The Observations (49 page)

It was not a word I could associate with missus.

Hail Mary Holy Mary save me.

The man was looking at me askance, he had mistook my laugh for a hardness of heart. “It’s not funny,” he says, turning away. “The woman’s dead.”

And then he broke into a run and sped away from us, until the rog and darkness closed around him.

As I sit here now writing this account, I am trying to remember what I was thinking in the seconds and minutes that followed. But there was no thought. Only absence of thought and a bedlam of activity all around me. Everybody was going somewhere at speed. Those that had horses were jumping on them and riding off towards the railway line, taking either the Station road or heading down Main Street. Those that didn’t were running in the same directions. A few people had grabbed whatever vehicles were available and everywhere you looked were carts and traps over-laden with passengers.

The moving figures and horses became a blur. I thought I might pass out and then I realised that Mrs. Bell was holding me up. It was my one small piece of good fortune that I had her beside me. She had not been offended by my outburst of laughter, having seen that it came from shock. Now, she was supporting me. I tried to concentrate on her grasp, I got it into my head that it might stop me swooning if I fixed my thoughts on some physical feeling. So hard did I concentrate that the rest of me seemed to disappear. All that was left was the band of flesh midway up my arm, encircled by Mrs. Bells fingers. The rest of my body was gone. I became aware that she was taking this band of flesh across the street towards the Swan. There was a dogcart emerging from the yard, driven by old AP Bastard himself. Mrs. Bell spoke to him and then she took the band of flesh and handed it up onto the bench after which she climbed up herself.

As soon as the dogcart jolted into motion, I was jerked back into my body, for the rattle and shake of the vehicle went through my arse-bones and up my spine into my skull where it made my teeth chatter. It felt as though the springs of the cart were shot, although I don’t believe they were, it was just that in the absence of thought I seemed to be experiencing every sensation more intensively. As we turned up the Station road and picked up speed, the vibrations grew worse, I was bounced around like a footmans diddle until every part of my body quivered and trembled. I could practically feel my bones separating from my flesh. The flesh falling off, like cold silk ribbons. I was being shaken apart, I was dissolving, I was melting in fact, my mouth filling up with saliva. I was becoming vapour, my breath shooting out in steamy gasps as though I had been running. And yet I was seated, or at least seated as much as the jumping and slithering of the rig across the frozen mud would allow. The air smelled of smoke and soot. Cold, ragged curtains of fog whipped towards us as Henderson drove the horses harder, flailing the whip, and urging them on with yells, and as we approached the slope up to the railway bridge it felt to me as though we were rattling towards the very gates of Hell.

Here at the bridge Henderson slowed the horses for there was a line of vehicles waiting to turn. The road carried on to the north. Down to the right lay the station. To the left was a rough lane that ran in more or less the same direction as the railway track for about two miles before it ended at another road bridge—from where, if you turned south and carried on across country you would eventually reach Castle Haivers. Every vehicle was heading down this lane and we followed. Once the horses got around the turn they picked up speed and on we went, past various people that were racing along on foot. To one side of us lay the railway track, sometimes gleaming, close enough to touch. At other times, the ground sloped away sharply as the line went through a cutting.

A little way ahead, a few carts and traps had pulled up on the grass beside the lane. There were horses tethered to the trees and a group of folk stood at the edge of a steep cutting, while others were leaving their gigs and carts and running to join them. A moment later, we reached the same spot. Henderson brought the horses to a stop. I helped Mrs. Bell to the ground and then hurried over towards where the crowd had gathered.

From the edge of the slope you could see down onto the railway line. A group of four men in working clothes were stood beside the track. They didn’t look very happy. On the ground next to them lay a shape or form, it had been covered by empty potato sacks. Another similar form, also covered by sacks, lay a few yards distant, further along the track. Sammy Sums stood a little way off, counting the sack-covered forms, pointing at one then the other. One, two, he went. One, two. One, two.

Master James and the doctor were beetling down the grassy bank and when they reached the bottom, they went over to the men. A few words were spoken. Mrs. Bell appeared beside me and took hold of my arm but before I knew it I found myself breaking free from her and scrabbling downhill.

Just as I reached level ground, one of the labourers bent down and raised a corner of the sacks. Master James, his face full of trepidation, leaned down to see what lay beneath. A moment later, the trepidation changed to amazement. After which I heard him say, “That is not her. That is not my wife.”

Relief shot through me, it was like a knock of gin on an empty gut. I stepped closer, to look for myself, just to be sure, and saw that master James was exactly right. For the person laying dead by the tracks was not missus. It was Bridget. It was my mother.

She was on her back, her eyes closed. She looked tiny, like a child. There appeared to be not a mark on her. Her hair, her face, the little that I could see of her clothes—everything perfect. It was as if she would open her eyes at any moment and stretch her arms and start talking. Only, there was something not quite right. At first, I couldn’t work out what it was. The doctor was crouching down to have a closer look at her while master James had turned away. Beyond him lay the other pile of sacks. They had definitely been used to cover something up. Two corpses! Could this other be missus? Sammy Sums was still counting. One, two. One, two. For a moment, I could not make sense of what I was seeing. Why did they not show master James the
other
corpse? And then, with a sickening jolt, I realised my mistake and why my mother had looked so small. It was not a 2nd body that lay beneath the other sacks. Not a 2nd body at all.

I doubled over and boked and carried on boking until I boked only air. And as I knelt there, heaving into the dirt and stones at the side of the tracks, the mens voices came to me as if from a great distance.

“We were jist walking home alang this way,” says one of the labourers. And we seen her lying there. And then—we found the rest ae her, over there.“

I lifted my head and saw him pointing to the other pile of sacks.

“Cut right in two,” says the doctor. “Dear God.”

“Aye, she was probably walking along the line, like we were. Except she couldn’t have seen the train because ae the fog. And she was drunk. You can smell drink on her.”

“She might have fallen off that bridge back there,” says the doctor. “Or been carried along by the train that hit her. That’s not uncommon.”

More words were spoken but I don’t remember anything because the next thing I knew, master James had noticed me and was walking towards me. “Bessy, Bessy,” he was saying, not unkindly. “What the Devil are you doing down here?”

I gazed at him and then beyond him at the thing that lay under the sacks and then up at the folk gathered on the top of the grassy slope, peering down. My head felt like it might explode. Master James was waiting for me to say something but I couldn’t speak for fear I was about to burst. The sweat was pouring off me. I wanted to leap at him and batter the lard out him with my fists. That was the solution, by Jove! To have a square-go, wigs on the green! That was what I had to do. Why had I not thought of it before? I almost did it too, I had my fists bunched up but just at the last moment I changed my mind.
Motion
was what I needed, I suddenly realised. Motion and distance. And with no more thought than that I took to my heels and began running as fast as my legs would carry me, along the side of the track, with somebody calling out after me, the name “Bessy‘ echoing in my ears.

There was no plan to my flight. To be blunt, I did not know where the Hell I was going. I simply kept running alongside the track. Despite the clamour in my brain, it was good to be running. I got quite a rhythm going. I was the running girl, so I was. After some time, it might have been a few minutes or it might have been many, I came to a station. There must have been a train due because people were stood on the platform looking down at me running along the track. There they were, waiting on a train and instead what comes puffing along but a girl. I found that enormously funny for some reason. All these people staring at me, some of them with GREAT disapproval, you could just see it on their phizogs. Would you look at that girl there, running along? Trespassing on railway property so she is, causing a nuisance, acting in an unseemly fashion! I was guilty of it all, but I didn’t give a tuppenny damn. I just scrambled up onto one of the platforms and glared back at them all until they looked away. And then I stood there like a great lilty not knowing what the flip to do. If a train had arrived I might probably have jumped onto it, but nothing came immediately and I had no patience, I needed motion again. So after about 5 seconds I started to run once more.

Out the station I went and up towards the main road. There was a man coming downhill towards the ticket office. He opened his mouth as if he was about to yell at me but instead he just yawned and then he kept yawning as he walked along, it was the biggest yawn I’d ever seen. He was still at it as he went past me. How strange to be able to yawn with such contentment! I did not think I would ever be doing that again.

Up at the road I looked about me but hadn’t a clue where I was. To the right, I seen a row of big houses with wooden gates and archways of privet in their gardens and beyond them glasshouses in a field and so I ran up there and ducked through a gap in the hedge and after that I kept running across country. It was open marshland there, with no trees and in the distance only tall chimneys and squat bings. At one point I splashed through a stinking black bog that sucked the shoes off my feet and soaked me to the wishbone. It was agony to run in bare feet but I kept going. After a while, the lie of the land rose and the marsh became heath, with dark earth and knee-deep rusty heather, going through it was like wading through waves and my legs grew heavy. I struck out for a scribble of trees I seen in the distance but when I got there found it was not the edge of a forest, only a thin strip of woods. At the other side was a narrow unmetalled road and so I turned and began to follow where it led. On I went, sometimes crossing little bridges butted by clumps of trees, sometimes passing the ruins of old works, with tumbledown heaps of bricks, and beams exposed to the sky like a ribcage. The light began to fade just as I came to the outskirts of a village. Last thing I wanted was to encounter another human and so I struck off the road across more fields until I came to a place that was all fenced in. I peered through a gap in the fence and seen a few ramshackle sheds and a greystone bothy. Next to them was some kind of tank and the entrance to a tunnel but not a living thing in sight. It was a coal pit, all shut down for the night, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

By now the twilight was almost gone. I found a hole in the fence and slipped through, with the intention of resting in one of the shacks. As it turned out, the bothy itself wasn’t locked. I went inside, there was only one room, it must have been the office though there was nothing much in it except an old desk and chair and a blackened fireplace. No curtain or piece of cloth or cushion but at least it was a fraction warmer than outside and it was dry. I wrapped my shawl and Muriels coat around me and crouched in the corner with my back to the wall, hugging my knees and shivering because the sweat had gone cold on me now that I was no longer in motion. As yet I had not stopped to think. I had only run and walked, hurrying onward, filled with misery and dread. On reflection, I perceived that I felt strange and terrible. I was trembling all over and my head was splitting. No food had passed my lips since the day before. I believe I must have lost my senses. At one point, I started to have a daydream about how if I cleaned out the bothy and got curtains and a table and chair and a little mattress I could live there instead of going back to Glasgow. It was a daft idea, I know, but I kept thinking about it anyway. The only way it would work, I decided, was if nobody knew I was there. I’d have to forage for food at night. And then I started to think that if I could make myself cry it might help me get rid of the terrible anguish I was feeling. But no tears would come. I said out loud the words, “My mammy,” to see what would happen, but nothing did. And so I said it again, “My mammy.” But still I did not cry. And then I just started saying it over and over again. “My mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy. And then it just turned into, ”Mammy, mammy, mammy“

And then the tears came. Like a stubborn cork, they had stuck in my throat. But when they slipped out, unexpectedly and with great force, they took me by surprise. I wept like I was delirious and then sank into sleep like a dead person.

23

Desolation

Let me go on. When once again I became aware of what was around about me, the bothy was filled with silvery light. It must have been not long after dawn. How much time had passed or what I was doing in that hut in the middle of nowhere I hadn’t a notion but when I opened my eyes there was a rough, begrimed hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw before me a man in working clothes, peering down. His face was weathered and cut with deep lines and he had on him a wild untrimmed beard and whiskers that gave him the look of a startled owl. Beyond him were several other men, younger than he, but dressed the same in baggy trousers and loose jackets. Some of them wore caps. They were crowding in at the entrance to the bothy, all staring at me, practically clambering over each other to get a better view. In my delirious state, I thought they meant me harm. I cried out and tried to get to my feet but my body was too heavy, it was as though I had become part of the floor. I sank back. Whiskers said something I couldn’t make out. And then a circle of blackness closed in and claimed me once more.