Sacred Country (19 page)

But she makes me lean out of the train window to say goodbye. She makes me lean down, out of the open window, to kiss her. And then my hair falls round her neck like a noose and, at that moment, the train starts to move and I try to push her away, but she’s held in the noose of my hair and she has to start running along the platform to keep up with the train, to stop her head from being pulled off.

I scream for someone to help us but there is no one on the carriage and no one on the platform. And then the platform ends and Mary hangs by her neck from my hair and her weight pulls me half-out of the train, but I hold on, keep holding on, knowing that soon she will fall and be left by the line and then I will be free of her and ready to sit down and get out my sandwiches and my thermos of tea and enjoy my journey. But I don’t enjoy my journey. I wake up. I cannot survive this dream without waking.

I say to Sonny: ‘I had my dream about Mary.’ He says: ‘She’s gone now. Forget her.’

I’m trying to find a way to forget her.

I have distempered the walls of her room grey and painted the windows white. I have put it all into the past. Like Cuba.

Now, in this New Year, something new has come into my mind.

It started to come in when Irene brought Billy to the farm. I hadn’t seen Irene since our discussion about the H-Bomb cloud, because there’s a big difference between us now. Irene is happy.

But then she wrote to me and said: ‘You’re becomming a strannger, Estelle.’ Edward Harker has taught her a lot of things, but spelling isn’t one of them. She said: ‘Billy loves all annimals, small and large.’

Billy Harker is five. He wants to be a fireman. He owns a tortoise called Tarzan. He is trying to teach it to jump. He has brown eyes and thick brown hair, cut in slabs. Most of the time, he pretends he’s an engine. After teatime, says Irene, his engine blows a gasket and Billy comes to a halt and falls asleep on the stairs.

They came and spent a day here, Billy and Irene. He arrived wearing a little muffler. His face is quite round and his cheeks dimpled, like Irene’s. It was a sunny February day.

We showed him the combine, covered in old sacks against the damp. We had to take the sacks off so that Billy could climb up onto it and pretend he was cutting a cornfield. Irene and I stood in our winter coats while he harvested a whole imaginary field.

Irene started to talk about Mary, but I said: ‘Irene, I am not discussing that subject.’

When we got to the meadow where the hens are, we gave Billy a basin of grain and he ran about, scattering it everywhere and the hens squawked and tried to fly away. He began chasing them. I was glad Sonny was nowhere in sight. Billy dropped the basin and threw himself on one of the hens, like a rugby
player doing a flying tackle. It fell over and Billy held on to it. I hoped its legs hadn’t snapped. He stood up and the hen pecked his hands, but he didn’t cry. He tucked it under his arm and stroked the feathers on its neck.

In the afternoon, we sat in the winter dark and watched
Andy Pandy
. Billy had never seen television before. He didn’t know what to do except stare. He became very quiet and still. I put him on my knee. He was much heavier than my children had been. He lay back with his head against my shoulder and for the first time in years and years I felt entirely comfortable and warm. I wanted to hold Billy on my lap for ever. My envy of Irene was a well inside me, black and deep.

So that night I decided: I want another child. Why not? I’m still young, not yet forty. I still catch sight of my old resemblance to Ava Gardner. I will hold the baby to me safe and warm and this will be my new reason for living.

And I have a room for him: Mary’s room. On the grey walls I will pin up some brightly coloured pictures of tortoises and fire engines. I will ask Edward to make a crib.

This is my new idea for the New Year. All through
Z-Cars
, I smile.

The ghost of Arthur Loomis was behaving badly.

He walked into Walter’s dreams naked, still smelling of the grave. His penis was red and stiff. He waved it in Walter’s face.

‘Go away,’ Walter told his dreaming self to say. ‘Stop persecuting me. I’ve done everything you’ve asked.’

He told Pete what he had to put up with now: Arthur’s flesh hanging in tatters, his erect prick. But Pete only laughed. ‘Usually ghosts wear white,’ he said.

And another thing: when Walter woke up from his dreams, some of the stench of Arthur was on his pillow. It was as if he had sat down right there by Walter’s head all night. Grace,
when she came in with a cup of tea for him at six, would screw up her thin nose and say: ‘It stinks in here, Walter. You’d better open a window and give the place an airing.’

Even in the shop he’d catch it now and again, that whiff of the dead. It wore off after dinnertime and by the evening had almost gone, only to return while he slept.

It took Walter many weeks to realise that it came from his own mouth.

He felt afraid. He was twenty-seven and his breath smelled like a corpse and he didn’t know why.

He met Sandra in the street one lunchtime. She was wheeling a navy blue pram. Inside the pram was her baby, Judy. Sandra stopped and smiled at Walter and invited him to look at Judy, as though this were a special privilege given only to a few. Walter had no interest in babies, but felt he couldn’t refuse, out of politeness. He bent over the pram. He filtered his breath with his fingers. The baby wore a salmon-coloured bonnet. She looked ugly to Walter, like a prawn. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ said Sandra. ‘She’s yours,’ said Walter. ‘She would be.’

Sandra was wearing blue and white – blue dress, white collar and cuffs, like a nurse. Her breasts were large. Her long marmalade hair had been cut short. The Sandra for whom he had written the song no longer existed. He hated the new smile she wore, so smart and smug. He wondered what he could do to wipe it away. As he talked to her he tasted blood on his gums. He said: ‘Goodbye, Mrs Cartwright. It’s been a pleasure to run into you.’

That night, the ghost of Arthur didn’t appear. A nurse with a starched hat shone a torch into Walter’s throat. He remembered the old pain of yodelling and his dreams of writing songs and going to Tennessee. He remembered his visit to Gilbert Blakey and Blakey’s nurse kneeling by him with a look of stone.

When he was woken at six his mouth was so full of blood, he couldn’t say good morning to his mother. She put his tea down. She said: ‘This dreadful odour, Walter. Could it be your teeth?’

He opened his mouth and stared into the cavern of it in the
little plastic mirror on the bathroom wall. He curled back his lips. Poor Cleo, examining his face through her spangled glasses, had once told him his mouth was very sweet. ‘So pink, ducky.’

Now, it wasn’t sweet. His gums were the colour of Arthur’s prick. They oozed. It was as if, while the rest of him lived, his mouth was dying. It had never kissed Sandra. It had given up.

He asked Grace to telephone Blakey. She sat in her booth and dialled the number, watching Walter all the time.

He was dressing duck. He thought, of course she doesn’t want me to slice off my fingers, but what
is
it that she wants? A grandchild like a boiled shrimp? The name Loomis going forward into the silent future?

Global crisis had altered the landscape of Gilbert Blakey’s mind.

After Cuba, after he had understood that his nature could allow him to die long before it had allowed him to love, he began to feel the pathos of his own reticence.

He’d believed that if he gave in to desire a fissure would open up in the earth, that the ground would no longer have permanence. Now, he realised that there was no permanence in anything, not even in the sky. So he allowed his dreams to increase. His behaviour towards his male patients changed by a degree so small that his new nurse noticed nothing different. Merely, his fingers lingered longer in their mouths. He talked to them reassuringly.

He told his mother that he thought change might be arriving in one form or another. He said this idly, as though he were making an imprecise weather forecast. Margaret Blakey didn’t pay much attention. She noticed only that her son had taken to staring out of the window in a determined way. She said: ‘I hope you haven’t been over-working, Gilbert. You look tired.’

Gilbert had no idea when the alteration to his life would begin. He was unable to make plans, he hadn’t the courage. He had faith in the arrival of something. He thought, if the world can seem to embrace its end with so few regrets, then I can
meet a man I can embrace and not die for it. And he knew that when he saw the man, he would recognise him; he would know.

Walter cycled to his appointment with Gilbert Blakey. The field beans were in flower. It was an early evening of extraordinary sweetness. Since his mouth had begun to taste of death, Walter had become more sensitive than usual to the scent of the earth.

He wasn’t afraid. He believed that a cure existed for the thing he had, whatever it was. He whistled as he pedalled. He had faith.

Gilbert remembered him as soon as he saw him – the young man who had fainted. He remembered the fleshy lips and the heat of the heavy head. He dried his long-fingered hands. He noticed that Walter again looked very hot. He smiled at him, his Eden smile, canines prominent. He asked him why he had come.

Walter didn’t know how to put it. Being there under the Miralux lamp made him feel confused. He was on the point of telling the dentist about Arthur’s naked ghost or even about Sandra and her vet and her prawn baby, because he knew that these things were somehow connected to his arrival in the leather chair that could be pumped up and down. He stopped himself in time. The presence of a different nurse, very plump and crackly with starch, prevented him from babbling about his hauntings. All he described was his bleeding.

Gilbert selected a periodontal probe. He tipped back the headrest of the chair. The look in Walter’s eyes was resigned and pleading. He laid a caressing finger on Walter’s lower lip. ‘Open,’ he said.

It was only then that he became aware of Walter’s Devilish breath.

He talked gently and slowly, as if to a foreigner who might not understand him. He explained how, if a mouth was neglected, food stagnation occurred in the minute space between the gum margin and the tooth surface called the gingival crevice. This stagnation began a cycle of decay.
Calculus formed to irritate and inflame the gum, loosening its grip on the teeth, and so creating a ‘pocket’ in which more food could collect and decay. Calculus was a gritty substance. Its scales were jagged. This, combined with bacterial poisons, ulcerated the gum and caused bleeding at the least touch. If treatment wasn’t given swiftly, gingival disease would destroy sections of the jaw or alveolar bone and teeth would first become loose and subsequently be lost…

Walter listened. He was relieved there were nouns and verbs to describe his condition. And he thought, this is why I liked writing songs: I could make the words describe things I hadn’t known about until they did.

He looked up at Gilbert, at his white coat and his pale hair and his reassuring smile. He asked him what had to be done. He was told that his teeth would be scaled and polished to get rid of the calculus. He would be given a mouthwash to bathe the gums. He would be shown some principles of dental hygiene. The process of healing would be closely monitored. Three or four more appointments would have to be made …

Gilbert exchanged the periodontal probe for a scaler. He held Walter’s mouth open with his left hand, the chin resting in his palm. His thumb grew sticky with Walter’s blood.

Gilbert thought, this is what I am going to do: I am going to buy an expensive car. I am going to take the Devil for a ride. I will have one hand on the wheel and the other on the Devil’s thigh. I will feel the heat of hell coming into my fingers and spreading down my wrist and all along my heavy arm. That will be the beginning. And by my calculation, there will be no end, once it has begun. There will be no returning, ever.

I spent Christmas of 1962 with Cord. He had an altered appearance. He said a flock of geese had flown over Gresham Tears in a V-formation and the V was the arrow of time,
wounding everything in its path. His consumption of Wincarnis had gone up. He said: ‘Martin, I’m becoming a damn drunk.’

I got drunk with him. The days of ginger beer were past. We sat on the hearth rug getting sloshed and making paper chains. There was meant to be a colour order in the chains – red, blue, green, yellow, violet – but we were reckless with it. Our chains looked as if they had been made by chimpanzees.

The doctors had told Cord that there was no specific name for what had happened to him. He said: ‘There’s a name for every damn thing in the world but not for this.’ I said, thinking of Mary Martin: ‘Names are no comfort, Cord.’ He said: ‘I don’t agree with you there. Remember the three syllables of Livia.’

I wanted to console Cord with a nice Christmas present. My mother had sent me a postal order for twenty-five shillings. It was tucked inside a card that said Seasons Greetings with no apostrophe. The word ‘home’ was not written on it anywhere, nor the word ‘father’.

I decided that Cord would be cheered up by my brass rubbing of Sir John Elliot 1620–1672, so I had it framed and wrapped it with six sheets of wrapping paper.

Cord hung it in the downstairs lavatory. He said it was capital. He said brass rubbings were ghostly things in two senses and everything important in life was dual, like being and not being, male and female, and that there was no country in between. I sat on the toilet and looked at Sir John and he looked at me with his empty eyes and I thought, Cord is wrong, there is a country in between, a country that no one sees, and I am in it.

Cord gave me a ski-ing anorak with a hood trimmed with white fur. I put it on. Cord said I looked like the Snow Queen, so in the night I unpicked the fur and folded it away to give to Lindsey, if ever I should see her again.

And that is all I remember of Christmas. For the rest of everything, I was out of my mind.

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