Remember Me (2 page)

~

The wind was bringing in winter. The boy on the flower stall complained about it, stamping his feet like a horse in a paddock. He was breathing out smoke, or frozen air. He
mentioned the wind. The market boys always went on about it, blowing from the east; straight off the Steppes, they’d say. That’s why I bedded down in the alcove that night; the wind was
banging at the front window, coming down the chimney in gulps.

~

Once Hewitt’s fixtures were burnt, there was nothing left. By then, I was mostly on my own. That was summer just gone; people who hadn’t already moved on were
finding other places to go. I don’t know where they went. Robin told me of the refuge on Bethel Street being reopened, and a new hostel down near Riverside. He had a plan, he said, some
halfway scheme.

Halfway’s better than no way, he said, Might as well give it a try.

I didn’t have a plan. Not a thought to go anywhere else. No one invited me when they went, and that suited me well. I think I thought I was immune. Precisely, if I’m
true, I didn’t think at all; it was my routine, to not think about anything, just to go on. The nights drew in.

~

I took the sack and my case upstairs, and made my way down to the back of the house. It had been nailed up from the outside with sheet metal, but one of the lads had pulled the
board off the window, so you could get into the house from the back, if you had a mind to. I didn’t see the point, when there was a front door to use. They liked it though, this through-way,
and it didn’t bother me. I had to climb through the window to get into the yard. There’s a shed in the corner where Hewitt used to store coal. It was all gone, the coal, I knew it would
be, but I found some slack and loose pieces, cupped the dust in my hands and went back upstairs. It needed three trips, climbing in and out the window like Buster Keaton. I’m not infirm. I am
my grandfather’s age. I left a trail of shimmer all through the hall and up to the top, like a great snail. Making the fire took most of the light out of the day. By the time it was properly
going, the sky outside was black.

Apart from my bedding, the room was empty. I spread my coat out in front of the fire. Flames turned the silver to gold. My case with everything in it was at my side. My plastic bag was in my
pocket. My hair, of course, was on my head, drying nicely. Everything was normal.

I might have looked out of the window then; I might have seen her. But I was preoccupied with the small things: staying dry, keeping warm, keeping to my routine. A step further back into the
day, and I can almost believe that I would have passed the girl on the street. Perhaps I even looked at her. I would have wondered, wouldn’t I, what she was up to here, on The Parade, where
no one goes shopping and no children play. I am not unobservant. Perhaps she didn’t come until late. Or she might have been waiting for it to get dark, waiting for her chance.

But I didn’t look back into the day; not this or any other. I never looked back and I never looked on, and if I told myself anything, if a memory came creeping into my head, or if I found
myself out of a dream where I was a girl again and my life was flapping out in front of me like a flag, I’d say, That wasn’t your life, now, that belonged to someone else. That was just
before.

My plan was just to go on as I was going on, each day the same until the end. I will consider it, now I’m forced: there
was
no plan. I kept out of the way. I was nothing much.

~

She took it all. I can picture her watching my face, kneeling down at my side. Her fingers were cold. She must have been looking for jewellery; why else put her hands on me? She
could have just lifted my case, and left. She didn’t
have
to touch me. The girl put her fingers on me, the girl took everything I own. Now there’s some accounting to do. Her hair
was red as rust: Telltale. I used to have red hair, when I was a girl.

I’ve got to go and live with my grandfather. I don’t know him, and my father won’t be coming with me, but there’s nothing to be done. It’s been
decided.

Needs must, Pats, my father says. It’s a mystery to me. He doesn’t explain the words, and I’m not allowed to question. I’m going to live with an old man that I
don’t know and my father can’t abide. He used to call him That Old Devil, but now that needs must, my father doesn’t call him anything at all. I’ve never met the devil, but
I’ve seen his face.

Under the stairs in the pantry there was a carton which I wasn’t allowed to touch, sitting alongside other things that weren’t touchable, like the Vim and my father’s shoe
polish. The carton had got lye inside, which is poison. There was a picture of the devil on the outside, to prove it. He had a red face, red hair, pointed teeth, and a tail going up in a loop,
sharp as a serving fork. He didn’t look at all like my grandfather. My mother kept a photograph of
him
in a silver frame on the table next to her bottle of Wincarnis. I wasn’t
allowed to touch that either. The picture was in black and white. When my mother did her hair, or sometimes when she slept, I would sit on the stool by her bed and stare at him, and think about the
devil inside. I reasoned that his face
could
be red in real life, and he wasn’t smiling, so he could easily have pointed teeth. In the photograph, he looked uncomfortable. That would
be the tail, doing that: he’d be sitting on it. In his little round eyeglasses, I could see someone else standing a long way off. Two someone elses, one in each eye, holding a bright thing in
the air above their heads. I imagined this was a cross of fire to ward off my grandfather, sitting there having his photograph taken. I wanted to compare him with the devil on the box of lye, put
the pictures side by side, see if they made a pair, but I couldn’t get them together in the same room if they were not to be touched. I tried to memorize them instead: the devil was easy, his
wide grin and his hair so red; but my grandfather – he just looked like any old man, any plain old man in the world. And then one day I saw for myself how not like the devil he was.

We lived near the lanes, in Bath House Yard. We’d always been there, so I knew all the faces round about: next door to us was a tiny woman called Mrs Moon, with no husband and four
children all alike; and in the corner lived two brothers with a bulldog that bit your legs when you ran past. Across the yard was the knife-grinder. He did the rounds on his bike. When he came
home, he’d leave it in the yard outside his window. There were cloths tied to the back, and a basket full of tools on the front. The dog never messed with him. He preferred the butcher, who
lived in the rooms on top of us. I didn’t know the butcher’s name, and hardly saw him in the daytime, but I heard him, moving above my head in the morning, singing when he came home at
night. Sometimes I looked out of my window to watch him staggering up the steps; he’d be hanging on to the railing like a man at sea, with the bulldog snipping at his boots, waiting for him
to slip. It was easy to slip on the steps; the whole yard-end was leaning one way, as if any minute it would run off through the gutter and down into the city. My father said it was because of the
quarrying underneath. We lived on lime, he said. My mother said it was the ghosts that made things tilt. If anything happened in our house, she blamed it on the ghosts.

They made everything slant. Our front door turned out onto a path of cobbles made of flint. They looked like pigs’ knuckles laid out flat. Except they didn’t stay flat, they sloped,
and when it rained, the water came in under the door. My father put up a low wall around our door to stop the water. Everyone in the yard admired it, but no one wanted one of their own.

My grandfather came to see us just after I’d started at school. According to my father, it was because I didn’t go often enough. In truth, I hardly went at all. My father came to
collect me at the end of the first week, and found me sitting at the back of the room at a little table, just me on my own. While all the rest of the children were doing the alphabet, I was
sticking felt animals on a board.

Call that learning? he asked the teacher, who could only say that the idea of learning was beyond some of us and it was nothing to be ashamed of.

She’ll not be shoved in a corner, my father said, To be forgotten. After that, I didn’t go any more.

My grandfather paid a visit to Talk Some Sense into us. My father wasn’t worried, he said the Moon children never got any bother, did they, and anyway, he wanted me at home. It
wasn’t as if I missed going to school. I liked to play in the yard. I’d join in Ring-a-Roses with Josie and Pip Moon, but if the bulldog was out and about, I’d sit on the
butcher’s steps with my legs tucked underneath me. The day it all changed, I was doing just that.

A grey man came and stood at the wall. He had a hat in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. From where I was sitting, I could see the bald bit on the top of his head. He didn’t
knock on the door, and he didn’t say anything, he just looked up at me. He reminded me of someone I knew.

You must be Lillian, he said, after a bit. He sounded friendly, but I couldn’t answer back. My father has told me I must not speak to strangers, and I wasn’t sure whether he counted.
So I just looked at him. After a minute, he tried again.

You
are
Lillian, aren’t you?

It’s a trick question, I thought. Then I thought, Maybe I am a Lillian? And ran down to ask my father. I’m always getting stuck with my name, but Lillian at that
moment sounded important, and the way he said it, the grey-faced man, made it more familiar than my other name, which my father always calls me by. It’s Patsy, my other name. My father
thought it was important too. When I told him what the man said, he ran like a rat from the bedroom where my mother was kept, straight through the living room, jumping the wall out the front.
I’d never seen him run like that, pushing me aside as if he was fleeing the devil, not rushing to greet him. When I followed, he shouted.

You stay there! Don’t move!

I stayed right where he pointed, on the doorstep, and watched as the two of them had words. The piece of paper was exchanged. My father turned without looking back and grabbed
me by the hand. He had a fierce grip. He was squeezing my fingers in one hand and the piece of paper in the other. He slammed the door on the man, unfurled the paper in front of the fire and burnt
it straight away.

Who was that man? I asked, watching the paper curling blue.

That was your grandad,

was all he said. Then he went in to my mother.

It was the first time I’d seen my grandfather in colour. He
did
look like the photograph. I wanted to ask him why he called me by the wrong name and why my father thinks he is the
devil.

After a bit, I went into my mother’s room. She was lying on her side, with my father sitting on the stool next to the bed. They stopped talking and looked at me. The shutters were closed.
I went to the window and opened them a crack to see out. The man who was my grandfather was still there, waiting, his hands hanging open at his sides. I thought he might wave, but if he saw me he
didn’t show it. He was staring straight at the door, eyeing it just like the bulldog eyes me. I wanted to compare him to his picture. I glanced over to where my mother kept it, but the frame
had been turned face down on the table.

Come away from there, Pats, said my father.

But he’s still there!

Come away now, he said. My mother gave a slow blink. She didn’t talk much, but she didn’t need to; her blinking said it all. It said she wasn’t going to get up and let him in,
and I really shouldn’t ask questions at a time like this, or stand near the window like that, for everyone in the yard to see our business.

Why did he call me Lillian? I asked. No one spoke. I asked again.

My mother’s eyes were shut now. My father took a breath,

I’ll tell you in a bit. Go and put the kettle on for your mam.

I did as I was told. But I knew if I looked out of the window I would see the man again, standing still and waiting like a dog.

~

Soon after that, the photograph of my grandfather disappeared entirely, and the frame was put on the sideboard with the glass cracked and nothing behind it but white. And then
one morning, the frame was gone too. It was the time of the ghosts. It was the time, my father decided, that I should learn history.

It’s May 1930: a war has begun. Two men are standing in the shadow of a church inside which I’m about to be christened. Here is my mother’s father,
thin-lipped under his furious moustache, and standing a foot away, black hair slicked and shining, is my father. He would rather stand somewhere else to argue; the wind is so low and bitter, even
the headstones look as if they’re ducking out of the way. But there’s hardly any room, what with the graves and my pram and the bells. Eight colossal bells are lined up on the edge of
the path, their dark skirts tilted to the sky. They are hulled and empty, apart from the largest one at the far end, which houses a small boy enjoying a cigarette. His legs, stretched out from the
lip of the bell, are the only bits of him that are visible.

It’s a fine spring day, despite the cold. I am wrapped in a shawl and covered with blankets to keep me warm. Underneath the layers, I’m wearing a white christening robe. My mother
wore it when she was christened, and her father before her. In between times, it has been folded up in paper and stored in a trunk in my grandfather’s house. It has been handed down.
I’m wearing a bonnet too, which has not been handed down: it’s new as mint. It’s a sop, according to my father, a sop to my grandfather. This bonnet covers my hair completely.

The men don’t enter the church, they close in among the bells, as if in hiding from the world. This is a private conflict.

Lillian! says my grandfather, It’s been decided.

It’s Patricia, says my father, We agreed on Patricia!

I agreed to nothing.