The Collector of Remarkable Stories (33 page)

The Final Memory

It was the middle of January. Ten thirty in the morning. A flurry of snow had just fallen, leaving the churchyard blanketed in an oppressive shroud, the cold, white cloak of Death itself. A group of mourners stood huddled together, pulling their coats tight against the bitter chill, stamping their feet and shivering violently. Before them lay an empty grave, a simple white coffin sitting neatly beside it; patiently awaiting its final resting place. The muffled silence punctuated only by the harsh caw of a nearby crow.

At first the mourners didn't notice the strange old lady nearby. They assumed she was just a visitor. Someone come to pay their respects; to lay some flowers and chat about the week's events to a lost loved one, silently listening from six feet under. But something niggled.

The icy winds coming in from Russia cut like a knife, yet the old woman wore nothing more than a scruffy cardigan over her once-jovial dress. No overcoat, no hat, no scarf.

"My oh my," exclaimed one mourner quietly, pointing at Margie. "She must be half frozen to death."

The pastor commenced his service: "Death reminds us that we live in a fallen, imperfect world ... we are reminded of mankind’s failings, flaws, and limitations ..."

"Well, she's in the right place," murmured another.

"Do you think she's okay?" whispered a third. "She's not moving much."

All of them studied the old woman intently, their view partly obscured by thick clouds of boastful breath vapour, and the snowflakes which danced before them like little ghosts, tickling their eye-lashes and noses in an apparent attempt to distract them.

The old woman studied them back, like a chimp studying a human studying a chimp, then with a burst of maniacal laughter, lifted her skirt over her head.

The mourners gasped. One fainted. And another vomited. For the old woman was entirely denuded from the waist down (barring a pair of thick woolly socks and a pair of tatty old boots).

"
Behold," cried the pastor, completely oblivious to the naked septuagenarian, "I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed ..."

The old woman dropped her skirt and this time bared her teeth whilst growling and barking at the congregation.

"She just ain't right," said one of the mourners.

"She's a stark raving lunatic," spat another.

"Squirrel food," said a third.

Now, it just so happened that the old woman had an ally in the form of a grave digger called Lennie. Lennie had been watching this particular burial from a respectable distance, for it was his job to get the hole filled back in as quickly as possible.

He was used to seeing the old bag lady. And he was used to her strange ways. Hell, he wasn't exactly the full shilling himself. And his own grandmother had succumbed to the madness, imprisoned in a home filled with dribbling old ladies that smelt of cabbage. He hated everything about the nursing home. The faux leather chairs. The sycophantic nurses with their £7-per-hour smiles. The smell of shit, mash and polo mints.

Lennie had dreamt of stealing her away from it all, and the old bag lady was the living embodiment of this dream. She represented the freedom he'd wished for his beloved Nana.

It was against council policy to allow people to sleep in the cemetery, but Lennie felt sorry for her. He often wondered (for his job was quite a lonely and boring one) what her life had been like. What had brought her to this place. What had spiralled her into the madness. As long as she wasn't being a nuisance or damaging church property, then Lennie was willing to turn a blind eye.

There was something odd about her today though. Something a little bit irritable.

He had already made a move in her direction before she lifted her skirt. And she was already barking by the time he reached her. He motioned for the congregation that he had the situation under control.

"Margie, Margie, Margie," he soothed. But today, for some reason, Lennie was a red rag to the bull. Without warning, Margie started screaming like a woman possessed, her arms and legs thrashing about violently in all directions.

"Shh, shh, shhhhh," he urged, holding her firmly by the left elbow. But Margie was having none of it. She began lashing out and spitting and scratching like an angry drunk.

Lennie smiled nervously in the direction of the mourners then tightened his grip as Margie fought and struggled and wriggled. "Where in God's name did she get this strength from," he thought. "Calm down," he whispered, "it's okay. It's me. It's Lennie."

Ignoring the unfolding rumpus, Pastor Norman raised his voice: "
Jesus suffered in every way we could ever suffer," he shouted. " And He also is sympathetic with our weakness."

Margie pulled away from Lennie and, in the blink of an eye, once again exposed her seventy-two year old tutu to all and sundry. And that's when it happened.

Margie peed. Right there on Arthur Ormondroyd's grave. And for miles around, there was no other sound. No sermon. No crows. No howling wind. Just the sound of warm urine pouring forth and hitting the cold snow. The mourners, the pastor and the crow stared on in utter disbelief as steam rose from the snow between Margie's legs and a large yellow stain appeared.

The silence was broken only by the sound of a mourner's scream!

Incensed they started shouting.

"Who
is
she?"cried one.

"It's an outrage," cried another.

"Someone call the police," cried another.

"There's a phone in the Chapel office," cried the pastor.

Moments later a siren wailed in the distance.

Margie, having finished her wee, looked at Lennie who in turn looked at her. For the longest time their eyes spoke to each other and in a rare moment of clarity, she understood what Lennie was willing her to do. He wanted her to run. He didn't want her to be picked up like a stray dog and taken to some shelter where they would put a time limit on her life. He wanted her madness, her anger and her fire, to endure. To live to tell the tale. He couldn't say it to her. His conscience was telling him to report her to Social Services. She could die of exposure and he would never forgive himself. He could say it out loud. But he knew she knew. She knew he would be there when she returned.
If
she returned. She had a funny feeling about today. Maybe that's why she was feeling a little bit antsy. She put it to the back of her mind for now. She didn't want the police to find her. She hated the police. They had let her down before. She didn't care what others thought of her. The more they stayed away from her, the better.

She picked up her bags and ran. Down the hill, out of the church yard, down the lane and up the road towards the train station.

Already the snow had started falling again, more heavily now. But Margie ran on.

Moments later, Margie was lying in the road, a couple of yards ahead of a large, red, double-decker bus. The driver of the bus, a tall slender man with a 1950s teddy boy quiff, was drawing heavily on a cigarette and shivering through shock and cold. "I didn' see her guv. Just come out of nowhere she did. Out of nowhere."

"Is she dead?" asked a passerby.

"Dead as a dodo."

"It's a shame that disgusting smell didn't die with her," said the passerby turning up his nose at the stench.

"Ah, it could have been worse," said a police officer. "She was a handful alright."

"One less nutter on the street."

And together they laughed.

*****

Back in the darkness, Margie could see the image in her head, as though she was floating over the body. She could see the old woman's face. The bags. The old lady's hands. And then she saw it. The bag. The tatty leather holdall. The one she had been carrying when she arrived in Limbuss. Her chest tightened. Her stomach did a flip. The bag lay open on the side of the road, its contents spilled out for all to see and what Margie saw was like a kick in the gut.

The bag contained nothing but empty carrier bags. Hundreds of them.

A gust of wind snatched one of the bags and dragged it into the sky, whipping it about this way and that. Agitated. Restless. Anxious. A passerby attempted to grab the bag as it stumbled past him tantalizingly close. But it ducked and dived away. The bag had succeeded in its bid for freedom.

The Wanderer Returns

In the beginning, Margie spent most of her time weeping. She wept for the people she had lost and the life she had lost. She wept for her mother and father. She wept for Archie and The Giant. She wept for the pain she felt and the empty bag. Eventually she forgot what she was weeping for. She wept because she pretty much felt like it. The Beast of Loneliness hounded her relentlessly and she would often wake in panic, overwhelmed by the silence and the loneliness. And then she began to believe that perhaps she deserved no less. That the world (and indeed the universe) was better off without her. She couldn't figure out where the darkness inside her ended and the darkness on the outside began.

Time passed. Margie stopped weeping and started rocking. She started banging her head against her knees and pinching great bloody holes in her skin. Tormented by Hellish visions of Auguste and Spider Beast, she ripped all her teeth out one by one. She tore all her clothes off. And pulled all her hair out. The muscles in her body had seized up long ago imprisoning her in her own immobile body, her hands like claws and her nails like talons.

And then she simply gave up. She no longer allowed herself to exist. She went to sleep. And one year turned into a million years ... or so it seemed ... until one day something a little bit odd happened. A tiny, infinitesimal glimmer of light, a mere pinprick made thousands of miles away, broke through the darkness like a great shard, piercing through the desiccated remains of Margie like a spear.

Margie's body was there, but Margie was somewhere far, far away. As the light cut its way through to the outer core, it roused something deep within her. Slowly, slowly the young woman fought her way through the fog then chipped away at the inside of the shell until she broke free.

Margie shielded her eyes as from the light which shone brighter than the sun. As her eyes adjusted Margie found herself looking at a herself. Exactly herself. Like a mirror image. Only the new Margie was surrounded by a halo of light.

"I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reach you, " said the new Margie smiling kindly at the old Margie."It hasn't been easy."

"Who are you?" croaked the old Margie, her voice as hoarse and rusty as her manners.

"I'm the Collector. I've come to collect your story."

"The Collector?" The old Margie barely showed any emotion. Like her body it too had atrophied. She coughed, her throat and lips parched and flaking.

The Collector moved closer to Margie and knelt down before her. She reached out and touched Margie's lips which, along with the rest of her face, filled with the colour of life.

"Am I the Collector?" asked Margie.

"No, no you're not."

"Then why do you look like me?"

"Because for a long, long time we shared a body. A few seconds before you were conceived, I was attacked by something bad. If his attempt to capture me had been successful it would have been catastrophic for every single being that has ever existed. Their stories would have been used not for
creation
but for
destruction.
I could not let it happen. I did the first thing I could at that moment in time. I jumped into the a newly created soul. Right at the point that you were conceived you and I became one. And it worked. There was nothing that Auguste could do to reach me. I stayed hidden inside you from the moment you were conceived until the day you died. The reason you were such a powerful medium was because of me. All those souls who were desperate to relinquish their stories were drawn to you because I was hiding within you."

Margie turned her head away from the Collector, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. "All those voices. The pain. The madness."

"I could do nothing to help you. It was too dangerous."

Margie could not believe her ears. Spider Beast had been right all along. She
was
the Collector, but not in the way he had believed. The Collector had hijacked her body and soul.

"It was Hell. A bloody nightmare. My entire life," snapped Margie angrily.

"I had to do it," said the Collector kindly. "There's nothing I can do to change your story now. No one can change their story."

Margie sat in tense silence, her eyes trained heavily on the Collector's hands.

"How did we separate?"

"When we arrived in Limbuss."

"You deserted me."

"I didn't. When we separated there was a big shock wave that attracted the attention of Auguste. I was taken away but before we could guide you to safety, you ran. You hit that great machine, the Gravitonius, and you were lost to us."

"You could have found me."

"We did. But your story wasn't finished. And there was a lot of work to be done clearing up the mess that was left behind when I disappeared. I was with you for much of your journey though."

"My life would have been very different without you!"

"Of course."

"But that's so unfair."

"Why is it unfair? Your story is still your story. It's one of
the
most important. All your suffering was not in vain. The fact that we are here now would not have been possible without you. We have a lot to thank you for."

"I'd rather have had a happy life."

"Very few
are,
" said the Collector. "I could take you and show you billions of lives that are miserable. Children dying of starvation, innocent people being blown apart by warfare; peoples' bodies killing them from the inside out though disease. Just a few moments ago I collected the story from a young child, murdered and buried in a shallow grave somewhere her mother and father will never find her. And there's nothing I can do to change that. My job is to collect your story, whatever that may be. Every story, be it happy or sad has its place in the universe. Each is as vital as the next."

The Collector's luminosity began to fade. "I have to hurry you," she urged. "You can relinquish your story and come with me or you can stay here."

Margie hesitated.

"I must warn you though," said the Collector gently, "very few people leave Limbuss once they've decided to stay. Do you understand? It's a place of Darkness."

A small movement behind The Collector caught Margie's eye. Was it Auguste? The surge of terror that thundered through her body in that moment was quickly replaced by a warmth in her chest that lifted her chin and pushed her mouth into the widest, most beautiful smile. After all these years of nothingness she still remembered his beautiful face, right down to the tiniest details; the hairline scar on his right cheek (which he told her he'd gotten from a sword fight even though he'd merely tripped over his own feet and smacked his cheek on a rock) and the sadness in his eyes; battle scars of the heart. It was the kind of wound, she thought, that could only be sustained by a good, honest and loving man. His presence anaesthetised her instantly from everything but the good and in that instant she knew that she never wanted to lose him again. They had an adventure to make. A story to write together. Death wasn't the end. It was only the beginning.

The Collector held her hands out to Margie. "You have to make a choice."

Margie made no answer. She sat still. Silent. The Collector was right; Limbuss
was
filled with Darkness, but it was also filled with Light. There could never be one without the other.

The Collector knew. She smiled knowingly then melted into the air. No anger. Just love.

Margie grinned at her friend for the longest time then together, arm in arm, they walked out of the Darkness and into the Light.