Sudden Traveler

by Sarah Hall

  You did not want to be there. You were afraid of that last inhalation, its lack of echo. You did not want to see the door close. You wanted those dry, wood-tongued breaths to go on and on, selfishly, fearfully, even though, when you had the room to yourself, you told her it was OK to go, you told her you and the others would be OK. Just sleep, Mum.

  But you did go to the morgue. You stood and you looked. She was so altered she seemed like another substance, not flesh. She looked like an image in the only dream you would ever have thereafter. Why did you go? You’ve asked yourself. Because you had to see, be sure. Your brother did not come into that back room. He sat with your niece and nephew and drank exceptionally well-made coffee with the morticians, allowed them to steward him, even to humor him, so good were they at their service, those two placid, blue-robed gladiators—you must write to them too. Your brother’s wife came in with you. I don’t think I can touch her, you said, and you handed over a pair of little socks belonging to your son, and your brother’s wife gently tucked them into your mum’s hand, she who never considered herself brave, who exemplified, in that moment, all concept of courage.

  Your brother dumps the bag and goes back into the cemetery. You watch him through the bars of the gates. He rakes the leaves. He kicks at the blockages with his heel. He sweeps water down the culverts. He would climb into the sky if he could and hammer shut the clouds, command the rain to stop like some demented prophet. You could go to him and say: She wouldn’t have wanted us there. She spent her whole life making sure we would be spared such things. After the funeral, you will say it to him.

  The baby sleeps. This is his commitment. You have not really slept for several days. The undertakers—who, like the morticians, move through the darkest realms with a kind of grace and levity you can’t fathom—have told you this is usual for the bereaved. Too much adrenaline has been dispensed into the body. Unusual psychological events need to be processed. All that survivalist caffeine has stoked you up too high. You are so tired there are moments you are not sure if you are awake anymore. It feels like those early newborn days, the fugue state of new motherhood, when the baby was in a separate plastic cot at your bedside. There was no involution yet, they couldn’t stop the bleeding and chemicals were being used to shrink your womb. There was talk of a transfusion. You couldn’t stand up to lift him, so from time to time he was being handed to you, then put back in the cot. There was no milk. The trauma of surgery had arrested it, or your body wasn’t ready. They were giving him formula to keep the weight on. His fontanel looked depressed. A wasp had come into the room and kept landing near his feet. Your eyes would simply not close. On the third night, you finally did sleep, and fell into a terrible kinetic dream in which your atoms were blown apart and your essence was drawn with tremendous force outward and outward, into the hospital room, into the sky, into black space and whatever lies at the furthest reaches, emptiness. After you’d come round, crying, hitting the alarm on the bed, you interpreted it in only one way. Transposition. The baby had come, and you would go, the universe was telling you. It was the most scared you’ve ever felt.

  Two months later, the diagnosis came. Your mother had had backache for a while, since before you gave birth. She couldn’t hold the baby either, though she tried several times and had to put him down. She was booked in for X-rays, then MRIs. You were visiting your parents at the time. They arrived home from the consultation and you saw their faces and knew what was coming. On the scans were shadows in the lungs and spine. The liver. Glands. Not yet the brain. Smoker. Decades of smoke.

  It was early autumn, gilded, the gorse was going wild, so fragrant it was like another country, those long shadows running up and down the fells, quartering the fields, warm enough to swim in the river if you’d been the child you once were, river-child, bright in the evening when you walked the lanes, the baby in the sling in front of you, your abdomen still aching from the section. With therapy, there would be a year, a little more, a little less, the statistics showed. It was a very standard, very predictable cancer. Everyone should prepare, though how to prepare can never be clear. Ask questions, friends said. Spend time. Take videos. Listen to stories. Stories. There was, of course, the ongoing joy of the baby for your mother, a child whose memories would not be able to form in time to remember her.

  When he is older, you will ask him: Is there anything you remember of her? Any texture? Any sound? Smell? You were a little older than your son’s age when your mother lost her father. Too young to really know him. So it goes. People as fundamental as the sky, gone before they can be shared by future generations. You remember a little, your grandfather’s arms, the faded Navy tattoos, shreds of tobacco on the tabletop and the little machine he used to roll cigarettes, him stirring a pan of cocoa. From so little, can a person be summoned? You remember London, where he lived with your nan. London one winter in the seventies while you were visiting, under all that snow, a buried city, alleys of ice, cars gone missing, frozen taps. Ever since, London has seemed in your imagination a broken winter city. You have conflated these memories, of course. Your consciousness wasn’t formed, you can’t have made them yourself. You have often wondered about memories that are not your own, memories of what you’ve been told, implanted, hereditary, even genetic. Your grandfather was a boy soldier at the Somme, one of so few who survived. He spent four decades at sea. HOLD FAST was inked on his knuckles. In your mind, it’s easy to see those words, faded, bled through the skin. Yellow gas. Drenched wool. Wounds in his legs that would swallow the shrapnel and keep it as a heavy souvenir. Those green, incalculable waves, south of the equator. But then, you’ve read all this, seen films, heard family stories. Your cells, your neurons, your imagination have all been manipulated.

  As your son sleeps, you whisper things about your mother and your mother’s history to him. You think of her. She loved butter. She always sneezed three times. Her perfume rose a few notes above her skin. She hid much of her identity. Her grandparents crossed the border in a farm wagon to get out of their country. The rest, the unnumbered, were never spoken about. The great stirred cauldron of Europe, where so many were and are repelled, sent into exile, east and west, again and again. What order of gifts are you trying to give him?

  But here, now, in the calm warmth of the car, holding the child, a hurricane surrounding the county and shutting everything down, you can feel the river of what has passed and what is coming. The morning sky is dark. Birds are being blown between branches, forming shapes, auguring. This rain is not helping: savage, unrelenting, incanting, strange even for here, making it hard to see anything clearly or think clearly. What you sense is mutability, the selves within the self. The terror of being taken, ahead, into sheer darkness. What is coming? Not just this lesson of a dying mother. But travel into— You can do no more than intuit. You suspect your dreams are communicating far more destruction than you have interpreted, and in this you are correct. The future is a window that cannot be opened until it is opened.

  Your mother’s coffin is white. Lightweight. It is made of wool, from this district of wool. It is waiting quietly for her at the undertaker’s, and will be covered with the flowers she loved most. Six of you will bear it from the car into the church, then to the cemetery—you and your closest cousin at the front; your tall, quiet, fourteen-year-old nephew at the back; your brother, father, and one other, who is already turning away from you and will remain faceless. Your cousin has farmed sheep for years, hefting animals on to her shoulders, bringing them into the sheds in winter gales, for lambing, or in sickness. It is one of the hardest occupations. Though she worries she is not capable, you know she is. You are worrying too, about this duty. Will you remain upright, sure-footed? Will you break down under grief? And, yes, who, after this is done, as it must be done, tomorrow, or the next day, whenever the rain permits, who will carry you?

  This, you can’t be told. Stories are the currency of past lives. Families, lovers, enemies, friends. You do not understand yet, who you will lose
, who you will become, who will arrive. We are, all of us, sudden travelers in the world, blind, passing each other, reaching out, missing, sometimes taking hold. But, sooner than you think, after this flood, after the darkness, the loss, the loneliness, someone is going to take your hand and tell a story about the death of his grandfather. It is a story about displacement, about expulsion from a homeland, again, always, thousands fleeing for the border, making a new home. It is a story about snow as well, snow in the suburbs of a city you have not yet seen, but will see, vast, continental, where, in the year of the grandfather’s death, water flooded the basement walls and froze to ice, the ground was so hard, so locked, the family worried no grave could be dug, though dug it was. The men carried the coffin, from home to mosque, traditional pall-bearers where no such occupation exists, rotating positions, bringing in new arms every so often to renew their strength. He carried it too, this teller, this future traveler. The story will feel so familiar to you. You will begin to understand that those who suffer, suffer the same. In this condition, we are never alone. The heaviness that you are going to feel when that white box is upon your shoulder, and even after it is set down, lowered, buried, and for years to follow, will, for the first time, become less. But not yet.

  First, these floods, the waterlogged cemetery, people toiling to get this ruined English patch clear and open and ready to receive. Bags of muck and silt dumped at the gates. Promissory clouds in the west. The undertakers will be arriving in a while to assess the situation, to see whether the small yellow digger will be able to get in and do its work. He is young, the head of the funeral home—forty perhaps, Irish, unfazed by rain’s catastrophe, by any catastrophe. You have fallen, after only a day or two in his company, in love with him, and will love him for the duration of this event. His immaculate suit. Hands with the high veins of one used to ferrying awkward human loads. He purveys the calm and rightness of what must happen at life’s end. Astonishing, you think, the care with which a stranger might be tended by strangers. Don’t panic, he says, just don’t panic. This is his standard catchphrase, panic being, you realize, one of death’s main ingredients. Ring me, he says, day or night, if you want to come and see her. She is your mother. She is yours. Your father has visited, kept her body company, brought her a letter from you with cuttings of hair from you and your son, brought her some sloe gin; it’s brewing season. She is still his wife.

  But she is no longer your mother. Atoms, dreams, gods, whatever the new state, she is gone. That is what you wanted to see in the mortuary. You wanted to see that she had been taken, that she was vacant. And she was, like a bad photograph of herself that failed to capture any soul, or any real likeness. Her body, which was your shared pre-language, which is the language your son speaks with you now, was empty, altered, altering, chemicals notwithstanding. Matter can’t last its separation from energy. To say you could not touch her isn’t true. You touched her hair, very gently, a coward, knowing this would be the least cold part, while your brother’s wife did the rest. And that was the last time you saw her. That was when you gave her up.

  The baby stirs, constructs a new nested position under your arm. If he were to open his eyes you could compare their color to hers, which is very similar. Even now you know that will be a consolation over the coming years. You will say it readily to people. They have the same blue . . . like denim. It has occurred to you that you have been neither a very good mother nor a very good daughter over the past year. Caught between two extreme experiences, incoming and outgoing, to put it bluntly, you felt some kind of internal paralysis. People have been kind, mostly. It’s an impossible situation, they’ve said, all you can do is cope, look after your child, tell your mother you love her. Of course, there are expectations, unspoken, and judgments. You are a woman, after all. But you have fed and dressed and cleaned the baby. You have arranged his immunizations, taken him to the swimming pool, read and sung to him. You’ve kept up with the prenatal group—there’s a lot of tea and cake involved, chat about managerial blow jobs, wilted breasts for the ones who are no longer nursing, even talk of second babies, may as well get it all over and done with . . . You have called and visited your mother, helped her up the stairs and into the car for appointments, told her the wig looks great—really natural—and in fact it did, mashed her food, helped her to the commode, cleaned up, done as much as you could. You have operated in the capacities you’ve had to. But you can’t say that you felt truly present, or receptive, or mindful. Where were you? There, but not there. Waiting for something to change.

  Now, you must wait out the rain, see what the earth will allow. Ceremonies can happen any time, words, the songs of grief, celebrations—these things are fine and lost like smoke. It is the last deep ritual of commitment that humans battle to make. The relinquishment, to fire or soil or salt. You can see the stress on your father’s and brother’s faces. They know they are fighting not just with elements, the earth, the bloody ridiculous weather, but with their own mortal machinery. Their voices are becoming more and more anxious. When is it going to give up? Pass me that shovel. Do you think the water’s going down in the corner? Your brother tries to check the weather app on his phone, but, surrounded by hills and clouds, there is no signal. As a hundred years ago, the sky is the only way to predict. And in the west—more anvil clouds, thick, the forge of the storm. Your brother is squatting by the drain; his elbows are dripping. Your father stands looking at the trickling slope on which is her plot, and his too. His head is bent. He might be weeping. He might be praying or thinking nothing. In this graveyard lie the bones of his own father, who died long ago, whom you never knew at all. You could place the baby on the seat of the car and go to them. But you don’t.

  Wait. That is all you have to do. It is a lesson from your childhood in this place. Nothing is unchanging. Rain that seems unstoppable, that seems impossible to see through, that keeps coming down, obscuring the world, washing away time, will end. Like everything else, it is only passing spirit.

  And then you know how it will be. Breaking cloud, sky with discernible color, fantastic-seeming sunlight. The rain will lift. The river will recede. Your father and brother will have dragged enough branches and mess clear of the drains for the flood to disperse. The little yellow digger will chug down the road, bow wave before it, churned wake following, and it will toil over the uneven ground to the place your father is standing now. It will set its bucket down, ready to bring up mud and roots and slop. The gravedigger, a man in his seventies who calls himself “Fosser,” after his Roman predecessors cousins, will do something he has not done for years, possibly since he was an apprentice: he will build temporary wooden struts to keep the sodden walls of the grave from falling. And, listen, if you really need a sign, now, that something better is coming, that you will survive, that you will one day travel through kinder times, here it is. When Fosser arrives, he will climb out of the cab and he will stand looking out at the valley’s expanse of water for a moment; he will come over to the car and knock on the window, which you will put down, and he will say one word to you: Bosphorus. Later, you will remember this. You will remember it while standing on board a ship, holding the rail, rain hammering the surface of the strait, domes and minarets and towers rising out of the mist, calls of gulls, and a man’s face turned toward you, his heat against your chest as you make the crossing, not really from west to east, or east to west, but from suffering to happiness. Coincidence? Fate? Just Fosser, mentioning his last holiday, perhaps. These laborers of the other realms, of portals, these keepers of the beyond—can they predict, can they see what you cannot?

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow, the hearse will swim through the remaining tides and lumber gracefully up the unmade lane to the house, looking like a black swan. Freesias will line its polished wooden shelf. Inside, the white wool coffin will cosset your mother. You will put on a long black coat and red gloves, boots. Your oldest school friend will come and mind the baby—the first day of him being fully weaned, though you had not planned
it this way. The church will only be half-full, not because your mother wasn’t loved, but because the roads and railways right up the western half of the country are shut. Chaos for the mourners, chaos for commuters, for everyone, homes abandoned, bridges washed away, power out. You will stand up and speak at the service, as will your father and brother, you will all manage to get through it, and your niece, only twelve years old, will read a poem about hearts within hearts, flawlessly, and she will seem so much older. Your shoulder, the shoulder upon which you usually set the baby after feeding, the shoulder where the strap of your bag hangs every day, and where there will be, in a year or two, as a protective talisman, or instructions for living, a small blue tattoo with the words Vive ut Vivas, your shoulder will bear one-sixth of the weight of the coffin, of the reduced, insubstantial body of your mother. The churchgoers will process through the village behind the hearse, as is tradition here, to the cemetery, where the gates will be open, where the undertakers will steward you across difficult slippery ground, like outriders; your boots will gather mud up the heels, but you will not stumble, you will carry her, you will carry her, all the way, you will carry her, steadily, so will your cousin, and the four other bearers, with an unrelieved ache, and someone will have remembered roses to let go into the grave, and the gorse on the moorland, still flowering wildly, will smell almost like jasmine, and the rain will hold off, and the mountains will neither pity nor forgive you.