J Collyer’s Weblog

A strange piece inspired by a genuine event.

 

Under Aletsch

 

So that was how it happened was it? An oddly quiet way to go. I always imagined you’d leave the world kicking and screaming, like we entered it. It’s suitably dramatic, I suppose. Always knew you’d end early and it wouldn’t be in a nice way.

What did it feel like, Dawn? Was it like going to sleep from the feet up…?

You weren’t destined to last. Even Mum knew it. You could see it in the way she looked at you. Her eyes would go distant and hard, like they were freezing over. Did you never notice? Like the time she found you disembowelling the hedgehog on the lawn to see the roots of the spines from the inside.

I knew you were dead. There was no way you would have left me in peace for thirty-three years if you weren’t.

The first few years you were gone I was afraid you’d show up again, that it was all too good to be true. I half expected you to turn up at my wedding. In fact, I remember now, I stood at the front of the church sweating and shaking. Dad had patted my shoulder with a wise grin across his face, said my cold feet would warm up again soon enough. But I was thinking about how you’d wait until the suitably dramatic moment, just as Marian was pacing down the aisle, a vision encased in the floating ice of veils and rose petals, and then rise from one of the pews in a black hat to laugh and point and screech everything into the church air.

But you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. That was 1983. You’d already been lying still and solid for two years by then, each cell meticulously stiffened and saved from rot.

Marian. My Marian.

That year I found Marian and a house with a little lawn at the back. There were clumps of daisies in the summer, small white islands amongst the grass like icebergs on a green sea. There was a tree and a shed to keep the mower in. Space for a swing set, Marian said, smiling. I smiled back and kissed her, I remember, though I knew there would never be any swings.

 

I’m supposed to go and see you. They’ve sent me the plane ticket here: SWISS International Air Lines. Business Class. Leaves a week from now. They’ll pay for the hotel, too.

Marian thinks you’re an old flame, you know. She heard the voice message they left on the machine. I couldn’t find the words to explain. I don’t think the words exist. I saw her swallow tears and move to the hall cupboard to fetch a suitcase.

Old flame. I fire that burned once and has since been cooled to zero.

I’ll ring her later. I’ll find some plain, ordinary words that’ll parcel it all up simply. She’ll believe me. She will. Why wouldn’t she? I can make it sound like a perfectly normal story. Why have I never mentioned you? Why, indeed? Were we close? Can one half of you be close to the other, or are you all the same thing?

‘We fell out’; that ought to do it. It’s true, after all. We fell out of whatever we were in. Then you disappeared, like you’d never been there, except for the ache at the back of my head, like a scar inside my skull.

It’s easy to ignore an ache that’s always been there. That’s what the sting of your presence faded to, Dawn: an old wound finally allowed to close a little.

The logo of the airline is the Swiss flag, the white cross on the red, red, red. The same red, unforgiving and artificial, as the dye you used to put in your hair. A chemist down the road sold your favourite colour, unrelenting and plastic, nothing like blood or roses, hedgehog guts or dying sunsets. You’d spend hours perfecting your acrylic face-frame of hair and I’d watch from behind a magazine, each pin-point twitch with your expert fingers arranging it ever so slightly more perfectly. Then you looked at me through your lashes as you blew me a kiss and I had to look away.

You strayed from the path and froze on a glacier. You left the house and got on a plane and flew to Switzerland to wander off the path. Why Switzerland, Dawn? Why on earth…? Did you go on SWISS air?

Most likely it was Switzerland simply because it will have been the first flight out. You will have eyed the clerk up and down, flashed your streetlight smile and said ‘anywhere’ in that voice that is nearly all.

I’m going to go. Of course I am. I was a fool to think I could live without you. I’ll ring the man again in the morning, say I’ll be joining him next week. I’ll make a formal identification.

Mum died in your room, did you know that? She was hoovering it, though no one’s touched the damn place except her in years. That cranky old hoover that weighs a bloody tonne. Dragging it up the stairs and heaving it around the room finished off her little heart.

 

I hate planes. Always have. And buses and trains. Long, thin people-boxes, one of the most efficient ways possible I can think of to kill off a group of people in one go. Even in Business Class you’re still a billion bloody feet off the ground and the air tastes like it’s come out of a bottle and you have to duck and edge around and purposefully look away from dozens of strange people.

            Every single thing I see levers up another paving slab in my mind. All these people breathing the same box of air is like when we snuck onto a train to Manchester in the middle of summer. Mum believed me when I said we were going to a friend’s to study. We’d laughed the whole way and you produced a six-pack of cider that you’d got by smiling at the man in the off-license. Everyone stared at the noise we made but even if we’d been quiet as a pair of curtains they would have stared anyway. We were used to it. We’d come to accept we were unusual, exotic, enticing, two versions of the same thing. You dyed your hair but it just made it look more. When you cut it short like mine and started dressing like me even I found it hard to tell where I ended and you began.

Mum once told me looking at us was like standing at the very point when two rivers meet only to hurtle over a cliff. I copied you when you laughed at that, though I wasn’t sure I liked it the way you did.

You saw a man watching from across the train so you drew me in and kissed me, tongue and teeth and the taste of cider. I could feel his eyes on us as surely as I felt your eyes back at him, even with my own shut.

The police brought us both home the next day, having spent the night in a Manchester cell because you’d screamed and wouldn’t let me tell them where we lived. You’d gone hoarse by the morning whilst I’d lain curled in the corner all night with vomit in my hair and I’d told the policeman the name of our village.

The frozen face, do you remember it? You must have seen it that time, the way the flesh of Mum’s jaw tightened and stuck as the policeman told her what we’d done.

I remember the sting ebbing to an ache. Six months, a year, you still didn’t turn up and it faded and faded even as Mum cried in the evening before she went to sleep. She’d heard our argument, she must have. If I pretend I can say I’ve forgotten all the things I said to you. It was over thirty years ago and I’ve spent all that time forgetting so it’s a believable lie, even to myself. I meant it all, at the time and I’ve spent the rest of my life telling myself you deserved it.

A low, spreading ache. I bathed in its throbbing pulse and as time went on and on, still no word, it spread over all my skin and then down through my mouth and into my guts until it was all of me. When I looked in the mirror and didn’t see you, that’s when I knew you were gone.

I met Marian that very night. She had brown eyes and a soft, soft smile and she knew how to make hotpot and wanted to be a teacher. I sighed out a kind of last breath and settled against her warm breasts and let her lead me somewhere where love wasn’t torture.

You’d have hated Marian. You’d enjoy telling me that she was dull, grey. A cardigan in human form, that’s what you would have said. She’d hate you too, no question, although there’s very little capacity in her for such things. She would have managed it for you, I think. But then she would look from you to me and she’d see the red hair and the lips and eyes and she’d have seen us as one and she’d never be able to look at me again.

But who knows, you might still win. Because here you are again and now Marian knows about you. I might have known you’d find some way to intrude, scratching your way in like claws through a net curtain. Because you never really died, did you? You’ve just been hiding under a thick layer of rocks and ice in my brain.

I haven’t heard you laugh for a lifetime but I can hear it again now, in my mind, ice-clear and fiery. It was the laugh you let fly at Mum when she caught us behind the shed at our thirteenth birthday party. It was the laugh you threw at me when I said I didn’t want to.

You found it so funny that I didn’t want to run away with you.

“Run away? What from?”

“From here, of course.”

“To where?”

“Fucking anywhere.”

 

You’re not an aunt, by the way. I worked and earned and built and bought Marian everything she wanted to try and make up for what she really wanted from me but that I wouldn’t give. Just think, she said once, just think, a little bit of you, alive with us. But I know two of me is too many. I’ve spent a lifetime pretending, a lifetime’s dedication bent towards burying everything I really am, everything that you personified. A second’s lapsed control and I would feel again in my heart and mind and skin everything I shouldn’t when I looked at you and thought you were beautiful.

I ended up shouting at Marian that day and I caught my face in the mirror, wide mouth open and brow dark and our insane red hair dishevelled. That’s what you must have seen the night you ran away.

Marian never brought it up again, though I saw it in her face sometimes: a melting when we walked past play parks and front gardens in the summer, teeming with sprinklers and happy faces and tiny limbs.

 

Formally identify the body. Anything and everything and nothing and all of what had been before coming and going, clawing up through rocks and ice to swirl like a blizzard inside my head, parcelled up neatly in four little words.

Yes, that’s Dawn. Look how red the hair is.

Sign the paper, accept the patted back, back to the hotel and, thank God, a mini-bar. Fly home tomorrow. Home to Marian. She’s bringing the Alfa and she’ll meet me at Birmingham International. She won’t say anything, just gather me to her like a child and hold me. I’ll breathe in her smell of violets and ease myself into the familiar shape of her and then I can begin laying a whole new patio in my head.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight it’s just you and me, again. I’ve come and I’ve disturbed your sleep, just when you thought you’d got rid of me. Just one more night, Dawn, then I’ll spend the rest of the years left to me laying you to rest. I owe you that much.