Man with a Seagull on His Head

by Harriet Paige

  “One day he just started painting. He painted and painted and painted until all the walls were covered.” She reached out her hand again and touched the surface, which gleamed like the estuarine mud. “They must have varnished it or something. It’s not paint. He used food, earth, blood, anything he could lay his hands on.”

  Tom walked over to the other side of the room and tugged at the covering on the wall opposite, then between them they unmasked the two remaining walls, watching as the sheeting came to rest and lay like crumpled husks upon the furniture and floor. The unveiling did something to the air. It thickened. Mira felt her throat constrict and tears begin to surface, as Tom’s hands reached slowly around her waist. She leaned back, letting herself soften into the circle of his embrace.

  Fourteen

  Jennifer didn’t return to London until after Vito was gone. Their marriage continued until then as they had vowed it would. Nothing was said about that night she slipped out without a word into the cool evening air. She made something up about where she’d been. And it wasn’t at all plausible of course, because who just walks out of the door one evening without saying where they’re going? And she felt the knowledge that she was odd, secretive, always accompanying her whenever she was with any of the Italians who had filled her home that evening.

  She kept the business going for a few more years then let it go to look after La Mamma, who could no longer be left alone. Vito carried on at his shop long after it was necessary. They had a cat and watched it grow from skittish youth to sullen old age. They religiously repainted one room of the house each year. They never went to Positano. The longer they were married the less they knew each other, what there was to be known becoming buried deeper with each passing year. They spoke of little beyond practical matters. They touched infrequently and never with intimacy. But as a partnership engaged in the unremarkable tasks of keeping a house from decay and getting an old woman from one end of the day to the other they, managed fine, excelled even, for they held no animosity towards one another. Anyone looking on would have called them happy and judged them to have attained all that a marriage could aspire to, noting perhaps the intuitive way in which they cared for each other, the small and selfless ways in which they attended to each other’s comfort.

  Despite their efforts to keep her at home, La Mamma was eventually admitted to the Ashton House residential care home. Her crucifix, the faded black and white photos of her parents and siblings, and her many blankets, shawls, and cloths went with her. Seeing her lying amongst them in the tiny room it was as if she inhabited her own memorial shrine. She had plenty of visitors but gave them little regard. Jennifer and Vito came most days and insisted on continuing the regular ablutions they had begun at home. With a bowl of warm water and a bar of expensive sandalwood soap between them they edged towards each other from opposite ends, Vito drawing the cloth between each misshapen toe, Jennifer stroking hers over the eyes, behind the ears, down the back of the neck, the two of them silent in respect of the quiet into which La Mamma uncharacteristically slipped during the ritual.

  Together they awaited her death but it was Vito who went first. He gave her no warning. One day she walked into the sitting room with his tea and there he was slumped in his armchair, his eyes wide and vacant, a line of dribble descending from the corner of his open mouth. The television was too loud, as it always was, something about lions. She turned it off and put down the hot tea before she went to him. It was strange how calm she was, how slow and deliberate her actions. She lowered his eyelids, closed his mouth, wiped his face with a warm flannel, and gently combed his hair. Then she sat with him and held his hand, letting herself cry a little before reluctantly calling an ambulance.

  He shocked everyone by choosing cremation over burial. Jennifer didn’t see what all the fuss was about. They had talked about it together and she’d always thought it the best way: cleaner, neater, more final. The wood-panelled room at the crematorium was bare apart from the flowers she’d chosen, which had been brought in and placed on a table at the front. It was just herself, Paolo and Giulietta and their children, and La Mamma, who was wheeled in by a carer from Ashton House. Jennifer hadn’t had any strong thoughts on music. They could barely hear it anyway above La Mamma, who wailed and crossed herself continuously. The celebrant ploughed bravely on, talking them through the events and achievements of Vito’s life and likening him to a leaf, one of millions, which appears one season to flourish and then die, taking sustenance from the tree itself, which grows and endures. It was only at the end that Jennifer looked at the coffin which rested, closed, on a platform at the back of the room. Vito was inside. And then it all happened far too quickly: a curtain closed in front of it and she couldn’t help it, she imagined it descending into the flames and she wanted to jump up and save him, draw him out. He wasn’t a leaf. He was a man.

  When presented with the ashes in the little urn she felt nothing but shame and regret, for she knew that she had failed him.

  Naturally La Mamma died soon after, avoiding the indignity of a ninetieth birthday party at Ashton House. She was buried in the Catholic graveyard, lowered into the hard earth by straining coffin bearers on a cold, bleak February morning.

  Giulietta, who had always had a rebellious streak, surprised them all by declaring that she preferred Vito’s way. Maybe she would choose cremation herself. Paolo said it would be over his dead body and she laughed, saying it probably would. She became quite taken with the idea of where to scatter the ashes and Jennifer let her take charge, after she’d secretly taken a careful spoonful of the grey powder and placed it in the bottom of Vito’s little Italian coffee pot to keep for herself.

  There was talk of a trip back to Stilo and a walk up to the Basilica to let him float down gently over the village in which he was born but … no, it was far better he stay here in Southend with them. But significant locations were thin on the ground. The trouble was that Vito had never really been a fan of the outdoors. There were the cliff steps, which he and Jennifer had walked up and down most Wednesday mornings as a gesture towards keeping fit, but the routine had been far from a pleasure for him. There were his shops, the six Mr. Cobbles, and she and Giulietta agreed he would not have been displeased for a little part of him to lie down on the pavement outside each one. But with so many people traipsing past, and the road sweeper with his brush, who knew where he might end up?

  Jennifer was reluctant to mention the pier, the scene of their first kiss, but they were running out of options.

  “Why didn’t you suggest it in the first place? It’s perfetto!”

  So they kept their eye on tide times and at around half past three one Thursday afternoon, when it was sufficiently high, they took Vito for a walk to the end of the pier, the urn wrapped in a long woollen scarf and lodged at the bottom of a green canvas shopping bag. Giulietta shrouded her head with the length of black lace she always wore for funerals, and Jennifer too wore a scarf to keep off the wind. They hadn’t counted on the fishermen who colonised the end of the pier like nesting birds, forcing them to retreat to the sides for their bit of business.

  They stood side by side against the rail for a moment just watching the water, and then Giulietta turned to Jennifer, the wind whipping strands of hair out from under her scarf and across her face. “Are you ready?”

  “I suppose so,” said Jennifer, who had been thinking how much Vito hated the wind, and the water too for that matter. She’d never once seen him swim and it was just occurring to her now that he probably couldn’t. He’ll drown! she thought, as Giulietta unwound the scarf from around the urn and held it carefully on top of the railings. She lifted the lid a little and a few flakes of ash rose in the wind.

  “Oh!” said Jennifer, her voice emerging small and light, carried quickly away.

  Giulietta quickly covered the opening with her palm. “Sorry Jenny, would you like to say a few words?”

  “No,” said Jenni
fer quickly. She wanted it over with now.

  Giulietta lifted the lid once more and Jennifer reached her hand into the soft grey powder. So dry. So utterly lifeless. Yet as soon as she raised her fist above the lip of the urn it spun from her fingers as though eager to be free.

  “There he goes,” said Giulietta as the ashes dispersed over the muddy, churning waters.

  Jennifer sold the house and moved to a one-bedroom place that was not much bigger than the bedsit she’d started off in. Not so far from it, either. It was in one of those new blocks that were going up all over the place now, built more for the young folk who caught the train to London every day than for old ladies like her, but it suited her well enough. It was new and clean, with a smooth ceramic hob and a toilet with two buttons for the flush. It had beige carpet and cream walls and bright white skirting boards and very little else. She’d carefully labelled all her furniture, wrapped and packed all her possessions, every last eggcup. But her treasures dulled in the move. Taking them out was like going through her belongings after her own death, finally seeing them for what they really were: sad, pointless, useless objects, everything either chipped or cracked or old or just plain ugly. Even the picture of Positano, which had been donated her way when Paolo sold the restaurant to a Chinese family, seemed gaudy and cheap. And her furniture, which sat around the room like misplaced boulders, seemed to sully the newness of the place. She’d persuaded a second-hand shop to come and take it all away and had bought herself a new single bed and a small sofa.

  It was a nice flat, but that didn’t stop her always trying to think up ways to get out of it. She still liked to walk along the seafront, and on a sunny day she took her knitting up by the bandstand. She often met Giulietta in town for a cup of tea or an ice cream, and twice a week she went to her sister-in-law’s for lunch. She was really Jennifer’s only friend, although anyone seeing them together could tell they were a mismatched pair: Jennifer tall and broad, Giulietta sharp and quick, taking two steps for every one of Jennifer’s. That their lives had run alongside each other for so long did nothing to dispel the gulf that background, culture, and circumstance put between them. Complaining constantly about the demands her huge family made of her, Giulietta knew nothing of loneliness. And yet the two of them had found a way of being together that took no account of these things. Giulietta was there, and that was enough.

  They had been on their way to East Beach to watch the controlled detonation of a World War II bomb when they came across the house. The trip was Giulietta’s idea, of course, and if it hadn’t been for her, Jennifer would never have entered Belvedere Close. For although East Beach remained a favourite spot of hers and she often passed by the end of that road, the sight and sound of heavy-duty machinery wouldn’t have been enough to draw her off course. But Giulietta didn’t even look for Jennifer’s acquiescence before scurrying into the Close, so natural was her assumption that anything out of the ordinary should be properly investigated.

  Orange plastic barriers had gone up around one of the properties, behind which a small crowd of onlookers was gathered. Inside the cordon a large excavator was at work, noisily digging a trench around the house, which was just a modest bungalow and looked rather lost in the middle of the moat being dug around it. There was a truck parked in the road and other workmen were involved in unloading long wooden posts from the back of it and carrying them into the property across a wobbly wooden board which bridged the trench.

  “You mean you can just pick up a house and move it?”

  Giulietta was already quizzing one of the bystanders, an oldish man who stood resting his arm upon the barrier as if for support.

  “I don’t know what they’re up to. Crazy scheme. It’s going to London or something,” he said. And now he looked at Jennifer, for she had drawn a little closer to be included in the discussion. “It was in the paper the other day, wasn’t it? Someone decided it should go into a gallery. Ha! Gonna have to be a big one! Owned by an artist it was, years ago. Been empty for years. Couple over the way used to look after the place, kept the grass mown and the house clean for the people in London what owned it.”

  “The Zoobs,” said Jennifer.

  “I don’t know. Americans weren’t they, more money than sense.”

  “Did you see it in the paper, Jenny?” asked Giulietta, craning as if to try and see in through the front door.

  Jennifer had stopped taking the Echo. She was thinking of that woman, Grace Zoob, who had so terrified her. Her home had terrified her too, the walls crammed with all those ugly pictures. And Grace herself like an alien, with her cropped silver hair and angular features and sharp words. I beat the shit out of him. Those words always reared up in her mind when she thought back on that awful evening. And always when they did, the horror they aroused was always mingled with an awareness that her own flesh felt only the absence of touch. She felt it again, now. No one had touched her in such a long, long time. Even that evening, which was long before Vito died, it had been too late. Their marriage had already silently accommodated the fact that their bodies would never come together again.

  “You can’t just pick up a house and move it! How are they ever going to get that all the way to London?” said Giulietta, clearly thrilled by the thought.

  “Beats me, but they’re doing it, aren’t they?” said the man. “Going by boat, apparently. They just have to get it down to the beach, then, whoosh, off it goes.” He straightened up, sliding his hand out in front of him like a boat launching from the shore.

  Jennifer quietly loosed herself from the conversation and began making her way around the outside of the barriers. They skirted all the way round the property which, although small, stood some distance from its neighbours, allowing this excavation to take place without much disruption to the other houses. The onlookers were not just confined to the roadside but were spread out sparsely all the way round, entering areas that would normally be deemed private property, such as the back garden. Jennifer found a gap at the rear of the bungalow and stood looking at it, although there was not much to be seen from back here, the curtains being closed as they were elsewhere and the back door firmly shut.

  So this was it. She’d often wondered when out walking this way which it was, for she’d known for years that there was one around here that held her prisoner. Would she, had she come up this road, have noticed the closed curtains and suspected it? Maybe. And what would she have done then, other than to stand outside as she was now? Funnily enough, she found herself thinking of Ruth Smithson. There’d been so many girls over the years, at Keddies and then at Enid Scott’s. They’d work for a year or two and then move on, and Jennifer would never hear from them again. Occasionally she’d see one in the town and it always surprised her that they’d grown old, that they weren’t girls any longer. Strange how it happened. Life really was going to end, and she would probably never see inside this house. And she would probably never lose this feeling, one that she believed she’d always carried with her but which had never been stronger than it was now: that she was alone. She struggled to retreat in her mind to a person or place with whom or where she might be comfortable. Certainly not Giulietta. Not Vito either. Not even her childhood or her parents. And she realized that she had no true friends in the world and that there was no one at all who understood anything about who she was. And it wasn’t even surprising. It had always been that way. And once again the words of Grace Zoob sounded in her head: It’s not you in those paintings. This goes way beyond you. You don’t matter at all.

  “Hey, Jenny, there you are!” Giulietta came hurriedly towards her. “Come on, we’re going to miss the blast.”

  If Jennifer had told her sister-in-law what lay inside, would it have delayed her?

  “It’s okay, we still have fifteen minutes,” she said, looking at her watch.

  But by the time they made it down to the beach there were only a few minutes remaining and, there being qui
te a crowd, they couldn’t see anything of what was going on. Jennifer was expecting some kind of warning, a countdown maybe, but they hardly had time to catch their breath before the blast, which came like a sudden attack, hitting her deep in her chest as if her heart was exploding.

  Fifteen

  There was a particular place, accessed down a small dark passage between two tall buildings on the north bank of the river Thames, where Ray and Pigeon could sit unseen on a kind of small stone platform, a jetty almost, close to the water that lapped at the steps below. They spent much of their time by the river. It provided a natural focus to an otherwise aimless existence, and the choice of bridges was good for nesting down at night. But, even so, Pigeon had always been wary of the water and on the occasions when they came here to this old, hidden-away jetty, she wouldn’t get too close, settling down a cautious distance from the edge. Ray, on the other hand, liked being near the river and would sit as he was now with his legs dangling over the side of the wall, his heels kicking gently against the algae-covered stones, his gaze lowered to the brown river, caught up in the patterns it made as it flowed past, the small splashes as it slapped against the wall.

  Maybe it was this distance between them which always fostered in Ray an unusual level of introspection at the times he came to this spot. Life on the streets had done much to shut down those parts of his brain not concerned with basic survival, concerns he found increasingly wearying, as if his stomach should by now have learned to do without food entirely rather than be constantly gnawing away at him, never satisfied by what he managed to throw at it. And there was Pigeon to worry about too, who looked to him as provider and whose dependency Ray felt keenly. Despite the bird being an adept scavenger, Ray knew that, one-eyed and unable to fly, she would never have survived this long alone.

  But sitting here in this dank, solitary spot with Pigeon squatting quietly behind him released him for a time from the pressures of his existence. Sometimes he could sit for a long while without awareness of anything passing through his mind at all. But often he fell to thinking a little of his past. Of his years in Southend perhaps. A few memories of that earlier life had been given back to him. Enough for him to realize that it was not worth trying to resume it. He remembered less from those interim years with the Zoobs, which were shrouded by an almost impenetrable fog. Were it not for this “almost,” these thoughtful times by the river might have been limited to recollections of those occasions when, as a boy, he’d found some moment of companionship with, say, a trail of ants marching towards his own kindly placed segment of orange, or a snail making its slow course towards a lettuce leaf offering. But there were chinks in the veil of forgetfulness and some of what was intimated through it troubled him a great deal.