Nightingale Point

by Luan Goldie

  ‘And what happens now?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s up to you and Malachi.’

  They come out of the room, Mary first, and she notices how Harris and Malachi look past her to Tristan, to gauge his reaction.

  Malachi steps forward and hands Tristan his stick. ‘You want to get out for a bit?’

  Tristan nods and allows Mary to squeeze his hand. She watches the boys leave, noticing how sloped Tristan is when he walks, how slow. He’s right, there’s so much she’s missed.

  ‘I’m sorry it went so badly,’ Harris says as he joins her by the window. ‘Tristan has missed you so much; I’m surprised by his reaction.’

  But Mary isn’t. With every day she stayed away, every call from him she didn’t take, she knew it would hurt him more and more.

  ‘What did Malachi mean about everyone needing to forgive something?’

  Harris pulls the curtains shut and then sits on the armchair. ‘They’ve both been through a lot; those first few months after the crash were quite intense.’

  It’s clear Harris is not yet ready to tell her the details and nor does she deserve them. She takes the tea in her hand and it feels so silly, how they are pretending to be normal.

  ‘And you? Do you think you can forgive me?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course I forgive you, but …’ He sighs. ‘Things can’t go back to how they were before. What’s happened has changed everything and I want different things now. Having the boys here, it’s been challenging but it’s made me want more than I had before. I don’t want you to be a woman I see once in a while. I want more than that.’

  But again, the vows, she took them, all those years ago in the local church, with the baskets of sun-bleached plastic flowers. They are set in stone.

  ‘Mary, I don’t need an answer now, but I do want you to be clear on what it is I want.’

  Finally, Mary thinks of the engagement ring studded with rubies as pink as the hibiscuses back home, and then she gives Harris her answer.

  Five Years Later

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Chapter Forty-Five ,Jay

  After so long alone, Jay finds he enjoys the company of sound: the coughs and grunts, the snoring and clearing of throats, the breathing and movements of others. A door is dragged shut against the uneven carpet in the corridor, the lock turns and the handle is pulled to double-check the security of the valuables inside. Jay waits for the sound of footsteps, fingerprint unique, and by the fourth step he is able to identify which of the nameless occupiers of forty-nine Cassland Road has just left. He listens to them constantly, these footsteps up and down, some heavy and deliberate, others quick and skittish, and this particular one, careless and clumsy.

  It’s 10.55 a.m. The new kettle is taking too long to boil. Jay flips the lid. The steam wets his face and inside small pieces of polystyrene bob violently in the water. The instructions read: Rinse before first use, but he chose not to follow them. The tortellini looks unappetizing as it falls into the plastic sieve in one solid lump. He’d found the sieve in the sparsely stocked cupboards. ‘All your essentials,’ his caseworker said, to which Jay smirked about how indulged a man would have to be to think a sieve essential. The boiled water cooks his meal and he sits on his bed to consume the soft, wet globules, filled with something vaguely cheese-like. It’s always the same crap they press on him at the food bank. The kind of stuff people are always clearing their cupboards of: sweet corn and baby potatoes in tins, red lentils, muesli, cup-a-soups.

  11.04 a.m. He will leave soon. He has to.

  A patch of dried red skin on his elbow flakes. Is he pouring the washing powder too generously? Pamela always used to say that was the cause of his psoriasis.

  There’s a lopsided mirror on the back of the door. Despite a grey face and lined skin, the reflection looks like a man much younger than Jay feels. The longer he looks, the more he recognizes the man as a ghost, still in the same camouflage trousers and yellow T-shirt he wore that day, five years ago, as he stood and watched the building burn.

  Pamela, at five years old, comes to mind: her refusal of haircuts and brown bread, the snorting noise she made when giggling too enthusiastically, the Rainbow Brite pyjamas she ordered him to buy her. Jay wishes his memories could make him smile.

  11.30 a.m. He needs to leave now or risk being late. Or risk changing his mind about going at all. He grabs his oxblood boots. The original ones were pulled from his feet years ago as he slept under a carriageway. His feet smart as he pulls at the laces. Last Christmas at the shelter there was a podiatrist, who was too young and too kind. She bathed his feet in a bucket of warm, soapy water before chipping away, and Jay wondered what kind of father would let his daughter spend Christmas Day at a homeless shelter with men like that? Men like him. If Jay had his daughter back he wouldn’t let her out of his sight ever again.

  He locks the door to his room tightly, and wonders if anyone is listening to his footsteps as he descends the staircase. What would his slow and careful walk say about him?

  The walls are lined with posters, which spell out the price of violating house rules. Strongly worded threats of eviction, decorated with clip art images of sad faces and the charity’s sunny logo. They sit alongside posters for AA meetings, the Samaritans, the local needle exchange and methadone clinic. The back of the front door hosts a new sign: Please respect our neighbours when coming and going. As Jay steps out of the house, he clocks a woman, one of the neighbours, her eyes full of disdain. She glances at him and quickens her step. No one wants a house on their street to be filled with men like Jay, the dregs of society. The smell of destitution probably emanates from number forty-nine; he can imagine it flowing between the plane trees and Volvos as it pollutes the air.

  On the tube he closes his eyes and hopes for the heat and motion to put him to sleep. But he can’t drift off, so instead he reads every advert and studies the spider of coloured lines on the map. The carriage fills and he looks into the faces of others. They all have secrets, dark pasts and regrets. No one has ever asked his story, not on the streets and not in Cassland Road. Sometimes other men talk about their histories, to share or brag, even to confess, he is never sure. Tales of wife-beating, affairs, loss and unemployment, gambling, drugs, drink. They all have a similar tale, but no one has been through what Jay has, no one has suffered such a great loss.

  As he waits for the bus, he becomes aware of the quiver in his legs. The journey is going too smoothly, too quickly. He will soon be there, and will have to face it.

  The bus passes by the William Hill. It’s shocking to see the unchanged exterior and how it pulls him back to the moment he has replayed in his head many times over the years. Perched on one of the high stools at the bookies, his hands clutched together as he urged the horse on under his breath. It was hot that day, the air was close, and sweat ran down the back of his T-shirt. His luck was about to change. Then, over the sound of a fast-talking commentator and slap of the horses’ hooves, there was a sharp bang followed by a boom. Everyone looked at each other. Jay slid off the seat and saw that the man beside him was wearing plastic beach shoes; his pale, naked toes blended in freakishly with the paper betting slips that littered the carpet. People began to move outside, to stand on the street and look up at the smoke and flames in the sky, so close to where they stood. Too close. The memory hurts; physically he feels it.

  The two fourteen-storey towers that make up what remains of the Morpeth Estate come into view, and he gets off the bus on the other side of the field. Everything looks so different; the estate has been remodelled around its famous missing piece. There are new trees and flowers to be neglected, a swing park to be ruined by local street rats, a sandpit for dogs to shit in. Bile starts to rise in his throat. The key is in his hand again, the gate locked, his mind at rest knowing Pamela is safely out of harm’s way.

  He stalls on the green and lets a bench take his weight; he can’t go any further.

  ‘Has it really been five years?’ A woma
n in a black felt hat beside him asks. Between them sits a bunch of roses, in romantic shades of pink and red. ‘Feels like yesterday.’ She tips her head to one side as she waits for him to agree. ‘Don’t it?’

  But she’s wrong; it feels so distant, a lifetime ago, almost as if it happened to a different person. Sometimes it’s like Pamela never existed at all.

  The woman’s flowers are plastic.

  ‘I lost my photos in there,’ she says. ‘Ten years’ worth of photos from the Chelsea Flower Show. Used to go every year. Even had photos of Her Majesty.’ She tuts several times, as if seducing a bird Jay can’t see. ‘All gone; the fire took them. But it didn’t take me.’

  Pamela’s school had given Jay the photo they had of her on file, smiling brightly in her uniform, her ponytail high on her head, her tie slightly wonky.

  He feels the light hand of the woman as she pats his shoulder. It’s embarrassing, he doesn’t want to sit and cry on a bench like this in front of this stranger.

  ‘You never get over something like this, do you?’ the woman says.

  She removes her hand and uses it to push herself up slowly from the bench. Quickly she switches her handbag from one arm to another, before collecting up her bunch of plastic roses and crossing Sandford Road to join the crowds.

  Every year on this day he comes here, and every year he can’t bring himself to get any closer than this. Grief is meant to be private, but these people make such a scene. He hates the way they dress up for it, the way they let the cameras in, the way they think some stupid memorial stone will make any difference to how much it still hurts.

  Five years. It’s a long time. Long enough for him to get closer today, to see the place where he lost her. Slowly, he crosses the road, taking care not to make eye contact with any of the others; he’s not part of their group because he’s not blameless.

  It doesn’t take long before Jay spots him, standing out in the crowd, taller than Jay remembers and looking older, because of course he got to grow up while Pamela is stuck as a sixteen-year-old. Malachi turns and they lock eyes, the first time since the six-month anniversary. Jay often reimagines that fight happening in private, where Malachi would have been free to let all his aggression out, to keep hold of Jay’s neck so he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this anymore.

  Malachi’s face momentarily hardens and he looks away, off to the pointless block of stone everyone is here to see. Somewhere on it is Pamela’s name, but he won’t be able to look at it, not yet, not today. Perhaps Malachi feels the same way, wandering around the edges of the crowd, his head bowed. He stops and turns to face Jay once again. So much happened back then, so many things that can’t be unsaid or changed. But today isn’t about that, it’s not about Jay or Malachi, it’s about acknowledging Pamela, the sixteen-year-old girl who loved laughing and milkshakes and running till she could no longer feel her legs. The girl they both loved. They share a look, which Jay feels is not filled with violence or regret, but with understanding of what they’ve both lost.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Chapter Forty-Six ,Mary

  The memorial has been placed in the middle of the field rather than in the actual space where Nightingale Point once stood. It is bordered tastefully with flowerbeds and in her head Mary hears Harris listing the merits of each plant. How they would have been chosen for their beauty or hardiness across the seasons. She is glad he is here to support her today, yet knows that when she comes face to face with David’s name cut into the memorial stone for the first time, she should be alone. The memorial itself is not what she expected: three thick concrete discs stacked one on top of the other. A loop of text is chiselled into each ring: one bears the date of the crash, the other the names of the victims, and the final holds a sentiment of how we must never forget. Mary looks at the thirty-nine names etched around the rings, like declarations of love on a wedding band. Then she sees it: David Tuazon. She places her flower on the top, a single white lily like the ones David’s mother used to grow in her garden back home.

  Mary has waited for this. This place to sit quietly and remember the man she had, as a nineteen-year-old trainee nurse, fallen in love with. In a few months, on David’s birthday, she will make his favourite food – oxtail stew – and bring it here, along with her Discman. She will listen to sixties pop music while overlooking the Morpeth Estate, the place they were meant to start their lives abroad together.

  Nothing ever works out how you planned it.

  She thinks back to that strange time when she was reunited with Harris, Malachi and Tristan. How odd it was to find them all cooped up together in the bungalow and how warm it felt when she moved in there too. They spent that winter squeezed in, eating soup and arguing over what films to watch. Tristan’s anger towards her slowly thawed, but even now she occasionally catches him looking at her curiously, like he’s trying to work out who she really is.

  Then the boys were finally rehoused, and for the first time, it was just Harris and Mary. And it was wonderful.

  The Virgin Mary’s arms on the old broken fob watch, which she keeps in her pocket, show half past twelve. Mary rubs the face. She decided years ago there was a kind of beauty in its cheapness, the way the saint’s arms have to reach awkwardly to indicate the numerals, the greening of the silver that has become more prominent over the years, the way it smells both metallic and perfumed. Soon, someone will ring a bell and everyone will stand in silence to think of all they lost on that day.

  ‘Is that it?’ A woman stands next to her and huffs. ‘Some poxy bit of concrete?’

  But no, it’s beautiful. Even next week, when the flowers wilt and brown, and next month, when the polish dulls, and in the coming years, out here in the wind and rain, isolated in the middle of the grass, with the cold sinking into it, it will still be beautiful. This memorial will have a whole life out here. A piece of David will always be here.

  Harris is talking with Julia and John, the awkwardness of their relationship more evident today than any other. He catches Mary’s eyes and they smile at each other through the small crowd.

  ‘Goodbye, David,’ she says, then walks over to her husband, her son and daughter, and her grandbabies.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Chapter Forty-Seven ,Malachi

  ‘Malachi Roberts?’

  He turns towards the familiar voice, grateful for a distraction after seeing Jay.

  ‘It’s so good to see you.’

  He struggles to place the face of the woman in front of him, but allows her to hug him; her hair smells like fried food. As they part, Malachi checks his bunch of blue and white flowers haven’t been squashed by her embrace.

  ‘You look well,’ she says. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased to see you.’

  He nods. It’s hard to remember everyone from back then and he is yet to attend one of the Nightingale Point Survivor Meetings, the invitations for which still arrive at Harris’s address twice a year. The very idea of being a ‘survivor’ makes him feel like a fake.

  ‘So, how have you been?’ she asks. There’s a softness in her face, which takes him back to those afternoons with Pamela in the Turkish café. It’s then he realises she’s the waitress, one of the few people who played audience to his short relationship with Pamela. It sends him back five years, to big white plates of greasy chips and thick splodges of unmixed milkshake powder.

  ‘I’m okay. And you?’

  ‘Well, you know what it’s like, busy as always.’ She laughs. The blue evil eye pendant stares at him from her cleavage. ‘You don’t live around here anymore, do you? Most people moved away after. It must make it easier.’ She looks to the ground, embarrassed, as if she’s spoken out of turn.

  ‘Yeah, but my brother’s still in London, though not around here.’

  ‘How is your brother? I’ll never forget reading his story.’ She closes her eyes and puts a hand on her chest. ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s around here somewhere. Do you know him?’

  ‘O
h no, love. I only read about him. I don’t think he ever came into the café with you. And what do you do now? Did you get those big dreams you were chasing? Always with your head in a book. It was architecture, wasn’t it?’

  He feels embarrassed for his younger self, the ambitious twenty-one-year-old, focused on getting qualified and making a success of himself. That’s all most people knew him as from back then: Tristan’s older brother, the one who was always studying.

  ‘Well, I’m still an assistant. I’m two years off my original plan because of,’ he nods up towards the blocks, ‘because of what happened.’ He is never quite sure how to refer to ‘it’. He’s uncomfortable with the words ‘tragedy’ or ‘accident’, nor can he bring himself to use the simple drama of ‘the plane crash’. It sounds so sensational, too cinematic.

  ‘And I know you’re still young –’ she blushes – ‘but I’m curious, did you meet anyone? I always think how close you and Pamela were. How hard it must have been to go through losing a girlfriend like that. Sorry, I’m prying,’ she says. ‘Ignore me.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Actually, I did meet someone.’ He smiles at the ground, but it feels wrong to talk about his happiness today.

  ‘That’s great.’

  What are they expected to talk about next? Malachi wishes Tristan, the king of small talk, was by his side.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like five years,’ he says, to get off the subject and because it’s what he thinks he’s meant to say, to feel. It’s what people have been saying all day. ‘Or does it?’

  ‘Sometimes it feels like yesterday and other times it feels like it never happened at all.’ She looks up at the space left by Nightingale Point, then turns back quickly, a small smile on her lips. ‘It’s good to see you again. Take care.’ She pulls him in for another hug, squeezing his arms as they part.