Anticipation (21 page)

He takes the Tube to Chancery Lane, walks down to Fleet Street and delivers his one exposure to
Today.
He calls Jemima later to apologise. A jammed film, he says.

The shot is good. They run it with Will’s credit.

He tries again. He walks the streets of Camden with an empty camera. He frames dirty buildings, rubble, rusting locks. Children throwing stones. The smell of rotting meat moves with him. He vomits in alleyways and restaurant bins, in weeds beside the
thick-watered
canal. The zombies rush his aperture. Lice crawl up his spine. He makes himself complete the hour.

The next day he tries for another.

The dead stick to his skin. He takes to scrubbing his hands with carbolic and the landlady’s laundry brush, and his knuckles split and bleed. He checks his bedroll for lice every night, and again at three most mornings.

Today
calls with another assignment. Will says he’s booked.

He tries Wimbledon with the Rolleiflex, but the dead are there, too, thick as leaves beneath the birch trees. On Haldwyn Street, he finds himself wondering how his mother looked when they dug her out of the rubble. He almost runs back to South Wimbledon station, but he can’t outpace the corpses. They’re in the tunnels
now. Faces flickering on dark glass. In the stuffy, too-warm air, the smell of them is ripe, and he has no choice but to breathe it in.

Back in Camden, he can still taste it on his tongue. Blackmarket whisky, he finds, will wash it away, if he is careful. Just enough to weigh down the lid on the box of the dead. Not enough to smash it open.

When Clive’s telephone rings the following week, Will doesn’t answer.

He thinks about re-enlisting.

He gets a Christmas card from Maura McCormack. She’s seen his picture of Camille Durot in
Today
. There’s a whiff of Belsen about the envelope. But he keeps it, sets it up on the mantelpiece, because it’s the first thing he’s seen in London that is real.

He can’t imagine the camp as she describes it. A sort of continental Butlins, with games, a cinema and a nightclub. The old huts burned, with much fanfare, to the ground. Now they exist only in Will’s head. He feels responsible for them. How do you burn that down?

His demob leave is nearly up. The Surreys are fully subscribed, and the Hardings are asking questions. He takes the one job he’s entitled to, his old one, as darkroom technician for the
South
London Examiner
— a good job, six years ago, for an aspiring photojournalist of twenty-two. For a war correspondent of twenty-eight, it isn’t much, but they’re required to give it to him. In the offices over Tooting Broadway, few of his former colleagues remain. The telephonists remember him, though. They look up from their knitting and give him a smile.

On a damp day in February, in a registry office smelling of floor polish and sausage rolls, Will marries Sarah Harding.

He wakes, hungover, in a Brighton hotel, bemused to find himself with a wife and an erection. They make a decent enough show of things, that weekend. They dance, and eat fish and chips on the pier. They talk about the weather. They make no plans.

In November, Will is surprised again, amid more floor polish, and forms. The maternity ward, this time. Unprepared, despite the accumulation of nappies and bootees, despite the long slow
swell of Sarah’s belly, to be someone’s father. Realising, there in the waiting room with his cheap cigar unlit, that he does not want a child.

In the incubator room, a nurse holds mottled Maggie Biggs up to the glass. Will stares at her. This wrinkled kernel of reflexes and need, with all its terrible potential. And he feels something. A kind of hopelessness. A weight. A fear. Let’s call it love, why don’t we.

L
ook! Here she is again, at last — my squirmy mother. Usurping, as she always would, somebody else’s story. Shall I allow her in now? She has, after all, already had her own part, and this is supposed to be
Will
, not
Maggie.
But I don’t really have much choice. Despite my best efforts, I always found her hard to ignore, and it’s safe to assume that Will can’t manage it either.

For the first year or two of her life, my mother is actually right — it is all about her. How she is, and the things she needs, and what she might grow into. She gives them something to say to each other, Sarah and Will, in the hour a day when they’re both awake, those awkward moments they cross over.

One of the first things Maggie Biggs needs, of course, is a home, which comes in the form of a garden flat in Colliers Wood. She won’t remember much about it. (Depressing daisy wallpaper. The smell of fox in the garden, and the Hardings’ tobaccoey old sofa, with its frayed piping, into which she sinks her baby teeth.) Certainly not Will Biggs, who is mostly shut up in the big
bay-windowed
bedroom, with the second-hand curtains drawn against the daylight and the street.

Will no longer works in the
Examiner’
s darkroom. He’s a typesetter now, a real trade, with a union wage plus overtime, and no expectation of ambition. He works a lot of nights, and the shiftwork suits him. He feels safer sleeping during the day, alone. The flat is often quiet. The upstairs neighbour is usually out at work, and Sarah, the good wife, takes the baby up to her mother’s every day.

In the evenings, he eats his supper and leaves for work while Sarah puts Maggie down. He slips out quietly, against the flow of
men coming home up the street, away from all that caring. Often he stops in for a pint on the way, with a few of the boys from his shift. They’re all ex-servicemen, of course. They know the codes of conversation. They tell funny war stories, in which no one gets hurt, at least not badly. An endless one-upmanship of complaints about food and officers and the worst place to sleep and the longest time they went without changing their underpants. The other men like Will. He’s got a lot of good stories about the top brass. And besides, they know they can always count on him to cover another night shift.

Maggie does remember the next house, off Mitcham Lane. It’s a brand-new semi-detached, three-up two-down, not far from Tooting Common. She and Sarah love the place. It has two different wallpapers in every room, and swans on the
cafe-curtains.

Will is ‘Daddy’, now, and sometimes he’s up when she gets home from school, and if she promises to be a good girl for her mother while he’s at work, he’ll help her do her homework. They sit at the table together. It’s a new red Formica one, with matching vinyl chairs. Daddy’s head of the night shift, and really quite important.

What Maggie remembers best, of course, is that Saturday morning in January 1954, when Daddy comes home in the dark, cold and wet, and doesn’t go straight to bed but sits down with them at the table and shows them the display ad he’s made in today’s paper. It has a big ship pointing down, and a shiny sun, and something they all mistake for a palm tree. Maggie’s seven now, and before she’s sent off to play in her room, she can read the name of that Commonwealth country so troubling to spell —
NEW ZEALAND.

When she comes back down for lunch, Daddy’s still up and looking quite pleased, and she’s glad, because he’s been in a really funny mood for days, ever since the men from the council came and planted the birch trees down their street.

Forty-two years, twenty thousand kilometres later, here we are holding Will Biggs’ luggage. His box of the dead, the one thing he could never leave behind. What do we do with it, Maggie and I?

It’s a contentious issue. Maggie wants to publish his work. If it was up to me, I’d burn it. Send the proofs up in smoke, like the huts and William Biggs. Give back what the camera took, set the souls of the undead free. I have no doubt that, had my grandfather’s last morning gone to plan, they’d be ash already.

(Ah, the cleansing power of flame. What’s more empowering than watching the past disappear? If he’d burned them fifty years ago, it might have done Will the world of good. It’s not just the Hardings who like a good blaze.)

But not all pasts, inconvenient Maggie asserts, are allowed to be forgotten. Some need to be kept at your shoulder, so close you can see the whites of their eyes, what’s reflected there. They’re mirrors that don’t distort, these pasts, and we should check ourselves before we go anywhere, make sure our slips aren’t showing.

Of course, I don’t have to listen to her. I moved out of Bradbury Street ten years ago, and I can do what I like. William’s photographs are in my BMW now, and if I choose to take them back to Otatara and stuff them into my schist fireplace there’s not a lot my mother can do about it.

Then again, maybe William knew what he was doing. Release these celluloid ghosts and who knows where they might get to. These gases, too, might sink. Get into your nose and throat, stick to the hairs in your lungs, spread their accusations and threats through your blood and bones. Then what do you burn?

It’s a long drive back to Invercargill. Somewhere around Twizel — the horrors of the Pukaki Dam behind us — Maggie opens her eyes, and we agree that William’s work belongs behind glass. Conservation glass, to keep the past in and the present out. The kind that doesn’t reflect, and no one can fall through.

By Omarama, I have been put in charge — again — of choosing a museum. (In due course, I will pick the Imperial War, send that box all the way back to the scruffy streets of South London where it belongs. Where Will’s war can be displayed, or not, as the
contract states, alongside everyone else’s. No donor recognition, thank you — there’s nothing charitable about this.)

It’s late by the time I get home, but still I feel the need to change the sheets and have a shower. The dead are sticky. Something’s making me itch — decay or lice or a black wool shirt, it’s hard to say — and I’d take a spray of DDT any day if that would get it off my skin.

Greg’s out — it’s indoor cricket night. I pick up the socks on the floor, the week’s worth of striped shirts he’s pulled off without unbuttoning and piled beside the clothes basket.

Don’t make me do this,
I think.
I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t want to be anyone’s mother.

The itching gets worse. And here it is, my jackbooted rage. A fury that surely should not stem from laundry. These small abdications of underpants and thought and self-regulation.

But if he walked in right now — asked me if I knew where his jacket was, or his keys or his shoes or his wallet — there’s really no telling what I might do. Rant or slap. Boil-wash his favourite jeans, cut his brakes or drop cyanide into his coffee. It’s never been a Harding strength, the drawing of lines.

Through three hundred square metres of silence, I can hear a southerly coming up, roaring through the golf course pines, buffeting down the chimney. I go back downstairs, light the fire and pour myself a whisky.

William was right, it helps.

‘Still up?’ says Greg when he walks in and flicks the overhead lights on. Full strength. He never uses the dimmers. ‘Everything go off okay up there?’

I look at him, robust and pink-cheeked and triumphant, and take a leaf out of my grandfather’s book. ‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Good.’ He leans down and kisses me, quickly, eyeing the bottle as he does so. ‘What’s that you’ve got in the box?’

‘Just some old stuff of Grandpa’s.’

‘Oh.’ Greg clicks his tongue, nods sympathetically, studies the Berber loop-pile. A moment later, he says, ‘You don’t mind if I go to bed, do you? I’ve got a seven-thirty meeting.’

I find I don’t mind at all. I wait for a while, just to make sure he’s not coming back. Then I get up, turn off the lights, put some more wood on the fire, sit back down and pour myself another glass. A swirl of peat-bog and charred oak. It’s older than I am, this whisky, another gift from the dead to sting my tongue.

I drink, and read Nurse Maura’s letters. They contain no regret. Just a snapshot, in a dirty envelope sent ten years ago from a refugee camp in Rwanda, of her with her husband and baby granddaughter against the sweep of Dublin Bay.

When I’ve finished, I feed the letters into the fire. Slowly, one by one.