by Simon Ings
The cemetery is reached by a narrow track across ground so soft the trees here cannot reach their full height before they succumb to their own weight. They do not die, but, falling, sprout from their topmost side, forming natural hedges, barricades and nooks. Here wild dogs made their nests, till Cole flushed them out with fire and made his home here, fellow with the dead.
Which is to say, Cole lives within the dry-stone bounds of the village cemetery. Villagers are not permitted to explore the hallowed ground itself, on pain of instant execution. Exactly what form this formalised murder would take, how public the event would be, and even how Cole, an old man now, would accomplish it against a young man fighting for his life, are questions Cole has never needed to resolve. The taboo has never been tested, nor is it likely to be. What, aside from an overwhelming urge to desecrate, would convince a marked, already mutilated felon to risk capital punishment, just so that he can say he’s wandered around a few abandoned white goods dumped in a swamp?
For this, to the bemusement of outsiders (whose scepticism, if they are fools enough to express it, is quickly and permanently silenced) is the site Cole has chosen for the town to bury its dead. A flytip full of fridges.
He ties a kilt of stoat-fur round his withers with a cord woven of virgins’ hair (on and on and on, over half a million words of this shit and counting, the literary equivalent of diarrhoea – once begun, why stop?) and brushes fallen leaves from his white-goods’ lids with a mop made of strips of rabbit fur and on and on and on.
TWELVE
Poppy is afraid to leave her home unattended over the holidays, so Michel and Hanna have arranged to celebrate Christmas early.
I arrive just a couple of hours before Poppy is due. Michel’s mood darkens as we wait for his mother to arrive. ‘The thing about Mum is she’s never here on any proper day. Flag Day, Christmas, birthdays, she’s always a couple of days early or a couple of days late and it’s always by special bloody appointment. Everything becomes about her.’
Michel turns over his resentments like a child sorting through a box of toy cars. Meanwhile Hanna runs after Agnes, trying to contain the whirlwind of the girl’s ‘tidying’. ‘Agnes! Agnes, for God’s sake, I just put that away.’ At the door of the kitchen she turns. ‘Please, Mick, not in front of her. Agnes!’ She swings the door shut, but her voice is hardly muffled. ‘Agnes, what did I just say?’
Michel casts around as though he has mislaid something. Losing one half of his audience has thrown him out of his stride. ‘Fancy an espresso?’
Succumbing to convenience at last, they have bought themselves one of those machines that make thimblefuls of rocket fuel out of pre-packaged coffee cartridges.
Since he embarked on an original film script with Bryon Vaux – they must be on their twentieth rewrite by now – Michel has developed a cast-iron ritual. It’s the only way he can meet his obligations to both Bryon and his publishers, who are still expecting a book a year from him. He writes, long-hand, in the garden or the summerhouse every day. Poppy’s Christmas visit is breaking the habit of many months and he’s as jittery as a chainsmoker attempting a cold-turkey withdrawal.
I’d like to say something to distract him, to take his mind off work, but the first thing that comes out of my mouth is, ‘How’s the film?’
‘Christ.’
‘That good?’
‘We’re gearing up for production.’
(I hide a smile at Michel’s use of the royal ‘we’. Once the cameras start humming, Michel’s involvement will surely be at an end.)
‘You must be excited.’
‘I’m up and down into town, with Bryon Vaux yelling in my ear, typing on-the-fly revisions on the train. It’s a bloody hopeless way of working.’
‘But you must be nearly done if you’re shooting in January.’
‘Are you kidding? Do you know we actually had an executive production meeting the other day about how immersive entertainments should be set out on the page? We’re going to be rewriting this bastard all the way into April’s edit suite.’
The doorbell rings, saving me from any more of Michel’s unbrookable enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get it.’
Poppy is about a foot shorter than I remember, and her skull has retreated from the surface of her skin, her face a mass of lines. I give her a hug. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She pats my back, a bird beating its broken wing, spastic and frightened.
I sit her down in the living room. Michel’s vanished. Hanna tries to usher little Agnes in to say hello. Having chattered non-stop about Grandma’s visit for days, Agnes hesitates, half-hidden behind the living-room door, her smile a moue of shyness. It doesn’t take her long to thaw. A few minutes later she is badgering Hanna to assemble her puppet theatre so she can give Grandma a show.
‘I’ll do it,’ I offer. How hard can it be?
‘No!’ Agnes scolds me. ‘Not that there. That doesn’t go—Not like that! That’s the wrong way round! No!’
Hanna brings in cups of tea and Poppy and I snatch a little conversation between the adventures of Little Red Riding Hood and Mr Punch. Michel has still to reappear.
I try to get Poppy into conversation, but she’s tired and a little bit grumpy and everything seems to be a trial. ‘Oh, the garden! I’ve got no-one to help me, you know.’
Poppy is happiest just listening to her granddaughter, so I leave them to it and find Hanna in the kitchen, still preparing dinner. ‘Dinners,’ she corrects me. ‘I want to get ahead.’
‘I’ll help you.’
Out in the hall, Michel finally greets his mother, with a not-very-convincing show of surprise. ‘I was off in the summerhouse! I didn’t know you were here!’
‘Daddy, come and sit down!’
‘Hang on, love.’
‘Daddy! You’re interrupting the show!’
‘She’s doing a show.’
‘Yes. I can see—’
The door clicks shut, cutting off their conversation.
‘Here.’ Hanna hands me a bag of sprouts. ‘Peel these fuckers.’
‘Is Michel all right?’
Hanna makes a face. She runs water in the sink and drops potatoes into a bowl. ‘We’ve had a bit of a barney with Poppy this week.’
‘What about?’
‘Agnes has a school project for the holidays. They’re supposed to find out what they can about their grandparents. Mick asked Poppy to bring over some stuff about his dad. She said no, that she couldn’t get up in the loft to get it. It was all packed away. And when Mick offered to drive down and help she said she wasn’t interested in a five-year-old’s school project.’
‘That sounds a bit direct.’
‘The thing is, Mick doesn’t have anything of his father’s to show his daughter. Not even a photograph.’
It occurs to me that the video clip of his father’s head being kicked around a dusty parking lot in the middle of a desert must still be floating around in the aether somewhere. Nothing really gets deleted any more. Nothing really gets forgotten.
After dinner, once Agnes is in bed, Poppy digs about in her handbag and hands Michel a cheap plastic wallet. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’ve brought you the photographs you wanted.’
‘Well.’ Michel flicks through the plastic leaves. ‘What is this?’
‘I just brought what I had. There aren’t many. I had a sort-out.’
‘That’s great.’ In silence, Michel turns over the pictures. ‘I’ll scan them and you can take them home with you.’
‘Oh no, dear. They’re yours now.’
‘But you’ll want to put them back in the albums. Won’t you.’
‘I’ve given you the album.’
‘What album?’
‘That album.’
‘This is an album?’
I know what Mick’s getting at. I remember from my time in the bungalow on Sand Lane, Michel’s family photographs were fastened with adhesive paper corners onto the thick black pages of old-fashioned albums. Every photograph had a
description written underneath in white ink: Michel’s father’s meticulous signature.
‘Where are the albums?’
‘Oh, they were taking up too much space.’
‘You’ve thrown them away.’
‘They’re not your albums anyway, Michel. They’re the family’s.’ Poppy has a way of talking about the family that makes you forget there’s only her and Michel in it.
‘No,’ says Michel, warming up, ‘they’re not the family’s, because you’ve thrown them away.’
‘They were taking up space!’
Michel flicks back and forth through the wallet – there are barely a dozen snaps in it. ‘How am I supposed to know what these are? Or where they were taken? Who is this here? Christ.’
‘I’ve written what they are on the back,’ Poppy tells him, her voice tight and high in the back of her throat, defending her corner. And so she has. In biro. She has been very careful not to press too hard, so the writing on the back of each photograph has come out faint and spidery and barely legible. How typical of Poppy, to cook up a pointless task for herself and then make a difficulty out of it.
After Poppy has gone to bed, Hanna, Michel and I stay up drinking. We need to decompress. Even setting aside Michel’s spat with her, Poppy is a heavy presence. She is incapable of saying what she wants, while being utterly ruthless at getting it. Hanna has spent the entire afternoon trying to establish whether she takes milk in her tea any more.
‘Oh, don’t worry, dear.’
‘Yes, but do you want some?’
‘I often have it without.’
‘But do you want any?’
‘I’d be very happy with a cup of hot water.’
‘But I’ve just made you tea . . .’
‘If it wasn’t for Agnes,’ says Michel, ‘I’d never have invited the old sow.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Well, I’m glad I’ve seen her. It’s been years.’
No-one is interested in my sentimental reunion.
‘God.’ Michel shakes his head. ‘Agnes is besotted with her. She spent all last week asking when is Grandma going to get here? How long is Grandma staying? Is she staying for Christmas? You’d think Poppy would have made an effort.’
‘But Agnes knows Grandma isn’t staying for Christmas Day.’
‘I’m not talking about her staying, Hanna, I’m talking about the photographs.’
‘Oh. Well. That’s not about Agnes, is it? That’s about you and her.’
‘What did I do?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ Hanna corks the whisky and gathers up our glasses, policing us. ‘Agnes will be all right.’
Michel says to me, ‘Mum thinks I want to trash her house. She thinks I can’t wait till she’s dead, so I can get my hands on all her things. It’s why she’s thrown so much away. The albums. Dad’s medals and letters.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t think like that.’
‘This is exactly the way she thinks. How else do you explain this shit?’ He waves the plastic photo wallet at me. ‘She’s afraid of me. No way is she letting me get my grubby paws on the precious things. Not by the hairs on her chinny-chin-chin. Grandma’s built her house of bricks and lit a fucking big fire in the grate.’
Hanna comes back in to announce, ‘I’m going to bed.’
But Michel has the bit between his teeth. He continues, ‘If you had any idea how often I’ve sat on Agnes’s bed of an evening, tucking her in, explaining to her why we never go to see Grandma.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘why can’t you go see Grandma?’
‘Because we’re not invited,’ says Hanna, drawn back into the conversation in spite of herself.
‘Come on, you could just turn up if you wanted—’
Michel’s eyes go wide. ‘Turn up?’
Hanna says, ‘Agnes has only ever been to Sand Lane once, when she was a baby, and then only because we invited ourselves.’
Michel says, ‘We’re never fucking doing that again.’
The next morning I come downstairs to find Agnes playing by herself, singing and laughing at the top of her voice, the way children do when they are trying to block out something bad. In the kitchen, Michel and his mother are already at each other.
Michel says to Poppy, ‘Look, I don’t want to take it. I don’t want to take anything off you. Jesus. I just want to copy stuff.’
‘You’ll get it all when I’m dead anyway, I wouldn’t care.’
‘Why wait?’
‘I’m not having you clambering about the loft. I’m not having you up there stamping about in my things!’
‘Morning.’
Poppy runs to me, as best she can. ‘You speak to him!’ There is something magnificent about Poppy – the way she assumes I will take her side.
‘Speak to him about what?’
‘He’s going on about his father’s things again!’
‘Michel. I have told you before. These heirlooms traditionally belong in the family home. Now stop badgering your mother.’
Poppy’s self-satisfaction is priceless. ‘You see?’
Hanna comes in and sends Poppy and me packing. ‘There’s croissants and coffee in the sun lounge.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t manage a whole croissant.’
‘Whatever. Agnes! You see that Grandma has a good breakfast.’
Agnes, an eager gaoler, leads Poppy from the room.
‘That,’ I say, ‘was brilliant.’
‘Fuck off, Connie.’
‘And a merry Christmas to you.’
In the sun lounge, Poppy is staring at her croissant with revulsion, as if it were a dead rat or a large turd.
‘You know how this all started, don’t you?’ Poppy says, picking up her knife with a shaking hand.
Agnes is here to help. She tears her grandmother’s croissant in two and, with a sidelong look, shovels the larger half all the way into her mouth.
Poppy, oblivious, ineptly butters the shred that’s left. ‘It’s because—’ It suddenly occurs to her that Agnes is in the room. But Agnes, aware that another wave of boring grown-up gibberish is about to break over her lovely Christmas morning, is already on her way out.
‘I’m going to rehearse a show!’
Sotto voce from Poppy: ‘Agnes had a school project.’
‘Well.’ I go over and close the door. ‘I think it’s normal, when you’re a child, to want to know about your grandparents. It’s normal to be interested in that stuff.’
Poppy flaps her hands in irritated dismissal. ‘It’s not her. It’s the school. It’s ridiculous.’
‘Perhaps you should write a letter to the school explaining how ridiculous it’s being, and Agnes can take that in as her holiday project.’
You can say these things to Poppy because her self-defence is seamless. She only ever hears what she wants to hear. This has nothing to do with her age. She was always like this. In fact I would go so far as to say that, after a gap of almost twenty years, she hasn’t changed.
‘Michel’s never shown the slightest bit of interest in Louis until now.’
Louis? It occurs to me I’ve never heard the man’s name before. It’s always been ‘Dad’ from Michel or, from Poppy, ‘Michel’s father’.
‘This isn’t about Michel,’ I point out.
‘He’s never asked for anything of Louis’s before. He’s just got it into his head.’ She makes it sound as though he’s contracted an infection.
‘Is that a problem? Why is that a problem?’
Poppy’s trouble is that she has never really believed in communication. Information goes in but it never comes out, and if you force it out, it emerges so tortured, twisted, hedged around with all sorts of mysteries and qualifications, that it’s worse than useless and obscurely upsetting. ‘I had nothing from my family. I didn’t have anything of my mother’s or my father’s. Anyway, I don’t want to have to explain myself to you.’ Poppy is in tears now.
�
�You don’t have to explain anything to me. Come on, Poppy.’
‘My home was sold from under me. Why should I have to explain myself to you?’
The next evening, once he has seen Poppy off at the station, Michel comes home and we try scanning and printing out Poppy’s photographs so that Agnes can have at least a couple of pictures of her grandfather for her Christmas project.
I suppose I had a very romantic notion of what a writer’s study should look like. Waxed floorboards. Kilims draped thickly over a daybed under the window. African masks on the walls. A desk piled with manuscripts and obscure books.
Michel’s den isn’t remotely like that. It is tiny, carpeted, and brutally functional. The walls are bare. The window is too high to see out of. On the far wall there is a small MDF bookshelf, stacked with copies of his own books. The desk is a sandblasted glass sheet on unvarnished wooden trestles. There’s a laptop, connected to a larger screen. A landline telephone. A desk lamp.
Michel sits at his screen. ‘Can you go round and sort the scanner out?’
The scanner/printer sits on top of a small drawer unit behind the desk, out of his reach. There’s nowhere for me to sit so I sit on the carpet, slipping the photographs out of their plastic wallet while the scanner clunks and whines. It is warming itself up, checking itself over with a painful attention to detail, like a geriatric man recovering from a fall. ‘It says it has low ink.’
‘It always says that.’
There are only three pictures that are any good, and even these are misframed. Either the top of Louis’s head is missing, or an ear, or his feet, as though some malign supernatural force had sought to presage the ugly manner of his death. He doesn’t look like a soldier, any more than Poppy ever came across as an army wife.
He looks worried in these photos – the very picture of introversion. As for Poppy, you would expect her to exhibit, if not a certain stiffness, at least a sense of make-do-and-mend, a resourcefulness that, even if it had not been there to begin with, would have been forced on her by years of relocation, loneliness, and the narrow social confines of the army life. Many years have gone by. It could all have been worn away by now, but the thing is, I have no memory of her being any tougher than she is now, or any more straightforward. ‘How long was Louis in the army?’