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.

Ida

It was a long ride down from the Wee Wah Lodge and into Manhattan on a weekend kindly given by Mrs Spedden when she didn’t need her maid so much. Even in early June, the weather there was hotter and harsher than anything Ellen Bird had ever been used to, back in Norfolk where she was born. The colours were all wrong too. Ellen felt a stab of loss in her chest, tucked under her right breast; she missed the summers in England. Not for the first time after, she was surprised by feeling anything at all, as if she’d breathed all of her feeling out in puffs of vapour in the icy air. As if she had no right to feeling at all, any more.

She hadn’t slept well since it had happened. Two months later, she still woke up struggling to breathe, and there weren’t enough sheets on the bed, ever, to make her feet feel warm. On the train, even in the oppressive heat of a New York summer, her feet didn’t feel truly warm. Maybe they never really would again? Perhaps that was the small price paid for her survival? If so, she would have given it again. She would have given anything to save herself from going into the water that night and, if that made her a coward then she was nothing that God didn’t make her, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t suffered, afterwards. It wasn’t like she hadn’t prayed for all those people, fifteen hundred and more souls, their bodies made of out of salted ice.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t wept.

A woman asked her if she might take the seat beside her, close to the window, and Ellen rose to make way. Her overnight bag was tucked into the wire rack above her head, but she kept the large package close to her chest. She had carried it back from the middle of the sea with her, on her shoulders. She’d huddled in it on the deck of the Carpathia, away from the fearsome frost. She’d carried it all of that way, by then, and she would carry it a little further still. It was the least that she could do, when Mrs Straus had been so kind to her, in what time she’d known her. It hadn’t been very long, not in the grand scheme of things, but it might as well have been forever, for everything that had happened, and everything that Ellen had seen come to pass.

Around her, people nodded and dozed in the heat. Ellen closed her eyes but stayed awake, bolt upright in her seat, padded for comfort on long rides. She worked her fingers through the join in the edges of the brown packing paper, until she found the the fur, black as night and so soft. Sable, Mrs Spedden had said. Sable, which had once run free in Russia, and survived the cold twice over. When the steward had come, he’d suggested top coats and hats. It was wickedly cold up on the deck in the night. Ellen had helped Mrs Straus into her fur and her lifebelt before she’d put on her own coat. That was what you did. You helped your mistress, then you helped yourself. She’d still been fastening her buttons with clumsy gloved fingers as they’d made their way up onto the deck. All the way there, other maids had been brushing past them, bobbing heads in apology as they hurried down the halls. So many of those girls must have drowned, after they went back to boil water for tea. Nobody thought they were going to be out there for a very long time. Those other women thought that it would blow over and it never occurred to one of them that they might be sending those girls to their deaths. Mrs Straus had never cared for tea.

That ship was supposed to be unsinkable.

Between her glove and the cuff of her dress, Ellen’s wrist was bare. She’d never had the money to waste on a watch. That night on the deck she hadn’t worn a watch and so it had felt like eternity and no time at all, both at the same time. It had all happened too fast for her to truly understand it. It was the finest ship in the world, but it was a piece of fine work that unravelled to nothing but threads and pins in a matter of minutes. Gone, all gone.

People would like to talk about it, maybe: the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others…how quickly everything had fallen apart, there, right at the very end. They’d somehow make it loud and exciting, or dignified and solemn with the weight of some great history. It hadn’t felt like great history, at the time. What it had felt like, at the time, was knowing the date of her own death, down to the minute. What it had felt like, actually being there, was knowing that she could no longer believe in God as she had believed in Him before.

There had been children crying, and women crying, and even the odd man crying, and everything had gone to Hell. Ellen had been too frightened to make a sound, and Mrs Straus had taken her firmly by the hand and drawn her with her and made sure that she wasn’t lost. That was a brave woman, right there. That was a woman who had bore seven children, and lost one, and kept going. That was a woman who had sailed to a new world in her youth, and made her life there, and made it well. If Mrs Straus had been afraid then she hadn’t let it show. She had taken Ellen by the hand and drawn her with them, all the while following her husband, and never letting him out of her sight.

The band was playing. The band had been playing something that Ellen had last heard when people were dancing. Nobody was dancing then, but, all her life, Ellen would remember the song that they were playing. Mrs Straus had called it something in German, and Mr Straus had nodded his head.

Life boat no. 8. Ellen had turned thirty-one years old the day before entering Mrs Straus’ service, and two days before they left Southampton, but if she lived for forever and a day, she would never forget the number painted on the white wood of the boat. Eight. Her luckiest number forever. Women and children only, the officer had been saying. Women and children only, but he’d made an exception for Mr Straus with his grey whiskers, his hand holding onto Mrs Straus’ so tightly that, in their gloves, their knuckles must surely have been bone white. Ellen had already been in a seat on the far side of the boat, ushered in by the steward and Mrs Straus both. She couldn’t do anything but watch them, and try to hear them, over all the rushing noise of the people and the water.

Mr Straus had begged her, begged his Ida, in the end. He’d begged her to be a little selfish…To not always think of others. He had known, then, that he would not go in the boat while they were still women and children to take those seats, but he had hoped that Ida would go with Ellen, go on without him and live to go home and remember him as a hero to his children. He had hoped that Ida would go on without him, and live.

Ida Straus set foot in lifeboat no. 8. just the once. She’d lost her hat, somewhere in the chaos, so, when she swept the sable fur from her shoulders, her hair blew against her cheek in soft grey curls. She’d settled the fur around Ellen’s shoulders and said something to her in German, something that Ellen would never understand but never forget, either. I will not be needing it, she said, and stepped out of the boat and back onto the deck. The lifeboat started to lower, with a sick sway, and Ellen had lost the couple in the dark up above them, and she had never set eyes on them again.

The papers would repeat what Ida Straus had said next, said to her husband, when they held her up as an example of Jewish womanhood, of good wives. They’d report it word for word, as repeated to them by witnesses, but it came to Ellen mostly by the reading of her lips.

“We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”

It had become her story then, she supposed. The story of Ellen Bird, who was born in Old Buckenham, Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife.

Ellen Bird, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

She counted thirty five women in lifeboat No.8. Thirty five of them, and how many of them had left husbands or fathers behind? Some of them wore very fine coats, but none of them as fine as the fur that Ellen huddled in, the one that Ida Straus wouldn’t be needing any more, no matter how cold she got before the end. As they watched, the ship sank lower and the sky got darker still, and the man in the boat, the one in the uniform, he told them to row towards the light in the north. They rowed, hard as they could, but Ellen never saw a light.

From the dock, she’d thought that it was surely too big to move under its own power and, as she watched it tilt and swoon into the cold, dark water, she wondered at the fact that it had stayed afloat for as long as it had, at all. Ellen felt every crack and every sig of the great ship in her bones and yet it all fell apart so quick. The water rose and lapped at the polished deck and people ran and screamed, with nowhere to go. They watched from the lifeboats, so afraid that, at the last moment, the whole ocean would somehow open and take them all down with Titanic, punishment for the sin of pride, for imagining that there was anything in the whole wide world that God couldn’t sink, if he chose. The propellers had come right out of the water, like teeth, like a woman with her mouth open, and crying towards heaven for release. A release that would never come, because Titanic was going down, and there would be no saving her. The great funnels fell, which looked to Ellen for all the world like someone throwing up her hands in utter despair, and, not long after that, the lights went out, and the women on the boat watched what happened next by the sickly green glow of the flares. They watched as Titanic folded in on herself, with a great cracking, splintering sound, and sank finally below the surface, and died.

Gone, all gone, and fare thee well, Titanic. Fare thee well.

There was such screaming, afterwards, such horrible noise. One of the men in the boat wanted them to row back, to pick up some of the poor souls who’d gone into the water, so cold, and some of the women agreed with him, but most didn’t. Most were fearful of being dragged under by the sheer weight of people scrambling to be saved. Ellen herself was too terrified to say a word, and, in the end, they started to row again, away from where Titanic had been, pulling towards the light.

Rowing, Ellen sweated under Ida Straus’ sable fur, and it took such a long time for all of the screaming to stop.

Pennsylvania Station was cramped and noisy, such a flood of people. Ellen stood still, the package clasped against her chest with one arm, and let them pass around her. She didn’t have it in her to force her way past them, through them. She’d done all the surviving that she physically had in her. There had been over two thousand souls on board when they’d left Ireland, nothing between them and America but all of that water. She’d never expected it to be so cold, the water. People had told her that they’d pulled nine people out of the water, but three of them had gone too far to be saved. Their bodies were already solid ice, and they died on the deck of the Carpathia. Rescued, they were, but never saved.

What she wanted, when she came out of the station, was a breeze, a gust of fresh air to blow away the train and the dreams and the smell of other people. The air was muggy and heavy. She wished that it would rain to cool things off. Rain was a good thing in summer, and a million miles away from the dry, dry cold which haunted her. Walking, the package was cumbersome. One handed, she shifted it against her chest so as not to drop it. It would be wrong to drop it now, so close to the end of her pilgrimage. As she walked down 7th Avenue, it occurred to Ellen that this would have been her home, if she’d come here with the Strauses; that she would have come to know this place well. Instead, Ellen had come to this place like any other migrant, and known that she could not go home. America was her home. She had been delivered. She had been given to a new world.

She was bringing the fur back. She was returning it to its rightful place. In her little room back in Tuxedo Park, she’d kept it folded under the bed, and, occasionally, she’d removed it, buried both of her hands in the soft thickness of it and remembered the little boat, remembered the rowing, and the praying, the soft sound of some woman behind her weeping for her man, lost at sea. Pull for the light, the man had said but the only light that Ellen ever saw was the one behind them. The Titanic’s lights, which, one by one, flickered, and went out. When she touched it, she remembered those things, but she also remembered the kindness in Ida Straus’ face and the iron in her handns when she’d pushed Ellen down into Lifeboat no.8, and gotten out herself, and gone back to her husband’s side. A paper that Ellen had seen called it heroism, Mr and Mrs Straus and what they’d done. They’d talked about radiance over all humanity, like something bright. Like the sun rising. To Ellen in the boat, all it had looked like was love, pure love. Simply that.

Mrs Spedden had checked for Ellen, found out that Mrs Sara Straus Hess lived at 154 West 22nd Street. As she turned the corner, onto the street of large, redbrick houses, Ellen rehearsed what she was going to say to Sara Hess, who had been Sara Straus.

Good afternoon, Ma’am. My name is Ellen Bird and I was in Mrs Straus’ service when she boarded the Titanic, and this was hers, and she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it to you, because its too fine a thing for me and if she’d lived then she wouldn’t ever have seen it with a person like me. I’m sorry that your mother died, Miss. I’m sorry that your father died. They were good people, Miss. They were good people, and they saved me, God bless them. They saved me.

On the doorstep of the house, Ellen paused. She set her overnight bag down by her feet, and she straightened her hat, and the plain collar of her dress. She hugged the fur against her like something very precious. Brown packing paper crackled. She reached up, knocking on the door with three raps on the brass knocker, shone to within an inch of its life. A shiver went down her spine, turned the sweat between her shift and skin cold. It had been two months, and still no sign of Ida Straus’ body. They waited as long as they could to bury Isidor, longer than they should have but, still, Mrs Straus had not come home to New York City.

As she stood on the doorstep, listening to footsteps coming towards her from inside the house, Ellen wondered if she was going to spend her whole life thinking about Mrs Straus and the hundreds of others who were never going to come home, if she was going to spend her whole life, however long she had left, just thinking about them, and pulling towards the light.

Marilyn

(For Mom)

It’s funny how a little thing can bring it rushing back. When I was a little girl, somebody must have told me that if I could smell my own perfume, then I was wearing too much. I could, though; it was a green smell which recalled green things, especially green Indian silk pulled across my face in traffic to keep out pollution, to ward off death. It made me think of Elizabethan women carrying oranges stuck with cloves, only that was the scent of their own bodies and this was the entire world. I didn’t want the smell, you see. I didn’t want the smell to get in. How do you know when you’ve been in Delhi for too long? You’re not holding onto anything except for the scarf across your nose and mouth. And then we’d laugh, but we weren’t laughing at the time. Delhi was a step too far for both us in our white plastic charity bangles (don’t give begging children money, you can’t give all of them money, but, God, they love pens). Bangkok was closer to home. Western-Eastern. We were so shamefully grateful to see fast food with recognisable wrappers; everything tastes the same everywhere. You can never leave home again. When we went away, I’d had this vague idea of embracing it all, taking it into myself, coming home with no fear of death having experienced the whole of life. Failed, though. I’d given up, by Bangkok – I leant my head against the sealed window of an air conditioned cab and watched the city pass me by. Bangkok, Bangkok, city of angels, city of lights, loud and full but not quite so close to death as Delhi. I wasn’t even twenty one; I was too young to come so close to death, if not mine then other people’s. Young people aren’t immortal; they just don’t yet know anything about death.

I must have been wearing my scarf; the one bought in Delhi for virtually nothing and sprayed with duty-free perfume. Scent is such a strange thing. Scent is sometimes more powerful than sight. I’ve got no memory for faces. I have always had trouble picturing people’s features with my eyes closed.

And then I opened my eyes, and saw your face, fifty foot high. We’d seen a Buddha the day before, reclining, the biggest in Thailand, the world, the Universe, something and there you were, big as Religion, pink satin, bleached blond, perfect. Suddenly, I felt much closer to home. You were that familiar thing I’d needed. I guess that this needs explaining.

Your influence in my life was not even an influence at all. You were a ghost in my mother’s machine; a birth date-death date thing. I didn’t learn to recognise your voice until I was buying my own films to watch in my own time (never specifically searching for you, but you turned up anyway). It was never your voice that my mother was interested in. An icon is a symbol is a matter of faith but it all comes down to beauty, to the image, first of all. August 4^th or 5^th, 1962. She was six years old and, somehow, you implanted. A kind of reincarnation by pieces, I guess. A million little girls, each carrying you with them into womanhood. A second chance. The world forces connections in unlikely people. When we moved, you moved with us; a box of books, framed photographs, a shelf with jewelled bags, your face in black and white and glitter. Your smile look wrong on a doll’s face; neither hair nor dress hung quite like the pictures. We grew up with you in the background but we never really knew you or claimed to; that song, the one they wrote about you was about somebody else by the time I even realised. It wasn’t until later that I realised that I should have taken a photograph; that building framing your storey high eyes.

Bending over in Belfast to pull on boots, I get a mouthful of my own perfume and, via Bangkok, I suddenly feel closer to home. When I ring my mother, I don’t say anything but you’re part of our shared experience, one way or another now and you get another cycle, another life. I liked the first version of the song better anyway. This is a letter. You’ll never get it but you might and then you’ll know. I love you because I loved her first.

Stay righteous, Norma Jean.

Joan

“Ex-junkie gun loving novelist, pensive in a black bow-tie gazes at his clasped hands. He looks like a church deacon, a riverboat gambler, a soft palmed widow strangling con-artist.”

Adrian Searle, describing a photograph of William. S. Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

In a long room in Philadelphia, there are photographs on the wall. The silver makes the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. When I was sixteen, I was given a worn copy of a book and I read it and it changed me, one molecule at a time, and made me into something different. I can’t exactly put my finger on how it happened or why but maybe that book made me into who I wanted to be after I read it. The person that I wanted to be at the time?

And somehow that Changed Me makes it to Philadelphia in the winter and I stop in front of this particular picture.

In the photographs of him that I’d seen before, he always looked like an old man. It was at odds with the life that I know that he led, but maybe Old Bill cheated…where Dorian Grey had a picture of him that aged, maybe, somewhere, there was a photograph of William Burroughs in an attic that lived a good and quiet life for him in his absence?

Yeah, maybe.

It’s cold in the city but in here it’s too warm and I sway quietly on the balls of your feet while I look at the photograph and don’t think a lot of anything at all. I let my mind go blank. I didn’t hear her come up behind me because, if I’m listening to anything at all it’s the distant murmur of my friends’ talking because the last thing that I want is to be left here, in this strange gallery and this strange city. I’m chewing on the blue plastic chip that they gave me so that I could eventually claim your coat, which I’ll need. It’s cold.

“That’s a bad habit.”

I look at her like it’s none of her business, but I take the chip, the piece of blue plastic, out of my mouth too. It’s damp and you hold it in my hand.

“Sorry.”

She’s a little woman, lumpen, black coat, black hair. She’s one of those women who seem possessed of a huge and ancient sadness, a sadness that centres as an absence in the eyes. I feel like I might have seen her before; I don’t know her, but there’s that sort of glancing familiarity that comes with brushing past someone in a crowded corridor at roughly the same time every day for a week or so.

“He looks so peaceful.” I hate small talk. I’m not good at it.

“He looks old,” she says. “And sad.”

I am twenty two years old. At this age, anything older than your parents is a flat line, but you’ll learn.

“He was young once,” she says, her dark eyes pinpricks, fixed on Bill’s white hands. “We were young together. It was Allen’s fault, though.”

And now I remember where I saw her. Tucked into a reader which I took out of the library once, little more than an appendix, a footnote, a blurry photograph of a woman in her twenties, the same age as I am now, but looking much older, her pockets full of papers, her eyes closed against the sun. The picture was blurred by the shake of someone’s hand. She’s blurred now by how quickly I look away and then look back again.

“I know who you are.” I can’t help it. I blurt it out, and then it’s said and can’t be taken back. She doesn’t look at me, so I stare, for a moment. Either I’ve finally gone out of my mind, or something miraculous is happening. It’s always difficult to tell in these situations. Either she’s a ghost, or a figment, or she’s really there. Her name, I know now, is Joan.

“I read Junky when I was sixteen,” I say, trying to act as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. “It made me want to be a writer, sort of.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She looks older than twenty, but she did in the photograph too. It’s difficult to tell if she’s actually got older since 1951.

“For what?”

“Writers. They’re flawed…and they tell lies.”

I look at her. The first time I read about her death I was in the grip of hero worship and I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that, at a party, Bill rested a glass on the top of her head and shot at it and missed, but did not miss her head. I didn’t want to believe that he was capable of doing that and walking away.

“You could have stopped it.” There I go, blurting things out again. “You could have. It was a stupid game. You didn’t have to…”

“You’re a baby,” she says, house mother of that sprawling slum, more important to them, for a while at least, than Joyce or Edie. “How can you possibly know how much things can hurt?”

I want to tell her, then…want to set her straight. I want to tell her about all of the things that have happened to me, and all of the things that can hurt and how, at twenty two, I am just now coming to the conclusion that sometimes your life can have too much life in it, but I’ve never been good at talking about those things, so I don’t.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” That’s all I say. That’s all I can say.

We stand there for a moment, her and me, me and the woman who held her own for a little while in that circle jerk, that boy’s club that, fifty years later, I’d still be trying to get into. It doesn’t really matter if she’s there or not.

“Don’t you think he looks sorry?” Personally, I would like to think that Bill was sorry for what he did. For a long time before a hopeless Californian stole my head in a way in which, maybe, it would never be stolen again, Bill was my favourite in the world. I want to think well of him.

“I don’t know,” she says and squints her empty eyes at him. “Well, Bill? Are ya?”

Bill doesn’t say anything. I almost expected that he might. I remember reading somewhere that, afterwards, Joan’s death kept him constantly terrified.

No way but to write myself out.

“His books changed my life.”

“He isn’t sorry,” she says, and shakes her head, once. “He isn’t sorry and I love him anyway.”

She’s silent then except for a barely breathed goddamnit. I want to put your arms around her or at least my hands on her, somewhere. I want to be a comfort but I’ve never been good at that, either. I’ve never had to be anybody’s mother. Unlike Joan in that photograph, I’ve had the luxury of never having to grow old before my time.

“He loved me,” she says. “But not hard enough and not for long. I lost him in a…” she moves her hands like I do when I can’t remember the exact words for what I want to say, “…Benzedrine dream, and I saw double, and, by the time I blinked and saw right again, the real him was already gone.”

Joan bends down in her black coat with it’s full pockets, slightly blurry, and sets something on the gently sloping floor, off-centre under the photograph, which is perfectly aligned. From the door, I’m being called and I have to go – there’s a dinner and beer and a train to catch. This is a journey which I had to promise yourself. Sometimes, I’m just dying to move.

“He said that it was an accident,” I say.

Joan smiles, and it’s not the tight lipped smile that she’s showing in that one photograph I’ve seen of her. It’s broad, wide open, and she looks, if not twenty two, then no older than thirty-seven.

“In the magical universe, there are no coincidences and there are no accidents…” she says.

“Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen,” I say. And I think that I understand.

And then she’s gone, as these things are.

And the glass doesn’t break this time either.