by Jemma Wayne
Luke hasn’t said anything, but over the creeping winter weeks Vera has noticed him beginning to look at her like this. And not only from beneath an arched brow. There are other tiny, barely perceptible differences that hit Vera at her core. Like when she makes a joke and his face stiffens. Or when she reaches for his hand, and he moves it away. It has been a long time since he kissed her.
One November night, he turns up late on her doorstep, and she can almost see the turmoil inside him bursting at his sensible seams. She has forgotten to call him during the day and hasn’t checked her messages. It is possible that he has rung. But she has been trying to avoid thinking about the phone and who else might be at the end of it, or what that person might shout at her down the line. Luke tells her he has been at his mother’s. Vera doesn’t know what to say. She offers him her arms but he shrinks away from them. She offers him wine, but – with arched eyebrows – he shakes his head. He wants to talk, but not about his mother, or St George’s, or them, or work, and nothing she says seems appropriate. He doesn’t stay.
The following day he reminds her, over the phone, that she shouldn’t be drinking wine. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” he asks. “And that you have a duty not to allow it to be mastered by anything?” It isn’t a lot to ask, he says over and over. Not from his future wife. Silence follows this. She senses that she is meant to fill it, but cannot. She is not really thinking of giving up wine. It does not seem to her to be a prerequisite for loving Jesus. And besides, she is thinking of the red she drank at the tapas bar all those weeks ago, and listening to the beep on her phone line that is almost certainly Charlie calling again.
“Tell me something true,” she asks Luke softly.
Luke sighs. “It’s late Vera. I’d better call Mother before bed.”
During the night, Luke’s words stack up around her. On top of her. Heavy. They terrify her with their judgement. She dare not even imagine what he would say if he knew the whole truth of what she has done. What would her parents say? What would a judge say? What is Jesus saying? Fragments of passages she has been learning at the Alpha Course run through her head. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. She doesn’t feel free.
Over and over Vera searches the bible. Over and over she ignores her phone. Over and over she prays, and smokes, and collects the ash into a small container that she waters with tears and intends to bury. Her lungs the only witness to the slow, gradual goodbye she has begun to say to the baby she longs for more and more, and longs to lay to rest.
Chapter
Seventeen
They had been playing Rummy before the boys arrived. Lynn would have preferred Kaluki but they would have needed a third, and even with the simpler game, Emily was proving a faster master of numbers and probability. Lynn had never been a great one for games of chance, or maths. Her strength had always lain in sideways thinking, in analysis, creativity and blind faith. But suddenly, numbers that gave definitive answers were more appealing than they had been. They left no room for doubt, no space for what ifs. Plus, in Rummy, there was the opportunity to gamble, to risk everything. While Emily collected straights and pairs and flushes, Lynn, with equal skill, gathered spaces between them into which she wove questions about Emily’s childhood, about Rwanda.
The shock of seeing her curled up in the park the previous week had not quite left Lynn. Nor her words: She’s dead. At night, the image flashed before her, unsettling, but replacing at least visions of her own demise. Emily’s knuckles were healing and she’d regained her composure, that insurmountable, lip-curled restraint, but a knowledge had passed between the two women of darker things beneath bleeding skin. Lynn had not told her sons when Emily had failed to show up for work the morning after their trip to the shops. Nor had she complained to the agency. Instead, she had called Emily herself, three times before the phone was finally answered, and marshalled the girl back into the world of the waking. Without condemnation she had instructed Emily to return. And quietly, she had noticed the contriteness in the girl, the gratitude, the fresh nervousness and timidity. A bond of conspiracy flapped tantalisingly between them. But Lynn knew better than to start with the genocide. She asked Emily about what food they ate, about the dances they did, about the games played by children.
“But I am not a usual example,” said Emily, having been enticed ever so slowly into such a conversation. “I climbed trees with my brothers, and played football, and liked to be dirty, not like the other girls.”
“You were a tomboy,” nodded Lynn, understanding. “So was I.”
“You climbed trees?” asked Emily, smiling in amusement, looking up from her cards as if to draw the image.
“And once fell out of one. You see this arm?” Lynn raised her left arm, before conceding to a stab of pain in it. “I broke it in three places.”
Emily grinned wider. “I suppose it was strange for you then to have a boy so feminine.”
“Feminine?”
“John. Was he always so gentle? Was it a shock when you found out he was gay?”
“John is not gay,” said Lynn abruptly.
Emily looked up again from her cards. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Oh. Okay.”
“He’s sensitive, that’s all.”
“Okay.”
They both paused. Lynn threw a card away and Emily picked it up. “Rummy,” she said hesitantly, laying down the proof.
Of course on some level, Lynn had always known it. In the deepest crevices of her memory was a day, a year before Philip had died, when John was just 15, and he had tried to talk to her, to tell her, to have her listen. But before he could wade into the pain of the conversation that was back then written so frequently all over his face, she had hushed him up. With silly questions about what he wanted for his supper, and if he had done his homework, and yes she did know his friend Tony, and wasn’t he the boy whose mother had gone into a psychiatric hospital, and it was good of John to remain such a close friend to him in what must be a very confusing time. Philip had been in the next room and would have lectured John with Christian teachings about the sin of homosexuality. Which to some extent, Lynn had believed too.
So she had diverted the conversation, and thought she was sparing him. She pretended, later, that he had not been trying to tell her what she suspected. That with her omission she had helped him, guided him away from sin without having to judge it, or him, and unravel everything. She prayed that Luke and Philip wouldn’t notice and knew that they wouldn’t. She helped them not to and told herself again that there was nothing to see in the first place. Believed it. Ignored it. Ignored it. Ignored it.
“He’s sensitive,” Lynn said again.
“Okay,” confirmed Emily.
Of course that was the moment that the front door slammed and John’s voice sang up the stairs. It was past twelve but Emily had convinced Lynn that morning that it was acceptable for her to have lunch in bed, that in fact, it made it easier for her because Lynn’s medicine was upstairs anyway.
“Mother?” came John’s deep, soft tones. “Are you up there with the angel?”
Emily glanced at her awkwardly. Lynn’s voice was no longer strong enough to shout back, so she cued Emily to do so. Unable still to shout in front of her, Emily scurried to the door and stuck her head around it so that John could see her from the stairs. “We’re in here,” she told him softly. “We’re having a day in bed. With Rummy.”
“With rum? Oh, but I brought brandy,” John winked appearing empty-handed. “How are you Angel?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“How is she?”
“I’ll leave you to spend some time,” said Emily. She followed John back into Lynn’s bedroom and glanced meaningfully at Lynn before picking up the tray of lunch and making for the door.
“Hello Mother,” breathed John, settling into the vacated chair next to her bed. “You look stunning.”
John was still sitting with Lynn, regaling her with the story
of a botched performance the night before, when Luke arrived. Lynn supposed the lightness of John’s tone, or of his life – in comparison to the weight of helping Africa’s poor, and getting married, and looking after his mother – was grating to Luke. And perhaps this is what set them off. But it had been the same between them for a long time. When Philip had died and Luke had stepped so bravely and seamlessly into his shoes, John had still been tucked up in the bosom of childhood. Or so it must have appeared to Luke. John had had meals cooked for him, and school teachers to direct him, and did not seem to feel the need to take on any of their father’s responsibilities at church. Like Luke did. Of course Lynn saw with searing clarity now that John didn’t, because John couldn’t. But she had pretended too well for too long. And what Luke must have seen all those years ago was his younger brother spending more and more time away from home, with friends who they never met, at clubs they did not go to, leaving Lynn alone so that Luke felt he had to come back from university to keep her company at weekends.
Two years later, at the first chance John got, he moved out of home altogether into a student flat, even though he could have stayed at home with their widowed mother during his time at the drama school which was only 10 minutes away. After that, he had never returned really, or made the effort to include Lynn in his life, and Luke was infuriated by this. By the contrast between his flighty brother and the expectations he demanded of himself. Lynn made excuses for him. She had always made excuses for him, and though she knew this angered Luke further, she understood now why she did it. Her eldest son however, couldn’t comprehend the compelling force of culpability, and she could not explain it to him.
As they sat on either side of her bed, Luke and John bickered as usual, and looked to her to call the winner. Luke, who had raced over to see her on a lunch break from work and noted that John who had been free all morning, had only just arrived, preached Responsibility; John countered with Humility. There was a time when she would have knocked their heads together and been done with it, but the sound of their arguing made her so tired now, so wretchedly tired, and instead she closed her eyes. Their voices circled in a dizzying hum. In the end, it was Emily who silenced them.
“I heard shouts,” she said, sticking her head around the bedroom door. “All the way from the kitchen. Is everything okay Mrs Hunter?”
At once the boys quietened. It had never been acceptable for family grievances to be aired in public and this was one value on which they all continued to agree.
“It’s okay Angel,” John said brightly, smiling immediately. “Thank you, everything’s fine.”
“Mrs Hunter?”
Lynn appreciated that it was her opinion being sought and not that of her sons. “Thank you Emily. I’m fine,” she said, looking to her quiet, seated offspring. “They’re behaving themselves now.”
But then, Luke stood up. “Emily. Sorry, I wouldn’t usually leave these things to my brother but - I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time,” he said as he volunteered an outstretched hand. And as Emily shook it, it was impossible not to notice how stricken her face was, how suddenly hunched her posture, how her hand trembled then flew to flatten the fringe over her eye. Even Luke, so easily confident, flushed red against her awkwardness.
“Well you made quite an impression,” John teased as soon as the door was closed. “Got a way with the women have you Luke?”
“Be quiet,” Luke had retorted, pulling on his coat. But then paused, looking towards the door, then to his feet. Then to his mother. “You are okay with her mother, aren’t you?” he asked, fatigue or perhaps anxiousness dragging his voice into a whisper.
Lynn only flapped her hand.
Chapter
Eighteen
It was as though she was there all over again, standing, facing him.
It was his eyes: the half-grey, half-green duplicity of them. Not one thing or another, but two things at once. Lightness and dark. Trust and deceit. After and Before.
They penetrated her armour. They dug beneath Lynn and London. And she was there again, in front of him.
Of course, Luke’s skin was white, he had blond hair, and a far more angular nose. A black face, a brown face, even Omar’s movie star, smiling face should have been a closer comparison. But the eyes, the eyes alone sent Emily running downstairs and into the closed room at the back of the house, the door for which she’d days ago finally found the key though not yet opened, locking it fast behind her.
She had no idea how long it took for her to calm herself. She breathed deeply, forcing the air into her closing lungs, and stared straight ahead of her at the panel of the door she rested her head upon. Over and over she told herself that she was safe, she was in England, she repeated it out loud. She conjured visions of snow, and skyscrapers, and trains, and puddles. She rubbed her wool-bound arms and reminded herself of winter winds, of grumpy bus drivers, of white faces. But her body wouldn’t listen. It shook violently. Her stomach contracted and she vomited onto the floor. Emily’s skin was cold but covered in sweat. Outside the room, she heard doors open and close, footsteps on the stairs, then slower ones, the creaking of the couch in the living room, the buzz of the TV; yet they could just as easily have been gunshots and the sickening slice of machete, the hum of laughter, the thud of her face on the ground.
At some point she must have passed out. It happened sometimes. More often lately. A shrill ringing would begin inside her head, growing louder until the pain of it was unbearable, and then finally turn everything to blackness. When she opened her eyes, they were caked in sticky reminders of her desolation, her left arm was numb from lying too long upon it, and the room stank of her own vomit. She looked to see if there was a window.
The room was covered in painted canvasses. Great, five-foot tall ones leaning against a table; smaller, square ones dripping from the walls and piled on top of each other in a careless fashion as if they were excess crates of beer; and a single, carefully positioned canvas set upon an easel, unfinished. Emily approached it and to reveal it better drew apart the heavy curtains that covered the great French doors to the garden, opening a window to let out the smell. There was something about this particular painting that drew her to it. The others were beautiful and intricate, whole stories conveyed in the wrinkles of angular faces, the sideways glance of an eye, or in the meandering paths in the distant corners of vast landscapes. But the unfinished painting was of a different style. It was a face only. Stark and stripped. A crown of wispy blond hair flew about the background as though the figure was in rapid motion, but the blue eyes were still, the skin pale and serene but for a spattering of freckles, and the expression on the mouth unremarkable. Yet the effect was luminous. Somehow full of hope and possibility and strength and courage. Emily looked down. Despite the impression of colour on the canvas, she saw that Lynn had used reds mainly; countless shades of them that must have been painstakingly mixed within the small pallet lying crusty and neglected beside the easel.
Emily’s mother had loved art, though they never owned any, just as her father had loved books though in his job at the hotel he was barely required to read a whole sentence. To Emily’s memory, art was not a means of expression that had touched her much in Rwanda, there was not a tradition of it. There was dance, there was song, but nobody in their village painted; perhaps for lack of tools or time. Still, her mother had taken her as a young child to an exhibition at a small gallery in Kigali and pointed out a painting that she herself had seen three times before. She told Emily that the painting gave her hope, though she didn’t say why or for what reason hope was needed, only stood, staring at it for hours, long after Emily had been ready to go home. Emily’s mother would have liked to learn to paint properly, she told her once, but instead she made do with making beautiful the lives of the children she’d borne, which was no small task in their village but exactly how Emily remembered it.
Luke’s eyes flashed in front of her again, merged with another’s. She raised her fingers to her
scar, then she addressed the mess she’d made on the wooden floor, which she now noticed was covered with dust. Slowly, she turned the key in the door and edged her way out into the hallway, tiptoeing towards the kitchen from where she was hoping to retrieve a bucket of water and some disinfectant.
“Emily?” came Lynn’s voice from the living room.
Emily froze.
“Emily? Can you come in here for a moment please?”
Despite a growing feeling of familiarity around the woman, there was always something about the way Lynn spoke that made her requests not questions at all, but imperatives to be followed. Emily moved slowly towards the living room.
Lynn was sitting in her usual chair, her head tipped awkwardly to one side so that she could view the television around a vase of flowers that Emily could only presume had been too heavy for Lynn to move. The woman had deteriorated rapidly in the past weeks, but she refused to bring her sudden frailty to anyone’s attention, most of all her sons’. Instead, Lynn had Emily prepare in advance plates of (newly) assorted biscuits and asked her to keep the teapot ever-ready with a few teabags in the bottom, which she said was for the sake of efficiency, but Emily knew was for illusion. Any extra care that Lynn needed, any new ailment that crept up on her had to be spotted, and not mentioned but dealt with like a trivial inconvenience. Emily stepped forward now and shifted the vase of lilies to the left.
“I suppose there is a reason why you decided to lock yourself in my garden room?” Lynn proposed, keeping one eye on the TV and making no mention of the art that flooded the soft-lit space or why it was kept locked. “And why you chose this as the place in which to empty your stomach?”
Emily said nothing.