It was a humid day in July and Frances Delaney was out shopping for milk, onions and liver.
In the supermarket, she was served by a girl who looked too young to be working on a weekday.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” she said.
“I left school three years ago,” the girl said, eyeing Frances’s tweed jacket and black bowler hat. “Did you find everything you need today?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The girl’s face reddened. “Did you find everything you need?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s what we’re told to say.”
“Well don’t. You have no idea what I need.”
“Screw you.”
“Excuse me?” said Frances, but she liked the girl better now. She let her pack the shopping into a bag without saying anything more.
Outside, she walked along the high street, sat on a bench opposite the church and pulled a can of Coke from Miriam’s old rucksack. It hissed and she drank and it tasted the same as everything else she put in her mouth these days. Hearing footsteps behind her, she turned her head and saw a skinny man. He had grey slicked-back hair and was wearing a black suit, white shirt and black tie. She squinted as he came closer.
“My God.”
He sat down beside her. “My wife will be here in a minute,” he said.
What kind of greeting is that after twenty-two years?
“What are you doing here?”
“We’re back for a funeral.”
“Who died?”
“You won’t know him.”
“I might.”
“You don’t know anyone, Frances.”
“I knew you didn’t I? Before you left me.”
“Your daughter gave us no choice. Stupid girl.”
His mouth was full of we and us. Revolting.
“Don’t talk about Miriam like that,” said Frances.
A pompous laugh, full of spit. “Did you just defend Miriam?”
“What’s it to you?”
A woman walked past. It was Mrs Thomas from the chemist, a dainty woman with a thuggish face. (Heaven help those who asked why their prescription was taking so long.)
“Blimey, she hasn’t got any prettier,” the headmaster said.
“Who was she?”
“See, you don’t know anyone,” he said, rolling his bloodshot eyes. “Anyway, since when did you care about Miriam?”
“What?”
“You never loved that girl.” He took the can of Coke from Frances’s hands, wiped it with his sleeve and drank for a long time. “She would’ve been better off with me.”
“Yes, me.”
“She hated you.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, staring ahead at the church.
“You wound her up.”
“Oh I did much more than that.”
She looked him in the eye, but was distracted by the amount of hair coming out of his nose. That’s what the years had brought him: less hair where he wanted it, more where he didn’t. “What?” she said.
He put his hand on her thigh. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
“You wound her up, that’s all. You taunted her.”
He moved closer, whispered something into her ear: “I went into her room while you were sleeping.”
His mouth just there, his breath inside her, she would have been lying if she said it was unpleasant. He was putting something into her, it didn’t matter what.
Until it did.
Words. Evil. Despicable.
“What?” she said, wanting him to stop and go on but mainly to stop.
“Night after night,” he whispered.
“No you didn’t. I would’ve heard.”
He pulled his face away and spoke in his usual voice. “You slept like an old pig, snorting in the dark. You wouldn’t have known if the house was on fire.”
Where was this hatred coming from? After all these years, surely he could manage some pleasantries? Like: Hello, Frances, how lovely to find you here on this park bench. Like: I can’t believe how fast time goes, has it really been twenty-two years? How are you keeping? How has life treated you? Like: It really is lovely to see you.
But no. Not even a hello. He had appeared from nowhere and accosted her. That was the word, and there was another word too: ambushed. He wasn’t the only one with words to push inside someone else.
“What’s happened to you?” she said. “You’re not the same man. You never would’ve ambushed me like this before.”
He lit a cigarette. “Miriam loved my little visits,” he said, sucking smoke into his mouth.
Frances could hear traffic, spiders creeping across the ground, twigs falling from trees, fish swimming in the sea. She could hear the grunts of arm-wrestling boys, clouds drifting through the sky. Noise, coming from everywhere. Nothing but noise, inside and out. The amplified echoes of the world, turned up to full volume.
“But—” she said.
“But what?”
She felt a pain in her stomach. I know this pain, she thought. I will never forget this pain. I’m having contractions. Here and now on this damp wooden bench. Contractions.
She wanted to push. Push this baby out. Get it out of me, I can’t do this, I’m not made for this, why can’t people see? I’m not good enough. I’ll put it in a blanket and leave it outside the hospital. It it it. Get it out out out.
“Oh for God’s sake,” the headmaster said. Typical Frances. Squirming around. Hamming it up. Look at her, bent double, having some kind of fit, making a show of herself.
She moaned, leant forward. The pain was unbearable. She tightened her muscles, closed her eyes. Contractions on top of noise on top of contractions on top of noise.
“I promised to keep her safe,” she said.
“Safe?” he said, standing up. He kicked her rucksack, knocked it onto its side. “You’re joking aren’t you? You wouldn’t know how to make anyone feel safe.”
She opened her eyes and watched him walk towards the churchyard. He looked like a matchstick man in a Lowry painting, monochrome and creaky.
“Miriam,” she said. It was the last word to come from her mouth.
She staggered to her feet, picked up her bag, made her way to the bus stop. Her stomach still hurt, there were spasms inside her, she wanted to push. The bus stopped and its doors opened. She dropped change into a tray without saying where she was going. The driver looked at all the coins. You want an all day ticket? he said. Her body landed fast and heavy on the first empty seat she could find.
She had seen it on the news, what happened to a person who jumped from that spot. Or what didn’t happen. They didn’t come back.
Smell that? Almost makes you want to live, doesn’t it?
Frances breathed deep until her lungs were full of the ocean.
She stood there for a while, just watching, breathing in and out, listening to the waves.
This is a nice way to spend your last half an hour, she thought. Then the contractions started again.
She took five steps backwards. Stopped. Waited.
Then she ran and she jumped and it was over.
On the surface of the sea, a black bowler hat.
On the floor, at the cliff’s edge, Miriam’s old rucksack. Inside it they found a purse, two onions, a pint of milk, a pig’s liver.
He thought it would feel good, dangling a lie in front of Frances Delaney, like twisting the tail of a live rat through her hair and watching what it did.
But it didn’t feel good.
It felt like betraying the one person he didn’t want to betray: Miriam Delaney. “I loved that girl like she was my own daughter,” he once said to his wife. “That freaky whispering girl?” she said. “You disgust me.”
As he entered the church, he thought about turning around. Frances couldn’t have gone far. He would take it back, say I’m sorry, I was lying, I did go into her room but only to talk. I’ve been so angry, Frances. You’d never believe how angry I have been.
But he didn’t turn around. His wife was here now. They were sitting at their friend’s funeral, dusted with death. Streaming eyes, sore throats, nothing in the air but death. He listened to the vicar, reducing a stranger’s life to a litany of headlines. Dear friend, he thought. You are diminished in death and I am diminished in life.
As he watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, he glanced at the empty bench. The desire to find Frances had gone. She didn’t seem important any more.