Not like yours. Hey, how do I know that? You’re a real success story these days, and in a way I’m not surprised. If you’d been what you looked to be, you’d never have left me. That smile you had. A bright, soft, shiny smile, like a baby smile. But you were tough, weren’t you. A lot tougher than me. I would never have been able to leave you the way you left me, no matter what you’d done. You didn’t even look back. I can see you now.
I know you think it was all my fault, but nothing’s that simple. I’ll tell you my side of the story one day. Not now. I’ve waited so long, I can wait a little longer.
But do you really like the pictures? If you do I’ve got plenty more. Calvin gave me the negatives as well, so I can just keep on printing them off. Some of them I have to be a little careful where I get them printed. You probably know what I mean.
I never met a girl like you again, Simone. You’ve got kids, that’s what they tell me. And you’re married.
Home, marriage, career, kids. You’ve done it all, haven’t you, Simone? Just like we always said we wouldn’t. You remember all that talk you used to give me, about being free? I can’t begin to tell you what I’ve done.
Simone –
The letter ends just like that, on my name, like a conversation that’s been interrupted. But it’s going to go on.
Two people died in the other car. It was so still, so silent. But then I realized there was a thrush singing, and I saw it in the bare hedge, where the twigs were heavy with raindrops. As the thrush bounced along its twig the rain shook off, sparkling. The sun came out and so the bird sang. It was as simple as that. The woman I’d dragged out of her car kept on crying and shaking. I began to feel the pain from my hands where the battery acid had burned them, and then another car stopped, and it was a man with a mobile phone. After he’d looked into both cars he called the ambulance and then he climbed through the hedge and down two fields where he knew there was a stream. He took his petrol can and brought back water to wash the battery acid off my hands. When he came back he had mud all over his clothes. He must have slipped climbing down the bank. I wondered if the mud would brush off his jacket when it was dry, or whether he would have to have it dry-cleaned, and should I offer to pay. He made me sit down, took my hands and turned them over and washed them very gently.
‘What about the people in the other car?’
‘Don’t look, there’s nothing we can do for them,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ the woman who’d been in the crash kept saying, and she cried with her mouth open, her smeary face held up to the white sky as if there was someone there who might take it all away. Then we heard the sirens.
‘You’d better stop saying that now,’ said the man. His voice was harsh, but then he’d seen what was in the other car, and he couldn’t feel sorry for the one who was still alive. I suppose he may have thought she’d caused the accident. But as far as I can remember, all we knew then was that she was the only one who’d survived.
SIX
I drive south and east into a rainy sky. The cloud still has windows in it which let down pale ladders of sun, but over the marsh it’s already raining hard. I am shivering, and I grasp the steering-wheel tightly. I got cold from sitting still too long with the letter in my hand, then walking back stiff and slow to the car-park. All the cars were gone except mine. The streets had that desultory look of in-between times. I felt panicky suddenly, as if I might have been away by the river for a year or more, letting time flow by me instead of water. As if Matt and Joe might be gone, their places taken by two older boys with shuttered eyes.
I drive fast down the dual carriageway, past the old finger signpost and onto the sea road. Here the road is sheltered by hawthorn and willow bent sideways to the wind. Then the shelter peels away and there is the wide, drained marshland on either side, full of sheep and cloud shadows. The road is raised above the land and there are rushy ditches on both sides. The sheep are not meant to be able to climb the ditches, but sometimes they do. They pose on the side of the road with their fleece combed through by the wind and their black, foolish eyes fixed on oncoming cars. There’s no guessing which way they’ll bolt. They don’t seem to know themselves. The whole world is a surprise to sheep, even their own nature. So I drive slowly, watching the road, while the wind tears at loose rags of cloud. At this point of the journey home the road seems to gather itself for the sky, like an airport runway. Without meaning to, I drive faster. Wind whines through the ventilation system. I love that punch of acceleration in the small of my back at take-off, when the plane rackets down the runway and there’s no turning back, only flying or failing to fly.
I am so afraid. It’s not only the letter, the solid thing that’s in my document case, tucked well away. I have to believe it was Michael who folded those pages, stuffed them in the card-backed envelope, stuck down the flap and the stamps. The sweat of his finger and the moisture of his saliva are here, in this car, with me. He’s got to me. It makes me think of criminals trapped by the DNA printed into the spit and semen they leave behind them.
I don’t know Michael’s tongue or hands any more. I can’t imagine him as he is now. What kind of man waits twenty years and then posts a letter? The tone of it frightens me. That eerie cosiness, as if we’d been wrapped together in the same sleeping-bag just a couple of nights ago. Or as if there’s been a conversation going on all those twenty years, but I put the phone down and I’ve only just picked it up again. He’s been talking to me all the time. He’s been fingering me in a life I didn’t even know I had. I’ve been talking and smiling in his mind. It’s like being followed by someone who stops dead when you do, so you have to look round to find out if it’s more than an echo. But you don’t dare look round.
I’ve waited so long. I can wait a little longer. Do you really like the pictures?
Those pictures. There were always the two of them, Michael and Calvin. Calvin would never leave us alone.
It was a hot, still day in late August. Things were slowing down and Michael had more time. He found an old enamelled bath-tub and hauled it out into the yard behind the cabin. We didn’t have a hosepipe so we carried the water out by hand and slopped it into the tub. It was shady in the yard. It smelled of hemlock. When the tub was full I pulled off my dress and climbed in. The water was cold, sweet after the stickiness of the day. Michael had a dipper and he dipped it up full of water and poured it over my head so my face ran with water and strings of hair. He did it again and again until I was cold all through, shivering. I knelt up and pulled him down by me. He was wearing that blue check shirt, a plaid shirt he called it. The collar was open. I bent his head down so his hair fell forward and his neck was bare. The skin was paler because the sun never shone there. I took the dipper and poured the water over his neck onto his hair. Then he pulled off his shirt. The light was thick and green, squeezing through a canopy of leaves. The dirt smelled strong as the water splashed on it. The light wobbled on Michael’s wet shoulders. His skin shone. I think he was laughing. Anyway he had his eyes shut and I think I remember the sound of laughing. He let me do what I wanted. I drenched him, he was my baby. I started to lick the water off the ball of his shoulder, where the muscle rose.
That was when we heard the yard gate squeak and there was Calvin.
‘What’re you guys doing?’
‘Just fooling around.’
And Michael was away from me, his face shut, rubbing the water off his face. I reached for my dress.
The road turns and runs parallel to the sea, though we’re still two miles inland. I’m nearly home. The road goes through the village, past the empty school, the string of houses, the flapping sail drying on someone’s line. It’s not a pretty village at all. You’d drive straight through it and never think of it again, unless you lived here. It’s the light that makes it beautiful. There is so much more sky than land, and the sky changes so fast that sometimes the land itself seems to be moving. It’s really raining now, and the house
s have an inward look of tea-time and television. The boys will be at home.
My tyres hiss round the last corner of the village and I accelerate, wanting to get home to them, to hold them tight even though they won’t like it. They come home from school jumping with news, but I’m never there. By now they’re glazed over with TV and all they want is more of it, sprawled out on their beanbags, with duvets wrapped round them because the house is always cold. They lie close together, but Joe has his territory and Matt has his. They scuffle if one of them crosses a border which only they could define. There’s always a mess of crisp packets, banana skins, apple cores and sweet-papers round the beanbags. Childhood is a slum and they love it.
It’s my home and he knows where it is. No one forwarded that letter. It came straight here, nicely typed.
It’s been a long time and my life’s not been so good. Not like yours. Hey, how do I know that? You’re a real success story these days …
I should stop the car. I have got to think. I have got to read this letter again. But I’m close to the house now, slowing down, bumping over the cattle grid, turning the wipers up to full speed to shift the load of rain that is pouring down now. I hope Donald has remembered to put the bucket in the right place under the bathroom ceiling. Water leaks through where two tiles are gone. I’ll go straight up and see. If there’s any hot water I’ll shower. That’s what I want, to sluice off the dirt of the day before I go in to the children. But the heavy gate that is meant to keep the sheep out of the garden is swinging wide. Donald’s rusted Escort has gone.
There’s no note on the table. The house is dark and quiet. I look in the sitting-room and the boys’ beanbags are plumped up, the way I left them the night before. No duvets, no food on the floor. The kitchen is clean and still. They’ll be shopping, or else there’s some arrangement I haven’t remembered. But I find myself listening as if they’re in the house somewhere. I go up the stairs, moving lighuy and keeping close to the wall. The bathroom door is ajar and that’s where the sound is coming from. As soon as I open the door I know what it is. The tick of water falling onto bare linoleum. Donald hasn’t remembered the bucket. But there’s something there. A heap of towels, pulled roughly out of the airing-cupboard and tumbled on the floor. I go back downstairs again. In the kitchen I see at once that the wall phone is off the hook. It is silent. I put it back on the rest, then I unplug the kettle, which is still faintly warm, and take it to the sink to fill. The noise of water gushing out of the tap is bruisingly loud and I turn the tap off quickly, as if it might be covering other, more important sounds.
Nobody comes. I make tea, then wash quickly, put potatoes to bake in the oven and lay a fire in the sitting-room. I think about washing the kitchen floor, which looks smeary, but I’m too restless. The wind throws rain against the windows and when I open the back door I can hear the sea too, beating up in the distance. A smoke of rain hangs over the marsh. The path is plastered with torn leaves. What are they doing out in this? They haven’t even taken their jackets.
I can’t work, I can’t eat. I go to my document case and take out the letter. I read it through again, gathering evidence, reading it as I would if it were a document in a case. Then I fold the letter back into the envelope.
When at last the car comes, pushing through the rain with its lights on, I’m beyond anxiety. The children and Donald have died a hundred times in my mind, but I know as I go out to meet them that I look calm. The boys are in the back, huddled together. Matt has his arm around Joe’s shoulder, and Joe has a thick bandage over his head. I rip the door open.
‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s OK. They were swinging on the gate and the metal bar caught the top of Joe’s head. We went down to Casualty to get him stitched up.’
‘There was blood pumping up out of his head. I had to press down on it with a towel all the way to the hospital, didn’t I, Dad? And we had to throw the towel away.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine. They did an X-ray, that’s what took so long.’
‘They stitched inside my head first, then they sewed up the outside,’ says Joe. ‘I had fourteen stitches. When they take them out the nurse is going to give them to me in a little plastic bag so I can keep them.’
We get them into the house. The boys smell of hospitals and chocolate, and Donald looks exhausted.
‘I’m cold,’ says Joe.
‘I’ll light the fire. And Matt, run upstairs and get your duvets. You can have your tea in front of the TV, you’ll like that.’
‘I want to go back to our old house,’ says Matt, and starts to cry.
‘I won’t be able to go to school tomorrow, will I, Dad?’ says Joe proudly, and Matt cries harder. I pull them down to me, one on each side. I hold them tight, the smell of them, disinfectant and their hair which needs washing, their skin, their chocolate breath. I see the spit in the corner of Matt’s mouth as he cries. They are bleached with shock and tiredness. I hold them tight, crushing the damage that’s been done.
‘They shaved my hair,’ says Joe.
‘It’ll grow back,’ says Donald. ‘For Christ’s sake, Simone, don’t make a big deal. They’re fine. You weren’t here. You didn’t have to cope with it.’
‘That’s why the towels were on the floor,’ I say stupidly.
‘Yes, and I’ll tell you something. Old Matt wiped the blood off the kitchen floor while I was putting Joe in the car. Mum’ll be frightened if she sees it, he said. Wasn’t that something?’
Matt squirms against his father, scrubbing his head into Donald’s sweater. I think with a pang of how often he isn’t praised, Matt the older and clumsier one, the one who argues brashly for later bedtimes and a fair division of the last tinned peach, who puts up with Joe week after week then falls on him savagely for no reason anyone can see and gets punished for it.
When I had children the first shock was that there would be no sacrifice in dying for them. It would be easier than living without them. I let go of the boys, kneel down and put a match to the fire.
‘Can I have a dwarf rabbit?’ asks Joe. ‘Andy Collett’s rabbit had six babies yesterday, and it only ate one of them.’
When the children are asleep Donald comes to sit by the fire. He brings a new bottle of whisky. Don’t comment, say his eyes. Don’t say anything. He slops whisky into two glasses and we drink.
‘Have some more.’
‘Not so much. I’m starting early tomorrow.’
‘Aren’t you always.’
‘Yes.’
He drinks down the second glass and stares into the fire.
‘They put this thing over his head, like a little tent with a square cut in it where the wound was. God knows why. She was good, though, the doctor. The way she worked inside the cut. It was like watching my mother picking up a stitch she’d dropped. She said a cut that deep, there was no point stitching over the top till you got the layers firmly in place. It’ll heal properly now. They’re good, you know, here.’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Well, it’s not much more than a cottage hospital really. I nearly fainted.’
He says this in the same tone, without looking at me.
‘What, when?’
‘In the operating theatre. It was the lights, and the smell. I can’t stand that hospital smell. And she was right inside Joe’s head.’
‘What happened?’
‘I was OK. I don’t think anyone noticed.’
He smiles, fills the glass again. ‘Have some more.’
‘I won’t, thanks.’
He drinks. ‘Remember when they were born. The way that bit on top of their heads used to go up and down.’
‘Yes.’
I remember. That sealed, passionate world.
He has his hand on my leg, round my ankle. ‘Why do you wear jeans all the time?’
‘Because they’re warm.’
He kneels up, facing me. Either we’ll fuck or he’ll cry. At the moment I don??
?t know which would be worse.
Late that night I wake and go in to see Joe. His door is open and Matt is there too, sprawled over Joe’s bed, asleep. Joe must have cried out and Matt heard him before I did. That hospital tang is still in the air. I bend and listen to them breathe, and pull the duvet close round them. They have crept close in their sleep, and Matt is snoring softly against his brother’s neck.
Once I saw them walking to me out of a sunset. The air was dusty with harvest, the light thick. They had their arms slung round one another’s shoulders, and their hair was spiked with sweat from running. They were rimmed with gold. Then they came close and they were my boys again, squabbling, jostling for attention.
I sit on the end of Joe’s bed for a long time. I would die rather than let anyone break into their brotherly sleep.
SEVEN
All night I wake and sleep and wake again, and think about the letter. I’ve always loved letters. It’s because they’ve been touched by the person who sent them. Faxes and e-mails aren’t the same. Letters smell of their senders. They’ve been handled, folded, licked. Even the shiniest envelope has the blur of fingerprints on it. Stamps get cancelled with postmarks. And the words inside grow more real by the minute. You can think of your letter tossed into a sack by a tired man working overtime, then cantering westward on the night mail. All those hands sorting and weighing and carrying as the lighted train sways on its way through sleeping cities, through the world that’s forgotten about words until tomorrow. The train comes out of the night’s long tunnel into dawn. The mystery of all the possible addresses narrows down to one postman with his bag and his footsteps that might pass your house, or might not.
I say that I love letters. I’ve always said it, but it’s not true any more. When I hear the postman at our gate, I’m afraid.
There’s another letter. I grab it, take it into the bathroom and lock the door. At first I think the sheets of paper are blank.