INVITED

‘So, what do I write back?’ said the girl.

Abigail turned on the dressing table lamp to compensate for the setting sun. The face powder pot was knocked askew, its contents spilled across the glass surface as if it too had had a coughing fit at the sound of that name, spoken out loud after all these years. 

‘You are cordially invited, it says. That’s mental. You’d think it were a wedding, not a memorial service. I s’pose it’s different for people with OBEs.’ The girl bounced into position on the squeaky mattress.

Perfumed particles floated in the air, like memories – some more fragrant than others.

‘What a blasted waste.’ 

‘I don’t know, ninety-eight years is like, forever. Come on, Nana, you must write something back. I’ll do an email for you. Wasn’t she a member of Parliament, or whatever?’ 

‘I’ll send a telegram, or carrier pigeon, saying, “I do not remember her fondly.”’

The girl chuckled and held the black card up like she was knee-deep at an archaeological dig. ‘It’s 2010, Nana, not the Dark Ages.’

‘History never was your strong suit.’

‘Look at that gold lettering pressed into the paper. I never even knew you had a best friend called Marion.’

‘I don’t. I didn’t!’ 

‘Alright, alright, keep your wig on, I’m just intrigued. It’s like one of those Agatha Christie novels you gave me. She was from your time, wasn’t she?’ 

‘Cheeky. I met the writer when I was about your age. Your great great grandmother was a nurse alongside her in World War I and II.’

‘Nice,’ said the girl, untouched by the fluttering pages of her remarkable history. She bounced off the bed (“You’re like some kind of rubber ball!”) and kissed the white cloud of wisps the old woman had been attempting to put into a bun.

‘Let me, that’s what I’m here for.’ The girl began combing as gently as her youth would allow. Abigail tried not to flinch, but when you are not used to human contact it is hard to pretend to like it. For the girl, she would always try; it was the least Abigail could do. She was almost a woman herself now and pierced in places that should be reserved for livestock. Perhaps the girl thought such adornments would protect her. She thought wrong.

‘I see you have your war paint on again today, my dear.’ 

‘You’re amazingly sharp for someone who’s half blind. We feminists need to be a bit scary don’t you think?’

Abigail laughed. The girl didn’t know what that struggle looked like. The young these days only had one battle to fight, with themselves. Look where it got them, impaled by metal in every orifice, hiding behind fringes and betraying their comrades with touched-up photographs. Feminism, ha! 

‘Nana, you are going to have to get back to the family. Say something.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Because it says on the back that it was her dying wish, hand-written and everything.’

‘Vindictive bitch.’

‘Nana!’

Outside, Cathedral bells chimed, and a group of rosy-cheeked do-gooders battled the elements to sing about, ‘tidings of comfort and joy.’

‘Can’t I just send one of those sad-faced emojis?’

‘What’s your problem with her anyway? Not like you to be such a bad-ass.’

‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’

She met the girl’s gaze reflected in the oxidized mirror, the silver worn but defiant, like its owner. The outline of her, uncreased and seventeen made Abigail gasp. She had been that age when the ‘unexpected turn of events’ (as if it were no more than a raised eyebrow, a trip on a pavement, a train taken to the wrong destination, and don’t you ever come back!) had taken place. This girl, with her sing-song voice and innocence, the knowledge shared would kill something inside her, the best part.

Snow, nature’s chambermaid, threw sheets of white down on to the pavement, adding an eerie brightness to the streetlamps. 

‘You’re not going anywhere until this lets up.’

‘Don’t sound so disappointed. I’m glad. More time to interrogate you. There, you look so pretty now.’ The girl gently patted Abigail’s brittle shoulders and her bones creaked at the weight of love and respect that she didn’t deserve.

‘How much did I spill?’

‘Nothing really, I’m waiting for the T, the goss, the big reveal.’

‘No, idiot child,’ they smirked, ‘the face powder. Can’t have that going to waste over a silly death notification. At my age it’s all you get. Lucky if there’s anyone left to die.’

The girl mopped up the make-up with a tissue. 

‘You’ve hardly spilt anything, as per usual.’

‘You should join the police force when you are older. You love prying into people’s lives, opening their mail, etcetera.’

‘First of all, Mum tells me I have to, and second, I just might, if I don’t become an ‘influencer’.’ The girl sat back on the bed; dust puffed off the pink blanket.

‘And just who would you influence?’

‘Old ladies who have trouble sharing.’

‘Your lot share too much.’

‘Careful Nana, I think I just heard a full stop at the end of that sentence. You know how we Gen Zs don’t like the use of the full stop. Very aggressive.’

Abigail threw her ivory hairbrush in the girl’s general direction. It made a cracking noise as it landed on the Victorian tiles of the fireplace. The wood in the hearth was covered in a layer of soot. A memorial to the man who had laid it twenty years ago, just before he went out for milk and never came back. Heart attack. ‘Just like that,’ they said, ‘in the dairy aisle,’ they said.   

‘You’re a good shot for an old crone.’

The girl tucked her legs under her rear with alarming speed. Abigail could tell her to slow down, but there was no point, at that age she too had been a meteor. It was the way it ought to be. The young would give up before they started if they knew that the prize at the finishing line was more questions than answers. 

The past should burn.

‘Let’s light the fire.’ 

The girl seemed to understand the significance of this suggestion.

‘I don’t know. I mean it is as cold as Siberia in here, but Mum said…’

‘Forget your mother.’

‘Nana!’ Esteem squealed up in her voice.

‘Come on, light the bugger! I know you smoke; I can smell it on that raggedy cardigan you cover in bathroom air freshener. Come on.’

Although the girl was in soft focus, Abigail could sense a collaborator’s smile spreading across her face. 

‘I’ll only light it, if you tell me what happened with this dead Marion. I don’t care how bad it is. I can take it.’

Perhaps her pretend rebel of a great granddaughter did have the shoulders to bear it. But should she? There was no one left. Once she was gone the truth would become nothing, as if it never was, as if it never happened. When she died – which had better be soon because these bones could fracture no more – this girl, sitting in front of her like an excitable praying mantis, would never know her birthright.

‘After I tell you, you might not like me very much.’

‘Ooh, intriguing.’

‘You won’t want to visit anymore.’

‘Don’t be mental.’

‘I don’t know why you spend your valuable time hovering around a fossil anyway. It’s creepy.’

The girl pulled her cardigan sleeves over her hands and shrunk by inches. Abigail wanted to retract what had needed saying. Soon she wouldn’t be here every day after school, soon the girl would have to be as brave as the war paint she hid behind.

‘O.K. I’ll tell you.’ 

The girl pulled out a Zippo lighter and a packet of Rizla papers to use as a wick. A metallic sound, gas ignited, and soon unimaginable loss began to spark and hiss. Abigail saw her husband kneeling, right there by the hearth, saying, ‘Light it when I’m gone. Should keep you warm ‘til I get back.’ 

The girl pushed Abigail’s wheelchair up to the fireside and tenderly tucked the misshapen blanket she’d knitted for her around broomstick legs. Then she sat back on the edge of the bed. The bed had been upgraded to a larger size in the interim years and was dangerously close to the hearth. It was as if the objects in the room had grown fat on the emotions of the hermit who lived there.

‘It was the summer of ’28 in Bath. The whole country, the world was drunk on possibilities – except the sodding Germans, of course. The Great War was behind us, The Great Depression ahead, and Hitler was just some snot-nose sociopath trying to sell sketches on street corners. I was seventeen, full of vim and vigour. Amelia Earhart had just flown across the Atlantic and there was a sense that anything could happen. Women had just got equal franchise. Do you even know what that is, dear girl? It meant I only had to wait until I was twenty-one to vote out some of the sexist buggers in parliament. Marion was my oldest school friend, and we were going up to St Anne’s College, Oxford, to start our degrees in the autumn. All very radical, paving the way for you to be able to pierce delicate parts of your anatomy and protest about the rights of sunflowers, or whatever this week’s cause is.’

‘Nana!’

‘But in the build-up, we were earning money in the Roman Baths. It was a fun job: handing out the towels, comparing bodies and what not. We looked very different from one another; Marion was blonde and rosy – quite buxom, and I was a dumpy redhead, a lot like you.’

‘Nana!’

‘But we were a team. Where I went, she went. Our parents used to call us twins. We’d done the lot together, you know: fallen out of trees, rebelled at school, built huts with our bare hands. Normal teenage girl stuff.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Well, that bond was tested when, one day, into the spa reception walked a very handsome and enigmatic chap.’ 

‘A player?’

‘If you could call an anti-fascist, youth leader with magnifying glasses over his eyes and a dirty old donkey jacket on his back a player, then yes. He talked a lot about Marx and Lenin, while dropping three shillings and six pence on the counter to bathe in the springs. We didn’t notice the dichotomy; I suppose our hormones got in the way of judgement. Marion and I had never competed over anything before, but when that young man appeared, well, you’d have thought he was the last bag of sugar in the village.’

‘Was there a bitch fight?’

‘No dear. It was so much worse than that. It was heart-breaking; Marion was probably the person I loved most in this life.”

‘Get you, bi-Nana!’

Abigail silenced her great granddaughter with a look so cold that the girl turned to warm herself by the fire. The child had yet to find that kind of friend in life, but she was out there. Unless… what if Abigail was this girl’s person? Well, they couldn’t have that; the old woman would not be here for the milestones. The wood in the hearth spat in agreement. 

‘His name…?’

Goodness, how peculiar, she couldn’t say his name out loud. She tried again, but she couldn’t utter it. We will never speak of him. We will never speak again.

‘Nana? O.K.? Nana?’

‘Yes dear, so sorry. His name escapes me.’

‘You were panting.’

‘Don’t fuss so much! Pass me the smelling salts, they’re on my dressing table.’

The girl scrambled to her feet, returning moments later with a vial, the contents of which were so pungent that the teenager became distracted from her former concern. 

‘So come on. What happened to Mr Donkey Jacket?’

Abigail shifted in her wheelchair and tried to sit up straight.

‘Well dear, we killed him.’

Silence. The pause that follows the final moments of a performance before the curtain comes down when the audience isn’t quite sure of themselves. Do they clap now? Or is there another move, another joke, another soliloquy to follow? The girl broke into raucous laughter befitting a giant, seemingly impressed by her clever Nana and her twisty tales, made up on the spot and, look at that, it wasn’t even Halloween. 

Abigail concentrated on not crying.

‘We killed him.’

The orange flames made a grab for the chimney. 

‘You’re serious?’ The girl’s fingers played tug-of-war with her cardigan.

‘I am afraid, I am. Until this moment, only Marion, myself and your great grandfather knew this, now it is a cross you will have to bear. I am so sorry. Are you very upset?’

The girl didn’t look at her, which was understandable.

‘Great Grandpa knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he help you?’

‘No.’

‘Fucking hell, Nana!’

‘No swearing.’

“Or what, you’ll kill me?”

‘Don’t be silly. Just maim you. Oh look, the truth is, the silly bugger did it to himself. He flirted with both of us; took us out to dances – separately and together – played us off each other, while somehow expertly making us feel that it was quite alright to be stepping out as a trio. All that talk of Communism, I don’t know, it seemed radical. So, we shared, and Marion and I never even allowed ourselves to discuss it. Slowly but surely, over that summer, our childhood friendship was dropped, like a coat left in a playground or a parasol on a train – not intentional, but foolish all the same. We should have guarded the coats of our friendship, they protect you from the heavy weather that follows in every woman’s life, but you just don’t know that when you are young. Silly, to have our heads turned by a mop of black hair and calculating eyes. He seemed so grown up at twenty-one. 

We were a trio for a while, over that summer. Always playing around, quite forward thinking in many ways. Probably would have done better in the 60’s. At least then we might have moved to San Francisco and lived in Haight-Ashbury. But we were just three brats from Bath, finding our way, all in love. It wasn’t like your day dear. Our times were innocent, furtive, hidden. We would splash about in the thermal spa after it closed, kiss, pet, that sort of thing. Nothing more.

‘I don’t think I want to know anymore.’

‘Really? Not eager to discover how the dastardly deed was done?’ 

The girl’s phone buzzed, making them start. 

‘Holy shit, it’s Mum.’

Both peered guiltily at the screen even though only one could see the text. 

‘She wants to know when I’ll be home for tea and to let you know that the carer you told to “piss-off” yesterday is coming back tomorrow, whether you like it or not.’

Abigail huffed. Sometimes love felt like being throttled.

‘Nana, you have to get to the end. I’ve got to go.’ The girl needed a happy ending, for this confession to have a punchline.

‘It was a hot August evening. We were tasked with closing the spa. Two teenagers, can you imagine? And he showed up, all dirty from a day of protesting for the ‘common man’. The arrogance of youth and privilege. Marion was in the changing rooms. I knew to wait for her, but it was a rare moment alone with our prize. “Come swim with me?” he said, twirling me around. I felt like a yo-yo won at the travelling fair. I knew to think of her, to wait, invite her to join, but I wanted him to myself. “Naked,” he said. I could smell alcohol as he kissed my neck. Whisky, I think.’

Abigail paused to catch her breath; the girl held hers.

‘My rational mind said “Stop!” But my dear, I am sorry, I was young once and attraction made me stupid. I was in that pool faster than you can say “air raid.” One thing led to another and, well, you have covered sex education at school?’

‘Nana!’

‘Fine. Well, he was educating me, so to speak. More than he should have, and certainly more than Marion felt he should have. I had no idea what I’d been expecting, but all too soon he’d finished the lesson. I was in shock, I suppose. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, I did, but it was not how I pictured it happening. I was disappointed. There were no tender kisses, no romance. I remember green, moss green, as I swam away underwater. Next, a splash, and Marion had come to join. As you know dear, a man cannot perform twice in so short a time. Perhaps that made her jealous. Perhaps she always thought it should have been her, not me. The whisky was his undoing. He could never have fought her off. Too drunk.

‘Later, when we were gasping by the side of the pool and he was floating, face down, she told me she’d done it to protect me, that I’d been raped. I hadn’t been raped. It was all such a ruddy blur. No one suspected the innocent girls from good homes. The papers wrote, “Drunk Communist drowns in his own high ideals.” I’ll never forget it. The word Communist was enough to deserve a drowning. It had been Marion’s idea to leave the window open, to make it look like misadventure. I left Bath soon after and came here to York. Avoid scandal and all that. The young doctor who looked after me was your great grandfather. He helped raise the child when it was born.’

Abigail hesitated; would the clever young woman understand? 

‘Are you very angry with me, my dear?’

The girl shook her head. 

‘Not with you, Nana. Did you and Marion talk about it, about Grandma?’

‘We never spoke again after that night. Not one word. I didn’t go up to Oxford after all, for obvious reasons. The shame on the family was too great. She never even attempted to get in touch. Her career soared and I imagine I was a bad memory. I never told your grandmother. God rest her soul.’

The girl picked up her phone and began tapping furiously. The snowstorm outside intensified and wind flew down the chimney, fanning the embers of Abigail’s life.

‘What are you writing?’

‘I… DO… NOT… REMEMBER… HER… FONDLY. And… send.’

‘Quite right. Quite so. All this getting “closure” business isn’t my thing at all.’ Abigail lied as she kissed the youthful hand in hers.