‘Me too. It’s confusing. All those hormones. All that Brylcreem. I used so much of that stuff my mother would put sheets on the backs of the armchairs to stop me staining them. I was out of school, working in a factory, crazy with lust. You remember how it was?’
‘I remember.’ I’d been sixteen years old when I lost my virginity to a young man named Alfie Burrows who lived next door. We did it in his treehouse at the height of summer and played Alice Cooper records when his parents weren’t home. I told him when I grew up I wanted to be a botanist. He said he would be a famous footballer. That autumn he moved away and never wrote to me again. One year later I would meet a man called Mark Hudson at the bus stop outside the greyhound racing who would later breathlessly promise not to ejaculate inside me but do so anyway, rolling a cigarette on his hairy stomach afterwards and saying, ‘Women never get pregnant if they’re on top anyway, don’t worry.’
‘Teenagers are stupid,’ Tony said, interrupting my memory. ‘They’re dickheads. They make shitty decisions and think they know it all. I know she was a handful, Sam. I know she made your life hard sometimes. But at the heart of it that’s all Edie is, a typical teenager. She’s made a bad choice and she’s probably somewhere regretting it right now and trying to figure out how to come home. All right?’
‘I don’t know if I believe that any more, Tony.’
Over the road, the neighbours had come out on their doorsteps, arms folded. Peering into the street. I lifted my hand and waved imperiously, like the Queen herself.
Frances – Now
St Mary de Castro is just outside the centre of town, ten minutes from the high street. The building itself is tall and imposing, looking more like a red-brick castle than a church. It’s modern, too, tall and airy and spacious, without that perfume of old churches: damp stone, old books, mildew. The churchyard itself is around the back, through a pair of rusted iron gates. As you step inside, a little sign has been erected to show you what wildlife you might see. Slow worms, finches, rabbits and mice. The sky is hazy and dull with a prickle of heat in it that suggests a summer storm. There is no one else around as I make my way down the churchyard path. I’d expected it to be hard work, but I find the grave after a few minutes’ searching. It’s by a large holly tree that’s ringed off by an old metal fence. Edward Thorn, 1935–1997. Steadfast husband and father. ‘I am nearer God’s heart in the garden than anywhere else on earth.’
There’s a tangle of ivy over his grave, and flowers, long dead, tied to the headstone. The cellophane crinkles noisily in the breeze. Alex must have been here, or Mimi maybe. Whoever it was, they haven’t visited for a while. By the looks of things, no one has. I straighten up, knees popping, wondering idly if William will come and visit the grave before we head back to Swindon. I doubt it. William rarely mentions his father, except to suggest he was weak and somehow contemptible. My mind keeps circling back to the crow that flew into the greenhouse roof yesterday afternoon, cracking its skull wide open on the glass. ‘A bad omen,’ Alex had said. ‘It foretells a death.’ Of course I’d laughed, but now, standing here in this churchyard, surrounded by the headstones of people who once lived and breathed and loved, their remains feeding back into the earth – bonemeal, I think, my stomach queasy – it’s harder to dismiss the omen of a death, even one heralded by a bird.
I hope it’s not Mimi, I think, brushing leaves from my knees. I don’t know how William will cope if anything happens to her. He loves his mother with the sort of deliberateness with which he approaches paperwork; a focus that is almost entirely singular. She refers to him as her ‘precious first-born’ and tells me that he was the only thing that kept her alive when she suffered bleak post-natal depression.
‘Just to look at his face, those beautiful eyes, so innocent – as if he was just telling me to hold on.’
I had to get out of the house this morning. Mimi’s taken another turn. She had her meds as usual at eight o’clock, but by half past her eyes were darting to the window, growing agitated.
‘Where’s that robin?’ she was saying, over and over. ‘He’s got a message for me.’ She gripped my hand with her own, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks. ‘Who are you?’
‘It’s me, Mimi. Frances. William’s wife.’
Mimi turned towards me, her bony elbow knocking over the glass of water that stood on the nesting tables beside her bed. I cried out in dismay as it soaked into her sheets and lap, but she barely noticed. She looked at me curiously, her pale eyes searching my face.
‘Who’s William?’
‘Come on, let’s sit you up, get you out of that wet bed.’
‘He boiled the bones in pots on the stove.’
I froze then, in the act of helping her out of the bed. That image, of bones boiling in pots on the stove, made my blood turn cold and fast-moving, like a river of melting snow. Mimi’s thin legs hung over the edge of the mattress like sticks. I could see the blue tinge of her skin, burst blood vessels beneath the surface like tangled threads. Mimi was looking straight ahead, past me, out the window into the garden. Her voice trembled.
‘We return to the earth. That’s why the tomatoes taste so good. Where’s that robin?’
Mimi fell silent as I helped her into the armchair, smoothing back the wisps of grey hair that floated about her face. Her teeth chattered, although she wasn’t cold.
I pressed
