Half-Sick of Shadows (3 page)

On the day she took ill, Father worked late on the farm. The Manse’s kitchen was hot and thick with the aroma of beef, potatoes, carrots and onions. Sophia, me, Edgar, Gregory, Granny Hazel and Mother had enjoyed stew and crusty bread for dinner when the first sign happened. Our empty bowls were stacked and ready for washing. Tea steamed from six mugs.

‘I feel sick,’ said Granny Hazel.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Mother. ‘The way you down it.’

Granny Hazel moaned. ‘It wasn’t the stew.’

She moaned again and toppled sideways off her chair.

Surprised but unfazed, Edgar and Sophia stared at the place where she had been. Gregory stared too, before turning to Mother, who pretended not to have noticed. I looked under the table to see where Granny Hazel had gone. Her eyes gazed at me unseeing.

‘She’s collapsed,’ said Gregory.

Mother said it looked like it.

I emerged from under the table to see what would happen next.

‘I hope she didn’t bang her head,’ said Mother, pouring herself another cup of tea. After blowing on it, she sent Gregory on the spare bicycle to tell Father at Farmer Barry’s farm.

By the time Gregory returned – with Father pedalling twenty-four to the dozen behind him – Granny Hazel had come back to life. She had drunk a cup of tea and retired to bed, colliding with more walls than usual on the way. When she came downstairs the following day,
she
couldn’t get back up. Father took her bed apart, carted the whole thing down to the living room and rebuilt it. He and Mother talked about getting a doctor for Granny Hazel, but nothing came of it.

Father didn’t trust doctors. He said if the Lord makes you sick it’s because you’re supposed to be sick, and if the Lord wants to heal you He’ll heal you. He said doctors suffered from having had an education. Education blinded people with false knowledge and fancy words from the facts of sin, the Saviour, and salvation.

Sophia and I remained quiet in bed after Mother left because Sophia had nothing to say and I was preoccupied with puzzling out passing on.

Whenever I tried to puzzle something out, Mother called me precocious. So I took to puzzling out in private. I wanted to puzzle out what Granny Hazel had passed on, and thought about asking Mother in the morning. Knowing it would be a silly question, I decided against it, and satisfied myself with the knowledge that when people die they pass something on.

But what?

I knew people passed on information. Sometimes Father told Mother Farmer Barry had asked him to pass something on – usually something about his wife’s health. I used to think Mrs Farmer Barry suffered from halitosis. It kept her indoors. I knew about halitosis because Mother said Edgar had it. Mother corrected me when I made a fool of myself one day by saying the wrong word. Mrs Farmer Barry might have had halitosis too, but she definitely had tuberous sclerosis. When I asked Mother about tuberous sclerosis she told me to go to bed.

Noises like moving furniture came upstairs from downstairs. Father must have been shifting Granny Hazel’s coffin into the house from the outhouse. How would he get her in? She was bigger than him and fat. He would have to roll her on to the floor first. I listened for a bump that never came. My brain fogged over trying to fathom the
mechanics
of it. The kitchen table was about the right size; the coffin would best go on it. Maybe Granny Hazel had enough life in her to walk to the kitchen. Father could give her a leg up.

I gazed at where the ceiling would be if I could see it in the Dark, and wondered if it was there even though I couldn’t.

Lying there, I wondered if I could invent something better to do with a dead body than bury it. Use it as a scarecrow or something. We ate meat. A dead body had meat. Just today Mother said we were out of sausages. But we couldn’t eat Granny Hazel if Father put her in a coffin and buried her – not that I’d want to eat Granny Hazel; she would probably make me ill.

In the Quiet, Dark and Cold, Sophia pulled me back from the rim of sleep. ‘Who’ll sleep in Granny Hazel’s room now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I didn’t know. Until then, I hadn’t thought about it. I thought about it. I thought about it for longer than I thought. ‘Gregory, probably.’

Sophia didn’t answer. She’d gone to sleep.

Next thing I knew, the bedroom door creaked and candlelight came in with Mother – and Father too this time. I must have been asleep because no creaks came from the stairs.

Father had shaken Gregory and Edgar awake, and brought them in dressing gowns and bare feet to speak to all of us together. We were all there: Sophia and me in bed, Mother, Gregory and Edgar shivering, and Father, the white of his face glowing between his head hair and his beard. How could anyone say, as Mother did, that Gregory had inherited Father’s square chin and strong looks? How did anyone know what Father’s chin looked like? In Gregory, I could see only Father’s ugly disposition, which, up to that point, Mother had never mentioned.

None of Father’s strong looks or ugly disposition remained when my and Sophia’s turn came to be born. Our birth called upon Mother’s substantial resources. Even as a child, I saw shards of her in us: the splinters of solemn mood, the sharp edges of delicate features,
and
the jigsaw piece of sallow pallor. I was less a handsome boy than a pretty one. Sophia reflected Mother in every way. Mother depleted herself when she produced us. I came out of our birth best. Neither Mother nor Sophia came out of it whole. As Sophia gained strength through infancy and grew into childhood, Mother’s remaining strength shrank in equal measure. They were ghosts of each other.

Father’s voice crackled with emotion as he gave us our instructions for tomorrow: no dawdling, no talking, no laughing and no horseplay. We were to get up promptly, wash, and get dressed in our Sunday best. We were to be respectful at all times. Were we to step out of line there would be consequences. ‘Justified consequences,’ he said. I wondered how justified consequences differed from ordinary ones.

Our Sunday best should have been for church. We only attended at Christmas. The nearest church was two hours away and two hours back if the horse hurried and the cart kept all its wheels.

While Father talked, Gregory’s and Edgar’s feet turned blue.

Blue feet were common; we all had them.

But we didn’t mind blue feet. We didn’t mind groaning, crooked rafters. We were deaf to creaking walls and joints. We made peace with the wind that penetrated brickwork gaps like the breath of ghosts. We were accustomed to straining noises at night like the noise our gums made when Farmer Barry pulled a rotten tooth. Commonly, a whine somehow different from the usual whines awakened one or other of us – me, Sophia, Edgar, Gregory, Mother or Father – and sometimes a whine woke all of us together, and we would be twelve eyeballs in the dark. One of us might frighten another downstairs, or in the corridor, with or without our candles, as, unable to return to sleep, we prowled in search of dawn.

When Father had done talking, he left our bedroom without saying goodnight. He never said goodnight. Gregory and Edgar never said goodnight either. They limped out behind him and went to their room. Mother kissed me and Sophia, and muttered as she tucked the sheets in that we would catch our deaths, which made me aware, for
the
first time, of death’s existence as my future possession, waiting for me to claim it, drumming its fingers, bored, because I had two left feet – according to Mother – and took ages at everything.

Sophia went to sleep before our parents went down the creaky stairs. I decided to stay awake and listen in case she woke. On that night, as on most others, I was useless at staying awake.

Granny Hazel, dead on the kitchen table, and only a floor or ceiling between us! She looked up at me with her eyes closed. I feared looking over the side of my bed in case she opened them.

3

Sophia’s Promise

Poor Mother.

Mother rose before dawn even in summer when dawn came early, and we ate breakfast with sunlight streaming through the kitchen window and making the marmalade glow like orange jellyfish.

Every pre-dawn, Mother hurried downstairs in her high-neck blouse, V-neck pullover, cardigan, woollen socks, long skirt, and invisible green Wellington boots. She had ballet feet and a ballerina body. Either I saw her hurrying downstairs in my dreams or I’ve muddied her haste with images from books and movies: Jane Eyre, Blanche DuBois, Tank Girl, and the blind daughter in
Little House on the Prairie
whose name never made as much impact as her hair – which was like Mother’s after she washed and dried it.

Sophia had similar hair. They were great, troubled women – not Mother and Sophia; they were just troubled – Jane Eyre, Blanche DuBois, Tank Girl and the blind daughter in
Little House on the Prairie
whose name never made as much impact as her hair. I became familiar with television years later. The Manse had no aerial in those days, nor television to connect it to.

Every day, Mother built up scrunched newspaper, firelighters, sticks and coals, and put a match to protruding paper ends. She watched the firelighters catch and flames embrace the sticks, then put the fireguard
on
the hearth. She smiled her first and often only smile of the day. Daily, she hurried to the kitchen. If the gas for the stove was too low – she could tell by the hiss – she pulled on her coat and hurried to the outhouse where the bottles were stored.

This morning, the gas had a strong hiss. Mother put the kettle on the ring to boil. Boiling took ages. Heat had first to change water from solid to liquid. Mother washed soot off her face and hands at the sink and dried them with a towel. She did this while spooning tea into the pot, a juggling act, like patting her head while rubbing her stomach. By the time she had stale bread – all the better for toast – on the board to slice, and the pan on the heat ready for oil, bacon, sausages, eggs, soda and potato bread, Father had resurrected himself upstairs.

Father, as usual, knelt at the side of his bed and thanked God for His gift of another day and plentiful bounty from the land. I heard him giving thanks and asking forgiveness through the thick walls and across the corridor. He prayed at listeners on the far side of the planet, and to a god I had a notion wore a hearing aid.

Mother cooked continuously, baking bread for future meals when she finished preparing imminent ones. The fire in the living room gave off a sweltering heat when lit, but most of the time the hearth sat black, like a hole in the wall. The bedrooms had fireplaces, but Father kept them empty to spare expense. He said sinners should never get so warm and comfortable they forget their need to repent.

When we repented, our teeth chattered.

The worst thing about the Manse was the toilet – a hole in a plank in a coffin-like box across the courtyard beyond the outbuildings, and a large bucket under the hole. Mother had the pleasure of emptying it daily, and twice daily when we were all blessed with freely moving bowels.

Father suffered from the need to perform excretory functions like the rest of us, which meant he suffered like the rest of us. Therefore, he prayed long and hard about what to do about our old-fashioned
outdoor
toilet. It served six needs and often had a queue. The Lord had given him permission to have a modern toilet built indoors, but the Lord had yet to give him a date and enough money. Father had spoken to builders and sought planning consent from whichever authorities had the power to grant or withhold it. I prayed for a positive verdict. We all did. An indoor toilet: we would truly praise the Lord for that! It would mean an end to bare cheeks frozen to the seat and fingers liable to snap off as we wiped our bums.

Six people go through a small fortune in toilet paper, which is why Father brought other people’s newspapers home from wherever he could find them. Mother held a ruler against each newssheet and tore it into six smaller sheets. Daylight shone through a crack and we hurt our eyes reading stories with the endings missing, and pulled our pants up over inky posteriors.

The Manse contained other reading material: an encyclopedia and a dictionary – wholesome reading material, Father called it, but I had never seen him reading anything except his bible.

Candles hurt our eyes at night when we read the encyclopedia. Father made us use candles because lamp oil cost the earth. I liked the encyclopedia better than the dictionary. It had stories, and sometimes they made sense. It had more than a thousand pages, and three columns of writing on each page, which felt like reading for ever. While I enjoyed reading from the encyclopedia, I wished it had only one column per page and fewer pages.

The encyclopedia contained hundreds and hundreds of every letter in the alphabet, and had many pages devoted to words beginning with each one. So had the dictionary. An encyclopedia is a dictionary with true stories. On my fourth birthday, I started reading the dictionary at the beginning, intending to learn all the words through to Z. Alas, I gave up when the A entry introduced the word ‘diphthong’, which I made the mistake of looking up … something to do with two vowels. I looked up vowel … something to do with the speech tract. I looked up tract … a short pamphlet, often on
a
religious subject. Learning words involves more than meets the eye.

Newspapers and magazines were the Devil’s work, especially newspapers – although useful for the toilet. They let the world’s filth into the home, according to Father, which is why I never saw an intact one … except once, when Father must have forgotten to hide it. I saw my first bare-chested woman in that newspaper. She deserved pity more than anything else, having to walk around all day, every day, deformed. I thanked God, in my prayers, that neither Sophia nor Mother had breasts.

If Father had allowed newspapers, I would have been better prepared to encounter the world. Encountering the world, and possibly conquering it, was my destiny. Despite the absence of information – except in the encyclopedia – about life elsewhere on our flat planet – the one God made in six days – I knew we were safer in here, in the Manse, with the dead all around, than out there, in the world, with so much Devil’s work going on.