Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  I contemplated playing back my answerphone messages but there were over thirty of them and nobody but Ian Mawker knew my home number. And suddenly I was thinking about the great weekend I’d had with Adam in Northampton, and then I was thinking of what he’d said about Mum and before I realised what I was doing I was on the phone to Jimmy Two.

  Jimmy’s a friend of mine who looks after my Saab. He wants to buy it off me but I’ll never sell it. My girls have sat in that car and so nobody else will. He keeps the engine tuned and ticking over and I keep him in bottles of single malt. I hardly ever see him though. He picks the car up and stows it at his garage on the Cally Road or he drops it off when I need it. And then he goes back to doing Jimmy Two stuff – whatever that is. I’m guessing it’s above board though, unlike the antics of his twin brother, Jimmy One, who is on bread and water in Wandsworth for decidedly below-board behaviour.

  I wasn’t worried about waking Jimmy Two – he sleeps less than a lidless insomniac pulling an all-nighter – and he promised he’d have the Saab outside my flat with a full tank within twenty minutes. I made a mental note to treat him to a bottle of Talisker, and went to the bedroom where I packed a small bag with a change of clothes.

  I chucked Mengele under the chin and poured him an extra big bowl of Fishbitz. ‘Sorry it’s not pigeon flavour, you ruthless, cold-hearted bastard killing machine,’ I told him.

  The car was where Jimmy Two said it would be. I got in it and pointed it north.

  * * *

  I arrived four hours later. I sat outside her house for some time, watching the smoke curl from the chimney, watching the birds and the squirrels duke it out for supremacy over the peanut feeder hanging from the laburnum in the front garden. I saw a glimmer of movement in the kitchen and my heart pitched. I saw her, fifteen years younger, perched on an armchair reading a book to Sarah while her granddaughter nestled in the crook of her arm, a tired hand playing with the curls in her hair. Crystal clear – so real I could reach out through time and touch it. The smells of the kitchen. The music on the radio. My mother’s perfume, unchanged in all the years I’d known her. I set myself: there is an acute agony in going home, doubly so if you haven’t been back in some time. It’s a form of time travel. You will see things that will pierce you, especially if you’re a nostalgic old cockmuffin like me.

  I got out of the car and stretched, listened to the tick of the cooling engine like the second hand of some infernal clock.

  I walked up the drive and rang the bell. I heard the same two-tone chime I’d heard when I was a kid waiting for Dad to come home. She opened the door and gave me an instant scolding – ‘You might have ruddy well warned me!’ – before she ghosted back to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder: ‘And take your shoes off… the last time you were here you walked ruddy dog muck into my carpets.’

  She asked me if I wanted my old room and I said no, I couldn’t stay, that I had to be back in London that night. She called me a bloody fool, told me I’d do myself a ruddy mischief driving around all day. And then she stopped flapping around the kitchen like a trapped bird, put down the tea towel, sighed, and drew me into her arms. She was crying and I was crying and I couldn’t have foreseen any other outcome. I’d dreaded it, but it was an immense relief too.

  Once we’d recovered somewhat, she pressed me gently back into a chair and set about making breakfast. Everything in the kitchen was as I remembered it. Wallpaper patterned with sunflowers. Mustard-coloured floor tiles. A spice rack containing dozens of little pots of sun-faded spices and dried herbs that she never used. She stored the cereal boxes in the same place. The tea and coffee were in old jars both labelled SUGAR, next to an old tin of biscuits that would contain only ginger nuts.

  ‘Have you heard from her?’ she asked, and I hated that she’d asked, but I was relieved it would be out of the way so soon.

  ‘I would tell you, immediately, if she got in touch. You know that.’

  ‘But you know she’s all right. You saw her. That photograph at the exhibition. You told me about it when you called. For a ruddy change.’

  ‘It was just a photograph. I’m guessing she’s all right.’

  She poured hot water into a teapot and stirred it a few times before popping on the lid. ‘If I was you I’d be raising holy hell… I’d be walking holes into the pavement looking for her.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m not, Mum?’ I asked, trying to keep the exasperation from my voice.

  ‘Because you’re up here, farting around CA12 for a start,’ she said.

  ‘Trails go cold,’ I said. ‘Dead ends where you’d think the road was clear and long and wide.’

  ‘Adam told me you went to see him recently.’

  It wasn’t quite a question, not quite a statement. But there was the stench of rebuke all over it.

  ‘I’m allowed some down time, aren’t I? Jesus Christ. I’m switched on all day. Every day.’

  ‘Not for her you’re not.’

  ‘What do you know?’ I yelled. ‘You know nothing. This talk, this is all just born of frustration. You want to be a part of what happens every day but you can’t.’

  ‘I know other sons who let their mothers in.’

  ‘You were never left out,’ I said. ‘I never imagined you’d want to be a part of her absence.’

  The same old cups and spoons. The same old jug of milk. The way she tipped a frying pan to spoon hot oil over the egg yolks rather than flip them.

  ‘It’s not just about her. It’s you as well.’

  ‘My absence?’

  She slapped my wrist as she set a steaming plate in front of me and sat down. There was the smell of Fairy Liquid and vanilla essence under the perfume. ‘I’m not bothered about that, though yes, it wouldn’t hurt you to call once every ruddy ice age, would it? No, you. You, I’m talking about. You’ve not been the same, and before you tell me “no shit, Sherlock”, yes, I understand, how could you be the same? But it’s like you had the stuffing knocked out of you when it happened. When Rebecca… and then when Sarah… I’m just saying that you never quite put the stuffing back. If you see what I mean. You’re empty. You think you’re moving forward, and you might be for all I know. But you’re empty while you do it.’

  ‘I can’t stop if she’s out there, Mum,’ I said. ‘And she is out there. I’m closer than I’ve been in five years.’

  She was nodding but her eyes glistened and pain was folding all around them. ‘What if…’ she said, and could say no more.

  ‘What if she doesn’t want to be found?’

  She held my hand in her own and I was aware of the age that was in it: the skin dry, thinning, blemished with liver spots and the tracery of blue veins, like routes on a map that it was unwise to explore.

  ‘Could you live with that, if you found her?’

  I shrugged. Her pulse shivered in the delicate webbing of skin at the base of her thumb. I picked up some bacon and dipped it in the perfect yolk, knowing that eating with fingers made her shit hang sideways. She didn’t admonish me. ‘I have to know,’ I said.

  * * *

  I went up to that old room of mine after I’d washed the breakfast dishes. The view – of the old school I had attended – was more or less unaltered but for an additional smudge of new housing up by the railway bridge. Boxes of my stuff were lined up against the wall, covered in my handwriting from twenty years before. A different life, a different person, before my two girls came and went. I opened a couple of them. Old vinyl albums. The Unforgettable Fire. Meat is Murder. In Utero. Heaven or Las Vegas. Books I’d read that I’d signed and dated: A Dream of Wessex. The Ice Monkey. Concrete Island. Fahrenheit 451. There were diaries from the nineties containing names of people who had remained there, for whatever reason. Claire. Amanda. Paul. John. Little deaths, these. Everyday corpses. Forgotten friends who took different paths. I felt a strange ache for them all.

  I stopped myself from going through the boxes of photographs; I’d had my fill of nostalgia. You’re
led to believe nostalgia is a good thing, a harmless appetite for what went before; little more than a strange kind of embarrassed pride regarding the TV shows we used to watch, the sweets we used to rot our teeth with, the music we danced to, the clothes we wore – a kind of time panic. You found yourself craving a you that didn’t exist any more, that didn’t exist in the first place. Younger and fitter, yes, but that was just cosmetics. Your memories and perceptions were formed by a stranger. Reconciling yourself with that schism was difficult, if not impossible. Or at least it was for me. Part of the problem of being human was being aware of one’s own mortality, but this was tied to something even more tragic, the awareness that you were no longer the person that looked back at you from those photographs. And it was an ongoing tragedy. It was like a series of bereavements.

  Christ, I needed a drink.

  I went downstairs, trying to remember what my mother’s tipple of choice was – God, was it perry? – and found her watering a burly hosta.

  ‘I was thinking of nipping out for a walk, for a drink. You fancy it? You must be gasping for a red biddy.’

  ‘Some of us have work to do,’ she said. ‘Go. Go on. Pick me up some milk and butter on your way back. I’ll have lunch on the table at one. On the dot.’

  I left, thinking of Romy and how much easier, how less painful this would have been if I could have somehow convinced her to make the trip with me. The thought released, I suppressed laughter. What was I thinking? I’d known her a day and I was imagining introducing her to my mother. There was something wrong with me. I couldn’t work out if it was healthy to crave some kind of normality again, to be with someone living rather than a ghost, a wish, or whether it was creepier than an uncle with roving hands when his young nieces come to stay.

  I walked through Keswick in the direction of Windermere. Eventually I reached the edge of the town and headed away from houses and roads, walking a bridle path with the hill of Latrigg to my left. I crossed the A66 over a footbridge and veered left at a fork in the path, which would take me around Mallen Dodd. I’d walked these roads with my parents and, later, with flings and friends so many times that even though I hadn’t been back for years, I could follow the route without thinking.

  I slipped through a gate and walked a fenced path alongside a plantation of Sitka spruce. Up ahead was a ridge called Saddleback. It started to rain, which gave me pause – I was wearing jeans and Converse and a light jumper over a thin-as-skin T-shirt – but I thought, Sod it, it’s April. I might get wet, but I won’t freeze to death.

  I turned left and passed through a kissing gate into a field populated with sheep. They all watched me as I strode through the tall grass, the denim darkening with every step, past a stone cross and on to a gravel path leading towards Skiddaw mountain. Things got steeper, but that’s mountains for you. I felt my heart rattling in my chest like a brick in a tumble dryer. My breath came in huge whooshing noises and I was put in mind of the three sucking chest wounds I’d heard in my life, all of which sounded like small beer compared to this. After a while the incline eased off and I plodded gamely on, kind of enjoying it, kind of not, the rain increasing in intensity, my clothes increasing in weight, until I reached a row of cairns that led me to the summit ridge.

  At the top I crouched and concentrated on levelling out my breathing. It wasn’t cold by any means, but I was shivering like a shitting poodle. Out of shape. Ten years away from heart attack country, if I wasn’t already there. I felt a shiv of fear stab me in the chest at the thought of suffering some sort of attack out here. I hadn’t told Mum where I was going. If she called 999 she’d tell the ambulance service to check all the pubs in the town before she thought of any of the walking routes.

  But I calmed down, and the wind calmed too, even if the rain did not. I stared out at Helvellyn and, further afield, the Yorkshire Dales and the Forest of Bowland. On clear days you could see as far as the Mourne Mountains, and Goat Fell on Arran. But the sky was torrid, skeins of rain drifting down like barrage nets, and visibility was failing by the minute.

  I turned to leave, and I heard the whistles and frenzied cries of an osprey – kareek, kareek – the sound it will make when its nest is under attack. I searched the sky and peered into the black ledge of trees further down the ridge but could see nothing wheeling. The sound was not changing in tone or consistency, either, which confused me until I skipped around a thin ledge of rock and saw the fish hawk snagged on a length of barbed wire.

  It was a juvenile – that much I knew from the streaked feathers on its head – but I couldn’t tell its sex. If Romy had been here we could have got it to write something down and worked it out that way. It was clearly in distress. The blue cere at the bridge of the black bill was torn, and blood coated much of the plumage. It was trapped fast by the teeth of the metal; one of its wings was broken, the primaries drooping like long-fingered hands. I couldn’t tell how long it had been here, but the blood had dried, and the nictitating membrane across its eyes seemed dry too, or reluctant to peel back fully. Its golden brown irises fixed on me, and it flapped in extremis, trying to get away as I approached.

  I didn’t know what I could do. I pulled out my penknife but the blades were blunt and it was adorned with nothing so grand as a pair of pliers. Even if I could have cut it free, there was no flying left in this poor beast. It was thin. It was dying. It didn’t try to attack me when I reached for it. The black talons dimpled my hands, nothing more; no strength to drive them into me.

  I wrenched its neck and shut off the pathetic cry.

  * * *

  It was still raining when I turned into Mum’s road. I was exhausted. A little wander through the town had turned into a four-hour hike. She let me in and didn’t say anything about the lunch I’d missed. She handed me a fresh towel and congratulated me on my intelligence regarding the change of clothes I’d brought. She shooed me into the bathroom and I took a long shower under water as hot as I could bear while she fixed me something to eat.

  I dressed and seated myself at the table, feeling better. I fell upon the food when it landed and I ate it so quickly I couldn’t be sure what it was, but it was hot and good and filling. She’d accompanied it with a glass of milk and I almost laughed, but I drank it and that was good too. I don’t think I’d had a glass of milk in thirty years.

  I washed the dishes and checked the time. It was getting on for six o’clock. I found Mum in the living room, flicking through a magazine, though her eyes were fixed on the window, where the sky seemed unsure of what to do. It seethed and boiled, but the light was such that it wouldn’t have appeared strange had the clouds separated to allow some early evening sunshine through.

  ‘I should go,’ I said.

  ‘You should,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather you had a nap first. You’ve been on the go for over twelve hours. You’ll fall asleep at the wheel.’

  I felt an impulse to tell her about the osprey, but Mum was about as squeamish as it gets. There was a good reason why she had never asked me about the details of my pursuit of the Four-Year-Old in the winter. She couldn’t cope with the violence of it. She couldn’t watch a butcher cut the pork chops she ordered. Whenever we cut ourselves as kids, we had to clean the wounds ourselves and apply our own sticking plasters.

  ‘I won’t fall asleep,’ I said. ‘I seldom fall asleep when I’m meant to, so don’t worry.’

  ‘Your dad could fall asleep anywhere,’ she said. I was a little taken aback. She rarely talked about Dad. Certainly not since I was a teenager, not with me anyway. Maybe age had oiled her hinges. ‘I saw him fall asleep standing up once, leaning his head against a pebble-dashed wall. He fell over and scraped half his cheek off. The ruddy daft get.’

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said.

  ‘It was when you were very small. I think I was pregnant with Adam at the time.’ She sighed. ‘You think you’ve got all the time in the world. You think nothing will go wrong.’ She touched my hand. ‘I love you,’ she said.


  I hugged Mum and I was surprised – shocked, even – by how insubstantial she felt. She had never been a large woman but now, underneath the padding of the large knitted cardigan she liked to wear, she was like a bundle of sticks. Age was settling in her where it had never dared show its face before. I struggled to remember how old she was, but I knew she’d been born in the year America entered the Second World War – so 1941. You do the maths.

  ‘I love you too.’ I got in the car and started the engine, buckled up.

  ‘You got breakdown cover?’ she asked, jutting her chin at the vibrating bonnet of the Saab and hugging her elbows to her chest.

  ‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘Take care.’

  ‘Be in touch,’ she said. She waved once and went inside.

  * * *

  I was on the M6 within twenty minutes. The motorway was uncommonly quiet, just a smattering of lorries and cars, maybe a dozen or so in total. It was getting on for seven o’clock. Clouds were piled like wet grey towels.

  My dad died when I was five years old. He dropped dead in a car park in Southampton while he was attending a conference, some work-related training course; he was an office manager for a stationery business based in Penrith. Aneurysm. The technical name for it – subarachnoid haemorrhage – gave me nightmares. I thought his head had split open under the weight of a skull filled with spiders. I bore the fear of that for years; a time bomb in the brain he had carried from birth.

  I remember little things about him, although I suspect I’ve also dreamed some of them into perceived reality. The way he drank instant coffee exclusively with hot milk and lots of sugar; his penchant for big coats with big pockets so he could line up his pens in a row; a love of Dylan and Mitchell (I remember singing along to Blue in a Christmas living room smelling of vinyl seat covers and tangerines and Harveys Bristol Cream). I remember going to the swimming baths with him, and clinging on to his shoulders in the deep end, where the water was always colder. He would buy me crisps and chemical-green pop from the vending machines afterwards, and we’d sit on plastic chairs while I ate and he tied my shoelaces.