by Diana Evans
“No,” says Bel, turning away, then turning back…. and Bessi, there will be drums and soaring songs rattling in the sun-shocked wind as they take her down lower and lower to the hushed double sleep. They will sing, Let us go to the land of love, where the love light shines so bright above, lower and lower, and the flowers will be tossed gladly onto her in all their innocent colors. There will be no tears, no howling, only the joy, the relief, the laughter, and the peace, cascading down as she falls. That is how it will be.
“We’ll take that one, then,” Aubrey tells JP, “Bessi knows best.” He pats the side of her head with his palm. He has never done this before. His palm is full of pity.
“It’s a good choice.” JP casts a quick, longing glance at the Garratt and leads them back downstairs, where Dora has left the macaroons on the desk. They drink tea and Aubrey and JP eat macaroons and discuss costs and arrangements. Aubrey remarks that the best bit of a coconut macaroon is the rice paper.
Bessi’s ribs are quiet now. She sits still in the stuffed chair staring at the photograph of Neasden Lane in 1902, and Bel keeps looking at her as if she wants to ask her something.
“The coroners will be bringing her down on Friday,” says JP, when all the aspects of dying are covered. “Why don’t you come back then with a few things, something for her to wear, a favorite outfit perhaps, and there’ll be the makeup to do—”
“I’ll do the makeup!” Bessi leaps from her silence, because JP and Dora would get the colors and the foundation wrong, wouldn’t they; and Bel can help too—Bel knows the colors.
“That’s perfectly all right, of course,” says JP. He now has a piece of macaroon in his whiskers.
The four of them stand. Aubrey and JP shake hands. Dora is out in the hallway and she purses her lips at them as they leave, which might be the way she smiles.
We will be back on Friday. Take care, JP, how you handle her. We have heard the parlor stories of bodies being thrown about like old bits of rubber, so handle her well, as a rose petal drifting on the lake.
Bessi, shall we?
WHEN THE POLICE lifted Georgia down she crumpled in their arms like fabric. The feet hung outward. She was wearing bright yellow trousers and a white top with a low neck and around the neck there were bruises.
It was half an hour toward midnight on Monday. The tips of the fingers were black. The sister was waiting in the flat downstairs where the neighbor of the deceased had offered her tea.
The police, one man, one woman, had broken in and gone upstairs. They saw her almost immediately, for she was swaying and spinning over the banister above their heads. The man swung around. He said to the sister: “Stay back. Get back.”
The sister cried out the name of the deceased.
Earlier, while she was sitting on the wall outside waiting for the police to arrive, Bel had shivered in the cold and had thoughts, some of which she said out loud, some of which she did not. She had left home in a rush, with her slippers on, and her feet were coldest.
She said: I can see her. I can see her swaying.
And the cold and the wind answered: Yes.
The phone in Georgia’s flat had been ringing since morning. Bessi, wanting to make arrangements for coming back on Monday. Bel, worried because she’d had a dream of a wedding in a big red tent and a dog that wouldn’t stop barking. Georgia did not answer. She was spinning. By four o’clock there was no room left for messages. The answering machine replied with a long dull note instead of her voice, which used to say, quietly, with a guitar in the background: “Hello-ha.”
All day at work Bessi had felt a stillness about things. It was a feeling of absence, of silence, despite the phones ringing all around her and the smell of coffee and the clock on the wall. She felt gray inside, as if she were made of dust.
She rang Georgia’s flat every hour. She rang her every fifteen minutes. And Bel rang. And Georgia spun. There was dread in the afternoon.
On the way home Bessi prayed to God for the first time since the apples. She shut her eyes: Please, God, let Georgia be waiting for me when I get home, please, she has let herself in and she is sitting there on the sofa with her bag of things, and I will say, “Where have you been? I’ve been ringing you all day,” and she will tell me that she went out for a long walk and lost track and I’ll say, “Well, here you are now, I’m glad. Amen.”
Bessi got home at six o’clock and Georgia wasn’t there. In her head a voice said, What if?
Impossible, Bessi replied. Absolutely most definitely impossible.
She cooked giant mushrooms and sweet corn with olive oil and pasta shells. She made enough for two because Georgia might be hungry when she came and she would come and Georgia liked giant mushrooms. She decided to wait until she arrived before eating.
At eight o’clock, in Kilburn, Bel was at home with Jason. They had just finished eating dinner, during which Bel had gotten up twice to answer the phone when it wasn’t ringing.
Bel went to wash her hands in the bathroom. She used soap and rinsed. She watched the water falling off her skin. Then she left the bathroom without turning off the tap and returned fifteen minutes later to water spilling over the top of the sink. She turned off the tap and stood still.
Georgia, she said. Oh my God.
She left the house with wet hands and there was a hole in her right slipper. The drive to Tottenham was slow red lights in dark streets. The stars were hidden by rain clouds. Bel held the steering wheel very tightly because her hands were shaking, and as she approached Georgia’s flat she held it tighter.
All the lights were off. She walked up the stairs to the front door and knocked. She stepped back from the door and looked up. From the streetlight moon she could see the top of the bookshelf and the light hanging from the living-room ceiling. Nothing else but the dark, and something around the edge of the dark, something that was so very still.
“Bessi,” she said into the phone. “I’m at Georgia’s. She’s not here. I’m getting the police.”
“Where is she?” said Bessi. She sounded parched, as if there was no moisture in her mouth. “I’m waiting for her. She was supposed to come. Where is she?”
“I’m getting the police.”
Bessi waited in her bedroom. She was wearing a thin red nightgown with wide sleeves that Kemy had made her out of silk. She placed the phone in the center of the bed. She lay down next to it and the sky was red tonight and each moment waited for the next. She fell into one of the moments. Georgia was standing in the living room with mildew eyes. Let me go, she said, and her arms lifted from her sides.
Bessi got up and walked into the kitchen. She saw the cemetery out of the window. She opened the fridge and closed it. She said out loud, to the air that was beginning to buzz: I told her to come back on Monday.
Just before the phone rang, Bessi was drowsy and she allowed herself to imagine what if. She saw herself alone in a tunnel, turning around in circles and falling to the ground. She saw herself get up and walk down the passage, without a face.
Her last thought was this: If she has gone, I will not forgive me.
Then the phone rang. Bessi picked it up. Bel spoke the words.
And in the red night, Bessi screamed.
She dropped the phone and kept on screaming. Afterward, she sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed. She didn’t understand what to be.
But only last week, she said to the dust, we were dancing!
At one o’clock in the morning Bel arrived at her door instead of Georgia. They sat on Bessi’s unbest bed and held each other in the dark.
“I told her to come back on Monday,” said Bessi, “as if she was the milkman.”
“I saw her swaying,” said Bel.
All night Bessi tried to remember something. The moment before the scream. How exactly, exactly, did it feel, all those years, being alive with Georgia alive? What was it like? She wanted to hold it in her hands, the warmth and the tenderness of it. She sensed that if she couldn’t remember she woul
d have lost everything including herself; and that she would never quite remember it because of what she had lost.
She fell asleep in a crooked position next to Bel. By dawn, she had words for the questions.
First: How do I talk to her?
And this: Oneness in twoness in oneness—forever? But how?
THEY ARRIVED AT Waifer Avenue and let themselves in. Ida was on her way down the stairs in her old champagne wrapper to have some bread and black-eyed beans. Bel and Bessi stood in the hall looking up at her.
Ida was pleased to see them. And then she was not pleased.
She looked at their faces and she could see dust. And she thought it was odd that they were here, suddenly, on a Tuesday morning, when they should be at work. And where was Jay? And what was wrong?
Ida said: “Where is Georgia?”
Bessi began to cry.
Ida screeched: “But where is Georgia!”
Neither of them could speak but Ida could see it. In Bel’s face, in Bel’s memory, she could see the echo of a fatal sway.
She heard Georgia’s voice then. It said, Were you scared? How did you know it was right? She saw the scar across her daughter’s stomach and the faraway eyes and she felt her legs dissolving beneath her. In a compulsion toward dying she did not grip the banister to stop herself falling, and she did not shield her head from the danger. She fell. She tumbled. She landed at the bottom of the stairs at Bel’s feet and screeched, “You bring her to me! When she is sick you bring her to me!”
The fall damaged her leg. Bessi had to go upstairs and find Baba’s walking stick with the snake carved around the middle that Ida had brought back from the funeral in Aruwa. Through the afternoon she limped about and said, “All on her own.” She said, “You bring her to me.” She limped into the hallway and looked up the stairs at the eyeless black mask with straw hair and said, “The devil he tek my child.”
That evening the dining-room table changed. It experienced something it had forgotten many years before.
That evening, the dining-room table witnessed Ida and Aubrey in a mutual embrace for the first time since the 1970s.
Aubrey got home, the cold wafting off his coat, and Bel immediately made him a large cup of tea because tea was the way to make things manageable even if no one drank it. She put sugar in the tea and the sugar was uncomfortable. Aubrey took a long time taking off his tie, opening and closing his briefcase, walking up and down the hall. He straightened the pens on his desk, he went upstairs and came back down, he wondered about dinner.
Bel said, “Will you sit down, Dad.”
Aubrey was getting nervous. They looked like blackbirds, standing about like that, waiting. What were they all waiting for? He was getting spooked. Bel’s hair was a mess, and this was unusual, and Bessi was flitting around in the middle of the living room like a wasp.
“What the blast is going on?” he said.
“Sit down!” went Ida.
“What’s wrong with your leg?”
Ida pulled out a chair from the dining table and pushed him into it by the shoulder.
She said: “There is bad news. About Georgia. I fell down the stairs, she—”
“Georgia fell down the stairs? Is Georgia here?”
“No,” said Bel, “Mum fell down the stairs, this morning.”
“What for?” said Aubrey.
“Oh, Mum, tell him.”
“Georgia—”
“Is she all right?”
“Georgia tek her life.”
Aubrey looked up at Ida as if she’d punched him. He tried to stand up but failed. A little boy gasped like a man, threw his arms around Ida, and buried his face in her stomach. Ida bent over him. She held him and stroked his white hair. There it was.
“Hellfire Jesus God almighty! God help us, Jesus Christ al-bloody-mighty I say, what? What? How? But what the dammit do you mean?”
Bessi started to howl. It was deep and clawing and not quite human. All the house joined in. From far off, as she swiftly traveled, Georgia could hear them calling.
Aubrey peeped around Ida at Bessi. He said, “It must be worst for Bessi, poor thing,” and howled, and held on to his wife.
THE POLICE HAD taken Georgia’s body to the mortuary in Hornsey. On Wednesday morning, in preparation for the identification, the body was laid out on a narrow table behind a wall of glass. On top of her, covering the neck, they draped a heavy velvet cloth embroidered with a gold cross. The cross reached from her chest to her feet (she was a little one).
The parents and two sisters arrived with raindrops on their shoulders. In the reception area the mother and father sat next to each other in their very thick glasses, and the sisters sat adjacent. The woman who welcomed them noticed that one of the girls, the one in the blue coat, looked the same as the one on the table.
The mother and father went in first.
While they were waiting, Bessi looked into the office leading off the reception area. There were two women in blouses typing. Every so often their fingers stopped and they sipped coffee, which Bessi could smell. She wondered if they were writing something about Georgia, and what the coffee tasted like; she wondered whether coffee tasted different in a place like this and whether it cooled down quicker than in other places.
Aubrey and Ida came out. They looked smaller than they had when they went in.
Bel took Bessi’s hand and led her inside. It was spacious and without time. It occurred to Bessi that today—this—might be the reason why Wednesdays were what they were, the tumbling and tossing, the oldest thing she knew, because Georgia was lying over there at the end of this bare room, behind glass, underneath a golden cross.
They concentrated on getting to the glass. In the center of the room was a rectangular indoor garden outlined by a low brick wall. The leaves were green, but there were no flowers. Bel and Bessi walked around it, bent forward like old women, Bessi around one side, Bel around the other.
They came back together a meter away from the glass and looked into a very bad dream. She was wax already, preparing to disappear. The eyelids were closed forever. The mouth was a darker, harder shade of ruby than the moment before, which Bessi still couldn’t remember. The cheeks were falling, all the muscles in the face had breathed out. Her neck was hidden beneath the cloth.
Did it hurt a lot? How did you bear it? Bessi wanted to ask. But she didn’t know how to talk to her.
She stepped forward into the dream. She pressed her thumb against the glass, in the place between Georgia’s eyebrows, and moved it upward, over the forehead. She felt cool air, around her ribs.
Bessi leaned her whole body against the glass now. She fell into the dream and lay down on the table next to the rest of her, and slept for a while beneath the quiet velvet. It was a long and hopeless sleep, and when she woke up the body beside her had gone. She tried to get out, but the glass would not let her.
From behind her, Bel said: “It takes a soul to make a body come true.”
2
It’s dark outside and the rain and the moon have turned the streets to glass. On the short drive from JP’s back to Waifer Avenue, Bessi looks out through the car window and there are questions in her head. Is it you? she asks. Her ribs are aching now, as I shift and climb, as I struggle to arrive completely. She begins to feel hot and asks, Am I going to die too?
Ida is sitting in her rocking chair and all the lights throughout the house are off except for the sun lounge. We come in through the back door and the bells ring. “Dammit!” says Aubrey, because Ida doesn’t like the bells now. She says they’re too loud. The house should be quiet. It is no longer a real place with real sounds. When someone speaks, it is as if they have spoken in their sleep.
Aubrey turns on lights.
“The funeral’s next Tuesday, Mum,” says Bel.
“We’re doing the makeup ourselves,” Bessi adds.
Ida shakes her head. “You bring her to me.” She is wearing a head scarf and lots of layers of fabric, a wrapper, a dre
ss, a black crocheted shawl. Baba’s walking stick is leaning against the radiator next to her.
Behind the rocking chair, I can see a stooped figure with an ancient face. Her shriveled hand is resting on her daughter’s shoulder. She is hazy but I know her immediately. Nne-Nne leans forward, and squints at me.
“All on her own,” Ida whispers. Bel steps out of her heels slowly, and goes into the kitchen to make tea.
Nne-Nne says to me, How did you come?
I try to tell her, about the forest and the running and how it was just like Baba said, but I am weak still, and my words will not reach her.
Aubrey asks if Kemy has phoned from Trinidad and Ida says no. He is full of coconut macaroons. He sits down and does not switch on the television.
Bessi leaves the room and goes upstairs to 26a. She wants to see.
The beds are stripped. The saloon door has finally fallen off. It smells musty and there is nothing in the wardrobe except for the two white corduroy coats that Dad said to keep because of wasting not and wanting not. There are beanbag ghosts in the alcove and a smell of strawberry that is not a real smell.
Bessi looks in the mirror. Her eyes flicker. She almost sees me and she shrinks back from the glass.
Is it you? she thinks again, and crawls back toward the face. It is her face, as much as it was ever her face.
Is it? You?
I lift her hand to the glass because I am not yet strong enough in her eyes. We touch the cheek with the fingertips. I am tired. I am so very tired. The hand drops and Bessi gasps.
There is more to climb. The aching in her ribs gets stronger. The heat is filling her head and throbbing inside her fingertips, which begin to dance of their own accord. I move up toward her shoulders where it is tight and I cannot quite enter. I push and clamber around the bones. Inhabitation is not an easy thing.
From the staircase below comes the sound of footsteps approaching the loft. Bessi stands up and concentrates on keeping her fingers still.
Bel puts her head around the door. “Dinner’s out.”