There but for The (23 page)

One year, when it was nearly the day, she told herself she’d speak.

But when he came, she couldn’t say anything.

All she could say was, Are you all right, then, son?

Fine thanks, Mrs. Young, how are you?

What else could he say? What else could they say?

I don’t know how else, I don’t see how else I could have been about it.

There had been nothing to do but put an extra biscuit on the side of his saucer, and tell him they were the luxury biscuits, and make sure he ate it, which he did.

She said all these things not out loud but in the confines of her own head.

For when May thought of her youngest child she saw her pure, fixed in time at the age of ten, no older, and enthralled thin-armed thin-legged on the rug in front of a brand new television watching her favourite programme in colour for the first time. Her favourite programme was full of clean untouched kids, shiny from being born well after the war, and they all lived in a scrapyard full of old British junk and sang
see you next week
around the pole of an old London bus, and for the first time, a miracle, Jennifer saw the bus was bright red. For the first time the kids in her favourite programme ran about in unbelievable colour. They chased a little dog across a graveyard, they were trying to catch it for a lady in a sports car, and their colours were even more colourful against the graves and so on. The whole room smelled of new TV. Jennifer kept getting up and putting her nose to the place where the sound came out.
I’m just smelling what colour smells like.

It was a blessing, thank God and all the angels, that Jennifer got to see colour before she went. Her brother and sister worked as a team for weeks, going through the new Radio Times every Thursday lunchtime at the dinner table and reading out the name of every single programme that had the sloped word
Colour
printed next to it; for weeks they did this, until May could stand it no longer and made Philip buy the new one, though the black and white one was still fine, went on working for years. But if Princess Anne was going to all the bother of getting married, the least they could do was make sure their children got to see history happen in colour.

All three of her children ran about in May’s head in colour turned up too-high, on a throbbing green lawn bordered with throbbing yellow roses. They ran between the front garden and the back, appearing and disappearing from view like it was they themselves, running about like that, that gave grass and roses colour in the first place. It was a time when the smell of your clean child in your arms was a sort of dream smell, like when lime trees threw their scent ahead of themselves so you walked through it and by the time you reached the tree itself there was no smell left at all.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, though, remember the smell in Patrick’s house when he moved in with Ingrid! He must have no nose on him, Philip said when he and May came home from theirs with their own clothes all strange-smelling from the hippy burning sticks she had smoking away all over the flat. May had had to hang the clothes they’d been wearing out the back windows to air them and get the smell of it out afterwards. Ingrid was mad as a box of jackdaws, believed that God was in her crystals, and she kept them all arranged inside a cabinet. As if God was in a crystal and you should worship a bit of rock.

Well, there’s definitely no God in that church you made us go to for years, Patrick said once.

Well, he was angry they’d been rude to his wife.

And he’d not gone to the church himself, not for years, not since Jennifer. Well, that was definitely understandable. I’d have believed in God if God’d done something about it, Patrick said. But who or what lifted even a finger? Who sees the sparrow fall? Nobody. It just falls. She just went. Nobody saw. There’s nobody there to see.

God is present everywhere, Mrs. Young, the young soft priest who’d just come to the church after the old Canon left, and who didn’t know her from a million, said to her on the church steps. God is in everything.

Well, was God in the way there was no controlling your own bladder, your own bowels, any more?

Oh, it was blasphemous. She’d never get to the afterlife thinking a thought like that.

But was God in the way they told you
Harbour House, when well enough
so that you knew, by that, that something had made them blind to you? God was nothing more than a rhythm repeating itself in an old stone building. That’s what God was in, if God was in anything.

Was God in the eye of that rabbit?

Well, you, you can just go and get lost.

Well, we’re all just a heap of cut flowers on the ground at the end of the day.

Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking legs! is what Philip used to say.

Well, some go younger than others, it’s true.

Well, I’ve had a much fairer innings than some that should’ve.

Was God in the eye of the January boy, the January man?

It was January now. It had been January for a few weeks.

May Young’s heart gave a start. Then it went twenty to the dozen.

No, it couldn’t be today, Jennifer’s day, because the boy, the man, hadn’t come.

But maybe he didn’t know where she was. Maybe he had gone to the house and knocked on the door and found that no one was there, and had no idea where she was.

Well, he’d ask a neighbour, wouldn’t he.

But what if something was wrong, something had happened to him?

No. If it was the day, she’d know, because he’d be here. He always came, without fail. Though just the once, he sent the postcard. But he always came. And he wasn’t here.

But that girl was here, in the chair.

May levelled her gaze at the girl.

She needed her glasses.

She lifted her hand. The old hand on the bed lifted. She sent it towards the locker top, where the glasses were. But it missed, she knocked the hand into them by mistake, as well as into several get-well cards, and the glasses fell with the cards off the locker on to the floor.

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

She lifted her hand. The old hand lifted and waved in the air.

The girl had her eyes shut.

May redirected her hand to the top of the locker. The hand came up against more cards from them all telling her to get well. It knocked them to the side. It found the box of tissues. It got its fingers into the open place, the hole where the tissues come out, and got a good grip on the box and got it over to the bed, there, and got an even better grip on it.

With all she had she made the old hand throw the box at the girl.

It worked! It hit her on the leg. The girl opened her eyes with a jolt and looked to see what had happened. She looked first at her leg and then at the box of tissues on its side at her feet and then at May in the bed.

What? she said.

May took a deep breath into the confines of her head. Then she did it. She opened her mouth. She spoke.

Look at all that hot water, running away like that.

It came out in a gravelly husk. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say at all.

Look at all the what? the girl said.

May tried again.

If someone had done the job right.

If someone had done the job, the girl said.

Wouldn’t be happening.

Nothing’s actually happening, the girl said. There’s no water. I don’t see any water.

May shook her head. The room swung.

They done the job wrong.

Okay, the girl said.

Terrible the waste.

The wrong things were coming out of her mouth by themselves. She shook her head at the girl again.

Okay, the girl said. We’ll sort it.

Where’s the cake?

You want a cake? the girl said.

You hold it and I’ll cut it. Where’s the plates? Where’s the knife?

The girl put her phone thing down on the chair and went round to May’s locker. She opened the doors and rummaged around. She took out a pair of shoes and put them on the bed. She took out a jar of sweets.

I don’t see any cake. But I found these, she said.

She unscrewed its top. May opened her mouth like a child. The girl unwrapped a red sweet and put it in May’s mouth.

May nodded.

The girl took one too. She took the sweets with her and sat down again on the visitor’s chair. May sucked at the sweet. She nodded at the shoes on the bed.

Bad luck, that.

That was right. That was the first thing she’d said that’d come out right.

The girl got up, picked up the shoes again and put them on the floor under the bed.

I don’t like pink.

The girl listened.

See, we were all supposed to hate her, think her a bad lot. Because she ran away to America. But she had to, for her husband. In the war. Him being an Eytie from the Isle of Capri. And she didn’t run away. That was a lie. She did her songs. She made a fortune. Enough money for a hundred Spitfires, they said! And the head German. The head German.

Like, you mean, Hitler or something? the girl said.

No, no. Weasel, he was. Little weaselly face. She was singing in France. The war effort. He gave the order, he said they were to bomb her hotel. Send a message. But they didn’t get her.

Right, the girl said. In the war, yeah?

Yes,
in the war! In Arras.

Is that a place? the girl said.

!

Ha ha!

The girl, amazed, sat in the visitor’s chair and watched May laugh.

(May Winch is home on leave, cycling home in the blackout from the dance and there’s no moon, but it’s okay because she knows where the potholes are, it’s like a game to miss the potholes and it’s a game she’s good at. But she rounds the corner on the stretch between the town and the village just past the crossroads where the signpost used to be and BANG the air itself becomes a wall, and oof she hits it, it all happens fast and slow, off the bike she comes and the bike goes one way and she goes the other, hits the ground side first, arm up to stop her head, then her knee and her thigh hit the road, and it takes her a jiffy to realize she’s cycled into a warm flank, an animal, there, she can hear it go, it’s run off too fast for a cow, must have been a horse, maybe a deer, the feet didn’t sound like a horse, nobody’s horse would be loose on the road like that. She sits herself up, feels her elbow, skinned, wet, bit of bleeding it feels like. She stands up, puts the weight on her knee. Fine.

She’s fine.

She bursts into tears.

She walks the rest of the way home shaking.

It was the dark taking a shape, going solid out of nowhere in front of her. It wasn’t like when the bomb hit the ball-bearing factory next door to the shop and she’d been blown across the room backwards and hit the wall behind her. That had been different. This had come out of nowhere and it had no sound, just the muffled thump of May being hit by the dark. The difference was that she’d just gone headlong with her eyes wide open into it, that she’d done it herself somehow, hit the dark.

When she gets to the fountain she gives her face a wash and dries it on her sleeves. At the front of the house she waits behind the hedge for a bit till she is calm, has sorted her face into the right face, for you need the right face to come into the house, for Frank, at sea, is already presumed, the word is, and has been for eight months.

Her mother comes into the hall. When she sees May her hands fly up to her face.

I’m fine! May says. Me and my bike hit a deer on the road. Fell on my arras.

That gets her upstairs without too much fuss, where she has a look at her elbow and her knee and they’re not too bad.

The next day she’s sore all over and the elbow is giving her gyp.

She walks back along the road and finds the bicycle, in the long grass in the ditch, and it’s fine. She gets back on it. It goes fine, it’s fine.)

He took me to London once, Frank did.

Who? the girl said.

On the Underground trains. The smell of all the dirty wool. I was only small, mind.

Right, the girl said.

I’m all washed up, me.

Seem like you’re doing fine to me, the girl said.

Dog-tired. Been on the late shift.

Fair enough, the girl said.

But it’s nice to be loved. Isn’t it nice to be loved.

Telling me, the girl said and her face went sad.

The eyes of the men after war. Like rabbits in headlights. We all were. All them who never came back. All them going up into the air and then not coming down. A line through the name in the morning, Philip told me. And that was that. Well, we came through, Philip and me. And it was behind us, and we got married, got a family, got a new house, brand new. Never a house there before. Even the mud in the garden. Listen! Brand new mud.

But that girl sitting there in the visitor’s chair wasn’t listening, had a long face on her now. May lifted a hand. An old hand in front of her lifted in the air, wavered, then came down proper hard in a fist on the woollen blanket.

Cheer up, you!

(Jennifer comes into the kitchen. She is fourteen. She has the usual sullen face on. It is a summer evening and May is at the machine.

Jennifer, your shoulders, May says.

Yeah, because I’ll need a straight back when we all die in a nuclear holocaust, Jennifer says.

May presses the pedal down on the floor and guides the material through beneath the needle. Now Jennifer has opened the cupboard, taken the top off a Tupperware box and helped herself to a handful of sultanas. At least she is eating something.

If you’d eaten your tea, May says. I need those for the scones.

Jennifer used to be so perfectly dressed. She used to be a model child. These days she is pale and thin with a miserable long face on her and wears such terrible old scruffy-looking clothes and leaves her hair a mess. May is forever telling her. Cheer up, you! It is her age. Also, she is hanging around with girls who are too old for her, the too-clever girls in the year above her at school, and spending far too much time with that boy, whose hair is too long and whose parents May and Philip don’t know anything about. She is spending too little time thinking about school. You can’t be a translator in Europe, which is where the jobs will be for people doing languages not science, without proper qualifications. She is always going around the place with that boy, and if she’s not with him then she’s on the phone to him. She is fourteen. She is too young to have a boyfriend.