Edith Jessie Thompson

They’re sitting around the flaking Formica table, a cup of tea a-piece, and the radio is playing “How Long Has This Been Going On” again.

Too long. It’s been going on too long.

Outside, the trains come rattling. At night, in bed with Percy, she’d lain awake and listened to the trains and wanted to take one, just hop on, and go anywhere away from him. Percy used to get on the ferry and go off to Paris, and leave her all on her lonesome. She’d always wanted so much more than Percy gave her, off to Paris to buy fabric and buttons but he never brought her anything back. Maybe if he’d bought her presents, all of the things she wanted, it would never have come to what it came to. Poor old Edith would have been his poor old wife forever. Poor old girl.

A train thunders past and shakes the café. It’s the train to London, but it never bothers stopping here. Edith imagines getting onto that train and going all the way to London, Buckingham Palace and tea at the Ritz. The tea in here is weak and watery, and the radio’s always playing the same song. She hates that bloody song.

When she sleeps, she dreams about grand old London town.

Across the table from her, the Greek woman hawks and spits straight on the floor. No class at all, these bloody foreigners. Her Freddy used to tell her stories about foreign places that he’d sailed to when he was in the merchant navy. She’d always wanted to go with him, off on an adventure. The Greek looks likes someone’s granny, with her grey curls and the rings on her fingers, but sometimes, when she looks real close, Edith can see flames reflected in Granny Christofi’s eyes. Gives her the bloody heebie-jeebies too. Granny smiles, but there’s never anything warm in her eyes but fire.

Bloody foreigners. Edith used to see them everywhere when she went to the pictures with Freddie, always while Percy was away. They used to sneak out to the pictures, giggling like school kids, and then back to Freddie’s car or, if she was feeling naughty, back to her bed, Percy’s bed, and let him touch her there. If she committed a crime, maybe it was that. That she let Freddie touch her in Percy’s bed and she liked it, she really did. Never did no wrong, but that. Never did no wrong, and since when was wanting something better a crime? Since when? Freddy was so handsome. He had such gentle hands.

The other two women speak English, but they huddle their heads together and whisper to each other, like witches. Edith always worries that they’re speaking about her, ripping her to pieces and then looking up at her with their razor-sharp eyes. Bitches, just judging her for listening to her heart like all the bitches on her street who’d been there when the bobbies came to get her. They huddle together over their blanket-wrapped bundles, and, every so often, Edith catches a glimpse of blueish lips and tufty hair. Never cries though, not even when one slaps the other’s hands away and bends down to tuck the bundle away in her bag under the table. She sits back up and the other one just leans against her, smiling up at the ceiling. Edith doesn’t know their names, but she wakes up in the dark with their elbows in her ribs and their hair in her mouth, tumbled together in the dark, all of them left there, and forgotten. In the prison, the man told her that death was a release. In the cell, he’d promised that he’d look after her, afterwards. Oh, God, why did Freddie do it? She never wanted him to do it. Where’s that man who said that he’d look after her now? Where’s he gone? Where have any of them gone?

Just like a man to let her down.

Maybe she let herself down. Maybe a well bought up girl would never have written those letters, 60 letters, and all of them S.W.A.L.K. She never did half of the things she said she did. It was like a fairytale, somehow, or one of those dirty books with the flimsy paper covers that she hid from Percy in the space between the bed and the wall. All silk skirts and no knickers. She never did half of those things…She just wished she could, wished she could have ground up a light bulb and fed it to Percy a little at a time in his grey porridge that he ate first thing in the grey morning already in his grey suit. She hated him, and she wishes that just once she’d had the guts to do what she wrote in her letters, to do something desperate and wind up with his blood on her hands.

Only not really. Just in her head. Just in her letters. Just to make herself feel better when the bastard was away.

Percy hadn’t liked finding out about Freddy, showed it with his fists, too, but, still she never meant for Freddy to do it. She never meant for that to happen. She never wanted it to. Just because she liked to imagine Percy bleeding from the mouth doesn’t mean that she ever wanted to lie there screaming while he bled all over the pavement. Now, sitting at the table with them, these horrible women, she doesn’t remember what she wanted, really, but she knows that it wasn’t that. Nothing here shines enough for her to check, but her cheekbone feels pulpy and sore, like rotting fruit. Like a fruit that’s rotting must feel.

She’d been able to see her face in the table that the bobbies sat her at, and asked her the same questions over and over again. Things about Freddy and Percy. They had her letters. They wanted to know why she’d written the things she did, and why she’d asked Freddy to do the things he’d done. Over and over, the same questions and, over and over, the same answer.

She never wanted him to do it.

Granny Christofi looks up from her tea. Her old face is slack and sad. Edith never wants to look like that, but maybe she won’t. She was only thirty years old, and Freddy always said that she was so pretty. Never going to look like that dried out bitch.

It’s difficult to tell what season it is, here. Outside the window, the sky is always grey and the trains don’t seem to follow any particular pattern. It could be a mild December or a wet June, but she remembers that through the bars she could see Christmas lights and tinsel in somebody else’s window. She spent her last Christmas not eating, not sleeping. She’d scraped at the mortar in the little cell with her fingernails. She’d thought about carving their names into the wall. FREDDY AND EDITH FOREVER in a heart.

She never did, though. She just sat there and cried. A face at the bars had told her that she was the first woman to have a noose around her neck since ‘07. It didn’t make her proud, not at all. She didn’t know how to stop crying.

Something splashes into her tea-cup. Could be a tear, could be the ceiling leaking again.

When she was a little girl, her Mum told her the story about the wise men who came to see the baby Jesus when he was still lying in his crib, padded out with sweet-smelling straw. Edith never really went to the country, but she images that the straw must have smelled sweet, under his little head and his little bum and his little kicking feet. When her mother set up the crib scene in the parlour, she always arranged those wise men just so, standing around that baby like points around a star. It wasn’t until later that Edith found out that they didn’t get there until later. Epiphany, they called it. Twelfth night, and that was when all the decorations came down. The miracle was already over, done for another year.

It was around Epiphany that she’d started screaming and she couldn’t stop. Oh, Freddy, why’d you have to do that bloody awful thing? Why’d you have to do that to poor Percy? She knew what she’d written, but Percy’s only crime had been being a bad husband, and it’s never bad husbands who bleed, only bad wives. She was such a bad wife.

No, don’t! she’d said. No, don’t!

He had. Why had he, though? Because of her. Because he loved her too much not to.

Every so often, she’d hear someone screaming in the dark, and it would be a while before she’d realise that it was still her, still screaming, still carrying on.

Still there at the table with those other women, she can barely summon up a whimper for what happened to her, and what she did.

The night before they came her for her, she prayed, or, at least, she dreamed that she did. She’d prayed that, somehow, there’d be a miracle, and she’d go back to her mum’s house, and be quiet, and rest. She’d have liked to have slept without waking herself up crying. She’d have liked to close her eyes without nightmares. If anybody could have given her that, maybe it was worth praying for.

In the morning, the Doctor came, with his cold hands, and he stuck her with a needle. Everything was slow and sleepy after that. She couldn’t scream as much. It was like everything was happening to her underwater.

The rope rubbed like Percy’s hands around her neck.

When she was a little girl, she found a dead frog at the bottom of her mum’s garden, where her dad grew runner beans. She put it under a stone and left it there, and, the next time she went back, months later, there was nothing left but tiny white bones. In her cupped hands, under the table, she’s holding something so small, so sad she doesn’t have words for it. It’s been with her since the prison. It’s been with her since the rope. A little knot of cells and clots and her and Freddy and all of their love, and all of their sorrow too. What they made. What she lost. She closes her eyes and imagines the little frog resting between her two hands. The sum of so few tiny bones.

“Come,” says Granny Christofi. “Koimaomai. Now.”

She puts her hand on Edith’s arm. Edith wants to beg her not to touch her, but she never listens so, this time, she doesn’t tell her.

“Come on, dearie,” say the others, their coats already done up under their chins. “Baby’s got his bonnet on. Time to go home.”

Once, it was her and Freddy, when Percy was away but now, where they go, they go together. Back home. Back to their hole in the ground. She doesn’t know how they came to be tumbled together in the dark. In the end, nobody loved her enough to come and get her, not even her sister, not even Avis. She wonders where they buried Percy. She wonders where Freddy’s lying.

The stone is grey. The others go on down first and leave Edith on her own with her secret clasped between her hands. Sleep on, beloved, says the stone. Sleep on. At least she’s never alone in the dark. She’s warm and cradled between them and she can lie down in the wet earth with her thumb almost to her mouth and be quiet a while, and rest.