Remember Me (3 page)

Both men stand firm; they would like to fight, hands round each other’s necks, rolling over on the stubbled grass like a pair of urchins. But they are aware of the boy,
his feet dabbling the path as they whisper at each other, and the two men keep their hands to themselves, pulling on their own suits, fingering their cuffs. My father aims a kick at the nearest
bell, half hoping it would let out a peal, some sound to break the silence. The bells look helpless lying down like this; unarmed, naked.

He first saw them last spring, up in the belfry. He was one of the gang of men who climbed St Giles tower, and came quickly back to earth again, their hands stinging with fear, legs like water.
My father tried to grip the wooden guide rail as he tumbled down and the whole piece came away, thin as splints. The beams had rotted to dust, but it wasn’t this that made the men afraid.
They had been standing in a careful circle around the nest of bells. It was just a slight tremor to begin with, so that my father thought the foreman behind him was having a joke, jockeying the
slats they stood on; and then a deep rumble which turned everything to jelly: the sky outside, the frantic bats, the bells swaying in the grit air. All to jelly. The bells didn’t seem so
harmless then. A month later, people were still talking about the earthquake that shook the city. Another month, and the work to fix the beams was lost: the bells needed to come down, and it was
not a job for a carpenter. My father had met my mother by then.

A year on, and he’s staring at the bells once more, his hands are sweating, his legs are water.

You’ve no right, he says, through his teeth.

No more have you, my grandfather says.

She’s my daughter, says my father, I have every right. My grandfather does not reply to this. He closes the discussion,

Anyway. It’s been decided.

They are back to the beginning, which to my father seems like no beginning at all, just a curve in the circle. He would let the matter drop; he is my father, after all: he can
call me whatever he likes. But this is not his church, and not his parish, and the priest is not his priest. Watton was my father’s home. Once a week, knotted at the neck, he went to his own
church. It had no crumbling tower, no beacon, and just one solitary bell with a desolate clang. When he left for the city, he thought that he had finally escaped the churches and priests and cold
stone mornings. And apart from his wedding and the recce of the bell-tower, he hasn’t stepped inside St Giles once. But it wouldn’t matter if he was regular in his attendance, it
wouldn’t matter if he was devout, the priest would not favour him. My father is an incomer, after all. The priest is perfectly civil; he gives all the appearance of benevolence, and a thin
smile of welcome. But my father isn’t fooled; he knows how things can slip away and splinter, even if they
look
solid, even if you hold on tight.

My father and grandfather are too busy arguing over a name to notice that someone is missing: my mother is nowhere to be seen. It’s not as if she hasn’t prepared for the day: she has
a long satin dress, a new hat, a pair of handmade silk slippers in cornflower blue, worn just the once, on her wedding day. They’re all laid out and ready, but my mother is slow to get up and
slow to get dressed; she makes my father impatient. He stalks about the room, then up and down outside the bedroom door until she bleats at him to go. She’ll meet him at the church; she
promises, emphatically, that she’ll be there. My father leaves her; he has to attend to me, after all. I am the reason for everything. The arrangements are all to give me a name; the priest
has been summoned to give me a name; my mother has to get out of her bed to witness me being given a name; the two men standing outside the church are arguing about my name. It has passed from
simmering disagreement to bellowing rage.

Lillian! shouts my mother’s father.

Patricia! goes my father.

Lillian Patricia Lillian Patricia. The boy in the bell listens, dabbles his feet, flicks the dog-end of his smoke onto the path. He’d go for Patricia, but they won’t
ask him for an opinion, nor anyone else. No one will come to save the day, to offer a compromise, to make a show of peace, despite the sending of the lace-edged invitation cards. The acquaintances
will stay away. This family is tight as a fist. I can’t say I’d rather be one thing or the other: I would tell my father, if I could, that in the end it will make no difference to me
what I am to be called, because my fate, which no one knows yet – even if they can dress me and christen me and take me from my mother – is that I won’t stay with a name at all.
This war will be for nothing.

~ ~ ~

I present the facts, all the same; names are to be Learned; they are to be Remembered. My grandfather’s name is Albert Price. My father re-christened him That Old Devil.
My mother is called Lillian; she was a Price first and then a Richards. My father also has a name: he’s Richard Richards, so, clearly (according to my grandfather), from that sort of idiot
family he cannot be trusted to name a turnip, let alone his first child. The bells lying in the churchyard have names too: Baxter, Brend, Brasyer; their makers have inscribed themselves on their
creations. This is all my father wants to do. The boy in the bell is not nameless: he is called Joseph Dodd.

The girl who stole from me is not nameless: someone will know what she calls herself.

~ ~ ~

The boy traces the name cut in the curved inner of the bell; he knows the feel of it well enough, but not what it says. If he had a blade, he would scrape his own initials on
the iron. But Joseph has nothing in his pockets; he has smoked the cigarette he stole from the vestry and now he’s bored with waiting; he would like a coin to buy his breakfast. When the men
and the baby go inside the church, Joseph takes his place, hand open ready, at the door.

Above the rows of empty pews, the saints in the window shine like jewels; the angels vault the ceiling, a bell is sounded from a recess. Watched by my father and grandfather, the priest moves
towards the font like a man in mud. My father longs for the sound of footsteps behind him. He’s willing my mother to come. He turns around once, twice, sees only the square door of daylight
and the outline of the boy framed within it, hopping like a goblin from one foot to the other. If she were to come now, she could change it; she could tell the priest there’s been a
mistake.

~

Where is my mother? She’s waiting. She lies straight as a poker underneath the bedclothes, and stares at the clock on the dresser. She’s waiting for the hands to
move up to ten. When the hands reach ten, she tells herself, she will get up and get dressed and go. There will still be time. She fixes on St Giles with its ceiling of angels, the rainbow window
of saints, the wisteria hanging in beaded clusters over the walls. But then the noise of the bells begins, ringing people to mass. She will not hear the eight bells of St Giles, but she listens to
the rest. The sound is layered, cacophonous: tolling and pleating in her head; there are six churches within a mile of Bath House Yard. It’s a bright sound on a bright morning, but not to my
mother. She listens to what they’re saying, a language of tongue on metal only she can understand. The sounds are different but the meaning is the same: Lillian, Lillian, Lillian, rolling
over each other, calling louder and darker and longer, until her angels are cracked and crumbling and the saints are shredded glass. Lillian, Lillian, Lillian. She thinks they’re calling her
name: they’re calling mine. I am Lillian Patricia Richards. But not forever.

And she never came?

My father shakes his head. He echoes me,

She never came.

We’re in the kitchen, with the back door open, because my father is making a soup. Mrs Moon has given him a remedy for a calming broth, to help my mother get well.
She’s been worse since my grandfather came and stood at the wall; since I’ve started going to school again. She tries to tell me what’s wrong, but it doesn’t make sense.

It’s a thing inside, is all she will say.

I try to get her to point to it but the thing keeps moving. It’s never in the same place twice.

Oh, here, she says, passing her fingers over her eyes. Another time, she’ll put a hand on her chest, or tap her throat just where the dent is.

Is it the ghosts? I ask, because I know they’re responsible for everything.

Yes, that’s right, she’ll say, Silly ghosts, eh? Never giving me a minute’s peace.

My father doesn’t tell Mrs Moon about the ghosts. He tells her it’s the meddling that makes my mother so ill.

That meddling Old Devil, my father says, Doesn’t know when to leave well alone. He wants to make sure
she
goes to school, to sit in the dunce’s corner and learn nothing!

He points at me like I’m a culprit in the meddling. Mrs Moon makes a sympathetic face and comes back with a recipe. She says it’s for my mother’s
Disposition.

My father’s good at things like tea and toast and potted beef on bread, but he doesn’t know how to make soup; he has burnt two pans already. The back door is open to let out the
smoke: he doesn’t want my mother to smell things going wrong. He hands me one of the burnt pans and a scrunch of newspaper.

See if you can get that off for us, Pats – he says, turning again and looking hard at Mrs Moon’s writing – I shall have to . . . Keep Stirring, he reads.

He stops immediately, scoops up a mound of leaves and dashes them into the pan. A cloud blooms up. I’m thinking this through, her not coming to my christening.

Da-ad?

Yes.

Dad,
why
didn’t she come? My father prods at the leaves with a spoon, his head parting the steam as he stares into the pan. He’s sorry he told me now.

It wasn’t anything to do with you, Pats. It wasn’t your fault or anything.

It comes out before I can stop myself:

Maybe the ghosts wouldn’t let her.

I picture them in their white nightgowns, blocking the door; my mother standing there in her satin dress and blue slippers, trying to swerve past them like you do in British
Bulldogs. Or if they knew she was heading for the church, they might be chattering at her, grabbing her with their bony fingers, asking her to send a message, asking for a prayer to be said. You
never know what a ghost might want from you.

My father stops stirring. He doesn’t believe in the ghosts. He rests the pan on the draining board and takes a bunch of hyssop from a paper wrap. He sits down next to me on the step.

Budge up, he goes, moving me over. The hyssop smells of fields. Some of the heads have tiny blue flowers, which he drops into my lap.

Y’know, Pats, they’re not real, the ghosts.

But Mam says they don’t give her a minute’s peace. He finds this funny. He does a quick laugh, then stops. Sucks air through his teeth.

Your mam suffers with her nerves, he says, And the ghosts – well, she was just trying to explain what it feels like, that’s all. Like they live in her head. But she’ll be right
as rain with a bit of rest, you wait and see. So don’t you go worrying about the ghosts, Pats, they’re only on the inside.

~

My father is telling lies: the ghosts are real. He admitted it, in a way; he said they live inside her. I know how that feels: I’ve got a bird inside me; it flaps if
things start to go wrong. When I’m at school, for instance, and the teacher asks me something I don’t understand and the other children laugh. I’ll be sitting there in the back of
the class, at the table in the corner, all the other children scratching their heads in front of me, and the bird will start to flutter. I bet that’s when the ghosts seize their chance:
I’m looking at the felt animals trailing two by two into their felt ark, at the picture books with Jesus doing his miracles and St Brendan standing on an island which was really a whale,
probably the same one that had Jonah in its belly, and all the time, the ghosts are at home, pinning my mother to the mattress.

They were always gone by the time I got back. My mother lay on her bed like Snow White in her glass box: skin the colour of pond ice, wide eyes, long black hair. She wore it twisted in a plait,
wound round her head and clipped up with a silver comb which shone its teeth when she moved. Her hair was her glory, she said. That was before the ghosts came to live in her.

Going to the school put me out of their way. I tried to stop it. I thought by memorizing how she looked, I could keep her just as she was. But I was distracted by other pictures: the Virgin
looking startled in her pale blue frock, Moses floating down the river with his pink fist raised to the sky, Jesus standing on a mountain, handing out bread.

At first, she teased me. She said I’d forget my own name if ever I could remember it, so how could I do my schoolwork and
still
be minded to look after her?

Could Jesus help? I asked, thinking of a miracle. She smiled.

Maybe, she said, If you promise to say your prayers every night, like a good girl.

I avoided cracks in the pavement, I crossed my fingers and touched wood, and at night, I prayed. Despite everything, the ghosts took their fill. Each day a little more of my
mother was stolen. In no time at all, her eyes went hard as jet; her hair, brittle as spun sugar.

Once or twice in the day she would get up from her bed and make her way to the closet at the end of the scullery, her bare feet inching along the flags. Watching the journey back again, I could
feel the time it took: balancing with her arms held out on either side, walking her tightrope between this world and the next.

~

I try not to mention the ghosts. My father doesn’t like it. It’s not his fault if he can’t see them. I’m learning to believe in some things, but not
others. If I close my eyes I can picture the lists on either side of my slate: God and his mysterious ways on one side, the ghosts and meddling devils on the other. My father believes in home
remedies, and rest, and time. He’s full of ideas. Today, he’s putting his faith in hyssop, stripping off the woody bits, scraping at the edges with his nails.