by Paul Tomkins
“She had her dark side all right. But she could be nice, too.”
“She drove me batty. And what she did to her poor mother – it’s unforgivable, really. Teenagers never think, do they? So selfish.”
With a delicate touch Kitty strokes the walls of the landing, where I’ve yet to start redecorating; her arthritic hand trailed gently over the tired wallpaper. I follow her into her bedroom. “This is all rubbish,” she says, referring to everything on view. “The good stuff is in the wardrobes and under the bed. Along with more junk.”
“I did start to have a look, but I didn’t know what was yours and what might have been Mum’s. I didn’t want to sort through it without you.”
She stands beside the bed and begins to slowly lower herself, but then, with a few inches to go, trusts the give of the mattress and flops down onto her backside. The springs twang, but she remains upright, wobbling. “Bring me that stuff,” she says once steadied, gesturing towards the first wardrobe.
I open the mahogany doors to boxes, carrier bags, hard-backed photographs, folders, loose papers and all manner of bric-a-brac, whose airtight cramming holds them in place. One by one I attempt to pass them across to my aunt without the rest spilling onto the floor.
It takes over an hour to sort through her possessions, and, knowing that time and energy are on the wane, she doesn’t spend long on decisions. She looks at each item, then quickly places it either to the right or to the left, onto the patchwork quilt. Discard, keep, discard, discard, discard, discard, keep, and so on, with the discard pile growing higher as she tires. Some boxes and envelopes are opened then dismissed, the contents warranting no further inspection. “All this,” she says, looking to her right, “can go in the bin.”
The sorting complete, I make room on the bed beside her – casting the discarded pile to the floor with the rest of what she considers disposable – as she collates a handful of objects to show me. With hands shaking she presents photographs of their childhood: two skinny sisters in gingham dresses on the front porch; slightly younger sisters, paddling in the lake; a fair bit older and seated around the dining table, Kitty now in her teens and wearing glasses, my mother’s full, relaxed smile a shock.
“I’m glad I saw these again,” she says, handing them to me. “But you should have them now.” I consider protesting – how can you give away such precious mementos? – but it’s not like Kitty will have much more time to appreciate them.
“You can’t take any of it with you,” she says, looking around the room. At first I think she’s giving me an instruction, but adds, “You leave it all behind,” and I understand.
She hands me an old ciné film, encased in a yellow Kodak envelope. “I’ve no idea what’s on it,” she says. “It was your mother’s. I’ve no idea what ever happened to the projector.”
“What can I do with it?”
“Can’t you send it somewhere?” she asks.
“Probably,” I say. “I guess these days there are places you can send most things.”
“Ah, these are what I was after,” she says, tucking some scraps of paper into the pocket of her cardigan. It seems invasive to ask what they contain, and she doesn’t offer an explanation. She simply moves on to the next item in the pile. I recognise it instantly: it is Monty, my childhood teddy bear. “This is yours, I believe,” she says, holding him out to me like a midwife passing a newborn. One touch of his bow tie puts me back on that train, rattling away from my mother’s existence. He seemed so much bigger, then. Now, my hand stretches right around his waist. I slip him into my bag.
“Ah, these,” Kitty says, handing over a clutch of letters grouped together with an elastic band. “You might want to read them. They’re from your mother’s younger days.”
I quickly scan a page pulled from the first envelope, reading it with the sense that my mother was somehow cheating on my father, decades before they even met. I feel a sense of betrayal, that she knew love in her youth. Unwilling to confront the final paragraphs, I fold the paper and slip it back into the envelope. Maybe once the shock has worn off I’ll be able to read them, from start to finish.
“You’re your mother’s son,” Kitty states, matter-of-factly.
“Pardon?”
She hands me a photo. “I see her, in you. I notice it more, now you’re all grown up.” She then tuts, softly. “You’re almost her age. You know, when she…”
I hadn’t really thought about it before. But yes, it’s now less than a handful of years until I’m fifty. How did I ever make it this far?
Kitty is clearly tiring as we descend the stairs. Her whole weight – which admittedly isn’t much – is pressed into me as I hold her upright. After the final step I release her into the curved embrace of her walking frame. I go to open the front door, but she wants to see out the back. Slowly we shuffle through the patio doors, out onto the veranda.
“It’s such a lovely view, isn’t it?” she says, looking across the shimmering lake, to the tree with its broken bough, and beyond, to the woods in the distance, before turning her head to take in the entire panorama. “I shall miss it,” she sighs. I drink in the same crepuscular views: dappled golden light on the long grass, angular shadows falling across a field of rape, the drifts of smoke from a distant bonfire, a handful of low pink clouds in sky. I take a deep breath: there’s a strong scent of rosemary and rapeseed in the air.
“What was she like, when you were children here?” I ask.
Kitty pauses. “Quiet and shy, with outsiders at least. But she was also a little mischievous. Keen sense of humour.”
“She wasn’t as serious, back then?”
“Good heavens no! That came much later. It’s funny, I remember a lot of my childhood better than I remember this morning. I can still see your mother running around the lake, she must have been ten or eleven, round and round, as if she was competing at White City. She loved to run. So full of beans.”
“Were you happy living here?”
“We were. Life was simple, at least until our mother died. She – your mother I mean – would have been thirteen. It affected her badly – it did us both. She had got over it, somewhat, by the time she left school. But I think it was part of what undermined her, when times got tougher.”
“It’s silly,” I state, clearing my throat, “but I still think I should have done something, back then. I was just six, but I can’t recall being six without knowing what I know now, as if I was equipped to intervene, when obviously I wasn’t. I just wish I’d known some of it at the time – enough to say something that might stop her.”
“We live and learn, Patrick. In that order.”
FIFTEEN
The clay smells foetid, but it’s an aroma I’ve not only become accustomed to but actually grown to like, due to its associations with creativity and achievement. I use a rare organic compound, as opposed to the more heavily oil-based variety popular with my peers, because its humus is all part of the cycle of life. A wealth of dead plant and animal matter has dissolved into the clay over millennia. The ground then gives up this substance which, in turn, helps create an identity for someone deceased, who will themselves, when that identity is discovered, return, boxed up, to the soil. There is something about organic clay that gives more of a connection to the process than the Plasticine used by others, or the computer modelling that, I fear, may soon make such skills obsolete.
As with any portrait, the eyes hold the key. But how can I get them right without anything to refer to?
Given that those made for dolls and taxidermy have unnaturally large irises and too little of the white space that surrounds them, it’s essential for maximum realism to use synthetic eyeballs from a medical retailer. I plump for brown eyes, on account of it being the most prevalent colour amongst the population. If definite proof of hair colour exists –– say blonde or auburn –– then I might opt for a shade of blue or green, but with no such evidence I stick to the laws of probability. I tear off two golf-ball sized slabs of clay a
nd force them into the hollows. I then sink the glass eyes into these soft sockets, at just the right angle, careful not to push too far. Aligning them within the recess is a delicate balancing act: a ruler bridging the bony arcs of upper cheekbone and eyebrow ridge should lightly intersect with the tip of the cornea. Once in place, I pad the circumferences with more clay, to further secure them.
The phone rings. Expecting it to be David, and unwilling to be distracted, I turn up the music on my stereo. Even now, in this age of digital music, I persevere with vinyl on a turntable, sticking mostly to records from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
All thirty-two numbered tissue-depth markers are in place, the glue dry. I slice a strip of clay roughly ten centimetres by three in length, tapering to between four and six millimetres in depth, and run it down from one peg to another. Next I take a strip of similar length and place it horizontally, from left to right, as the underpinning to eyebrows. I step back: the skull appears to be wearing an inverted cross on its forehead. From here I work outwards to the cheeks, then down through the lower jaw, until the clay joins in a mask encompassing the majority of the markers. At the end of this stage, for which, it must be said, creative talent is not necessary, the sides of the face and the forehead are covered, but the central area – nose, mouth and what surrounds the eyes – remains untouched, the bare skull showing through. All underpinning, along with some flesh, has been applied, but what follows is the artistic side of the process. What follows is the appearance.
With a Boley gauge I measure the front six teeth, the size of which largely determines the width of the mouth. My aim is to give her an open smile. I usually only go down this route when there’s something like a snaggletooth or an unusual arrangement – or even absence – of teeth, because broken, missing or crooked teeth can often be the one distinctive feature of which we can be certain. However, teeth like these demand to be displayed. If you have teeth like these you are not ashamed to show them. It complicates my task, given that the facial infrastructure alters, as the muscles pull and stretch the corners of the mouth: the cheeks plump, and push the eyes into more of a squint. But it has to be done. I lay two strips of clay and curve them into lips, pinching away the excess thickness of the upper, fattening the lower. I’ll return to it later, to smooth it all out, but I first want to establish a rough idea.
How the lids arc over the synthetic eyeballs is another process where a millimetre here or there, either in terms of thickness or shape, can radically alter the look. I carefully lay the first thin fronds of clay. What starts as the widest possible stare – unnaturally bulging eyes – recedes into a natural expression once the lids are in place and smoothed down. A tiny pea of clay is pushed into the inner corner of each eye, to replicate caruncles. The canthi – the inner and outer corners of the eye – are fractionally lower on the inner edge, either side of the nose. As such, the eyes need to appear fractionally tilted.
According to studies comparing rebuilt faces with existing photographs of the deceased, the nose tends to be the most accurate feature in reconstructions. And crucial for this accuracy is the nasal spine – the base, in between the nostrils – which can often be missing or damaged. In this case I’m fortunate. A nose dictates so much of a person’s attractiveness, as the facial centrepiece. It’s not so much the size, but how it suits its surroundings; its proportion to the rest of the features. Judging by the nasal spine – which here is small and upward in projection – and the slender protrusion of the nasal bone (the bridge), this young woman most likely had a neat, diminutive nose. A narrow nasal aperture adds to the theory of delicacy.
I take a measurement of the nasal spine, and multiply it by three to get the full length. This can then be joined to the projection of the nasal bone, with a dab of extra clay for some kind of neat bobble or furrow at the tip. I fill in and encircle the cheeks, to get a nice round look, and, with fresh pieces of clay, create small, delicate ears that I add to the skull once fully shaped.
She is evolving, returning to life. A physiognomy is apparent, an existence harked back to. She is far from finished, but to someone, somewhere, she might already be alive.
SIXTEEN
Time: then and now. My six-year-old self, dressed awkwardly in new black trousers and a heavily starched white shirt with grubby cuffs, standing at the edge of the lake, which dominates the grounds to Kitty’s cottage. The water is so still, so lifeless; a mirror reflecting the sky, the tree line. I grab a stone, pull back my arm with the grace of a sportsman – a cricketer at the third-man boundary – and in a swift forward sweep release it with a flick of the wrist and a follow-through of the hand that splays the fingers; something occurring instinctively, to produce the best leverage. No one taught me, I just know.
It skims across the surface of time, dipping below, skipping above. The mirror cracks, and then gradually reforms.
One heartbeat later I am thrust into middle-age so fast it knots my stomach, and the existence of the stone, like my childhood, my youth, my potential, is nothing but a ripple on the water. The memory of that day four decades ago – the day of my mother’s funeral – is eerily fresh. Beside the lake I drift back to those moments when, having been kept away from the service itself, I snuck out from the solemnity of the wake to play by the water’s edge.
Daydreaming, and with the total detachment of an aerial perspective, I see my younger self pull from his trouser pocket the St Christopher left to him by his mother, and launch it across the inky water, using the same technique as with the stone; hard and low, although it only skips once, the chain dragging it down. Nothing more dramatic than a flurry of bubbles marks its descent somewhere out towards the centre.
* * *
Yet another of those childhood days that would stay with me forever: just eight years old, and positively racking them up. I came home from school and, as usual, let myself in. I had a key, even at that age: my father could not be relied upon to be awake or to hear the doorbell.
At first I failed to sense a problem, but even the mundane details of those few minutes have stayed with me, such as how the low spring sunlight streamed through the coloured glass panels on the door and painted the radiator with Art Deco rays; the football pools coupon lying on the mat; and the exceptionally strong smell of coffee that in itself suggested very little, other than my father had just brewed a cup. Little did I know that, several hours earlier, I’d become an orphan.
If never apparently right at death’s door, my father shuffled furtively near its porch. I took his genetic inheritance of being slim, but at no point have I ever been as scrawny – possibly because, unlike him, I didn’t smoke or drink more calories than I ate. He had a greyness that permeated his entire existence, from his sallow complexion to the dull suits he wore at the council’s waste management services. That was, until he lost his job two months earlier.
A good man at heart – gentle, with no anger or malice – but also undeniably weak. He wanted me in his life, but seemed ill-prepared for the burden of full-time cohabitation. When a week here and there became a full-time obligation, it took its toll. And with the loss of his job went the last little sparks of life.
I made my way into the living room, half expecting to see him stretched out on the sofa. With no sign there, I went into the kitchen. The lingering smell of coffee suddenly made sense: the percolator was on, a cup of oily black liquid resting beneath its spout. Something felt wrong, but it wasn’t yet clear just how wrong it could possibly be. That would change once I made my way upstairs.
I found my father semi-naked on his bed, full ashtray beside him. He looked asleep, but even paler than normal, apart from a slight reddish-purple colouring to his skin where it met the mattress. Dampness radiated across the bedding, and there was a smell of urine in the air, rising above the coffee. His jaw looked unusually – unnaturally – slack, his eyes firmly closed. Despite all this, it never occurred to me that he had died. I didn’t understand alcoholism or depression, but by then I knew enough of my father’s
odd behaviour to think that, not for the first time, he’d simply fallen asleep and pissed himself. But the more I watched him, the longer I went without detecting a breath. Perhaps flickers in my vision – those swift blinks – concealed the movement of his chest? It was only when I touched him, to try and wake him, that I recoiled at the coldness of his flesh.
I didn’t cry; at least not right away. I simply stared at him. Even though I think I understood he was dead, I kept expecting him to move; the man I knew would always shift sooner or later, would always awake from the drunken stupor, the near-coma.
I sat on the end of the bed, and eventually, after thinking about his hand in mine when he met me from the train twenty-one months earlier, I began to cry. He never did hold my hand like that again, and I never again felt as close to him as I did that day. I must have been in a state of shock, as, despite some tears, it didn’t fully sink in. Indeed, it felt slightly surreal, as if I were a mere spectator, watching myself from a distance. I covered my father’s body with the bedclothes, closed tight the bedroom door and went downstairs to watch Crackerjack.
I consciously held off from dialling 999, even though I knew it was the thing to do. Facing radical change once again, only this time I would have even less of a clue where it would take me. I’d recently seen Oliver! on TV, and believed that being an orphan meant an awful existence. Aside from my aunt Kitty, I had run out of family – at least those I knew about. Delaying the inevitable – and I think I knew that it was inevitable – gave me the chance to stay at the place I had come to call home, before strange people came in and decided my fate. I felt helpless and confused, and at times terrified, but also like I’d been initiated into an adult world where parental control presented no issue, a world where I could be my own boss, at least until the harsh realities of how to cook a meal or find money to spend on food came calling. For the time being I got by on snacks from the fridge and the larder.