The secret of anatomy, p.57
The Secret of Anatomy, page 57
David stared at the place where the shape had been, but now there was only the blue of a night sky, smoky with settling dust. He heard a groan, felt Jane squirm against his knees. He turned to look at her just as her eyes opened and she stared up at him with an expression of wide-eyed puzzlement. He smiled, feeling plaster dust prickle on his face like a thin mask crumbling.
“Hello, Jane,” he said, his voice brittle with dust and emotion.
Jane’s lips moved slowly. And after a moment, as if he was the most unexpected sight in the world, she murmured, “Daddy?”
Epilogue
The car pulled up over the rise, then indicated and turned cautiously right, through a narrow entrance in a high chain-link fence. A handwritten sign looped through the fence links read XMAS TREES FOR SALE. The car park beyond was merely a ledge overlooking the Yorkshire Dales, pitted with ruts that had iced over and which cracked, oozing mud, when the car’s tyres passed over them. There was one other car in the car park, a silver-blue Citroen, the owners of which, a young couple, were perusing the two dozen or so fir trees lounging against the fence.
David brought the car to a halt and reached for the gardening gloves on the dashboard. As he pulled them on, he said, “There’s plenty of choice anyway.” He glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw Jane bouncing up and down on the seat and pointing with her three-fingered hand, Rachel trying to be cool, to hide her excitement.
“Can we have that one, Daddy?” Jane cried. “That big one there? Can we, please?”
David turned and smiled at her. “We’ll see,” he said. “Remember the freshness test. We don’t want something that’s going to have shed all its needles by Boxing Day.”
The car doors opened and the family tumbled out, Jane racing across the muddy car park to the tree she had already fallen in love with, eager to claim it before the young couple could. David and Ellen looked at each other and grinned, rejoicing in her excitement. This last year had been very tough for all of them, but for Jane in particular, even though she had adapted to her deformity surprisingly quickly. She was drawing and writing now as well as she ever could, and did not seem anywhere near as self-conscious as she had been a few months ago.
It was the mental scars that lingered longest, however, that resulted in her, a year after the event, waking up screaming and crying in the night. Tippi had been a great help, of course, not only to Jane but to all of them, but still it would take a long time, perhaps years, before Jane was able to put the trauma of her ordeal firmly behind her.
David slipped his arm around Ellen’s shoulders as they strolled towards the identity parade of trees, and Ellen reciprocated by slipping an arm around his waist. Rachel walked beside them, quiet as always. She had really grown up this past year, had become very reflective and level-headed, more adult than child. At times, especially when she had been comforting Jane after a nightmare or during one of her bad days, David had been astonished to see how closely she resembled Ellen. It was almost as though she had grown up secretly, when he wasn’t looking, and it gave him a pang of wistful regret, made him feel he was somehow responsible for stealing away a little of her childhood before she should have been ready to relinquish it. Certainly she seemed a little more serious than she should have been; nowadays it was a relief rather than a joy to see her laugh. On the whole, though, she had coped well. She had become firm friends with Tippi, despite the four-year gap in their ages.
Jane was standing in front of the tree she had chosen, rubbing the needles between the thumb and index finger of her mutilated hand and sniffing them. As David, Ellen and Rachel approached, she turned, eyes shining, cheeks red with the cold, and held the hand out.
“It’s fresh, Daddy. Smell,” she ordered.
“That’s not very nice,” said David, “calling me a smell.”
She rolled her eyes and punched him playfully on the arm. “No, smell,” she explained as if to an imbecile.
David sniffed her fingers dutifully. They smelt of pine, a scent that reminded him more than any other of Christmas.
“Ahh, Bisto,” he said, and she punched him again. “What do you two think?” he said, turning to Ellen and Rachel.
Ellen looked doubtful. “It’s a bit big, isn’t it?”
“You always say that, Mum,” Rachel said, “but it never is. It’s always just right.”
“But how will we get it home?”
“You always say that too,” Rachel said, smiling wryly.
“We’ll slap it on the roof rack like we always do,” said David, “and I’ll drive along at ten miles an hour. Either that or Jane can sit up there and hold it. What do you reckon, Janey?”
Jane looked alarmed. “No way,” she said, making them all laugh.
“Well … okay,” Ellen conceded after a few more seconds of deliberation.
“Yay!” shouted Jane, loud enough to cause the young couple to look round and smile. To the tree she said, “You’re coming home with us, Mr Tree, and we’re going to make you look really nice.”
“I’ll go and pay Mr Murray,” David said, and clomped through the muddy puddles in his Wellingtons to a ramshackle shed on the far side of the car park. The door of the shed was open, so he leaned in. A fat red-faced man with white hair tufting from beneath a checked cap was drinking tea from a plastic cup.
The man looked up, and the flesh of his cheeks folded into ridges as he smiled. “Hello, Mr Fox,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. Brought the family with you, have you?”
“Yes,” said David.
“Oh, that’s good. How are they all?”
David hesitated, wondering whether he should mention Jane’s hand. In the end, though, he just said, “Fine.”
“Oh, that’s smashing. It’s done me good to see some of my old customers coming back this year. After last Christmas, you wonder what’s happened to some folk, and if they don’t turn up, well you fear the worst, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said David. “How have you been, Mr Murray?”
“Oh, can’t complain, lad, can’t complain. It’s nice to see things getting back to normal.”
David paid him for the tree and waived the offer of help with getting it on the roof rack, saying that the four of them would manage. He went outside and looked across the car park at his family, who hadn’t seen him emerge. Ellen was standing with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her quilted jacket, chatting to the young couple; Jane appeared to be showing Rachel some kind of complex dance movement which involved spinning on the spot. Instead of walking straight back over to them, David wandered to the edge of the ledge and looked out over the valley, breathing in cold air that smelt of pine and rain and fresh earth.
A haze hung over the land, blurring the horizon, but it was still beautiful: the undulating hills, fields like tiles whose colours didn’t quite match, woodland like clumps of broccoli spears, farmhouses like sculptured boulders linked to the sky with umbilical cords of smoke.
“Back to normal,” Mr Murray had said, and out here it was easy to believe that things were or soon would be. Of course, things were much better than they had been, and were improving all the time, but it would be a long while yet before the world would be able to outpace the echoes of last year’s events.
The Christmas Riots. That was what the chaos had become commonly known as. David suspected the phrase had been chosen to make what had happened seem more innocuous than it really had been, to make it manageable, understandable. Of course, very few really understood what had happened, or more accurately why it had. Apart from the Flux and the Schism, only he and a handful of others, including those whose faces he had glimpsed an instant after smashing the bottle, really knew the truth.
The world had suffered in many ways—psychologically, economically, politically. Priests and philanthropists were trying to mend its spirit, aided by the people themselves, by the kind of generosity and sense of community that seems only to show itself in times of great crisis. Psychologists and historians were trying to understand what had happened, to reduce the disorder into neat theoretical patterns and cold statistics. The mechanics of the world, however, the nuts and bolts, was a different matter. Channels of communication had been repaired and restored relatively quickly, but such was the devastation that the economic systems of many countries had all but collapsed. Big businesses had gone under, dragging numerous small businesses with them. Insurance companies had been unable to cope with the demands placed upon them, as a result of which thousands of people were now destitute, living on government hand-outs and charity. The health service, too, in a bad enough state before, was only now getting back on to its knees. A rough estimate put the number of deaths in Britain alone on that fateful night at three hundred thousand, but thousands more had died as a consequence of the night’s events, simply because the resources needed to treat them were no longer there.
Three hundred thousand dead. The worldwide figure ran into millions. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone who had died. Everyone had a story to tell, a nightmare nestling in their mind.
David thought of Ralph and Diane, who would be coming over tomorrow with the boys and their dog, Boss, to help the Foxes celebrate David’s forty-first birthday on Christmas Eve and then Christmas itself. They had arrived back home to find their house razed to the ground, all their belongings reduced to ash, and with no hope of compensation. Since then they had been living a nomadic existence, staying with friends here, relatives there, and even occasionally with members of the Schism, such as the Hodges or the Fleischers, all of whom had been very kind. Twice they had stayed with the Foxes, and on the second occasion David had been shocked to see how defeated, how ground down by life, their friends had seemed. With no call for private gynaecologists and no vacancies in the health service, both Ralph and Diane had had to try and find work in other areas. Ralph had found the odd temporary job, working mostly as a builder’s labourer, but his earnings had been meagre, nowhere near enough to support a family of four.
The boom professions this past year had been building and undertaking, though even these had had to be reliant for the most part on government funding. Many families could no longer afford to pay for the funerals of their relatives. It was hard enough keeping the living alive, never mind spending money on the dead.
David felt arms slide around his waist from behind, a chin press softly into his shoulder. “What’re you thinking?” said Ellen.
“I was just thinking about Ralph and Diane, and about how lucky we were to still have a house, and for me to have a job.”
“Do you still feel unworthy?” she asked.
He turned to face her. “Wouldn’t you? Thousands are starving, and we’re living the life of Riley.”
“Hardly that.”
“Okay, but at least we can afford a Christmas tree. Some people can’t even afford food. In some areas of London they’ve taken to eating dogs and cats, for God’s sake.”
“That’s just a rumour and you know it.”
“Okay, whatever. But you know what I mean.”
“You deserved to get that job, David. You’re a good journalist, and an honest one. People need to be kept informed.”
“Maybe so, but there were lots of people ahead of me in the queue, people with more experience of proper journalism, not bloody film and video reviewers for a pissant little magazine. You know I only got the job because Max and his cronies pulled a few strings for me, used their influence …” He pulled a face. “Whichever way you look at it, it stinks, Ellen.”
“Resign then if you feel so strongly about it.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Well shut up then and give me a kiss and try to give your conscience a rest for once. You deserve that job, David. It’s the very least you deserve. You saved the world.”
He laughed, a little bitterly. “Did I? I don’t know what happened that night.”
“Well, you must have done something because all the … all the badness stopped, didn’t it?”
“That wasn’t my doing. I was just the messenger. I even broke the bottle before I realised that that was what I was meant to do just so that that … thing would stop hurting Jane.”
Ellen tilted her head towards him and kissed him on the mouth. Her lips were cold and her tongue warm. It was a delicious combination.
“What was that for?” he said when they broke apart.
“That was to shut you up, and to let you know that you’re a wonderful man and that I love you.”
His frown remained for a moment longer and then suddenly he smiled. “I love you too,” he said, “more than words can say.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him, kissing the dark honey-warmth of her hair. “Shall we go?”
“Where to?” she asked.
“Home. Let’s go home. Let’s go and make things nice for Ralph and Diane.”
She smiled up at him, the wind pushing her hair, which had grown long this last year, away from her face.
“Good idea,” she said.
Mark Morris, The Secret of Anatomy
