Sudden Traveler
Page 7
I think we should go here.
I have to get back soon.
Not yet.
They’d sat on the uneven stools of rock, backs to the fells, not even facing each other. It felt like a disaster, being stranded miles out with this spare part. All she was planning was how to get home without having to get a lift from him. Finding a phone box, reversing the charges, getting someone to fetch her. But then he’d turned and put his hand on her leg. Before even kissing her he’d brushed aside her skirt like cobwebs and had begun to stroke her, very softly, as if he were stroking a breakable and delicate thing, a baby rabbit. She’d caught her breath. It was the first time someone else doing it had felt right, not clumsy, not uncomfortable. He’d knelt down in front, looking up.
Do you want me to?
Do I want you to what?
Lick you out.
He was shockingly unembarrassed. There was a look of remedial honesty on his face. It was simply a question, an option, no guile to it. He was still stroking her.
Can you stop if I ask you to?
He took off her wet, dirty shoes, one by one—the only romantic act. Her underwear he pulled to the side, and after he’d begun, when it was clear she wasn’t going to stop him, he’d stripped her underpants off over her legs and thrown them into the grass. She looked to the side, at the patches of bright moss in the stones. Some of it she didn’t like, when his tongue went stiff and sharp, but he knew, he could hear that, and he repeated whatever had made her sounds soften or get louder. He knew what he was doing; maybe he’d been taught; she didn’t want to think by who. The older girls were always talking about which ones were naturals, which ones bit too much or came too soon or liked it if a girl was on top. After a while it was unbearable, and she’d pushed his head away.
What do you want me to do?
Now she was just tired. She didn’t want to walk far, she couldn’t, just past the cottages and on to the howe, so she could feel that upland wind flowing off the grass and bracken. She took the phone out of her bag and checked for a signal. It was low, but registered. There would be a few minutes from the call to authorization, she knew. She wondered what they would say to her, if anything. Good luck, Mrs Lydford. God bless you—she hoped not that. She’d written to Mia, a proper letter, not an email, that would arrive too late in the post, but would explain, as best she could. They’d had a short decent phone call the day before. Perhaps Mia wouldn’t understand, perhaps she would; her daughter often surprised her. In truth, Mia didn’t need her, and that was how it should be.
She went into the shop. There was a magazine rack, sweets, crisps, and shelves of beans and pasta, a fridge of local meats and a little table with pottery for sale. Things had come back around to local crafts and produce. She was glad about that. Her parents had given up farming after the supermarkets arrived and the subsidies were cut, then had run the place as a B&B, the big barns empty, pots of flowers outside the front door. Not many had adapted that well. A neighbor in the valley had hanged himself in his shed. On hearing the news, her father had nodded. Carl had his ideas. I respect that.
She hadn’t understood. Now she was older than her mother had been. Her mum had had a bad heart too. Blue hands and feet and the tip of her nose in winter. With her, it had been quicker. She’d dropped like a sackload of rusk in the courtyard and the ambulance had stalled coming across the river ford. She felt a bit of lovely pain, remembering. It never went away altogether, that kind of loss, but sat about you like weather, changing, getting up a gale from time to time. And for the others. Her brother. Kenneth. She was sorry he was dead too; sorry she hadn’t known him later in life. What kind of man would he have been? She often wondered. But there were those who could only fit into the past, couldn’t come onward with the turn of the years. A love might never be at all, if there wasn’t symmetry, a moment to try it. She’d thought a lot about the heart, all its functions and associations. Dr. Ong’s hearts were so simple-looking—blue and red pockets, a few holes, a few tubes.
The girl behind the shop counter was about eighteen. She wore a fleece, trim jeans, no make-up. Her skin was totally under control. She didn’t look worldly—maybe that was the point these days. To be it, but not look it, or to have an online persona that was your opposite, that saved you the job but made you feel false and inferior. Was she going up on to the moor? Was she clear about her yeses and noes? Girls now were supposed to be more adventurous, weren’t they, and angry, and they had their own cars and jobs and phones. Were they getting lessons in how to know yourself early? She doubted it; they all looked so sad and thin.
She bought a packet of Orton beef. It was expensive, useless, and would sit inside her purse getting warm, but so what.
Could I have a tea to go? she asked the girl.
Earl Grey or normal or herbal?
She pointed to the English Breakfast. She’d never liked the fennelly or camomile ones Mia preferred; they all tasted like hay.
Don’t forget to save, she said to the girl, who looked confused.
The hot-water pipe hissed. She took the tea in its paper cup outside and sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs. The sky was still lumpy, grayish. March. Soon the evenings would be getting longer, blossoms unfurling on the hazels and the hawthorns. The walkers from the bus were consulting a plastic map, gazing up at the Pennines.
She sipped the tea. She took the phone, the setter remote and the piece of paper with the code out of her purse, and she called the number. She was afraid, of course. She might change her mind. She’d asked Dr. Ong at the last cardiology clinic how it might be, how it might feel. Would it be painful? It was all right if so, she thought, she’d known pain. But would her heart struggle on, try to reinstate itself? She didn’t want to end up in between. It made her think of cattle that the bolt-gun had mishit in the line.
Not painful, we don’t think, the doctor had said. Your heart is no longer capable of autonomy, so we would expect swift discontinuance of the organ, and across the whole body.
The doctor had spoken quietly. They were perhaps not supposed to discuss such things speculatively. There was supposed to be a plan. They went through the usual tests; she watched the ultrasound picture of the muscles shuddering and contracting, on cue. Then, as she was leaving, Dr. Ong had said something odd.
It is perhaps beautiful and powerful.
That slight, enigmatic medical smile.
Like a climax, of sorts.
She didn’t have to wait in a call queue. The voice was pleasant, intelligent, a young man from Newcastle. He asked her the questions, her memorable information, the name of the prime minister, and she answered correctly.
I didn’t vote for him, she said, and the man laughed politely.
Your passcode is active, he said, is there anything else I can help you with today?
Did he understand what his job really was, she wondered. She thanked him and said no and hung up. She took another sip of tea. One or two spots of rain could be felt. The remote vibrated on the table. She unlocked it, typed in the numbers carefully, pressed enter, and set it back down. Her hand was shaking a little. There was a short beep. Borrowed days, she thought, all of them.
Not far away, there was a bench near the steep packhorse bridge, where the common opened out on to fellside. The river there was fast and shallow. She remembered the spot, flies above the water and the pale mouths of trout coming up and kissing the surface. She’d sat there afterward with him and watched the water for a while, watched him upending rocks in the current looking for crayfish, feeling stunned, but unafraid. She’d never felt so unafraid in her life, even with the stinging trickle between her legs.
What about you? she’d said.
She hadn’t really understood the preferences of men. She’d pulled his face to hers, his glistening mouth, because it seemed wrong not to. He broke away and continued. She hadn’t known him, or liked him as she had some of the others, but it didn’t matter to her body. When she came it was like a blind goldness, like
staring at the sun, so that she was gone, she was its soft destroyed atoms. That brilliant bursting sensation all through and up and into her, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t control any part of what made and drove her. She heard the clink of his belt coming undone, and he was inside. With the others there had been a few moments of bareness, before stopping, anxiety for days after about the risk, the before-rain drizzle. It was as if he, and she, knew the purpose of it all, and there had never been anything as honest or as free as that commitment, not in all the years of love and the practices of marriage, the planning of children, the bonds favored by people.
Both of them unable to stop, as if dragged into a beautiful slaughtering machine. Even after he’d come he didn’t still, but kept moving. Then he finally lay against her, shivering, while she looked away. Carrion bones and a ring of stripped tawny fur nearby, the smell of burned wood, and the black return of everything to peat. Afterward, they’d walked back down the sheep tracks, as silently as they’d come up, and gone to the river, then gone home, and not ever spoken again, not even looked at each other across the street in town. Another life started, which was the proper one, the one that comes after a sacrifice.
She stood up, took off her coat, left it on the chair for someone to find and maybe keep, and began to walk. The bridge and the bench were not far. She would get there. She would settle herself, arrange the skirts of her dress and wait. It would not be bad for whoever found her. It was nature; no, it was what nature would have done, a while ago, were it not for the brilliance of human invention. And no, she wasn’t afraid, here in Orton. She hadn’t been afraid that day, over half a century ago—that’s what she would have explained to everyone, if she could. And he hadn’t been afraid either, when there was usually so much fear in life and of life, all those named and nameless fears that finally exhausted and controlled everything, when really there was no control, not in the end.
Sudden Traveler
You breastfeed the baby in the car, while your father and brother work in the cemetery. They are clearing the drains of leaves and silt, so your mother can be buried. November storms have brought more rain than the valley has ever seen. The iron gates of the graveyard are half gone, the residents of the lower-lying graves are swimming. Water trickles under the car’s wheels. The river has become a lake; it has breached the banks, spanned the valley’s sides. And still the uplands weep. On the radio they have been talking about rescue squads, helicopters, emergency centers in sports parks and village halls. The army is bringing sand. They have been comparing measurements from the past one hundred years. The surface of the floodwater is decorated with thousands of rings as the rain comes down.
Inside the car is absolute stillness. When he is finished, the baby sleeps against your side. There are only two small feeds a day now. His mouth has become a perfect tool and you no longer have any marked sensation, no tingling, no pressure across the chest wall as the milk lets down. His mouth remains slightly open, his cheeks flushed. There are bright veins in his eyelids, like light filaments in leaves. He rests heavily against you, hot, breathing softly, like a small machine, an extra organ worn outside the body. You could try to place him carefully on the front seat, under a blanket, get out and help clear the leaves. You would like to feel the cold air against your face and hands as it streams over the mountains. You would like to work with the men. But you dare not move.
You sit in the car, watching reefs of cloud blow across the valley, watching the trees bow and lean and let go of their last leaves, hearing the occasional lost call between your father and brother, and feeling the infant heat against your side. Nobody warned you about this part—suspension from the world. Waiting to rejoin. The baby is some kind of axis, a fixed point in time, though he grows every day, fingers lengthening, face passing through echoes of all your relatives, and the other relatives, heart chambers expanding, blood reproducing. It is like holding a star in your arms. All the moments of your life, all its meanings and dimensions, seem to lead to and from him.
In the hospital, he played with the plastic bracelet the nurse gave him, identical to the one your mother was wearing. He threw it on the floor and everyone, even the consultant, picked it up and gave it back, laughing. No one could resist such a game. Joy in the midst of trauma; such a welcome relief. Should we write his name on it, a nurse asked. No, no, you said. Absolutely not. Then again, you kept the tiny one from his birth in a box of medical mementos—the wool hat they put on him, despite the heat of July, despite his raw scalp, the subterranean surgical thread they’d used to stitch you closed, its two blue beads. The power of artifacts, like a ritualistic hoard. Occult. Perhaps, in keeping such items, you have created a dark charge.
Good as gold, the nurses said as he played on the ward floor. He smiled at the ladies in their beds, ladies of ruin, gowned, chronically pained, with systems in shutdown, embarrassed by their smells. You could see his effect, like tonic, for them. What a poppet, they said. Bonnie lad, you’ve come to see your Granmammy. He watched your mother jerk under the white sheet, too young, of course, to understand. It might have seemed like a silly game. You took him outside when the nurses changed her pads, knowing, knowing she would want that privacy, and walked him on your feet down the corridor, holding his wrists, his operator, his avatar. You bought coffee for everyone in the hospital cafe—your dad, brother, even your niece and nephew—then came back to take your place at the vigil.
The nurses were talking about death around her bed, casually, the normalness of dying, and at first you were horrified, you wanted to tell them to stop, shut up, it would frighten your mother to hear such things. Then you began to see they were, in fact, comforting her, better than you could. Dying: like having a wash, like stirring sugar into tea, or laying out cutlery. It was the first instruction of what would become a vital list of instructions, bringing the experience close, feeling its cool brush against your skin.
You sat your son on your mother’s bed, keeping him away from the intravenous pump pushing morphine. Enough morphine to relieve, but not to render insensate, yet—let her be conscious for the goodbyes. They had removed the feeding tubes, which was also an act of kindness, no matter how counter-intuitive. The baby reached for the dish and the sponge with which you had been wetting her dry mouth. He reached for your mother’s twitching fingers. Everything in her was breaking down. They told you some part of her would know what was going on in the room around her, she would be able to hear at least and at last, and yes, you think she did know. Your son’s name was the only word she could say properly, though she was trying and trying to talk, her voice hoarse, making no sense. When you held him close, and put her hand on his head, on that beautiful drift of hair above his neck, her eyes focused for a moment, on you, on him. She said, Hello—
The ward was full. The hospital was full. Winter, the season of infection, of brutalization of the weak and the old. Within half a day, the nurses had found her—through some complicated political subterfuge—a private room. Less than forty-eight hours, the consultant had said, once they’d admitted her and run tests. You forget exactly who broke that piece of news—your dad, your brother, one of the doctors, maybe. You were already en route to the hospital, halfway up the motorway, on speakerphone. The night before, she’d fallen out of bed, and your father and the neighbor could not lift her back in, though she weighed, by then, very little. You knew it was not good. You had been keeping, in fact, a small overnight bag under your bed, ready to go. Like the weeks when your son was due. Thank you, you said, to whichever green-winged angel told you, thanks for letting me know. You did not pull over into a lay-by or service station, though you were advised to sit quietly for half an hour, to have a cup of strong tea, maybe call someone to comfort you. Who idles after such news? Instead, you gripped the steering wheel, accelerated up to sixty and switched the wipers on. The baby slept in his tilted seat. There were already weather warnings, talk of road closures, diversions. There were clouds the color of iron ahead of you.
Your brother carries a bag of wet leaves out of the cemetery. His coat is stained, his trousers soaked to the thigh. He looks towards the car, doesn’t smile. He and his wife and their kids are staying at your parents’ house too. Your father’s house. The house where you were raised. All of you, over the last week, have been driving to and from the hospital, dozing in the chairs, bringing supplies. Only your father remained in full attendance, requesting clothes, his medicines, her favorite Christmas tree decoration. The nurses were kind about suspending the restrictions, you must remember to write, thank them, do something, send them a set of teacups, perhaps; they drink so much tea.
Tell me when, your brother had said to your dad the last night at the hospital, as he was leaving, tell me to come and I’ll get there in time. The hospital is nearly an hour’s drive away in the day, slow country roads, then steep northern motorway. Not exactly a swift journey. But at night the north has other dimensions. Empty roads shine like dark wounds through the mountains. Everything warps. You almost believe he would have got there. Four a.m. was when her breathing finally changed, but your brother was so worn out he didn’t hear the phone ringing. Didn’t pick up the message, your father’s anguished plea: Come now. A neighbor knocking on the door broke the news in the morning, and then your brother went out on the moor with the dogs and nobody knows what came next, but the dogs made their own way home. He will not forgive himself, you can see it in the way his body moves between the graves. Penance. Hard labor. He wanted so badly to be there in that final moment.