Talking to the Dead

  I must have fallen asleep. At once Isabel is beside me, in her green gingham dress. Her bare legs are thin and scratched, and she has a pair of battered sandals on her feet.

  ‘You’ve come back,’ I say, and my heart floods with relief.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Neen, I only went ahead to see if you could manage it. I think you’ll be OK. Come on.’ She takes my hands and leads me round the bulge of a cliff. We are walking on packed, damp sand, and a wave runs in over our sandals, then another. ‘Quick, the tide’s coming in,’ says Isabel. ‘We’ll have to hurry.’

  We’ve done it again. We’ve walked round the headland, forgetting the time as we paddled and jumped from rock to rock. Beyond each rock-pool there’s another, and another. We dig with driftwood in coves of white sand, and decorate our castles with shells and red seaweed. Now the tide’s coming in and we can’t get back in time. We’re going to have to climb the cliff. There’s nothing to be frightened of because we’ve often had to do it before, and the cliffs are not as high here as they are farther down the coast. I’m four years old and I climb like a crab. But we’ve never gone so far before.

  ‘Here,’ says Isabel, ‘we’ve got to get up these steps.’

  They don’t look like steps to me. They’re too big. They are high and hard and they go up the cliff in tight zigzags.

  ‘Smugglers’ steps,’ says Isabel.

  ‘Are they really, Isabel?’

  ‘You can tell by those hooks in the rock. Look. Those are for hauling up the contraband.’

  The lowest hook is just above my head. I reach up and touch the rusty iron, then snatch my hand away. A wave washes the back of my legs, nearly to my knees. The steps are slippery at the bottom with seaweed hanging off them like green hair.

  ‘Come on, Neen. You can’t wait there. I’ll go first.’

  ‘Isabel! I can’t get up this step.’

  ‘Of course you can. Here. Put your knee up there, like that, now grab my hand.’

  ‘I don’t want to, Isabel. Let’s go back the way we came.’

  ‘We can’t. The tide’s coming in too fast.’

  ‘We could swim. I can swim now, can’t I, Isabel?’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, Neen, you can’t swim in this. Look at it.’

  The tide swirls round my legs, pushing me against the rock. It falls back then pushes me again, harder, almost knocking me over.

  ‘Quick, Neenl’

  She hauls me up, my knees scraping over the rock. One big step, then the next. ‘You have to hold on to the hooks as well. Hold my hand, and hold the hooks. That’s right.’

  ‘What if we get stuck?’

  ‘We won’t get stuck. I’ve climbed this cliff millions of times.’

  ‘Have you really, Isabel?’

  We keep climbing. Once I slip on a patch of seaweed and bang my head hard on the rock, but Isabel hauls me back upright.

  ‘You’ve got to hold on tight, Neen!’

  I look up at the cliff above us. It goes on for ever, the great slippery steps, the iron hooks which are too big for my hands.

  ‘It’s all right, Neen, I’ve got you’. Look, we’re nearly at the top. You wait here and hold on to this. I’ll climb up then I’ll turn round and pull you. Hold on tight.’

  The sea moves hungrily below us, like our cat pacing up and down under the nest in the lilac bush in our back yard. I’m always afraid the babies will fall out.

  ‘The sea wants us to fall,’ I say quietly, so that it won’t hear. Isabel doesn’t hear me either. She’s climbing. The steps are cut even wider here, for men’s legs, not ours. She puts her hands on the edge of the shelf and pushes herself up. Her strong brown legs beat wildly in the air and then she’s up, scraping her knees over the lip of the rock. I hold on tight to the hook, with rusty flakes of iron cutting into my palm. Isabel’s face appears over the edge of the rock. One of her arms is wound round the next hook, and the other is reaching down for me.

  ‘Come on. I’ll help you up this bit.’

  She smiles. Her hair blows round her face but she hasn’t got a free hand to push it away.

  ‘You climb and I’ll pull.’

  But I can’t let go of the iron hook. I stare up at where Isabel is, then down at the waiting sea. ‘Don’t look down, Neen! Look at me.’ But I hang back. Isabel’s face changes. ‘If you don’t come, Neen, I’m going to go on up and leave you there.’

  I stare at her in horror. She kneels up, stands with her back to me and reaches for the next handhold. ‘Isabel!’

  ‘Come on then. Let go of that hook and grab my hand and I’ll pull you up. Come on or I’m going without you.’

  Sobbing with terror I shut my eyes and lunge for Isabel’s waiting hand. The rock tears my legs as she drags me up and I claw my way over the edge with my free hand. I roll against the rock-face and curl up tight, shutting myself up against the sea and Isabel. Isabel kneels beside me. ‘It’s all right, Neen. The other steps are easy. We’re nearly at the top.’

  ‘You said you were going to leave me down there on my own.’

  ‘I had to say that or else you’d never’ve come. I didn’t mean it.’

  After a minute I stop crying, uncurl myself and we go on up the cliff, Isabel first, and me following, holding her hand.

  I open my eyes. ‘Isabel,’ I say. The dry plants suck up the rain around me. I’ve slept and while I was sleeping the water went into Isabel’s mouth and she drowned.

  ‘She couldn’t have swum for long,’ Margery said as we drank our coffee, meaning to console us, ‘not after that operation. She was so weak.’ She meant that Isabel didn’t have time to be afraid. But I know the sea and I know it’s not as easy as that. Time at sea is different from time on land. I look at my watch. It’s two o’clock now, and in less than three hours it’ll be getting light. Morning will come, bringing Edward’s cold face and the police and the rawness of everything. I walk on, feeling my way past branches which dip low with their weight of rain. An apple knocks my cheek and my feet wade in sprawling flowers.

  ‘Nina,’ says Richard.

  ‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I knew you’d be out here.’

  ‘I had a dream about Isabel.’

  Our cold hands touch, then hold. ‘Margery’s gone, and Susan’s got the baby in with her,’ says Richard. ‘He’s been no trouble tonight, has he? Nina, you’re soaking wet.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  His hands touch my shirt, my jeans. ‘You’re wet through.’

  ‘Yes. Soaked to the skin.’

  ‘You ought to take those clothes off.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nina–’

  ‘It’s OK, Richard’

  He drags me to him and we sway, clinging together, my wet clothes against his. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ he says. ‘I thought you’d gone. I’ve been all over this fucking garden in the dark trying to find you. Round and round these bastard paths that don’t go anywhere. It’s a nightmare.’

  ‘I was out here all the time.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d gone.’

  He shoves his head into my shoulder and I feel his lips sucking my neck, blistering the skin. He’ll raise marks. I pull back.

  ‘I want you so much,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. I watch his tangled head, his big hot body butting against mine. There is no Isabel any more.

  ‘Where can we go? Let’s go, Nina. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘We’ve got to stay.’

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he repeats. ‘I’ve always hated this fucking garden.’ His weight is on me, pushing me down. ‘The ground’s wet,’ I say.

  ‘Nina.’ He wraps both arms round me and squeezes me tight, tight.

  Death makes people want to fuck. Who said that? Someone at work, after coming back from a funeral. American Paul. I’ve never felt so horny. But there was no one there I could screw, so I ate a bowl of potato chips. I am under Richard, my head s
crubbed into the muddy ground. I wriggle and pull down my jeans, then raise my hips. He is hot and I’m cold, freezing, as if I’ve been out in the rain a long time. I can’t stop myself shivering.

  ‘I’ll make you warm,’ he says. He kneels and kisses the mound of my stomach, sucking and licking. I look up over his shoulder at the sharp black leaves and the mist and the moon. I’m cold and shrunken and it hurts when he comes inside me.

  ‘You weren’t ready,’ he says afterwards. ‘I’m sorry’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I pull up my clammy jeans over my bare flesh, zip them and fasten the button. He puts one hand on each side of my face, framing it. His hands are warm and it’s a gentle gesture, perhaps the gentlest that’s ever passed between us. It almost melts me.

  ‘I’m a selfish bastard. You must be dead on your feet.’

  ‘I’m all right. It’s just that everything feels so strange. I think I need to sleep. You’ll wake me up, though, won’t you? You wouldn’t leave me behind? I want to go down there as soon as it’s light.’

  ‘I’ll wake you.’

  ‘Richard. I want to sleep in Isabel’s room.’

  He takes in a breath against my cheek. ‘Why, Nina? What’s all this about Isabel’s room? There’s nothing there.’

  ‘Were you going to sleep there?’

  ‘No. I’ll grab a couple of hours downstairs on the sofa.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind if I do.’

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘Just for tonight.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Richard stumbles, puts out his hand to the wall and leans there. He gazes stupidly at the table, his eyes black with fatigue. Wave after wave it washes through him. What she fucking well wanted. Everyone else could go and fuck themselves. If she’s in the water. Things don’t look so good. My golden Isabel with the fish prodding her, sly as rats.

  ‘You need some brandy.’

  I fetch the bottle from the kitchen cupboard, and two glasses, and take them into the sitting-room, where he’s sitting on the sofa, knees apart, head down, hands covering his face.

  ‘You drink this, and then you’ll sleep.’ I fill his glass to the top with the pale expensive cognac that Richard’s always bringing back from trips abroad. When he brought this bottle home in its tacky presentation box inside the plastic airport carrier, Isabel was there. She wrote down in her diary: R back from X. He drinks his way steadily down the glass, making a trustful noise like a child drinking milk. His eyes are half-closed.

  ‘Have some more.’ I splash it into his glass and drink from my own, but not too much, just enough to warm me. I can’t sleep yet.

  ‘Lie down there and I’ll get you a blanket. I won’t be a minute.’

  In the hall there’s a blanket box where Isabel keeps bedding for people to sleep downstairs when all the bedrooms are full. I drag out a thick black-and-red blanket, and a pillow. By the time I get back he’s lying full-length, his eyes open a slit, and he’s sucking in air through his mouth.

  ‘I’ve got you a pillow. Here, lift your head.’

  ‘That’s excellent,’ he says in a loud, strange voice, but he’s already asleep.

  I push the pillow in under him, drape the blanket over the mound of his body, and then tuck it in at his feet and stand back, looking down at him. I’ll have to set the alarm or none of us will wake at dawn as we’ve got to do. I wait to make sure that he’s really asleep. He might thrash and cry out, wanting someone who isn’t there. His lips are parted and there is saliva shining at the corner of his mouth. The room smells of brandy and there are raindrops shining on the window. Richard lies in a swill of light from the lamp and it’s like being in a pub on a rainy day, with the light wet and sexy and the whole of an afternoon’s drinking ahead. Sweet and useless.

  I was dead to him in the garden but now I’m aching. It could have been a slow, perfect fuck, but I didn’t give it my attention. I lean forward. It’s a bad angle and I can’t get the position I want. He feels me, and shifts and sighs, but he’s beyond waking. He smells of brandy, of sour fear, of the café’s grease smell which cooked into us for hours. I kneel by the sofa and put my lips over his. My Isabel. Come on, Neen, why can’t you ever keep up? His lips are full and warm. I keep my eyes open and his pores and lines dissolve as I come close, into a new strange country. I press my lips on to his, and then release the pressure so his lips swell back into shape. Press and release, press and release. My mouth stops feeling like my mouth, the way your finger ends do when you put them together and push them in and out a few times. I lean down into him. After a while I don’t know where I stop and he begins. I try to fit my mouth exactly on to his, nought to nought. He’s awake. He must be. But he stays still, letting me do everything. I breathe into his mouth and imagine my breath spilling down the bright branches of his lungs, until it crosses into his blood. Under the heel of my hand his heart bumps slowly and steadily. He’s not awake. I edge his lips all round with minute kisses, and then I walk away, my bare feet light on the boards.

  I go upstairs, and pause outside Isabel’s room. Very quietly, I move right up to the door and put my ear against it and listen. There’s nothing. No one waiting with that smile on her lips which I’m never going to get from anyone else. I say her name aloud, hearing it hollow and stupid in the house which she’s shucked off. A floorboard creaks as my weight shifts. There is no one there. I’ll come back.

  I’ve got something to do first. I creep on down the corridor to the turn, and Susan’s room.

  Susan’s asleep, too. A bar of light from the corridor cuts across the room and shows her blond head gone dark, burrowing under the duvet. She’s turned away from the door, and away from the cot. The room is stifling with baby and female scents. Edward’s mobile turns above the cot, in the draught from the open door, and the fish ride on the end of their invisible threads. Edward must have come in here and fixed it some time during the long evening when he and Susan waited for news. He’s put a hook in the ceiling.

  It’s a small room, about twice the size of the boxroom over the stairs where Colin slept in our house in St Ives. The baby is asleep under his cotton blanket, sleeping on his side with his round cheek pressed against the sheet. Slowly, silently, I let myself down until I am kneeling beside him, looking at him through the bars of the cot.

  There was a poem my father loved, which he would say to us before we went to sleep. He would walk over to the window and look out at the bay, and the Island, and the darkening sea. He was ready to go for a drink as soon as we were in bed, and we’d hear the half-crowns chink in his pocket. But he’d stay for a while, walking around our room and saying the poem.

  My mother wore a yellow dress,

  Gently, gently, gentleness.

  Come back early or never come.

  My mother never wore a yellow dress. She wore overalls that smelled of clay and dust and she worked all day long and earned more money than my father. She had to. What he earned was less than he needed for drink. She was strong. The poem went on and grew fierce and strange so I pushed up tight against warm Isabel:

  The dark was talking to the dead;

  The lamp was dark beside my bed.

  Come back early or never come.

  My father had known the man who wrote the poem. They used to drink together in London, and once he got my father some work on the radio and we all listened.

  ‘Come back early or never come,’ my father repeated, one last time, after the poem was over, and his voice made the room shiver. Isabel sat up in bed. ‘That’s stupid,’ she said scornfully, shaking back her hair. ‘Come back early or never come. Why does he keep saying it?’ My father laughed. ‘You’ve got the soul of a potato, Isabel,’ he said, ‘like other beautiful girls I can think of.’ Isabel wasn’t crushed, as I would have been. ‘I don’t like any of that poem, anyway,’ she went on. ‘It sounds slippery when you say it.’ I knew what she meant. A poem like that slipped into you like a knife and made you feel things you didn’t want to fee
l.

  ‘You’d do better yourself no doubt,’ said my father. There was still a smile in his voice but soon there wouldn’t be.

  ‘I would. I’d just say what I meant.’ Isabel thumped down flat on the pillow again.

  ‘It’s never as easy as that,’ said my father, ‘as you’ll find.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said. It was a phrase of ours at the time, and he went out without kissing us.

  The baby snuffles, his lips against his hands. It’s her smell he’s looking for but she’ll never come, early or late. When he looks up there’ll be no face or shadow, no perfume. Isabel’s gone, and her absence will grow along with him, getting bigger every year. He could be lying in her arms now, sodden and bruised by stones, on a grey foreshore where the tide’s taken her. She would have held him tight, locked her arms round him. Before she went away up the beach she asked Pat Newsome if she ought to take the baby with her. She called him Colin. She must have thought Colin had come back, using her body, feeding on her. No wonder she stopped breast-feeding him. When he’d learned to speak, what would he say?

  I stand up, and lean down over the cot and the sleeping baby. Gently, so as not to wake or startle him, I put my hand against his face. I spread my fingers and feel the warm thread of his breath, like a feather tickling my palm. His face is so small. My hand covers it completely, blotting it out. At once he moves his head to the side to free his mouth and nostrils. Gently, lightly, my hand sinks down again. He moves again. He moves strongly, wriggling away from under my hand. My father was right, things are never as easy as you think. It must have been hard to do. Colin was older than Antony, and stronger. His legs must have drummed the mattress a long time. Maybe she was afraid halfway through, and took the pillow off and saw what he looked like and knew she couldn’t go back now. She’d gone too far and it was already beyond undoing. She had to go on pressing harder and harder till the movement stopped and there was no more little mewing from under the pillow. By the time he went still she must have hated him for taking so long to be dead. And at the same time maybe she still wanted to go back, and told herself he’d be alive again in the morning.