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I have at several times in my life recognized that there was evil in the neighbourhood, the surroundings, that the environment of someone who was evil was near me, connected with what was happening.
Miss Marple (Nemesis)
Where were you when it all happened, that’s what you need to know. Where were you, and where was everyone else? If Miss Marple wanted to find out what had happened she would start by asking some questions, some very particular questions.
‘What happened, dear? Can you remember where you were when it happened? Who were you standing next to? What were you wearing? Were you holding anything in your hands? What happened the moment, the very moment, when the man with the dazzling light and the gun said “Stick ’em up”?’
And I would say: ‘I remember the back door standing open and Mummy with a pale face and her hair lit up like a lamp. Mummy’s face wasn’t moving; she looked like a ghost. Mummy was a ghost come back from the dead and the man next to her was saying something in a language I couldn’t understand. He had a red face and no hair and Mummy wasn’t moving at all. Mummy was as still as a statue. The man with the red face was the only one talking, and all the time the light kept shining through Mummy’s hair, shining and shining and shining. And that is all I could look at, Mummy’s hair, which was as neat as a haystack.’
The only word I remember from that day is ‘hospital’. Mummy and the man with no hair said they were going to the hospital. And I thought, hospitals are for sick people or for children who have bashed their heads.
That day Mummy went into her bedroom and shut the door. She went into her room and closed the curtains. She got into bed with her clothes on. Mummy stayed in bed for years, until the day the lady in brown came round with her notepad and began to ask questions.
7
They were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.
(Jane Eyre)
If you listen carefully, you can work out things that adults don’t tell you. You can hear small scraps, words floating through windows on a hazy summer day. If you sit outside the kitchen window downstairs you can hear Mum and Maze whispering. You can hear bits and pieces of Poor Sue coming your way on the breeze.
Poor Sue was married to a man. His name was David, like my brother. Sue and David were married for a while and then something interrupted it, the being married I mean. I strain my ears but I can’t tell you any more than that because the wind keeps scooping up the words. The words never get any further than the washing line before the line strangles the words.
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Mum speaks Greek but she doesn’t like me listening because she says it’s personal and private. Greek is a special gift from God. But I don’t see how that can be in our house. Nothing is private here.
Private is for someone with a big house with a wooden gate and crunchy gravel stones. Private is for the people who live on Maltravers Drive. Private is for the girls who go to Rose Mead School in the middle of town. Private is a place with pretty flintstone walls around it to keep out the tramps and alcoholics. We could never ever live anywhere private.
Still, I know there are private things going on all around me, but I don’t know what they are. They aren’t the things people usually mean when they say something is private. ‘Private’ in my house means secrets. ‘Private’ means Poor Sue.
Of all the ghosts, Sue is the one who has survived. After she went missing, people still mentioned her name. Sue’s name never went away, not even after all these years.
‘Gone off the rails,’ said my aunt wearily. ‘She has only herself to blame for the way she went … Sue was a poor little thing … No real guidance, that was her trouble … Married the first man she met. She had nobody to show her a way through.’
Through what, I wondered? Back through the white door upstairs, back to that front room in 1969, the one I see in my dream.
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And the dream is always the same.
It is 1969 and a striking, dark-haired woman sits in the front room of a terraced house marrying herself off to Jesus. Her altarpiece is a brocade-covered television. Her nave is an orange and brown carpet. Across her face a white mantilla veil rises and falls. White lace touches the edge of her tongue. She kisses it softly. She is a young bride marrying her lover. Tonight she will dance with her Lord. Tonight her kingdom will come.
‘Lift your eyes unto the Lord, unto the Lord!’ And the cross-legged people look up towards the ceiling; the cross-legged people lift their hands in prayer.
‘Christ is near, oh Christ is near, Christ, He is near. Oh Christ we hear you, oh Christ you are near. Draw near!’
Her head rocks and her eyes close into tight black buds. Her mouth falls open. What comes out is neither English nor human. It is the sound of women in long-forgotten temples, women with their tongues cut out. It is the sound of madness, of the moon caught between the trees, howling.
The lights go out. A woman screams. Someone tears a nail.
The dark-haired woman begins to rise and fall. Her tongue flicks in and out; her head falls backwards.
Suddenly, hot rocks fly across the room. A window smashes.
‘Gooolagoooolagoooolagah. Gooolagooooolagooooolaha.’ Glass begins to fly.
My aunt has caught the sound of God in the back of her throat and is wailing with all her might.
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But I had started to tell you about Poor Sue. Sue wasn’t exactly real any more because she had disappeared, but once upon a time Sue really was there. She was there in the garden, by the back door; there in the blue and white kitchen drinking tea with the people wearing coloured clothes; the people who sang songs about Zion and Babylon; the people who came in and out through the back door with long hair; the people who lifted their faces up to the Lord. Sue was there too, lifting her hands to the Lord, and it is Sue who reminds me of Jane Eyre, or Jane Eyre who reminds me of Sue, who Charlotte Brontë says is a small brown bird.
Years later, someone told me that Sue had been an orphan too, like Jane. I think it was Someone’s Mother. Sue had no mother, she said, no people of her own, so the people of Babylon, the people I see in my dreams, scooped her up and took her to a tower where they gave her a room overlooking the sea.
Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.
(Jane Eyre)
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The first thing I remember about Sue is that she was small and plain. If you say someone is small and plain it probably means you’re not very fond of them. If you say, instead, that someone is slight and shy then you are probably trying to redeem them. Maze says you should always focus on the redeeming features. I wouldn’t say that Sue was small and plain, but someone else might, someone who didn’t like her very much.
Sue wore brown, and brown is hard to hold on to. Brown blurs in with