Authors: Morag Joss
My mother died of a particular sorrow, which was that she took
the life of a child. In a drawer in our house there was a
photograph of the child, a baby girl. In the photograph were also
the child’s mother, Marjorie Porter, holding a cup and saucer, and
my mother Irene, with her teacup on her lap and one hand on the
crucifix in the hollow of her throat. At the time Irene was
forty-one, a year younger than I am, come to think of it. The women
were in deck chairs on a patch of grass in a back garden; the
ground around them was studded with floppy clumps of lettuce and
lined by long fringes of carrot tops. In the background through a
fence you could see the next-door garden sprouting the same rows of
vegetables, the same pointed towers of bean plants climbing up
bamboo frames; these were clearly the gardens of neighbours who
shared packets of seed and swapped cuttings. A curl of smoke rose
from a cigarette that rested in an ashtray on a kitchen chair
beside the women. Next to the chair stood a man in braces holding a
garden sieve up to his face and laughing through the mesh into the
camera. His face couldn’t be seen very well, but it was certainly
my father.
What was also certain was that they were in the Porters’ garden
and not ours, for there on a rug in front of Marjorie was
five-month-old Annabel, all baby jowls and bandy baby legs and
puffy baby feet, wearing ballooning, frilly pants and a sundress
and bonnet. Marjorie’s face as she looked down at her child was
weary, eternal, transparent; motherly love had opened her out, and
had also laden her for ever with its ballast of implications:
responsibility, fertility, continuity, and all their warm
perplexing weight, their proud, dull glow. Even knowing what was
about to befall her, I envied her that. (At the time I still had
the photograph to look at, I believed I would never have a child
myself.) The picture had captured her in new motherhood, before all
this knowledge had reduced her to mereness, to that dumpy,
overlooked category of numberless, undifferentiated mums. In fact,
on that day, in her sleeveless dress and lacquered beehive hairdo,
she looked less maternal as well as a whole generation, rather than
the actual sixteen years, younger than my tightly permed and
dirndl-skirted and still childless mother, whose sharp, wing-framed
spectacles had caught a ray of sun and trapped her eyes as though
behind small, blazing mirrors. Marjorie’s husband, Mr Porter, whose
first name I never knew, must have taken the picture. It was
probably his cigarette in the ashtray.
The strangest thing about any old photograph is it is all
containment, all innocence. My parents and Mrs Porter happy and
joking on the second or third day of a heatwave: of course they had
no idea what was coming, how could they? Their unawareness is the
most tremendous thing in the picture. I used to scan their faces
for a flicker of fear assailing any of them as they posed in the
blinding sun; I searched for one of those slight, momentary
twitches of dread that can descend on someone on a summer’s day,
the dread that nothing can last. I never found it. If only they
could have remained there for ever, in their grainy, bordered
ignorance, clicked and shuttered into rectangular place by Mr
Porter’s Box Brownie, trimmed and untouchable – if only they would
not be propelled, in the coming days, into the imprisoning,
defining series of events that would capture and frame them in
their misery for as long as they lived. And of course, in that
picture, they knew nothing whatsoever about me, for there was
nothing yet to know, least of all that I was, in my way, in it with
them. I thought that strange, too, that I could be conceived yet
not conceived
of
, and this was not egotism on my part but a
regret that I was powerless to turn them all in another direction
altogether, even though I was
there
. I longed to shake them
all alive again and make everything come out differently. But my
wish was futile, and perhaps also paradoxical; my mother would have
claimed that I could only have come alive to have such a wish
because what happened
did
happen.
When Anna’s mother put her blanket around my shoulders and drew
me against her I was begging her silently to ask me nothing more
than my name. She didn’t. When I got into the trailer everything
seemed very simple. I had no strength left, and I lay down. I knew
I would sleep before long, but I lay with my eyes closed for a
while, wondering about the name I had given myself – Annabel – and
about the photograph.
I didn’t have it any more. I had put it along with everything
else on a bonfire in the back garden, the same garden beyond the
fence in the background of the picture, though the fence had long
since been replaced by an ornamental breeze-block wall. I had been
in a hurry to be done with my father’s things and get going; in
three weeks I would be married. I had watched the trembling air
above the flames suck the photograph upward, curl and blacken it
into weightless fragments of ash, and I was impatient with myself
for noticing at all that it was fragmenting away to nothing in the
very place it depicted, our back garden captured in Kodachrome more
than forty years before. But I hadn’t let myself ponder any further
on my strange
in utero
status in it, both invisible and
present, or on the absence in it of any omen of the tragedy into
whose tainted echoes and rhythms I would be born and grow up. I
just watched it burn, and I trusted it to disappear.
I
woke her in the
early afternoon. Her face was puffy and white and not
healthy-looking at all, and she would have gone on sleeping, but
I’d had enough of waiting. I was curious. Also I needed something
else to think about, because although I knew you would be back
before dark, I was puzzled at what was keeping you. I could hear
that the traffic was moving again up on the road. You must have
taken her over to the other side of the bridge, I was hoping, or
maybe even to Inverness. You knew I didn’t like you doing that, and
that would be why you hadn’t called. Or your phone had run out of
battery. You’d confess to it when you were back, and after a time
you’d try to make me forgive you, and after a time I would, in our
usual way. Or maybe you’d caught the bus to Netherloch, and got
stuck there when the roads jammed up. Wherever you were you’d be
trying to get back. You would both be home soon.
While she’d been asleep, to keep busy and warm I had wandered up
the bank and brought back some wood and laid a fire, and I’d
dragged over the old enamel bathtub and set it there on top of the
circle of big stones. Then I hauled water up from the river in
plastic canisters and filled the tub and lit the fire. When the
water heated up, it sent off great clouds of steam into the cold
air. All that took hours.
When her eyes opened, I expected her to be shocked to find
herself there in our trailer. I thought she would immediately be
ready to go. But she lay there drowsy and half-awake and watched me
as if she was in no hurry while I sorted through a bundle of
clothes. I wasn’t sure if I liked or disliked that.
“You’ve been asleep. Are you feeling better now?”
She raised her head a few inches and shook it, then grunted and
lay down again.
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat up.
“I’m still so tired.”
I picked out some things of yours and Anna’s for washing and
went back outside to the fire. I drew off a few jugfuls of hot
water into a basin, then I stirred in some washing soda and added a
few grains of washing powder, for the scent. The soda is cheap and
makes the powder go further. I dropped your clothes in and let the
slippery bluish scum lap over the wet material. It always amazed me
slightly, the chemically floral smell rising from a basin on the
ground outside the trailer, where the real smells were of river mud
and wood smoke and sometimes frying onions and the rain drying on
stones. I loved it, that house-proud, indoors scent of laundry.
She came outside and stood watching while I swirled the things
around, pressing Anna’s little clothes against the sides of the
basin.
“I was wondering…I mean, the bridge, if you knew,” she said.
“Yesterday – I mean, you can see it from here. Did you see it
happen? Has anyone – ”
“I was at work. I heard it.”
“So you weren’t here? But was there, I mean, was there anyone –
”
“Look, who are you? What do you want?”
“Nothing! Nothing, honestly. That is, I wanted…Are you here on
your own?”
“My husband is on his way back. With my daughter. Right
now.”
“On his way?” she said.
“Right now. I’m expecting them soon.”
I turned back to the washing. Now it came to it, I didn’t want
her calling the hospital for me. Even asking her to would be like
believing you and Anna weren’t safe and already on your way back to
me. I went on knead-knead-kneading your saturated things, lifting,
rubbing, squeezing, submerging them, over and over and over. She
didn’t move. I looked up. She was staring at the basin of wet
clothes. Tears running down her face.
“Oh, thank God. So it’s all OK. Well. I should go.”
But she didn’t go. I stood up.
“Who
are
you? What do you want? What were you doing down
here last night?”
“I’m sorry, I’ll go. I just needed…I was tired, I feel so sick
sometimes. I’ll go.”
“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“I just wanted to make sure. Your husband, is he, I mean, where
is he?”
“My husband is fine. What is it to you? We can take care of
ourselves.” I said.
She was looking at me with her frightened, watery eyes, and
suddenly she turned away and doubled over, trying to catch and hold
her breath. She was going to throw up again.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Sit down. What’s the matter with you? Sit
down and get warm.”
“Thanks. Just for a minute.” She squatted by the fire and wiped
her eyes, then pulled a ragged bit of tissue from her pocket and
blew her nose. She stuffed the tissue into the fire and held her
hands over the steam for a while to warm them, rubbing her fingers
together. She looked hard at her palms, then rubbed them down her
jacket. Her hands displeased her. There was disgust in her eyes at
the way dirt and cold were starting to cling to her.
“Did you say your name was Annabel?”
She nodded. She was still rubbing her hands.
“Well, thanks. I’ll be off in a minute,” she said.
She lifted her head and looked out beyond the yellow ring of the
fire and across the river into the raw afternoon. There were a few
geese on the water, and the grey cabin stood lonely as always, the
sky collapsing with the weight of low cloud into the sloping
treeline above it. Sounds from the bridge and the road were muffled
by cold and fog.
“Oh, for God’s sake, look at you. You haven’t got anywhere to
go, have you?”
She looked surprised. “Oh, well, not really, not anywhere
permanent…I suppose I’ll get myself organized, find somewhere.” Her
eyes filled with tears again. “I didn’t know it would be this hard.
I didn’t think I’d feel this bad.”
“There’s hot water.” I nodded at the fire. “I need some of it
for rinsing, but you can have a wash if you want.”
She moved a bit closer, waving the steam away with her arm, and
peered in. The river water is dark with peat, but the silt stays at
the bottom. She probably didn’t know the salt water that comes in
on the flow tide is heavier than river water and runs underneath
it.
“In there? Wash in that?”
“It’s all right for washing. It’s not seawater. You have to wait
a while, though,” I said. “I’ll kick out the fire, and when the
metal’s cooled down you get in.”
She looked round. “Get in? You mean here – out here? What about,
I mean – ”
“Where else? I do it all the time. You don’t have to if you
don’t want to. I just thought you could do with a warm bath.”
“What if somebody comes?”
“Don’t be stupid. Who do you think’s going to come down
here?”
I laughed, thinking of you coming back and finding her standing
naked and dripping. She tried to smile, but there was a genuinely
shy look about her. I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone older
than me blushing before. How could she be embarrassed about her
body, at her age?
I tipped out the clothes water from the basin on the ground and
refilled it from the enamel bath.
“If Stefan comes I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you. I’m only
offering. Of course you don’t have to.”
She managed to smile. “I’d love to get clean.”
“You’ll be OK,” I said. “There’s nobody here but us.” I pushed
the ashes of the fire with the end of my foot into the ground.
“Wait till I’ve done this and then you can get in.”
When I’d rinsed and wrung out your things and pegged them up,
she pulled off her hat and ruffled her hair. It was thick and dyed
reddish, and dark at the roots. She got up and dipped a hand in the
water. “Have you got any shampoo?”
“I’ll get it. You need to undress quick and get straight in. It
cools down fast.”
When I came back she was stepping into the bath and I saw I was
right about her age. She was at least forty, maybe even old enough
to be my mother. As she stooped and curled modestly into herself,
her waist folded into a line just above her belly button, like a
crease in a roll of dough, and the skin on her haunches looked
dusty and neglected. She crouched and soaped herself, splashing
water over her shoulders for the warmth, and her skin was wet and
shining and bright-white.
“Come on,” I said. “You have to be quick. My husband will be
back soon.”
She stood up again and took the jug while I waited with the
shampoo.
“Keep your mouth closed,” I said. “It’s not drinking water.”