by Adam Thorpe
‘Hello, home,’ says Ray. He sits in the largest chair. We light the fire. He watches the flames. I’ll bet that’s what he misses most, I’m thinking. We can only find camomile teabags so Cliff leaves thirsty.
Ray points out the shelf. There’s a row of red and black notebooks. Above them are his published works. One of them is called Brick Kilns of North Wessex. No stone unturned, as they say! I fill two Tesco bags with his life’s work. I could burn them, I’m thinking, in a big blaze. Isn’t that awful, Mother? The things one thinks. They (I mean, the experts here) say it’s to discover one’s limits. Have something to bounce off. It’s because Ray is watching me with such a vulnerable look, as I pack his notebooks, that I think this awful thought.
He doesn’t want lunch. I pop out for a cheese roll and munch it in front of the fire. He’s dozing. I flick through some of his books. Well, he’s not a great writer, but someone’s got to track the little things. When he wakes up, I ask him what time he wants to go back to Hazeldell. He tells me he’s staying the night. I knew it! Small lies lead to bigger lies. I phone the Home and tell them he has to stay because he’s had a dizzy spell. The young nurse says she’ll tell the boss. She sounds a bit worried. It’s now mid-afternoon.
‘Want anything for supper, Ray?’
‘I’ll tell you what I want. Hedgerow fruit, freshly picked. And a bran loaf. If you can stretch to it. If it’s not too much bother.’
Bother. I thought he was going to say ‘an egg’.
Back in my garret, I begin to look through the notebooks for any more signs of you.
I’ll explain the system now. The black notebooks are called Magpies, the red notebooks are called Robins. The Magpies steal anything that glitters, the Robins pick through this hoard by theme, with the page reference of where it was found in the margin. There’s a redbreasted notebook entitled Spooks, Etc. After an hour in this I dig up Gracie’s story. First recorded in Magpie 1973–4. So I go back to this first scrawl, written in the open with a frozen hand in the scuffed black notebook.
I’m so disappointed. In all that primordial scribble there’s not one new fact. I read the entry several times, because it’s muddled up with a ghost on a gate and the ghost of the German pilot who crashed his Me. 109 in Stiffs field, but the most important fact is clear.
Gracie did mean you, Mother.
It was Ray who muddled Arnold and Arkwright when rewriting the scrawl neatly in the Robin. He then jumped to the conclusion that you were Uncle E’s ‘first wife’, when he typed the passage for the book. Too many women, I suppose.
He was very concerned to find out who Mrs Rachael Arnold was, though! There’s a cross-reference to a page in the Magpie for 1978–9, next to Aunt Rachael’s name in the Robin. But it’s dusk and I’m fretting about Ray, so this reference doesn’t get looked up. Why should it? It’s you I’m pursuing, Mother.
I think it’s at this point I go out and garner Ray’s supper. Hedgerow fruit, remember? Yes, it must have been at this point. As I write, a lot of things come back, grow clearer. As the experts here said they would. This is the point of it all, for me. Although I must say I’m beginning to feel very close to you, talking to you like this. As I used to do at school, writing you letters. You were at my shoulder, then. You’re the other side of the room now, like a spectator at a play. But I still feel you are closer to me than when I was a boy. Whether you like it or not.
I pick blackberries and hazelnuts along the Gore path. It’s good to know they’re still there. As I do so, I begin to think it’s all nonsense. I’ve put the yellowing label from the trunk in my socks drawer. I put Gracie and Muck in there too and that’s it, that’s all my conjecture’s based on. Neither Gracie nor Muck seem quite of this world. I’m picking the blackberries and dropping them into a plastic bowl and remembering how Father told me once about living men who are actually dead. They are killed by a sorcerer but given the appearance of life for a short time, until something ordinary like a cold or an attack by an animal kills them. Father told me about this in his study: the corrugated map, the rustspotted typewriter, the fan you could work with a string on your foot, the heat.
‘Why does the wizard do this?’ I asked him.
‘To cover his tracks, of course. No one can trace the false death back to him.’
Clever, isn’t it? Like dropping bombs.
When I eat a blackberry off the hedge, I eat all the months behind it. The squirrels have plundered the beechmast in Harry’s Wood. All the squirrels were red in our day, weren’t they? I pick quite a few hazelnuts, though. Nuncle (I started calling him Nuncle when I was old enough) held hunter-gathering feasts in his Maglemosian period and I wrote the labels in italics: Honeysuckle, Juniper, Elder, Black Bryony, Dogwood, Hawthorn. On the second day everyone would throw up. He’d flap about in his long hempen cloak shouting, ‘Soft stomachs, soft heads and soft stomachs!’ No one ever actually died.
His Maglemosian period was at its worst after you left us. But even before you left us, I do remember you telling me how the trenches had made him suffer so much, that a time before history offered him a way out. Years of a blasted wasteland might urge anyone to dream of endless forests, Hugh – even to dream that a small patch of neglected woodland in a country garden could seed it all, Hugh!
So he must have been quite Maglemosian even before you went.
I return to the village and buy Ray’s bran loaf. It’s around now that one of the mummers called Sally, in a self-knitted sack, says she hopes to see me at the rehearsal and that she’s heard about the leopard skin. Oh dear, I think, John Wall still has it. I would have forgotten! This is why I’m in John Wall’s garden a few minutes later, talking to his mother. Her forehead has stitches in it. We’re talking next to the chicken coop, full of plastic cartons and tins. She tips out some vegetable scraps from a bucket and tells me that John isn’t in.
‘Will he be back before nine?’
‘He’s up at the house. The funny one. Finished my husband, but it en’t finishing my son, if I can help it.’
‘My house, you mean?’
The chickens lift their claws in disdain around the vegetable scraps. I don’t blame them.
‘How did it finish your husband?’
She gives a big snort. It could mean anything. I ask about the leopard skin. She gives a smaller snort and leads me inside. The kitchen’s cleaned of her blood. While she’s upstairs, I poke my head into the front sitting-room. The parlour, in your day. It’s odd, it’s full of little rugs – no, dead cats. There’s this big monument of a crazy-paved fireplace and all these dead cats draped everywhere. Then my eye gets used to the light and I see that the cats are a lot of skins: every field and woodland creature you can think of, Mother. Badger, mole, rabbit, stoat, fox – even an otter! He’s nailed huge black glossy wings above the fireplace and the bushy tails of squirrels next to the Swiss clock. There’s a big black badger’s claw dangling from the door handle. The room smells like a long-shut theatre wardrobe and mouldy woods.
Scalps, I think. Shrivelled heads. Power. Ah, yes. Power.
Nothing big enough in the shadows to resemble a leopard. Nothing with spots. A creak on the stairs. I whip my head back.
‘It en’t up there.’ She’s eyeing me suspiciously, scratching around her stitches.
‘I need it rather urgently. It’s for a costume.’
That’s all for now, phew!
With lots of love,
Hugh
A few days later. Spitty.
Dear Mother,
I’m still in John Wall’s house, with Mrs Wall, where I left off. The TV’s on, showing a circus act. She watches it for a moment, as if I’m not there.
‘You’d think they’d get cold, wouldn’t you?’
It might not be a joke. I watch the trapeze artists in their sequined swimsuits as if it isn’t.
‘You don’t want to go out in it,’ she adds. ‘Catch y’death. Took all his clothes off down to his knickers and put it on. You Jane, me Tarza
n. Silly bugger. Looked like that Jackie Collins, I told him. He didn’t like that. Just like that Jackie Collins. Weren’t the right thing to say at all, were it?’
But she smiles, thinking about it.
‘Chased me right round the table here. Could scarce catch my breath, silly bugger.’
I think at first her hands are catching invisible midges. But it’s a clawing movement. She’s miming.
‘He’s upped and sold her, anyway,’ she snaps. And sits down with a bump, wheezy, rubbing her thighs.
‘Sold her? The leopard skin?’
‘He’ll tell you it were pinched. Cabbaged off the line. Butter wouldn’t melt an all that. Feller in Fogbourne, taxidermite chap. Stuffed crows, people are so bloody daft. That’s what I reckon. He’s upped and sold her.’
‘I hope not,’ I say. ‘I do hope not. I certainly didn’t ask him to. I’ll be at the rehearsal in the village hall tonight at nine o’clock. If he could deliver it by then –’
Thump thump and screams. The clowns. Doing things with boxes.
‘Go on. Give him the boot, then.’
Her stitches look like black flies. I can imagine her going on for ever and ever, soiled and undead. She’s getting me to give him the boot because she’s afraid of my house. Afraid of the house!
Well, I can’t blame her.
Ray is in his kitchen. He’s made himself a pot of tea. The metal crutches lean against a chair. I have to move them to pour myself a cup and I’m ashamed to say that I find their weight and their warm black pads rather repulsive. I could lift one up and batter him over the head with it – such an onion-like head with its wisps of white hair. What an awful thought! I’m sure everyone has them, Mother.
‘We’re in trouble,’ he says. ‘The son’s phoned the Home. He can sue ’em. Supposing I pop off here. They’re not happy. You might have kidnapped me. Have you kidnapped me?’
We laugh about it, but I’m worried. And the son is on his way. Ray starts to feast on the blackberries, straight from the tub.
‘I have to spend the night here,’ he says. ‘Or I’ll go nuts.’
The son turns out to be blond and pudgy. ‘Hello Piers.’ ‘Hello Dad.’ I introduce myself and pour him a cup of tea. He drops his car-keys on the table; the key-ring is a large plastic fish, like you see on the backs of cars belonging to an evangelical sort of Christian, Mother. He rubs his hands briskly and asks his dad how he’s getting on. A crutch begins to fall, but Piers catches it by the pad. Even he looks a bit repulsed. (I bet Jesus didn’t.) At some point there’s an argument about when Ray should go back, because Piers is here to take him back. It’s to do with personal insurance. Piers takes a punch at his father! – but is just looking at his watch, it’s all right. I suggest staying the night, if that would help. Piers looks at me. His eyes are too small for his head.
‘I’ve got a house meeting at nine,’ says Piers. ‘Chipping Norton.’
‘I never wanted to stay in that dump in the first place, did I?’ Ray growls.
Piers keeps quiet. The fish key-ring on the table looks as if it’s gasping.
So that’s how I end up staying the night in Ray’s cottage.
‘See you, Dad. You haven’t even got your beeper thing, have you?’
‘No, and I haven’t got Jesus either.’
Piers leaves, all pink and tense. I’m thinking, as Ray chunters on, that the one in California has the better deal. There’s a photo of two small boys on the fridge. Another of a toothy woman in a scarf by a lake, windblown in boots. That must be the mother, now dead. I have no photos in this room. I didn’t want any, it’s not worth it, I’m here for such a short while. In for a service, as I joke. Top notch people. One of them was trained by Dr Wolff, who I came across thirty years ago! They’ve all heard of me, in one way or another.
I can’t stand Ray’s company any longer, to be frank. (I’m back in the cottage, Mother.) He’s chuntering on about Piers, and the crutches seem to be growing taller. There’s a bad smell and the kitchen is rather poky, with crookbacked black beams. It’s like being inside a spider’s web. I’ve never been good with ill people, as you were. And Ray is so ill, he’s dying. I can see Death’s mouth stretching its jaws behind him, ready to snap in a few days or weeks. Or even hours. I say I’ll be back to put him to bed. He seems pleased to be left alone. Ray is somehow sticky, I reflect. One gets stuck on his threads. It’s all this snooping about of his.
There’s a big party of student geologists in the hotel restaurant, and I end up sitting next to two of them. They’re conducting field work in some old quarry nearby. My fingers are stained purple from blackberrying, theirs are pallid from grubbing in the chalk. Jill and Tim, that’s it.
Jill is very attractive, Mother. She has a Brum drone but she also has It, as you would say. I didn’t know what It meant when you said that, but now I do. It means that someone is stirring your golden syrup – or even turning up the little flame in your heart, in rare cases.
I explain to them why my fingers are purply.
‘Ooh, chuck him into a bog, quick,’ says Tim.
I express surprise.
‘The season of death’d be perfectly recorded. Last meal. The sludge in his peat-kippered duodenum would be full of pips. Dead useful to our palaeo-ecologist colleagues in a few thousand years.’
That’s how these people talk, like I talk about theatre. Tim spent the summer not far from Eilrig, bobbing up and down in the heather, collecting midge remains from a Highland bog. His big windburned face is grinning away, but Jill tells him to shut up. Did I know that downland chalk is 1,500 feet thick? That no one really knows why? And so on.
Now I’m in the churchyard, Mother. I’ve a few minutes to kill before the rehearsal at nine. There’s moonlight on the gravestones, their silica winks a sort of blueish white. The dead prefer moonlight, because they can open their eyes. Then a shock.
Aunt Joy’s name, as if she’s reciting it over the telephone.
Joy Crystal Arnold, née Unsworth, 1889–1930. Not where I thought it was at all. Next to it is a little square stone laid flat with nothing but Dawn etched in, but there are fresh flowers on it. Aunt Joy’s slab is bare, except for the shadows of branches shifting about in the moonlight. I’ll have to bring flowers. I can hear that little clearing of her throat – a tic, really. Do you remember, Mother? The black Scotch pines moan and whisper like shingle or sad ghosts. Standing by Aunt Joy’s grave, I feel cross that I can’t bring you a bunch of flowers. Really cross! There are empty plots and I think: I must find out where yours was. Even if it’s been taken by someone else, I must find out. Then I think: well, I can buy a little plot for you and put a memorial stone on it. Otherwise, when I’m dead, there’ll be nothing. How awful. Only a legend about a ghost, fading in turn. Nothing.
Not a trace.
‘Please please please listen. Hugh has come here especially. We’re incredibly lucky to have him. Please.’
But the Man-Woman, the Witch and the Bold Slasher would not be any better were they to listen to what I’m telling them. My approach is dependent on rules. They don’t know any of the rules. And there’s no leopard skin. Malcolm thinks it’s my fault, but doesn’t say so. I don’t tell him that John Wall might have nicked it. Mrs Pratt’s very tall son spends his time tapping the chair at the back with his knuckle. Sally the Fool is always desperate for a fag. The depression that rises from mediocrity descends on me, it’s infectious, a sort of miasma. I recognise a face or two staring from the Village Hall Founding Committee photograph, 1928. Was I really alive, then? And can they all be dead, now? You must have known them.
Ray has hobbled up to bed by the time I get back. Tufts of white hair show above the blanket in the dim light of his bedroom. His grunts sound as if someone’s thumping him. Doesn’t he need a pain-killer against the gnaw of cancer? His teeth float in a glass of pink water: why are they grinning so gleefully at me?
A book lies on the bedside table, pressed open at an underlined passage I know b
y heart from sixty years ago:
I will sit here on the turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall pass over me, as if I too were but a grass. I will not think, I will be unconscious, I will live.
I’m always telling the people here that the best cure for the blues is a walk in a graveyard. A walk through the works of Richard Jefferies is also to be recommended. The book is a first edition of Field and Hedgerow. It is over a hundred years old. I’m sure it has another hundred left in it. Piers has got it now, I suppose. Or sold it along with all the other books. You don’t recognise it, Mother? Oh. I know you liked novels, magazines.
I’m lying on Ray’s sofa, under a blanket. The firelight flickers on the walls, the, books, the old crooked beams.
I’ll fill in my diary last thing. What a full day! Full, because I’m doing things I did not do in London or Scotland. I did not babysit dying men, muse in churchyards, rehearse hopeless amateurs, or chat up student geologists. It’s good for me, I think. I pick up the black notebook and read the passage relating to you.
Closing my eyes, I mutter to myself that I don’t believe in ghosts, therefore I don’t believe the Red Lady was a ghost. It’s like a charm, a magic formula. But I’m not sure what’s emerging from the green smoke, you see. What monstrous form.
Being thorough, sieving the grains of earth one last time for a tiny amber bead, I read the Robin entry again. There’s still that cross-reference next to Aunt Rachael’s name. It’s in another black notebook, the Magpie for 1978–9.
I pick it up and turn to the appropriate page. A sort of dark shaft runs through me from head to toe but I take no notice. It isn’t always a warning.
Horrible. Absolutely horrible.
How high does my horror mount? Up to the sky and beyond. A searchlight’s beam goes on for ever and ever. My horror goes on for ever and ever. But it’s not like the horror that is to come, Mother. That horror fell out of the sky and hit me on the head, burned me to a shell. This one’s precise and focused and goes up and up. It picks out the words one by one, as we used to pick out the tiny silver Dorniers from the black sky. I even copy the words down.