May was sat by herself in the front room. The half-sized coffin, resting on two chairs like a mesmerist’s audience volunteer, was by the window at the room’s far end. Her baby’s sleeping face looked grey, suffused by dusty light decanted through the nets. She’d no doubt look all right when she woke up. Oh, stop it, May thought to herself. Just stop. Then she began to shake and cry again.
The cruellest thing was that they’d brought her home. After a week May’s child had been sent back to Fort Street from the remote fever camp, so May and Tom had thought she’d be all right. But what did they know of diphtheria? They couldn’t even say it properly and called it ‘Dip’ like everybody else. They didn’t know that it came in two parts, or that most people got over the first only to have the next stage take them off. Weakened by the onset of the disease, they’d got no fight left when it stopped their hearts. Especially young children, so they said. Especially, May thought, the ones whose mams had kept their little boys and girls too clean. Whose mams had been concerned lest people say that they weren’t fit to take care of a child, and then gone on to prove those people right.
It was her fault. She knew it was her fault. She’d been too proud. Pride came before a fall, that’s what they said, and sure enough it did. May felt as if she’d fell out of her life, the lovely life she’d had two weeks before. She’d fell out of her dreams, her hopes. She’d fell out of the woman that she thought she was into this dreadful moment and this room, the coffin and that bloody noisy clock.
“Oh, my poor little darling. My poor lamb. I’m here, my love. Mam’s here. You’ll be all right. I shan’t let anything bad …” May trailed off. She didn’t know what she’d been going to say, hated the sound of her own useless voice making a promise she’d already broke. All of the times she’d comforted her child and told her she’d always look after her, sworn sacred oaths like every mother does then let her daughter down so wretchedly. Said she’d always be there for little May but didn’t even know, now, where ‘there’ was. Just eighteen months, that’s all they’d had with her; that was as long as they’d kept her alive. They’d joined that tragic and exclusive club folk whispered sympathetically about and yet preferred to keep their distance from, as though May were in quarantine for grief.
She wasn’t even thinking, sitting there. Thoughts wouldn’t stick together anymore, led nowhere that she was prepared to go. What filled her was a wordless, shapeless hurt, and the enormity of that small box.
There were black holes burnt in the hearthside rug that she’d not noticed, prior to today. The wicker footstool was unravelling. Why was it such hard work to keep things new?
The door being as usual on the latch, May didn’t hear the deathmonger come in. She just glanced up from studying the rug and Mrs. Gibbs was stood beside the chair, her apron showing up the dust flecks like the powdered, folded wings of a black moth. It was as if the previous eighteen months had never happened, as though Mrs. Gibbs had never even truly left the house that first time. There’d just been a change of light, a change of apron, butterflies all gone, embroidered summer’s day replaced by night. It was a ‘spot the difference’ picture
game. The baby had been switched on May as well. Her lovely copper cub had disappeared and in its place was just this hard blonde doll. And May herself, that was another change. She wasn’t who she’d been when she gave birth.
In fact, upon closer inspection May realised that the whole picture was now wrong, with nothing else but differences to spot. Only the deathmonger remained the same, although she’d put on a new pinafore. Her cheeks, like Christmas stocking tangerines, weren’t changed a bit, nor her expression which could mean whatever you supposed it meant.
“Hello again, my dear,” said Mrs. Gibbs.
May’s “hello” in reply was made from lead. It left her lips and thudded on the mat, a lump of language, blunt and colourless, from which no conversation could be built. The deathmonger stepped round it and went on.
“If you don’t feel like talking, dear, then don’t. Not lest you need to but you don’t know how, in which case you can tell me all you want. I’m not your family, and I’m not your judge.”
May’s sole reaction was to look away though she conceded, at least inwardly, that Mrs. Gibbs had hit on something there. She’d had no one to talk to properly these last two days, she thought, except herself. She couldn’t speak above two words to Tom without she’d weep. They set each other off, and they both hated crying. It was weak. Besides, Tom wasn’t there. He was at work. May’s mam, Louisa, that was useless, too, not just because her mam wept easily. It was more May had let her mother down. She’d not been a good mother in her turn, not kept up the maternal tapestry. She’d dropped a stitch and failed the family. She couldn’t face them, and they couldn’t help. Her aunt’s attempt had been an awful scene that May was keeping shut out of her mind.
As a result, May had been left cut off. It was her fault, along with all the rest, but she was stuck with nobody to tell about all that was going on inside, the frightening thoughts and ideas what she had, too bad to say out loud to anyone. Yet here she was, and here was Mrs. Gibbs, a stranger, outside May’s immediate clan or any clan as far as May could see, except that of the deathmongers themselves. Mrs. Gibbs seemed outside of everything, as carefully impartial as the sky. Her apron, deep and private like a night, or like a well, was a receptacle that May could empty all this horror in without it ringing round her brood for years. May raised her sore red eyes only to find the other woman’s grey ones gazing back.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know how I shall get over it. They’re burying her tomorrow afternoon and then I shan’t have nothing left at all.”
May’s voice was rusty, cracking with disuse, a crone’s voice, not a twenty-year-old girl’s. The deathmonger pulled up the fraying stool, then sat down at May’s feet and took her hand.
“Now, Mrs. Warren, you listen to me. You’re not to tell me you’ve got nothing left. You’re not to even think it of yourself. If nothing’s left, what was your child’s life worth? Or any of our lifetimes, come to that? It’s all got value, else none of it has. Or do you wish you’d not had her at all? Should you prefer that you’d not seen me once if you were going to have to see me twice?”
She took it in and found it was all true. Put like that, asked in such straightforward terms if little May were better never born then she could only dumbly shake her head. The lank red strands, uncombed, fell on her face. She’d not got nothing, she’d got eighteen months of feeding, burping, going down the park, laughing and crying, changing tiny clothes. The fact remained, though, that she’d not got May. She’d got her memories of her little girl, favourite expressions, gestures, favourite sounds, but they were painful in the knowledge that there’d be no new ones added to the list. And that was just her sorrow’s selfish part, her pitying herself for what she’d lost. It was her baby should be pitied more, who’d gone into the dark all on her own. May looked up hopelessly at Mrs. Gibbs.
“But what about her? What about my May? I want to think she’s up in Heaven but she’s not, is she? That’s just what you tell kids about their cat or dog when all the time you’ve found it with its back broke in the street.”
At this she wept again despite herself and Mrs. Gibbs gave her a handkerchief, then squeezed May’s hand between her papery palms, a bible closing on May’s fingertips.
“I don’t hold much in Heaven, personally, nor in the other place. It sounds like tosh. All I know is, your daughter’s upstairs now, and whether you believe me or you don’t is none of my concern and none of hers. That’s where she is, my dear. That’s what I know, and I’d not say it if I wasn’t sure. She’s upstairs, where we all are by and by. Your dad’s told you already, I dare say.”
The mention of May’s father made her start. He had said that. He’d used that very word. “She’s upstairs, May. Don’t fret. She’s upstairs now.” In fact, now that she thought, she’d never heard him speak of death in any other way. Not him, her kin, nor anyone round here. They never said “in Heaven” or “with God”, nor even “up above”. They said “upstairs”. It made the afterlife sound carpeted.
“You’re right, he did say that, but what’s it mean? You say it’s not like heaven in the clouds. Where is it, this upstairs, then? What’s it like?”
In May’s own ears her voice was sounding cross, angry that Mrs. Gibbs was so cocksure about a thing as terrible as this. She hadn’t meant it to come out that way and thought the deathmonger would take offence. To her surprise, Mrs. Gibbs only laughed.
“Frankly, it’s very much like this, my dear.” She gestured, at the armchair, at the room. “What else should you expect it to be like? It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.”
May wasn’t angry now. She just felt strange. Had someone said those words to her before? “It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.” It sounded so familiar and so right, although she’d got no idea what it meant. It felt like those occasions, as a girl, when she’d been let in on some mystery, like when Anne Burk told May the facts of life. “The man puts spunk on the end of his prick, then puts it in your crack.” Though May had thought spunk would be soap-flakes in a little pile, spooned on a flat-topped cock-end into her, she’d somehow known that the idea was true; made sense of things she’d previously not grasped. Or when her mam had took her to one side and gravely told her what jamrags were for. This was like that, sat here with Mrs. Gibbs. One of those moments in a human life when you found out what everybody else already knew but never talked about.
May glimpsed the coffin at the room’s far end and knew immediately it was all junk. Upstairs was heaven with a different name, the same old story trotted out again to console the bereaved and shut them up. It was just Mrs. Gibbs’s atmosphere, the way she had, that made it sound half-true. What did she know about the hereafter? She was a Boroughs woman, same as May. Except, of course, she was a deathmonger, which gave the rot she talked that much more weight. Mrs. Gibbs spoke again, squeezing May’s hand.
“As I say, dear, it doesn’t matter much if we believe these things or if we don’t. The world’s round, even if we think it’s flat. The only difference it makes is to us. If we know it’s a globe, we needn’t be frit all the time of falling off its edge. But let’s not talk about your daughter, dear. What’s happened can’t be helped, but you still can. Are you all right? What’s all this done to you?”
Again, May found she had to stop and think. No one had asked her that, these last two days. It wasn’t something that she’d asked herself, nor dared to in the wailing, echoing well her private thoughts had recently become. Was she all right? What had this done to her? She blew her nose on the clean handkerchief that she’d been given, noticing it had no butterflies, just one embroidered bee. When she was done, she screwed the hanky up and shoved it in one jumper-sleeve, a move that meant Mrs. Gibbs letting go May’s hand, although once the manoeuvre was complete May slid her fingers voluntarily between the digits of the deathmonger. She liked the woman’s touch; warm, dry, and safe in the wallpapered whirlpool of the room. Still sniffing, May attempted a reply.
“I feel like everything’s fell through the floor and dropping down a tunnel like a stone. It doesn’t even feel like I’m meself. I sit and cry and can’t do anything. I can’t see any point in doing things, brushing me hair or eating, anything, and I don’t know where all of it shall end. I wish that I was dead, and that’s the truth. Then we’d be put together in one box.”