‘What happened? Tell us. We need to hear it,’ Mrs Berry said.
Myles raised an eyebrow, fixed his eyes on a yellow flower in the rug and said, ‘He received a letter from Tara. She said she was finished with him that evening. We had rain. August rain in Lebanon is rare, you know – the earth smelt its redness, a rusty smell – I was thinking that when I heard the shot. And I ran out and heard the boys saying that Paul had shot himself. I got a jemmy bar and prised the door … he left a note. You got the note?’
‘We read it,’ Mrs Berry said, looking hard at Charlie.
‘Youse didn’t get along, Mr Berry?’ Myles said, a gentle probe to remind the old fella that he didn’t have to travel farther than his own shirt buttons to find one of the underlying causes for his son’s death.
The old man remained silent.
‘They didn’t, no,’ Mrs Berry confirmed.
‘The letter said that,’ Myles said.
‘You didn’t mean it … isn’t that so, Charlie? You were only teasing with Tara about the money, weren’t you? He was only teasing, Myles.’
Silence.
Tara wrote and told Paul that his father was putting pressure on her for repayment of €20,000 they’d borrowed from him for their house deposit. They’d been hoping Charlie would turn it to gift money. He didn’t. Wouldn’t. Not unless he was given something in return … leave the army and come back on board the family’s Starship Enterprise. That was the surface reason ….
Myles had a friend in the military police who on the quiet told him Charlie baby was screwing Tara, and he didn’t mean for the return of his money; he wanted his money’s worth. Paul learned of the affair from Tara’s sister, who thought he should know.
Myles didn’t reveal that he was pissed off with his best friend for not confiding in him – especially after he had weeks earlier confided in him about his own marital problems.
‘You’ll stay the night, Mr ...’ Mrs Berry said.
The offer was empty of sincerity.
‘No, I won’t, thanks. I’ve accommodation arranged. Thanks anyway.’
She let him out, not a word of goodbye from either of them, their son’s best friend, lousy failure of a friend.
The fog hadn’t thinned, so he pulled in to a picnic area at the mouth of a forest. In a while, he would let the seat back and try to fetch some sleep. He would probably spend most of the night wondering about Charlie and Paul, and when the bond linking them had first begun to weaken. About how the old man will point his finger in every direction and never at himself. Refusing to let the truth sink home, fending it off like an able politician – how he’ll push the army for answers, doing so energetically so as to cast off any suspicion his wife might have concerning him and Tara. And of Tara’s silence? For money, perhaps? Or threat? Myles did not bring himself there – that was a bridge for another day. She, he suspected, did not mind the affair at first, but grew tired of it. He could be wrong, though. Part of him took a comfort in putting her in a bad light – taking Paul’s side. His buddy who couldn’t share a burden, only with a bullet.
His mother, all the while, would observe Charlie’s antics, derive satisfaction at the sight of him squirming. And then someone one day will whisper a fact in his ear, and he’ll find out what he does not yet know – that his wife had known all along.
Myles stared into the fog-shrouded woods. He understood now why Paul had joined the army: to get away from his parents, to save himself – but he hadn’t gone far enough. In the end, all he had done was give them another game to play.
The woman who wanted to do nothing for ever and ever
It is in 1878, when the days start to draw in and the nights stretch for too long, that Emma decides she has had enough of life. She is 49, and works as a maid in a house set well back from a lake that holds pike, which one catches only for show and not for cooking, for pike are full of bone and though it is twenty-five years since Miss Mildred choked to death from a fishbone, her death throes appear to have been indelibly lodged in the very memory of the old house.
This dark evening, Emma Dundon, daughter of Edward and Elizabeth, both long deceased, sits to the side of her bed in a small room, cosy from reddening coals in a fireplace that casts out smoke whenever the wind turns a certain way. A stout white candle burns in an oval glass holder, but a draught every so often attempts to gutter the flame. The light is weak, like a tired heart in an otherwise sound body. She had lost weight in the last few weeks, yet still feels well, or so she tells herself. Her mind seems to reflect the sickness of her body – she is snappy and broody and quiet, not at all herself. She displays still her seemingly tireless energy. Every morning, before the stars go out, she clears ashes from half a dozen fireplaces and replenishes fuel boxes with coal and logs before seeing to breakfast and the making of beds.
It was hard enough to do all these things when I was young, she thinks, but it’s not getting any easier, and the Mister and Mistress won’t take on help to replace Biddy, who died six months ago. They insist on standards being kept as they were … bugger me, I do say to myself, bugger me they do, will you sew that Emma and sweep the yard? Sew, knit, sweep, wash, scrub, cook, bake, fill fuel, run a bath, polish this, shine that, do the dishes? God almighty, I do say to myself, will you sprout another of me, please? A double, so this one, me, can rest a while. A pair of knees on me like red onions, joints creaking and groaning, and aches and pains all over my body – all clamouring to be the worst of them, and me unable to make that decision. Tired, so tired. Yet not sleeping, even with a sip of the Mister’s whiskey in me. His whiskey these days is the only thing of his that comes in me. Mistress has no idea of where he used to put himself. Oh, stand in front of the fire there, warming his bits and bobs, his hairy behind looking at me, and he talking about the price of hay and what this gentleman said to this other gentleman, and then he’d turn about, full of himself again, and he’d slip into bed and tell me to bite the pillow and not his shoulder, and if I’d mind opening my legs a little wider and bring them up high. Wasn’t I fortunate he was spent in that how do you do of some men, and never could rise a belly on me?
She stands up and begins to undress – exhausted. She wakens these dark mornings as though she’d been asleep for merely minutes. Another day of it comes far too soon. Drudgery. She pulls her sleeping gown over her short, lithe body. Good enough still to hold a man’s attention, but she is rarely inclined these days to have a man in her, and makes do with the occasional hand to herself – she can bring herself to orgasm quickly by imagining herself with the gardener’s son, Jed – quiet, muscular, tall, with rugged features – now there is a man who could have put a belly on her. He’d done so to his wife, pretty quickly as a matter of fact – two already and another on the way. She looks a beaten woman already, and she only 25.
Mind if I borrow him in my mind for a bit, love? Only for a minute or two, depending on the quickness and the lightness of my fingertips. Sure, who’s to know or object? He’ll do no harm only good, I think, but a body wouldn’t know that for sure, would it? For they say that the mind can be the sickest place of all, and the body underneath is kept in the dark about the fact.
The Mister never comes near her these days, and speaks to her like he had never known her in that way. Three men all told in her life: one a man who was a butler in the house, and left shortly after Miss Mildred died – she was to go with him and in the end did not, for the Mister and Mistress needed her in those days, when their only child wasn’t too long dead. And in truth, the child’s death had stricken her too with a sort of melancholia that, once it grabs on to the tail end of a person’s soul, never seems to let go. Gordon White, kind and lovely and sure to have made her a good husband – she did not love him of course. And he had yet to assert a liberty of her that their master had been enjoying for six months – it was from him she wanted away, and Gordon was her ticket. It was
a certainty, she had reckoned, that someone would catch the Mister with her – she was surprised that the squeaking bed boards had not alerted anyone, and she had whined aloud with pleasure one night when he put his tongue to her. But no one ever found out, and their secret remained one – survived as a goodly few appear to do in this life.
The other man was Frank, and he was rough, and rode her as though she was one of the Mister’s racehorses. She was not sorry to hear he was fired when the Mister caught him whipping a horse for no reason. He had bad teeth and breath and hands, with fingers that did not know how to touch things lightly. The marks he left on her occasionally come to her mind, and she winces at the memory.
She hears the fall of feet on the stairs. Once familiar to her ears – he used to tell Mistress he was going to read in the study. This was an old habit before she became a new one for him. A poker must have its fire, she used to say, and there was no fire of much note in the Mistress of the house. Life had left her like a patch of scorched gorse – you could see the blackness and smell the soot ….
She listens intently.
Surely he is not about to start up that racket again? She is surprised to discover there is a flicker of want in her. He knocks the door – it is timid, like the rap of old.
She goes to the door and opens it.
His stubby candle has burned down on one side, the tongue of flame high. Candle grease thick, like prominent veins in the back of a leg. His waistline had expanded since they had last been lovers. He is dressed as for the day in green waistcoat and tweed trousers, white shirt she had ironed that afternoon – remembering that it had not washed well, for there existed the faintest whiff of his perspiration. Oh, the sweat of him when he used to furrow inside her, sliding off his face and dripping like beads of rainwater into her eyes, the saltiness stinging her worse than the air in her room from down sweep of smoke.
‘I have news for you, Emma,’ he says softly.
His eyes do not hold hers – they move to the fire, and to the bed, and then to the window. He coughs into the fist he’d made of his hand. She steps back, and he walks by her. She catches the smell of his armpits – the faint whiff now loud. She closes the door ever so gently. He stands to the fire for moments before turning his back to it.
‘News?’ she says, folding her arms across her chest.
‘Damn bad news I’m afraid.’
‘Bad news?’
‘Yes.’
He takes in a deep breath. She knows now that he has not come for her, and is more than a little disappointed – she is also somewhat surprised at herself.
‘The Mistress and I are selling up … there’s a bid made, and it’s most likely that we will accept. We are going to live in Spain. It’s for the mistress’s health, you know how poorly she has been …’.
He waits for moments for her to acknowledge this, and when she does not he continues.
‘The thing is … the Hudsons, the new owners, have their own staff, and have asked to pass on the news that there is to be a clean break. Do you understand?’
She nods.
‘We’ll pay and keep you to next May, and give you something in expenses and so forth thereafter, to help you on your …’.
‘May?’ she says.
‘Yes … it’s a while off, but we wanted to be fair to you and give you plenty of notice. You have given us much service.’
‘Fair,’ she says. Service, she thinks.
‘You must have someone you can stay with?’
She remains silent, for he knows she has no living relative. Awkwardly, he says, ‘The Stevens are looking to hire help … I could put a word in there for you if you like.’
The Stevens – they have six children, and provide a meagre wage that sometimes isn’t even paid, and the accommodation is shared. What would she be at, sharing a room with a young one?
He says into the silence, ‘I suppose not … but they will ask about you, you know. Your reference will be first class, rest assured, any house would be glad to take you in.’
‘Any house.’
He waves a hand.
‘And the books … help yourself to any of them that you fancy from the study. I know that you like reading. Are you still reading poetry?’
‘A little.’
‘Good, good-o, good for you.’
He nods several times and rubs his hands together.
‘I best be off back to the mistress or she’ll be wondering where I’m gone, eh?’
‘She’ll think that you’re in your study.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m afraid, Emma, she knows that’s where I wasn’t a lot of the time.’
‘I see.’
Hastily, he says, ‘But she doesn’t think it was you.’
‘No.’
‘I said it was Biddy.’
She sighs and says, ‘Poor Biddy.’
‘None of the pleasure and all of the blame,’ he says.
She cuts at him with her eyes. He throws out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘If I said your name she’d have you on the street, and no money coming to you. No beneficial reference either.’
‘Who told her of your affair?’
He pretends not to hear, and so she does not ask again. He walks to the door, hesitates with his hand on the round brass knob, and then he is gone, leaving behind the odour of his perspiration and the scent from a crooked candle.
She sits again at the edge of her bed, and sips at the last of the Mister’s whiskey. Then she extinguishes the candle with a harsh breath and slips under the blankets. The house is awakening around her in creaking floorboards, and a door that needs jamming with paper to the frame in a room above her. The Mister can fix it.
Over the following days, she consumes more of the Mister’s whiskey than is good for her. She has begun to write poetry. What she owns in this world fits into a single piece of luggage with space left over. She wants none of his books. She retires in the early hours, and is late in wakening and tending to her chores. Clothes are half washed, and the hair above her lips she let grow. When the Mister approaches to scold her for her laziness, she says she is feeling poorly, and when the Mistress comes to her she says she isn’t at all well in herself, and that a fierce lethargy has come over her. She tells the Mistress a partial truth: that she can’t get Miss Mildred out of her mind – isn’t it the twenty-fifth year of the accident? A week it takes for her to succumb to the fever she’d acquired from walking naked in the freezing fog, shrilly calling out in a drunken stupor for a husband, anyone’s … she giggled. Then arrives the day that she’s dying, and when the Mister and his wife visit her with the doctor, she points to an envelope on the mantelpiece. Hesitantly, he takes it up and opens the flap. The Mistress is looking at him reading the letter and is awaiting her turn …. Emma’s eyes close, and she feels herself slipping and slipping … pushing herself too, wanting to embrace death, to know the peace of nothingness.
The doctor says, ‘She’s gone.’
‘The letter, Andrew …’ the Mistress says, hand extended.
It is easy for him to hand it to her.
It reads: My epitaph, if you don’t mind it being so ….
‘Here lies a poor woman who was always tired, for she lived in a place where help wasn’t hired. Her last words on earth were: Dear Friends, I’m going where washing ain’t done nor sweeping nor sewing, and everything is exact to my wishes, for there they don’t eat and there’s no washing of dishes. Don’t mourn for me, don’t mourn for me never, for I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.’
Ends
(Epitaph from an English graveyard, circa 1860.)
Halabja
Unwilling to face into the biting cold, he had delayed in bed until he could no longer tolerate his mother’s shrill voice.
There was a certain sharpness to it that he would not dare to bring her beyond, and now she was close to the summit of her temper. He dressed in a hurry, and called out to let her know that he was coming.
She said he was the laziest of boys, and his sister muttered that he was a lizard-face for disturbing the quiet in the home. His grandmother smiled. She was deaf, and he thought she enjoyed being that way so she could hear nothing of the shouts and threats, or any of his father’s loud snoring. Mother said he liked to snore because he knew it upset her and kept her awake. He hadn’t always snored: it started when he put on the belly and began to drink too much arrack.
The Stupid Man, she often said of him, but not in a bad way. Well, he thought, not when Grandmother’s, his mother’s eyes, were on her lips.
An imperceptible breeze slipped off the flanks of the snow-covered Zagros mountains, the foothills of which tapered to merge with the town’s cemetery road. He rode the bay mule his brother would take back down the mountain. Wickerwork panniers carried kindling to light the evening fire, logs, lumps of charcoal, a sharpened machete, fresh pitta bread, beans, tea leaves, sugar, and some toffee sweets given to him by his grandmother. He was 15, Kurdish, dark-haired, green-eyed, thin, and short for his age. Cotkar Amedi, called after an uncle on his mother’s side whom he had never seen, who lived only in photographs and the occasional spoken memory of him. He bore more of a likeness to his father’s twin, Salar, who lived across the border in Iran, in Marivan village.
Other than to complain about his late arrival, his brother had little to say. After spending two nights with the herd in the mountains, Memu was usually gruff and silent, anxious to be on his way. But Cotkar had questions he needed to ask. Had he seen any wolves or wild dogs? Had any of the goats been taken? Had he come across any more corpses of deserters from the Iraqi army? Last month, Memu had stumbled upon the remains of three young men in a ravine. All of them had been shot in the back of the head. They’d been buried in shallow graves, and pulled from them by either wolves or wild dogs. Out of begrudging respect for their souls, and the bad luck it might bring if he had just left them there to rot, Memu swung a pickaxe to the ground.
Deadly Confederacies Page 10