The Other Lives

by Adrian J. Walker

  ‘The Herald,’ lies Zoe. ‘I’m writing a piece on bench plaques in the area.’

  ‘Right,’ says Gladys. ‘And…’

  Her eyes travel towards me and I drop my gaze.

  ‘My assistant,’ says Zoe. ‘Why did you choose that bench for the plaque?’

  ‘It was a favourite spot of his. He liked the view of the harbour and the coastline. He liked boats.’

  Gladys munches her fig roll and brushes the crumbs from her lap.

  ‘I never liked my father.’

  She releases a breath and her shoulders fall, as if the words were a knotted rope she has finally freed. The action has a strange effect on me and I look up.

  Why?

  ‘I was supposed to. Everyone called him a nice man, a quiet man, a thoughtful man. And he was. He never hurt anyone. He never hurt me. He worked hard, same job all his life. Kept his shoes clean, kept his hair a respectable length. He was twenty years older than my mother. He bought her flowers on her birthday, gave me a shilling on mine. He always smiled when he saw me, never told me off. He left that to my mother. He didn’t drink, didn’t gamble. Other men did, especially the ones who came back from the fighting.’

  ‘What did he do in the war?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. He never spoke of it.’

  I feel a nauseous chill. I know exactly what he did.

  ‘He never stayed out, never strayed, never disappointed us. On Saturdays he took his Jack Russell out for a walk up the coast and over the hills. He’d be gone by the time I was awake and then I wouldn’t see him until the afternoon, when he returned with his paper under his arm. He’d kiss my mother on the cheek, then sit in his chair until teatime. Sunday was church. That was my favourite time because we’d all walk back together: him, mother and me.

  ‘Whenever we got to that bench, my mother would say here we are, your father’s favourite spot. And sometimes we’d sit and watch the sea. He liked calm water, mill pond weather, but I couldn’t stand it. It didn’t seem natural for an ocean to stand still. I wanted to see it churning, all moving about and making a noise. There was a storm once, and I remember wanting to stay and watch it. The water was black, fierce, frightening.’

  Gladys’ eyes sparkle. I can almost see the memories flitting through them.

  ‘But he led us back. Come on, it’s terrible, he said. He looked scared. Scared of water. I was never more ashamed of him.’

  I find myself shaking, wanting to speak. Zoe senses this and grabs my hand to stop me. Gladys doesn’t notice. She’s looking up at her net curtains.

  ‘Sunday afternoons he’d write whilst my mother made tea; then he’d go for another walk and be asleep by evening. He was like clockwork.’

  ‘He sounds like a gentle man,’ says Zoe. ‘You were lucky.’

  Gladys snorts bitterly.

  ‘That’s what I was always told, love. How lucky I was to have such a nice father. He’s such a kind soul, they’d say. But I never saw kindness. He’d never hurt a fly, they’d say. And it’s true, he never would. But he’d never make a child laugh either, or make her feel like she was special, or even sit her on his knee.’

  ‘At least he didn’t hurt you,’ says Zoe.

  ‘A girl needs more than that from her father. More than just safety.’

  Gladys stares out of the window at the dim afternoon. Her lips tremble as she considers the words.

  ‘I hated him.’

  She looks at us, shocked or elated at her own words—it’s hard to tell.

  ‘And I don’t like that word, hate, I really don’t. But it’s the truth. All I wanted was to see something of him—some kind of feeling or emotion, anything that told me he was human. Sometimes I’d be deliberately naughty around him, try to make him cross. I broke an ornament once when he was sitting in his chair. I knocked it off the dresser, a china doll my mother liked. I liked it too. But I just tipped it off like this.’

  She taps two fingers in the air.

  ‘It shattered into hundreds of pieces at my feet, and my heart began to pound. I was sure he’d tan me, sure I’d see him in a rage, and I wanted it; I wanted him to grab me, wanted to feel his anger.’

  She looks shamefully at Zoe, who is looking at her feet.

  ‘But he just lowered his paper, then mumbled for my mother, who had already heard the crash. It was her who tanned me. Real proper one and all. He never got up from his chair.’

  She picks up her cup and stirs her tea in slow circles.

  ‘He was adrift. He was adrift from the world like a boat cut loose from the harbour. He had no connections to people, nothing real, nothing at all. If you want to know about my father, I’ll tell you — he was a nothing man, a clockwork nothing man.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I snap.

  Gladys looks at me, startled. Zoe too. With every word Gladys speaks, I remember more about her dead father — and yes, it feels absurd, and yes, every new memory brings with it a swell of doubt and fear, but they come nonetheless. I remember his sadness, I remember the loneliness, the feelings of impotence as he struggled with life. Gladys was right — Stanley Mordant was adrift, but he wasn’t a nothing man. He would have given anything to find a way back to reality, back to his daughter.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, staring into the carpet’s brown spirals.

  We sit in silence for a moment. Then Gladys frowns.

  ‘There was one time,’ she says. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and heard something from the front room. I walked through and found him there in his chair. He had his head in his hands. I thought he’d died at first. Dad, I said. Then he looked up. His eyes were red. He cleared his throat and stood up, sorted himself out. Never spoke of it again.’

  I remember it.

  I remember what he was hiding, and what it cost him to do so. I can feel his weakness. I can feel the well of his own making into which he fell time and time again.

  ‘If you hated him so much,’ I say, trying to hide the bitterness in my voice, ‘then why did you put the plaque on the bench?’

  ‘It’s what my mother wanted. She liked to think of him looking out at the boats. I sat there once, about a year after he died. I thought, I’ll just try. I’ll just try to pretend being him, try to imagine what it was like to be him. It was another mill pond day. The water was like grey glass, with all the boats wedged in it. I couldn’t stand it; I felt like screaming. No movement, no energy, no life. The thought of staring at that scene for eternity…well, it felt like hell to me. Absolute hell. But I suppose it was heaven for him.’

  She takes another fig roll from the plate and eats it in two bites, munching furiously and staring through the window.

  ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to be other people,’ she says. ‘You just can’t. We’re too different. Only our surfaces are the same. Underneath it’s different water.’

  Gladys licks her fingers and brushes the crumbs from her lap.

  ‘But that shouldn’t stop you from being nice. I don’t hold with hiding away under rocks. You have to make friends, as many as possible, in my book. And real ones too, none of these imaginary computer ones people are always going on about. Real people. Real connections, talking and listening.’ She gets to her feet. ‘Speaking of friends, my bridge ladies are going to be here soon, so if you’ll excuse me…’

  We stand up too. My heart is pounding.

  ‘Do you mind if I use your toilet?’ says Zoe.

  ‘Of course not. It’s through the hall.’

  Zoe walks out, leaving Gladys and I alone. I keep my face hidden, counting the seconds.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know who you are,’ she says at last.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Herald. There is no Herald. You’re him off the telly. I’d recognise you a mile off.’

  ‘I, I don’t…’

  ‘Nasty piece of work, you are, if you ask me. It’s not right to treat people the way you treat them. It’s not entertainment, it’s brutality. And all for money.’<
br />
  She’s moving in on me. I can feel her breath, and the smell of recently minced fig roll.

  ‘What are you doing here? What do you really want?’

  I can’t keep my eyes away any longer. I look at her and I’m in, sliding down the years of her life, feeling everything she told us and a whole lot more. Right now I’m fierce. Elliot Childs — a man she despises — is in her house, and she wants to know why.

  I grab my lifeline, and back to the shallows I float, mumbling as I go.

  ‘Your father loved you, Mrs Mordant.’

  ‘What did you say? Now listen here, I —’

  I take the photograph from my inside pocket.

  ‘Do you recognise this, Mrs Mordant?’

  She peers at it. In a second her face has lost its grimace and most of its blood. She takes a shuddering breath and staggers backwards, into the corner of the room. There’s the sound of a flush and Zoe returns from the bathroom.

  ‘Mrs Mordant, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  Gladys gathers herself, straightening her cardigan and wincing at the photograph still in my hand, as if it is an unwanted thing.

  ‘Wait here,’ she says.

  She scurries from the room, and there is the sound of drawers and cupboards banging. When she returns, she’s holding an old shoe box.

  ‘I have never opened this and I never will.’

  ‘What is it?’ asks Zoe.

  ‘My mother gave it to me before she died last year. She told me he gave it to her before he died. She said he had had it for a long time.’

  She looks up. Her face is drawn and haunted.

  ‘He had only two instructions. The first was to keep this safe. The second was to give it to anybody who came enquiring about a photograph.’

  She nods at the one in my hand.

  ‘That photograph.’

  Her hands are shaking as she holds out the box.

  ‘Take it.’

  I do as she asks. It is old and full of dents. The surface is rusted, but a picture is still just visible on the lid — a colourful sketch of a merry-go-round, one horse ridden by a little girl in pigtails with her head thrown back in delight.

  ‘What do you think this is?’ says Zoe.

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. I only have a bit of future left, and I’d rather not spend it dwelling on the past. Now, please…’

  She sighs, and I can feel a sudden lightness about her.

  ‘Take it and leave.’

  We are shown to the door and greeted by a wall of rain. We turn to leave, but as Zoe bolts through the rain to the car, Gladys Mordant grabs my arm.

  ‘I honestly don’t care what you’re doing here, but don’t come back. You’re not welcome.’

  And with that, she closes the door.

  We drive out of town through the storm, with the grey headland rising up through streaks of water falling from ranks of black cloud. I hold the box in my hands, recognising its shape, feeling every bump and dent like a long-forgotten but well-known landscape. We stop at a carpark overlooking the deserted bay, the car still moving as the wind pummels it. Only then do I open the lid.

  THE OTHER LIVES

  MY NAME IS STANLEY Mordant and I have lived before.

  As I write this, I am sixty years of age. The war is ten years done, but it’s still being fought. It’s being fought inside me, and inside every other man who others thought lucky to return from it.

  Our man Churchill has just resigned. The country is poor, but I doubt any would care to complain. Just like me and those other bastards — those six years are to be pushed down and forgotten about. Not to be spoken of, unless it is with pride or joy.

  Never with complaint.

  My father always said that complaint was the baby inside of you still crying for its mother. You had to stop that when you were young or you’d never grow up. And don’t say anything out of place, or that might confuse people or make you appear strange or anything else but a strong man in control of his own destiny. Be strong. Don’t let life eat at you. Beat it back with a rod of your own making. Be stern and stoic and all the rest.

  Don’t be weak. Don’t be different. Don’t say strange things.

  This was extremely difficult advice for the young boy that I was.

  I had my first other dream — and my first real memory — when I was four. We lived in a council tenement in Edinburgh. My mother was a Scot, my father a soldier from Manchester who met her while training north of the border. We were seven to a room — my mother and father in one bed with my sister, me and my two brothers in a second, although I, being the youngest, usually found myself on the floor. My grandmother slept behind a curtain and kept us awake with her groans and whinnies like a knackered horse. It was cold, so whenever I felt that kick that sent me out of bed and onto the wood floor, I would slide towards the stove and curl up beside it, hoping for warmth.

  One of these nights I awoke with a terrible fright, believing myself to be in the wrong body. For a second, I thought that this was the dream — this reality, not what I had just experienced. But the feeling soon wore off and I was left in the darkness, struggling to understand with nothing but the clouds of my breath and the sounds of my grandmother’s agonies for company.

  I had dreamed of being Emily Havers. She was my first dream and my most common ever since. I think she is the closest to me. I think she is the one I was directly before I was me. It would certainly make sense, given the date of her birth and death: 1849–1868. It took me until the age of 21 to look her up. Funny, that. I was so convinced of the reality of her existence that it never occurred to me to prove she had in fact lived.

  Or it may only have been that she was my first. I know I have lived lives that come after this one in the flow of time. I can remember walking through cities of light in air so clear I hardly seemed to be breathing. I can remember a world of water, an entire life without knowing the feeling of dry land beneath my feet. I can remember fighting in week-long wars with hideous weaponry strapped to my side. I can remember lying with a woman on sheets drenched with the light of two suns.

  And I can remember an old wooden warship. The smell of it. A pile of green matter and bone landing next to my canon — the brains of the boy who manned the one next to me. I can remember riding bareback across a wide plain, my fingers stroking the spear in my hand. I can remember a cave, and dull, wordless thought.

  Stanley Mordant has lived before and after himself.

  How can this be?

  I have long since stopped struggling to answer this. I have only ever met one other person like me and my time with him was short, so you could say my guidance was lacking.

  But Emily Havers was my first. She was so vivid, so real. She never let me go. She coloured my life — everything I thought, believed and did from that moment on.

  I told my brothers, who beat me for it. Then I told my mother, who kissed my head and cut me breakfast from the porridge drawer. When I told my father later that evening — sat on his lap by the stove — he gave me a strange look. I watched his face struggle between comfort and reprisal — part of him wanted to pat my head, the other part wanted to strike it.

  In the end, the second part won and he chided me, dropping me to the floor, pulling on his boots and leaving for the alehouse. I think at that moment, I ceased to be his youngest baby boy. From then on I was to be a man, and only to be given manly advice.

  Don’t be weak. Don’t be different. Don’t say strange things.

  I told my grandmother by candlelight. She watched me speaking with awful, haunted eyes. Then she rolled over in her bed, leaving a sliver of drool on her pillow.

  One Sunday soon after, we received a visit from a minister enquiring about my father’s absence from church. My father, still drunk from his payday evening, flew into a roaring rage. He gripped the minister’s collar and dragged him yelping down the three stone flights of the tenement stair, in full view of the neighbours, and hurled him out
onto the street. My mother called it ‘the day your father threw God from the family’.

  We left Scotland and my father was posted to India, where we spent three years in the mountains. My dreams continued, fuelled by the heat, the humid nights, the pungent air and the monstrous insects that crawled our walls. They became more numerous and more vivid, and as I got older I began to remember things when I was awake too. It was as if my dreams had run out of space for the memories, so they began to leak out. A conversation at breakfast would trigger a recollection of something thought or done hundreds of years in the past or future. The sight of a particular face might send me into paroxysms of grief for some ancient tragedy.

  My mind became full of these things, and with nobody to talk to about them, I thought I might explode. Still they came, piling on top of each other with no sign of respite. I felt like I had no more room to be Stanley Mordant. I felt like he was just as much a ghost as the others.

  Then I met Mr Galesh.

  To get to school in India, I had to walk three miles across the jungle hills near where we lived. I dreaded this daily journey. There were bandits in these hills — as well as tigers, snakes and a hundred other things that wished you dead — but it was not because of bandits or tigers that I was afraid. I was afraid because of the local legend about an evil, blue-faced wizard who lived in the hills and would boil your head for his magic if he caught you. Nobody knew where he lived or dared to find out. But if he saw you — chop, plop: Your head was for his pot.

  One day I walked to school in torrential rain. It was monsoon season, and once those clouds opened, you could expect them to remain open for a long time. This was a different breed of rain to back home — not the wet squall of Edinburgh. This stuff was thick and warm and endless. The air became a swarm of giant, hot drops, each one a puddle in itself. The ground flooded instantly. And it didn’t stop. It just would not stop.

  Halfway along a ridge, my feet became stuck in the new mud. I felt myself moving. I felt the mountain slide, and I slid with it.