Your Blue-Eyed Boy

by Helen Dunmore

  I want to take her hands and lead her away, in her lime-green suit, and sit her down somewhere and say, ‘It’s not so bad, what you did.’

  Michael was right. I can’t do this any more. There’s sweat on my forehead so I turn to the mirror to wipe it away. My face looks out at me, strange under its wig. I take off the wig and my face appears as I know it, soft and surprised, the hair springing up where the wig has crushed it. I lean into the mirror and look into my own eyes. I don’t know if I’d trust this person, or believe a word she said. I comb my hair, put back the wig. As it settles it turns me into monochrome, black and white. My hands are sweating. Even though the blisters from rowing have faded, they still burn. I ought to wash my hands, but I seem to have been in here a long time already. Probably it’s only a few minutes. I didn’t look at my watch when I retired. I should have done that. I’m forgetting things.

  Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you’ll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.

  I wouldn’t give good odds on Mrs Islett. She looks desperate. She’s been clinging to this case, but if she loses she’ll let go, and sink down. I remember a client I had, a woman who lost her children after a long dispute over custody. That was in the old days. She held on for a while, living in a bedsit and holding down a job while the kids lived with her former husband and his new wife in the house which had been her home. I know because she came in to see me once. She only wanted to talk to someone. After that I lost sight of her.

  Then one day I met her when I was rushing to the baker’s at lunchtime. She was sitting on the pavement with her feet in the gutter. She had a bottle of British wine and she was cuddling a sheepskin hot-water-bottle cover. She didn’t recognize me, but I’d said hello before I knew it. I wished I hadn’t. She remembered who I was, and the remains of her former self came floating up like bubbles from a wreck. And then she started stroking the sheepskin again and her eyes went off somewhere, and I hurried to get the bread. I made sure I came back the other way. That was a woman who had a house on the Glebe estate, a job in Tesco, two children, fitted carpets. She left them all, because she fell in love.

  I go back into court, and again they rise. Again we go through the little dance which precedes everything in this world. I look at Mrs Islett, and Mr Conrad, and gather the papers together in a pile in front of me. I clear my throat.

  The door opens. It’s the usher, holding the door wide in a pantomime of willing service. Some member of the public coming in when the case is all but over. The law students are the worst.

  The usher enters, and the door swings to behind him. But as it swings someone else comes in. I spread my hands on the papers in front of me. I feel myself rise, but I force myself down.

  He slips into the public bench and sits there, watching me. It’s an open, friendly, curious look, as if he’s just waiting to see what I’ll do next. I’ve never seen such a look on Michael’s face before. It comes from long before I knew him, when he was a child. Long ago, before he learned to play basketball. He sits heavily and comfortably, his thighs planted broad on the bench. He wears jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. There is no mark on him, no blood. He setties himself as easily as if he has just come in from the next room. He waits. I clear my throat and fumble for the glass of water on my desk. All the faces in court are looking in my direction, but that’s normal. It doesn’t mean anything. The usher is watching me from the door. His face is intent, as if he’s watching his dog with something it’s caught. Unease ripples through the courtroom. I see the two barristers glance behind them, then back at me. The clerk leans towards me, confidentially. ‘Madam –’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  He continues to sit there. He is beautiful. I can see beneath the flesh of Michael at forty-eight the shadow of Michael as I first knew him. As if nothing ever goes away. It is just packed somewhere we can’t see it. I see the fall of the thick dark hair I used to run over my lips, and the short grey hair that the sea combed upwards as it took him down.

  I look at him, feasting my eyes until they hurt. Then I look away, down at the papers. Mrs Islett is waiting. I could divide the blame in half, like a baby, but that would be unjust. This is a trial of evidence.

  I can hear the babble of the children in the back seat, and the back of my neck prickles with irritation. They are giggling over some joke no adult could ever share. They tell it over and over again. Their giggles rise to shrieks, they roll and drum their heels on the back of the seat. I pull in and stop the car. I turn and lash them with my anger. Now they are my children, Matt and Joe.

  I see their faces shrink as my rage throws them back against their seats. I see their fingers fumble slowly at their seatbelts. These are my children. I would do anything for them. I have done everything for them. You don’t understand, I say. I did it for you. It was all for you. I had to protect you. But they look away. Their hands creep towards one another and hold on tight, as if something about me frightens them. I drive on. When I catch their eyes in the mirror they duck their heads down.

  My face is soft, but you have to be hard to get where I am.

  I face the court where Michael sits, and I begin to deliver my judgment.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I don’t believe in ghosts. I could walk through a graveyard at midnight and I wouldn’t be afraid. When the children were frightened of the dark I’d take their hands and walk them from room to room without putting on the lights, feeling our way. Look, there’s nothing to be frightened of. But in the dark I can feel the print you leave on me.

  I’m in my house, in the dark. Donald is sleeping, and the children, all sleeping the confident sleep that doesn’t come to me any more. Donald says he’s going to stop drinking. He says we’ll just make a pot of coffee in the evenings. I look at him as if he is mad. He has got the woodshed packed with wood now, enough to last through the whole winter. Matt’s teacher has given us a box of apples from her garden, and Matt has wrapped each apple in newspaper and laid them on a shelf which Donald put up in the woodshed. The shed breathes out the scents of wood and apple.

  ‘I feel as if we’re starting to belong here,’ Donald says.

  They sleep their confident sleep. I want to cover them up so the wind doesn’t blow on them. But when I reach to hug the boys now they wriggle out of my touch. They run to Donald to show him things, not to me.

  I don’t know why you stay here. My hands hurt. I hold them up to the light to see if there are still blisters under the surface of the skin, but if there are I can’t see them. Why do you stay here?

  I think you want my company. You are pulling me towards you and I feel myself going. It’s like an arm around my waist, firm and warm. Not ghost-like at all.

  Do you remember those Indian bones? You said to me once: ‘This whole country is built on Indian bones.’ And I said, ‘Maybe, but you can’t live thinking like that. That’s the way the world is.’ I’d been in America for two months when I said that. And you said, ‘Oh, so that’s the way the world is, Simone?’ And you smiled in a way I always put down as teasing, mocking; but now I don’t think it was. I think you may have loved what embarrassed me in myself. And you saw my hardness, which I didn’t dare show to anyone else. Later that day you cooked steak for us. You beat it out on a wooden board, slapping it over when one side was finished. I’d never seen that done before.

  ‘You have to break the fibres to make the meat tender,’ you said, as you pounded the meat until the steak spread out flat. You chopped up a bunch of parsley and scattered it over the surface of the meat, then turned it again. You crushed peppercorns and spread them over the steak as well. The pan smoked blue on the fire, and when you tossed the steaks in there was a hiss and a leap of steam. You let the steaks char on one side, then flipped them over. You had two plates ready, but no potatoes, no mushroom or quarter tomatoes. You saw me looking and said, ‘You don’t need any of that other stuff when the meat’s as g
ood as this.’

  It was the biggest steak I’d ever eaten, and it covered my whole plate. You poured out some pepper vodka you’d got from Calvin, and I ate the whole steak, a mouthful of the charred, tender flesh, then a mouthful of burning spirit. Afterwards we lay back, gorged and sweating. A bit later you put your hands behind your head and at first I thought you were talking to me, then I realized you were quoting something. A poem or the lyrics of a song, about Buffalo Bill:

  Buffalo Bill’s

  defunct

  who used to

  ride a water smooth-silver

  stallion

  and break one two three four five pigeons just like that

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man

  and what i want to know is

  how do you like your blue eyed boy

  Mister Death

  I nearly said that I never knew you liked poetry, but I shut my mouth. Later on I found the poem in an anthology in the town library, and I copied it out. It looked different on the page, and more difficult than it sounded when you said it. When you said it the words flowed out of your mouth as if they were part of you. I never heard you say any other poem, or talk about one either. You’d learned it a long time ago, and kept it with you. You told me that you used to say it over and over when things were bad, like a charm. It was beautiful and insouciant and you understood every cadence, because it was your history.

  how do you like your blue eyed boy

  Mister Death

  The distant barking of a farm dog hammers the silence. I get up noiselessly and go to the window, and look out. I keep very still. I can see a long way, as far as the faint rise of sea-wall. Beyond that there’s the sea, moving inwards, feeling into the crevices of the land, bearing all its burdens with it. Wind moves, and the shadows of branches poke and rummage on the ground, as if they are coming towards the house.

  I think I can see you. Just there, by the gatepost, where the dark is thickest. You are standing very still, so that the moon won’t catch you and light you as you move. You are standing still, and looking towards me. You count the windows, white with reflected moon.

  I have shut all the windows on the ground floor of the house. But maybe, without knowing it, I have left one open.

  THE BEGINNING

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  First published by Viking 1998

  First published in Penguin Books 1999

  This edition published 2008

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore, 1998

  ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag’ words and music by Joe McDonald © 1965, renewed 1993 by Alkatraz Corner Music Co., BMI. All rights in the UK and Eire administered by Chrysalis Music Ltd. Used by permission.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91732-0