by Helen Grant
I didn’t seem to be able to think properly about what had happened. After a little while I crawled over to where he lay, because I didn’t feel as though I had the strength to stand up.
Tom was very white and silent. The blue of his shirt was stained a deep purple and all around him there was a spreading film of red on the tiles. He was absolutely still. I watched but I could not see his chest rising and falling. I think I knew then that he was gone.
Still, I thought perhaps there might be something someone else could do, someone armed with all the modern things Tom had told me about, the medical advances. If there were some spark of life there, they might bring it back. I felt in his pockets until I found his telephone, thinking that I might somehow call for help. I turned the thing over and over in my hands, trying in a confused way to remember what Tom had told me about it, but I was unable to make it do anything at all. I pressed the button that should have brought it to life, but nothing happened. In the end, I put it back into his pocket. It seemed wrong for me to have it.
Then I tried shaking Tom. I tried putting my ear close to his pale lips to hear or feel his breath. There was nothing. At last, shuddering, I laid my head on the purple-dyed shirt, feeling the damp sticking to my skin, and listened for a heartbeat, but there was silence.
I had no energy to move. I lay like that for a long time, until a dull unconsciousness that passed for sleep came over me.
When I awoke, it was light outside. Sunlight came through the window. I saw it through a red film; my eyelashes were full of blood.
My head was still pillowed on Tom’s chest, and even through his clothing I could feel how terribly cold and stiff he was.
I sat up, recoiling in horror from the bloodless face, the eyes staring into nothing. I could not stand up. Instead I scrabbled away across the tiles, moving backwards, eyes wide, until my back touched the wall. I put my arms around my knees, hugging myself. I stared at Tom lying on the tiles.
I don’t know how long I stayed there after that. The sun coming through the windows was very bright at first, and then it moved and changed. There was light coming from the upstairs windows too, and that waxed and waned with the passing day. Eventually the light began to fade altogether.
I don’t properly remember what I did all that time. I might have talked to Tom, even sung to him a little, or I might have done that in my head, or dreamed it. I think I cried some of the time. Sometimes I seemed to go away altogether, to be absent from myself even though my body was still sitting there on the floor of the hallway. Whenever I came back to myself after those times, I would glance at Tom and he would still be there, so cold and white on the floor, with his own blood congealed all around him.
I didn’t feel hungry, even after so long with so little food, but at last it was thirst that compelled me to move. I was so stiff after sitting on the floor that the first time I tried to get up I simply fell over. Eventually I managed it. I staggered down the passageway to the kitchen, where I found a jug of water I had pumped the previous morning. When Tom was still alive. I poured myself a glass of it and drank, then I poured another and drank that too.
I sat at the kitchen table in the gathering dark and wondered what I should do. There was a tin of oatcakes on the sideboard; I opened it and ate two of them. They were dry, and filled my mouth unpleasantly, but I could not think of looking for anything else.
The kitchen stove was out. More from habit than from any real motivation, I lit it again. It would take a long while for the kitchen to become properly warm, but now that night was coming on, I could not imagine going back through the hallway where Tom lay. In the end, I spent the night in the kitchen, doing my best to keep warm by wrapping myself in Grandmother’s old coat, that still hung by the back door. I did not sleep very much.
All that night, one thing ran through my head. Did I mean to shoot, or not? I was so angry, so full of pain. The whole world seemed like a war to me, and Tom was the enemy. My own body had been the collaborator. I was sick with myself and sick with him, filled with fury and shame so intense that it was like madness. When I heard him coming back, I had taken up the rifle, and in the extremity of my agony, I had pointed it at him. But had I meant to pull the trigger? I remembered the gun shaking in my hands because they would not be steady whatever I did. I remembered my finger hovering tremulously over the trigger, risking at any moment the convulsive motion that would set the gun off. So easy for an accident to happen – the merest unintentional twitch of the finger would be enough.
I don’t know why it seemed so important to decide whether I had done it on purpose or not. The end result was the same. Tom was lying dead on the floor of the hallway, and nothing could change that. I had shot him. My hands had killed him, no-one else’s.
Still, it seemed to me that his death would be easier to bear if it were an accident, and not intended. Surely it had been an accident? My hands had been shaking so much I could hardly say that I was in control of them. Sometimes I really believed that it was accidental, but at other, bleaker, times I was afraid that I was simply deceiving myself, that underneath all my protestations and denials, I had really meant to do it.
At some point in these terrible deliberations, I finally fell asleep, slumped over the kitchen table, wrapped in Grandmother’s overcoat and my blood-stained nightdress. I had not even washed Tom’s blood off my face.
When I awoke the next day, I was stiff again but a strange calm had descended on me. All the savage emotions had drained away. I felt hollow. It was hard to imagine that I should ever feel anything again. Nevertheless, I began to think what I should do, in a curiously detached way, as though the situation had nothing to do with me.
Tom was lying dead in the hallway of the house in a large pool of blood that had probably dried by now. His motorcycle was somewhere outside the house. I had blood on my clothes, and my skin, and in my hair. And my bedroom upstairs bore what only the dullest wit could fail to interpret as signs of a struggle.
What would happen if someone from the Outside discovered any of this? I supposed they would hang me, unless they had thought of something worse since 1945. I supposed that I deserved it, and yet – I saw no particular reason to offer myself up to it. It wouldn’t bring Tom back.
The first thing to do was to put on some working clothes. I couldn’t sort anything out dressed in the impractical combination of an outdoor coat and a nightdress with long sleeves and a trailing hem. I steeled myself to go back along the passageway and through the hall so that I could climb the stairs to my own room.
It was not as bad as I expected. I knew what I should see. Tom did not look as though he was asleep, as people in books were sometimes supposed to do. He did not even really look like Tom. Something essential had departed; what was left was a shell. I had never seen anyone look as inert as that. There was no mistaking death. I could not even say sorry to him; he had gone, completely.
I went upstairs to my room, stripped off the coat and the nightdress, and dressed quickly in some of my oldest things. I took care to put on boots; there was a quantity of broken glass lying around from the shattered picture frame, and I had no desire to cut myself to ribbons on it. I caught sight of myself in the little mirror over the washstand and had to stare. There was dried blood on my face, like war paint, and parts of my hair were stiff with it. I poured some water from the jug into the basin and rinsed as much of it off as I could. I would have to bathe properly later, when the work was done, but there was something horribly grisly about going about with Tom’s blood on my face.
I swept up the broken glass. The sheets I bundled up to take downstairs for washing. Once the bed was made again, the room would look much as it had before. Then I went downstairs, carrying a few things with me.
I tried to do my best for Tom. I couldn’t leave him in the clothes that were dyed in his own blood. The horrible stiffness had gone now, so I was able with some difficulty to undress the
body and wash it. I did my best not to look at the wound. It made his death too brutal, and I wanted to think that he was at peace now.
I cleaned as much of the floor around and under his body as I could, and then I dressed him in the clothes we had chosen together from the trunks in the attic. It took a long time. I had never had to dress anyone but myself before, and certainly not a male body. I knew what the collar studs and other things were, but it took me a while to fit them.
Mostly I was calm while I did this. Only once, when he was naked, an image flashed across my mind of the two of us in bed together, of his warm body moving together with mine. Then I ran outside, my hand to my mouth, and threw up helplessly onto the gravel.
I made myself go back inside and finish the task after that. There was no other thing I could do for Tom now.
When he was washed and dressed, I wrapped him in the largest sheet I could find. There was no other way to drag the body outside without making him just as dirty as before.
Only when Tom was secure in this makeshift shroud did I feel I could take a break. I stumbled down the passageway to the kitchen and drank as much water as I could. I scavenged some other things – biscuits, a withered apple – and made myself eat them. And I picked up the padlock from the mausoleum, with the key still sticking out of it, and put it into my pocket.
I opened the front door and propped it with a wooden wedge. Then I went out to look at the ground. I had no idea when the rain had stopped, but now the sun was shining and much of the water had evaporated or drained off. That was good; the grass and the soil would still be damp but I hoped I wouldn’t have to drag Tom through actual mud. I went back to the hallway to fetch his body.
I made fists of my hands in the end of the sheet, and dragged it out of the house. There was no other way. I could not have lifted him. By the time we got to the corner of the house, my arms and hands and back were aching, and I was sobbing aloud. The sheet slid over the grass at the side of the house with a sound like a harsh whisper, and a bird, disturbed by the noise, fluttered out of the undergrowth and flew away. Other than myself and the bird, no other living thing stirred.
It took me a long time to drag Tom’s body to the mausoleum. In places where tree roots or fallen branches crossed the path, I had to haul him over them bodily. Often, I had to stop and rest, and I leaned over the bundle, whispering I’m sorry, I’m sorry, crying at the final indignity being wreaked on him.
At last, I was able to drag him into the cool gloom of the mausoleum. I did not look at the contents of the open stone coffin. I knelt on the floor and uncovered the dead face; I kissed the dead lips, but already he was hard to recognise as the Tom I had loved. I covered his face carefully and stepped back out into the daylight.
Then I went back into the house, cleaned my hands and face as best as I could, and went to the library. There I selected a small volume bound in dark leather with the title picked out in gold on the spine: The Book of Common Prayer. I had no idea what Tom believed in, but it seemed the decent thing to do.
I carried the book out to the spot where he lay, and went through it until I found the order for the burial of the dead. I read all of it aloud. My voice wavered and cracked, and I dug the nails of the hand not holding the book into my palm, but at last it was finished. It was faintly ludicrous to observe formalities after I had killed someone, but it was also strangely comforting in a way. I couldn’t make things right, but I didn’t have to make them anymore wrong by disposing of Tom’s body without dignity.
Afterwards, I closed up the mausoleum and locked it with the padlock. Then I walked wearily up through the forest to the place where the stream cascaded down the rocks into a pool, and I threw the key into the deepest part of the water.
Tom’s motorcycle caused me some trouble. He had parked it at the far edge of the drive, where it was sheltered from the torrential rain by the overhanging tree branches. I went and looked at it for a long time. The keys were in it, but I did not dare to try and ride it anywhere. I was not sure I could have remembered the sequence of things Tom did with his hands and feet to start it, even if I had been relaxed and well rested; now I was miserable and exhausted. I did remember the power of the machine, how it had rumbled and throbbed when the engine was running, and I mistrusted it; I might as well have tried to ride a fire-breathing dragon.
In the end I pushed the bike over into the undergrowth. I fetched an old tarpaulin to conceal the bright metal, and then I did my best to conceal the whole thing under broken branches and handfuls of mulch. The effect was not entirely satisfactory but so long as nobody went right under the trees and actively searched, I thought it might escape notice. I hoped so. So long as it was never found, and Tom’s body lay safely hidden in the mausoleum, his family need never know what had happened to him. They might imagine that he was still out there somewhere, skimming along the open road with the wind in his hair. I wished that were true myself. As I walked back into the house, I began to weep.
The next day was my eighteenth birthday.
They come, as I thought they probably would: two of them, in black uniforms. A man and a woman this time.
I’ve thought about it a lot. I could lock the doors and pretend there is nobody here, like I did the last time. They might just go away, but supposing they don’t? They might decide to walk around the side of the house, to see if there is any other way in, and if they do that, there is just the remotest chance they might see that place under the tree, where the motorcycle is hidden. Or they might come back later and search properly. Better to give them some answers and let them go away for good.
I could tell them the truth, of course.
I killed Tom McAllister. He’s in the old mausoleum in the grounds.
But I don’t want to be hanged, or whatever else they do to people now. I know I don’t deserve to live, since I’ve taken someone else’s life, but still I want to hang onto my existence, haunted though it is.
It’s Tom who haunts me, or at least, his absence does. Wherever I go in the house – the window where I stood and gazed at him, the attic where we chose the clothes together, the bedroom where we made love – I remember him. It’s almost as though he’s still there. But I never see him, even though I long to. The pain of his not being there is indescribable. I wish I still had something of him, however insubstantial.
I shan’t ever leave Langlands. Oh, I suppose at some point I shall run out of things and I shall have to make the trip into town, travelling wearily by foot since there’s no longer a car. But I shall keep my contact with the outside to a minimum. There is a kind of War going on out there, for me at any rate.
I shall stay here forever, with the ghosts of what passed and the ghosts of what might have been. Forever may not prove to be so very long after all. There’s something wrong with me. I’m sick all the time; the last three days I’ve thrown up my breakfast. It’s not like anything I’ve ever had before; perhaps it’s something I caught from the Outside. Supposing it never gets better? Then maybe justice will be done after all.
In the meantime, I have to think what to say to these people. When they knock at the front door, I open it. I see surprise on their faces; I see them look at each other. They didn’t really expect anyone to be here. I suppose I’m not looking my best, either. I’m pale and tired because I didn’t manage to keep my breakfast down. I try to look presentable though, even though I’m alone here. I’m wearing a clean dress and stockings and shoes. Old things, but neat. I may let my hair grow again too in time.
“Good morning,” I say, politely.
“Good morning, miss,” says the man. “We didn’t know there was anyone living here.”
“Yes,” I say. Just that.
They look at each other again. I suppose they are wondering who I am, and whether I was here before, and perhaps whether I have a right to be here at all. But that isn’t what they have come for at this time.
; “We’re making enquiries about a missing person,” says the woman. She holds something out to me.
Before I’ve even looked at it, I guess what it is. This is the moment I have to steel myself for. I mustn’t react when I look at it. I mustn’t give myself away.
It’s a photograph of Tom. Handsome, kind, dead Tom. I take it from her fingers and look at it gravely, as though considering whether I might ever have seen this person before. I hear the woman talking, saying that this is Tom McAllister, aged nineteen, missing since, motorbike also gone, family grieving. All those things.
I shake my head. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Are you sure?” she says.
“He and his father did some work up here during the winter,” says the man. “You weren’t here then?”
“No,” I say.
“And you haven’t seen him around here at any other time when you’ve been here?”
I shake my head.
“This place has a bit of reputation locally,” says the man, looking at me. His gaze is not unfriendly, but I am still on my guard. “Tom McAllister’s family thought there was a small chance he might have come back up here. Dared himself, or something. They seemed to think the place was empty, now the previous owner has died.” He shrugs. “Derelict buildings are dangerous. Break in, have an accident...”
“It’s not derelict,” I say. “I live here now.”
“And you are?” says the woman.
“I’m Augusta McAndrew.”
“A relative of the previous owner then? It’s a shame you weren’t here before,” she says. “I heard it took them a while to find her next of kin.”
“Yes,” I say. I wish I could ask them about Grandmother, if they know where she is buried. But I stop myself. I’ve told them I wasn’t here when Tom and his father worked here last winter. It’s best to leave it there. It’s something, to know that they did find some of Grandmother’s family – someone to take care of her.