"My girlfriend"s pregnant," Des said. "Mum"s going to bring the baby up. We can"t handle it. Bionic b.a.l.l.s, me."
They sat in comfortable silence until Des laughed under his breath and muttered, "f.u.c.k me." It was his mantra. It"s what he would have said if he"d discovered America, or gravity.
Ellis crawled off the bench and lay flat out on the gra.s.s. A few gaps appeared between the clouds and beyond them glowed a reddening sky.
"Your dad put a note up in Bridget"s shop saying that you"d f.u.c.ked off and if anyone heard anything to let him know. Then he put another note up saying you were all right."
"The goldfish bowl ..." Ellis muttered.
"I wouldn"t rush into Bridget"s, by the way. She don"t like you one bit."
"What"s it got to do with Bridget?"
"Fancies your dad. Always has. No, I definitely wouldn"t go in there unless you"re really desperate for bread or milk or something. Even then I"d just borrow off someone, you know? Or pay a child to go into Bridget"s and get what you need and wait round the corner, except if you want cigarettes "cos Bridget"s clamping down on selling them to kids. I think she was warned."
"Des! Shut up, man, you"re stoned."
"Oh ... Yeah ..."
Ellis returned to the bench and took another joint from his pocket. He dangled it in front of Des. "Up for it?"
"f.u.c.k me, yes!"
Des stood up and shook his head and torso to wake himself up, the way a dog shakes itself dry. Then he sat down and wrapped a huge arm round Ellis and looked him in the eye, as if he were going to kiss him or kill him. Ellis recoiled.
"I"ll tell you something," Des growled.
"What?" Ellis swallowed.
"I was in Bridget"s when your dad came in ..."
Des went quiet. His eyes pierced Ellis from close range. He breathed deep into a chest carved from stone.
"He looked like a dead man. I shan"t forget it. He looked like a ghost. Made me want to say something to him, say something nice ..."
Ellis found that by tensing up his neck and flaring his nostrils he could prevent his eyes from welling up. He walked away and lay down again on the gra.s.s. He watched the clouds close rank and darken. Des lay beside him and took the spliff from Ellis"s fingers and lit it. He toked, then placed the joint between Ellis"s lips. Ellis drew heavily and felt the drug rise behind his eyes.
"Sorry for shooting you in the head."
"Sorry for stuffing gum up your nose."
Their laughter rang out across the village green to the old man inside the Methodist chapel, who mistook it for the laughter of children. It drew a smile across his face and he returned his polio-ravaged body to his empty house on Glebe Road with an uplifted heart.
Denny emerged from Mafi"s room late on Christmas night. He said to his children, "It"s nearly time, I think."
Mafi"s skin seemed paper thin, as if the life had already slipped away beneath it. They sat with her, deep into the night, until tiredness overcame them all.
Denny slept late for the first time in many years. He was woken by the sound of Ellis shuffling sleepily along the landing corridor to Mafi"s door. He heard his daughter"s bedroom door open and moments later she appeared in his room and sat on his bed.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" she asked wearily.
Before Denny could answer, they heard Mafi"s bedroom door burst open. Ellis thundered in.
"Can you come!" he gasped and ran out again.
Denny bowed his head. Dignity was a priority for him from this moment on. Chrissie waited. There was no need to rush. Their eyes met and he nodded, with the faintest of smiles. When they entered Mafi"s room, Ellis was plumping up the pillows and Mafi was sitting bolt upright in her bed. She beamed her nephew a rosy-cheeked smile.
"You know what I fancy, Denny? A lamb chop."
Ellis felt Mafi"s forehead. She found it irksome and waved his hand away.
"With peas and potatoes, preferably."
"Right ..." Denny replied, unsure.
After she had eaten, Mafi talked, without significant pause, into the evening. Then she slept.
Ellis drove Chrissie up to the town, where she was getting a lift back to London with an old school friend. On his return, he parked his car facing down the driveway so that he was ready to head off next morning. He breathed the cold air deeply, gave thanks for Mafi"s return to health and smiled in antic.i.p.ation of his return to the coast next day. As he walked towards the kitchen door, he readied himself for a final evening at the sharp end of his father"s resentment. He stepped inside the cottage and, behind his back, the first flakes of snow began to fall.
He woke beneath a bedroom ceiling that radiated light, and he knew that he was trapped.
The garden and rooftops were thick with snow. Ellis stomped his feet into his boots. When he reached the car the snow was up to his knees. He wandered around the cottage, inspecting the depths of the drifts. On the front lawn, he encountered his father doing the same. Denny ignored his son but, momentarily, they were shoulder to shoulder beneath the old cobnut tree and wearing identical clothes, Denny in his current winter coat and hat and Ellis wearing Denny"s old ones, relegated now to gardening use. Mafi"s voice rang out from her bedroom window.
"Yoo-hoo!"
She held Ellis"s new camera to her eye and took a picture of the two men, staring up at her, incredulous of her recovery.
Mafi held court, a gla.s.s of whisky cradled in her porcelain hands.
"I kissed a German," she told them, out of the blue. "I was picking hops at Boughton in 1941 and a German plane appeared, firing at vehicles on the main road. It swooped over the farm. Everyone ran for their lives except me and Doris Uden. I saw him as clear as if we were dancing together at the Leas Cliff Hall. He was a handsome devil and he flew right at us. I blew him a kiss and he blew a kiss back."
Denny went downstairs to cook the lunch.
"Don"t be stingy, Denny, I"m hungry as a horse," Mafi called out. "I might meet that handsome German in heaven when I die," she confided to Ellis.
"You"re not going to die now."
"Don"t be so silly. This is pure willpower. A parting gift." She winked at him. "The day you returned from Europe, your father sat at his bedroom window all day, peeking out from behind the curtains, waiting ..."
"He was fast asleep when I went up to see him," Ellis said.
"If you believe that you"re a fool," she told him. "Anyone can lie in bed and shut their eyes."
Denny O"Rourke sat with his aunt all afternoon. Ellis split cherry logs in the back garden and shovelled the snow away from his car in a futile gesture of intent which ignored the reality that the village was cut off. Every now and then he stepped inside and could hear m.u.f.fled conversation and laughter from Mafi"s bedroom.
Ellis took a gla.s.s of whisky to his bedroom and hid from his father there. When he was sure Denny had gone to bed, he watched a film on television and smoked cigarettes throughout, having not had one all day. In the early hours, he put on his boots and his dad"s old coat and walked into the village, through deep snow. Footprints mapped everyone"s movements, from their front doors and back again. There were no secrets in a snow-bound village. The night was still and stingingly cold. Ellis felt the tops of his ears burn and his lips and jaw became numb. The village green was a lake of bright, reflected moonlight. Ellis"s breath billowed towards the star-flecked sky, a smoke signal for a soul on its way.
He looked in on Mafi. The moonlight was pale blue on the walls of her bedroom and on her skin, taking the blemishes of age away from her face and hands, leaving her ancient but flawless. Beautiful. He studied the rise and fall of her breathing the way a parent watches their newborn child.
When Ellis woke he sensed he had slept late. The sky was a single enormous pearl light bulb emitting soft, even light. He listened carefully to the quietness and in it he detected sound. It was the discord of absence. The afterglow of departure.
His dad pushed the door open delicately. He placed a mug of tea down for Ellis and sat on the side of the bed. He looked his son in the eye. The grave censoriousness had left his face.
"Mafi died an hour ago," he said.
Ellis nodded and smiled at his dad. Then he fixed his gaze on the bedroom door as it moved back and forth in a draught.
"Were you with her?"
"Yes."
"That"s good."
They sat for a while not knowing how to cross the few inches that separated them. Ellis"s gaze moved from the door to his dad"s hand, resting on the blanket beside him. He considered laying his younger, thinner hand upon it but couldn"t.
"I don"t want you to be upset," Denny said sternly. It was almost an instruction.
That"s right, Ellis thought, you don"t. You don"t want me to experience grief or harm or heartache. That"s all you"ve ever tried to deny me.
Ellis waited for Reardon at the foot of the green. The sun dazzled from a cloudless sky but there was no thaw. Russell Grey stepped out of his back door and sucked on a cigarette. He was wearing a dressing gown, long johns, combat boots and a woolly hat. They watched as Katie Morton"s father appeared at the top of Wickhurst Lane in his suit and overcoat, with a scarf throttling him and a Russian-style winter hat pressed down on his head.
"Dressed by his wife," Ellis said, loud enough to be heard.
Mr Morton stepped gingerly across the ice, scowled at Ellis and bade Russell Grey a good morning as he began a four-mile walk to the mock-Tudor-fronted office he had moved his insurance business to after his son"s imprisonment. The two men watched Mr Morton struggle up the ice slope out of the village.
"Mad," Russell Grey murmured.
"Not when the alternative is staying at home with Mrs Morton," Ellis said.
"Their daughter"s not exactly Meryl Streep, but fair play to you, they all count."
This observation aired, Russell Grey returned indoors to his flat above the post office and to the wife who still sported the beehive hair-do that had scared Ellis as a child, although she no longer dyed it blue.
Ellis jogged on the spot and cursed into his scarf at the cold until Reardon"s tractor appeared. It barely slowed at all as Ellis leapt on to the trailer. It was the first vehicle to get out of the village since the snow came. Mr Morton politely declined Reardon"s offer of a lift as they pa.s.sed him. They came to a halt at the top of Hubbards Hill, on the edge of the common. Shaded from the brilliance of the sun, the common was frozen over. Through a labyrinth of white-capped branches, Ellis found four slow-moving figures in black. He saw their top hats first and then the thick fur-lined boots into which their trousers were tucked. They carried a polished cherrywood coffin, upon the lid of which were four pairs of immaculately polished black shoes. On the far edge of the common, a hea.r.s.e was parked up where the snow dunes had swallowed the road.
The coffin lay on the dining table whilst the men prepared Mafi"s body upstairs. They carried her down in a large sling and this, in particular, Ellis and his dad made sure they didn"t see. The coffin was returned to the trailer. Denny O"Rourke and his son sat alongside it with three of the men whilst the head undertaker went on foot, ahead of the tractor. At the church, they left Mafi"s coffin on trestles in front of the altar. Denny O"Rourke went into the garden as soon as they got back. He was mute and impenetrable. Ellis went to Mafi"s kitchen and took a Mackeson"s bottle opener from the drawer and placed it in his pocket. It was all he wanted of hers.
He screwed two planks of wood to the wheels of the hay cart and pulled it out of the valley. It took him two hours to reach Hildenborough station. The train from London was pulling away and Chrissie was standing on the platform, a suitcase and half a dozen carrier bags of food at her feet. They loaded the bags on to the cart. Christmas-tree lights shone from the windows on Scabharbour Road as Ellis and Chrissie trekked back towards the village. They stopped at the five-bar gate opposite Mackley Farm and looked across to the Rumpumps. The snow blanket on the landscape glowed in the dusk and, already, Ellis couldn"t remember how the village looked without it.
"I"ll be glad when this is over," Chrissie said.
Ellis wondered if the lame, lonely widows and widowers inside the almshouses on Glebe Road ever looked out of their windows at this view and thought the same thing.
I"ll be glad when this is over.
The horror of growing old shot through Ellis"s young mind for the first time.
"Jesus Christ ..." he muttered.
They wrapped their arms around each other and Chrissie had her cry.
There was a note on the kitchen table from their dad. He had returned to the church.
"Dad"s not taken the torch, Ellis," Chrissie said. "Go and meet him halfway so he"s not walking back in the dark. Please."
Ellis turned each corner expecting to see the shape of his father against the snow, but reached the church without encountering him. The nave was in darkness and the altar lit by a single, harsh bulb, high above. Silhouetted by this light, Denny O"Rourke stood rigidly beside his aunt, his hands pressed down on the coffin lid, his head bowed.
Ellis watched with a certain reverence. This could be any moment in time, he realised. Any moment in any year since 1971. His dad had been standing here ever since that date. When he held Ellis in his arms, when he carried him on his shoulders, when he led him across the Marsh, when he smiled at him and laughed with him, when he resented him and ignored him, through all these times Denny had also been standing at a coffin, head bowed, presuming no one could see.
Ellis felt suddenly agitated by his invasion. He feared that if his father saw him now then he would never look his son in the eye again, never forgive him for being here. So Ellis crept away, but as he reached the door he heard a sound which compelled him to turn back. He saw his father look to the heavens and fight back his tears with a sharp intake of breath. He pressed harder down on the coffin, bowed his head again and gasped for air. Then the sobbing came. His shoulders heaved and cries battled their way out of him. He inhaled again, fighting valiantly, but the battle was lost and the tears and sobs burst out of his shaking body. His dignified, upright frame buckled and he slumped forward on to the coffin, resting his forehead against it as he wept. Ellis stared open-mouthed. He was seeing the unseen, touching the unknown. He was watching G.o.d. Then the panic returned to him, for if his dad knew he was a witness to this, their estrangement would be complete. His heart raced as he tiptoed to the door and slipped away.
Chrissie knotted Ellis"s tie for him.
"Got some news," she said.
"You"ve worn out your G-spot?"
"Good news for you, what"s more. Or could be."
"What?"
"I"ve hooked up with Milek."
Ellis let this hang for a moment.
"Milek the photographer?" he checked.
"How many Mileks do we know?"
"When you say "hooked up" I presume you mean spread your legs, wide open like a giant clam?"
"You presume correctly. Extremely pleasant it was too."
"Why didn"t you say so before, when you gave me my camera?"
"Because we hadn"t hooked up then. This is very fresh Yuletide news."
"And why does this news relating to your rarely unshared bed concern me?"
"Because he"s a photographer and he might give you some work."
"Carry on k.n.o.bbing."
She hushed him, seeing her father appear.
"Time to go," Denny said brightly. He had equipped himself with an armour-plated smile to see out the morning.
From the window, Ellis saw Gary Bird"s mother and her neighbours emerge from the cottages across the lane. They were dressed in their best and tiptoed through the snowdrift to the middle of the road, like farmyard geese. Mrs Bird held her palms upwards and grimaced at the sky. Ellis, Chrissie and Denny walked through the village and up to the church. Some of the villagers waited at their gates holding sprigs of holly and fell in line behind the O"Rourkes. An hour later, when they followed Mafi"s coffin across Glebe Road into the new cemetery, the world was a blinding whiteness again and the snowflakes were like feathers.