Mercy Seat Read online

  Where are they?

  Three more in town, I think, then one in some place I can’t make out. She stared closer at the clipboard. His handwriting’s awful, she said. Anyway, it’s a Welsh name starting with a ‘P’ or a ‘D’. I can’t tell.

  I’ll check when we get to the pub.

  Then I’ll look it up on my new map.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant it to sound comical. I couldn’t decide if this new, child-like mood was a real attempt at intimacy or just some extended sardonic joke. When I glanced across to check her expression she kept her head bowed, eyes fixed on the clipboard, her fingers toying with the cheap yellow biro someone had attached to it with Sellotape and string.

  The deliveries around town were straightforward enough – boxes of snacks, crates of bottled beers and a few trays of shrink-wrapped pies. The out of town address turned out to be in a village called Penderyn, though, which was ten miles inland and on a route I’d never taken before. Christine seemed genuinely pleased to have to use her map and she read out each direction in a precise, military kind of way hundreds of yards before I actually reached any of the junctions.

  The village was small – just a single terraced street with bigger, manse-like houses separated off – and the hotel we needed was impossible to miss. I pulled up at the kerb outside the main door, which was shut. There was a bell in the shallow porch, but ringing it didn’t do any good. After a couple of minutes I looked back at Christine and shrugged.

  Tap the windows, she called.

  The glass was frosted except where the lettering for the hotel’s name, The Red Dragon, had been stencilled and left clear. I looked through the lettering but it was gloomy inside and the glass was dirty. I tapped a few times anyway but wasn’t surprised when nobody came. The day had been overcast, but now a late afternoon burst of sun was warming the back of my neck. I looked up and down the street but apart from a young mother hauling two kids towards me there was nothing stirring. I’ll go round the back, I told Christine, and she nodded, one hand raised up now to shield her eyes from the new glare.

  There was an alleyway running along the side of the hotel and off it a wider lane with back entrances to all the buildings on the main street. The wooden door to the hotel’s back yard was ajar so I pushed it and walked in. The few wooden tables and a set of children’s swings were completely deserted. A muddy Land Rover occupied one of the spaces in the car park and a rusty bicycle stood propped against one of the posts holding up an empty washing line. Nothing stirred and I was considering giving up and leaving the delivery piled high on the pavement when a fire escape door clattered and scraped open on the first floor. A short fat woman in a white apron appeared on the metal balcony. Yes? she snapped.

  I’ve got a delivery round the front, I called up.

  Yes – deliveries round the front!

  I shrugged up at her. I knocked, I said, but I couldn’t get an answer.

  Well. You will now. She waved me back out of the yard, disappeared inside and dragged the fire door shut behind her. The sound of its steel bar locking into place cracked like a gunshot and somewhere along the lane a dog started to bark.

  By the time I got back round to the front door it was open, though there was still no one around. I shifted the boxes and crates inside, stacking them on the balding hall carpet. Hello! That’s the delivery in! I called when I’d finished, but got no answer. I waited a few seconds, then wandered back outside and opened the van door. Did you see where she went? I asked Christine. I need her to sign for it.

  She shook her head, unclipped her seat belt and got out of the cab to join me on the pavement. She hooked her thumbs into the back pockets of her jeans and flexed her upper body, arching back from the waist.

  We can’t go until someone signs the bloody invoice, I said.

  She tilted her head, amused, and squinted at me. Let’s go inside.

  There was a broad staircase just a little way along the hall. Christine sauntered halfway up its stairs, then turned and grinned at me. She carried on out of sight, turning onto a landing running over my head. Within a few moments a door opened and closed somewhere on the floor she was on, but not in the direction she’d gone. Christine, I called as low as I could, and started after her up the stairs.

  There was a flurry of light footsteps and suddenly Christine was back on the stairs and skipping past me back to the van. The fat woman arrived on the landing in time to see the back of Christine’s head, maybe, but nothing else. You only need to ring the bell, she scolded. That’s all you need to do, you know. I’ve got a thousand and one things to see to. I can’t be everywhere. A man’s voice – low and bad-tempered – rolled along the upstairs corridor from somewhere behind her. She stumped down the stairs, snatched the clipboard off me and signed without even glancing at the delivery. There, she said. Now off these stairs.

  Sorry, I said, and retreated to the door.

  There, she said again. The bell, there. See?

  Look, said Christine, when I got back into the cab and started the engine. She drew a big glass ashtray out from under her jacket. It had the sign of the hotel etched in red on its base.

  Where the hell did you get that?

  One of the bedrooms. The door was open.

  Jesus, I said. Why?

  She shrugged. It must have been a nice place once, if they had their own ashtrays. Don’t you think?

  I don’t believe it, I said. What the hell were you thinking?

  It’s just an ashtray, she said, and studied it more carefully. I’m sure they had lots of them. It’s clean, she added, as if that was what might be bothering me.

  All the way back to town Christine hummed quietly to herself; scraps of classical music, then what sounded like hymns and choruses. The sun stayed bright and by the time we hit the rush-hour traffic my forehead was throbbing.

  Where are we going? she asked when I turned off from the main route into the centre.

  They were the first words she’d spoken to me since showing me the ashtray and I could feel my blood swarming up. I took a deep breath to control my voice. Anzani wanted the van left at the warehouse.

  It’ll be nice to see where you work, she said, as casually as if we’d been chatting happily for miles. She was looking away again, humming another hymn. It sounded familiar though I couldn’t place it and thought it might be a Christmas carol, or something I used to hear in Sunday School when I was a kid. I turned back to the road and soon was easing the van into the sharp corner at the bottom of the warehouse hill. It’s up this road, I told her, just for something to say.

  She broke off her tune. I’ve walked this way, she said. I remember how steep this hill was, and going down the other side to the castle and the seafront. She turned to face me. Maybe you were in the warehouse when I walked past.

  I nodded, the hairs on the back of my neck bristling like pins. Here we are, I said, pulling the van over onto the concrete apron fronting the warehouse doors. An awkward silence fell over us once I’d killed the engine. For a while we both just sat still, waiting, though for what I didn’t know.

  Take me inside the warehouse, she said at last, and those must have been the words I was waiting for somewhere in my mind because I wasn’t surprised and the answer came straight to my lips.

  I can’t, I lied. I’ve only got the keys for the van, not the door. Sorry. I unclipped my seat belt, suddenly embarrassed at having apologised.

  It doesn’t matter, she said.

  While I locked the van, Christine wandered up to the side door of the warehouse. She squatted and lifted the letterbox to peer through.

  There’s nothing to see, I told her.

  She straightened up and shrugged. Too dark to tell, anyway.

  I looked up and down the road. Which way do you want to walk home?

  Up the hill.

  The sun was weaker now and a cool, marine atmosphere had begun to settle in the early evening shadows. A strip of bright sunshine still lit the opposite side of the road but
Christine seemed content to stay in the shade. She set off quickly and in a few minutes we were clear of the buildings and amongst steep slopes of broom and gorse. What’s up there? she asked, pausing for breath.

  The golf course.

  Do you get a good view up on top? She swept her hair back. Do you get a view of the castle and the sea? Her face was starting to pink with warmth.

  I told her yes, but didn’t start climbing again. I looked up at the gorse bushes and the faint, sandy ways between them and waited again like I’d waited in the van.

  Let’s climb up – I’d like to see. She was already walking so I followed her, watching her haunches work under the denim.

  About halfway up the hill she took one of the side-trails, easing through overhanging gorse and broom, and as if by instinct brought us to the patch of open grass where I’d often sat to be alone and eat olives and drink a beer between the end of a shift and the slow walk home. I noticed an empty olive jar, almost hidden in the tangle of gorse roots where I’d left it months before.

  What’s that? Christine said. She’d stopped and was waiting for me.

  Nothing, I said. I used to come up here for a break sometimes, that’s all. I must have left an empty jar behind one day. I pointed it out with the toe of my shoe.

  She stooped down to see. There’s a beer bottle, too, she said to me over her shoulder. She sounded pleased, and bent to pick it up. There’s a dead slug in it, she reported.

  They like beer.

  It’s just a little one. She flipped the bottle and its passenger deeper into the gorse bush.

  I looked back down over the tops of the bushes, towards the warehouse. The zinc roof and the flat top of the tyre-fitters were shining like brass in the reddish, angled light.

  It’s peaceful here.

  I turned and saw she’d sat down now, knees drawn up to her chest. I thought about the last time I’d wandered up this way, watching black, long-legged flies reeling from blossom to blossom. There were no flies now, just a heavy-looking bee drowsing into the sharp heart of the bushes. The memory seemed strange – vivid but remote – like something I’d dreamed I’d once done. I sat down next to her, and I didn’t know if what I felt was a kind of excitement or despair. My arms felt numb and useless, trembling, too heavy to support, and I folded them over my raised knees.

  I had to go to counselling, you know, she said. I was in a bad way after the funeral, and things happened, and the doctors at the hospital made me speak to people. Shrinks, you know?

  What kinds of things?

  She shook her head. They were all so stupid. It was like living with my mother and Jenny again. They couldn’t tell me why I should feel one thing for somebody and not another thing. You can only be one thing to somebody you love, they said, but they couldn’t tell me why I couldn’t be more than one thing, if I wanted to be. If it was my choice. It was too late by then, but they still couldn’t tell me. Just legal things, and second hand psychology. Babble babble babble. They were like the kids I teach: full of silly rules they don’t even understand. So I just told them what they wanted to hear, and they said I was getting better. I don’t have to talk to them anymore.

  Your father? I said.

  You don’t know what it’s like to be told that you can’t possibly love the person you love most in the world, and that the love you feel for them is part of being damaged, and wrong. You have no idea.

  No, I said. I don’t.

  She was silent for a while. The Bible says, Know ye not that we shall judge angels? He liked that. I think it was his favourite verse. It was in the letter he left me, too. I never showed the letter to anyone.

  You seem to know what you think, I said. And what you feel. That’s something.

  She nodded, absently. The last time you were in this place, you didn’t even know what I looked like, she said, and her voice was low and drowsy. Everything else was the same, but you didn’t know who I was. You’d only just found out I existed. That’s right, isn’t it?

  Yes, I said. I could barely speak.

  How can such a simple truth change everything? But change is always simple. I sometimes think now that if I’d been walking the fields on Pugh’s farm, or passing by the whins above the warehouse, and God’s still, small voice had come from a burning bush the way it came to Moses, the way Christine’s came to me that day, I would have obeyed without doubting it, and without surprise. And why not? I ask myself now, after half a lifetime spent wondering. We’re all believers for as long as we sleep, and nothing we dream is strange until we wake. And maybe that’s just how they happen, the big, irrevocable changes in our lives, underneath their dull material facts. We go through the looking glass, we wrestle the angel, we stumble on the goddess bathing naked. We hear the voice that tells us to sacrifice our son, and we pretend we have all kinds of answers to it, reasonable and human, but maybe all we have is Abraham’s weary Here I am.

  It’s like I’d just been born, in your mind, she said. She moved her face to mine and before I had time to even register what was happening we were kissing, hard and clumsy. I pulled her on top of me, felt her grind herself against my thigh and raised it, forcing her legs wider. Straining, I worked an arm between us and found the button of her jeans, opened it and tugged at the zip. She gasped as I drove my fingers lower, jamming them between denim and skin, finding the thin cotton underneath. I heard myself moaning at the back of my throat but kept my mouth clamped to hers. Raising my thigh again I lifted her closer so that her whole weight was bearing down on me. I thrust up and suddenly her mouth left mine to fasten at my neck.

  No! I said, in a voice that didn’t seem to belong to me. Don’t mark me.

  She rolled away as if she’d been kicked. She was breathing quick and shallow but not with passion. Something else.

  I stared at her, touching my throat, not knowing what to say.

  Someone’s coming, she said simply, and buttoned and zipped her jeans before jumping to her feet.

  I hadn’t heard a thing but she was right – two young boys puffed by on the far side of the bushes, loaded golf bags slung over their backs. They glanced at us through a break in the gorse, then gave each other a look.

  We should get back, Christine said matter-of-factly once they’d passed. She bent to kiss me lightly on the cheek then started back ahead of me down the slope.

  The rest of the walk home passed in a blur. If we spoke at all, I can’t remember anything of it. When we reached Bethesda she said she wanted to see the basement kitchen. You said you’d show me, she said. The day I arrived.

  I know, I said, remembering.

  I led her past the Clements’ flat. The mumble of a TV show and the chinking of cutlery came from behind the closed door and just for a moment filled me with a kind of loneliness. I had the feeling that some kind of rescue was waiting, there in their stuffy living room of television shows, small talk, knitting, and dinners on trays, but we were already past the door and heading down the basement stairs.

  The enormous kitchen was empty. Christine surveyed it for a few seconds, then wandered up along the side of the long bench table, staring at the iron hobs ranged along the walls. When she came back to me she ran her open hand up my forearm, stroking it without closing her fingers. I almost reached for her, but held myself back.

  What’s in there? she said softly, looking past me, back through the kitchen doorway.

  A dining room. I turned to face it.

  She left my side and walked to its glass-panelled door. She peered in. Everything’s covered with cloths, she said. All the tables. You can see the shapes of glasses and dishes under them. It’s horrible.

  I moved behind her and put my hands around her waist. She didn’t move them.

  It’s like in old films where rooms have been left because someone’s died in them, she went on. She pressed her forehead to the glass, staring deeper into the unlit room.

  I got myself locked in there once, I said.

  She stayed turned to the glass. How
?

  There’d been storms and high tides and they’d had to take the floor up in the far corner. I wandered in to look around because I’d never seen the door open before. Anyway, the next thing I knew the key was turning in the lock.

  Why didn’t you shout?

  Too embarrassed. We hadn’t long moved in and I didn’t want Clement thinking I’d been snooping, or trying to thieve something. In the end I climbed through one of those little half windows into the yard. I pointed to the windows through the glass. They didn’t look much bigger than cat-flaps from where we were standing now and it was strange to think of hauling myself through one of them.

  You fitted through one of those?

  I laughed and nodded. Despite what had happened, and was happening between us, I was enjoying telling her the story. Then, I said, I had to get past Clement’s old Alsatian in the yard. He actually bit me on the arse as I climbed the wall.

  Christine half turned her head against my chest. Did they ever find out?

  No, I don’t think so. They never said anything, anyway.

  She leaned back a little more strongly against me, but now I’d spoken about it I found my mind drifting back to what I’d seen in the room after the storms. Where the floorboards had been pulled away there was a space around a foot deep, then sand and shingle. In the bad light it seemed colourless – a kind of ghost beach. I was startled to see it there, stretching off into the shadows. It struck me that it must all have been lying there, sand and pebbles and bleached shells, since the buildings went up more than a century before – a buried, silent night-beach running under half the town. I remember dreaming about it not long afterwards and waking up convinced that my father, wherever he was now, had died in the night while I slept.

  Christine levered the cheap gilt door handle and pushed, but it was locked as usual and didn’t budge. Why are you living here? she asked.

  I almost laughed. It’s not so bad, is it?

  She shrugged and let go of the handle. Her free hand drifted back to the side of my thigh, stroking it gently.