by Morag Joss
Seeing him to the door, I said, meaning it in a way that I truly don’t understand, that I hoped poor Mr Brookes was all right. The policeman said (and this was unofficial) that if you asked him the poor man had done away with himself, possibly from the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Left the car somewhere in the vicinity, from where it was later nicked, and driven by joyriders, most probably, straight up the M5 and into Wales. A lot of that went on, joyriding over the Severn Bridge, but could you get the Bridge Authorities to co-operate in a clamp down? You could not. And Mr Brookes wouldn’t be the first, it drew suicides like a magnet, that place, and if you asked him they should shut off pedestrian access to the Clifton Bridge, full stop. People were always tipping themselves off it, often at night; he wouldn’t be the first, poor devil- on average it was about ten a year. And it was notorious, the Bristol Channel. The tides could wash a body up and down the estuary for weeks and months before they had finished with it. I do hope you’re wrong, I said. So do I, he said, so do I. They were keeping an open mind. But if that was what had happened, and he wasn’t saying it had, mind, then it would all ‘tie in’.
August
When the telephone rang it was just after one o’clock in the morning. Jean woke at the sound of it, her heart pounding.
‘Hello?’ She could hear a rushing noise, and piped music. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’ It was Michael, fractured and afraid.
‘Oh, my goodness! Michael! Michael, are you all right? Where are you?’
‘I’m in one of those service stations. I want to come home. Is it all right? Is it all right to come home? Is everything all right?’
‘Yes! Yes, come at once! Come home, come straightaway. Where are you?’
‘In a service area, I’m not sure, on the M6, no, the M5, I’m near Birmingham.’
Jean said, ‘Oh! Oh, that’s miles, I thought you meant you’d be- Oh, you’ll be hours still. Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t stay up, I just wanted to check it was okay- it is okay, is it? There hasn’t been any trouble with- you know, anything?’
‘No! No, everything’s fine. We just want you home. Oh, hurry, won’t you- I mean, no- don’t, don’t hurry, drive safely. Be very careful. Oh, Michael!’
He arrived at three o’clock. Jean had got dressed again and was lying awake listening for the car, and as soon as she heard it she got up. Steph was downstairs before her and was already leading Michael into the kitchen. He was crying with tiredness, and was visibly thinner. They put him in a chair by the Aga. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe; he sucked in air and held it in the top of his chest and swallowed, as if fearful of letting it go. When he did breathe out, he sank physically as the air left his body and waited, it seemed for long minutes, before gulping in another chestful. It was painful to watch. Jean made tea and fussed, to conceal the fear she felt for him. Had he been eating? He was so thin, he must be starving! Michael shook his head.
‘No appetite,’ he said. His voice was rusty from lack of use. ‘I had no appetite. I was too scared. But now I’m here I am quite hungry. In fact, I really am hungry. I’m starving.’
Jean smiled. ‘Oh well, I can fix that. What would you like? A bacon sandwich? Scrambled eggs?’
Michael looked at her as if he were struggling to understand what she was saying. But the tea was already beginning to calm him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not bacon. I really couldn’t eat anything salty.’
‘Something sweet, then? What about something sweet?’
‘Maybe. I- I think first I want a bath, if that’s all right.’
Steph went ahead to run the water. When he came down again he looked even more tired. Jean had made a mound of toast and another pot of tea, at which Michael managed a smile, a little like one of his old ones. He sat down. But when he lifted the lid of the pot next to the butter, peered in and smelled the strawberry jam, he had to get up quickly, unbolt the back door and dash outside to be sick.
***
You read about such things in the papers, don’t you? Head in suitcase, torso in canal, that kind of thing, you think, how on earth has that come about? And you picture some monster getting up to all sorts, enjoying himself, and phrases like pure evil pop into your head. I know better, now. I know that the blackest deeds are not necessarily done by those with the blackest hearts. I know that in the first place we did not want to kill Mr Brookes; we had to. Second, we most certainly did not want to deny him a proper burial. Even less did we want to plant bits of him all over the country. But it was the only way to deal with the situation we found ourselves in, and he was dead anyway after all, it’s not as if we were doing any worse to him than had already happened.
But I fretted and cried after him. I tried to think, if there is a God, He knows all about it already. If He is there and serving any purpose, doesn’t He know everything anyway? So He’ll take care of poor, blameless Mr Brookes’s soul without the need for the coffin and prayers, surely. It would be a little trite of God, I thought, to insist on the coffin and the prayers in the circumstances. I prayed, yes, literally I prayed as if God might still be listening to me, that He would be above all that and see His way to dispensing with the niceties in Mr Brookes’s case. It worried me. Actually, it began to lose meaning, this connection we cling to, between the person lost and the stuff in the coffin. They’re not the same. Let’s be grateful they’re not the same. Let’s not burden ourselves with talk of souls, but let’s just separate the man from the meat; regret the passing of the man, even if only to shield ourselves from the fact that the meat has been jointed, carved, and distributed all over the place. We wish it could have been otherwise.
And if there is no God, well, what then? Then we’re all in it together, we’re all the same, there’s no escaping it. If there’s no God, then no one of us can be closer to him than the next person, so that dispenses with the religious haves and have-nots, and what a relief that is. When it comes to our deeds, I am not without conscience, but I think we all do what we have to, according to who we are and where we find ourselves. We cannot preserve the delusion that we are not mere creatures of clay, or that some of us are at heart any better or any worse than anyone else. Unless you believe in monsters, which on the whole, I do not. The point is, the whole Mr Brookes episode is as horrifying to us as if we had read it in the paper ourselves and shaken our heads in pity and disbelief. We are not monsters.
The night Michael returned he would not go to bed. Steph kissed him so tenderly when she went up, saying that Charlie would be awake and needing her in three hours’ time. I saw the tears start in his eyes when she said that, but he let her go, telling her he could not sleep just yet and would be up soon. We sat until the silence that followed Steph’s leaving us was absolute. I was waiting for him to talk, and he knew it. We sat downstairs until dawn. Still he would not go to bed because he did not think he could sleep just yet. And then, as I almost feared he would, he told me all about it.
I shall not, could not give you all of it here. But Michael had gone east and then north, disposing of those thirty-one bags, in thirty-one different places, between here and Scotland. He brought the road atlas and showed me, as much as he could remember. He had tried to work by night when he could, and in the daytime he would park up somewhere to sleep. The car parks of those large supermarkets on the edges of towns were often suitable, if he used one of the spaces furthest from the store entrances. But he never dared stay for more than two or three hours. He was afraid it might attract attention to be in one place too long, so several times a day he would move and find somewhere else, keeping his eyes open all the time for places to bury the bags that he could return to after dark. He used the washrooms in motorway service areas when he could. He wanted, he said, to keep looking slept and clean and shaved, like somebody who might own a Mercedes, not some ragbag. When a person is described as ‘suspicious-looking’, apparently, it usually means they look tired and poor and not very clean. But he c
ouldn’t eat, and he knew he was beginning to look half-starved and haunted.
By night he would park in as concealed a place as he could find, and then take the spade, a few of the bags, the torch, and go off. After the first night or two he decided the spade was not such a good idea. He bought a trowel and handfork, and another backpack that he lined with plastic sheeting. Each night, with two or three bags from the boot in the backpack, and the tools in his pockets, he would set off looking for burial places. It looked less suspicious, he said, as if he were just setting out on a night hike.
It is amazing when you start to look, he said, how many places there are that never get walked over or noticed, even though nearby people are coming and going all day. He dug holes on those patchy and desolate stretches of ground where people do not go, not even to walk dogs, the soft ditches at field corners where no footpaths cross and where no ploughs go. He even buried two bags deep in the middle of a huge roundabout, planted with thick shrubs and trees.
As he went further north he began to seek out remoter places, though it was hard to judge how suitable the ground would be. He walked long distances in the dark, managing whenever he could by moonlight. On some nights he would hit rock not far below the ground’s surface, and then he would have to give up, the night wasted, and take the bags back to the boot. And the boot was beginning to smell. But he never gave in to the temptation just to drop bags in a litter bin and get away, or to scratch shallow holes for the bags and cover them over quickly. He always dug deep, emptied the contents of the bag in with the remains of the salt, filled the hole and trod over and around it carefully, replacing any turf. The thought of an excited dog with a wagging tail dropping some freshly dug-up part of Gordon Brookes at its owner’s feet filled him with horror. Not one of those bags must ever be found.
But just in case any should be, he avoided leaving them in any discernible trail. He branched off the M1 and wound through the High Peak District of Derbyshire, then continued due west into Cheshire and turned north again on the other side of the country, on the M6. From there he made detours into the Forest of Bowland and Swaledale. He crossed the country again south of the border, and drove east to Newcastle and then set off northwest through the Cheviots, entering Scotland at Hawick. But he could only get rid of three or four bags a night, at the very most. The boot seemed almost as full as when he had begun. So he pressed on, beyond Glasgow, across the Forth Road Bridge into Fife, burying bags where he could. The last two went into the North Sea at a place called Garron Point, north of Stonehaven. The next day he bought a large container of disinfectant, emptied it over the boot of the car, and headed south.
As he told me all this I asked questions: but how did you manage it, were you not frightened, how could you drive so far, on next to no sleep and little food? To my ears it was heroic. It hadn’t occurred to Michael to see it that way, but I was overwhelmed with admiration. Bit by bit as he talked and the day grew bright, some of the flint that was in him began to melt out. It came gradually, his understanding that it was all over. I sent him up to bed just as Steph was coming down. He went willingly. Now he could rest. The massive effort was over and we were back together again, and safe.
Jean was kept busy with the plums. There were six or seven trees, some bearing red fruit and some purple, and a golden one that she told the others were greengages. She decided against jam. But she read up about stewing, purйeing and freezing plums; she made them plum tart and plum charlotte, working in the kitchen with the radio on. She paid special attention to the news, dreading to hear anything about the discovery of human remains. No news came. She was now even more grateful for every day that passed. Each morning she would wake with the thought that another twenty-four hours had gone by which, even as she slept, had been doing their degrading, natural work. With every moment that passed Gordon Brookes was being returned to earth, dissolving hourly into the elements in which he lay.
She watched Michael, willing him to mend. After several days during which he did not get out of bed, he re-emerged with a white face and unsteady eyes. He blinked too often and glanced away to the side every two or three seconds, as if he had suddenly heard a soft but unwelcome noise over his shoulder. He had also developed a habit of giving tight little sniffs which would momentarily convulse the muscles in his throat. But the days of August stretched on, the time between the present and the past grew longer, and the events which had threatened his near-collapse seemed to fade in his mind. He did not get any worse. Jean trusted to the passing of more time and to the house itself to heal him, as she knew they would.
The summer continued hot. Some of the trees all but dried up and began to drop their leaves ahead of time, before their colours changed. They lay like torn paper strips painted dark green on one side and pale grey on the other and set out on the ground to curl under the sun. Jean pointed out to Michael the jobs in the garden that she considered mellow, soothing, and in keeping with the season, sending him out to be among the fallen leaves, not because she wanted them tidied up (she very much liked the dry swirl of them under the trees) but because she thought it would please him to feel their papery weightlessness in his arms.
It was not a particularly theatrical August. These days a mist lay on the garden until late morning. Amber blisters broke out over the remaining plums. They oozed and then rotted on the trees and on the ground; wasps feasted. In the flower beds it was the turn of the geraniums and carnations to eclipse the waning early flowers, the roses and monkshood, but everywhere the colours looked a little exhausted.
Charlie was less content to be carried round the garden on Steph’s hip having the names of colours told him; he wriggled now to be put down on the grass, where he would sit for a moment, pointing, and then lunge forward trying to reach the flowers, desperate to get among them. He could bounce along quite fast, and needed constant watching. Steph fretted pleasurably about his increased independence and mobility. She was worn out, she said. What with Charlie being here all the time, she was being run ragged. And he would put anything in his mouth. One day Jean came out to the garden to find her entire wooden spoon collection in a circle around him on his mat and Charlie sitting with his arms stretched up towards her, two bright red circles on his cheeks. He was teething.
There followed some disturbed nights and days of frantic gnawing, bad temper and a burning temperature. It was Steph and Michael together who saw him through it. They took it in turns to rise as soon as they heard him cry and dose him with Baby Calpol. For four nights in a row they walked the hot little bundle up and down with a cold flannel against his face. Then there were two twin white stumps in the centre of his lower jaw. It seemed to bring Michael round. His smile, which had been tight, filled out again. He laughed. Sally, who rang Steph once a week or so, sounded sorry in a remote kind of way to have missed her baby’s first tooth. Steph promised to take a photograph. In the meantime Simon, Sally said, was no worse, but neither was he much better. She could not come home yet. Steph told her not to worry.
Not only the colours in the garden faded, but the skies changed too, and in the afternoons the light shining on the walls of the house was gold. Inside the house Jean noticed the scent of roses and from the windows, looking up from what she was doing, she liked to watch Michael and Steph in the garden with Charlie, whose good humour was quite restored. Now once again there would be singing, and shrieking and laughing, and Michael and Steph swinging Charlie up high between them, then quiet spells. That was when Jean liked to walk slowly outside to join them. Charlie would be either asleep, or amusing himself on a rug in the shade, Steph would be lying or strolling about nearby. Michael most often would be reading. A pretty picture they made, or perhaps they created something more like a line in a poem than a picture, because the faint reluctance Jean sometimes felt to walk in and become part of it was not a fear of sullying the thing visually. It was an appreciation of the scene’s completeness, and her utter contentment in standing there beholding it, that sometimes made her wonder
if adding herself to it would be clumsy. For she was beginning to feel the slight separation that comes with being the first to realise something important, ahead of other people. The date was beginning to weigh on her mind, and, with her face as calm as ever, she now, as she went about her work, would be wondering about it, thinking what to do. She would not discuss it with the others, not yet; she liked to be thinking it over for herself as she watched them out in the garden, oblivious. She did not want to burden them with it yet. Then they would look round and see her, and call out, and she would go towards them, smiling. So they would lie about talking and playing until it was time to go in. They were impossibly happy.
***
I did say earlier that it is amazing to me the way this house seems to provide what we need. It amazes me further that it provides it just when it is needed. For it is only now, in August, that I have remembered about monkshood although I have been tending the flowers, picking them, learning about them from the gardening books, arranging them, all this time. And I have known for years that monkshood is a poisonous plant, but it was only when Steph was talking about Charlie, who is now crawling and putting all sorts in his mouth, that I wondered how safe he would be in the garden, and then, as if I had only just seen it for the first time, I became aware of the monkshood. Aconitum, to give it its proper name.