Herring Girl

by Debbie Taylor

  ‘I’m afraid the baby died too, a few weeks later.’ She reaches for his hand again. ‘And the little boy with the cough.’

  ‘Not Ricky? But he was never that bad. I mean, he was always poorly, but I thought—’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He blows his nose again, then levers himself up until he’s sitting on the edge of the sofa. ‘That was Annie’s mother, wasn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘It would appear so, yes.’

  ‘Dory. Her husband called her Dory.’ He closes his eyes, apparently trying to recapture the fading scenes. ‘They were all over her, you know. The little kids, Henry. She’d be mashing taties and he’d come up behind and sort of press up against her. Or she’d sit down for a cup of tea and Emily would squirm into her lap. Even Annie. Whenever the boat was out, she’d be there in the bed, come for a giggle and a chat. Then, after Sam died, crying for hours.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he says as the tears come again. ‘She really loved Annie. When she disappeared, it was like—’ His face distorts, crumpling and reddening in that agonized manner of all men’s faces when they cry, as though the emotion must force itself out; which is presumably exactly what’s happening, Mary supposes, given the strictures of masculinity. Was he like this thirty years ago, when she left?

  ‘She loved them so much,’ he’s saying. ‘That’s what gets me. God, the woman was just overflowing with it. When they were all sitting round that wobbly table she’d feel so proud, looking at them all tucking in to the food she’d cooked. And she’d go round every night, you know, checking them all, tidying their arms and legs. Not because it needed doing, but because she just wanted to see them again.’

  ‘Ben said she was a lovely lady.’

  ‘She’d pour Henry a cup of tea and watch him stirring in his sugar. That’s all. She just really liked watching him do that one thing. She thought his wrists were sexy – can you believe that? And she loved the fact he had to have exactly one and a half spoonfuls, no more and no less, and she could never get it right.

  ‘But they had nothing. That old table, chairs, dresser, a few dishes. It’s not until you’re there that you realize how poor people were.’

  ‘And presumably they were relatively well off, compared with most families in the Low Town,’ Mary says.

  ‘She knew she was dying, you know. With that much blood, it was obvious. But all she could think of was, how will Henry manage with the baby? Who’ll comfort wee Emily if she wakes in the middle of the night? What if Annie comes back and I’m not here? They were like a shawl she couldn’t bear to take off.’

  ‘I’ve always thought that it takes a special gift to love well,’ she remarks. He’s more shaken than she’d expected by his hour inside the mind of a dying fishwife. It’s been a long time since she’s seen this more vulnerable side of him. She likes it, she realizes. She likes him.

  He reaches for his jacket and Mary clicks off her tape recorder. ‘I didn’t get around to buying more wine, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘I don’t think there’s any milk either. Would you like an espresso? Herbal tea?’

  He pulls a face. ‘Cigarette?’

  Outside, it’s chilly after the warmth of the room. The sun’s gone and it’s windy, spotting with rain. Mary arranges the blue towel on the bench and they light up, inhaling companionably.

  ‘This reminds me of the time we met,’ he says. ‘Outside that awful New Year’s party in Warwick Street, when I spilt wine on your dress.’

  It was a long mauve-sprigged Laura Ashley garment, she remembers: typically demure – and totally unsuitable for the time of year. The stain never came out. ‘You lent me your coat, I recall,’ she says. ‘A big creaky thing that smelt like the interior of my father’s car, that combination of petrol, cigarette smoke and warm leather.’ She smiles at him. ‘I suspect that’s what first attracted me to you.’

  ‘There was I thinking it was my devilish good looks.’

  ‘Not the coat, but you just standing there in your T-shirt as though it was the middle of summer, not even noticing the cold – when my hands were completely numb. It was the same quality that drew my attention to the red-haired boy on the surfboard. I was such a timid little thing, always shivering.’

  ‘Isn’t there some drug you can take for that? Your hands I mean?’

  She stubs out her cigarette. ‘Certain blood pressure medications are said to help by relaxing the blood vessels.’

  ‘But you don’t take them.’

  ‘Apparently one can now buy special “Raynaud’s gloves” that can be heated in a microwave oven, should one possess such a thing. Failing that, a doctor on the BBC suggests donning oven-gloves for rummaging in the refrigerator, and carrying a hot baked potato in each pocket whenever one leaves the house.’

  He laughs his big open laugh, and a gust of his familiar smell engulfs her briefly: peppery, salty, warm. She used to wear his T-shirt to bed to keep his smell with her when he was away.

  ‘I have an interesting selection of bobble hats for the winter,’ she continues. ‘But I can’t quite bring myself to wear them at this time of year. I persuade myself that my hair will suffice.’

  ‘I’ve always loved your hair,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you never cut it.’

  She lights up again then offers him the packet. ‘Of course smoking exacerbates the condition,’ she says, exhaling and leaning back, enjoying the discomfort of the bench slats against her spine. The spots of rain on her face are curiously invigorating.

  ‘Ben thinks the Raynaud’s is because your hands and feet got so cold on the boat in a previous life. He’s got it all worked out. He reckons you inherited your nicotine addiction from your fisherman too, and that your sea phobia is because he drowned.’

  ‘Yes, he told me.’

  ‘Is that what happens?’ Ian asks. ‘A sort of karmic Lamarckism?’

  ‘I’d been telling him about the concept of karmic scarring,’ she explains. ‘That’s the theory that very intense psychological and physical experiences can leave a scar, as it were, that persists from one incarnation to the next. Unusual birthmarks, for example, can often be traced to a past-life trauma on the same part of the body – you might like to investigate that hypothesis when you do your programme on stigmata,’ she suggests. ‘Anyway, it’s thought that unusually powerful likes and dislikes may have a similar provenance – though the karmic connection is more obvious.’

  ‘So if you can’t kick the habit in one life, you have to try again in the next?’

  ‘I’m not doing very well with this one, am I?’ she says ruefully, examining the glowing tip of her cigarette.

  They stare out at the river, at the terraces of South Shields on the opposite bank glowing in the setting sun. ‘Did you notice Paul with those free mints by the till in the pub last night?’ Mary asks. ‘Every time he passed, he couldn’t resist taking one, yet he manfully refrained from ordering a dessert. I’d be prepared to wager that he’s on a diet. Then lo and behold, we discover the obese biscuit-eating Lord Jim: the epitome of everything Paul’s now struggling to combat.’

  Ian looks sceptical. ‘That’s a bit post hoc, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘If you’d discovered Lord Jim was a beggar starving in the gutter, you could argue the exact opposite: that Paul’s sweet tooth was caused by his hunger in a past life.’

  Mary nods, acknowledging the point. ‘That’s the trouble with karma as an explanatory principle. You can adapt it to explain almost any outcome. It’s the same problem Freud encountered with his analysis of dreams. It doesn’t mean it’s not relevant, but I usually prefer to focus on a post-traumatic stress approach instead.’

  ‘OK. Remind me how that would work.’

  ‘Well, when someone experiences a trauma – a violent attack, for example, or a sudden accident – the shock can sometimes be too great to be absorbed entirely by the conscious mind. So it recurs in flashbacks and nightmares, in hysterical symptoms, in phobias.’

  ‘And you think that’s carried over from one incarnation to
another?’

  ‘Yes. When you think about it, post-traumatic stress disorder is the epitome of “unfinished business”.’ She sits back, waiting for him to put two and two together. She doesn’t have to wait long.

  ‘My thing about blood!’ he exclaims.

  ‘What thing about blood?’ she teases.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. I practically pass out if I nick myself shaving. So you think that’s because of what happened to Dory?’

  Mary shrugs. ‘It’s just a theory,’ she says modestly, but she’s gratified by how excited he seems. ‘But between fifty and sixty percent of recalled past lives end in some kind of trauma, compared to around five percent of deaths generally.’

  ‘I wonder if I can shoehorn that into the programme somehow,’ he muses, grinding out his cigarette and reaching for another. Then: ‘Damn! Why didn’t I record that session on the DAT? But you’ve got it on tape, right? It’ll be crap quality, but we can probably get round that—’

  It’s fascinating watching his brain work, but Mary’s remembered something else about the session with Dory. ‘Can we get back to Annie for a moment?’ she asks. ‘I’d like to focus on what her mother said about the night she disappeared.’

  ‘God – yes! I’d forgotten about that. They were all out that evening, weren’t they? Flo and the priapic Tom. And young Jimmy skulking off – what was that all about?’

  ‘Perhaps he was out exploring his sexuality,’ she suggests. ‘Now we know how the rest of his life panned out, that would have to be a possibility. Or perhaps he was just wandering around feeling miserable. But it’s also possible that he was with Annie.’

  ‘No, our Jimmy would never hurt his little sister,’ Ian blurts out, then laughs aloud. ‘Jesus, just listen to me! That’s Dory talking. But she was really worried about him, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I imagine there were some pretty unsavoury characters roaming around on the lookout for a pretty young boy. He could have been involved in all sorts of clandestine or dangerous situations.’ Mary takes a last drag of her cigarette and buries the butt in the flower pot.

  ‘Maybe he saw Annie with someone.’

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t ask him,’ says Mary, picturing Paul storming out earlier that afternoon, the disgust and anger on his face, and poor Ben dragged along behind. The boy had looked at her, stricken, obviously expecting her to intervene. She’ll remember that look for a long time, the trust it conveyed – and the look of shock and hurt that followed when she did nothing.

  Ian breaks into her thoughts. ‘I hate thinking of Annie wandering those streets,’ he says. ‘You should have seen the place, Mimi. Fucking teeming with people, and half of them drunk or on the pull.’ He shakes his head.

  ‘Dory seemed to think she’d committed suicide.’

  ‘Or gone off travelling with that kist thing. But I’m not sure anyone really believed that. It was too out of character.’

  ‘So we’re not really any further forward.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Surely this is just the confirmation we need for your group souls hypothesis? If I was Dory, and Paul was Jimmy, who else could we match up? This could be dynamite, Mary – riveting telly. Plus it means we can carry on with the film without Ben. I’d call that a result, wouldn’t you?’

  Mary smiles; his enthusiasm is infectious. ‘You seem to have recovered remarkably well from your upset earlier,’ she observes drily.

  He grins. ‘I’ll feel even better if you’d walk me back to the hotel.’

  They set off, Ian hoisting his new bicycle effortlessly onto his shoulder by the crossbar to carry it down the stairs to the Fish Quay. Mary smiles: he wouldn’t be able to lift her bicycle that easily.

  ‘I’ve still got Belinda, you know,’ she remarks as they reach the bottom, picturing her old bone-shaker, with its cracked leather saddle and crooked handlebars.

  ‘What? That old dinosaur?’

  When she lived with her parents it was kept in the old coal shed; she can still conjure the tickle of coal dust up her nose as she propped it against the wall. Later it accompanied her on the train up to Oxford. ‘She’s shackled in the yard,’ she says. ‘Though I can’t imagine anyone wanting to steal her.’

  He laughs and, before she can stop him, tugs her forwards and plants a swift kiss on her forehead. ‘Oh, I do love you, Mimi!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she says briskly, pushing him away and setting off quickly along the sea wall towards Tynemouth.

  ‘Why won’t you believe me?’ he complains, catching her up.

  ‘One, you’re married,’ she says. ‘Two, you’re the father of an indecent number of children. Three, you’re married.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop me loving you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well it should,’ she says tartly. It seems bizarre that he has so little insight into his obsession with her, when it’s obvious that piqued pride is the only reason he keeps bouncing back into her life.

  They walk on in silence beside the dark water. Out towards the mouth of the river a little fishing boat is chugging in to port, skirting the line of light buoys down the centre of the channel. Mary shivers and pulls her shawl across her chest, wondering why on earth she’s agreed to this absurd outing.

  After a while, he says: ‘I came across this crazy New-Age book about soulmates when I was doing my research for this film. About a man and woman who kept reincarnating together over the centuries.’

  Mary knows the book he means. ‘Only Love is Real by Brian Weiss.’ She snorts derisively. ‘That’s the sort of thing that gives my work a bad name.’

  ‘Total schlock, I know. But it must be based on something, surely?’

  ‘It has been suggested that the reason some pairs of souls meet repeatedly in successive incarnations,’ she says, ‘is to allow them to continue where they left off, as it were, and help one another make progress.’

  ‘Like doing their homework together.’

  ‘I can see that I may come to regret my course module analogy,’ she says. ‘But if such a phenomenon did exist, it would be just a particularly potent subset of the group souls idea.’

  A burly young man towed by a wheezing bulldog overtakes them.

  ‘Would Dory and Henry qualify, do you think?’ Ian asks. ‘How long would they have been married at that point? Twenty years? But he still made her go weak at the knees.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mary says guardedly. Where’s he going with this? ‘They were lucky to have found one another. Annie and Sam, too. Whether you believe in soulmates or not, I think it must be rather rare to encounter one’s ideal partner at a time when you are both fertile and free. There must be so many near misses down the millennia, with people marrying the wrong person, or dying too early, or being born too late; the wrong age, or the wrong sex; in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ She wonders sometimes how many near misses she’s had over the years. Or if perhaps Peggy’s unfortunate experiences with men have rendered her too prickly and cautious even to notice when an opportunity arises.

  They’re approaching the end of the sea wall, where the river starts to open out into the alarming agitated mass of the North Sea. Mary backs away from the railings with a shudder and sits down on a graffitied bench. There’s a grassy headland between the mouth of the river and the ruins of the Priory. ‘I think this must have been the hill Dory was talking about,’ she says. ‘Where she went searching for Annie after Sam died. Does it seem familiar?’

  Ian props his bicycle against the railings and sits beside her. ‘Sort of, I suppose. But everything looks so different with all this concrete. I mean, the grass used to come right down to the rocks where the sea wall is now, and there were great heaps of seaweed piled up on the bank to dry – for fuel, I suppose.’ He pauses, looking back along the sea wall, then back at the hill and out to sea. ‘There was a muddy track she walked along, just wide enough for a horse and cart. And a little path off it, leading uphill to a sort of gorsy area. The gorse has gone, but you’re right. This must hav
e been the place. All the courting couples used to come here.’

  ‘Poor Annie,’ sighs Mary. ‘Imagine losing the love of your life just when you’ve vowed to be together for ever.’

  She thinks of the young girl, chilled to the bone and exhausted, numb with grief, staring out to sea. And the mother, picking her way over the rocks with a blanket in her arms, and the two of them weeping and rocking together, waiting for the sun to rise.

  ‘You remember earlier, when I suggested you might have been Annie’s father?’ Ian asks.

  ‘And I pointed out that I could have been any one of the men on that boat – or none of them.’

  ‘What if Dory and Henry really were soulmates?’ Ian puts his hand on her shoulder and turns her to face him. ‘Mimi, isn’t it possible that we walked here together when we were courting, before Annie was born? That we loved each other over a hundred years ago?’

  It’s getting dark. He’s leaning towards her. She can smell his breath; sweet and smoky. He smells the same as he did when they were students, when all he had to do was kiss the corner of her mouth and she would inhale his breath like a narcotic and let him tug her into the bedroom.

  ‘Please,’ she says weakly. ‘This is silly.’

  His lips touch hers and her mouth opens without her volition, letting his tongue in, which is as hot and insistent as he is. She feels an answering heat spreading through her, a sudden sharp ache in parts that have been quiescent for years. How long has it been since she’s let a man get this close? For a wild moment she imagines herself sinking down in the wet grass behind them, and letting him pull up her skirt and damn the consequences. Then a visceral reluctance floods through her, a reluctance she recognizes, and she shoves him away.

  ‘Let me go. This is ridiculous.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to be together,’ he insists. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too. Give me that woman’s phone number. Let’s get her up here to hypnotize you again.’

  ‘No, Ian. Please, stop this.’

  ‘We could find out about us.’

  ‘There is no “us”,’ she says. ‘What about what’s-her-name, your wife? Christina. Women aren’t like coats. You can’t just put them on and take them off again when you feel like it.’