Remember Me (12 page)

~

It doesn’t blow over. It rains. It rains for the whole day, and then on into the night. It rains the next day and the next day and the next. The dust on the land is picked
up by the wind, coating the windows with a film of grit, finding its way into my hair, crunching like salt between my teeth.

Outside, the sky is over everything. Inside, Aunty Ena plays the piano. She hums under her breath. At first, thinking I need to be entertained, she finds things to occupy me.

You ought to
do
something, she says, with a kind of bright terror in her voice, You must do
something!

She brings me items to polish – blackened pots, a dented brass plate with a milk maid stamped into it, two tarnished spoons, a fistful of knives with ivory handles.

Be careful with those, she says, dropping them with a clash onto the table, We don’t want an accident, do we?

Holding the knives with the edge of a duster, I spread the vinegar paste along the blades. I do it with my fingers. It’s not the sharp edge making me shudder, it’s
the feel of bone. I won’t touch the handles.

When everything is gleaming, there’s nothing left to do but sit. Aunty Ena says she isn’t much of a talker, but I don’t mind that, because neither was my mother. But my mother
never sang the way Aunty Ena does;
that
would’ve sent the Moons flying to the doctor.

~ ~ ~

Late autumn sun in Chapelfield comes like spring. My grandfather feels it on his head when he’s tending the garden, on his neck as he bends to pull up the weeds
encroaching on the path. He senses the last warmth of it; rain is aching through his bones. For a while now, the trains on the tracks below have been more frequent, carry a heavier vibration, as if
they have changed their nature. The rumbling alongside the garden wall is like a premonition. My grandfather avoids the wall entirely after a while. He tends to his garden. He doesn’t look up
at the sky.

~ ~ ~

Even though it never stops raining, Mr Stadnik sets to work in the field. He doesn’t mind the wet; he doesn’t mind that the earth is sodden and that every morning,
whatever had been dug the day before is turned into a pool of quag. He’s digging a channel, he says, for drainage. Aunty Ena says it looks more like a moat. Often Mr Stadnik unearths things
buried in the sod: a gnarled beet wearing a smile, a blackened coin, a small knit of bones. He has a way of dealing with his finds: the beet is lobbed into a sack, the coin he spits on, rubbing it
with the bulb of his thumb before slipping it into his pocket. But he is careful with the bones: he makes a tidy pile on his handkerchief, spread out flat at the edge of the ditch. I can’t
think what Mr Stadnik will do with them; perhaps he’s saving the bones for Billy the dog. I know he hates the feel of them too; I’ve seen him, pulling the edges of the bundle together,
careful not to touch, his breath short and heavy and his face like stone.

Billy stays in the barn. He catches rats, I suppose, although all I ever see him do is bounce backwards and forwards on a long chain tied to the door. He makes it look like elastic, running the
pure length of it, jerking so hard at the end that, for a moment, he’s flying. His bark is constant, hollow yaps that sound like someone way off in the distance banging a piece of iron. But
there is no one way off in the distance; there is only distance. Mr Stadnik says you can see your neighbour coming to visit you before he decides to set out. Pleased with this joke, he repeats it
to Aunty Ena. She doesn’t laugh: she goes very clipped.

Our neighbour is Mrs Myhill, she says, And her daughter, Agnes. You will have met them at the shop. They do not visit.

Aunty Ena spread her arms wide, as if the gesture would explain.

You see, Mr Stadnik, I am an incomer. And you – lifting her hands together now to a point – Will be even less likely to receive visitors. You are a foreigner. You’ll find that
life is very quiet in the country.

I lie in bed at night, and between the hooting bird and the keening wind, I think about the countryside being quiet. It’s not true. Noise fills my sleep: Billy’s chain becomes the
knocking bones of skeletons as they rise from the fen; the rain is a shower of silver coins; the barking is the scarecrow standing in the far field, knocking his pipe out against the fence. His
head is bent to one side and his hair is luminous against the sky. He wears my grandfather’s face.

In the rare silence, the moments midway through the chain unravelling and the barking, my mother visits me, smiling, her hair piled up on her head and her bare feet soundless on the dusty track.
She’s happy to see me, she says, she tells me she is resting, now. She doesn’t ask about my father. He never comes back. He stays hanging in Fisher’s window, waving like a puppet.
There is nothing I can remember to bring him close: no voice, no words. Despite all the stories, he is a shape without a noise. Then the din of the countryside starts up, and they are all lost
again inside it.

~

Mr Stadnik is convinced he can make things grow. When the ditch is finished and the digging done, he plants himself at the end of a row and, bending and unbending, prods seed
after seed into the soil.

Be good and strong, he tells each one. From far off, it sounds like he’s singing. He works without a shirt, and despite the cloud hanging on his shoulder, his skin goes dark as the cuff on
his wrist. Aunty Ena leaves off from her piano and takes to looking out of the window. She looks out of the window every day for a week, craning her neck like a giraffe nuzzling a branch.
There’s nothing to see, except Mr Stadnik getting smaller and smaller as he disappears into the sky, then bigger and bigger as he comes back. Occasionally, she calls me to her side and
remarks on his progress.

I’ve told him, she says, But does he listen? Nothing can grow there. Black land, they call it. Dead land.

The watching softens Aunty Ena. Even though it’s dull most days, her eyes are full of light.

Look how far he’s got, Lillian, she’ll say, He’s whizzing through that land!

I don’t think he is. To me, having been called to look only a few minutes before, he’s inching up the furrow like a worm. But Aunty Ena is content. Sitting in front
of the fire, I keep an eye on the hands of the clock, edging the hours into dark. I listen to the slow tick, to the wind, to the squeak of Aunty Ena’s sleeve on the window as she wipes her
breath from the glass.

~ ~ ~

Chapelfield, and my grandfather moves from kitchen window to hearth and back again. Sometimes he looks at his clock on the mantelpiece. One day, he realizes that what the time
is doesn’t matter. He lets the clock wind itself down. There is rain on his garden, and snow, and in later days, a sharp, clean sun. Things grow. He lets them grow. Sometimes, when the noises
start again above his head, he sits on the upturned bucket behind the cellar door, and remembers me.

~ ~ ~

One Sunday before church, Aunty Ena swaps her black fitted long-sleeved dress for the same in maroon. She wears a white blouse underneath it, with a small round brooch pinned to
the collar.

Opal, she says to me, with a crooked smile, Supposed to be unlucky! But superstition is for heathens, Lillian. What is it for?

Heathens, I say, not knowing what one might be.

She turns to Mr Stadnik,

Are you a heathen, Mr Stadnik?

A man prays when he cannot act, he says, sounding like someone else.

Mr Stadnik has never been invited to church with us, even though he walks us to the lane, bowing low as we jump the ditch. If he had a cloak, he says, he would throw it down. It’s plain
he’s keen to go. I would tell him that he’s not missing anything. The church is big and rocky on the outside, and inside it’s hollow and cold. The vicar speaks the words, Aunty
Ena fishes about for the book with the tiny writing in it, everyone starts up singing, and I pretend I am Jonah in the whale.

Today will be different. Aunty Ena tells Mr Stadnik to put on his suit and accompany us. Mr Stadnik doesn’t have a suit. He has a jacket with shiny elbows and a stiff shirt with frayed
wings, which I think won’t do for Aunty Ena. But when he presents himself, standing at the turn of the stairs with his hair slicked flat across his head, smelling of goose fat and rosewater,
she blushes and puts her chin on her chest.

How Exotic, she says into her brooch, May I introduce you as Henry?

Mr Stadnik does one of his little bows. He smiles up at her, a show of yellow teeth.

And you may call me Enid, she says.

They walk either side of me, up the lane to the ditch, Mr Stadnik holding my left hand, and Aunty Ena – Enid! – holding my right. Their hands tight and sweaty,
squeezing me between them. There’s a break in the air, a smell of matches, a noise like a storm overhead. A point of light runs through me, out of Aunty Ena, up one arm and across my chest
and down the other arm and into Mr Stadnik. It grates through my veins like the sound of Billy flying on his chain. My hair rises of its own accord off my scalp. I can feel it lifting.

Oh look! says Aunty Ena, pointing into the distance, A shooting star. Quickly, we must make a wish!

We watch the star fall, which is not a star at all; it’s a shard of grey metal with a streak of light attached.

No, Mr Stadnik says, Not a shooting star. What should we do?

A suck of air, a pocket opening in the sky, and then a roar. Aunty Ena starts to run, dragging me with her, and I drag Mr Stadnik. Both of them running now, jerking me off the
ground, nothing beneath my feet, my stomach in my throat, all of us running away. It’s like riding the gallopers at the fair. They don’t stop: I’m strung out between them like a
kite and as they run, they laugh, lifting me and swinging me, laughing so hard it’s frightening now. Before the corner of the churchyard they stop still and listen. I can hear a wheeze like a
bellows in Mr Stadnik’s throat. He leans on a headstone while Aunty Ena composes herself. Mr Stadnik repeats his question.

What should we do?

We should pray for them, Aunty Ena says.

Mr Stadnik wipes his forehead with the tips of his fingers.

But we’ll tell someone? he says, Someone can help them?

No. It will draw attention to— she corrects herself – Where none is wanted. We didn’t really see it, did we? If we were looking the other way, we might not have seen it. And
they may be safe, after all. We might cause a fuss over nothing. I want Mr Stadnik to challenge her, but he turns away from the thin line of smoke in the distance, turns and nods, as if this is the
right thing to do. Mr Stadnik said people pray when they cannot act; and I’d like to believe that Mr Stadnik is always right.

~

We didn’t see a shooting star. According to Aunty Ena, we didn’t see anything. But whatever it was or wasn’t, I would like to see it again. I would like to
make a wish.

By the time we get to the church, Aunty Ena and Mr Stadnik are silent, ashamed in their looks. They stand apart and pretend they are strangers. Instead of praying, instead of pretending to be
Jonah, I close my eyes and wish anyway.

Perched like a crow in a treetop, Joseph Dodd watches. From the tower of Trinity Church, he has a clear view of the surrounding flatland, the great sweep of Middle Drain
cutting through it like a slake. On fine days he can see the old windmill on the lip of the horizon, and another church, floating on a distant field. More often the air is mist, drifting like
liquid in front of his eyes, so he can only see what lies immediately below. Much of the land here is busy with work: women in overalls with high-pitched voices. There is nothing remarkable in this
for him, nothing he would need to keep secret. Nothing that might
betray
his secret. His interest lies in the two fields either side of Stow Farm. This is it, a forbidden interest from a
forbidden vantage point.

Joseph sits on the ledge, dangling his legs and smoking. His right arm is bound up in a sling. If people ask him how it happened, he lowers his head. Father Peter sent him here to mend, and
because his sister Alice was sent here too. He has yet to find her among the fen and flat, but Joseph has found someone else.

At first, he only saw the man down there, coming and going along the track, digging a trench which filled overnight into swamp. Joseph recognized his gait, the small, hunchedness of him, but
couldn’t remember where from. He watched the man, and the dog in the yard, leaping backwards and forwards as if plagued by a hornet. There was a stiff old woman who sometimes came to the door
and called at the man; he had seen her in the village too, bending her way up to the church in the field. And then he saw the girl. He knew her straight away. Hair like glass: the girl on the
bridge at Chapelfield, who said she had a red-haired sister, waving from the wall in the garden down below.

He watches as at last the three figures negotiate the ditch at the edge of the farm. Now the man will bend from the waist, flourishing an arm, and make his way back up towards the house. Now he
will stop and look over his shoulder, like a reluctant dog. Now the man will stand and wait as the two walk away, down past the shop, left up the lane, and out of sight to the church. But this time
the man doesn’t stop, doesn’t bow, doesn’t stand scuffing his boots in the dirt. He walks with them, holding the hand of the girl with the hair, walking with them all the way.
Joseph has no time to consider this development; a flash of white light in the corner of his eye, a sharp metal wail, distracts him. Above their heads – Look out! – Joseph cries, still
not used to the way the perspective is flattened, the plane turning on its nose, cutting the day in two, dying. Joseph stares open mouthed as it sinks into the fen.

He would like to run down and tell the vicar what he’s seen. But he isn’t allowed up the tower; he would no longer be able to sit with the birds and the bird’s eye view, watch
the girl as she makes her way to church. Joseph decides to say nothing. He knows how the fen will suck any weight into itself, remembers the cow in the bog, no trace of it by the time the farmer
arrived. The plane’s cockpit is under now; in a few hours, even the tail will be invisible. Joseph decides it’s already too late.