by Неизвестный
‘Now isn’t a good time,’ she says. ‘I was just heading to my neighbour’s house. See her there spying on us?’ He turns to look and from her kitchen window Shirley waves at them. Not at all embarrassed at being caught.
‘You should seduce the man I just saw you talking to,’ Shirley says when she lets Marie in the house. Marie laughs as she follows her into the kitchen. Shirley puts some coffee on and Poochini paces her kitchen with his nose glued to the floor.
‘Who’s kidding around, Marie? Shoot, if you don’t I will.’
‘Not interested.’
‘But aren’t you just bored to death out here? Going out with a nice bit of beef like that would be fun.’
‘I’m not so bored. And it’s too much work, trying to find one that’s halfway decent. You have any milk?’
‘Sure.’ Shirley goes to fridge and puts the carton on the table. ‘Who was he anyway?’
‘Wanted to check the water meter.’
‘Oh yeah? Maybe I’ll get him to come by here.’ She grins. ‘I’ve got a meter that needs checking.’
Marie is using a safety pin to work the string of Thomas’s pyjama pants back through the hole. He asks for permission to go play a video game in his room, one where he runs around a military base murdering everyone he sees with some kind of huge gun that shoots white acid. The Freudian implications of his video games astound her.
‘But keep the noise down. Billy is sleeping; his stomach hurts.’
Thomas nods and runs out. After a moment she hears the game’s start-up music. Bored, she goes to the bathroom to try her new lipstick. She puts on mascara too and the eyeliner. A little foundation. Not half bad, she decides, appraising herself in the mirror.
The bathroom window is open and from outside she thinks she hears something. It sounds like – it might be – footsteps shushing through the leaves behind the garage. Then it’s quiet again.
‘Hello?’ she says out the window and is greeted by the sound of nothing but the distant noise of cars on the expressway. She closes the window and locks it.
When the boys are asleep, she gets her old duty Glock out from the safe in her bedroom. She doesn’t like handling the gun again.
She’s sure she’s just being paranoid, but stays up all night in the living room with the TV on, occasionally getting up to check on the boys.
Dinner time. Poochini’s tail thumps the kitchen floor as he looks up at their plates. Billy dabs at his mouth with a paper napkin and lifts his pinkie in the air as he sips from his juice box. She wonders if he’s picked up these flourishes from some television show and smiles down at her plate, happy. She loves both her boys equally but feels guilty for liking Billy just a little bit more.
It’s the afternoon and she’s at her desk, working at translating a brochure, when Poochini gets off her bed, goes into the bathroom and begins to growl. Through the wall she hears him bark once. She closes her dictionary and turns off the radio. Sits totally still at her desk to listen. Nothing. She goes to the phone to call the police, but hesitates with the receiver to her ear then puts it down. Really, she’s not sure why she’s scared. There’s no one here. She’s seen no one.
Near midnight. Marie takes her gun with her to the bathroom. On the toilet she hums a little to herself then flushes. She leaves the Glock on the tank as she washes her hands. Then picks it up, shuts out the bathroom light and leaves.
In the hall she hears Poochini, closed in the bedroom with the boys, scratching at the door and whining.
She waits for a long time in the hall, pressed up against the wall, not sure what she’s waiting for. She’s about to head back to her room when she hears a familiar noise, amplified in the night silence. The shower-curtain rings moving against the metal rod. The curtain was closed, she realizes.
The bathroom door opens slowly. Quietly. The dense dark of a man’s silhouette appears in the looser dark of the hallway and comes towards her. She tries to flatten her body against the wall but still he stumbles into her in the dark. He makes a small, surprised sound and she feels a hot blast of his breath on her forehead before she pulls the trigger. The sound of the shot explodes through the quiet house and the man’s silhouette collapses to the floor.
‘Mommy?’ a scared voice calls out.
‘Stay in there!’ she shouts. ‘Don’t you dare open that door!’
She turns on the light. The man is easing onto his back from his side. She sees the top of his shaved head and that his feet are just inches from the boys’ room. Poochini is barking hysterically, jumping up against the door and making it shudder.
She goes to the man, crouches at his side. The man from the grocery store. He looks stunned and is hyperventilating. She hit him in the left thigh; blood soaks through his jeans. A lot of it. She’s terrified the bullet has hit his femoral artery and that he’ll bleed to death right there at the threshold to the boys’ room.
The phone starts ringing. She guesses Shirley heard the gunshot. The man is still gasping. She’s overwhelmed by the absurd desire to take it back, to pluck the bullet out of him like magic, to fix all the tissue she’s destroyed. She says, ‘Hey. Don’t you die here, all right?’
He nods almost imperceptibly, puts his head back against the floor and closes his eyes.
‘Mom? Was that a gun? Mommy?’ She looks up. Half of Billy’s face right above her, peering out from behind his door and looking scared.
‘Close it! Close it right now!’ Her voice sounds rough in her own ears and panicked. He closes the door.
The man passes out. She doesn’t want the boys to see him, doesn’t trust that they’ll stay in their room. So she takes him by the hands and drags him into the bathroom, where there’s barely enough space for his body on the floor. She reaches out to the door, pulls it closed and locks it.
She hears Billy’s voice: ‘Don’t, Thomas! She said not to.’
There is banging, loud and heavy, on the bathroom door. She says as calmly as she can, ‘Thomas, I’m in the bathroom just this second.’ Under the sink, beside the bathroom cleaner, are rubber gloves, which she puts on. ‘I’m in here.’
‘Mommy, there’s blood. Did you get hurt?’
She smiles, the old trick of smiling to make your voice sound cheerful. Catching a reflection of her face in the mirror she sees that she looks ghastly. ‘I’m fine. I’m OK. Is your brother OK? Is he scared?’
‘He’s OK, I think.’
‘Thomas? Can you please do something for me?’ She clears her voice and starts again, louder. ‘Thomas, can you do me a favour?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Call the police for me, please? Would you?’
She hears his footsteps run across the hall to the living room. But already there’s the distant sound of police sirens.
Gloves on, she checks his unconscious body. She feels a gun in the holster at his waist and takes it. His pockets are empty.
She looks at his face. He’s still breathing. There’s something about his bearing that makes her think he is, or was, in the military. She wonders whom he works for. He’s been watching her. She wonders for how long and feels sick and exposed.
‘Mommy?’ Billy says softly. He’s right outside the door. She looks down at the man. He must’ve known the kids were in the house and the thought makes her angry at him for the first time.
‘Billy? Are you scared?’
He hesitates. She can hear him starting to cry. ‘No!’
‘I’m OK in here. Don’t worry. How are you?’
She hears him sit down by the door. ‘Fine.’
When the doorbell rings she shouts out, ‘Only open it if it’s the police!’
She hears heavy boots come down the hall. There’s a knock on the bathroom door. Poochini is barking and a man’s voice tells him to be quiet. Then it says, ‘Ma’am? It’s the police.’ And he too sounds like he’s from down South.
‘I think he’s alive,’ she says back. ‘Just make sure the boys can’t see in here, OK? Tell them to w
ait in their room. Boys, go back to your room!’
Billy starts screaming. He says to someone, ‘Don’t! Don’t do that. Stop it!’
‘Are you all right?’ she shouts at him through the door. There’s no answer.
She picks up her gun, afraid now that these men aren’t the police. Could they have arrived so fast even if Shirley had called them? Yes. Maybe. She doesn’t know. Her heart is still racing.
‘Ma’am, my partner took them to their room. OK?’
‘Why was he shouting? What’s going on?’ She gets up on the tub again and reaches for the door, ready to go out. She’s got her gun. She’s got to protect her boys. Keep them safe.
‘Nothing. He just, um, was talking to his brother. It’s just me out here, now. Open the door, OK?’
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine, I swear it. But, Ms Mitchell, you’ve got to do something for me now. You’ve got to open up the door, OK? You’ve got to open up and let me see what’s going on in there.’
GRANTA
* * *
FLOWERS APPEAR
ON THE EARTH
Samantha Harvey
* * *
Five weeks after the disaster, at the end of July, the islanders trooped from the church of St Helene to the eastern promontory. At the front of the cortège was the vicar and those carrying urns. These men and women tucked the urns in the crooks of their arms, or held them with both hands, solicitous and anxious, or clasped them to their chests. Behind those the rest of the islanders, who carried bouquets and spades. At the back, the small party of cameramen and journalists from the mainland for whom the island’s acrid smell was new and who could be seen now and again flinching where it collected in sheltered dips. Their track followed a gentle descent along the southern edge of the island, bordered by rhododendron bushes on one side and a low unbroken wall of bracken on the other, and to the front a wide blue vista of sea, waves furling and unfurling on its surface.
As they neared the site of the old factory, the track became a tarmac road which led to gates and barbed-wire fencing, and the smell seemed to catch at the air – a chemical smell, almost stinging, though nobody could pin down exactly what it was like. Something burning, no, something melting or rancid, noxious, rasping, corrosive, miserly. At first it had made the throat sore, though lately not so much, now that the body had adapted. When they reached the site, those with urns put them down and a group of men and women began to dig, one grave for each urn, where the small polished wooden crosses marked a spot. Blackened, friable, the earth gave easily. The seams of dried dye that ran through it might have been mistaken for something naturally occurring, like the striking pigments of fossil moths in oil shale, the beautiful greens, purples and blues. In their deepest sorrow the islanders buried the ashes of their forty-six dead, pushed them back into the ground as if these two finished forces, the earth and the ashes, might find comfort in each other.
How discreet the journalists were in their recording of the scene. What could have been crass was made reverent by their light-footedness and silence, and the tender advances of their cameras towards the bent heads of the diggers, an almost maternal care in the way the lenses attended to the greatest concentrations of pain and anguish. There was a feeling of safety and recognition among the islanders, whose eastward gaze naturally enough turned out from time to time towards the faint heathery scrim of colour that was England’s most south-westerly tip; our motherland, they thought, even those who’d usually have spoken proudly for Tre’s independence.
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
The vicar stood facing east into the wind, and his reading voice was compromised by his own grief. God does marvellous things without number. To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety.
On the first anniversary, the boats came in. Two of them had gone and two were returning, just as the new tradition had it. There was a quiet wait at the head of the jetty where the islanders grouped, tight-jawed and protective of their children, and then two dark specks expanded into form: there’s the prow, the mainsail, there’s the mizzenmast. When the ketches came into view the islanders stood if they hadn’t been standing already and straightened their backs and anticipated some kind of salvation.
The boats quivered back into the harbour on a soft June wind with their flags and festoons rippling. The larger of the boats was called Xanthippe and the smaller Lamprocles, mother and son, in service of all those child–parent bonds that had been broken a year before. After the disaster it was agreed that to commemorate the dead the boats should be sent out to the mainland the day before the anniversary, where an English dignitary of some sort would greet them and lay flowers on the decks. The boats would moor at Penzance overnight, a meal would be shared between the islanders and the dignitaries, and the next morning the islanders would take the thirty-mile crossing back.
So it was, and on the first anniversary the dignitary was no less than the Leader of the Opposition himself, bowing his head empathetically all the way through dinner. I lost my brother recently, he said, my heart goes out to all your families, a waste, a terrible misfortune. He had to leave before dessert, but not before he’d confessed a love of sailing vessels and asked the three islanders about the magnificent ketches in the harbour. On the boats’ return, the people of Tre collected from the decks the forty-six wreaths of roses and lilies from England and made their way to the burial site. There were still tracks between the crosses where the media had first worn their tiptoed routes, slinking under the weight of cameras; like sheep tracks, somebody remarked – sheep tracks cutting across ground in search of something to chew on. For the anniversary a small number of journalists had come to photograph the laying of the flowers and the raw ceremony was conducted – as had been most of Tre’s events over the last year – under the lens.
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground.
He is giving the same reading as last year, one or two of the islanders remarked to themselves as they laid their flowers. God does marvellous things without number. He must be busy doing these marvellous things in England then – went the thinking – because He hasn’t been doing them here. Perhaps the vicar protests too much, perhaps he’s lost his faith. The vicar rounded the graves with a blessing for each and when the sun was falling low enough to make the shadows yearn across the ground, he and his community made their way back from the eastern end of the island to the harbour at the south, to the pub, where for the most part they drank one toast and then went home.
The national news reported it with grim diligence at first, and pictures of a beautiful island rendered hellish were splayed across Britain’s living rooms. Uproar hit the nation and for two years afterwards tourism even increased; people wanted to see what a chemical explosion does to houses, trees and beaches, which, extrapolated, meant that they wanted to measure the wingspan of evil in more general terms – how resilient is good to ill? Are creation and destruction equal opponents, in other words, are we locked in a fair battle, us humans; can creation win, can good win? Those tourists were disappointed to find that two years on, the score wasn’t settled. Some of Tre was rebuilt, some was still gnarled and sunken. Good was winning here, evil there, the battle was fought in fits and starts. Then the rest of the world lost interest and Tre was left to its own spoils.
Then malaise. The island had lost a quarter of its people – men, mostly, so that what the survivors seemed to suffer was post-war in miniature. Forty-six people had died and several more had left the island to return to the mainland to find work. The remaining islanders looked hopefully towards Britain. Britain looked sympathetically back. Compensation cheques began to arrive, which for the most part were banked and left untouched for lack of any idea of how such money could be spent; those who had to spend theirs to make up for lost liv
elihoods did so with parsimony and regret, which became reluctance, which became bitterness.
The normally rinsed and glowing island fell into a state of shabbiness – the hanging baskets outside the shop weren’t watered, the model ketch that welcomed visitors at the harbour grew a damp covering of mould through the winter. The wall that bordered the dramatic drop from the pub garden to the sea became encrusted with gull droppings; so too did the coin-operated telescope at the same site, its eye trained on England – it was even difficult to put your twenty pence in and set the mechanism to work. Services at the church of St Helene gained vehemence as they lost attendance, and in response to his shrinking congregations the vicar began to read more from the Old Testament, declaring those vigorous and spectacular passages in a raised voice that was as relentless as winter waves crashing at granite. One day he realized he was almost shouting, and to a near-empty room at that, and in shame and sudden self-dawning he sat and prayed, and from then on delivered lacklustre sermons that spoke of patience and fortitude and asked for the strength to bear what had to be borne.
It was the rattling, most of them had said, the rattling and shaking as if in an earthquake, and the way their living rooms had seemed to lurch as if startled from sleep. The cat fell off the bed, the doors fell off the cupboards, the glass shot like shrapnel from the windows. It had happened on a Friday evening when fewer than usual people were working at the plant; over half had gone home. A fire broke out and vat after vat of dimethylaniline subsequently exploded: one of those situations – so the British government liked to say at least – in which both everybody and nobody was to blame, and where the knife of blame is in any case soon blunted by being driven repeatedly at an impermeable body of grief.