by Chloe Turner
She asked him once, what drove him to break apart so much. What he sought to find in all this deconstruction. She’d chosen her moment carefully: he was back from the hospice with a drink in his hand, and his mother was having one of her better days, not mistaking him for his dead brother, nor screaming for a nurse when he arrived. It was before the miscarriage, so he was gentle around her, often stroking her belly, fanning his wide hands across the taut skin. He started to tell her: how he regretted the deconstruction—the essential violence in it—but that it was a necessary evil: only by breaking it utterly could he get to the heart of a thing. Then the doorbell rang with a delivery for next door, and by the time she got back, she knew from the white knuckles around his glass that she’d regret asking more.
He didn’t take the loss of the baby well, coming so soon after his mother’s death. They buried them together, in the village graveyard that looked over and down towards the Severn Vale. He’d not wanted anyone there, just the two of them, and the unsmiling undertaker from Murray & Sons. Di had brought a bunch of sweet peas from his mother’s wild garden, but Michael kicked over the jar as they were leaving, and she didn’t dare stop to right it.
After that, he went out even less than before, and a month went by before she knew he’d be away long enough to open up the workshop again. He’d been so quiet in there—none of the usual orchestra of creak and thud and clang of metal on metal—she was intrigued as to what he was working on. He’d been tender with her those past few weeks, and her thirtieth was a month away. Could it be that he was working on something for her? The first chance she got—it had taken an abscess on his jaw to get him out of the house—she lifted the basket for the key. She’d never been any good at restraint.
To a stranger, that picture in the worktop dust might have seemed like a cartoon. A skeleton drawn for a child to cut and pin for Hallowe’en. But on closer inspection, the viewer would have seen the care with which the bones had been sketched in pen and ink, ordered first by body part and then by height, so that the effect was of a ghastly fence, pitched across the width of the page. So many bones needed a huge sheet: he’d used an architect’s drawing pad, pre-printed tracing paper with space for the scale and notes. He must have bought it specially. And as the bones declined in size, coming at last to incus, malleus and stapes—the anvil, hammer and stirrup of the inner ear—beyond them, rendered in the same black ink, was lined up a sad collection of small metal items: two medicinal gold studs and a single hair band. She recognised in the sketch of the band the narrowing in the elastic beside the steel fastening, where it had thinned from overuse. On the far side of the sheet, in the pre-printed box for job title, a name had been rubbed out. It began with D, but she didn’t pause to decipher the rest of the grooves left on the greased page. She did snatch up the sheet as she ran for the workshop door. She rolled it clumsily, to shroud those careful, dreadful drawings of all the parts of her. Last to slip under the rough scroll—he had drawn it so finely, it could be only hers—was the bald circle of her wedding ring.
On Old Stones, Old Bones, and Love
‘Now I understand why the shepherd died.’
They are queueing alongside the bulging gleam of their coach, trapped in a reservoir of dirty exhaust while they wait to get back on.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Margot can feel the ugly pinch in the skin between her brows as she snaps at him. But these days Norman speaks like a man underwater; too slowly and with exaggerated expressions, as if his eyebrows might try to communicate alone. There was a time when she needed to watch his lips to keep up with the barrel roll of his thoughts. Nowadays, she thinks about rummaging under the back of his jacket, searching for the key to wind him. She doesn’t wait for an answer now, turning away to tuck in an escaped strand from the bun she tied so early this morning.
‘In the Turner painting, I mean. That one of Stonehenge.’
Norman hasn’t taken the hint. ‘You know it, Marg, I’m sure. All savage skies and dead sheep. Those ‘in the know’ might argue over whether the shepherd was struck by lightning, or whether he’s just Turner’s emblem of a violent pagan past. I tell you what I think: the lad just lost the will to live, more like, trying to make his way out of the fucking coach park.’
There’s a cough, in front, at the profanity, and Margot turns back, slightly mollified. She can’t abide people who flinch at the use of expletives—it seems a terribly middleclass affliction—and she can’t help but feel pleased when they are moved to complain. Norman’s amused himself, anyway; the points of his cheeks are flushed. And Margot knows she could at least smile (it would cost nothing), but it makes her itch to see the way the cotton-pleated folds around his eyes are contracting.
‘I think you’re losing it, dear,’ she says instead.
But he just shakes his head, exhaling so that the hairs in his nostrils flutter, and holds out a hand for her to go first up the coach’s narrow stair.
They must be about the last ones back on the bus, not that it matters: every one of their overwhelmingly geriatric travel companions has meekly returned to the slots allotted to them at London Victoria this morning. The American couple who can’t pronounce Salisbury are already pulling white plastic plates from a hotel hamper across their knees. The two East London matriarchs in the front seats are even quicker off the mark, with crumbs already spilling down their sari and dashiki respectively. Bengal silk and Ghanaian kente come together as their heads meet over a Tupperware pot of something reeking of cumin and sweetness. Margot holds her breath as she passes.
A few rows further back, she slips into the window seat Norman insisted she take—her birthday trip, she must make the most of it—and closes her eyes against the inevitable, alien closeness of his leg on hers. She can hear the deep exhalation as he collapses into the upholstery next to her, and the fine whistle which underpins his breath on hot days. She can smell that underarm staleness which emerges every time the cleaner runs the iron over his shirts. They skirt around each other at home these days, hands touching only fleetingly when cold entices them both towards the Aga rail. It’s been three years since his snoring drove her down the hall to the little spare room which overlooks the tulip tree. She presses her knees together now so that her thighs won’t spill over to his side.
‘Are we waiting for someone?’
The woman opposite, who had been sitting straight-backed as a mannequin pressed into a chair, has turned towards the aisle. She’s wearing a tatty pendant made from bottle tops and feathers and tarnished copper plumbing parts, all on a long cord. Later, Norman will no doubt describe it as looking like something strangled and washed up on the high-tide line.
‘That young couple, perhaps?’ The woman has answered her own question before they can reply. ‘I didn’t see them get back on.’
And she’s right: through the window, Margot can see the couple on the path leading back towards the baleen struts of the visitors’ centre. The boy has wrapped his muscled arms around the girl’s shoulders, and his chin is resting where her hair parts into two sleek plaits. Did we use to be like that, once, Margot wonders? Staring down at the liver spots on the back of Norman’s hand, it’s difficult to dredge up the memories. But yes, there was a time when they were rarely apart. For a moment, she experiences a strong physical memory, of Norman’s hands on her shoulders, of her pulling his arms around from behind, savouring the warmth of his chest against her back. A beach, somewhere cold: Wales, probably. Cheap, if not cheerful; no need to spend more than necessary, she can hear him saying.
Then the coach driver presses the horn, and the young couple break apart, laughing. The girl’s got her hand to the place where she thinks her heart is, as if that youthful vessel might not cope with the shock of the blast. She turns towards the bus, but the boy pulls her back a moment, presses his lips on hers, one plait caught up in his fingers. We used to kiss like that once, Margot thinks. Urgent, so you could feel the jolt of it run through you.
‘Fancy a min
t?’ Norman’s asking, but when Margot looks back wearily, he’s not addressing her. He’s leaning across towards the woman over the aisle, the knuckles of his other hand white on the hand-rest as if reaching out a lifebuoy for a fallen shipmate. When he offers one to Margot, she declines, but then wishes afterwards she’d accepted; it would have been a welcome distraction from the spit and crunch of mastication beside her ear.
There is more waiting and shuffling when they get to the museum in Salisbury, but it’s not so bad: the sun has come out, and in the museum’s garden, the borders are full of freesias and agapanthus, dusky honeybees drawn to the purple allium globes in the centre of the bed. Two suited gentlemen are supporting each other down the last step of some other coach, and Margot smiles to watch them, then realises that perhaps they are only ten years older, and yet they are so very old.
As she stands in the shadow of Johannes von Stumm’s Goliath, a vast gatekeeper of granite and glass, it seems impossible that she and Norman could ever be so ancient. Surely it was barely yesterday they were students in Highgate, then not long after, walking the jungle in Ecuador, as if nothing could touch them? Moments, surely, since that wild night—so unlikely now—with the shaman on the riverbank, vomiting wild dreams on ayahuasca. Swimming together afterwards in the Jurumbaino River, holding hands against the crocodiles. Were there even wilting passionfruit flowers looped into her hair, or has she made up that bit? She breathes out a laugh, acknowledging the lure of the museum tea shop’s tin chairs on the far lawn, wondering how long she will be obliged to feign interest in hand axes and old bones.
‘Wilfully stupid,’ Norman mutters.
It’s the American couple again, a few steps ahead in the queue, still mispronouncing Salisbury as they discuss the buildings they’ve passed through the town.
She watches Norman thrust a note into the donations box on the threshold, banging it down with the heel of his hand, his frown deepening when the tenner catches in the Perspex chute and is left dangling above the silted coins below. Margot feels a pang of something: it might be sympathy, God forbid it’s pity. She touches his hand—because Norman is not too tight at all, never has been—but he doesn’t notice. He’s already striding on, impatient as if the dusty remnants of those who walked these hills and valleys long ago might not wait a moment longer.
It’s cooler inside, and the open rooms come as a relief. She has lost sight of Norman, but the exhibits hold her attention more than she had expected. Alone, she moves from one glass case to the next, pulling her spectacles from her bag to read the cards and marvel at the delicacy of a beaten gold pendant, twelve hundred years old, and a perfect teardrop of jadeite, fashioned by some Neolithic craftsman into a flawless axe-head.
In the Wessex Gallery, she is surprised to come upon the Turner watercolour Norman was so exercised about, and she steps close to see for herself the curious way the man had with light: thunderclouds which seem at once menacing and touched with gold, lightning threaded through sunlight. Beside the fallen shepherd and their stricken fellows, the rest of the flock of sheep graze on, oblivious. The great sarsen stones of the monument seem delicate and other-worldly beneath the raging, chemical sky.
Norman’s there on the far side of the gallery when she steps back at last, but he’s bent over the resting place of the Amesbury Archer, peering at the skeleton between what remains of his hair. It wasn’t such a bad joke, about the shepherd, she thinks. Norman used to be known for his wit. He’s moving on now, to examine the ridges in an aurochs’ horn. Margot smiles as she turns away.
She’s staring down at a mosaic pavement, admiring the drop handles of a water jug motif and wondering whether something similar might work as a bathroom tile, when they hear the thud through the gallery’s thin walls. A heavy slump, like the slip of old masonry. There’s a commotion in the main hall now, and as Margot steps away from the pavement, one of the receptionists appears in the gallery doorway with her hand to her mouth. Then before the cry for a doctor’s even gone up, Norman’s moving, disappearing through the doorway at a pace she hasn’t seen for years.
If she had to guess, she’d have put money on it being one of the Americans; the man, because there’s no immediate sign of him when she reaches the reception hall, and his wife’s there with her cap off and a tissue to her nose. But when the murmuring crowd around the desk shifts a moment, Margot sees that she’s wrong; it’s the larger of the East London dames lying prone—the West African woman, whose gilt earrings chimed with tiny bells when she moved. Now, she is on her back, her eyes closed. The loose fabric of her blue and gold dashiki blouse has feathered out like a doomed parachute, and her face looks pale and waxy against the chestnut polish of the parquet. Beside her, her Indian friend fidgets with the tunic’s fabric until its bold print runs straight, then unfurls the fingers of her companion’s hand to clutch them with her own. And Norman’s on his knees beside the Indian woman, leaning close to say something, laying a hand on her shoulder as he does it. Sometimes, that is all there is left to do.
Afterwards, as they wait for the ambulance to bear the body away, Margot thinks about Norman’s hands: they might be draped with loose skin now, and sun-freckled, but there is still so much kindness in them. And as they sit side by side in the coach on the way home, with the upright woman across the aisle asleep behind her gold frames, Margot lifts the armrest between the two of them. She places her palm on the back of Norman’s hand, fanning her fingers across his. He blinks, twice, then turns over her palm; traces a finger down the life line, the head line, the line of the heart.
The coach slows as they pass the strange green hillock of Old Sarum, and he leans over to place a kiss on the crinkled skin of her cheek. Once, briefly lost in that Ecuadorian rainforest, they navigated home by the lines in their palms, or so they told their children. There are so many more lines now. She leans against him, grateful for the lines they have travelled together.
Lobster Scissors
She was always a storyteller, my mother. A good mimic, too. A clown, even, when the urge took her. Though like the best clowns, she had a darker side.
The first time I heard her tell this story—the story of the girl—was many years ago, when I had not long left home myself. I remember my brother, Reuben, and I laughing as she conjured up the German couple on the cruise ship who’d told it to her: Herr What-Not, with his awkward cough, and the tight Berliner accent that lent his English a staccato edge; and Frau, with her wincing pretensions, and the blanket she tucked round her knees over dinner, even though the billowing steam of the ship’s infernal kitchens made this absurd. This German woman had brought on board a strange pair of pink scissors, which particularly delighted my mother, the only apparent purpose of which was to snip the shell and sever the tendons between the joints of lobster claws. She had watched, fascinated, as the older woman cleaned the blades with the edge of a napkin after their one use, before hanging them back around her neck on their gold chain. The trip had been my mother's first away since Dad's death, and I remember we were pleased to see the return of her smile.
It was never a funny story, but the story of the girl held no horror then. While they navigated the slate waters of the Norwegian fjords in that great behemoth, what Herr and Frau recounted to my mother was little more than a fairy story. A girl lost from a wooded village, who returned years later; subtly changed, her memory gone. The details were few: the village was not named, though apparently it was not the couple's own. They had boarded at Warnemünde, having retired to the seaside resort beside the great port. But the story took place somewhere nearby, they implied. They did not claim to know the girl. Still, drawn by something in the story, my mother sought them out again later in the trip. The couple were elusive, and when she did track them down, the closeness of that night had dispersed, she said, and she did not press them on it.
A spooky story, then. Dark, in the tradition of German fairy tales. But by the time it reached my mother’s lips, it was told to us lightly by a woman still i
n the prime of life, and it was as much about the idiosyncrasies of the source as the fairy tale beneath.
It was twenty years before I heard my mother tell the story again, and much had changed. Her strength had waned, and perhaps for us all, the world had grown darker.
We were in the aquarium down by the docks, the day my mother saw fit to tell the story again. It was a rare day out together. Reuben had taken a day off from the oncology ward to join us, and my oldest, Hannah, had consented to spend a single day apart from her monosyllabic friends. The aquarium was a choice of convenience: only my younger child, Barney, had any real interest in the fish, but it was easy to park and find, and the accessibility of the place meant that, even in the hated wheelchair she used by then for excursions, my mother could maintain the illusion of independence.
When we got there, I liked it more than I expected. There was something soothing in the darkness. Ribbons of light rippled across plaster rocks and combined in lacy arrays over the sleek backs of reef sharks. Plump anemones glistened between fronds of purple weed. But it was a strange place for my mother to retell that old story; I'm not sure why the urge took her. The children were with us, as I said, and Barney, though eleven, was still an impressionable child. Hannah, who at eighteen strained against almost all organised activity, seemed sleepy, half-hypnotised by the play of the light. My mother had positioned herself in front of the curving theatre of the main tank—a performer, always—and behind her, an octopus had suckered itself to the front. What a strange, pustuled star; pink flesh stretched pale across the glass. I remember both the children had wide eyes in the neon glow as she began.
As the story rolled out, I noticed at once that it had grown. The girl disappeared, as before, but as my mother told it now, strange happenings began to occur in her absence. Wells ran dry, and small plagues overtook the village: frogs, red-eyed mice, fat-bodied spiders that entered the ears at night. Crying was heard by woodsmen and poachers—screams sometimes—but the direction was always indistinct, and the girl could never be found. When at last she did emerge, her tongue withered from lack of use, all the clothes had rotted from her body. Unable to explain or forget her ordeal, she went mad, quite mad, and threw herself from the bridge into the river that ran through the village’s heart, while it rolled and heaved in unseasonal spate.
