She’s Not There

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‘Is that what’s up with him!’ Raff got to his knees, and risked another peek. ‘She’s too busy cussing Mayo,’ he said, lying back down. They listened to Saviour’s van drive away, and Alison’s shoes clipping back to her house. Then there was just the tinkly Slingsmen tune again. Jonah gazed at Roland’s aquarium, remembering the bright, flitting fish. Four parrotfish, three angelfish and eight swordtails. The fish food had run out, so they’d fed them cornflakes, and they’d all died.

Raff sat up. ‘Who’s going to read us a story?’ His voice was very small.

‘I’ll read a story,’ said Jonah. ‘What story would you like, Raffy boy?’

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It was very hot upstairs. They went into the bathroom and Jonah stood on the lid of the toilet and pushed the window wide open. The sky was all streaky, and the birds were singing – sweet little chirps in the dusk. A couple of flies had drowned in Lucy’s bathwater, and neither of them wanted to put their hands in and pull out the plug. They brushed their teeth and took off their clothes, and Jonah bundled them all into the laundry basket, but then he took them out again, remembering that there were no clean ones. Raff got a book out of their bedroom, and they went into Lucy’s room with it, because that’s where she read to them sometimes, sitting up in her bed with a boy either side. They got in and pulled the sheet up over their naked bodies. Her smell was coming from the tiny particles of her left behind on the cotton, and in the air. Was that what a ghost was, millions of molecules, hanging together in an invisible swirl? He opened the book. It was one that they’d got out of the library ages ago, but never got round to reading, a proper chapter book, and the words looked very small and close together. Trying to get rid of the idea that Lucy was dead, he focused on the first sentence.

‘“Until he was four years old James Henry Trotter had a happy life,”’ he read. But sadness and worry gripped his stomach, and he let the book drop into his lap. Through the window, above the Broken House, he saw that the sky was finally darkening, and as he watched a single star came out.

‘Why have you stopped?’ Raff sat up and peered at Jonah’s face. Jonah looked down at the book. Then he shut it and got up and went over to Lucy’s chest of drawers.

Some of her underwear was spilling out of an open drawer, and he pushed it all back in and pushed the drawer shut. He climbed up, wedging his toes onto the wooden handles, and reached for the wire tray that lived on top of the chest. It was piled high, with letters and other bits of paper, and when he jumped back down with it, most of the papers slid out and fluttered to the floor.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Her diary.’ It wasn’t there. He sat down and gathered up the fallen papers, which were mainly printed, and to do with money: lots from Jobcentre Plus, a couple from Smart Energy, a few from something called HSBC. As he gathered them up again, he noticed a postcard from the dentist saying they should come for a check-up, a letter about a clinic appointment, and one about their overdue library books, which made him shake his head. A white, handwritten envelope stood out from all the printed pages, and he stopped piling up the papers to look at it. Their address, of course, in handwriting he recognised; and there was a prison stamp on the back.

‘What are you doing?’ Raff sounded like he might start crying again. Jonah pulled the two sheets of letter paper out of the envelope.

Hello there, Lucy

Firstly, I want you to know that I don’t blame you for refusing to testify. I don’t really blame you for anything.

Raff had come to stand next to him. Jonah looked at his brother’s feet, which were big and long-toed, like Lucy’s, and then at the date at the top of the page. The letter was from 2011, the year Roland had got sent to prison. Ages ago. He stood up. ‘I think we should go into our own room,’ he said.

It was a tiny bit cooler in their room, and not as smelly. They could hear Leonie murmuring to someone, in between big drags on her smoke, and the other person grunting now and then. Raff got into his bed and Jonah sat on the floor, the carpet rough on his bare bottom. Raff said, ‘Read the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.’

Some of the words in the poem were hard, but he knew it more or less off by heart. He tried to read it like Lucy did, in the same soft, chanting voice.

On the Coast of Coromandel

Where the early pumpkins blow,

In the middle of the woods

Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

As he read, he remembered again the feeling from the evening before, listening to Lucy’s voice: his own mother, unknown, unreachable.

Two old chairs, and half a candle,–

One old jug without a handle,–

These were all his worldly goods:

In the middle of the woods,

These were all the worldly goods,

Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Such a sad story. Such a strange, lonely man, who loves the Lady Jingly Jones, who is also lonely, with only her hens to talk to. But when he asks her to be his wife, and to share his worldly goods with her, she cries and cries, and twirls her fingers, and says no.

‘Mr Jones – (his name is Handel, –

Handel Jones, Esquire, & Co.)

Dorking fowls delights to send,

Mr Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!

Keep, oh! keep your chairs and candle,

And your jug without a handle,–

I can merely be your friend!

– Should my Jones more Dorkings send,

I will give you three, my friend!

Mr Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!’

Raff sighed and rolled over. Jonah paused, staring at the picture: the Lady Jingly Jones, with her huge, feathered hat, weeping. Why had Handel Jones left her there on that heap of stones? And why did he send her hens? And would it really be so wrong of her to get together with Yonghy? Then he wondered if Handel might be in prison, like Roland, and Angry Saturday started flashing in his head. The sexing on the table, and then the peacock, with its terrible cry, and Bad Granny’s hand, reaching for him, like a claw. Although the way Raff was breathing meant he was already asleep, Jonah started reading again.

‘Down the slippery slopes of Myrtle,

Where the early pumpkins blow,

To the calm and silent sea

Fled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

There beyond the Bay of Gurtle,

Lay a large and lively Turtle, –

You’re the Cove,’ he said, ‘for me;

On your back beyond the sea,

Turtle, you shall carry me!’

Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,

Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.’

There were another two verses, but it had got too dark to read them. Jonah sat still, feeling himself to be very small. Were the gods all talking about him, deciding whether to help him? Or had they forgotten about him? Had something more interesting come up? He closed the book and ran his finger over the title on the front cover. The black letters had been stamped into the red cardboardy stuff, so you could feel them.

THE JUMBLIES & OTHER

NONSENSE VERSES

The book had been Lucy’s mother’s book, and it was on its last legs. Lucy had Sellotaped its spine, to keep it going a bit longer. There had been a raggedy paper jacket, but it had fallen to bits. He opened it at the first page, where Lucy’s mother had written her name, very neatly. Rose Marjorie Arden. Arden, because she’d written it when she was a child, long before she’d married Lucy’s father and become Rose Marjorie Mwembe. Underneath, in much bigger, messier writing, was Lucy’s name: Lucy Nsansa Mwembe. She was still Lucy Mwembe, even though she was married to Roland. These days women who got married didn’t always change their names to their husband’s. Nsansa had a meaning; she’d told him, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

He let the book slip from his lap, tipped to one side and curled into a little ball on the floor. They hadn’t sung the song, he realised, the song she sang to them every bedtime; a kind of prayer, thanking God for the day, and asking him to look after them through the night. Glory to thee, my God this night … He sang the words in his head, picturing that old, Christian God, with his big white beard, all fatherly and silent, waiting to be noticed. Then he stopped, thinking instead about Rose. She had died a long time ago, when Lucy was a child. Lucy couldn’t remember her that well, but she remembered the bedtime song, which was an English song; and that she’d called her Mayo, a Zambian word for Mummy. She had a tiny photograph of her face in the locket she wore on her throat, showing that she’d been white, with a very straight fringe of dark hair. Their other grandmother. Was she up there with the old, fatherly God, and the angels, with their white, seagull wings? Or had she been reborn? What would she have come back as? He tried to get a sense of her, of her smile, her motherliness, but all he could get was that tiny, faded face in the locket.