Before All Else Read online

  She dreams of bleached bones.

  2

  Cecily

  The next morning, a few cars are still bumped up on the verge outside Mrs Green’s house. Relatives from afar, perhaps, who had billeted with friends and neighbours. She makes her usual way down to the churchyard. The High Street has yet to come alive, with only a few delivery vans, their back doors opened to boxes of Dutch stems, hanging carcasses, crates of milk. The pavement is still treacherous with frost, glistening under a spent moon.

  The church sits upon its own grassy rise flanked by low flint walls and the one-way system. Having fulfilled its original promise to make the local wool merchants wealthy, it now sees to the occasional religious requirements of the village of Bullenden. A wrought-iron archway with its central lamp embellishes the entrance. The bulb flickers, throwing its intermittent light over inch-deep flies and spiders, each as dead as the other. Walking gingerly up the path, she makes her way over to Henry. Darling Henry.

  He is always Darling Henry. Could never be anything other than Darling Henry. Even now, six years later, she thinks of him only with an access of pure love and affection.

  Mandy

  She wakes slowly. The bedroom is warm and close. There is an old, familiar, heart-wrenching smell in the air. Paris Nights. The scent is old, sour, but it belongs to a time when there had been more promise in the air. “Hartlepool Nights, more like,” her Jerry had said, as she waved a drenched wrist under his nose.

  Jerry. Jerry. Jerry. So different from Ned. Where are you now, Jerry?

  More to the point, where’s that Ned? Luckily he hadn’t had a go at her last night. He’d pushed her up the stairs with his hand in the small of her back. Had she been sick again? She leans over the bed. The bucket is empty. Mercifully she’d made it out to the Greens’ garden in time last night. Sharon had come out with her and rubbed her back. “Never mind, love, happens to all of us at some time.” Those sausage rolls were definitely off.

  Cecily

  She leans against the granite headstone that marks out his dates. Even now she is only just the age Henry was when they met. He had been looking forward to retirement; she had been living in a rented farm cottage, working part-time, biding her time, although for what, she couldn’t say.

  What a tiny, tiny moment it was. How many factors conspired to make that meeting possible? Equally, there could have been a million reasons for them not to have met. Where would she be now if they hadn’t?

  She’d been cross country for a few days and was waiting for her train home, sitting at a precariously balanced plastic table, coldness seeping in through the tall, steel-framed windows, her few purchases stacked in front of her. The station was crowded with commuters returning home corralled into a holding bay with their coffees and laptops. As the screens flickered, so the next batch of travellers moved down the steps to be heaved onto their train on the platform below. Between the tilting panes of glass, office buildings glowed in the setting sun with the warmer tones of the city’s Victorian industrial heritage. A mass, a press of people, of processes; no different now than a century or two ago.

  The exhibition had been so-so, not that she was that interested in Surrealism, but she’d let herself wander amongst the terrifyingly skewed world of oversized and undersized objects juxtaposed in an apocalyptic landscape.

  She was checking her phone – there were still twenty minutes before her train was due to depart – when the pearly light from the grimy window darkened a little. She was aware of someone scraping back a chair and sitting down. Still in the middle of the table was the exhibition’s guide book, its glossy cover featuring a spinning cauldron, molten animal parts stirred by shrouded, ghostly white creatures. A hollow house with flaming windows was set on a distant hill made of bleached bones.

  “Looking at that too long would give you nightmares.”

  She glanced at the programme. It looked not a little dystopian, even weird, fetishistic.

  “Mind if I have a look?” He held her eyes with a directness and bonhomie, before reaching across to pick it up, skimming the pages, stopping every so often for a brief look. As the pages fanned past, releasing the smell of freshly printed high colour, she felt herself becoming almost mesmerised. He bent the pages back, cracking the spine. It was as if she herself were being scrutinised; all her dirty little secrets coming chattering, unreservedly, to the fore. And what was more, this man with his bold hands like catch nets and barbed eyes could, she thought to herself uneasily, become the procreator of a few of those guilty little secrets. “Not really my style,” he said, replacing the programme on the table between them and shaking out his newspaper.

  There was nothing she could think of to say, so returned to her phone.

  Later they found themselves on the same train, heading east from Crewe.

  And this is why bones rattle while houses burn in her dreams. For if Henry had ever found out, it would have knocked the stars out of the sky for him. If anyone knew, everything – the exquisite house she lived in on the High Street, her love for her sisters, her grieving for Henry, the daily visits to the graveyard – everything in her life, would be shown up to be a sham, a pretence, built on the shifting sands of hypocrisy and undeserved good fortune.

  Cecily shakes her head but the thought refuses to dislodge itself. She steps carefully over the still frosted flagstones to Henry’s grave.

  Mandy

  Jerry had gone. Good riddance. But he wasn’t hers to keep anyway, was he? And then, surprisingly, Ned had come along. On the surface, it had been a pretty good swap. Jerry, with his suet butties and roving eye, for Ned; compact, local, honourable and, above all, available.

  She’d promised Mum that she would give Ned a go but it had been Jerry who had lifted her higher and higher.

  She counts on her fingers, although she knows the answer all too well. Fifteen years. Fifteen years since Jerry had drawn up in his wagon, asking the way to Britannia Street. “No idea love,” she’d called up over the thrumming of the engine. He’d hooked his elbow over the partly closed window. “Want a lift?”

  “It’s alright. Can find my own way home.”

  “Funny place for a lass. In the middle of the roundabout.”

  She’d wanted to explain how she’d been out with the girls for somebody’s leaving do and it would have meant the taxi making a detour into the village, so she’d said she’d get out here and walk home. The girls hadn’t wanted her to, of course, but she was a big lass, could take care of herself. Seen off many a likely lad in her time.

  “No, you’re alright. Hubbie’ll be along shortly.” A lie. Mr Trucker wasn’t to know that, that most of the time she felt so completely and utterly all alone in this big wide world with not even so much as a Premium Bond to her name and no friend to pull her out of the River Alyn. Ok, they were alright, the girls at work, had a laugh with them – she had that night – but she could tell what they all thought of her. Good for a laugh with a few Malibus inside her but the office ran a hell of a lot more smoothly on her sick days.

  Yeah. Jerry. Jerry! Jer-rey. Fat ugly bastard who took every last penny of her dwindling savings, all two and a half thousand quid saved from her divorce settlement.

  Fair dos, though, that night he’d said he’d wait until Hubbie arrived. Even when she told him to push off and stop mithering, he gave a lopsided grin, put his hands on the steering wheel, but never budged.

  “I’m off. Night.”

  “Night, love.”

  “Night.”

  Cecily

  She couldn’t now remember what they had spoken about as the train pushed its way through the thickening night. Certainly the conversation revealed no impediment to them seeing each other again. On the contrary, she had the feeling that the forces of inevitability were at work, as strong and as powerful as the man sitting in front of her.

  Henry put his contact details i
nto her phone. “So you can’t make the excuse that you must have put the numbers in the wrong way round.” She’d walked down the aisle of the train with him and waited, staring at his back, for the doors to open at his station a few stops before her own. He turned and took a kiss from her willing lips, unbalancing her as he stepped back away from her.

  “Phone me.”

  “I will.”

  Back at her seat, playful, whimsical rondos from La Fille Mal Gardée popped into her mind, making her smile. At approaching forty years old, it was laughingly delicious to be The Wayward Daughter.

  Mandy

  Ned ignores her on the way to the bathroom. The door closes on her, the toilet seat clacks against the cistern.

  She longs to fall back on the quilted bed covers and fall asleep again but there’s a vile taste in her mouth. She needs to rinse her mouth.

  The night she met Jerry replays on the silver screen of her memory. She wishes she had a friend she could tell the story to. A friend who might even have the perception to ask why she doesn’t hold the memory of the night she met Ned so dear as the night she met Jerry.

  She’d tell the friend, this imaginary friend, how once she’d called out ‘Night then’ and set off across the grass verge, she’d came to a sudden halt. Couldn’t move a muscle. “Get like that, I do, when I want a wee. Been like that since I was a little girl. Stock still. Just got to concentrate on holding it in. ’Cos, let a little out, and it all comes out. Not an age thing. Always been like that, I have.”

  “Standing there, you know how you’ve got to press your legs together and your arse sticks out a bit. And he’s laughing.”

  And he’s laughing. The memory is sweet. “Stop bloody laughing, you.”

  “Why you standing there like some kind of demented ostrich?”

  “Can’t bloody move, can I?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “No.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No. I’ll be alright in a minute.”

  He makes to look in the mirrors. “Can’t see nobody coming to fetch you.”

  “Oh shut up.” It eases off a bit. “Look, I’m alright. Just bugger off will you,” because she’s thinking she might be able to hop over the hedge if only he wasn’t looking at her like he had plans for her. Which he had, as it turned out.

  “Well, OK, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  The loo flushes and she can hear Ned clean his teeth with the electric toothbrush. He pops his brush into the stainless cup. He can’t bear to have his brush close to hers. He flushes the loo a second time. Why has she got to go through these motions, this acute intimacy, with a man she can barely stand and who seems to begrudge her her every succeeding breath?

  The old familiar sadness grows in her breast, both augmented and diminished by replaying in her mind the events of the night she met Jerry. To keep the memory shiny and precious she must choke back her true feelings for the low down, cheating, thieving bastard.

  If she had a friend, just one good friend, she’d have them in stitches by this point. She’d tell them how it was pitch black when she climbed over the gate. “I can hear these sheep munching away, at least I think it was sheep. Blessed relief it was, thought I’d never stop. I climb back over the gate and bleedin’ Jerry comes back again. He’s only just gone round the next roundabout and come back again.”

  “Need a hand, love? You’re looking a bit precarious.”

  “I’m halfway over the gate by this time, trying to get me other leg over and keep me shoes from falling to the ground.”

  “Fuck off, I tell ‘im”

  “He drives the cab onto the verge, hops out, all nimble like, and gives me a steadying hand over the gate. Funny thing was, I wasn’t worried. You can usually tell when a bloke’s a bit threatening. He wasn’t. Let go of my hand as soon as I was down. Didn’t try any funny business. Which is why I thought I’d let him give me a lift home. My feet were wet, I couldn’t get my shoes back on and it was two o’clock in the morning. I told him Mum would still be up.

  “Having got me off the gate, he’s now getting me up the steps into the cab. Heave ho.

  “It was only two minutes home, but we chat and he tells me his name, where he lives, the fact that he’s single, getting a divorce, him and his wife splitting up after twenty years. But he’s alright about it, kids have left home. Tells me to call him if I like because he’ll be passing through this way again a week on Tuesday.”

  Mandy hauls herself upright and coughs loudly. Stepping from the bed, her foot kicks a high-heeled shoe across the floor against the skirting board. She imagines Ned pulling the floss from his teeth and pricking his ears at the sudden noise. She pulls a vigorous V-sign at the back of the bathroom door on her way to her vanity unit.

  She puts the stopper back on the bottle. Must have left it off last night. Paris Nights. Pah! She’d got her wires crossed once. Nearly given the game away. Forgotten that it wasn’t Ned who called her perfume Hartlepool Nights. Looked at him like he was stupid for not remembering their little joke. But it wasn’t him at all. It had been Jerry. Fucking gobshite…

  Truth is, of course, whatever the seductive promise of the perfume, her silk stocking would never glide gracefully from her smooth leg like a falling feather! Nor would the man of her dreams cup her slenderly turned calf in his hand and blow lightly across her toes like pan pipes! No longer does she have the power to withhold a promise, the power to tease, to thwart, to reject; the power to disappoint.

  Cecily

  A week after their meeting on the train, Henry’s name buzzed onto her phone screen. “Passing your way next Wednesday. Lunch?” She’d almost forgotten about him, putting it down to a flash encounter on the road to nowhere. Yet she had no hesitation to text back, almost immediately, “That would be lovely.”

  The village is quiet, the hush that only comes with the bitter cold. The orange of the sodium lights in the street muddies the clarity of the early morning.

  When Mother and Father passed away, within fifteen months of each other, as it happened, Mother was adamant that no cut flowers were to be left on their graves. “So untidy. So common.” But that was Mother. Cecily does not share the same qualms and, every week, brings fresh flowers, seasonal fruits, berries, something from the garden, a piece of Christmas cake, a daisy chain – anything. After all, Henry had given her so much in her life that this small pile of grave goods could only be just that, very small in comparison.

  It was Tilly, who once said, “I’ve given Daddy a boiled sweet,” that gave her the idea. Cecily had looked at her askance.

  “How? What do you mean? Daddy’s not likely to fancy a boiled sweet now.”

  “No. I’ve pushed it into the earth, so Mother can’t see it. Well, I know she can’t actually see anything now, but you know what I mean.”

  The youngest, always outwardly obedient, Tilly relished these small gestures of rebellion. “Come, I’ll show you.”

  Tilly bent and showed Cecily a small removable square of grass. She lifted it and beneath, in various degrees of decay and stickiness, were Nuttal’s Mintoes, Glacier Mints and Travel Sweets. “Mother was almost as adamant about the perils of sweets as she was about the vulgarity of floral offerings, so it’s mine and Daddy’s little secret.”

  Cecily laughed at Tilly’s childish glee, her irrepressible spirit bubbling to the fore.

  Cecily looked to Tilly to show her a more playful, less literal way. She envied her youngest sister for her imagination.

  Henry loved this about her. Her solemnity. Her passive face while awaiting direction and instruction. Her wide-eyed cat’s stare. “You are such the eldest daughter. It’s as if you line up to offer your shoulders for the next burden, your back for its strength, your arms for the next lo
ad.”

  So she brings little offerings to Henry. And she tidies them away again before they blow into Treasured Memories of a Dear Nan, or Zenobiusz Chojnowski, or Toby Cobain, infant son, whose company Henry keeps.

  She has made peace with Henry’s going, in a just-in-the-next-room sort of a way. She has made peace with her parents shuffling off – just. There is just a sense of emptiness now. The sadness has drained out of her, taking much with it, but still leaving some air, some room for a breeze to blow. As honoured and exalted a role as being Henry’s widow is, is it enough?

  Here she is, standing in the graveyard, while the dying stars move over her head and the dead slumber at her feet. Life, it seems, is everywhere else, but here.

  Mandy

  Oh, she had the power to disappoint all right. As she soon found out.

  No such thing as consensual in Jerry’s mind. A man’s right, it was. A man’s right to help himself whenever and, in the end, wherever he wanted. She should have known. She should never have made that phone call the following Tuesday. Would have saved her a lot of grief and her savings.

  But phone she did. Pretended that she’d dialled his number by accident. Pretended for a moment that she couldn’t quite recall anyone called Jerry. Alarm bells should have gone off then, when he obviously couldn’t remember who she was. “You know, you stopped and asked me the way to Britannia Street.”

  “Lots of streets called Britannia Street, love. Give us another clue.”

  “Er…” She hesitated to remind him of her drunken wobble over the farm gate, her desperate need to relieve herself.

  “Come on, love, give us a clue. Oh, I know, you the lassie at the chip shop?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, hang on. I’ve got you,” and he asked her if she managed to get the car home.

  “No. No. No. Forget it!”