The Missing Marriage (5 page)

Instead she got up to pour herself a glass of water at the sink, and saw through the nets at the window that it was the garden where the cancer had taken its toll. The house was as still and immaculate as always, but the garden . . . Erwin's shed was the only thing to rise out of the debris with any semblance of its former self. The plot that had fed the Fausts, their freezer, and many neighbours was laid to waste. The shed looked embarrassed – as though it was just about holding onto its dignity with the help of the crocheted curtain, white still at the tiny window.

Looking out at the garden, Anna finally felt afraid; afraid of what was happening here at number nineteen Parkview, and afraid of what was going to happen. Erwin and Mary had been there all her life; they brought her up when her mother disappeared off the face of the earth – grandparents who became parents again. She wasn't losing a grandfather; she was losing a father.

Erwin had an appointment at the hospital the next day, and although they let Anna drive them because she was there, she knew they'd have preferred to go on the bus like they usually did.

They weren't doing any tests – it was just a consultation
to see how things were going to be at the end
, as Mary put it, re-arranging the brooch in her scarf.

Anna was left outside in a waiting area, on a blue chair next to a water dispenser and wire rack full of cancer care leaflets.

Erwin and Mary had gone into Dr Nadafi's room – Mary had long since got over her agitation at being assigned a ‘coloured' man – and sat down in front of his desk. Before the door shut, Anna saw them taking hold of each other's hands beneath the desk, and her heart broke suddenly for them.

The waiting room, which had been empty, soon filled with young couples, children, a teenage girl and her parents.

Unnerved, Anna stood up to get herself some water from the dispenser, her hands shaking, aware that people were staring. She felt them wondering about her, briefly, then went to wait in the corridor – standing against an old radiator whose heat she could feel through her jeans.

‘You didn't have to hang about,' Mary said when they came out, verging on angry.

‘For C-christ's sake, Nan!' Anna was angry herself now. ‘We could have got the bus home,' Mary persisted. ‘I want to be here. Just let me be here.'

Erwin, looking stunned still from the consultation, said nothing.

‘I need the toilet.' Mary set off down the corridor. ‘Where's she going?' Erwin asked Anna, in a panic at the sight of Mary's retreating back.

‘Just the toilet.'

Erwin nodded as Mary called back over her shoulder, ‘Take him down to Out-Patients – we've got a prescription to pick up from the pharmacy.'

Anna started walking towards the stairs when Erwin grabbed hold of her suddenly and pulled her back, staring intently at her and chewing rapidly on the inside of his cheek.

It felt like the first time he'd even noticed her since she'd arrived the day before.

‘Whatever she says – I want you to be here, you know, at the end.'

She cut him off. ‘Granddad.'

‘Please,' he insisted, keeping a tight grip on her arm, his breath rasping. ‘I mean it.'

He hadn't really spoken to her until now, and, listening to him, she was aware of his accent – how German he sounded.

‘Not for me,' he added. ‘For Mary. You have to be there for her because I'll be leaving her alone.'

Anna put her hand over his, which was still gripping her upper arm. ‘You know I will. You know that.'

‘Hearing's the last thing to go,' he started to mumble, more to himself than her, ‘isn't that strange? You've got to carry on talking to me even when I lose consciousness, even when you think that might be it. You've got to keep on talking because I'll still be able to hear you.'

‘I will.'

He nodded and they carried on walking down the stairs, following the blue signs to Out-Patients.

Mary stood by the bedroom window at number nineteen Parkview, looking out for the nurse the hospital was sending them. Her poise of earlier weeks was shattered after having spent an entire night lying next to someone she was convinced was dying. When Anna, angry, asked her why she hadn't phoned earlier, all she could think to say was, ‘What was the point?' – unsure even what she'd meant by that.

‘Where's the nurse?' Mary said irritably.

Anna, sitting in a G-Plan chair that was as old as the house and still upholstered in its original Everglade green, shut her eyes. She held on tight to Erwin's hand. His face was turned towards her, his mouth open – rasping. As soon as she so much as started to loosen her grip, his hand slid away from her down the side of the bed, and that scared her. The furniture in the room, like the carpet she remembered from childhood with its dense pattern of ferns, was still in good condition so had never been replaced. Neither Erwin nor Mary would have dreamed of growing tired of these things before they became threadbare.

Everything in the house had been earned and that's why the television set was covered with a blanket to protect it from dust when it wasn't being used; why the stereo was kept in the box it came in unless it was being played. Even now, the house was as clean and tidy as it had always been because for Mary and Erwin's generation cleanliness and tidiness were the only things separating them from the lost and the damned: the drinkers, the fornicators, the unemployed and the hungry.

‘How was Laura last night?' Mary asked after a while.

Anna hadn't been expecting this. ‘In shock.'

‘It's funny – you can't have seen her in, what – fifteen years or something?'

‘Sixteen.'

Mary turned away from the window to look at her, pausing. ‘And yet, you and Laura, when you were growing up, you were like this,' she said, twisting her fingers together in spite of the arthritis. ‘You were close to Bryan as well – at one time. He used to wait for you coming home from school – off the Newcastle bus, d'you remember?'

Anna did. She could see him now – waiting on the flower troughs outside the station, next to the Italian café, Moscadini's. They'd walk back from the station down to Hartford Estate together, sometimes talking, sometimes not – Bryan in something barely resembling a uniform and Anna in her navy blue and red Grammar School colours, the beribboned hat pushed in her bag. She'd been glad of the company – and the protection – because it was a risky and unpleasant business getting home to Parkview in a Grammar School uniform.

‘He was forever in our back garden, drawing some miniscule insect with his magnifying glass.'

Anna stared at Mary. She'd forgotten that Bryan drew, and she'd forgotten all about his magnifying glass as well, which had a resonance for her she fought to remember, but couldn't right then.

‘Have you got any of his pictures still?' she asked suddenly.

‘Probably. Somewhere. I'm sure I put some up in the wash house. That poor child,' she added, lost in thought and barely aware now of Erwin's rhythmic rasping. ‘He was as good as orphaned – the Strike on one side and suicide on the other. It was Bryan who found her, you know.'

‘Found who?'

‘His mother – Rachel. What a thing to come home from school to. You won't remember –'

But Anna did remember. She remembered because it had been a Monday – wash day – and Bryan had come running through all Mary's sheets, hanging from the line she had propped cloud high, and Mary had yelled at him until she'd seen his face, and the dark patch on his trousers where he'd wet himself.

Mary took him inside number nineteen and ran a bath – and that was the first time Anna saw Bryan Deane naked; at the age of twelve, the day his mother died.

‘It was hard on Bryan – he was Rachel's favourite. They said all sorts of things about Bobby Deane after that, but I don't think Bobby ever laid so much as a finger on Rachel, she was just lonely that's all – you know, that real loneliness; the sort you can't escape from. Bobby was a Union Official – he was working twelve hours a day and more. They said all sorts about Rachel as well,' Mary carried on, ‘about how Bryan wasn't even Bobby's because there was a darkness to him that none of the other Deanes had.' She sighed.

‘Bryan?'

Mary nodded. ‘During the Strike, Rachel took to spending a lot of time with somebody Bobby sang with on the colliery choir. She liked to sing as well. I think it was just companionship, but it wasn't something you did back then. Men and women weren't friends. You stayed in your own home . . . your own backyard. You didn't take to wandering, however innocent that wandering might be. There were rules – and Rachel was never very good at rules; she used to say she felt suffocated.'

‘So who was Rachel's friend?'

Mary hesitated. ‘A widower, but a widower still counted as another woman's husband if you were married yourself, and Rachel was. He was a safety engineer at Bates.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘He died in an accident. You've got no colour,' she said suddenly to Anna.

‘I'm not sleeping well.'

‘I can tell. That's what make up's for, you know – the bad days.' Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna's running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.

An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.

‘That hair.'

‘What about my hair?' Anna patted her head.

‘Not yours.'

‘Whose hair, Nan?'

Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin's morphine crossed Anna's mind – and not for the first time either.

‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.'

‘Or he chose her.'

‘Maybe, but if you'd asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I'd have said you were. Don't look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn't grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?'

She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.

‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,' she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I'm angry with him for dying, Anna. I'm just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange threads,' Mary concluded, making an effort to control the tears.

Anna left Erwin – and Mary – with the nurse, Susan, who was in her late forties and who entered the Fausts' lives with fortitude, humour, the re-issued eau de toilette of Poison, and a portable oxygen canister.

Within minutes of her stepping inside number nineteen Parkview, normality had been restored and the terrors of the night vanquished. By the time Anna left, Erwin was breathing normally and Susan was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette with Mary.

Anna got into her car and paused for a minute – pressing her forehead hard into the steering wheel before turning on the engine and driving out of the estate past the parade of shops where Mo's used to be. Curious about the shop that had featured so prominently throughout her childhood, she parked the car.

There were only two shops still open on the Parade – a fish and chip shop called The Seven Seas, and the convenience store that used to be Mo's – although this wasn't immediately apparent given the caging across the windows on the outside of both.

There was no longer a post office inside Mo's, but the security glass had been retained – behind which there was a till, an overweight girl in a tracksuit, a child, and most of the shop's alcoholic stock.

‘Milk and eggs?' Anna asked, not particularly hopeful.

‘Back of the shop – in the fridge.'

She felt the girl's eyes on her as she made her way towards the back of the shop, which smelt of underlying damp and rotten lino.

Anna recognised the lino – it had been there in Mo's time when there had been a baker's, butcher's, grocer's, hardware store, chemist and hairdresser's owned by Mo's twin sister on the Parade. It was where all the women on the estate used to go to get their hair done, including Anna when she was small. She hated getting her hair cut so much that Mary used to have to bring one of Erwin's belts with her to the salon so that they could tie her into the chair in order to keep her still.

She and Laura used to spend most of their summers walking between Mo's shop, the park and home. Anna could even remember the way Mo's used to smell – of sherbet, newsprint and hairspray from the salon next door. There had been a pink and green rocket outside whose presence it was difficult to justify given that nobody she knew ever had ten pence to spend on a rocket ride – the pennies they pooled together went on sweet things.

They would walk sluggishly, tipping back sherbet, towards the park the houses on Parkview overlooked to the rear. A park that had been in perpetual decline, and whose play equipment – erected on concrete in the hedonistic days before health and safety – was painted metal that got chipped and rusted, a fall off which resulted in broken teeth, fractured elbows, hairline cracks to the skull and tetanus jabs.

Anna would sit behind Laura on the metal horse as the sun moved across the sky, not speaking, surrounded by roses that never seemed to bloom, the horse's rusting saddle dying their thighs a feint red – until the big boys crawled up out of the sewage outlet where they kept their stash of pornography and sniffed glue. When the big boys appeared it was time to go home, but if they were out of glue, and walked in a straight line still with eyes that weren't red, they let Laura and Anna play chicken with them on the railway line that ran between the Alcan aluminium smelting plant to the north, and Cambois power station to the south – the power station whose four chimneys would have filled the horizon through her apartment windows at the Ridley Arms if they hadn't been demolished in 2003.