A plastic bag containing several animal pelts. Some still fairly aromatic. Katherine carefully removed two rabbit skins, a badger skin, three rat pelts. Even the skin of a tiny field mouse.
She stared at the field-mouse skin for a long time, flattened it out between her fingers, uncrossed her legs from around the rucksack and bounced off her bed, still holding it. She walked over to her
doll’s house, gently unclipped the latch on the right-hand-side, opened the front, peeked into the living room (on the ground floor), shoved a couple of pieces of furniture aside –leaving a space before the hearth –then pushed the little mouse-skin inside, placed it next to the fire, adjusted it, drew a rocking chair in close again, pulled back, smiling.
She returned to her bed, and to Wesley’s rucksack. Next she found a scarf. Hand knitted. Grey. White skull and crossbones at either end. Matching gloves. Fingerless.
At the bottom of the central section she discovered a home-made (yet rather lovely) wooden box. Inside this (she opened it cautiously; it was hinged and squeaked a little) were two improvised wooden banjo picks and one in imitation tortoiseshell, several fragments of ancient-seeming pottery –all unpatterned –burned. An envelope with what seemed to be –but
couldn’t
be, surely? –gunpowder inside of it.
About ten old buttons. A cotton reel and needle. A ball of string. Several rubber bands. A comb with most of its teeth missing. A strip of velcro. Three hypo-allergenic plasters. Five thick black marker pens. Two small HB pencils. A rubber. A packet of condoms (
Durex,
half used). A pack of playing cards (hailing from Jamaica). A small tin of Germolene. An even smaller tin of Tiger Balm. Some
Rizla
papers –
Ah-ha
Two tiny fossils. An owl dropping made out of hair (this made her shiver a little). A photo of two young boys sitting on two swings, both smiling wildly. The one slightly older, the other… it had to be Wesley: green eyes, a mop of brown hair, a striped jumper, flares. Gappy teeth.
Katherine stared at this picture for a long while. She turned it over. On the back was written –but very faded –Wes and Chris, Portmeirion, 1973.
She drew a deep breath, and –for the first time in a good while –looked over towards the door, uneasily, then replaced the picture back inside the box, very carefully.
Three postcards; two from the British Museum. One depicting a simple-seeming Egyptian-style tapestry, the other an old jug shaped like an owl. She turned them over. The first was addressed simply
to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and said
Wes you fucking cunt! Marty.
The other had just an address in Barnstaple (Three Chimneys, Pembury Road) but no message. The third was a picture of ‘The New Penguin Enclosure at London Zoo’, was very dog-eared, had a foreign stamp on the back –postmark
… uh…
somewhere in Japan?
To Wes,
it said,
Wish you were here, son. Dad
Katherine frowned at this, confused. The address it’d been sent to was somewhere in Gloucester.
A small locket –a woman’s locket, by the look of things; gold, tiny –with… (Katherine struggled to open it. Her clumsy nail seemed so huge by comparison to the clasp of the thing)… a tiny lock of hair inside and a photo of a man and woman –the man in some kind of military uniform –sitting on the deck of a ship, their arms wrapped around each other, smiling, perhaps slightly uncomfortably.
Katherine closed this locket, carefully.
Last of all, and perhaps most eerily: two plaster casts –joined together by wire –of the teeth of a mouth; a child’s mouth. The kind of cast dentists made when they were moulding the jaw for braces (maybe) or a cap, or some kind of serious dental surgery.
A curiously tiny but neat set of teeth. Not particularly gappy. The top front two slightly overlapping.
Katherine shuddered. She put the mould away. She sat still for a while, deep in thought, frowning.
Finally she closed the box and placed it back into the rucksack, followed by every other item, refolded and put back in meticulous order. Last of all –and most regretfully –the banjo.
Next she started in on the side pockets. On the left-hand side she found a tartan Thermos, three spoons, a fork and a knife inside a plastic tupperware sandwich box. A small pale blue enamel plate with dark blue trim. A matching bowl. Some strange metal prongs which seemed darkened at their tips by –she sniffed –meat juices. Old blood. A very small saucepan. Very battered. Stained black.
A wooden spoon. A strange –this was hard to pull out, there was obviously a special technique –metal rack thing like you’d have in a grill pan, which unfolded, from its centre, so was pretty handy (for cooking fish or fillets over a fire, she presumed).
Matches, matches,
matches.
Tiny boxes, from all over the place.
Pubs and bars mainly. A tiny tin of –she opened it –gravy browning? Cocoa? Coffee?
Hard to tell.
Dozens of sugar sachets.
The other side. Mainly cosmetics. There was an old tube of smoker’s toothpaste. A toothbrush –so ancient its bristles were flat and yellow. A half-used bottle of Rescue Remedy (she raised her brows at this). A damp brown towel. A small bottle of cardamom oil (an amateur pressing; on the front was written; CARDAMOM, FOR INDIGESTION. DO NOT APPLY DIRECT TO SKIN OR SWALLOW (two exclamation marks).
Katherine unscrewed the lid and inhaled. She smiled. It was a good smell. It reminded her of Wesley (that moment when he’d leaned forward to kiss her. She closed her eyes. Remembered that moment, her lips moving, unconsciously. She opened her eyes again. Cleared her throat. Twitched her shoulder).
An old fashioned razor –bone handled –wrapped up in a small off-white face towel (Katherine almost cut herself upon it. She squeaked. Gazed. Tested its sharpness on her thumb. Was impressed. Wrapped it carefully back up again). A whole pile of –
Urgh
– goo (how else to describe it?). In an old shaving tin. Bits of stringy green stuff and some kind of cactusy foamy…
She closed the tin, rapidly.
A pill bottle containing a series of odd-looking tablets. Several kinds. Homeopathic. An ancient –very battered –hip flask –
Yip yip!
– containing (Katherine unscrewed it) bourbon or sour mash whiskey. She put it to her lips, swigged, coughed, grinned.
A cream fabric bag with a draw-string top containing (she thought it’d be dope or something) grass, but of the seed variety, poppy seeds, too, and countless other kinds –
Sweet
She had a vision of Wesley strolling along in high summer, haphazardly scattering seed into the hedgerows, out of pure… pure…
Altruism
Or was that just naive of her?
Three books. One called (deep breath)
Famous Utopias; an omnibus containing the complete texts of More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Katherine scowled tiredly as she paged through it. It seemed ancient –so old, in fact, that the pages were raw and uncut. But the cover was beautiful –black and white, with freaky lettering –of several different styles and all just sort of shoved up together, willy-nilly.
Inside was an inscription;
For Wes,
(it said, in a beautiful hand; real green ink)
For laughing and feeling,
Stevie
Two kisses.
Katherine raised her brows at this, almost jealously, and as she flipped through it again something fell out –a picture. A photo. She picked it up from her lap and gazed at it. She blinked and stared harder.
A little girl. Oddly familiar. Katherine gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down at it, as though testing herself: small girl, dark haired, wearing an alice band, not smiling, serious-seeming, thin, sickly-looking.
It was the same –
Wasn’t it?
– almost the same photograph Arthur had shown them during dinner (perhaps taken at the same sitting, on the same occasion? Christmas? Birthday?). The same little girl, she was certain.
Katherine scrutinised the photo closely again. Nodded to herself, frowning. Idly turned it over. On the back was written –in pen, but very neatly –
This is the daughter.
9
yrs. Birthday Jan 7th. Lives with the mother.
Now that was definitely –
Hmmn
– more than a little strange. She gazed over briefly to the letter she’d tossed down onto the floor –
A well-wisher
– then slipped the picture into the front pocket of her dressing gown. Almost surreptitiously. She closed the book gently and put
it down. Took a deep breath. Exhaled it, slowly. Snapped back to the task in hand.
The second volume –this one a paperback –was called
Ravens in Winter
by Bernd Heinrich. She paged through it (one field biologist’s struggle to uncover the mysteries of raven behaviour in Canada or North America or
somewhere).
The book was marked by a series of feathers. She drew every feather out, one by one. They were all perfect. All iridescent. A deep blue-black-green (hard to see it properly in the muted light), with the occasional sidelong smear of white –
Magpie
Whatever else?
Next to each feather –in the book’s margins –she discovered that Wesley had scribbled a series of comments –seemingly unconnected to the text –in pencil.
NB. Contact:
(one such comment read)
Michael Hitchens; re. Goodwin;
then a phone number. There were other numbers too. Other names. Another scribble said
In Madagascar an acceptable unit of time is ‘rice-cooking time’, or shorter; ‘the frying of a locust’. Toffler (TTW).
There were plenty of these cryptic comments (all saying Toffler
TTW
afterwards –Katherine presumed Toffler was a person –a writer –a seer of some kind).
Somewhere else Wesley had written:
Edward Albee: ‘the permanent transient’.
Elsewhere;
Support the GPO!
In big letters.
‘
Social decay is the compost-bed of our civilisation’,
then after, in capitals,
BUT THAT’S SO FUCKING PRAGMATIC!
Katherine grabbed her dictionary again. Under
Pragmatic(al)
she read;
meddlesome, positive, dictatorial
(she snorted, irritably). Then later;
doctrine that the conception of an object is no more than the conception of its possible practical effects.
She slammed the dictionary shut and threw it at her cupboard. She continued to inspect Wesley’s Raven book, crossly.
Next to another feather marker was written: J
oseph Williamson; King of Edge Hill. Tunnels. Must see.
Then further on:
Time: circular or linear?
As she read, Katherine carefully returned each feather to its
original position. Towards the back, her eyes suddenly tightened as she struggled to decipher an especially interesting but rather badly written scribble. She stared at it for a long while. Eventually she made out…
Korsikov;
Alcohol abuse.
Short term memory-Liver-Testicular
She straightened her neck, flipped her second plait over her shoulder, growled, slotted away the last feather and sat still for a long while, rocking –almost imperceptibly –and quietly musing.
Finally, she grabbed hold of the third book –gazed at the cover –
Ah
Now
this
was more like it –
Bottersnikes and Gumbles
by S.A. Wakefield. A slim children’s story about some squidgy but very
pliant
creatures called…
She frowned… called…
Gumbles
(Now why did that mean something to her? Why was that ringing an alarm bell, somewhere?)
She inspected the picture. A small, white and rather adorable koala-type animal… Her forehead cleared. She grinned.
And they were relentlessly bullied and manipulated, these… these Gumbles (and kept in old tin cans) by an angry but regal pointy-red-eared creature called Chank who lived in a dump with his furiously lazy Bottersnike compadres. Fully illustrated.
Katherine collapsed back onto her pillows with Wesley’s flask in her spare hand, emitted a gentle burp, licked the remaining slick of spirit from her lips and commenced reading.
Of course this was Wesley’s child. He’d known it – he told himself (if a touch unconvincingly) –
An instinct, call it…
– from the very first moment, the first
instant
he’d laid eyes on her.
Wesley’s own little Sasha. The freak-girl who lived among the deer at her grandparents’ Norfolk-based Menagerie-cum-Garden Centre.
She looked like him, too. Arthur shot her a sly glance. But not exactly. He’d seen pictures of the mother (blonde, angry, angular) and she appeared to resemble that side of the family in no way whatsoever.
The mother was a hard-nut. Had gone to the papers – several times – during all the maintenance complications the previous year. Seemed to actively enjoy unburdening on the subject of her ex-lover. Told everything and yet – Arthur’s brow rose, minutely – nobody could ever tell quite
enough,
could they?
He visualised the page on the website;
Uh…
Food:
‘When we lived by the sea in the little bed and breakfast in Hunstanton, we’d cook macaroni cheese from the tin on our tiny cooker – share a bowl of it – curled up in bed together.’
Hygiene:
‘He was never all that big on changing his clothes or dressing up or having a bath. He’d swim in the sea, though, all the time. Even in winter. He was like a seal. Or a
machine.
He never seemed to feel the cold.’