Counting Stars (3 page)

He stared down at the grass.

“Think about it! Think!”

He thought and cried.

“I think I remember,” he said at last. “I think it starts with The.”

“Hell’s teeth,” said Colin. “The bloody what?”

“The Hayning?” said Catherine. “The Crescent? The Green? The Drive?”

His eyes brightened.

“The Drive? Yes? The Drive?”

“I think so. I don’t know.”

We looked at each other. We looked over the playing fields and rooftops to the distant curved roadway named The Drive.

“But what time is it?” said Margaret.

Colin looked at his watch: just time enough, if we hurried and Valentine was right.

We gathered our things together. We lifted Margaret’s hot figures from the dying embers and laid them in the tin where the eggs and bread had been. She carried the angel that wouldn’t fit, rolling it from hand to hand because of its heat. We hurried out of the Heather Hills and away from the hospital. We kept urging Valentine to move, to hurry, we were doing this for his sake and he should at least try to keep up. He kept stopping, saying he was tired, he was too hot, he wanted to go home, we were being horrible to him. His face was wet and wild and red with weeping. I lost patience with him and half dragged him across the playing fields.

“Is it near here?” said Catherine as we entered Chilside Road and headed down toward The Drive.

“He doesn’t blinking know,” said Mary.

“I think so,” said Valentine. He said yes as we entered The Drive. He wiped his eyes with his fists.

“Yes,” he said. “That one there.”

We hesitated as he began to lead us toward it.

“Don’t leave me yet,” he said, starting to cry again.

We went to the gate. The garden inside was worn smooth as stone. Someone had been digging a deep hole. A sheet of corrugated steel was thrown across it with Danger Keep Out painted in red. At the side of the house a sleeping mongrel was chained to a clothes post and a fire was smoldering. A man stared from the window, disappeared, appeared at the door. He wore a maroon dressing gown, black boots.

“Who’s this?” he said.

“They brung me home,” said Valentine. “My friends.”

“His brother just left him,” said Mary. She pulled up Valentine’s shirt. “And look what he did to him.”

“Get in here,” said the man.

Valentine walked to the door and the man pulled him over the threshold. The door slammed. We heard the yelling from inside.

“Adrian! Get in here! Many times have I told you not to leave him? Many times have I told you not to hit the little sod?”

Then there was Adrian’s voice, yelling in pain and cursing, too, and Valentine looking out at us through his tears.

“Poor little Valentine,” we murmured as he was dragged from our sight.

“We’ll see him again,” said Catherine.

“We’ll take him to see Mam,” said Mary.

“Yes. Someday. Poor little soul.”

We turned away and Margaret sighed: she was so tired and hot, the way back was so steep. Mam would be so worried if we weren’t there on time.

The distant rooftops and chimneys of the hospital shimmered in the heat.

We heard a voice:

“Here they are! Oh, here they are!”

It was Mrs. Minto in her garden. She knelt at the border of her lawn with a trowel in her hand. She still had her battered hat on and when she rose and came to the fence we saw the little squares of carpet tied around her knees with string.

“Fancy that!” she called. “How lovely! How nice to see you all!”

She stood there beaming, with dirt on her face and a ladybird crawling over the front of her green blouse.

“Don’t move, now!”

She trotted off to her open back door and came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla in her hand. She passed it across the fence and we drank and handed it on to each other.

“Fancy you lot coming past my fence on such a lovely day. Suppose you’re off to see your mam. Give her my love. Make sure, now.”

She took a packet of biscuits from her pocket and passed them over, too.

“Go on,” she said. “You need the nourishment. Get them down.”

Colin looked at his watch and said it was all right. We’d be there on time. So we stood there and munched and drank and started to smile.

“So lovely,” said Mrs. Minto. “So warm and bright. Jesus safe in Heaven. Mam tucked up in hospital, and here’s us all together on God’s good Earth.”

Margaret inspected the angel in her hand. The surface was crumbly and one of the wings had snapped.

“Don’t worry,” whispered Catherine. “She’ll love it just the same.”

I lifted the lid of the tin and showed the others resting safe in there.

The trumpet and bell sounded from a distant boundary.

Mrs. Minto tilted her head.

“Can you hear that?” she said. “It’s gone round and round in my head all day long.”

The Baby

T
HERE WAS A SEAMSTRESS,
Miss Golightly, who lived in Kitchener Street behind Felling Square. We bought our gloves and balaclavas from her. She lengthened our hems and altered our hand-me-downs. She was no taller than I, she smelt of mints and liniment and cologne. She had a thin mustache and her earlobes were stretched by the silver earrings she wore. On cold days a tatty fur stole with animals’ heads hung over her cardigan and stared at you with stupid glassy eyes.

There were kids who said she was a witch and who wouldn’t pass her door at night. They talked about spells and spirits. They said she’d stolen children and sold them to the devil. Her great-nephew, Kev, a red-haired boy of my own age, said the stories were true. He hated her. He said his family knew she’d done terrible things. She’d been a whore in her youth and after that nobody’d touch her with a barge pole and that was why she was alone.

“Watch yourself,” he used to say. “She’s a filthy cow. She’ll start touching you up. Just you wait and see.”

When I repeated some of this at home, Mam said there wasn’t a harmful bone in the woman’s body. She wanted no more than to have children to make and mend for, and she loved us all. This seemed true to me. I liked to be with her in her little front room, to stand on a chair before her while she held her pins between her teeth and tugged at hems and seams. She touched me so gently as she smoothed the clothes to fit the body. She stroked my hair and said how quickly I grew. Afterward there were jars of wrapped sweets on her sideboard, dozens of books on her shelves, framed faded photographs on her walls.

The photographs seemed alien and ancient at first, but she guided me to see that the unknown existed within the familiar: that carnival with its brass band and tents and roundabouts took place on the fields at Felling Shore; those horses with the great leather halters around their necks drank from a trough at the center of Felling Square; that steep row of shops with the aproned proprietors outside was Felling High Street. Everywhere, there were glimpses of the world in which I’d grown: the broad river, the curve of the Heather Hills, St. Patrick’s steeple, the unmistakable gradients and intersections of our streets, the shapes of buildings beneath reconstructed facades, the names of public houses and businesses rewritten but unchanged. I sought familiarity in the people, too, looking for my ancestry in the faces of those who had held still while the film was exposed, and trying to decipher the shapes of those who had moved and left only translucent impressions like ghosts.

As I leaned close, I kept whispering, “Yes. I see.” And she smiled and nodded and squeezed my arm in congratulation.

There were many pictures of nurses. They posed in formation in hospital grounds, they were busy in field hospitals preparing for the first war. They cared for the casualties: young men on benches or slumped in wheelchairs, with their bandages, their stump limbs, their brave smiling, their deadened eyes. Once she brought a parcel from another room: her old uniform, folded and pressed, wrapped in tissue and brown paper; the dark blue skirts and the brilliant white pinafore, the cross on the bib darkened to the color of blood. She held it before her body and posed for me. She directed me to the photographs. “Where am I?” she asked, and time after time I scanned the faces until I learned to see her quick and true: the little bright and beaming one, who still survived in the gentle seamstress at my side.

It was inevitable that as I grew older her seams should begin to pucker and twist. We noticed it first when she was making me trousers from a length of blackout cloth we’d found in the back of a drawer. She was distracted that day, she found it difficult to focus on her task.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Ten,” I answered.

She counted on her fingers, whispered numbers, decades.

“Ten?”

“Yes. Ten.”

“Ten.”

She meditated, or dreamt, with her needle poised in midair. It was November, near to Remembrance Day. I remember the red poppies we were wearing at our breasts. Frost was resting in the joints of the cobbles outside. A family hurried by, parents and small children in a close group with their breath in clouds around them. When she came out of it and stitched again, her fingers slipped and she drew a little bulb of blood from my leg.

“Poor soul,” she whispered as she dabbed my skin with cotton wool. “Such tender things.”

She stitched again, half dreaming.

“How old are you?” she asked. “How old?”

Afterward we stood before the photographs again.

“There you are,” I told her.

“And here’s this one,” she said.

Beneath her finger was a grinning black-haired soldier, helmet in his hand, thick uniform buttoned to his throat. He stood by a front door like hers, which opened directly to the pavement. Even in this darkened print you saw how the sun had beaten down that day, glared upon the brick walls and the threshold, how the soldier narrowed his dark eyes against the relentless light and grinned and grinned.

“See?” she said.

“Yes.”

She turned me to another photograph, a crowd of soldiers in loose formation on a railway platform on a duller day.

“Where is he?” she said.

I played the game, scanned the faces.

“That one.”

“No. This one,” she said. “This bonny one.”

We went to other photographs.

“Where is he?”

“This one.”

“No, this one. See?”

“I see.”

She cupped my chin in her palm. She pressed my cheek with the tips of her cold fingers, pressed harder upon my cheekbone, traced the delicate curve of my temple.

“Silly bonny boy,” she said. “And where is he now?”

She dreamt again, then left me and went to somewhere else in the house and came back with another photograph. It was the head of the soldier, in shirt and tie, relaxed, hardly faded at all, smiling through the even light at us. The name of a Felling photographer was embossed in the corner of the print.

“Here he is,” she said.

She touched the flesh of my cheek again.

She wrapped up the trousers in brown paper.

“I told him, you know. Don’t go. Nurses know the body’s such a soft and fragile thing.”

At home, Mam fingered the crooked stitching at my waist. She tugged the material and tried to make it fall evenly to my ankles. She knelt at my side with scissors and needle and thread, opened the stitches, tried to close them again more evenly. She sighed and shook her head and said they’d just have to do, I could use them for playing in.

I told her about the soldier.

“Poor body,” she whispered. “Poor soul.”

We didn’t use Miss Golightly for some time afterward.

Mam still called on her, and came back with stories of how she was failing.

It was my eleven-plus year. Dad said that I was carrying the dreams of the past, that I was a pioneer. Preparation at school was relentless: day after day of Maths Progress Tests and English Progress Tests and prayers that the hardworking would be rewarded. I took the examination at Jarrow Grammar School. There were scores of us there, ranked and registered in the yard by district and school and name. Ban the Bomb and great Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbols were painted on the corrugated roofs of the outside classrooms. Stern teachers stood around us like warders. Even in the toilets we were watched. I stood dazed in there, stared at myself in a cracked mirror, saw the baby and the boy in me, saw the images of my parents upon me. Someone yelled at me to move, to get out. As I stumbled past him he shoved me on my way.

When I began to write in the regimented hall, in a silence broken by scared breathing and the padding feet of proctors, I began to be released. I knew, as Dad had said, there was nothing for me to worry about, that I would be rewarded.

I passed, and the uniform was gray: gray flannel blazer with a badge of battlements and lances, gray flannel cap, gray shorts and socks. The blazer slopped down over my shoulders, the shorts kept slipping down across my hips. I stood at the center of the family and they smiled and giggled. Dad put his arm around me and said who knew what wonders time would bring. He took me around the town in his Austin. He burst in on our relatives and called down their congratulations upon me. They laughed at my shyness and pressed coins in my hand. They poured glasses of beer for Dad. His own father told me he’d seen it in me as soon as I was born.

Dad took me to Miss Golightly to have tucks sewn into the shorts. He left me there and walked around the corner to the Columba Club. She beamed with joy, kissed my cheek, said she’d thought I’d left her.

She stood me before her and tugged my uniform into place.

She wore a battered cardigan. The flesh on her cheeks was sagging and wrinkled. There was a vague scent of urine in the house. When she began to tack my shorts with pins she trembled. When I felt her fingers on my skin, I thought of what Kev had said and I cursed myself for it. I sat with a towel around me while she held the shorts in her hands and worked with needle and thread. Spring light poured in from the street, fragments of silvery dust were buoyed upon it: I gazed around the little crowded room, at the photographs.

“Miss Golightly,” I said. “What happened to the soldier?”

She looked at me in surprise. I could see how her eyes strained to focus on me after staring at the needle point. She clicked her tongue, raised her eyebrows, laughed a little.

“Death,” she said. She went back to her work. “That’s all. Just death.”

I put the shorts back on. I stood before her. She touched my cheek.

“How old now?” she asked.

“Eleven.”

We unwrapped sweets together and stood before the photographs.

“My bonny boy,” she whispered.

She sighed. She squeezed my arm. I felt how small beside me she had become.

“You’ll be going off soon,” she said.

She dreamt.

“This is secret,” she whispered.

She left me. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She came back with a polished wooden box in her hands. She put it on the sideboard, lifted its lid with trembling hands, then took the jar out from inside and showed her baby to me.

It was a fetus suspended in liquid. It was hardly longer than my thumb. There were buds of eyes and nose and mouth on its face, little half-formed hands raised to the chest, little knees raised to the belly. It rested upright with its spine gently arched as it curled in upon itself.

“My little boy,” she whispered.

She rested her palm upon the curve of the jar.

“He would have been like you are.”

We watched the baby in the liquid, the thin shaft of light falling upon him.

“What’s he called?” I asked.

“He would have been Anthony, like his father. But death happened in me too.”

She put her arm across my shoulder. We were silent and we dreamt.

“Do you see us in him?” she asked. “Me and my soldier?”

Then Dad was knocking on the door. She put the jar back in the box. She kissed me and told me it was secret. When she let Dad in she told him what a fine lad I’d become. He laughed, and said hadn’t he just come from showing off about me in the Columba Club.

I grew quickly that summer. I played in the blackout trousers. They faded, they tightened, the hems frayed and holes were worn into the knees. I played in the great soccer games on the high playing fields: dozens of boys from opposing streets rushing at the ball and kicking and cursing each other. I set off with my friends on expeditions into the Heather Hills. We carried knives and homemade spears and parcels of sandwiches. We looked down upon the new buildings rising in Felling Square. We squatted among the ruins of the old gun site, peered to the distant North Sea, reported bombers coming in. We lit fires and smoked cigarettes pinched from our fathers. Our bodies ached and tingled with sunlight, exhaustion, exhilaration. We lay close together in the warm long grass and talked of the journeys we’d take when we’d grown.

Sometimes I came across Kev Golightly. He grinned at me and talked of the filthy old witch and asked if she’d been in my pants yet.

I dreamt of Miss Golightly’s slackening flesh, of her dead soldier, of her baby in the jar. Often it began to grow, familiar features to appear in its face.

Late August I went with Dad to buy new pens and a mathematics set. I put on the uniform again, felt how the blazer had become a closer fit. A bus pass naming my route was sent to me. The days were shortening fast. Earlier and earlier we looked down from the hills to the whole of Tyneside fading into the dusk.

“That’s it,” we whispered on the final evening as we went back down.

Miss Golightly’s heart gave out that October. A child who passed through Kitchener Street one morning saw her lying dead at the center of her living room. I went with my parents to the funeral. She lay in her coffin at the front of the church while the service was said. I knew that she would have already begun to decay and I tried to imagine her lying in there. I wore my uniform, and I fingered the last stitches she’d made for me, which would soon need to be undone. We spoke the prayers and sang the hymns for her. The minister said that she had left the troubled body behind and had been born again into glory. I said a private prayer that her soldier would be waiting for her. I heard her voice in me: Where am I? Where is he? and I cried, for I understood that their baby could not be there with her.

Afterward, as we drove home in the Austin, Mam said she’d heard Miss Golightly’s family had been awful, already fighting to get their hands on the few things she’d owned.

By then I’d heard teachers whispering that I was the best of my year. Dad said I had the world in the palm of my hand. Mam smiled as she unpicked Miss Golightly’s stitches, and asked where her little boy had gone. One evening Kev Golightly’s mother came to the door with a parcel. She said the old woman had written a note that I should have these. She scowled and told Mam it would take weeks to get rid of the clutter. She said you wouldn’t believe the things they’d found in there. She stood and watched as I unwrapped the photographs of the nurses and soldiers and of Felling as it was. She looked at Mam and raised her eyes and shook her head and hurried out into the night. Dad helped me to put the photographs up in my bedroom. I showed them Miss Golightly in her youth. I showed them her soldier. Together we picked out the familiar features of our town. I recalled Miss Golightly’s brightness, her gentle touch.