Authors: Polly Samson
Though Julia found William easy company, laughing often in his presence, she was soon ushering them both out of the flat for what William irritatingly insisted on calling a ‘boys’ night out’. She couldn’t stop yawning. ‘Go on,’ she said, heading for bed with her book and a hot cup of tea. He yearned for her to say:
Oh, don’t go. Stay here with me
.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been out once since Mira was born.’
Surprisingly soon they were in a strip club and William was calling for cocktails, shouting above the music: ‘You don’t have to tell Julia.’ The girls had shaved pudenda. A redhead in a smattering of sequins and elastic slithered to their table. William gulping and nodding. The girl dancing to Madonna, mouthing the words as though in some insane ecstasy. ‘Crazy for you . . . touch me once and you’ll know it’s true . . .’ Her skin so white it was almost blue, thin as milk, her veins showing through. The unfastening of ribbons and slippery stuff sliding away. Grinding and pulsing to the beat, freshly plucked chicken skin juddering and slightly shiny just inches from his face.
The road from the village is clear and Julian takes the humpback bridge at speed, as he has done ever since he passed his test. It’s more habit these days than thrillseeking. Still he feels the bounce in his stomach the moment his tyres leave the tarmac.
He slows his car at Deadman’s Curve – everyone in the village calls it that, but not in front of Jenna. Jenna never takes this road, but Julian often finds himself here. There’s a rolling view all the way down into the valley, a rocky wall to sit on, clumped with moss. Not many cars pass. The land slopes away, hedges, trees, and down below the river snakes through its water meadows. He often pulls over and tries to imagine what was going through his father’s mind as he lost control. People said it was lucky Jenna and the baby weren’t in the car: perhaps that’s what Maxwell was thinking as his wheels left the ground.
Julian had caught himself helplessly praying on the day Mira was admitted to the hospital, begging his father not to let her die. Wedged into every space beneath the stained-glass windows of the hospital chapel, a crowd of totemic soft toys witnessed this folly. Alleluia! In great gold letters at the font, a vase with coral-red gladioli, a picture of a baby propped at its base. He prayed to his dad. Who else was there to pray to?
Apparently it was icy the night it happened, and black. No view for Maxwell as he left this earth. His car tumbled three times, they said, nose to tail. He was already dead when they cut him from the wreckage and when they opened the boot a sea of broken glass spilled out from all the empties he’d been hiding in there.
Julian starts the car. Jenna will be needing her ingredients, only cooking keeps her sane.
Of course Sue is waiting for him when he gets to Michael’s car parked outside her cottage. No chance he could smuggle out the shopping like a burglar. She stands with her front door already open, a butcher’s apron askew across her uncontainable bosom. ‘Oh Julian, you sweet boy.’ She sweeps him into a suffocating hug and he braces himself for her tears. He’s noticed it’s always him left doing the comforting.
‘Tea? I’d offer you a glass of wine,’ she says, patting her eyes and blowing her nose with a tissue from her apron pocket. ‘But I’m afraid we finished my last bottle.’
He starts switching the supermarket bags from the boot of Michael’s sleek car into his own. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I’d better get this lot back to Firdaws.’ Judging by the amount of shopping, it doesn’t appear his mother and Michael are planning to be anywhere else anytime soon.
Sue pats escaped straggles of hair towards her blonded bun, licks her lips. ‘Jenna told me what she’s cooking, shame I’m on a diet.’
‘But you’re not fat,’ he says, unconvincingly.
As a boy, one of the high points for Julian at his mother’s river parties was Sue, stripped to her bra and pants, with all her delicious-looking pink flesh spilling out. She embraces him again, says: ‘Oh, it is always lovely to see you back where you belong,’ as his face grows warm at the memory.
Sue fills the silence. ‘Your Peace Convoy mate is back, I’ve noticed. Have you seen him?’ And he remembers Sue once telling Jenna she had the hots for Raph.
‘Your mum was saying she thought you should go and spend some time with him, and I thought, well, that’s a turn-up for the books.’
Julian opens his car door. ‘I’ll probably catch him in the next two days or he’ll be gone. He never stays beyond the last day of August.’ He’s behind the wheel, ready to go.
‘He doesn’t get any less handsome with the years,’ Sue calls as he starts his ignition.
He hadn’t wanted to share Raph with anyone, that was the thing. A couple of men in the village sometimes stopped at Raph’s fire and he would find them chatting there, folded back on their haunches on their way to or from the pubs in Woodford. Julian was tongue-tied when the men were there, a boy who shouldn’t be drinking beer, but mostly it had been just the two of them on those August nights: a fire, a sky, man to man.
He turns to the rutted road of his father’s final failure to return home.
He puts his foot down, gathering speed up the hill, here comes the bend, he’s pointing the car at the wall but his foot slams to the brake and he swerves. He pulls over, his hands shaking on the wheel.
Dusk falls, the moon not yet risen. He stares into the void. Jenna will have to wait for her shallots because he needs to pee. His trainers scrunch against loose stones and grit as he clambers over the wall and drops on to the grass. The birds have given up for the day, all but a few shadowy night-timers who call from the trees. Julian unbuttons his jeans and pees into hawthorn and dark nettles while above his head his father’s Fiat takes flight across the sky, a glittering constellation shattering in its wake.
Julian and Julia stalling at the entrance of the Byzantine chapel at Great Ormond Street, the gleaming gold hush of it, PAX in a mosaic beneath their feet and the very notion of peace a shattered dream. PAX: what was this? Some sort of imperative? An impossible promise in exchange for obedience?
He tried to speak as he followed Julia, but his mouth was so dry that nothing but nonsense would come. She shushed him and knelt to pray. Around them, spinning, the overwhelming goldness, even the air, a simulacra of heaven trapped inside a Fabergé egg or the brass workings of an ornate clock. He didn’t know whether to sit at the carved pew beside her or keep moving.
In the end he knelt. Prayed to his dead father. Our father. My father. They both started crying again; she, silently, hidden by the kinking curtain of her hair, and he with racking sobs. The chapel was just somewhere to go, that was all, while upstairs in the Lion Ward the medical staff worked to stabilise Mira’s blood pressure, and then, oh God, oh father, and then.
At Firdaws he drags the shopping from the boot, glad to be home. But now there are voices, he stops on his way through and listens, the polythene of Jenna’s shopping bags cutting into his fingers. There’s pealing laughter. Katie’s, if he’s not mistaken.
The kitchen is ablaze. Jenna doesn’t appear to have sobered up, she is barefoot, and a bit jingly, her bracelets and her voice. They have put on some music: Leonard Cohen. Jenna sings along to ‘Closing Time’, muddling the words. Katie jollies by her side.
‘Swift and brave with the knife like this.’ His mother is teaching her to make her special kebabs, slicing lamb fillet as thin as leaves while through the open windows he smells the charcoal that Michael is preparing for the grill.
‘You see, you slice almost through but not quite, so it stays in one long piece like a book of many pages . . .’
‘Crikey,’ Katie says as Jenna’s knife flashes, ‘that’s surgical.’
Jenna slits the meat, a cut for each line of the song. ‘. . . And it’s one for the devil and one for Christ.’
Zeph’s toenails clatter on the tiles as he tears himself away from the meaty doings to throw himself at Julian. Julian holds out the shopping bags as Katie advances. She is dressed entirely – T-shirt dress and some sort of wraparound-cardigan thing – in a bright emerald green that matches her eyeshadow. Her kiss falls awkwardly between his cheek and mouth.
It occurs to Julian to make an excuse – bed being the only one that springs to mind – but Katie silences him. ‘It is so lovely to see your mum again,’ taking up her knife by Jenna’s side and eyeing him over her shoulder. ‘And very nice of you to invite me.’
They have their backs to him as they slice the meat, Jenna’s shoulders slightly raised, a scheming pigeon in her crumpled grey dress beside Katie’s resplendent green cockatoo as she shows her how to weave a skewer through the meat. The green fabric is pulled tight as Katie shakes her tailfeathers.
Jenna points to a tray piled with plates and cutlery: ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful and take this stuff outside?’ She gestures through the window, a look that says she cannot contain her excitement a moment longer. ‘I think Michael has a proposal for you.’
The hurricane lamps are lit. Michael has a striped tea towel tucked into his waistband and his sleeves rolled up. The night is spattered with stars.
‘That was good of you to get the shopping,’ he says, turning hot lumps of charcoal and nodding towards the kitchen. ‘She’s got herself set on preparing quite a feast tonight.’ He puts down his metal prongs and rubs his stomach. ‘Lucky us!’
He wipes his hands across the tea towel, looks at Julian over his specs. ‘Your mother wants me to talk to you about Firdaws. She’s had an idea . . .’ But Julian interrupts him before he goes any further and makes a run for the kitchen.
Safe in the pantry he overhears Jenna and Katie.
His mum, what was becoming a well-worn theme: ‘I never thought she was that pretty, if I’m honest . . .’
‘Oh Jenna, you’re wrong. She’s stunning.’
‘Icy eyes,’ Jenna says as he walks in with a bottle of elderflower. ‘Glaciers,’ she adds sotto voce with a small shiver.
He waves the cordial bottle at her. ‘Perhaps not too much wine tonight, huh?’ Mixes it in a glass jug with sparkling water, hacks apart lemons. Bubbles cascade to the surface, but all he can see is Julia in the plastic chair by Mira’s hospital bed reading her
The Ugly Duckling
for the umpteenth time. ‘I’m a very fine swan indeed.’ And the tears in her eyes because when she was little her mother used to say: ‘See, there’s hope even for you, Julia . . .’
‘Julia never believed she was beautiful,’ he says as he clanks the ice into the jug. Jenna and Katie carry on slicing the meat, their heads so close he’d like to bang them together.
‘Oh, come on,’ Katie has a blush coming.
He picks up the jug. ‘If you’d ever been around her mother, you’d understand why.’
Outside Michael places the grill over his bed of embers, wipes his brow with the tea towel and holds out his glass. ‘I’ve had a very interesting conversation with William,’ he says.
Julian pours him some elderflower, plonks the jug on the table and himself into one of the slatted seats.
‘He wants to make an offer for the book you spoke to him about before Mira got ill . . .’ Julian picks at the bread while Michael waits, spatula in hand.
‘I told him he’d have to speak to you direct, of course. But I’ve given it some thought, and though the advance wouldn’t be huge, and we’d have to sort out what to do about Firdaws, I’ve a feeling it might not be a bad thing. You know, writing your book might even help a little to make sense of what’s happened . . .’
‘Right. I’m getting a proper drink, do you want one?’ Julian launches himself from his chair and bumps straight into Katie carrying the lamb to the grill. Zeph almost gets his dearest wish, but Michael makes a surprisingly agile leap and a save just before it hits the ground.
A bottle of red wine and the smell of cooking meat soothes them all. The thin strips of kebab almost melt in the mouth, the okra is sweet. Katie regales them with stories of Billy and Arthur. No one mentions Mira. Jenna brings a brown earthenware bowl to the table. Saffron rice pudding with almonds and pistachios. ‘Your favourite,’ she says to Michael as she lifts the lid and releases a cloud of fragrant steam.
Julian pats his groaning stomach. ‘I’ll just take myself off for a little smoke.’
He rolls his cigarette and falls into the hammock, swinging himself with one leg to the ground as he smokes. Their voices carry across the grass. He stares through the leaves at the sky. Bats flicker. He tries to relax his eyes and not search for shooting stars. If you try too hard you never see one. There is only one thing to wish for. He softens his gaze. The ropes sing and there it is, sizzling through time. One flare of magic and things are unsaid, knowledge unlearned, the lock back on Pandora’s box. He closes his eyes and wishes, can almost believe it is true: Julia waiting for him, reading in the kitchen chair, Mira upstairs, her white rabbit, her thumb and one of its ears resting on her bottom lip. He opens his eyes to find Katie staring down at him.
‘May I join you?’
‘You don’t smoke . . .’
‘No, I meant in the hammock.’ She doesn’t wait for his answer but slips off her pumps and levers herself in with her head at his feet and her legs stretched beside him. He leaves his leg trailing the ground but stops swinging. She wriggles to get comfortable and he feels the fabric grow taut beneath them and the knots creak against the trunks of the trees.