It is all of them in the car—all of them, that is, except for Ernie (as he liked to be called), who died last month and has come along therefore in a dead way, a few handfuls of lumpy ash snap-locked inside a cobalt-blue jar. His ring is in there too, apparently, though Faith hasn’t had the heart to look closely. It is molten and curled, says Nana Jo, which is odd—that it’s in there—since he lost it the night he died.
‘At least he doesn’t need a whole seat to himself any more!’ someone said as he was being placed—carefully, upright—in the boot. Faith didn’t see who it was, who said it, but it was certainly either her mother or Nana Jo. Perhaps her mother, who never succeeded at being light-hearted when light-hearted was the last thing she felt.
Faith’s mother sits up front wearing her back-support contraption, its many straps locked across her chest. She looks like a displaced tramper, Faith thinks, with the seat an oddly shaped pack. She is pressed so hard against it that it looks a part of her, though in reality she couldn’t really tramp, considering her weight. It is a six-seater, this car, rented from the car place on Davis Street. Nana Jo is driving—which doesn’t seem right at all—with Faith’s mother beside her, and Faith and her brother Phil behind, his face pressed close to the pictures in a surf magazine called Making Wavez. Their step-sister Trudie is behind them, and her fiancé John. They talk to each other in hushed voices every now and then, and laugh softly, in a way that makes Faith feel nervous. She’s glad they’re behind her, rather than the other way round—that would be nauseating.
So there it is. The six of them. It is true—there wouldn’t have been much room for Ernie anyway.
Outside, beyond the fences and sporadically grassed bank, the salt lakes come into view. They are a tired-looking pink, square after square of them, crystals forming on their edges. They are divided by slabs of concrete, and there is a soft mist—a soft mist that almost looks like but couldn’t possibly be steam—hovering above the ones in the middle. The mist is not surprising; it is only just past dawn.
It is the beginning of July and they are on their way to the snow. Faith has taken a week’s leave from her job on the outskirts of the city, where she works for a small PR firm, and where, four months ago, she unwisely began sleeping with her (twice married) boss. He has let her take a holiday even though this is their busiest time of year. It is a simple sort of equation. She lets him slide his tanned, dark-haired hand up her skirt between business hours, and he, in turn, lets her take her leave when she wants it. A cosy wee arrangement—when you balance things up.
The car glides effortlessly over a rise in the road, where it curves a little, and they find themselves even closer, almost level with the salty ponds.
‘Look,’ says Faith’s mother without any sign of excitement, her finger stabbing softly at the glass of the passenger window. ‘Look.’
She is pointing at the salt lakes, which Faith and Nana Jo—hopefully, considering it is she who is in charge of the wheel—have already seen. Phil lifts his head away from his magazine, but drops it instantly again, not bothering even to attempt to look interested in what’s outside.
‘Look,’ says Faith’s mother again, but as she says it the car turns a corner and the salt lakes are lost from view.
*
Ernie always said he’d like to die in late spring, along with the daffodils, but he died mid-winter, which proves you don’t always get what you want. In any other family he would have been called Granddad but his own Grandfather’s name was Ernie and for some reason he decided that’s what Faith and Phil should call him. It is ironic now, of course, Ernie being in an urn. Perhaps that had been his intention all along.
Nobody had really expected him to die when he did, though it seems now they had refused to read the signs. He had been in hospital for seven weeks, driving them all mad, showing no sign of going anywhere.
‘I’ll just wait here,’ he would say to Faith as she was leaving after every visit. ‘I’ll just be staying here then.’
It made her laugh at the time, the absurdity of it, a man so suddenly shrunken, tubed up, feet as big as baseballs, behaving as if he actually had a say in the matter.
‘Well, I’ll just stay put,’ he would say, without even a touch of sarcasm, his hand raised in a salute.
Of course, all he wanted was to be taken home.
*
Things with Faith and her boss have plateaued. If Faith were being honest with herself, she would even go as far as to say that things aren’t going well, but she wonders if they ever do—go well, that is—when it comes to adultery. She has started to feel resentful. Is that really surprising? Richard—or Retch-ard, as Faith calls him, just to herself, on the bad days—has developed a way of looking at her as if he is tired and it is she who is making him so. His eyes have a slightly red-rimmed look to them, which she never noticed in the early days but has probably always been there. The redness matches the red of his gums, which he bares when he smiles, though he doesn’t necessarily mean to. It is just that his teeth are somewhat stubby. Somewhat stubby, but alarmingly white. He isn’t tall, or particularly handsome, and this makes Faith sometimes wonder what on earth she is doing with him. Three days ago, as he was grating his cheek against the skin of her neck, she noticed his hair thinning on the top of his head. The fact that she noticed it, and also that the top of his head was something she could see, seemed like bad signs to her. Perhaps she is only with him because he refers to her as a firecracker, which is something she has always thought she would like to be but isn’t really at all.
Faith rests her head against the window. The road is surrounded by paddocks now, hilly ones that have a smattering of sheep strewn across them. Far off, pressed flat it seems against the clear skies, are the mountains, white and jagged, looking like a stage set, or at least an illusion of some kind. She feels too hot in the car. The heater is probably on full. She pulls at the neck of her jersey. She feels as if she might faint.
‘Does anyone want to stop at some tearooms?’ says Nana Jo, her voice characteristically jolly. She has two saunas a week and is clearly in her element temperature-wise.
‘Are there tearooms close by?’ says Faith’s mother.
‘Well, I don’t know, to be honest,’ says Nana Jo. ‘But I thought it was worth just throwing the idea out there, as a possibility.’
Faith looks at her watch. It isn’t even 8 a.m.
‘Does anyone feel like some valium?’ Phil says into the pages of his surf magazine. ‘Cocaine, perhaps? Anyone? No?’
He says it quietly, but loud enough so that Faith can hear. His hair is still in a state of shock, probably from prising himself from bed so early. One side of it is as flat as a pancake, but at the back and top it sticks out jauntily, almost with flair. He looks like a parrot.
‘Anyone?’ he says again, his top lip leering a little at his own joke. His face is completely smooth, Faith notices, even though he turns twenty-four next month. His girlfriend has recently left him for his best friend, or some such thing. It has given his manner an edge that was never there before.
‘Ah, well. All the more for me then,’ he says. And all of a sudden—like a crashing sound far off, a sudden disintegration—Faith finds herself bewildered, and can’t tell if he’s joking, or not.
*
As children, Faith and Phil had dreamed of a skiing holiday. It was something that seemed exotic to them, just out of reach, a snowy-topped, quivering mirage. That was the ticket to success, somehow—just going for one skiing trip with your family.
Ernie may have known that, but he also may not have. Faith was never sure what he remembered and what he simply improvised. He had the serene authority and mannered charm of someone accustomed to the stage, a sense of occasion and drama in an otherwise ordinary world. When they were small he had pulled coin after coin from deep within his ear canal. It had appalled Faith at the time, this abundance of metal in people’s heads. She had imagined when she moved hers too that there was a jingling deep inside—all that metal, and Ernie the only one in her life able to extract it.
Of course, he was also the only one who, until recently, had not successfully extracted himself. There had been Faith’s father who, as her mother always said, had taken off and left the three of them when Phil was only three—the matching numbers somehow detracting from the awfulness of it, moving it into a realm that was more bearable, approaching humour. Ted, of course, had had all the good intentions required, having nursed his dying wife through MS while bringing up their only daughter all alone—or so the story went—but his good intentions seemed unable to be contained within the nest. He was overflowing with good intentions wherever they were required. All that trauma, Faith’s mother used to say good-naturedly. She said it with such emphasis that, after a while, it began to seem like a sound an animal might make: a low, drawn-out ache.
It wasn’t until after Ted officially left, or after he was officially—finally—kicked out, that Faith’s mother began to balloon. It was a slow, steady sort of process, as if someone, puff by puff, were blowing her up with air. She developed rolls on her neck that grew shiny with sweat on warm days. The skin round her ankles seemed to be falling over itself to get to the floor.
Faith and Phil watched the whole process with an adolescent helplessness that grew into adult helplessness over time. Ernie and Nana Jo, advocates of fruit, vegetables and yoga in the morning, must have felt a certain helplessness too.
‘Your mother’s body is just all brimming over with sadness,’ Nana Jo said to Faith one day, a conspiratorial hush in her voice.
Faith had never felt sure if it was the brimming over, or the sadness, that was cause for such a tone. Both things seemed to be wallowing around in a shameful realm, equally fascinating and awful, like the holocaust, or a nuclear bomb.
‘Be grateful for your suffering,’ Faith once read on the back cover of a self-help book. ‘It is the greatest gift you will ever receive.’ It was true, of course. She bought it for her mother and gave her the gift of the book—advocating the gift of suffering—for her birthday. ‘Gifts come in many guises!’ she wrote in the card. She was trying to be light-hearted.
*
In a town with nothing in it but a store, a butcher and a cluster of tired-looking houses, Nana Jo pulls up beside a concrete block of public toilets. Nothing, it seems, is open except for the toilets, and outside of them stand a man and woman (boy and girl, really) with clipboards. One by one they all—Faith and Phil, Trudie and John, Nana Jo and Faith’s mother—launch their deadened bodies out of the car and walk jaggedly across the car park like a flock of strange, misshapen birds, bent forward a little, lifting their legs and putting them down again in halting, jerky movements.
The air is cold—wet-feeling—even though the sky is perfectly blue.
Inside the toilets the cubicle doors don’t lock, and there is no soap to speak of, though there are two dispensers and a coating of slime on the soap dish on the basin which certainly suggests some did exist, once. Nana Jo has brought her hairbrush in with her, but there’s no mirror either. She doesn’t seem put off, and instead doubles her body forward and begins to whack her head with the brush, with vigorous movements reminiscent of some sort of medieval torture. Her short, wiry crop of hair, under the wild attentions of the brush, appears to be trying to get as far away from her scalp as possible.
‘Better than washing it,’ Nana Jo says by means of explanation when she’s finished.
When they emerge back into the morning light, the clipboarded pair slide towards them. They are doing a survey for the local council, they say, compiling satisfaction ratings of the amenities. Would they be willing to take part? Their faces seem wide and eager with hope—hers caked with a ghostly foundation that has been applied only halfway down her neck, his blooming with rosy clusters of acne. They both have deep-set eyes. Perhaps they are related.
‘Will it take long?’ says Nana Jo. ‘We’re on our way to somewhere.’ She says it with such authority and self-importance that it seems she is entirely unaware of the obviousness of the statement: that a town like this would almost never be the actual destination. She smiles brightly at them after she’s said it, encouragingly even.
They queue up, all six of them, and one by one answer the questions. When Faith’s turn comes, though, she forgets to list anything of actual importance in the ‘Suggestions for Improvement’ section, and just mentions the lack of mirror, somehow forgetting, for that moment, the lack of soap and missing lock.
As they crawl back into the car, she asks Phil for his rating out of ten. She mimes holding a microphone out to him when she does it, which is the sort of thing that would have delighted him when he was small.
‘One,’ he says, with no sign of humour.
‘One! So low!’ says Faith, adjusting the paraphernalia around her—discarded clothes, pillows, an array of shoes—and buckling her belt.
Phil has already found his magazine, and has opened it on a poster page of an enormous claw-like wave, a dot of a man crouched beneath the froth of white.
‘There was no toilet paper,’ says Phil. And still no smile.
‘Marlene always came first,’ says Faith’s mother to Nana Jo, ‘but Helen was the beauty.’
The two of them have been foraging through the past—old neighbourhoods, street names—and are now onto the Martyns, who were raising their two granddaughters: their neighbours from around forty years ago. Faith has gathered this from tuning in occasionally through the cloud of her own dream-like thoughts. Everyone else in the car is in a doze too.
‘With a name like that,’ says Faith’s mother, ‘and she did look like a goddess.’
‘Dead eyes, though. Not much happening between those pretty ears of hers,’ Nana Jo says.
The radio, gurgling away in the background, suddenly turns to static, and instead of turning it down one of them turns the dial in the wrong direction, so that the static turns to a violent screech, just for a moment, before it is hurriedly switched off.
‘Thick as a brick,’ agrees Faith’s mother, her voice now sounding clear and strong, only the hum of the car in the background. Nana Jo and Faith’s mother make identical clacking sounds of agreement with their tongues.
‘And Mr Martyn, always saying, “Will you look at that,” no matter what you said to him. Remember that? You’d tell him you were on the way to town and he’d say, “Will you look at that.”’ When she says this, Nan Jo lowers her voice and gives it a sort of a lilt, sounding not like herself at all but presumably like Mr Martyn. ‘It was as if that was his way of encouraging you, in a conversation. Funny man,’ she says. ‘Terribly kind.’
‘Marlene used to say, “My Dad’s a bad egg.” All the time.’
‘Not about Mr. Martyn?’ Nana Jo lowers her voice even more at this, though it’s clear she’s just playing around.
‘The father,’ says Faith’s mother, ‘whoever he was. She’d always say it: “My Dad’s a bad egg.” Must’ve been something she overheard. Mind you, they’d know about eggs, considering all those hens.’
At this the two of them chuckle—a love of bad jokes, clearly, runs in the family—and Faith can hear her mother shifting around in her seat, re-adjusting her back-support straps.
‘Marlene told me that Helen got pregnant from playing on the jungle gym too much.’
‘I’ll bet,’ says Nana Jo.
‘I believed her for a while. I was only—how old would I have been? Twelve?’
‘Bless,’ says Nana Jo, and the two of them fall into a sudden silence.
The silence draws Faith out of her dozing, and her eyes waver open for a moment. Outside, grassy plains stretch out on either side of the road, wide and flat, but flickering in the breeze. The grasses are a milky copper—sun bleached and parched-looking, but still bristling, undeniably alive. The car is in the base of a valley, and it feels to Faith as if they have sunk to the bottom of a bowl, hurtling along towards a certain end, surrounded by mountainous walls.
‘Will you look at that,’ says Nana Jo, but she says it in her own voice, not Mr Martyn’s, and therefore must be referring to the mountains. It seems she has already forgotten about the Martyns and their granddaughters. The conversation has returned to the road.
*
Richard likes to send Faith emails at work that say things like, ‘I’d like to tha(fuck)nk you for getting the Ellroy job finished in time.’ That sort of thing. He sits behind a glass wall in their office, and after he’s sent an email he watches her, waiting for the moment when she opens it. She is training herself not to react, but she must give it away somehow, because he waits for the moment so blatantly before going back to his work. He has hands which are square, roped with veins, and brown from the weekends that he spends in the garden with his wife. She, by contrast, is pearly white, oddly luminous, like frosted glass. Her name is Annie—which is, Faith thinks, the perfect name for the wife of a man one has an affair with—but he refers to her simply as A. She always wears rubber-soled ballet flats that are imported from somewhere in Spain. Not cheap, that’s for sure, and always muted, tasteful blues and apricots—though once Faith saw her in a pair that were a washed-out gold. It is not that she is even particularly pretty—she has features that are small and pale also, and a slight stoop, exaggerated on the left side—but she has an effortless manner that exhausts Faith. That, and the fact that Richard has told Faith the two of them have sex in the garden (most probably amongst their well-kept hydrangea bushes) on Sundays, after they’ve done the mulching. He is a believer in honesty, he says, though clearly only with Faith. Jealousy is an unnecessary emotion, Richard says, which is obviously why he doesn’t tell his wife about her—so that she won’t be troubled with pointless thoughts.
A. is the love of his life, he says—aloof, adorable. But Faith—well, Faith is a firecracker.
Such perfect alliteration.
*
The car passes a road sign with large white lettering. They are 72 km from their destination, or so it says—their destination being the mountain, and a lodge (Nana Jo refers to it as a chalet) that they booked last week.
Inside the car it is now eerily quiet. They are filled to the brim with extraneous materials which, when they set off, appeared to be important items. Now it seems they are all at sea, utterly swamped by things that resemble rubbish more closely than they resemble anything else. Faith has misplaced one of her shoes, both of her socks and her sunglasses case. Every now and then she tries to locate them: a process that makes her look—or, rather, feel—like a long-beaked bird searching in the undergrowth for grubs. Everyone in the car reminds Faith of an animal today. She wonders if she’s developing a disorder. Last week, in fact, she sat on the bus opposite a family of Swedish tourists who, alarmingly, turned into a family of guinea pigs right in front of her eyes. The little one was the first to set it off—she had such perfectly protruding teeth, and white down that matched her hair, curling its way down the edges of her hamster cheeks. Once Faith started looking—whilst, of course, trying to maintain the illusion of not looking—she realised they were all toothy, though not in an unattractive way. Cute, really. And eating nuts out of a paper bag, which only made matters worse. Guinea pigs. Or happy squirrels. Marvellously tanned.
Richard (oh, tanned one) says his favourite thing about Faith’s body is her tan lines, left over from summer afternoons at the beach. Even without any clothes on, she has a little pair of white briefs etched into her skin, and two white triangles on her (not very big) breasts. They are so faint now, Faith can hardly believe they are such a stand-out for him, but it is the Playboy model look from the early 1970s, or so he says. Those girls made tan lines fashionable, coquettish, unbearably sexy. He has a collection of the vintage magazines at home which his first wife bought him, as a joke. So sexy, Richard says—and Faith never feels sure if he’s referring to his first wife, the giving of the gift, or the magazines themselves. He likes the word sexy, and defines the world, somehow, by what is and isn’t. He uses it in a way that unsettles Faith, as if it is some kind of liquid, perhaps a liqueur, breathily leaking out of his mouth.
Faith has tried saying it back to him—your hands are. so. sexy—but when she says the word in his presence she feels like some kind of badly animated cartoon character, perhaps with oversized shoes that trip her up whenever she tries to move. A lurch forward, followed by a stumble, inside.
*
Months before his death—did he know even then that the process was already underway?—Ernie began to compile a list of postmortem dos and don’ts. He would bring it up—his death, and the aftermath—in the most inappropriate of settings, often causing conversation to come to a standstill around him. He started up about it at a distant relative’s wedding, just before dessert, and at one of Phil’s birthday dinners (though perhaps that was more understandable, the link between birthdays and death at least being clear).
‘Don’t go packing me in under the earth,’ he’d say gravely (ironic, that) when everyone else was talking house prices, or, ‘Just throw me straight into the flames,’ when someone mentioned the heat. He had become smaller with age, his voice, too, quite small, and as a result everyone paid less attention to him, as if he was already shrinking away into nothing, right there in his seat.
Once he was in the hospital, though, death didn’t seem to interest him so much. Perhaps it was too close by then, a large but indistinct shape moving towards him. He would change the subject whenever the word arose, and this made everyone believe that it wasn’t coming to get him after all. Faith discovered in herself a love for him that she’d never felt for anything else before—not even babies or injured pets. She felt it as an all-enveloping heat, a sort of a roar, filling up her entire body. She wanted to fold him up like a napkin and smuggle him out of there under her jacket. She would be flying, inside, when she walked down the corridor towards his room.
Ernie always seemed to be waiting for her, his ally, or that’s how it felt. In the early days he was full of instructions the very moment she appeared by his bed: he wanted Faith to smuggle socks onto his feet, even though he wasn’t allowed them in case he slipped, or he demanded to be put back in bed straight after a nurse had got him into a chair to practise sitting. His feet seemed to grow larger by the day, round and hard, the toes sticking out of them like claws. They were as cold as stone. Getting socks onto them, especially when hurrying, was almost impossible.
After a few weeks, though, he became more resigned to routine. Words seemed to matter less. Faith understood, now, what needed to be done. He knew the sound of her footsteps coming down the corridor. As soon as she caught sight of him he’d be slipping his dentures out of his mouth, holding them out to her, wanting them to be cleaned.
*
Their accommodation is not a lodge or chalet, as Nana Jo may have liked them to think, but an overpriced backpackers’ swarming with Germans. The owners look tired—they work seven-day weeks, they tell Faith and her mother, and have done so, without a holiday, for ten years. Perhaps this explains—or is an attempt to excuse—why they charge like a four-star hotel, even though there are no stars (or hotels, for that matter) in sight. Both of them might have been attractive once, Faith thinks—Ken and Barbie wearing polar fleece—but everything about them misses the mark now. Her blonde hair is teased up and is set so firmly it doesn’t even bounce as she walks; his has been dyed dark brown but has a plum-coloured sheen in the light. They refer to each other, humourlessly, as ‘the husband’ and ‘the wife’.
‘Childless,’ Faith’s mother whispers to her as they exit through the sliding door.
She turns back to smile at them after she’s said it.
In the unit, Nana Jo is busy cleaning, having already piled the luggage out of the car and placed the bags, tidily, in the entrance to each room. She is using a sock—just an old sock of mine, she says—to dust the window sills, but there is no judgement or disapproval in her movement. She darts around the room, cheerily gathering the dust, and then flapping the sock outside on the porch to get rid of the excess. She is like a happy sparrow taking a dust bath, although, of course, the intention here is quite the opposite. She pats Faith supportively on the forearm as she passes her. ‘What point is life if you don’t make the best of it?’ she once said to Faith. Faith’s mother had tried to adopt this attitude, but it didn’t sit so comfortably on her. There was a resentful quality to her brightness, a slight aggressiveness. It was impossible to match yourself against a happy disposition such as Nana Jo’s.
___
Ernie’s ashes are placed in the corner of the room. No one wants to have to look at them all the time, says Nana Jo. Trudie and John don’t seem to want to look at them at all, subtly turning away—but towards each other—whenever they are near them. They met on a cruise ship, where they were both working for six months to pay off their student loans. John proposed to her within weeks, using the ring off a Coca-Cola can. This detail is intended to demonstrate the depth of their passion for each other, but in some company the anecdote falls flat.
‘Well then,’ Nana Jo had said to Trudie when she first heard. ‘Are you engaged to a man or a can?’
No one except Faith had laughed.
John is in his mid-twenties, but looks sixteen, with his hair spiked up with gel and his whole being radiating the odour of spray-on supermarket cologne. He plays football, and is knotted with sinewy muscle on his top half, but his fair-haired legs have an odd shapelessness to them, a pre-pubescent look, as if he is not yet a man. He wears shorts—or cargo print three-quarters—and trainers all year round. When he laughs his shoulders jolt up and down, seemingly of their own accord. It is this, more than anything else, that irritates Faith about him. This, and the fact that when Trudie is in the room he seems incapable of making conversation with anyone—even looking at anyone—but her. Who on earth invited him along? He hardly knew Ernie, anyway.
There is a risk, Faith sometimes thinks to herself, that one day she may be eaten up by her own unpleasant thoughts. ‘You’re not just a nice girl, are you,’ Richard often says to her, although he seems to say it to fulfil his own purposes, since those words come out of his mouth only when she is in a compromised position—pressed up against the refrigerator in the office kitchen with her underpants awkwardly round her knees, or folded over the photocopier like origami, Richard holding a fistful of her hair. He’s beating to the sound of his own drum when he says things like that, she’s sure of it. It certainly seems to get things over and done with soon enough, which, quite frankly (given the time constraints of such office exchanges), is often, quite simply, a relief.
*
In the last week of his life, Ernie decided that Nana Jo was having an affair with one of his nurses. He announced this to Faith quite matter-of-factly one afternoon, his eyebrows raised earnestly.
‘She’s hanging around with him, you know,’ he said, opening his mouth immediately afterwards to accommodate a spoon with a mound of wobbling red jelly on it that Faith was attempting to steer towards him. He was off his food generally and the doctors were worried. He seemed no longer interested in nutrition at all, preferring the ice cream and custard, once trying to pop a little bit of it on the end of a forkful of Shepherd’s pie. He had taken to hiding bits of food—the crusts on his morning toast, a floret of broccoli—between his blankets or in the drawers beside his bed.
Faith had waited for him to swallow and then, scooping up another spoonful, had asked him what he meant.
‘That nurse,’ he said, gesturing towards the door. ‘And your grandmother. The two of them are having it off.’ He paused, patiently, waiting for Faith to cotton on to what he was saying—that the broad, hairy-armed Scottish nurse with one gold stud in his ear was indeed involved in some kind of sexual tryst with Nana Jo.
‘That’s ridiculous, Ernie,’ said Faith.
‘You’re telling me!’ He opened his mouth for the spoon again, and then swallowed. ‘He’s got it in for me now too, of course.’ He breathed out, wearily—but with no emotion—and then hooked his teeth out, studied them for a moment and laid them, carefully, in the congealed mound on his plate which was presumably supposed to resemble beef stew.
That was the beginning of the end, of course. Each day there would be a new conspiracy, which he would relay to Faith with the same resigned manner. They were turning the heating up in his room, he said, to try to suffocate him, and were giving him more pills than usual, some of which were bitter, tasted like poison.
‘I tried to call the papers,’ he said, ‘on the ward phone, but they stopped me. Of course.’
Faith would flurry around him, puffing his pillows, trying to talk some sense into him, but after a while it seemed pointless.
‘Your mother and grandmother are part of all this,’ he would say. ‘You’ll see. They’re trying to knock me off my perch.’
It was truly exhausting. But his trust in Faith—and his mad, paranoid distrust of everyone else—only made her love him more.
‘You’re my wing man,’ he would say to her, and Faith would nod, too kind to point out to him that she wasn’t a man at all. He seemed unable to differentiate by that point, once exclaiming loudly, ‘He’s a big fella!’ when a large Samoan woman with a flower in her hair came in to clean his room.
All of a sudden, though, he began to fade away from her—from all of them. One day he was giving her the soldier’s salute and the next he couldn’t be woken, and Faith, her mother and Nana Jo took shifts moistening his open mouth with a special little sponge on a stick.
The top of his head was burning hot—the Tibetans said that was what happened when someone was dying: that their soul was preparing to escape. Nana Jo told them this, her eyes wide with the wonder of folklore being borne out in this way. She seemed generally astonished by everything, but she also looked drawn and grey. Faith noticed that she was holding her own hands a lot, one palm cradling the knuckles of the other, her fingers supportively stroking the skin.
*
Nana Jo and Faith drive back into town to get supplies for dinner. The white cloud that had settled over the mountains lifts, and they see them in all their expansiveness, gleaming and sharp against the mottled plane of the sky. Their accommodation is perched at the base of the largest peak, but it is from a distance that the mountains look their best. The cloud is rolling back all along the horizon, like footage of a wave in reverse. Nana Jo hums as if she’s singing along to a tune, but there’s no music playing in the car.
‘He’d be glad we came here,’ she says.
She seems tired to Faith, although she would never admit it.
The morning before he died, Ernie woke up with a start, as if he’d slept through an alarm and suddenly realised he was late for something. He had been unconscious for twenty-four hours. He blinked rapidly, but his eyes still looked a milky blue.
‘For goodness sake!’ he said to himself when finally he seemed to take in the three faces peering over him. ‘I’m still here.’
He couldn’t get enough air—he announced this to them immediately afterwards.
‘The oxygen isn’t getting in like it should,’ he said, and his face turned grave, a trickle of panic passing over him, tightening the skin above his lip into a small grimace.
Faith’s mother went for the doctor.
‘Take me up the mountain,’ he said, ‘as if you’re going skiing.’
Nana Jo started telling him sternly that they weren’t taking him anywhere, that he had to stay right there in his bed, before realising, mid-sentence, what he meant, and stammering to a halt.
‘I want to go up like a stack of hay,’ he said, ‘and then be thrown up into the mountain air. Don’t go washing me down a river like something going down the sink. I don’t want to go under, I want to go up. In the wind. I can’t seem to get enough air right now,’ he said. ‘Is someone going to help me?’
And he carried on like that for hours. Seeming to enjoy it, the process of confusing them all.
*
In the late afternoon, having returned from town with food and drinks, Faith leaves the family to their napping, and walks through the empty camping ground to a phone booth. It is cold, and the wind is getting up. The cloud is bearing down again on all of them.
She dials the office number and then Richard’s extension, and feels oddly queasy just listening to the ringing tone. Richard doesn’t answer. His secretary, Madeleine, does. This never happens. Faith, too surprised to realise she could actually just hang up, chokes a little, and then manages to speak.
‘Faith?’ says Madeleine, her voice unnaturally perky—as usual. ‘I thought you were on leave?’
She is too dim ever to suspect anything. Faith can hear the sound of her fingers tapping away on the keyboard as she speaks.
‘I am,’ she says. ‘I am. I just remembered something I needed to tell Richard—’ she pauses— ‘about the Macmillan file.’
‘Well,’ says Madeleine, taking a gulp of something, then swallowing. ‘You’re out of luck. Serves you right for even thinking about work while you’re on holiday.’
‘He doesn’t normally leave this early.’ Faith can feel the strain in her voice, like the whine of a badly tuned instrument.
‘Yeah well—’ other phones are ringing in the background— ‘he’s gone with Annie to the doctor’s.’ Madeleine lowers her voice a little. ‘Word on the street is that they’re pregnant.’
For a moment Faith feels truly bewildered, imagining them joined together like Siamese twins, a lump, like a beach ball, growing out their conjoined stomach. Everything in her mind goes into technicolor—an image of Richard, naked, with one enormous testicle, a little foetus showing faintly through its skin. The words rattle around in her head, trying to locate sense, before they finally find their correct order and drop into place. Faith feels them fall.
Yes, that’s what the words mean: that Annie has Richard’s baby growing inside her; that it is his love—his loving of her—that is making that baby grow.
On the other side of the camping ground a Coke can is being bounced along the asphalt by the wind. The streets lights begin to flicker yellow—seeming for a moment like candle flames wavering in a breeze—and then all turn on at once.
*
They all get up at 6 a.m.—Nana Jo’s idea—and by seven they have driven up to the ski base, and have caught the chairlifts further up the mountain. Overnight the wind has got up even more and it blows at them in alarming gusts, but the sky is blue, and this is all that matters to Nana Jo.
‘A little bit of wind never hurt anybody,’ she says. And she truly seems to believe that this is the case.
They are wearing snow boots and heavy jackets, and Faith’s mother is lagging behind a bit, having removed her back-support brace for the first time in days. It was cutting into her skin when she wore it under her clothes, she said, so has recently taken to wearing it on top of them—having adjusted the straps, so that it will fit over her bulky sweatshirts—but this too is causing chaffing. Her back will just have to go unsupported.
Faith carries Ernie, holding him against her stomach, like a child carrying a ball. She thinks of Annie, with her stomach growing into a perfect round white moon. She tries to dismiss the thought, but it keeps trotting back to her, eager, like a dog.
Trudie is lagging behind with Faith’s mother, and Nana Jo and Phil are way out front, searching, of course, for the ideal ash-scattering location. John is right behind Faith, she knows that, but she doesn’t acknowledge his presence. She tries to keep her pace even, so that he won’t think she’s slowing down to let him catch her up. He is wearing shorts, even though they’re up in the snow. This, she thinks, is reason enough to ignore him.
His voice comes towards her on a gust, surprisingly loud over her heavy breathing and the hat pulled down hard over her ears.
‘Your arse is hot.’
For a moment she takes his words literally—imagines steam drifting out through her pants, heating him in her wake. Surely he couldn’t mean anything other than that. She turns around, the urn suddenly heavy in her arms, her face registering shock. John slows down a little, but he keeps walking towards her. His cheeks have a boyish glow to them. He doesn’t look guilty in the slightest. Perhaps she misheard. She turns around again, not saying anything, but speeds up, although the striding makes her walk feel all lopsided.
She can hear the crunch-crunch of his footsteps, jogging up behind her.
‘And your tits.’ He’s puffing, so his voice sounds inappropriately loud, too enthusiastic to pull it all off. ‘Your tits are cute too.’
Nana Jo and Phil are well ahead of them now. It is impossible to tell their dark figures apart. Faith’s speed is making her jerky, her feet sinking, threatening to throw her off balance. She is filled with an astonishment that almost renders her dumb—though not for long. John is catching her up. She can see his face out of the corner of her eye. He looks extraordinarily pleased with himself, as if he’s just discovered language—those words in particular—for the first time in his life.
‘I don’t think you should be saying that,’ she says, sounding like someone she may have once known: a fearsome teacher, perhaps, at high school. ‘Has it just slipped your mind? That you’re almost married?’ Her voice is quite low, but she knows he hears her. She feels his footsteps drop away.
She only wants to catch up to Nana Jo and Phil. She can see them—so far away—and tries calling, though her voice isn’t strong any more but sounds strangled, all worn out. She tries to run then, but can feel after just a few steps that she’s made a mistake. The awkwardness of Ernie is jogging in her arms. If she tries to slow down now she will slip, she knows it. She thinks that thought, and within seconds the ground responds. Her boot hits something hard, and just like a bad slapstick skit her movements go into slow motion—her eyes scan a line of black rocks jutting through the snow all around her; her arms lurch forward; and the urn does too, taking off like a bird, flying out of her hands. It hovers in the air, glowing sky-blue, and as she falls, Faith thinks, Maybe it’ll just bounce.
It doesn’t, of course. Between blinks, it floats, then falls onto a rock, and there are pieces of it lying everywhere on the snow. Ernie’s ashes puff out into the air in a plume of dust. The wind blows them onto the snow, and onto Faith—her hair, her skin, up her nose, into her mouth.
Ernie is everywhere. Faith—down on all fours, and gasping—tries to scoop him up off the snow with her hands. The ash is not a smooth powder, as she’d imagined, but is gritty, tiny shards of bone in it like the bones in tinned salmon, or sardines.
‘Can somebody help me?’ she shouts. ‘Can somebody help?’
Up ahead of her, Faith sees the indistinct shapes of Nana Jo and Phil pause, and when she shouts again, louder this time, she sees their bodies turn. She tries to scoop Ernie up with the shards of urn—the little pieces of bone easier to catch than the dust which, she realises, would be the powder of his skin, the few strands of hair that had remained on his head, his heart and lungs, beloved to them all, that had grown sallow and clogged with age. She spies the molten curl of his wedding ring—just a wisp of its metal, glowing against the white.
‘Can somebody help?’ she calls again, but the words turn into an awful choking cough, long strands of spit stringing out of her mouth and landing in bubbles on the ash. When she turns, she vaguely sees Trudie and her mother moving towards her more rapidly than she ever thought her mother could move. John has disappeared entirely, seemingly vacuumed up by the snow.
The dark figures of her family, snaking their way downhill and uphill towards her, remind her of ants—all of them, enormous ants—a broken procession of them coming to save her. Don’t ants carry their dead in funeral processions too? Don’t they, too, try to honour them? Nana Jo has started to run now (an extraordinary sight), and as she gets closer and closer—the colours of her clothes and her face and her boots sharpening into focus—Faith hears her voice, calling:
‘A snowman! Faith? We can make him into a snowman!’
She hears the words in bursts, the jolting of Nana Jo’s jog making the rhythm of them seem odd, like she’s attempting to do rap.
‘He would have liked it, Faith—being a snowman,’ Nana Jo calls again.
Faith thinks of Annie then, even though Annie, surely, should be the last thing on her mind. It is a flash of Annie, more than a thought, coming to her with the cold seeping in through her jeans, the padding of footsteps all around her.
A jumble of pictures: Annie and her belly, the fullness of it, her ice-white skin. Then a snowman, with Ernie growing inside it, as if his cells could reacquaint themselves with each other in there, huddle together to form a little curled spine; as if he needed only to be held like that in order to start again.