Chemistry and Other Stories Page 2

  He knew he’d died but he didn’t care. He found his stick behind the door and went for a walk into the village. He could feel his blood flow thin through his veins and his left hip no longer troubled him. He passed two or three people on his way to the shop and they returned his cheerful greeting with manifest surprise and a certain awkwardness.

  The shop bell rang and Elsie came through from the kitchen. Her large owl’s eyes widened behind her thick pebble-specs, and then narrowed. ‘Does Joan know you’s out, Joseph?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘She was only in yere just now.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Elsie,’ he replied, ‘I never felt better. Only I wants some fags. I’ve not had a smoke in ages.’

  Elsie looked away, embarrassed. ‘I haven’t got none of your sort in, Joseph. You’s the only one what smoked that brand.’ She reached over to the shelves. ‘You could try some of this, they says ’tis a strong one.’

  ‘I’m not bothered, I’ll take a packet of they,’ he smiled. She handed them to him hurriedly and he felt in his pockets. ‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘I’ve come out without any money. You know how much I hates credit, but can I send the lad down later on?’

  ‘Course you can, bay,’ she said without looking at him, ‘you git on, now.’

  As he turned to leave, he said, ‘I might even bring it myself.’

  Dr Buckle appeared the next day and took his temperature and checked his pulse and listened to the sounds of his insides through the dangling stethoscope. Then he declared, in a voice of scientific indifference, ‘It’s an impressive respite, Joseph. But you’re still weak. Don’t overdo it.’

  He wanted to get straight back out on the farm, but Joan told Mike she’d hold him responsible if Joseph picked up so much as an ear of corn, so he left his grandfather behind in the yard. Joseph wandered around the garden and poked about in the sheds. It was a hot day, the sun rose high in a blue sky, and he wiped the sweat from his neck and forehead. Sparrows swooped in and out of the eaves, a throstle sang from one of the apple trees, and when he saw a magpie in the first field he knew without any doubt that he’d see another, and sure enough there it was over by the hedge.

  A ladybird landed on the back of his hand. At first the tiny creature appeared strange, only for being so distinct in his cleansed vision, but then he observed that its markings were red dots on a black shell instead of the usual other way round. He didn’t think he’d ever seen one like that before, but he might well have and never been struck by it. There must be a name for it, he thought: an inverted ladybird, perhaps; a topsy-turvy. He lifted his hand and blew, and the delicate insect opened its wings and flew away.

  During the months of his miserable decline Joan had climbed uncomplaining up the stairs many times a day to make him comfortable, to help him on to the bedpan and carry it off to the bathroom, to rub cream into his dry skin, eventually to spoon food into his mouth. His recovery must have meant a great easing of her burden and he was frankly glad that she let him occupy himself now without interruption. Midway through the afternoon he became aware of a curious, pleasing sensation somewhere inside him and then he realised with surprise what it was: hunger. He marched into the kitchen.

  ‘You’ll not believe this, girl, but I’ve got myself an appetite all of a sudden.’

  Joan didn’t look at him directly but fussed around in the fridge and said at the same time, ‘Sit down, I’ll knock ’e up a sandwich.’

  Joseph planted himself at the table and laid his cigarettes and matches on its grainy surface. He could remember his own father making it, after a huge old beech tree had come down in an April gale. He could remember the sweet smell of the shavings as his father sawed and planed in the far shed, and he could remember the way his father kept nails between his moist lips.

  Joan set a plate of sliced white-bread sandwiches in front of him and murmured that she was off shopping, as she departed from the room. He watched her through the window disappear down the lane and then he closed his eyes, the better to appreciate the texture of mushy bread and coarse ham, and to savour the sharp distraction of mustard, contradicted by granules of demerara sugar.

  That evening after supper Joseph suggested a game of draughts with Mike, and they played for the first time since Mike was a child and Joseph had taught him, after the boy’s father had left. They played half a dozen games, all of which Mike spent hunched over the board uneasily, never once looking up at his grandfather, who won every game.

  That night Joseph slept for eight hours solid, untroubled by the morbid, drugged dreams of those last months, and he woke fully rested. He lay and listened to the chickens squawking and to house martins scurrying. He yawned and stretched slowly, his knotty old muscles elastic again, and he relished their pleasure.

  As he got dressed he saw his older grandson, John, who always came home late and left early, drive off to work, in Exeter. Joseph went downstairs. The kitchen was empty. He heard the tractor ignition and stepped outside; he called but Mike didn’t turn around, as the tractor coughed and rattled into the lane. He came back in and called his daughter, but there was no reply, so he made himself a mug of strong tea and wondered whether there was any secret to making toast. And he assumed there must be because he burned it, but he ate it anyway and enjoyed the taste of charcoaled bread beneath the butter and home-made, thick-rind marmalade. Then he took his cap and went outside.

  He knew he’d died because he felt so light and so at ease. It occurred to him that that evening he should challenge Mike to an arm-wrestle, and he laughed out loud at the idea. He tried to look at the sun and it made his eyes water.

  He walked through the lower fields. The wheat was high and brittle. He bit some grains and let the dry nutty flavour linger on his tongue and he wondered who first discovered how to make flour, and then bread. He entered the pasture where the dairy herd was grazing and passed among his Friesian cows, patting their flanks. He rolled up his sleeves and held out his arms, and the braver among them licked his skin for its salt with their rough wet tongues, though still like all the others eyeing him with their dull expression of fear and reproach. He wondered whether they forgave him for his life’s labour of exploitation and butchery, and he understood how much he loved this farm, these animals, this rich and crooked valley.

  Joseph walked into the village. As he began climbing Broad Lane he realised he’d left his walking stick behind, but he also realised that he didn’t need it: he was striding forward, with his bow-legs and his slightly in-turned toes; his tendons and sinews and leathery veins felt invincible, and he wiped the healthy sweat from his face without pausing. For the first time in he didn’t know how long he thought of his wife, whom he once used to walk to Doddiscombsleigh to then court during long walks in Haldon Forest, where, while the Second World War raged far away from them, they made urgent love in the shadows of the pines on a scratchy bed of cones and needles, dry twigs crackling as they moved. But he found that, in truth, he was thinking less of her than of himself – walking, so much walking in his life; he could carry on walking now and he needn’t ever stop he felt so strong, he felt he could walk the length of the valley and back again.

  Joseph looked around as he walked, peering over hedges and through gates, but there wasn’t a soul around. When he got up to the phone box he thought he saw a child running along the lane in the distance, but he wasn’t sure. He sat down on the bench at the top of the Brown. The improvised goalposts stood quiet and forlorn. An absurd television image leapt perfectly remembered out of his memory, of the majestic black French defender Marius Trésor lunging into a breathtakingly insane tackle during the 1982 World Cup semi-final.

  Joseph felt some tiny drops of rain fall on his hands. He looked up and the sky was a clear, unblemished blue. He wondered whether they were the prickles of pins and needles and he lifted his hands and shook them, and ran them down over his face. The world was silent and empty. He knew he’d died three days earlier at three o’clock in the afternoon, and he leaned forward with
his head in his hands and wept.

  When he heard the church bell tolling he wiped his eyes with his damp sweaty handkerchief, which made his eyes sting, and walked up past the almshouses and then the village hall where he’d once gone to school, and he walked through the lychgate into the graveyard. Twenty yards away they were lowering the coffin into the ground and the rector read from his Bible but Joseph couldn’t hear him. Then the rector, still reading, picked up a handful of soil and threw it into the grave and that he did hear, faintly, granules scattering across the lid of the coffin.

  He knew everyone there: Granny Sims, for twenty years his fellow churchwarden; Douglas Westcott; old Freemantle and his fragmented family; Martin the retired hedge-layer; Elsie and Stuart from the shop.

  As to his own family, in front of the various cousins and nieces and nephews, John held his mother Joan’s arm, while Mike looked like he ought to sit down, because he was leaning a little too much of his weight against his girlfriend, whose name Joseph never could remember.

  He looked across the graveyard at them and for the first time since his death Joseph felt a sudden upsurge of anger. It swelled inside him, pure and physical: a rage of bile, while his heart pumped hot blood through his veins. Volcanic anger. Anger so strong he thought he might burst.

  He closed his eyes, clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. And then he shouted out, ‘Why did you not show me this world before, you bastard?’ as he lifted his eyes to the wide blue sky, and felt himself light and rising.

  Harvest

  She dug all through that spring. She dug the earth. After the children had gone to bed Sarah stepped out of the back door, and in the chill evenings she turned the earth over. The vegetable plot had been abandoned years before. If a person was going to sow in the spring they should have dug and manured back in early winter, she knew that much. Added fertiliser, lime maybe, according to a gift-wrapped A–Z of Gardening she found in a drawer clearing out their married quarters. Had he intended it for her? She would never know.

  The compulsion to dig into the earth, though, seized hold of her, and she obeyed it. Digging deep, stooping, pulling the fleshy roots of dogged perennial weeds. Clay and silt and sand churned together ten thousand years earlier into this rich topsoil gave off a dank, archaic odour she inhaled, and couldn’t hold fast enough. Standing up, backache made her groan, a pain she came to relish.

  Her tears were lost in the dark soil. She broke open clods of mud with her hands. Worms emerged as if she had liberated them, but this was their terrain, they had the run of it. What now took place was a collaboration: worms broke down matter with their digestion, Sarah tilled it laboriously, until damp earth gave way; crumbled in her grasp. It clung to her skin, silting under her nails, highlighting the lines and cracks on her fingers, ageing her.

  The night before David joined his battalion she had woken, disturbed by his mind sawing beside her in the silence.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked; in the dim seconds waiting for his answer knew she wanted only to hear of his love for her; and how their children – that genetic duet of theirs – had become the only heroic legacy he needed.

  ‘The peaceniks,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The human shields, already there, in position. Before us! Already shipped out, and cosied up with their hosts. Welcome guests, don’t you think?’

  He was alert. Lying on his back, fiercely awake. Artificial light outlined the curtains, seeped weakly into their bedroom; the shape of wardrobe, dresser, emerged vaguely from the mirk. There were hours yet before the undesired dawn, and no more profit to be had from them, she figured, than in sleeping.

  ‘They don’t support you, those peaceniks,’ she said. ‘They don’t support us.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ he said.

  ‘They have no idea, do they, those people? Of what, of who, guarantees their freedom.’

  He said, ‘That’s not what was in my mind. I was thinking of the tough guys left back home here.’

  ‘Which guys?’

  ‘The hardballs. You know? Who sound off in the bars and the dinner parties. And write columns in your free newspapers arguing the case for war. Hard-boiled truth-tellers making mock apologies for seeing the world as it really is. Tough enough to commit their views to print. In bold black and white. And take payment. I mean, look, they’ve got mortgages to pay, haven’t they? Kids to get through school.’

  She knew him in this tensile mood: he was off now. The calmest of men, her husband; but occasionally something riled him and he would worry away at it, gnawing it through till it was all chewed up. His eyes gleamed in the dark; she could feel his muscled body fraught.

  ‘The tough guys,’ he repeated. ‘Who believe more than we do, Sarah, in the accuracy – the righteousness – of our heat-seeking missiles. Our smart weapons. Our sci-fi. The big boys back home, you know? With their faith in our precision bombing. Oh, they regret that there may be collateral damage, there always is in war, but less this time, you see. Our expertise, our compassion, will ensure it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured tiredly, wondering whether in bedrooms dotted all around the country other partners lay with their men and women grinding out resentment on the eve of departure. ‘Yes, David. Those guys support you.’

  ‘No, no, they’re the ones, Sarah, don’t you see, who should have gone? Who should be there. Well away from target areas, of course. I’m not being funny. Far from army bases and anti-aircraft batteries. But it’s the wrong way round, for Christ’s sake. Those who believe should be there. Not the protestors. The champions of war. Put up in some quiet residential quarter of the capital. Sitting on an upturned oil drum in … a busy marketplace. Camped out in the desert surrounded by … sheep, sand, blue sky.’

  What did he mean, exactly? Should she ask? Did he want her to ask? A spouse should know the answer to such questions, at such a moment.

  ‘Why?’ she ventured.

  ‘Why? Why? Just … I don’t know. Just to feel how the earth shudders when our missiles land.’

  She put her arm across his chest, squeezed his upper arm. Sarah felt herself tremble against David’s ribs, knowing there was nothing she could do to keep him here.

  His battalion flew to the Gulf, where they played little part in the campaign but were kept on for the peace. He and the men in his platoon were manning a roadblock, according to the visiting officer, who with the garrison padre came marching through the patch in formal uniform to break the news of his death. There was no body. There were body parts, as Sarah discovered later when she asked to see him, seeking closure.

  There were parts of a number of bodies. The bomber had eased his car, packed with three hundred pounds of home-made explosive, into the clamorous throng of people. Forensics had analysed the scene and it was believed that all victims had been accounted for.

  Seven people were killed; eleven injured, more or less severely. Native passers-by as well as foreign nationals in uniform. A child of three, a girl, was blown apart – was she grateful, Sarah wondered, for this unasked-for martyrdom?

  And her husband, infidel soldier, who according to witnesses was leaning towards the car when, at eleven thirteen a.m. local time, the bomber triggered the explosion.

  ‘Where is he?’ the children demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nowhere.’ What could she tell them?

  ‘You must know,’ the boy persevered.

  ‘He’s dissolved into the universe,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. He lived – we loved him, he loved us – he died. Death means oblivion. Your father no longer exists – except in us.’

  ‘But his soul,’ the girl insisted. ‘I don’t care what you think: I believe in life after death.’

  ‘Why don’t we say …?’ the boy offered, twisting his mouth as he thought, the way his father had. ‘Let’s just say, he’s in another dimension.’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl agreed. ‘All right. And he can see us.’

  The boy frowned
. ‘I think that’s true.’

  Her vegetable plot was cleared of all enemies: nettle, bindweed, dock. Couch grass, creeping thistle and a hundred unidentified species of weed. Swept clean, pristine, a deep and ample bed.

  Seed potatoes had sat in egg boxes on the windowsill of the gloomy living room, and sprouted. She marked out rows with taut string, cleared drills with a trowel and solemnly offered the vegetables to their places in the soil.

  She followed them with broad beans: when he saw those large seeds, her son demanded to sow them, and did so slowly, measuring each eight exact inches between them, his tongue working in concentration. Sarah wondered whether his father had done that as a boy. A boy from a fairy tale, with a magic beanstalk to a land above the blue sky.

  She sowed carrots and broccoli, beetroot and courgette. Her daughter watched, unimpressed by her mother’s Passion, until in the first week of June she joined her to help sow the seeds of wrinkled garden peas.

  ‘They’re so old,’ the girl said. ‘They’re like pea grandparents, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are,’ Sarah agreed.

  They raked the soil flat.

  ‘Do you think he’s still there, Mum?’

  ‘Where? In that other dimension, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes. His soul. Would he stay there, or would he move around? I’ve been thinking about it.’