Canvey Island

by James Runcie

  ‘There you go, my darling.’

  It was as if Dad was alive but a child again and she was soothing him to sleep. She fetched a comb, parted his hair and began to brush it back. Then she reached into her handbag and took out her compact and blusher.

  ‘He looks a bit pale, doesn’t he? I’ll just put some colour back in his cheeks. I know it’s silly but I’d like him with us a bit longer.’

  I took off my gloves and washed my hands. I didn’t want the smell of death to remain: gases, ammonia, carbonic acid, nitrogen. I wanted to phone Claire. I wanted to be anywhere other than in that room.

  ‘I feel we should pray,’ Vi said, ‘even though your father said he never believed.’

  What? I thought. Just in case we can get him in at the last minute?

  ‘We might find it a comfort. We don’t have to say anything out loud.’

  She sat beside my father and took his hand once more. I stared out of the window because I did not think I could continue to take in the sight of my dead father, dressed in his Sunday best, waiting for his funeral without his socks and shoes.

  Outside an elderly couple were standing at the bus stop. Perhaps they had just finished visiting a friend and were wondering how long it might be until they too ended up in the home. Perhaps they were thinking which of them might die first. As I watched them I thought of my own marriage, and Claire’s words to me on our honeymoon. She had turned to me and said: ‘I hope I never see you dead.’

  I opened the window. For a moment I did not want to turn round. If I did so then everything that had just happened would be true.

  ‘It’s all right, Martin,’ Vi said. ‘I think I’m ready now.’ She stood up, took off her apron and put on her jacket. ‘The undertakers will be here soon.’

  I looked at my father and could hardly remember him being alive: sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and a plate of shrimps before it was light; tapping the packet of fags to release a cigarette; shifting in his chair before the look of surprise came to his face when he remembered a joke.

  Now he lay waxen and still before me. There was nothing between me and my own death, no protecting grace.

  Despite the drained pallor of the features. Dad’s face began to glow in the diffused light of death. I thought that I should probably kiss him but I didn’t want to say goodbye. I remembered the last joke he had told me, of a wife moaning to her husband, ‘I think you love Tottenham more than you love me,’ and the man replying, ‘Don’t be daft, I love Hartlepool United more than I love you.’

  The undertakers came to zip him in a bag and take him away. Mrs Harrison arrived with some of his possessions. ‘These are his things: a few photographs; his watch and dentures. You can wait in the conservatory. I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed.’

  ‘Is that what people do?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s best if the undertakers get on with it themselves.’

  I sat with Vi in the Lloyd Loom chairs and looked out at the sea view. In the distance, a man in a rugby shirt was skimming stones, teaching his boys to do the same, ignoring the black Labrador who was still waiting to chase a stick they had forgotten.

  ‘You should have his stuff, Vi,’ I said.

  A coffee-pot without a spout

  A cup without a handle,

  A tobacco pipe without a lid,

  And half a farthing candle.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something I used to sing with your mother. About our dad:

  My father died a month ago

  And left me all his riches;

  A feather bed, a wooden leg,

  And a pair of leather breeches.

  ‘I should give you these while you’re here …’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re just photographs. From the attic in the old house. I gave them to Dad.’

  I handed her the envelope but she didn’t want to look.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘George and Lily.’

  ‘Did you take that?’

  ‘I’ve never seen this one before.’

  ‘And the baby is me?’

  ‘I suppose it must be.’ She was still hesitant. ‘Lily must have kept it. You with the two of them. I thought all these had gone in the flood.’

  She started to put them back in the envelope but stopped. ‘And, look, here’s one of me when I was young … and my wedding … George … and one of Len too. He always was a looker. And he could dance; for a small man he could dance so well. All those nights upstairs at the Casino or over at the Kursaal. On a clear night they didn’t close the curtains and you could see the stars over the sea. We were almost the same height and that helps when you’re dancing, you can keep close, cheek to cheek rather than cheek to chest; a man doesn’t have to lean down so much.’

  She gave me back the photographs. ‘You keep them. I don’t need them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I like to think of the last time we danced together. We’d had such a happy time with the champagne and the memories and we just danced into and away from each other. He was so proud of me. He even laughed when I swapped my high heels for dancing shoes. “Still going strong then, Vi …” he said.

  ‘I told him I was the last of our generation to wear them. I’ve always had good legs. They’re the last things to go south. I even told your Claire that.

  ‘Len laughed when he saw my shoes but I knew he was proud. “Amazing you don’t fall over.”

  ‘“I can keep my balance,” I said. “And I still find them comfortable.”

  ‘“I love a girl in high heels,” he said and I shivered. I was still a girl to him. Always a girl. I’m going to keep remembering that.’

  ‘You loved my father, didn’t you?’

  Vi waited. ‘Oh no, I didn’t love him,’ she said. ‘I adored him.’

  Linda

  I heard about Martin’s dad. Dave and I even went to the funeral because we knew there wouldn’t be that many people there. It was the kind of event the word ‘smattering’ had been invented for. A tape recorder on the back pew was playing old ENSA hits when we walked in: ‘I Cover the Waterfront’, ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ and ‘She Does It All For Me’. We sat halfway back on the left behind an old couple who weren’t sure they had come to the right service. They kept looking round every time anyone came, in the hope of recognising someone, anyone, and finally decided that it would be easier just to ask us. We tried to be discreet because I didn’t want Martin’s wife seeing us. Ade turned up, which was good of him, and someone from the Navy, and Vi sat in the front on the right in her black hat and veil, the smartest person in the crematorium, a new leather handbag matching her shoes, her lace handkerchief at the ready.

  Martin read from the Book of Revelation.

  I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

  God, I thought, I bet it didn’t take you long to choose that.

  Then he gave a tribute to his father, talking about the times when they’d gone out fishing when he was a boy and how they were more friends than father and son. He talked about how Len was amused by his granddaughter, and how supportive he had been to Claire when she’d had post-natal depression, and I wondered whether any of us really needed to know all that. Then one of the old boys’ hearing aids kept going off and he couldn’t stop it so anything Martin said was accompanied by high-pitched whistling.

  The priest stood up and said that Len was ‘one of life’s great characters’, which meant that he didn’t know that much about him, and that ‘the genial fisherman we all knew and loved’ would live on in our hearts and prayers.

  He told us that the people from the home had set out refreshments and that we would all be welcome to join them afterwards. Dave said he’d rather give it a miss. I didn’t know whether it was the thought of the old people’s home or the presence of Martin but I wasn’t going to disagree. It was good enough of him to come as it was.

  We
both found it depressing, not just because it was a funeral and the end of an era, Len being the last of our parents to die, but because the service was all so matter of fact, not like the funerals we’d known after the flood. We were only in there for about twenty minutes and the next mourners were already queuing up when we came out. It didn’t seem right.

  Dave was still a bit distracted when we got back to the boat and I could tell it was because we had seen Martin.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And do you still love him?’

  ‘No, Dave, I love you. You don’t have to ask.’

  ‘Then I won’t any more. It was seeing him again …’

  ‘He won’t be back,’ I said.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about me. I’m quite strong. You know that.’

  ‘Strongest girl in the world, you are.’

  Ours wasn’t a complicated relationship. We didn’t have any great hopes or dreams any more. ‘Life when the lust goes,’ Dave called it. Once he was going to be the next Pete Townshend and I was going to be a great painter, but after all the drink and the setbacks and the failed ambition we had decided to live a simpler life, messing around in boats, earning money hand to mouth, surviving however we could. Sometimes friendship can last longer than love.

  It was one of those rare days when even the weather was hopeful. The tide was going out, water fizzing through the channels, the sea curling away from the land.

  ‘Let’s take the boat,’ Dave said. ‘Get out of Canvey for a while.’

  ‘Where shall we go?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, petal: canals, rivers, a bit of sea, who knows? We could even do the waterways, just the two of us.’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘What do you say?’

  He started to untie the boat and threw the rope on the deck. Then he jumped back on board. ‘Do you want to take the tiller?’

  ‘We’ll take it together,’ I said. ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘Then let’s see where the water leads us. I don’t care where we go provided we have each other.’

  A swift darted up in front of the boat and circled away. I stopped for a moment, taking everything in, knowing that I was happier than I had been for a long time. I listened to the knocking and the ringing of ships’ rigging, to distant traffic, and to the last cries of the oystercatchers, singing on the wing. I could hear a radio playing in the caravan site, I think it was Youssou N’Dour and Neneh Cherry singing ‘Seven Seconds’, and I stood there with a light breeze on my face, listening to the music, letting time come to me.

  Dave started up the engine.

  ‘Straight on till morning?’ I asked.

  Once we were away from Canvey and all that was past, I would start painting again. I didn’t know what. I didn’t care. But I knew I would reduce my life right down into what could be trusted and known, and that I would be free, guided, as I had always wanted to be, by currents and tide, moon and stars.

  ‘Are you all right, treasure?’ Dave called as we headed out into the estuary.

  ‘As long as you keep calling me that,’ I said.

  Violet

  Nobody asks me for my opinion any more. That’s another thing no one tells you about old age. People talk about the weather or the telly, and sometimes they ask a little bit about how you are keeping, but they don’t stay long for an answer. Everything has to go on in your head because there’s so little life left in the world outside. I think that’s why so many old people go crackers. If the dementia doesn’t get you then the loneliness will.

  When I look back over my life, it’s not always the big events that I can remember. It’s mostly silly little things: a laugh at a party, Len taking my hand or George flying a kite that Christmas after the flood. Sometimes I’m not so sure that any of them happened at all. Was I actually there? I wonder. It’s like I’m looking at a photograph of myself and thinking that the woman in it could be almost anyone. It certainly never seems to be me.

  Of course I can’t acknowledge how much of my life has gone and that there’s so little of it left. I can’t accept that Martin is no longer a child, that the men who mattered to me are dead, or that I am old. How many springtimes will I see? How many birthdays? And who will be with me to celebrate them?

  Celebrate: well, there’s a funny word for it.

  I was a different person in the past, always up for a bit of larking. Now I’m more serious. I suppose it’s because there’s so much less to be larky about. And it’s all gone so fast; that’s what Mother always said: gone so quick. I never believed her when she told me. I thought I had ages and that she’d just wasted her life. I even thought that she was somehow to blame for her old age, and that perhaps if she’d lived differently and appreciated everything more then she wouldn’t have found herself in such a state at the end. I thought it was all her fault. And yet, of course it wasn’t. I know that now.

  When you’re old and alone you sometimes have to stop yourself thinking too much. You have to give yourself a good talking to, or have a chat with an old photograph. Imagine he’s there with you for a cup of tea and a bit of a laugh. People might think it a bit mad but sometimes it’s the sanest thing you can do. If you can’t do that then you have to find things to look forward to and get on with it. No one likes a moaner.

  Sometimes I think, Oh, why bother? Can’t I take a pill or something? but then I hear Len’s voice coming back to me all over again: Come on, old girl. The last battle.

  And that’s what it is. And I’m fighting it in every way I can. Mostly it’s the small things, having nice soap and making myself presentable, but they all add up. I can still cook and I like to keep everything clean. It may be a bit vain but I think it’s only common courtesy. You don’t want other people seeing you when you’re not at your best or without your make-up.

  I do think about dying, of course I do, but I can’t ever quite imagine it happening to me. George had the right idea. He must have known, walking off the jetty like that. And for Len to die with a chuckle thinking the whole thing was a joke, well, you have to hand it to him. Both of them knew how to go, whereas I haven’t the foggiest.

  When I do get scared I think of all the things my friends have said to me in the past. I hear their voices. I see their smiles. I remember the way they laughed and I try to imagine they’re still with me.

  It’s the voices that matter most because when I hear them I can make myself believe that they haven’t died at all. They keep talking, and laughing, and dancing, and they won’t fall silent, I know they won’t, because I am keeping their memory safe for them and they’re always close by.

  And in the end it doesn’t really matter whether they are alive or dead because they are still with me and with all who remember them.

  And then I think of the things I’ve learnt in life, and how you have to keep living through it as best you can, and that death is simply the last thing you have to get through.

  I try to picture myself dancing towards it with everyone I’ve ever known in an endless reel, all of us changing hands, one and then another, each in turn, past all our memories and our fears towards a future we cannot ever quite grasp. The orchestra is playing and we have forgiven each other everything and we keep moving, dancing towards the light, and I can’t ever imagine it ending because we are together at last and for ever, it’s as simple as that, and no one is ever going to ask us to stop.

  Martin

  I tried to imagine Dad was still with me. You’re never bored by the sea, I remembered him saying as Mum waved to us from a distance. I was a child then and her arm was raised high above her head. Her gesture swept across the sky, a rainbow arc touching the horizon to her right, the cliffs to her left. She was describing the world, waving hello and goodbye at the same time.

  I walked along the coast to Holehaven. The pebbles underfoot were mottled like birds’ eggs: pink-white, blue-black, dove-grey. I remember
ed my childish curiosity about such stones; how they could be sharpened by the tide to flint axe-heads, or used to light fires or become counters in a children’s game:

  One-ery, two-ery, tickery, seven

  Hallibo, crackibo, ten and eleven,

  Spin, span, muskidan,

  Twiddle-um, twaddle-um, twenty-one.

  A ship’s horn sounded in the distance. There would be a summer storm tonight: violent thunder, cracked shards of lightning cutting through the sky. I thought of the walks I had known along the strandline, watching the sand turn to mud, the visitors departing, the end of the season.

  I imagined my father’s voice. ‘Things keep coming at you and then one day it’s all gone from you, son. The tide stays out and you know that you won’t ever see it back.’

  I remembered my mother still alive, and the house filled with laundry and baking, and how the shirts left to dry on the rack above the stove sometimes smelt of bacon when you put them on. She was always busy, my mother, washing, cooking and cleaning, never still. Nothing was ever wasted: not food, not time, not life.

  I remembered her dusting the flour from her hands and coming in to sing me a bedtime song: I’m a little butterfly born in a bower, christened in a teapot, died in half an hour. I could still see her smiling down upon me, her hair falling across her eyes and her brushing it back, turning away, bidding me goodnight from the doorway.

  I could hear her singing. Ickle ockle, blue bockle, fishes in the sea, if you want a pretty maid, please choose me.

  Then I heard my father’s voice. Don’t you worry, son. We’ll be watching you.

  But you can’t, I thought.

  I can, son. I’m here. Always will be.

  And I heard Claire’s voice and the sound of Lucy calling: Come back, come back.

  I walked away from the jetty, up on to the sea wall, and looked out over the sweep of the island. There, amidst the coastguard cottages and mobile homes, the gas cylinders and the oil refineries, were new buildings and new futures; homes as ours had been fifty years ago.