Puccini's Ghosts (36 page)

Joe looked at her from the bench. ‘Is it too much to expect you to mind your own business? Go home.’ With a meaningless little smile, he looked away.

She picked up the disintegrating parcel with both hands, yelped with pain and dropped it. Joe ignored her. Watching him, she sucked on her stinging, torn palms, then blew on them until she felt light-headed. Carrying the parcel was out of the question. A film of sweat had dried on her face and her skin felt tight and hot. She was still shaking from the fall, she was in pain and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t understand why everything she loved floated on ahead of her, forever out of reach yet not quite invisible enough, like a black veil fluttering in darkness. Sinking down next to the parcel, she collapsed in sobs that seemed to break from a desert inside her.

h
e’s furious, Steve. He’s at the door and Christine’s behind him.

She says, Now, Steve, it’s not the end of the world. It was my fault anyway, we were just walking past and Paris ran in, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

Steve does not spare me the detail. As if it’s not enough you wandering the neighbourhood all the hours. This afternoon, he says, Christine was bringing Paris back from playgroup—

Pow Little People’s Paradise, you mean? I ask, smiling. I know, Paris’s playgroup.

Steve glares. Aye. Paris pulled her hand away from Christine and ran into your front garden, and see that heap of rubbish? That big heap of rubbish you’ve got sitting there? That’s why. That’s the attraction. It’s an eyesore and it’s downright dangerous.

Dangerous, I say. You’re telling me.

Steve, don’t exaggerate, says Christine. Mind you, she says to me, it is getting bigger, isn’t it? It’s getting awfully big. What’s all that that’s on it now? I mean what’s the point, what’s it for, where’s it all going to end?

Can my mother’s wrecked piano, a heap of papers and notes and cuttings and sheet music, fusty rolls of cloth and ruined clothes and now some harmless stage props (papier mâché shields and helmets, painted banners and wooden swords) be thought dangerous? I mean, to anyone but me? As for where it’s going to end, I’m the last person they should be asking. I really am the last person.

So Paris goes climbing right up over it before Christine can stop her, Steve says. And she hurt herself. She got a skelf in her finger. That heap’s a danger and an eyesore and we’re not folk to go complaining normally but it’s been there days now. It wants shifting. At least you want to get the stuff in a skip. It’s a bloody menace and I want to know what you’re doing about it.

She was climbing in to get at the piano keys, Christine says, and lowers her voice to explain. There’s a keyboard at playgroup. She’s never away from it, I suppose she just made the connection, when she seen you know, your, er…piano.

What’s left of a piano more like, Steve says sourly. Bloody mess.

She just wanted to hear what it sounded like. She was curious.

Steve won’t let the matter go. He says, So, how long’s it staying there? It’s a danger to wee ones. I don’t like seeing my wee girl in tears with a sore finger. I’ll be back to see what you’re doing about it, I’m warning you.

I clap my hands and say, Oh, sweet! She wanted to get to the keys, she wanted to hear what it sounded like! Well, that’s a very good sign. Curiosity. She might be musical. Maybe it’s not too early to think about piano lessons.

And Joe’s furious. He drags me upright, takes the parcel and says, Oh for Christ’s sake, stop crying! People will see you! Come on then.

All I can do is follow.

There isn’t another train for an hour and a half so I suppose he thinks he can get me home to Seaview Villas and still make it back to the station in time; I don’t know and I daren’t ask. We’re not quite over the footbridge before I’m thinking that if he’s walking out of the production then there isn’t going to be a performance at all, so why all the effort to get me and the headdress home?

I don’t dare ask that either, in case it’s because he hasn’t worked it out yet. In no time I’m convincing myself it’s simply because he cares about me, even if he doesn’t quite realise it enough to say so. My mind calls up all the romantic moments in stories when hero sees heroine in distress for the first time and that’s when he finally realises. I follow with a sense of anticipation.

I limp a little behind him, snivelling into my sleeve. There’s no question of our holding hands because mine are too sore and anyway, he’s now carrying the holdall as well as the parcel. He still has the holdall! He doesn’t leave it at the station. This is the final proof. He will be staying after all; something is compelling him to stay, all he doesn’t know yet is that it is because he loves me. He fishes for a handkerchief in his pocket and finds he hasn’t got one, so he tears a strip of brown paper off the parcel and hands it to me without a word. I blow my nose on it and tear that bit away, then I spit on what’s left and try to clean up my hands as we walk along.

We make our way up Boydfield Gardens. I keep my eyes half closed against the traffic of people and for once I walk in a straight line and make other people move for me; usually it’s the other way round, me stepping round them. I don’t care today if I annoy the women with lumpy beach bags and kids hanging on their sleeves.

At the bus stop Joe says, Okay, right, now I have to go. You’ll be okay. He puts the parcel down. Somebody’ll help you on with this, or the conductor’ll do it. He swings his holdall up and holds it close against his chest.

I start to cry again.
Go?
You can’t go! You’re not going?

I’m trembling, ready to make another scene. Joe sighs and looks around to see if the people waiting over by the wall can hear. They can.

And anyway,
why
? Just tell me why. Oh, you can’t go!

He stares across Main Street where the soot-stained sides of buildings that don’t get cleaned and where the sun doesn’t reach are still wet from the rain and look as hard as coal. He shivers with weariness at all the effort he makes to feel he belongs here but of course he doesn’t, any more than I do. The bus rolls in from the far end of the street, tyres sighing through puddles in the gutter. He moves back from the curved wall of water sent up from the wheels, motions angrily to me to get on first and he follows, depositing the parcel in my lap and the holdall at his feet.

We ride along without speaking and when I try a small sideways smile in his direction he just glares. His eyes look filmy; the whites are lustrous and wet but also hard-looking, like the secret iridescent underside of a seashell picked off the shore and held up dripping to the light. When you don’t know any better you bring them home, these shells, in a bucket of seawater. They rasp and gleam like treasure in the swing of your bucket as you walk, you gaze into it instead of where you’re going. At home you set them on the garden wall and they dry off and turn dull and you see them for what they are, not so alluring after all. You were misled into thinking you’d found pearls.

Tears are still spilling out of my eyes, I can’t help it. I must be the most watery person he knows. Maybe my face is wearing that lost rabbity look it gets when I cry. I try to weep attractively and look brave, so that he’ll know this is unusual, that I’m not this person very often.

When we get off at the Pow Burn bridge Joe places the parcel on the ground and says, Okay, I’ve seen you home, all right? You go on home. You can manage from here.

But his voice is mellower. He gazes across the waste ground to the sea which today sparkles as a sea should.

But she’ll kill me. I can’t take it home like this, I whisper, touching the parcel. It’s all bent and spoiled. You have to help me fix it, they’ll kill me if I take it home like this.

He casts around for the words to refuse. I have no wish to cry now; I want only to keep him.

We can’t fix it here, he says. You’d better go home.

Please, I say. Please help me. Come on. There’s a place down the shore we can unwrap it and take a look. Come on.

I can hardly believe it, but he looks at me dumbly for a moment and then he does come, and my heart starts to thump because I am making things happen for once. Is it this simple? Can I just say come on, and he comes? Now I lead the way, walking across the scrub as fast as I can, too fast for him, laden as he is, to draw level and start objecting. The sun is hot again and shines through the silver marram grass in deadly splinters. I am full of dread in case the heat raises smells that can’t be ignored, because Joe’s continuing attendance is a fragile contract that will collapse if he is caused another moment’s disgust, embarrassment or boredom. We cross the dunes and head up the shoreline towards the border of the tip. He had no idea I was going to bring him this far; I walk swiftly and do not turn round.

Since I was last here with Enid there has been a high tide and there are new deposits of seaweed that we have to cross. Joe starts to protest but I press on and he has to follow. The seaweed at least has dried and does not smell, but hidden in it here and there are dubious white fragments and remains that might have been fish or bird, bone, feather or egg. Whatever it is they are disgusting so I try to pick a path that doesn’t veer too close. Then I take a step and I am in the middle of a black upward rush of raging flies, I scream and jump away, running, flapping my arms to get them out of my eyes and mouth and ears and hair. Not two feet away lies the split bag of a dead seagull. I was about to tread in a corpse. Joe laughs.

Up ahead, strings of smoke rise from the sprawling bonfires of the tip. The car seat is still lying in the place where Enid and I hauled it weeks ago, set against the bleached log and facing the sea. Another few yards closer to the tip and the stink of burning rubbish would drive us away; here, the smell puckers the air a little but does not encroach too badly. Joe flings down his load with some force, collapses into the seat and pulls a wrapped bottle from the holdall. My brain is working some seconds behind my senses, it seems. I hear the tear of the wrapping and the glump of the cork before I quite understand.

Why have you got that? Why are you drinking?

Go on, he says, I’ll even let you have first go.

I shake my head.

You should. Helps you relax. He shrugs, takes a drink and gasps. That’s the only time I ever take it, he says. When I need to relax.

The fume of whisky carries from his mouth and perfumes the air around me. I am concentrating on the sea and sky, whose blue is the only brightness in the landscape. A few hundred yards away beyond us the mottled scree of the tip rises like a loose wall, dripping bricks, broken fireplaces, furniture carcasses and torn sheets of plasterboard from which rags of wallpaper in fleshy, private colours hang off like flayed skin. The shingle of the beach is the colour of wet concrete. Joe glances at me surreptitiously for a sign that I will give up on him and let him go. Without allowing myself to breathe any more freely, I bring the parcel over, sink down on the car seat and start to pull off the string. Again I break into a sweat, and some new weight in my head tips sideways and I find myself falling forward as if I’m being pushed. I try to right myself and find that I am groaning.

Here.
La bella
Liù. You need a drink, Joe says, almost tenderly.

Because he has used my special name I take the bottle. Then I catch in his eye a look that I feel stupidly unprepared for, as if from the day I met him I have been ignoring the direction he has been bringing me in all this time. Somewhere along the way to here, he and I uncoupled ourselves from normality and joined each to the other, so I shouldn’t be surprised that we have ended up here. I take an experimental drink from the bottle and then a longer swig and I hold my breath to stop the coughing. Then I swallow and my head is full of a taste so dense it seems to stick to my face. Although the stinging in my hands has abated I hurt in several new places: I did scrape my knees, and I banged my hip, and an old ache in my chest is now reaching round into my spine. Not just my throat but my whole neck is sore. Again heat breaks out all over me and I picture the squalid little rolls of paste that must be lying in the folds of my skin where talcum powder mixes with sweat. I try to stretch, and can’t. Joe takes the bottle from me and drinks hard. Even though I am hot I am shivering, and when I hug myself to try to stop, in my armpits I find tender swellings, like rubbery little beans. My mouth curls with distaste at myself.

Joe is still drinking.

Looks like that’s fucked, he says amiably, nodding at the headdress at my feet.

No! No, we have to fix it. It’ll be okay, I say, reaching forward and picking it up. Look, you just have to straighten it up and bend the horn things back the right way. You’re stronger than me. My hands are too sore anyway.

The effort of this speech makes me belch and my eyes water with the sharp backbite of whisky. Pardon me, I say.

Joe actually smiles. He takes the headdress and does as I ask, with surprising care and gentleness, pulling the red wire back into two equal points. He dusts off the silk, picks stray threads away. Some of the beads and paste jewels have come off but there were so many to begin with that a few less won’t matter. When he’s finished he sets it down on the brown paper and we both have another drink. I hate the taste but the whisky is helping me to feel less. I’m trembling all over and my heart is beating hard, sending painful vibrations through every rib and up into my head.