“Do you know the dead man Gussie?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 31
“Do you know the dead man?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what happened love.” Frank is being kind to me, and when people are kind to me I feel I don’t deserve it, and if there’s something wrong before, then it’s doubly wrong. How can I keep strong with tenderness trailing after me, pulling at my umbilical cord and wrapping itself all around me? I am crying and Frank is holding my hands across the table, but I want him nearer, I feel positioned with the table there, it’s a barrier and I can’t be me if the table’s there, I think I will be watching this rather than feeling this. But I know I need to be living this. “Do you know what happened darling?”
“No.”
“Do you want to tell me what you know dear? Because I know you know something about it don’t you?” We are just two of us in this still and heavy square room, there is no one else, there is no tape recorder, no paper and pens, no solicitor or lawyer, nothing to make me pause, stop and rewind.
“We’ll sit in here” Frank had said to me, shuffling me in, blind and deaf and dumb, my head stuffed full to bursting with fear and upset, with white and with black bulky substance, and shouldn’t there be someone else?
There is a smell of roast pork in here, roast pork in floppy white bread rolls with stuffing and the smell makes me feel sick, and I imagine eating it and know it would make me vomit. And the thought came into my head that if I fainted, if I vomited, if I broke down, on to my knees, Frank would look after me and tell me what to do. I see strands of my hair before my eyes and those eyes are heavy and fat with tears and twitching with lack of sleep, I am weary.
I breathe out and tell Frank about the dogs, the garden, the footsteps, the fear, the beating, the death. “No dear, tell me again, that’s not right is it?”
“It is right” it’s so easy to tell him now and it’s so obviously the truth, I don’t understand why he doesn’t believe me. “Come along dear, we know that’s not right because Mark Davies isn’t dead is he?”
“he is dead” why is he saying this? and once again I go through it all again, why is he saying he isn’t dead?
“Gussie love, we picked up Davies early last week. He’s very much alive, he’s been in the wars a bit, but he’s alive, unfortunately. So, let’s start again shall we?” But I can’t talk now, all I know is that he was dead, and Frank is trying to help me or lying to me. He wouldn’t lie to me. And then I remembered when once grandma fell down the step outside and had to go to hospital and Frank picked me up from school and said she’d gone off to visit friends. He lied to me then I think as my eyelids half close on my tired eyes, as my lips slam shut, heavy and straight, as my head moves up and I realise it was hanging down, as I feel the breathing from my heart and I feel tangling coming up from my throat, ripping through my body, grasping out from within. And now he is talking again. “OK, I’ll tell you what we know shall I? we’ve got his dogs, RSPCA’s got them. Now, we know that your Charlie took them there, we know that.”
“But then I don’t understand. I don’t understand. How come he isn’t dead?” I read the word ‘Avon’ scratched out on the table and the date, we used to write ‘4’s’ like that at primary school. And I hear myself saying, as if it were somebody else “how come Charlie is dead then? How did he die? Why is he dead? Why? Did he know that Mark Davies wasn’t dead? It is all wrong. Why is he dead?” something is galloping, something is out of control, someone is trying to steer a course, but something is hurtling to disaster. “I don’t know darling” and somewhere in my head, somewhere far away, but echoing faintly is a little voice saying you’ll be ok. “Will I be in trouble?” I am a child, I hear myself sound like a child “you won’t darling, but we need to get this straight don’t we?”
“Yes. But what happened? What did he do? How long’s he been dead? Did he drown? He was fishing, he had grandpa’s waders on” and then I felt that slightly scorched feeling I always felt when I mentioned my grandpa in front of Frank. The back of my head is hurting, heavy, pulling me down. I am whimpering “he was wearing waders. Did he drown Frank? Did he?” I am jelly, I have no bones, I am rivers running after a flood through a mountain range. I am so many dead things and deserted places. I am the lost look on survivor’s faces. “Was he coming back to me Frank? How long has he been dead?” and I will work it out. And the dim room seemed all at once so much darker and the table dominating everything with it’s size and formality, taking the words from my mouth and screwing them up in my head and throwing them, carelessly, scornfully, hatefully to the floor. He wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t have gone fishing. “Did he have the belt on his waders Frank? I can’t remember.”
“He didn’t darling, that’s probably how he drowned.” He did it on purpose, I know he did. And as if he read my thoughts, Frank said “It was an accident darling, he drowned. His wife won’t need that divorce now but those little boys of his have lost a fond father.” And I remember him telling me statistics about the children of suicides. He is trying to protect Charlie’s children, like Charlie wanted to but couldn’t. He is collecting them under his wing and delivering them to safety. And I am just looking on again.
Frank stared at my face, as if working something out, and without taking his eyes from mine, he pushed a paper across the table to me, in age-long thin silver silence.
I was watching something sleeping but alive. The paper was torn from a notepad, crumpled and folded and wet. “No one needs to see this but you dear, you keep hold of this for yourself” he is whispering to me. He has shrunk within himself, he is beige where once he was brown, he is silk where once he was steel, he is love and his first finger on his right hand rested on the paper as he pushed it towards me. And all I hear is my breathing and all I feel is sleep reaching up to me to drag me down and around and escape this. Escape this dormant thing that I know will tear through the room, leaping wildly into life with chaos and destruction. And somewhere, somewhere in the distance I hear a blackbird singing, faint and sweet ‘won’t be long, won’t be long’.
I looked down at the paper and all at once a glimpse of when Frank and I used to play shove ha’penny on grandma’s dining room table, shining deep, deep, deep, dark, with decades of polish and polishing. I could smile in that table and see it smile back at me. I would look and see if I did have an imp face, that’s what Frank used to call me, a cheeky imp. I must keep a tight hold of myself or I will lose me.
I looked from the paper to his face and he smiled at me, a slow, straight, sad smile and all the time in the world slowed down and my head glided through the atmosphere to look down at that paper and my hands in slow motion to take it up from the wood. I was dead leaves falling, drifting from trees, I was a dusty old heavy rug being heaved away from the floor. I was a tyre getting flatter as you look at it. I was a plug being pulled out of a too cold bath. And there, held between my fingers, Charlie’s precious and unformed hand
‘Gussie, I am falling apart, I can’t think of any other way. I’m sorry. I do love you and only you with all my heart. You are truly lovely and I do appreciate you in so many more ways than I suspect even you can guess. I am sorry I am so bad at communicating this and so much more. I’m sorry’.
My hands, still holding his letter, slid off the table and went to my belly and caressed the slight roundness there. “It’s not a game dear, life that is, you appreciate what you’ve got now, because it can go, just like that” and he clicked his fingers, a thunderous noise in the room. “Now you go and take care of my grandson.”
And then I heard a great roaring and screaming, and it was coming from me. My soul bellowed forth for love and hate and for mischance and misadventure and for Charlie and for grandma and for Coningsby. My body a pool in that dry and empty room. And all the mean tricks life’s played on me, all it’s taken away from me, and they have gone. They have gone. And my tears came and came and flowed burning hot down my cheeks, on to m
y hands, down my dress, drenching me, drowning me and I couldn’t breathe, my head back, my mouth open, I couldn’t speak, I cannot breathe, my head shaking. I am treading water and suddenly there is a strong current and my body becomes feeble in it. The sky is deep and black and low and begins to choke me, smother me and a thousand rooks grumble all around me, unseen in the dark. And the water now entering my mouth, dripping down, slipping down, crawling through me and I can’t keep up and I gulp and start and my wild eyes, so many terrified horses, close and I give up. I give up and I am being carried away, beaten and buffeted, turned upside down, turned inside out and thrown about, and deeper, deeper and deeper I sink. “Are you my father?” I try to say, but all I hear are animal cries too loud and too wild ripping through the walls, bringing them down around my ears “are you my father? Is Toby my brother?” again and again “is Toby my brother?”
“Are you mad? How could I be your father?” and now he is standing over me pushing me back into my seat, hands gripping my shoulders, too hard. “You and my mother” I am screaming now “and Toby is my brother”
“Keep your voice down. I am NOT your father. Who told you that?”
“It’s what everyone thinks”
“you think I could be your father when the only woman I ever loved was your grandma. Do you? Are you not ashamed of yourself? It’s not me who’s your father you stupid girl and it’s not Toby who is your brother.”
“What do you mean, it’s ‘not Toby’ who’s my brother. What does that mean? Do I have a brother? Have I got a brother? HAVE I? Tell me NOW.”
“No. No, of course you haven’t got a brother.” His steel has left him, seeping out of his body, he is silver, he is gentle “you’ve got me I’m afraid. That’s it. You’ve got me and you’ve got Toby, but as far as I know that is it” but my ears don’t hear now and there is a blanket of deafness in the room, smothering me, clinging to me and my breath sinks back in to my body and stays leaden there. My self is falling away from me, layer by layer, pale and transparent all over the floor, sliding off me, sinking to drown itself, moving out of reach, falling away to leave me with nothing.
“And what is vulnerability?” someone once said to me
“It’s lying on the ground” I said “and there are boots kicking and kicking me and I’m curled up on my side trying to protect myself.”
“And then what happens?” he said
“And then I get up” I said “I get up and walk away and think that I’ll never let that happen again.”
Chapter 32
I have found a very magical place, under a Beech tree where the leaves are whirling and whirling above me and sound like so many sinusy mammals. The horizon before me is unbroken.
Before I sat down at the base of this tree there was a squirrel on a dead and fallen branch playing look-out with his orange head on his grey body, still as stone, staring at me. I pretended to be looking at the 12 pheasants just beyond him, or the hare just beyond the pheasants so he wouldn’t scamper off. This is a magical place, anything could happen here.
I hear the tiniest noise now to my left, the tiniest creature that I can’t see muscling through the dead and fallen leaves. And now my squirrel is back, to my right, and next to him, a sparrow. My feet rest between dead nettle stalks, headless and threadless and painless now, they tower amongst dead swirling grass and empty sexless Beech-nut shells worn and used and pointing downwards in their impotence. Rocks show their backs slowly and proudly through the crisp brown leaves and to my left something is coming towards me, I turn my head towards the noise and it is gone. My tummy growls now in triumph as I am King on my Beech roots and the sun lowers to my right, pinking the sky and “what have I done? What have I done?” cry two birds, unfamiliar black objects flying high up past me.
I see the moon now, slinking it’s way out from behind peach-coloured clouds. And so many starlings, flish, flish, flish before it. The grass on the horizon is becoming blacker and the grass nearer me is Cyprus green and the soil, the colours of a duck’s back, brown, black and blush and beige. My tummy howling now and out of nowhere yowls a motorbike. A motorbike haunting a dead road.
My bottom bones are uncomfortable on my hard throne, my back aches against this ridged bark, and with my belly heavy I move out to the grass and lie down on my back. Two sparrows scream at me and another joins them now and the black branches of the Beech above me tangle up in confusion and they mislead me, tangling up to the sky, goodbye, goodbye. I see no one here, I will see no one here, I want to see no one here and the birds are coming back to me and the pheasants are creeping out once more from the hedge line. I am no threat.
The turned up soil I came across to get here is littered with flint, broken, smashed-up bones they look like, but the grass is fat and fertile. A tiny beech leaf has fallen on to this white, white, pure white page, I touch it and it is softer than I thought it would be, too soon to begin it’s slow journey to death.
I lie here on this uneven ground, on this soil and close my heavy eyes and all this magnificence I let inside. And when I wake up my hair is tangled and tangled and wrapped around my head. It is getting dark and the still night touches me right through. I will be quiet. I will make no sound. And it is so cool here now, this night is so touchingly cool, so fragrantly chill. And I stand up and a million particles of soil fall to the ground. The fields to my right are balancing mist. A white, grey, hazy heaviness leaning down on them, feet from below pushing the top bunk up. A nettle bounces up from where I must have lain and stings my right knee and I bend down to rub it and then rub my hands in the wet grass, sway them this way and that until they are totally covered in the purest damp. I am so in love with this.
I stand still until the chill raises my hackles and ruffles my feathers and then I head home, to my little house. To warm rooms and mess and my kittens all waiting for me in soft and golden light. And then it comes back to me…
‘Do you remember brother, that stainless morning
And how we went, hand in hand to the curling sea?
The long, slow curl of the over-curving rollers
The shining pause before the white surf broke free.
Do you remember brother, we left her lying
Out of the way of the wind in a grassy dell
Far we followed the wayward butterflies flicker
While she gathered the frail dark poppies she loved so well.’
The End.
Epilogue
What happened to Coningsby
When I got home I went up to my room and lay on my bed. I stared up at the ceiling. And then Coningsby came in to the room crying. There’s something the matter with her, she’s sitting on the bed now looking just ‘not right’. I can’t work out what it is. She’s been snotty on and off for ages now, but she had her two-monthly jabs last week and now she’s still snotty, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She sat on my lap for ages, it was beautiful, but she never does that. “Coningsby will you be OK? Will I be OK? What’s going on darling? I sat her on my bed to study her and she hasn’t moved. She looks very tired and I thought a minute ago that she was going to fall over sideways, but she didn’t. I’ve tried Charlie again on his mobile, but no answer, I just wanted to say “she’s not going to die is she? She’ll never die will she?” I want him to feel my need. I just need reassurance, because there’s something wrong here. I know she’s almost 18, but she’ll go on forever. And my head hurts now with worry.
I saw Charlie’s partner Andrew, who took her temperature (which was normal), felt her all over and she felt normal, weighed her and she’d only lost a little weight, then he suggested we did blood tests. He said it would only be 20 minutes to wait. So Coningsby and I went outside to wait, and it started raining, it was lovely, heavy, heavy, rolling, bubbling, vrooshing thunder that came first. Nearer and nearer. It was exciting. We stood outside, Coningsby and I, she in her basket in my arms, both of us against my car and we watched the downpour, felt it all over, whilst the street cleared of people.
I love anti social weather with an all-consuming passion. I love weather that means something. “I love you Coningsby” I breathe in to her flank. And then Andrew called us back in after 20 minutes and told me it’s her kidneys. And suddenly the thunder came from within and the heavy downpour from my eyes, and my head was shaking like a mechanical donkey, “what do you mean? Is that bad?” and I knew it was. He told me that he was very concerned about her sudden weakness and her relevant blood levels were very high, that she must be pumped full of fluids. “What do you mean?”
“We’d like to put her on a drip for 24 hours to flush the kidneys out.”
“No, I don’t want that, she’d hate it, it would be horrible, I’ll give her fluids.” And he didn’t say ‘it doesn’t look good for her’ but I could tell he was thinking that, and I cried and cried and I am crying still.
Come Not When I Am Dead Page 24
