Dead Letters Anthology (5 page)

For a moment, I was stunned. My head was like a hive of bees. Where had that memory come from? And how could a picture of me as a child have found its way into an envelope dated 1971, along with a piece of technology that wouldn’t be available for another thirty years?

I looked around. There are security cameras here, to safeguard anything valuable that might be found in the dead mail. But I know where the cameras are. And I know how to fool them. I slipped the opened envelope, the memory stick and the photograph into my overall pocket. Then I went for my lunch break, although I was no longer hungry. I finished my shift. I went home. Once more I looked at the photograph. Then I sat at my computer with the memory stick in my hand, wondering if I was going mad. I’d stolen mail from the sorting room. I could be fired for doing that. My job is a position of trust, and I’d risked it all – for what?

The photograph of the children was lying on the keyboard. An almost generic picture; a beach that could have been anywhere. The children were playing by the water’s edge, not looking at the camera. A shadow in the foreground was probably the photographer.

I told myself it wasn’t me. That little boy could be anyone. A five- or six-year-old boy with brown hair, squinting in the sunshine. But that was my name on the envelope. My face in the photograph. And, though I’d heard the ocean, smelt the scent of frying fat, felt the sun and seen the sky mackerel-blue above me, why did I have no memory of that little girl on the beach, or even of being on a beach at all?

The memory stick was a cheap thing; unmarked and unlabelled. It might contain a virus, or a malicious program that would download illegal porn onto my laptop. I ought to throw it away, I thought. It will be bad for my peace of mind. And yet I couldn’t help myself. I had to see what was on there.

Whatever it was took some time to download. I waited, and looked at the photograph. It wasn’t a very good photograph, with that shadow in the foreground. You’d have thought the photographer would have noticed something like that. Instead, they’d framed the photograph so that half of it was in shadow, and the children looked like an afterthought in the top half of the picture.

Where was the beach? Who was the girl? Was the little boy really me? I have so few photographs of myself as a child. But the one that stood on the mantelpiece in my mother’s old house was of that little boy with the fringe and the National Health glasses. Of course, that picture was lost in the fire. But I remember it so well, and I could have sworn the face was the same.

Poor Mother. It can’t have been easy, bringing up a child alone. Especially in Belfast, at the height of the Troubles. Not that the fire was deliberate, of course – just a silly accident that might have happened to anyone. But it left me all alone in a hostile country – an English boy with a German name and nothing much else to sustain me. I took a job as a postman, and thirty years later, here I am, here in the dead letter office, doing whatever it is that I do.

The laptop made a chiming sound to announce that the download was complete. I looked at what it had brought me. Pictures – half a dozen of them. No porn, thank goodness. Only a handful of snapshots. My mother was there in black and white. She was wearing a coat with a fur collar, and her hair was loose. She looked young, maybe twenty-five; pretty; impossibly slender. Next, there was a door, under a peeling sign that read:
SUNSET VIEW; PRIVATE HOTEL
. It could have been almost anywhere. And yet I knew it wasn’t. There was a number on the door. 87. I knew that. Just as I knew that the door was green, although it looked black in the picture, and that the steps were yellow tile, and that it smelt of something like cabbage, and worse, and that it was often damp and cold.

How did I know that? How could I know? A moth flew into the table lamp. I checked the window; it was shut. I turned back to the laptop. There she was again, my ma, wearing a yellow raincoat and a multicoloured dress. She had gained weight when we moved to Belfast, and here she was already obese, caught in an unguarded moment, eating a sandwich in a crowd. Was this a wedding? A parade? Her colourful clothing suggested as much. But her face was lined and sour. For a woman who ate so much, she never seemed to enjoy it.

And then I remembered the Orange walk; the sashes and the marching bands; the cordons of police; the man riding on the white horse. My hands began to shake. It was cold. It smelt of cigarette smoke and fish. I hated tuna sandwiches. That was all my mother had brought.

When can we go home?
I said.

She shook her head.
When I say so.

And when she started to heckle and shout at the Orangemen in their bowler hats, I felt myself cringe and shrivel inside at the sound of her voice, broken by drink, shouting hoarsely above me. And when the people around her started to laugh, then got angry, saying:
Shut it, you drunken hoor
, and worse, I wanted to die – no, not quite. I wanted
her
to die.

Another moth came to join the first on the side of the lampshade. The lampshade was blue, and I recalled someone telling me insects were especially drawn to the colour. Another moth, a darker one, fluttered underneath the shade. It made a surprising thudding sound – soft, and yet oddly sinister. I’ve never liked moths. Even butterflies, if you look at them closely, are ugly in spite of their brilliant wings. My mother’s dress in the picture was white, with large spots in orange and fuchsia-pink. Ugly. Like a butterfly.

What’s the difference between a butterfly and a moth?
I asked.

She told me:
Moths come out at night. They come at night and eat your clothes.

After that I was always afraid that moths would come and eat my clothes. Why they would want to, I didn’t know. But they always frightened me, with their fat, furry bodies and their dusty, thumping wings. That’s why I don’t open windows at night. And yet, they’d managed to enter, bringing with them those memories.

I turned back to my laptop and saw another photograph appear. Another black-and-white photograph, showing me and the little girl standing on the side of the pier at Scarborough, looking out to sea. I was wearing my glasses this time. The little girl’s face was turned away.

Who was she? I knew so much, and still I didn’t know her name. I knew we were in Scarborough; I knew that we were six years old. I knew my mother was at the hotel, conducting grown-up business. My mother’s grown-up business often involved meeting strange men. It sometimes involved drinking, too; and the little room in which we slept often smelt of vodka. There was a record player there, and a small pile of records. One of them made my mother cry. Its name was
Madam Butterfly
.

There. Another moth. I swiped at it as it blundered through the dusty air towards the lamp, where already a dozen more were crawling plumply on the shade. Brown moths; white moths; moths like torn-up newsprint. Where the hell were they coming from? What were they trying to tell me?

Moths come out at night
, replied my mother’s voice from beyond the grave.
Moths come out at night
, she said.
Moths come out—

In Scarborough, we shared her room in the hotel. Sometimes people knocked at the door. My mother always ignored them. During the day, if it was fine, I went off to the beach to play. I had a yellow bucket and spade. Sometimes I took sandwiches. My mother had told me never to go any further than the pier, but I liked to stand on the walkway, pretending to be an adventurer. If I took my glasses off, I could see America, rising up out of the sea like a castle in the clouds.

Another moth. I could hear them, thudding around in the lampshade. I pulled the electrical plug out of the wall, but with the screen of the laptop glowing so invitingly, they started to move towards the light; crawling on the carpet; moving onto the edge of the desk; one of them settling onto the screen, its soft and plushy wings spread out like a swatch of velvet.

I went into the kitchen and checked all of the windows. I left the main light on in there, so that the moths would be drawn away. The air was filled with moths now; pointillistic brushstrokes that dabbed their colours on to my face.

Moths come out at night
, she said.
Moths come out at—

I thought of my mother’s powder-puff, and the way she would sit at the window, doing her makeup with the help of a tiny pocket-mirror. I didn’t like her makeup. It felt both greasy and powdery, like sugar on a doughnut. Then there was the scent she wore to cover the smell of vodka and smoke; a scent that was sweetly dangerous, like burning rope and Bonfire Night.

There. The moths would fly away, and later I would spray them. Close the kitchen door and wait for them to fall like blossom. I turned back to my laptop, swept aside a dozen moths and saw myself and the little girl, hand in hand on the pavement. Another shot in black and white, our faces turned away, and yet I knew she was wearing a pale-pink dress, with thin grey stripes, and that my shoes had been full of sand, and that we had decided to run away. Maybe to America; or maybe we’d just stay on the pier, living on ice-cream and candy floss, and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.

Why
had we wanted to run away? I couldn’t quite remember now. My mother was inside the hotel, with one of her business partners; a man in a suit, with a handsome face, who called her by another name that wasn’t the one she went by.

Liesel Blau
. It’s right there, right there on the envelope. How could I have forgotten that? It was staring me in the face. And it had sounded familiar, even then, though I didn’t know why. Of course, it’s also a German name, although we didn’t speak German any more. By then, even Oma Loewe had receded into a bright point of memory, like the dot on a rented TV when you’ve turned the picture off.

Oma. It’s been so long since I even remembered her. I’ve forgotten all my German, of course – I lost it many years ago, along with most of my memories – but now I could almost hear her voice, and the songs she used to sing to me.

Another moth settled onto the screen. It gave shadow-wings to the little girl. The photograph was over-exposed, and she and I were luminous, filled with a dangerous clarity. I brushed the moth away – it left a smear of powder across the screen. And then I was there; with Liesel Blau, and Oma, that day by the sea, with the sound of the gulls and the scent of the spray and the feel of the little stones under my feet and the mackerel sky above me.

And Izzy. There was Izzy. That was her name; my little friend with the ponytail and the stripy dress. Izzy Loewe, whom Oma had brought from Germany to see me, travelling across the sea, from town to town, in search of us. We’d played together for more than three weeks while Ma was with her businessmen, and Oma had watched from the boardwalk, with her knitting on her knees, and her sandwiches in a plastic bag – German sausage and
Schwarzbrot
.

The moths were back. I could hear their wings. The kitchen door must have opened again. In the glow of the neon strip, the air was a growing maelstrom. The tube was old and flickering, and their bodies fluttered against the light with stupid, awful persistence, buzzing and burning their wings on the light and falling like bunches of rags on the floor. I turned back to the laptop screen, and there was the sky, that mackerel sky that hung above us all summer like a ragged curtain, and Oma, still sitting there on the steps of the private hotel, waiting for Ma to notice.

She called me Karlin. That was my name. Carey was American. My mother liked American names. She thought they were modern; sophisticated. She’d changed the Liesel to Lisa when we moved. Now we were Gail and Carey Loewe. She pronounced it Low, though actually it was something like Ler-vah. But Ma didn’t want to remember that. The less German we sounded, the better. If I happened to let something slip – a word, a name, a story – she used to get angry. Sometimes she’d cry. And so I soon learnt to be English, as later, I learnt to be Irish. After all, what did it matter? Names on an envelope, forwarded from a dozen different addresses. Snapshots on a memory stick; postcards from the distant past.

Izzy didn’t speak English at all. That was okay; I understood. Although Ma wouldn’t speak German, I still knew a lot of words. And Izzy and I could understand each other without even having to say things aloud. I know that sounds crazy. But when you’re so young, anything is possible. Izzy had blue eyes like mine, although she could see to the end of the world. And her hair was brown like mine, and when she smiled, she was pretty.

She always had the best ideas. She always took the lead in our games. Izzy was smart, and she never cried when the big kids jumped on our sandcastle. Instead, she put stones in the turrets, and pointed sticks in the sides of the moat, and when the big kids came again, they hurt their feet, and limped away, and never came back. And so, that summer, while Ma was inside, we played together on the beach. We played at being adventurers, looking out from the end of the pier. We looked for starfish, and pieces of jet, and buried pirate treasure.

And then came the day when the businessman with the handsome face came along, speaking to Ma in German and calling her by her vanished name. We didn’t hear much, but the shouting told us something must be wrong. Oma gave us pieces of cake from her sandwich box and told us it would be all right – that it was grown-up business. But then the man with the handsome face came running out onto the beach, shouting in guttural German:

“
Wo is Karlin? Wo ist mein Sohn?
”

That was when we realised that it had all been a trap. You see, Oma had called my father. The man from whom my mother had fled, long ago, in Germany, taking her little son with her. Ma told me the story herself, years later, when I was grown – how she’d had to make a choice between her two young children, and how she’d chosen the weaker twin, the little boy who needed her most, leaving Isabella in the care of her paternal grandmother.

By then, we’d been living in Belfast for years. I’d completely forgotten Oma, and Izzy, and that day by the sea in Scarborough. In fact, until she mentioned it, I’d even forgotten I had a twin; but Ma was drunk, and when she drank, she sometimes let the truth slip.