Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (13 page)

It’s what we do. It’s what the English do. You chop your girlfriend up

because she’s pregnant and you’re worried what the wife would say

if she found out. Or you poison the banker you’re sleeping with,

for the insurance, marry a dozen men in a dozen little seaside towns.

Margate. Torquay. Lord love them, but why must they stand so still?”

When I asked her who, who stood so still, she told me

it was none of my beeswax, and to be sure to be out

of the house between midday and four, as the char was coming,

and I would be underfoot and in the way.

I’d been in that B & B for three weeks now, looking for permanent digs.

I paid in cash. The other guests were loveless folk on holiday,

and did not care if this was Hove or Hell. We’d eat

our slippery eggs together. I’d watch them promenade

if the day was fine, or huddle under awnings if it rained. My landlady

cared only that they were out of the house until teatime.

A retired dentist from Edgbaston, down for a week

of loneliness and drizzle by the sea, would nod at me over breakfast,

or if we passed on the seafront. The bathroom was down the hall. I was up

in the night. I saw him in his dressing gown. I saw him knock upon

her door. I saw it open. He went in. There’s nothing more to tell.

My landlady was there at breakfast, bright and cheery. She said

the dentist had left early, owing to a death in the family. She told the truth.

That night the rain rattled the windows. A week passed,

and it was time: I told my landlady I’d found a place

and would be moving on, and paid the rent.

That night she gave me a glass of whisky, and then another, and said

I had always been her favorite, and that she was a woman of needs,

a flower ripe for plucking, and she smiled, and it was the whisky made me nod,

and think she was perhaps a whit less sour of face and form. And so

I knocked upon her door that night. She opened it: I remember

the whiteness of her skin. The whiteness of her gown. I can’t forget.

“Mister Maroney,” she whispered. I reached for her, and that was forever

that. The Channel was cold and salt-wet, and she filled my pockets with rocks

to keep me under. So when they find me, if they find me,

I could be anyone, crab-eaten flesh and sea-washed bones and all.

I think I shall like it here in my new digs, here on the seashore. And you

have made me welcome. You have all made me feel so welcome.

How many of us are here? I see us, but I cannot count.

We cluster on the beach and stare at the light in the uppermost room

of her house. We see the curtains twitch, we see a white face

glaring through the grime. She looks afraid, as if one loveless day we might

start up the pebbles towards her, to rebuke her for her lack of hospitality,

to tear her for her bad breakfasts and her sour holidays and our fates.

We stand so still.

Why must we stand so still?

I
N MY FAMILY “ADVENTURE”
tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine.” Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “
what she did that morning
.” Going to the wrong part of a supermarket parking lot and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.

She is getting older, now. She no longer gets out of the house as she used to. Not since my father died.

My last visit to her, we were clearing out some of his possessions. She gave me a black leather lens-case filled with tarnished cuff links, and invited me to take any of my father’s old sweaters and cardigans I wanted, to remember him by. I loved my father, but couldn’t imagine wearing one of his sweaters. He was much bigger than me, all my life. Nothing of his would fit me.

And then I said, “What’s that?”

“Oh,” said my mother. “That’s something that your father brought
back from Germany when he was in the army.” It was carved out of mottled red stone, the size of my thumb. It was a person, a hero or perhaps a god, with a pained expression on its rough-carved face.

“It doesn’t look very German,” I said.

“It wasn’t, dear. I think it’s from . . . Well, these days, it’s Kazakhstan. I’m not sure what it was back then.”

“What was Dad doing in Kazakhstan in the army?” This would have been about 1950. My father ran the officers’ club in Germany during his national service, and, in none of his postwar army after-dinner stories, had ever done anything more than borrow a truck without permission, or take delivery of some dodgily sourced whisky.

“Oh.” She looked as if she’d said too much. Then she said, “Nothing, dear. He didn’t like to talk about it.”

I put the statue with the cuff links, and the small pile of curling black-and-white photographs I had decided to take home with me to scan.

I slept in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall, in the narrow spare bed.

The next morning, I went into the room that had been my father’s office, to look at it one final time. Then I walked across the hall into the living room, where my mother had already laid breakfast.

“What happened to that little stone carving?”

“I put it away, dear.” My mother’s lips were set.

“Why?”

“Well, your father always said he shouldn’t have held on to it in the first place.”

“Why not?”

She poured tea from the same china teapot she had poured it from all my life.

“There were people after it. In the end, their ship blew up. In the valley. Because of those flappy things getting into their propellers.”

“Flappy things?”

She thought for a moment. “Pterodactyls, dear. With a P. That was what your father said they were. Of course, he said the people in the airship deserved all that was coming to them, after what they did to the Aztecs in 1942.”

“Mummy, the Aztecs died out years ago. Long before 1942.”

“Oh yes, dear. The ones in America. Not in that valley. These other people, the ones in the airship, well, your father said they weren’t really people. But they looked like people, even though they came from somewhere with such a funny name. Where was it?” She thought for a while. Then, “You should drink your tea, dear.”

“Yes. No. Hang on. So what were these people? And pterodactyls have been extinct for fifty million years.”

“If you say so, dear. Your father never really talked about it.” She paused. Then, “There was a girl. This was at least five years before your father and I started going out. He was very good-looking back then. Well, I always thought he was handsome. He met her in Germany. She was hiding from people who were looking for that statue. She was their queen or princess or wise woman or something. They kidnapped her, and he was with her, so they kidnapped him too. They weren’t actually aliens. They were more like, those people who turn into wolves on the television . . .”

“Werewolves?”

“I suppose so, dear.” She seemed doubtful. “The statue was an oracle, and if you owned it, even if you had it, you were the ruler of those people.” She stirred her tea. “What did your father say? The entrance to the valley was through a tiny footpath, and after the German girl, well, she wasn’t German, obviously, but they blew up the pathway with a . . . a ray machine, to cut off the way to the outside world. So your father had to make his own way home. He would have got into such a lot of trouble, but the man who escaped with him, Barry Anscome, he was in Military Intelligence, and—”

“Hang on. Barry Anscome? Used to come and stay for the
weekend, when I was a kid. Gave me fifty pence every time. Did bad coin tricks. Snored. Silly moustache.”

“Yes, dear, Barry. He went to South America when he retired. Ecuador, I think. That was how they met. When your father was in the army.” My father had told me once that my mother had never liked Barry Anscome, that he was my dad’s friend.

“And?”

She poured me another cup of tea. “It was such a long time ago, dear. Your father told me all about it once. But he didn’t tell the story immediately. He only told me when we were married. He said I ought to know. We were on our honeymoon. We went to a little Spanish fishing village. These days it’s a big tourist town, but back then, nobody had ever heard of it. What was it called? Oh yes. Torremolinos.”

“Can I see it again? The statue?”

“No, dear.”

“You put it away?”

“I threw it away,” said my mother, coldly. Then, as if to stop me from rummaging in the rubbish, “The bin-men already came this morning.”

We said nothing, then.

She sipped her tea.

“You’ll never guess who I met last week. Your old schoolteacher. Mrs. Brooks? We met in Safeway’s. She and I went off to have coffee in the Bookshop because I was hoping to talk to her about joining the town carnival committee. But it was closed. We had to go to the Olde Tea Shoppe instead. It was quite an adventure.”

(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.)

EYES ONLY.

         
1)       Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

         
2)       Seventeen on June the ninth.

         
3)       The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

         
4)       I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

         
5)       An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum
used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).

         
6)       Two. My sister, Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother, Pryderi, twelve.

         
7)       Several times a day.

         
8)       No.

         
9)       Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

         
10)     She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

         
11)     It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

         
12)     I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

         
13)     Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

         
14)     Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

         
15)     Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little QuickTime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.