So I’m saying, what about the one he’s getten from Flo? And he’s saying he’s never asked her to knit for him, and I’m saying he’s never asked me neither. Which is a mistake, for now he’s thinking I wanted him to ask me, and is grinning down like he’s caught me out.
Now we’re at our stairs and I take the chance to let go his arm and pick up my skirts. But he’s barring my way, and asking where’s his kiss. And I’m saying, what kiss? Why, for walking you home, says he. And I say such a small service is not worth a whole kiss, but I’ll shake hands if he likes – just to keep it light, see?
So now I’m offering my hand – all the while thinking, it’s nowt, he must be teasing, for it’s daylight and Flo could come running down the stairs any moment. But there’s a look in his eyes says he doesn’t care who sees us, and he’s taking my hand and not letting it go, and tugging me towards him.
And it riles me that he’s still teasing me, when there might be a baby, for sweet Jesus’ sake. So I beg him to let me go, please, for it’s all wrong to carry on so when he’s with Flo. And I nearly blurt out about the baby too, but stop myself just in time. So now he does let me go, and I gather up my skirt and scuttle up the stairs fast as I can.
Chapter Twenty-Six
2007
‘Thanks. That was brilliant, Ben, Mary,’ says Ian. ‘Another fantastic session.’ He glances at his watch then starts hurriedly collecting up his equipment and stowing it away in various bespoke compartments in his backpack.
‘Would you like an espresso?’ Mary offers.
‘Sorry.’ He looks round distractedly and pockets a small black and chrome item he retrieves from the corner of her desk. ‘Got to dash. I’ve set up a phone conference back at the hotel.’
‘Oh?’ Mary can’t begin to imagine what that might involve.
‘Budgets. Film crew. Research. Nothing to worry your pretty little head about.’ She follows him outside, where he mounts his gleaming new bicycle and pedals off. She has a sense that all this haste has been manufactured so he doesn’t have to explain his plans. But why? What is he keeping from her?
Ben’s putting on his hoodie, getting ready to leave too.
‘I believe I owe you an apology for yesterday afternoon,’ Mary says. ‘I felt nauseous all of a sudden – it was the heat in the Search Room, I suspect – so I went for a walk and—’
‘You forgot all about me, didn’t you?’ he interrupts with a grin.
‘I’m really sorry. I meant to call you when I got home, but I couldn’t find your number.’
This is only partly true. In fact, she’d been so taken aback to discover that Tom’s initials were T.H. that she’d ended up striding right past her house without stopping and simply continuing along the coast for miles, as far as the Whitley Bay golf course, then catching a bus home again. By which time she was so uncharacteristically famished that she grabbed a takeaway menu at random from a heap by the phone and ordered something inadvisable and orange, that purported to be a Madras prawn curry, and ate it far too fast with a nan bread the size and texture of a tennis racquet.
She watches him set off too then goes back inside the house and shuts the door behind her. Standing in the narrow hallway, she wonders what to do. Her consulting room, which doubles as a sitting room, where she’d normally relax doing the Guardian crossword or making spiderish notes in the margin of some book she’s reviewing, is out of bounds. Not literally, obviously, but this continuity business makes her feel inhibited, worried about moving something without thinking. She’d quite like to look out her transsexual case notes, for example, to see if she has enough material for that masochism paper. But that would involve moving her desk and fossicking through box files.
She wanders through to the kitchen and sits at the table, leafing through the latest issue of Analytical Psychology. But she can’t settle: the wooden chair’s hard on her buttocks and the spotlight bulb aimed at the table has gone out. She considers going up to bed to read, but that seems ludicrous at this hour – and somehow defeatist, as though Ian has bested her in some obscure contest.
By way of displacement activity, she fills the kettle and amuses herself briefly as it boils by experimenting with her distorted reflection in its curved stainless steel side. The kitchen smells slightly swampish; even now, in the middle of summer. It makes her think of the meadows that were here once, whipped by the sea wind, with skylarks high overhead, filling the wide open sky with manic fluttering music, when the port was little more than a double row of fishing cottages or ‘shiels’ on the lower bank, and the rocks teemed with seafood of all kind, like berries in a hedgerow, ripe for the picking.
Stirring an unaccustomed cup of Ovaltine, Mary realizes she’s exhausted. Performing for Ian’s film, sparring with him, fending him off, has left her feeling wrung-out and rather besieged. The infuriating man knows exactly how to discombobulate her. Those absurd double entendres, for example. She’s never known how to flirt. Even when she was in her twenties, and arguably in her prime, a flirtatious remark could render her as mute and prickly as a thistle. Now he’s let slip about problems with the lovely Christina, she’s finding his attention even more uncomfortable.
Then there’s that disturbing business about Tom being Thomas Hall. Of course, there would have been hundreds of young men with the initials T.H. living in North Shields at that time. So there’s no reason at all why the tobacco tin she remembers would necessarily have belonged to Annie’s Tom. Still, it’s never pleasant to contemplate the possibility that a previous incarnation might be an unsavoury character. One prefers to think of oneself as more sinned against than sinning.
The doorbell goes and she tenses, assuming it’s Ian returning on some pretext. Hoping he’ll think she’s gone out, she flicks off the kitchen light then slips silently out into the hall to listen. The bell goes again, then the letterbox is pushed open.
‘Coo-ee! It’s me-ee!’ comes Laura’s voice. ‘Can I come in, or will I catch you in flagrante on the stairs?’
Laughing with relief, Mary opens the door.
‘What are you doing lurking in the dark?’ Laura asks.
‘I thought you were Ian back to torment me.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘No, not really,’ she sighs. ‘Just rather relentless.’
‘Do you fancy a fish supper? I was chopping a chaste onion when I got the urge for something stodgy and artery-clogging instead.’
‘I hadn’t even thought about food,’ says Mary. The rest of the orange curry is in the fridge, congealing uninvitingly in its foil container.
‘Well get your cardie on pronto, lass. They stop frying at nine.’
They make their way down the stairs and join a short queue of brawny young men with sunburnt shoulders. A woman in a white hat and overall is shovelling chips into polystyrene trays and scattering big scoops of batter bits on top. The place looks and smells yellow: warm, greasy, delicious.
They take their food to a bench by the river and unwrap it on their knees. Laura tears the corner off a sachet of ketchup and squirts it over her chips. ‘How’s it been going?’ she asks.
‘All right, I suppose – albeit complicated somewhat yesterday by a brief and rather puzzling detour into another of Ben’s previous incarnations.’
‘Anybody interesting?’
‘A good old-fashioned spinster type—’
‘Like you.’
‘Indeed, though I’ve often felt that the connotations of the word “spinster” are well overdue for rehabilitation.’ What is it about a chip that makes it so compelling as a foodstuff, Mary wonders. There must be some subtle alchemy of fat and carbohydrate that makes it especially amenable to the human digestive system.
‘So how long’s this filming going to last?’ Laura asks.
‘I honestly have no idea. To my shame, I’ve become rather disenfranchised. There was some talk of “the film crew”, whatever that might be, arriving next week. But Ian assures me that’s less alarming than it sounds.
’
‘You shouldn’t let him bully you.’
‘I don’t think I do. It’s more a question of standing back and seeing what happens.’
‘Like a rabbit in a car’s headlights, you mean.’
‘Oh, dear. Is that how it seems?’ Mary breaks open her slab of battered haddock and buries her fingers in glimmering white flakes of fish.
‘You never told me what happened between you two,’ says Laura.
‘No.’
‘Well?’
‘It’s not a chapter in my life I’m very proud of.’
‘You managed to leave him, though. That must have taken some doing.’
‘Actually I didn’t intend to leave for good at first. I just needed to get away for a while. I was—’ She stops herself. ‘Let’s just say there was something I needed to sort out. But one thing led to another and – well, if you must know, I had a bit of a breakdown. Anyway, by the time I’d resurfaced, it was six months later and I’d rather gone off the boil as far as love affairs were concerned. So I bought one of those overland tickets to India and Tibet. The rest, as they say, is history.’
‘How exciting! What kind of a breakdown?’
‘It was pretty dramatic, as these sudden attacks quite often are. I was diagnosed as suffering from acute delusional schizophrenia and confined for a while in what Ben would describe as “the loony bin”. It was my first serious experience of a past incarnation intruding – though of course I had no inkling at the time.’
‘What did Ian do when he found out?’
‘I never told him – none of my friends knew. I swore my parents to secrecy and they were happy to oblige. I think they found the whole episode rather excruciating.’ She remembers them coming to visit, sitting side by side in the hospital day room in their coats. Her mother had brought a fruit cake in a tin and a bottle of Robinson’s Lemon Barley Water. ‘They weren’t really cut out to have children. They were rather old when I was conceived and I think I was always rather an inconvenient and perplexing presence in their lives.’
‘So were you hearing voices, then?’ Typical Laura, to home in on the gothic detail.
‘Yes, to some extent. I was aware of an intermittent buzz of female voices discussing my moral shortcomings.’ How strange to be talking about this now, after so many years; almost as though it happened to someone else. ‘But my main symptom was the delusion that I was bleeding to death. Which was confirmed to an alarming degree, of course, every time I had a period. Though in between I was convinced I must be bleeding internally.’
‘How awful.’
‘Yes, it was rather distressing. Though completely explicable in retrospect, once I’d discovered how Peggy died.’
‘Of course. That botched abortion,’ says Laura through a mouthful of chips.
‘I think the voices I was hearing were probably those of various uncharitable neighbours gathered outside Peggy’s door when the doctor was eventually called. There was a spooky hushed quality to them, as if they knew they were talking about a dying woman.’ She shudders, recalling the indistinct jabber that had filled her head for months. ‘I often wonder what became of her son, Bobbie,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t much of a mother to him, I’m afraid.’
She wraps up her left-over food and stuffs it into the waste-bin beside the bench. ‘Sorry, Laura. This probably isn’t the cheerful interlude you had in mind.’
‘Don’t be daft. You know what a nosy cow I am. Anyway, it’s been yonks since I’ve had you to myself.’
Something in Laura’s voice, a tightness, prompts Mary to ask: ‘Was there something in particular you wanted to talk about?’
Laura stirs her ketchup with the stub of a chip. ‘I didn’t want to bother you.’
‘Now you’re being daft. That’s what friendship is: two people bothering about one another.’
‘It’s just, well, them nightmares are back. Not every night, and not as bad as before. Well, the nightmares are just as bad, but they don’t freak me out in the same way, because I know where they’re coming from now.’
‘I thought we’d laid your Tom to rest years ago.’
‘It’s funny you should put it like that. Because that’s exactly what it feels like. Like he’s a ghost, come back to haunt me. Though I’m not sure he ever went away completely. There was always the odd dream, now and then.’
‘Why didn’t you say? We could have had another few sessions and explored the issues further.’
‘It was only now and then. And we were friends by then. I didn’t want to go back to being doctor and patient again.’
Tom, Thomas. Was it possible? Mary had completely forgotten that Laura’s previous incarnation had also been called Tom. ‘So, am I right in assuming there’s been a recent escalation?’ she asks and Laura nods miserably. ‘Can you think of anything that might have brought it on? Anything that might have set off unconscious associations.’
Laura looks at her. ‘It’s ever since we started on that research at the library. I had a terrible go that first night, and it’s been on and off ever since.’
‘What form have they been taking?’
‘Oh you know, the usual. Getting into fights, having sex with drunk lasses, battering that poor wife of his.’
Mary peers at her friend in the darkness. She looks exhausted, as well she might, and rather diminished: not at all like the Laura she’s used to. ‘Would it help if I referred you to another therapist? It might be easier to confide in someone you don’t know.’
‘No. I’d rather talk to you. And another therapist wouldn’t understand about Tom.’
‘Shall we schedule another series of regression sessions?’
‘Let’s see how it goes, eh? You’ve too much on your plate at the moment.’ Laura bundles up her remaining chips in their paper.
They sit in silence for a while, watching a rusty old fishing boat chug alongside the bank and manoeuvre into its moorings, belching black smoke.
‘What about you?’ Laura asks. ‘Did you ever get a repeat of them nightmares you used to get? The ones on the boat?’
‘No, thankfully – at least not that I’ve been aware of. Though of course we all enter a period of intense dreaming every night.’ Mary burrows into a pocket for her Gitanes. ‘I keep meaning to start a dream diary. If one makes a habit of jotting dreams down at the moment of waking, one’s awareness of one’s unconscious life becomes more acute.’
She lights up and inhales, drawing delicious smoke down into her lungs. Why is the first hit after food so satisfying? ‘It’s been dubbed Faculty X,’ she goes on. ‘It’s possible to train oneself to access unconscious material – rather like exercising a muscle.’
Laura pulls a face. ‘I’m not sure I’d like that.’
‘No. Which is perhaps why I’ve never got around to it. I’m not sure I could cope with regular sorties into the lives of my fisherman forebears. They only broke through to consciousness on that occasion because I was so unwell. As you know, a high fever can sometimes bring about breaches, as it were, of the boundary between conscious and unconscious realms.’
‘What about them flashbacks you were on about?’
‘Yes, I should probably keep a record of those too. But they’re just as disturbing in their way, so I try not to dwell on them. The tobacco tin clattering down the stairs – for some reason I find that utterly chilling. And the heaving dark water, of course.’ She shivers suddenly, convulsively.
Laura pulls a sympathetic face. ‘Do you think I’ll ever be free of my Tom?’ she asks after a while.
‘I’m not sure we can ever be entirely free of our prior incarnations. If they continue to haunt us, then we have work to do. If they are quiescent, then our work is done for the time being, and they settle down into the core unconscious that makes each of us uniquely who we are.’
‘It’s dead spooky though, to think of them all, all my past lives, buried deep inside my mind somewhere.’
‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It reminds me
of that man possessed by demons in Matthew’s gospel. When Jesus asked his name, he answered: “My name is Legion, for we are many”.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1898
I’ve woken early, I can tell from the sounds. Just a few lumpers rumbling their barrows down on the fish quay, and the nightsoil drays clopping up Brewery Bank and away. There’s sleepy seagulls mewing from the chilly lums, and soft blue light slipping in through the window like pearly water over sand.
I can hear Mam out sweeping the yard, for she’s always first up and likes to finish her dirty chores before breakfast: raking out the fire, emptying the slops, seeing to the midden. And I’m wondering, did Sam have his word with Da on the boat last night? And that unknowing has me so on tenterhooks that I’ve thrown off my blanket and pulled on my skirt before I’ve rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
Now I’m tiptoeing down the stairs barefoot, with my clogs in my hand, and here’s the kettle hissing on the fire, and Mam leaning in the open doorway looking out, and a warm smell’s rising off her – for she’s been sweeping – that’s her smell, that I think I’ll remember all my life.
‘Howay, pet,’ she’s saying. ‘Are you ailing?’ So I’m saying no, I couldn’t sleep, and heard her sweeping and thought to help. But I’m too late, for what I’ve interrupted is her quiet time, when she has her brew and her sit down before waking the house and collecting the slops. So we sit together at the kitchen table with our tea, and stir sugar and she asks, how does your Sam like his gansey? And I say I never stopped to see, but I’m canny stirred up now, waiting to find out did he speak to Da, and what did Da say.
So now Mam’s saying not to fret, and I’m saying I can’t help it. But looking closer, I see that she’s smiling, and it’s the sort of smile that’s trying to be wider, but she’s keeping it small. So I’m saying, what? And she’s saying, nothing. But there is something, and she’s teasing me, and won’t say – until I’m just about screaming with so much unknowing so early in the morning.
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