A Habit of Dying

by D J Wiseman

  The nonsense of the pathetic cards appeared again yesterday, hers with two hearts linked together. I could not make out what it was at first, couldn’t understand what it was or what meaning it had or indeed if it had a meaning. I was off guard, surprised by this foreign item that she clearly expected would cause some response from me. Catching my struggle, she explained it was a valentine card. Yes, yes, I knew that, of course, but then reaching into some imagined past came up with “I thought we didn’t do that any more”, to cover my incomprehension of it. It worked well enough she did not see the chink that had let her slip past the defences. But it shows that I must be more careful, have a bland and non committal response prepared for absolutely anything that she might throw at me. And it is so devious, hiding her plans behind such a thing, she had even signed it. And only the night before I was feeling very pleased with the way that the office people have accepted the new me, it hasn’t taken the effort I thought it would. Maybe I was getting complacent, too clever by half. I have learned the words that make them happy, make them leave me alone, let me write the words they want to read. Let them think that I don’t know how they scheme and whisper, titter in their corners from the sides of their mouths, turn away when they speak on the phone about me. To her I am sure, reporting back, logging movements, and when they are done they’ll casually ask if I need some more water. I feed it to the plants when they are not looking or tip it out the window. It is not possible to see if they put something in it, it is too clear to see.

  27th entry

  Now I am redundant in every sense. Today found that I was no longer required at the office. Now I will have time to think of solutions. A whole pile of stuff is redundant too, all the thinking for the office is gone, there is room for everything now, space to get it straight once and for all. Complete concentration on S and her plans. She has no chance to get past me now all my power can be channelled right to the very centre. Enough money to see my [me] through, not a lot when you think of the millions my clever little words brought them. They’ll pay more one day for sure. Goodbye for now Pink [on] Pink your turn will come. They will probably go to the wall anyway. I must repay them before they do. Eight years of my life redundant. Most likely she has a similar scheme but without the payoff. She will not be allowed to do it, I will stop her before she can push me out or she slips off to another bed in another hotel and slides back through the door all smiles and guilty hellos. She is so far away now she is like a little dot on the horizon but I can still see her if I strain my eyes, still hear her if she speaks above the static. Not that I let her know that, better she thinks I am not aware of her at all. I see her hollow smiles and fake tenderness, I see them for exactly what they are, I wanted the real one the one who used to live here, not this imitation, this [stepford], this [deceitful] hideous parody. She must go away from here or be made to before she breaks my head and the void consumes the every part of me. There is still a refuge at the bright centre of everything but it is harder and harder to get there, like walking through a black [whirlwind].

  28th entry

  She really is very good at what she is doing, but not as good as I am at seeing the truth. She makes out that I am short of vitamins or some such and this is to be remedied by some new pills. I took one the other day when she was watching, but not till I had seen her take one herself. OK one won’t kill me, I’ll take it. Then when she was out I checked the bottle. Sure enough the label showed they were just what she said. But they are making me feel sick and I have a constant headache. It seems that she has swapped the bottle with an old one that she had. I checked the date on it and sure enough it is not new, she has had it for months. But I am keeping this to myself, I will not challenge her, I will be the compliant fool that she takes me for and let her think that I continue with the taking. But in one thing she is right, I do not eat well, it is of no interest. And she thought that she could take that little [observation] and use it to poison me. I must be very careful of what I eat from now on.

  29th entry

  It has taken a huge effort but I see the way now. Still a few things that have to be planned the little details of the timing. I will write a list elsewhere for safety.

  30th entry

  Now I have the time and the place and the means all neatly arranged it is sometimes a struggle to keep them in order. Right now I want to write them all down again to be sure that I have them but security is an issue. I know them off by heart and write them easily but must destroy them once written. I will write them again to be sure, I have purchased a notepad for the purpose. Always use the back page straight onto the cardboard cover so as to leave no indentation. Written. Read carefully, yes all there all in the right order. Neatly torn off from its spiral binding, all the little flaky pieces removed. The page was never there. Chew until dissolved then spit into the toilet. So long as I can hang on to that sequence and repeat it [faultlessly] that will be the way to do it. Mr Punch I think.

  31st entry

  I am at once calm and excited, nervous and elated. [It] just occurs to me as I write those words that it may simply be a migraine in waiting. Or the [vicious indigestion] that wrecks my snatches of sleep. All is ready and I have everything in [perfection] in my head. Rehearsed and rehearsed until I know it in my sleep, can walk with my eyes tight shut. This book has done its job, been the space needed. It seems certain that this will be the last entry, something I did not realise until I wrote it out now. Maybe a new book will be needed another day. Tomorrow is another world a new world a better world. Or it is oblivion. Which would be its own peculiar blessing. But action will cause reaction and something will happen. The leaf will be cast to the forest floor where it will lie anonymously turning to mould. Though a million feet were to walk right by it, none would pause to remark its presence. Even I would not be able to detect it. The future at once looks crystal clear and impenetrable. The calmness of the centre has flowed out to envelop me and all around is light and clarity but the horizon remains black and infinite. This I think is the world without her even though she sleeps a sleep through this last night. Check mate in the game. Mr Punch.

  The effort of transcribing these words had left her tired enough, now reading them through as a whole proved just as exhausting. She was bound up with them, part of them in some inexplicable way. Nagging away at her was the growing belief that what she had found were the terrible cries of a man who meant to kill his wife, or at least be rid of her by some sinister means. Whether a plan to do so existed in reality, or simply as imagined events was far from clear. But some event had caused him to stop writing, and to stop at a point which he knew was the end. Stopping had not been forced upon him unexpectedly, he had not stopped mid sentence or mid thought. The author’s mental breakdown, for surely that is what it amounted to, was laid out in the pages for anyone to see, even though Lydia was sure that she was the first to see them. If not, then how else would they have come to be sold as part of a job lot from some house clearance. A house clearance! Why oh why had she not thought to go back to the auction rooms months ago and check where the albums had come from? If she knew the house, the family whose house her assorted box of books had come from, she would finally be on the track.

  Lydia slept soundly for the first time in weeks, content to have a plan of action that held out the promise of resolution to her puzzles. Yet the question of puzzle or puzzles remained to be answered. She would contact the auctioneer on the Monday, then gather together all her facts, prioritise her searches, sequence her actions and move forward with purpose.

  4

  The auctioneers were closed on Monday and when Lydia called the following day she found them less than helpful. She had not realised it had been so long since the sale until she found the catalogue still crumpled in the recesses of her bag. It would take them time to find the records and after all, they complained, it was nearly six months ago. If she came over on the Wednesday someone might be able to find something for her. When she presented herself at the office it wa
s only to be told they had no record of where her purchase had come from. Since it had been described as a mixed lot it could be a collection of items left over from another sale, possibly even from another sale room. Her last hope of a real helping hand to get her started had evaporated. Driving back to Oxford she weighed what she might do next. One option was clearly to put the box and its contents out with the newspapers for recycling. But that would go right against her grain, for she was still convinced that someone somewhere would be pleased to have the photographs, to be introduced to their lost family. And there was that other puzzle to be solved, the one that went beyond family history, the one that might be far more important than finding a distant third cousin.

  ‘Lydia, when are you going to really do something?’ Gloria asked. ‘You need to get out more, get in the swim.’

  ‘I do lots of things, I’m busier than you think.’

  When Gloria suggested, as she did regularly, that she should ‘get in the swim’, Lydia knew that what she really meant was ‘get a man’. Getting a man had never been high on her list of priorities and never lower than it was now. She was completely focused on her box of treasures and every hurdle that was put in her way only made her more determined than ever to unravel their mysteries.

  ‘Busy? Come on, what’ve you been busy at? We’d love to know, wouldn’t we?’ Gloria included the rest of the section, all female, all younger than Lydia by a decade or more, in her question. Nothing would have pleased them more than for Lydia to be having an affair with a man, maybe a married man. That would have made her conform to their norm, put her back in the swim. She was tempted to hint at what they wanted to hear, for she grew as weary of their continual goading as she did of the chatter about their own sex lives.

  Instead, a thought popped into her head and before she knew it, it had found voice. ‘I’m busy with a murder,’ and then, quickly to cover her folly, ‘It’s a family history thing.’

  Gloria rolled her eyes. ‘Typical Lydia, that’s just you isn’t it? You need some real interest in you life. I could fix you up with someone, anytime you like.’

  Lydia smiled her thank-you and shook her head. She knew that she was going to be busier than ever for a while, far too busy to be thinking about being fixed up by Gloria or any of her workmates.

  The spoken words crystallised what she had been gradually working round to ever since she had finished the transcription. Saying out loud what she had not fully admitted to herself, suddenly made it true - she was busy with a murder. But she needed a new approach instead of repeatedly banging her head against the same brick wall of unanswered questions. She reasoned that if all her puzzles were to be solved then there was no hope of solving them individually. She would look at all her evidence again on the assumption that it was a single puzzle, that all the main players were related in some way, even the tormented journal writer and his misunderstood wife. She’d look at all possibilities and probabilities and see if a coherent picture could be made from the pieces.

  As a first task Lydia let herself become familiar once again with all the photographs, feeling for the lives, absorbing the scenes. At the same time she kept her detailed notes handy for reference. Then she opened the journal alongside the printed copy she had made and read through them, taking from the original where it was easy to do so and from her copy where it was not. By putting all the photographs, the captions, the notes and the journal into her head as a whole collection she hoped to gain a different insight. If she absorbed them as a single entity then perhaps she might begin to see where they joined. But instead of seeing where they joined, a solitary thought jumped into her mind as she read the thirtieth entry of the journal. A thought that fixed the journal as being fact and not fiction. To be certain, she read the words again:

  ‘. . .Always use the back page straight onto the cardboard cover so as to leave no indentation. Written. Read carefully, yes all there all in the right order. Neatly torn off from its spiral binding, all the little flaky pieces removed. The page was never there. Chew until dissolved then spit into the toilet . . .’

  Carefully turning the same page in the journal itself, she examined where it was bound to the spine. Three or four of those tiny little flakes were still there, just the few that had not fluttered out as she had held the pages up to the light. A surge of triumph and excitement swept through her, it was so small a thing and yet it was real physical evidence. This was not a fiction, no author would have gone to such lengths, it was not sheer coincidence, it was real. The probabilities swung in her favour.

  With her fresh conviction about the journal, Lydia set to work drawing up a list of possibilities for the names and faces in the albums. To begin with, she concentrated on those who might reasonably be regarded as the core family, who appeared repeatedly and whose names were common to more than one volume. From the Longlands album she had already drawn a rough family tree with Papa and Mama as the head and with the definite children ‘self ’ and Alice, and probable children Albert and Isabella; then, in order of probability, Beatrice, Joseph, James, and Henry. Finally, there were possible children or grandchildren Phoebe, Albert M, Albert and Harriet. Clearly Albert the son, who looked about thirty-five, would not have a brother Albert, more likely his own son Albert. Albert M, who might be around six or seven, was differentiated by the letter M, possibly suggesting a different surname than the others. If that were so and Albert M were a grandchild, then he was the son of a married daughter. Beatrice and Isabella were the obvious candidates, but that might also imply that their husbands were in the photograph and that did not quite tally with the count of adults. Lydia did not spend any great time considering this, instead she moved back to her original purpose.

  The next album was devoted almost entirely to James, the second ‘self’, the son Henry, and presumed children Verity and Bertie. James was the tentative link to Longlands. In this second album, or as Lydia had come to think of it, her ‘RAF’ album, James could be between thirty-five and fifty. The Longlands James might be twenty or so, a difference which was consistent with him being one and the same person. Lydia examined them both under her magnifying glass. Nothing to say they were and nothing to say they weren’t, just a family likeness that could be her imagination. She did the same with ‘self’ from the RAF album and the possible females from the Longlands album with exactly the same result. The RAF album did have the huge advantage of a family name, the Myers name, to give her Mr & Mrs J D of whom the J was surely James, plus Henry, Verity and Bertie. She looked closely at Henry and Verity. Similar ages and brother and sister she was sure, but there might be more to it than that. Might they be twins, and if so then did twins not run in families? She was positive that the Longlands ‘self ’ and Alice were twins. Another possible link danced elusively in the mist.

  According to her notes, the next album in sequence would be the one without photographs, her ‘VE Day’ album as she had christened it. From the little she could gather from the brevity of the captions, it covered the years from the late 30’s to the early 50’s. Albert needed no prompting to be considered first. An Albert who was present in the captions before 1945 but not after, so an Albert of an age to have died in the war, one who might have had children called Ethel, Violet and Rose in the 30’s. Assumptions certainly, but the name Albert was a link with Longlands. Either one of the Albert grandsons would have been in their mid twenties and perfectly placed to be have children at that time. The Essex connection was there again, in the name Coggeshall. Lydia checked her gazetteer. Sure enough there it was, just a few miles from Braintree. The idea that three random photograph albums should all have links to so small an area and end up together in an Oxfordshire saleroom was unlikely. Once again, Lydia considered the probabilities to be favourable.

  The last album, her ‘sandcastles’ album, had no discernable reference to Essex. But it did have a Fred to go with the pictureless caption ‘Ethel and Fred, Chelsea August 1952’ in the VE Day album. It also had Susan and Paul and yet another �
��self’, plus the usual cast of extras, a handful of appearances by Tommy and Mick, and various picnics with ‘the Arncliffes’. Although the ‘self ’ in each of the albums was certainly not the same ‘self’, Lydia wondered how unusual it might be to caption a photograph in this way. How did people identify themselves, if not their name? Might ‘self ’ be something unconsciously learned from a mother, or was it so common as to be unimportant? Having no way of answering her question, Lydia let it drop. The dates and places identified were those of holidays such as ‘ Margate ’58’ and ‘The Dales’‘. The possibilities for this album amounted to just one; Fred was the same Fred as the Chelsea 1952 Fred in which case it was just conceivable that ‘self’ was the Chelsea Ethel. Lydia reminded herself that ‘just conceivable’ did not offer the balance of probability she was seeking, but she still noted it down.

  Finally she gave similar consideration to the journal. In doing so, Lydia realised that she had only looked at words and handwriting, trying to decipher their sad and seemingly awful meanings. She hadn’t really thought about dates, places, and clues to identity. It seemed clear that the book itself was a good deal older than the handwritten entries within it. The author had used at least four different ball-point pens for the most part, with a sprinkling of pencils which had their points broken at regular intervals. Now she read the whole account once more, looking not for clues to the outcome, but to see if people, dates and places could be narrowed down. The author was educated, had a good vocabulary, worked with words, wrote jingles or advertising slogans. The use of ‘jingles’ suggested a date after the 1960’s, but it was a tentative marker at best. When she read the reference to a film about suspended animation and the word that she’d interpreted as ‘comatose’, a quick search on her computer came up with ‘Coma’ which dated to the late 70s. There was a reference to ‘user-trialled’ which she felt must be later still, possibly a buzzword from the 80’s. The only places mentioned by name were Brighton, Bournemouth, La Rochelle, probably Harrogate, and Cockermouth. As for time span, she noted a summer holiday and two distinct references to Valentine’s Day, and one between them to a Christmas, although admittedly that was in the least reliable entry, the illegible twenty-fourth. But it was followed by a reference to New Year, so a year had passed between the eleventh and the twenty-sixth entries. If that was the pattern for the whole journal then it covered about two years. Some entries, she was sure, were only a day apart, may even have been the same day, others were more separated. By how long was uncertain but, if she needed to, Lydia reasoned that she could get a closer approximation. The company that made the author redundant as his illness - it was surely an illness – progressed, he’d referred to as ‘Pink on Pink’ although on checking she saw that the tiny scribble she’d read as ‘on’ could be any single letter or two letter word. It could also be ‘and’.