Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  God, she was light, so small and light. He could not look at her, only weigh her in his arms and wrap her in his blanket. Even then she was nothing to carry and not even after he had crossed five fields, splashing along the waterlogged footpaths, half limping on his gammy leg, boots caked in mud, did she feel like much of a burden.

  He laid her down by the stones, opened the blanket and folded the stones in next to her, leaving one out to mark the spot. Then he lit his hurricane lamp, cut off a length of twine with his clasp knife, threaded one of Iris’s old darning needles and sewed the blanket up. He worked slowly, in big jagged stitches. When he was finished, he picked her up and the stones collected and dragged at the hem. The blanket sack had doubled in weight. It would do.

  He left it there and walked to the tree, pulled himself up onto the bough and shuffled along, sitting, to hang the lamp on the broken stem at the spot from which the girl had fallen. He walked back to the stone and took off his boots. He picked her up and walked along the shore, triangulating and measuring from the stone to the bough to the water. Then he focused on the point where the water darkened and lowered himself in, dragging the sack in the crook of one arm like someone he was trying to save. The water was freezing. Tom swam clumsily out till he felt a change of temperature and depth. He checked the lamp and looked for the stone and was convinced: this was it. The blanket sack pulled under. She wanted to go, so he let her.

  Lucas was trying to remember what the Scots called houses that had no chimneys. Black, a black house. It was getting too cold now for a fire outside his shed and so he’d have to fashion some kind of stove inside. He could bash a hole in the roof and stick an old tin through it.

  His joints ached and he’d got the shakes. He lay on his mattress and listened to the night. It must be five o’clock by now, as he could hear the first lorries gearing up for their run down the High Street. The milk train trundled through, its rattle abstracted across the fields into a soft but unmistakeable burr. He waited for the shudder of the early workers’ bus and then remembered that this was a Sunday.

  Lucas planned to be up and making a brew by the first church bells, but he was fixed in a chilly torpor. When a man came stumbling through the door, he reached for his torch and turned it on, then blinked and blinked, unsure of what he was seeing, wondering even if this was a spirit come in from the fields: a man of clay, like they said. The man stood shaking in the middle of the hut, and in the time it took Lucas to haul himself up and think it out, he realised it was Tom.

  He was soaked and bruised, and covered in a thin skin of something between earth and water. Lucas turned his torch to one side but not before he saw that Tom had no boots on, just socks swollen to clods of mud. ‘Had a bit of an accident, lad?’ Tom just gasped. Lucas pulled him down into the small pool of light.

  ‘You’ll be needing a blanket.’ Tom thought of her in her blanket, slipping away, in the right place. Lucas took his old army blanket off his mattress and wrapped it around Tom’s shoulders. Then he made his way outside, took a slow difficult piss, and warmed his hands at the still glowing fire. He never let it go out and had piled it high before turning in that night. It was this light that Tom had seen across the fields and had made his way towards.

  Behind the shed, under a plastic sheet, Lucas had a pile of kindling and wood that he’d scavenged or been given. It didn’t take long to get a blaze going and when he felt it warming him, Lucas went inside and got Tom. He sat him down on a log and went off to fill his kettle from the trough at the bottom of Stroud’s field. He threw in several large pinches of tea, some sugar lumps and the last half of an open tin of condensed milk, and boiled it up in the kettle together. Later, he’d go up to the yard to help himself to his egg.

  Lucas gave Tom his mug and drank tea from a saucer. When the boy had finished, he started talking. ‘You remember don’t you the Dip?’ Tom’s teeth rattled. Lucas nodded. ‘You knew my mother and me and Christie and our house and the church and the farm like it was yesterday don’t you?’

  ‘Like it was yesterday,’ Lucas concurred. It was.

  ‘All I’ve wanted is to put what I could back in place and then in my head it would be in place and I could get a bit of peace. You know that, don’t you?’

  Lucas had tried to concentrate but the words came so fast that it was hard to follow what Tom was saying, so he held onto what felt most important. ‘Yes. Of course. Peace.’ Yellow was weakening the dark sky.

  ‘I took her back there.’

  Lucas, who had been nodding vaguely as Tom spoke, stopped at this and wondered. ‘Took her back?’

  ‘Back.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Back home. I know now I can’t go back but she could and that’s enough.’

  ‘What have you done?’ Lucas turned to face him but Tom stared into the fire.

  ‘She’s there now back.’ When Lucas said nothing, Tom felt safe and able to explain. ‘You knew us all so you would understand, Lucas, I had to do something, everything was so out of place I couldn’t go home, it was all wrong. Christie too so hating her, and I thought if she was at home at least one of us would be in the right place because she should have been buried there but they put the concrete down and then the water. It’s all I want for her to rest in peace and me too to rest, you understand, don’t you?’

  ‘You mean Iris?’

  ‘Iris?’

  ‘You took Iris … home?’

  ‘That’s right, you understand I carried my Ma so carefully and worked it all out, the right place and how she would go down.’

  ‘You took her?’

  ‘She was in the wrong place.’

  ‘That was her grave, son.’

  ‘But not her place.’

  The previous night’s drink, the cold, the wet, the layers of newspaper and clothes, his aches and pains and deadenings, made Lucas feel so far away that it took time for things to sink in. His first thought was, Of course, this is just one of the boy’s hallucinations. How could he have dug up a coffin, disturbed a ten-year-old grave without anyone noticing? How could he have carried a body all the way to the water? Then again, when had he, Lucas, ever visited Iris’s grave? And he knew that Father Barclay liked to encourage ‘wilderness’. He was trying to persuade the Parish Council to think of the Catholic cemetery as a nature reserve. It was said he wanted to let Stroud put his sheep in there to graze when the grass needed cutting back.

  Lucas could sense Tom’s great energy and knew he could have dug up his mother’s coffin with his bare hands if he’d wanted to and carried her bones all the way to the sea.

  Remembering Iris, her sadness and her kindness, stirred something in Lucas. ‘You can’t just go round digging up graves and carrying bodies about! That was your mother!’

  Tom flinched. What was he doing? He had held it all so beautifully secret and now it had been given away to Lucas, who knew everything and told everything, who had pretended to understand. ‘You think I did wrong?’ His fists were clenched in his pockets, the left one empty, the right one round his knife.

  Lucas saw that the boy was no better. All that talk about him being best off where he belonged was nonsense. He’d been propped up these last six months by people who had no idea what was really going on in his head, family and friends who would not admit they weren’t enough. Where to start? ‘You did wrong,’ he said.

  It was enough. Allnorthover had given its judgement. Not good old Tom for seeing his mother right after all that work and care, but bad Tom, mad Tom. The pounding certainty upon which Tom had depended these last few weeks drained from him. All that was left was the village and its judgement given by this filthy, raddled old man whom no one turned away. Tom couldn’t stand the reproach in that sloppy face, those rheumy eyes. Poor Tom. Mad, laughable Tom.

  ‘You think I’m not right … in my head …’ he was speaking hesitantly again.

  ‘You’re apt to fix on something, get it all out of shape.’

  ‘But my Ma. I had to do right by
my Ma!’

  Lucas sighed. ‘Your mother knew what she was doing. To her, the Dip was a trap.’

  ‘She loved it there! We loved it!’

  Lucas kicked at the fire, stirring it up, thinking of another pot of tea. Tom needed to be told now. ‘You did, yes. What I’m trying to say is that you mustn’t go on troubling yourself for her sake. Giving away the house to someone who would let it go was her way of –’ Lucas was overtaken by a booming, rackety cough that left him spluttering for breath. His yellow tongue waggled in his wide-open toothless mouth as he brought up thick brown phlegm. His eyes streamed.

  Tom poured all the disgust he had been made to feel about himself onto this pathetic old man. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We were friends, boy. You remember?’ Lucas after the war, bright, shaky, moving from job to job but always turning up for Sunday tea. Another cuckoo. Tom was restless, angry now, his energy returning, his left hand tapping against the log on which he sat, his right hand opening and shutting the knife.

  ‘Maybe so but you … didn’t know her understand her like I did. That’s why I came … home from university, why I stayed, she needed me!’

  Why couldn’t Lucas stop himself? Why did he need to claim Iris now? ‘You were troubled, lad. It was you as needed her.’ Then, as if that wasn’t enough, because he was angry, ‘You should have left her where she was! She had a terrible painful death and she was at rest! Not being bundled about the place just to give you a happy ending! You should have gone to her in the hospital when she needed you, not now! She doesn’t need you now!’

  Tom broke. He couldn’t stand those eyes anymore and how wrong they made him feel. He pushed them away, pushed Lucas away with his right hand, in which there was his knife, now open, and it was the blade not his fingers that jabbed and jabbed, taking away the old man’s sight.

  Valerie had wanted to help Mary indoors, explain her shock to Stella and make sure she was cared for. ‘You’ve had a nasty fall,’ she insisted, remembering how for one long second it had looked as if the girl was floating not falling, but that must have been when her jacket caught. Mary had almost shouted that she wanted nothing said, no one was to know, to forget it, just forget it. She had leapt out of the car, ran indoors and got into bed.

  Mary had no trouble sleeping now. She wanted to stay in bed for ever. It was better than trying to do anything because things always went wrong, especially when she tried to do what was right and it turned out not to be. Other people seemed to know what was right and then they didn’t.

  It had all been so stupid. The tree had been far too slippery but she hadn’t felt able to say anything, to just climb down and say no, not even when the rain grew so heavy. There had been that bare patch, a knot and a stumble, then Billy’s jacket catching on a branch and snapping it but breaking her fall, tugging her back and giving her time to reach up and catch hold. Valerie had come running, crawled out along the bough, helped her up and coaxed her back. That man had just stayed where he was, and was still smiling as they drove back (Valerie chalk-faced, the bones of her tiny fingers standing out as she grasped the steering wheel, saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’). Mary was sick of him. He might look like some kind of martyr but he was just mad. So what if everyone had known him all their lives and he was ‘Iris’s boy’? He was a loony, like Julie said.

  Mary’s secret wasn’t what anyone thought at all, nothing that meant anything, just emptiness. That was what she was looking for now, and she was relieved to be so weak and feverish. It left her mind free to wander and kept everyone else away. Mim spent most of the day lying at her feet like an anchor, not even stirring when the buses came through. It was the only contact Mary wanted. Stella fluttered in and out, saying less and less. Dr Clough visited on the Monday. He didn’t ask her any questions so she told him things, not about that man and the water but about fear and helplessness, and crying all the time and getting everything wrong. He didn’t make a fuss or say much, which helped.

  In her room at the back of the house, with her windows closed and curtains drawn, Mary got a sense of something happening in the village. There was more traffic and noise, more voices and comings and goings on the Green. The tone of the place was different. People kept knocking at the door. Mary heard the doctor insisting to Stella that first she must be left to recover, explanations could come later, something about giving a statement and something about shock. He prescribed tablets for her fever, which Mary liked because they thickened her sleep.

  When Mary did wake up, she remembered the way the world had turned over so she had been half-falling, half-clinging to the bough, looking up into deep water. She’d seen that there was nothing in it, no house or church or farm. It was just empty water. As Valerie hauled her up and steadied her, the sky swung back over her head and it, too, was empty. Nothing was holding Mary in place. She would never walk out over the water again.

  Her parents came in together during one half-sleep, or she dreamt they did. They spoke at the same time, even sounding alike and saying her name, all her names over and over. ‘Mary, Mary Fairy, Mary Mystery, Miss Mary, Mary Mary Quite Contrary, Merry Mary Blackberry …’ She could feel the rough chill of her father’s hand on her burning arm and her mother’s cool fingers raking her hair and, in her drowsiness, felt as if she were flowing in both directions. Later, when she woke and the room was empty, she called for her mother and was going to ask about her father’s visit but didn’t, in case it hadn’t been real.

  Julie came, in her waitress’s uniform, on the way to her evening shift. She sat Mary up and puffed her pillows, brought in a flannel and washed her face. ‘You must be filthy, lying about in this heap of blankets all day! Says you’ve been rotting away since Saturday night! That’s two days, you lazy cow!’ She had brought sweets – the ones they’d shared as children: milk bottles, black jacks, fruit salads, foamy pink shrimps and rubbery teeth – and Mary ate them. Julie put on a record, The Supremes, and tried each of Mary’s perfumes on herself before choosing one for her patient. She dabbed Mary’s wrists and temples with 4711 cologne, because it smelt ‘healthy and refreshing’. She had a tale to tell.

  She went into it thinking Mary already knew then realised, to her horror, that no one had dared tell her. Tom Hepple had dug up his mother’s body and sunk her in the Dip, then he’d stabbed Lucas in the eyes. Tom had been found the next morning by Charlie Spooner, one of the hands out on Stroud’s farm, dragging Lucas across a flooded field. Charlie had thought Tom was struggling with some animal that was sick or dead. He’d gone over to help and had stopped at the edge of a pool, in the middle of which Tom had stopped too. Charlie said the morning had been bright and the floodwater like a mirror that Tom was staring down into. He had kept hold of Lucas’s sleeve with one hand, and took no notice of the blood leaking from his half-submerged body. Before Charlie could think what to do, Tom saw him, howled and ran, and Charlie had waded in to drag whatever it was out. Only then did he realise it was human. He knew Lucas by his coat and covered his face as soon as he saw it. He’d run up to Stroud’s and rung the police, and Constable Belcher had followed Tom’s chaotic tracks out to the Dip. It was said that when he was found he had been almost dead himself, half-drowned and half-buried, halfway into or out of the water.

  Julie told Mary all this as plainly as she could, not entirely able to resist its drama. She was astonished that Stella had encouraged her to visit, knowing she was bound to say something, couldn’t not.

  Somewhere between the hut and the field, Lucas had died. All sorts of people had been asked to make statements.

  It was so much for Mary to take in, that she started with something easy. ‘How’s Christie taking it?’

  Julie flushed. Mary remembered and bit her lip. ‘How’d I know?’ Julie’s retort was too quick.

  Mary was direct. ‘I saw you. On the Common. Hallowe’en. Not really saw you but enough.’

  Julie was agitated. ‘What did you see?’ Christie raising his wet, buried head; Julie’s head thr
own back. Mary said nothing. ‘So, Mary George! Because I’m blonde and have got a bit of a mouth on me, you think I’m a slag?’

  ‘No!’ And she really didn’t. ‘I didn’t know what to think!’

  Julie was hurt, but she laughed. ‘Well, think what the fuck you like, girl. Yeah, he’s come after me, says he’s in love with me, god knows. He talks and I don’t really listen. These days, he just cries.’ Christie’s wet face. ‘I babysat the twins a lot last year when I was finishing school, and he used to drop me home. The first time he tried it on, I was petrified! I didn’t know how to get him to stop without being rude!’

  ‘What about Sophie?’

  ‘What about her? Sophie’s great!’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘They don’t, anymore.’

  Mary said gently, ‘I should think they do.’

  Julie shrugged. ‘Yeah. Reckon they do.’

  The pause that followed brought back Tom and Lucas. Mary grasped Julie’s hand and they sat in silence. Beyond the facts, there was nothing that could safely be discussed. The smallest ‘what if’ would open a door from which an avalanche of events, connections and secrets would fall. It would flatten them all. Instead, Mary absorbed the truth. She was grateful to Julie for being straight with her so when the next shadow crossed her mind, she offered it up immediately.