So I agreed, took some clothes to change into, and went off to cook turkey roll for twenty.
I kept out of sight until the cortege had set off, then rushed to lay the table. I reckoned I could set out the prawn cocktail, and leave them to help themselves to veg, once they’d got a plate of turkey each. Forty-five minutes later they were back, so I ran out with the red hot tureens of steaming veg and fixed them all along the table. Now, Joe could hand out the plates, and we might get away with it. It went well, until the ice-cream. The portions were standing by on the tray; Joe had promised to carry them through, then get everyone to leave the table, for coffee and cake in the parlour, so I could clear up. Suddenly the vicar from the cemetery stood up, and motioned Joe over to the door. Joe looked panic-stricken then came over to me, where I was peeping behind the kitchen window.
‘You’ll have to do the ice-cream. He wants to talk to me.’
‘But Joe . . .’ I was terrified, and he had already gone.
I picked up the first tray and tried to make my face look different.
‘Vanilla?’ I asked Mrs White, plonking it down in front of her.
‘Vanilla, Pastor?’ I asked, spilling some of it.
‘Vanilla May? Vanilla Alice?’ And I vanilla’d my way down the line until I came to my mother. She was staring at me, with her mouth a little bit open.
‘You?’ and her pearls quivered against her throat.
‘Me. Vanilla?’
Elsie’s relatives from Morecambe thought we’d gone mad. The pastor stood up.
‘Where’s Mr Ramsbottom? Is this a sick joke?’
‘The woman’s ill,’ I explained, ‘I’m helping out.’
‘Have you no shame?’
‘Not really.’
The pastor motioned to the flock. ‘We won’t stay to be mocked any longer.’
‘Oh she’s a demon your daughter,’ wailed Mrs White, holding on to the pastor’s arm.
‘She’s no daughter of mine,’ snapped back my mother, head high, leading the way out.
And they left, and so the relatives from Morecambe had seconds, and two pieces of Battenburg. When Joe came back he just shook his head, said they were all mad, and that I was well out of it. He was right, but I was lonely. As I washed up in the kitchen thinking it over, I felt someone standing behind me.
It was Miss Jewsbury.
‘You weren’t at the meal,’ was all I could think of to say.
‘No, I didn’t want that. I wanted to see Elsie off, that’s all. I know her cousin from Morecambe.’ I didn’t reply, and she looked awkward. ‘How are you then?’
‘Oh fine,’ I told her, ‘I can make some money, and I have a plan for next year.’
She was the first person I’d confided in, apart from Elsie. She seemed pleased, told me it was a good idea, that she should have done it herself. ‘Things get in the way,’ she said, ‘that’s what’s sad about life.’ Then suddenly, ‘Will you come and see me in my flat?’
‘No,’ I answered slowly, ‘I can’t do that.’
She gathered her bags and her gloves. ‘Well if you change your mind, or if you need money, I’m in the directory.’ She turned away, and I heard her heels for a long time. I don’t know why I didn’t thank her, or even say goodbye.
That was the last time I worked for the Elysium Fields on a regular basis. I had finished school and been offered a full-time job in a mental hospital. It wasn’t something I would have chosen normally, but it had a distinct advantage over other jobs, because I could live in. A room of my own, at least.
‘She’ll not like, will she?’ the woman said to Joe.
‘How can she?’ Joe replied, ‘All them lunatics.’
But I went, nevertheless, comforting myself with my plan. Winnet tried to imagine what the city might be like. Some of her village said it was made of crystal, others, that it had been spun from a web. Some called it a nonsense, and told her she’d still be unhappy even if she managed to find it. She thought how everyone must be strong and healthy. She thought of their compassion and wisdom. In a place where truth mattered, no one would betray her, and so her courage grew, and with it, her determination. She found a map rolled up round a broom handle; the map showed the forest, and the edges of the forest where the towns began. She found the river, placid and shrunk, but growing to a huge mouth where she had once lived; the river belted the sacred city, and splitting itself like a cut worm, flowed variously into the sea. Winnet had never sailed on the sea. She had known the sea only as it came to the shore, known it only in connection with the land. She was afraid of it, though she knew the faithful have made miracles from coracles. The easiest way to the city was out into the sea, then back up the river again. The only other way was through the deepest forest, down a part of the river that looked like a tunnel. The waters there were brackish, she could not hope to navigate them, as they lost themselves in a thick tree-dark that lasted long after the night. She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.
Winnet studied the ways of boat builders; how they turned and trimmed the hull for speed, and fattened the stern for steadiness. She learned the geometry of a sail. The blind man who taught her said rope was like a dog, rough and dependable. Warm and scratchy like a dog’s coat, and brown and needing to be handled right. She learned to handle everything like it was alive. It was alive, he told her, and it worked better if you knew it. He told her it was Wu li: principles of organic energy. She didn’t understand, but she felt it moving; the rich black tar and the tight thread bound round the stem of her oars. When the stones are hot, he said, they sing, and he gave her a singing stone for her journey.
Soon it was Winnet’s last night at the village. She decided to sleep outside, where she could sniff and sense the earth she was leaving. The wind blew and it didn’t seem important, but tomorrow when the wind blew, it would be important. All the familiar things were getting different meanings. In the night, Winnet had a dream.
She dreamed her eyebrows became two bridges that ran to a bore-hole between her eyes. The hole has no cover, and a spiral staircase starts, and runs down and down into the gut. She must follow it if she wants to know the extent of her territory. She must pass through the blood and bones that swill round the bottom step, before she can squat on the top step, in the huge space under her skin. Then she finds a roundabout horse, and that gives her a chance to look at things more than once, and she thinks she doesn’t change anything as she looks, but she must, because every time she goes round, the same things are different. She’s getting dizzy, if she doesn’t jump she’ll fall off.
When Winnet wakes up, there’s a light rain, and she must move quickly. She’s crying and the blind man, touching her, tells her not to worry about being afraid. She rows out to the sea, and stores her boat for a day, until she gets used to the salt taste and how big it all is. The need for the city fastens her heart to her mind. She will get in her boat and sail to the other side. The sail is pulling and the sun is out. Now there is nothing about her but water. One thing is certain; she can’t go back.
‘When did you last see your mother?’ someone asked me. Someone who was walking with me in the city. I didn’t want to tell her; I thought in this city, a past was precisely that. Past. Why do I have to remember? In the old world, anyone could be a new creation, the past was washed away. Why should the new world be so inquisitive?
‘Don’t you ever think of going back?’
Silly question. There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it’s hard to pull away. I’m always thinking of going back. When Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kil
l your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
‘When did you last see your mother?’
I don’t know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted. Hearing the words as they hit the surface is sensitive work. You will have to be a bank robber and listen and listen to the little clicks before you can open the safe.
‘What would have happened if you had stayed?’
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
This ancient city is made of stone and stone walls that have not fallen yet. Like paradise it is bounded by rivers, and contains fabulous beasts. Most of them have heads. If you drink from the wells, and there are many, you might live forever, but there is no guarantee you will live forever as you are. You might mutate. The waters might not agree with you. They don’t tell you this. I came to this city to escape. This city is full of towers to climb and climb, and to climb faster and faster, marvelling at the design and dreaming of the view from the top. At the top there is a keen wind and everything is so far away it’s impossible to say what is what. There is no one to discuss it with. Cats can count on the fire brigade, and Rapunzel was lucky with her hair. Wouldn’t it be nice to sit on the ground again? I came to this city to escape.
If the demons lie within they travel with you.
Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.
As I change from the inter-city to the local line, I notice something odd. This is a busy station, but there are hardly any people, and very little noise. It’s muffled, like the universe has been gagged. What’s going on? A hand at my shoulder.
‘Last train luv.’ I search for the clock. It’s only half-past eight.
The voice sees my confusion. ‘Snow luv, lines are clogged.’ What is he talking about? I travel just a few hundred miles and I am cut off. I feel suspicious. I am in the sphere of enchantment and anything is possible. Right now though, I must get on to this train. My carriage is already occupied by a sighing man. I haven’t brought gloves, and the luggage hammock above me has rotted.
‘Don’t put yer bags in the aisle luv,’ the ticket clipper scolds.
We shunt off and I make a porthole in the fug. Beyond the window there must be three feet of snow. The tracks are covered and the sidings are packed high. I haven’t brought my wellingtons. The sighing man turns into a muttering man until we reach our first station. We don’t stay long, then there is an ear-piercing shriek. The train stammers and halts, jerks a few more feet, then different feet come running down the aisle. The clipper man and the guard and the muttering man drag behind them. The shrieking does not stop. I stick my head out of the door and see a great black bundle being tugged on to the train. Suddenly the bundle pops through, and we are off again. As I move back to my seat, I notice the bundle coming down the train towards me. ‘Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell,’ it chants. ‘Don’t give a body time to climb on. Bloody hell, and me with a bad heart.’ The woman had got stuck in the door.
There are three of us now; the bundle chanting her complaint round a fat cheese sandwich, one fat hand clasping a thermos like a long lost friend; the muttering man singing a ditty about love and the lack of it; and me, with a copy of Middlemarch under my pullover. It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.
‘Well, here we are,’ I thought, as the train sidled up to what used to be a station. In the old days it had a model of the Queen Mary, and a waiting room and a machine full of Fry’s Five Boys. I went to Liverpool from here once, wearing a hat that looked like a tea cosy. Elsie knitted it for me; she called it my Helmet of Salvation.
The wind blew, and my shoes got darker and damp as I slithered past the town hall, Christmas pine radiant, crib courtesy of the Salvation Army. It had begun to snow again as I reached the bottom of our long stretchy street. The hill at the top looked like the bundle on the train. ‘Ten blocks, twenty street-lamps.’ I counted automatically. Soon be there. I wished I’d brought gloves. The last few flags and suddenly I’m outside my front door again. The parlour has a leaded window, so no one can see inside properly. I can see shapes though, and I can hear what sounds like Hark the Herald Angels Sing; it sounds like it, but in the background there is the distinct rhythm of a samba. I hover, then, mustering all my hormones, push open the front door. The lobby is lit, the reindeer shoehorn still hangs by the barometer, though the wallpaper no longer does. I will go into the parlour and hope for the best. In the parlour I find my mother sitting in front of what is best described as a contraption. More interestingly, she is playing it.
‘Hello Mum, it’s me.’ I put down my bag and waited. She swivelled round on her stool, waving a piece of sheet music. The cover said ‘Glad Tidings’.
‘Come and look at this, it’s specially for the electronic organ,’ and she spun back again, rippling the keys.
‘What have you done with the piano?’
‘Oh, I’ve gone all electronic now. I like to keep up with the world.’
I went over to inspect the contraption. It was enormous, with a great flourish of a music stand on the top. There were two keyboards, and a row of different coloured knobs and buttons, with things like ‘Spinet’, and ‘Xylophone’ printed on them.
‘Listen to this spinet,’ my mother commanded, and tinkled out the first verse of In the Bleak Mid-Winter.
‘It’s very atmospheric,’ I had to admit.
‘Oh it’s more than that, I’ll show you.’ And for the next half-hour she demonstrated the contraption. We Three Kings with and without snare. We Three Kings with and without flugel horn and bass ensemble. She could play pop too, guitar and up tempo beat. ‘For the youth meetings,’ she explained. ‘We’re going to get a band going, just like The Joystrings.’ She switched it off, then stood back so that we could both admire it. ‘The stool comes with it.’ She pointed at the sculpture of plush and melamine. ‘And you get a bound copy of your favourite music book. Course, I had The Redemption Hymnal done, see.’ They had bound it in calfette, with gold leaf lettering, and my mother’s initials on the spine. I nodded and asked if we could have a cup of tea.
‘Did you get it from the Society for the Lost?’ I asked her, thinking she might even have designed the accessories. For a moment she didn’t answer, then I saw she was blushing. She told me that the Society had been disbanded, that there had been corruption at the Morecambe guest house, and that the Rev. Bone was a broken man. It appeared that most of the money put aside for the fishermen’s missions had gone to pay the secretary’s gambling debts; the profits from my mother’s memberships and sales of religious accoutrements had gone to pay his wife maintenance. His estranged wife. The woman he lived with was his girlfriend.
‘Pompadour,’ spat my mother. ‘Living in sin with his pompadour.’
When it was discovered that the Society was on the verge of bankruptcy, my mother composed a letter to her vast battery of members, asking for funds, and warning them that the Society would not be present for much longer. The response had been overwhelming; postal orders began to arrive by the next delivery accompanied by notes of thanks for all the happiness through the years. ‘I carry my wipe-clean copy of Revelations everywhere,’ wrote one woman. Finally my mother sold off all the remaining copies of Th
e jim Reeves Devotional Selection at half-price. They cleared their debts, with enough over for the Rev. Bone to take a short holiday in Colwyn Bay.
At the Morecambe guest house reports of watered-down soup and unchanged towels caused an investigation by the health authorities. The place had slipped into disrepair, and was ordered to clean up or close down. This was bad enough, but my mother had discovered an advert from them in the Psychic Weekly offering those recently bereaved the services of ‘Morecambe’s most famous medium’. The guest house had started holding seances every Friday in the billiard room. You had to pay extra, and miss your evening meal, because the medium didn’t like to work with full stomachs. My mother was so upset that she submitted a long piece on devilry to the Band of Hope review. She gave it to me to read for bedtime.
‘Have you got enough to keep you occupied?’ I asked her anxiously.
‘I told you I’d gone electronic, well it doesn’t stop in the parlour.’ She was mysterious and wouldn’t tell me anymore. We spoke for a while of what I was doing and why. No detail, just enough to make both of us feel like we were making an effort.
‘Your cousin’s in the police force now,’ she said brightly.
‘That’s nice.’
‘Yes, she’s got a young man’ (she’s deliberately not looking at me).
‘That’s nice.’
‘She asks after you.’
‘Well just tell her I’m not dead, then she won’t waste money on a wreath.’ I decided it was time I went to bed. ‘Don’t forget this,’ chirped my mother, tossing her article after me.
Sir Perceval came to a glorious castle built of mountain rock and set upon the side of a hill. As he approached the drawbridge, it lowered towards him and he saw trout swimming in the moat. His horse is weary. Sir Perceval dismounts and they walk across the water together. On either side of the ramparts stands a dwarf, fully armed. They greet the knight, tell him he is welcome, tell him there is meat inside. One takes the horse, while the other leads the way. Sir Perceval finds himself in a room made entirely of oak. The dwarf bids him rest till sundown. Sir Perceval curses himself for leaving the Round Table, leaving the king, and the king’s sorrowing face. On his last night at Camelot, he found Arthur walking in the garden, and Arthur had cried like a child, and said there was nothing. The king had given him a string of bells for his horse. On the first day and the second day and the third day, Perceval could have turned back, he was still within the sphere of Merlin. On the fourth day, the woods were wild and forlorn, and he did not know where he was, or even what had driven him there. Now Sir Perceval lay on the bed and fell asleep.