by Morag Joss
So instead I read some more of your story about Overdale. You take me right back there. I had some pictures fished out over the floor already, hadn’t looked at them in years.
And I found this, your poem with the photograph.
Overdale
I remember the white waterfall,
a liquid horsetail spilling over white rocks,
wires of spray silvering the white air,
making rainbows and wetting our faces.
I suppose you meant to finish it someday. Was that all you remembered, the waterfall?
I’ve taken the liberty and come up with a second verse. Here goes:
We ate lunch out of flapping paper bags.
We tried to open cheese triangles with gloves on
and the girls’ hair stuck to their noses.
One boy’s juice carton waltzed off with the wind
And you gave him hell about the environment.
Does that scan or whatever it’s meant to do? Della says poems don’t have to rhyme, just as well, I haven’t the talent, don’t claim to. In fact if it’s a poem at all, I don’t see why.
But A for effort?
Here’s the photograph. Taken by that lad mad about cameras, came two years running. Forget his name, was it Lee, he got us the prints, wouldn’t take the money, it was to say thank you, he said.
Now, not sure if I’m remembering the day from itself or from the photo. Or remembering a bundle of days like that. There were countless of them, those hiking days, the stiles and sheep gates and views and resting places and bogs and rocks. Different kids of course, give or take, but the same complaints: blisters, hunger, thirst, boredom, wet, cold. Same smiles, too, even if just for a photo. Same lunches in paper bags, wolfed down somewhere out of the wind if we were lucky-roll with luncheon meat or similar, choice of cheese triangle (see poem above) OR hardboiled egg, Yo-Yo OR KitKat, an apple, and a carton of orange squash. All litter including apple cores and eggshell to be carried home.
What became of luncheon meat? It wasn’t that bad if you were hungry and freezing. I have clearer recollection of the luncheon meat than of the waterfall. Has anybody ever put luncheon meat in a poem?
Bye for now
A.
In the end, only my grandmother’s smile proved inexhaustible. Her hips gave up and her hands also became arthritic but she continued to smile, working her knitting on her lap a little more slowly. She took painkillers smiling over the rim of her glass; when she got too crippled to get in and out of the bath I brought basins of water and washed her in her chair, and she would smile. Afterward I would take her compact and lipstick and dab her face and lips and leave her smiling in a sugary-scented haze. She found these washing rituals exhausting; almost at once she would doze off, vacating the smile that would somehow wait on her pink frosted mouth until she returned from sleep and re-entered it.
By then I was suspicious of it, that smile. It seemed to me implausibly rapturous. It could mean only that she had decided to see in her darkness certain things and not others. She talked about the view from a hill somewhere in the north one April day when she was young, and I could tell from her face that she had gone back in her mind to gaze at it again, seeing from her chair next to the sweating gas fire and the liverish wallpaper patterned with brown lozenges, skylarks’ wings brushing against the clouds over a sparkling reservoir half a mile away and stiff stripes of sun and shadow rippling deep violet water. I think she returned there easily, to this place whose name escaped her, to that bright cold day more than half her lifetime ago. Her mind was not so much failing, as obscuring the importance of knowing precisely where or when a thing occurred; she spoke of her gratitude at being able to remember it at all, and smiled.
As the walls between the years and decades came down, she began to think that life had a way of turning out all right in the end; there were ways back, after all, from disaster, and the old cruelties, even her husband’s, had seldom been deliberate and so perhaps had hardly been cruel. Just who had inflicted them anyway, and upon whom, exactly? The smell of alcohol, the sounds of someone falling against furniture and crying out, furious words, the swipe of a hand or a fist came out of darkness and at random whether from her husband or from anyone else. And it was either now, or it was all a long time ago, she didn’t remember. Time had lessened the sting; time reduced all wrongs because misdeeds died just as people did. Records faded and got muddled and generation melded into blurry generation the way photographs piled on a windowsill imprint shadows of themselves on the image below, one upon another. So my grandmother settled into her smiling contemplations and let her fragile and partial visions illustrate a whimsical philosophy of all things being for the best. Her memories, freed from sequentiality and filtered clean of bitterness, ceased to add up to her true history and so ceased to trouble her.
To conjure these flimsy apparitions from the past was work that kept her no less busy than her knitting did; she knitted, I now think, for more than the comfort of repetition. I think she knitted so that her skipping fingers might somehow impart some of their agility to her mind, to help it go on sifting through its gallery of imperfect and far-off images. There was perhaps something of a grimace of concentration about her smile.
Because how unimaginably tiring it must have been for her, every day, to summon from the dark a faith that the world though invisible to her was benign, finally, and had been all this while busily fashioning out of the uncoloured fragments of everyone’s defeats and little pleasures, not just consequences, but parables. Or perhaps, spared every smear and crease on the surface of events, every blank glare on her daughter’s devastated face, my grandmother found it easier than I did to believe that nobody’s life was ever so blighted as to be wholly without point, that memories never were thin and useless but bloomed out of experience to some good end, to become stories that would stand for something greater than themselves.
Dear Ruth
I remember that story of yours in the Save Overdale Campaign Newsletter but that was back in the Eighties, when we were trying to stop them from closing it. I knew you had your writers group, Della & her cohorts, and there was that booklet of poetry and whatnot you got printed up that one time. All well and good.
But I never saw anything you wrote. You never showed me a word. You called it all “work in progress.” You always made it sound as if you were just practising. You most certainly did not mention a novel and here it is popping up all over the house.
The Overdale photo, I keep it on me now. I don’t remember if it was taken before or after the juice carton incident but we all look well, if not cheerful. You can’t smile nicely into a force five gale, not even for some lad’s Duke of Edinburgh Award Special Photography Project.
But Ruth, see, the picture. It’s what’s not in it. It’s got 1969 on the back. It looks about late April so it must have been Easter. You can just see lambs there with the ewes in the field miles away on the right, little white blobs close to the big dark ones, and look at the state of the bracken, it’s certainly not October. Which means it must have been just after. Might even have been the very morning after! Funny how you can’t tell from our faces. You’d think it would show.
Remember, Ruth? 1969 Easter at Overdale, only a few weeks after the February half-term when we first met there. The night we arrived, the Thursday before Good Friday, when we sneaked out and we talked in the dark? You told me you’d been the first person at your school to put your name down to bring the Easter party to Overdale. You’d made yourself a bit unpopular in the staff room because you’d just been at half-term, but it was first come first served. And that was all because I’d happened to mention at half-term that I’d likely be back at Easter with another of my lot?
I was pleased when you told me that, Ruth, but I couldn’t say so. I couldn’t tell you I hadn’t “happened to mention” coming back at Easter. I’d worked it into the conversation just so you’d know. Shaking with fear in case I was making it obvious. It seemed importa
nt I wasn’t obvious, can’t think why now. Not able to do the direct thing and just tell you I had to see you again. Dropping a hint instead of saying what I wanted and then making it happen. Calling it being shy when all it was was weakness. Weak with words.
I’d spent that Thursday travelling with the kids on the bus. The usual mayhem-three vomit stops-and my insides lurching, wondering if I’d see you. Getting ready for a big letdown in case you weren’t there.
But you were. Your brown hair in a single long pigtail right down your back and some pendant made of pottery on a leather thong- you looked like a squaw. I couldn’t wait to get the kids’ tea and the first round of the darts and table tennis tournaments over. We postponed picking the Snakes & Ladders teams, and let them skip showers, remember? Thought we’d never get them settled. The first night’s always the worst, they’re high as kites, been cooped up on the bus half the day. And first night there’s always one or two feeling lost and homesick, the silent weepers you have to watch out for. The dorms didn’t go quiet till nearly eleven, and by then it was well after dark.
That stumped me! I’d thought of asking you to come out to see the sunset to get you away from the others, and it was already pitch dark and I didn’t know what to do.
But you said, So, Arthur, you’re the ornithologist, do you get nightingales hereabouts? I’ve always wanted to hear a nightingale.
And I nearly said, Nope, no chance this high up, or this far north, or this time of year.
Then I saw your eyes, and I said, Oh, uh… well maybe, and it’s a fine clear night. Care to venture out?
So out we went to listen for a nightingale. I saw the others, Bill What’s-his-name and Mary Dixon, smirking, didn’t care. All they cared about was getting a few beers open and the ciggies out. Who else was there that year, I can’t remember, can you?
I remember I initiated you to the unofficial spare key system that night-the set Bill had made and we kept hidden outside in the porch so any of the staff could slip out after lockup? With Bill and the others it was most often down to the pub or the fish and chip shop. In our case, into the hills, to be alone.
Ruth. The way the wind dropped, and we lay in the shelter of a rock under the hill’s curve. The stars-candles seen through pinpricks in a black velvet curtain according to you (you see, I remembered!) and the moon over the reservoir and not a sound except the wind higher up on the peak, a sighing sound. No nightingale, no night birds at all. My parka on the ground and the smell of the reeds and heather. Like old vines and honey you said, this must be what ancient Greece smells like. I didn’t comment, to me it was just dried and rooty, plus that muddy smell off the parka.
I’ll never forget that time, Ruth. We never did talk about it. You were lovely that night.
And here’s another thing I never said. Thank you. What happened was heaven on earth. Never mind ancient Greece, heaven on earth. I was thirty-two years of age and it was my first time. You told me about your ex-fiancé and you asked did I mind I wasn’t the first. And all I said was, no I don’t mind. Did I add something like, well, this is 1969 after all?
Why didn’t I say I already loved you so much you could have come to me with the smell of a hundred men in your hair and I wouldn’t have cared, as long as you stayed with me?
With love
Arthur
PS Did it mean as much to you?
PPS I ask because I think you forgot about the parka, significance of-you didn’t understand why I held on to it, “Oh, THAT smelly awful old thing” you called it, the first time I looked for it after you’d put it in the rubbish. Must have been twenty years later.
Jeremy had taken to telephoning me when it was not convenient for me to speak to him. I didn’t want to leave the receiver off the hook because he might then have reported the line as faulty or even come to the house, and either of those events would have meant intrusion. It was easy enough after the first few times just to ignore the ringing.
It was more important that I got adequate rest. I would arrive back at the cul-de-sac at daybreak and go to bed at once, though I couldn’t sleep straightaway. I would lie feverish in the way I remembered being as a child once or twice, in bed and missing school, and secretly happy to be so still and separate. After what seemed a long time, sounds would bob in on the surface of the day outside: motors running, children’s feet on gravel, doors opening and closing. My mind played out the scenes whose sounds I heard: my neighbour Gail shepherding her daughters Thomasina and Jessica from their mock-Tudor house into their estate car, big and small hands clicking seat belts, her slavering dogs, Bertie and Maisie, jumping in the back, leashes thrown in after them. Later would come the cruck of letterboxes in between the revving and halting of the post van at its usual two stopping points in the cul-de-sac.
Eventually, silence would come and embed itself. No, not silence. It was more like sound loitering in the shade while the day outside swelled with light, and the morning hours, burdened with heat, struggled to pass and expired, inevitably, in the end; then it would be afternoon, when the day seemed to sigh and slacken and give in to an indolent winding down towards evening. Languorous and minimal as a cat, I barely moved from hour to hour except, in my sleep, to yawn and stretch, as if testing some notion of elasticity in my lungs and limbs. I would sleep, and wake, and sleep, dreaming that I was not in my white nest of a bed but outside, under a warm sky. At intervals I would find myself half roused as if I had been dreaming in a hammock under white trees in a white garden somewhere, or lying on a pillowy bank of white grass like rough toweling, lulled by the prinking of distant radio tunes, a barking dog. Then I would lie very still in case I really was in a garden and the neighbours might be walking by, talking about me, and might see me and cast worried smiles and call out with questions. Only half awake, I would wonder if I had just missed the ringing of a telephone, or I might think that I could hear one but that it didn’t matter. It soothed me to lie still and not even try to get to it, for surely it was too far away.
Then I would let myself slip further away, deeper into my whiteness, and the whisper of the sheets as I drew them up around my ears and over my head was the same sighing as the wind in the pink blossom branches overhanging the narrow road in April, and the beat of my pulse on the pillow under my throat the same sad faraway sound as the drip of rain on the colourless flowers under the trees and on the messages of loss and regret, washing them all away.
Later a telephone or a doorbell would ring again, but not here, nor anywhere very near. All sounds came from the faraway “out there” of a warm cul-de-sac afternoon of opened windows and summery gardens and neighbour greeting neighbour: dreamy calling voices, the tap of claws as dogs trailed along the sun-soft tarmac of the road, the tick of a pram or a child’s tricycle wheeled by under the shade of the hedge. I had to burrow away from the sounds of innocuous, innocent lives. A telephone would go on ringing, in another room or maybe in another house, maybe the one against whose wall a pruning ladder had just struck with a soft, wooden tock that travelled across the way and flicked off the side of the house opposite, then bounced back, the sound mingling with the clip of shears slicing high up under the eaves and an exuberant fluster of clematis fronds falling in clouds of black and green against the brittle blue of a July sky. It was bitter and pleasant to lie immersed in whiteness with eyes closed against the sight of any more events beyond my window. The police were still hunting for a killer. There was so much more than glass, now, between me and what went on out there.
Eventually, of course, I had to answer the telephone. I told Jeremy I hadn’t got more than a few minutes because I was already late, and he asked me what I could be late for at nine o’clock in the evening. I was startled by this question. I hadn’t been awake long. As usual I had waited until it was dark so that when I got up I didn’t feel I was leaving my bed behind so much as entering another embrace. I stepped out of my bedroom not to confront a darkening house merely unlit, but to encounter the night. It breathed on me as I walk
ed downstairs, and it floated behind, lifting the hairs on my neck, swirling around my feet, hanging on my clothes. It swept ahead and spread into the spaces before me. I had lit some candles for the pleasure of the counterpoising dots of gold in the blanketing darkness, just enough light by which to watch the night filling my empty rooms. The telephone had rung as I was putting down the box of matches.
Jeremy said he wanted to know if I was all right and then began to tell me why he knew I wasn’t. As I listened, I nipped out the flame of a candle and dabbed the escaping drop of wax between my thumb and forefinger until it was a cool, curved disk with brittle edges, like a fingernail detached from a corpse. I nibbled it while I waited. It tasted of oil and smoke.
“Are you there? Hello? This is the whole problem. This is pure emotional blackmail.”
I didn’t speak.
“All right. But since you have at least answered the telephone, perhaps you would tell me how you are?”
“I am here. I’m the same.”
“Are you?… I mean, have you…how are…have things…” He couldn’t flatten down the brisk interrogative breeze fluttering through his voice, lifting the edges of words and sniffing underneath. What things? “Are you coping with the heat, for instance? It’s terribly hot.”
“I told you, I’m the same.” As I said that an ache was rising in my chest and my heart began a kind of bumpy climb up my ribs. I tried to concentrate on how safe I was, to remember that I was alone in a dark room and that although his voice was present, he wasn’t.
“I know you’re shutting yourself away in the house,” he insisted. “Gail says she and Hector haven’t seen you for weeks, she thought you were away. She’s been trying to rouse you.”
I nipped out the flame of another candle. Smoke from the sooty wick trickled up my nose and I coughed. “I’m all right.”