Being Here (15 page)

I am touched.

She wanted to be at my funeral. She wanted to say goodbye.

I am moved beyond anything I've experienced lately. The tears that stubbornly refused to materialise at Lucy's funeral now make an abrupt appearance. I watch the landscape through their haze.

I am an old fool and I don't know why I am weeping.

CHAPTER 13

D
ICKENSIAN LONDON WAS A SQUALID
, crowded, noisy, smelly place.

The author's words were strange. Many I did not understand. But the pictures he painted with them were vivid. Oliver was painfully thin. His spirit shone through his skin. Fagin was not, as he seemed to become later, when the novel was turned into an entertainment for the eyes only, a lovable scallywag, but a bent and bitter soul with darkness in his heart. The Artful Dodger was old beyond his years. He was the sin of the times, a childhood withered before it had had the chance to bloom.

I read to Adam, but in my mind Pagan was always there, his tail thumping on the barn floor, raising small clouds of dust. I finished the first day of Oliver's arrival in London. When I glanced up from the page, Adam was regarding me as if nothing else existed. Maybe it didn't.

‘I have seen that place,' he said.

‘Show me?' I said.

‘So your mother let you keep the ripped-up book?' says Carly. ‘That's kind of out of character.'

‘It was never mentioned again,' I reply. ‘Something changed the day she killed my dog. She never apologised. As I told you before, there was nothing to apologise for. But you don't spend your entire life weighing up moral consequences, as mother did, without wondering if what you did was wrong, if she had in some way betrayed me. So she ignored the issue. I kept the loose pages of my book in an old box in the barn. She knew they were there. But neither of us spoke of it. We carried on as if nothing had happened, our respective secrets in respective boxes. We never mentioned Pagan again either.'

‘All that secrecy and fear. It must have been a horrible life.'

‘But it wasn't, Carly. Seriously. Mother loved me. I loved her. We both loved the farm.'

She snorts.

‘Why do you find that so hard to believe?' I ask.

‘You're kiddin' me, right? Unless it's like that battered wife thing. You know, the women who are so low on self-esteem that they end up thinking violence is a kind of love.'

‘Listen,' I say. ‘I am using the tools of narrative. I am focusing on only part of the picture, the conflict that drives my story. I might have told you instead about the time Mamma dressed us up as characters from a book. She took the role of the wicked witch and I was Snow White, but we laughed so much we couldn't stay in character. Or the picnics by the dam, my head resting on her stomach as I watched clouds drift. Or collecting windfalls from the orchard, the two of us dunking for apples as they bobbed in a water trough. Mamma and me. Soaked in water and laughter.'

The images are sharp in my mind. Every detail is in focus.

The girl doesn't appear convinced. She scratches at her forehead.

‘I guess I'll have to take your word for it,' she says. ‘Tell me about Adam instead.'

Carly hadn't turned on the recording machine until I'd insisted. We both knew our talks would never see the light of day in any school assignment. But I wanted to feel my words weren't just fluttering in the air for a while before shrivelling and dying, like moths around an indifferent flame. The machine was a comfort.

‘Tell you about Adam?' I said. ‘The problem is knowing when to stop …'

I think … It is difficult to know what I think. Even more difficult to know what I believed then, so many years ago. Five lifetimes for someone of your age. But I believe that, at first, Adam changed according to my needs. His personality, but also his looks. Whatever my child-like imagination created as the exotic, the exciting, from the little I knew and the lot I had read. He was
my
fiction.

That changed the night Pagan died. Adam was truly outside of me now. He no longer owed me his existence. And that was wonderful, because he became more magnificent than I
could
imagine. Those eyes, a romantic brown at first, became flecked with grey. His body was no longer the hard and muscled fantasy of a pre-pubescent girl. Not that I had fantasies. Not consciously at least. And I certainly had no conception of sexuality. That was not something taught in church, and, as you can imagine, it was not a topic Mother would have found suitable for instruction or after-dinner conversation. But a sexual nature there was, though I would never have known where it came from nor recognised its manifestations. I think maybe that was part of it. Bury sexuality and it must surface somewhere. For me, it surfaced in Adam. Anyway, he became softer. His hair curled, turned coarser. He wasn't an idealised version of an older brother or a romantic lover. He was … He was Adam.

And he loved me. I knew that. Perhaps at first he had no choice. I'd designed it as the cornerstone of his creation. But now … he was freed from that compulsion. He chose to love me. And that made the love sweeter than I can describe.

He was truly independent of me. Adam had little in the way of a sense of humour. He was so earnest, he would take things literally. And no woman I know would create someone with a stunted sense of humour. It's what women find most attractive, or so I'm told. Yet Adam rarely laughed. Even his smiles were, more often than not, a response to mine. He went to extravagant lengths to please me. Some of the places we visited – the landscape of books I so adored – were, for him, unexciting, even tedious. Yet he was with me every step of the way. He grew to hate London in the nineteenth century. The sweaty bulk of humanity offended his soul. Yet he never complained. He knew that for me the world was inside my head. He wanted to be wherever I was.

On the farm, he sensed those few occasions when I wanted to be alone. I'm not sure he understood them. He seemed to think any time spent apart from me was wasted. Yet he would vanish when I wanted to roam the orchards by myself and obviously any time when mother was around. Every morning when I woke he would be curled up at the end of my bed. I once called him as faithful as a dog with a dog's sleeping habits. He didn't smile. He didn't take offence. It was simply what he wanted to do.

And Adam was affectionate. He loved to touch me, the feel of my hair on his fingers or the taste of my skin on his lips. Sometimes we would hug and feel the beating of each other's heart. Even now, after all the long years we have been apart, I feel his absence as a physical sensation. It is a knife within my flesh. It is a knife within my soul.

Carly plucks at her lower lip. I realise she finds it hard to believe. I am slumped in my chair and I know what she sees. An old woman, with hair as dry and dead as parched grass, her skin loose on her bones, crumpled, desiccated, hollow. What would such a creature know about passion? More importantly, why would she have the bad manners to comment on it? It is an offence to good taste.

Yet nothing in her eyes betrays such thoughts. She is absorbed. Maybe moved.

‘What happened to Adam, Mrs C?' she says. ‘Where did he go?'

‘His story is not yet told,' I say. ‘We will get there, Carly. You know what they say. All things come to those who wait.'

‘I thought it was good things come to those who wait.'

‘And do you believe that, Carly?'

She considers this for a few moments.

‘I don't know. I haven't had to do much waiting.'

‘I have.' I smile.

‘Well, what about your mother's book, then?' she asks. ‘The one she spent all her time writing. Did you ever get to read it? Or is that something else you'll tell me when the time is right?'

‘Oh, I read it,' I reply. ‘But not until she died. Apart from what little remained of the farm and some furniture fit only for Mrs Hilson's junk shop, it was all she left me. I remember opening the box, a few months after she died. The key was lost, so I had to force the lock. That struck me as fitting, somehow. She tried to keep her secret right to the end. And beyond.'

‘What was it like?'

I travel back to that moment. I feel again the icy hardness of the strong box, hear the crack as the lock yields. The pages are a solid block. I pull them out and place them on the kitchen floor. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, covered in mother's small, neat script. Her life's work, heavy with responsibility. Words from decades earlier ring in my mind:
I will write a story that
will be perfect, about a place where we will want to live
forever
. I am scared. But I read anyway.

‘It was rubbish,' I say. ‘Rambling thoughts, ill-conceived ideas about a way of living that, unsurprisingly, was based upon fundamentalist Christian philosophy. There were rudiments of plotting. Many characters who shared two basic characteristics: all unbelievable and poorly drawn. Maidens whose only distinguishing feature was their allegiance to chastity and virtue. Heroes who were diluted Christs. Villains who were flimsy variations of the Devil. How can you make the Devil flimsy? It was rubbish, pure and simple. If there was nothing else to make you pity that woman, it was the reading of her life's work.'

‘Did you read it all?'