Songs, says Maggie, I remember songs.
Do you? Maybe we could play them? When shall we do it? Do you have the records to hand?
She shakes her head.
Never mind, he says, We can find them again, Maggie. And then we can listen to your music. I’d love that.
He leans across the table to pour her more water, thinking again of the bottle of Stoli in the freezer. But he won’t leave her now.
They’ll be easy to find, will they? There’s a very good second-hand record shop in town. We could go hunting. He offers her the full glass, holding it out in front of her.
If you had the Internet, you could probably download them, she says.
Kenneth pulls a baffled, ironic face.
God! You’re beginning to sound like Will. Got the lecture again today, how cut off I am from the outside world, how – decrepit.
He hunches closer to her, lowering his voice.
Do you know what ‘happy slapping’ is? he whispers, Is it something to do with kinky sex?
Maggie tilts her head back, and Kenneth, like a child, copies her, sees the branches of the cedar hanging above them. He wonders if he’s guessed correctly, until she says,
It’s a form of bullying. Kids do it – one of them will hit someone, and the rest of them film it on their mobiles.
I’m definitely not getting one of those phones, he says, folding his arms.
It’s not a requirement of the purchase, she says, smiling properly now, You wouldn’t have to slap anyone.
Wouldn’t dream of it, he says, and, cocking his head on one side, considers, Well, I’d quite like to give those buggers down at the golf club a swift kick up the arse. Balls flying everywhere. Marching about in those ridiculous clothes. But that phone business, it’s – it’s beyond comprehension. Why would anyone do that?
It’s a way of using technology, says Maggie, Ingenious, if it wasn’t so cruel. When I was younger, it was graffiti on the toilet wall. So and so is a slag, phone this number for sex . . .
Has that happened to you?
No, says Maggie, patiently, I was just giving an example.
Good, he says, because I would have to shoot them too. I hate bullies. Will was always getting picked on at school.
Maggie strokes her eyebrow with her finger.
He was bullied?
He was a lonely child, says Kenneth, Very secretive. And he had, he still has it, this . . . front. It made the others distrust him.
But he wasn’t cruel? she asks.
No. Underneath all the bravado, he’s hypersensitive.
She asks again.
He wouldn’t hurt anyone, wouldn’t get – violent?
No! He’s soft as butter, that boy. He wants to meet you, by the way. He was very curious.
What did you tell him?
Kenneth lets out a theatrical sigh, hangs his head to one side.
I’d like to have told him that I think you’re lovely and kind and beautiful and just what a chap needs in his dotage.
But?
But I couldn’t remember the word at the time, he says, I couldn’t remember ‘dotage’. I went through them all, dosage, and postage, and sewage and—
Maggie lets out a yelp of laughter, presses her hand to her chest.
‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break or lose myself in postage’! she cries.
What’s that, Maggie? That’s Shakespeare, too, isn’t it?
Yes, but I can’t remember who says it, she lies, You know, Kenneth, I bet the archive was his idea, wasn’t it? To keep you out of the real world, where people forget things all the time and have to face actual problems, like pain and loss and – and chaos. Some things are better left forgotten. And as for that rubbish in your den, you don’t need a catalogue, you need a bonfire. You need to burn it.
Ah, but Will thinks I’m losing my grip on things, Kenneth says, He asked me what day it was.
And what day is it? she asks.
Haven’t the foggiest, he says, grinning at her.
Me neither, she says, and he feels such a choke of gratitude that he has to look away. She looks away too. She can’t bring herself to tell him what she’s going to do. They sit together in the shade, staring out over the sloping lawn and into the trees. Kenneth sees a possible future beyond them. Maggie sees the glinting river.
eighteen
Oh Nelly you’re a funny one got a face like a pickled onion, got a nose like a squashed tomato and—
Onward Christian shoulders, marching off to war. With the cross of Jesus, going on before!
She sang her way through the songs she knew, hymns she could remember from Sunday school, leaning against the sweating brick, legs pulled up under her pyjama top. She really wanted to pee, but there were things moving about on the floor: mice, or could be big mice. The boy had put his chewing gum in the bowl; that would make it a bin, not a potty. But she really wanted to go.
Maggie looks back to her last entry, flipping the pages of the notebook. It seems appropriate that she’s working from back to front, as if the end will simply emerge as the beginning; the final page will become the first. She checks again, reading through what she’d written about how William took her away and put her in the trunk room. She’s sure it was a trunk room; she’s sure of the location. But it wasn’t where she thought it was. Fine, she tells herself, That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way. A child of four, what could she know about geography? But something is still wrong with the entry. Reading her words again, it takes Maggie a moment to see what is different: she’s removed herself from the memory; there’s no I. She’s managed, without thinking, to displace herself from the centre, and put William there instead. She has imagined what she thought would be impossible: what it would be like to be him. Maggie looks up to the stained-glass lady for guidance, sees the rain clouds beyond the window, their bellies laced with purple and black.
That’s okay, she says, That’s classic.
Maggie knows from the counselling she’s had how she copes. She separates; she’s very good at splitting and dividing: black and white, then and now, sound and silence. The first time she started to modify her body, it was random and awkward. She pulled her hair out, one strand at a time, then a few, then in the end, whole clumps. The feeling was delicious to start with, and painful; the waiting moment, the tugging, the release as it fell away through her fingers. She did it when she was bored, when her mind was racing, before she went to sleep. Like all habits, it was new and real and something in the beginning, and then after a while it just became the thing she did. She ate the evidence, crushing the fine filaments of hair under her teeth, rolling the strands around her tongue; a gritty swallow. When the bald patches became noticeable, she had to think of another way. She couldn’t bear the thought of burning herself, although she knew girls who did it, with matches or lighters or more often the red tip of a cigarette. It was the smell she most disliked. They had a coven at school, the girls who branded and cut and etched. They called it ‘contouring’, as if it were a treatment you’d have done in a hair salon or beauty parlour. The girls who contoured knew each other without knowing how. Then one day Janine showed her how she did it; with a safety razor, on the inner arm, high up. When Maggie tried cutting, she marvelled at the small streaks of itchiness that bobbled red, the feel of secretly glowing in hidden places. None of them wanted to be found out: it made it bearable, to sit in maths or history, and let the heat of a fresh wound take you away.
It was reopening a wound that gave Maggie the greatest relief: like returning to the site of a hard-won battle. And she hated the bumpiness of a scab forming, she’d want the skin smooth and perfect again, so she’d slice or pick it off. Catching the edge of a long scab with her fingernail, she’d pull, carefully and slowly, astonished at the acute point of pain, at the way the old skin came away, leaving a shiny pink weal beneath. New skin. Incredible. Sometimes, it would well up again with freckles of blood, bright shiny beads of wet. And then she would lick the
wound, or talk to it: How does that feel, does that feel all right?
She knew one morning, in needlework class, that it had to stop. She’d been watching the teacher demonstrate how to stitch a hem. All the girls had gathered round Mrs Evans as she bent over the machine, head down, following the rapid stab of needle into fabric, feeding it through with her slim fingers. Maggie saw how the material ran over the plate, how it glided, really; how the hem went in rough on one side and came out smooth and neat on the other. And then she was considering how that might feel. How it might feel to stitch through the skin, to stitch it together, smooth and neat. Fold it over, hide the rough edge from the eye. The surface would be perfect. That was when Maggie realized she was thinking of her skin as if it didn’t actually belong to her.
There have been times since when she’s actively planned to modify some part of her; gone to Boots or Superdrug and bought razors and antiseptic wipes and plasters, and then she would battle for hours to conquer the feeling. Like a recovering alcoholic, she would tell herself: just last this day, just this one day, and the urgency would gradually drain out of her. Or she’d argue herself out of it. This is so boring, she’d say. You are so predictable. Can’t you think of anything more inventive than this? What are you like?
But occasionally she’d be caught, as she was when she discovered the fountain pen from Kenneth. She couldn’t say then why his gift had made her so weak. Now she considers it: not because he likes her, but because she likes him back. She would like to be neat for him. Smooth. She would like to be as smooth and perfect as a neatly stitched hem. That’s not supposed to happen. And the fact of it makes it hard to keep things separate in her mind: black and white, smooth and jagged, him and her, then and now.
When it gets to the edge of the bench it will be day. After a while, she stops staring at the thin line of light and falls asleep, her body curved like a comma on the wooden slats. The brick against her back is damp and then her back is damp, and when she wakes up she thinks she’s had a dream about a boy.
Leon always says, What’s up, babe? when she cries, and she can show him where she caught her finger in the cupboard door or slipped on the wet step outside when she was running in and banged her knee. He kisses the place and says, Looks terminal, Bird, which she knows is funny because Nell laughs and he laughs, and if it really is terminal, Nell will wipe it with a wet cloth and put a plaster on it. Sometimes, when she takes the plaster off, the skin underneath is a different colour, paler and lighter than the rest of her, and Nell will say, All better, and throw the plaster away. Then a sticky brown edge will show her where the plaster used to be, until eventually that too will be gone. She can’t find the place, now, to show Leon where it hurts, because it’s deep inside and it hurts all over.
It’s very hard to see, even though the line is getting wider and brighter. She’s thirsty and her eye is sore and there’s a thing inside her belly that feels like when she’s hungry but it’s a feeling she doesn’t really know because she’s never had it before. She thinks it’s a hungry feeling but it’s not, it’s fear.
nineteen
The market place is nearly empty. Three teenage boys lean against the lychgate at the clock tower, a man jogs by on the other side of the road, tugging a reluctant dog. Inside the perspex of the bus shelter, two elderly women, so alike in their appearance they could be twins, perch on the bench, swapping nods and pauses. Now and then one or the other will bend forward, investigating the distance for any sign of a bus. Maggie stands a little way away from them, her case jammed between her feet. She feels conspicuous, as if any minute now Kenneth will screech into the lay-by, fling open the car door, and ask her what she thinks she’s up to. She relaxes a little when she remembers that he doesn’t drive any more. She’d left him sitting in the garden, a volume of Shakespeare in front of him, having what he called a ‘sundowner’. Except the sun wasn’t shining; you couldn’t tell where it was in the sky.
As the coach pulls up, it starts to rain, a rush of thick blobs smelling of road dirt and tar, but fresh, Maggie thinks, a good smell after the headache-inducing sultriness of the afternoon.
She’d hated having to deceive him. There was hardly any food in the house; an inch of milk, some dried goods, stuff in tins, but he’d used all the salad for his lunch with William, and most of the bread was gone.
Who needs milk when we’ve got wine, he’d said, And the van comes round in the morning. We can manage, Maggie, we’re practically old hands at awful dinners.
But she had insisted; she’d go into town before the supermarket closed and buy some vegetables, some fresh rolls, and anyway, she’d said, the walk would do her good. That was a mistake.
No more walking for you today, Maggie. Listen, I can’t run you in – it’s – I no longer have a licence. So perhaps, if you’re very careful, you might take the car?
And then he’d offered to come too, to keep her company, and suddenly she was trapped.
I’ve got to go to the chemist, she’d lied, which made him throw his hands up in retreat.
The notebook is at the bottom of the case, and she will leave it there. When the driver asks if she wants her bag stowed, she says yes, to avoid the temptation of looking at what she’s written, to stop herself from writing any more. There are hardly any other passengers on the coach. The two women sit together at the front, their walking sticks sliding companionably along the handrail in front of them, and the teenage boys head straight for the back. She smells cigarettes and chewing gum as they pass her.
The clock on the tower says eight, but she knows that’s not the time: it read eight o’clock when she arrived, and was still eight o’clock when she got on the coach. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself, there’s no such thing as the right time, but then goes through it again: she left at six-thirty. It would have taken her twenty minutes to walk to the market place, and she waited for ten or so minutes for the coach to come. The urge to know makes her get up and lean over the headrests and ask the two women. They both consult their watches.
Quarter past, says one, Ten past, says the other, and she leaves them to argue it out and sits down again. She’ll be back at Field Cottage within the hour, with nothing to show for it but a new wound, and a second, invisible one opening up, a small fissure of sadness and regret. Kenneth will have started on his ‘concocting’. She imagines him standing in the pantry, holding a tin at arm’s length, or trying to read the use-by date on a jar of soupe de poissons. Then he’ll be sitting on the terrace, his best place, as he calls it, and he’ll be looking at his watch, too, and wondering where she can have got to. It’s not pain, she tells herself, it’s pity, so put that feeling away. And it’s not where I’ve got to, it’s where I’m going, Maggie whispers to herself, wiping her breath from the window. You’re not running away, she says, touching the smooth outline of the plaster through her sleeve, You’re quitting while you’re ahead.
He checks all the rooms on the ground floor and all the rooms upstairs. He goes and knocks on the door of her flat. The east wing – the suite of rooms beyond Maggie’s landing – is unused, and the connecting door locked, but as Kenneth climbs back down the stairs, he tries it anyway, to make sure. He tells himself he’s being silly, but then he saw something in her face this afternoon when he was talking about Will – an anxious look – that makes him return to his office and fumble about in the desk drawer and find the master key, and he climbs her stairs again and unlocks the door to her flat. He knocks twice, very loudly, before he steps into the room, only now considering the possibility that she might simply have fallen asleep. Bound to be tired out after the day she’s had. He hasn’t been in the place since she moved in, and although he can see at once that she’s gone, he finds her everywhere. A square indentation on the quilt where she laid her case to pack it; a vase of flowers on the kitchen table; the scent of her on the bathroom air. He sees some bloodied cotton wool balls in the metal bin and he looks away. He has to be gone from here. Kenneth takes the stairs quickl
y, gripping the cold iron balustrade at the bottom; feels a sharp pain in his ribs from all the climbing up and down.
She’s the last person on the coach. The boys jumped off at Boxford, and not long afterwards the elderly women got let off by the side of the road, at the intersection of two enormous fields. The driver dropped down out of his cab and walked round the side of the coach. Maggie waited, listening to the rolling engine, as he carried their shopping across the carriageway, then ran back to shepherd them over. Now, as the coach nears Welford, the rain ceases and a cloud break appears, low in the sky, just wide enough to glimpse a streak of sunset.
Kenneth tries to behave normally. He’s hungry so makes himself a snack of peanut butter on toast, but as he’s eating it he realizes why the jar has been in the pantry for so long: he isn’t at all fond of peanut butter, the way it cleaves to the roof of his mouth. He wanders about the rooms with his glass of wine, wanders back to the kitchen to top it up. In the library, he puts on a collection of Chopin nocturnes, thinking it will soothe him, but all it makes him feel is depressed. He sits in the chair Maggie sat in and then moves from it as if bitten, paces the room, perches in the window seat, walks to the wall of records. She said she liked Dylan, and some other stuff. Martin someone? Folk, soul. He half-wishes she’d said she liked military bands, or Billie Holiday. Nina Simone. There’s so much he didn’t play her. All he’s got in the folk section is a pristine Peter, Paul and Mary album. His soul collection is nothing to boast about either: a couple of Aretha Franklin, Al Green, a Motown Classics record that Will bought him one Christmas and which he’s never knowingly played, and Otis Redding. He chooses this one, sliding it from the shelf, but his heart sags when he remembers the moment Maggie found it, her teasing: it would be torture to hear this now. He looks again at his watch. He’ll wait until ten, and then he’ll do something. He isn’t quite sure what.
The Song House Page 12