The Translation of the Bones

by Francesca Kay

  A white veil, yellow roses, baby’s breath. And less than two years later that girl had hightailed it and run off with someone she liked better. Or fancied at the time, perhaps. Poor Stewart. He had been very low. But he had cheered up now with Emma.

  Fraser’s girlfriend Stephanie was lovely. Mrs. Armitage quite understood that he could not have asked her to marry him before he went to Afghanistan, that he did not want to put her under pressure, even though they had been living together for three years, on and off, when he was not in barracks. But maybe, when he got back. Maybe he’d feel that it was time to settle. When he got back. When he got back.

  She opened the door of the boys’ room and looked in. Take care, love, she said to the bed on the left, with its neatly folded duvet. Silly cow, she said then, to herself. Talking to yourself’s the first sign of madness.

  At Mr. Kalinowski’s earlier that afternoon, Mrs. Armitage had come on quite a scene. The poor, poor duck; he was so upset, and indeed no wonder—wounded dignity hurt more than wounded flesh. He was trying to clean the mess off the carpet when she arrived and would never have opened the door to her, him in his underpants, if she had not persevered. When he had not answered the first ring, she had given him a minute or two before trying again. Then she grew quite worried. If Mr. Kalinowski had been going out that afternoon, Alice Armitage would have known. It would have been a red-letter day for him and he would have told her. As it was, he went out once a month to a Polish ex-servicemen’s club in Ruislip to which a fellow veteran would drive him. And he went to church. Otherwise he had very few engagements, and so Mrs. Armitage pushed open the letter box and called through it, then started banging on the door.

  Eventually Mr. Kalinowski opened it, a tea towel clutched around his waist. Alice saw he had been crying. The smell in the sitting room informed her of the accident, without the need for words. It happened so quickly, Mr. Kalinowski said. My leg was hurting. I couldn’t get out of my chair . . .

  Never mind, love, she said. These things happen. It’s not the end of the world. Have you got some Flash? I’ll have the carpet clean in no time; you just pop along and change.

  Mrs. Armitage rinsed the old man’s trousers in the sink and put them in his washing machine. Then she had made them both a cup of tea. Mr. Kalinowski was still a little shaky, but composed. She swilled Dettol round the sink. He kept things very nicely, she noticed, glancing round the tiny kitchen.

  I’d be lost without you, Mrs. Armitage, he said, as she was leaving.

  Now Mrs. Armitage was looking forward to the evening. Old friends who had moved away to Suffolk were coming back to visit, and they all were going out to a restaurant. She loved the luxury of a meal she had not had to cook. It was a good restaurant, newly opened on Battersea Bridge Road—real food, not vacuum-packed and microwaved; lamb shanks and sea bream, goats’ cheese soufflés, duck confit. Anticipating dinner, a nice bottle or two of wine and the pleasures of friendship reaffirmed, Mrs. Armitage went to her bedroom to get dressed.

  Other people were marking days. Kiti Mendoza was organizing a Facebook event for Easter Sunday, when, if you could trust the notice in that stupid church, the cross would be unveiled. People were going to gather in the church and afterward they’d have a picnic in the park. It was a holiday weekend. She was not on duty. A party in the park, those disposable barbecues that were not expensive, a sort of carnival, like there was at home; something to look forward to at last.

  Every morning of that week Mary-Margaret went to mass. She took her place in a pew toward the back, went to Communion, knelt quietly, left as soon as mass had ended, and did not stop to talk to Father Diamond, as she would have done before. She did not try to enter the Chapel of the Holy Souls. But, as she stood or sat or knelt through the familiar incantations, her whole being was focused on one thing. Although her lips apparently moved in prayer, it was nothing more than reflex, the mouthing of unapprehended words. She went through the motions like a ventriloquist’s doll. Inside her head her own voice spoke its real meanings: love and longing, desire, fidelity and passion. She transmitted them telepathically to Him.

  Passion Sunday. Father Diamond looked bleakly at the calendar. Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday, the threshold to Holy Week or the entrance to a tunnel, the mouth of a deep well. This year, more than ever before, Father Diamond doubted his own strength. Did he have the stamina, or indeed the will, to plunge through that door into the week ahead, to suffer each day’s events all over again, to walk the weary Stations of the Cross in the footsteps of the Lord? Once, he would have held on to the promise of Easter as a traveler on a winter’s night might fix his gaze on a lamp burning in a distant window, the light promised to an exile on return. The glory and the triumph of the Resurrection would have shone out like a fire on which his Lenten sacrifices would be burned, together with the petty deprivations, the insults, the disappointments, the trials of the flesh of forty days. All these would be last year’s ashes, consumed by the conquering flame. But this year he could feel no sense of hope. The whole of life seemed as thin and dull as his Lenten diet: black coffee, unbuttered toast, pieces of fish that he unhatched from plastic casings, like mutant embryos entangled in their cauls.

  For years Father Diamond had been forswearing animal flesh and the products of flesh in Lent. He took no sweetenings or alcohol either. Usually he appreciated the increased clarity of mind, the sharpened edge, that these small restrictions gave him. They brought him nearer to the desert saints he venerated, who lived their solitary lives in parched, high places; in the salt lands without name; in wilderness, concentrated on prayer alone and close to God. This year he experienced only hunger. Hunger of the acid, nauseous kind and a sort of tiredness; sensations as flat and as discreditable as a habitual drunkard’s headache.

  Passion Sunday was particularly hard. All those raised hopes dashed and celebratory voices silenced, the sweet hosannas on the lips of children stilled. How could Christ have borne it, riding to Jerusalem in triumph through adulatory crowds who strewed His way with branches and with cloaks, knowing He would die an agonizing death in days?

  Father Diamond did not for a single moment equate his suffering with Christ’s. He knew that in the scales of pain his own weighed no more than a flake of ash. But he knew he was suffering nonetheless. The problem was that diagnosis gave no clue to cause. Why, suddenly, this year, should his life seem so sad and stagnant when nothing outwardly had changed and his circumstances were the same as they had been for twenty years? Not having an answer, he was afraid. The black hole of the week ahead might be the gaping jaws of hell. How could he force himself to go there, drag one foot after another, plod inexorably onward into darkness? And yet, how could he not? What choice had he? He missed Father O’Connor, who was not due back for another three weeks. In the meantime he must hang on to the liturgical routine as a seafarer in a storm clings to the handrail of the deck; he must mark the days and plead for strength.

  Red vestments for Palm Sunday. The color of spilled blood. Blood matted on a crown of thorns, beading on a wounded head.

  Fidelma woke in the dead of night, her heart thudding hard against its buried cage of bone. Darkness pressed her down, surrounded her, piled up in her mouth and throat. She could not breathe. She could not see. The thunder of her racing heart was the sound of galloping death, or maybe she was dead already. She was gasping, choking, fighting to cough the darkness out, fighting for her breath.

  Coming to her senses, she knew it was that dream again. Her nightdress was soaked with sweat, even her sheets were wet. Oh God Almighty what a struggle it was even to sit up in bed, let alone to get clean out. She heaved and squirmed, leaned her bulk on one arm, pressed down with one leg, until at last she sat upright. The light switch was to hand. Not again, she thought, wearily. It came so often now. She knew from dreary experience there was no use haring after sleep; it would have flown toward the dawn.

  All through the long hours that followed, Fidelma sat, propped unevenly by pillows, tryin
g to calm her breathing, to steady herself against encroaching fear. But it lapped against her anyway. This room might as well double as her coffin. She would never get out of it again. There would be no touch now that could reconcile her to her flesh. Her mouth was full of fear; it had the taste of earth and ashes.

  Azin Qureshi found his mind returning to Stella Morrison even as he went about the ordinary business of a weekend—taking his sons to football on Saturday morning, mending a broken light fitting, catching up on work. It was not that the dinner party had been particularly memorable. His wife’s professional life was sociable and Azin was used to accompanying her to a lot of dreary functions. That evening in Battersea had been pretty much what he had expected: middle-aged and middle-class people bewailing the state of the world, or at least its schools and ski slopes, over too many bottles of what they were pleased to call “ordinary” claret. People just like him, as a matter of fact. Theirs was his world too. But Stella had not seemed to fit it as precisely as she should. He couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. Outwardly she was no different from other women of her type. She was beautiful, certainly, in a distracted way, but then so was his wife Jenny, more so, with her elegantly cropped blond hair and supermodel figure. By contrast Stella was will-o’-the-wisp and indefinable, all strands and tendrils and impossible to pin down, a figure in a graveyard seen through mist. It irritated Azin that she should haunt him.

  One reason why she might, Azin supposed, was the inconclusive conversation they had had about the absurdity of visions. He had observed Stella then, seen how she was about to speak but then held back, seen her almost imperceptible withdrawal from the others, her distance from her husband. His life was full of words; silence was beguiling.

  Mary-Margaret in her room, oblivious of her mother, was full of fear too. In the early morning she knelt beside her bed. The day was coming closer; she was eager and impatient but she was also deeply anxious: what would He ask her to do? Would she be strong enough for the task? Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, she prayed over and over again. But only say the word and I shall be healed. Only say, only say the word, only, my own darling, only say one word, but say it straight to me.

  Stella Morrison woke to a still morning and the call of birds. With each day and its small new freight of light, their songs grew stronger, as if they were members of an orchestra emerging one by one from hibernation, tuning up with caution, trying out a few notes before releasing the full range of their sounds.

  Otherwise it was very quiet. Rufus had left yesterday for New York. Stella stretched diagonally across the bed. Where Rufus would have slept the sheet was smooth and cool; she slid a foot luxuriously along it. There was a whole day and night ahead of her with no one in it and nothing to do but please herself. And tomorrow she would have Felix back.

  Stella got out of bed and drew the curtains. Last night the sky had been clear, obsidian-hard, the stars like sharpened points of steel, auguring a frost. But a west wind must have changed the weather’s mind; this morning was more gentle, there was the promise of sunshine, ice transubstantiated into mist. A whole day ahead and the countryside around her wakening from winter, pushing out fresh shoots, scented with sap and rain.

  Stella had many mornings on her own but fewer uninterrupted days. Having had no supper yesterday, she was hungry now. The kitchen of the cottage was as orderly and still as only a room that has been left by a sole occupant can be. Everything was in its place as it had been the day before; if the small creatures of the night had passed through in the dark hours, they had left no trace behind. There was apple juice in the fridge pressed locally from the fruit of nearby orchards: Worcester Pearmain on the label. The juice was very cold and sweet and cloudy; she swallowed it as thirstily as if the night had been a desert. Apple scent, breaking on her tongue.

  A boiled egg in a blue cup, a jar of clear honey. Stella held the jar up to the light; in it the honey glowed like melting amber. She laid the table properly for her breakfast—a pale blue linen napkin, milk in a white jug. From time to time Stella’s unobserved habits gave her pause. Perhaps I was never made to be a wife, she thought. Although I would rather not have lived than not have been a mother. These little rituals—the knives and teaspoons carefully placed, the twin triangles of toast—these were the rituals of a woman on her own. If there were a watcher hidden in the corner cupboard, Stella wondered, spying on me through the keyhole, would I be ashamed? Would it be more normal, on my own, to eat my breakfast quickly, standing up, with my attention on the radio or the television news, as Rufus would? Yet the fact is that I am unobserved. And small ceremonies afford great comfort. The ordinary miracle of an egg.

  Rufus had, as he had promised, set aside almost the whole of Tuesday for her. And Monday evening too. Together time, he said. I owe it to you, don’t I? She cooked dinner for them in the cottage; he lit a fire in the sitting room and set a good bottle of wine to warm before it. The next day they went to Kimmeridge and walked the miles of coast from there to Lulworth Cove. He held her hand the whole way and talked of his aspirations and his plans. He’d probably come too late to politics ever to make it as Prime Minister, he supposed. But he’d give it a good shot in the cabinet, after the election. And after that, who knows? Probably he’d get bored of politics, as he had of banking. But having been a government minister was a pretty good springboard. Europe? The World Bank? Ambitious, restless Rufus. Or, he said to Stella with a grin, we could chuck it all in and sail around the world together, thee and me, a second honeymoon.

  Afterward they had lunch in a pub chosen by Rufus for its obscurity, so that he would not be recognized. It was obscure for a reason, Stella thought, as the reek of chip fat settled on her hair. But it was also warm and friendly and sustained Rufus’s good humor; they had not been out together for some time.

  Let’s have coffee at home, Rufus had suggested. It’s not likely to be drinkable in this place, jolly charming though it is. Stella knew when they got back that he would want to go to bed. Remember how we used to make love in the afternoons? he’d say. Before the kids came. We’ve just got time before the taxi. Wasn’t I clever to make sure that I was booked on the late flight?

  Stella remembered. She remembered making love in the mornings and most of the night as well. In the beginning she had thought their lovemaking would be more fulfilling when it was less frantic—when Stella was Rufus’s adulterous secret, there had been an element of desperation in their meetings. Much later, when they had put the misery of his divorce behind them and were settling into their own marriage, they made love regularly and often, but for Stella it never became the passionate experience she had hoped it would be. She blamed herself for that. Everything that Rufus did—eating, drinking, talking, walking—he did with great dispatch: why should it be any different in bed? When Stella and Rufus walked anywhere together, she had to quicken her steps almost to a run if she wanted to keep pace with him. Speed and efficiency were intrinsic to her husband. That he brought the same qualities to sex should not have come as a surprise. And now, although he was still businesslike about it and would fit it into his schedule when he could, as he had done the day before, that schedule was too full to leave much room.

  Love in the mornings, in the afternoons . . . well, one could live without it. It was not as if there was a choice. Stella had found a compensating pleasure in the intense physicality of the relationship with her children, in the days when they were small. There had been a lover’s joy in the touch of them, in the grace and ease with which they had embraced her, the softness of their knees and elbows before they were roughened by hard use.

  Felix would still allow her to hug him and to stroke his hair. He would not do so for much longer. Before he went to boarding school, his days began in Stella’s bed, where he would slide in beside her in the mornings to ask the questions that came immediately to mind when he woke up, or to speculate about the hours ahead. He did not do that now. And it was quite correct, as Stella knew, that he had made this
little distance of his own. It was the same as his new rules about the bathroom. Once, bath time had been a good time for communication with the children. Then, one by one, inevitably, as they grew older, they began to shut and lock the bathroom door. It was strange, in a way, that bodies you once knew as intimately as your own should later be kept hidden from you. Stella had known and loved every tiny portion of her children—the insides of their ears, the gaps between their toes; she had felt each emergent milk tooth with a finger. She had loved her children purely, wholeheartedly, without inhibition, in a way that she could not have extended to an adult’s body.

  As her children progressed to adulthood, they rightly closed the doors on this unembarrassed closeness. In the changing rooms of the gym where Stella went, women who were strangers to each other thought nothing of being naked. If they looked at one another it was only to reassure themselves through comparison: she is fatter than I, her breasts are saggy. But Camilla would not take off her clothes in front of Stella. Stella would never again see the naked bodies of her sons. Unless they were dead, she thought with sudden horror. Dead and laid out on a marble slab.

  Stop this. These sentimental, morbid thoughts. Evolution was a fitting thing, and Stella recognized it. She expected her relationships to change. It was her great fortune that Barnaby, Camilla and Felix stayed close to her in their own ways, were open with their thoughts and feelings. But even so. When they were really grown and gone—to careers and households of their own, to marriages—what then? She would necessarily be peripheral to their lives. Then would she be an aging woman on her own, talking to herself as she was doing now, comforting herself with toast and milk jugs? Or a woman still married to a man she could no longer love?