by Edward Carey
And after that memory, Anna Tap suggested they all take a break, and took Twenty, who seemed increasingly restless, across to her flat to feed her. Peter Bugg, during the day’s lunch break from their memories, in the privacy of his rooms, neat, tidy, smelling of a hundred smells, was not one willing (as yet) to share his past, but he remembered too. In his largest room with its strange and inappropriate wallpaper (left over from the tenant before him) of greatly enlarged photographs of some distant port in some faraway land with bizarre ships and scantily dressed fishermen, Peter Bugg let in his remembrances. He stared at his own photographs, sealed in frames, of schoolboys stacked together for their yearly portrait. These boys had been neatly hung over ships, fishermen and port buildings, but Peter Bugg didn’t see the foreign harbour, he saw only the boys from his life. He put names to the faces of each of those smiling boys. Then he saw, quite by accident, for he tried never to look in that corner, the face of his father, a black and white photograph. And he remembered how that face of his father’s moved. Then he started sweating and crying a little more than was common for him. And in so doing he remembered a time when he neither cried nor sweated. But once his remembrances had been connected to his father, his father would not let him go. He kept his son in his seat, watched his son sink down that seat, petrified. Remember that fear, Ronnie? – for his father always called him Ronnie, he remembered that, couldn’t forget that – oh yes, Ronnie remembered the fear.
It was that same fear, he remembered, that he handed out so easily to his pupils. And especially to one pupil in particular. His name: Alexander Mead. No, put that name away, screamed Peter Bugg (aloud now), for he was suddenly terrified. His heart began to race. Sweat and tears rushed on to his skin. Put that name back, he screamed. Put it back, back, back into the abysses of my brain. Let it stay in the darkness. But the boy, encouraged by his name being remembered, comes out to play. A fair-haired boy: tidy, precise, an exceptionally bright, friendless student. Go away, boy – screamed, aloud, the boy’s retired schoolmaster. Go and do your homework. But the boy says he’s done his homework, sir. Peter Bugg opened the window of his sitting room but the boy wouldn’t go out with the heavy air smelling of one hundred smells. Instead, he sat on Peter Bugg’s head and slipped off every now and again when the sweat became too slippery. Into Peter Bugg’s eyes.
Yes, Peter Bugg remembered too.
Twenty remembered – 4.
Twenty, when they had all returned to flat sixteen after their lunch break and with some encouragement from Anna Tap, remembered walking for days, perhaps months, maybe even years, she had no way of knowing for sure. The time, she said, was vague in her, as yet, still vague mind. She did remember, though, certain dogs on this long walk of hers. She remembered she took her food from the dustbins kept outside people’s houses. Some of those people kept dogs. She remembered dog fights. Ferocious dog fights. She remembered licking the dog Maximilian’s wounds after the fights. She remembered the taste of dog blood.
Each time Twenty remembered she grew a little less confident.
Anna Tap remembered – 2.
Then Anna Tap remembered the second time that she visited the museum in which she was employed for so many years, in which her eyes were irreparably damaged. She could not remember her first visit at all. When she first visited the museum she was only a few days old. She had been wrapped in blankets and left in the women’s lavatory, in a basin with her head beneath a tap, she explained. She thought it might have been the hot tap. She was found, she did not know by whom, and taken into care. That was all that Anna Tap could recall being told about her first visit to the city museum.
Her second visit, however, she remembered without help. She was sixteen then. She had been told that she had been abandoned in the women’s lavatory in the museum and wanted to see it for herself. She saw it, she spent two hours inside it, trying to get closer to Mummy, she remembered. Then, when she had seen enough, she walked around the museum. She called the museum objects her brothers and sisters. The closest, she explained, she was ever likely to get to brothers and sisters. She decided she wanted to work in the city museum, to be in a place where, she believed, her mother had once been, and also to be close to those so-called brothers and sisters.
She had never, she remembered aloud, lost her fondness for women’s lavatories.
Francis Orme remembered – 1.
This recollection, when it was presented to me later that day by Peter Bugg, reminded me of one of my own memories. And so it was that even I remembered. Anna Tap’s museum story breathed life into my own first visit to a museum. The museums are different. The museum I remembered was a waxworks museum. I was taken by my father to the waxworks museum shortly after the death of Emma. I was taken there, I suppose, to cheer me up. Emma’s death had saddened me greatly and I was deeply preoccupied in mourning her. I even insisted on being bought liquorice.
But nothing, save the beginnings of my own exhibition, thrilled me quite so much as that afternoon I spent wandering around and between the men and women of wax who loomed over little me. I considered then that since I had no friends the wax museum would be an admirable place to find them. I could spend, I remembered thinking, my days here surrounded by people and never get lonely. I could talk to them, I could give them voices and I could keep still and close my eyes, as I had practised at home with my toys, and imagine that I was made of wax.
I was impressed that day, so much so that I forgot to mourn Emma. Father, I remembered thinking, was impressed too. I vowed that when I had grown beyond child age to adulthood I would get myself employed at the waxworks museum.
Twenty remembered – 5.
Twenty remembered, earlier that day than my remembrance of the wax museum, that she walked from her homeland all the way to Observatory Mansions. She remembered that when she set off she did not say to the dog Maximilian – We shall carry on until we reach Observatory Mansions. The fact that she arrived at Observatory Mansions was entirely coincidental. On the evening before she took up residence in flat twenty, Twenty and Maximilian had got caught in a dog fight, a particularly bad one, she remembered. That night the dog who fought with them was particularly fearsome. It had scratched Twenty in many regions. But it had, she remembered, chewed poor Maximilian nearly to death. And running from the fight, she remembered in tears, Maximilian had been hit by a car. He howled so when he was hit, she said, and later he whimpered and whined and shivered. She needed, she explained, in her foreign tongue, with Peter Bugg translating, a place of shelter to lick Maximilian’s wounds. But Maximilian, sad Great Dane, died during the night. She buried him, she remembered, under some dried earth outside Observatory Mansions. Then, she recalled, she did not know what to do with herself, nor could she remember why she had walked so far, or in what country it was that she had ended up. Looking around Observatory Mansions she saw the number twenty written on a door and that number seemed to mean something to her, so she decided, she remembered, to stay there. In flat twenty.
Twenty was not laughing when she remembered this.
Claire Higg remembered – 4.
One morning Alec Magnitt, remembered Claire Higg without invitation, had come out of his flat to go to work and had as usual smiled at Claire Higg as she came out to pick up her milk bottle of love. But that day Alec Magnitt had said something, he had said – I didn’t know that we had milk delivered here. Oh, yes, Higg said, Higg lied, Higg remembered aloud, I can fix it for you if you want. Would you really? said Magnitt. Absolutely, said Higg. And she did. She bought an extra milk bottle every night, one for Higg, one for Magnitt, and placed one outside her door and one outside Magnitt’s door every morning at seven o’clock. She remembered that morning very clearly, she said, because it had seemed to her on that occasion that Alec Magnitt was in fact flirting with her. He didn’t have to ask me about the milk bottles at all, did he? she asked. And receiving no response she went to her kitchen to pour herself a glass of milk. She said, on returning:
I al
ways love to drink a glass of milk.
Personally, I can’t stand it.
Anna Tap remembered – 3.
It was Anna Tap who remembered her detestation of milk. Claire Higg looked offended. Anna Tap offered her a cigarette and went on to remember a time when she was sent to orphanages. We lived in dormitories sometimes of only ten, sometimes of fifty or more, she said. One orphanage dormitory she remembered particularly. This one, she said, was so full that there were two girls in every bed, and girls lying between the beds, and girls along the passageways. If you slept on the floor you slept on a mattress, she said, if you slept on a bed you slept without a mattress, lying on the cold stiff planks with only a sheet between those planks and yourself. The sheets were dirty, almost always. And there was only one pillow to each bed or mattress, so that the weakest child in each pairing always went without. We lay down with our heads at opposite ends – if we were found lying or sleeping together head to head we were beaten. There were windows there, but the windows needed cleaning and were bolted and barred. And during the night the dormitory door was always locked. The beds were wooden and on each bedhead and foot were scratched children’s names or words of hatred or of love or simply scrapes and dents, signatures of those children who could not write. The children might remain in that orphanage or be moved on (at least three quarters would be), and so the priests who ran the orphanage took less care over those potentially temporary boarders, since they could be sent away before they had even had a chance to learn their names. It would have been easy for the priests to sit down and listen to each child’s story, to pass her a handkerchief and comfort her as she went through it. Each story carried a similar charge and passion, the priests could spend their lives listening to them. If they stopped for one child, then others would insist on attention too, and so all were left alone. Cried alone. Covered the already dirty sheets with their snot and tears. The sheets, such flimsy mothers, too weak to resist, would be stretched, ripped, loved and smudged over and then left without a goodbye for the next girl to mistreat. Sometimes we lay there all day as well as night. During the day the door was always open. From the door a stone passageway could be seen and, every now and then, other children, better dressed than us, Anna Tap remembered, would pass. Adults passed too: priests, cleaning women, doctors. But only the other children looked in and they never stopped to speak, offer comforting words or insults because on a wooden stool in the doorway sat an orderly. The orderly was a well-built man in his twenties. He sat there on those days and in those hours when we were forced to stay in the dormitory. He sat with a paper, reading it through and through, starting with the sports pages and then working backwards. He only looked up if one of us approached the door. Then he would point the child back to her bed or stand up filling the whole door frame.
Everything was temporary; all those little bodies would lie there for no longer than three months. Only the stains, the beds, the orderly were permanent. During the day when the orderly sat at his post with his paper (unless we were allowed to sit outside or in a large classroom) everything was silent, only the rustling of blankets or sheets was heard or the quietest of whispers, for the orderly’s presence was a perfect notice – BE QUIET. But at night, after the meal of a glass of milk (she remembered, looking at Claire Higg, for it was the glass of milk that had sparked off her memory), soup, bread and biscuits, after the door was locked and the passageway was silent, the noise gradually began.
At first there were quiet whisperings from here and there, from this bed or that bed, this mattress or that mattress: never progressing beyond the originating bed or mattress where the occupants were whispering to each other. So the first conversations were only between two. Couples whispered, whispers that began timidly, not knowing if the neighbour would react, with – It’s dark, or It’s cold, or You awake? And then the answers came back – You’ll get used to it, or Am I taking too much blanket? or I’m awake, I don’t mind talking for a bit. And then they’d ask each other’s names, where they came from, did they know where they were going next, how long do we stay here? The talking gradually grew in confidence, the words came quicker, were spontaneous now, she remembered, not carefully thought out. All about the dormitory the numerous private conversations grew in volume, and those other pairs at first too scared to talk gradually let out their own sounds – and so the words fell from bed to bed or leapt across to the row on the other side, darted from head to head: words not coming from one or two places now but from numerous, uncountable origins. Anna Tap said at this point, when everyone was talking excitedly, sitting up in their beds, calling to the new girls many beds away, that those were the sounds she loved most. They meant to her company, pure, necessary company noise. The girls in that dormitory shook hands, imitating adults, feeling for them in the dark, smelt each other’s voices, told of their lives so far. And if one child told a life story that was exceptionally sad or frightening or funny or moving, she would be asked to go to another part of the room so that others might hear it. This task – the sifting and swapping of stories – was executed by the senior girls who had been there for weeks or months. They acted as editors, organizers, not brutally controlling the nights but rather helping them along; encouraging each new child to speak. But each night would end disastrously.
The senior girls, so called not because of their age but because of the length of time spent in the dormitory, had listened to nights and nights of stories and greedily awaited this time of day. They were brilliant listeners and they prided themselves on their memories. They listened without interruption, nodding at the right places or looking sympathetic, or laughing when required. But once a story was ended and was a few nights old we’d often hear it again. This time it would be told by a senior girl who had adopted it, but if questioned would swear on her life that it had actually happened to her. And this was where the trouble began. Though names and certain smaller incidents would have been changed, reworked in the quiet day to be ready for the night performance, its source could not be denied. Often the girl, the originator, who had told the story would hear it being claimed by a senior and react violently. Though her story may or may not have been true, there were surely elements of truth in it, and it often included the one sacred person, animal, object or incident that the child had treasured so completely, and now, hearing her own tale on another’s lips, it was as if someone had stolen her life. Anna Tap explained that they had no possessions, no luggage, even the clothes they wore belonged to the orphanage. If a child arrived with her own clothes they would be removed, forcibly if necessary, and never seen again. Bullying had been reported, with stronger girls seizing such items of clothing and claiming by their possession an individuality that was not their own.
The stories that the new girls were tricked into telling were stolen and, like losing cherished photographs or letters, they felt that suddenly they had never belonged to a past, to a place, to people. Stories and memories were the only possessions left to them and they fought when they had been stolen, they violently struck out, bit, pulled hair. It often happened that two or more seniors stole the same story; for they grew bored of their own tales and changed them as often as three or four times a week. And when it happened that the same story was stolen by two seniors or three or four, a larger fight for ownership began, sometimes including the true author, sometimes with the true author looking on in tears.
With the beginning of the fights, the stories ceased for the night – the sounds grew ugly, crying now was often heard, beds being pushed about, other children yelling as the fights trod on them, heads being banged on bedheads. And then the wounded and the victor would slowly return to their beds and a quiet sobbing might be heard for a while and then silence. If someone, new girl or senior, were to say something then, even if in a whisper, a chorus of shut up would silence her. And the silence would continue until the next night when it all would begin again.
The dormitory was a museum of stories, original, stolen, fused. And the curators were
the seniors who, rather than cataloguing the works, mixed them up, disposed of many, lost many.
Francis Orme remembered – 2.
The section of Miss Tap’s history about children’s possessions (or lack of them) reminded me of other children’s objects. I remembered the attic rooms of Tearsham Park, and in the attic rooms furthest from the stairs, beyond the servants’ quarters, I spent many hours discovering the objects of dead people. All the dead people’s objects were kept out of the way there. Many of those dead people’s objects were an embarrassment to the still-living people who dwelt down below. But some objects in the attic rooms were kept there because their dead owner was supposed to remain a secret. Hidden in a locked wooden trunk in one of the smaller rooms I found a child’s possessions, among them a teddy bear without a mouth (lot 174).
Peter Bugg remembered – 2.
The prattle about dormitories, as Peter Bugg viewed it, about all-girls dormitories, reminded him of other dormitories, filled with boys, where he had turned the lights out at night and left the boys to their thoughts of girls. The names of some of those boys came sir-siring up into his head once more. And among those names was that of the boy who had died, that of the boy Peter Bugg was certain he had brought to death by his own mean ways. Tears rushed down his face as the boy, sitting on top of his bald head, slipped again under the lubrication of his excessive sweating into his eyes. Alexander Mead. He remembered so many boyhoods, so many schooldays, so why could he not lift the image of this boy’s face from his eyes. The boy stayed, smiled into Bugg’s skull when he blinked.
This is a remembrance of his that he declined to share with Higg, Tap and Twenty. But he told me later on about the boys’ dormitories …