by Alison Moore
In the kitchen, she made herself a cup of tea and a fruit salad. She hoped, with this sliced banana, this chopped apple, this quartered plum, these brightly coloured fruits, to keep cancer at bay. Noel Edmonds seemed to believe that cancer was caused by negative thoughts, but in that case, too, a banana could help – she had read that bananas contained serotonin, which could give one feelings of happiness and well-being.
While she ate her breakfast, she began on the little stack of Christmas cards that she had to write and send. She hated the feeling of being late, of being so late with her Christmas cards that they might not arrive in time. She had been getting earlier and earlier with them. If she could get them out before December, she thought, she would be happy. Inside her parents’ card, she added a note to say that she hoped they had settled in well, and that she would visit soon. Gail had given her their new address.
When Jessie had finished writing her cards, had sealed them in their envelopes and stuck on the Christmas stamps, she walked The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse down to the postbox, and then down to the river where the dog could run free. The post would not go today – there was no collection on a Sunday – but at least the cards were in the box and would go first thing in the morning. She had known a boy at school who posted lit matches into postboxes, and ice poles on hot days, and anything else that might do damage. It horrified Jessie, to think of all that mail that might never be received, and the sender might never know.
She could not send a card to Paul, so she texted him instead. She knew it would annoy him to receive a text saying ‘Merry Christmas’ in November, but she sent it anyway. She signed off as ‘Mum’ even though when he was a teenager he had taken to calling her ‘Jessie’; instead of saying ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ he had said ‘Jessie’ and ‘Brendan’. Jessie’s parents had not liked that; they said it was disrespectful. ‘I called my father “Sir”,’ said her dad. Paul, in the end, called his father ‘Tosser’, and his mother ‘Bitch’, and then left.
She did not know if he actually got her texts; she did not know if he still had the same phone, the same number, but she continued to send him her greetings, her news including changes of address, and her love. No one ever replied. Every Christmas, Will said, ‘Nothing from Paul?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Jessie, but she appreciated that he asked, that he never forgot. Will had always hoped to meet Paul. He had very much wanted a child and did not seem to mind that this child was not his own. He was not a child any more though. Paul had left home before Jessie’s move to Hawick; he would be thirty now. Jessie had also expected to have a child with Will, but none had appeared – that was how Will put it when people asked: We would have liked a child, but one never appeared. He said this, she had noticed, in the past tense. At least she had Paul, at least in a sense.
Isla knew that Paul existed – it had come up in the early days, when Alasdair was small and Jessie had sometimes looked after him – but after a while she had stopped asking about him; she had also quite quickly stopped asking Jessie to look after Alasdair. Jessie had committed the crime of giving Alasdair cola after school, and Isla had asked her very nicely not to, and then less nicely when Jessie did it again. ‘You’ll rot his teeth,’ said Isla.
‘I used to give it to Paul,’ said Jessie, though perhaps not quite so young.
She was glad, later, that Isla had not pointed out that Jessie had not seen Paul’s teeth for years and would not know if they had rotted.
On Sundays, Jessie liked to be busy in the garden, and then on Monday mornings she would ache from the hours spent hunched over digging out weeds.
On this cold Sunday afternoon, she raked the leaves off the damp grass, and pruned the leafless shrubs, not entirely sure that this was the right time of year for pruning and, when she stood back and looked at the trimmed forsythia, suspecting that she had been overzealous. She moved the most fragile pot plants so that they would be sheltered when the frost came. She looked around, but at this time of year there was not much more that she could do, and besides, the light would soon be going.
She went inside, put on some music, and sat down with a bottle of wine and her favourite glass, looking out of the window and listening to the King Creosote album From Scotland With Love, the soundtrack to a film documenting past lives – the lives of her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations – although, as the singer-songwriter had said, you had to remember that for them it was not the past; they were in the present, at the cutting edge of time.
By the time the album had reached the instrumental reprise of ‘Something To Believe In’, it had grown dark outside; she was gazing at her own reflection, at her unsmiling face and her Christmas jumper. She rinsed out the wine bottle and went upstairs, closing the door to the spare room as she passed.
On Monday, on her doormat, she found her first Christmas card of the year, from her mother. Jessie had read an essay by Mark Twain in which he discussed what he called mental telegraphy, expressing his conviction – his great discovery – that thinking of a person and deciding to write to them would prompt them simultaneously to write to you; one could unwittingly read the thoughts of someone hundreds or thousands of miles away. Jessie wished it really were possible, by sitting down to write to someone, to make them get in touch with you.
The truth was, her mother also liked to get her Christmas cards out early. Inside the card, her mother had written a note about a piece of sky that Jessie’s dad was missing, the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that he had been working on before their move into sheltered accommodation. There was always so much sky in these jigsaw puzzles, so much sea, and such tiny pieces that were so easily lost. Jessie remembered from childhood how a missing piece could create a mood around the house, and whilst they might ask if he had found it yet – that edge piece, that little bit of background, that piece that was needed to fill the hole right in the middle of the picture – they already knew the answer, because of the mood in the house. It has really upset him, her mother had written. We can’t think where it has gone. He’s hoping that it may yet turn up. It’s a corner piece.
Jessie knew the feeling herself; she lost small things too: she had lost her locket, and her turquoise earrings, the ones that went so well with her best blouse. She also lost not-so-small things: she had lost the dog’s favourite tennis ball, and her new jar of marmalade, amongst other things.
She put the Christmas card on the living room mantelpiece. It was a silver star, handmade – her mother had always made Christmas cards and birthday cards with Jessie and Gail when they were girls, and she continued to do so now even without a child to keep busy. She collected anything that could be used – scraps of card and paper, the brown paper and tissue paper in which purchases were wrapped or packed, scraps of material, shiny bits and pieces that she stashed like a magpie. She had boxes full of these odds and ends, and Jessie was pleased to see that they must have gone with her to the sheltered accommodation.
The silver star looked rather beautiful against the blue of the wall, even if at the same time it looked, this star that had tumbled to earth, rather sad.
Isla said that these walls were turquoise, but Jessie thought of turquoise as green and of these walls as blue. ‘Turquoise is greeny blue,’ said Isla, ‘like your walls.’ But these walls – Jessie could see with her own eyes – were blue. It was not only the living room: this blue was the overwhelming colour of the house’s interior – the paintwork, the soft furnishings, the bedding.
She had once painted a bedroom tangerine, when she was married to Brendan and studying part-time at university. It was to be the baby’s bedroom, Paul’s bedroom. Brendan said it would do her head in, and it certainly was vivid and rather relentless on the eye. She had done all four walls; there was even matching gloss on the skirting boards. When Brendan looked at it, he said, ‘What were you thinking?’ There were mice in that house too: she found mouse droppings in the kitchen cupboards, and she heard something small mov
ing around at night, rustling in the rubbish bin in the tangerine room while she sat in the dark feeding Paul.
She would have to get a Christmas tree. Will had always been the one to go out and find a tree, and Jessie had been the one to hoover up the dead needles that it dropped. Perhaps this year she would get an artificial one, which could be kept in storage in between Christmases; it could be kept in the spare room. She knew someone who left the decorations on their tree from one year to another – the star on top, the baubles and the tinsel, everything. They just covered the tree with a sheet and brought it out each winter. It would look like a ghost, thought Jessie; it would look like the kind of ghost that a child would be if they were dressing up. Jessie would not like that: she would not like to see it, or to have to try not to see it, every time she went into the spare room, or every time she looked into the spare room as she reached for the handle to close the door.
1985
The campsite in Belgium was full of children who spoke French and German and Dutch, languages Eleanor did not speak, but she seemed to understand these children well enough to play hide-and-seek with them. At the age of four, Eleanor had been no good at the game: her feet would be visible, she would fidget too much, she would show her face when she peeked; she was easily caught. But by five, she had become an expert hider. When Jessie played with her, she always had to shout out, I give in! Gail and Gary had to shout out as well: I give in! And still Eleanor would not come out. Her parents’ voices would rise in pitch – You can come out now, Eleanor, you’ve won! – so that you could hear the slight shake, the touch of desperation. You win, Eleanor, please come out now!
One afternoon, in Belgium, the other children had all gone off to the swimming pool without finding her, and the grown-ups had to find her instead. And a day or two later, when she had once again been playing with the children, Eleanor had come back to the grown-ups to say that she had been hiding for ages and no one had discovered her hiding place; so much time had gone by and no one had found her and she’d become frightened. The four of them were playing a game of Happy Families when Gail said to her, ‘You did tell the other children that you were going to stop playing, didn’t you? You didn’t just wander off?’ ‘I did tell them,’ said Eleanor, but her face took on a guilty, shifty look.
Eleanor, with her reddish hair, looked very much like Jessie; she looked more like Jessie than like Gail, like Jessie’s own child might look if she were ever to have one. At bedtime, Jessie took Eleanor to the campsite facilities, where they brushed their teeth side-by-side in the mirror, their mouths foaming like the bicarbonate-of-soda volcanoes that Eleanor had learnt to make at a summer playscheme. Jessie had big front teeth – slightly crooked, like gravestones, a boy had once said – next to which Eleanor’s looked tiny.
When Eleanor kissed her aunt goodnight, Jessie could still feel, on Eleanor’s lips, the cold from the cold tap; Eleanor’s mouth felt like something that had come out of the fridge.
They slept in a four-person tent. During the night, Jessie was woken by Eleanor talking. The first time, Eleanor said, ‘Where’s the front door?’ and Jessie said, ‘What do you mean? We’re in a tent. Had you forgotten we were in the tent? Do you need the toilet?’ She switched on her torch and saw then that Eleanor was fast asleep. She switched her torch off again and lay awake listening to the walls of the tent shifting. Later, she was disturbed again: in the dark, she heard Eleanor say, ‘I’ve not had my fish and chips.’ And even though Jessie was almost certain, this time, that Eleanor was fast asleep, she still asked her very quietly, ‘Are you hungry?’ In the morning, Jessie said to Eleanor, ‘You talk in your sleep.’ Eleanor wanted to know what she said in her sleep, so Jessie told her. ‘I’ve not had my fish and chips? What would I say that for?’ said Eleanor, as if this nonsense were Jessie’s rather than her own, as if the finger ought to be pointing at Jessie for hearing such a thing in the night, rather than at Eleanor for allegedly saying it. Eleanor’s parents had not heard her say anything in her sleep. Thereafter, each morning, Eleanor would ask Jessie, ‘Did I talk in my sleep?’ and if Jessie had heard anything she would tell her, though more often than not she had to say that she had heard nothing, and that disappointed them both.
When Eleanor had a secret, it was generally Jessie in whom she chose to confide. When, at the campsite, she lost a small toy, a new toy that had been bought for her on the ferry, it was to Jessie that Eleanor came. ‘Daddy will be furious,’ she whispered. And Jessie whispered back: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find it.’ The toy was a little rubber action figure. ‘Where did you last see it?’ asked Jessie, and when Eleanor wasn’t sure, Jessie went through everything she could think of: ‘Did you have it when you went to the . . . Did you maybe leave it in the . . .’ But it wasn’t anywhere they looked, anywhere they could think of, and in the end Jessie had to tell Gary that it had been lost. ‘But Jessie said we’ll find it,’ added Eleanor, who never called her ‘Aunty’; she called her ‘Jessie’, as if she were a friend, as if she were not a grown-up in charge.
‘What did you tell her that for?’ said Gary. ‘What if you can’t?’ And indeed Jessie could not find it. In the end, they had to leave the campsite without it; they had to leave with Eleanor crying her heart out. Even as they drove away, Jessie was scanning the ground – the mown grass, the dirt road – looking for that little rubber action figure. She wondered how long it would take for it to perish.
To make up for the loss, Jessie gave Eleanor her locket. Eleanor was very fond of her aunt’s locket, and Jessie told her that she could wear it all the way home. She distinctly remembered telling Eleanor that she could wear it all the way home but that then she would need it back, and yet when they arrived back at Gail and Gary’s house and Jessie asked for her locket, Eleanor did not want to give it to her. She made a terrible fuss and began to cry.
‘I suppose you could keep it,’ said Jessie, ‘for one night. But in the morning, when I go, I’ll need to take it with me.’
This made Gary angry. ‘You said she could have it until we got home,’ he said, ‘and now we’re home and she must give it back. Give it back, Eleanor. Give the locket back to Jessie.’ There was a dreadful scene, at the end of which the locket was back in Jessie’s possession and everybody was angry or upset.
When it was time for Eleanor to go up to bed, she came and found Jessie and whispered in her ear, ‘When you die, can I have your locket?’ But her whispering was actually rather loud, and was overheard by her father, who told her off. He sent her away to bed, but Jessie went up later and found her still awake and said, ‘Yes, when I die, you can have my locket.’ In the morning, over the breakfast table, Eleanor said to Jessie, ‘When do you think you will die?’
Eleanor was fond of small, shiny things, precious and semi-precious things. She admired Jessie’s gold watch, so Jessie bought Eleanor a watch of her own, a child’s watch with all the numbers on it to help her learn to tell the time, though Eleanor continued to covet the watch that her aunt wore. She liked Jessie’s earrings as well. At eighteen, Jessie did not have her ears pierced, but she did own a pair of earrings, picked out of jewellery that her mother had inherited. ‘I don’t need them,’ her mother had said. ‘I don’t have pierced ears.’
‘Nor does Jessie,’ said Gail, who was older and did have pierced ears and who desperately wanted the pair of turquoise earrings that Jessie had got, but Jessie would not give them up. Jessie put them in a jewellery box in a drawer in her bedroom, but she suspected that Gail came in to look for them, so she moved them around, making them harder and harder to find, and sometimes she could not recall where she had put them, and lost them for months at a time.
‘But can I have them,’ said Eleanor, ‘when you’re dead?’
Translation
It’s a long way home, and it’s not an easy journey. Sometimes I stop where I am for days at a time, and sometimes I wonder about just staying there, wherever I am. I’m getting closer
though, and Jessie knows I’m coming.
Jessie took her second cup of tea of the day, in her Silver Jubilee mug, up to her desk, above which were shelves full of translated fiction. She had various versions of The Outsider, the Camus novel whose first line was so famous, so often quoted, and yet which changed from one English translation to the next; it was different in each one of her three Penguins. What ought to be stable shifted. But if a text was not allowed to rest, the responsibility could not be laid entirely at the translator’s door; a text could be changed after publication by the author or an editor at the publishing house. Between one edition and another, words could change and disappear; punctuation could come and go. Although one talked about this novel and that novel, there were all these versions. It was even, perhaps especially, possible for the text to change – and to alter significantly – after the author’s death, as Ulysses had, decades after Joyce went to his grave, and they were rewriting Enid Blyton, nearly fifty years after her death. Was anything final? She would once have said death, death was final, but she was no longer sure about that.
Just this month, she had discovered, through the radio, that the Epic of Gilgamesh, which she had thought to be almost literally set in stone, existed in different versions. Clay tablets telling this four-thousand-year-old tale had been unearthed in the nineteenth century, but it turned out that this was just one version, the earliest version, and most of the tablets were missing anyway. The tablets had been taken to the British Museum, but even then they could not be translated until the script could be deciphered. It must have been a long process, solving the jigsaw puzzle of those clay tablets, and with crucial pieces lost. A later version, hundreds of years younger but also incomplete, began, so she understood: ‘He who saw the deep’ or ‘He who sees the unknown’, but when she looked for it online she found yet another translation.