Remember Me (7 page)

Gloria is born! he said. Mr Stadnik said she had come to protect me. She would keep the ghosts away, watch me while I slept. She was my very own. I wanted me and Gloria to wave at my father when
he came.

My grandfather says my father won’t be here until the afternoon, so I have to help him in the garden. He is obsessed with things that grow. There’s a glasshouse thick with tomato
plants, neat rows of vegetables tied up on sticks, and at the far end of the garden he has fenced off a perfect square. It’s full of flowers. They’re tied on sticks too. All along the
wall, my grandfather has hung a line of broken mirror pieces, twinkling like diamonds in the sunlight. A huge one hangs from the roof of the glasshouse. He says they’re to keep the birds off,
although Mr Stadnik secretly feeds them in the mornings, so it doesn’t always work. In between the jitter and shunt of the trains below, my grandfather enlists me in a duty.

Here, take this twine for me, Lillian, and watch where you’re putting your feet. The twine is rough, dark brown, coiled upon itself. I hold it close in my hand, feeling the spring of it in
my grip. He leads me a cautious path, past the glasshouse and the rockery to the fenced-off perfect square. The heads of a hundred flowers are drooping on their necks: white and pink and creamy
orange and velvet brown. They have all got their own names: Roses, Dahlias, Chrysanthemums. I must learn which is which; I must learn to tell the difference between things by their names.

They should be straight, he says, lifting the head of a chocolate dahlia, So we’ll give them a bit of help. We have to wrap the twine around their stems. I don’t want to do it; their
necks are so skinny and their heads so heavy and full I’m afraid I might choke them. The first one I touch falls to bits; the petals go everywhere. My grandfather takes no notice.

A young thing has to grow straight and tall, he says, wrapping a caught neck to a stake, You don’t want to grow up all crooked, do you?

I don’t want his flowers to droop, but the question has nothing to do with me. Except, it feels like it
does
have something to do with me, and I’m being
forced to agree with him. He takes the twine from between my fingers and shows me how to wrap it, going round near the head, careful and silent.

No prizes this year, he says, That storm nearly did for them,

and then he gives me a quick look, as if he’s said something wrong; as if he has rules he must obey too, and he’s just broken one. He’s right about the
dahlias; they’re almost gone. From the house they look perfect, but up close they are weary and bedraggled; the weight of the rain must have been too much to bear. We go along the rows,
putting their heads to rights with bits of twine. I’m careful where I put my feet.

My grandfather’s so pleased with my progress, he’s smiling. He’s funny when he does it, as if his teeth are causing him pain. He says can he trust me to do the bulbs. I
don’t know what they’re for, the bulbs, but all I have to do is watch him and copy. I want him to trust me, but I’m not going to promise.

Watch me now, Lillian, he says.

He takes a bulb and puts it in the centre of a pot, pressing it down with his finger. It’s the same jabbing action he uses when filling his pipe. The finger on his right
hand is yellow. When I ask him why, he says it’s the tamping that does it. I tamp the bulbs all morning; he says I do a grand job.

~

There’s no wall outside my grandfather’s house; he’s got a gate. It hangs a bit to one side and the hinge needs oiling; on the path is a long scar from where
it’s been opened and shut again. You can hear if someone’s trying to come in: the gate bangs against the post when it’s pushed. I’m waiting in the parlour for my father to
come. I’m allowed, because I’ve done so well in the garden. I must sit quietly and not touch anything. I’m used to that; that’s one rule I can remember. I’ve got
Gloria for company, and the two boys in their turbans, and the clock plays a bong every so often to let you know how much time is going past. I’m waiting for my father to come. I’ll
hear the gate, and then I’ll wave.

The first night of my new life, in my new room in my grandfather’s house, I couldn’t sleep for the gate and the noise it made. I kept seeing my mother on the floor, the black spill
around her, and the horses galloping, the lights of the carousel turning, the flame my father held, dancing then spinning down to my mother on the floor. I wanted the doctor to make her well again.
He came with my grandfather, and they looked like brothers; they were both wearing round glasses and they carried cases. The doctor’s case was small and brown; my grandfather had a green one
with a label stuck on the front. It said Lillian Price. I didn’t know it was going to be mine. I was still Patsy then. No one looked at me but I felt in the way, as if I was a hole they had
to step round and not fall into. They went in different directions. The doctor disappeared into my mother’s room, and my grandfather went into my room at the back. My father sat out the front
on the wall. The bottle was in his pocket by then. He took swigs from it, and when he wasn’t doing that he was smoking a cigarette. I wanted to be next to him, so I got as close as I could,
sidling along the edge of the wall until we were nearly side by side. He smoked one cigarette after the other, lighting a new one off the old one, flicking the stub away into the yard, watching it
spin in the swirl. The rain was blowing in gusts, soaking his head and vest. I thought he must be angry with me.

You have to go away for a bit, Pats, he said. Then he said something else which was taken by the rain, something about my grandfather, and Don’t worry, twice, Don’t worry, Patsy,
promise me you won’t worry. Promise me.

Cross my heart and hope to die.

~

I
tried
not to worry but the gate kept me awake, swinging open and shut in the wind: bang, nothing, bang, nothing, bang, nothing; so in the end the silence had its own
sound too, and it was a huge heart I heard, beating through the dark. In the morning, my grandfather brought me tea. He opened the curtains and stood at the window, chatting about the weather and
his flowers and what needed doing in the garden as if he always did this, as ifit was an ordinary day, and I had always lived here.

My father won’t come into the house when he visits; he leans his elbows on the gate, swinging it and staring at the crescent scrape in the path, while my grandfather
helps me into my coat and beret. When I’m ready to go, I have my father in front of me and my grandfather at my back. They look but they don’t speak. Around my neck I wear a doorkey on
a long piece of string, which my grandfather has given me in case he’s in the garden and won’t be able to hear me knock, and his silver watch so I’ll know the time. The watch is
heavy and cold, then warm, against my chest. I’m ticking like a bomb. My father looks smart in his blue suit. He leaves it hanging in Fisher’s window all week and fetches it out on
weekends, just to visit me. I’m not allowed to mention the watch; my grandfather says my father would hock that too, given the chance. I don’t know how to tell the time, anyway. I just
wear it to please him. I don’t even have to use the key because my grandfather’s always there when I come back, waiting behind the curtain in the parlour.

You never know what might happen, my grandfather says. But nothing ever does happen. So the key I don’t use and the time I can’t tell stay on the string around my neck. I come home,
I knock and I wait, while my grandfather makes sure my father is far enough down the path, then it’s my grandfather in front of me, and my father at my back. This is the pattern of
Saturdays.

My father tells lies all the time. He told my grandfather that we go to visit my mother’s grave. I think we almost did go there once, but then he changed his mind and took me to the
pictures instead. We always leave the same way – over the bridge and towards St Giles – so even though my father doesn’t say so, my grandfather thinks we’re heading for the
churchyard. He cuts flowers from his garden for me to put on the grave.

That one there, he says, pointing to one bloom or another, That one’s a beauty. Not the dahlias, Lillian, they’re just about finished, they are.

On the draining board in the scullery, he slices their stems with a quick strike of his knife, wraps them tenderly in newspaper. He breathes through his mouth as he does it,
short, anxious sips of air, as if inhaling the scent of the flowers would use it all up.

My father takes me up the steps at the end of Chapelfield and along the bridge. It’s the same bridge I saw on my first day in the garden, when I stood on the bucket and watched the boy
balancing his body over the tracks below. I’m looking at things from the other side. That first time we crossed it, my father and me, I got a strange feeling, a cold water rush on my skin. I
saw what the boy would have seen: the railway lines streaking off past the mill, and the crooked terrace with my grandfather’s house tilting a bit at the end; the dark tangle of elderberries
hanging in clusters over the wall at the far side of the garden, and the garden itself, neat as a stitch, with the mirror pieces twirling in the wind. Something was wrong with the picture. Then I
saw, exactly, what the boy would have seen. In front of the glasshouse, I spotted her. She was very still, her red hair fuzzed like a halo in the sunshine. She was watching.

I felt her fingertips gripping the sooty wall, and her eyes, staring at the bridge. I felt the cold of the bucket seeping up through the soles of her boots. I caught my father’s sleeve to
tell him, but he was looking at another thing, a trail of steam in the distance, a dense cloud eating up the sky, and in the corner of my eye I saw his hand, coming up to point it out. But he
wasn’t pointing; he was taking the flowers from me, unfurling the paper wrap and opening it, shaking it out like a dishcloth over the edge of the bridge. The heads twirled down onto the
tracks and were lost in the smoke of the train as it passed beneath us. When we reached the end of the bridge, I looked back into the garden; the girl was gone too, only the garden and the wall,
and the twirling mirrors catching bits of sky. I could have told my father about her, but with the flowers spiralling down so fast and the smoke coming up like a cough and the shuddering bridge
making the light jump black and white – with all that – I couldn’t speak. One of the ghosts had followed me. I didn’t want my father to know I could see her.

~

On our days out, we go to the picture house. It’s The Ranch for cowboys, and the new Regent for everything else. My father likes to see films where the girls dance in
patterns. He looks hard for one that reminds him of my mother, and then he points her out to me. He won’t go to the churchyard, but he tries to find her everywhere else. I can never follow
the story, because he’ll keep nudging me and saying,

There she is, Pats, the spit of your mam. The absolute spit.

She’ll be wearing a sequinned evening dress or a bathing costume, or a fancy head-dress with feathers sticking out of the top. When there’s a close-up, she’ll show her perfect
teeth, and my father will smile back at her. It’s like they’re having a conversation: the girl’s big head nodding down at us from the screen and my father staring back with the
side of his face lit up, his eyes glowing in the dark like oysters. The girl never looks anything like my mother, really, but I have to watch out for her all the same. I want to know what it is
that he’s seeing and I’m not.

Sometimes, if we’ve been to a picture more than twice, my father promises me a boat trip on the lake. We’ll walk along the riverside, right up to the bend where the heath sits on one
corner and The Flag on the other, and my father will wipe his forehead and say,

I’m parched, Patsy. Shall we wet our whistles, first? I’m not allowed inside The Flag, so we slip through the gate and into the yard at the back. I have to sit on the wall under a
tree and wait, while he goes round again into the front like an ordinary customer. He comes out through a side door, holding a drink in each hand, and says, Ta-ra! as if he’s a magician
who’s just sawed someone in half. My father has black ale with a froth on it, and I have ginger beer, which he says isn’t a beer at all. He always gets it for me, even though I
don’t much care for the taste, and he puts it down on the wall and always says the same thing:

Just like your mam. She loved her ginger beer! He wants me not to forget. But it would be easier if we both remembered the same person. He always brings a thing of hers, a ribbon or a
handkerchief edged with lace, and tells me the history of it. The ribbon could be anyone’s, and the handkerchief has a smell I don’t recognize, and the wrong initials embroidered in the
corner. I didn’t like it at first, not because of the initials, but because of him. Sometimes, my father thinks I’m dim. He pretended to find it behind my ear, but I knew it
wasn’t really there. He’d magicked it. I didn’t think it was funny.

Don’t you want it, Pats? he said, looking hurt. He scrunched it up in his fist, blew on it, and the handkerchief was gone. I wanted it back immediately. It wasn’t the thing, but the
gone-ness of it, the feeling of something lost in thin air, something missing. It set off the fluttering inside me. But my father doesn’t bring me things just so that he can take them away
again, and in a few seconds it had reappeared in his other hand, unfurling like a leaf. I must learn the correct expressions: happy face, surprised face; pure joy, wonder.

Today, my father has a heart-shaped locket in his hand. He clicks the fastener to open it.

See here, he says, Come on, have a look,

holding the cleft heart up for inspection. Inside are two locks of hair, coiled up on either side: one black, the other shining red. We sit in the yard of The Flag, me with my
ginger beer and him with the locket, balanced on his palm.

I try to tell myself it’s just a story, made up, like one of Mr Stadnik’s stories, or like the parables. If only my father didn’t want me to believe it was true.

~ ~ ~