by Robert Lock
“To numb the pain.” In some ways Colin was grateful to his mother for these insights, for offering him a glimpse into the mechanics of a long-term relationship, which was something he had neither experienced nor felt any particular need for, and yet this gratitude was tinged with resentment, born out of a suspicion that his mother would always be closer to George Parr, in emotional terms at least, than he ever could. A thought occurred to him. “Do you think he might have harboured suicidal thoughts?”
“Oh, without a doubt,” Edna replied without hesitation. “I’m sure there were plenty of times when he wished he could join his wife and daughter. And then there’d be times when he would be so angry he could scream, and times when he’d wonder if he was being punished for something he’d done… and then sometimes he’d feel all those things at once, and they’d be the worst days. The days when you know that Hell can’t be any worse than what you’re living through.”
The archivist pinched his bottom lip and nodded. Clearly his mother was describing her own condition as much as Georgie Parr’s, but what troubled him the most was that, having heard her candid and heartfelt description of long-term grief, he had to concede the possibility that events beneath the pier had played out in precisely the manner described in contemporary reports, and that, far from being the wronged victim, George was in fact a murderer. Had all his weeks of research, cross-referencing and analysis been rendered futile by one moment of empathy? And if so, what did that say about him?
“Colin? Are you alright?”
He managed to assemble a smile. “Me? Yes, yes. I’m fine. Just a bit tired.”
Edna glanced at the clock on her bedside table. “You ought to have an early night. It’s nearly time for Dallas, anyway. We can finish your story tomorrow.”
“Alright.” Colin felt chastened and ridiculous, his crusade to find justice for George Parr sabotaged because he had been unable to comprehend, much less assign as a pivotal influence, the fierce emotional tides which must have ebbed and flowed within the music hall entertainer. “I’ll pop back later to make sure you’ve got everything you need for the night.”
“There’s no need, love, I’m right as rain. You get off to bed, you look shattered.”
He exhaled through his nose, the slightest hiss of wry amusement. “That’s precisely the word I would have chosen.” Colin stood up, leaned over and gave his mother a kiss on the cheek.
“Night night.”
“Night night,” she replied. “See you in the morning.”
The archivist had almost reached the bedroom door when he stopped and turned round. “Mum?”
Edna, who had been manoeuvring the television remote control into position with her good arm, looked up. “Yes, love?”
“Do you really believe Mickey Braithwaite can see into the future?”
“Yes, I do,” she said simply. “Why?”
“Oh, no reason.” Colin smiled. “I just wondered, that’s all. Night night.”
Counting The Seconds
Days passed, and the unfinished story of Georgie Parr and Hannah Goodwin slipped from the forefront of their minds, displaced, in Colin’s case, by the demands of an upcoming exhibition charting the resort’s history of political conferences, whereas Edna, inspired by Sue Ellen’s decision to make a feature film about her marriage to JR, spent many a happy hour thinking up scenes for a film of her own. She imagined it in black-and-white, shot in the sort of gauzy light that seemed to soften all her favourite films, and, unlike Sue Ellen’s Texan melodrama, Edna’s movie would be a much quieter affair, illustrating how many years of the commonplace, the routine, can become quite exceptional when viewed as a whole.
Perhaps unconsciously both mother and son had sought a brief respite from the story’s intensity and darkness. Certainly neither of them mentioned George or Hannah; their conversations instead centred on either Colin’s work (and Edna’s rather jaundiced opinion of nearly every politician he mentioned) or the weather, which was becoming extremely hot and close. Edna asked Colin to turn up her fan, and even allowed him to crack open the smallest of her bedroom windows, despite her staunch belief that hordes of intruders lurked outside, waiting patiently for an opportunity to ransack the bungalow.
And then, late one afternoon, she heard the distant rumble of a thunderstorm. As it approached Edna began, just like her grandfather had taught her, to count the seconds between a flash of lightning and its corresponding echo of thunder, plotting the storm’s advance with that atavistic combination of excitement and fear felt by humanity whenever it is faced with a force immeasurably greater than itself.
The window, whose closed curtains had filtered brilliant sunshine since early morning, filling the room with a tender glow, grew darker. As the light leached away, Edna reached instinctively for the lamp’s extension cord with its white rocker switch, but as her hand groped in an unseen emptiness she remembered Colin moving it to one side while he rearranged her pillows. He must have forgotten to replace it, either that or he had reasoned that on such a bright and beautiful day she would not require the lamp.
A dazzling flash of lightning lit the window. “One, two, three, four, five,” she counted out loud, her sequence silenced abruptly by a prolonged rumble of thunder that reverberated across the sky
The curtains began to twitch, galvanised by a strengthening wind. Mrs Draper shivered. The temperature in her bedroom was dropping rapidly, yet all she had on was a thin cotton nightie and a sheet draped loosely over the bed. She glanced at the fan, whirring away on its stand, the blades and mesh surround sweeping slowly backwards and forwards and propelling chilled air the length of her body. Edna knew that switching off the fan would reduce her discomfort, but there was a supportive, soothing quality to its movement, its benign touch, that stayed her hand. She regarded the fan almost as a companion. Switching it off now would mean facing the storm alone, a far worse prospect in Edna’s eyes than having to endure an hour or so of feeling cold.
The wind strengthened still further, blowing the first drops of rain against the window and carrying a thick, musky scent of honeysuckle into the room. Normally she loved to breathe in the plant’s fragrance; on warm spring evenings Edna would listen to the industrious hum of bees as they delved into the rambling mass of foliage which sprawled over half the bungalow’s south-facing wall and, from within her own immobility, be transported by their ceaseless movement. Now, however, the scent appeared to have been subtly appropriated by the approaching storm, turning it from a heady statement of vitality into something darker, like the pungent odour of an animal. A final burst of sunlight illuminated the bedroom, only to be extinguished moments later, plunging Edna into a forbidding twilight.
Lightning bleached the room. “One, two, three—”
The thunder made Edna jump. She instinctively tried to curl up beneath the sheet, but of course there was no response from her mutinous body, which simply lay there, offering itself up to the storm. A memory came to her of Fay Wray, trussed and defenceless as something huge and terrifying came crashing through the jungle towards her. That was how Edna felt now, and, for the first time in years, she wept quietly at her utter vulnerability.
A sudden squall of rain clattered against the window, followed moments later by another flash of lightning. “One, two—”
This time the thunder was more physical, like a huge hammer being brought down on the roof of the house. Edna felt for her crucifix. Gripping it tightly, she peered through the gloom, her gaze locking onto her wedding photograph as though it had become the only stable reference point in a world of tumult. In the darkness the image was reduced to little more than a collection of further shadows, but Edna knew every detail so well she could see it perfectly.
“Dear Lord,” she whispered, “what are you keeping me here for? What am I supposed to do? All I want is to see Malcolm again.” Her voice took on a slight tremor. “I don’t want to be on my own any more.”
Outside she could hear the wind shaking their neighbour�
��s beech trees, generating a sort of static that filled the silence between thunderclaps. Lightning flared. Edna flinched, and as she did so her gaze slipped away from the photograph, flicking instead to the incandescent instant of her bedroom, and in that starkness, that brief eternity, she saw within it a figure, whose sloping shoulders she knew so well, as though it had been carried into the room and deposited there by the lightning. And then, in a blink, it was gone, snatched away. Rational thinkers, like Colin, would have found a ready explanation for the vision; after staring at the picture, and then having it so dazzlingly illuminated by the lightning, Malcolm’s image would have been preserved on Edna’s retina for some seconds. As her eyes re-focused that image would therefore have been superimposed on the room, thus creating the illusion that there was a figure standing near her bed. It was a perfectly natural combination of the brain’s retention of vision and the deep psychological longing as evidenced by her prayer. If Mrs Draper had ever had the chance to tell her son about the event then this would doubtless have been his response, along with, perhaps, some gently mocking comparison to Mickey Braithwaite. But Edna was not rational, especially when it came to her husband; her belief could take the preposterous and re-cast it as not only probable but necessary, in the same way that by touching two thin bars of gold joined perpendicularly to each other and declaring one’s loneliness to an empty room you could bring back a man dead and buried for over forty years, bring him back and find such comfort in his momentary presence, and not for one second even consider that this was the alchemy of delusion, or be terrified by the implications of such an appearance. Then you would know the meaning of the word faith.
Malcolm was nowhere to be seen in the next flash of lightning, but he had no need to be. Edna had already snuggled further into her pillows, reducing the thunder to a muffled percussion, and though she tensed slightly at the lightning, half-expecting some calamity, like the ceiling caving in, the bang and grumble carried with it an air of resentment, as though the storm was well aware that this tiny life far below, damaged and pathetically flimsy though it was, had defeated it. The storm rattled the glass in Edna’s window, but her eyes were already closing. She had overcome.
Colin turned the key in the front door and stepped into the hall. He had lost all track of time during a protracted and at times heated debate with the town’s head librarian over the relative merits of displaying the conference exhibition in chronological or party political order, a dispute that not only ended in what to him was a muddled and unsatisfactory compromise, but also caused him to miss his bus. The next one had sped past the bus stop, already crammed with workers on their way home, so by the time he finally turned into Rosemere Crescent his stomach was rumbling and he was steeling himself for a dressing down from his mother.
For the second time in less than a month the archivist was greeted with silence.
“Mum?” Once again he spoke into the impartial quiet, and once again he heard the child in his voice, the boy who, on being told of his father’s death, ran to his bedroom, connected the transformer to his model railway and spent the rest of the evening lying on his stomach, watching the engine and its solitary carriage go round and round whilst imagining, from his proximate viewpoint, how wonderful it would be to climb aboard the train and be carried away.
He placed his keys in the brass bowl on the hall table, as was his habit, but even that clattering, tuneless ringing, which had for so long signalled the demarcation between adulthood, work, being Colin Draper, archivist, and becoming son and carer, sounded different, because a part of him already knew what he would find, and how that discovery would alter everything. Pam had, as always, placed the day’s post on the table with admirable neatness, even taking the trouble to position the envelopes in size order, largest at the bottom. Colin rested his fingers on the letters for a moment, their symmetry a comfort to him. He looked down and began to study the handwriting on the topmost envelope; Colin recognised the style, with its ‘E’s formed from a ‘C’ split by a horizontal line, but he could not remember who wrote like that. He examined the postmark, hoping for a clue from the letter’s source, but it was smudged and illegible. Obviously the post had been delivered during the thunderstorm, the archivist reasoned.
He glanced at the door to his mother’s bedroom. A soft, lustrous glow radiated out of the room and into the hall, tinged with a delicate cornflower blue. It reminded him of the light to be found in Renaissance religious paintings, bathing the saintly and protecting them from the medieval gloom which pervaded the rest of the canvas. This thought led in turn to the memory of his childhood night-light, modelled on the Virgin Mary, who held back the darkness which hung in dusty swags beyond her beatific radiance, a flimsy boundary that, if he watched it long enough, would creep slightly closer, extinguishing a little more of the Virgin Mary’s glory.
“No,” Colin said, though he would not have been able to say what he was denying. His declaration voiced, the archivist pushed himself away from the hall table as though it were the jetty of a last outpost on some uncharted river, took the three long strides along the hall and stepped into the light.
At first the glorious early evening sunshine almost blinded him, bleaching every detail in the bedroom in a silent explosion, but as his eyes adjusted the familiar items of furniture drew themselves back into a solid existence, coalescing from the light like a stage set at the beginning of a play. This was no act one, however, but rather a coda, made more poignant by a daring directorial decision to keep the set unchanged, except in one hugely important regard.
Colin walked round to the far side of the bed, his heart thumping.
Edna appeared asleep. Her good arm was folded across her chest, the single sheet slightly corrugated and creased beneath it, as though she had tried to pull it further up over herself, an impression reinforced by the sight of her feet and ankles, which were protruding from the bottom. The skin of these exposed limbs appeared pale blue, but how much was inherent and how much was due to the quality of the light was impossible to tell. Colin reached out to touch her foot, and even as he registered how cold the skin felt, and what that coldness inevitably signified, he could not help but be beguiled by the wonderful softness of the soles of her feet. He remembered passing the bedroom’s open door once and seeing the district nurse massaging his mother’s feet with moisturiser. After the nurse had left he queried the efficacy of massaging feet which were, to all intents and purposes, ‘dead’, but Edna retorted that it was ‘good for her circulation’, before adding, in what was for her a rather caustic tone of voice, that he had no need to worry, because it ‘wouldn’t be long before the rest of her caught up with her feet’ and she would no longer be a ‘burden’ to him.
And now it had happened.
Now she was gone.
Colin gently lifted his hand away. How many times had he mentally rehearsed this moment and speculated what his emotional response would be? For all that their relationship was characterised by its incessant bickering, mother and son had, since Malcolm Draper’s death, forged a powerful bond, providing them with the emotional strength to face bullying, bereavement, insecurity and illness. And this mutual support had continued, a stable structure of more or less balanced forces, until Edna’s deteriorating condition threatened its equilibrium as she became increasingly physically dependent on her son. Her reliance on him, though Colin attended to his mother with unfailing commitment, would by turns dismay, frighten and infuriate him. What he never realised, or at least never admitted to himself, was that his mother’s dependence created an essential bolster for his fragile self-esteem, so even if Colin saw himself as the one shouldering the greatest burden, theirs was in fact the perfect symbiotic relationship, an alliance against what seemed to them to be a harsh and unforgiving world. If only the archivist could have acknowledged this parity he would have found his reaction to Edna’s demise far less surprising.
In every imagined deathbed scenario Colin had seen himself as a blubbering mess, eithe
r collapsed in a heap by her side, or wandering aimlessly about the house, or even railing against his mother through the tears for having had the audacity to abandon him, but now, as he actually touched the leniency of her death, all he felt was happiness. Colin could see no possible reason, be it biological, intellectual or even spiritual, for a life after death, but he had also been forced to acknowledge the tenacity and comfort of his mother’s faith. The archivist had always regarded such convictions as nothing more than an inability to see the universe for the beautiful hiatus that it was, though Edna had occasionally alluded to some sort of corroborating evidence for this belief, without ever giving him a full explanation. Maybe she had been waiting for some sort of indication from her son that his attitude towards her religious convictions had softened, or perhaps she found it difficult to put this evidence into words; maybe there never had been anything more than simple faith, and she had been trying to couch it in terms that her son’s empirical mind might understand. Whatever the reason, the simple truth of the matter, a truth written on her quiescent features, was that his mother had died without fear, and for that Colin was truly grateful.
As he had done for so many years on his return from work, the archivist manoeuvred round the television on its trolley and sat down in his chair next to the fan. Outside a group of starlings chattered amongst themselves, and in the distance a dog barked; all life’s threads, woven together to form the most beautiful and fragile of materials, remained intact, save one.
“You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had at work today,” Colin began. “Janet… the head librarian, you know, the one with the moustache and bad breath… the one who thought terrorists were going to blow up the library last year because the council leader insisted they have a copy of The Satanic Verses… well, anyway, her, she wanted the conference exhibition to be arranged by party, but I said that was ridiculous because it wouldn’t flow properly, and it wouldn’t reflect how the parties swap around, and it’d be tedious, because who wants to read a huge chunk on Labour, then Conservatives? Better to spread it out, vary it a bit, year by year, but oh no, Janet wasn’t going to have that, she said that my ‘fragmented approach’ was confusing. Confusing! What’s confusing about taking it year by year? I said anyone who could grasp the basics of a calendar would be able to follow an exhibition laid out how I wanted it, and that only an idiot would be confused. She took that personally and started going on about my ‘sexist’ attitude and how the council was full of misogynistic dinosaurs who belonged in a museum. I might not have helped matters when I said that if the museum was set out by her no one would want to look round it, but then James intervened and said that the town was very lucky to have two… how did he put it? Oh yes, two ‘passionate and unique visionaries’, but we had to find common ground and that we all needed a break. Of course Janet’s idea didn’t seem any less ridiculous after a cup of coffee, but we ended up arranging the displays in chronological order by political party, which I thought wasn’t a true reflection of the conference pattern but James babbled on about an ‘amalgamation of genius’, even though you only have to spill a can of paint on a canvas these days to be called a genius… ” Colin exhaled, one of his sneeze-like laughs, and shook his head. “Oh dear, I have officially lost my mind. I am performing a monologue for my deceased mother.” He felt tears begin to prickle his eyes, and realised that he would have to do something or else give in to the collapse and lamentation that he could feel bubbling in his chest.