‘Hands up!’
And then Stella is screaming. It’s a sound that goes on for years and years.
Later, I discover that on his way out with the box from the freezer, Sal had noticed the garage door ajar. The farmer who owned the house was often popping by to collect things from the garage, which he usually kept locked by way of a thick padlock. But today he’d left it open, and Sal, being Sal, had gone inside.
Propped up in the corner, he’d found a rifle.
I don’t know what kind of rifle it was. Those kinds of details don’t really matter. Or do they? Whenever there’s a school shooting, people want to know what kind of gun was used, how many rounds of bullets it took, what the shooter said to the crying students, where they hid, which video games he played, the colour of his skin. People love the details.
So I’ll do my best.
They were those spiral lollipops that looked like helter-skelters, lime flavoured with some exotic-sounding French word emblazoned across the front of the box. The box itself was slightly soggy from the deep ice that clung to the sides of the freezer.
I think the rifle was for killing birds.
Sal had wedged the box under the same arm that held the gun.
He said he’d only meant to scare us. Actually, he said he didn’t even mean to do that. He thought we’d laugh, he said. He thought we’d all say, wow, Sal, that’s cool and then he’d hand out the lollies.
He was so excited that he took the steps two at a time. As he reached the bottom and called out, the box began to slip from his grip and his arm tensed to stop it falling. But what his brain also did was send a message to his finger to tense the rifle, and so his finger did exactly that, pressing the trigger and firing the gun. When they investigated the scene afterwards, they found a chipped section of stone behind the waterfall, where the bullet had hit and ricocheted across the pond towards the loungers, where it hit our mother in the left temple and didn’t come out the other side.
Nothing that could be done, they said.
Died instantly, they said.
Part Two
* * *
Summer 2003
Near the End
The day was hot.
Each day that summer started out the same, but this one I remember differently. I remember the beads of sweat crawling through my hair – what there was of it – how they slipped like snakes along my scalp to my neck, or the back of my ear, before sliding down the rest of my body. The days when we were together, I didn’t care about the heat. It stuck me to her, and her to me, and that was quite all right.
‘Let’s go to Eastwell,’ Anna had said when she reached mine. ‘Everyone’s at the beach today. It’s safe. Let’s go back to the lake.’
We were walking along a country lane. The hedgerows were short and forced us into the brunt of the heat, our shadows stretched before us. What we did, they did too. When I took her hand, the figure in front reached out to grasp its lover, and when I pulled her in for a kiss, I looked sideways at the mirror as two became one.
‘I’ve just realised something,’ she said, drawing back. ‘I’ve never seen you dance.’
‘There’s a reason for that.’
She raised an eyebrow in expectation.
‘I don’t dance.’
‘Rubbish. Everybody dances. Even if it’s alone in their bedroom.’
I shook my head. ‘Not even then.’
She stopped and raised her arms in protest, as if what I had just said was a statement of seismic proportion. There was a light sheen of sweat on her forehead and I imagined it tasting of salt.
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be the girl to show you how.’ And she grabbed my arm and pulled me close so our stomachs were touching. She placed my hand on her shoulder, her own on my waist, and our other hands joined together towards the road.
‘Aren’t I meant to lead?’ I said as she lurched us forward.
‘Says who?’ she said, pushing us on to do the tango. ‘Just having a penis doesn’t give you rights.’
I slid my arm down around her waist and gripped her tight, then picked her up and spun us around and around until we collapsed dizzy in the road and laughing.
‘You’re a shite dancer, you know that,’ she said, laughing and wiping her wrist against her forehead. ‘But I’m pleased to be your first.’
We smiled at each other and began to lean in for the kiss when there was a rustling behind and a fox pushed through the hedge. Something dangled from its jaws. The fox stopped when it saw us, then dropped whatever was in its mouth and darted off up the lane.
‘Oh, look,’ said Anna, gesturing at the tiny brown creature panting on the ground.
We scrambled to our feet and ran over. It was a baby rabbit, its stomach split open, bloody entrails oozing through the wound. It lay on the road with its eyes half open and stared into the dry beat of the sun. There were humble fights for breath.
‘No,’ said Anna and dropped to her knees. ‘No, poor thing. Poor, poor thing. Its life was just beginning.’ Her hands reached out instinctively to touch it, and I leant down and stopped her.
‘Don’t,’ I said, taking her wrist. ‘It might be diseased. Look at it. There’s nothing we can do.’
She looked up and her eyes were wet. ‘But we can’t leave it like this.’
I searched the lane and returned with large torn leaves that I used to scoop up the rabbit – Gentle, Anna kept saying. Don’t hurt it – and carefully deposited its barely alive body on the shady side of the road.
A few hours later, when we returned this way home, we would find the creature dead and Anna would claw at a patch of baked earth to make room for a shallow grave. But now, she gripped my arm as we walked on, throwing the occasional glance over her shoulder. We were quiet until we reached the lake.
There it was, shimmering, how water does in memory. We stood on the bridge and watched a while, then walked along to the ruined church and lay on the bank in the shadows.
I turned my head to her. ‘That’s why I struggle to believe in a god.’
Her eyes were fixed on the tree canopy overhead.
‘Your belief that everyone will live forever,’ I went on. ‘I struggle with that, because death is an entirely natural part of life. These trees are already starting to drop their leaves, and soon, everything will be dead. Then life starts again in spring. It’s a cycle. It’s the natural order of things.’
‘Trees don’t die in winter,’ she said. ‘They rest. And that’s how death is described in the Bible – a deep sleep. One day, the dead will wake up. Imagine if the trees didn’t pulse with new life in spring. You know it’s going to happen. Why should it seem so magical for the same thing to happen to us?’
‘But that’s my point. It’s new life. Not the one that came before.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Those sunflowers by my house,’ I said. ‘They bloom and fade before they die and are cut down. Next year, Stella will plant more. But those sunflowers have one chance. There will be others like them, but never one the same.’
‘Are you a gardener now?’
‘Listen to me. The sunflower accepts that this is it. It doesn’t ask why. It doesn’t spend the short time it has to bloom wondering if now is when it should be blooming.’
Her silence told me she was listening. I wish I had too.
‘You’re talking about trees, though,’ she said quietly. ‘About flowers. They’re not living things like us. They don’t have a heart pumping blood.’
‘But the rabbit did. It had a heart like us, and a home like us, and a family, like us. But it also had a predator. If God made the animal kingdom, then surely death was part of that. Life ends, and the carcass becomes food for the earth to grow new life. Nothing lasts forever.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ Anna said after a while. ‘But how can this be it? Think of what our minds are capable of and how our bodies work, how a baby starts from nothing. How can that all be down to chance?
That’s terrifying.’
‘Living forever seems terrifying. Each day the same as the next.’
She smiled. ‘The Bible says God will satisfy the desire of every living thing, so you don’t need to worry.’
‘He didn’t quite do that with Eve, though.’
‘What?’
‘Adam and Eve?’
‘I know who Eve is, thank you.’
‘He didn’t satisfy her desire. She went looking for forbidden fruit.’
‘Well, yes.’ She was surprised, I could tell. I hadn’t said about my recent visit to the library.
‘Eve wouldn’t have gone looking for an apple if she had everything she needed, would she?’
‘She was wilful,’ Anna said, after a beat.
‘But he made her that way?’
‘He gave her free will, yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But she chose to use it poorly.’
‘So you have the right to choose, but if you choose a path he doesn’t like, then you’re condemned to certain death or hell or whatever you call it. Does that sound fair?’ I tried to keep my tone light.
‘For someone with no belief in God, you certainly know your Bible stories.’
I riffled around in my pocket and brought out my smokes. ‘Maybe I’ve read enough to know I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s fun being lectured on the fundamentals of Christianity by a heathen,’ Anna said, putting her hands behind her head. ‘Please continue.’
‘I just take issue with that concept of free will.’ I lit my cigarette and let it rest in my hand furthest from her. ‘Because it seems that God’s putting a gun to your head. Serve me and live. Don’t and die. Funny kind of free will.’
She stared up at the trees. ‘I guess it depends how you look at it.’
‘Well, he failed with Eve. He had the chance to create his best work and he ballsed it up, first try. If they were perfect and yet chose the fruit, what hope do the rest of us have?’
‘I’ve never seen you so passionate about a subject as you are about this.’
I turned towards her, propped up on one elbow. ‘Hear me out. They took the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, right? That’s the one tree in the garden God said they couldn’t touch, because … what would happen?’
‘Their eyes would be opened so that they knew good and bad, and then they would die.’ She reeled off the script, word perfect.
‘So until they ate the fruit, they didn’t know what good or bad meant. How then could they know eating the fruit was bad if they didn’t know what badness was?’ I made little stabs in the air with my cigarette to make my point.
‘But they disobeyed God.’
‘But he didn’t arm them with knowledge. He deliberately made them naïve, then planted a tree as a test and allowed an evil snake to deceive them. Why didn’t he protect them from the predator? And how would they even recognise a dishonest snake if they had no concept of dishonesty?’ I lay back down. ‘God’s the one up to the tricks.’
‘Blasphemer.’ Her hand shot out and gripped my arm, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
‘There’s no way he’s satisfying every desire. If he’s even real, then he’s the one that created desire in the first place, the good and the bad.’
‘It’s the future desires he’ll satisfy. In the New World. When we’re perfect.’
‘We?’
I took a drag and our eyes met. Anna bit her lip as if regretting her words, and looked down to where our hands were touching.
‘All I know is what I feel in here,’ I touched my fist to my heart, ‘and here,’ to my brain. ‘That’s true. That’s real. Everything else is unknowable.’
There was the long, mounting drone of a plane in the sky, the sound of thunder, or the end of the world. She let go of my arm and drew her hand up to rest on her waist, and we lay there for what felt like ages. She bit her nails while I finished my cigarette.
Then she stood and went down to the water, and I watched her kick off her shoes as a strap from her red dress fell from her shoulder. She didn’t turn to look at me or shake off the rest of her clothes. There was one step forward, another, and then she walked fully clothed into the lake.
She sank under the surface and came up a moment later. The water lapped gently as she floated on her back, facing the sky.
I sat up and watched her for a while. She drifted between the light and shade, her hands and feet pushing back and forth against the current. Her red dress billowed around her like a pool of blood. Finally she straightened and turned, submerged up to her neck. ‘Come in with me,’ she said softly, and I left my fags and phone with my shoes and walked down to the edge.
I dived in.
I saw her legs above a tangle of weeds underwater, and when I reached her, I put my hands through the green mist and felt my way up her body. When I broke through the surface, she pushed herself against me and wrapped her legs around my waist, kissing my mouth.
This is the moment, I thought to myself. This is exactly the moment.
We went for each other with a strange, carnal hunger. Our clothes were no match for the fury from our hands and our fingers. We found a way.
Then came that old familiar ‘Wait’.
God no, I thought. Whatever you want, but please God no.
She stopped and looked at me, the water dripping from her face, her expression wild, my body breathless.
She broke away and pulled me towards the bank. We swam to shore and climbed out, remnants of the lake trickling from our bodies. Here is where she began to peel off her clothes, and watching her, I did the same. We stood naked in front of each other in the midday sun, then she took my hand and led me further in towards the church. There, hidden from the lane and beneath the bracken, she pulled me down on top of her.
Still, I could not catch my breath. All I could do was look at her, this girl I had wanted all summer, who now took my hands and pressed them to her skin and was completely sure. This girl, who brought my ear to her lips and whispered, ‘Promise you’ll tell no one.’
This girl, to whom I said, ‘I promise.’
Late Eighties
We go down to the Isle of Wight for the October half-term in the year of an Indian summer. The two hot days are spent on the beach, building sandcastles with a found pink bucket and burying Mum in the sand. Sal digs a moat around a city of sandcastles, and Mum runs back and forth to the sea, filling the bucket with water that she pours carefully into the moat. We watch as the water seeps through the sand and disappears, then she turns and jogs back to the shore to repeat the process. We never fill the moat and she never stops trying.
Dad doesn’t figure in this part of the memory. He is absent, probably behind a newspaper or asleep after too many beers. It’s always Mum there with us.
The rest of the week is a washout, and we spend it cooped up in a tiny chalet, with rain lashing windows as we play endless games of Snakes and Ladders. There is nowhere to hang our dripping coats and the place smells like wet dog.
On the ferry home, Sal loses Elephant. It’s a small blue cuddly toy that he began to carry everywhere from the age of about three. Dad would comment that six-year-old boys shouldn’t be hugging teddy bears, and Sal would clinch it to his chest and insist that it wasn’t a bear. Mum and I would just look away.
It’s about an hour after we get off the Portsmouth ferry that Sal cries out. Mum and I look around us, in the footwells, in bags, but there is no sign of Elephant.
‘You must have left him where you sat in the window on the ferry, watching the boats,’ says Mum, and Sal begins to cry.
‘We have to go back,’ he says.
Dad snorts. ‘Of course we’re not going back. We’re nearly halfway home.’
Sal rubs the tears from his cheeks. ‘But I can’t leave him there. What will he do?’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ says Dad. ‘Creatures with stuffing for brains don’t usually feel things.’
‘What will I do? No, we have
to go back.’
‘This is exactly what you need. You’re far too old to be attached to a grubby toy.’ Dad tightens his grip on the steering wheel.
Sal’s face turns a hot red. He balls his bony hands into fists and pushes down on his legs, trying to bruise his own skin. His eyes are squeezed shut to hold back the dam, and I watch as his body starts to shake.
Mum has turned around in the front. She reaches round the seat to hold his leg and tries to grab his hand. ‘Darling, darling, it’s okay. I’ll ring the ferry people when we get home and I’ll get them to search for Elephant. We’ll get him back, sweetheart.’
‘You’re giving him false hope,’ Dad says, staring straight ahead. ‘They’ll never find it and you know it.’
Mum throws him a look I’ve never seen before. She turns back to Sal, who is making low, growling noises like a hurt animal. He has been doing this lately. Getting angry in an effort not to cry.
‘Paul,’ says Mum, turning back to face the front. ‘Please pull over. He needs me.’
‘We’re on the motorway, Louise.’
‘There’s a service station coming up.’ Her voice is calm and distant. ‘You can pull in there for two minutes. That’s all I ask you for.’
Dad sighs and swerves off into the slip road. Someone honks their horn and he makes a face at the rear-view mirror. I can’t see the car behind so it looks like he’s scowling at me.
When the car stops, Mum jumps out to open the door and Sal falls into her arms. He buries his face in the folds of her cotton jacket and I watch as his skinny body shudders without making a sound. Mum is rubbing his back and making soothing noises in his ear. She puts a hand on the back of his head and holds him tight against her, the vibration of her heart seeming to soften the violence of Sal’s grief.
I turn to stare out the window.
Finally, he stops crying. He hangs limp in her arms, exhausted by his own rage, and she rocks him from side to side like he is her baby again. The only sounds are the rushing of the motorway and the slow tapping of Dad’s fingers on the steering wheel.
Another Life Page 10