Even Billy’s visits were becoming more strained, she felt. She got the impression he wished they could be speeded up. Bless him, he was her only visitor. She wasn’t quite sure when she stopped having friends, or even whether she had friends. She paused a moment. I must have done! She thought to herself, I must have done.
She racked her memory and all she could think about was how the world was apparently getting more connected as she was slowly withdrawing. You could see it on the television. The gadgets of today seemed to have swelled in proliferation. In her day, every new invention seemed to come along with years and years in between. Computers then were the size of buildings. It’s extraordinary to think a tiny microchip today can do ten times the things one of those great big machines could do then. Not that she had had personal experience of all those things, of course, but Billy brought her the paper from time to time and she hadn’t lost her marbles, yet. Just her strength. And some of her memories.
She turned to another of the books on the shelf, placing the poetry anthology to one side. This other one was dark blue hardback and had childish, spidery handwriting throughout. Black ink. She always wrote in black.
She turned to the inside cover: ‘Gracie Scott. Aged 14.’
She had spent many an hour whiling away the time, flicking through old memories. The diary had chronicled lots of childhood recollections tracing back to the start of everything. And then there were day-to-day notes and scribbles. As if somehow Gracie Scott, aged 14, felt the need to tell her story.
And it was the beginning, the middle and the end of the story, really, wasn’t it. Some of it was too hard to read. Some of it she refused to read. Some of it she reread a hundred times, with a smile in her heart.
Blowing bubbles with her mother in the garden. Sunny, carefree days. Playing in the clearing with young Billy. Princesses and fairies.
Little Gracie had carefully mapped out all the key milestones of her young life. It was almost as if she knew …
There were lots of references to Billy, to how he was the best friend in the world ever.
Lots of story snapshots of games they played, chats they had.
She had also recorded little notes of memories from her much younger childhood, carefully marking them ‘Memories From When I was Little’. Like that secret moment of swapping peeks into each other’s private bits in their ‘jammies’.
All sweet and innocent games.
She also wrote down all the different foods she had to eat, as if it was a mission to capture the time and place it in aspic, to be remembered forever.
Minced beef and dumplings. Hotpot. Stotty cake. Pease pudding and pork sandwiches. Crumble. She really liked her crumble.
And at the back of the diary she had made lots and lots of lists, as if she wanted to help historians of the future. She had put prices of tin cans, household goods, sweeties and furniture. With careful descriptions about everything, meticulously written up:
‘Lollipops, 3d for a bag the size of your fist! These take forever to eat! They’re enormous and they last for hours, But you can forget talking or playing or doing anything else. They’re so big! They taste sweet. They come in different colours. My favourite is yellow.
‘I also like boiled sweets (which are clear and fruity) and nougat sticks. I don’t much like liquorice strips because they make your teeth go all black.
‘But the yummiest is either toffee apples or chocolate, I can’t decide. Sweet rationing stopped in 1953 and since then everybody eats chocolate. You buy it in 2lb boxes!
‘And talking of black things, you can also get biscuits called Garibaldis which look like they’ve got squashed flies squidged inside! But they’re really currants and actually quite delicious.’
She had also noted down all the vagaries of currency and weights (‘we have something called the Imperial system, I think because in the past we in Britain were very Imperial. But we don’t have an Emperor, like they do in places like China’) and there was a line each for every member of the Royal Family (‘I particularly like the Queen. She is so beautiful and young and gracious. She is married to a stern man called Prince Philip who I think is very handsome but looks a bit serious.’)
She had crafted a precise sense of time and space, with florid descriptions of everything from how houses are decorated to what the streets and landscape looked like.
She painted word pictures and when you read her lists, written as they were, punctuated by exclamation marks and childish chatter, you could hear her voice and imagine her there, explaining excitedly everything you could possibly want to know about life in fifties Britain. Or more specifically, life in early fifties north Tyneside. But for Gracie, that was just about the same thing.
She talked about the big foghorn they tested all the time – so loud and noisy. And she talked about the weather (‘I mostly like it when the sun shines and it’s warm and fine. But quite often it rains. It rains a lot actually but I try to make it fun by thinking up clever ideas about what the rain drops look like, as if I’m a poet.’)
And she wrote about her school lessons, her struggles with spelling and her annoyances with various teachers. There were descriptions of all the school buildings and lots of her classmates, their clothes and their personalities. There’s a special section all about Tish and Jo with a typically Gracie take on their childish bullying:
‘Tish is quite tall and built very solidly. She has short brown, mousey hair and a babyish voice. She isn’t very good at sport and so far doesn’t seem to be very good at lessons, either. I can’t understand it myself but she seems so confident and strong, as if she doesn’t have a care in the world on the outside. But I think she seems bitter and unhappy and always looks as if she has been sucking on something sour (like maybe those sour sweets you can get). So I’m not sure if she really is confident or whether she is putting on an act.
‘Jo is short and – well, I’ll say it! – dumpy. But she has very nice fluffy pale blonde hair. She’s quite good at running but like Tish isn’t very good at lessons. Jo is one of those people who looks really sweet, she has pink round cheeks and her Ma buys her lovely clothes. But she can say the most horrible things to people (well, to me). I don’t really understand why she wants to be mean to people, but she does. Apart from Tish, neither of them are friends with anyone else. But those two are thick as robbers (is that the expression?).
‘The pair of them go round together all the time and call me Pastie Gracie because I have fairly pale skin. I don’t particularly mind having fairly pale skin but I mind being teased about it. Or rather, I did mind. I think after what happened, happened … that first time … well, it helped me put their girly teasing into proportion. And it occurred to me that maybe they’re not very happy either.
‘The main thing is, I’ve got Billy, and Billy’s got me. We look after each other. And we always will.’
Dragons
She got home from school that day and emptied her satchel onto the bed. Out fell her notebook and some pencils. And the book from the library.
She looked at it properly for the first time.
‘Rainer Maria Rilke’ it said on the front cover. In her haste, she had thought it was a poetry book – something about ‘rain’ – now she realised the rain bit was just part of someone’s name.
She didn’t have a clue who this might be, but she was intrigued. He hadn’t come up in English yet. She scanned the opening pages. He’d lived from 1875 to 1926 and wrote in the German language. Luckily, this book was an English translation. German was something you associated with the War, not with poetry and beauty, she thought. She read the introduction carefully. It turned out Rilke was born in Prague and had lived through a difficult childhood but went on to become a world famous poet. She felt excited at the discovery, as if she had snuck upon a secret place only she knew about. She couldn’t wait to see what his writing was like.
She turned the pages and began to read.
She saw to her surprise that he had composed hi
s own epitaph. She’d only recently learned that word but was amazed that someone had the forethought to write the words that would mark their own grave. She contemplated whether she should make an attempt at writing her own one of these days. She read …
Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one’s sleep under so
many lids.
She let the words float into her and felt their gentle power begin to take shape in her mind.
She couldn’t be sure what the epitaph meant, but it intrigued her. She wondered if he’d hoped that instead of dying, which would have a forced finality to it, he wanted to fall into an everlasting sleep. She imagined the scented folds of a rose embracing each other, with every petal nestled into fragrant hugs with the next. Joined together at the base, strong and bonded but frail and prone to separation at the gust of a fierce wind or at the mercy of intense rain. The human hand could cherish it or tear it apart.
She thought of the physicality of sleeping. Eyes closed, heavy-lidded with tiredness. The depths of slumber gently rocking you to bliss.
She couldn’t think what ‘pure contradiction’ meant but the mind shape she conjured revealed the petals of the rose as eyelids, softly closed and asleep.
Then suddenly, she remembered the scattered white roses on the floor of the clearing that day when the raven wanted to attack her. When she had fallen into a kind of sleep. She shuddered. At the time the sight of them hadn’t registered but thinking about them now, they had been collected together like a little posy. The shudder brought about by the raven was quickly replaced by the warm, safe glow of thinking about Billy.
And now back to her other new friend. Someone to love alongside Billy and Wordsworth. Rilke.
To be honest, some of the collection was quite hard to get your head around and Gracie was beginning to feel tired. She caressed the pages of the book tenderly and leafed through a few more, thinking to herself it must be nearly time to go and help Mam with the tea.
Then something happened. The words ‘dragons’ and ‘princesses’ seemed to dance off the page towards her. She peered down at page 27.
It was the first time she had ever seen the poem that would become the talisman of her life. She slowly read the opening phrase and an overwhelming sense of coming home engulfed her.
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths
That are at the beginning of all peoples.
The myths about dragons …
That at the last moment turn into princesses.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses …
Who are only wanting to see us
Once beautiful and brave.
She put the book down and gazed into space.
A chord struck deep in her core and she felt she was at the edge of discovering something profound about life.
She thought of the raven. She thought of Tish and Jo. She thought of her Ma on a bad day. And she thought of Joe.
The dragons of her own life.
She pondered what this could mean.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being …
Something helpless, that wants help from us.
She was transported back to three-year-old Gracie and thought of the grass that bit her. The wasp, the grown-ups said.
She thought of the dead bird, chasing her in the hands of a taunting boy.
And she thought of the raven. Eyes locked on her, hungry. Wanting to devour her.
She looked at the raven’s beak, its talons, its shiny, menacing blackness and Joe’s stern, dark face loomed into view. Eyes locked on her, hungry. Wanting to devour her.
In the way that children often can, she began to speculate about the fate that brought her to this book. Is it possible that this was a special message, just for her? Was she supposed to understand something important about the nature of things? Had she been suffering so many punishments for so long for a reason?
She had searched long and hard over the years for an explanation of the persecution she endured. She had always drawn the conclusion that somehow God had wanted her to suffer because she had done something wrong. She had never been quite sure what it was, but she had utter conviction that somehow it was all her fault.
Now a new sense of understanding was dawning within her.
So, even evil had something weak and helpless at its heart? So there’s no such thing as pure evil, there’s no such thing as a man without a soul.
It didn’t make sense, it didn’t. But then maybe it did …
Another thought drifted into her mind. The familiar refrain of her favourite song began to play in her head, quietly.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
The Lord God made them all. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless after all.
‘Gracie! Gracie, pet!’ Her Ma’s voice stirred her out of her drowsy thinking and popped the bubbles of her mind shapes.
‘Coming!’ she cried back, slowly closing the pages of the book together and placing it onto the small white table in her bedroom. She had found a new friend, and she was looking forward to getting to know him better.
Bruises
At home with Aidan, Billy was getting comfortable on the big leather sofa. They’d not long ago savoured a sumptuous chicken risotto – one of Aidan’s specialities, and the cello chords of Bach were wafting thoughtfully in the background.
They’d just opened a bottle of red and were settling down for the evening. It had been a couple of days since Billy’s last visit to the hospice.
The clock on the mantelpiece tick-tocked comfortingly and the warm cream walls were tastefully decorated with a swirling cream art deco pattern, something a bit William Morris but all monochrome. A modern take on an old theme.
There were two oil paintings on the wall. The first had a deep azure foreground with cream and white dapples. Perhaps an ocean, or a sky. The second was vivid magenta with cream swirls and azure flashes. A sunset, perhaps.
The floor was hardwood, beautifully sanded and varnished, with a plush cream rug knotted with Damascene silk. You could see why they weren’t keen on children visiting.
On the table – a dark teak piece apparently heft from an ancient fallen branch – sat a sculpture of marble. Reminiscent of Rodin, two hands entwining. And alongside the sculpture was a carved fruit bowl, scooped out of fossilised volcanic rock.
There was a vase of irises and cornflowers on the mantel- piece, picking up the azure depths of the first oil painting, and in a short black vase on the table squatted some magenta orchids, reflecting the tones of the second painting.
Aidan’s favourite was the large, deep brown armchair fashioned with a footstool and headrest – a reworking of a Tom Dixon he had once had the pleasure to sit in at a hotel while away on business.
Billy favoured the old chesterfield. Buttons smart as a pin and leather lovingly restored – it was an ancient piece but good as new – since the restoration – and comfy beyond compare. Especially with those big squishy pillows. Azure and magenta, of course.
The room was an object lesson in tone and taste. It could easily have featured in one of those homes magazines which left people sighing with envy.
‘I can’t stop thinking of the child she used to be,’ he pondered, ‘so calm and placid, but with a wise and clever head on those shoulders. I wished you could have met her then.’
Aidan didn’t need to ask who he was talking about.
Over the years, this was a subject he returned to endlessly. It was as if by talking about it, he could somehow recreate the person she was and breathe life back into her innocence.
‘Tell me a bit about what happened,’ Aidan encouraged. He’d heard it a thousand times before, but he knew that it would help his partner to go over it again. He was sure there wasn’t anything new to say – God knows
it had happened so long ago – but if it helped Billy, it helped Billy. They were there for each other, to love and to hold, through good times and bad. He could tell Billy had been having a bad few days.
‘The worst thing is, I think it could have been prevented …’ Billy mused.
‘Gracie’s mother was a lost soul, I think, and didn’t know what to do with herself when Joe turned up. I think at first, from what Gracie told me, that she might have been pleased to see him. But if she was, that turned sour fairly quickly when he started beating her.
‘And of course it seems that he had been taken by young Gracie from the very first time he set eyes on her. Gracie had always said he looked at her strangely, with a kind of fierce intent. Surely her Ma would have been worried about that? Wouldn’t any parent? And it turns out there had been a previous occasion when he had stalked into the bathroom unannounced, intimidating her. Gracie had let her Ma know, but she had brushed it aside as one of those things. She had developed an unnatural tolerance for Joe and his ways.
‘Sometimes, we children from the Close saw that she had bruises and cuts. She had tried to cover them up, but it wasn’t hard to see that Joe was being very rough.
‘Everyone knew he had been in jail but no one really knew what for, other than it involved violence. Some said he had even murdered someone. But no one knew for sure.
‘There were rumours swirling around him but there was an aura of untouchability he emitted, as if nothing and no one could get in his way.
‘I heard from Mam years later that Da had been threatened by him once when he’d tried to confront him. Apparently Joe had said he would break every bone in all us children’s bodies if he ever interfered again. Now you know Da had seen action in the War and been to hell and back from what we learned much, much later. But there was something about what Joe said that made him take it very, very seriously. Mam thought it all a bit odd, given Da was a soldier and should have been able to take him on. But apparently he was adamant.
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