September Again (September Stories) (3 page)

“
I’ll be gone soon.”

“
Good. Can you assure me you won’t come back, please?”

“
She wrote some beautiful things.”

“
Did she? Well, I never read any of it.”

“
Thousands of people loved her poetry. You must have seen how heartbroken people were when she died.”

“
I saw how awful the press were, trampling all over my flowers.”

“
Do you do a lot of gardening?” Zelda’s eye is caught by a grey pot on an antique oak dresser. She looks at the old woman in amazement. She’s seen such a pot once before. “Are those her ashes?”

The old woman inhales, closes her eyes
, and tilts her head back.

“
They are, aren’t they? Oh my God.”

“
I’m not sure this is at all good for you. And I am absolutely certain it is not good for me. Yes. My daughter’s ashes are in there.”

“
Your beautiful, beautiful, beautiful daughter. You really don’t know what a very special person she was. So gifted. So full of love.”

“
Oh, I know, all right. I know. She had it all: looks, talent, love. The full package.”

“
Were you jealous of her?”

“
What a foolish question. Why would I be jealous of a manic-depressive without an ounce of sense?”

“
I think you were jealous of her because she had the courage to live life to the fullest.”

“
Since when does hurling yourself under the wheels of an express train constitute living life to the fullest? That poor driver. I don’t suppose you know what happened to the driver of the train, do you?”

Zelda shakes her head.

“No, I thought not. He, like you, was a fan of my daughter’s attempts at poetry, or what passes for it these days. He never recovered from seeing her lifeblood all over the windscreen of his cab. It made an impression on him. The poor man. I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. Perhaps it will help you to get things in a more orderly perspective. He never worked again after what my daughter did. He became depressed, kept returning to the spot with flowers and copies of her books, I’m told. Heartbroken. I believe the word is ‘sectioned.’ He was placed in a psychiatric ward for his own safety. I believe he’s still locked away to this day. There’s the power of poetry for you, young woman. My daughter ruined his life, too. The Sylvia Plath Syndrome. Shelley used to drive impressionable lovers to their deaths. That’s poets for you.”

“
My father was never like that.”

“
Perhaps he wasn’t a poet.”

“
That’s not a very kind thing to say.”

“
You’ve come to the wrong place, my dear, if you’re looking for cakes and comfort or tea and sympathy. There’s none of that here. And you can stop looking at that jar. It’s private property. I’m not about to show you my daughter’s ashes like they are some medieval relic. Not that there is much of her in there, considering exactly how she died. I know they tried to collect as much of her as possible. But I know what a train does to a human being that walks down the tracks straight into it. I’ve heard say that the crows and magpies always gather once the men with the body bags have gone, especially on a stretch of line out in the country. I just hope my daughter didn’t poison their chicks. She certainly poisoned the lives of those of us who were left behind after her little gesture.”

“
Little gesture? Is that how you really see what she did?”

“
Listen you, Zelda Savage, whoever you are. I never met your father and I never wanted to. I saw him on television talking about my daughter afterwards and I did not like what I saw. And I don’t much like what I’m looking at now. I don’t know who you think you are, splashing into other people’s lives like this. Yes, you are right; my daughter was beautiful. And yes, by the standards of the mean –very – average – very – world, she was talented. But no, I was not jealous of her in any way at any time for any reason. I felt sorry for her, if you must know. Sorry that she was ever born into a world where morality and grammar were spat upon.”

“
I love your daughter. She might have been my mother. I could be your granddaughter.”

“
You are insane.”

“
You’re not the first to say that.”

“
I’m not surprised.”

“
I have the same condition as your daughter.”

“
Congratulations. I suppose you are in a manic upswing today.”

“
It’s called bi-polar now. They want me to take meds for it, but I won’t do it. The meds imprison your personality.”

“
Have you considered a little old-fashioned self-restraint? I imagine not. Restraint is not something the world understands now. The collective effect of more than half a century of chemical stimulants – illegal and legal drugs – has had a cumulative effect on human behavior, or lack of it.”

“
Would you like me to take your daughter’s ashes and scatter them for you? I take it that’s a no. I just thought I’d ask. I know you’re enjoying me being here. I don’t suppose you get many visitors, do you?”

“
Far too many, as it happens.”

“
So this is it, then? I leave and you live for another fifty years in a state of permanent torment, unable to go up, unable to go down. Stuck with the ashes of your dead daughter, a human being I love deeply, whatever you might think about her.”

“
I think you’ve said quite enough. Would you leave now, please?
The World at One
will on the radio shortly.”

“
Yes, of course. I don’t want to ruin your routine.”

“
Thank you. I knew you would understand. All I ever wished for my daughter was that she might become a headmistress one day at a nice school. She would have made a very good teacher, I believe. She had all the right qualities.”

“
My father really loved your daughter. She was loved. Doesn’t that matter to you? No? It doesn’t, does it?”

“
I think you’d better go now.”

“
Thank you for seeing me. I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“
You have nothing to worry about. You did not upset me. In fact, you have made me realize that it is time to be done with the past once and for all. When you have gone, I am going to put that pot of ashes where it belongs. There’s a hedge at the end of the lane. I might throw it over there. I shall wait till I am sure you are gone first, though. I don’t think it is healthy for you to have any tendencies towards making a cult of a suicide’s remains. I’ll show you out.”

Zelda takes one last look at the grey urn as she gets up, shoulders her bag
, and makes her way to the front door. And then she’s out. Malachy, her driver and the confidante of her father, is sitting in his car on the lane outside.

“
Well, how did it go?” he asks. “You were in there for over an hour.”

Zelda says nothing.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“
It was a terrible mistake coming here. She was ten times worse than my own mother. She has Indie Shadwick’s ashes in an urn on an oak sideboard. God, it was awful, awful. I can’t believe she was Indie’s mother. Indie was so beautiful and talented. That woman in there is ugly and twisted. Is this what life’s like, Malachy? Because I don’t think I can stand it.”

“
Don’t say that, Zelda. You came. You found out. End of. We move on. Indie was no less beautiful or talented because of the woman in there.”

“
She hates my father, Malachy. I think she was jealous of her own daughter and I think she blames my father for her death. I really, really shouldn’t have come here. Can we go now, please?”

“
Sure.”

She reaches for her phone and clicks on the pic
of Indie smiling. How could such a giving genius have sprung from such a cold and cankered source? Indie’s life must have been a torment with such a mother. Yet another thing Zelda has in common with Indie. She imagines Indie creeping around the house beneath the thunderhead clouds of her mother’s disapproval. She shudders at the thought of the pressure falling around Indie’s ears, the chills in the air. She imagines the witch’s tongue lash out at her far too beautiful daughter like a dark and destructive twister seeking the ruin of all it touches. No wonder Indie was unhinged. Surely it was her very own mother’s hate and not her love for Jack O. Savage that was the real force behind her suicide. Surely. She kissed her dead love object’s image, eyes glistening with empathy. She knows what she must do, has never been surer of anything in her life – other than her hatred of her own mother, that is.

“
You won’t believe this,” she says to the back of Malachy’s head. “There wasn’t a single photo of the old cow’s beautiful daughter anywhere to be seen. Can you believe it? Not a one. The most talented poet of a generation, my dad included. Nothing. It was like she’d never existed. The most beautiful and brilliant of talents. Absolutely nothing. What is it about bitch mothers?”

Malachy trims his speed as he approaches a roundabout and wonders how things would have been if Jack had lived. He glances at Zelda in his rear view mirror. She is communing with her phone, like just about everyone else these days. Would she have been so tortured if Jack had lived? Probably not. But who knows? Famous Parent Syndrome
is quite a handicap in life. At least she’s definitely eating less since her Camden escapade.
Did he activate central locking on the car doors?
Yes. Phew. He glances in his mirror again. Her jawline is almost discernible now. Good for her. Unless, of course, it’s the new meds she’s on. He brakes as a fox scampers across the road.
A poem,
Jack would say.
There goes a poem
.
Catch it if you can
. Foxes. Poets. No catching Jack now, that’s for sure.

Malachy remembers how painfully thin his employer, mentor, friend, became towards the end. A pageant of
memories fills his mind. Running to catch up to the famous poet with the sheep on the fields around Nook Manor. Plato the ram butting Jack in the nuts. Liz flying in from Georgia or Tennessee like some exotic firebird blown wildly off course. Jack’s total happiness at her arrival. The sheer love. Everyone being happy. Endless hours on the farm with Jack, The Man, just watching him in the middle of his beloved sheep with a sack of peas, the happiest man alive. And Liz, the crazy can-do American with a drawl, but without a history. Liz the mystery. Jack obsessing about her purple cowboy boots. Watching them fall ever deeper into love, deep in the Cornish countryside. Zelda showing up. More happiness. He glances at her in his mirror again. Hours of baby-sitting her, pushing her around the farm in her stroller, as Liz called it. Who’d have guessed she’d turn out like this? AFU. Then, who knows how anything will turn out?

He blinks at the thought of his own task, of making sense of the eighteen boxes of Poet
Jack’s handwritten papers, the countless thousands of sheets with his life’s work written all over them. Not for the first time, he wonders if he is up to doing Jack’s bidding, sorting through it all. But then, would anyone be? Would he ever finish? Does he even want to? And what other surprises await in those boxes? The shock and joy of finding Jack’s surviving poems of Indie. Some of his best work, some which even Indie never saw. Some of which no one had seen until Malachy found it. Then, the letter in the desk written after Jack died to a man in Tennessee, unfinished, in Liz’s handwriting. The shock on Liz’s face when he returned it to her.
Why
? What did that letter mean to Liz? So much of so much. Poets. Foxes. Words. Mostly unpublished. Unsent. Undone. His, Malachy Busvine’s, little secrets.

“
Her ashes were right there in a grey plastic urn on an old Welsh dresser, just like the one in our kitchen,” resumes Zelda.

“
Whose ashes?”

“
Hers, Indie’s.”

Malachy almost crashes the car into a hedge. Twigs scratch and whip over doors and windows.

“Jeez, Malachy!”

“
Sorry, kiddo. Thought of those ashes. That’s absolutely incredible.”

He wonders if she knows that her own father’s ashes are presently locked away in a bank vault in London. Perhaps he’ll try to have another diplomatic word with Liz about her exact intentions. He imagines the two urns
of Jack and Indie coming together, their lids shooting off like clay pigeons – and the poetic ashes exploding into the air in the shape of two foxes which comingle into one, and then darts into a black hole of death. Sadly, that would hurt Liz and it wouldn’t be exactly as Jack had planned, either. Best not go there, Malachy old boy. Eyes on the road and all that. Just drive.

A few moments later
, the car crosses the River Tamar. Cornwall. Soon be home, where Liz will be waiting. He wonders how long it will be before mother-and-daughter hostilities resume. Best leave them to work things out and not get caught in the middle of their personal war.