I liked talking to it, though. ‘Good morning,
m
eero
chiriclo
,’ I’d say. ‘
Sar
shin
meero
rawnie
?’
If he had been himself, Lijah would have made sarcastic remarks about my canary. But instead, he sat in the parlour in silence and watched me talk to it.
He hadn’t done much since he’d moved in with me. Not even gone off down the pub. Sometimes he said, ‘I’m off for a little walk now, Dei,’ and I knew he was going to go and sit by Rose’s grave. We didn’t have much
lovah
at that time and it still only had a wooden cross on it. Before the funeral, Daniel had offered to pay for a piece of granite but Lijah got quite sharp with him and said nobody was paying for his wife’s gravestone but himself. Still stubborn, even in his grief.
I never said it to him but that was the real reason I persuaded him to move in with me at Wellington Street, to save the rent on the Buckle Street house. I had a little money put by, but he would have to pull his socks up and get back to his market stall sooner or later.
He did, eventually, of course. Perhaps that is the most painful bit of losing someone, the bit when you realise that your life is going to carry on. It’s painful, of course, because it makes you think that others will do that after you have gone, too, and none of us likes to think that, do we? The weeks turned into months, and Lijah went back to his market stall and his dealing and we saw the others from time to time but it was like we saw them through a fog. I put up with it and put up with it, thinking it would change but it didn’t, it got worse, whatever
it
was, and in the end, I thought, I’m not prepared to just sit by while this family dissolves around me just because Lijah and me haven’t got to the bottom of what’s going on.
*
Scarlet. She was the answer to it. I knew that right enough. Scarlet had loved her mother fierce-like, in the way that youngest children do. I also knew she was the only one who would be honest with me if I tackled her head on. Mehitable and Fenella would have been scared of upsetting me, but not Scarlet, oh no. And she was the only one who didn’t have a family of her own yet, so by rights she was the one who should have been looking after
her father now he was a widower. So, it was her I decided to tackle.
Scarlet. She was a match for me any day.
*
I went round one Saturday afternoon. Scarlet was lodging with a Miss Cowley who worked in the same office as her. I waited at the end of Bishop’s Road, sitting on a bench by the Recreation Ground, until I saw Miss Cowley go out. I wanted to talk to Scarlet in private.
I knocked on the door with the end of my walking stick. Scarlet opened it quickly, as if she had been passing when she heard me knock. It was two steps up to the door and being on the short side as I was, I was at something of a disadvantage as I looked up at her. She didn’t seem at all surprised, standing there, and I felt as if I was suddenly seeing her for what she was, a large woman, broad of face, not pretty exactly but quite handsome, hair in careful waves – but for that hair, the image of her mother.
‘Hello, Gran,’ she said, moving back to allow me to step up.
‘Scarlet,’ I said, nodding to her.
She hovered for a moment while I put down my stick and unbuttoned my coat, which is a right fiddly job for me these days. Then she turned to the kitchen, to put the kettle on.
As soon as we was sat in the parlour with a cup of tea, I started. ‘I’ve not come here to muck about,’ I said, pushing my cup away from me. ‘I’ve come here to find something out and find out straight.’
She had a dry sort of expression on her face. ‘What might that be, Mami?’ She was the only one of my grandchildren who still called me Mami, sometimes. It was her way of getting on my good side, I suppose, but it wasn’t going to put me off, not that afternoon.
‘Why are you lot being so off with me and your father? You come round and you can’t wait to get out the door as soon as you’ve set foot inside it. It’s breaking his heart.’
‘Has he got a heart to break? That’s news to me.’ She took a sip of tea.
‘Don’t be insolent, my girl. Remember who you’re talking to.’
At that, she had the grace to glance down, but still a bit mutinous-like.
‘He’s got five children, he’s entitled to be close to at least one of them.’ It was a strange sort of logic, I suppose, but it made sense to me. ‘And the man’s been widowed this past year. Do you not think he could do with a bit of comforting from his own daughters?’
At that, her head shot up. ‘Five children, well, yes, Gran, you’re right. Let’s take them one by one shall we? One: Daniel. Well I can’t speak for Daniel, all I can say is I’m not sure whether he really feels like he’s got a father seeing as he has had to be father to us all since he could nearly stand up. I saw Dad give him a back-hander that knocked him across the room once, when he was pissed, so we’ll leave Daniel out of it, shall we?’
I was shocked she should use such language in front of me.
‘Two: Billy. Well now, Billy was always closest to him out of all of us but she’s having quite a hard time at home at the moment and could do without any extra bother. Three: Bartholomew. Oh no, there’s no point in doing Bartholomew is there, as none of us have heard from him in years and why not? Because he’s just like his father.’
‘I can count, you know. You don’t need to go on.’ I hadn’t expected this. This was horrible.
‘Four: Fenella. Nellie’s too good natured to hold grudges but she tends to agree with me on most things and she does on this, so there.’
She stopped. I saw a look of hesitation in her eyes. I couldn’t help but let my voice be a bit dry sounding. ‘Well, that leaves one we’ve not yet accounted for, don’t it?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Five. Five is me.’ She looked me right in the eye. ‘You were the only one with Mum when she died, Gran. What did you say to her?’
I thought that a mighty peculiar question. ‘I told you. I said, whatever will we all do without you? And she smiled at me, and then she just went to sleep. I fetched you all straightaway, soon as I realised. Don’t tell me you don’t believe me, in the name of heaven,
mi
biti
chai,
what reason would I have to tell you else?’ This was all getting far too deep for me.
‘Why didn’t she want Dad?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When we all went up to see her that morning. I was last up. I said, do you want Dad, and she didn’t. Why didn’t she want to see her own husband?’
‘How on earth should I know?’
At that, she looked defeated. She stopped, took another sip of tea, and sighed. Her broad shoulders sagged. ‘I’ll tell you why not. Because he only made things worse, that’s why not. She was dying. She deserved a little peace, for once.’
She wasn’t making a right lot of sense, I must say. ‘Scarletina,’ I said gently, my nickname for her. ‘They were married a long time, your mum and dad, and I think maybe when you’ve been together that long maybe you’re just not that important to each other any more. Maybe she’d said all she needed to say to him.’
Her eyes narrowed, and I sensed we were about to get to the marrow of things. ‘Aye, and what had he said to her?’
I looked at her.
‘He told her she’d been a rotten mother, that’s what he did. He went in there and accused her of the worst thing he could think of, a week before she died, when he took in all those stupid bits of furniture that he’d insisted she should have when she couldn’t even get up to use them. She was dying, and she should’ve been allowed to die in peace, and instead he went in and told her how useless she’d been with our Billy and Lord knows what else as well.’
I could not believe it. ‘No, Scarlet, you must’ve got it wrong.’
She rose from her seat, her gaze firm. ‘I’ve not got it wrong,
Gran, I’ve not at all. She pleaded with me, after he’d gone. You should have seen how agitated she was, desperate to see Billy. You were there that day when Billy went up, so you know all about it. After everything our father did when we were growing up. And when his wife was dying he went in there and accused her of all sorts and she died tormenting herself with everything she’d done wrong.’
I rose too. ‘Don’t you dare say that of your father. Your father loved you like anything! He thought the sun shone out of your plump backside when you was a baby! He doted on you!’
She crashed her fists against her forehead. ‘You’re not listening to me, Gran!
Listen
to me! I know he loved us, that doesn’t mean he was any good at it, does it?’
I couldn’t believe she could disrespect her own father so. ‘So, you lot think you’ve had it hard, do you? You don’t know what hunger is. You’ve know idea how little we had when he was growing up. Compared with the life he had, you lot lived like royalty. At least you had a roof over your heads … most of the time.’
She turned away from me, and spoke over her shoulder, her voice ringing with feeling. ‘You’re still not understanding me, Gran. I can forgive him not knowing any better. But I can’t forgive him going into Mum when she was dying and taking away her peace of mind. Even if he didn’t mean to do it, it was wicked. It was just as wicked for him not meaning it.’
I saw that I was wasting my time. Lijah’s children would have to be reconciled to Lijah in their own good time. There was nothing more I could do.
It took me some time to raise myself from my chair. My knees had started to hurt bad when I got up and down.
Scarlet picked up my stick from where it rested against the table and handed it to me. Then she took my arm and helped me to the door. ‘Do you want me to walk you back?’ she asked.
‘I’m not quite that far gone yet,’ I said. ‘Will be one day, mind.’
We made a slow journey to the hallway, and she lifted my coat and hat from the peg. I rested my stick against the wall, and put my things on. She wrapped my scarf once around my neck and then she tried to do my coat buttons for me, as if I was a child. I batted her fingers away. I still find it odd that I can’t straighten my hands no more. I look at these strange, twisted things on the ends of my arms, like tree roots with their lines and lumps, and I think, are these really my hands?
Scarlet watched me while I fiddled with the buttons. I daresay it took a deal longer than it would have done if I had let her help.
‘You and Mum didn’t really like each other all that much, did you?’ she said. She said it quite gently, just stating the fact, without any accusation.
I stopped what I was doing and looked at her. ‘Your mum and I were close as close can be for thirty years,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to do now she’s not here.’
She turned to open the front door.
*
As I stepped out into the bitter cold, I remembered a conversation I once had with Rose. We were mangling some laundry. It was February and freezing and we were out in the yard at Sutton. I was turning the handle and she was pulling the laundry out the other side – it was sheets, so it needed two of us. We always did the sheets together.
She was doing the bit I hated. I hated gathering heavy, wet cloth when it was cold. Your fingers would redden and freeze in a minute.
I sneezed.
Rose said, ‘You’ve not got an ague there, have you?’
I shrugged.
‘You want to watch it,’ she said, as she pulled the sheet through. ‘It was the Fen ague that killed my mother. It can carry you off in a trice.’
She had never raised the subject of her mother with me before. ‘Was that when you was on the farm?’ I asked her, lifting the next sheet from the tin tub.
‘It was. It was the farm that killed her, for sure. We didn’t have those sorts of agues in East Cambridge.’
All at once, I thought of my little Dei, broken on the tread-wheel in Huntington House of Correction. ‘I lost my mother when I was young, too,’ I said, as I pushed the edge of the sheet between the rollers ’til it caught. ‘I’d just had Lijah.’
‘What took her?’ Rose asked. She had folded the sheet and was rubbing her hands together against the cold. The chill wind lifted her hair around her face as I looked at her. I wondered what she would think if I told her the whole story, about us being arrested and accused by the farmer and his
prosecutrix
and hard labour and cannon balls.
Well, what would any
gorjer
think if you told them a story of a
gipsy
that had died in prison?
‘Same as yours,’ I said, and took a deep breath as I pushed the mangle handle to its full height, always tricky for me as being on the small side it’s hard for me to put my weight into it. ‘An ague.’
‘Well, like I said,’ Rose said, as she grasped the emerging sheet from her side and began to pull, ‘you want to watch it.’
Her sleeves were rolled up and the muscles on her forearms bulged as she pulled the sheet. She pursed her lips with the effort, frowning.
She was as strong as an ox, that girl. It never once occurred to me I might outlive her.
*
As I walked away from Scarlet’s house I thought, if I could take Rose out of that box in Eastfield Cemetery and put myself in there instead, I’d do it in a trice. Lijah, Daniel, Mehitable, Fenella and Scarlet – all of them grieving away over Rose, all broken apart over it and unable to comfort each other. I loved them all, every sodding
stubborn one of them, and would bring Rose back in a minute, if I could.
There are some people who are like threads in a knitted jumper – pull them out, and the whole garment starts to unravel, and you realise too late that you’ve pulled out the one bit of thread what was holding the whole thing together. Strange, when it looked like all the other bits of thread.
T
he odd thing about living as long as I have, is, you get so used to the idea of dying that it stops being real. You start to think you never will.
I’ve been expecting to die for decades. I thought I would when I was poorly, when we were stopped on Stourbridge Common. I had stomach-pains fit to bust after some young
grasni
from the next
vardo
gave me a stew with the wrong leaves in it. Kale is for cows, I told her – that’s how come they eat it.
Then, when we were in Sutton, I had the
noomonia,
and that was a fair one for carrying off the old ladies like me. Then Rose died, and her being a generation down from me meant it felt all wrong. Surely it was my turn, not hers?
So I keep waiting, but it doesn’t happen. And now I’ve got to the point where I can’t get my head around dying at all. There’ve been too many false alarms.
*
I thought I had better try and take the subject seriously for a change. So, one evening, when Lijah and I were sat in the kitchen after supper, I tried to bring it up. It must have been a year or two after we lost Rose – or maybe it was longer than that.
It annoyed Lijah that I always wanted to sit in the kitchen of an evening. ‘That’s what we’ve got a sitting room for, Dei,’ he would say, ‘to sit in, you know.’
And I would say back, ‘The parlour’s for guests.’
And he would say, ‘We never have any guests, Dei,’
And I would say, ‘Well, whose fault is that?’
And that would be an end to it.
Anyroad, we were sat in the kitchen, both with mugs of tea in front of us, mine lovely and dark, and I thought it was time I took dying seriously.
‘Lijah,’ I said, ‘I’ve decided it’s time I took dying seriously.’
‘Righto, Mum,’ he said, and took a sip of tea.
I had a sudden urge to make him promise to burn me, with all my things, like we did in the old days on the road. That would give him what you might call a bit of a dilemma, as I don’t reckon it’s legal these days.
‘I’ve thought about what I want, after,’ I said.
‘After what?’
‘After I’m dead, you fool, what d’you think I’m on about?’
He would have rolled his eyes at the ceiling if he’d thought he could get away with it.
‘I want to motor, so I do. I’ve never been in a motor car.’
‘Haven’t you?’ He looked a bit surprised.
‘Never in all my born puff.’
He scratched his head. ‘Well I’m sure I can manage that, Dei.’
‘I want a nice shiny black one, like all the posh folk have. And I want to motor nice and slow, all the way up Eastfield Avenue, so slow that folk have plenty of time to stop and stare and wonder who’s in there.’
‘All right, then,’ he nodded.
‘Apart from that, it’s up to you,’ I said, shrugging. ‘It’ll be your business when I’m gone, nobody else’s. I’m not fussed about having crowds of people or one of those daft get-togethers where nobody says what they’re thinking. Can’t stand all that nonsense. You can put me in the hole with your own bare hands if you like.’ Lijah frowned a little, as if he was trying to get his head around the idea of me actually dying, me not being here any more. ‘But I do like the idea of a big shiny motor, so I do.’
*
There wasn’t any one point when I realised things had got a bit better between us and the children. I just realised they had, bit by bit, as the years passed. But I’m not sure Lijah was ever close to them like he should have been. I don’t know what you have to do to make that sort of thing happen between a mother or father and children what are grow’d. Maybe it’s too late by then, too late for the sorting out of stuff. They do it in the moving pictures, I’m told. I’ve never been to the cinema myself but they say that on stage, when the piano plays, it’s like lanternslides only the people can move about. They have writing at the bottom that says what the people are saying, and they are saying things like, ‘You’ve never loved me, have you?’ and the fella replies, ‘No I haven’t, but only because I lost my first fiancée in a tragic drowning accident.’ After that, they come to an understanding.
People don’t have those sorts of conversations where I come from. Leastways they didn’t on the Fens, nor in East Cambridge, nor in Sutton – and especially not in the little brick houses of Peterborough. No, in all the places I’ve ever been, they come round for a cup of tea and they keep their private thoughts to themselves. They drink tea by the gallon, so they do, as enough of it might wash away the secret things what have got buried in the secret insides of themselves.
Except sometimes, in the dark. That’s the time when you think
about ghosts, and dead pigs and whether stories really happened the way you remember them or whether you are just a bit mad in the head and it would be better if someone shut you up so you won’t do no harm to nobody.
*
We had a routine in the mornings, did Lijah and I. We were always up at first light. I would come down and light the fires and brew tea, then take my cup outside for a bit of a smoke in the fresh air. It was the only time the gas tower looked pretty, in the morning light. You couldn’t see it from the back garden, so I liked to take my tea and my pipe out to the front step, even if I needed a shawl round my shoulders. A few folk would be about – people always greeted you right politely first thing in the morning on account of how the day hadn’t been able to upset them yet. I would squat down on the step and chew on my pipe and sip my tea and as the dawn rose, the gas tower would glow – this huge orange cylinder, looming over the houses, like a big bucket of answers.
Lijah was usually up by the time I went back inside. Quite often, he’d have had his tea and a slice of bacon and onion roll and be getting himself ready for the outside world. He would sit in on a kitchen stool with his comb and his cap on the table in front of him. He was quite bald by then but for a small piece of hair that grew at the back of his head, which he had managed to grow as long as long could be, like a China-man. He oiled this, so he did, by dipping the comb in one of my saucers. Then he would wind the strand of hair round his head, until it stopped on his forehead, when he would fashion a kiss-curl out of the end of it. With his cap on top, it looked almost normal.
When we were Travellers, no decent mother would ever let her child fix his hair inside, nor use a saucer to do it. Sometimes, I watched him do this and wondered what we had come to.
‘All right, Dei,’ he said, when he had finished. He would rise up and pat his waistcoat pockets. ‘It’s off to the market for me.’
Mehitable and Scarlet had market stalls right next to each other, by then, selling woollens and hats and gloves. Fenella helped them out sometimes but she was a bit busy with her girls. Mehitable was renting her stall from a fella called Thompson and went down there every morning while her boy was at school. She didn’t like Lijah going down the market when Thompson was around, on account of how Lijah might forget and start rokkering to her in Rummanus. That would be the end of it, then. She needed the bit of money on account of how the no-good she had married had upped and left her to raise her boy on her own. Always unlucky, Mehitable.
‘Off to
dik
the big wide world,
amaro
chavo
?’ I would say to Lijah, as he set off.
‘
Avali
,
I am that, Dei,’ he always replied.
*
I had a nasty moment, the other day. It was like I sort of woke up, and I was in the middle of the parlour. Thing was, I couldn’t remember why I was there. And for a moment, I didn’t even know where ‘there’ was. I looked around me for a bit. There was an empty birdcage hanging in one corner, from a standard lamp with the bulb and shade removed. There was a carriage clock on the mantel. Beneath me was carpet, in a swirly pattern. When I moved my toes inside my soft house-boots, I could see the knuckle of them bulge upwards, rising above the carpet like small sea-monsters. It was like these things were the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly rearranged themselves into the right order and it came to me that I was in the parlour of my own little house.
For the life of me, I could not remember what I was doing in the middle of the parlour, or how I had got to be there.
*
Once, my father sent me to get him something from a market. And he gave me some pennies to buy myself a pie. I was stood in front of the pie stall and I must have looked like a poor, starving child or
some such, as the stall-holder called out to me, ‘Hey, come here, girlie.’ I saw that in his hands he was holding a piece of brown paper, and there was a heap of broken pastry on it. I realised that he had been watching me while I was staring at his pies.
I had only been staring at them as I was wondering what sort of pie to choose but he must’ve thought I had no money for a pie. He was a giving me a broken one for free.
I took it, even though I was too embarrassed to thank him properly, and turned away and ate it, and it tasted every bit as good as a not-broken one, I must say. Having got it for nothing didn’t spoil the flavour of it, neither.
As I’d got myself a free pie, I walked around the fair for a bit, wondering what to spend my pennies on.
I bought myself a little bird. The lady put it in a brown paper bag. I could feel its wings a-fluttering inside. It was a pretty feeling. On the way home, I stopped on a bridge and decided to take a peek at it, but when I opened the bag, the bird flew right away.
Just like my black canary.
*
I met a madman once, a real one. It was in a field. He came back with me to the camp and he frightened everybody but I liked him and fed him and gave him jobs to do. But as he was a real madman, we had to give him back. Some men came and got him. I wasn’t there when they took him. Dei told me about it later. I think. No, I saw him, So I did.
*
There’s going to be another war, apparently. It’s the Germans again, still up to their old tricks. We didn’t beat them good enough last time, so we’ve got to do it all over again. When Lijah told me about it, I got right agitated and made him promise not to go off, and he said, ‘Dei, I’m in my sixties. They wouldn’t have me in the army even to polish their boots.’
After a while I said, ‘Was my grandson killed in the war?’
‘No, Dei,’ said Lijah. ‘The boys came back safe and sound. We all did. We was lucky.’
‘Well, where did he go, then?’ I meant Bartholomew, my Barty-boy, the little terror.
Lijah knew who I meant, right enough. He sighed. ‘Bartholomew was not right in the head after the war, and he went off to London and no one knows where he is, now.’
I frowned, just trying to get the pieces right in my head. ‘And what about Daniel?’
‘Daniel owns his own sign-writing business. He’s done very nicely for himself. Got fellas working for him, now and a girl what’s almost grow’d. We saw them Sunday.’
‘Oh,’ I said,’ that’s right.’ Daniel’s wife had served us lamb. She had put a little dish in front of me and shouted in my left ear, ‘That’s mint sauce, that is, Grandmother!’ Snooty little cow.
*
This next war wasn’t like the last one. In the last one, people just disappeared. Men marched off and some of them came back injured or not right in the head like Bartholomew – and some didn’t come back at all. But it all happened somewhere else a long way away as I remember, not here.
This new war came here a bit more. They tried to set fire to the cathedral by the marketplace, did the Germans, although we put it out in time. Some people broke shop windows and said you shouldn’t work at Werners.
It made things ugly, this war. If you didn’t have curtains on your windows then you had to paint them with green paint and put up strips of sticky brown paper all over them to make your house so ugly the Germans couldn’t be bothered to bomb it. Lijah said you couldn’t get a horse for love nor money.
*
I get confused sometimes. Sometimes I wonder who I am telling my story to, for it is like I am telling a story over and over in my
head. And sometimes it feels like I’m there, right back in it, and I lose myself, and then at other times it’s just remembering, like any other old fool.
Sometimes, it’s like there’s someone listening. I found myself wondering the other day about who that someone might be, and I pictured a girl, who’s waiting for me somewhere, and maybe she’s someone else or maybe she’s only me, the old me that used to exist and is still there underneath the layers of everything. Then, when I think this girl is me, I feel as though I am talking to her and warning her of who she’s going to become, except she’s not really listening, of course, as she’s too flipping stubborn.
There are many things I don’t believe in, but I do believe in ghosts. How could I not when I saw
Bafedo
Bawlo,
the Ghost Pig, with my own very eyes? Sometimes I think I’m talking to a ghost but it is not the ghost of a dead person, oh no, as that would be an evil thing and it would drive me quite mad. No, it is like the ghost of someone not yet born. They are not evil. They are thin and pale and wispy, like made-up ghosts in the picture-books my grandchildren used to have – pretty little things, like dandelion fluff, not like real ghosts at all.
Lijah said to me once, when we were sitting together at the kitchen table after supper, smoking in silence, ‘Dei, for what are you always muttering and talking to yourself these days? Are you going mad on me, or what?’
And I replied, ‘I talk to myself, my son, as it’s the only way I get a decent answer.’
Well, he might’ve been an Old Fella by then but he still needed slapping down once in a while.
*
It was when I went to buy tobacco that I saw it, the Ghost Pig, right here on a street in Peterborough, with my very own eyes.
I was on my way to Phipps’, the newsagents. You could get the ’baccy at the stationers as well, but old Phipps liked me, for some
reason. Probably my girlish charm. Anyhow, when he’d taken my ration card and weighed a quarter ounce for me, he always added a few scraps more, before he twisted the paper.