by Jeremy Page
When Mr Holbeach came out he didn’t see me. He only ever had eyes for the tulips. I watched him loosening soil around their stems, counting how many had broken the ground, examining an area where there seemed to be no plants growing and then marking off a patch of earth with a length of white string. When he pushed bamboo canes into the soil I imagined my mother pushing candles into a birthday cake. My ninth birthday. Pushing candles into the cake and asking me whether I was going to tell her any secrets. Just a whisper now, that’s all we need. And then Mr Holbeach was straightening up with the sound of his knees cracking and I was back in his dismal fen, feeling more determined than ever to see Elsie.
Elsie. There she was, standing on a stool in the bathroom under a bare light bulb, her hair as bright as copper wire. On and off went the light, several times, then I slid through the grass so old Holbeach wouldn’t see me, and as I reached his picket fence Elsie was there at the back door. I sprinted over the soil and was still wondering about my footprints when I noticed the door closing and she unexpectedly pushed me against the corridor wall and kissed me. On the lips, like an adult. I tasted her breath and felt her hair brush quickly against my face and it wasn’t copper at all and I jolted back and knocked my head on the wall. She was pulling me forward then, and we were running up the stairs and through the window I saw the crouching figure of Mr Holbeach still scratching away at the soil with his finger. Elsie pushed me into her room and shut the door.
Before I really knew what was happening she’s dived at me and together we fell against her bed with a big soft crumpling sound and her head knocked clumsily against mine. There was a sudden pain in my ear and I panicked because I knew she’d bitten me there. Only a year since I’d seen her being carried up the slope in my father’s arms in the rain. Now she was big, with arms that were powerful and long and strong.
‘I wrote to you,’ she said, urgent and hushed. ‘And to Aunt May.’
I tried to reach for my notebook, but it had twisted behind my neck, so I had to shake my head in answer.
‘You never got the letters?’
No! I gestured, completely at sea as to what was happening. A crazy girl.
Elsie read the look in my eyes and started to giggle. She quickly pulled her skirt up so she could sit on my stomach, a leg either side of me, then grabbed my wrists again so I couldn’t move. I’d never been this close to a girl before. Tiny bronze hairs were growing above her knees. She seemed heavy and boisterous. I could still taste her breath.
‘Shall I kiss you again?’ she said, then abruptly she let me go and swung herself off me and sat on a chair. She got some paper and a pencil for me from her desk.
‘I’m nearly sixteen,’ she said, and gave me the paper to write on.
Get off me! I wrote, then crossed it out and wrote Mum’s ill.
I showed it to Elsie, then wrote as fast as I could, describing the silence and the time I’d seen my mother crying when she was making jam, and then about how weedy the garden was and when was Elsie going to come to see her.
While I was doing this she rested her chin on her knees and pushed her lips into a pout.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad would go mad. They said I could’ve died that night in the fen. I can cycle as far as the Ouse but not any further, and you can forget about going in any boats.’ When she stopped talking she re-formed her pout, sucking in her chin till it made a tiny crease below her mouth. Her lips were red and I knew there must be lipstick on my mouth and its film felt sticky and I thought I might sweat and I knew I couldn’t wipe it away, not while she was staring at me.
‘Why isn’t she talking to anyone?’ she said.
The phone rang downstairs and after it rang a second time I heard not Mr Holbeach but - surprisingly - his wife’s voice saying yes that’s right we have you down for three dozen.
‘You’ve got to go when she calls Dad in,’ Elsie said, springing to the door. Again, she looked big and clumsy in a room so small. She reached into a glass jar on a shelf and gave me a mint humbug.
‘That’s Aunty May’s. For her throat.’
She opened the door a crack and peered down the stairs. Holding her hair back with one hand. In the shadow of her armpit I noticed the elasticized whiteness of a bra. A decorative herring-bone stitch running along the top of the hem.
‘Now!’ she said, and as I went to the door I sensed movement at the bottom of the stairs. For a second I imagined Mrs Holbeach was down there in stockinged feet, lying in wait with a rolling pin. Murder in her Quaker heart. And then Elsie was gripping me and I saw the exotic beetle’s back of a second humbug in her hand.
‘For you,’ she said, unwrapping it. I opened my mouth only to see her pop it between her own lips and in the same movement push me against the door till it banged shut. A sudden kiss, again, knocking my teeth with her teeth, and I tried to close my mouth and she pushed her teeth hard against my lips and gums. It wasn’t her teeth but the glassy surface of the humbug, and as I struggled against her the sweet was suddenly in my mouth and it tasted of mint and it tasted of Elsie. Then it was all over and she was pushing me away from her and down the stairs and telling me to come and see her again.
That afternoon I gave the first sweet to my mother. From Elsie, I wrote, a little angrily. She stared long and hard at the mint, at my note, then finally at me. She put the sweet in her mouth even though I knew she didn’t like humbugs and in a hoarse voice she whispered you’re everything I could have wanted. Do you know that? You’re my angel. A real angel.
It made a single tear roll down the curve of her cheek, and I felt guilty for that. It gathered in the crease near her mouth, then slowly dried from her eyelid downwards, as if she willed it to go.
She didn’t ask how I’d seen Elsie, or when, and a whole month passed without any more reference to what I’d done. Until one morning, when I was putting on my shoes ready for the estate, she pressed a small note into my hand. Will you? she asked. I tried to stay calm, pretending we’d planned nothing else the whole month. I folded it into the front pocket of my dungarees, and patted the pocket in the same way my father did to remind himself he’d remembered his wallet, and immediately I felt ashamed to have used the same gesture.
On a chair in the larder, while my dough shapes were baking in the range, I read it: My dear Elsie. I love you. I’m thinking of you. Thank you for my sweet.
The farm was decaying. Dust covered the egg grader, oil cans popped and leaked as they expanded in morning sunlight, rats threaded their way through the outbuildings, eating everything. Cow parsley, hogweed and alexander grew as tall as a man in the yard. Days and days on a bike, circling the yard, the house, the sheds, the fields, forever moving, forever pedalling, stop and the weeds might claim me, stop and there’s my mother, in her bed, a kitchen ghost, a sleepwalker. Stop and my father will get me, not let go, send me away. And rapidly I was cycling too close to something colourful on the ground by the copse and I saw it was someone lying down. A woman lying on a fallen beech tree, stretching her arms above her head along its smooth trunk. Her fair hair bunched to one side, framing her face like ears of barley. She was lying in the full heat of the morning sun with her knees drawn up and her shirt tied into a loose knot over her belly-button. A little way off, my father was sitting on the grass, whittling a stick with a knife. She stretched along the trunk and turned her head in my direction. A flash from the blade as he folded his knife away. She swung her legs off the trunk and they began to walk back over the pasture. Him rolling his shoulders and her carrying her sandals.
I shut my eyes and imagined myself standing in the parlour at the Holbeachs’ cottage. With Elsie just run in from outside. Run in because she always seems on the verge of action. Legs long and clumsy and full of life, hands clenched into fists like she always did as a child. An uneasy gesture, unsure whether she’s an adult or a girl. Her shirt has a knot in it over the belly-button like the woman on the fallen beech tree. Elsie’s belly is as bronzed as fresh bread. She’s
full of expectation - her face is stretched with it - the creases which mark the points where her nostrils meet her cheeks have the sunken curve where the stalk enters the top of a peach, ripe with life. There’s a smell of baking in there, of suet and flour, and a carbolic cleanliness which connects Mrs Holbeach and this house with the hospital where she used to work. A smell of violet water, from a bottle, though there are several thousand flowers outside. And I lean forward, thinking of herringbone stitches and shadows in armpits and I try to kiss Elsie and she pushes me away so violently I hit my head on something large and soft and I turn to see it’s Mrs Holbeach, cheeks red with the anger she’s always swallowed and I think her body must be filled with years of it, and I see that deep within her there’s a dark curl of temper like a bramble she can’t kill. What are you doing here? she says. Elsie has vanished and Mrs Holbeach seems to grow larger, all the lines in her face are soft and curved. She says in a calm, gentle voice, what’s the matter with her, Pip, your mother’s ill, isn’t she? She needs help, my love. And I run at that moment, run to my mother, across the pasture and dry stubble, and at the outbuildings I hear a strange, muffled noise coming from near the pigsty. Careful of the large pile of rusty poaching traps my father stored in there fifteen years before, I climb on to two sacks of feed and peer over the internal wall into the next shed, only to see my father, grimacing with some sort of pain, leaning against the wall. Above him was the hook he’d hung me from, all those years ago. It seems his pain is private, until he breaks into a broad smile and at the same instant I realize he is not alone. I see the blonde hair being shaken to the side and once more I see her face, pressed against the wall this time, her eyes still shut tight like they had been that morning. It is her who is making the noise. A sharp, regular intake of breath. Together they are pushing against the wall, my father’s hand either side of her flat against the brick and now holding her by the shoulders and pulling her shirt off her shoulders as he leans his weight against her and she buckles softly against the wall. He pulls the shirt to the side and quickly I see inside her blouse and her breast is as soft as cream, and one of his rough hands reaches for it and I see the dust from the dry brick wall on his fingers as he holds her there. And she seems to wince with pain and she bites her bottom lip and nearly laughing and screwing her eyes tighter till suddenly she gasps as if someone has struck her and she opens her eyes and stares right through me. Right at me.
11
She Went This Way
A sickly smell of boiled eggs and hot butter. For the sandwiches. Some have been left for me on the corner of the table but I leave them there. I want no part of their lunch. Tonight there’ll be bread-and-butter pudding bubbling like lava in the big glass pot, and I’ll eat that.
My mother has made the sandwiches, dutifully, and she’s taken some cold beer for them because they’ll be parched. All the doors are open to let any kind of breeze shift the relentless, scorching heat of a late-summer afternoon. As I watch her go, the wheels of the car stir up a fine cloud of golden dust.
It’s the day they harvest the twenny-acre. A big job, and they’ll be out there till late, ten, maybe half ten even. Everyone from the estate gets involved. It takes two to drive the combine it’s so fierce. The damage you could do with a machine like that. I go to the window and even though I can’t hear the combine I see the yard’s filling with dust. The whole air is quietly glowing, as if it contains some strange flame, some form of inferno. It’s like the end of the world.
As the dust settles behind the car I go quickly to the end of the dresser. I look at the Gallyon & Sons shotgun leaned against the wall. I touch the metal. Heavy steel. In all this heat it seems cool, really cool, as if somehow the gun has remained unconnected with everything else. And yet that metal could be hot. When they’d last done the rabbits I remembered watching the rifle lowering to my height, being told to feel how warm the barrel was in front of the stock. They all laughed when I burned my finger.
I lift the rigid weight of the gun, then turn it slowly round the room, gazing down the sights, calmly placing it on a chair and lodging the butt under the edge of the table. I’d never breached a side by side. I push down harshly and the gun twists like a broom handle. Locked tight. My hands smell of old metal.
Again. This time the stock snaps at the breech leaving the barrels swinging on their hinge. I quietly open the drawer of the dresser, find the dry cardboard box and pick out two cartridges. They slot into the breech and when I touch their flat shining ends the metal is so smooth it feels greasy. I lift the Gallyon, gaze down the sights, then begin to walk, like that, gun raised, one eye shut, into the corridor. I feel for the safety with my thumb, find and disengage the lever, hear the click close by my ear and go into the living room. So quiet in there, looking through the twin sights. The target wanders casually along the walls, over the furniture, comes to rest on the bureau. A photograph of my parents on their wedding day, sitting in their boat after the service. Brylcream hair, smooth skin. My mother’s fledgling beehive haircut. I aim at him, at the bastard and his stupid grin. I feel the pressure of the trigger, the harsh edge of the metal cutting into my finger. The shot explodes into the room knocking me back against the settee and the gun thrashes up towards the ceiling and I notice confetti flakes of plaster falling all around. Along with the photo, a pair of glasses has flown into the air, its rims twisting like surprised eyebrows. There’s a smell of gunpowder, acrid and sweet, a smell of burning wood and still the sickly smell of eggs and butter. The bureau is beyond even my mother’s woodwork repair; in a cone shape around where the picture had been it is splintered and peppered with shot, long grooves scored into the wood, smoke winding upwards, the photo itself, gone, smashed against the wall harder than any anger could throw it . . .
Unexpectedly something moves by my leg and I see it’s Gull, woken from his afternoon nap. I see the tiny scars on his forehead where the ticks have bitten him, and I realize I’m not in the living room at all, that I’m still sitting at the dining table instead, by the uneaten sandwich. Across the room the shotgun leans quietly against the wall, untouched.
The car will be back soon in this long blazing day.
I’ll be at the table, waiting.
But there is no bread-and-butter pudding that night. My father returns, exhausted, grimy with the thick make-up of sweat and dust. Someone else’s face on his own. He sits at the kitchen table drinking a can of lemonade. Through the open window he looks at his wife as she stands out there by the edge of the corn. He sighs.
‘Lil’,’ he says, flatly, ‘come on in now.’
In front of her the burnished crop rises far into the distance. A low sun, heavy and smouldering in the sky. Every now and then a breeze forms in some part of the field and she gazes at the tall stems beginning to sway, their movement confused, then she sees them settle, as if a wave has drifted through them. The breeze seems to come from nowhere, but when it rolls towards her it’s hot and dusty, and she must be able to smell just how ready the crop is.
In her hand she has a box of cat biscuits, and she shakes it again, once, twice, then for a continuous length of time as her desperation mounts. The kitten’s in the corn, and if it doesn’t come out before morning, the combine will take her. The rattle that the box makes sounds so insignificant, so ridiculously quiet against the swirling hush of the field. Does it unnerve her to look out across the wheat? I don’t think she ever quite got used to it, living there, that crop so full of its own movement, so close.
I see her look at the picture on the box: a cat approaching a bowl of cat biscuits, one paw outstretched. She begins to shake the box again with renewed vigour. Come out, come out of the corn. Tears fall down her cheeks. It’s her last chance. The sun’s so low now the tops of the corn shine like broken glass.
Her heart is breaking; I think, right now, I’m watching my mother’s heart break.
Some time that next day, when the combine turned so close to the farm buildings its hot exhaust of dust and diesel
gusted against the windows, Pepper must have run into the gatherer while the jungle of brittle stems snapped around her. Perhaps she found a corner of the field which had felt safe, far away from the shaking ground and the whirring metal. Perhaps her last movement was to chase the dancing patches of sunlight which would come swiftly at her as the combine approached. We never found the body, or the bodies of the mice that Pepper had been chasing. From a glinting sea of corn in the evening light, there was nothing but sharp stubble and brown soil twenty-four hours later, with the combine itself, giant and exhausted in the field’s centre.
As night began to fall the only lights in the field came from the vast headlamps of the combine shining across the stubble. My mother walked out to the men with their supper of warm potatoes and a stew of lamb. The men were thoroughly exhausted, quiet. They knew about her hunt for the kitten the night before and read in her face that the kitten hadn’t returned. Each one of them thanking her silently, handing their empty plates back to her, then watching her return across the destroyed field in the glow of the headlamps.
Winter brought ice, covering my bedroom window like a cataract. Ice on both sides of the glass. Each morning I’d sit in front of the one-bar electric heater in the middle of the floor, and hear its deep comforting hum of electricity. I’d crouch and lean forward till the thin cold metal of the grill almost touched my chest. The bar itself was oxidized and old, but slowly its ash-grey surface would turn brown, then start to glow through a series of rust reds. The heat spread quickly across the bare skin of my legs and belly. A sharp smell of dust burning. Each morning, there by the heater, bowed over it and collecting all the warmth it could give until the bar glowed fiery orange and all I could breathe was the airless smell of dry heat. And then shuffling back on the carpet, rubbing at my legs and chest to stop them burning. When the bar was hottest, I’d spit on it and watch the drops sizzle in little black spots like the poker’s mark on glowing coal.