No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  It was hard to tell what effect this meeting had on Hobman. He seemed more withdrawn than ever. Then she died, and Hobman applied to attend her funeral. He had been a quiet patient for years now, taking his meds and keeping out of trouble. He had started a hobby of leather binding during his day workshops, and had become skilled at tooling leather — helping to bind the cover of the large bible that rested on the chapel lectern. His fingers were strong and dextrous from pushing the awl through the material as well as from hard work in the gardens and woodwork shops. He no longer actively menaced the others, although his fellow patients tended to fall back and form a space around him like an invisible barrier, as he glided down the corridors. And so, they let him attend the funeral, judging his risk to be low. He now carried a letter in his suit jacket which had been passed by security, he wanted it to be placed in the coffin with Fiona and there seemed to be no harm in that. They didn’t quite see its significance at the time. It was reconstructed later by Poynton from electrostatic analysis of the writing pad.

  My darling lost Sister Fiona,

  It’s been years since I expressed my feelings for you and now it is too late. Now all I have is our forgotten land of Utopia. I release you from our bond my darling Fiona.

  My sister, my loving sister. I see us still, falling in the fresh grass, laughing together in the sunshine in that field at the back of Southey Street and you telling me not to stop.

  I bless your cheek with a kiss in memory. You’re the only woman that I loved. How I often think of Southey Street when I came to see you as if to seduce you. But you seduced me in the end.

  I always felt open about our love and I feel that you guided me and guide me still. I am sorry that it has come to this after all these years.

  Do you remember you making me a teddy and his little clothes?

  Dad didn’t care for us tho I am sorry that I killed him. He was evil to us and you understand that I know.

  I dedicate my entire life, my entire sex to you. And I am sorry that I have hurt you.

  I want you to know that you are as rare and precious as a butterfly in winter, as a peacock in the spring and you know that our love has always been a strong shoot, a strong spring shoot.

  I am so sorry that I left you behind once and I want you to know I will not do that again. I promise to join you where Nikki takes you. I miss you so much that it hurts. I have studied Indian philosophy and psychology for many years now, and carpentry and leather craft.

  I have made myself better. I make friends and I am an empathising person and I know how to share pain. May we pass our lives over to God. May we pass in peace.

  Your loving brother

  Martin xxx

  The letter crackled in his suit jacket pocket as the Merc turned out the hospital gates. Hobman continued to stare out at the shorn barley fields, at the huddled village and the cemetery for the hospital dead, as they headed east out over the river. He looked down at the water as they crossed the bridge and fingered the stiff edge of the envelope in his inner pocket. They drove for two hours out to the flat, fenny lands of his childhood and stopped in a lay-by for him to piss into a bucket, moving awkwardly in his handcuffs, and one of the escorts let him comb his lank hair while looking at himself in a driving mirror. They stopped at the low-roofed crematorium on the outskirts of a Norfolk market town and the letter he had written was given to the funeral director to be placed in Fiona’s coffin. There was a swift fifteen minute service, the song “You are the wind beneath my wings” played over the crematorium speakers. Hobman stood quietly at the back with his escorts next to the sprays of forsythia and daffodils. The other mourners kept glancing uneasily back at him over their shoulders. He seemed to sway for a moment as the coffin moved jerkily away on a conveyer belt behind the curtains at the end of the ceremony. Nikki was not allowed to embrace him but Hobman was permitted to talk to her for a brief moment. He whispered something urgently into her ear with his head close to hers before he was whisked away, back to the carrier which had remained with its engine running in the car park.

  As he was escorted back to the vehicle he looked up for a moment to the wide, empty Norfolk sky and took a deep breath of fresh air before ducking back into his wired enclosure. Travelling back, his face barely changed expression, his gaze appeared inward and the escorts might have heard a dry rustling murmur and seen his lips moving as he crooned to himself: “I can fly higher than an eagle...”

  Spring came to the hospital, collared doves mated in the wired-up gutters, masonry bees came probing around the concrete stanchions and pitted brick work of the perimeter wall. They were looking for nesting sites little knowing that security would gas them as soon as they were discovered. Hobman seemed to settle back readily enough on the villa, diligently working at the carpentry shops and even making himself useful, popping his head around the office door, running little errands for the staff, offering betting tips and the like. In his review medical notes the registrar observed “I think we are beginning to turn a corner with this patient.”

  *

  I had seldom forgotten Hobman’s presence in the hospital over the years. We would nod as we passed each other in the corridors, but I had little direct contact with him except once in those early months of my affair with Irina. It was at the M Spot, a club for patients in one of the annexes off the blocks. It had once been a small gymnasium and then it had been done out like a 60s coffee bar where the privileged patients could go to socialise during supervised sessions. There were posters there of rural scenes and of health advice on the walls. Cups of tea and cakes could be purchased with tokens and a dummy Wurlitzer played a recurring tape of hits. One of the security staff once said to me that during the war years, when the hospital population swelled to thousands and there were few guards, this place had become the assignation rendezvous for the patients. There, inset into the walls, were two large wooden cupboards just large enough for two people to squeeze into at the same time. This was where in the old days patients went to couple, while someone distracted the guards or bribed them with a packet of fags.

  I had seen Irina on the blocks shortly after we returned from our trip to Burgh-Next-The-Sea and I had drawn her down to the M Spot, wanting to plan our next meeting — thinking that the place would be clear of patients. It looked empty and there was only the sound of a water heater clicking and the far-off booming of doors. We were standing close to each other, leaning up against the old cupboards with one door just ajar, when Hobman emerged from an alcove, a tea towel over one arm, seemingly alone, looking unsurprised. His eyes flickered between us as he advanced closer and closer to us.

  “Well, Mr Keyse, a pleasure, Miss Starsha also, clinical discussion is it you’re having? Am I interrupting?” His eyebrows arched ironically although his painted face remained grave.

  I knew he had immediately divined that there was something between Irina and me. He appeared to breathe in deeply as if scenting us, as we both shrank back by the cupboard doors.

  “Pay no mind to me, I am on tea duty as you see, they also serve and all that,” he said.

  We must have appeared startled and guilty, and I wondered if he had been listening as we had stood murmuring to each other.

  “Mr Keyse and I go way back, but unfortunately you have never offered me therapy, what a shame I must say,” he said looking at Irina, “You are good at it I hear … I have received testimonials …”

  “Here on your own, Martin?” I managed to ask.

  “Oh no I am never alone for long, Mr Keyse, you know that.” As he spoke, as if on cue there was a flurry of activity behind him and an escort came in, stubbing out a cig, casting us a suspicious look and calling out, “Haven’t you finished yet Hobby?”

  “Ready, boss!” Hobman answered, storing away a bucket and cleaning materials in a side room. The guard locked the slops room and Hobman turning to me, flicking his wrist in a key-locking gesture. “Click, clack. Hey Mr Keyse, click, clack, a lock should go. Don’t you remember our old days
on Eaton?”

  I nodded saying, “Yes, I remember.”

  He turned to follow the guard then swung around to us and made a benediction, his illuminated face turned intently on us, his hand raised. “I bless you both,” he murmured and blew us a kiss.

  His whispery, soft laughter washed around the room as he was escorted away.

  Irina and I joked about it afterwards and she asked me what his strange comments meant. I gave an anodyne reply yet inwardly I shuddered, thinking of Kress swinging on that knotted lace. Hobman’s blessing was really a curse, there was something unsettling about it but we soon forgot about that as we went, hot-faced and secretive, out to our assignations that early summer, our miraculous summer.

  We met in Redford sometimes, at our favoured place on Gun Square where a Crimean cannon was sited down the main street pointing to where the inhabitants milled on market days next to the long rolls of cheap carpets and the stalls for second hand tools. I would watch her coming to see me and, as she neared, she would often dip her head in a characteristic, nervous head toss, flicking the hair back from her face. We would stroll together past the market stalls, past the watch repair booths and the stalls of repro fashion clothing where Asian traders lounged by the empty fountains. We went to the old Sun pub where we would huddle in a back room. Sometimes we would walk along the side streets, arm in arm, while all around us this worn-out little town went about its business: graffiti shimmered on walls, the school children in blazers skulked at the back of the bus station, and the shabby goods in the shop windows faded in the intense summer light. Irina and I did not mind, wrapped in our world of brief happiness. We smiled at the glistening plastic and gilt bust of Tutankhamen in the front window of the amusement arcade, and watched benignly among the broken glass and litter of the municipal gardens where young girls with pert faces and mottled, pale legs and white socks, screamed, “Wanna shag?” and the older boys shouted back, “Slappers!”

  We conformed to a degree of circumspection, yet we also took many risks. We had a scare when we once saw Poynton walking ahead of us on the main street, off duty, yet with his head weaving about alertly. We looked for other places after that and settled at a nearby tree-sheltered fishing lake. Here we would embrace in the car while outside the fishermen crouched, waiting under their green domed umbrellas. Once, Irina brought a flask of tea with her, a wifely gesture which I resented, pulling up her jersey and telling her to strip. She took her clothes off awkwardly as a child would and curled naked on the back seat, her skin making squeaking sounds on the car leather. There were red lines on her legs where the seats pressed and she began to cry, her face hidden by her hair.

  “Not like this Jack, I don’t want to like this.”

  And I relented. My hands slipped away from her for, in truth, she denied me little, coming to me in my flat whenever she could, always leaving a discreet message before she did so. I guess that the loyal, sullen Gosia covered for her or perhaps she simply managed her husband extremely well. It intrigued me how ready she was to betray the eminent professor. No sooner had she waved him off at the airport than I was arriving with my bags ready to move in to the marital home for a week. Anton used to greet me not with, “Da, Da,” but with “Ja! Ja!” We both laughed about it. It is strange how such an erotic bond makes one so callous. And I performed all the duties of a husband — even tending to Anton while Irina went to her psychology department meetings and evening clinics. I would sometimes lie in bed with him in the early evenings as she worked, enjoying the strange novelty of that infant being with his heavy, lolling, downy head. And I became skilled at soothing him when he had teething pains, rubbing ointment onto his gums and carrying him around Irina’s bedroom in the dark, crooning a song from my childhood, while he grizzled and then slowly settled.

  Jolly boating weather,

  Hay harvest breeze.

  Anton began to grasp out to me in particular in the evenings, calling “Ack! Ack!” and Irina would murmur sleepily, “Sing him that song again Jack, he loves it.”

  I would lean over him, cleaning him down as he babbled and wobbled his legs about, looking down at his curled, soft member, her husband’s child, my enemy’s child.

  Irina and I maintained a strange, illusory existence during her husband’s absences. We even went to the cinema together to laugh at The Silence of the Lambs, newly out, knowing that our killers were, in the main, much more banal. But more often, we hid in her house, away from the eyes of her husband’s academic colleagues who lived nearby. Here we maintained our pretend life. We would cook up exotic meals in the evenings, then would bathe together in candlelight once Anton was asleep. Sometimes I would help with Irina’s forensic research — discussing interesting cases as we lay together.

  Then the weeks came when her husband returned from his conferences abroad. I imagined him moving about in his home. I scanned Irina’s face at work for signs of tension, yet she seemed outwardly calm. Sometimes I would worry intensely when she did not appear at the hospital or contact me at home for a few days, imagining violent, marital quarrels. Yet she managed it all with disturbing ease. I began to think that all marriages must be in accord with deceit like this. She somehow kept him happy as well as satisfying me. Although always on that first night when he was back and I was displaced, I would feel sick imagining him lowering himself on her and I could not bring myself to ask her directly about it, though once she offered. “I don’t want anything between us Jack. Ask if you must.”

  But in the end I preferred not to know. Though one night I crept to her house in the night to peer over her crumbling garden wall to see a lit bathroom window and her slender figure combing her hair, clearly distinguishable, then behind her I could make out the shape of her husband moving behind her, and I crept away again, ill with misery.

  Irina did not want evidence of our affair. She was cautious in that. She asked me once not to send her letters and she forbade me ever to take her picture. All I had from her were a few brief notes on scraps of paper arranging assignations — and of course that little card she sent me with the picture of a miner from Wieliczka at the very beginning. She gave me other tokens over time, in particular a medallion of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, which once belonging to her grandmother.

  “Wear it always for me,” she said leaning close to me, fastening it round my neck. That heart-shaped trinket was my most treasured possession. It dangled to tap secretly on my collar bones as I walked, and to clink against her silver necklace as we writhed against each other in the summer afternoons. Yet I always wanted more from her.

  Once she came to see me for ten minutes on the pretext of getting a babysitter before going out to dinner with her husband, servicing me slickly, professionally, and then slipping her evening dress back on, no need for a brassiere with her tiny breasts. She rewrapped her shawl, then dabbed herself with Cuir de Russie and leaned forward saying, “I have bought you something special. Let this be yours. It is from myself entirely.”

  She handed me a little photo wrapped in tissue and as I gazed down on it, I was puzzled.

  “What is it?”

  “It is me as a girl with my black doll, I so loved that doll, I cried when it was taken from me. In Poland it was a rare thing. I had such a love for it. My black doll. Now, sometimes, I think in a strange way you are my black doll.”

  She then embraced me and said with a sigh, “Partir c’est mourir un peu. It’s always like that with us, no?” then she flitted away back to her dinner party.

  Long after she had gone, I stared at the photograph she had given me. I saw Irina as an infant, quite recognisable, with her familiar fringe and clutching her black doll. I wondered at our passion which had so dangerously carried us along, and half-remembering my own black doll, my own hopelessly loved object. In time, I reached up to place the photo with her other offerings to me, grouped on my mantelpiece to form a little shrine: the glass box with blue cornflower motif, her cards and notes to me in a bundle, a drawing that Anton made a
nd a sheaf of seeding barley and poppy heads she had picked for me once during a country walk.

  That intense year with Irina nearly displaced everything that had driven me up until then; yet as August still burned mid-way through I could already see the rowans setting on fruit and the first yellow leaves in the street limes. Irina’s husband had gone to teach at a foreign campus for a few weeks earlier in the month and once more I moved in to the family home. I suggested that we stay up one night and look at the Perseids. Irina asked me what these were and I told her that they were stellar dust, filaments from the tail of comet Swift Tuttle which revisits every year from the north eastern sky. The comet could obliterate the Earth but contents itself with looping around us each summer, shedding in its wake thousands of fragments that burn up in our atmosphere.

  I woke Irina at 3am at the peak of the meteor showers and we both stood barefoot under a cloudless, starry sky in her garden. The city was stilled and, in the pre-dawn night sky, there was a faint penumbra of blue on the horizon. The first ones came, faintly visible with transparent orange tails: earthgrazers, the astronomers called them. Then we could make out twinkling silver and orange showers and tumbling streamers of light weaving all along the horizon’s edge. Irina turned to embrace me in her nightie, “I must fetch Anton and let him see this also.”