SOMETIMES we leave parts of ourselves in the places we’ve been. My Mother told me that once. How old had I been? Nearly 6, or 10? The numbers get foggier every year. Those days were sepia toned and spent exploring the farmland behind the cottage, with Elsie and our dog, Tanner. I found sheep’s fleece, a silver-blue spool of it, caught on a sprig of barbed wire. It had no business being where it was; there had never been any sheep in that field. I pulled it free, stuffed it into my grubby denim pockets where it stayed, until weeks later, when I dug my fingers in to find it dried up, crisped over with leftover Persil. It was crimped, and had the same blue tinge I later compared to the flushes of colour on three duck eggs Tanner unearthed beneath the apple tree. His wet nose sunk into the soil, inhaling bugs and grass seeds when it fell upon one cool shell after another. Elsie wanted to eat them, or smash them against the wall to watch their colours spill out onto the sandstone. But it was a case of Finders-Keepers and—Tanner aside—I was there first. I rolled the eggs between my palms, their shells dimpling as they began to warm in the way Play-Doh does.
I remember Elsie grasping Mother’s thumb, tugging her down the garden steps towards our find. Marvelling, she’d lift each one to the sky, gathering us beneath her wing to get a closer look at the blue domes. As the light hit their shells, the chicks were exposed. They seemed fleshy and undefined, almost crescent in their curves, but our Mother brimmed with tenderness for them. She was like that till the end. I remember how she placed them beneath a bantam, roosting in the hen hut which sometimes doubled as our den.
I showed Mother the fleece, but she didn’t seem too impressed. She told me to leave it out for the hen and her adopted brood. Ideal nest building material, she’d said, her fists rolled into balls of dough as she baked. Then I remember tears and spilt juice, or perhaps spilt juice like tears, and that’s when she told me. Sometimes we leave parts of ourselves in the places we’ve been—the duckies will be happy if you leave ‘em your wool because they’ll have something to remember you by, Bess, when they’re all grown up ‘an building nests of their very own.
• • •
I took some supplies to the hospital in a plastic carrier bag. I’d thought about this for some time, folding everything neatly to be packed, even folding her socks in at the heel. There would be no need to retrieve the suitcase from under her bed, not yet. It would only be a few days at best, so I packed the fresh change of clothes and her toothbrush. I pulled into the car park, clipped the curb, thumbed too much change into the hungry meter and slapped the ticket onto the dashboard. Above me the sky smudged. Oily water spun through the air towards this grey hospital scene. Clasping her belongings, I carved a path through the elements towards the reception and asked for directions to Ward 7: Geriatrics.
The people there move in units. I moved inside them as I made my way down the strip-lit hallways, tasting leather and antiseptic. It was a stench that reminded me of Tanner’s vet trips, to rooms that reeked of sterilized fear. As I passed through these people, it was easy to recognize the sympathy worn on their faces. It manifested in downturned eyes and cautious smiles that swept the floor of the hospital like an epidemic. As I reached Ward 7, I was shown towards my Mother’s room by a nurse with pastry white cheeks, dusted with cinnamon freckles—like Elsie’s—and I wondered if she had managed to visit yet. Like Elsie, this nurse seemed to painfully young. She had the daintiest, doll-like hands that grasped a ceramic mug, with the words World’s Best Mum embossed in pink. I tried to imagine those same hands nursing bandaged heads like they did cups of tea, pouring milk like they poured blood back into people and I couldn’t have felt more ashamed. A mere child could look after my Mother better than I could.
She was barely recognizable, spread thin like butter over too much bread. I lifted her melting hand and laid it in my upturned palm as she opened her eyes. Cataracts had pasted a thick film over them, but the light that slipped through brought her gaze towards mine. She was drowsy as she asked me to tell her something sweet. I told her about the wool and the duck eggs, and how it would always be my fondest memory.
She told me there had been no such thing.
At reception, they handed me her wedding ring and dentures. I tucked them into the carrier bag before strolling back out into the downpour.
• • •
Sometimes we leave parts of ourselves in the places we’ve been. My life has become a continuous loop of déjà vu, sewn together by those words and the ones that escaped my Mother as she slipped away from her hospital bed. I trawl the contents of her house, searching for eggshells or wool or something to hold on to. I take a bottle of Shiraz to bed.
Beside her cigarettes on the bedside table there is an oval mirror. Beneath it I place her wedding ring, its delicate band of 14 carat catching some of the stale light in the room. I lift the mirror to find my eyes have been replaced by blood pools. The skin beneath is bruised, pricked with veins and bulging with sleep. I move towards the curtains to let in some more light, but this place has become like a museum and I feel a need to protect its artifacts.
I crouch before her bed and feed a hand into the voice. My fingers tap a Morse code across the wooden slats, pushing dead bugs and dirt into the cracks as I search. Eventually, they fall upon the suitcase. I tug it free, sending a solitary spider scuttling for a gap in the skirting boards. I thumb open each latch and heave, the dilapidated lid coming away easily in my hands. Torrents of old dust disturb the air and it clogs up my throat with dead skin and mildew.
This is where I should have started.
This case is teeming with relics, pieces of my Mother she has left in this place. There are photographs, thousands, printed in the dull shades of her life from cradle to grave. Some are dog-eared or torn, or mottled with marks left by dust mites. The people in these photographs are smiling, lost in their moment and their faces crowd me. I lock eyes with each of theirs as though greeting old friends, but I am drawn to a tea-stained print, half hidden by Elsie as a baby in a Christening gown. Inside the boxed frame I see myself, Elsie and Mother. We are so painfully young. We are by the sea? I try to remember. She has written on the back in neat scrawl, La Plage d’Os.
• • •
We are in France. Everything is delightful and French, as we are surrounded by croissants and puffs of Chanel. I clasp hands with Elsie and our Mother as we roll, laughing, towards the shore. We are chasing waves. Our skin is pink and prawn-like beneath the heat. Carved into a driftwood sign are the words La Plage d’Os. Elsie tells me this means The Bone Beach, and it’s plain to see why. As the waves go out, whittled bones are exposed beneath, their jagged contours bleached by the insistent sun. There are hips, craniums and jaw bones thick with teeth. There are bird skulls and mammal carcasses, their rib bones like toothpicks. As Elsie and Mother play amongst the waves, I begin to wander, the soles of my feet finding the ridges of objects obscured by the sand. I walk over lashings of seaweed and kelp, their pouches popping, squelching against the bones and stones and hard skins of dead cuttlefish. I walk, kicking winkles as off-white hermit crabs nick the fleshy webbing between my toes. There are other things here. Watches—still ticking, and collections of keys. There are glasses and records and balls of odd socks. Strewn between are copper coins and the occasional twenty pence piece. It seems this is the place where all lost things are found.
I’ve come to rest in the shade of a fallen tree. As I crouch here, amongst the bric-a-brac of other people’s lives, I look to my family for pieces of my own. They are building castles now, Elsie’s hand patting sand like she did Tanner’s fur. I cup the sand in my own hands, drier than down on the shore line, and make an hourglass shape to drip feed the grains back into the beach.
And then I notice something curling, growing from between a femur and a collar bone. It is something I thought I’d lost, crimped with a blue tinge I’d once compared to three duck eggs. I grasp it hastily, pull it free. I wave it through the air like a white flag. I kick my feet up, spitting trinkets into the air as I race towards my family, my girls. And I look to my Mother. She is smiling. She is sepia toned.
She is right.
• • •
In the photograph, we are smiling.
We are by the sea? I can’t remember when, but Elsie was there. Mother was there, too. It’s as though we’ve left parts of ourselves there, cast out amongst the trinkets and bones buried in the sands.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathy Halliday is a Creative Writing MA student and graduate of the Creative Writing and English Literature programme at York St John University. Her work has appeared both online and in print at Pastiche Magazine, The Cadaverine, Beyond the Walls and Turbulence Poetry. She is also co-founder of The City Fox e-zine and blogs over at Feathers in the Rain. She lives in York, where she is currently failing admirably at writing her first novel.
MORE: Website | The City Fox
LF #058 © Kathy Halliday. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, February 2014.
