Mourning Ruby

  They want to turn outside into inside, but with fresh air. They build their canvas walls well, debating wind direction and maximum exposure to sun. The baby’s tent is set in the shade with a bouncy cradle outside it.

  Wetsuits, surfboards, barbecues, newspapers, cool boxes, baby gym, an inflatable dinosaur, spades, buckets, blankets, fishing nets, footrests, ice cream, sun cream.

  The sun cream takes up hours. Running after the two-year-old with a sun-cream spray. Applying and reapplying the sun cream to every inch of the flesh. Behind the shoulders, on nipples and footsoles. Everyone has the same expression during the anointing process. Serious and dreamy, as if they’re slowly falling in love with themselves.

  There’s a young girl, the daughter of the camp, with the boyfriend who’s come on holiday with them. He’s skinny and gawky and she’s beautiful. She fills her palm with cream and approaches him from behind where he’s lying face down. But as soon as he feels her hands on his flesh he twitches, rolls over and shoves her backwards into the sand. The grandma screams with laughter. The girl’s left with her hands full of sun cream and sand. But she doesn’t seem to care. Next moment, she’s kneeling beside her boyfriend, helping him fill in a wordsearch.

  (I have to imagine this. I didn’t see it. They were safe from my eyes inside their camp.)

  She’s so perfect and he’s so imperfect and yet she’s the one who’s trying to please him. She jumps up and starts pegging wet swimming costumes onto a line that runs across the top of a windbreak. She uses little red plastic pegs, like dolls’ pegs.

  The camps are gone. It’s the thirtieth of September now. The last day of September. We used to play a game to that song, at primary school. One girl (it was only the girls who played) would make an arch with her arm, her outstretched hand braced against the rough stone playground wall. All of us would hold hands and make a long chain which wound through the arch as we sang.

  The captain said it would never never do

  Never never do never never do

  The captain said it would never never do

  On the last day of SeptemBER

  As we sang the last word we would jerk our arms down hard and if you were the girl who was making the arch you would brace yourself against the wall in case you were pulled off your feet.

  The games we played were full of mystery. They were like adult conversations we’d overheard. But it was us playing them, not our mothers and fathers.

  We dip our heads in the deep blue sea

  The deep blue sea the deep blue sea

  We dip our heads in the deep blue sea

  On the last day of SeptemBER

  I have a job, for a few more weeks. The café has had a wonderful season and I’ve done well with tips. I have a room with what are called sea glimpses, and a sour-smelling en-suite. There’s a pretty oak chest on which I’ve spread the piece of silk that Mr Damiano gave me. The fragment of his first Dreamworld. The silk is fragile and I’ve spread it out of the sun, in case it fades.

  I sleep lightly. Every time I wake there’s the noise of wind and sea. Gulls walk on the roof at night and their big claws scrape the tiles.

  I am beginning to think of what Ruby lost. The life Ruby didn’t have. Her life, that didn’t spread out and grow. She used to talk about what she would do when she grew up. She’d realized that people left their parents to find homes of their own, and she didn’t like it.

  ‘If I was living in another house, you wouldn’t be able to make my dinner.’

  I told her she could stay living at home for as long as she wanted. ‘But you won’t want to, Ruby. You think you will now, but you won’t. Not when you’re grown-up.’

  She looked at me, frowning. She thought I could look into her future as if it were rolling out on a TV screen. Much later, when she was in her bath, she asked me with false casualness, ‘Can kidnappers make children live away from their houses?’ I told her that they could not. My adoptive mother had told me the story of the Moors murders when I was eight years old. She did it to make me careful.

  ‘You can’t trust anyone, man nor woman,’ she said. ‘They come up to you all smiles and sweeties. It’s inside that they’re bad, where you can’t see.’

  My head was loaded with terror each time she sent me to the shop for bread. My adoptive mother chastened me with the thought of what could happen if I stepped out of line. The bad people who would seize me. The teachers who would tell me off. The cars that would run me over. She filled me with terror.

  I did not terrorize Ruby. I was determined she would live in the sunlight. And now I am alive, and Ruby is not.

  I think for a long time each day of the life that Ruby lost. I think less of my grief, my longing for the feel of her and the smell and touch of her. I try to think less of this. I think of the space of years Ruby missed. The houses she would have inhabited, away from us.

  I sit on my mat with a towel spread on it, staring out at the sea. I might swim. I’ve got my swimsuit on under my dress. The sun is warm, and there’s no wind.

  I haven’t visited Ruby’s grave yet. It is behind me, within sight. It’s the north of my compass. I walk along the top of the graveyard every morning, on my way to work. My view is Ruby’s.

  There’s one family group left, twenty yards from me. A big burly woman, about fifty. A matriarch. Two daughters with her, or maybe it’s a daughter and a daughter-in-law. A son who has hammered in the windbreak with skill and precision.

  The woman keeps standing up, shielding her eyes to watch the four little children playing at the water’s edge. Her grandchildren, presumably. Well she might watch them. I’ve been uneasy ever since they were let go on their own. People don’t know what this sea is like.

  I am clenching my arms around my knees. Before I know that I’m going to do it, I get up and walk over to the big woman.

  ‘The sea can be dangerous here – you’ll get a big wave suddenly. And they’re very young…’

  ‘I’m keeping an eye on them,’ she says, not taking offence, just stating the fact. She has the face of a Viking. Big jaw, stern blue eyes.

  ‘But by the time you got down to them –’

  She sees what I see: the vastness of sand between us and the children, playing where the waves break. The children are knee-deep, maybe thigh-deep – the water’s swirling around them –

  ‘If they were mine I’d be down there,’ I say, not caring now what she thinks. But she doesn’t get angry.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she says, and strides towards the sea. The space between her and the children narrows. They have heard her voice. They turn and leap and splash their way towards their Viking grandmother.

  My heart steadies itself. I go back to my towel, and there’s Joe, standing where I was lying, shielding his eyes, watching me.

  ‘I’ve been to the Tate,’ he says, as I come up to him.

  ‘Oh – have you?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been watching the expression on people’s faces as they come out. They look as if they’ve had a bit of good done to them, don’t they, Rebecca? Like people coming out of a church service. Only it’s a church where they’re not members, so they’re extra respectful.’

  ‘It’s good for the town.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  *

  We are in the deep blue sea now. We’ve waded out into the loudness of the waves. From here, the shore is a foreign land. Joe swims ahead of me with the strong breaststroke I’d forgotten. He used to swim like that when we went to the Baths on Thursday nights, adults-only night. They would turn the lighting down to try and create an atmosphere, but they couldn’t change the smell of chlorine or the after-echo of a hundred school galas trapped under the glass-andiron roof.

  Joe has grown broader. I noticed it as he walked into the sea. His chest is more muscled, his thighs thicker. And his swimming is surely better than I remember it.

  I swim slowly, keeping his wet black head in sight. He’s swimming properly, dipping his head down in the water and
lifting it to breathe. But the water’s cold, even at the end of the season, and it tires me. I won’t swim far. I turn on my back and float, resting before I swim back to shore.

  I hang, suspended. My arms are colder than the rest of me. I could yield now, neither on earth nor in heaven.

  There’s a small plane overhead. It’s not very high. It’ll be going to the Scillies, maybe. It’s hard to judge distances when you’re floating. I could reach up and touch it with a wet finger.

  ‘I saw a seal,’ says Joe beside me. He’s smiling as he treads water. ‘It was this close. It looked at me, like a dog. More intelligent than a dog. And then it dived.’

  ‘Did you touch it?’

  ‘Of course not. You’re tired, let’s go back.’

  But Joe’s not tired. He dives and comes up shaking drops of water from his hair. He dives again, deeper, and rises in a stream of bubbles.

  ‘It’s wonderful here. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  We swim back side by side. Joe looks happy today, and hopeful. Maybe his life will be as he wants it to be. He’s so clever, I think, as if Joe’s a new person whom I’m seeing for the first time. So talented. He has succeeded in what he set out to do. Everyone reads his book, or pretends to do so. There’s talk of him presenting a TV history series. I look at him and realize that he would be good on TV.

  We climb out of the water and now it’s the air that seems cold, and the breeze chill on my skin. We rub our bodies down and put on clothes. Joe glances at me, but I keep on combing my hair, not meeting the glance. He has so much to offer. He’s been going hiking every weekend out on Vancouver Island, he says, and swimming three times a week. It’s true, his body is firmer, more fully muscled.

  But what hangs between us is that I have never wanted it.

  ‘You look well,’ I say.

  ‘I am well,’ says Joe.

  ‘Are you staying?’

  ‘No,’ says Joe. ‘I don’t think so. I’m going back to that cabin. I need to get on with my writing.’

  ‘The cabin with the bears?’

  ‘That’s the one. I’ll live there for a while. Six months, maybe a year. You and Adam must come out and visit.’ He looks me full in the face.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘You’d be a fool not to, Rebecca.’

  ‘He may have changed the colour of his front door. He may not want me there.’

  ‘The trouble is that you think nothing of yourself. I know why that is, but you do damage, Rebecca, because you don’t know the power you’ve got.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got no call to be sorry. You’re not getting any declaration from me, Rebecca, don’t think it. All I’ll say is that I love what you are in my life.’

  It’s like the slow release of a vice on my heart. I hold his words in my mind, to think of later in the hope that they’re true, and that I no longer need to feel the guilt I have always felt towards him. He said the words as if they were true.

  We are clothed, side by side and eating chocolate. Joe gets a wad of paper out of his backpack.

  ‘I’ve printed the story off for you,’ he says. ‘Here you are. It’s not finished. I thought it was going to be a short story but it’ll make a novel.’

  ‘Can I read the rest when it’s done?’

  ‘If you like. But this is the part I wrote with you in mind. The rest won’t be like that. It goes on to the next generation, my father’s generation. The story’s taken on a life of its own. That’s why I need to get back and work on it.’

  ‘Have you seen a bear at the cabin yet?’

  ‘Yes. A black bear comes most evenings now. My neighbour says she’s got cubs off in the woods. But she’s all right as long as you don’t scare her.’

  ‘You like it there.’

  ‘I do. I like it more than I would ever have believed possible. I’m content in my cabin, Rebecca, along with the bears.’

  24

  The Birthday Party

  Adam touches the doorbell and it rings smartly. A pink balloon bounces from the door-knocker. From inside there comes a crush of happy, excited voices. It’s Lisa who comes to the door, dressed in a yellow shirt and cream trousers. Her hair is brushed back into a ponytail, and she looks years younger than the woman who sat night after night beside the incubator that contained her daughter. Then, her brown eyes were set in stains of shadow. Now, they glow with pleasure.

  ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she says. ‘We weren’t sure – I mean, I wanted to ask you, and then Ramzi said maybe we shouldn’t, you’re so busy and –’

  ‘I was glad to be asked,’ says Adam. It’s true. There’s something about Lisa and Ramzi and little Amina that has stayed in his mind. Lisa talked to him one night about Ramzi’s family. They hadn’t been able to accept her. That was the way Lisa put it, in words that didn’t seem to contain a judgement. They lived in Huddersfield, where she and Ramzi had both been brought up, but in different parts of the town. They’d gone to the same comprehensive. She’d seen Ramzi’s parents at school parents’ evenings, but she’d never spoken to them.

  Lisa and Ramzi didn’t remember when they’d first met, but when they were sixteen they started going out together. Well, not going out exactly. They had to be careful, because all Ramzi’s cousins were at the school as well.

  In the end they had to leave. ‘It got too difficult.’ They came down south and both got jobs. Her family had visited, but not his. None of them had come to the wedding. It was too difficult. She’d written letters to Ramzi’s mother, and sent photographs. Ramzi had phoned to tell them of Amina’s birth, and he’d sent them a copy of the Polaroid photograph which was taken a few minutes after her birth. But they hadn’t sent a card back or anything.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be angry with them, they can’t help it. It’s for Amina I’m angry. They don’t know she’s alive, not properly. If she doesn’t come on all right – well, they won’t know about that, either. Not the way they should. Maybe they’ll even be –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I shouldn’t say it.’ But she whispers it. ‘Relieved. Because then they’ll be able to pretend that she never existed. And that makes me so… well, angry.’

  ‘I’m sure they don’t feel that,’ says Adam. ‘She is their granddaughter.’

  Lisa shrugged her thin shoulders.

  ‘Amina’s responding well to the antibiotics,’ went on Adam. ‘Once we get this infection under control –’

  ‘Yes. Ramzi’s coming in at ten, when he finishes his shift. She looks better than she did this morning. He’ll see the difference.’

  Ramzi worked in a call centre, as Lisa had done before Amina was born. Ramzi was doing well, he was a supervisor and they thought highly of him. There was a chance of management training. But what Ramzi wanted was to do a degree in engineering. It would happen, Lisa said. They were only twenty-two. She would go back to work, get herself promoted. They would share the care of Amina whilst Ramzi studied.

  ‘Only now I feel I couldn’t ever bear to leave her, not for an hour,’ said Lisa.

  It was over many weeks that he learned all this. The closeness of the unit was a strange thing. It seemed so personal and yet in an odd way it wasn’t. Some parents found it very hard to cope, when they finally took their babies home. They’d longed for it and counted down to it and yet it frightened them once it came. They didn’t feel safe without a nurse within call. They weren’t forgotten, no, it wasn’t as crude as that, but some stayed in your mind more than others. Amina, for example. A still baby, a baby who knew how to conserve her energy. She’d had a lot of problems but he’d always had a hunch that Amina would make it. He’d felt that they were in it together. She knew that he was trying to help her. He talked her through it, as he did with all his patients.

  ‘Now, Amina, what this drug’s going to do is fight the infection in your lungs. You’re off the CPAP, we’re not going to go backwards now.’

  Nobody outside neonatology
understood the amount of character there was in his patients.

  ‘Come on inside, Ramzi’s borrowed a camcorder and he’s filming them having their tea.’

  He follows Lisa down the flat’s narrow corridor into the living room.

  And there’s Amina, in a pink ruffled dress with her scant hair tied up in a matching ribbon. She sits in her highchair at the head of the table which has been placed in the centre of the room. There are five other babies, on their mothers’ laps or crawling round the floor. Bunches of pink balloons hang from the walls and the table is heaped with sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, crisps, feeding bottles, dummies, wipes, tissues. How young they all are. The fathers look even younger than the mothers. One dad is showing Ramzi a function on the camcorder. By the window a boy in jeans and T-shirt jogs a grizzling newborn infant.

  They all seem to know who Adam is. Lisa must have told her friends that he was coming. She settles him into an empty chair next to Amina, and brings him a glass of lemonade. His eyes note the child. There are the hollows at her temples, the typical translucency of a child born at twenty-seven weeks. Her wrists are so narrow that he wonders where they found the gold bracelets that clasp them. As he watches, Amina leans forward, fastidiously opens a sandwich, removes the cheese slice inside it, and eats the bread.

  ‘She likes cheese really,’ says Lisa. ‘But she’s got a thing about opening up things if they’re closed.’ The baby stares intently at her mother, then at the door she has bitten into the bread.

  ‘She’s sitting up well,’ says Adam.

  ‘I have to keep remembering she’s not really one at all. She’s only nine months.’

  ‘She’s doing fine.’ She looks fragile but he knows how tough she really is.

  Here’s Ramzi with the camcorder.

  ‘Is it all right if I take some film of you with Amina? For her, when she’s older. We can tell her, that’s the doctor who took care of you when you were born.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Amina is still regarding her bread. Suddenly, with immaculate timing, she holds it out to Adam.