Remember Me

by Trezza Azzopardi

  I felt her fingertips gripping the sooty wall, and her eyes, staring at the bridge. I felt the cold of the bucket seeping up through the soles of her boots. I caught my father’s sleeve to tell him, but he was looking at another thing, a trail of steam in the distance, a dense cloud eating up the sky, and in the corner of my eye I saw his hand, coming up to point it out. But he wasn’t pointing; he was taking the flowers from me, unfurling the paper wrap and opening it, shaking it out like a dishcloth over the edge of the bridge. The heads twirled down onto the tracks and were lost in the smoke of the train as it passed beneath us. When we reached the end of the bridge, I looked back into the garden; the girl was gone too, only the garden and the wall, and the twirling mirrors catching bits of sky. I could have told my father about her, but with the flowers spiralling down so fast and the smoke coming up like a cough and the shuddering bridge making the light jump black and white – with all that – I couldn’t speak. One of the ghosts had followed me. I didn’t want my father to know I could see her.

  ~

  On our days out, we go to the picture house. It’s The Ranch for cowboys, and the new Regent for everything else. My father likes to see films where the girls dance in patterns. He looks hard for one that reminds him of my mother, and then he points her out to me. He won’t go to the churchyard, but he tries to find her everywhere else. I can never follow the story, because he’ll keep nudging me and saying,

  There she is, Pats, the spit of your mam. The absolute spit.

  She’ll be wearing a sequinned evening dress or a bathing costume, or a fancy head-dress with feathers sticking out of the top. When there’s a close-up, she’ll show her perfect teeth, and my father will smile back at her. It’s like they’re having a conversation: the girl’s big head nodding down at us from the screen and my father staring back with the side of his face lit up, his eyes glowing in the dark like oysters. The girl never looks anything like my mother, really, but I have to watch out for her all the same. I want to know what it is that he’s seeing and I’m not.

  Sometimes, if we’ve been to a picture more than twice, my father promises me a boat trip on the lake. We’ll walk along the riverside, right up to the bend where the heath sits on one corner and The Flag on the other, and my father will wipe his forehead and say,

  I’m parched, Patsy. Shall we wet our whistles, first? I’m not allowed inside The Flag, so we slip through the gate and into the yard at the back. I have to sit on the wall under a tree and wait, while he goes round again into the front like an ordinary customer. He comes out through a side door, holding a drink in each hand, and says, Ta-ra! as if he’s a magician who’s just sawed someone in half. My father has black ale with a froth on it, and I have ginger beer, which he says isn’t a beer at all. He always gets it for me, even though I don’t much care for the taste, and he puts it down on the wall and always says the same thing:

  Just like your mam. She loved her ginger beer! He wants me not to forget. But it would be easier if we both remembered the same person. He always brings a thing of hers, a ribbon or a handkerchief edged with lace, and tells me the history of it. The ribbon could be anyone’s, and the handkerchief has a smell I don’t recognize, and the wrong initials embroidered in the corner. I didn’t like it at first, not because of the initials, but because of him. Sometimes, my father thinks I’m dim. He pretended to find it behind my ear, but I knew it wasn’t really there. He’d magicked it. I didn’t think it was funny.

  Don’t you want it, Pats? he said, looking hurt. He scrunched it up in his fist, blew on it, and the handkerchief was gone. I wanted it back immediately. It wasn’t the thing, but the gone-ness of it, the feeling of something lost in thin air, something missing. It set off the fluttering inside me. But my father doesn’t bring me things just so that he can take them away again, and in a few seconds it had reappeared in his other hand, unfurling like a leaf. I must learn the correct expressions: happy face, surprised face; pure joy, wonder.

  Today, my father has a heart-shaped locket in his hand. He clicks the fastener to open it.

  See here, he says, Come on, have a look,

  holding the cleft heart up for inspection. Inside are two locks of hair, coiled up on either side: one black, the other shining red. We sit in the yard of The Flag, me with my ginger beer and him with the locket, balanced on his palm.

  I try to tell myself it’s just a story, made up, like one of Mr Stadnik’s stories, or like the parables. If only my father didn’t want me to believe it was true.

  ~ ~ ~

  The first time he saw her, she was framed in the archway leading to the rear of the shop. She had the back door open and was standing on the step, shaking out one cloth after another. My father could only see her silhouette, the wide-shouldered uniform with its nipped waist, the skirt bellowing to her ankles, and all around her the air, glittering with dust. She reminded him of a figure in a snowscene. When she sneezed, bending back into the room, he caught the whiteness of her hands, the sharp edge of her jawline, and the spool of hair pinned up on her head; she sneezed again, so hard he thought it might come undone. He hoped it would; there was something about the hairpin which was familiar to him, and faintly unpleasant. My father was sitting on a long wooden bench which ran the length of the shoe shop, from door to wall. The room was hectic with customers; he would have to wait his turn. He heard his name called once, or maybe someone else’s, repeated twice – Richard, Richard – and cast a guilty look around. It was another man, standing in the corner, who nodded and took his position in line.

  Richard had not started out with the intention of buying shoes; he was on his way to St Giles church to look at the belfry. No one had been back up the tower since the earth tremor, but it was his job to deliver the firm’s estimate. Evidence of the death-watch beetle had been found in the bell frame, and a replacement would be costly. It wasn’t the thought of breaking the news that upset him, it was the memory of the place: a smell of bats, thick in the air; the floor tilting away under his feet so the sky outside went sideways; the feel of the splinters slicing into his palms as first he slid along the stair rail, then flew, then fell, to the bottom. And now there was the death-watch beetle. Richard had never seen one, but he’d heard it was a menace. He imagined one single insect: huge, earthquake-sized, black as pitch. It would have pincers sharp enough to cut through a man’s arm. The slightest movement of its heavy body would make the tower shake and the bells fall. His legs went to liquid whenever he thought of having to go into the church, having to sit in the vestry and drink tea while the thing manoeuvred its clicking body somewhere in the space above his head. Richard had been putting it off all week, and today, when he was braced to do it, he found himself instead amongst the lines of men, standing in rough queues or sitting and staring at their socks.

  The opening of the shoe shop on The Parade was an event. It had been advertised in the newspaper and on handbills given out in the street. The man sitting next to Richard had rolled his up into a tube, which he put to his mouth now and then and blew like a trumpet. There was a feeling of excitement, a circus atmosphere, which didn’t fit well with Richard’s dread of going – or not going – to the church. He studied his handbill. It was written in thick black ink with a variety of lettering styles covering the entire space, and at the bottom, an illustration of two single shoes, one style for men and one for women. The back of the handbill was as inky as the front. It heralded a new machine from America, called the Amazing Fluoroscope. A diagram showed what looked to him like a Peepshow box. It was a Device, he read, for Precisely Measuring the foot using the Latest Technical Advances. This, and the promise of credit, had drawn a Saturday-morning crowd. Richard only caught sight of the actual machine in glimpses, when the crowd parted just enough to let another customer try it out. Each man was invited to place his bare foot inside the box and view the resulting measurement through a square of glass. There was laughter among them as the next man up removed his socks, and much nose-holding and wafting of handb
ills. And then a hush would come down while they waited for the shriek of surprise. The proprietor, aware of his female staff, asked the men to refrain from cursing.

  My father soon grew bored with the gasps of wonder and delight. He didn’t particularly want to put his foot in the machine. He didn’t want to see the bones of his toes, glowing through the skin like embers in a fire, but nor did he want to leave and make his way to the church. The girl in the back of the shop had caught his attention, and he was content to sit and watch her while she shook out the dusters and arranged them in a pile at her feet, and sneezed her sideways sneeze.

  What are you looking at?

  The girl was moving through the archway now, the heap of dusters folded on her arm. She didn’t stop for an answer, sweeping past him so he had to pull his feet up or risk an injury. She stepped over them, holding the edge of her skirt just high enough for him to glimpse her thick black boot. He looked up into her face: a sheen of sweat breaking on her forehead and the stray hairs clinging to her neck. And his eyes followed her as she bent behind the counter and crammed the dusters into a drawer. The clip at the back of her head was a thick black oval of jet, glittering in its twist of hair. She drew her hands down her skirt and folded them in front of her, a waiting pose, as she had been taught on her first day, her face serene and open.

  ~ ~ ~

  It put me off a bit, Pats, I can tell you, he says, Seeing it crouching there like a dirty great beetle. But not the hair. Beautiful hair, she had. Everyone said so. See how lovely it was?

  The locket is still perched on his hand.

  Whose is that one? I ask, pointing at the coil of red.

  This, he says, Is yours. Cut it from your head, when you were very small.

  It looks like a thread of copper. I want to ask him what it means, cutting the hair and keeping it inside a heart, in the dark, but his eyes are moving over the top of my head. There’s nothing to see, unless he’s looking at the flowers. I’m sitting under the tree; it has a few close blooms in dying pink. When the breeze gets up, the petals shower down, crisp and brown and soft off-white. I have to sweep them from my lap. I could be buried beneath the petals for a hundred years, waiting for a Prince to come and brush them away. I don’t know the name of it. If my grandfather was here I could ask him, he would have it straight off, he’d have it in Latin. But he doesn’t know we go to The Flag, and I’m not allowed to say. My father takes no notice of the tree, or me. He won’t find a story about my mother in its leaves. But the piece of metal in his hand – the heart which is supposed to remind him of her and the glory of her hair – that’s important. He will want me to have it. I don’t see her in it at all: I see a dead black strand in the shape of a question mark. If I look very hard, I see a single hair hanging from a comb, a coiled-up nest, a broken mirror.

  ~ ~ ~

  Richard passed the shoe shop on the following Monday. At first, he didn’t understand why he went out of his way, and blamed it on the church and the job he had to do. It had become a real aversion for him; each time he set off, he found himself walking anywhere but up St Giles towards the church. The tower could be seen for a good distance around the city, so he also needed to avoid the streets and alleyways that might lead him to a view of it. He thought this was his reason for returning to The Parade, just to walk along without a worry, but when he got there he rushed by with his collar up and his cap low over his eyes, feeling oddly exposed. On Tuesday he found himself passing down The Parade again, and by the end of the week, he had grown nonchalant: lots of people walked this way, why shouldn’t he? On Friday morning he stopped and looked in the window of the shoe shop. He couldn’t see anything for his dry mouth and the choking sensation of his pulse, thumping in his throat. He couldn’t get beyond the lettering etched across the window and his own dark reflection staring back. He couldn’t see her.

  But she saw him, and Sarah, the other shopgirl, saw him too. A thin-faced, worried young man, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his neck.

  He’s back, she called, Lillian, it’s lover boy! Lillian went to the door and opened it fast. Later, she would say she was going to have it out with him, ask him what he thought he was up to. Later, they would joke about this almost-meeting. But Richard was too quick for her. Hearing the door bell clang, he ducked down a side passage, moved fast, not stopping until he got to the top of Cow Hill, where he saw the thing he had been so carefully avoiding: St Giles church, with the snake of wisteria winding its way along the wall and the chiselled flint of the tower behind, full of memories of the earthquake and now infested with the death-watch beetle. But not a bell in sight.

  Joseph came to his rescue, although Richard didn’t know him then, and wouldn’t recognize him, a year on, as the little boy who hopped like a goblin outside the church door. It was a fancy of Father Peter’s that a goat should be used to keep the grass short around the graves, and that a boy should be employed to tend the goat. The two came together, although Joseph would say, if he was ever asked, that the goat preferred the flowers left in the tubs, and had a spiteful kick, and was a cloven beast who had no place in God’s garden. It was Joseph himself who kept the gravestones neat, using the shears Father Peter had given him, and then pulling the grass out by the handful when the shears rusted. Joseph was employed for as long as the goat was employed, and made himself useful by tying up the animal on a very short rope and tending the grounds himself. In between times, he scaled the tower, or stood at the door on wedding days and christenings, and collected some coins for his trouble.

  Joseph sees the man, sweating, out of breath, staring in wonderment at the naked square of light in the tower where the bells should be.

  Farrar’s in Thetford have come an’ take ’em down, says Joseph, Father Peter say they won’t be hung again till next spring.

  He holds out his hand, judging that this piece of information deserves payment, and Richard freely obliges. His relief is visible. It won’t be necessary to go back up into the tower, and he needn’t bother with the vestry and the tea and the careful estimate furling in his inside pocket; his firm specializes in carpentry, they won’t be given the contract. He feels so light, he could float up to the sky.

  ~ ~ ~

  My father stares into his beer, dabs quickly at the foam with his free hand, lifts it to his face and scrutinizes it: on the tip of his finger, a blackfly kicks its legs.

  I didn’t expect it, he says, frowning at the insect. He holds his finger up in the air to show it to me, like Jesus giving a sermon.

  I was let go a fortnight later. If there’s no work, there’s no work. So I went to London, and bought the lady something special.

  He smiles at his other hand with the locket on it, open like a butterfly. He has two insects now, one with sharp jaws and the other drowning in beer. He wipes the real one along the edge of his trousers and extends the heart locket to me. He calls them keepsakes.

  You can have it if you like, Pats, he says, She would’ve wanted you to have it. She kept all these nice things just for you.

  My father says he went all the way to London to buy this piece of jewellery for my mother. Or he won it at a fairground in Yarmouth while she was having her photograph taken with a monkey in a hat. Or he found it in the aisle of the Regent Picture House after they saw Stars over Broadway, and offered it in lieu of a wedding ring. I’ve heard all these stories before. There’s no reason to disbelieve him, but I do. He brings her back every time, sees her in everything, but he won’t put a foot in the churchyard, where she lies under a weight of earth. He won’t know her that way.

  I don’t say a word. I want him to tell me again, to tell me all the other versions, the ones where he can believe how it might have been. I’ve yet to learn that memories aren’t real, that nothing except the thing itself is real, not an image of a pencil-thin woman lying flat on the bed, not the smell of sunlight baking a room, or the shape a life makes when it spills across the floor. But a handkerchief, a ribbon, a heart-shaped locket speckled with
rust; these are objects, artefacts, proof of life. I balance his memories, all the same, storing them on top of mine, carefully leaning one against the other like a stack of playing cards. I am building a tower without bells. Later I will bring it down, in an earthquake of my own.

  paradise

  I thought I was known; I thought I was a face. But the angel gave me a right look. She couldn’t see who I was. Maybe she didn’t recognize me through the plate glass, and I have to say, I was altered.

  I wouldn’t just go in, I’d never go in unless they asked me to; that would be brazen. I bided my time. The shop didn’t open up before nine, and it was only ten to by the city hall clock. Not that you could trust it. Clocks and mirrors: liars both, but it was all I had to go on. I stood near the window and waited. They’d put a new display up, a white Christmas theme: the dummies were wearing thick fur coats and fancy hats. Snowflakes twirling on string, and more silver string in the corners with cupids hanging off them, blowing trumpets and playing lutes. It was only just November. The year rolls round more quickly in the shops. I thought I’d just stand there until they noticed me. There was no one else on the street, apart from that lad who sells magazines. I’ve seen him often enough down the Centre, playing pool with Robin. I’ve heard him singing as well,