The Forevers

by Chris Whitaker

  ‘And maybe we’ll just die an extraordinary death at the end of a life so ordinary it barely counts.’

  He stood and walked into the middle of the street and held his hands up to the sky. ‘I reckon I can take her.’

  Mae smiled.

  ‘You think Abi is looking down?’

  ‘Or up.’

  He looked across at her. ‘She said she had to do something bad. What if it was so bad it got her killed?’

  Mae looked up at the stars, trying not to feel the chill that ran down her spine.

  12

  At Newport she left the bus and crossed dying grass, the sun fierce above.

  Most shops were closed down, most cars sat on flats. Flyers plastered a phone box, the glass shattered.

  The truth will set you free.

  She pressed the buzzer outside the pawnbroker’s and watched the man inside look up, then release the lock and frown at the same time.

  She pushed the caged door and stepped into rows of glass cabinets, people’s possessions displayed crudely. Electricals to jewellery to rare books and coins.

  ‘You again.’

  She handed over the laptop and camera.

  He scratched his beard and stared past her at the small television on the wall, Morales on the screen.

  ‘Nuclear,’ the man said. He wore glasses on a string, put them on briefly and studied the laptop. ‘A nuclear warhead will blow her out of the sky. Morales, he’ll get a prize or something, when this is done. Nobel Peace … for using a nuclear weapon. That’s poetic.’

  He placed notes on the counter.

  ‘The laptop, it’s worth more.’

  ‘It’s stolen.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Try somewhere else.’

  ‘You’re the only place in a hundred miles.’

  His laugh turned into a cough. He fished out a handkerchief and wiped a streak of blood from his mouth. ‘Cancer. I used to worry about going before my time, but then I see kids like you. You come in here with that look in your eyes. Is it easier, if you can’t remember before?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Why’d you need cash?’ He dabbed his mouth. ‘Drugs?’

  ‘So I can find a cure for cancer in the next month.’

  Another smile, another laugh and cough. More blood. ‘Are you a leaver? You know there’s nowhere to go. Here is as good a place as any to die, kid.’

  ‘I’m not –’

  ‘Bring me gold if you want real money. It’ll hold its value. In the sky, underground.’ He pointed towards the window. ‘They’re building bunkers all over. They bring me their gold so they can pay for the work.’ He reached behind the counter and pulled out a thin gold necklace with a blue stone. ‘This is what I pay out for.’ He held it to the light and the stone shone. ‘I pay pennies on the pound. If they stop Selena I’ll be rich.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘Then I won’t care much about anything.’

  Mae looked at the necklace, the shape of a half-moon. She reasoned she had a moral code, muddied but there. If it carried value beyond monetary, she left it. A laptop could be replaced, a memory couldn’t.

  He turned back to the screen. ‘Morales. Maybe he’s not even real, maybe none of this is. I mean, what proof have we seen? CGI. Damn, they make new worlds on computer systems. They faked a moon landing.’

  ‘It is real and we will die.’

  ‘You want a buyback price?’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No one ever does.’

  She stopped in Pitmann Square and listened to a man who stood atop a wooden box and slurred about eternalism and gravity. A small crowd listened.

  On another box a girl with a guitar played and sang about lighting candles in a daze and Mae peeled one of the notes from the meagre stack and placed it in her case.

  The council offices occupied the old courthouse.

  Mae took the steps slowly and found her way to the third floor.

  Files stacked by the window blocked all but the thinnest slice of sun.

  Colin Hayes frowned when he saw her, went to call security but she snatched the phone from his hand.

  ‘Every month,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. A lanyard hung from a thin chain around his neck. In the photo he had hair and a smile, neither of which remained that afternoon.

  She sat, clutched the phone and glared at him.

  ‘You know there’s nothing I can do.’ He dabbed at sweat with a paper napkin.

  ‘You all made promises. You voted for them.’

  ‘And they worked, until they didn’t. No one is paying taxes. Your grandmother isn’t the only one to lose out on her pension. There’s no benefits. I get women with three children, they can’t pay the rent. Or the landlord wants them out because he’s selling everything he owns and heading to Spain to die in the sun.’

  ‘How am I supposed to feed my sister?’

  ‘Ask for help. You must have friends.’

  ‘Charity,’ she said, the word hard in her mouth. ‘I can take care of my family. But we need what’s ours.’

  ‘In a month things will get better. People will have to go back to work.’

  ‘Or they’ll be dead.’

  ‘I want to help you, but I’m drowning here.’ He picked up a stack of papers. ‘Sixty-four thousand, three hundred and nineteen. That’s how many people have been released early over the past eighteen months. No one wants to be a prison guard, Miss Cassidy. Can you blame them? People want to be with their families, or on the beach. If you want to protect your sister, you’ll keep her away from …’ he pulled on his reading glasses, ‘Lewis Cranston. Oliver Sweeny. Malcolm Banbridge.’

  ‘Who are –’

  ‘These are people that shouldn’t be going home. These are the worst of our world, and because of extenuating circumstances they’ll be coming to a town near you very soon.’

  She left the office and was about to head down the stairs when she saw him. He stood alone, eyes down and hands deep in his trouser pockets.

  She took a step towards him, then stopped. She felt the crossroads, knew she should turn back because something about him seemed reckless. And she was measured, she had to be, for Stella. For the fragile ship they sailed through these last days on.

  He looked up.

  He didn’t smile, she didn’t either.

  Behind him she saw a large room, a circle of chairs. A whiteboard. A man with a beard led a small group.

  She looked at his shoes, his legs and arms and hair. Anywhere but into his eyes.

  ‘I don’t really feel anything any more.’

  He was tall and she was small. She stood her ground but the ground was soft. Her heart beat so loud she imagined all the glass around her shattering. The letters on her wrist floated up and he looked down and noticed them.

  ‘The girl from the tape.’

  It was hot, so airless she felt sweat on her top lip, beneath her arms, down her back.

  Outside in the sun, on the stone steps, he stood with his back to her.

  ‘Sometimes I want her to come, so I won’t have to do it myself.’ She swallowed.

  ‘And other times?’

  ‘It’s the last thing I can control.’

  He turned and looked down and in that light he dazzled her with a smile that changed his face. And then it was gone.

  ‘You ever miss being a kid?’ he said.

  She said nothing.

  He stepped up onto the low wall beside, his arms out wide. ‘When every wall was a tightrope. When you didn’t worry about shit you couldn’t change.’

  She lit a cigarette, the smoke filling her lungs so totally.

  He wobbled slightly. ‘I feel like I’ve lost that balance. But I don’t know if it’s me, or if the world is trying to throw me off.’

  ‘You work here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘No way you need the money.’

  His eyes were light, he spoke without humour. ‘I
go where the judge deems fit, where I can work towards being a productive member of society and atone for past misdeeds.’

  ‘Probation?’

  ‘Haven’t you been to church? This life is probation.’

  She looked out across the town. The faded awnings shaded boarded shops. The sun beat fiercely.

  She fought the urge to stop him falling.

  He stepped down and she breathed.

  ‘The idea of Selena. And death. Its existential importance. You ever think that each second, each instant is the most important moment in your life because it will never happen again? We plan and wait and hope and expect. But what if we miss it?’

  ‘What?’

  He stared at her. ‘What breaks into our home.’

  ‘What drags us into the water at night.’

  ‘Survival is basal. Take away every luxury we’ve known –’

  ‘And I’ll bet you’ve known some.’

  ‘And that’s all we’re all doing. We’re fighting our endless numbered days. Where we are, there is no forward. There’s an immediate. And that’s a luxury in itself.’

  Mae glanced at the betting shop across the square. The odds changed daily. Life or death.

  Mae closed her eyes to the sun. ‘It’s all memories and regret. What you haven’t done or what you could’ve done differently.’

  ‘What haven’t you done?’

  ‘Too much to list.’

  ‘My mother says all you need is to tell someone you love them, and for them to say it back. Everything else is secondary. Distraction.’

  ‘Like I need some idiot boy giving me flowers, reciting poetry and thinking up some elaborate promposal. It’s … It’s not even what I haven’t done. It’s my sister. I want her to … I want her to see light.

  ‘Religion.’

  ‘Light, not the light. What we take for granted.’

  He loosened his tie and opened three buttons. ‘Maybe you’re asking for too much.’

  ‘So what should I be asking for?

  ‘What’s a Forever?’

  That look again, so deep like he could see every secret she’d ever kept.

  She hated that her stomach flipped.

  Hated it.

  She saw her bus.

  He took her wrist and traced the letters with his finger and she felt his touch too deep in her bones.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  ‘Jack Sail. You can just call me Sail. Everyone does.’

  ‘You saying that like I’m everyone, Jack?’

  13

  She noticed him near the front of the bus.

  There was something puritanical about Theodore Sandford, sitting there blessed by the sunlight.

  ‘I keep thinking of her,’ Mae said, sliding into the seat beside him.

  ‘Yes.’

  His voice was too high, lending itself to falsetto but nothing more. Kids made jokes, but when he sang they sat there as rapt as everyone else.

  He pressed himself close to the glass. ‘My grandad lives in White Cove. He doesn’t believe.’

  ‘In God?’

  ‘In Selena.’

  ‘Not believing like that. No telescope. No watching the sky, the news. No posters of constellations. That takes its own kind of commitment.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You haven’t been to see Abi’s parents.’ She did not know Theodore Sandford well, but she could see he looked nervous.

  ‘I will.’ He spoke quietly. There was a practised deference to him. His hair was neatly parted to the side, his shirt tucked into his shorts and buttoned to the top. On his finger she noticed he still wore the silver purity ring.

  She looked down and saw the skin raw on both his knees, the scratches bloodied and dark.

  ‘Did you fall?’

  He followed her eye. ‘People keep asking you about it. How you found her. What she looked like.’

  ‘She was dead, Theodore.’

  He flinched at the word. A physical reaction.

  ‘I think her back was broken. Maybe her leg had snapped. There was blood around her head. Her jaw looked wrong, maybe dislocated.’

  He closed his eyes and she stopped.

  ‘Hearing her voice in school … I didn’t sleep after. I used to ask her about the tattoo,’ he said.

  The bus eased to a stop. No one got on and no one got off.

  ‘We were fifteen,’ Mae said.

  ‘You can get a tattoo at fifteen. You can get alcohol and drugs, and my cousin in the city said his friend has a gun. Do you think maybe Selena is doing the universe a favour?’ He spoke with a sincerity that disarmed her.

  ‘You were together for a long time but you didn’t sleep together.’

  He reached down and turned the band on his finger. ‘Why do people make such a thing about sex? We made a commitment. I don’t expect someone like you to understand.’

  Hunter had started the rumour that Mae had been with a line of boys at the beach, summer boys that lined up and used her and high-fived afterward. She’d seen writing in the toilets at school.

  Mae Cassidy is a slut.

  Mae Cassidy will burn.

  ‘Most boys wouldn’t wait. Especially now.’

  ‘I’ve spent my whole life preparing for the next one.’

  ‘You think she jumped, Theodore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You sound certain.’

  ‘Death is only hard for the living.’

  The bus hit a bump, her knee hit his, he moved further from her, like sin was contagious.

  ‘The concert, the last Sunday, we each get to choose a song. Most are going with a hymn, “Abide With Me” or something like that.’

  ‘What did Abi choose?’

  ‘Something about creeps and weirdos.’

  Another time and she might have smiled, might have allowed Abi’s death to colour her memories.

  ‘Whenever we tried to practise, she’d cry. I mean, she’d cry so much that we had to stop.’

  She watched his face as he spoke, the delicate bow of his lips. He was the kind of innocent that could be shattered. Mae couldn’t imagine him with Abi, or with anyone at all. He was to be displayed at the front of a choir, to be projected as a Sacred Heart ideal.

  ‘Where were you the night she died?’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Where I always am on a Sunday night, practising with Sally Sweeny. That’s my life. Sometimes everything is simple. And sometimes nothing makes sense. But most things fall somewhere in between. Was it you … the recordings?’

  Mae shook her head.

  ‘Whoever’s doing it, they need to stop now. They really need to stop before something bad happens.’

  ‘Something bad already happened, Theodore.’

  He pressed the bell as they reached the edge of town. ‘If you’re looking for answers, Mae, you should look to the sky.’

  ‘I do, only it’s not God I see rushing down towards us.’ She stood to let him pass.

  ‘Faith is a choice. It’s not thrust upon you. You have to work hard at it. I don’t think Abi ever understood that.’

  She saw him as she stepped off the bus.

  Behind him, purple cannoned from the water.

  He carried flowers, a small bouquet of daisies that looked like they’d been torn from someone’s garden.

  She chewed the inside of her cheek.

  He held them out.

  ‘That’s the sorriest bunch of flowers I’ve even seen. Did you steal them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A group of girls passed and stared and he ignored them.

  ‘You always dress like you’re going to a funeral?’ she said.

  ‘I gave all my clothes away.’

  The church bell rang loud.

  ‘You didn’t ask if you could come into my life. Now you’re here.’

  She felt his hand on her lower back, his chest against her.

  ‘I’m not. I’m nowhere,’ she said.

  Their lips were close, too close.

/>   ‘You’re everything I hate about this town,’ she said.

  She walked away, back towards home, carrying her daisies. As she passed the church, she saw Theodore cross himself and head inside.

  She stopped by the door.

  He cried without shame, small beneath the cross.

  14

  They buried Abi on a day too beautiful.

  Half the school littered the grounds of St Cecelia, some cross-legged on the grass, some sitting on broken gravestones. In the distance surfers carved the waves.

  Reverend Baxter spoke choice words about God’s need for another angel, like he wouldn’t be drowning in them soon enough.

  Though Abi was close to eighteen, she took her place in the children’s cemetery, in a spot beneath white blossom so fragile Mae kept her eyes fixed to it as Luke Manton screamed his daughter’s name, his knees in the mud, his hand on the coffin.

  Abi’s mother hid behind large sunglasses, separate from her husband, separate from all of them.

  Maybe it hit home then, to everyone there. The kids that came because there was nothing else to do. The neighbours showing face. Death in all its finality.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Felix said.

  Mae took a breath. ‘She left us behind. Everything we did before. Our flawed idea of perfect.’

  ‘My father, the people here and the god they pray to, that’s flawed. Open your eyes, Mae. You’ll see it again.’

  When it was done they drifted towards a church hall filled to bursting.

  Luke Manton took a plastic chair and a bottle of vodka and remained by his daughter’s grave. No one went over, no one knew what to say. Of all the words left, not one of them fit.

  ‘Paper plates,’ Sally said, from the buffet table. ‘They don’t have the structural integrity for what I’ve got planned.’

  Mae saw an empty foil serving platter and held it up.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Sally said, taking it and loading it with sandwiches.

  Mae watched her, the way she went through food, sweat ran down her forehead and dripped from her nose.

  ‘I’m surprised her ex came.’ Sally air-quoted ex with her fingers, then licked barbecue sauce from them. ‘You know she ditched him?’