The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

I don’t remember my treks with Mary Joplin, but by five o’clock we always ended, whatever loop we traced, nearby the Hathaways’ house. I do remember the feel of my forehead resting against the cool stone of the wall, before we vaulted it. I remember the fine grit in my sandals, how I emptied it out but then there it was again, ground into the soles of my feet. I remember the leather feel of the leaves in the shrubbery where we dug in, how their gauntleted fingers gently explored my face. Mary’s conversation droned in my ear: so me dad says, so me mam says … It was at dusk, she promised, it was at twilight, that the comma, which she swore was human, would show itself. Whenever I tried to read a book, this summer, the print blurred. My mind shot off across the fields; my mind caressed the shape of Mary, her grinning mouth, her dirty face, her blouse shooting up over her chest and showing her dappled ribs. She seemed to me full of shadows, exposed where she should not be, but then suddenly tugging down her sleeve, shying from a touch, sulking if you jogged her with your elbow: flinching. Her conversation dwelt, dully, on fates that could befall you: beatings, twistings, flayings. I could only think of the thing she was going to show me. And I had prepared my defence in advance, my defence in case I was seen flitting across the fields. I was out punctuating, I would say. I was out punctuating, looking for a comma. Just by myself and not at all with Mary Joplin.

So I must have stayed late enough, buried in the bushes, for I was drowsy and nodding. Mary jolted me with her elbow; I sprang awake, my mouth dry, and I would have cried out except she slapped her paw across my mouth. ‘Look.’ The sun was lower, the air mild. In the house, a lamp had been switched on beyond the long windows. One of them opened, and we watched: first one half of the window: a pause; and then the other. Something nudged out into our sight: it was a long chair on wheels, a lady pushing it. It ran easily, lightly, over the stone flags, and it was the lady who drew my attention; what lay on the chair seemed just a dark, shrouded shape, and it was her crisp flowered frock that took my eye, the tight permed shape of her head; we were not near enough to smell her, but I imagined that she wore scent, eau de cologne. The light from the house seemed to dance with her, buoyant, out on to the terrace. Her mouth moved; she was speaking, smiling, to the inert bundle that she pushed. She set the chair down, positioning it carefully, as if on some mark she knew. She glanced about her, turning up her cheek to the mellow, sinking light, then bent to coax over the bundle’s head another layer, some coverlet or shawl: in this weather?

‘See how she wraps it,’ Mary mouthed at me.

I saw; saw also the expression on Mary’s face, which was greedy and lost, both at once. With a final pat to the blankets, the lady turned, and we heard the click of her heels on the paving as she crossed to the French window, and melted into the lamp-light.

‘Try and see in. Jump up,’ I urged Mary. She was taller than I was. She jumped, once, twice, three times, thudding down each time with a little grunt; we wanted to know what was inside the house. Mary wobbled to rest; she crumpled back to her knees; we would settle for what we could get; we studied the bundle, laid out for our inspection. Its shape, beneath the blankets, seemed to ripple; its head, shawled, was vast, pendant. It is like a comma, she is right: its squiggle of a body, its lolling head.

‘Make a noise at it, Mary,’ I said.

‘I dursn’t,’ she said.

So it was I who, from the safety of the bushes, yapped like a dog. I saw the pendent head turn, but I could not see a face; and at the next moment, the shadows on the terrace wavered, and from between the ferns in their great china pots stepped the lady in the flowered dress, and shaded her eyes, and looked straight at us, but did not see. She bent low over the bundle, the long cocoon, and spoke; she glanced up as if assessing the angle of the dying sun; she stepped back, setting her hands on the handles of the chaise, and with a delicate rocking motion she manoeuvred it, swayed back and angled it, setting it to rest so that the comma’s face was raised to the last warmth; at the same time, bending again and whispering, she drew back the shawl.

And we saw – nothing; we saw something not yet become; we saw something, not a face but perhaps, I thought, when I thought about it later, perhaps a negotiating position for a face, perhaps a loosely imagined notion of a face, like God’s when he was trying to form us; we saw a blank, we saw a sphere, it was without feature, it was without meaning, and its flesh seemed to run from the bone. I put my hand over my mouth and cowered, shrinking, to my knees. ‘Quiet, you.’ Mary’s fist lashed out at me. She caught me painfully. Mechanical tears, jerked out by the blow, sprang into my eyes.

But when I had rubbed them away I rose up, curiosity like a fish-hook through my gut, and saw the comma was alone on the terrace. The lady had stepped back into the house. I whispered to Mary, ‘Can it talk?’ I understood, I fully understood now, what my mother had meant when she said at the house of the rich it was bad enough. To harbour a creature like that! To be kind to the comma, to wrap it in blankets … Mary said, ‘I’m going to throw a stone at it, then we’ll see can it talk.’

She slid her hand into her pocket, and what she slid out again was a large, smooth pebble, as if fresh from the seashore, the strand. She didn’t find that here, so she must have come prepared. I like to think I put a hand on her wrist, that I said, ‘Mary …’ But perhaps not. She rose from her hiding place, gave a single whoop, and loosed the pebble. Her aim was good, almost good. We heard the pebble ping from the frame of the chair, and at once a low cry, not like a human voice, like something else.

‘I bloody got it,’ Mary said. For a moment she stood tall and glowing. Then she ducked, she plummeted, rustling, beside me. The evening shapes of the terrace, serene, then fractured and split. With a rapid step the lady came, snapping through the tall arched shadows thrown back by the garden against the house, the shadow of gates and trellises, the rose arbours with their ruined roses. Now the dark flowers on her frock had blown their petals and bled out into the night. She ran the few steps towards the wheeled chair, paused for a split second, her hand fluttering over the comma’s head; then she flicked her head back to the house and bawled, her voice harsh, ‘Fetch a torch!’ That harshness shocked me, from a throat I had thought would coo like a dove, like a pigeon; but then she turned again, and the last thing I saw before we ran was how she bent over the comma, and wrapped the shawl, so tender, about the lamenting skull.

In September Mary was not at school. I expected to be in her class now, because I had gone up and although she was ten it was known that Mary never went up, just stuck where she was. I didn’t ask about her at home, because now that the sun was in for the winter and I was securely sealed in my skin I knew it would hurt to have it pulled off, and my mother, as she had said, was a woman of her word. If your skin is off, I thought, at least they look after you. They lull you in blankets on a terrace and speak softly to you and turn you to the light. I remembered the greed on Mary’s face, and I partly understood it, but only partly. If you spent your time trying to understand what happened when you were eight and Mary Joplin was ten, you’d waste your productive years in plaiting barbed wire.

A big girl told me, that autumn, ‘She went to another school.’

‘Reform?’

‘What?’

‘Is it a reform school?’

‘Nah, she’s gone to daft school.’ The girl slobbered her tongue out, lolled it slowly from side to side. ‘You know?’

‘Do they slap them every day?’

The big girl grinned. ‘If they can be bothered. I expect they shaved her head. Her head was crawling.’

I put my hand to my own hair, felt the lack of it, the chill, and in my ear a whisper, like the whisper of wool; a shawl around my head, a softness like lambswool: a forgetting.

It must have been twenty-five years. It could have been thirty. I don’t go back much: would you? I saw her in the street, and she was pushing a buggy, no baby in it, but a big bag with a spill of dirty clothes coming out; a baby tee-shirt with a whiff of sick, something creeping like a tracksuit cuff, the corner of a soiled sheet. At once I thought, well, there’s a sight to gladden the eye, one of that lot off to the laundrette! I must tell my mum, I thought. So she can say, wonders will never cease.

But I couldn’t help myself. I followed close behind her and I said, ‘Mary Joplin?’

She pulled the buggy back against her, as if protecting it, before she turned: just her head, her gaze inching over her shoulder, wary. Her face, in early middle age, had become indefinite, like wax: waiting for a pinch and a twist to make its shape. It passed through my mind, you’d need to have known her well to know her now, you’d need to have put in the hours with her, watching her sideways. Her skin seemed swagged, loose, and there was nothing much to read in Mary’s eyes. I expected, perhaps, a pause, a hyphen, a space, a space where a question might follow … Is that you, Kitty? She stooped over her buggy, and settled her laundry with a pat, as if to reassure it. Then she turned back to me, and gave me a bare acknowledgement: a single nod, a full stop.

The Long QT

He was forty-five when his marriage ended, decisively, on a soft autumn day, the last of the barbecue weather. Nothing about that day was his plan, nothing his intention, though later you could see that every element of the disaster was in place. Above all, Lorraine was in place, standing by the cavernous American fridge, stroking its brushed steel doors with one lacquered fingertip. ‘Do you ever get in it?’ she said. ‘I mean, on a really hot day?’

‘It wouldn’t be safe,’ he said. ‘Doors could swing shut.’

‘Jodie would miss you. She’d let you out.’

‘Jodie wouldn’t miss me.’ He understood it only when he said it. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s not been that hot.’

‘No?’ she said. ‘Pity.’ She stretched up and kissed him on the mouth.

Her wine glass was still in her hand and he felt it roll, cool and damp, against the back of his neck, and make a creeping down his spine. He scooped her against him: a motion of ample gratitude, both hands around her bottom. She murmured something, stretched out an arm to put the glass down, then gave him her whole attention, her open mouth.

He had always known she was available. Only not found her alone, on a warm afternoon, her face a little flushed, three glasses of Vinho Verde from complete sobriety. Never alone because Lorraine was the sort of girl who moved in a crowd of girls. She was round, kind, downmarket for the neighbourhood and easy to like. She said droll things, like, ‘It’s so sad to be called after a quiche.’ She smelled delicious, and of kitchen things: plums and vanilla, chocolate.

He let her go, and as he relaxed his grip he heard her tiny heels click back on the floor. ‘What a little doll you are,’ he said. He straightened to his full height. He was able to picture his own expression as he gazed down at her: quizzical, tender, amused; he hardly recognised himself. Her eyes were still closed. She was waiting for him to kiss her again. This time he held her more elegantly, hands on her waist, she on tiptoe, tongue flickering at tongue. Slow and easy, he thought. No rush. But then, crudely, his hand snaked around her back, as if it had a will of its own. He felt for her bra strap. But a twist, a flinch told him, not now, not here. Then where? They could hardly shove through the guests and go upstairs together.

He knew Jodie was rattling about the house. He knew – and he acknowledged this later – that she might at any moment blunder in. She did not like parties that involved open doors, and guests passing between the house and the garden. Strangers might come in, and wasps. It was too easy to stand on the threshold with a burning cigarette, chatting, neither here nor there. You could be burgled where you stood. Picking up glasses, she would push through groups of her own guests, guests who were laughing and passing mobile phones to each other, guests who were, for Christ’s sake, trying to relax and enjoy the evening. People would oblige her by knocking back what was in their glass and handing it over. If not she would say, ‘Excuse me, have you finished with that?’ Sometimes they made little stacks of tumblers for her, helpfully, and said, ‘Here you go, Jodie.’ They smiled at her indulgently, knowing they were helping her out with her hobby. You would see her off in her own little world, her back to everyone, loading the dishwasher. It was not unknown for her to run a cycle before the party was an hour old. The time would come, after dusk, when wives got maudlin and husbands boastful and bellicose, when spats broke out about private schooling and tree roots and parking permits; then, she said, the less glass there is about, the better. He said, you make it sound like some pub brawl on an estate. He said, for God’s sake, woman, put down that wasp spray.

All this he thought, while he was nibbling Lorraine. She nuzzled him and undid his shirt buttons and slid her hand over his warm chest, and let her fingers pause over his heart. If Jodie did come in, he was just going to ask her quietly not to make a scene, to take a deep breath and be more French about it. Then when the people had gone home he would spell it out: it was time she slackened the rein. He was a man at his peak and must see some pay-off. He alone by his professional efforts kept them in hand-built kitchens. He was pulling in an amount seriously in excess of anything she could have expected, and his shrewdness had made them near as dammit recession-proof; who could say the same, on their patch? And after all, he was prepared to be fair. ‘It’s not a one-way street,’ he would say to her. She was a free agent, as he was. She might want an adventure of her own. If she could get one.

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