Angel of Brooklyn (39 page)

‘I’d be there every night,’ said Beatrice.

‘So would I,’ said Lizzie. ‘If I could afford it.’

There was a knock on the door. Lizzie went to open it.

‘Ada?’

‘Can I come in?’ she asked. She was wearing a washed-out-looking dress and holding a leather wallet, which she slipped inside her pocket.

Lizzie nodded. ‘Beatrice is here.’

As soon as Ada walked into the room Beatrice felt uncomfortable. She stood up, sat down, she didn’t know what to say. Lizzie poured tea and offered a plate of biscuits.

‘How are you feeling?’ Lizzie asked Ada.

‘Sometimes better, sometimes worse,’ she said, taking one of the biscuits and snapping it in two. ‘One good thing. At least I know. The wondering and waiting was making me sick. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. I’d pace up and down, I’d be wearing out the floorboards. I knew that telegram would come, it was just a matter of when.’

Beatrice knew how she’d felt. She was always at the window, leaving warm greasy marks on the glass. There had been no more letters or postcards. At night she would sit up late reading old magazines, listening to music, tidying the cupboards, anything, because lying in bed was no good, she’d close her eyes, open them, watch the shadows from the moon, listen to the owl, the ticking of the clock, and when eventually she did fall asleep, she would dream, and sometimes Jonathan was at home and there wasn’t a war at all. They were travelling in the motor car. She wanted to see Wales. They had children. A girl. A boy who looked like Elijah, and sometimes it was Elijah, saying grace, reading
The Life of John Wesley
, then saying prayers and requiems for all the dead birds, he was digging shallow holes and giving them a funeral.

For something else to look at, they took their chairs into the yard where they sat in squares of pale sunshine with the scent of the dusty lilac bush.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ said Ada. ‘I thought this was it. Me and Jim. The shop. Our trips out to the seaside. We went to Blackpool one year. It’s like Morecambe, only faster.’

Lizzie looked pained. ‘I’ve never been to Blackpool,’ she said.

‘They buried him, you know,’ said Ada, not looking at Lizzie or Beatrice, but at a small lick of cloud above their heads. ‘They had to, and I’m glad of it, but it doesn’t seem right, he’s such a long way from here, and how will I ever get to visit him? They’re going to send me a picture of the grave. A picture isn’t the same. It doesn’t seem real. And
I
would have liked to have seen the coffin going in, though now that I think about it, I don’t suppose he had a coffin, did he?’

‘They would have given him a coffin,’ Beatrice nodded.

‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, ‘I’m sure of it.’

Ada narrowed her eyes and rubbed at her arms.

‘Are you getting cold?’ asked Lizzie.

‘Cold?’ said Ada. ‘I’m always cold.’

They sat looking at the wall, with the moss, the white lilac and a thorny-looking rose bush. Suddenly, Ada reached into her pocket and brought the wallet out.

‘This was Jim’s,’ she said. ‘They sent it back to me. It’s a good one. It’s from Letterman’s in town. It was a Christmas present from his mam.’ She opened it out. Beatrice thought she was going to be sick, right there on her boots. Lizzie paled. There were some pieces of paper folded inside it. ‘Letters,’ Ada said, embarrassed to see her own handwriting. ‘And this.’ It was a smaller piece of paper. She unravelled it. Beatrice’s stomach dipped as soon as she saw it, but she didn’t say anything.

‘“Solange Devaux, 20.30,”’ she read. ‘French. I wonder what it means? It sounds like a place. I’ll bet that’s where they were fighting or where they were going off to. I wish I knew where it was.’

Suddenly Lizzie smiled. ‘I know – you could look it up for her,’ she said to Beatrice. ‘You have all those travel books.’

Beatrice pursed her lips together and gave a little smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If I have a map of France.’

Ada looked at her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, with a begrudging kind of smile. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’

It was getting late. Beatrice did a long slow circle of the village, pausing to look at the water with its small inky waves. She passed the cottage where Mary had lived and through the open curtains she could see Mary’s mother and the doctor, sitting side by side on the sofa. A ginger cat was stretching on the doorstep, rattling its claws. She didn’t know what to think. She looked at the sky; a single star was out.

It was another warm night. Beatrice fell asleep, then woke up with the sheets on the floor. She’d been dreaming about Normal. She was in a dirty room and a man was in the doorway with a bar of buttermilk soap.

She lit her lamp and read her magazine for a while. When she
closed
her eyes they were full of gold buttons, feathers, a map of northern France, and in between Bracquemont and Reims was a small black dot that turned into the village of Solange Devaux where soldiers passed between stations, where they could fill their canteens, smoke cigarettes, and talk about nothing, everything, or what it really felt like to be walking in the mud, spitting out rainwater, watching death, dodging bullets, terrified, and all of this such a long way from home.

WALKING IN THE DARK

1. Walking in the Dark

IT WAS ALWAYS
light in Coney. Walking home, the sky might be the colour of a telephone, but there’d always be something else to light your way, and not just the moon or the stars; this light was coloured, and at quarter past midnight, when they turned out all the bulbs, it seemed like they’d left the ghosts of themselves behind, that the boardwalk was glowing, that the air was still full of it, like the phosphorescent mist Beatrice had seen all those years ago hanging like a shroud in Hackett’s Wood. But she knew better. She knew that the light came from the tucked-away places down the side streets. Shen Yip had a string of red lanterns outside his shaky-looking bar room where you could sit on dragon-patterned cushions smoking opium pipes with thin-faced men who talked about poetry and ghostly apparitions. The tattooist couldn’t sleep. He’d leave a blue bulb shining by his doorway. Sailors who’d docked for the night could crawl their way over and by morning they could have sirens on their arms, a rose-entwined anchor, or the name of their sweetheart over the initials of the last one. Abdul the Turk slept through the day. He’d eat his breakfast at supper time, a plate of cheese and grapes, or an apricot pastry, then he’d sit by his door watching the crowds walking back to their rooms. Later, he’d light his lanterns and set the kettle on the stove. He’d make mint tea. He was famous for his tea. If you’d been working late, if you were an insomniac, if you were alone with a problem, or you just needed a little company, you could pull on a pair of slippers and a robe and make your way over to Abdul’s. He didn’t care about your clothes. He usually wore a djellaba. Sometimes he slept in it. He was often alone, or he would sometimes have company, but he’d always have room for one more. He always had tea.

There were lights everywhere. In hazy late-night bars. On funny-face torches, the latest craze of the season. On buggies. Automobiles. Ferry boats. In windows where people packed items into stiff cardboard boxes. Where the baker was just starting his shift between
the
hot black ovens and plates of rising dough. The twenty-four-hour dentist had a blood-red light in his lobby that made the people who were holding their cheeks and moaning with the worst pain they had ever known, even worse than childbirth, turn right around again, looking for the drug store with those little paper packets that might just do the trick.

Beatrice knew all these lights. The gambler’s, the whorehouse, the shaky-handed abortionist – who’d once shown Nancy fake certificates, telling her he’d been a bona fide physician when all he’d ever worked on were the horses at the racetrack – the blind woman who used candles to show the world that she was still alive, the coffee drinker, the man who was reading his way through the library and was on his way to C. Beatrice knew all these lights, because she was looking for the darkness. In the darkness she wouldn’t be distracted. She’d be alone. She could ask herself questions and think long and hard about the answers.

When the lights went out across the park, fizzing on the wires, she’d put a small fruit knife in her pocket and walked down towards the shoreline. There were shadows. The shush-shushing roll of the sea at her feet. Pinpricks of light in the distance showed fishing boats. The moon was a scratch. There was a twinkling from the pierhead where the rod and line fishermen were sitting with their bait. But it wasn’t nearly dark enough. There were the lights shifting from the far reaches of the boardwalk. She could see her hands in front of her face, and when her eyes adjusted, the world was clear as daylight. It made her think about other people. The things she could see. The sign that said
Mabel’s Hot Rolls. Buy Our Crab Cakes. Drummond’s Wines and Liquors
.

She walked down the darkest-looking side street she could find, her hand on her fruit knife feeling nervous. She could hear something humming, talking behind windows with the shutters pulled down, and then a wailing. She squeezed the fruit knife tighter. There were men on the corner, she could see the jagged outline of their faces, a soft low groaning; these were the drug addicts who came looking for their own kind of darkness, and in the morning the men taking out their trash would find them on the sidewalk, still slumped inside a bruised kind of daze. Beatrice walked quickly with her head down. A single light bulb still quivered on the sign for Frankfurter Heaven. The men ignored her. The hungry ragpickers. The drug addicts. They were floating
from
the kerb. They didn’t need shoes because they were dancing with the girl who sang songs about the boy she’d left in Donegal and they were the boys come to get her.

She went home. The street lights were lit, and they poured through the window as she made herself a blindfold. The blindfold nearly worked. She made herself another one and pulled it very tight. She sat against the wall with her eyes closed. Two blindfolds. Darkness.

In Normal she had wrapped herself in night-time. She’d had long conversations with her mother who’d told her that if she was still alive the first thing she’d do would be to get rid of all the birds.

It wasn’t easy in Brooklyn. She had to throw away the pictures seared behind her eyelids. Nancy, hooking up her wings. Conrad with his hair wet. The men on the opposite chair were cracking their knuckles, rubbing their watery eyes, looking at the picture of her that was supposed to be hidden, and taking it away with them for as long as their memories (or their wallets) would let them.

She tried to relax. The room was quiet enough and she wanted to see her father. Not the man in the outhouse with the blood on his apron, the man who forgot to wash from one week to the next, reading manuals in the half-light, but her father at his best. Holding her hand on her first day at school, the only man in a room of clucking mothers. Why had she forgotten that? Then hadn’t he dragged her to see Elijah’s only attempt at sport, a fielder in a baseball game, sent off with a headache at half-time? She’d stood on the sideline, bored, but her father had cheered his encouragement, whooping like a madman, hitting Elijah on the back as if his small attempt had made all the difference. She folded her arms around herself. Tight. She saw her father laughing; he was slapping his knees and laughing. What had been so funny? She tried to imagine a time before the birds, a time when he’d stood behind his polished desk with a shiny fob watch, and he’d swung it on its chain while the boys were doing a test. In those days he must have woken early, making sure to trim his beard. He was well respected. Genteel ladies would knock at the door and ask him to tutor their sons. He would come home with a toppling mountain of copybooks, sitting up late, reading every word, and being vigilant with his marking. He would grin over supper. So what happened?

In the darkness, Beatrice sees his face. He’s young, but already looking worn. And now the neighbours have stopped leaving baskets of food, they’ve stopped coming over with their offerings of cake, fish
wrapped
in paper, loaves of bread, or ‘Won’t you let me clean the kitchen for you?’

Beatrice wipes her fingers across the taut blindfold. She feels small sitting there in the dark. For years she has tried to think up alternative versions of her life. Her father remarrying. Why, there were plenty of eligible young women in Normal. These women went to church, fluttering in their best white clothes, like moths. They taught school. They had hope chests. She might have had a stepmother. Her father would have stayed at the front of the classroom with his fob watch and in place of the birds there would have been dainty ornaments or brightly polished spaces. There would have been other things. Birthday parties. Visits from new relations. Brothers and sisters. Something like a home.

But what is the use of thinking like this? There was only then. There is only now.
And what would you think of me now?

2. The Joys of Fan Mail

Dear Angel
,

You made me happy
.

Spike. (I was wearing a red necktie and suspenders.)

Dear Brooklyn Angel
,

I would like to take you home with me. You could lie in bed all day doing nothing. I work in maintenance. I would bring us food from Mr Chow’s, he makes the best rice noodles. You wouldn’t have to do nothing. I can clean. I have a nice place. If you crane your neck out, you can even see the ocean. I would buy you presents. Anything you want. It wouldn’t be such a bad life. What do you say?

Jake Jackson

Dear Blondie
,

I wish that fella didn’t charge so much. I would see you every day. I dream about you. Oh boy, the things you do in my dreams! I sat with you on Tuesday. I’m the boy with the irons on my legs. I had polio, but things are looking up. I can get about. I can do almost as much as the next man. I can even kick a ball. Well, thanks for making this the best vacation of my life!!!