‘Thank you for coming over, Beri,’ she says. ‘I am also very sorry for your loss.’
‘Shall we sit down a minute?’
Anne pretends not to see Beri’s hand briefly poised in the air to take her arm.
When the younger woman next speaks she is, as always, direct.
‘It must feel weird, Anne, with the family here, the whole palaver. And then having done all this before.’
‘Your dad was the love of my life.’
‘But the whole dying thing, and then the funeral, again and again? Your first husband and then your second. And now Dad. A whole row of losses.’
‘We shouldn’t go into it, love, not now. Not the time. Everything ends in death, everything, so what can I say? I loved him. I will always love him. Whatever happens.’
Anne thinks of the pills in her handbag. She will take two in the taxi home and not wait for her g-and-t, she decides. She has a small bottle of water here in a side pouch. It calms her, thinking of the pills, swallowing them down with a cool drink of water.
She thinks also of the crisp white envelope slid in beside the pills. In the envelope are Enid’s pearl earrings. She had thought she might give them back to Paul’s kids here at the funeral, put them into Beri’s large, capable hands. But now perhaps she won’t. She hasn’t yet written a name on the envelope. Keeping the earrings tucked away, it makes her feel somehow vigilant, watching out on Paul’s behalf.
She and Beryl stare across at the funeral crowd. People are starting to say goodbye, touching shoulders and wandering over together to the parked cars. Beryl stonily bestirs herself.
‘I should go. I should be over at the hall serving tea. Family is invited, Anne. You should come along.’
Anne lays a hand on her arm. Beri’s forearm is a long curve, just the same as Paul’s.
‘I want to be clear with you, dear. I can see it’s hard. I did love the others, in fact very much. The thing was—well, he would never have said it himself. No disrespect to your mother, but Paul and I, it was magic for us, you know, being together, age or no age. It was like heaven. When we were together there was no death. We didn’t even think about it, death and the rest, age, illness—’
The younger woman gets up. Anne’s hand drops away from her arm.
‘I know all that, Anne. I know about the soldered beds. He told me about them when my pre-teen Genna was present. Your down-there blah blah blah, God knows what he was about to say. The whole business was… Well, all I can say is I’m glad it’s over. Now, would you like me to arrange a lift for you, or would you like to come over to the hall for some tea?
~
It is a sunny morning, a couple of months since the funeral. Beryl stands waiting in the Crosskeys Retirement Home reception. She has come to pick up her father’s final effects. Just a shoebox full, the manager said on the phone.
She presses the metal bell on the desk but it makes a thudding noise that doesn’t carry and no one appears.
Her father’s small flat has been sold. Her brothers hired a removal company to take away the last pieces of furniture: the pine dresser no one had space for, those soldered-together beds. After the big items were taken, a few odds and ends surfaced. The printed list is in her bag. There’s a pen engraved with his name, a box of bolts and screws, a newsagent’s calendar that he used to write down appointments, that kind of thing.
Believe it or not, her brothers said, after the night he met Anne, there wasn’t a single appointment in the calendar. The year went blank.
Two people have joined her at the reception desk, a stooped man and a woman standing side by side. Together the three of them make a rough queue. The man punches his middle finger into the pile of What’s On leaflets on the counter.
‘I’m just so terribly worried about what’s coming,’ Beryl hears him say.
She steps out of the queue and sets out for the garden.
To the side of the building the phlox beds are interlaced with grassy areas in a symmetrical pattern. The gravel is freshly laid, crunchy underfoot. At each turn in the path is a bench. On the bench closest by sits a thin elderly woman with aquamarine hair. A woman with bright purple hair sits on a bench in the far corner. The Crosskeys Retirement Home colourist has been at work.
Beryl says good morning to the first woman. She ignores her. The woman pecks at a family-size bag of crisps open on the bench. She breaks the crisps into pieces on the open foil.
‘Always the shortest person in the room,’ the woman says to herself as Beryl crunches past, raising a triangular piece of crisp to her lips. ‘That’s what I’ve had to deal with, always, every day the same.’
Beryl sits on one of the unoccupied benches and takes out her phone. See if she still has that number of Anne’s.
A male voice answers.
‘Sorry, who’s this?’ She tries to imagine a few possible candidates to fit this voice, a neighbour, a friend. But at the same time she feels stupid, clumsy, as if she’s been spotted falling on her face.
‘Graham. I’m Graham, a friend of Anne’s.’
‘Is Anne there?’
‘No, love, she had to pop out. She went to the doctor’s and left her phone behind. Shall I say you called?
‘Yes, please. Say it’s Beryl—Beri, Paul’s daughter.’
‘Paul’s daughter, of course. I’ve heard so much about you, you and your brothers. You will call back, won’t you? She’ll appreciate hearing from you.’
‘I will call back, yes. It’s been a while.’
‘She talks about you often, Kerry, very often, you’ll be happy to hear. Paul and his children. You’re all here in a photo album she often shows our friends. She scolds me mightily if I guess the names wrong.’
‘Meeting people definitely helps to put names to faces,’ Beryl says.
She ends the call and stares at the phone in her hands.
Our friends? Already? But she doesn’t want to think this. Something hard and dry swells in her throat.
It doesn’t have to change a thing, she tells herself. This Graham, whoever he is. She believes Anne when she talks about her father. A rhapsody, said Billie Holiday. She and her father had a rhapsody together. She, Beri, refuses to doubt it for a minute.
She looks up from her phone and meets the eyes of the woman with the aquamarine hair still eating crisps. A crisp square lies like a communion wafer on the woman’s lower lip. Beryl motions at her own mouth, to let the woman know, but she stares on unmoved, her lower jaw working, and the fragment drops into her lap.
~
When Beryl calls back Anne is watching television.
‘Switch on the news, Beri,’ Anne says, ‘You won’t believe your eyes. A tide of plastic trash is washing up all over, right across the Indian Ocean. In Bali, Thailand, you name it, all those beautiful beaches.’
‘I’m not close to the remote right now, Anne.’
‘Well, it’s astonishing, you must take a look later, the sand is covered with it—rubbish in heaps, water bottles, plastic twine, yoghurt pots, flip-flops, you name it, in piles and piles. They say there’s a chance it could come down here too. The stuff swills around the ocean like in some toilet bowl. Fish eat it. It’s terrible.’
She stops abruptly. There is a noise of wind and a commentator shouting.
‘I went over to Crosskeys to pick up some odds and ends of Dad’s today, Anne,’ Beryl raises her voice to make herself heard over the television. ‘It’s nothing much but there’s a pen engraved with his name. I thought you might like to have it.’
‘That’s so kind of you, so thoughtful,’ Anne says. ‘And gosh, speaking of your dad, Beri, well, this rubbish tide, they were saying earlier, it interferes with the pearl divers, you know, the young boys plunging down vast distances into the ocean, at great risk, to gather…’
Then her voice drops away and there is a scuffling sound, a long pause. When she next speaks her voice is suddenly sharper, clarified. ‘I really do appreciate it. I had glue with you, Beri dear, we
had glue, we got on together. In fact it should be me giving you a present.’
‘That’s hardly necessary, Anne. It’s just an old pen of Dad’s I’m talking about, with his name on it, in case you’d like to have it.’
‘I’m serious, Beri. It should be me. I’d love to give you something. See, with Graham now, being with Graham, I’ve changed my style. You know how I liked to dress smart because your father liked a smart look. But with Graham I’ve got more relaxed, I’ve switched to brighter colours. I like to be in sync with Graham, the same as I liked to be in sync with your dad.’
‘So then…?’ Beryl manages to ask, very softly, but she can’t think how to finish her question.
Anne doesn’t notice the interruption. Beri might like to have some of her smart bits and pieces, she is saying—a nice velour scarf, a few strings of beads, just mementos really, pretty, nothing very rare or precious. She doesn’t have many precious things. Come round any time to have a look.
‘I never had anything valuable, Beri,’ she adds, ‘till your dad began to spoil me.’
Beryl hears the swish and crunch of waves on a beach, or, no, on a bank of crunchy plastic. Pearl divers, did Anne really mention pearl divers? Beryl imagines the slim legs of the pearl divers knotted up with plastic twine.
‘Keeping in style we stay young, Beri,’ Anne is saying. ‘I believe that.’
‘So I’ll keep Dad’s pen, Anne, I’m gathering?’
‘Yes, that’s probably right,’ Anne says, and drops her voice. ‘Don’t take it personally, dear. You see, my memories of your father, they’re locked in my heart.’
Then she speaks more loudly. ‘And now you’ll have to excuse me, Beri. Graham likes to watch the news without me chattering in the background the whole darned time. Isn’t that what you say, Graham my dear, the whole darned time? Dear Anne, you say, God knows how you keep at it.’
~
Beryl walks out into her garden. The dew is already on the grass, shiny and cool. She walks down the path her father laid not long after she divorced James. On either side running down to the shed are the marigold borders her mother planted—to have something to do, she said, while her father was putting down the flags.
Startling, that orange of the marigolds, Beryl thinks. Startling, even spooky. Every time she looks out of the kitchen window the colour is always the same, neither more nor less, the marigolds standing orange and bright and strangely wide awake whatever the light.
She remembers her mother’s broad hands tamping down the earth around the seedlings. Perhaps that’s the strangest thing, the hands being gone and the marigolds still thriving like this, still glowing like lamps.
She walks down the path to the shed and the air feels heavy around her, clogged, full of solid things blocking her way. She puts her hands up to the shed wall. Its roughness gives a kind of traction.
Mother, she thinks. Mother. Father. What wouldn’t she give to have them back, both of them, her mother and her father, right now, to have them close again, together again? To have back even if just for a minute or two her mother’s smell and her dad’s stride, and her voice and his laugh, and his long arms and her broad hands pressing the seedlings into the earth. She wants back her parents’ two beds separate and side by side, though she knows how ridiculous this is, longing for everything back just the same as before. She will probably laugh at herself tomorrow, how childish she was crying for this silly moon of the past, but still she wants their lives back all together as they were before, when things felt somehow gentler than they do now.
Anne took it all away more effectively than death itself and right now Beryl hates her for it. Hates—it’s strong. Strong, but good.
If Anne were here in the garden she, Beri, would like to grab her tiny bird-like shoulders and shake her, hatefully. She would like to throw her bead necklaces into her face and drag the pearl earrings off her small pink ears.
Oh yes, she would like to shake her so hard she wouldn’t forget it, even though she is sure Anne hardly cares one way or another what she thinks, that from the day of the funeral she has barely spared her a thought.
Thinking this, Beryl hates her more. She hates her for these terrible feelings sweeping through her, these patches of heat prickling in the crook of her elbows, in her palms. She hates Anne for making her feel helpless, hapless, clumsy, from the very night of the Crosskeys Christmas party. She hates her for wrong-footing her.
So, Anne, she’d like to tell her after shaking her, here’s what I wanted to say from that very first day. Your dance with him, I hate you for that, for that especially. For how special it was to him, for how graceful you were. From the hundred times he told me about it, every move is inked into my memory. I can see how you took that dance all for yourself. I see the thrust of your red hip, and the curve of your body. I see how he came walking over to you and I’m in your place. I see his head weaving its way through the hanging Christmas lanterns and, though it’s stupid, I want a dance like the one you are about to begin—a dance with a dancer like my dad. I mean, not my dad, but like my dad. I want someone to catch me around my waist, and sweep me lightly onto the dance floor like Dad did you.
I see every move that you made in his arms and I envy you.
Beryl hears the phone ring and then stop. She straightens anyway and takes her hands away from the shed wall. Genna, she thinks, her phone out of credit, calling for a lift home. She should go in.
Mysteriously, she feels a little better, better for the creosote smell on her palms and the orange marigold lamps still glowing at her feet and this good strong hatred pulsing through her heart.
The windows of the house reflect the colours of the evening sky. Something flashes across the glass, a blink of the light, a passing bird, probably. She knows there is no one indoors.
She scrubs at her wet cheeks with the backs of her hands, the skin that is free of creosote smell, and walks up the path. She finds she is humming something, must be a dance song, dah-da-da, she can’t quite place it or locate the words. She takes a few small steps anyway, right, left, left, dah-da-da, and spins herself around. The bright windows wind marigold scarves around her head.
~
In the church yard after Graham’s funeral Anne stands to the side of the main group of mourners. A dusty yew tree pokes its dry twigs into her shoulder. This time there are no relatives or children to avoid—Graham was her first partner without children—but she doesn’t in any case want to draw attention. At home she took her usual cocktail of valerian pills with gin, a double shot, to still her dizziness. No day is free of dizziness now. And she has worn black, just the same as all the others, an old dress that has seen several funerals, the same as all these other weeds.
She puts a finger to her ears, checking the warm feel of her pearl earrings—Paul’s pearl earrings. The earrings are the only thing she has on that’s not black. They are still the most delicate and the most precious thing she owns. Graham was well off and generous, but not open-hearted in the way Paul was—not in life anyway. In death, well, in death it has been different, very. She’s still—
You only live once, Graham would say, scrolling the hiking-holiday sites on TripAdvisor. You’re a past master, Annie, come help me spend my money.
She thought he meant then, naturally, spending his money in that moment then that he always talked about seizing. She didn’t think, never could have thought, he meant spending long-term, spending his money then, and also now, beyond the grave.
Her black outfit hasn’t warded off rude stares from people here on the cemetery path, now that they’re out in the daylight. Well, whoever they are, Graham had no use for his old acquaintances, he said so himself, and, if they stare like this, she has no use for them either. So-called old friends from my work days, he used to say, and I mean old friends, Annie, they don’t keep up with me like you do, do they, more ways than one?
After they met, she and Graham—they were both waiting in the queue at the optician’s, two young-old peop
le fated to cross paths, he later said, two young spirits wanting to drink life to its very dregs—after that, he no longer much contacted his old friends. They, she and Graham, spent every day they could keeping busy, hiking the trails and visiting the sites he had wanted to see all his working life, but had never had the time. They hiked River Hill, Rocky Point, Wild Valley, Grace Cliffs, all the best rambling and coasteering resorts—the more remote the route the better, and the more luxurious the hotel. She learned to enjoy hiking. She was nimble, after all. Afterwards, she always had a facial booked. As for coasteering, she waved him off, then retreated to the spa.
It was coasteering that had taken him, an unexpected slip and fall one day at Grace Cliffs, a fall that brought on a sudden heart attack, and then, by the time they got to hospital, another, the fatal one, an unimaginable two weeks ago.
Still, nothing can take away the memories of the fun they’d had together, the enormous fun, she’ll never forget it, she’ll always be grateful. As for the other business, grateful doesn’t quite do it. Greatful would be better. Greatful. No word quite big enough.
No word for it, eh Beryl, Anne says to herself. She remembers how nice it was at Paul’s funeral when Beri came rolling big-hipped out of the group of mourners. She’d like it if she were here now, a friendly face to talk to, share her news. She’d assure her, of course, your father, he was my best love, but Graham, oh gosh, he was so here, there and everywhere, and he made me laugh. Together we laughed at life.
Cheers, my darling, he’d say, clinking my glass, why wouldn’t beautiful old girls like you fall for wrinkled old fellows like me? We’re gold, aren’t we, we’re solid gold.
I remonstrated with him, Beri, of course I did. I enjoyed his company like I enjoyed Paul’s, my dancer. But he shut me up, he put his finger on my lips.
Not a word, Annie, he said, I’d do it, too, if I were you. Who wouldn’t go for gold, eh, old gold, someone with your talents? In my shoes, who wouldn’t give their life and heart and everything they own for holding you, you leathery, impossibly sexy thing.
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