Mercy Seat Read online

  In the weeks after her graduation – an English degree – Jenny toyed with the idea of moving back to Merthyr where her mother taught at the local primary school, and maybe getting work as a classroom assistant while she figured out her options for the future. But soon after, the first chill of autumn began to blow in for blustery wet days on end and Jenny took it into her head that it would kill me to stay out at the farm into winter. I laughed at her predictions of the caravan blowing down the mountain with me like a rattle inside it, or of my freezing to death in the first cold snap, but underneath my joking I was a little frightened too; not so much of the weather, but of the long dark nights to come with only the old man and Meirion for human company, each orbiting the flimsy caravan, field to stony field, in their own private, deeper winters. One Sunday at the end of September, Jenny told me she’d decided to take a secretarial job with the local council, and wanted us to look for a place together, maybe a bedsit big enough for two, and then a flat, later, if I could find work in town that paid well enough. She was already pregnant in fact, but hadn’t told me. Out of pride I told her I’d think about it through the week, but really there was no choice to make.

  The day I left, old Pugh said nothing as he handed over my twenty pound note, but his long chin moved with that way he had of chewing on air, or on whatever words he kept locked in his mouth. After a moment’s hesitation he took a small folding knife from his pocket – a stubby, heavy, old-fashioned thing with a worn bone handle and a thick blade curved like a hawk’s beak. It was the kind of hook you might use to dig a sharp stone from a hoof, and he handed it to me in a clumsy, thrusting movement. I was astonished, but took it from him with a mumbled diolch. I kept it with me for years, until it was stolen along with my backpack while I slept in some barn in the Basque hills; long enough I’m sure to have outlived the old man.

  *

  Within a week I’d found work – part-time but steady – at a warehouse on the edge of town. It was owned by Mr Anzani, who ran a cafe and delicatessen on the High Street but made his real money from wholesale supply: before the big chains like Costco and Makro took over and squeezed him back into retail, he was the hub for just about every coffee shop and deli on the Ceredigion coast, and inland to Lampeter. He’d come to Wales from Sicily as a child, and was fond of telling me how his first job had been as a delivery boy for his uncle, an ex-prisoner of war who’d stayed on after his release and opened an ice-cream shop in Mountain Ash, just six or seven miles from where I was born. That tickled him. I didn’t tell him my father must have bought ice-cream there when he was a boy because he’d been brought up in a nearby street, but the thought of it unsettled me and Anzani’s reminiscences always left me restless for hours after I escaped them.

  My first day there a little old woman, stooped and frail, but dressed very smartly in dark maroon, came in off the street and abused me in Italian before shuffling back out again. By my second week in the job she was turning up quite regularly, and was getting more confident, haranguing me in English too. By then I’d found out from one of the van drivers that she was Anzani’s ancient, crazy mother and her fussing was because the business had been milked in some small way by the warehouseman I’d replaced. So I paid no attention. At least it broke the monotony of the work a little. If I was high up amongst the crates taking inventory she’d get particularly infuriated, and would break into shrill, stilted English. Hey!You! Why you sitting up there like a mohnkey?

  I’m counting the crates, Mrs Anzani. I need to see behind the crates.

  What? What are you saying? Why don’t you get down? Get down you lazy mohnkey!

  We went through the same routine at least once a week, and in the end I’d get tired and climb down and shift a few boxes to the loading bay to calm her down.

  I lied to Jenny about the hours I worked: my first lie to her, and harmless enough, I thought. I liked to be able to wander off and have time alone after my shifts, time where nobody knew or cared what I might be doing or where I might be found. It was a token freedom, I suppose. The warehouse stood at the foot of a hill, next to the clatter of a tyre-fitter’s and near the furthest point of a straggling, scrubby golf course that had its club-house above the harbour, half a mile away. There was rarely anyone around except for the slow moving mechanics and maybe the odd rambler cutting in from the coast across the golf links and ambling back into town. After finishing my shift I’d often make my way up the grassy slope to the ninth hole with its tattered red flag and then climb a little way beyond it, easing sideways between bushes of gorse and broom, to a small clearing, a sun-trap in the late afternoons, where I could sit and daydream, or brood. Sometimes I’d steal a bottle or two of Peroni and a jar of olives to take with me. Until the first hard frosts set in, the gorse around the clearing was often busy with big, black heather gnats: clumsy fliers, trailing their long, broken-looking legs behind them, bumping from one late yellow flower to another. I liked to watch them stumbling amongst the thorns; they seemed drunk and peaceful from the sweet coconut smell of the blossoms.

  We were in Jenny’s single bed when she told me she was pregnant. By then she was two months gone and already through the morning sickness, which I’d noticed but had been too ignorant to understand. You were still working on the farm when it must have happened, she said. It was the day we walked to Clarach and it rained, and the cows followed us through the field when we took a shortcut on the way back. Remember how frightened I was? I thought we’d slip in the mud and they’d trample us.

  I didn’t answer and we lay there silent a while in the dark. It was a warm night for late autumn and neither of us could sleep. After a time she said, I’m keeping it, anyway, whatever happens.

  I turned onto my back and stared up at the low ceiling. It occurred to me that I’d never noticed anything specific about the room before. It was simply the place where I came to lose myself in Jenny, and all its physical features had always been a blur of vague impressions: its stuffy warmth, its lingering, faint smells of perfume, nail varnish and sandalwood joss sticks, the wobbling desk in front of the window that every Sunday I wriggled my stomach across and over; the dip in the middle of the bed where the springs had failed, probably years before we ever had the use of it. And the light shade, I noticed now: colourless in the near dark, but pale and fringed with short, braided cords, some of them tangled. It looked oddly familiar and I wondered if my grandparents had a similar light shade in their own bedroom. I wondered what colour it became in the day.

  What are you thinking? she said.

  Nothing bad.

  Then tell me.

  Well, I’m thinking I don’t mind. I’ll help you, I said.

  You don’t mind, she breathed into my shoulder. I could feel the words on my bare skin.

  You know what I mean, I said. I mean I’m happy about it.

  Is that what you meant?

  Yes. That’s what I meant.

  I wanted to rub my shoulder where her breathing was tickling it. I lifted my other arm across my chest and put the back of my hand between my shoulder and her breath, and I remember her kissing the knuckles in the silence, very lightly, each in turn.

  Two

  I wake sweating from a dream of drowning under waves.

  I close my mouth and wait for my heart to settle. The room’s already warm and half-lit by the early sun. I glance sideways at the clock. It’s just before five. Jenny lies like a dead thing on my right and I turn my head to look at her. It seems a long time since I saw her so deep in sleep.

  I try to relax myself – knotted shoulders, arms and legs – then peel the sheet from my wet skin and roll carefully out of bed. I pad across the thin carpet to the window. The yellow curtains make the light inside seem late and warm, but when I shift them there’s a dead white sky. Down below the tide is right up, glutting in and out of the big grey boulders along the prom. The boulders look new and fresh-cut. They’ve been there a few years now but nothing sticks to them, no seaweed or limpets, except maybe on th
e undersides where it stays cool and damp. They stretch out in a long, clean curve all the way up to the sands and the pier. I stand there for a while against the windowsill and watch the water slip in and out between them, slow and smooth like oil. The prom and the road are still littered with debris from the storm three nights before, scraps of dried out seaweed and long snakes of gravel. The last day Christine woke in this room, and stood at this window, I can’t help thinking, and feel the familiar twist in my stomach. It’s calm outside now – not even a ripple on the sea – and any sounds from the water down below are too soft to carry up to the window. The sweat prickles as it dries on my bare back and a sudden, deep shiver works out from my shoulder blades and along my arms. I press my palms against the sill as if I could earth the tremor through the wood. After a while Jenny mumbles something, but when I turn she’s still sleeping blind and I cross the room quietly to the door.

  Outside, the landing and stairs are much darker than the room and there’s a stale biscuity scent coming up off the carpet. It’s a smell that builds every night but vanishes during the day. In the stillness I can hear the hot water pipes sounding through the depths of the building: a faint rattle way down on the ground floor, rising to a solid knocking behind the wall across the stairwell. It’s a tall, narrow guest house – a slice of what must have been a fairly grand hotel when it was still joined to the guest houses either side – thrown up in a rush for Victorian trippers when the town was briefly fashionable, and getting cranky in its old age now. Almost any time I see Mr Clement, the landlord, he’s carrying his handyman’s bag of tools, off to crouch stiffly in front of another leaking cast-iron radiator, or blocked waste pipe – a long, losing battle. The bathroom is up another short flight of stairs. I slip along the passage, past the half-open door of Alex, the young student teacher, then onto the stairs and up.

  In the bathroom I lift the gluey toilet seat with the back of my thumbnail, noticing the bath tub at my side is still full of greyish, used water from the night before. When I finish I drain the bath as well as flushing the toilet. I find myself watching the water level drop with absolute attention, as if there were secrets at the grimy bottom of it. The small window above the sink is jammed open and in the yard below, five floors down, Clement’s Alsatian starts barking, snapping me out of my trance. Maybe it’s heard the water emptying through the pipes. I decide not to go back to bed. I think of Jenny’s warm body turning to me, stale with sleep, and it feels a relief to be naked and cold instead, hearing the dog – alert, and with no thought at all in its animal head – barking out its place in the world far down in the yard.

  Back in the bedroom I manage to dress without waking Jenny, then go through to the sitting room. Michael lies sprawled belly-up in the cot, his wide head tilted back, eyelids sunk. I know he’ll wake crying. It seems strange to see the cot back in here now Christine has gone. I cover Michael with a knitted blanket he’s kicked halfway through the little wooden bars. He doesn’t stir, and I’m grateful. I look over at the sofa. In the gloom I half expect Christine’s shape to be still curled under sheets just a step away. Then I concentrate on what I’m doing, which is covering Michael with a second blanket, stupidly, because he’ll be too hot and wake, but I do it anyway before going through to the box-room to study.

  When we moved here, Jenny persuaded me to start a few courses with the Open University. You can’t keep working in that warehouse all your life, she said, reasonably enough, and it was true I was getting bored, slowly but surely, with a life that was purely physical, other than when I escaped into the novels she’d kept from her student days.

  As soon as I began studying again I understood that what I’d hated about school wasn’t the learning after all, but just the awful sociability of school life – the constant, sparrow-like jostling and pecking that left me numb at the end of every weekday afternoon. Maybe if I’d been brought up in a younger household it would have been different; but the contrast between my grandparents’ lives – they were old even for grandparents – and the lives of everyone else around me seemed to coat my schooldays in a thin wash of unreality. It was chronic loneliness I suppose, or rather chronic aloneness – I didn’t think of myself as lonely because the last thing I wanted was company. There must have been others around me who felt the same way, but I never met them, or never recognized meeting them.

  I chose options in History for my university courses, just because it was the subject that had held my attention best at school. It didn’t matter to Jenny that I wasn’t studying anything vocational, something that might spring me out of Anzani’s warehouse: I think she believed that study was an end in itself and one day soon, somehow, it would begin to change my life.

  If I wasn’t at the warehouse or looking after Michael, the study packs that arrived every few weeks in the post took up my full attention, almost to the point of obsession, though now I remember almost nothing of what I learned. It belonged purely to that time, maybe, and once it was over, all that knowledge, all those facts and stories, dissolved into a kind of ghostliness along with everything else.

  At half past six I stop what I’m doing, which isn’t much apart from staring into space and thinking, and decide to go and buy milk from the nearby newsagent’s on the corner. I know it’ll be open by now – the paper boys trailing in to collect their heavy sacks before school. I like slipping out this early, unnoticed. It reminds me of my time on Pugh’s farm, that other world, when the days started with the light and ended with the dark. It feels like a life I read about, and imagined as vividly as a child, rather than lived in the flesh.

  On the way downstairs the rest of the guesthouse is still quiet, but when I get to the ground floor I hear Clement’s daughter, a heavy, dour woman in her twenties, saying something behind the closed door of their shared flat. Then her own child, a plump blond toddler I sometimes catch sight of in the hall, answers back with a petulant yell. I take the front door off the latch and open it carefully, not wanting to be heard. The air’s still and heavy-feeling, and I wonder if more storms are on the way.

  Down on the pavement there are still a few fragments of starfish littered around, left over from the last blow-up. They get washed over the wall sometimes this time of year, hundreds of them, then dry out on the prom where kids use them like frisbees, though they only last one throw. I cross the road and head up towards the town, every now and again glancing down over the sea wall. For a while a small flatfish cruises along the same way, following the line of the stones, then one of the sunken boulders blocks it and it turns lazily back out to sea.

  When I get back with the rolls Jenny’s still sleeping, and suddenly I wonder if she’s taken anything. She used to like to knock herself out when things got bad, but stopped after she knew she was pregnant. I decide to let her sleep till the alarm, then if that doesn’t work, take another look. Michael looks very still too, though while I was out he’s turned to lie flat on his stomach, head twisted to one side. I put the milk in the mini fridge then close myself in the box-room and stare at the latest of my study packs. Something about Russia, my topic for that term: these days, if I ever read anything about the czars, the Moscow winters or the big, empty steppe, I’m always reminded incongruously of that summer, and the wife and child I had so briefly, and the small, musty rooms we lived in looking out over the sea.

  Michael wakes and cries just before eight. I finish the paragraph I’m reading and get up, but just as I move from the small desk I hear Jenny walking through from the bedroom to lift him up. I stay where I am and listen to her comforting him. Luke? she says, in a voice that seems to come from miles away. Luke? Are you in there? It’s already a familiar tone now, that flat, far-off note in the way she calls my name, though I couldn’t have said that before Christine arrived, hardly more than a week ago. I wait a moment then say, I’m here, and open the door.

  While we eat breakfast Jenny tells me about her dream – Christine climbing through the window, though we’re sixty feet up, getting into bed and
crouching on her chest. Then Chris was a cat, Jenny says, and she was so heavy I couldn’t breathe.

  I nod, force myself to spoon in a mouthful of cereal.

  She was this cat called Max we used to have when we were girls.

  She pauses to wipe a slick of dribble from Michael’s chin. The cat was on my chest but over at the wash-basin in the corner of the room at the same time, she says, watching my face as she speaks. It was sucking at the tap, which made me panic for some reason, and in the dream I was crying because Max had turned against me. I was upset about Max, not Christine, she says, as if that’s the key point she wants me to understand.

  She concentrates on working some softened rusk into Michael’s mouth. I notice how her own mouth opens in sympathy with his.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t want to eat, but I chew another spoonful down.

  I haven’t thought about Max for years and years, Jenny goes on. He was never even there, around the house. She scoops a drool of paste from Michael’s bottom lip, then feeds it back to him. Max was a real tomcat. He was never about. She scrapes around the Tupperware bowl with the spoon. He was a big ginger tom, she says.