Attend

by West Camel

  ‘But no one had stolen anything. I thought of my collection, the old chest I had dragged from the wreck of Jack and Digby’s room and filled with tapestries and cloth. Everything was simply found by those who happened to be looking in the right places.

  ‘Mr Mellor was done for, though. The Turkish authorities heard of the fuss over here, revoked his licence to dig and said if they could prove he was in possession of items of importance to the new Turkish nation, they would not hesitate to prosecute. Mr Mellor wouldn’t be going to Turkey again, let alone digging there – and I thought I knew what a blow that would be to him. I might have only sat with him the one time, with the knuckles of his toes and fingers bright red from splashing about in the creek, but I’d read enough to know that his work on the Anatolian Plain was his life.

  ‘I turned into Creekside and pushed my shawl back, letting the raindrops run down my face. How could I turn it around? Because it was down to me, whatever way I looked at it. But as I followed the curves of the road, past the wrecked boat sheds and the remains of the old wharfs, I thought I knew that I couldn’t. How could I send a letter? I could thieve bread, cheese and vegetables, needles and some thread, but stamps were another thing. And delivery by hand? I could stand for days outside the Royal Archaeological Institute or the British Archaeological Association or any number of offices in Fleet Street without anyone paying me the slightest bit of attention. A telephone call was out of the question too.

  ‘Or perhaps it was just that I felt too betrayed. Mr Mellor, the first person to pay me the tiniest bit of attention for all those long years after the war, had taken what I had given him – the hard work of my own fingers, the gift that had been handed down to me – and had lied. And then had laid a lie upon a lie.

  ‘What trouble would it have been for him to have sought me out, whatever it took, and to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m in a fix. Can you come to my rescue once again?”

  ‘And what trouble would it have been for him to acknowledge in the Illustrated London that through the kind offices of Miss Deborah Wybrow, he had come by a most interesting and important piece of work? Miss Deborah Wybrow. My name typed out in printer’s ink, so I could imagine hearing Mrs Clyffe saying it aloud, around the fire on a Sunday evening – proud, but trying not to show it.

  ‘And right then, wet and cold and crying in the rain, I really believed I had disappeared. And I believed I knew why.

  ‘As I came to the viaduct, the rain came down even harder. Two trains passed one another: one electric, humming into Deptford Station; the other an old steam engine – already rare, even then – tugging wagons of coal out to somewhere in Kent. A little group of boys were sheltering under the bridge, kicking their ball high into the arch. As I passed, one managed to hit the highest point, so the ball bounced straight back down and landed right beside me, spraying my legs with muddy rainwater.

  ‘I pulled my shawl back over my head and turned into the alley. And, just for a tiny moment, it was as if a part of me stood with those boys and saw my short grey figure slipping out of sight.

  ‘But now?

  ‘Now it seems I’ve been noticed once again. People are paying me at least a little bit of attention, when they could stay wrapped up in their own complicated lives. It’s very gratifying – I won’t deny that. But it’s confusing too. It makes me begin to doubt what I’ve held on to these past sixty years. It makes it difficult to know what to think. To feel.

  ‘Because I wanted it all to end for so long: for all those years when I sat in my window looking out over the creek, which had become just a dirty ditch with all the wharves and warehouses closed. For all those days when I opened my door and saw the slime-covered walls and the riverbed littered with burst mattresses and battered prams, and was reminded of how I’d been forgotten, despite being right in the centre of things – in the place I was born and lived most of my life.

  ‘But now, with everything changing, with not being so alone and with people digging about in places only I ever went – places I thought only I would ever see – it seems as if it might be coming to an end, after all. And I’m not sure I want it to. Not just yet.’

  Chapter 31: Anne and Sam

  Anne let go of Nigel’s arm as soon as they passed through the gate onto the cobbles of Albury Street. She watched his bending gait as he loped away.

  When he finally reached the junction with the High Street, he paused. In the double light of the street lamps and the gradual approach of day, he looked both ways, then back at where Anne and Sam stood. His long figure was streaked with dark lines, his limbs and neck were swinging, his whole body in motion, as he tried to decide on a direction to take. He made a leap around the corner, south, but then reappeared, bounding north instead.

  ‘Should we have held on to him?’ asked Anne, still watching the empty grey space where he had been.

  ‘We did what we intended to do. That’s it, I think,’ Sam replied. He turned in the other direction and Anne followed him out onto Church Street. A cool, windy dawn was growing over the creek. She pointlessly pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing and they crossed the empty dual carriageway. They were opposite the church now, the white walls luminous. Anne looked up; the perfectly proportioned spire, tapering beautifully, desperately, above everything around it, was catching a hint of gold light from the first rays of the sun.

  ‘So we’ll go to see how Deborah is?’ She let her arm brush against Sam’s.

  ‘OK,’ he replied. He wanted to add, ‘If she’s there’. And then tell Anne about the grip of cold fingers around Nigel’s ankle. Around his own wrist. No, it had just been a sodden loop of cloth. There was no one down there. He opened his mouth. ‘What’s the time?’

  And the church bell replied, striking five o’clock.

  ‘It gets light so early these days.’ He looked up at the clock face. It was sunlit now; a magic coin with its own glow, while the building beneath it remained a submarine blue.

  ‘What if…?’ Anne began.

  They were passing under the railway and the first train of the day rumbled over their heads, flattening her words into a featureless flow. Sam had heard her, but needed her to repeat the question; he needed to see if she would say it into the clear morning air.

  ‘What if Deborah’s down there?’ she said.

  It was a ridiculous thing to ask, with the square, red-brick corner of the nearest block just beside them. There had been no one in the mud after Nigel; just scattered scraps of filthy cloth. He raised a hand to begin a dismissive gesture, but couldn’t quite make it flap.

  He’d wanted this to be simple. Derek still seemed too far away.

  ‘She could have got down there while we were at my place.’ Anne was looking at him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead, so as not to meet her gaze.

  If it was Deborah Nigel had seen – if she had played them, feigned sickness and knew another way into the tunnel, she had got herself caught. It was a dangerous place – she’d been told as much when she was a kid. He stopped abruptly and almost tripped over his own feet. It would be so easy to turn around now and go home – throw a sheet over this whole mess and stride away.

  But Anne was worrying at it all, picking and examining. ‘You heard what Nigel said. A woman told him she wanted to die – she asked him to help her.’

  ‘And that’s exactly what Deborah’s been saying. I know, I know.’ Sam began walking again, quickly this time; he would get to Deborah’s and make all this clear.

  Anne had to trot to keep up with him and, within moments, he heard her begin to pant.

  ‘There are loads of reasons why he could have said that,’ he burst out, as if Anne had been protesting. He threw his arms up in front of him and made intersecting circles with his hands. ‘He thought he was going to die himself. Maybe he heard something before the ceiling collapsed, and while he was lying there he imagined all sorts. Who wouldn’t?’ He was silent for a few strides. ‘And Kathleen wanted to die, didn’t she? That’s why Nigel was down the
re. See? All that was mixed up in his head.’

  Anne nodded; she felt too breathless to reply. It was as if Sam had a sword in his hand and wanted to slash his way through the confusing thickness. She wanted answers too. But she needed to sit down and work out what went where, what was attached to what. She wanted to place a hand on his shoulder and slow him down.

  They had passed her courtyard now and were approaching the long swing of Creekside, with sleeping blocks of flats on one side and empty warehouses and apartment blocks on the other. She screwed her head around as they hurried on and thought she caught a glimpse of her bedroom window. Near the entrance to the alley, a football was resting in the gutter. It must have been there all night.

  A few steps down the alley, Sam spoke again, as if the five minutes of silence had been seconds. ‘And what can we do if she is down there?’ His voice felt trapped and thin between the high walls. ‘If we go to the police, we’re telling them why we were down in the tunnel, and then they’ll know what Mel and Derek and Nigel were doing down there.’

  He caught sight of the faint spots of Nigel’s blood on the ground and slowed up. There was no real resolution, he realised; just a new tangle, and another new tangle, all catching on each other. There was nothing smooth with a clear end.

  Anne put her hand on Sam’s arm. ‘Listen, I don’t want to get Derek in deeper trouble either. And I was born and brought up in Deptford: one thing I don’t want to be is a grass. My mum could put up with the drugs, looking after Julie for me, everything. But if I grassed on Mel and Derek – that would be it.’

  She realised she was tapping Sam on his forearm and spreading the fingers of her other hand. They were at the kink in the path. She looked quickly behind her. No, she couldn’t rip up all her delicate work. She’d righted Mel’s wrong; she respected Kathleen’s choice now. If Deborah was down there, maybe that’s where she should stay.

  Her skin prickled at the thought. ‘We’ll know in a minute, anyway.’

  They reached the creek wall and she began climbing over, carefully descending the rungs on the other side.

  But Sam remained standing in the alley. ‘What if she’s not there?’ He was raising his voice, he knew; he heard it ringing across the surface of the water. He flexed the hand that had felt fingers on Nigel’s ankle. Anne stopped, her head still above the parapet. A slight wind blew strands of hair across her face and her eyes were creased looking up at him. He had the sense he’d fallen asleep for a microsecond and woken up again, unsure of where he was.

  At last he swung the bag onto the top of the wall between them. Anne continued her descent onto the ledge and he followed. Within moments, they were walking into Deborah’s house.

  The kitchen was just as they had left it the previous night; the clean, empty cups sat in a quiet cluster on the table. Now, though, the morning light, reflected off the creek, flowed around the room in grey-blue waves. He paused, resting his fingertips on the table.

  ‘She must be asleep,’ murmured Anne. Then she drew in a breath and called into the blue air, ‘Deborah, it’s us. We’re back.’

  There was no response. The room remained still; all its objects waited. Anne kept her eyes on the layer of air just below the ceiling, listening. But then her neck ached, and she had to look down again, catching Sam’s eye as she did so. His look repeated his question: ‘What if she’s not here?’ He may have even spoken the words, but she didn’t hear – she was already scampering up the stairs.

  The upstairs room was overflowing with yellow light; the sun had just risen above the roofs on the opposite bank and its rays gushed in a torrent through the bow window, almost rattling the panes and blinding Anne, so she had to turn away. The screen that normally divided the room was still pushed back and the sunlight stretched out across the high, wide bed, illuminating Deborah’s tiny body. Her head lay a little to one side, the eyelids not quite closed; a sliver of white glinted between them.

  Deborah was dead.

  Sam was beside Anne now and they both stood, frozen, between the window and the bed, staring at the body. The white of the sheets, of Deborah’s hair, of her absolute stillness, was dazzling. For a few moments it wiped out any emotion.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Anne said and made her way to the bedside; the creak of the floorboards under her carefully placed feet seemed deafening. She touched Deborah’s hand – it was cool and stiff, still carefully pinching a needle; the thread ran back to the long, pale sheet she must have been working on as she died.

  ‘Look,’ Anne lifted the fanning tail of the sheet, so Sam could see it. ‘It looks like she finished it – there’s no room for any more.’

  She brought the textured fabric close to her face, then glanced at Deborah, as if she might wake up and tug the sheet away in a gentle protest. But Deborah was still – a quiet little statue. ‘We’ll never know what it says.’ Anne felt the choke bloom in her throat and had to cough it back down.

  ‘She only read it to the two of us,’ said Sam, bending over Anne’s shoulder, trying not to look into Deborah’s dead face. ‘Unless there were others we don’t know about.’ He took hold of the other corner of the sheet and raised his hand, so that it spread between him and Anne. The craze of stitches was as confusing to him as it had always been. ‘Didn’t we just do the last bit, anyway?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Anne, and took the sheet out of his hand, holding it with care, as Sam had seen Deborah do.

  Sam moved to the other side of the bed and took long, cool breaths through his nose, forcing himself to watch as Anne wound the sheet into a loose coil on Deborah’s belly, then delicately straightened the head on the pillow and smoothed back the ivory hair behind the crisp, miniature ears.

  ‘So I suppose she can’t have been in the tunnel, then.’ He felt a blush of heat cross his chest as the words sank into the cotton ripples spreading across the bed.

  Anne, her hands still tidying Deborah’s posture and clothes, looked over the body at him with swimming eyes and then pressed her lips together and shrugged almost imperceptibly.

  Sam made half a move to sit in the chair by the bedside, but straightened his legs and stayed standing. And then he did what he had planned to do when he next saw Deborah, not thinking that she would be dead: he retrieved from the bag the nest of thread and the blank strip of cloth that were the remains of the motif. He placed them on the bed cover, showing the unseeing eyes the tawny tumble. But Deborah remained dead and he wondered at himself.

  ‘What shall we do with her?’

  Anne didn’t look at him this time. She knew what she wanted to do now. She prised the slim white fingers apart and removed the needle from their grasp; she smoothed them into a gentle curve and laid the hand across the barely swelling chest. Then, ignoring her confusion of thoughts and attending simply to the childlike body under her hands, she gently stripped the sheets away, sending the bundle of brown thread and the strip of dirty fabric onto the floor. With the handkerchief she found tucked inside a sleeve she wiped the face and dabbed at the mouth, then settled the hips and unbent the legs.

  Names came to her lips – Mum, Kathleen, Julie, Tom – and a stutter that was the name she had never chosen. And then ‘Deborah’ formed in her mouth, very simply, and she spoke just that and smiled at the soft, pale face.

  Sam stared at the remains of the motif that lay at his feet, almost under the high bed. It was no longer structured, possessing no strength or organisation; just a confusion of fibres, the ends untied and unsecured. He had undone it so easily, but it still held some kind of charm, he thought.

  A chime in his pocket roused him. He pulled his phone out and jumped up, as if his heart had leaped into the top of his skull. Derek’s name was on the screen.

  ‘It’s Derek,’ he whispered to Anne, as if not to disturb her, as if not to wake Deborah. The phone chimed again, more loudly.

  ‘Take it.’ Anne raised a small smile and nodded reassurance at him.

  ‘Hello?’ Sam strides across the room and sta
nds in the bow of the sunlit window, unsure how his voice must sound. Derek’s is rich with relief; he is outside in the morning air. Sam sees him settling his shoulders in his grey suit jacket.

  Sam finds his words come easily, requiring almost no thought at all. He sends them out, above and around the almost impossible house, over the streets, up into space, and back down to earth. And he receives Derek’s words back, across the invisible networks, crossing and recrossing. Beneath the window, beneath the net of signals, the tide is rising against the current again, so the creek flows both up- and downstream. The railway slips both ways too – up-trains and down-trains. And the alley beside it leads to the swaying Creekside, which swings on to its junctions with Creek Road and Church Street. Then, stopping, turning, stopping, turning, the streets form a mesh, securing panels of people – blocks and houses and shops and schools. And underneath it all, the tunnels lie, wandering and winding, with dead ends and back ways, blocked entrances and forgotten exits, unseen and unthought-of by the early risers above, who trip along the pavements, their coats over their arms, surprised by the first day of summer.

  Sam’s whole body is warm and the tide outside is at its fullest. Still murmuring words that are for him and Derek only, with one strong arm he throws up the sash and the summer air enters the room – a fleshy rose, tinged pink and about to unfurl. Now unfurling.

  He leans his damp torso out over the brimming water and above he sees a plane travelling across the flat blue sheet of sky. It is incredibly high up – just a slim, silver shaft. It flashes a beam of sunlight at him, and behind it leaves a white trail.

  Anne takes up the glinting needle from on top of the creamy folds and quietly, to the sweet accompaniment of Sam’s voice, she casts off, finishing the delicate, near-invisible pattern that spreads over the long sheet and that she knows now she will never be able to read. Then, without even letting herself think about whether she should or she shouldn’t, she begins to wrap the complete work around the small body, winding it gently, over and under, right up to the soft white head, until she has made of Deborah’s neat little corpse a tight lozenge, a smooth white stone she could hold in her palm and close her fingers over.