The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (4 page)

I pick it up.

My hands are numb with cold, but the sharpness of the point, the keenness of its edges, can still cut through that. Holding it in the palm of my hand, examining it from every angle, I draw its sharp edge across the fleshy heel of my thumb, then drop it into my pocket and continue planting my Christmas tree the best I can.

When I've finished and my gumboots are caked in mud from pushing the soil down around the roots and the base of the trunk, I stand back and admire my handiwork. It's almost dark, but my eyes have adjusted as the light's dissolved. And I no longer care about the hiding I'll get.

However, the tree seems too empty now, and cold, so I kneel down and sift through the box of decorations. Pulling out three of the glass birds, I peg them on different branches, and the tree is happy again.

Later, heading upstairs to my bedroom, I stop to look at Dad's ‘effects', still sitting on the cabinet in that horrible plastic bag. Having planted the tree, I'm feeling reckless and brave and so I unfold it, take out his wristwatch, put it to my ear, listen to the soft tick of it: the gentlest of movements. It's still going. Though it's too big for me, I strap it to my wrist, and then, before refolding the bag the way it was, I take one last, long heady draught of the smell of his tobacco. My dad. My tree. My watch.

Our home withers and the house acquires a smothering quiet about it; soil-heavy and pressing down. Living there is like being buried alive. And something between my mother and me withers too.

Another visitor comes casting a shadow through the glass of the front door about a week after Christmas. The visitor is
all
shadow, even though it's dark outside.

“Hello, young man,” it croaks.

Dark-suited, dark-browed and sunken-jowled, I recognise Reverend Lofton, even though he's not wearing his black frock. Visible between the lapels of his coat is a black vest and white collar, while craning down from this is the craggy face of a gargoyle, beaking forward with a lop-sided grin and hollow eyes. His likeness is chiselled in stone, perched along the roofline of St Giles' church, facing the school. At Harvest Festival and Christmas and Easter each year, he leads the school in morning assembly, chanting sentences that bubble and stew around the hall, which already reeks of stale school dinners, as he preaches about flesh and blood and corruption, bread and wine, life and death, salvation and damnation.

He brings a cloying scent into the house, which pervades the lounge and hallway, but beneath it is the centuries-old dampness and mildew of crumbling stone. I walk past the doorway several times and notice him sitting forward in the chair, balancing a teacup and saucer on its arm. The best china. He may be offering sympathy and solace, the busy God's-body, but even at seven I recognise how proud my mother is. She sits opposite, in my father's chair, and holds her teacup with her little finger poised uncharacteristically in the air.

“Why was that man here, Mum?” I ask afterwards. I'm in my pyjamas and I've even brushed my teeth, but my dressing-gown won't button up anymore.

She's sewing. Lengthening a hem or mending something.

“Reverend Lofton? To see if we're alright, I suppose.”

“Are we?”

“Of course we are.”

“Why don't we go to church, Mum?” And I expect anything from anger to delight.

She carries on with her sewing. “We just don't.” Blunt. As hard-edged as her thimble.

I move closer to her sewing, stand in her light. She looks up.

“Some of my friends do.”

“What?”

“Go to church.”

“You want to go too?” She pricks her finger with the needle and puts it to her mouth.

Although he's a man who scares me (partly because he's more gargoyle than man – a bogey-man – and partly because everything about him stinks of death), I'm also curious.

“I don't know,” I say, knowing that I do, and realise in the same instant that my dressing-gown is inside-out.

“Why on earth would you?”

I shrug.

For the following Sunday, she asks Mrs Davies, an elderly neighbour, to take me to church with her. I've learnt enough at school to know it's a house of ghosts and souls, and that maybe Dad's ghost or soul might find a way there too.

The Reverend Lofton is cloaked in the softness of white and purple – surplice and silk stole – but he can't mask his gaunt face. Escorted by a dozen choirboys, he slides from the vestry, up and down the gloomy aisles, snaking through the eleventh-century church towards the chancel, illuminated by candles burning gold and brilliant against the burnished brass. My skin prickles and, at first, I'm sure it's because ghosts from all the way back to the Dark Ages are pressing against me, hanging off the backs of the oak pews, kicking their hallowed heels to every chanted response in the ritual. While the sermon is boring beyond anything I'd ever imagined, everything else is part of the dark mystery: the foreign language, the wine and the slivers of bread, the hymns, the sitting and standing, the kneeling and praying – the mumbo-jumbo of magic. Hocus pocus; abracadabra.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.

Our Father.

Our Father who art.

Hallowed be Thy name.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and give us this day our daily bread.

Forever and ever and ever and ever.

So be it. Amen.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.

But when I walk out, nothing's changed at all. If there're ghosts in there, then Dad's isn't one of them. I'm further from him than ever before, and drifting towards learning that death is the premature extinction of a light, along with all the possibilities of its hidden colours, replaced by the dark vacuum of winter night. For all time.

Old Lofty – the Angel of Death – visits once more, about a fortnight later, but not after that. I've been playing at a friend's house, but I can smell him and the best china is sitting on the draining board. This time, I ask nothing of my mother and don't go to church again either.

A respectable year and a quarter passes before Brian Taylor slithers onto the scene – or before I meet him, let's say. Outside, it's a cold, spring day, with daffodils in bloom, shivering yellows in the wind, hurrying-up the sun. Inside, the atmosphere is tense with the odours of purple Windowlene, polish and purple hyacinths.

“This is Mr Taylor,” Mum says. The visitor she's made me wear a crummy tie for. “Say hello to Mr Taylor.”

Her eyes are shining, probably from polish fumes.

“Hello, Mr Taylor.”

He stretches out his hand to shake mine, man-to-man. I'm eight. He has a dark moustache and thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and he has the smell and slip of Brillo in his hair and on his hands.

“You can call me Uncle Brian. He can, can't he, Margaret?”

“He can.”

There's a celebratory smile between them, which I catch, but pretend not to. If it was a butterfly, I'd put it in a glass jar to see if it'd lay eggs… and it'd die there.

All the same, it's good to be made a fuss of. For a while.

Brian Taylor is listening to the radio with Mum when I'm told: “Say night-night and get yourself ready quick-smart for bed, young man.” He's absent the next morning, but rings the doorbell an hour before lunch. I know he'll reappear because the smell of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding hasn't filled the house since the accident.

“We used to have Sunday dinner every week when Dad was alive,” I say by way of polite, man-to-man, lunchtime chitchat. “Didn't we, Mum?”

“Ssh,” she says. “I've told you before I don't want to hear you talk about that. If you've got nothing useful to say then don't say anything.”

“How about we go to the park this afternoon?” Mr Taylor says, stabbing the roast potatoes and cutting the beef with a fierceness that's been missing from meals for too long.

We go that week, the following week, and the week after that.

It doesn't matter at first because I like hearing her laugh again, even if he grips her hand in his own slippy paw; even if it's him that makes her laugh – not me, not Dad. There's been times when she's spat bitter words at the memory of my father, and I've felt guilty, as though some of this was my fault and because her sense of loss was bigger than anything I could replace it with.

“Do we have to do the same thing every week?” I ask one time.

“It's a kindness,” she tells me from the bathroom mirror, pursing her lips to achieve symmetry of lipstick. No longer the same person. “He doesn't have to take you to the park.”

“We could go by ourselves,” I say. “You and me.”

“We could, but we never did though.”

This is true. And whose fault is it?

I try running circles around their conversation as they walk the village pavements arm-in-arm, expecting me to skip ahead. I imagine I'm the string on a kite tying their words up in a tangle of interruptions, so they'll have nothing left to say to one another, but they're quicker than that.

Several months after, following a brief appointment among the red carpets and plush government furnishings of Northampton Registry Office, we're officially made a family. The frequency of the man's visits and the ease with which he's settled into Dad's chair puts the event beyond surprise.

And the memory of my father as a person recedes. With it goes part of who I am – my link with who I've come from, my connection to our past. There's nothing else to hold onto except his name – the smallest of fragments – and the knowledge of his death.

Until they try smashing that too.

I've been sent to bed early after something I've said, but, unable to sleep, I pad downstairs quietly, politely, in the hope I'll be forgiven and allowed to watch TV. When I'm in the hallway though, I stop to flick my hair into a parting, the way Mum likes it, and I hear them talking about me.

“Tell the boy, Margaret. You've got to tell him sooner or later.”

I move to the doorway of the kitchen and stand there with my arms at my side, thinking they'll see me waiting politely, but she's got her hands on the edge of the sink, facing the window, and he's standing behind her, talking to her back.

“Not yet. I can't.”

“The longer you leave it, the harder it'll get, and he'll keep on saying these things. What happens when some busy-body tells him his Dad killed himself? What then?”

“Ssh,” she spits, “don't you dare. Don't you ever dare.” There's a pause, before she adds in a softer tone: “He might hear.”

“For crying out loud, Margaret, the boy's asleep, thank God,” he says, and turns away from her to see me standing there. The clock ticks. The water gurgles down the sink. “Well, there you go. Why the hell aren't you asleep like you were told?”

My mother turns then and, at the sight of me, covers the round ‘O' of her mouth with one hand, as if she can shovel their words back in.

“Why aren't you in bed?” Her hand straightens and tenses, ready to slap.

“I couldn't sleep. You're talking about Dad,” I say. It's an accusation. “You can't talk about Dad,” I tell Brian. “Mum doesn't like it.” Now I'm parroting the day's lesson back at him.

He seems to expand several inches when I say this, like an angry red balloon, and I'm ready to duck if he explodes.

“This is bloody ridiculous, Margaret. Tell him. You have to ruddy tell him.” In two steps, he pushes past me and then I hear the front door slam.

We're alone in the kitchen now and, with both hands, she beckons me. I think she's going to hug me, because I've stood up for her against Brian, but she puts her hands on my shoulders and grips them hard, digging her fingers in, clamping me in place.

“Your father killed himself,” she hisses. “He put a rope round his neck. Do you understand me?” Her face is hard; she isn't crying.

I stand looking at her and can't speak or blink. She might as well have hit me.

“There, is that what you wanted to know? I hope you're proud of yourself. Does that make everything better, does it?”

I try taking a step back, but she grabs me tight again and I lose one of my slippers. There'll be red marks under my pyjamas. “He was in a car crash,” I say. “I saw the policeman come round. You told me he was.”

“Now you damn well listen to me and listen well.” And she begins shaking me backwards and forwards. Her fingers are pressing in and hurting, and when I try shaking them off she shakes me harder. “He hanged himself. Put a rope round his neck, rather than… couldn't… the coward… He was weak.”

“He was in a car crash.”

“I sold the car to pay the bills.”

“No!” I shout. “No!”

And now she lets me go. She takes a step back and turns to face the window.

“Yes,” she says. Quietly. “He gave everything up, including you. That's how much he cared.” She turns from the window and begins tidying her hair. “Don't you ever ask about him again. I don't ever want to hear him spoken about. Not ever. I forbid it.”

“Why? Why shouldn't I?”

“Get out of here. Go to bed this minute.”

The year after that was the year the twins were born. Annette and Andrew. A half-sister and a half-brother, but too young to be fun.

*

I begin digging my way to Australia, I suppose, and twenty-odd years later we arrive.

Beyond the runway and airport traffic, is a vast, dry plain and, on the distant horizon, an eruption of hills. There's a clear, sharp light and a cloudless, soft, deep blue to this morning sky, which is wider and higher than anything I've ever met before. I almost trip over with looking up.

“Birdie,” Elspeth says, tottering towards some kind of honeyeater.

A line of ants trails across the red brick pavement and up a palm tree, but the taxi rank is empty.