The Extra Large Medium

by Helen Slavin

  If I could just pick up the right frequency I could be inside his dreams, sort through his memories for myself. He wouldn’t be harmed, he wouldn’t even know I was there. If he did, he would just think it was a dream brought on by our recent encounters. He might spend some of the next morning thinking about me and then he’d have an important meeting scheduled and I would vanish. I could spend the night hours finding out. I could see My Mother before she was My Mother, perhaps when she was a stranger.

  I struggled hard after all the lights were out, struggled against the night full of servants and people mown down by horse and carriage, people scarred by smallpox. People I did not want to see or hear. Clutter.

  I willed. Strained. Concentrated. Wished.

  On the fifth day they called the police.

  Detailed Report: Incident number 79845A/Z Constable Terry Adam

  Report on female stalker at home of Oliver Howard.

  What’s to report? Shouldn’t say it but Mrs Howard calls us out on a regular basis for nothing at all. Strange cars parked in the neighbourhood. Nuisance cats. Prowlers who always turn out to be surveyors or estate agents dressed in suits and wielding tape measures and damp meters and instamatic cameras. The one and only time there was a break-in Polly Howard didn’t know about it until she read the piece in the local paper. Then we had a series of abusive calls from her yapping … Sorry, I’ll keep it businesslike, informing us of her disappointment with our policing and her dismay at the waste of taxpayers’ money.

  I’m beyond dismay. I want to raid her house early morning, bundle her into the back of the squad car and take her to the estate where the carpeting, if they have any, sticks to your feet when you walk on it. Where little kids are learning the cottage industry of crack cocaine manufacture. Want to show her the body in the dumpster at the back of the Drayman’s Arms. The abandoned pensioner. Not everyone lives in a Georgian mansion, Polly Howard. Stop. Stop. Breathe.

  Historical note: nothing has changed. When the Howards’ house was first built in about 1739 there was an opium den and a whore house and gin palaces and no police force. There was a highwayman, Red Rob, who used to operate practically outside Polly Howard’s front door. Sorry. Sorry.

  Back to the facts. I was in and I volunteered to go up to check on Mrs Howard. I had had a bad morning with a body in the kitchen of a corner house on the estate. Not very old. Bloke. Drugs related. Sniffing Ajax it looked like. Depressing. I try to keep this type of event at arm’s length. You have to. It should be in the training. My own personal blocking tactic is to erase the memory of it by filling in a detailed report. That way all the facts are noted, fresh and clear from my head. That way all the facts are flushed out of my head. I’ve been commended on the quality of my scene-of-crime reporting. I don’t want to carry that useless knowledge around. It isn’t as if I’m going to find it handy one evening in the pub quiz. That particular day, the report didn’t do it. Couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d had a restless night the night before (still couldn’t shake the recent fatal RTA I’d attended either) and this had lowered my mental defences. This is the reason I volunteered. All right, I confess. I was trying to run away.

  I like the Old Park area. It’s lush and green and old. Forget the fact that it is Millionaires’ Row. The houses are fine. I don’t care that there isn’t one of them that sells for under half a million these days. I care on an historical level. They are unusual and beautiful and have travelled through time. They have the quirks and delights of their original owners written into the brickwork and stonemasonry. Polly Howard doesn’t live there. She inhabits the space. Hezekiah Wheatfield lives there. Not that I believe in ghosts. I mean, his legacy. What he left behind. Whatever. Sorry. Sorry.

  I like the Old Park area because the houses don’t impinge on the wildlife. The trees don’t have to fight their way through concrete. In the park you can see goldfinches and greenfinches, the odd woodpecker. You can usually hear the woodpeckers. Jays. The dappled. The speckled. The light through the copper beech. It is restful. The trees have space. I thought it would do me good to have a run up there. Cleanse my soul.

  I do not think that Annie Colville was a danger to anyone. She was emotionally charged but by no means hysterical. We talked for some minutes under the copper beech trees and I learned that she was looking for her biological father and had wanted to talk with Mr Howard, had in fact had some conversations with him already. I reiterated a point that Mr Howard had made already it seemed. That point was that he wasn’t her biological parent and didn’t know who was and that there wasn’t much point pursuing him.

  But the point is, if you let go, you lose it.

  At this juncture I was able to give Annie a couple of names of people I had had contact with who help adopted offspring search for their biological parents. I put her on to Dorothy in town who is very helpful and sympathetic. Dorothy reads a lot of mystery fiction and quite frankly could do a lot better than a couple of our detectives. She’s an eye for details. She’s got excellent people skills. If she couldn’t find anyone for Annie she would at the very least be able to make her feel better about the situation. Annie Colville listened and she put up no resistance to being moved on. She looked tired and I was relieved she accepted a lift back into town in the squad car.

  I took the longest route. I could lie and say that I did this to give her time to gather her thoughts. I did it because I wanted to keep her in the car with me for just a few more moments. Up through the furthest edges of the park along the perimeter walling of Rood House. Past the boating lake. Along the river. Following the river back into town, across the bridge. I took that route because there was something about her.

  I wanted to take her in my arms. Hold her. At the roadside, under the copper beech tree I wanted to hoist her up and carry her off. It isn’t allowed is it? Eh? That is one advantage of horses over cars. If you’re going to give a woman a lift on your horse you have to lift her up. You have to make physical, human contact. Her body neatly spooned against yours in the saddle. Your arms encircling her waist to hold the reins. We are too far apart in modern times.

  Not that I’ll do anything about this. Not that I can ever bring myself to say anything, to even ask the woman out for something as basic as a drink because I can’t be taken on. The baggage would weigh anyone down. I know it weighs me down.

  On the way home I drove past the Howards’ place. Mrs Polly Howard was impressed with my follow-up procedure. Annie had not been back.

  Job done.

  Forget it. Time for a brew. Time to scrumple this up and start again. Make a fresh copy. Facts only this time.

  Interview with self: suspended @ 19.27

  Viewed from the bridge

  ISAMBARD KINGDOM Brunel did not build this suspension bridge. Sir Charles Whitworth wanted him to, arranged a special meeting, travelled to London taking a few town bigwigs with him. They took the photographer, Guild. The Guild family still have a photography studio in our town.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel died that morning. He didn’t do this on purpose but Sir Charles Whitworth took it as a personal slight and vowed they would build a bigger, more modern bridge than Brunel could have designed. Or engineered, I don’t know. What do you do with bridges?

  They have Guild’s photographs of the construction work in the library archive. There had been a ferry up until then. He made a few thousand taking people on construction viewing trips and kept the ferry going for the squeamish or ‘those of a nervous disposition’ who couldn’t hack going over the bridge. It is very high, spanning the top of one side of the valley straight across to the other. The sides were too steep to run a road up to the top. The bridge had to go up and across, not just simply across. From Old Road to Red Rob Road.

  Red Rob being the highwayman whose pitch this was before the bridge. Before Sir Charles Whitworth. Before photographs. He’s stuffed in the museum, believe it or not. He hangs in a glass case with the curtains drawn to keep the daylight from destroying him. Like a vamp
ire. You have to go under the curtain and press a button. Then a dim light illuminates his tanned face, his dead, glass eyes looking out at you, the faintest trace of bristle just under his nose. The ultimate bogeyman. He looks tanned brown because of the preservatives he is soaked in. Skin is, after all, simply pale pink leather.

  There are two Gothic-style towers at each end that used to be for tolls. Eventually someone realised that the bridge’s construction had cost so much they would never pay back the debt. Now we pay a set amount each year in our council tax for the upkeep of the bridge. They even call it the Bridge Tithe. There are three men who paint and maintain it endlessly, dangling from cradles, abseiling up and under like spiders. Now they have specialist cabling and technology. When Sir Charles Whitworth commissioned the bridge they didn’t. They built it with sweat and hammering. They were hauled up and down hemp lines in oversized buckets.

  Which is why, as I stood leaning over the balustrading looking into the river, three chocolate-brown-clad workmen were sitting just underneath me. They were perched like birds on the iron angled girder below the deck. I could hear their chat and smell the tobacco as they smoked into the night.

  ‘Don’t see the boats so much now,’ said a stocky bearded one, scratching at his chin like a flea-ridden dog.

  ‘The steam packet runs.’ The thin one is leaning into the girder, stretching himself along its length. He looks like a masthead on a ship, his form bent to the metal. At one with the girder.

  ‘To the tea garden and back.’ A wiry bloke on haunches, pinching his cigarette out. ‘Don’t go nowhere else now.’ Tossing it. It arced like a diver, to the water below.

  ‘All right. I’ll give you the steam packet. But not the tugs and the fireboat and the little cargo barges.’

  ‘No. But the carriages look pretty in the night, with their lights.’

  They pondered the roadways on either side for a moment. Looked down into town and the shift and glide of headlights.

  ‘What happened to the horses? You don’t never see the horses.’ The stocky man adjusted his position, resting one foot higher up the girder, leaned a hairy arm on his leg, relaxed.

  ‘Ate them. Or shipped them off on those bloody little cargo barges…’ The wiry man grinned, winked and they all chuckled.

  ‘You jumping or what?’ Wiry spoke up, tilting his head so that he could look straight up at me through a gap in the decking. I looked back. Unsure of the answer.

  ‘She’s here for the view.’ The stocky one was calm, as if this was the sole reason anyone used the bridge.

  ‘It is a beautiful view.’ Watching the lights of the cars down to the left where town started. A single car rolled over the bridge behind me, over onto Red Rob Road travelling across the topmost edge of the land like a beacon. The sky was lit with a deep grey-blue. The air was cool. I breathed in.

  ‘We like it.’ The tall man shut his eyes as if he was going to snooze. Roost up there.

  ‘Don’t you want to be somewhere else? Move on now?’ I ventured.

  ‘She’s on about Heaven.’ Wiry was clearly the cynic.

  ‘No,’ said Stocky, squinting into the distance as if he could just make out the sea. ‘This is home.’

  It was a four-letter word, Home, and it did not seem, at that moment, to apply to me. If I shifted myself over the handrail, if I lifted my leg, hiked myself over the balustrade and let go, where would I end up? Would that be Home? I’d be cosy in my chocolate brown skirt and woolly jumper. Wouldn’t I? Isn’t that where My Mother was…waiting?

  I looked down, although you’d think the path to Heaven should, ideally, be up. Never have had a sense of direction.

  As I lifted my leg over the rail I realised the balustrade was higher than it had seemed. I was half on, half off, my feet suddenly no longer in contact with the decking but my middle, my hands, flat on the handrail. Clinging on. It seemed that down continued for a very long way. The river didn’t seem like a river, it was more like a vast well. If I jumped, probably, about an hour from now, there would be a faint splash rustling in the bottom of the valley.

  And then I realised how stupid it would be. With my endless back catalogue of unfinished business I’d spend an eternity plunging down, repeating the same tomfoolery over and over in front of the three workmen.

  Only now of course I was losing my balance. I was going to slip to my doom in a half-arsed accident, a disgraceful skidding, with no double-twisting pike or triple salko. Which was when I felt my body lurch to a halt, my chin scrape against wrought iron metalwork, felt my shoulder pop out. I thought I had caught my sleeve in the balustrading, saved myself by default. Something held me there.

  I looked back. It was Joe, the wrestler. His arm was reaching through the widest part of the balustrading, his hand was clenched around my left arm and beads of sweat were sparkling on his face. His features were twisted up with the effort of it. We were held there for a moment in a stalemate. He couldn’t lift me. He could just hold on. I hung there for one of those hour-long minutes that my life is dotted with.

  I saw the lights in town, heard a joke car horn parrump-parp-parp as it tootled through the Old Park area. Then I reached in and clutched at the decorative iron work.

  In the tollbooth on the townward side of the bridge, Joe patched me up with a medical kit, stretching the sticking plaster too tight over my wounded chin. He was shaking. Angry. He didn’t say much. The stripping sound of the sticking plaster as he unravelled it. The steely snip of the scissors. The kettle hissing to a boil, now rattling and shushing on his antique stove.

  ‘If you jump you take others with you. Always. Remember that, however depressed you get. You aren’t finishing anything. Not for the people left behind.’

  He turned to make tea, stirring leaves in a huge shiny brown earthenware pot.

  His eyes were less certain however as he offered an old-fashioned biscuit barrel loaded with shortbread. No Bourbons thankfully.

  ‘Think on.’

  We thought about it. I told him everything then. It took the entire barrel of biscuits and some cheese on toast. Joe’s theory was that Sam would miss me or at the very least be touched, might blame himself. He decided that it sounded as if Brian clearly had problems of his own in the grief department.

  He didn’t give advice or lecture. It was more of a crossword solution. Three down Evan disappears. Five across My Mother dies. Seven down, the mental strain of waiting seven years for Evan Bees starts to strain your seams a bit, because you are human after all. Five across, your friends at the Spiritualist Church are dropping hints you should go. Then go. No sense brewing up all this emotional wind.

  Joe’s phrase. Not mine. Joe also mentioned spells. The ritual of waiting. The mystical capabilities of the number seven.

  I did not tell him that I was Annie Colville and that I spoke to the Dead. Didn’t want to scare him.

  But I sat there for a while with Joe, partly because I didn’t really have anywhere to go and he looked like he needed the company. He had a cosy place there, a nest he’d made, roosting as he was so high above the rest of us.

  I had taken very little with me from the shed to the Zion Chapel, essentially because I didn’t have more. My earthly possessions were dwindling.

  I still clung to the handsewn patchwork quilt I’d acquired during my allotment shed days. There was a silver filigree bangle that had belonged to My Mother in a square box. There was a fruit peeling knife she had kept in her handbag at all times. Useful not just for peeling fruits but also for unfastening jammed locks in public toilets. I had another pair of shoes, a change of clothes. A sweater. A petrol blue sweater. A cup, saucer and plate from my shed days, and the teapot.

  Other mementos of my sojourn at the shed were in everyday use by Atalanta at The Glade. I didn’t need the Swedish stove. That was now at The Glade too. I was beginning to think there were not-so-subtle hints about where I should settle. About where Home was.

  It seemed to get dark early and stay dark. I noticed t
hat Joe was getting edgy, looking out of the window, checking the fire in the small Victorian grate. It was getting very cold no matter how many logs he placed there. Joe was looking at me. Expectant. His wristwatch alarm beeped in a panic and startled him. He consulted the time and switched on some more lamps. The bulb popped in one and he began to fumble about in a cupboard, with what I wanted to call desperation.

  I’ve never been fond of the dark. I like to keep a light on. This is my territory, the land of light and I stake a claim.

  Sam always thought it was silly and switched it off before plunging into a sleep as deep as the ocean. A transcontinental express train with a brass band on board could have driven through our bedroom at the speed of sound and not even the sonic boom would have woken him. There were many nights when I got up and slept in the even boxier, aptly named, box room with the light on.

  I think it is something I inherited from My Mother. She always kept the lights on. One in my room, and one on the landing and a small bedside one in her room. There was even the mail-order million candlepower emergency torch she kept by her bed.

  She smiles at me. In the past. She didn’t think at the time that the memory of it would break my heart but it does. I don’t really remember her face. The feeling of love and safety, of being there with her is more vivid. But I don’t see it in total focus. It is the CCTV of memory.

  Then I thought about Evan Bees and once again what I saw was the empty chair at the table that first night alone. The place I set for him. The knife and fork unmatched. A washed-out spot of tomato sauce on the placemat, the smell of spaghetti catching in the dried-out pan.

  I left the place setting where it was for a month. I made spaghetti with every sauce I could think of each night. Carbon-ara on Tuesday. Tomato and basil on Wednesday. Pesto on Thursday. Garlic and pancetta on Friday. At the weekends, eventually, I started to help out full time at The Glade and ate there.