Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind

by Deirdre Shanahan

  Bleary eyed and headachy, she lay on the bed.

  ‘What happened?’ Lola asked, arriving back. She tumbled shopping on the side of the sink and leant over Caitlin to feel her forehead. ‘You gotta look after yourself. What did you take?’

  ‘I’m not sure which. I thought the ones to keep me going.’

  ‘Hon, I told you to watch it.’ Lola sat on the bed and stroked Caitlin’s hand.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong.’ Caitlin blew her nose.

  ‘Don’t cry. It’ll mess your mascara and look awful. And hey, you’re slipping away. Thin arms. You’re not eating proper. We’ll skip going out tonight and I’ll get us a take-away.’

  The door clicked shut as Lola left and Caitlin lay back against cushions. She closed her eyes against what was missed, what was lost.

  2

  For four days his mum lay in bed, ashen and drifting between hours. The little table held phials of tablets. A nurse had called twice, stepping over old newspapers and tutting. She had been swift and efficient, opening and closing her bag as she brought out thermometers and blood pressure gauges, seeing to his mum. The nurse had left, tip-toeing down the steps as if they might eat her. His grandad said Eva was tired, but this was a tiredness Torin had not seen before. It flooded every part of her. When he offered her a cup of tea one morning, she fluttered open her eyes and smiled. He held her hand with a weight of questions. How had she left Caitlin with Delia? What was his father like?

  ‘Thanks,’ she murmured, raising a trembling hand.

  He propped another pillow behind her. The skin on her temples was thin, revealing a network of veins. As if he might see right through her.

  He offered a cup. She grasped it, bringing it close. Her nails were purplish-blue, indented with ridges. Her thumb nails were cracked.

  ‘Have more.’

  She sipped but grimaced with distaste. He put it down to try again, but it was not drunk two hours later. He tended to his mother, keeping close, the only thing he could do to help her, to urge her out of this darkness, while all the time hoping Caitlin might appear. Surely she would. To find him. To talk. But her absence grew, a load upon his shoulders that he could not shake off until he brushed the notion away in the long nights of his mother’s short breaths.

  ‘What did they do at the hospital?’ he asked his grandad.

  ‘She’d treatment with the radiography business. You know the kind, whatever it is, she was always weak after.’

  Torin stood at the side of the bed. He might wake her, disturb her into some kind of life.

  His grandad muttered, ‘She’s ill beyond hope.’

  What did he know? He wasn’t a doctor. Torin had seen her this way before, at Christmas and after parties. She would lie down for hours, the day after. Sleep till the afternoon, turning away offers of food until she woke ravenous and would do a fry-up in a celebratory mood. She always recovered. She might look as if she was falling apart but she recovered.

  The days drained, stretched hours, until they merged into one long watch by the side of his mum as she weakened. She refused toast and fish fingers, turning down scrambled egg. He was frightened by the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. He wanted to shatter the silence, hear her talk and talk to her, but it was late. Her face, thin and glazed with lost nights in hospital, looked up but gave no answers. Why had she left Caitlin? Why had she never told him? If she recovered, he would not be angry. He wasn’t angry with her. He wasn’t. It was the shock. He would listen.

  The night after she had been quiet all day, his grandad said he would stay up and watch over her. She lay like a child. Torin lay down to sleep but could not. The night was too alive with her.

  In the dark, she turned, shadowed as if the night was breathing. All his years with her. He knew so little. So much. His grandad dozed and woke with a judder.

  ‘I only closed my eyes a while,’ he said.

  They sat up watching, as if all the watching might help.

  ‘Why did she leave you for England?’ Torin asked.

  His grandad’s face crumpled, his eyes moist.

  ‘She was forever wandering. Eager for new places. We couldn’t please her. She was keen to be off. I never knew was it because we had wandered so much ourselves, or she was wanting one place to stay in.’ His face was grey and weary.

  He was cutting into the heart of his grandad. The real questions would have to wait. Later, when she was up and better, they would sit around and he would get the answers he wanted, find out all there was to find out.

  Next morning, she slept on. Torin bent close as her eyelids flickered. She offered so little, yet it overwhelmed him. Could she not open her eyes? He raised a small glass, cupped her head in his hand. Drops of water touched her lips. But she raised no hands to grasp or draw him close. He feared what he knew. She did not fully know who he was. Or where she was. His hands were big and clumsy next to hers, worn-out and bony, slivers of veins tracing grey and blue. Although scared he might knock against her frail skin, he ran his fingers across her cheeks. Cold. Her brows were light without the strokes of the pencil, and her lips were pinched and naked. Her hair was robbed of colour. Otherwise, he might believe she had come in from enjoying the night and the company of men at the pub and was only recovering. In the late mornings, when they had lived in the high flat in Sherlock Close, mechanics from the garage opposite had stood around catching her to chat to, while music came from the workshop. Old stuff. Very old stuff. But what she liked. Sinatra. Marvin Gaye. He set down the glass and went outside. One man, fat as a bear, the other a stick of a man, as his mum would say, sat on the steps of the trailer next door, drinking from cans. They gave Torin one and opened packs of crisps. The men talked and joked in competition with Clint Eastwood, on a laptop propped on a chair, the aerial sticking up behind. Barely listening, and wanting but not daring to tell them about his mum, he drank until a terrible wail rose. He went hot and cold, stumping his drink to the ground. He pushed back his chair and rushed in.

  It was over. She had gone, taking herself and part of him. Numb and calm, he kicked a chair. She had let him down. Had slipped away. The way she would nip out for a drink or meet a man in the night. Her skin used to be dewed with rain when she might have slipped out to Shepherd’s Bush market on an evening, but she lay waxen, her eyes sealed closed. He half expected her to rise and ask what on earth he wanted and not to leave his dirty clothes lying around. She was there and yet was not, in a coldness beyond the depth of temperatures.

  His grandad had filled him with bits of history but his history was her. And she was all there was for him, for a long time. She had been his link to anything that mattered. Given him a sense of belonging. Yet, history was all he had of her. And what she had said. Scraps. Bits of song and story that his grandad had retold. Ragged bits of what his grandad valued. Without his mum, he had a new freedom which was frightening in its enormity. He was lost and going nowhere. Could go where he pleased. Except. He’d straighten things out with Caitlin. Seek her out. He’d seen nothing of her since he’d been to Delia’s. She’d be afraid of what she must know, as he was. But he had to see her. Make things plain and good. Afterwards he’d leave. Get out of her life altogether. He realised what he had not seen before: in her crazy, cack-handed way his mum had tried to protect him. She had not intended any harm. She had not expected it. In a strange innocence she had believed what she had done was right.

  Men from trailers nearby came in; older women he had not seen before streamed through the trailer all the next day to see her lying in the coffin, across the table. In twos or threes, wearing dark clothes, they filed by. He and his grandad sat through the outpouring of prayer upon prayer. His grandad talked or cried or both, babbling into a wet handkerchief. The slightest cause and he was off. His grandad was crazy, and himself nearly so.

  A crowd turned up. Trailers and caravans parked on every verge. Horses stood whi
le vans and cars nudged one another. He wondered if he might see Delia, if she had even heard the news. But if she had, without neighbours or a car to bring her, she would have been unable to get there. The day was overtaken by ceremony. He watched from the side, as his mother was carried away. Everyone followed the big black car through the town to the packed church.

  In the cemetery, his grandad stood over the coffin and threw down soil into the gaping hole. So much to know. He wondered about her time alone in London before she had children. How had she lived? No one with her. And later with him. A toddler. He pulled his jacket collar up against a light breeze. Turves of grass were piled on the side. The priest said prayers. Two men hung around with shovels and when the mourners left, they started digging her in.

  The rotten bit inside her would be hidden underground; guts mangled, stained like nicotined fingers, going off with mould. He had seen samples in a school in Leeds: lab shelves of jars with animals and insects, a sheep’s brain and its eye. The boys who had made fun of his accent said the brain was pickled. The big jar with a goats brain had a gory lump, thick and plasticky. One woman said, it was the way with cancer. You never know where you are, one day a person is fine, the next, they’re eaten up with it.

  ‘There was a good few more years left in her,’ a voice said, from a clutch of women.

  They looked as old as his mum. Even older, with worn dragged faces and cardigans, and he wondered why it was they were there.

  ‘We’d never a cross word between us. She should have lived, been able to enjoy her time,’ his grandad said, looking thinner.

  Joe walked with them towards the gates.

  ‘A pity I didn’t know her sooner,’ he said.

  His jacket was worn at the elbows yet it was the smartest Torin had seen on him. He wore a dark tie. Grief had scrubbed him of years. He looked younger. If Torin didn’t know, he would have assumed he was off to a wedding. Even his shoes were blackly shining.

  ‘What’ll you do?’ Torin asked.

  ‘I’ve no call to be staying. I’ll head north. There might be more work. Most places have a call for mechanics.’ He was a good bloke. The only decent man in a long time. Torin would miss him. ‘It’s not the dying that’s hard. It’s the ones left who have it difficult,’ he said. His dog lay placid, making no scratches on the ground with her feet, or running in the hope of a stick.

  Surely she had only popped out to the shops. Any minute she’d come back, a loaf of bread and pint of milk in her hand.

  His grandad cried in the night, shuffled and spat, coughing his lungs out. He lay on his bed, blankets around his chest. Fat tears rolled down his rough cheeks and his frail body shivered.

  Torin woke before light and turned to check if his mum was awake. The unused bed was stark and cold. But nothing was real, only the dark outside with fragile glitters of light in the window; a wood without the sound of birds. He could do anything, yet freedom was a burden. She had brought him here but had buggered off, leaving him with his grandad hollering like a baby, like a cat crying out to the moon.

  His grandad said they had to clear the caravan. Empty it.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘We’ve to burn it, for it’ll do us no good with only a bad spirit in it.’

  ‘Where’ll we live?’

  ‘Another caravan, big enough for the two of us. I’ve the price of one, even though I’d to give back the money we got for poor Feather. I’ll see we’re all right with a roof over our heads.’

  Torin threw all the cutlery, cups, clothes and washing things he could find into plastic bags.

  His mum had bought double eggcups, sets of mats and coasters of British birds, a wooden toast rack, a lampshade with a map, statues of women in full skirts with little dogs, sailors, baskets of flowers, two donkeys and dainty, pale-faced figurines.

  ‘Chuck ’em. I don’t want to be looking at their faces,’ his grandad’s voice weakened. ‘What good will those crocks be? I’ve enough to remember her by.’

  Torin had to go along with him and get clean out of the place when they finished. He delved into dresses hanging on the door, taking a green one and lying it limply on the bed, in the way his mum might rest to get her breath. Under the seats, he found dried carnations, hat pins, tortoiseshell hair combs and a clutch of shells. They had a pocked, scarred outside but when he picked them up, the film of dust shaken, they were creamy white.

  While his grandad was out, Torin sorted through his mum’s stuff. At the far end under the sofa bed, his hand caught the edge of a Peak Frean tin. The lid slipped off. Photographs burst out. ‘Brighton Belles’ had two young women with rouged cheeks. They peeped from under the fringe of a large Victorian bonnet, and next to them, the face of his mum. She held up her dress, showing thick white legs, bloomers and a blue garter.

  Mass cards for people he had never heard of and old birthday cards fell from a worn envelope. A rosary dripped through his fingers like a bunch of grapes, as he tried to work out what to do with it. He sorted through papers. From the belly of the envelope, he pulled a scrap: ‘the time came but she was smal I asked my mother to take her so she is no truble at all so you dont have to wory love Eva.’

  He turned it over, nursing it for the words might reveal themselves. Tell him what to do. Offer a glimpse of who she was and who she used to be. He read and re-read. The words held him. Caitlin. The note was about Caitlin. He could throw it out with the other stuff. Or keep it. But it was her. A side of her he didn’t know. He threw it down with the pile of papers to burn. It was no use.

  He sifted through photographs. One showed three young men in front of a gate to a field. From a yellowed envelope, he pulled out one of a man with a flourish of oily black hair. He moved his hand over, gazing into the eyes. The man kept staring out of the picture, an open face and small eyes under a hedge of eyebrows. He scoured the man’s face and the way his jacket fell open. ‘John,’ was scrawled on the back. His father. The most he might ever have. John Taylor, who had left the west of Scotland on a journey southwards to find work and come across his mum, who in her own way was travelling to him. But John moved on. Had visited a few times when he was small and was supposed to have brought him a toy train. Torin pushed the picture in his trouser pocket. For later.

  A plastic bag was stuffed under the sofa bed. He pulled it out. Small clothes fell; in yellows and pinks, the soft fabrics were the shapes of babies. A pale lemon jumpsuit, the sort spacemen wore, had ‘Today’s Angel’ on the front. A matching hat fitted his fist. Stuff his mum had nicked. Wasted. She could have made money selling it, or at least given it away. He shoved the garments back in the bag.

  As he left to chuck out her old perfumes in the toilets, rain began. Heavy splodges chucked down. He grabbed a man’s jacket from the back of a chair. His mum had said it had been given to her by a fella who was an actor. Sleekly black, it was cut with shiny lapels of midnight blue. He pulled it on and put up the collar. When he had worn it before like this, his mum had laughed and said he looked like a curate. In the wash-house, he poured the few remaining drops of perfume down the toilet and they swam like urine, squirling down, drained to the sea.

  The men from other trailers helped his grandad take the caravan to the far end of the site. It was stripped, abandoned. Ready. Joe and one of the fellas poured a can of petrol inside; splashes going on easy as water, lapping the sides of shelves. Joe bent forward and lit. Flames whirled, whelped higher and higher. A flare. Glows of flame waved and swirled, drowning the small trailer. Windows shuddered and curtains fell, little shelves where his mum had kept Marmite, jam, HP sauce and pickles, collapsed.

  Metal cried and plastic which had been the base of the beds and chairs, shrieked and curled. The place she had lived in was blackened metal, last gusts of smoke like breath, wound up. The bed she had slept in was grazed and gnawed. Wooden drawers for underwear fell apart, jittered in the shock. Flames jived and jumped the s
ides, the front door creaking till it fell on itself, banging the step. Window frames thrilled with snakes of fire. In a puff and squander of smoke, Torin’s eyes stung. Flares turned on themselves and lay down. His life was lit. Torched. Gone in an instant.

  His grandad had word of an empty caravan he could buy. It was old, with scuffed metal and a scarred door. The curtains, once a thick brocade, were rags. Torin couldn’t bear the sight but it was either this or be kicked onto the road. His grandad said years back he had lived under a tent of ash with waterproofing stretched over it, and how he did not so much wish to be done with all the old ways after all.

  ‘I wonder what’ll become of us, bunched in like this? I wish it was like it used to be when I was in the seat along with the others and only the lurch of the caravan over stones and the puddles to bother us. Instead, we live among rubbish mounting and never collected ’til summer when the corporation starts to notice. We’re dross. If the tap on the site doesn’t work, they won’t bother to see to it ’til families are ill and the doctor has to be put out of his way to come.’

  How would they go on, knocking against each other, lost to themselves? He’d never wanted his mum around much and now she wasn’t. He’d got his wish. It was stark and all around and he didn’t want it like this. This emptiness.

  His grandad opened the door to the trailer and they stepped into a smell of damp. Rust on the cooker. The sink blocked.

  ‘Is this what we were born for, when once we were the noblest people on the road? The years have climbed into the clouds and we’re not wanted.’ He sat on a seat under the window. Cushions were worn at the edges and foam stuck out. Torin opened the wardrobe. Dust piled in little heaps along the edges and corners. He walked outside, his nostrils full of dust and the stale air. Dark was coming down. He wanted to be anywhere but there, stone cold with fears, his fingertips frozen and the wind whistling through.