She sat down to her feast with a heavy heart. The pot was in pride of place like a centrepiece at Christmas dinner, surrounded by cakes and dips and asparagus tips, flans and chicken drumsticks and salads busy with colour, stiff with dressings. The urn of gold seemed to exert its own dull pressure on her spirits. ‘Get rid of me,’ it urged tonelessly; ‘I’ll bring you nothing but ill fortune. Why didn’t my last owner cash me in? Have you thought about that?’
‘That’s a point,’ the infant clucked, fleshly again and sitting across the table from Charlotte. ‘One simply doesn’t get lucky like this. Gold coins! It doesn’t happen! Not to people like us!’
‘Why are you going on at me like this? What do you want?’ She was a touch distraught.
The child looked solemn. ‘Allow me to do your garden. I’d like that.’
Overcome, Charlotte stood shakily and went to embrace the child, but she tripped on the rug beneath the table, fell and hit her head.
She came to, feeling dreadful, quite early on Sunday morning. With a throbbing headache she emptied the ruined party food into her wheely bin. While out there she took in her garden. It was looking unkempt by now. Her little man hadn’t been round in a while.
She went to bed for the rest of the day, leaving Classic FM playing on the Teasmade by her bed. She mulled over the course her life was taking.
All Sunday she dreamed listlessly of when she was married to a soldier and taught children and had a garden with roses in the south.
Monday morning she was late in at the Spastics shop. She’d stopped down the Burn on her way and, in a little ceremony on the wooden bridge, dropped the pot in the water. It hit with a ker-plunk. The water looked exactly like morning sun coming through her full cafetiere. She went to work.
Monday morning meant a good deal of new belongings ln the back room. Charlotte put on her rubber gloves. This Monday was a little below par, she thought. Or maybe she was disgruntled, throwing a fortune away. She almost wished she was religious; couldn’t she have felt virtuous, performing a sacrifice like that?
She struggled with the clasp of a battered blue suitcase. Picturing the gold scattered on the rocks in the Burn. Those stunted fish nosing at the abandoned coins. There was definitely something inside the case; she had to check.
Not many books this week. Not many bargains for me, she was afraid. (Though she was wrong, I found. Lady Chatterley twenty pence. But it was my own copy, donated out of spite by my sister.) And inside the case: heaps of crumbling newspaper. It came onto her fingers like grey pollen and went up her nose. The pages were dated 1933 and a heavy stench came out after all that time: rotten fish and chips. The papers were bundled around some light, solid object and she worked into this parcel, soon discovering the child’s skeleton.
Silhouetted that evening in the matte blue window of her yellow brick of a bungalow we could see Charlotte slumped in her swivelling tortoise shell. She watched, rapt, while the child sat up at the smallest of her nest of tables and ravenously ate a meal she had cooked him. His bones were faintly yellowed, slick with plaque.
At last the child finished his first supper for many years, belched, and began:
‘I was a child who menaced an old man who lived down our lane. He worked in his garden and I would stand in his gateway, aping his every action in order to annoy him. Cutting grass, pruning hedges, pressing saplings into the earth. I’d take him off for badness’ sake. I was only a child. Only learning. And one day he must have had enough because he brought out a sharp knife and I thought, This is it! I’ve pushed my luck!
‘Yet he came nowhere near me. He simply mimed, for my benefit, slashing his own throat, there and then in his garden. Then he went in for his tea, still furious, leaving the knife on the lawn.
‘When he returned for a last go at his beds, there he found me, white and slashed in a gleaming pool on his garden path.’
‘There, there,’ Charlotte consoled him.
An emaciated cupid, a stripeless buzzing bumblebee has supplanted Charlotte’s young man in the garden. You can see the skeletal child hovering about her shrubs in the very middle of the night, if you’re coming in late, sneaking round the houses. The child will have secateurs in hand, being business-like, wearing its ineluctable maniac’s grin. But the child is glad of the work. He’s handy, too, because his spiritual powers and know-how ward off disasters. So Charlotte hopes she’ll never get a van or a lorry through her front-room wall, like that old bloke did. She exists within an enchanted circle of the child’s deceit and sups contentedly alone still, on Saturday nights.
COLD COMPANIONABLE STREAMS
‘Look!’
My mother, Hilde, pointed out to sea. We were walking across the scrubby headland. It was a treat; the place I used to walk with Father. In this evening’s lowering gloom, however, we found there was no more enjoyment to be squeezed from this place. Things had changed.
‘Eliza, look!’
She dug me in the ribs, and I was forced—rather sulkily; I was, with good reason, I think, an uncommunicative adolescent—to glance across the bay. The sun was setting; sky, land and water had acquiesced to the colour and texture of raw, streaky bacon. Eleven wild swans ruffled this calm.
‘Eleven!’ Hilde sighed. I shall call her Hilde; she was never my real mother.
‘So?’
Her face twisted itself into one of those pitying leers. My slow-wittedness was, she claimed, the bane of her life. Already it had caused me endless trouble. Surely even I ought to see the prudence
