My Little Blue Dress (8 page)

Davey croaked me his details, I hung up, and turned to find me mam standing right there at the foot of the stairs. “Mam!” I said, pumping my fist. “Fantastic news! My Davey's alive and he's coming . . .”

But all was not well, I saw. Me mam's face was white and her own fist hung slackly at her side.

Me da wouldn't be coming home, she told me.

What? Why not?

Because he'd been killed by the Germans.

I broke down and wept, for what had to have been an hour, but then I stopped. The time for self-pity was past. Now was the time for me to be strong, a rock, the glue that held the family together. I glanced at the grandfather clock in the hallway. Now was the time for me to go meet Davey at the station.

T
HEY UNLOADED
D
AVEY
from the rear of the train with the freight. He didn't look well: completely unconscious and
plastered and bandaged from head to toe, with one arm propped bizarrely away from his body by a metal rod. It was a horrible thing to think, I chided myself, but he looked like the sort of invalid one came across in funny cartoon strips. You kept expecting him to wake up and say, “Doctor, Doctor, do I have a large intestine?” and for some white-coated medic to appear out of nowhere and shoot back something hilarious over the top of his wire-rimmed half-glasses.

In fact a doctor did appear: Dr. Proctor, our family physician from Murbery, and he took charge of the whole situation. He gave me a sheaf of prescriptions to fill at the apothecary's and told me to meet him back at the house.

The mood was firmly upbeat when I finally got there. In my bedroom, which I'd agreed to convert into Davey's sickroom, me mam and Dr. Proctor were drinking tea around my writing desk while Davey lay on my bed, supported by a mound of inflatable orthopedic cushions. And it seemed that he was conscious, because with his one free arm, the one without the metal rod, he was scribbling away at a large white block of writing paper.

“What's he doing?” I whispered, helping myself to tea.

“ 'E's writing poetry, lass,” said Dr. Proctor. “Don't worry, tha won't disturb 'im. 'E's lost in t'world o' 'is memories. This is standard treatment for lads returning from t'front. We've found that recov'ry times are slashed in 'alf if t'poor lad is gi'en an outlet for 'is feelin's.”

“And how
is
he feeling?” I sat down on the windowsill and blew on my tea. “Did he say?”

Proctor had a chocolate biscuit in his mouth and so I had to wait for a response. Finally, he swallowed. “We won't be able to speak wi' 'im until he's fully unburthened 'imself o' all 'is trauma, lass. Ev'ry particle o' it.”

“Wow.” I looked over at Davey, the pen in his hand was jiggling away like the needle of a seismograph. “That could take a while.”

A
CTUALLY, IT DIDN'T
take that long. About a week. That Friday morning as I was emptying Davey's feces-and-urine bowl curiosity got the better of me and as he dozed, I tiptoed up and slid a poem from beneath his plastered hand.

“Noooo!” he roared, waking up. “Don't tha be readin' that! Don't tha be readin' that!”

“Why not? What is it?”

“It's not
finished
is what it
isn't
. Lass, please . . .”

The title of the poem was “Caveat Emptor.” I cleared my throat and started reading aloud. “ ‘Mud and gas?' ” I playfully declaimed. “ ‘May as well be
gud
and
mas
for all the difference I perceive between them. They are both brown. I
hate
them both. Both substances have found their way into my special soldier's bag and have permeated my belongings . . .”

“Lass, please . . .” Davey croaked. “Tha's tort'rin' me . . .”

I read on in silence. . . and, actually wow! “Caveat Emptor” was the best poem I'd ever read! Despite his lack of formal education Davey had somehow managed to capture the entire experience of being a soldier in the First World War in occasionally rhyming couplets that were as vivid and moving as anything I'd ever read. For instance, in one sequence Davey was crumped awake by a falling bombshell in the early morning and stood with some friends gazing blearily over the edge of the trench at this patch of weird smoke that was just sort of hanging there. Then a breeze picked up and the smoke blew slowly away to reveal:

The leg of a dead horse
Cold, and stiff, and
Sticking straight up.

Jesus, I thought, impressed, and read on agog as one of Davey's friends, a young, scared private who evidently viewed Davey as something of a father figure, had his head blown off by an enemy sniper, at which point their commanding officer—an effete, upper-class type—minced over and announced that it was “rather a jolly development” that their friend was dead because it meant the Germans were wasting ammunition on mere infantrymen as opposed to officers or equipment. There was a lot more stuff like that, all of it incredibly powerful, and upon reaching the final stanza I found I'd been literally pushed back against the ironing board by the sheer force of Davey's poesy.

So then
caveat emptor,
quote unquote “Sir.”

A simple phrase from Latin that I'm told means “buyer beware.”

If you buy, as you seem to, the inherent worth-fightingness of this war,

Then please beware the day when it's over that I turn up on your door

Step. I'll be looking very different,

In casual weekend gear,

Come for a peek at the other junk you've doubtless bought over the years.

Because the things you think are good

The lads and I think are bad.

And this is without a doubt the worst birthday I've ever had.

“Unnerstan', lass. This is nowt more than manure at this stage. It's basically just a first draft like . . .” I silenced him with desperate flaps of my hand.

Because I was suddenly having a vision . . . a vision of us, of me and Davey, twenty, forty, even
sixty
years down the line . . . as a happily married couple, a poet and his wife . . . him in the shed at the bottom of the garden, outside which I would leave his meals, me up in the main building eating meals of my own, dreaming my own dreams . . .

A thing like that could really work out.

S
OME TIME AFTER
that I ran into Dr. Proctor at the apothecary's where I was buying Davey some medicated antidandruff shampoo and asked him what he thought the chances were that Davey would continue to write poetry once his recovery was complete.

“Oh aye, lass!” he said with a lusty flare of the nostrils. “If me data are correct 'e'll only become
more
enslaved to his rhymin' craft as t'years roll by. An' it's not just thine Davey! Out o' the mud o' that terrible war 'as sprung a great fountin'o' progress, rainin' down on all o' Western culture. Tha's 'eard about the great Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and 'is controversial theories o' 'uman be'avior?”

“A bit.”

“And all the goin's on in Paris? T'French capital? Oh lass, it's sheer
bedlam
over there. Folk takin' their clothes off, drinkin' each other's urine, sellin' each other toilet bowls for millions of pounds in the name of art, struttin' around doin' whatever they choose . . . Why even 'ere in the Isles of Britain we've got authors writin' books wi'out
any punctuation at all
as an attempt to render the workin's o' the 'uman
mind in all its burblin' grandeur! Why it's as if . . .” he removed his tortoiseshell half-glasses and polished them on his shirt. “Almos' as if the war brought so much un'appiness to this formerly pure an' unreflectin' land that it forced us for t'first time to acknowledge 'ow much o' a role our mental lives play in our . . . lass?”

I wasn't listening.

I was staring past him out the shop window, absently fingering the edge of a bag of lozenges that was next to me in a wire stand . . . lost in thought . . .

M
E MAM COULDN'T
really process the news that I was upping stakes and moving to France. The information jammed her brain. Rather than question my motives, or try to talk me out of it, or ask me what the hell she was supposed to do about the hulking form of one Davey L. McCracken currently filling up pads of paper and porcelain bowls at the top of her house, she immediately started twittering, “But we haven't any suitcases. What'll tha do for a suitcase?” I told her I'd use some of the old hatboxes we had in the attic. She countered that it wasn't “proper” for a girl my age to travel in Europe with more than one hatbox, and quickly what should have been a tear-sodden mother-daughter hugfest degenerated into a stupid argument about money belts and working visas and insect repellent. Somehow she managed to shut up long enough for me to instruct her on caring for Davey, and after squabbling some more briefly, I made my escape up the stairs to the sickroom.

I found him scribbling away as usual, and in the doorway I toyed with the idea of just slipping quietly away
without saying anything. Perhaps by this point he was wrapped up enough in his rhymes and his symbolism and his imagery that he would never notice my absence, that he'd been able to keep telling himself that I was somewhere nearby, watching over him . . . In fact I did more than toy with the idea; I executed it.