by Ruth Hogan
‘You’re looking very glamorous today. Are you going somewhere nice?’
She starts making me a flat white, but she can barely contain herself.
‘Or perhaps you’re meeting someone,’ she adds, just a little bit too loudly.
The café is already quite busy and as I scan the room for an empty table I spot the cause of Flo’s amusement. The Olympian. For once he is having his coffee here instead of ‘to go’, and he is sitting alone at a table reading a newspaper. There are precious few empty seats left, and two of them are at his table. It is the perfect opportunity. I take my mug of coffee and go and sit at the one remaining seat at a table near the door. Flo looks aghast. Kitty Muriel will not be pleased and I can hear Ruby Ivy’s string of expletives ringing in my ears. I wish I had a newspaper to hide behind, but I haven’t even got a book today. I take out my phone and pretend to be checking something. If the coffee wasn’t so hot I’d have swallowed it as fast as I could and beat a hasty, if cowardly, retreat. But the first sip scalds my lips. There is the sound of a chair scraping across the floor and I know that he is leaving. He gets up, tucks his paper under his arm and takes his empty cup back to the counter. Flo takes it from him with a beaming smile.
‘Thanks, love. You have a good day.’
‘You too.’
As he passes my table I force myself to look up. He looks straight at me and smiles.
‘No cake today?’ he asks.
‘I had a biscuit.’
As lame lines go, it’s right up there with Baby’s line to Johnny Castle about carrying a watermelon in Dirty Dancing. And I can’t think of a single other thing to say to prove to this gorgeous man that I’m so much better than that. I’m funny. I’m great with dogs. I’m going to be a tour guide at the cemetery. ‘I had a biscuit’ is my pathetic effort to beguile the Olympian. It’s not even true. I didn’t. Unsurprisingly unbeguiled, he nods and walks away. If it were possible to kick myself I would. I look across to Flo and she is shaking her head in disbelief. I bet she’ll tell Kitty Muriel.
Outside in the crowded car park my day doesn’t improve. Someone has backed into Edith Piaf and cracked one of her headlamps. She looks strangely forlorn, and I’m pretty sure she’ll make me pay for her injury by refusing to start or breaking down on a busy roundabout. At least the culprit has had the decency to leave a note on my windscreen. It is a brief apology, a name and a phone number. Gideon. It’s very apt. It means ‘destroyer’.
I put off calling the number until early evening. I almost don’t bother. The damage looks minimal and probably not worth claiming on the insurance, but I suppose it would be better to get it checked. I punch the numbers into my mobile and listen to the ringing tone.
A male voice answers, and as I explain who I am and he responds, I realise why his voice is familiar. Gideon is the Olympian.
Chapter 49
ART
Alice
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
From ‘For the Fallen’ – Laurence Binyon
So many dead babies. Another day had slipped away in a drug-dazed fog. Alice gazed out of the window at a starry night, much like the one Vincent van Gogh saw and painted from his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It was her favourite painting. What if each star was the soul of a dead baby, like Netty had told her when she was a little girl? Well, she hadn’t said ‘dead’, she had said ‘babies who had gone to heaven’. But she had meant dead. Alice wondered if her babies could see her from so far away. She leaned forward and pressed her cheek against the freezing glass pane. There had been four before Mattie: one boy, a little girl and two other pitiful mites who were too young for anyone to say. ‘Miscarriages’, the doctors had called them, but to Alice they were all her babies, no matter how imperfect or unfinished the scraps of flesh and blood were when they had abandoned her wretched body. The little boy had been a maquette with insufficient detail to survive. She had had the briefest of glimpses before they had taken him away. Her daughter, Emily, had been a perfect miniature. When she was born, every detail had been present and correct. Except one: life.
Alice went to the wardrobe and steadied herself against the door before opening it and reaching up to the top shelf to take down a battered brown shoebox. She hugged it to herself and took it over to the bed. Inside, wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, were a tiny plastic hospital bracelet, a faded photograph and a set of doll’s clothes. Alice held the soft, pink bonnet to her face and breathed in.
They had dressed Emily in the miniature clothes and given her to Alice to hold. They had even taken a Polaroid of Alice and her husband, Michael, and their dead baby daughter. But what happened after that she never knew. She left it all to Michael and lived inside her head for weeks, never leaving their bedroom. The doctor came to see her and gave her tablets, but she flushed them down the toilet. She re-emerged into the world only when the familiar obsession possessed her once more; the all-consuming physical ache of longing for a child, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. But for Michael that dream had soured irrevocably into the worst nightmare and he wanted no more of it.
Alice took the photograph from the shoebox and stared at the image of her broken family through a mist of tears. She was cradling Emily in her arms and Michael sat next to her, wooden with grief. No one was smiling. As Alice returned the photograph to the box, the wedding ring that she had worn for all these years slipped off her finger and landed on top of it. The ring had been part of the pretence that she had kept up for so very long, implying widowhood or perhaps divorce, evidence of a family life more normal than the one that she and Mattie had actually lived.
They had married young; Alice was only eighteen and Michael just two years older. His parents hadn’t been pleased – they never seemed to be quite at ease with Alice. Alice had no parents to express an opinion either way. She had been born to a sixteen-year-old girl, who would have been described at the time as ‘backward’, and put up for adoption as soon as she was born. Her adoptive parents were good people who made an honest and sustained effort to love the little girl that they had taken into their lives. But a bond between them was never forged, and their relationship with Alice was defined by a cool, well-meaning kindness rather than warm and unconditional love. The closest thing to family that Alice had was Netty, the old lady who lived next door and told her stories and gave her sweets. Their adoration was mutual and when Netty died, Alice, who was then still a little girl, was inconsolable for weeks.
When Alice left the home of her adoptive parents at seventeen, neither party made much attempt to stay in touch and eventually even the perfunctory exchange of birthday and Christmas cards fizzled out. She had met Michael when he came into the sandwich bar where she was working and within six months they were engaged. Michael had a good job working in a bank, and with a little help from his parents they managed to rent a flat and set up home together. When they married, they took it for granted that a happy family would follow. Instead it had been a holocaust. Each time a baby died, she begged and pleaded with him to try again until she eventually drove him away. But they had had sex just once more; for old times’ sake – a farewell fuck. It had been enough.
Alice replaced the lid on the shoebox and returned it to its shelf. She lifted a small, old-fashioned blue and white suitcase from the floor of the wardrobe and carried it back to the bed. She clicked open the two silver catches and the lid burst open, spilling out some of its contents onto the bed. Alice began searching through them, caressing each item with infinite tenderness. There was a photograph album, thick with images of Mattie, from a few minutes old in his proud mother’s arms, to a smiling young man, tall and with the promise of a muscular frame, on his fourteenth birthday last year. Wrapped carefully in
a muslin there was a breath-soft curl of baby hair and two tiny milk teeth. Other treasures included a cycling proficiency certificate and some Cub Scout badges sewn onto a scrap of felt.
When Alice had found out she was pregnant again she didn’t tell Michael. She gathered her worldly goods and chattels and disappeared. This time it would be different. She would make it perfect all by herself; a new home and a fresh start. Because then he would live. And he had.
There was a soft knock on the bedroom door and Mattie’s smiling face peered in.
‘Like a cup of tea, Mum?’
She held her arms out and motioned for him to come and sit with her. She hugged his strong, young body to her bony frame and hoped that he couldn’t smell the sickness on her, the way that she could.
‘You know I love you more than anything in this world?’
Mattie rolled his eyes at her in good-natured embarrassment.
‘Yes, Mum, I do. Now do you want tea or not?’
Chapter 50
ART
Masha
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
From ‘For the Fallen’ – Laurence Binyon
It is a perfect day for ghosts. The familiar contours of the cemetery are lost beneath a heavy pall of November’s finest fog. Like wet smoke it swaddles the tombstones and angels exactly as it is supposed to, according to the best gothic ghost stories with which the Victorians loved to frighten themselves. The dripping trees are strung with delicate chandeliers of glistening spiders’ threads, and the grass is silver stiff with frost. Haizum’s panting breaths are swallowed into the churning mists, but his bark, at a solitary crow standing sentry on little Marie’s grave, cuts through the thick silence and echoes around the damp stones. The prospect of Haizum’s walk this morning was not an enticing one. But I couldn’t afford to delay it for too long. I have a busy day ahead. Preparing for what might just be a date with the Olympian this evening.
I’m not afraid of ghosts – I find the living far more alarming. It seems strange that the Victorians, who celebrated death so splendidly, should be afraid of ghosts. I think they were more likely fascinated by the frisson of ghouls and spectres. The physical aspects of death were universally mundane, so perhaps the exploration of its spiritual mysteries injected some welcome excitement into what was otherwise commonplace. Diseases like scarlet fever could destroy an entire family in weeks, and children as well as adults were very familiar with death as a regular house guest. They knew only too well that if one of their brothers or sisters contracted the disease, it would often be fatal, and might well result in their own death to boot. There was no hiding place from one’s own mortality and so protection from it was considered pointless. It was a perfectly acceptable topic in children’s literature of the day, along with lovely fluffy kittens, jolly nice table manners and Lizzie’s new bonnet.
But that didn’t mean that it was any less painful for those left behind.
Of course, nowadays, people are rather uppity about the Victorians’ approach to death, condemning it as excessive, sentimental and overly dramatic. But I’m not sure our attitude towards it is any better. Our considered approach to death is to try very hard to ignore it. We can’t even say it. We say someone has ‘passed away’. We talk about having ‘lost’ someone, or someone being ‘late’. They are neither lost nor late. We know perfectly well where they are, and they’re not late, they’re just not coming. Nobody, apart from Edward, ever described Gabriel as dead. Well, certainly not to my face, at any rate. They hid behind polite euphemisms. We are so much more comfortable saying ‘fuck’ than ‘dead’. We are happy to let children spend hours merrily slaughtering, maiming and motherfucking in front of their computer screens, and yet baulk at them attending the funeral of a dearly loved grandparent in case it upsets them. I think we are teaching them to be afraid of the wrong things.
If there are any ghosts in the cemetery today I won’t be able to see them because the fog is too thick. But I can hear them, and they’re playing bagpipes. Surely it must be ghosts, because no one in their right mind would be playing bagpipes in the middle of a cemetery, on a dank November morning in fog thick enough to choke your chanters. Unless it happens to be Remembrance Sunday. Today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and it is now the eleventh hour.
The bagpipes are for the men of the Royal Highlanders who were posted in the town during the war. There is a raised rectangle of grass bordered on three sides by a retaining wall of stone blocks about two thirds of the way up the hill. It contains a large white memorial cross engraved with military insignia, and twenty or so smaller stone crosses that mark the graves of the Scottish soldiers who died. I always stop by that of James McKilroy, who ‘was killed accidentally aged eighteen years, his courage untried’. I beg to differ. Aged just eighteen years old, he volunteered to fight for his country, and die for it if necessary. I believe his courage was not in doubt, but am nonetheless eternally curious about how he was ‘accidentally killed’. Each year a small group of friends, relatives and comrades makes the long journey from Scotland to remember their fallen men. Each year the group grows smaller. The pipes are silent now, and I can hear snatches of conversation drifting through the fog. Haizum lifts his head and, cocking it to one side, listens for a moment, clearly puzzled as to where the disembodied voices are coming from. He ignores the bagpipes completely. Once the small service of remembrance is finished, I hear muffled footsteps and the soft clunk of car doors. As the last of the cars pulls away, the silence creeps back across the cemetery, as all-embracing as the fog, and the only sounds I can hear are my own footsteps and Haizum’s panting. It’s just as well that I know this place as well as the lines on my face, as I can hardly see more than a couple of feet in front of me. We are following the bottom path; well, I am at least – Haizum skips on and off as though he is playing a rather disorganised game of hopscotch, although he is clearly following his nose rather than a thrown pebble. As we pass the nursery of babies’ graves, we turn to climb the narrower path up the hill. Many of these infants were ‘born asleep’. And failed ever to wake.
I know that if we climb for about three minutes, we shall be just about level with the Scottish regiment. I am certain there are other visitors to the cemetery today. There is quite a collection of military graves scattered across these rambling acres, and many will be decorated with wreaths of scarlet poppies before the end of the day. But the fog has swallowed everyone and everything, and those who are here will be making their acts of remembrance alone.
I remember my little boy differently now. I can cherish his life without the memory being tainted by his death. I can see his beautiful, happy face without the picture being washed away by the cold and murky waters that enveloped him. I can even hear him laughing and playing games, instead of screaming and thrashing in fear as the river stole him away. My own bloody battle has come to an end, and my armistice is in sight.
I leave the path and cut across the grass until I can see the large white military cross looming up ahead of me. There are three crimson wreaths laid on its pedestal, and a large red poppy is fixed to each stone cross. Haizum is sniffing around the base of the pedestal with worrying interest, and just as I am preparing to grab his collar to prevent him from relieving himself inappropriately, he snatches one of the wreaths and gambles off into the fog. Lady T would be appalled, and frankly, so am I. By the time I catch up with him, Haizum has tired of his new toy and drops it at my feet. He looks up at me, panting, with some poppy petals still caught in his teeth. We return the wreath to its proper place and head off home through the park.
The fog is beginning to clear a little and I can see Sally in the distance. My stomach lurches as I realise that she is being followed. I can’t see their faces, but I’m pretty sure they’re the morons who attacked her before. There a
re only three of them this time, but as I hurry across the grass with Haizum, I recognise Deliverance Boy. I’m about to send Haizum after them when an extraordinary thing happens. Sally stops and turns to face them. She throws her arms up towards the cinereous (word of the day – ashen, ash-coloured, greyish) sky, and one by one in accelerating succession the crows abandon their treetop vigils and fly down to her feet. Soon she is surrounded by a flapping, cawing circle of shiny black feathers and beaks. But they are not facing Sally; they are facing outwards and as the youths draw closer a few of the crows break rank and lunge at their feet, pecking at their precious trainers. The youths kick out at the birds and shout, but more crows join the skirmish, their sharp beaks aiming higher at the soft, exposed flesh of hands, necks and faces. Even the crows not involved in the physical assault are noisily cawing their encouragement. The youths cut and run, and Sally rewards her bodyguard of crows with the contents of her bag. It looks as though Sally was right. The birds are grateful for their daily bread and she now has her very own ‘murder’ of guardian angels.