by Jo Baker
Outside the bathroom window the rain still hammers down. The guttering is blocked: water spilling from its edge in an uneven waterfall. He’ll have to talk to the couple upstairs about getting that fixed.
He wanders through to the kitchen, fills a glass at the tap. Stands there in his underwear and shirt and drinks.
He misses Madeline. Suddenly, viscerally. He clutches the edge of the sink, and sobs hard, until he’s retching, and then brings up a flood of water, acid, and wine into the sink. When he can heave up nothing more, he turns on the tap, and rinses away the mess, and raises his hand to touch the wet away from his eyes.
He always knew that she was beautiful, he always knew that she was clever, but he never really noticed, when he was young, that Madeline was kind. Or, rather, he didn’t see how necessary kindness was.
Outside, the water cascades down from the blocked guttering, pools under the gravel, oozes through the seam where the coalhole has been imperfectly sealed, and drips down into the dark. The remaining dusty coal, which has lingered there since 1957 when the gas fires were put in, softens into a treacly morass, and oozes out from its dark corner.
Water also soaks through the brickwork of the cellar walls, growing mould on the wooden shelves, easing into the concrete floor and making it bead with damp. From the brick itself grows a white crystalline material, delicate and beautiful and unseen in the dark. Unseen, because Will hasn’t been down there since he carried down the unopened boxes of stuff that Carole had tumbled together on his behalf four years ago now. They’re mostly old notes and manuscripts and outmoded office supplies, and bits of drafts of books long published and gone. And whilst he can’t be bothered to check through them, he also can’t be sure there isn’t something worthwhile in one of them, and so leaves them down there, unopened, to rot. Though, in fairness, he doesn’t know they’re rotting.
The blue suitcase lies on the cellar floor. The cardboard wicks up the water from the concrete. It still looks solid enough, but it is weighed down by its own damp, and fragile. Inside, the vinyl album on the top holds some photos safe, though water seeps in and blots others, making the inks separate into the constituent colours, blurring the outlines of a young woman’s face, a toddler’s sundress, a graduation gown. The earlier albums—paper pages stuck with black and white photos—are drenched. A boy in his hospital bed. A rug on the beach. Different Sukies. A man on a bike.
• • •
Billie flicks on the light, heads down the stairs. Cobwebs droop from the light fitting. Will follows her down awkwardly, sideways.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Fine.”
“Is your hip hurting?”
“Is it a day?”
“You need to go and see a doctor. Get it checked.”
On the cement floor, a glistering of water.
“Shit.” He starts forward, past her, then stops. The walls are streaked with dark. They hear the drip of water coming from the disused coalhole cover. They see the boxes damp and softening, bulging out like bellies.
“What’s in them?” Billie asks.
“Nothing. Just crap. Office stuff.”
He goes over to the wall and touches the white bloom on the brick. The crystal crumples back on itself.
“So where’s the suitcase?” Billie asks.
He scans round; spots it, lying on its side, on the floor. He gestures to it. Billie darts over, as if her swift action would make any difference now. It looks, for a moment, all right. But when she kneels down and touches it the cardboard dips away, leaving the impression of her fingertips.
“It’s sodden.”
The wooden strips have bulged too, he sees now: they are bloated with water and splitting round the screws.
“Shall I lift it?” she asks.
“Go on.”
“It might just come apart.”
“Well, we can’t really leave it.”
He leans his weight on the top of the nearest box, watches as she slips her hands in underneath, lifting the suitcase like a sleeping child.
“It’s cold,” she says.
“Can you manage?” he asks.
“Yup.”
She eases it up, clutched in her arms, and makes her way between the boxes, back towards the stairs.
• • •
They sit on the living room floor, in the weak November light from the French windows. The case lies open on a folded throw, to keep its must and wet off the new green carpet. Billie lifts out the contents.
The stripy vinyl album is first. There are dewdrops inside the plastic sleeves. She slips the pictures out of their casings, and lays them out in the sunlight.
“Mum,” Billie says, of a girl in a green dress.
“Yes.”
Billie holds the photograph a moment longer, then lays it on the carpet. “Can I keep it?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“S’okay.”
There’s a moment when neither of them can speak.
“That’ll be me,” Billie says, fingertip suspended over the pink bundle of a child in Grandma Ruby’s arms.
“Yes,” he says. Her tininess. He remembers the washing-up bowl in front of the gas fire, her belly round and taut.
The older albums are buckled and softened and let their pictures loose. A boy in a hospital bed, holding a bow and arrow.
“That’s me,” Will says.
She looks at it. “You look like Matty. A fat Matty.”
“Fat! I was bedridden! I was in traction for a year.”
“Yep. Fatso.”
There are loose photographs too, and these she eases apart with minute care. A studio shot of Grandma Ruby, smooth-skinned, dark-lipped, beautiful and young. The photo is creased and battered and soft. And there’s another studio pose of Granddad Billy, a young man on his bike—To Mother, with love washed into an inky blur.
At the bottom of the case, drenched, is the postcard album, his grandma’s picture book. The wet has sealed its paperiness around itself. When Billie eases the pages apart, they peel into strips, fall into fragments like tinned fish. The postcards themselves are wet and soft, but more robust than the paper. One comes away in her hands.
“Shit. Sorry.”
“I think the album’s done for, love; don’t worry.”
She turns the postcard round to look at it. The picture is of the Grand Harbour in Malta. Her skin fizzes. “Whose was this?”
“My grandma’s. Granddad sent the pictures, during the war.”
“The one who died? Gallipoli? Granddad’s dad?”
Her dad nods.
“I was just there. I mean, I was just looking at this view; like, yesterday. This is Malta. Fuck.”
She tilts the card, dips her head to read the underside, as though afraid of turning it over fully in case the picture might drip off onto the floor. The writing is in pencil; sloping, even, very careful.
Dear Amelia
“Amelia?”
“My grandma.”
Thank you for your letter, which came in today’s bag. I am well, thank you, and longing to see you, and the child. I am glad to hear what you say of the offer of work. I thought you would like this picture. I am sitting now, looking out over this particular spot. I think you would find it quite beautiful.
Yours ever
William
Billie lays the card down on the carpet, touches it again, straightens it, dazed by a new sense of privilege, of unaccountably good fortune.
“He was in Malta, and it was wartime,” she says.
“Yes. That’s about as much as I know. He used to take Grandma to the cinema. She’d talk about that.”
Billie sits back on her heels. He is well, he is longing, he is glad. This is what you write if you’re writing home from war. If you’re writing on a postcard, that anyone could read. This is what is expected.
“What?” he asks.
There are things you can’t say, of course there are. Things you wouldn’t even co
nsider saying. About fear, and its deferral. About what you’d do to stop yourself from looking too far ahead. She feels choked with it. With what must have been felt, and may have been done, and could not be said.
“It’s sad,” she says.
She peels apart another page. He watches the care, the precision of her movements. She has become something, this past little while, while he wasn’t looking. Out of all the misery, she has pulled herself into focus.
“How was it, Malta?” he asks.
“It was good,” she says. Then, “Are there photographs of him?”
“Of my granddad? Don’t think so.”
“She didn’t have a single photograph of him, your grandma?”
“I never saw one. She always said my dad looked like him. He was named after him.”
Billie huffs a laugh, shakes her head.
“What?”
“The lot of you. Like a set of Russian dolls.”
“What?”
“All you men. Chips off the old block, the lot of you.”
He glances at her. “You think so?”
He means, does she think he’s just like his father. And there’s such a sharpness, an unease to it. She feels a rush of love for him. The boy he was. The years of pain. The damage done.
“You’re yourself. That’s the thing. Same block maybe, different chips.”
He says nothing.
“Is it okay to do this?” she asks, reaching out, almost touching the album. “You don’t mind?”
He nods her on: “I want to see.”
She sets the postcards down on the carpet like she is laying out a game of cards. She lifts one of a straw-roofed hut and places it next to another of some fishing boats. Turns them both over and reads the messages, the pencilled printing, the careful words. She turns them back. The colours are inked in on top of black-and-white prints. The shades are subtle, capturing the water’s rippled surface, the textures of rock and cloud. The pictures are what matters here, she realises. He’d seen the world, and even in the depths of war he’d found it beautiful. Whatever he’d written or failed to write, he’d communicated that.
Lancaster Station
December 12, 2004
HE’S STANDING ON the platform as her train cruises to a halt. She recognises him from his description on the phone. The black blouson leather jacket and jeans, the close-cut grey hair. As she makes her way through the alighting passengers, she watches him scan the crowds for her. His erect bearing, his stillness, give him away. Ex-serviceman.
He greets her with a nod. A brisk handshake. He says, “There’s something I want you to see.”
She buttons up her coat against the cold, slips her folder under her arm and stuffs her gloved hands into her pockets. She keeps pace with him up the narrow cobbled street towards the black hulk of the castle. He walks fast. Their breath plumes. Above them the sky is clear and bright.
She hadn’t expected to go straight to the Centre—this is just a first meeting, after all, and she understands his reluctance to introduce her there. She’d thought maybe they’d go to a café, where she could spread out her slides to show him. But instead they head past blank Georgian terraces and around the flank of the castle. To the left, the ground falls away, and Billie looks down on the slate rooftops below, dusted white with frost.
The castle is a functioning prison, he tells her. Mediaeval, she says, looking up at its dark, high walls. He asks her if she knows the proportion of ex-servicemen in the prison population. She says no, even though she has some idea. He tells her, and she expresses the necessary shock and sympathy. And then the homelessness? Does she know how many former soldiers end up on the streets? She shakes her head. The support, he says. The support is just not there.
They walk under the bare trees. It is a still, quiet day. The trees and dark stone buildings are stark against the sky. The air is fresh and clean.
He’s doing up a house—the other side of town—he gestures over to his right, and she glances round, and sees the terraces snaking up another hill, and beyond that woodland and the whaleback of moor. It’s a nice town, he says. Quiet. He’s been doing this a few years now, since he left the forces. Buying a place cheap, which you can round here, even now; doing it up, selling it, moving on. That, and the work at the Centre. Keeps himself busy. Her gaze catches on his hand, swinging by his side—the nails are scuffed and blunt and white with plaster dust. Like her granddad’s hands, capable of making anything out of nothing.
They turn the corner round the flank of the castle, through the priory gates; the old church squats dark and low along the line of the hill. They walk through the graveyard.
She asks about the men he works with. He gives her a sidelong look. She wonders if she has been too brisk, but then he nods. And he starts to talk. About their wounds, the nature of their injuries. The multiple amputations, the disfigurements, the scarring. He talks about how the charity he works for kicks in once medical treatment is over, and the men are sent home to get on with their lives. To adjust.
They pass headstones, and kerbed graves, and graves with iron railings round them, and an angel with her head knocked off.
“There are some things,” he says, “you just can’t adjust to.”
He is a good man. Decent. She likes him. She’s pretty sure that he has killed people.
They come up to the graveyard wall, a gateway. He pauses here, one hand on the gate. He doesn’t open it. This must be what he wants her to see. Below them a meadow slopes down to the woods below. Dry grasses and the dead heads of cow parsley stand rimed with frost. There are stands of hawthorn trees, scarlet berries and a rustling of birds. Further off, there’s a sweep of silvery water, and then, blue with distance, a scalloped line of peaks and hills.
“That’s Morecambe Bay,” he says. “Beyond, those hills there, that’s the Lake District.”
“It’s really lovely.”
“Those hills there,” he says, gesturing to the distant peaks. “That one’s Helvellyn, that’s Hawkshead Moor, and that’s the Old Man of Coniston.”
“It’s beautiful, really.”
He nods. She looks round at him. There’s a muscle twitching in his cheek.
“Sometimes I go climbing,” he says, and then for a moment he says nothing more. She follows his thoughts down what is clearly a well-worn track. The life he has. That there is no particular reason that he should have it when others don’t.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
He shakes his head. “No. It’s okay. My point is, you could paint that.”
He looks round at her. His eyes are startlingly blue.
“Seriously,” he says. “Why not paint that, that kind of thing? That’s breathtaking, that is.”
She nods. He’s right. Of course he’s right, it’s beautiful, it’s sublime. It’s wonderful to look at, to be in, to climb, to breathe. She wants to tell him about the hare’s skull, the dry newt with its dimpled eyes, the earlobe. These things, these damaged treasures, they need to be looked at, considered. They have their own beauty too.
“I know,” she says. “I know what you’re saying. You’re absolutely right.”
“So?”
“So I’m not a landscape painter. I don’t need to be. There are like a gazillion paintings of those mountains.”
She pulls a hand out of her pocket, tugs off the glove.
“Look,” she says. “I’m—I want to paint what we, what people don’t look at. I want to paint it and put it in a frame and make it something that people really look at. Deliberately. That they linger over.”
He studies her face, assessing her. She straightens herself up, brushes a strand of hair back from her cheek.
“You think it’s going to get you noticed?”
She shrugs. “I don’t care either way. It doesn’t matter.”
“Because, what, you think it’s worthy?”
“It’s necessary.”
She slips her folder up onto the flat surface of the wall; she goes
to loop the black elastic.
“Can I show you?” she asks.
He nods.
She lifts out a polypocket of slides, hands it to him. Her fingers are pale. It leaves her raw, bringing these pictures into the light. But if she’s not prepared to do it, to expose her inner self like this, she can’t ask anybody else to open themselves up to her scrutiny. He takes the sheet of slides off her, and holds it up to the sky. She watches his eyes as they move from image to image, following the descent of her mother’s illness. When his gaze lingers, she glances from him to the sheet, trying to work out what in particular has snagged him. Her cheeks burn. She feels ashamed of herself. Overeager.
“Who was this?” he says. He doesn’t look at her.
She swallows. “Mum.”
He nods. He puts the page down. She slips it back into her folder.
“I’ll ask for you,” he says. “At the Centre. If they’re up for it, I’ll introduce you to some people.”
She paints other men, but these are the three that matter most.
She paints Corporal Simon Gregg in front of his patio door. You can just see a glimpse of foliage and the red metal cup of a barbecue in the back garden beyond. He lost his right arm to a sniper bullet on patrol outside his FOB in Afghanistan: his sleeve is pinned up to his shoulder. He is planning to do a degree; he’s not quite sure what yet. He’s still working on his one-handed typing. His girlfriend is blonde, pretty, harassed, straight in from work and glancing at the drinks tray on the sideboard. He never seemed drunk, not once, not all the time Billie was working on his portrait. But he was never without a drink. She paints his whisky glass in his left hand.
She paints Private Louis Hargreaves in his bedroom. He sits on his single bed, his duvet cover a spread of stars, the wall behind him still stuck with posters. He’s lost both legs at the knee. The stumps are shiny and livid. He keeps his guitar on his lap, between him and what isn’t there. He keeps his face turned towards the guitar. He’s civil, but he doesn’t want to chat. He picks out tunes as she paints. He has a nasty scar up the side of his head: you can see it through his stubbly hair. He got that in a motorbike accident. Lost control on a bend and slammed into a tree: he was just a kid, still at school. She thought the army would sort him out, his mother did. She feeds Billie coffee and biscuits after the sittings. Custard creams and Bourbons and Garibaldis. Billie sits in the immaculate, tired kitchen, trying to dislodge clumps of biscuit with her tongue, listening to Mrs. Hargreaves talk, hearing, between the statements, the faint thrum of Louis’s guitar from his room upstairs. Mrs. Hargreaves talks about how good this is for Louis, Billie’s taking an interest, Billie’s being there, being company for him. He’s not a talker, doesn’t find it easy. And Billie, she’s been a real help.