loch Ness – but she had not asked the question that had occurred to her, only now asking Isla, ‘Did she die in the house?’
‘Not at all,’ said Isla, as if it were a question of scale. ‘Mrs Moffat went to live with her daughter in Glasgow. I spoke to her on the phone just the other day.’
‘Who lived in the house before Mrs Moffat?’ asked Jessie.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Isla. ‘Mrs Moffat was already living there when Andy and I moved in here.’
‘Did she have any other children?’ asked Jessie. ‘Perhaps one that died in the house?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Isla, taking out the rock cakes and setting them down on the side. ‘Perhaps it’s just the birds,’ she said, ‘scratching about on the roof.’
‘Do you hear them in your house?’ asked Jessie. ‘Do you hear the birds scratching on your roof?’
‘No,’ said Isla. ‘No, I don’t.’ She was shifting the rock cakes from the baking tray to a cooling rack. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘I’ll give you some of these to take away.’
Back in her own kitchen with a warm batch of Isla’s rock cakes, Jessie sat thinking about Lenore, the great-great-grandmother who had been living in this house in 1891, after which the trail had gone cold. Perhaps she had died in the house. Jessie ate a rock cake and then put away her plate, wiped the table, swept the floor, so that there could be no crumbs that might attract mice. Then she went upstairs to work, closing the door to the spare room as she passed.
Jessie sometimes thought about slipping things into her translations, things that ought not to be there; she thought about inserting little messages of her own, to see if anyone would notice. How many people read the original text as well as the translation, or closely enough to discover such a thing?
She saw marginalia in library books – in Freud’s On Dreams someone had written, How is it possible for one person to interpret another person’s dreams? – and she thought, Who are they talking to? Then she tried it herself, leaving notes in the margins of library books, which would be read by strangers: I’m sorry. Sometimes, weeks or months later, she would look to see if there was any reply. Just once, underneath her message, someone had written, Who are you? Jessie had not replied.
She worked at her desk in the mornings. At lunchtime, she downed tools. In England, she had made regular trips to Cambridge, even after moving from the Fens to the Midlands; she always ended up at the same museum. As a child, she had been disappointed by museums, which kept the past behind glass: nothing was to be touched, not even the glass. Now, sometimes, there were signs – she had seen them in natural history museums – saying Please touch. In adulthood, she was a museum regular, perhaps in the same way that a pub regular might have an unhealthy habit. The staff at the museum
knew her; she sometimes felt watched.
She knew every inch of the place, every detail: the exhibits, the cafe, the tiled corridors, the signposts which had little figures on them the size and shape of gingerbread men, like the gingerbread boy who got eaten up by a fox, and a gingerbread girl in a skirt. Their faces were blank. The signposts with the gingerbread figures on them pointed to the toilets, which had bright orange cubicle doors that you could see in the wall-to-wall mirror while you washed your hands. On her visits to the museum, Jessie always ended up in the gift shop, looking at the children.
She had been there with Gail and her family many times before taking Eleanor there by herself. Jessie, eighteen at the time, had had other plans that day, but she had been asked, instead, to look after Eleanor for her sister. Jessie had made a fuss about it, but she had taken her in the end, and she did like Eleanor, who was easy to be with, and Eleanor liked Jessie too, and trusted her. They’d had a nice morning.
When Jessie moved to Hawick in her thirties, she saved a fortune in museum entry fees, although hundreds of miles from home, in another country, she still could not entirely keep away; in her head, she still went to the museum, wandering its corridors at night.
It had been necessary for her to find a new afternoon routine. After eating lunch at home, she did some cleaning. She went to the swimming pool at the leisure centre, where she ploughed up and down the pool, doing a punishing hour of crawl; or she went to a class, to aerobics or Zumba, something with thumping music. While she was counting lengths or beats or steps, she did not have to think about anything else. It was the same when she was cooking, when she was chopping large quantities of vegetables or kneading dough, and she had expected that it would be the same with clay: she had started a clay-modelling course, but had not found it so beneficial. Each week, she had been working with her clay to make a face or a figure emerge, and each week she ended up squashing it back into a ball. She did not like what she produced. And anyway, she found the class difficult: it was out of town, and the tutor was so softly spoken that Jessie could hardly hear her at all. She had missed the last few classes. She thought about her lump of clay, abandoned near the art room’s huge sink, though kept moist for now inside a plastic bag. If she did not go back soon, they would put it back into the clay bin, and they would not refund her fee.
In the evening, she walked up to the track or down to the river with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She threw sticks for the dog to fetch, or she threw stones into the water, or she just stood and waited until it was time to go home again. She thought about the words she needed: in the coma story, should she say She hurt or She ached? It would matter, which word she chose. Context was vital. If the author wrote Geliebte, Jessie had to choose whether to translate it as sweetheart or lover or mistress; if the author wrote Schatten, Jessie had to decide between shadow and shade. Her choice made a difference. Sometimes it seemed like a terrible responsibility.
Will had agreed that it was important, ‘but choosing this word or that word,’ he said, ‘is not exactly a matter of life and death.’ It could be, though, said Jessie. Look, she said, at PC Sidney Miles and Derek Bentley and ‘Let him have it’; look at Eleanor and ‘Stay outside’. You had to be careful.
After the walk and the evening meal, Jessie worked some more, or she read.
In her Life of D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence was now abroad with no desire ever to go home again, while Frieda struggled to gain access to the children she had abandoned; but Jessie could not concentrate, she did not want to keep reading. She put down her book, pulled the duvet up to her chin and tried that trick of counting to clear her mind, to help her sleep; she tried counting sheep leaping over a gate, out of their field, but that did not help at all.
1985
Jessie’s best friend Amy had a scar on her cheek that she got when Jessie accidentally tripped her up into a rock garden, and she had a scar on her shin that she got climbing up a tree to fetch down Jessie’s coat which had been thrown into the higher branches by Brendan Doherty.
Amy was forever complaining about something that Brendan had done, but it was obvious to Jessie that Amy had a massive soft spot for him. In secondary school, Amy asked Brendan out and the two of them became an item, although the three of them generally went about together.
Amy and Brendan argued constantly. From time to time, they would have a really bad fight that seemed to Jessie to be the one that would split them up – they never seemed very far away from something that Amy would be unable to forgive – but they always patched things up, and they went on like that for years.
‘You wouldn’t give me such a hard time, would you, Jessie?’ said Brendan.
‘Hands off,’ said Amy, snaking an arm around his waist.
When Jessie came home from the camping holiday in Belgium, she heard from Brendan that he and Amy had had their last fight, that it was finally over between them.
‘I’ve always liked you, Jessie,’ he said. The two of them were down by the river. He’d just eaten a fish supper.
‘You threw my coat in a tree,’ said Jessie.
‘Exactly,’ said Brendan. ‘I threw your coat in a tree.’
‘You used to chase me with worms on sticks.’
‘If I ever had a worm on a stick,’ said Brendan, ‘I chased you with it.’
‘And it’s really over between you and Amy?’ asked Jessie.
‘It’s definitely over between me and Amy,’ said Brendan.
Jessie was used to cast-offs. She wore clothes and shoes that had once been her sister’s. She did not mind. Sometimes they were things that she had coveted for years. Brendan moved to kiss her and she let him. She could smell the river and battered cod.
It was only afterwards, when Jessie said that she really had to get home now, that Brendan said, ‘When I see her tomorrow, I’ll tell her we’re through.’
‘Hmm?’ said Jessie.
‘When I see Amy, I’ll tell her it’s over between her and me.’
‘You’re still together?’ said Jessie.
‘Nah,’ said Brendan, ‘it’s over. I’m telling her tomorrow.’ But that, said Jessie, would be too late.
She arrived home after her curfew, in trouble, with a love bite on her neck.
Jessie tried phoning Amy first thing, but no one was answering. She was keen to speak to Amy before Brendan did, to explain the situation in her own words. She decided to walk round to Amy’s house, but while she was getting ready to leave – while she was trying to disguise her love bite with make-up, a shirt collar, a scarf – Gail called Jessie at their parents’ house to say that she needed Jessie to look after Eleanor for the day because she had an appointment.
Jessie said that she was on her way out, that she had been one minute away from leaving the house. If it had not been for the love bite, she would already have been out of the door, but she could not say that; she did not want anyone to know about that. While Jessie spoke to her sister, her mother hovered in the hallway, and Jessie had to keep her body turned sideways so that her mother would not catch sight of the bruise on her neck.
Gail, on the far end of the phone line, persisted, saying, ‘Take her to the museum, I’ll pay.’ Then her mother joined in, saying that Jessie must help her sister out.
Her mother got hold of the phone and Jessie went to the front door. With one hand on the door handle, Jessie said, ‘Eleanor is not my responsibility,’ but she did not leave. Reluctantly, ungraciously, she gave in. She tried again to call Amy, but Amy, she knew, was already on her way to meet Brendan.
As they approached the museum, Jessie said to Eleanor, ‘Can you hear that?’
Eleanor listened. ‘Hear what?’ she said.
‘A yellowhammer,’ said Jessie. ‘A bird saying, “A little bit of bread and no cheese!”’
‘I can’t see it,’ said Eleanor.
‘No,’ said Jessie, who could not s
ee it either, ‘but can you hear it? “A little bit of bread and no cheese!”’
Eleanor listened.
‘There it is again,’ said Jessie, and they listened together to the bird twitting and trilling.
‘But it isn’t saying that,’ said Eleanor. ‘It isn’t saying anything.’
‘No,’ said Jessie, ‘but we like to think it is.’
She saw a girl with Amy’s hair, and another girl with Amy’s jacket. She passed a place where she and Amy sometimes met, but there was no one there.
Turning back to Eleanor, she found the little girl walking in the gutter. She looked like a stray urchin, as if one of the orphans from Annie had wandered away from the set: her socks were sliding down her legs, and her knees were smudged with dirt; her cardigan was hanging off her shoulders. The cardigan used for the reconstruction would be almost identical; the little girl would look so much like Eleanor. Jessie heard the ding of a bicycle bell and the pip of a car horn. She fetched Eleanor back onto the pavement. Amy had noticed that Eleanor could be careless around roads. ‘You need to teach her how to stay safe,’ she had said. Jessie said to Eleanor, now, ‘Watch out.’
Eleanor crouched down and plucked a dandelion clock from between the paving stones. She filled her lungs and blew at the seeds. ‘One o’clock,’ she said. She blew again. ‘Two o’clock.’ It made Jessie think of What’s the time, Mr Wolf?, the wolf turning suddenly – ‘It’s dinnertime!’ – and having to run so that the wolf would not catch you. Outside the museum, Eleanor took a final big breath; she left dandelion seeds on the museum steps.
One floor of the museum was given over to a series of connected exhibitions exploring ideas and images of the otherworld, the netherworld, the underworld, realms of the dead divided from our world by a boundary which, at certain times, thinned. Or they might be reached, these other worlds, via the portal of a watery place, into which offerings were sometimes cast, artefacts which might be excavated thousands of years later, pulled out of the mud.
