by Alison Moore
Some of the artwork was unsettling, and Jessie said to Eleanor, ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’
‘No,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m not frightened,’ but her eyes were rather wide as she scurried from exhibit to exhibit, from room to room. Eleanor would want to tell her mum what she had seen, and Gail would say, ‘You’ll have nightmares!’ and Jessie would say, ‘So will I!’
Eleanor slipped through a doorway into an exhibition of mummified bodies. She was curious about these bandaged figures – bandaged people, bandaged cats. Jessie tried to explain to Eleanor the purpose of mummification: it was to do with the dead being allowed into the afterlife, or it was to do with the dead wanting their bodies in the afterlife.
‘But they’re not in the afterlife,’ said Eleanor. ‘They’re here.’
‘But their spirits are in the afterlife,’ said Jessie. She looked at the bodies. She could not remember how it worked, how one accessed the afterlife. It was to do, too, with the weighing of the heart, a process depicted on a nearby panel, the god Anubis checking the scales. The dead could enter the afterlife if the heart was lighter than a feather.
Eleanor scampered off again, in the direction of the cafe where they would stop for lunch, and Jessie followed, trying to keep her in sight. It had been a nice morning, but Jessie’s mind was elsewhere. She was about to lose someone she loved. How easily, how quickly, it could happen.
Outreach
The journey is taking longer than I meant it to. I had hoped to be there by now but I’m still days away from crossing over. I’ve come quite a way though, and I am in more familiar territory now. I sometimes think I’ll travel through the night, but once again I find myself stopping, delaying. I send another message to Jessie, and then I rest.
The cat was obsessed with shadows. On winter mornings, the bathroom light cast a shifting puddle of shadow onto the bathroom floor around Jessie’s feet. The cat followed Jessie and her puddle of shadow around the bathroom, unable to decide whether to investigate or run from this thing that it could not begin to understand. It seemed wary, and yet kept coming back to see just what it was, dabbing with a paw at the impalpable darkness. It seemed perhaps less like a puddle and more like an aura, this shadow that followed Jessie around.
As she went from the bathroom to the top of the stairs, Jessie reached down to stroke the cat between its ears. It was an odd cat. Jessie would be petting it and then suddenly it would bite, darting at her like a snake. She wondered whether it had been taken away from its mother too soon. She wondered if the mother still remembered her kitten and worried about where it had gone.
The cat turned its head and bit into the flesh at the base of Jessie’s thumb, and there was just a moment of needle-sharp pain, and then the cat went on its way, trotting off down the stairs. Isla had said that Jessie ought to punish the cat when it did that, that it must not be allowed to get away with it, but Jessie would not do that. It was hardly anything, that tiny bite; it did not break the skin and barely hurt at all. And she knew that even if the cat did hurt her, she would not punish it.
Downstairs, Jessie fed the cat and the dog and herself, and then took the dog out for its walk before starting her work.
When she came downstairs at lunchtime, she found a postcard on the doormat. I’m on my way home, it said. ‘Now you’re coming,’ she said to the postcard, ‘after all this time.’ She did not know what to do with it. In the end, she propped it up on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink, and spoke to it each time she ran the tap.
She fed the cat, but not the dog, which did not get any lunch. This was a difficult time of day for the dog, which had to watch the cat eating while it went without. Jessie refreshed the dog’s water, in which it had no interest. It stood and looked at the cat eating, and then looked at Jessie, and then looked at the cat again.
She microwaved a portion of something from her freezer, not entirely sure what it was until she came to eat it. When she had eaten and washed up, she pulled the living room furniture away from the walls so that she could get behind and beneath things to clean, getting the dust balls. Under the sofa, she found one of Will’s socks, with a hole in the toe.
She hoovered the stairs and the landing and the bedroom. She rarely entered the spare room, but the door was standing open and she poked the hoover over the threshold, making tracks in the carpet. The room was long and thin, and home to odd things that Jessie did not know where else to put. In the far wall, there was a sash window. To one side of it, in one corner of the room, there was a creaky wicker chair, and on the other side, in the other corner, there was a single bed which had come with the house. There had always been an expectation about this room: Will imagined there being a child in here, and so did Jessie. It was already blue, he had said, and she knew that he was picturing a boy. She pictured a girl.
The bed was old and rather uncomfortable. It was easier to keep it than to get rid of it, but it had never been used for guests. It did have bedding on it though, so it looked decent when the door was ajar, and from time to time, in the depths of the night, Jessie’s insomnia brought her down the hallway to lie on this uncomfortable bed, on the dusty blanket. The room gave her strange dreams.
She was not far from the doorway when the hoover abruptly stopped, its roar dying – the plug must have pulled itself out of the wall. She could have plugged it into the socket in the spare room, but she felt that she had disturbed the room quite enough already. She retreated, winding the cord up as she left and closing the door behind her.
It was Friday. Friday had always been Jessie and Will’s day for going to The Bourtree for a drink. In the months since Will had left, Jessie had continued to go without him. Sometimes she went with Isla and Andy, and when they had other plans Jessie went alone.
She ate her evening meal early, walked the dog and then filled its bowl, and the cat’s. She knew that when she came home later, they would act as if they expected to be fed again, as if they had not eaten at all. She sometimes found the dog hard to live with: it seemed permanently poised between expectation and resignation, as if she were its only hope but also likely to disappoint. She wondered if the dog might have appreciated more of a routine: sometimes it had its meal and then a walk and sometimes it had a walk and then its meal; that would make it hard for the dog to know what was going to happen next, and in the meantime there was just so much waiting, so much drooling and sighing.
She changed her top and brushed her curling hair. She appraised herself in the mirror and found herself wanting but she would have to do.
At the bar of The Bourtree, she ordered a drink. She tended to drink red wine, although a few glasses were likely to leave her lips stained, and her teeth as well, which made her appear – when she saw her face in the bathroom mirror – rather ghoulish. She was watching her glass being filled when someone standing next to her said into her good ear, ‘Jessie Noon.’
She looked around and saw the man who had stopped her outside the cafe bar in Carlisle, though it took her a moment to recognise him. Under the pub lights, she could see the blue of his eyes and the red in his moustache and in the beard that had not been there before. ‘Hello, Robert,’ she said, and she could see that he was pleased she had remembered his name. She turned around to look for her wine, which was not coming yet. She glanced back at Robert, who did not have a drink in front of him; he had his coat on, so she supposed that he had only just come in. Her glass of wine arrived just then and Jessie said to Robert, ‘What will you have?’
‘I’ll have a pint of Abbot Ale, please,’ he said.
‘A pint of Abbot Ale, please,’ Jessie said to the young man behind the bar.
When the pint had been set down on the bar next to the wine, Robert said, ‘I’ll get the next ones in.’ Reaching for his drink, he said, ‘You’re not here with anyone?’
‘No,’ said Jessie.
‘We can sit over there,’ said Robert, picking u
p both of their drinks and carrying them to a booth, where they took off their coats and sat down.
‘I remembered where else I’d seen you,’ said Robert. ‘You were at the Halloween party. You were the one with tuberculosis.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She remembered him now; they had spoken briefly. It’s not catching, I hope, he had said. She had heard him perfectly well, as she did now, despite her bad ear; it must be the pitch of his voice, or the way he always turned his face towards her.
‘You caught your bus all right?’ asked Robert. ‘After I saw you in Carlisle?’
‘I did,’ said Jessie, ‘thank you.’
‘I’d driven down, myself,’ said Robert. ‘But I parked somewhere I shouldn’t have done. When I went back to it, the car was gone. There was just this empty space. It was a shock.’
‘Yes, I can imagine,’ said Jessie. ‘Did you get your car back?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Robert, ‘but it was a lot of bother, and I had to pay a fine.’
How nice that would be, thought Jessie, just to make a phone call and pay a fine and get back whatever you had lost.
‘What were you doing in Carlisle?’ she asked.
‘My family’s there,’ said Robert.
‘You’re married?’ asked Jessie.
‘God, no,’ said Robert. ‘I mean my mum and dad, and my brothers and sisters, and their families, all their kids – there seem to be more every time I see them, it’s overwhelming.’ He gulped at his pint.
‘You don’t have children yourself?’ asked Jessie.
‘None myself,’ said Robert. ‘I wouldn’t want them. How about you?’
‘I had a child,’ said Jessie, ‘with my ex-husband; we had a son, but he left home years ago.’
‘You have an empty nest,’ said Robert.
Jessie, seeing how her reference to her ex-husband could be misinterpreted, considered explaining that she also had a husband who was merely absent, but there seemed little point; either way, she was alone in her house. ‘Apart from the dog,’ she said, ‘and the cat.’ She finished her wine. ‘And I sometimes think that there might be a spirit in my house. I think it might be the spirit of a little girl.’
Robert got to his feet and picked up their empty glasses. ‘Same again?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Jessie. ‘Thank you.’
When Robert returned with the drinks, Jessie said, ‘Do you know the Woolf story, “The Haunted House”?’
‘No,’ said Robert, ‘I don’t know it.’
‘The ghosts in it are searching the house for something they left there, and what they find they left in the house is love. And that reminds me of the Scott poem, “The Eve of St John”, which is set near here, in fact, near Kelso. A lady is visited by her lover, who turns out to be a ghost.’
‘That must have been a shock,’ said Robert.
‘At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power,’ recited Jessie, ‘In thy chamber will I be. She ends up in a nunnery. And it’s like “John Charrington’s Wedding” by Edith Nesbit, in which the groom marries his sweetheart regardless of the fact that he’s just died.’
‘Does she know he’s dead?’ asked Robert.
‘She can see that all is not well,’ said Jessie. ‘But I don’t think she really knows until the very end. She seems to die of terror then. In Woolf’s story,’ she added, ‘all is well. They seem to be very nice ghosts.’ At that moment, she turned her head towards the bar and saw who had just arrived. She looked at his arms, forced away from his sides by his muscles. It must be uncomfortable, she thought, to carry around that much bulk. He had his back to her, but while he waited for the drink he had ordered – Jessie imagined a pint of something dark and strong – he turned his head this way and that as if looking for someone.
Robert leaned over the table towards Jessie and said, ‘Are you hungry?’
Outside The Bourtree, they crossed the road to the fish and chip shop and ordered fish suppers. Music was playing behind the counter; the track that came on while they waited was a twenty-first-century remix of an Elvis Presley track whose original version Jessie had known in her youth.
A lone woman came into the shop, heard the music and began to sing along; she danced up to the counter, where she said rather breathlessly to the man who was parcelling up the fish suppers, ‘They’ve found him, did you hear?’
‘Found who?’ asked the man.
‘A homeless man was just found dead in New York and his dental records prove it’s Elvis.’
‘Is that right?’ said the man. To Robert and Jessie, he said, ‘Anything else?’
Robert asked for a pickled onion with his fish supper, and Jessie asked for one too. It was not something that she would normally have asked for in a fish and chip shop, although she had loved pickled onions as a child. She was not sure why she had asked for one now, just because Robert had.
‘They’ve had him living under a witness protection programme since 1977,’ said the woman. Jessie wondered what it would be like to be one of the very few people to know something like that, to know that Elvis had never really died.
Outside, Jessie and Robert found a bench to sit on. When they opened up their fish suppers, Jessie was taken aback by the size of her pickled onion.
‘It’s the size of a baby’s fist, that one,’ said Robert. ‘It’ll bring tears to your eyes.’
Jessie touched her teeth to the skin, tasted the vinegar, and then found that, in fact, she could not face it.
‘I’ll take it off you,’ said Robert. He took it and put it with his own.
They ate their fish, and Jessie was reminded of the summer she turned eighteen, of kissing Brendan by the river right after he’d had a fish supper, and afterwards, when Jessie was home again and alone in her bedroom, she had found a tiny piece of cod in her mouth.
‘What work do you do?’ asked Jessie.
‘Social services,’ said Robert.
‘I imagine that’s a difficult job,’ said Jessie.
‘It can be,’ said Robert. ‘A lot of people hear “Social Services” and think of someone coming to your door, wanting to take your children away, or to take you away. They think of the outreach worker coming for your loved ones, coming for you.’ He picked up Jessie’s pickled onion and ate it in two bites.
‘I ought to be getting home,’ said Jessie, folding the paper around the remains of her fish supper. Robert was just about done with his too, and they both stood and took their litter to a nearby bin.
‘I’ll walk you back,’ said Robert.
‘No,’ said Jessie. ‘Don’t do that. I’m only a minute from my door.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure,’ she said. She did not set off though. They were standing near the Horse, and Jessie looked up at it, at the rider on horseback. It was a memorial to the Battle of Hornshole, a battle fought by children by the sounds of it; it had been fought to defeat English raiders and would not be overlooked or forgotten. At first, there had been only one memorial, and then, at the other end of the High Street, they had added another one. She passed these memorials every day, every time she walked to the river. Isla had told her about the battle, about the local boys and the English. She had said ‘we’ and ‘you’ and Jessie had bristled: it had been nothing to do with her; she had not even been born then.
Jessie touched the inscription on the base. She had not learnt Latin at school, and sounded it out like a child: ‘Merses Profundo Pulchrior Evenit.’
‘Overwhelm it in the deep;’ said Robert, ‘it arises more beautiful than ever.’
Jessie circled the base of the statue, running her fingers over another inscription, reading it the same way she used to read a cereal box when she was little just because it was in front of her – niacin, riboflavin, thiamin – not knowing what any of these things were even though she was eating
them. ‘Teribus ye Teriodin.’
‘A war cry,’ said Robert.
‘It means “The Land of Death, the Land of Odin”,’ said Jessie. She had found the translation of this Old Welsh phrase in a book.
Robert said that she was wrong, that her book was wrong.
‘What does it mean then?’ asked Jessie.
Robert did not seem to know, but he knew that she was wrong.
They stood for a while, looking at the stone base, on which there were no more inscriptions to translate.
‘I ought to get home,’ said Jessie. She put her hands deep inside her pockets and said goodnight and that she had enjoyed the evening, and Robert said goodnight and that he had too. They went their separate ways without arranging to meet again. There seemed no need when they shared a haunt.
No sooner had she shut the front door behind her than the cat was at her feet. It had a tendency to appear silently out of nowhere and was almost invisible in a dark room or outside at night; she had to avoid standing on its paws or its tail. The dog had come hurrying too. They wanted their supper, though they’d already had it. Perhaps a midnight snack would do no harm, she thought, even as she eyed their thickening bellies.
Jessie went into the kitchen, with the animals at her heels. When she switched on the light, she saw her Silver Jubilee mug lying broken on the floor. She crouched down and gathered up the pieces, looking to see if it might be possible to fit them back together, to glue them in such a way that the breakage would hardly be noticeable, but some of the fragments were so small that she could see this would not work, and anyway, she would always have known. Besides, she would never have been able to drink out of it again as the cracks would attract bacteria.
