Anna Symmonds

lights out

I think it’s been snowing here since Ash Wednesday. Flakes piling up outside like a dog’s collection of bones. Big dog. Phone lines went down yesterday, electricity the day before. The car is under there, somewhere. God. Look at me, I’m wearing your suit. Like Tom Hanks in Big. Not him though, the kid version of him. The version where nothing fits right.

Your boys are looking for that book you bought when they were little. The one about myths and legends. Plenty of pictures and not many words. You’re a bit like that now. Some bits of you stay with me and others I forget. Snippets glued onto other snippets like an old-fashioned ransom note.

I was on my way to see Uncle Pete the day we met. He sagged in his armchair like a coconut left in the sun. Sort of desiccating. He only moved to breathe. The nurse talced him every day. When she lifted his arms, his skin looked like ready-rolled pastry that she floured so her fingers wouldn’t stick. He coughed a dry phlegmless cough and his lips curled low when she floured his groin. I couldn’t tell if he enjoyed what the nurse did to him or not. His hearing had gone, and the nurse would shout kind things at him when we were visiting. He just sat there, in the salt-stained fabric of his nylon shirt. The doctor said he had mites on his skin. The white hairs on his forearm, knotted and matted, must have been full of them. Soon-to-be homeless mites.

In your last week you were also sort of disgusting and putrid. Your gums were bleeding and those scabs on your cheek just wouldn’t heal. The smell wafted like the sigh of a beast and your nurse whispered kind things to me. She was from Canada. She wiped your sunken mouth and told me about her family in Toronto. I’m not very good with accents. Worked months with a guy in Australia before I realised he wasn’t Australian. From somewhere in England, he said. I forget now where. I’m not good with geography. Maybe that’s the problem.

In my divorce group I met a woman who had an accent. She’d lost a son to cancer, and the death of her child led to the death of her marriage. You hear of that happening all the time. The glue coming unstuck after something like that. The woman was like a porcelain cup with a hairline crack. We became friends. Then lovers. Then memories. My divorce wasn’t so traumatic. It was difficult, but nothing like Sandra’s. Although there were similarities. My daughter still won’t speak to me. So, in a way, I’ve lost a child too. One day, she might come back to me though. I cling to that thought. My ex said I didn’t know what was good for me, and she took his side. My marriage to you was better. I guess I realised what was good for me. I met you at football. Both our girls played defence. We spoke for weeks, every Tuesday evening at training and Saturday morning at games. We became friends. Outside of the kids. We talked about everything. Marriages, break ups, sex, celibacy. 

When I was fourteen, the cleverest girl in class showed me a neat little trick.
‘You can do it like this, see?’
She drew a cartoon picture of the teacher with her fine tipped pen. It was the first time we spoke.
‘Oh,’ I said.
She furrowed her brow and looked away. I did a sketch of Mr Morris. I drew him as an existentialist. The French kind. I drew him with a cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing a beret and round spectacles. Then the clever girl drew an empty speech bubble above his head and we both laughed. My teacher had all the answers. He was like Miss Jean Brodie. We’d read about her the year before. Latin derivations of every other word. We realised later that he had nothing to say. Not a word to the microphones of news reporters when he left the court building, on the day of his trial. A witch hunt was what the ladies in the supermarket queue called it. Mum stared at them. But said nothing. He died in prison. They don’t take kindly to his sort, so I heard. I kept the cartoon that the clever girl drew, until one day I realised it was gone. As we sat there giggling in the classroom, I could smell the red wine on Mr Morris’ breath. The morning sun hit the clever girl’s red hair and she glowed. Tiny particles of dust danced a little waltz around her. I told her she had hair that went straight up like bristles in a brush. She said her hair didn’t do that. And it didn’t — when I actually looked at her. But that’s how I see it in my head. I smiled, and her leg brushed against mine. Down the hall the school orchestra played Brahms’ symphony number three.  

You heard a Brahms symphony when they told us you were dying. Which was interesting, you said, because you had only ever heard it once as a boy.
‘It’s called an acoustic neuroma,’ the doctor said.
The tumour was pressing on the nerves in your brain causing unusual sonic disturbances, sometimes quite beautiful ones. On the journey home in the car we were mostly silent. Then you said, ‘Don’t change because of this. Don’t be kind, don’t treat me like a patient. I don’t want to be fluffed up like a cushion. I’m just a rug that needs airing on the line.’
And you placed your hand on mine on the gear stick.    

It reminded me of the time we drove to Holland, to go to my sister’s graduation. It was only a four-hour drive, and, on the way, we stopped in a little town that looked like it was straight out of a World War Two movie, exactly on the border of Belgium and Holland. We took photos of ourselves with the country sign. This side; that side. Google told us that this was the town where Belgium's strongest man, Jimmy Laureys, had been born. He was five times national champion. We posed like muscle men in front of the sign, straining and tensing until our faces were red and the veins in our necks bulged. Then we had a beer and chips in a bistro. I remember we kept having to order more ketchup because it came in little sachets and Luke always drowned his food in the stuff. The first sachet went all over the red and white gingham tablecloth. I was kind of embarrassed by our clichés. But that was just the way he liked it. He was watching a video on his phone.
‘Look Mum,’ he said. ‘It’s a two second clip of how racist we used to be.’ He showed me an old black and white video of a tank. The narrator said, in a clipped voice, ‘This tank can fit three men. Three Japanese sized men.’ I looked around to see if anyone had heard. We were the only non-locals there. But no one stared at us. We stared at them. Us; them. I saw a girl playing with the food on her plate. Some kind of pancake with a mountain of whipped cream and summer fruits that bled into it. Playing with your food is what adults tell you not to do. Her adults didn’t seem to notice. They smoked cigarettes and spoke with intensity to each other and to the next table over. When she dropped the spoon onto her leg it was like a miniature personalised bomb had been sent down from a drone, directly targeting her. Red fruits dribbled from her thigh, as her white leggings soaked up the aftermath. Luke saw it and looked at me. You pulled a strained face, just like a strong man, and we all sucked in the air around us, smiling together. 

The drive to my sister’s graduation should have taken four hours, except Luke left his phone in the bistro that sat on the border between Belgium and Holland. Turning around, you squeezed my hand on the gear stick. When we got back there, we realised there had been an incident and people stood around in groups or alone looking in the direction of the border sign. The one we had posed in front of, sticking out our tongues and pretending to be muscle men. We got out of the car and looked. There wasn’t much to see. A large white sheet covered a lumpen shape on the road. Luke, concerned with finding his phone, went to cross the culvert to the bistro. In the rushes lay a severed leg, from foot to mid-thigh, wearing white leggings and a white trainer. Luke said later, at Gracie’s graduation, that he couldn’t tell which red stains were blood and which were fruit. 

Gracie had joined a cult. Her graduation was for that. We were the only non-members there. Them; us. A man who called himself Dr Fleishman gave a speech about how godly my sister was and then we all sang a church song. Except we didn’t, we just sat there trying not to laugh or cry, thinking about the leg in the rushes and the berry stains, and I thought how pretty my sister used to be. Six months after her graduation, on Easter Sunday, she was dead.

It’s like that film we watched, where in the future all the workers form a collective and commit mass suicide. They do it to end the slavery of the many that serve the few. After that, the elite turn on each other. It was one of those late-night TV movies we watched back when we would stay up till dawn, falling in love. Maybe Dr Fleishman had seen that film. Maybe they did it as a big fuck you to the capitalist world, or something. I don’t know if Gracie died willingly. I think perhaps not.

Easter was a big deal when we were kids. People went to church. Had a family meal. Prayed. The shops would shut. We spent every Easter at Lake Coniston. I say every Easter. It was probably only two or three times. Me and Gracie would play boule with pinecones we found hidden in the woods. Even that time it snowed. She never did anything she didn’t want to.

The clever girl called me from the emergency room. I just sat there watching telly next to my husband who told me to ignore it, it wasn’t my responsibility anymore. She rang me cleaving to something long lost. Demanding more. This was her way of going about it. Which is not a very good way of going about anything. Particularly with me. Because my way of going about things is to ignore. So, I didn’t answer my phone that evening. And that was how she knew she couldn’t have me. And how I knew I was sitting on a sofa, watching TV, with a man I didn’t love anymore.

I watched a documentary once, about a woman who lived in a house that she hadn’t cleaned for fifty years. She was decrepit, and so was the house. It had actual mounds of dust on everything. Like she had just been sitting there for decades, watching telly. Nothing touched. Not a single fingerprint anywhere. It was an experiment. A real-life Miss Havisham. For no reason except art. Which is the only reason. I don’t know if I made that up. The way I was with my ex, that wasn’t art. That was just watching TV. A week later, Julie started playing football.

Do you remember telling me, one night early on, when we would stay up until dawn talking and falling in love. You told me about why you bought this suit. The one I’m wearing now. You met him when you were a child. It was in one of those classic American diners. You were in New York’s Battery Park, visiting the Flanagan side of the family for the first time. The diner was on a corner where an avenue meets a street. Everything seemed angled there. Sharp. Not like the bendy lanes and roundabouts back home, which made you sick when you got in the car. Not you though; the kid version of you. Sick on your shoes. Sick in the footwell. Made your father rage. Made your sisters cry. The stink stuck in your nostrils all the way to America. You sat there in that diner, a clumsy country family, shuffled by a skeletal waiter into a booth near the entrance, as though that was as far in as you were allowed. You were tired from the flight. Your mother fussed over untidy shirt collars; your father puffed out his chest. You drank pink milkshake while you waited for Uncle Pat to finish his shift at the packing factory and come pick you up. All seven of you sat there, like jelly just tipped out of a mould. 

It was 5.30am. A young couple, nearing the end of their night, supped coffee under matted hair. A cleaner pushed a wheeled bucket back to the kitchen, sloshing dirty water as he went. An old man sat at the bar on a cherry-red stool, eating his breakfast alone. You stared at him. He wore an oversized pinstripe suit and looked to you like a gangster from the movies. On his white plate sat 4 boiled eggs, peeled and slimy looking, and a slice of dry white toast. You always ate porridge for breakfast. You watched him, as your sisters squabbled, and your father cursed them under his breath. The man must have sensed it, because he turned to face you. He stared right back. Then, he picked up an egg and walked over to your table. 

‘These eggs,’ he said, holding one up in front of his face. ‘I think of them…’ and he rolled it between his fat thumb and fingers. You all stared, waiting, open-mouthed. Bending down to you, he whispered, ‘I think of them… like my babies,’ and he stood bolt upright, looked dead into your eyes, and swallowed the egg whole, revealing his empty palm like a magician. A few years later, you saw on the evening news that Jean Paul Getty had died. The man from the diner. The richest man on the planet. Whether or not it really was him didn’t matter. That’s what you told me, anyway.  

At 7.30pm on a Thursday in 1989, I watched Dirty Den die on my telly. Me and 18 million other people. I watched him die again the following Sunday. 14 years later he turned up at the Queen Vic. Not dead after all. I keep thinking you’re going to do that. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. Where did I hear about that? It doesn’t matter now. I misunderstood the meaning of the story anyway. I thought it meant that there was a moment when you would be both alive and dead at exactly the same time. And if that were possible, maybe time was something we’d made up, and maybe you could be alive again someday. 

At the hospital, the skinny taxi driver carried you from his car to a wheelchair at the emergency room. You joked the week before that you could beat him up. Even in your current state. There was almost nothing left of you by then. Turns out he was a retired boxer. Jimmy ‘lights out’ Jones. He dropped some flowers round, after you’d gone. Was really sorry about everything. Everything. And he squeezed my hand.

Now, the snow seems even heavier, as the boys come into the kitchen. They say, ‘Hey mum, come build a snowman. Come build an igloo. Come.’ I smile and wave them away, and my nerves are like an old guitar string that’s too tightly tuned by playful hands. Like when I was giving birth to our son. Or when Harriet, the family hen, was killed by a fox. Or poor Gracie. I’m wearing your suit. Wide pinstripe, double breasted, with peaked lapels. The snow glistens in the sunlight. Until it melts away. In the distance, out of the window, I see a snow plough clearing the roads.

Anna Symmonds is an MA student in Creative Writing at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She puts her skills to use as a workshop facilitator and widening access tutor. Anna isn't on Twitter, but you can catch her on Strava.