The Museum of Doubt (6 page)

I’m not with you. Just stop, eh. Stop. Stop.

I’m not intending to stop. It’s hard to stop when you’re almost
there. You didn’t stop. And there are some accidents Pastor Samuel couldn’t help her with. He threw up his healing hands and said: If you don’t want his child, girl, cast it out.

STOP!

And she did cast it out. Six weeks gone. She really didn’t tell you, did she?

I pulled hard on the handbrake. We both went quiet for what seemed like a long time, watching the masts of the yachts fly past, it seems to me with our hands folded across our laps, but I suppose not. For a certain time, memory, the present and apocrypha became the same thing, a trinity, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I remembered the car flying off the end of the pier before it actually happened, and I felt it skim three times across the waves like a stone as if it really did, though I knew I was feeling, with every bone and muscle, the apocryphal version of what truly took place, and the vague, imaginary sense of hitting the water once and going down was what was real.

Arnie had the sunroof open and was out of it before the top of the car sank below the water. He braced his legs on the roof and plunged his arms down for me through the flood that was beating me down into the seat and tied to pull me out, forgetting about the seatbelt. We went down into the black firth together, me struggling with the belt and gulping down a gallon of salt water before I shut my mouth, him clinging on to the edges of the sunroof with one hand and tugging on my jacket shoulder with the other. I got free just as a part of me I never knew I had started to try to rationalise the death experience into something negotiable but only making it worse. We were trying to kick off our shoes and jackets and our faces were in the air. We were treading water. The ferry was steaming out of harbour a few hundred yards away. It whistled. Arnold was swimming away from me towards the pier with strong breast strokes. I
paddled my feet and coughed. I hate it when folk cry. It’s never good, and when it’s someone you thought you were fond of, like yourself, it’s a disaster. It was too late anyway. There was too much water all around. There was so much of it.

Adam on the floor opened the parcel without tearing the paper, labouring at the tape with the bitten-down pithy remnants of his fingernails to pick it off the gloss of the wrapping. Cate watched him from the settee, lying on her front, feet treading air. Soon they would need to start filling another drawer with old wrapping paper that never got reused. How could they? It was old. But they couldn’t throw it away.

A book had marbled board covers and a leather spine, with a spangled sheen on the edge of the thick, rough pages. The spine creaked when he opened it and clumps of pages fanned out with a sigh. He pressed it to his face and breathed in. It smelled of damp earth.

I know I said it was simple, but you won’t learn it by sniffing it, said Cate. If you could, all the cokeheads would have discovered perpetual motion by now.

Ellsta, he said, and leaned over to kiss her.

Ellsta! she said, wrinkling up her face.

El-lsta.

Closer but still way off. Ellsta!

He flipped through the pages. There were no pictures. There were desires and needs in other lives that had never even come
within sight of their own, before electricity, when the servants had no artificial servants, and couldn’t fool themselves. Mayryng, would you adjust the bedspread? Yoshua, would you bring fresh coals? Mr Ocksyng, would you shoe the brown mare?

Brymdon anches ytr gastorst, he read out. Instead of laughing at his version of Ask that lamplighter to step over here she looked at him gravely and corrected his pronunciation.

Is there a section where the master seduces the serving wench? he said. Come thee hither, bonny lass, and rowp thy postillion?

Cate rested her head sideways on her bare arm, kicking, looking at him. Try page 228.

He turned to page 228, quarter of the way through the book. Present pluperfect, he read out. Mercian tense structure in the present follows the pattern laid down in lesson 25:the future. I thought Mercian didn’t have a future.

Read to the end and you’ll see, said Cate. Don’t be so fucking smart. If you read it to the end there will be a future, won’t there?

Rowp thy postillion, said Adam, putting the book down carefully and moving over to Cate. He put his left hand into the fair curls of her hair, warm from her scalp, and it made an ultrasound like foil streamers a million miles long and a millimetre wide, crinkling and billowing in a solar wind, which only he and dogs could hear. Their tongues tasted each other and the fingertips of his other hand were running up the back of her leg.

Y tess ley, he said. It was the only Mercian phrase he knew, the one he’d asked her to teach him the first time they went out, which was also the first time they slept together, and had learned straight off.

Y tess leya, she said, and started to take off his jeans. Before
he entered her she took him in her mouth, which he didn’t like, but this time he did, he barely stopped himself coming there, her grip between the tongue and the palate was so determined. Afterwards they lay on the settee together for half an hour, dozing off and on, watching the lights blinking stupidly in the branches of the tree, the fanheater thrumming against their thighs and creaking.

It’s so old, said Cate. I was lucky to find it. A library was being merged out and they were selling off a load of old books.

It’s great.

Will you study?

Of course.

I’ll help you.

Yes.

I bought you a shirt as well.

Food for the mind and food for the eh, the other thing.

If you don’t want to learn it, it’s fine, there’s no reason for you to.

I said I would, I want to, I want to be able to speak it.

I know, it’s that I saw your face – not like you were disappointed, but that the book was old, like it’d been dug up and it’d been supposed to have stayed buried.

I was hoping there’d be pictures.

That’s because you’re a moron.

They left the house at noon and took a cab to where Cate’s dad lived. As the last but one native speaker of Mercian he was to have been living in a beehive-shaped wattle and daub hut, strengthened with stone and brick in the latter generations, on a ridge among derelict cattle-pens, out poaching in all weathers, keeping the Sabbath and standing stock-still of a late summer afternoon in a cropped meadow of thistles and
cowpats and horse-flies, scoured by the shadows of the clouds passing across him.

Instead he lived in a one-room council flat in a cubic four storey block in a street with lots of space between the cars, a gasholder at one end and a triangular park with grass at the other like badly laquered hair. He had the family’s Mercian bible which he’d told Cate and Adam he didn’t read and a bronchitic black labrador. He hoarded specific items at Christmas: cans of McEwan’s Export and tins of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding.

I wasn’t expecting you so early, he said. He had the kind of face that everything which had happened to him in the past sixty years had been unexpected, but he’d made the best of it. He was astonished to find his fridge full of shiny red cans of fizzy beer, and astounded to see the size of the pot of simmering water on the cooker, and the number of inverted pudding domes hottering inside it. He was incredulous that his daughter should turn out to be married to a man called Adam, and sceptical that they should decide to visit him on December 25, of all days. When Adam recognised the theme to the Guns of Navarone, as played by the band of the Coldstream Guards, he twisted round and looked at the Bush mono player in amazement.

Happy Chrismas, Dad, said Cate, handing over the socks. The incredible act of gift-giving just about sent him doing a double somersault backwards through the window. His mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged like a fish in a net. It’s from both of us.

Thanks very much, he gasped. He’d barely sat down in his armchair and started getting over the shock when he was sent reeling again by the discovery of two small parcels on the windowledge, hidden by a line of cards. He issued the gifts,
a leather wallet for Adam and a gold chain for Cate. Cate went over and kissed him and Adam tried to make a joke about money not included, eh.

Anyway, he said. Eh … Ellsta.

Cate smiled and looked at her dad. He shrugged and wrestled with the arms of his chair, looking down and away, trying to smile and looking like a condemned man waiting for the second buzz after the first application of 2,000 volts had failed to finish the job.

Ellsta very much, said Adam.

Adam, said Cate.

Anyway, Mr Finzy, Cate’s given me this brilliant book so’s I can learn Mercian and next Christmas I’ll be speaking it properly.

Cate’s dad nodded slowly, calmer now but more worried-looking. It’ll take up a lot of your time, he said. It’s not going to help you find a job.

He wants to, Dad. We’ve got time.

It never helped me.

Adam took a drink of Export. There was silence in the room. Cate was checking her nails, frowning. Her dad was looking into the middle distance, nodding his head as if a spring had broken. He coughed.

Did you put the vegetables on, Mr Finzy? said Adam. Those puddings’ll be ready before long.

I forgot. Cate’s dad didn’t make a move.

Mm? said Cate, who’d been looking out the window.

I’ll go and see to it, said Adam.

I’ll do it, said Cate, not making a move.

Adam got up. Cate and her dad were looking at him. He let them sweat for a couple of seconds. The sun came out and all the glass in town blazed with cold reflected fire. He went to the
kitchen, leaving the door open. This also had meaning in their festive entertainment.

He put a couple of pots of salted water on to boil, located the frozen sprouts and started peeling the tatties. The dog waddled in and collapsed panting on the lino with the effort. Adam tossed a scrap of potato peel in front of his nose. The beast didn’t even sniff it, he just looked at Adam pityingly. Don’t look so superior, said Adam. Your children will eat scraps and be glad of them. They’ll make a dog that eats all the rubbish we throw away. Eh Samm? Want to have your genes altered and eat teabags? He knelt down in front of the dog and scratched it behind its ears. You’re not a Mercian dog, are you? he whispered. Just keep listening to me havering. We had this same conversation last Christmas, eh. It’s crap, isn’t it?

Samm got up and walked out of the kitchen. Cate and her dad were talking. You couldn’t make out the words, not that you’d understand them if you could. Adam stood still for a while, listening, with his hands in the water of the basin, gripping the knife, the slivers of peel rocking on the surface tickling his wrists. Great long speeches they were making to each other. What the fuck about? It sounded eloquent and interesting. He only heard his own name mentioned once. Ad-dam. He’d never be able to prove she spoke better in Mercian, even if he learned it, especially if he learned it, what could he do but slow her down, but he knew for certain, even though she denied it, that she was better in Mercian. Her English was perfect of course in a way that you didn’t think about it but her Mercian was perfect in a way that you did. It was like an otter, there was nothing to prove they preferred land or water, but you knew they liked pussing about in the river more, you just had to look at them. Dryk, the in-law kept saying, dryk.

Adam stuck the peeled tatties in the pot and went and leaned
back against the windowsill, looking down the kitchen. He tapped the box in his jeans pocket with the flat of his fingertips and didn’t take it out. That was another Mercian word he knew: cygaret. Also televysion, radyo, VCR and wheel. Wheel! That was a giveaway. They hadn’t even changed the spelling. What’d they used before, sledges?

It was necessary to get stuck in to the grammar tables, that was all. An idea existed that he was a guest and Cate’s real lover was about to arrive and at that time it’d be time to be not there.

If Birmingham was full of Mercians and him and Cate were the only English speakers and they were talking about whatever bulk-buy crispy high-fat diet nuggets of conversation they engaged in, operational stuff, it would sound the same as Cate and her dad. They weren’t reciting poetry to each other. They weren’t talking about life and death, the limits of time, the origin and the end of things, the areas that didn’t tolerate words as English had designed them, the very colours, the very sense of the change of season, the very love there was. It just sounded like it. Dryk. He knew what they were talking about. Dead relatives. Mum. Remember Mum? She was great, wasn’t she. Yeah. Remember how she used to make those things, you know, the things she used to make. That was what they were talking about.

He heard Cate say: Y leya tess.

He moved over to the cooker and tipped the sprouts into the boiling water, hoping to blister his hands, not like he was trying, but sometimes a dose of pain and disfigurement was what you needed, that was why people carried needles and razor blades in their pockets, to prick and cut themselves when they needed their mind taking off things. He ballooned his cheeks and rubbed his palms on his jeans, looking round. It was hot. You didn’t tell your dad you loved him like you told a lover you loved him,
even in Mercian, not when your husband wasn’t supposed to be listening and you knew he was.

They stopped talking and after a few minutes Cate came through to where he was standing over the pots and embraced him from behind, her hips against his bum, her cheek against his back and her palms on his chest.

OK? she said.

It’s a sauna, a sauna, a steak and kidney sauna, said Adam.

I’m sorry, she whispered. You know.

Aye, I know what I know. Get the knives and forks, eh.

At the beginning of the meal Adam said if they wanted to speak Mercian, that was fine by him, and Cate said no it was OK, and her dad said nothing, and they ate the food and Cate’s dad asked about the job hunting and when they were going up to Fife to see Adam’s family, and they got on to the price of travel, and then television subjects, and Adam asked if they could have on the Cabaret soundtrack, and Cate’s dad put it on and brought a Christmas cake out from the kitchen and Cate sliced it up for them and Adam looked at Cate’s dad, smiled and said: Y tess ley.

Don’t Adam, said Cate.

Y tess ley, said Adam again still looking at Cate’s dad and smiling. Cate’s dad didn’t look surprised any more. He looked as if he’d known this was coming since before he was born, since before the words were lost in libraries and radiowaves and dumped at the school gates, since before his folk starting coming down from the hills to the honeycombs, since before they drove the painted ones from the peaks, since before one of them said: there’s not enough room here, let’s go out west to that big island and fuck the Britons, we’re that much harder than them, the women. He rested his arms on the table on either side of his plate, cocked his head to one
side, looked Adam in the eyes and said: I’m sorry son, I don’t understand you.

Y tess ley, said Adam. It means I love you. You know. It’s your language.

It’s not
your
language, said Cate’s dad. You don’t anyway. You only come at Christmas.

I’m family.

Adam, shut up, you’re not ready, said Cate. It’s the wrong place to start.

What’s the right place to start? said Adam. He doesn’t even answer back when I say thank you.

He’s shy! You don’t know what he went through at school.

Maybe but I know what I go through every time I’m round here, standing in the kitchen for half an hour listening to songs of old Mercia and pretending not to notice.

It’s only once a year. Who do you think you are, telling my dad you love him, Mary Tyler Moore?

I’ll tell your dad I love him if I fucking well like.

You will not.

I fucking will. And Mary Tyler Moore doesn’t speak Mercian.

How do you know?

’Cause if she did she’d be packing sandwiches for Tesco’s in Wolverhampton instead of having her own TV production company and a millionaire lifestyle. Who are you to tell me what I can say to your dad?

Tell him that you love him, then. In English. Go on.