Pumping Up Napoleon (10 page)

I parted the fronds. All six were there: I did not much notice the others. All I could see was the front of my sister's blouse – undone – and that Michael King sat next to her and had his hand in his lap and something pink and fleshy in his hand. It twitched and I shouted at them all, but especially my sister, telling them what I was afraid of: ‘Don't you know that God is watching you?'

It's funny. Sometimes you say something and when you first say it you really mean it; it's what you really think, but then, when the words are out there, twisting around in the free air, you get to have a good look at them and then you wonder: why do I think that? Is that such a good idea?

Debs says I am weird; I don't think she is being very kind, considering I told a lie to mum to save her; that is, when mum asked how Mass had been, I said, ‘Good' – which might not have been a lie, only I knew it made her think we had been to church.

So later in the week when she said Dad wanted to know why we
hadn't
been to Mass on Sunday (how would he know? He doesn't go either), Mum sat me down and gave me a serious talk about how I didn't need to lie and I could tell her anything and how much it hurt her to know I didn't trust her enough to tell her the truth.

Debs was looking at me over mum's shoulder. I said, ‘I wanted to go and play by the river instead and Debs had to look after me'. I lied to my mum.
That was my second sin
.

For some reason my mum looked relieved and said it was OK and stroked my hair. She said I only had to go to Church until I was old enough to decide for myself.

You'd think my sister would be grateful, but she isn't. She goes red whenever I look at her; she pokes me and tells me to stop staring.

In the confessional box the priest is silent.

‘Well, you shouldn't miss Mass now and you shouldn't tell lies to your mother.'

‘Even though she's not a Catholic, Father?'

‘Even so.'

‘I won't then,' I say and wait to hear the rest.

But he only says what he always says: ‘Now you'll say a prayer for your mother and your sister won't you? And one for me.'

On top of these I get a penance of five Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition.

Out of the box and back in the church, I kneel and say the prayers, counting each one on my fingers.

I stare at the red flame and wonder if God really is watching me, watching over me, now, as I say my prayers, at night when I'm asleep, and when I get undressed and into the bath.

Or is it just a night-light in a red jar?

For a moment the flame bends low, jumps and seems to disappear; I gasp. Then the sound of a door closing (Father Treavey off for his tea) kills the draught and the perpetual light flares up again. When I leave, it is still burning.

Burying Dad

When the woman comes who is thinking of buying the house, Susannah brings her out through the French windows and into the garden. The blackbird clatters his usual alarm and flies out of the blue hydrangea bush, but neither woman takes much notice.

The woman who is thinking of buying the house asks questions and looks around at the shrubs and the neat lawn, the empty borders. Susannah offers tea and the offer is accepted. Susannah is pleased: they will sit at the wrought iron table here in the garden and look at a wonderful collection of old photographs, pictures of the house as it had been when she was a child.

‘I've probably got some poor bird in there,' says Susannah. They are looking at ‘Suzie, 1965', a small girl with two sun-bleached plaits holding a shoebox and squinting at the camera. ‘In those days they were always flying into the French windows or falling out of nests, or getting caught in the fruit cage.' They had all died, of course, to be respectfully interred in the flowerbeds.

The woman looks beyond the little girl in the photo, to the house. ‘Why it looks hardly changed,' she says. (In desperate need of modernisation, she will tell her husband later.)

‘Yes, it does look very much now as it used to,' says Susannah. ‘Though I notice little things of course. The plants must be taller than when I was a girl, but when I think back, when I
remember
, the rooms and the garden did seem bigger then. Look. There's my father.'

They regard a black-and-white photo: the head of a man buried up to his neck in sand. His hair has been pushed up into a cockscomb, a hairstyle inflicted by the young Susannah. His just-awake eyes are rather anxious and he wears a chimp's grin, as if alarmed by the weight of warm sand. Weymouth1968. He shouldn't have fallen asleep.

He could have stayed awake if he'd really wanted to. But instead of moving, raising himself on his elbow to look, he had stayed quite still and allowed sleep to lift him up; he drifted like the waves washing and leaving the shore. Nearby there would have been the knocking of plastic spade on bucket. The sift and slice of Susannah's digging was close to his ears; other sounds from other children – cries, wails and splashes – hung and swooped like kites on the breeze. Someone trudged past and grains of sand lodged in his hair.

‘
Burying Dad on the Beach.
' The woman reads the caption aloud.

‘We were lying in a little depression which made it all the easier to dig him in,' says Susannah. ‘He fell asleep; I got bored. I could have wandered off or gone for a swim without him, but I knew he'd be worried about me, so I buried him instead.' She had done it very gently. The sand had been powdery and warm. She'd heaped it up against his sides and then between his legs and arms and then on top, little by little so as not to wake him. ‘In the end I was able to bury him quite deep,' says Susannah, sounding satisfied.

‘No wonder he looks worried,' says the woman.

‘He wasn't supposed to fall asleep,' says Susannah quite sharply. Then her voice softens. ‘But he
was
exhausted.'

Exhausted, from nursing her mother. They'd left her for the afternoon, with their newly installed telephone by the bed and a neighbour popping in, so that Susannah could have a day out in her summer holidays; a day spent away from the house and garden. Susannah had been promised a swim but her father had fallen asleep. She hadn't even reached the water.

‘Say cheese,' Susannah said the instant he awoke. She was already pointing the camera, and clicked just before he pulled himself out of the beach, stood up and let the sand slide off him.

In the silence it seems she is considering whether to take the woman into her confidence. ‘It was hard for us to be happy when my mother was at home dying,' she says at last.

The woman sets her cup down awkwardly with a clash of china and spoon. ‘I'm so sorry,' says the woman.

Susannah takes no notice; she is gazing at the house. ‘She had a bed downstairs, to look out of the French windows. She could have seen us sitting here now.' Susannah gives herself a little shake and turns back to the photo album.

‘Is that her?' says the woman. ‘She looks very happy then.'

‘Oh, no,' says Susannah. ‘That's
Julie
.'

‘Julie 1972' is standing on a newly pink patio: a big blonde woman with a broad smile, her body half-turned to the camera. Behind her are picture windows and a set of new patio doors half slid-open. Julie wears a flowery pink tunic and white trousers. In her right hand is a raised glass, in her left she's holding a barbecue fork.

‘Oh!' says the woman.

‘Hmm?' says Susannah.

‘Well for a moment I thought it was a different house, but it's here, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘But where are the French windows?' They had been there at the beginning of the album among the black-and-white photos and they were there now on the other side of the lawn.

‘My mother loved those French windows,' says Susannah. ‘I don't think patio doors were the thing.' Or a patio for that matter. ‘It was up to me to put things right.'

Julie was the sort who was always wanting something new, she explained: any old rubbish as long as it cost money. That was Julie: always changing things just for the sake of it. As well as getting new furniture and redecorating, Julie had rearranged the shrubs in the garden. She got Susannah's father to dig them up and move them. Then she'd change her mind and want them moved again. He said the bushes flinched whenever he walked past. And all the little bones, the skulls and rib cages of those once-cherished songbirds, had been dug up and scattered on the earth until they bleached and crumbled away.

‘Not long before my father died she said she wanted decking and a water feature. But Dad, I know, agreed with me: we didn't want that Mississippi-riverboat look here. It would have been quite out of place.'

The woman who has been thinking of buying the house shifts in her chair and steals a look at her watch. It is a lovely house. She has almost decided she wants it. The old-fashioned charm of the furnishings is not to her taste but that doesn't matter; she can change everything.

‘I've never been much good at things,' says Susannah. ‘I wanted to be: I mean I had ambitions and I did try. I would have been happy if I could have been a singer, but I don't have much of a voice. I didn't do well at school. I wasn't much good at keeping things alive, even. But I loved my Mum and Dad and I love this house.' Susannah sighs. ‘Dad loved it too. But to
her
it was just something to play with. You know, after they sent me away to school I came back for one summer holiday and she'd changed all the things in my room: the curtains, the carpet, the lampshades, the furniture, even the colour of the walls. My old wallpaper with the farmyard animals was gone. She said it was too young. And my old soft toys were in a box in the attic. When I found them, well, I could see they weren't for me any more. But it would have been kinder to let me decide.'

The woman frowns; surely she has just seen such a room upstairs? With the farmyard wallpaper and the delegation of old stuffed toys piled up on the single bed? The woman clears her throat. ‘About the asking price….'

‘I'm only selling up because of her… she wants her cut, you know. So I suppose I must get as much as I can for the place. I won't come down.' There is a silence into which Susannah slides the sentence: ‘Of course, sex isn't what mattered to him later'.

After a long pause the woman says: ‘The house has been on the market for a year now?' Then she reaches the last photo. ‘Oh! My goodness!' she exclaims.

‘I know,' says Susannah. ‘That was taken in hospital. I wanted to remember him as he was then, in his last illness. I suppose I forget it could be shocking. He lost a lot of weight. He must have gone through the same thing, seen it happen with my mother, but somehow I didn't know. I must have been here, playing in the garden while
she
was dying. I suppose I got used to her lying in bed with the French windows open. We didn't seem to have much to say to each other.' Susannah closed the photo album.

People can die very slowly. It's not like in the films where the loved ones gather round and a few last words are said before there is a closing of eyes and the loosening of a last sigh. No, sometimes it takes days, or weeks, even. And you get tired, very tired of waiting. There's no conversation. The person is just lying there, labouring to breathe, not eating, not drinking, not moving, not talking, not even hearing – though the nurses did say it was the last thing to go and to be careful what she said.

For days he lay there with his mouth open and his eyes half-shut. His breathing was so loud, it seemed like the only thing that mattered in the room. Then came the slow ending, when the sound of his breathing would stop and she herself took a breath and held it – until he shuddered and sucked in air again and she could go on breathing too.

She had stayed by his bedside night and day until she began to smell of the sickroom. And when he was dead Susannah had leaned over the bed as if she was already peering into the grave. She was dry-eyed and sharp-focused while Julie was blurry with tears.

‘How I wish I'd used a video camera, or had a tape recorder with me, instead of just taking that photo,' says Susannah. ‘Because it was just as I bent over him that Dad whispered, “Bury me in the garden”.'

The silence fills until it is as fragile and heavy as a water balloon.

‘And did you?' The woman's words spill out.

‘It was within my rights,' says Susannah, raising her voice. ‘Whatever the neighbours say.' She puts her face close to the woman's and looks her in the eyes. ‘Julie was on the side of the undertakers. But if you do it properly, bury them six feet deep, and make sure you're not interfering with the water table, there's no reason why it can't be done. No need even for a coffin; just get an old sheet out of the airing cupboard, a last look at the face to make sure he isn't “only sleeping”, then tip him in and pile the earth on top.' She sits back in her chair.

A certain tension in the air suggests the woman is like an arrow, ready to fly.

‘
But of course,' Susannah went on, ‘someone told Julie that without a will, nothing written down, there was only my word to say it was what Dad wanted. But I was his daughter after all; I'd known him all my life.'