If I Touched the Earth

by Cynthia Rogerson

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Did you enjoy your dinner?’

  ‘Aye.’ Then, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Fancy a pudding?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Full up?’

  ‘Actually, got to go now. Some mates are picking me up to go out.’

  ‘I said two burgers, one egg and chips. Not three burgers, no bloody egg and chips at all. And where’s our plate of toast, anyway?’

  ‘It’s coming. Uh, was it white or brown?’

  ‘From here? You could have said. But great, that’s great. What’s your plan? Inverness?’

  ‘Aye.’ Looking a little shifty, a smile in his eyes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you’re right, Mum. Inverness. Maybe clubbing.’ Suppressing a giggle.

  ‘Are you high again, Calum? You’ve got that face.’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘Jesus. Well, have fun, son. Be careful and have fun.’

  She heard the car before she saw it – deep thumping music and an angry male voice singing something about a bitch. And from her seat inside, she’d watched as he hopped into the boy-racer and joined three other boys, all looking about twelve, only stretched out and not cute anymore. She’d waved superfluously as the car revved up and sped off, swerving skilfully around the parked cars, leaving a thick exhaust cloud. That noise, that sight, seemed the epitome of young virility. The modern equivalent of young men tearing their shirts off and pounding their chests and roaring their fledgling manliness, while fighting dragons and bloodthirsty armies. Fuck you, everybody! Did you hear me? I said fuck you! And by the way, you over there: fancy a dance later? You think I’m hot, don’t you? Don’t you? Please!

  ‘This sauce bottle’s nearly empty, can you no just gie us a new one, hen?’

  ‘Aye, no problem.’

  ‘You said that five minutes ago.’

  ‘Did I?’

  And for no obvious reason, a memory that has stuck of four-year-old Calum, scabby-kneed and sunburned, picking dandelions one spring afternoon, wearing that Superman t-shirt and cape that Neal brought home one day from Woolys. God, he’d worn that cape to death. In the back garden, offering her a dandelion seed head, perfectly round and fluffy. She remembers telling herself to remember this scene, because he had jam around his mouth and the sun shone through his hair like a halo. Click! A mental snapshot.

  ‘Blow, son,’ she’d said. ‘Make a wish first, and give it your biggest blow.’

  ‘Never mind that, and never mind bringing me a bill either.’

  ‘Fine. Whatever. Sorry.’

  He puffed and spit, but not effectively enough. Half the seeds remained.

  ‘Ah, well, never mind, Calum, your wish will come true anyway.’

  ‘I never made a wish. Can I watch Sesame Street now?’

  She cannot think of this scene without immediately singing in her head: Sunny days, sweeping the clouds away, on my way to where the air is sweet. Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

  His death, of course, is on a continuous loop which she tries not to stare at, but which spins out his last moments in slow motion for eternity, and which she watches out of the corner of her mind’s eye. Like Zara, she’s written, directed and produced this film. And like Zara’s, it changes slightly with every viewing. Today, his car hits the concrete and the front half crumples like silver paper. Only it screams, this metal that crumples like silver paper. His face is frightened, so frightened it regresses to a panicky five-year-old, and then it too – this face with his freckles and that chipped tooth and his wonderful blue eyes – it screams too, and crumples.

  But why did his car go off the road at all? No other traffic, a clear bright day. Why? That is the haunting, maddening part. Some days she visualises a dog straying onto the A9, or his tyre blowing out, or a sudden steering wheel malfunction. On particularly surreal days, the car itself has a death wish. If it wasn’t for all these movies, she’d no doubt be a more efficient waitress, but Teddy doesn’t mind.

  ‘I think you’d be better off without that one,’ says one customer, nodding his head in Alice’s direction. She’s staring into space, while another customer tries to give his order. She walks away without writing anything down, or indeed acknowledging the order.

  ‘Away with you, she’s that great,’ says Teddy. ‘You’ve just to got appreciate her finer points, pal.’

  ‘I’d rather appreciate the finer points of a bacon buttie, like the one I asked for. Three bloody times,’ says the customer.

  Teddy glances over at Alice, who is now waddling dreamily, rather like a rubber boat on lazy wavelets, over to an empty table, carrying a plate of food for herself. Well, if a few customers don’t like Alice, there are at least a few dozen who do. Aren’t there? He sighs, returns to the kitchen. The girl has to eat, he tells himself.

  And she eats with gusto. She scans The Herald while methodically eating a hamburger, right till the very last greasy morsel. Without looking, she reaches out till her hand finds the plate of equally greasy chips and begins to consume these the same way. Without awareness, without haste, without taste; she eats blindly, and now she’s reading the advice page with the same vacant interest. A letter from a woman who wants to know if it’s normal to put on weight upon reaching menopause. Alice has not had a period in … well, ages. And she is getting – well, there’s no other word for it – fat.

  The advice columnist confirms her suspicions. Yep. No more periods equals no more waist.

  ‘Nearly finished, are you?’ asks Teddy. The café is filling up again.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you think of my new shirt then?’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘You didn’t even look.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s very … nice.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes. Truly. Too nice for here.’

  He turns sideways, sucks in his belly, squares his shoulders and pouts. The shirt is taut over his belly, like skin. It looks expensive.

  ‘Teddy, are you gay?’ It’s just occurred to her, and her voice is a little louder than it would be if she’d thought before speaking. The absence of decent food and coffee and tasteful decor make it so unlikely, but there you go. Stereotyping, even in her pit of depression. Teddy smiles, blushes slightly, and says, ‘What a question!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I suppose I am. A bit,’ he says, shrugging half apologetically and raising his eyebrows, as if admitting to a fondness for something embarrassing but innocuous. Reading Hello magazine, or watching Coronation Street, or cheating at Monopoly. ‘Trying to be, anyway. Bit of a late bloomer, it turns out.’ In a very low whisper.

  ‘Well, I think that’s … nice.’ Alice smiles vaguely while wiping grease off her mouth with her hand. The world is shifting a little again, she can feel it, but this shift is not unpleasant. It’s alright. It makes sense.

  ‘Weird thing to call it, eh? I mean, look at me. Hardly jumping for joy, am I?’

  ‘Hey, hey. Hardly anyone jumps for joy anyway. And it could be worse, you could be gay in the Highlands.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Listen, the shirt is perfect, Teddy. But the shoes.’

  ‘I know. They kill the shirt, don’t they?’

  He walks to the mirror above the counter, frowning, and she puts her apron back on and waits on a table of four young men. They all want the same thing, BLTs on white and cups of tea. When she returns with their orders, she spills a cup of tea and it quickly runs off the table onto their laps. They all stand up and roar with laughter, just when she’s expecting angry shouts. Their laughter, throaty, reckless, reminiscent of Calum – feels like a flood of goodwill rising to buoy her up. A solid surge of life itself. But it’s not solid; it does not last. And when the boys leave and their table is cleared, there is no trace of vitality, no promise of anything. Alice returns to the kitchen with their plates, absentmindedly nibbling on their left-over chips.

  The next day is Sunday. It
’s been a wet June, but it’s very spring-like today, and Alice spring cleans her room. This is accomplished in about eight minutes, due to her minimal possessions, but still – the weather is making primal demands, and she takes stock. She empties out her chest of drawers. Her meagre, inoffensive clothes lay clean and neatly folded on her bed, ready to be replaced in the drawers, newly lined with pages from the Sunday supplement. The brown plastic container of Calum has gravitated to her bedside table, not for any sentimental reason, but because the other table is too wobbly, and it sometimes falls off when she opens the window. The prospect of spilled ashes on the floor is appalling. She still regards the container with as much ambiguity as she had on the first day, when she’d tried to leave it on the train, yet been unable to leave it alone on the back seat of her car when she went shopping.

  She’s not a sentimental person. Never visited her mum’s grave at Kiltearn, though she’d loved her mum more than most twelve-year-old girls. Life seemed sad enough without seeking out reminders of a previous sadness, and besides, what connection was there between her laughing pretty mum and a lump of granite in the ground? Zero, that’s how much connection, and she feels the same angry way about this jar, which arrogantly claims to contain her son. Calum, the silent runner, the dry joke maker and lover of Snicker bars, in a plastic jar?

  Yet there it sits. Not in the bin.

  Janet has seen it, but not commented on it. Janet respects grief, and in fact, likes Alice better because she holds her loss so closely and quietly. Janet, like most people who reach their eighties, has hidden a fair amount of pain herself. Not even Teddy knows about the right leg of her Freddie Campbell, which was all that remained of him after the Germans bombed the Clyde third night running in the winter of 1942. How she’d felt when she came to and had to lift Freddie’s leg off her chest. Or what she later did, to sort out the baby Freddie planted in her. Teddy has never even heard his mother mention Freddie. She’s told him plenty about his own father with the unfortunate laughter, and the way she snuck off from him in the dead of night, Teddy by then amounting to about three dozen cells. And she’s told him about the kinds of illicit jobs she took for a while. But for Janet, these are, curiously, not painful secrets. Some secrets can be aired and some cannot, and that’s all there is to it.

  It’s still June outside, a brilliantly hard blue sky, and Alice opens her window to let in the air. In it rushes, with the sound of birds nearby, and these things stir her. She dumps the contents of her bag on the bed. She throws away old receipts, bus tickets, coupons, video cards, an old lipstick down to the pink nub. Opens up and reads a scrap of paper, folded into the side pocket. Oh aye. That poem Kate from Gairloch slipped into her condolence card, and which Alison had scanned and slipped into her bag. Never read it. Alison didn’t get poetry. Alice sits on the bed and reads.

  Mangurstadh

  I send you the hush and

  founder

  of the waves at Mangurstadh,

  in case there is too much

  of the darkness in you now

  and you need to remember

  why it is we love.

  John Glenday

  She frowns. She remembers that Mangurstadh is a beach on the Isle of Lewis. She and Calum went there once, on a camping trip with Kate and her toddler daughter Mhairi. An empty sandy beach, bordered by high rocky outcrops. Sheep had dotted those scrubby hills. Cow dung on the beach, and some driftwood. The hush and founder, the hush and founder… the waves sucking back, and crashing again? Maybe. It’s like a word puzzle, a riddle, and Alice’s brain aches in a pleasant way. She says the words aloud, very softly, and with their utterance comes the sensation of sand between her toes, and the vibrations of those waves, hushing and foundering. Whooshing and thundering. The clamour and spray. The way her hair felt, sticky with salt. Ten-year-old Calum, half naked, screaming as he scurried as close as he dared to the waves. The waves relax her even now, as if they are literally scooping out her sadness and whisking it away to a deep, cold place that doesn’t care. In, out, in, out. Giving and taking, pushing and pulling, hurting and pleasing, staying and leaving. Breathing in and breathing out; first breath, last breath.

  Alice, frowning very hard now, thinks, Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? Life sucks and blows a bunch, and then you die. Kate’s husband has cancer, not the kind that can be fixed; maybe this poem is something she administers to herself. As medicine. A tonic. Alice closes her eyes, a slight smile in her heart, too weak to make it to her mouth, which is pressed tight in concentration. The air full of salt, the gulls wheeling, Calum and his hysterical giggling.

  Why it is we love …? Has she forgotten why she loved? But what is the answer?

  There had been a full moon in that late afternoon sky, oh yeah. A very pale orb, and when she remembers commenting on it to Kate, it seems odd she didn’t make the connection at the time. The queen of gravity, coolly observing all the ebbing and flowing she caused. And from there, it’s a millisecond’s leap to Alice putting her own sad self on the surface of that moon over Mangurstadh beach. Queen of the moon. What? No, more a clown, her. Absurd sad clown on the moon, yeah, that’s more like.

  But imagine the earth from the moon. Her watching self, her Calum, Kate and her lovely naked baby – small as ants, then poof! Gone, just the jagged outline of the coast, and a dot of white for the sand. Then a quick zoom down (because moon clowns can do whatever they like), and there are those beautiful children in their beautiful bodies. Is there anything as beautiful as a child’s body on a beach? Alice’s eyes fill at the same time her smile finds an entrance to her mouth and eyes.

  But why is it we love? And why do we need to remember this? It feels like the answers must be obvious, must be hovering just outside her brain, but: No idea, thinks Alice. Not a smidgen of an idea.

  After a few minutes, she blows her nose, slips the poem carefully back into her bag, and recommences sorting out her bag. Looks at an old newspaper photo of Calum in the Fyrish Hill race. Neither foot touching the earth, his face a blur of concentration. Nevertheless, there is something peaceful in his face as he hurtles mid-air. It’s as if he’s trying to fly, and maybe more: that he believes if he runs a little bit faster he really will fly.

  She places this on her table, thinking – buy frame. Then studies a tampon, puts it back in her bag. She likewise replaces her new library card, some cash, her lipgloss, and then she stares at her old car and house keys. Adds buy envelopes to her mental list. Then suddenly, as if the answers needed her distraction to creep in sideways, Alice raises an arm, opens her hand to address the poet, like an anxious-to-please student to her teacher: Yes! I know! I know why it is we love. Because without love we just … float. Like … me, here. Like those dandelion wishes Calum tried to blow. And why do we need to remember this? Because it’s hardly worth living, being a dandelion wish, yeah? Am I right?

  Aye, answers the John Glenday in her head. A+. He is bearded and fat, wise and kind. His eyes are the warmest brown. He smiles and says, Floating dandelion seeds are just wisps of potential. Better the ties of love, Alice. Better those terrifying ties.

  Alison is Not Inside a Grey Fish

  Neal feels a little insubstantial on his own, as if he is floating, unanchored, but the Sally vacuum is filling, slowly. He has stretched all his routines out a bit, till there are few gaps in the old Sally spaces. His days pass easily, mostly.

  But early one early summer morning, the phone rings.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Neal, it’s me, Chrissie.’

  ‘Hey Chrissie, what’s up?’ He yawns, scratches his belly, tries to fill the kettle while cradling the phone under his chin.

  Alison’s sister has taken to phoning Neal a fair bit lately, now it’s been established that they both secretly think Alison is probably inside some grey fish. When her car was found in a car park near the station, they’d hoped for a while this might mean she’d taken a train somewhere. But no movement on her bank account, and no missing clothes, su
itcases or passport has forced a less optimistic conclusion. Right now, Chrissie’s voice sounds mystified, excited.

  ‘Listen, Neal. You will not believe this. Alison’s house and car keys have just come in the post.’

  The words take a few seconds to sink in.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘But that’s fantastic news, Chrissie! Thank god.’

  ‘Aye, she’s alive, at least. Thank God, as you say.’ Chrissie’s eyes smile, noting the irony of hiding her truth in speaking the truth, so to speak. He’d answered her prayers so efficiently, but damn, wasn’t she also good at praying to get such a fast result? And such a novice too. Who needs ministers, anyway?

  ‘A note? Did Alison send a note?’

  ‘No, but the handwriting on the envelope is definitely hers. Maybe she’s not wanting to talk just yet.’

  Chrissie is quoting God, actually. It was Him who explained about Alison not wanting to talk just yet. So sensible, God. So perceptive. And He won’t mind her taking credit. He’d not want her cover blown.

  ‘Still, you’d think a note – just to say where she is.’

  ‘Neal, she’ll get in touch sometime, I’m sure.’

  ‘What’s the postmark?’

  ‘Glasgow.’

  ‘Glasgow! Okay. That makes a kind of sense. Who does she know there?’

  ‘No one I know. Kate goes there sometimes to see her daughter, but she hasn’t seen Alison.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s still brilliant news.’

  ‘Aye. You’re right. It’s great. Can’t believe it, actually.’

  Alison is not inside a cold grey fish!

  But it doesn’t cure everything in Neal’s life, merely punctuates it with flashes of hope, slow at first but increasing in frequency, like this:

  He forces himself to eat a bowl of Fruit ’n Fibre with cold milk, which is what he always has now since Sally left and no longer makes porridge. (Alison is alive!) The noise they make in his mouth seems a little loud this morning, but he manfully finishes the bowl. Notes that anxiety resembles the symptoms of falling in love, for he could not eat much for a while after Golspie either. Odd that the two events – making love to Alison and being abandoned by Sally – should each reduce him to Fruit and Fibre. The cleverness of this observation, and the news of Alison’s aliveness, cheer him so much, he almost has another bowl. (The world contains a breathing Alison!) But then he notices the time and all the cheer leaks out. Late again, and anyway he still doesn’t know where Alison is, and to be honest, it is a little humiliating that she has not contacted him.