Half Broken Things

by Morag Joss

  Steph is a clever girl. While we were grappling with the question of the car she went rather quiet, and then she suddenly came out with something her art teacher had told her. She had once done a watercolour of some trees and painted the trunks brown. Her teacher said, if I sent you out and said come back when you’ve found a brown tree trunk, I would never see you again. Why have you given me brown tree trunks? Well, Steph said, wood is brown, see? The whole room was full of tables and chairs, she said, all wooden, and brown, as you’d expect. But why look at tables and chairs if you’re trying to paint a tree, he asked her. Go and look at trees. And don’t think, he said, that I am teaching you to draw and paint, I am teaching you to look. People don’t see what is actually there unless they look. Artists must learn to look, most people never do. They see only what they expect to see.

  Up until then I hadn’t really been getting her point, but she explained it. The point was, the vicar’s car might have been seen this morning, in the village, outside Sally’s, perhaps even turning off up our drive, and so while we had to get rid of it, we had better not try and say he had never been here. We had to get ready to say that he had been here, but had left after spending a bit of time with Charlie. Then she said that Mr Brookes had better drive back through the village again, this afternoon, so that somebody might see him again, and confirm what we would say about him leaving here. Well, this sounded mad to Michael and me.

  ‘You’re as tall as him,’ Steph told Michael, ‘and there’s that hat he was wearing so the hair won’t matter. You just have to drive through the village in his car, wearing his clothes. Somebody’s bound to notice the car, aren’t they, with all those stickers on the windows. You couldn’t miss it.’

  They were sitting with mugs of tea at the kitchen table. The sandwiches that Jean had made just in case anyone felt like lunch sat untouched. Only Charlie’s appetite was unchecked; today Steph was trying him on banana. Michael pushed his empty mug away.

  ‘But I’m not him! I can act like somebody else, I can’t be somebody else.’

  ‘But I’ve explained. The thing about most people,’ Steph told him with weary patience, ‘is they see what they expect to see. Like me and the tree trunks. Nobody’s going to say oh yes, I saw somebody wearing Mr Brookes’s clothes and hat, driving Mr Brookes’s car, in the village on Wednesday afternoon. They’re going to say they saw him. He’s not the vicar of the church here, is he, so it’s not like anybody actually knows him, it’s just the impression they’ll remember.’

  ‘But what’s the point? Why take the risk? Why don’t I just drive the car off and dump it?’

  Jean said quietly, ‘Because if you do that, and if somebody in the village saw Steph and Charlie in the car this morning, the police will know he was here. If we deny he was here, they’ll be suspicious. And if we admit he was here but just say he left, the police will have this place down as the last place he was seen. They’ll be very interested in us, they might be suspicious enough to turn the whole place over. Dig up the garden.’

  ‘So? We’ll have got rid of the car by then, and we can dump him too. He won’t even be here.’

  ‘No. But Miranda is. What if they find her? And anyway,’ she said, ‘how long before they find out more about us? Find out everything?’

  Steph said, ‘And haven’t you ever watched those detective things on telly? They can find traces of people, you know, even a hair or a bit of spit or something. If they really look hard, they’ll find something. We’ve got to do something that shows he left here. Even though he didn’t. If somebody thinks they saw him later on, it makes it really look like he left here, doesn’t it? And then we’ll be left alone.’

  So Michael put on Gordon Brookes’s dried and pressed clothes and his hat, removed the broken lenses from his glasses and put those on too. Jean managed to stop him, just in time, from touching the car without gloves. She found some thin plastic ones in the box with the silver polish. A backpack with Michael’s own clothes went into the car, and Gordon Brookes’s backpack, boots, anorak and Charlie’s car seat came out. Four hours after Gordon Brookes had driven his grandson up to the house, Michael drove his car back down the drive and along the road into the village. He was alarmed but pleased to see a knot of people, mainly elderly ladies and youths in baggy clothes, at a bus stop, and a man sitting outside the village shop next to a banked table of fruit and vegetables. He pressed the hat further down and drove by without turning his head.

  The tank was more than half full. With the map open on the passenger seat he drove, according to what had been decided with Jean and Steph, first to the M4. He joined the M5 northeast of Bristol and left it at junction 19. By half past two that day he had parked Gordon Brookes’s car at the far end of the Avon Gorge Nature Reserve, in an almost empty car park displaying a warning about theft from vehicles. Here and there little heaps of ice-blue fragments of windscreen glass glittered on the ground.

  A picnic was in progress nearby on a patch of grass dotted with tables, rubbish bins and notices about litter, dog walking and wild flowers. Keeping as far away as possible but remaining within sight of the picnickers, Michael took his backpack from the boot and set off down the path, marked with fat yellow arrows, towards Nightingale Valley at the heart of the wood. The path rose and fell along the steep, thickly planted banks of Leigh Woods. From the map Michael had hoped for a more remote, less public sort of place; there were arrows and maps everywhere, even little metal badges on some of the trees. But it was simple enough to keep his head down and ignore the grunted ‘g’afternoons’ of the few people he met, most of whom sped past him on mountain bikes. He doubted if any one of them saw anything more of him than his feet, or would remember seeing even those. Where the path branched Michael took always the smaller and less-frequented one, and after an hour or so of walking, and checking that the path was deserted in front and behind him, he scrambled up a bank thick with brambles and bracken. He found a place where a stand of rhododendrons under some conifers made almost a secret room, several feet wide but only about five feet high, and he crouched inside, panting, waiting until he was sure that the only sounds he could hear were his own breathing, and birdsong. He looked round to make sure that he was quite out of sight. Very carefully and quietly, he pulled his own clothes from the backpack, slipped out of Gordon Brookes’s things and put on his own, as quickly as he could under the low concealing arches of the rhododendron. He placed Gordon Brookes’s clothes- jacket, shirt, trousers, shoes, hat and glasses- in the backpack, and fastened it up. He settled back onto the ground and waited. Strange, how birds calling in woods sounded somehow hollow and far away. He lay listening to the stillness, broken by the wind sighing through the trees above him and from time to time by murmuring voices, a crying child, from the path below. Once, a dog came crashing by quite close to him before being whistled away back to its owners. The afternoon passed. It seemed to Michael, overwhelmed now by fatigue, that he was waiting here only until he could be granted some sort of permission to admit how tired he was. His eyes drooped and he leaned back on his backpack.

  Steph set off at the usual time to take Charlie back to Sally’s, tucking a cotton blanket around him in case he might feel a slight chill from the evening air. She called out to Jean that she was off now, and crunched away across the gravel. She had adjusted the pushchair seat so that Charlie was now facing outwards, to see the direction in which he was going, rather than facing her. He was old enough now to want to take an interest in the things around him and no longer needed to keep Steph constantly in his sight. But that was not the reason, or not the only one, why she had done it. Although she did not understand how it was possible, she knew that outwardly she was behaving quite normally. She knew too that Charlie had seen nothing ‘unpleasant’ and that, as Sally had remarked, he did not know his grandfather from the Archbishop of Canterbury; yet there was something in his long, considering stare that she did not feel quite equal to tonight.

  Still, she was finding on her familiar
walk this evening that she noticed the same things: the length of her own shadow slanting in front of her, the summer smells of grass under her feet and the sweet cow parsley at the roadside that sprang back bruised from the pushchair wheels. And when others carried on behaving normally it was even easier; Bill was stationed, as usual on a sunny evening, in his chair outside the shop, reading the Bath Chronicle. He lowered the paper and sent a grunt of recognition her way.

  Sally arrived back in her usual manner. As usual Steph was waiting with a peaceful, immaculate Charlie in her arms.

  ‘Oh, hi, Steph. God, I’m shattered. Look, did Gordon turn up here today? Sorry! Forgot to say. Everything all right?’

  Steph smiled. ‘Charlie’s granddad?’ She looked down at Charlie, widened her eyes and shook her head at him and he, laughing, reached for her hair. She was suddenly afraid that Sally might choose right now to pay attention to what she was saying, to look her hard in the eye and probe. She could manage this better, she felt, if she told it to Charlie. So she planted a raspberry on one of Charlie’s hands and prattled at him.

  ‘Oh, yes! Charlie saw his granddad today, didn’t he? Didn’t you! Didn’t you, Charlie-arlie, you saw your granddad, didn’t you?’

  When she looked up Sally was at the sink sponging at a mark on the front of her blouse. ‘Bloody nuisance, clean this morning. Bloody mayonnaise, plopped out of a sandwich straight onto my boob. So- did he stay more than five minutes? Did he behave himself? What did you think of him?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he gave us a lift. Yes, I put Charlie in the car seat, don’t worry. I’ve brought it back. He gave us a lift up all the way there and then he stayed for a while. He was pleased to see Charlie, I think. I thought he was nice.’ Well, that’s true, she was thinking. All that’s true.

  Sally snorted. ‘Oh, yes, he can put on nice. He hasn’t been near Charlie for months, so don’t be fooled.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You might not feel up to it. Not if your wife had just died.’

  ‘That was months ago!’

  ‘But he got depressed just after, you said. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’

  ‘Yeah, he says he’s on Prozac. Who isn’t? I suppose you got the whole lychgate story?’ She had thrown the cloth back in the sink now and was pouring a glass of wine. ‘I reckon he just claims to be depressed, to make me feel sorry for him.’ She swallowed some of her drink. ‘Maybe the Pennine Way’ll perk him up. Did he tell you about that? He’s off up there on holiday. They used to do it every year, the Pennine Way, only last year they missed it because Wendy- that’s Simon’s mother- she was too ill. So Gordon’s off this year on his own.’

  ‘Aw, that’s sad. He must miss her.’

  ‘I suppose. If you ask me he feels guilty. They were never that close, according to Simon. Anyway, you’re off now, are you? Here, I’ll take him. God, he’s getting heavy, isn’t he? See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah. ‘Bye then. Night-night, Charlie.’

  When Michael woke, it seemed as though the sheltering woods had turned against him. The wind had risen and now filled the trees with a sound like breaking waves; his bed under the rhododendrons was sunless and damp. It was only seven o’clock and the sun had not quite set, yet he was cold and lost, feeling a kind of loneliness in his bones that told him that it was too late to be out. He listened until he was sure everything was quiet. Cyclists, walkers and dogs had left the paths and birds had deserted the air. Picking up the backpack, he scrambled down the bank to the path and continued along it until he reached the point where the edge of the woods met the banks of the River Avon. From here a broad path, he knew from the map, followed the riverbank all the way into Bristol. He met nobody until he had almost reached the suspension bridge. From here onwards other people passed him on the path, not the manic mountain bikers of the afternoon, but young, evening people from the city flitting about in small groups or strolling in couples, absorbed in one another, thinking about having a drink soon and finding a place for dinner, wondering if they should have booked. Michael tried to slow his pace to match theirs. The country merged into town; the path became the pavement of a ‘waterside development’ passing by buildings that, unless they were brand new, had been prettified and adapted for purposes other than the ones for which they were built. Warehouses were galleries, boathouses were wine bars. He crossed the river by a footbridge into Hotwells and from there, passing the moored barges and houseboats, restaurants, shops and pubs along the river, he trudged into the centre of the city. At Temple Meads station he caught a train.

  When he got out at Chippenham it was quite dark. He was so hungry and exhausted, as well as parched with thirst, that he was tempted for a moment to take a taxi the rest of the way. Instead he bought a can of Coke from a vending machine outside the station, heaved the backpack up on his shoulder again and set off on foot through the town. When he reached the roundabout on the outskirts, where there were no pedestrians, he halted. Cars were still streaming round, shooting off at tortuous exits to McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s or the DIY store. He felt too visible. The next and final part of his journey was in some ways the most difficult; if he kept to the roads, which would soon be emptier of homing traffic, he might be noticed. There were no proper pavements, and a lone man walking along the roadside in the dark might be more memorable to a passing driver than the same man making his way along the streets of Bristol or Chippenham. God forbid, he might be stopped by a police patrol car; they had a habit of cropping up, and he still had Gordon Brookes’s clothes and car keys in his bag. He climbed a stile and set off on the last eleven miles to the manor, following the line of the road through the fields, keeping on the far side of the hedges.

  ***

  Michael returned late that night, after midnight. We had waited up. His appearance was a shock. Steph and I had collected our wits hours ago and had been going about things as normal and that being so, of course we looked more or less the same, except that our worry showed. Michael had aged in a few hours.

  All that day I had taken my cue from Steph and although my head was full of Michael, I had carried on as normal. While she was occupied with Charlie I potted the jam and labelled the jars. We had both been surprised by how easy it was to get on with the usual things, even though every single minute we were thinking of Michael. We mentioned him to each other on and off throughout the day, wondering how he was managing things, hoping he would find the strength for it all and not forget any important detail. But we did not fool each other, Steph and I. We both knew that the other one was thinking of nothing else. I kept the frown from my face for her sake, and she smiled and sang to Charlie for mine. Not being hungry myself, I nevertheless made a cake that afternoon, and for me she ate some of it. But we longed to have Michael home. I have never before in my life so much wanted for a day to be over, and that is saying something, for I have had other difficult days in my life.

  Steph was calm that day. Some stillness seemed to come over her, and in fact after that day it never left her. From that day on, her mind went into a permanent and steady gliding state. She opted for it, I think. She decided to keep her mind in a neutral, unfearing territory somewhere between helplessness and trust.

  There was a breeze that afternoon after the still heat of the morning, not ideal swimming weather. But once the pool had refilled Steph spent some time in it with Charlie while I sat out nearby and watched. I am sure that it helped us both, to see and hear Charlie just as happy and excited in the water as he had ever been. Something compelled us, I believe, to fill the garden and the pool with playful noise. It was necessary to exorcise any lingering spirit of ugliness. And it is certain that nothing sees off the looming atmosphere of strife that adults create around themselves faster than a delighted, shrieking child.

  But Michael’s appearance when he returned brought back to us the awfulness of what was happening. He was starving, but he couldn’t eat until he had had a bath, he said. Steph went up to run it for him. We were all hungry by then, as S
teph and I had not been able to eat until he was home safe. I had roasted a chicken, and we sat in the kitchen until quite late, eating with our fingers. It began as a performance that we all consented to appear in for the sake of the others, and slowly it mellowed into something else that was less of a charade, because our relief and happiness to be together again were real. Afterwards Michael needed another bath, he said.

  That night we were all exhausted, but we hardly slept. I lay awake wondering if I should feel guilty. Or rather, wondering if I actually did feel guilty- wondering, really, if this sleepless going-over of my life was a sense of guilt. Michael, not me, had done the deed, of course. But was it his proximity to me that had turned him into the kind of person who could do it, I mean kill another person? I dwelled on this for a time. Does the mere presence of one person whose hands are not exactly clean make it inevitable that another person will sooner or later dirty theirs? I lay in bed getting quite depressed, because despite all my efforts, it seemed that all this might go back to me and Mother.

  Mother’s own baby ‘wasn’t born right’ and died when she was three, eight years before I came along. I suppose they’d tried to have more babies of their own in that time. So I was meant to fill the space that was left, I suppose, which I now know to have been a doomed hope, because nobody can ever replace another. Charlie consoles us all but he does not, nor do we want him to, replace Miranda. Miranda’s tiny spot on this earth will always be precious and it lies in a place of its own, somewhere beyond a margin that Charlie cannot cross. All that Miranda meant to us remains with us and in us.

  It didn’t work, me and Mother. Not that direct or cruel comparisons were made, for the first little girl was never mentioned, but I didn’t shape up. Perhaps Mother tried, at the beginning. I know I did, probably right up until the time that Father died. It was around then that she first told me the truth about my real mother. She wouldn’t have dared to while Father was alive. She told me only to hurt me or, as she put it, to get me off my high horse about going to university. Because my real mother hadn’t died, after all. She hadn’t been the frail, tragic heroine in an air raid I’d made her into. I was the natural daughter of a ‘common prostitute’, who’d had me and handed me over to a children’s home the minute she’d been able to. And hadn’t she (Mother) and Father done enough, bringing me up as their own, even handing over valuable property (the clock)? Did I not think, in the circumstances, that I should be a little more grateful, content with what I had (a secretarial course)? It was the theme whose many variations have played over and over in my life until I came here, that good things- opportunity, security, affection, happiness- should come to me, if at all, only second-hand, and in second rate scraps.