by Tim Pears
Through her sobs, Auntie Gwen spoke faintly after her, ‘But Melony’s never had a child.’
6
Holly, the twins and I were up in the attic, each in our own alcove. Holly was sulking.
‘You want to listen to some music?’ Baz asked. ‘You can borrow my iPod.’
‘You can listen to whatever you like,’ said Xan. ‘Headphones. Docking station.’
Holly wouldn’t be distracted. ‘What is wrong with her?’ she grumbled. ‘She’s mad. How can we even be related?’
‘Fellated?’ Baz asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You said, “How can we even be fellated?”’
‘Don’t be dizzy.’
‘Didn’t she say fellated?’
‘No,’ Xan told him.
‘Why not?’ Baz asked.
Dinner had been a tense, indigestive occasion. Vegetable lasagne served with carrots and Brussels sprouts. I wasn’t hungry after the smoked salmon. Grandma’s seat was empty, as were Auntie Gwen’s and Melony’s. No one had much to say until Uncle Jonny breezed in with beery breath and, though disappointed by his sister’s absence, told the rest of us how Gwen’s first boyfriend – now a paunchy, moustachioed father of four – had been in the pub, and had asked after her in a wistful manner.
‘I thought of employing him, actually,’ Uncle Jonny said, without adding what for.
‘I can just imagine you outsourcing whatever it is you do out here,’ my father told his brother. ‘Cheap labour out in the sticks.’
‘Oh, you and your minimum bloody wage,’ Jonny said, grinning as he made his good-humoured accusation, as if Dad were the politician responsible, and not just a quiet citizen with a reasonable affection for social democracy. ‘You bleeding hearts make it virtually impossible for entrepreneurs like us to invest in people.’
My father declined to respond to this provocation, and Jonny turned to our grandfather and said, ‘In the old days, Pa, you’d have dragged us off to midnight Mass tonight.’
‘Your mother and I will be attending church in the morning,’ Grandpa said. ‘The ten-thirty, if any of you heathens are interested.’
We ate our dessert in almost total silence. It was lemon meringue and chocolate mousse, each a speciality of our grandmother, but no one looked like they were particularly enjoying them. Afterwards, I took the dogs out for their late stretch. This time Grandpa came too. Although I knew that the dogs liked me, they cleaved to my grandfather, their master, in a quite different way: both Leda and Sel were constantly aware of him; their lives revolved around him, were spent within a limited circumference, man and dogs on one another’s radar. He never beat them, according to Dad, who’d told me that there were always two setters around Grandpa – whenever possible, the children or grandchildren of their predecessors. He told me that when Grandpa was away on one of his rare business trips and telephoned home, after speaking to the children he’d ask them to excite the dogs so that, like the composer Edward Elgar had before him, he could listen to them barking.
We strolled around the riding school, the outbuildings and pile of rusting machinery, and back. Auntie Gwen’s car had gone. The grey clouds of the morning had promised rain; barely a drop had fallen. I could see no moon nor a single star in the night sky, yet there was light enough to walk without stumbling. We stood on the patio, the empty stables behind us, gazing across the valley. The night was still, and silent. We could see the isolated farms strung along the far side of the valley, a necklace of orange lights.
I wanted to ask Grandpa what he was thinking about. I wanted to ask him what was going on, but I didn’t know how to. After a while he let out a heavy sigh and said, ‘Well, that should do them.’ We went back inside and put the dogs to bed.
‘I wish they had a TV up here,’ Baz lamented.
‘What do you like to watch?’ Holly asked him.
‘Sky,’ he replied. ‘Setanta.’
‘She asked you what you watch,’ Xan said.
‘Plasma,’ said Baz. ‘HD.’
‘Widescreen’s okay,’ Xan mused. ‘And sensurround, obviously.’
‘High Definition’s more important,’ Baz insisted.
‘Of course,’ Xan agreed.
It turned out, Sid came through to inform us, that Melony was too offended and upset to stay here any longer: Auntie Gwen had driven her to the railway station in Wolverhampton, where she’d caught one of the last trains back to London. Gwen had since returned to the house, and gone straight to bed.
We turned the lights out in the attic. For a while there was a strip of white beneath the door from Sid, reading in bed, but soon that too went out.
‘Is your Mum going to church tomorrow?’ Xan asked in the darkness.
I assumed he was addressing Holly, and she must have, too. ‘No way,’ she said, in a tone so neutral you couldn’t tell whether Holly was loyally defending her mum from the very idea of doing something so insane, or on the other hand denying that her obtuse mother could be open to spiritual experience of any kind.
‘Dad said he might go,’ Baz said.
‘Yes,’ said Xan, ‘and drag us along.’
‘I’m just going to stay in bed until after they’ve left,’ Baz decided.
‘Well,’ said Holly, ‘since our thoughtful parents jointly agreed not to have Santa Claus deliver stockings this year, we might as well stay in bed all day.’
‘She does believe in Father Christmas,’ Baz said.
‘I wish I did,’ said Xan. ‘It would be weird if our Dad’s turning religious, wouldn’t it?’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Holly said.
‘No, I really think he is,’ said Baz.
‘Maybe he’s got temporal lobe damage,’ Xan suggested.
‘It’s the only explanation. Probably a stroke.’
‘He’ll be turning epileptic next,’ said Xan, whereupon both the twins launched into what were clearly, from the sounds they made in the darkness, the shuddering imitations of a fit.
The last thing I was going to admit was that I’d told Grandpa I’d go with him and Grandma to the service on Christmas morning. I accompanied them to church when I stayed in the summer. The truth was that I enjoyed it: the ritual was quaint and hard to make much sense of, observed by a congregation composed of a handful of people all as old as my grandparents. It was like the custom of some ancient culture, which I’d been allowed to witness before it slipped away for ever; the kind of thing Dad had once done in other countries, but I could do in our own.
It became clear after a while from the sound of their breathing that the twins – as if exhausted by their fake fits – had fallen asleep. I wasn’t too bothered by the prospect of their inevitable disdain of my church attendance, but I was more heedful of Holly’s opinion. Just then she switched the light on inside her alcove, leaned out and said to me, ‘You know what I think, Theo? You know how people say, like, an artist sometimes feels like God? First there was a God, who created everything. An artist might get a sense of this creative power in herself.’
It seemed that Holly didn’t just draw pictures; she also thought about why she did so.
‘I reckon,’ she said, ‘like, the opposite is true: people drew pictures on the walls of their caves. And these people – these artists – thought, “Perhaps there is a mind behind our minds. Creating us, just as we create these images.”’
I didn’t say anything. I was stunned, actually. Amazed. It was the first time I’d met someone who seemed to think like me. I mean, my parents did a bit, I supposed, but both of them were more interested in how people interacted with each other than what went on inside their minds.
‘You mean artists gave other people the idea of God?’
Holly nodded.
‘You could well be right,’ I told her. I recall now how exciting this conversation was: my cousin was the first person I felt I could share my own ideas with; ideas that till then were kept in a sealed part of my brain. ‘You know what I think, Hol?’ I said. ‘I
think we have a hidden spirit, a kind of guardian. Every one of us. We’re not really aware of it. Its influence is subtle. It works somehow without us knowing. What it’s doing is helping us to our destiny, sort of, I don’t know, steering us towards challenges we need, developing the talents we have.’
‘But it’s secret,’ Holly said. ‘I like that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and what’s really amazing is that this guardian is actually the permanent bit of us, which continues from one life to the next.’
Holly looked at me in a way that, I felt sure, mirrored the way I’d looked at her.
‘You mean reincarnation?’ she asked. I nodded. She smiled. ‘You mean like there’s no such thing as death?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
III
1
Grandpa had replenished the birdfeeders by the time I got up, and was down in the near pasture, the dogs scampering around him, racing after their noses, chasing scents left by animals in the night. The tits flocked and mobbed hungrily, joined by house sparrows and a greenfinch.
Grandma was not beside the Aga. My father, Uncle Jonny and Auntie Gwen were, however, over at the table, heads bent towards each other.
‘You’ve spoken to her already this morning?’ Dad asked. ‘Is she okay?’
‘An apology would help,’ Gwen told him.
When he caught sight of me, Dad said, ‘Be a good fellow, Theo, and take Mum a cup of tea.’
I did as I was asked, and carried a mug of strong tea out of the kitchen and back upstairs. A house whose rooms are occupied by people sleeping feels, as you walk along its corridors, curiously alive – in a way that it doesn’t when everyone’s up and about. A stair tread squeaked beneath my foot; a floorboard creaked. I didn’t wish to wake anyone. I understood why my father never wanted to lose this place; he wanted his parents to be here for ever, the house ever ready to return to. My dear, impractical papa.
The room was pitch black. I felt my way to Mum’s bedside table and she let out a tired groan of thanks.
When I returned downstairs, Grandpa was back inside, making a pot of coffee. The aroma of the ground beans when he opened the tin was delicious; it was hard to believe that he was about to make such a bitter, disgusting drink with them. ‘I just saw it,’ he told me. ‘It’s paid us a visit on Christmas Day.’
Uncle Jonny was gathering knives and spoons from the cutlery drawer. ‘Who has?’ he asked.
‘No one you know,’ Grandpa told him. ‘A feathered friend of Theo’s and mine.’
Jonny made no response. I didn’t think he even listened to the end of the sentence, was already making his way back to the table.
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ Grandpa quietly advised me. ‘He may be back.’
‘Do you think so?’ I whispered, as heartened at this prospect as by Grandpa’s choosing me to confide in.
Grandpa took the jug of coffee to the table. The others were all sat at his end, Jonny with his back to the kitchen, facing Dad – next to Grandpa – and Auntie Gwen. I sat quietly along from my aunt, and bowed my head over a bowl of cereal.
‘Happy Christmas, my children,’ Grandpa said. ‘Thank you again for coming.’
We ate fresh bread with the home-made jams, drank tea or coffee or juice. Aunt Lorna entered the kitchen, dressed in her running outfit; as she did so my attention was taken out of my control, helpless as the needle of a compass, and turned towards her. She came around the side of the island and stood across the table from me, half-turned towards the others.
‘Another tranquil day,’ she said, looking through the wide set of windows behind Gwen, Dad and myself.
‘Quite still,’ Grandpa agreed.
‘It’s like being on the deck of a ship here, isn’t it?’ Lorna said. ‘Becalmed on a green ocean.’
‘Have you been out?’ Gwen asked.
‘I’m just off,’ Lorna said. She stood there in her skintight gear, pinning her hair up behind her head, a hairgrip between her teeth. ‘Ideal for running,’ she said, taking the grip from her mouth.
I had the sudden notion that I was the last surviving member of an old family, the remnants of the previous generations also sitting at this table, while Aunt Lorna belonged to a superior tribe of beautiful athletes, who never grew older. She knew this. She wanted us to know it. That’s what she was doing, somehow, as she stood there, pinning her hair up: asserting a subtle distance from the family she’d married into, improved, taken in a different direction. She gazed outside, across towards the coach house and outbuildings, and said, ‘I think I’ll run that way today.’
I glanced at the others. Grandpa was looking at his daughter-in-law. So were Auntie Gwen and my father. I didn’t know whether they had similar thoughts to my own. Only Uncle Jonny, the man who had snared Lorna, with whom she’d had children, ignored her, and munched toast.
‘See you later,’ Aunt Lorna said, and left.
None of the others said anything for a moment or two, until Uncle Jonny swallowed the last mouthful of tea from his cup and said, ‘Not like Ma to stay in bed.’
‘She’s tired,’ Grandpa told him.
Again there was a pause, then my father said, ‘I’m trying to remember when Ma started railing at the imminent collapse of civilisation.’
‘The coming apocalypse,’ said Uncle Jonny. ‘But it’s becoming obsessive, isn’t it?’
‘Well, you can hardly say that she’s wrong, can you?’ Dad said.
‘Still,’ said Auntie Gwen, ‘there’s no excuse for attacking people the way she did.’
There was another pause. It was as if the things they were saying stirred up dust around them, and they needed to wait a moment for the dust to settle before moving on.
‘Yes,’ said Uncle Jonny. ‘You have to admit, Pa. Ma’s never bothered to bite her tongue.’ He laughed, and the laugh contained a lifetime’s memories of rudeness, insults, outbursts. ‘But she seems, I don’t know. There’s a fury to it that’s new.’
I noticed that Grandpa had been staring at his plate for some while. He wasn’t the kind of man to lose his temper. But his stillness, I realised, was not calm but the containment of emotion. The others seemed to realise this as well: their attention turned towards him. He spoke quietly, slowly. ‘Is it not obvious?’ he said. ‘Have you really no idea?’
As soon as he said it, everything changed. Instantly, it was clear, they had a very good idea.
‘Oh, no,’ said Auntie Gwen. My father put his hand out, and held hers. ‘Oh, Pa,’ she said.
‘What?’ Uncle Jonny demanded. He looked from Gwen to Grandpa, and then at Dad. ‘What?’
My father didn’t say anything. He held his sister’s hand, slowly shook his head.
‘She’s dying,’ Grandpa said, the words barely escaping the anger contained by his lips.
After another long pause, Dad asked, ‘How?’
‘Brain tumour,’ Grandpa said.
‘Does she know?’ Dad asked.
‘Of course she bloody knows,’ Grandpa said. ‘She’s dealing with it with the same bloody-mindedness and courage she’s dealt with everything else in her life.’
I sat there, a mute witness. I didn’t feel anything. Auntie Gwen managed to speak through her sobs. ‘Can nothing be done?’
Grandpa sighed. ‘It’s deep inside her skull,’ he said. ‘They can’t get to it, you see.’
‘Is Ma in pain?’ Uncle Jonny asked.
‘A constant headache,’ Grandpa said. ‘Most afternoons I hear her vomiting in our bathroom. She’s barely taken in any sustenance for weeks now. She has visual disturbances. Driving’s out of the question.’
Uncle Jonny put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. ‘Oh, God,’ he said.
‘I trust the three of you appreciate she’d be furious if she found out that I’d told you,’ Grandpa said. Then, as if noticing me there for the first time, he said, ‘I’m so sorry, Theo.’
‘What are your plans, Pa?’ my father a
sked.
Uncle Jonny sat up straight. ‘Plans?’ he spat. ‘What kind of ridiculous bloody question is that?’
Grandpa ignored him. ‘The hospice in Shrewsbury is excellent,’ he said, his grey eyes filling with tears. He took a deep breath, sniffed, and said, ‘It’s the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid, you see, it’s obstructed by the tumour.’ Dad put his right hand on Grandpa’s left hand, on the table. ‘That’s what’s causing the impairment of her mental functioning. Sending her off on these rants. They’re giving her drugs, corticosteroids, to reduce the swelling. But the drugs seem to make her even sicker.’
Dad shook his head. Gwen leaned against his shoulder, weeping. Uncle Jonny buried his head back in his hands. Grandpa gazed at nothing, his head bowed. The numbness inside me was, I could tell, beginning to thaw. Like the feeling you get when you know you’re going to be sick, not exactly now this instant but at some moment in the extremely near and inevitable future, I could sense a distant wave, not of nausea but of sadness. I shifted my attention to the collection of conserves on the marble carousel in the middle of the table: blackberry and apple jam, Aug 2006; greengage jelly, 2007; raspberry jam, Jul 2007; strawberry jam, 2007. It struck me that none of them were from this year, and I knew that if I were to look in the larder there’d be none there. Grandma hadn’t made any this year. We were already living on her reserve supplies, just as she was.
Grandpa took a deep breath, as if he needed it for buoyancy, and raised himself up. ‘We’ll be leaving for church at ten, if anyone wants to join us.’
I waited till Grandpa had left the room and then, before anyone could say anything to me, I got up and ran outside.
