Your Blue Eyed Boy

by Helen Dunmore

  SIXTEEN

  There’s a red post van at our gate, its engine running. The postman’s sorting through a handful of letters. He sees me, picks out three envelopes, gives me a long stare. He’s new. I hold the letters in my hand, not looking at them.

  ‘Where’s Pete?’

  ‘Taken a sickie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry –’

  ‘That’s how it goes,’ says the boy who can’t be more than twenty-five, with his yellow hair pulled back in a ponytail and his look of doing the job as long as it suits him and not a second longer. He wouldn’t dream of bumping a bike down here, over the ruts, the way Pete Titheradge’s had to do. Fifteen years, he’s been the postman down here. But the yellow-haired boy has got his smart scarlet van and his bad news and he’s happy. He gets back in the van, reverses sharply so his rear wheels spin into the turf, then shoots forward.

  The top letter is airmail. The stamps are US stamps. I don’t have to open it to know that it’s a letter from Michael. I don’t have to open it, either, to tell by its weight that there is more than a letter inside the envelope. I stuff the other two letters into my jeans pocket, and rip Michael’s open. For a moment it frightened me, his trick of being in two places at once. Michael is here, a few fields away, down by the sea. Michael is between my hands, in this letter. But I know he meant me to feel this way, and the thought makes me recover. He might have posted this letter himself, just before leaving. Letters from America can take five days to arrive. Or he might have left it behind for someone else.

  ‘Mail this for me Saturday, would you? I don’t want it to get there too quick.’

  I can almost see the hand taking the letter. I could put my own hand out and push it down, gently. No, don’t do that. You don’t know what he’s asking you to do.

  He’s got me jumping at shadows. I open the letter, see the slick backs of photos. I don’t turn them over. I unfold the letter first.

  Dear Simone

  Do you like getting mail ? I like it because it’s been touched. Faxes and e-mails don’t give you the same buzz, do they? Mail smells of people. Don’t you believe that? Did you just lift up this letter and smell it? I knew it. I know you so well.

  I’m here now, here with you. You know that already. Do you remember that time we barbecued chicken and shrimp, down by the water? Then we went back up to the cabin and Calvin came with us and took some pictures. We had to hold you up. You were out of it, Simone. You won’t remember a thing. But it was a beautiful night.

  Remember I love you. You can’t get away from that.

  He hasn’t signed the letter. I turn the photographs over. They are close-ups of me and Michael. I’m lying on my back, wrapped in a long blue cheesecloth dress, my hair long too, spread out so that Michael is lying on it. He holds my left hand in both his hands, and he presses it against his cheek. There seems to be nothing there but tenderness. We smile slackly, at space, not at the camera. In the second picture the cheesecloth dress is rucked around my waist. It is Calvin on the cushions at my side now. He is naked. I might be asleep. My eyes are closed, though the smile is still on my lips. Calvin’s hand rests between my thighs. He is not asleep, but resting, deep in some peaceful place I would have said he never visited. In the third photo I am back with Michael, both of us sleeping or pretending to sleep. Michael wears the blue dress, and I am naked.

  The pictures are sad, but only because everything in them has long since disappeared. They describe that time twenty years ago in a way that bears no resemblance to the descriptions in my head. We look at ease. We look as if we all belong to one another.

  Now I remember the barbecue. Michael built a circular stone fireplace on the beach, choosing heavy, smooth grey stones. He made a fire of driftwood and let it burn for a long while, feeding it fresh wood until the stones were hot and there were layers of red ash under the flames. As it grew dark the ash glowed. I sat opposite him and watched him. I remember his face in the firelight, and his hands which knew just where to place each lump of wood so it would burn right. I had my knees drawn up to my chin and my blue cheesecloth skirt stretched tight over them. When Michael moved out of the firelight he seemed to disappear. One gulp of the shadows and our fire would be swallowed.

  Calvin was going to come later with a jug of white wine and some grass. We hadn’t drunk anything yet. I’d been swimming just before dark and my hair was still damp; now I had my back to the sea and I listened to it retreating. There was a breeze which flagged the flames then blew them straight again, but it was warm. Every so often flakes of fire would break off the wood and smoulder on the pebbles, then die into darkness. We didn’t talk much. Michael was putting the shrimp he’d marinated in garlic sauce onto the barbecue rack. He had chunks of white fish on skewers, too, brushed with oil, wrapped in long coils of lemon peel, with lemon mayonnaise to dunk them in when they were browned. I didn’t know much about food then, and I didn’t know what kind of fish it was. But the texture was firm and the flesh meaty, with sweet white juice. The lemon peel got singed but its oil had already flavoured the fish.

  Michael knew how to cook crab and lobster. He’d gut and fillet the fish he caught, or a friend gave him. I would watch him hold the fish still in one hand, a last shudder kicking through it, then knock it against a stone. When he gutted the fish his knife seemed to find its way into an invisible seam and open it, a bright red spilling line. I never realized that fish had so much blood in them. And a heap of glistening innards that he threw on the fire. We gorged because fish was no good if it wasn’t fresh. It seemed wonderful to me, what he did, though when I got used to it I realized that everybody who lived year-round in Annassett had the skills Michael had. They all fished and hunted and knew how to use a knife and a gun. They all knew what the tides were doing and which channels to follow when they took a boat out of harbour, and where to place lobster-pots. They didn’t need to think about it. But I was a city girl, and from England too, and it was like a door opening wide onto a world I’d never thought I could live in. The way Michael would take a boat out, so easily, as if it was the same as walking down the street.

  He took me out from the beginning, in the Susie Ann. I thought he didn’t notice that the sea frightened me. One day we were out beyond the harbour, fishing. The sky piled up with cloud and the wind chopped the tops off the waves and threw them away in spume. I held onto the side of the boat as it rocked, and willed Michael to notice, to look up at the darkening sky and pull the lines in and turn the boat home. But he kept on baiting up hooks. Suddenly he looked up at me and I realized he’d been aware of me and of the weather too, all along.

  ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen now, Simone?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t like the weather. What’s the worst that could happen?’

  ‘The boat could capsize, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah? And?’

  ‘We’d drown. I couldn’t swim to shore from here.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Michael, and it was true, he was a poor swimmer. ‘So we drown. That’s the very worst thing that could happen, right?’

  ‘Well – yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘OK. So help me with these hooks.’

  The boat pitched, and we stayed out a long while, not catching anything because the weather wasn’t right for it. But after that I felt easy in the boat. Michael taught me to take out a little dinghy, and then I capsized, lots of times, and learned what to do when I did. It was hard at first and I felt as dumb on the water as someone learning a new language. But I began to see what it would be like when I wasn’t clumsy any more but was going the way the sea wanted me to go, with bubbles racing along the side of the boat, and the kick of the tide.

  Michael’s fire burned down to a mound of ash. The stones around it were too hot to touch. I thought we could have broiled the fish on them, but Michael balanced the barbecue grill over the fire. Oil dripped and hi
ssed on the stones. He kept turning the skewers so the fish would brown evenly. The lemon peel crisped and frizzled. Michael threw a coil of it into the fire. Flame burst out of the ash and swallowed it. The flame ran for a while over the surface of the ash, like blue brandy fire on a Christmas pudding.

  We sat back on our heels and ate. Michael handed me a skewer offish, and put the barbecued shrimp down on the hot stone in front of me. They kept on cooking, seething in the frill of oily bubbles around their bodies. I pulled off the heads and tails, stripped away the body shell and shucked out the naked sweet flesh. Calvin was late, so we had nothing to drink with the food, but I didn’t mind that. I dug out fish fibres from between my teeth, and threw my wooden skewers onto the fire. Then we went down to the water and dipped our hands to wash off the fish and oil. The sea was black, with no reflections. It was a warm night, but clouded. I pulled up my dress and waded in up to my knees, then to my thighs. The water swayed and wobbled around me. It was warm too, and quiet, with the waves collapsing softly on the shore. Michael waded the other way, looking into the water as if he could see things there, though I knew he couldn’t. It was habit. Behind us the fire glowed. There was no one else on the beach that night. I stood still and felt the tug which meant the tide was still going out. I looked towards England and I was happy I wasn’t there. It seemed far away and unimportant. I was deep in something, and all the unhappiness I’d felt with Michael was caught up with an excitement that made me cling onto where I was like someone on the dazzling top of a wheel.

  So now when I stand in front of my house and look at the photographs Michael has put in his letter, I see the way these pictures would look on the desk of the Lord Chancellor, or on the desk of a newspaper editor who cares about the morality of Britain’s judges. But I see other things. It was a beautiful night. And is that blackmail, or is it something more? The third thing I see is the youth of our flesh. If you put out a finger and dented those buttocks, the flesh would spring back. I am so used to the tired softness of my own body that it’s almost shocking to see what it was like once, before the children were born. There are no thread veins on the thighs. The stomach lies snug between the smooth hipbones. The face, drugged, drunk, out of it, is smooth as a plum. Even Michael is more like my sons than my husband. I used to think he looked so much older, his face grooved by experience. Now I see how young he was. His black hair shines like my children’s hair.

  I’ve missed a photo. It was stuck to the third one. I peel the two apart, and there they are, Michael and Calvin, face to face, breast to breast, naked, entwined. Michael’s face is covered by his hair. Calvin’s is closed, all the features drawn tight. A rumpled scrap of blue cheesecloth pokes out from under Calvin’s thighs.

  I’ve lost a lot of memory. Sometimes you have to, when there’s no way of organizing the past into a pretty shape, or even a shape you can live with. And when there’s no need to, either, because you’ve closed the door on it and you’re never going to see any of those people again. Those must have been my hands that squeezed the shutter, my eye that looked in the viewfinder and checked that everything I wanted was in the frame. But I don’t remember any of it. It’s all been wiped away with a clean click; and not just that night, but night after night after night.

  ‘Simone!’

  It’s Donald. It’s Donald at the window, leaning out. How long’s he been there?

  ‘It’s eight o’clock!’ he shouts. ‘You’re going to be late. Where have you been?’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Any letters?’ asks Donald.

  ‘Just a couple. Here.’ I take them out of my right-hand jeans pocket, keeping the one from Michael in the left pocket.

  ‘What were you looking at, out there?’

  ‘What? Oh, nothing. Just some notes for today. I must go and get changed quick, I’m late. What’s that you’ve got?’

  There’s a whisk of lettered paper, but Donald folds up the letter without showing it to me.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he says, baring his teeth in a smile. He’s very thin. He’s lost so much weight since we came here. And he’s stooping. If it was me I’d go out and get a job in a shop. How many times have I thought that to myself, vindictively, on the way home. Or on a petrol forecourt. Anything. But it’s clear that he can’t. The fight’s over. He looks ill and old this morning, and evasive too. No use thinking of that now. I run upstairs, unzip my jeans and trample them down while I pull on bra and blouse. I’m dressed and washed, hair combed, shoes found, in less than ten minutes. I look awful. Matt grabs me on the landing and begins a frantic story about handwriting homework. I cut him off.

  ‘Tell Dad to write a note and say your pen broke.’

  ‘I can’t do that! If he puts that you’ll have to get me another pen, because she knows what my pen looks like.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Matt, how can she know what thirty-two children’s pens look like?’

  ‘She does! She does! She’s going to kill me and then she’ll give me so much homework I won’t be able to go out all weekend.’

  ‘OK.’ I run to the bathroom, bang open the cabinet, seize the bandage. ‘Give me your right hand.’

  I run the bandage round and round his first two fingers and his thumb. ‘Hold it there while I get a plaster.’

  Matt holds it, staring at me dumbly. I fix the plaster on, as tight as I can.

  ‘There. Now that’s why you didn’t do your homework.’

  ‘But she won’t let me play football at dinnertime if I’ve hurt my hand.’

  ‘That’s your problem. Take it off if you want.’

  We lock eyes. Slowly his head droops. Take it off, Mum.’

  ‘Good. Come in here where I’ve got my scissors.’

  I scissor it off. Matt rubs his hand. ‘She’d think our family was always having accidents, anyway.’

  ‘That’s right. She’ll be ringing up the NSPCC any day now, so watch it. You might get taken away.’

  ‘I could ring Childline!’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, go on. Give me a break.’

  His face curls into a smile. I hug him, trying to lift him and pull him tight as I used to do, but he’s too heavy.

  ‘listen, say goodbye to Joe for me. I don’t know what he’s playing at but we’re all going to be late. And I’ve got a horrible day.’

  ‘Have you?’ His eyes fix me again, and widen, wondering. I don’t usually talk about work like this to the children. ‘I thought you liked being a judge.’

  ‘No one likes what they do all the time.’

  ‘Oh Mum.’ He wriggles his shoulders, scenting a moral. I turn and go down the stairs two at a time, clattering on the bare boards. The back door is open – Donald getting wood. There’s a piece of paper on the floor. I pick it up, unfold it. It’s the headed letter he hid earlier. Jesus. Jesus. He’s been writing to a loan company. I note the name quickly, scan it. They haven’t lent any money yet, but they’ll be glad to. I’ll bet they will. I drop the letter back and run out of the door. Jesus, Jesus.

  There’s Donald coming out of the woodshed, laden with logs. He smiles at me vaguely.

  ‘Get Joe up, he’s late.’

  Donald’s smile fades. ‘He’s all right. We’ll manage, Simone, we always do.’

  He’s going to let me go without saying goodbye. I yank the car door open, ram in the key so hard it won’t turn until I joggle it loose again. My files and case slither on the back seat. Shouldn’t have left them there, what if someone steals the car? All that confidential stuff. I’ve been forgetting too much, getting sloppy. My mind’s not on it. But I’ve got to be good.

  The car jerks forward and stalls. I try again, and this time it starts and I reverse out. Donald is just going in through the back door. He must have lingered to watch me go, but now he won’t look at me.

  ‘I am pleased to inform you that I have been authorised to offer you a loan of up to five thousand pounds …’

  That letter didn’t come from a bank. Donald has gone to a loan co
mpany. I don’t need to think about how much it will cost to repay those five thousand pounds. I see the procession of clients in my mind’s eye, smoking and sometimes weeping, telling me of the one-off loan, the innocence of it, the ready money that was supposed to pay off all their debts and maybe buy the children’s Christmas as well. That was when I was there to advise them, not to judge them. They told me about the men who came round to the house to collect when they couldn’t keep up with the payments. One man the first time, then three big men. The threats to torch the flat, mark their kids, pour petrol over them and then throw a match on it. Not idle threats, but alive and active. Sometimes I went to see them in hospital. And they still couldn’t pay it back. The loan grew faster than cancer. It seemed to double itself every night they slept. They hadn’t read the small print. I knew clients who disappeared, and one client who killed himself. He did it badly. He jumped out of a window that wasn’t high enough to kill him, then he took an overdose after coming back from hospital with a broken thigh. A few weeks later his wife came to see me, because the men had been round to see her. Now she’d had time to get over her nasty shock, they wanted their money back.

  Donald knows all this. I must have told him some of these stories. Sometimes I came home and I couldn’t sleep for thinking of nicotine-soaked fingers that shook when they picked up a cup of coffee, or a woman living in an eighth-floor flat with her three-year-old son, her baby, and two Dobermanns she didn’t want and didn’t like, but knew she had to have. She was afraid to leave the flat without them, or sleep without knowing that they slept by the front door. She knew what might be waiting out there for her. She asked me to visit her at home. I didn’t see anything as I came in. Only the empty forlornness of the grass outside the flats and the sag of rubbish in black plastic sacks. The Dobermanns circled us the whole time we talked, while the little boy played with a heap of toy cars, and the baby cried. She hadn’t been able to take the dogs out that day, because the baby had a chest infection. She had stopped the boy going to nursery school, just in case. I was afraid of the dogs, and afraid in case they scented my fear. If they went for me, what could she do? Round and round they went, their jaws level with the three-year-old’s face.