Blasted (49 page)

With a rustling, the figure moved toward me out of the dark. “It's me.”

The breath came out of me in a rush as my head fell back. The small voice went on. “I didn't scare you, did I?”

“Yes, you did, Tina.”

“Oh.” She hesitated beside my bed, staring.

“Go back to bed, now.”

She didn't move. “I… can you tell me a story?”

“My throat hurts.”

“Oh.” Another pause. She was holding something, twisting it in her hands. It was a small teddy bear. “Well, could I sit on your bed for a while?”

“There's not room for two.” Goddamn kid, scaring the shit out of me.

“Go on with you.”

“I… just for a minute?”

“What's up with you?” I raised my head to look her in the face.

“Please don't be mad.”

Goddamn it. Now the kid was starting to cry. “Shhhh,” I said.

“I had a nightmare.”

“Well, go to Grandpa – Uncle John, then.”

“B-b-but…”

“Go to Uncle John if you're scared.”

Her head lowered, and her tearful voice went into a whisper. “I can't.”

“Why not?”

Sobs welled up anew. “B-b-because I asked him yesterday how Aunt Maddie died, and he said,
in her sleep
.”

“So?”

“And that means, she died
in that bed
.” The little hand clutched me.

“Did she? Did she?”

“Aw, for fuck's sake.”

“You're not supposed to swear!”

“Shhh. I'm sorry. Sorry.” We held a moment, she standing by the cot sniffing, me lying on my back, her hand on my sleeve. A gust of wind rattled the windows, rushing through the trees on the Hill. She took her hand off me, and wiped her nose with the back of it, head sunk deep down. There was something so pathetically child-like about the gesture that I moved my body over against the wall, lifted a corner of my blanket. “Come on in, then.”

She didn't move.

“Oh, for – no, I mean it. Climb in. And bring your friend too. What's his name?”

“It's a her.”

“Oh.”

“Bear.”

“I can see it's a bear.”

“No, that's her
name
.”

“Are you coming to bed or not?”

Snuffling, she climbed onto the cot.

And then she startled me utterly by throwing her arms around my neck and burrowing right into me. Her blonde head fit just under my chin. I froze, afraid to breathe, as if I cradled a little chick. Then I reached down and drew the blankets over us both. We lay in silence. I willed my muscles to relax. Her breathing grew so deep I thought she slept. And then she said, “Good night.”

CHAPTER 36

One evening Queenie took Tina out to dinner and a movie, leaving Grandpa and me alone together. He spent the first part of the evening sequestered in the front room with the TV. After a long while I heard the TV shut off, then he came thumping down the hall, opened the fridge and got another beer.

He started to leave the room.

“Grandpa?”

His back, all bone toward me.

“Sit with me?” My voice was thin, like a child's. Still he stood there. Then, shoulders hunched, he came back into the room, sat at the table and pulled an old newspaper toward him, one he'd already read. He put it in front of his face and drank his beer. Lily curled at his feet with a martyred sigh.

The silence of the house grew between us, punctuated only by the snap and flap of Grandpa's ostentatious newspaper-reading. It was a thick, fuzzy silence, a silence that almost had its own sound. The blank wall of Grandpa's newspaper loomed between us, and I thought that if he lowered that paper now, his face wouldn't be his face at all, but that of some unknown night creature. His hands, strange claws. I stared rigid at the ceiling, breathing through my mouth, trying not to make any noise.

Some time later I awoke to find Grandpa banging around the kitchen, jaw clenched, a crackling waxed paper bag in one hand. Stiff and sore, I sat up. Three empty beer bottles and the abandoned newspaper littered the table. My left side was numb from lying on it; my hand automatically went to the pad still covering my eye, which was refusing to heal. His eyes flicked to me and he stopped what he was doing. Then he turned to the night-black window and placed a cake of hard-tack on it, next to another, the one he'd put there during my last visit. Putting the bag back in the cupboard he slammed the door and leaned on the counter, arms folded.

I gazed at his profile as he looked out the window. The birches rattled outside. At last he looked at me. The lines on his face were harsh, he cleared his throat, said nothing. I spoke into the silence. “How did you know where I was?”

He stared. “Your father…” He stopped. I didn't move. “Your father.”

“He was led.” I dared to say it. His cheeks trembled, and my heart surged.

“
Led.
” He spat out the word with wild, helpless contempt. “How many times did I find him like that? Blasted, and hissing like an animal.” I reached toward him, but he was blind to me. “It started when he was a boy, and it got worse every time. Left another piece of himself somewhere, every time.”

“He couldn't help it,” I whispered.

“Oh, he could.” His voice rose, words tumbled out of him. “He
could
, girl. Don't you go feeding me that. He wanted it. He couldn't wait to go. Going out there. Like my mother too, my…” Shaking, he stood up tall, hands clenching and unclenching. “I did everything I could, I almost lost Maddie over it, and still he… They wouldn't stay.” He was crying now, painful to see. “Bad blood will tell. It will tell!” He stumbled away, out of the room, leaving me alone.

The next evening Aunt Queenie came over and created some fish-dish on the stove. She visited every day, cooking meals and trying to cheer everyone up; there'd been talk of Tina coming to her house for a while, but Tina, remarkably to my mind, chose to stay.

“Oh, I need a wee nip.” Queenie took down a bottle and poured herself a generous shot of scotch. “You?”

“Hell, no,” I said to my great-aunt. I limped to the table and the four of us ate our dinner together, Grandpa hardly speaking. I fumbled with the fork, still struggling to eat with only one eye to see out of, missing things and clattering on the plates. Queenie chattered away on her own with her scotch, determinedly cheery. After dinner Grandpa stood, said, “Well, I'm going to bed.”

“Goodnight, Grandpa,” I said.

He froze like he was frightened, then growled, “Don't you… don't you speak to me!”

Queenie gasped, and Tina stared. Grandpa took off out of the room.

After a pause, Queenie said, “Time for bed for you too, Tina.”

“Aw…”

“I'll read to you,” Queenie offered. “Give your cousin a hug.”

To my surprise, Tina hopped off her chair and flung her arms around me. “Don't mind Uncle John,” she said. “He's just cranky. That's what Grandma says.”

“I certainly do,” Queenie muttered. “Come along dear. I'll be down soon, Ruby.”

She returned about half an hour later, interrupting my feeble attempts to clear away the dinner things. She poured herself a very stiff drink and sat down across from me at the table.

“It's hard for him, you know,” she began slowly. “He was only a little boy when it began happening.”

When
what
began happening? I wanted to ask, but I held myself in check, let her sort herself out. She lit a cigarette.

“You look so like her, you know. It's strange.” She exhaled, squinting at me through the smoke, her bright eyes narrowed. “Look,” she said, “do you want to hear this? Because if not…”

“Yes, I want to hear it, I want to hear it.”

“All right. All right, then. He… John was only, oh, maybe five or six the first time she… went over.” Queenie coughed and looked at me; I kept my face a blank. “We were out in the country, at the country house. She was taking in the laundry, it was night-time. Nineteen-thirty-five it would have been. See, back in the ‘twenties Mom and Dad had built a sort of summer place near a river. Dad would walk to it from the shop here on the Southside, but this night, he'd stayed in town. A lot of hard times, then, the Thirties, but we never starved; we were lucky. Anyway.” She inhaled, looking out the window at nothing. “The government gave people six cents a day; that was called relief. And you didn't want to go on relief, it was a shameful thing.” She was nervous, I realized, talking beside the point. “People used to come around here to beg – from up on the Brow, and other places – you'd hear someone calling out, ‘The beggars are coming, the beggars are coming!' Yes.” She paused. “They'd come around. We wouldn't give them money. We'd set aside food and clothing for them. We had this attitude that they'd only waste money.” Her mouth tightened. “I'm going on, aren't I? All right.” She slugged back half her drink at one go. “There was this one couple. They were too proud to beg. We didn't know who they were. They were renting a place up the hundred steps – down the road from here, it's all gone now, they blasted it away for the harbour expansion after the War. All those houses, and Dad's shop, the church, all gone now. Anyway. This couple, they were beautiful. She was a little thing with long gold hair, and he was tall, dark like a gypsy. They didn't beg. They went along after the coal carts, him pushing a little wheelbarrow, and they'd stoop and pick up any bit of coal that had fallen off the carts. Even shovel up the dust. Mom seemed to like them; she brought them food a few times. Theresa would bother her about it, ‘Oh, Mom, what do you want to bring food to the smelly coal people for?' But she said they were good people. They left soon, I never knew their names. Dad said, ‘Well, it's cheaper to move than pay rent.' He didn't like people he didn't know. John sort of takes after him.”

I nodded. Queenie drank.

“Funny things happened in that house. The summer place, I mean, now. Doors wouldn't stay shut, especially at night. And sometimes, you'd feel things in there. On the way up the stairs I used to feel things all around me, a whole throng of them brushing against me. But you couldn't see them.”

“I've felt that,” I said.

Queenie nodded. “Sometimes at night you'd hear the dishes clinking around. No, it wasn't ghosts. We'd built on a path, one of their paths, that's what I think. Mom said it too. But she said it wasn't to worry, they wouldn't hurt us. And they didn't, not until that day.” Queenie looked with surprise at her now-empty glass and poured herself another scotch. “I've gone a long way around to tell this, haven't I?” She sipped her drink. Swallowed. “She – my mother now – she was taking in the laundry. It was late, oh, I'd say ten at night. She'd been that busy all day, she hadn't had a chance to – ‘I'll just take in the clothes, Queenie,' she said to me, ‘then it's time for bed.' And she went out there and never came back. My sisters and I, we went out looking. There was the laundry basket, half the laundry in it, all folded carefully the way she did it, and half of it was still on the line, and no Mom. Dad was in town. We just went frantic, looking for her. We went all over the place, calling and calling. I got it into my head that she'd fallen into the river, and they couldn't console me. It was dark. Really dark, not like here in the city, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We had kerosene lanterns, but the shadows in the woods jumped out at you, you couldn't get into it at all. Theresa, she was the eldest, she finally said we should all get to bed and we'd see about Mom in the morning. Theresa put me to bed with your grandfather, giving me something to do, see, to calm me down. ‘Look after the baby, now,' she said, and it was a good thing for me.”

There were tears on her cheeks, but she didn't seem to notice. “Some of the girls went into town the next day to fetch Dad, and the rest kept looking,” she went on. “I looked after John. I was ten at the time, myself. Never a trace of her did we find. Search parties all through the woods there. And we had pretty much given her up – it was two weeks, I think, that she was gone. And then one day she just showed up at the door.” Queenie paused and took a swallow of her drink. She rubbed her cheek with her hand and stared, surprised at the moisture there. “She was my mother and when she opened up the door, I didn't know her,” she said. “Her hair was all wild. I'd never seen her with her hair down in all me life, she always wore it in a bun at the back of her head. It was like a wild mane now, full of leaves and sticks. And her sweater was full of holes; she was missing a shoe. And in her hands, she was holding a pair of socks. They were the socks on the line, that she was taking in when she went. When They took her.”

“They? Did she tell you what happened?” My mouth was dry.

Queenie shook her head. “Not then, not for a long… She said she was just thirsty, and tired. She sat by the stove and drank and drank. She told us that the coal man had come up to her as she was taking in the laundry and wished her a good evening. And that was all she could tell us.”