He hadn’t really spoken to her until now, and, listening to him, she was aware of his accent – how German he sounded.
‘Not for me,’ he added. ‘For Mary. You have to be there for her because I’ll be leaving her alone.’
Anna put her hand over his, which was still gripping her upper arm. ‘You know I will. You know that.’
‘Hearing’s the last thing to go,’ he started to mumble, more to himself than her, ‘isn’t that strange? You’ve got to carry on talking to me even when I lose consciousness, even when you think that might be it. You’ve got to keep on talking because I’ll still be able to hear you.’
‘I will.’
He nodded and they carried on walking down the stairs, following the blue signs to Out-Patients.
Mary stood by the bedroom window at number nineteen Parkview, looking out for the nurse the hospital was sending them. Her poise of earlier weeks was shattered after having spent an entire night lying next to someone she was convinced was dying. When Anna, angry, asked her why she hadn’t phoned earlier, all she could think to say was, ‘What was the point?’ – unsure even what she’d meant by that.
‘Where’s the nurse?’ Mary said irritably.
Anna, sitting in a G-Plan chair that was as old as the house and still upholstered in its original Everglade green, shut her eyes. She held on tight to Erwin’s hand. His face was turned towards her, his mouth open – rasping. As soon as she so much as started to loosen her grip, his hand slid away from her down the side of the bed, and that scared her. The furniture in the room, like the carpet she remembered from childhood with its dense pattern of ferns, was still in good condition so had never been replaced. Neither Erwin nor Mary would have dreamed of growing tired of these things before they became threadbare.
Everything in the house had been earned and that’s why the television set was covered with a blanket to protect it from dust when it wasn’t being used; why the stereo was kept in the box it came in unless it was being played. Even now, the house was as clean and tidy as it had always been because for Mary and Erwin’s generation cleanliness and tidiness were the only things separating them from the lost and the damned: the drinkers, the fornicators, the unemployed and the hungry.
‘How was Laura last night?’ Mary asked after a while.
Anna hadn’t been expecting this. ‘In shock.’
‘It’s funny – you can’t have seen her in, what – fifteen years or something?’
‘Sixteen.’
Mary turned away from the window to look at her, pausing. ‘And yet, you and Laura, when you were growing up, you were like this,’ she said, twisting her fingers together in spite of the arthritis. ‘You were close to Bryan as well – at one time. He used to wait for you coming home from school – off the Newcastle bus, d’you remember?’
Anna did. She could see him now – waiting on the flower troughs outside the station, next to the Italian café, Moscadini’s. They’d walk back from the station down to Hartford Estate together, sometimes talking, sometimes not – Bryan in something barely resembling a uniform and Anna in her navy blue and red Grammar School colours, the beribboned hat pushed in her bag. She’d been glad of the company – and the protection – because it was a risky and unpleasant business getting home to Parkview in a Grammar School uniform.
‘He was forever in our back garden, drawing some miniscule insect with his magnifying glass.’
Anna stared at Mary. She’d forgotten that Bryan drew, and she’d forgotten all about his magnifying glass as well, which had a resonance for her she fought to remember, but couldn’t right then.
‘Have you got any of his pictures still?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Probably. Somewhere. I’m sure I put some up in the wash house. That poor child,’ she added, lost in thought and barely aware now of Erwin’s rhythmic rasping. ‘He was as good as orphaned – the Strike on one side and suicide on the other. It was Bryan who found her, you know.’
‘Found who?’
‘His mother – Rachel. What a thing to come home from school to. You won’t remember –’
But Anna did remember. She remembered because it had been a Monday – wash day – and Bryan had come running through all Mary’s sheets, hanging from the line she had propped cloud high, and Mary had yelled at him until she’d seen his face, and the dark patch on his trousers where he’d wet himself.
Mary took him inside number nineteen and ran a bath – and that was the first time Anna saw Bryan Deane naked; at the age of twelve, the day his mother died.
‘It was hard on Bryan – he was Rachel’s favourite. They said all sorts of things about Bobby Deane after that, but I don’t think Bobby ever laid so much as a finger on Rachel, she was just lonely that’s all – you know, that real loneliness; the sort you can’t escape from. Bobby was a Union Official – he was working twelve hours a day and more. They said all sorts about Rachel as well,’ Mary carried on, ‘about how Bryan wasn’t even Bobby’s because there was a darkness to him that none of the other Deanes had.’ She sighed.
‘Bryan?’
Mary nodded. ‘During the Strike, Rachel took to spending a lot of time with somebody Bobby sang with on the colliery choir. She liked to sing as well. I think it was just companionship, but it wasn’t something you did back then. Men and women weren’t friends. You stayed in your own home . . . your own backyard. You didn’t take to wandering, however innocent that wandering might be. There were rules – and Rachel was never very good at rules; she used to say she felt suffocated.’
‘So who was Rachel’s friend?’
Mary hesitated. ‘A widower, but a widower still counted as another woman’s husband if you were married yourself, and Rachel was. He was a safety engineer at Bates.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died in an accident. You’ve got no colour,’ she said suddenly to Anna.
‘I’m not sleeping well.’
‘I can tell. That’s what make up’s for, you know – the bad days.’ Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna’s running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.
An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.
‘That hair.’
‘What about my hair?’ Anna patted her head.
‘Not yours.’
‘Whose hair, Nan?’
Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin’s morphine crossed Anna’s mind – and not for the first time either.
‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.’
‘Or he chose her.’
‘Maybe, but if you’d asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I’d have said you were. Don’t look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn’t grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?’
She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.
‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,’ she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I’m angry with him for dying, Anna. I’m just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange