Between the Regions of Kindness

by Alice Jolly

  Dislocated. Fallen back into place. He looks around him tentatively. Yes, there are balconies but nobody stands poised, ready to throw themselves down. And people walk along pavements but they will not step into the path of a car, or be hit by falling masonry. Oliver can’t make the adjustment. Without The Dying, the world looks naked. A balcony is glaringly empty without a figure who is about to jump. Cars are strangely innocent, they roll down the street quite merrily, harmless, jaunty even. People no longer glitter with the nearness of death. They’re merely people, ambling along, quite safe, stripped of risk and unpredictability. Oliver doesn’t trust this. Soon the images will start again. The world will reveal itself as it truly is – infinitely dangerous and unpredictable.

  He walks on, hears a distant roll of thunder. Spots of warm rain fall, then stop, then return, gathering force. He comes towards the centre of the town, takes the road towards the church. The balconies remain innocent, the cars continue to smile. He watches, endlessly watches, but the world remains brazen in its newfound kindness. Eventually he reaches the end of his street. The rain still drips but he notices also that he’s covered in sweat. It runs from every pore, soaking his shirt, his chest, his hands, running down his face. His eyes blur as sweat runs into them.

  He’s insubstantial, free. Someone has cut the guy ropes and a breath of wind could carry him away. He shrugs his shoulders, rolls his jaw, shakes his hands loose. He who saves the life of one man. Strange that he never believed that, even though he pinned those words on his wall. He reaches the church, unlocks the padlock on the door to the Community Centre, steps inside. Upstairs in his room, he strips off all his clothes, finds a flannel, washes the sweat from his chest and arms. He takes a clean T-shirt and pyjama bottoms from a drawer, pulls them on. How? How has this happened? This should be about the hospital, about Jemmy and Sebastian, the return of God. But instead it’s about Lara – who understands nothing at all, takes care to understand nothing. A joke with a weak punchline. But still he knows that it was Lara, with her brutal lack of tact, who released him. He should not be surprised. He’s always known that sometimes that which damages also heals.

  He never liked Lara but now he loves her.

  A wave of rain washes against the window again, thunder whips and snaps. He wants to be outside in the innocent and safe world. He wants to feel the newness of it, the glamour and comfort, the luxury. He pulls open the windows and feels the shivering air come in but still that’s not enough. Without stopping to put on shoes or a coat, he turns and heads downstairs, undoes the padlock again, opens the doors, steps out. Under his bare feet the doormat is spiky. Moving out into the road, he feels water rolling down onto him, washing him clean.

  He stands there for hours, minutes, days, lets the rain run down onto his face, fall down into his mouth, splash into his eyes. And now, again, he’s filled with the love of God – but of a small, misguided God. Who moves through the world like a heaving bull, spectacular but clumsy. Full of love and all the many errors that it brings. God may not be good but it’s possible to cooperate with the goodness in Him. He must be forgiven his failings now. The relative size of things has changed. If the smallness of God is acknowledged, then the vast, surprising expanses of man must also be recognised. Oliver’s greatest sin has been the attempt to be small.

  In truth, he can be proud of what he’s done for Lara. He and this new God, this small and uncertain God whose canvas is so limited. Those great epiphanies and redemptions for which one waits. They turn out to be nothing more – nothing less – than the forgiving smile, the hand on the shoulder, the muttered word of encouragement. God as the sum of all the unselfishness in the world. Ideas like that would once have been an insult to the Almighty but now it seems possible that the grand is trivial, the trivial spectacular. Oliver shivers, stares upwards through the rain. It’s always been said that the devil is in the detail, so perhaps it’s not surprising that God should be there as well. A curtain has lifted, the night is fierce, the world charged with an infinite, crackling energy.

  58

  NOW

  Lara – Brighton, May 2003

  The first morning without him. It’s half past seven in the morning but the Guest House is crowded. Rufus and Mollie. Wilf, Spike and Martha. Upstairs Stan, Stan and Stan hang around in the hall and the sitting room. Mr Lambert has put on his best frock, done his make-up, is clearly making an effort not to talk about his minor ailments. Everyone moves with an underwater heaviness, rehearsing the steps of a slow dance, behaving towards each other with exaggerated respect, looking for some comfort they can offer, some service they may render – but there’s little to be done. Lara watches, thinks, the whole house and everyone in it is made of cut glass. Take care or it will shatter.

  Phones ring – Lara’s or Wilf’s mobile, the house phone. At first Lara had answered all the calls but now she sometimes hands the phone to Martha. Greg rang earlier and swore viciously, then started crying, the sound like a saw going back and forward through wood. Others have also rung from Iraq, speaking in foreign accents, raging and weeping, spluttering incoherently. Some of them Lara doesn’t know but they must be friends of Jay’s. Hans – who she had always assumed to be middle-aged – sounded fourteen years old and she’d found herself speaking to him as she might have spoken to Jay, becoming a mother now, too late.

  Around her a web is being spun, a story created. Wilf and Spike say, Jay made the final sacrifice, he gave his life for others and for the cause of peace. Lara is grateful for this, but the truth is he just happened to be in a marketplace when a bomb went off. Wrong time, wrong place. No one knows who planted the bomb, of course. It seems that as many as thirty others were killed. Lara had at least wanted Jay to have his own personal death.

  Rufus stands by the kitchen window, staring up, silent. Mollie moves towards him, takes his hand. They are both old now. The text of life itself has become so powerful that neither of them have need to embroider it now. For Lara, love is still more than she can manage but forgiveness is possible. Her mind moves back a few hours to the moment when she opened the sitting-room door and found them there, sleeping like children beside the fire. Rufus lying on the hearth rug, snoring and dribbling slightly onto a cushion. Mollie like an injured animal under a blanket on the sofa. Lara had sat down, waited a while before waking them, giving them a few moments more of innocence, protecting them, watching them as a mother watches over a sleeping child, as she had once watched over Jay. After she told them, she’d waited for her father to wail and curse and fall on the floor. She’d needed him to do that, since that was how he always behaved.

  But instead he’d cried like a child, standing against the curtain with his back stiff and his hands over his eyes. Rufus weeping for the baby he didn’t want to be born, and for the young man who he raged against. For the boy who provoked him, and criticised him, and needled him, and deflated him. For the boy whose love he couldn’t bear. And Lara had felt then that she was seeing her father naked, newborn. And it made her realise that he’d always lived inside a thick shell, and that she and her mother had helped to keep the shell in place so that the naked thing inside him wouldn’t be seen by the human eye.

  Now someone guides her to the kitchen table, sits her down, puts a bacon sandwich in front of her. Strangely she’s hungry and begins on the sandwich with enthusiasm, licks butter from her lips. Wilf and Spike sit down as well and the tomato ketchup is passed. Lara drinks tea, feels her body unfreezing. Of course, Jay isn’t really dead. Soon they’ll be told it was all some mistake. Martha pours more tea for Spike and says, Of course, it wasn’t like this when my daughter died, not really.

  Lara stares at Martha, bacon sandwich suspended, but Martha has turned away to get the milk. Oh that too, Lara thinks. How come she never knew that Martha had a daughter, a lost daughter? So many things she never saw. But still she’s hungry enough to go on with the sandwich. Her mobile rings and Rufus answers it. She drinks and chews hurriedly now, knowing that the end, anothe
r end, is coming. Sorry, Rufus says. It’s the Foreign Office. I think someone should. They want to know about the body.

  Lara looks at him and realises that Jay is dead.

  Bacon drops from the sandwich, Lara’s hand grips her mouth. She thinks she might vomit.

  All right. OK. OK. Tell them to ring back. Or—

  Spike eases the phone from Rufus’s hand. Don’t worry. I’ll sort it.

  Lara feels panic rising. He’s dead, he’s dead.

  She turns and sees Oliver at the kitchen door, walks into his arms.

  I have to go out – now.

  She finds herself handed up the stairs and wrapped into a coat. The front door is opened and she feels Oliver’s hand on her shoulder as she steps out into the ordinary morning street. A man pushes himself at her, armed with a microphone. She retreats, falls against Oliver, tries to get back into the house. Rufus strides across the hall, passes her, steps out onto the doorstep, bawls with such force that the reporter staggers back down the steps, falls into the street. Despite it all, Lara looks up at Oliver and half laughs. Sometimes it’s good to have Rufus as a father.

  Oliver guides her out of the house again and they escape down the street, untroubled. The man from the Foreign Office shouldn’t have asked those questions because Jay is still alive, or at least he’s somewhere close. When she answers those questions then Jay will be absolutely and conclusively dead.

  It isn’t yet eight o’clock but other people are already out on the beach, walking dogs or swimming in the rolling grey surf. Lara strides forward, feels Oliver following her. Occasionally she stops, tries to talk, but the breath jerks in her throat and she heads on, up and down the same stretch of beach. Finally she slows and wanders down to the water, sits down on the sea breakwater and looks over at Oliver. He takes his shoes and socks off and his long white feet stretch out on the wet pebbles.

  I never thought, Lara says. Every day I imagined, but still...

  Her breath keeps coming up into her throat in a strange gasp, somewhere between a hiccough and a dry sob. Her muscles and sinews have disconnected from each other and she’s just a sack of rattling bone. She stares out across the beach to where a dog jumps for a stick, leaping into the sunlight, its body snatching as it pulls the stick out of the air. She’s shocked by how calm she feels.

  It was arrogant, Lara says. To think I could bargain. Even when Greg said he couldn’t find Jay, I wasn’t worried. I thought I’d be repaid. I thought if I just had the courage to let him go completely then he would come back alive. But it doesn’t work like that?

  No, sadly it doesn’t.

  She’s become part of Oliver’s club now, a club which nobody wants to join, a club where the entrance fee is beyond what anyone should have to pay. She thinks back to all the things she’s said to him – things which were deliberately rude and insensitive. She’d said those things so that she wouldn’t have to consider what it must have been like for him when Grace died. She’d said them as a means of avoidance, of distraction. Now she’s going to have her face pushed down into pain until she’s choking on it. Anything else can be mended, but this is for ever.

  I don’t understand, she says. I don’t understand.

  But there is nothing to understand. Her mind is like a car with a broken steering wheel. She tries to drive straight, but the car veers from left to right, might dive into a ravine or meet with a brick wall. It takes all of her concentration to keep it on the road. She doesn’t want to think about the way he died, the moment of his death, his flesh blown apart, burnt up. What was it he saw? A sudden light? A dull thud into nothing? She tries not to let the scene unravel in her mind but still she glimpses parts of it.

  I don’t know what he was doing, she gasps.

  He was just in the market. Wandering. Wearing a black New York T-shirt.

  She wonders how Oliver knows this, what he sees. Maybe someone just told him earlier. But who? When? She stares down at her feet, watching the water draw up the beach, stop, fall back.

  You know I’ve missed the point so many times, she says. I always wanted it to be about something else, some grand story – him dropping out of university, Rufus, Liam, Mollie. But perhaps for him it wasn’t about any of those things. Not Iraq as a symbol for something else, just Iraq. The people he cared for dying, a country tearing itself to bits. He said he wanted me to let him exist. But it was only recently that I— and now it’s too late.

  You can still get to know him, Oliver says. Not in the flesh perhaps.

  Lara shivers and swallows, stares out at the sea.

  Do you think his life was wasted? I mean, I know that his death won’t alter anything in Iraq – nothing at all. But all the same. I think something—

  Yes, Oliver says. Yes, of course. She knows from his voice that he’s doubtful but she’s grateful to him for trying. She herself is doubtful but now hope must be stitched together from the most meagre corners of cloth.

  He lived as he wanted to live, Oliver says.

  Yes. Yes. And of course, I’m going to go on. Working with Wilf and the others. Because although the war was apparently won, everyone knows, don’t they? That slowly but surely, over the years, it will be lost. Perhaps we’ll raise money for the families of the others who died. That’s something we could do. And maybe the money won’t get to them, or will be lost in administration or stolen. But that’s the only thing left, isn’t it? Either that or hatred and anger – and there’s no one in particular to be angry or hateful against really.

  She swallows a sob, wipes her sleeve across her eyes. Jay was so many things to her, the son she fought for, the son who was a burden, who was a fool and then a hero. He’s been all of those things but still she has no idea who he really is, was. The cornerstone, the scapegoat, a bone for them all to fight over. Will the real Jay please stand up? But he’s slipped away out of the back door, down an alleyway, over a wicket fence, across someone’s vegetable patch. Gone.

  What hurts the most, she says, is the fact that maybe none of it matters that much. He was just one boy. There is this view that human life has such great value but does it?

  He was important to you, Oliver says. To me. To us.

  He is putting on his socks now, easing them up over wet toes.

  Why do I feel – excited? Lara asks.

  You do, at first. Fresh grief does bring a rush of energy and hope. When death still has some glamour.

  And then?

  Eventually – grinding, mundane, tedious.

  The day is clearer now. The town is visible in sharper focus. Lara can’t believe that the news isn’t emblazoned on posters all along the seafront. Of course, people will know soon, when she goes and answers those calls. And there’ll be articles in the newspaper, and moral outrage and calls for this and for that. And people won’t know whether to call him a hero, or a saint or a lunatic. Some will be mourning and others will be muttering a different story behind their crooked hands. Of course, he was mad, I blame it on his mother, they were always an odd family. But even that will only be for a week or two and then everyone will forget. Except for the few – Mollie and Rufus, Oliver, Jemmy. It’s only now she thinks of Jemmy.

  Thank you for helping her, she says.

  I didn’t do anything.

  No, I’m sure you didn’t, she says. She knows now that this is what she must say.

  You know Jay was important to Jemmy, Lara says. In the hospital, she told me.

  Looking at Oliver, Lara realises how he has changed. His hands have stopped moving around so much. He’s calmer, settled. She also realises she loves him. Not in the romantic sense, of course. Those emotions are an absolute irrelevance in the world they now inhabit, a luxury far beyond what they can afford. But she loves him for his courage, for the way that he tries so hard to supply hope to other people, while having none himself.

  Lara stares out across the sparkling water, towards the grey oblong of a distant ship. Briefly an image appears, a memory she didn’t know she had. Jay turni
ng cartwheels somewhere. Not on this beach, in a park maybe or in the garden of some long-gone holiday cottage. Burning through a dew-glittering morning like a Catherine wheel, spluttering and splashing, the light of him dazzling. Oh my darling – how I loved you and I never knew, you never knew.

  The ship – it’s low on the horizon, barely more than a smudge. But moving surely, heading on somewhere. Grief is out there as well, beyond that distant horizon, but drawing in towards them. Her mobile phone will still be ringing at the Guest House, the administration of death continuing. She longs to stay here a little longer, with Oliver, in the morning freshness. She looks down and sees that her jeans are still stained by the coffee she spilt on them at the service station. This is the place before the storm breaks. When she has to return those calls then Jay will start to be dead. But she’s needed there. Oh give me some of your courage, my love. Remind me that even this day I must live a life on fire – because you’re not here to do that. She leans across to Oliver and kisses him. He holds her against him. Together they walk up the beach, towards the waking town, the Guest House.

  Ahmed has returned from washing up at the hotel. She hears his voice as she enters the kitchen. No. No. She can face anything but not Ahmed. For a moment she turns back to Oliver but then forces herself into the room. She is guided to a chair, shrinks into it, knows there can be no escape. Ahmed comes straight to her, kneels down, takes her hand. She forces herself to look at him. If only he would call her a selfish bitch – that she could easily stand.