by Laura Powell
Betty looks down at the brown paper bag. She opens it and drops two small smooth pebbles inside, without pausing to think about it. She twists closed the top and throws. There is a loud plop. The bag lands in the middle of the pond and sinks. Ripples ring out. Betty realises that she is panting. She traces a small cross shape on the surface of the water and watches the last of the ripples, then she hugs her coat around her and staggers in the direction of home.
Rain has washed away the chalked hopscotch run. Strangled dandelions push up through the gravel and pop cans rust in the gutter. Strange how she noticed none of this before she left. She shuffles bare-footed along the lane that runs behind Newl Grove, sidestepping the cans and weeds. Her legs are crusty. The old blood has dried and new stuff trickles out. She presses her thighs together even tighter.
She reaches over the gate and lets herself into the back garden. A damp sock lies on the ground. Betty drapes it over the washing line and glances back over her shoulder. The lane is empty but she senses that she is being watched.
She hurries to the back door and slots her key into the lock. She pauses to button up her coat so Mother won’t see the mud and the blood and the stains. If Mother is upstairs, she will have time to swill her face in the kitchen sink and scrub her hands too. She will make them both a cup of tea and apologise for disappearing for so long. She misses Mother, she realises. She will be more patient with her from now on.
Betty takes a deep breath and twists the key, just as something blue catches her eye through the kitchen window. A man she doesn’t recognise is standing by the sink, his hand reaching into the glassware cupboard. He spots her before she can hide and before she can stop the back door from swinging open. He takes his hand out of the cupboard and turns to face her.
‘Guv, she’s here,’ he calls.
Betty realises with relief that his blue jacket is a policeman’s uniform. An older policeman appears in the kitchen doorway too. He bows his head slightly when he sees her, and her relief evaporates. They must know about Gallagher or the giblet baby, or both. Mother must know too. She will be ashamed. Betty won’t cry, though. Mothers don’t cry.
Chapter 16
Fifty years later
Simon is there when John Gallagher wakes from his afternoon nap. John can tell it is him by the low guttural breathing, and he knows that Simon is squashed into the winged armchair in front of the window because the leather squeaks as he repositions himself. John keeps his eyes shut, the way he always does when he first wakes, until he knows who exactly is in the room and what to expect from them. It gives him back a little power.
He rummages through his memory and recalls that the date is 23rd September. It must be roughly half past six, for the light that seeps through his papery eyelids is pink. He remembers that Simon’s birthday is 15th August, that his own age is eighty. He checks that his toes still flex and knuckles still bend. He excels at his mental checklist and spends a few seconds resenting Simon and the doctors for shutting him up here, when his memory works perfectly well. Then he opens his eyes.
‘Why are you here?’ he barks, his voice coarse with sleep. ‘You’re not supposed to visit on Wednesdays.’
‘Afternoon Dad,’ says Simon with a sigh. ‘Feeling yourself then?’
‘Don’t call me Dad, it’s common. So? Why are you here?’
It isn’t that he is angry; he just wants Simon to know that his brain is still sharp enough to remember rules and days.
‘I told you yesterday, I’m flying to Geneva in the morning and I need to wrap up this chapter so Sylvie can transcribe it when I’m away.’
John turns it all over in his mind. He doesn’t recall Simon telling him any of that. Maybe Simon forgot. He wonders how to chastise him.
‘Don’t call me Dad, it’s common.’
Simon winces.
‘Don’t you remember that you just said that?’
‘Get cracking,’ says John, ‘I don’t have all day.’
He is embarrassed even as he says it. They both know his days hang empty, but it is habit.
‘Appointment with Countdown?’ teases Simon.
John glares at him but Simon is concentrating on switching on the small brown voice recorder balanced on the arm of the chair. John turns back to the Tuttle Tapes documentary that Simon muted when he arrived but Simon reaches forward and turns off the television at the power socket.
‘All right. Last time we were up to the point where you met Mum, remember?’
‘Of course I bloody remember. I’m not an imbecile.’
But he is touched at the way Simon clasps his pen like a boy, not a middle-aged solicitor.
‘So, how about we start with where you met her?’ says Simon. ‘At the French Embassy Ball, wasn’t it? November 1956, Mum’s twenty-first birthday?’
‘If you know the whole damned story, why bother asking?’
Simon pours water into the spare tumbler and gulps it down, the way he always does when John upsets him. Sometimes Simon can get through two jugs in a single visit.
‘Can’t we just get through today without any of this? I’m up to my eyes in prep for the Geneva meeting, I’ve mediation with Carole tonight and the publishers are breathing down my neck for this and—’
‘Fine,’ says John. ‘Get on with it before I change my mind.’
Simon pulls the ostrich-skin journal from the bedside cabinet and eases into the armchair. John had wanted to laugh when he first saw the book. That’s why you’ll never make a proper writer, he had wanted to say. Then he had thought of his own metal cabinets containing rows of scarred reporting pads that smelled of dust and foreign tobacco and singed flesh, and he had said nothing.
‘Tell me what you thought of Mum when you first saw her,’ says Simon.
‘Probably something like… Bloody French, can’t get away from them.’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘The book’s supposed to be about my career, not this puff.’
‘It’s supposed to be about you.’
John curls his nose and glares at his son.
‘No one would want to read about our shambles of a marriage.’
‘Was she very beautiful when she was young?’ presses Simon.
‘Not as beautiful as she believed,’ says John eventually.
Simon shakes his head but he scribbles it down anyway.
‘And what did you think when you first saw her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I can’t write that.’
‘Then write nothing.’
‘We’ve been through this. It could help when,’ and Simon lowers his voice, ‘the illness advances.’
‘What good will it do then? I’ll be a cauliflower.’
The word doesn’t sound right. Simon looks perplexed too. John closes his eyes.
He had thought that Simon would give up if he gave monosyllabic answers, but the months wound on and sometimes, as he neared sleep or his mind blurred, he found himself dribbling out facts without intending to. It was dangerous. The voice recorder filled, the ugly ostrich book thickened and slowly, his memoirs pieced together.
‘Do it for Max,’ says Simon softly. ‘So he can learn about his grandfather.’
‘Fine, I thought she was loose. See what young Maximus makes of that.’
‘Just give me something to put down… What did you speak about when you met?’
John shrugs and tries not to meet Simon’s eye. The truth was he had grimaced when he first saw Jeanette, the French Ambassador’s daughter. She was cold and brash, her dress was made of sequins and her bony body slunk around the dance floor from one man to the next.
‘You always shrug her off like this,’ says Simon. ‘Maybe she wasn’t perfect, but she was your wife for ten years. You at least owe her a paragraph.’
‘Nine years,’ says John firmly, but his chest thumps: it is coming. ‘Write whatever you want. You knew her best.’
Then it arrives. A wave of shadow rolls across and his mind fogs
over. He closes his eyes and pushes it away, just for this hour with Simon. He tries to remember facts to keep it at bay: yes, he had met Jeanette two days after he had driven back home to London from Cornwall. It was a cold Sunday in November and he had still been shaking at the memory of everything that had happened in the biscuit factory.
‘Why won’t you talk about my mother?’ says a faraway voice.
He had sat in his study drinking whisky all day, and only dragged himself to the Embassy Ball because the bottle had emptied and the shops were dry on Sundays. He had driven there recklessly, still thinking about St Steele. Or perhaps that is just his memory glossing itself. Maybe he hardly thought of it, or her, at all; just of himself and his own burden.
‘I did it for her. She could never know,’ he reminds himself.
‘Did what? And for whom?’ There is a pause. ‘Are you talking about my mother?’
‘Get them away from her!’
John tries to grip onto his memories but someone has spilled a tube of Smarties over them. At least they look like Smarties. The memories are laid out like a cartoon strip of pictures but with little discs of garish colour blocking out part of each, so nothing is fully there.
‘Get what away? You want me to go away?’ says Simon.
‘Not you. I didn’t mean you. The shadow.’
‘Were you just talking about my mother?’
‘No, not Jeanette. But Jeanette should have married that Henry, no Harry, fellow when she had the chance. I told her I’d never love her but that I’d support the child financially. I was very upfront,’ he blurts out before that disappears too.
Simon is silent.
‘Where’s my lighter?’ barks John.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Give me my lighter, I want my lighter back.’
‘Dad, you haven’t smoked since 1994.’
Jeanette had appeared next to him as he was leaving. She had asked for his lighter and plucked a cigarette from his tin. She lit it and took a long drag, fixing her dead grey eyes on him in a way that she probably believed was suggestive.
‘I should never have lent her that lighter.’
‘Your face looks funny, Dad. What’s wrong?’
‘Where are you going?’ Jeanette had asked.
‘Home,’ says John.
‘You can’t go home, Dad. We’ve been through this.’
He had let her catch his hand as they walked into the road for a taxi. A black Hackney had stopped. He had opened the door, she stepped inside first and laughed under her breath, though neither of them had spoken.
‘Get out of my taxi. I need to go back to St Steele.’
‘You’re scaring me, Dad. Don’t try to move, I’ve called the nurse.’
They went back to her suite and that night he slept with her twice. Jeanette had called for more champagne afterwards, while he locked himself in the bathroom, turned on the bath taps and cried for one of the first times in his adult life.
‘It hadn’t changed anything,’ he whimpers. ‘I still couldn’t forget her or Forbes or any of it.’
Something is bleeping and a red beacon flashes through his closed eyes.
‘I’ve pulled the cord, they’re on their way,’ someone is saying.
‘But then Jeanette found me a month later and told me she was pregnant. Her father said I had to marry her.’
‘Just stay calm.’
‘I was tired of doing the wrong thing, so I did. I married her.’
‘I’ve pushed you too hard. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.’
‘She named the boy Simon. He was a good boy. Slow perhaps, but kind hearted.’
There is a long pause.
‘It’s me, Dad. I’m Simon,’ says a voice that is scratchy with sobs.
John opens his eyes. He can’t recall the man, though his grey irises are familiar. An alarm is beeping. Feet are humping up the stairs. The man is peering into his face.
‘Stay calm. You’ll be all right.’
The man’s name is Simon. He is his son. Of course he knows Simon.
‘Why is your face wet, son?’ he asks Simon.
‘You remember me?’ and Simon sounds relieved.
‘Of course I do. Did you think I’d had a bloody lobotomy? I asked why your face is—’
‘Don’t try to speak. The doctor’s nearly here.’
A nurse sweeps in and Simon swims out of focus again.
‘I thought he was having a stroke,’ Simon is saying.
Something pricks John’s arm and he forgets to protest. The nurse is speaking in a hushed voice that is too soft to hear. His lips taste of aniseed; he hates aniseed. Something runny dribbles down his chin but he is too tired to find out what.
‘He was talking gobbledygook,’ Simon is saying as John drifts unconscious.
When John wakes next, his mind is foggy but he fights it away and listens. There is a squeak of leather; Simon is still here then. John’s toes still wiggle, his fingers still flex. Mental checklist complete, he opens his eyes and looks around the dingy room.
‘You shouldn’t have stayed,’ he says thickly.
Simon looks at him with that concerned expression he can’t abide.
‘The nurse said it was probably just a panic attack.’
‘Panic attack, my eye. I’m shut up here with nothing to do but examine my own fingernails. What’s there for me to panic about?’
‘I don’t think I should go to Geneva.’
‘Of course you’ll go. I never missed a day of work in my life. A half day for my father’s funeral, but I was straight back to Saigon that night.’
Simon is grinding his jaw.
‘The nurse says I should ease off the questioning for now.’
‘Go on, get out your book. I’m not a retard.’
‘Stop it,’ cries Simon. ‘You think you’re invincible but you’re not.’
He drops his head into his hands and rubs his temples. John waits. He notices that Simon has developed a bald patch; he watches it with a twinge of unease but says nothing.
‘I just don’t understand why you don’t try harder with the book,’ says Simon after a while. ‘The doctors agreed it could help.’
‘Everyone has stories, son,’ says John gentler. ‘Not everyone’s warrants a book.’
‘But yours are fascinating, the stories you used to tell me…’
‘Maybe to you, but everyone lives a life and collects a bank of them. Then you’re gone and they’re gone too, and everyone else is too busy building their own banks to give a damn.’ He pauses. ‘And if you really want the truth, mine are only a product of my job and… well, I hated it.’
‘You didn’t hate it. You loved being sent away.’
‘I despised it. Do you want to write that? How it was a penance and how I counted down every hour until I could let myself leave, but I never could because I’d never repaid my debts?’
‘Debts?’ says Simon looking up. ‘What debts?’
Simon leaves eventually. The night drags along and another morning carousels around. Someone drags open the curtains by their hems instead of the pulley, and the silence is ripped by the scrape of metal on metal. John’s instinct is to scold but he keeps his eyes shut and trains his ears on the culprit instead.
Her shoes have sticky soles. When she walks near his bed, he is hit by a noseful of Pears soap; that means she is the nondescript red-headed nurse, an octave less shrill than the others. He has no desire for small talk with her and no desire to greet the chain of blank hours that lie ahead so he keeps his eyes closed.
They are still closed when the nurse wafts out into the corridor and speaks to a woman with a chalky and lilting voice, pleasant somehow. But he blocks her out too and slips back into the cocoon of darkness. Minutes pass.
‘Hello,’ says that chalky voice louder. It jolts him awake. ‘Hello Mr Gallagher.’
He strains to hear every shallow slide of air between her lips and waits for her to say who she is but she doesn�
�t. He reassures himself that she is probably just a newly recruited nurse getting to grips with the rounds, but something is wrong. She is too silent and she stands too close to be a stranger. Something about her makes the hairs on the back of his arms and neck prick up. He is impatient; without preparing himself and without completing his mental checklist, he opens his eyes.
Sun pierces the window and the room dazzles so spectacularly, he wonders whether it is his room at all, or whether he is dead. The woman, for there is a woman, stands with her back to the window, cloaked in her own shadow. She looks like a black angel. He thinks that she might be an old friend of Jeanette but dismisses the idea; Jeanette’s friends were glossier, showier reflections of one another. He is gnarled with frustration. Who are you, he wants to know, but the nurse speaks. The black angel speaks next, maybe he speaks too, then the nurse speaks again. She says something that makes the angel dip her head, pull her handbag high up her arm and move towards the door.
The shadow falls from her body when she steps out of the glare and he sees her face. She has silvery hair twisted elegantly behind her head, her cheekbones are sharp and her lips are hot red, but the dimples in her cheeks make her look girlish. She is beautiful in an understated, untrying way. Even her walk is serene.
‘But I know your face. I never forget a face,’ he says and she turns to him head-on.
The blood has drained from her skin now and she is almost translucent. He sees her properly then, and he almost cries out. He sees the girl Betty. Her face has hardly changed. Her eyes are still almonds and her gaze is still searching.
He frowns and balls up his fists. No, not Betty. Never Betty. He is deluding himself, just as he did the night Jeanette died: he had been lying on his sofa, while Simon cried next to him for his dead mother. He had been thinking about Simon’s heart; how it was a sponge that absorbed every drop of warmth and kept absorbing, not like a grown man’s heart should be. Not like Jeanette’s sharp mirror heart either. Nor his own, a shrivelled bit of bark. He had opened his eyes for a split second and he had seen Betty quite unexpectedly. She was an angel with wings and still fifteen.
