by Ann Kelley
Mum told them, ‘It’s Not Safe – people throw their garden rubbish over the edge and it looks more solid than it is.’
Afterwards, when we were in the car, we were hysterical, laughing at the possible headlines in the newspaper if they had all gone over the cliff: ‘A Wailing of Witnesses’; ‘Jumping Jehovahs’; ‘Wipe-out of Witnesses’.
All in the worst possible taste, but we did laugh. Mum can’t dislike them that much – she probably saved their lives by warning them about the cliff edge.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FACT. THERE ARE two sorts of worlds.
1. The World of the Well
2. The World of the Sick.
You can pass from the World of the Well to the World of the Sick quite haphazardly, depending on luck, mostly, but if you happen to have started life in the World of the Sick, it’s difficult to pass over into the World of the Well.
Sometimes a cure is found.
Sometimes a miracle is performed, like a magician’s trick.
The heart lifts and blood flows the way it is supposed to.
Last year, after Daddy left and before Grandpop and Grandma died, the doctors opened me up to make some necessary repairs, discovered they couldn’t do what they wanted to and stitched me up again. But even though they could do nothing, air – oxygen, flooded the heart and my chest cavity, and found its way into the chambers and tunnels, and moved through all the narrow, dark passages, and the grey-blue fog that had been the colour of my flesh bloomed into a flushed, sun-kissed pink. I looked healthy and normal. My breathing was easier, even though I was stitched from front to back and scarred as if a shark had held me in its mouth and tried to bite me in half.
I felt great for a while.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I TRY NOT to think about it, but I suppose I’ll have to sometime. Grandpop dying, then Grandma. I missed it all really. I was either in hospital having my operation, or I was at home, recovering. I didn’t get to see him in hospital, and I didn’t go to his funeral. And when Grandma died only a few days later, I missed her funeral too. Mum had to deal with it all on her own. The first I knew of Grandpop even being ill was when he was in Southend Hospital having an operation. I was in my London hospital and Mum had to travel between the two to visit us.
When she told me he had died, it was like the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I couldn’t believe it. And then poor Grandma, dying of a broken heart a few days later. Daddy looked after me while Mum arranged everything about the funerals. I wanted to go but I couldn’t. It was weird, not having Mum there. Daddy isn’t terribly good at illness and stuff. But he did read to me, which was lovely. I only wanted children’s books for some reason. He read me all of The House at Pooh Corner and I couldn’t stop crying.
How many days does a woodlouse live? We get lots here, they come in the house, and you find them climbing the walls in the bathroom, keeping to the groove between the tiles. When I try to rescue them to put them out, they don’t curl up. The ones in Shoeburyness always curl into tight balls when you touch them.
Herring gulls can live for forty years. I read that here.
Pop comes every day, and every day I feed him. He is brilliant at catching food in mid-flight. He’d make a great cricket fielder. I have started to think of him as if he really is my Grandpop, like Mum says he is. I expect he was a good fielder – Grandpop. Grandma certainly was. Grandpop said she was a brave fielder and not frightened of the hard ball. She made some good catches and wasn’t afraid to hurl herself at a fast ball to stop boundaries being scored.
I read somewhere, or perhaps I heard it on the radio, that the world is made up geographically, of all the bones and ashes of all the animals and people who have ever lived. Not many people know that. Cool.
I was sitting on the rocks below the house yesterday evening and I suddenly realised there is only one me – only one Augusta Stevens, and no one else can see inside my head, my mind, or my heart, not really. They can saw through my rib cage and poke about in the flesh and blood of me and stitch me up again, but they won’t have found the Essence of Gussie. Only I know me, which is a very lonely thought.
I am Me.
I look at my blue hands, the clubbed fingernails, my skinny legs, my narrow straight feet, (my only good point). I touch my light brown hair and my eyelids and my clammy skin, and I’m suddenly aware of what it’s like to be – just to be. Scary. I wonder if everyone else has the same realisation about themselves and the fragility of life. I suppose they all do. It’s that, Who am I, what am I doing here and why? moment.
I found this, fallen down behind Mr Writer’s desk. It’s a poem:
Make use of the things around you.
The light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen…
Put it all in,
Make use.
I didn’t know you could put a Ferrari or a cigarette in a poem. So what would I write, if I wrote a similar poem?
Make use of this tabby cat
Lying across the table,
His regular purr and his curled claws
That don’t hurt me when I touch them.
The greenfinch chirruping in the pine,
The white curving wave creeping to the shore,
The coast path zigzagging through the hazels,
The heavy scent of the creamy palm flowers
Leaning against the window.
Cricket on TV – the voice of David Gower.
The curtain of tiny shells to keep out bees and butterflies.
The Mars Bar waiting for me in the fridge.
I could go on and on.
I don’t have a godfather or godmother because I wasn’t christened. Summer has loads and gets expensive presents on her birthday from them. Not that I need expensive presents – it would just be someone to talk to about stuff. My heart, Daddy leaving us, Grandma and Grandpop dying.
I know old people have to die, to make room for the young, I suppose, or there would be terrible blockages and overcrowding in the world, but I need my old people. I miss them.
Mum is taking me to a poetry reading. I don’t know who is reading whose poetry, but I think it’s a sort of local poetry magazine thingy. We’re eating out afterwards.
I’m bored. I never tell Mum that. She blows her top. Loses her cool. One thing she Can’t Stand is anyone saying they’re bored.
Hardly anyone ever goes past the gate, or climbs down to the beach. There are no human sounds, only nature. A horse came galloping over the sand towards us. It’s a strange noise – like nothing else – the hooves pounding the sand, sort of echoing and much louder than they should be. You can hear the hooves before you become aware of the movement of the animal, when the shape is still just like a small mirage, or a hovering shimmering person appearing in the distance in a desert.
I miss the small back gardens of London; our back garden on a summer evening – the overheard arguments, a violin playing, a piano, blackbirds, the robin that used to sing in the dark, the sound of traffic, the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine on our trellis on the yellow brick wall. Sparrows. Sitting on the fire escape with Charlie on my lap, listening to people chatting in the neighbouring gardens. Laughing. The orange sky at night, planes, heat haze humming over the tarmac. People with no gardens sitting on window ledges on a sunny day, or even on a sloping roof. I miss London – barbecues, curries, bonfires, bus fumes, babies crying, chatty taxi drivers, black people. There’s hardly any here. The amazing buzz of millions of people living cheek to cheek. Like ants. Giggling with my friends. I miss giggling.
I was woken one hot night in London by a crowd of men – drunk or stoned, I suppose – talking loudly in one of the back gardens, I couldn’t see where. One of them had a parti
cularly cruel voice, though I couldn’t hear what he said. It just sounded horrible, frightening. Scary. They talked until after four. I couldn’t close the window because it was so warm and stuffy. I should have shouted at them to shut up. Was everyone else sleeping through it?
Then a squadron of geese flew overhead, yapping to each other, and took away the anger I had been feeling all night. It’s odd how seeing wild creatures can do that to you. To me, anyway.
Last night I dreamed that there was a shallow pool left by the sea at the foot of the cliff. There were several large fish floundering in the too warm too shallow water. Robot toy soldiers attacked the fish. But the fish were scorpion fish and they fought back with their poisonous spines.
Dreams are weird. Where do they come from? Why do I see places I’ve never been to, and meet people I don’t know?
Grandpop sometimes appears in my dreams, but not close enough for me to see him properly or to talk to him. He’s always just disappearing around a corner, or he’s in the next carriage of a tube train and I can just see him through the bleary window and he doesn’t know I’m there.
Perhaps we sleep so that we might meet at night our dead.
How do you say goodbye to someone you love? When Daddy left, he didn’t really say goodbye – more of a ‘See you later, Gussie Babe.’
I suppose it wasn’t really goodbye, anyway. I do see him still. It wasn’t goodbye forever. Not like Grandpop and Grandma.
If I had known they were both going to die so soon, I wouldn’t have hit my Grandma and told her I hated her. I shouted, ‘I hate you!’ That’s the last thing I said to her, more or less, as far as I can remember. I cannot for the life of me remember what they said to me.
I suppose the only way to live is, whenever you say goodbye to someone, you must be loving, just in case it’s the last time. Though I can’t stand it when mothers say ‘love you’ to their kids even if they’re just going to Tesco’s. Makes me cringe. But I expect they’ve already thought about what happens if it’s the last time and so they’ve decided to say ‘love you’, just in case.
The poetry reading was crap. I didn’t really understand much of what was read, all rather obscure with Latiny bits, nothing to do with real life as I know it. Boring. But then something really strange happened. There was this old man, a complete stranger, who came up to me and Mum during the interval and said something to me in Italian. Cosi something, something bella. Mum asked him to translate, and he said it meant something lovely is going to happen to you. I felt very odd, tearful, I suppose, and I said thank you to him. He had a very wrinkly face with smile-lines fanning from the corners of his eyes and white strings holding his lips together at the edges.
We left then before the second half of the poetry performance and went for a pizza in a restaurant overlooking the harbour, with all the holidaying people walking by, and boys on skateboards, and lots of life. I really enjoyed it.
Then we came home. Mum dropped me off at the top of the hill because there was nowhere to park and left me standing in the dark while she drove back to park. I stood there listening to the night when suddenly I heard a scampering noise. I thought the three terriers from the house at the top of the hill had been let out. I’m nervous of them, because they bark at me. But these weren’t barking. They came very close before we saw each other. It was a badger and three young ones. The mother saw me and veered away with the little ones following, their claws scratching the tarmac. They disappeared into a thick hedge of a field where there are horses.
Four of them, so close. Mum missed the whole experience. She was very cross. ‘Buggering Nora’ is what she actually said, after Grandpop.
I expect that’s what the elderly Italian man meant. He must have known the badgers were going to appear.
Grandpop used to say, ‘Youth is wasted on young people.’
I’m not going to waste mine.
Charlie is sitting on my lap, what there is of it. She loves sitting on me. Usually she sits on my feet in bed, but sometimes on my chest, which is not a very good idea. Her ears are the softest silk, and her long stiff whiskers, some black and some white, are like seal whiskers, with little black spots on her cheeks where they start, like the black spots on the cheeks of old black men, or anyway, the actor that always plays a goodie high-up cop in American movies – I forget his name. Like black freckles. She has little folds on her ears at the back, and her ears are pinkish brown and hairy. And she stretches her paws and each of her four fingers is separated and she never scratches, ever, even when she is scared. And I love her black coal eye make-up. Very Egyptian. I forgot to mention her most extraordinary feature – jade green eyes.
Flo has squirted in the back porch. She must have been frightened or something to make her do such a thing. Cats spray when they are trying to mark their territory. I know a tomcat has been coming in at night. If I forget to cover over the biscuits cats come in for all-night parties. One night, Flo was being chased round and round by this huge ginger cat. They moved so fast they were just a blur. They both flew out of the cat flap eventually. The other two cats were hiding – typical.
I was really worried that Flo would be killed by the big ugly tom if he caught her, but she came back in after about an hour, no damage done. Then the other two appeared and they all walked on tiptoe around the house frightening themselves, thinking each of the others was the ginger tom. I had to groom them all before they would settle down. Flo only lets me brush and comb her head and back. Charlie wants to be groomed all the time. I think she thinks I’m her mother and brushing is like a mother cat licking her young.
It’s impossible to tell where the sea ends and where the sky begins today. It’s the same grey misty haze all over. The crows are grey blurs flying by. A man disappears on the beach, and then only his legs reappear. We can see Godrevy Lighthouse from here. It’s rather friendly – the light going on and off all night; comforting somehow. I imagine I’m a sailor lost at sea and I suddenly catch sight of the beam of the lighthouse. And I’m no longer lost. I can work out my bearings. I can get home.
I’ve found one of the magazines that the Jehovah’s witnesses left. It’s called The Watchtower, not The Lighthouse, but I was close.
Having the sea outside the window and almost surrounding us is like having a guest in the house who won’t go home, and won’t go and entertain himself. You are aware of the breathing sound it makes, and then you take it for granted and don’t hear it at all. Then it gets angry, or seems to – I know it doesn’t really – and you hear it crashing about and making lots of noise – the sea and the wind, together – a partnership. Does the sea do what the wind dictates, or is the sea the king of the elements? The sky changes every second. Now it’s totally grey yet still bright enough for me to need sunglasses. Now it’s blue and pink and green and orange, with thick heavy rounded clouds that are dark grey at the base. And the shadows of the clouds race across the beach. And when a seagull flies overhead, its golden ghost sweeps across the sand.
Perhaps I should take up painting. No point really when so many artists have already done it so well. What can I do that only I, Augusta Stevens, can do? I’m no good at anything. My best subject is English, I suppose. Because I’ve read quite a few books already. And I quite like acting. And cooking. And animals, but that’s not a subject.
Blurt. That’s a wonderful word. That’s exactly how it sounds when you say something quickly that you didn’t know you were going to say but it just comes out – blurt. You blurt it out. Like projectile vomiting. I used to do that, apparently, when I was three weeks old. I had something called pyloric stenosis – which is a blockage that stops food getting into your stomach and causes you to throw up in a stupendous fashion. I had to have to have an operation. That’s all I needed, what with my heart failure. I couldn’t have a general anaesthetic so they had to tie me down. Mum said the surgeon, who was Australian, said to them, ‘Your baby nearly went to heaven.’ My heart had stopped during the operation and they had to sta
rt it again. Luckily, I remember nothing at all about any of it. Seeing as my heart is so badly designed, it does quite well, considering.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EUGENE HAS JUST been. He told me he had read all about the hang-glider and said he’s seen the picture of me, and he also delivered a letter from the newspaper editor with a cheque for ten pounds. It’s for my photographs of the hang-gliding accident. Cool! Perhaps I shall be a photographer, like Daddy, only I’ll work really hard at it. I better start right away. Where’s the camera? I shall do landscapes first – I don’t need to focus for those, just point the camera, turn the distance bit to infinity, and click.
So, I’m standing on the little grassy flat bit just off the coast path and sort of below the garden, with my camera on one shoulder and my binoculars around my neck. I have just taken a few shots of the waves coming right in and over the tops of the rocks. It’s very exciting, and I think I have got one or two good pictures. I’m using black and white film – Daddy always said everything looks better in black and white, and I agree.
A boy comes down the steps and he’s wearing binoculars too, and just at that moment I stupidly let the camera fall off my shoulder. It sort of bounces and falls down over the edge onto a rocky ledge just below me. I am totally humiliated. Buggering Nora!
I can’t reach it, and this boy, who I think is just going to walk straight past me, says, ‘Can I help?’ And he leans down and plucks my camera from certain death. Death by damp and salt. I’m so grateful I can only stutter thanks, and take it from him.
He’s got a really nice smile. Wide and curly mouthed.
‘Is it broken?’
I take a shot. The shutter works OK.
‘It’s indestructible’ I say proudly.
He starts to walk away but suddenly sees something and looks through his bins. It’s our peregrine, coming right near us. I put my bins to my eyes (after first removing my glasses) and watch too.