by Helen Slavin
I don’t know that My Mother ever really approved of him. I suppose he just wasn’t her type, if that was possible. My Mother had very Catholic taste (ask Father Tansy). There was one day I remember, when we had decided to tackle her back garden. It had become a wilderness, so tangled with brambles that getting from the back gate to the back door was like a scene from Sleeping Beauty. She thought it was a site of outstanding natural beauty, but her neighbour had complained.
Evan picked his way through the brambles, unwilling to secateur them because they were going to fruit, the small green baubles waiting to bask in the sun. There was a moment, a look that passed between them, as if in saying this he had somehow passed a test for her. I watched him, the sappy green scents around us, the bitter sting of the nettles, as he tied knots into the twine, squinting into the sun as he tied them to the fence. We made blackberry jam a few weeks later, none of which we shared with the neighbour.
When we were working together it always felt as if we were uncovering treasure. He thought the bodies were travellers in time. Evan always seemed so connected to the earthly remains, as if he didn’t have veins and arteries, instead he had ley lines. As if he picked up energy, was tuned to the earth, and I was tuned to Heaven.
Well, I did warn you.
And I claimed the money on the Ice Maiden Sweepstake too. ‘Evan Bees is the winner of the Ice Maiden Sweepstake’, I pinned on the notice board. Sent it round as a memo and signed my name. Evan had no clue what that was about. Another reason I loved him. I found the cheque for £150 in my pigeon hole on the Friday. There was some of my Aunt Mag in me.
I think it is apt that people say, ‘I fell in love’. It is exactly like that. One minute you’re fine. You’re rational. The next you’re reeling on the floor semi-concussed wondering what it is that has poisoned your heart so.
I couldn’t be without him. We spent hours in the department together, cataloguing newly excavated skeletons. If I had had any sense I would have thought this was not really the most auspicious beginning to a love story. It smacked more of a murder mystery. But I didn’t have sense. I had fallen in love and was not right in the head.
Funny to look back. I don’t look at the photos. Not that there are many. There is only one of him. We had had a walk up to Long Way Crop, taking a picnic of sausage rolls and crisps. It was freezing cold that day but we didn’t care. The weather meant that it would be just us up there. With our greasy sausage-rolled kisses. At least, Evan thought we would be alone because, naturally, he couldn’t see the cohort of Roman soldiers busy finishing the road that ran along the ridge. The beginning and the end all in a few yards of each other.
I didn’t usually carry a camera. It was just in the bottom of the bag. We’d been out at a dig earlier in the week and the chap in charge had got a notion about using instamatic cameras to take instant images of the site and the finds. I was rummaging for a tissue and pulled out the camera. I was laughing at a scrunched and unintentional polaroid it had taken of the inside of my bag. I looked up at Evan. He was looking out across the view. He was miles away. I wanted to bring him back. To keep him.
There are just a few shards to be picked over. Catalogued. I wonder who that girl is, because she isn’t me.
Anyway, whatever I was like back then I was liked by Evan Bees. He understood silences too. He had a sense of history as acute as my own and he’d say things like, ‘I wonder what the last person to touch this was thinking,’ as we pored over the curved handle of a long-ago-disintegrated bucket. We looked at earrings and brooches and thought of the people who had pinned up their clothing against the wind, or whether the earrings had been a love token. What amazed me was that sometimes we hadn’t been speaking but we knew what each was thinking.
Yeah. Right.
No one bothered to let me know. Drop me a hint. We had a huge church wedding in a massive cathedral crammed to the rafters with history. Not a word. The bastards.
We did not have children. We had fun trying. Or I thought so. I’m a medium after all, not a mind reader. We seemed to be trundling along very nicely. I suppose the clues were there, he was always so serious and intense. Especially in bed. It was as if he wanted to savour every last moment. As if every day was his last. As if he was a soldier heading off, uncertain, to a war.
First hint I got was when he didn’t come home one evening in December. I waited. I waited. I waited.
I panicked. I thought of Beck and Shell. Which made me stop panicking. If he was dead he would come to tell me so. It would be his unfinished business. He hadn’t turned up. He was safe.
I waited. I waited. I waited. I waited. I waited. Christmas came and I waited, waited up like a kid waiting for Father Christmas.
Neither of them showed up. He could have got a lift back on that sleigh you know. If he’d tried. They could have both come tumbling down that chimney.
They found his car abandoned by a tourist information office in Northamptonshire. The keys were still in it. I drove it home. I parked it in the drive and after about a year I drove it to the nearest dealership and left it on the forecourt with the documents and the keys in it.
Those keys, glinting and chinkling like a lure for Sam.
Mum’s Eye View: sideways on
She found school difficult. High school. But then who doesn’t find school difficult? It’s all hectic competition. Competition for good marks. Competition for sports teams. Competition for boys. She didn’t have the usual teenage rampage which isn’t surprising considering all that was going on in her head. Well, no, not in her head. That makes it sound like mental illness which it isn’t. Wasn’t. I thought…suspected…Had her checked out. They did these tests. Nothing invasive, a bit of a chat with the psychiatrist and some putting wooden blocks in holes…or was that when she was a baby?
Anyway they couldn’t find anything wrong with her, which left me at a bit of a loss. No one really believes in mediums do they? I know there was our Sidney, but that was a long time ago and he was more of a showman than anything. A parlour trick. People believed in it then. They even had Conan Doyle going didn’t they?
What my girl said was different. I had a lot of documentary evidence. There wasn’t just Mrs Berry, whatever she’s told you…She has told you hasn’t she?…When she was really little, just tootling around in the pushchair, she could talk a lot. Very advanced.
One health visitor said to me, ‘She’s been here before.’ Which I thought…I ought to have thought…was creepy. But if I’m honest, I agreed. The first time I agreed with any of them. A battalion of spinsters eager to tell you what the books say but without any ‘hands on’ experience. But this woman. Just came right out and said it. And I was dishonest then. I didn’t tell her that only that week my girl had been sitting in the pushchair as we walked past the carpark where The Bind used to be…
You don’t know The Bind?…slums they were. Cottages. Set up by Sir Charles Whitworth’s grandfather and left to go to rack and ruin. I remember when I was a girl running round them all full of holes, windows falling out and floors caving in. They got shut of them in the fifties. Floored the lot. Then they couldn’t decide what to do and the weeds grew and then finally they made it into a carpark.
My girl had never seen The Bind but that day she’s in the pushchair and she points and she says, ‘When I lived here before I lived in The Bind…but you won’t remember because you weren’t my mammy then…’ serious as you like. ‘When I lived here before…’ she’d say it every time we went out. And then she didn’t anymore.
I wasn’t relieved either when she ended up at the uni and met Evan. He was too…and I know you’ll say that this is with hindsight and you’re always wiser looking back…but seriously, he was too good looking. You wanted to crack his nose.
I believed they could be happy. With my girl you believed more in fate or destiny, that maybe here was the other half of herself, they got on that well. In fact sometimes they were a bit spooky. Like the Midwich Cuckoos. Have you read that book? Or
maybe you’ve seen the film…all the little blonde kids? Not that she’s blonde.
I’m not kidding though. If I ever find Evan Bees and he isn’t dead, I’ll kill him.
Seven years. January, the first
SEEMED TO last the whole year. It was cold and the world seemed dark as if it would never get light again. I woke up day after day to endless grey cloud that never lifted. I seemed to repeat the same day over again. Me getting up. Me seeing grey sky. Me getting on with the washing/toilet cleaning/biscuit eating. Me hurrying to the door every time anyone put a leaflet through or delivered a paper. Me scaring them as I tore open the door, hoping that it was Evan.
I ate to sustain myself. If the Bourbon biscuit hadn’t been invented and sold in huge bulk packs, I would have starved.
Me waiting until midnight before I locked the doors. Me waking every hour, almost on the hour, because I thought I heard the gate squeak, or a familiar voice in the street, or his foot on the stair.
I didn’t get messages then. I didn’t go anywhere. The only member of the chocolate-brown-clad brigade I saw was a man who was buried in the concrete foundations of the supermarket. He was stupid and pointless too. All he cared about was revenge. His message was always, ‘Tell Eddie he’s dead meat.’ I wondered who was waiting for him, who was existing on sugar products until he came home.
He accosted me in the Bourbon biscuit aisle, directly above his concrete grave I suppose. Anyway, there I am hurrying to stack my trolley with supplies of chocolate brown biscuits so that I can get home to find that my wandering husband has returned. Up pops Concrete Man.
‘Hey. You.’ I looked up. Spotted the chocolate brown outfit. Bourbon biscuit brown. He had on a polo neck sweater that made him look porky and a leather jacket that I imagined had been chocolate brown suede even before he died. ‘Tell Eddie he’s dead meat.’
At first I tried to make an effort. I asked about Eddie and his possible whereabouts. I admitted that I didn’t know Eddie and would need this information to give him the message. Concrete Man seemed to think I was being obstructive. Why didn’t I know Eddie? Oh right, I was one of Eddie’s mates…
I didn’t listen. I didn’t care. I whizzed away down the aisle only too certain that when I arrived home Evan would already be there with a smile and a cup of tea.
Which of course he wasn’t. And there came the day when Concrete Man asked me to tell Eddie and I simply said, ‘I told him.’
Eddie wasn’t too pleased, and accosted me by the doors about three weeks later. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’
I kept pushing my trolley. Eddie was in a chocolate brown T-shirt and chocolate brown underpants, clearly an outfit that he wore to bed. He also had a chocolate brown bloodstain seeping out of his chest. He was deeply scary. In his fury he set an entire rack of trolleys rolling into the carpark after me. A huge metallic silver snake of trolleys, their wheels hissing across the tarmac.
I wanted a messenger. I wanted someone that I could turn to and say, ‘Ask Evan if he’s dead. Tell me he isn’t dead. Tell me something, tell me anything.’ But there was no one.
You might ask what My Mother was doing at this time. You might have completely forgotten her existence. I almost had. She tried to ‘bring me out of myself’, as she put it, but I was a hard taskmaster. I made no effort at all. I didn’t need to be brought out. She didn’t seem to understand that the only thing that was going to put me right was Evan Bees arriving on the doorstep.
My Mother worried and was powerless.
‘You can’t stop your life like this,’ she said, concerned, eating her way through a chicken and mushroom pie she had brought over. Then she uttered the magic words.
‘What are you going to do if he never comes back?’ She was ultra-serious, teary even. She attempted to stroke my hair, the way she had when I was little.
I could be coy about this and say, ‘I don’t remember, but I think I hit her…’ But that would be more than coy, that would be a lie. I walloped her, a great lashing blow that caught the edge of the pie and made it look as if her head had exploded and was bleeding chicken and mushroom in cream sauce.
Fair play to the woman. She picked the dish off the floor, got a tea towel for her hair, and after a quick, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she headed off.
February, the second
THE FOLLOWING February I had been quite ill. A diet consisting entirely of Bourbon biscuits is not good for you. I was picking up now on a diet of lemon risotto and herb chicken. This was food I could shove in the oven. I could cook the chicken six or eight pieces at a time on the Monday and still be eating it on the Friday or Saturday.
One Sunday I looked out at the car and its covering of leaves and bird crap and I made a decision. My Mother’s ‘What if he never comes back?’ was still ringing in my head. I was reaching a different stage now. I think there are about seven stages to grief: Bashful, Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolf. ‘What if he never comes back?’ had been in my head since the first moment they found his car.
I decided that getting rid of the car was a good idea. I would give it away and, therefore, I wouldn’t be haunted by the cash. I knew that if I advertised it and had to choose someone to sell it to I never would. I would simply be left standing in the driveway with a series of eager blokes as I looked for an Evan substitute. If you don’t look like Evan, sound like Evan…in fact if you aren’t Evan Bees, you cannot have his car.
I asked My Mother to follow in her car for a lift home. I drove it to the dealership out on the industrial estate. I chose it because it had banners flying. It looked medieval somehow, as if any moment Richard the Lionheart would pop out of the office and try and sell you a Daihatsu. I drove it onto the forecourt, parked it out of the way with the keys, the MOT, the road tax and all the documents I could find. Then I walked away.
I kept walking. My Mother locked up her car in the layby and she walked alongside me. We had one of our silences. The most understanding one ever in history. We walked and we kept walking, turning off the road onto the public footpath they had built to skirt the landfill site. The one they landscaped with silver birch trees so that the landfill site was one of the most beautiful places in the whole town.
We kept walking. Out past the reservoir and onto the Roman road, past Long Way Crop until we climbed and climbed steadily to the bare rocks of Redstone Crags.
‘He isn’t dead,’ I said at last. My Mother looked at me again, ultra serious. This time I was braced for what she was going to say.
‘How do you know, love?’
‘He hasn’t told me so.’
She nodded but I could tell by her lips, pursed like prunes, that she wasn’t finished.
‘Maybe he has nothing to say.’ She put her hands into the kangaroo pockets of her jacket then. ‘Perhaps he’s just all settled.’
She didn’t talk to the Dead but my God she could read minds.
The next morning Sam called, from the dealership. He had got my details from the car documents. He was most anxious about it all and determined that he should sell the car and I should have the money.
‘Don’t need the money,’ I said, rather rudely. Not that he cared, he was a car salesman, he dealt routinely with bolshy gits.
‘Do you want me to give the money to a charity then? Your favourite…Or your husband’s favourite.’
‘Give it away. Or raffle it.’
There was a pause then.
‘That’s spooky Mrs Bees. My sister works at Longcauseway Primary School, they could do with the cash.’
They had a prize draw and raised I don’t know how many thousand quid. I was happy. I didn’t know where Longcauseway Primary was. I never had to walk past it. I never had to look at it and be forever reminded of the car. Forever reminded of Evan.
Sam fell in love with me, but I felt that I was being unfaithful. I was waiting. I am sorry that I broke Sam’s heart, but I did not ask him to fall in love.
Sam knew about the waiting but he thought h
e would win through in the end. He thought, and I think My Mother aided and abetted him in this, that a year and a half was a long time (I was probably well into the Donner and Blitzen stage of the grief process by then) and that a new relationship was the next step towards a new life. My Mother had some very subtle ways.
‘You still see them don’t you?’ she asked one afternoon about six weeks into Sam’s ill-advised courtship.
We were in Valerie’s. She had made a fresh batch of rock buns that day. I loved the rock buns at Valerie’s. They had lemon zest in them that came from lemons. Tiny curls of peel in the fluffy dough. I don’t know where she got her sultanas, she got them from somewhere that managed to dry them with the juice still in.
‘Who’s them? The Driscolls from next door?…The O’Learys?’ I was being particularly obtuse. Helped myself to another rock bun.
‘They still talk to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t tell me about it.’
I couldn’t really tell if her tone of voice was intrigued, put out or just plain nosey.
‘They don’t have anything to say to you.’
‘What about Sam? Does he know?’
‘You think they’ll frighten him off?’
I was not harsh. I was honest. My Mother ordered another pot of tea for two. She let it brew for a long time before she came out with it.
‘What did your Aunt Mag say?’
It is to my credit that I didn’t spit out rock bun in startlement. I didn’t choke or splutter or drop my teacup. More than ever I did not want My Mother to find out her true history. It seemed so wonderful that someone could have a real fairy story, one that they had actually lived. I needed just one real-life fairy story then. My Mother had always provided them.
‘Nothing. I suppose she was just all settled.’