Mourning Ruby (20 page)

I can think of the things that may have run through his mind when he was in the dacha. An argument, a cry, a blow. A woman running out of a room. A wound smelling of blood that has already congealed, and a letter lying on the floor which he knows he should not read, but which of course he will read. A face that was alive with love for him, but now it’s shut like a stone. Children who feared him and men who danced for him like bears. But I cannot imagine myself into that room where he is alone. I’ve come to the end of trying.

You told me a long time ago that story was all you
had. You were angry with me for trying to reinterpret your story, maybe even trying to change the way you looked at it.

All you know about your mother is that she gave birth to you. All I know about my father is what my mother has told me. I can’t remember him at all. He was a flyer. My father flew and my grandfather flew and I know almost nothing about what they did and what drove them. They went to war, both of them, one in each generation, but I don’t know anything about it.

He would never talk about it, my mother says. When there was a programme about the war he wouldn’t watch it. He never went to reunions. ‘He’d had enough of all that,’ my mother said.

There’s a small museum of aviation here at Victoria, close to the airport. That’s how my story started. I walked around those aeroplanes and imagined men inside, starting up the engines. I could see it, feel it. One of the characters might be my grandfather. And there’s a woman, too. I see her alone in a room which she has painted herself. I watch the way she moves and hear the song she hums under her breath.

Do you remember telling me about how the midwife sat down with a long form to fill in, on your first ante-natal visit? You couldn’t give her any of the details she needed, about your family medical history. She was very tactful about it. She must have come up against the situation before, you said, people who don’t know who they are or where they come from. I recall your exact words: ‘It’s not only that I don’t know
my mother or my father. They’ve cut me off from the whole chain of my ancestors.’

I felt for you then, though I may not have shown it. You don’t want my pity, any more than I want yours. But in thinking it over, I’ve come to see that it isn’t true. No one can cut you off from the chain of your ancestry. They can’t do it by mistake, or even deliberately. It would be the hardest thing in the world to do.

You’ve got all the information inside you that everyone else has got: the genetic map, the mitochondrial DNA. Your features rise up from the swamp of the past, just like everyone’s.

Nobody really knows their ancestors, even if they’re living beside the graveyard where their great-great-grandparents are buried, or in the house which their family built and lived in for generations. They may possess papers, objects, maybe money and property. But they don’t possess the lives of the past, any more than you do.

But they may possess stories. I was thinking about what you said, Rebecca, and that the most important thing you haven’t got about your family are their stories. That’s why you got so angry when I suggested that there was another way to interpret your shoebox. It was your story and it was all you had and you were going to cling on to it. No one was going to wrestle that shoebox out of your arms.

So I thought I would give you another story. It’s presumptuous of me, isn’t it? Lucky I’m not with you so I can’t see you slap me down with a look.

If you don’t want it, you don’t even have to read it. It’s not finished yet, but when it is I’ll email you to
find out where you are, and then I’ll come and give it to you.

I’m not being completely honest. In fact, my dearest Rebecca, I’m not being honest at all. I’m not writing this story entirely for you. How could I? I’m also writing it for myself. I want to look at the features of it. I want to see my grandfather’s lips move. I want to hear the words that will come out of Florence’s lips. She’s called Florence, the woman I told you about, the one who’s in the room alone. At least, she’s alone now, but soon she won’t be –

So I am not going to write any more about Stalin. Olya was right, I should have written Volodya’s story, but I can’t do that, either.

I’m writing about the people who have been there all the time, waiting. I’m writing about you, and me. And you wouldn’t believe how fast I’m writing. All those years of struggle and research and drafts, and no book; and now I’m going to write this one in a matter of months. I can feel it.

Don’t take fright. Don’t sheer off, Rebecca, the way you do sometimes. All I’m asking you to do is to be my reader.

Yesterday, I saw a grizzly bear. We were on one side of a gorge, with our guide. There was a slippery path, and a steep drop to the river below. The river roared through the gully. They have close to six feet of rain a year there. Enough rain to bury you standing, Mikey said. He’s our guide. We’d camped the night before. Did you know that you can’t leave a trace of food in a tent in bear country? You have to seal it in boxes and hang it in trees well away from the camp.

Mikey touched my arm. He spoke quietly. I knew that he wanted to draw my attention to something without alerting the others.

‘Look down by the water. On the other side of the river. There’s a grizzly.’

I looked down. The bear was easy to see, though I wouldn’t have known it was a grizzly. It seemed to be playing with the water, right by the edge, where it churned through the rocks.

‘He’s hunting salmon,’ said Mikey. ‘Didn’t expect to see him here.’

I could tell that although Mikey took a certain detached satisfaction in the presence of the grizzly, he wasn’t in the usual sense of the words pleased to see him. And I could see why. The bear had climbed down his side of the gorge. He could most certainly climb up again, on ours.

But he was at a distance. None of his senses registered us through the roar of the water.

Mikey didn’t mention the presence of the grizzly to anyone else in our group. We walked on through the wet, in single file.

But as we went on it occurred to me that we weren’t walking into safety. Phew, no more bears, that’s a relief. It wasn’t like that. We were simply walking into the territory of being less close to a grizzly bear. There were pretty much bound to be bears within calling distance all the way we walked.

You know how they say that you are never more than three yards from a rat, in the city? And yet you rarely see one, unless it’s your job to do so.

So here I am, Rebecca. To be exact, here I am sitting
in a pool of electric light, with my iBook burning blue. I’m drinking whiskey and I’m about to start writing again. I’m in the territory of bears. They are all around me, even if I can’t yet see them. I can sense them, smell them. You know me, Rebecca, I’m an indoor man by nature, and words are the kind of bears I hunt.

With love,

Joe

I must have been smiling as I read it, because a young guy who was wiping the tables smiled back at me.

‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.

‘Fine.’ I glanced round. The place was full and there were more backpackers barging in the doorway. Too much trade for one pair of hands.

‘Do you need any help here?’ I asked.

And now it’s September. The thirtieth of September, to be exact. The families and children left weeks ago, and even the students have to go now. Tomorrow, people will be permitted to let their dogs run on the beaches again. Porthmeor has a washed, innocent look to it. The light’s changed too. It’s golden now, rather than white.

I can walk freely, where there would have been a hundred camps set up on the sand in August. Family camps: children, parents, grandparents, young girls with their boyfriends, maybe a son-in-law who keeps staring at gaps in the canvas walls that surround him, as if he plans a break-out.

But in some of the camps everybody looks content. Even happy. I want to get close, to find out how their happiness works. I want to watch from the very first
moment, when the first member of the family dumps an armload of chairs, cushions and mats on the sand and then another comes up with rolls of windbreak under each arm, and a big smooth stone for hammering in the poles. They don’t want to lie in the naked air of the beach, with people like me watching. They’re very genial but they know what they want, which is themselves.

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.