Warlight(45)

I went back upstairs again and opened that old brown envelope of photographs, still in my grandparents’ room. But there were fewer of them now. There weren’t the more playful, innocent ones she had shown me during an earlier summer. I saw again my mother’s serious young face under the lime bower that led from the kitchen—but later photographs, the ones I had loved best, were no longer there. So perhaps they had not been innocent. The ones of Rose with her parents and the tall man familiar from the other photographs—one, especially, of them all, in the foreign decor of the Casanova Revue Bar in Vienna, with my mother in her late teens sitting in a haze of cigarette smoke in the midst of this adult entourage, an ardent violinist bending towards her. And even a few other pictures, as if in time lapse, taken maybe an hour later, all of them in the back of a taxi, crushed together and laughing.

“That was my father’s friend. He was our neighbour, his family were thatchers,” Rose had told me when she showed me the photographs that were no longer there. I had pointed to the extra man and asked who he was. “He was the boy who fell from the roof.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

—

But now, of course, I knew who he was.

He’d been the one at my mother’s funeral, with the shy, quiet voice, who stood beside her grave and attempted to speak to me. He was older, but I recognized him from those scattered photos, where he had the same height and presence. I had once or twice seen him in the hallways of our building, a legend in the office, waiting to take one of the restricted blue lifts to a high, unknown floor, up to a landscape only imagined by most of us working there.

—

My last night at White Paint, two nights after the funeral, I went to my mother’s room, got into her narrow sheetless bed and lay there in the dark, the way she must have done, looking up at the ceiling. “Tell me about him,” I said.

“Who?”

“The person you lied to me about. The man whose name you said you couldn’t remember. The man who spoke to me at your funeral.”





THE BOY ON THE ROOF


He would look down from that sloped straw roof whenever one of Rose’s family emerged from the house to collect eggs or get into the car. The sixteen-year-old Marsh Felon had entered my mother’s childhood as a teenager because the roof of White Paint needed re-thatching. He and his father and his two brothers had roosted up there through the early summer, sometimes sunstroked, sometimes buffeted by great winds, the clan of them working with efficiency, always in conversation with never a doubt among them, myth-like in unison. Marsh was the youngest, a listener. During the winter he cut and stacked reeds, solitary in the nearby marshes, so they would be dry by spring when his brothers pierced and weaved them into the long-stem straw on the roof with pliant willow branches that they bent like hairpins.

The sudden gale had lifted Marsh and flung him off the roof, and he fell grabbing at branches of the lime bower, attempting to slow his fall before he landed twenty feet down on the paving stones. The others came down out of the loud wind and carried him horizontally into the back kitchen. Rose’s mother made up the daybed. He needed to remain immobile and not be moved. So Marsh Felon would become a resident for a while in this back kitchen of strangers.

The L-shaped room was lit only by natural light. There was a woodstove, a map of the region of The Saints depicting every footpath and river crossing. It would become his world for the weeks his brothers continued working on the roof. He heard them as they left at sunset and he woke to their loud persistent conversations as they climbed their ladders the next morning. After the first few minutes their talk was not quite audible, he heard only the laughter and yells of irritation. Two hours later he became aware of the family moving in the house, their conversations hushed. The world felt close yet distant to him. It was the way he felt even when working on the roof, sensing the great active world far away was passing him by.

The eight-year-old girl brought him breakfast and left quickly. She was often his only visitor. She would just stand in the doorway. He could see the further reaches of the house behind her. Her name was Rose. His own family had been motherless and womanless for years. Once she brought him a book from the family library. He consumed it, and asked for another.

“What’s this?” She had noticed a few sketches on the last, blank page of a book she had given him to read.

“Oh, sorry….” Marsh felt mortified. He’d forgotten his sketch.

“Don’t mind. What is it?”

“A fly.”

“Odd fly. Where’d you see it?”

“No, I make them, flies for fishing. I can make you one.”

“How? From what?”

“Maybe a blue-winged olive nymph…I’ll need thread. Waterproof paint.”

“I can get that.” She almost left.

“No, there’s more….” He asked her for paper, something to write on. “I’ll make a small list.”

She watched.

“What’s this say? You got awful handwriting. Just tell me.”

“All right. Small goose feathers. Red copper wire, not much thicker than human hair. They use it on small transformers—”

“Slow down.”

“—or dynamos. Perhaps you could bring me a needle? Also some silver foil to let it shine.”