Whispers Through a Megaphone (14 page)

Ralph knows what’s coming. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Here we go—a man’s fist, or feet, God knows what else.

“Goodbye,” Miriam whispers.

Red looks at her.
Weirdo
. He looks at Green, can’t read his face. What is his friend trying to say? Closed mouth, tight lips, something like a sneer but it’s not a sneer. He looks a bit ill, is that what he’s trying to say?

Red has never seen apprehension on Green before, only on other people. He is lost. He needs to find Janie.
Enough
.

“Goodbye freaks,” he says.

Ralph cups his hands over his mouth. “Well blow me,” he says, as the men disappear into the darkness.

Miriam grabs the bucket and toilet roll and hides behind the shed.

And that’s when it hits him. How fragile they are out here in the woods. How
exposed
. The violence and indignities they could suffer. But is anywhere really safe? Ralph thinks of his house, how simple it would be to break in. The only difference between the woods and the house is timing. He thinks of Julie Parsley: right woman, wrong time? He pictures Sadie, Arthur and Stanley, sleeping in their beds. Hopes they are all right. Switches on his phone.

Jesus Christ, how many texts? The phone beeps and vibrates as Sadie’s vitriol floods into it. This level of toxicity could make a device explode. She has threatened to leave him if he doesn’t text back—how arrogant, when he has already left
her
. He doesn’t want to respond. He wants to leave her to poach in her own vitriolic juices, stew in her own bitterness, text and tweet and blog herself stupid. NO COMMENT, SADIE. His sons, however, are another matter.

He pours water into a paper cup and brushes his teeth. He hums ‘Good Feeling’ by the Violent Femmes, not because he is cheerful and feels like humming, but because he is nervous, jittery, full of adrenalin. He is thinking about Miriam and her plan to freak out and go feral.
No man wants his eyes scratched out
. Was she speaking from experience? Is this something she does on a regular basis? Was he safer when Red and Green were still here?
Please God don’t let her take my eyes
.

Treacle brushes against Ralph’s legs. He picks her up and holds her against his chest. Miriam appears, carrying an empty bucket. She places it on the floor and stands there, fiddling with her hands. The feral woman has been replaced by a girl, her eyes sad and dull.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

“Exhausted.”

“Shall we try and get some sleep?”

“Okay.”

Old sheets on a cold floor. A single sleeping bag, unzipped and open to cover them up. Her pillow, a squashed rucksack. His pillow, a leather bag and folded cardigan. In the corner, on a chair, propped against four cans of pilchards, a torch points at the roof.

A chattering bat launches itself into the air from a woodpecker hole in a beech tree. It shrieks, flaps its webbed wings, emits an ultrasonic sound, inaudible to the human ear.
Echolocation
. The sound travels, ricochets off the environment and bounces back, a message in an echo, informing the bat about its position and prey. A second bat peers out from the woodpecker hole before soaring into the darkness, closely followed by another.

The chattering, the shrieking, the silence that is not silent.

A helicopter circles overhead. Louder, closer; fading, almost gone; closer again. The circles tell us that something is missing, it is still out here, undiscovered.

A tawny owl bickers over boundaries with another tawny owl. Round face, feather and bristle, a symbol of wisdom with acute hearing and binocular vision. It strains to pick up the rustle of a mouse on the woodland floor and two seconds later, swallows it whole.

“Everything sounds louder from in here,” Miriam whispers, not mentioning her rapid heartbeat or the whooshing in her ears. She has never done this before. Never been
in bed
with a man. Not that you can call this a proper bed—it’s makeshift, pretend, and they are both fully dressed—but proper or not they are side by side, planning to sleep, and she can feel his arm against hers. When they speak, it will be pillow talk. It’s improperly real, really improper.

“Miriam?” Ralph says.

“Yes?”

“I probably don’t have any right to ask you this.”

Oh God, this doesn’t sound good.

“But, well, I’m just curious really I suppose.”

“What about?”

“The feral thing.”

“Feral thing?”

He pauses. How to say it? “When we were looking for the tins, you said you would freak out.”

Yes I did, she thinks. I did say that. That’s quite right. It was that feeling again, that
insidious
feeling. It happened again.

“It was quite an unusual thing to say,” Ralph says, trying to lower his voice, wondering if she is finding it too abrasive. “The thing about scratching a man’s eyes out.”

There is an opening to another world. His words have carved the opening. Miriam can hear it in the distance, this other world: the buzz, the aliveness. There is a passage, a walkway, a crossing from one world to another. This is the intersectional moment. Take it or leave it, Miriam? Walk the same old path or do something different?

Why couldn’t I just let it go? Ralph thinks. What’s wrong with me? She was only trying to be helpful, to get us out of something—she tried to protect me, for goodness’ sake. Maybe
I
should have said what she said. Me, turn feral? What a joke. I’m a weed. Too polite. Lying in a filthy old shed with a stranger, prying like a shrink. I’m not her shrink, though, am I? Maybe we could become friends. Why don’t I have many friends? Would she care if she never saw me again?

Miriam loiters at the intersection. Ralph sits in his own world and turns himself into old rubbish. He advises his clients about this kind of thing, encourages them to notice the narratives they carry around, the way they diminish and judge themselves. The trick is to make the narrative conscious and
explicit, that way you’re observing it, you’ve bought yourself some distance. But Ralph can’t master the trick. It’s like juggling with three balls—some people can do it, some people can’t. Ralph is no juggler. He has never been good with balls.

A passage, a walkway, a crossing. Hanging above its entrance, written in neon lights: WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE (I’VE BEEN HERE ALL THE TIME). It looks like one of Tracey Emin’s neon signs. Miriam
loves
Tracey Emin. She loves the bed, the tent, the monoprints, the needlework and neon. She loves how everything is autobiography, everything is a message. Tracey Emin is not buttoned up. Like Fenella, she is a beacon in Miriam’s world, but a different kind of beacon. Tracey is a flare. A signal. And tonight that signal says GO, DO IT, TAKE THE RISK, GO ON, MAKE YOURSELF VULNERABLE.

“Ralph?”

“Yes?”

“I did turn feral once.”

Ralph lies perfectly still.

“That’s why I stayed in my house for three years.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, more for his sake than hers.

“I think I want to. You’re easy to talk to.”

“That’s my downfall,” he says.

“Oh,” she says.

“Shall we have a cup of tea?”

“All right.”

A kettle whistles on a tiny camping stove. Miriam is wearing a sleeping bag as a cloak. Ralph is wearing a cardigan as a scarf.

“People think I’m cuckoo,” she says.

“I don’t,” he says.

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“I bet I can change that.”

“Go on then.”

“Are you sitting comfortably?”

“Not really,” he says, from a carrier bag on the floor. He crosses his legs. “But tell me anyway.”

When Miriam’s mother died, all that was found was a bowler hat, floating in the sea. Mad hatter. Jumped and didn’t swim. Sank deep, dead weight.

A bystander spoke to the police: “I saw a woman in a tweed jacket and a black bowler hat. It looked like a long jump, it really did, quite peculiar to say the least. You can imagine someone standing at the edge and stepping off, but you don’t expect to see a
long jump
.”

Take a running jump.

Don’t mind if I do.

Go on then.

Here I go. (Bye Miriam.)

Miriam lost many mothers that day. The mad one. The one who was sometimes nice. The one she loved, despite herself, and the one she hated. The one who provided a roof, water, food. The one who made her feel unsafe. And most devastating of all, the mother she never had—all hope of her, gone. The mothers had drowned, they were all underwater.

There was no body to cremate or bury. It was typical Frances Delaney, refusing to let anything be simple and clear. Her death is something Miriam has to believe in—an act of faith. Her absence requires as much effort as her presence. A sunken woman, mauled by sea creatures, her bones on the ocean floor. This woman couldn’t tolerate her own company or the company of others. In its rare moments, her happiness was inconsolable. Joy was wretched. Only sadness and repulsion
made her feel secure—they stood by her when she hit out at them, came back when she pushed them away.

There was a poorly attended memorial service. Later, a plaque—FRANCES DELANEY, LOST AT SEA—attached to a bench in the botanical gardens.

After the service, Miriam slept for nineteen hours. She was woken by Fenella, banging on the front door.

“Are you all right? I’ve been calling you,” Fenella said.

“Sorry, I was asleep.”

“I was worried.”

“Why?”

“You looked terrible yesterday.”

Fenella made tea while Miriam took a shower. She waited in the kitchen, expecting Frances to walk in at any moment. She opened the kitchen window, walked through to the front room and opened the windows in there too. This house needed fresh air. It wasn’t dirty—no chance of that, thanks to Frances’s obsession with cleanliness—but it felt grubby somehow.
Contaminated
.

Miriam strolled into the kitchen, drying her hair with a towel, wearing grey cords and a maroon long-sleeved top. She looked surprisingly fresh-faced.

“I thought I’d take you out for lunch,” Fenella said. “Do you fancy walking to the pub? Are you up to it?”

“Of course.”

This was day one of Fenella’s Plan For Miriam: the PFM. Two copies had been typed, printed and laminated. Miriam’s future was shiny and wipe-clean, sturdy as a place mat. It would involve regular meals, long walks and small talk with strangers. On a Wednesday evening, Miriam and Fenella would attend a pub quiz. On a Saturday morning, they would have coffee in town. Miriam would purchase things by herself, small at
first, like a croissant or some daffodils, working her way up to jeans and skirts. There would be milestones and rewards. Yoga, perhaps. Or an art class at the local college. Miriam could write the words I AM NOT MY MOTHER in buttons, sewed onto a giant piece of material. They could go on holiday, somewhere slow and easy and hot, with nothing to do but sit by a pool, read books and drink gin. At the very bottom of the PFM, two words in red:
job, boyfriend
. Beneath them, Fenella had scribbled a protective afterthought:
but everything in its own time
.

At the pub, Fenella bought Miriam a cheddar and onion-marmalade sandwich, French fries, half a cider. She revealed the PFM while Miriam was eating.

“There’s no pressure, honey,” she said, holding a toastie in one hand as cheese dripped onto her plate. “I won’t give you a hard time if you want to take it slow.”

Miriam smiled. She didn’t feel pressured. Fenella’s patience was infinite and puzzling. She ate her sandwich, drank her cider.

“Blimey, someone’s got an appetite.”

She was clearly in shock or denial. It was obvious. Fenella made a mental note and decided not to mention it. Shock and denial usually passed of their own accord, didn’t they? No need to add them to the plan (which would have been difficult, due to the lamination).

“I’m going to treat myself to a laminator,” Fenella said, eyeing her A4 plans, flapping them about, admiring their stiffness. “You can use it whenever you like.”

“Do you need one?”

“That’s not the point, really. I want one. It’s good to indulge yourself, honey. Every now and then. It’s good to want things.”

“Is it?”

After lunch, they stood outside the pub and Fenella squeezed Miriam so hard it hurt. “I’ve got to dash to Pilates. Shouldn’t
really eat that much before a class, but hey-ho. Will you be all right?”

“I think so.”

“Give me a ring soon.”

Fenella jogged ahead, turning and waving before disappearing from view. Miriam strolled through the field, thinking about what she had found in her mother’s wardrobe two days ago: an old shoe box, with the words POISONOUS CLEANING PRODUCTS scribbled on the top. It didn’t contain poisonous cleaning products. It contained five letters addressed to Miriam, letters from her grandmother that she had never been given.
Your letters sound a bit unusual, dear,
Granny had written.
Are you all right?
In with the letters, an order of service from the funeral of Betty Hopkins, who had died when Miriam was eleven.

She had not moved to Spain.

She had not grown tired of her granddaughter.

She had died.

Frances Delaney was evil.

I lied, Miriam. And you swallowed my lies. You are full of them and full of me.

I hope they pick at your flesh, Miriam thought.

I will swim through your days and all of your nights.

The sky had darkened while they were inside the pub and Miriam hadn’t brought an umbrella or a coat. She quickened her pace, tried to avoid the cowpats, noticed a rabbit watching as she sprinted past. Just as she approached the kissing gate it began to rain. She stopped, looked up, closed her eyes.
Let it wash away. That’s right, mother. All of it. This is Miriam speaking. Can you hear me? I don’t know how to live without you, not because you are no longer here, but because you never let me live.
She ran her fingers through her wet hair, walked through the gate and on to the woodland path.