MY LIFE UNDERGROUND

I do not know how long I have been dead, lying down here like this. Crossing the High Street was the last time that I was vertical on solid ground. It had been a good day: the sunlight was reflected and refracted with all the purity and burnish of a sky in late November. Birds were singing in the trees that lined the path up to the church. My husband had kissed me long and hard before I left the house only two days after our nineteenth wedding anniversary. It was a beautiful day to be alive.

The High Street was clear in both directions. I looked left and right then left again. My telephone rang, suddenly if it is ever not sudden; I forgot to look right for one last time before I launched the smart clippers of my feet off the kerb onto the dangerous tide of tarmac. I never did find out who it was that called me. The static fizz and crackle in the telephone’s earpiece drowned out the sound of the caller’s voice and silenced the engine of the approaching car. I felt nothing. I can still feel nothing. I just wanted to know that my son, my only child, would be alright.

I can hear the worm turning. I can see the blackest black that ever crept into the holes of the earth. I can smell nothing, no sodden soil or sickly rottenness; just a hint perhaps of the odours that you might find lurking in the fevered wards of hospitals. Quiet voices sometimes come down to me from the people who sit under the trees near my grave: smoking cigarettes, drinking their drinks or eating food, perhaps; or just sitting for some peace in this quiet place beneath the beeches and the yew trees. They do not think that I can hear them.

I do not know what this place looks like: I never came here when I was alive. It must have grass as well as the trees, and grave after grave with their stones and monuments. I can just picture the trees. All cemeteries have trees like that.

I have the most extraordinary dreams. It is like when you rub your eyes and see stars and think that you are seeing something beyond yourself. When they are beautiful dreams, I see limitless waves of brightly-coloured butterflies. When they are bad dreams, countless dark moths fly into my eye-sockets and lodge in my skull. Often, I dream nothing and my mind’s-eye is shut tight for what seems like an eternity.

When my boy, Lucas, was very small he used to cling to me as if he feared that I would leave him. It took my reassuring and coaxing to make him let go of my legs when I left him at nursery or, later, at primary school. He was my little limpet, I was his rock. Why was he so frightened of letting go? He was thirteen when I left him and could not wait to be a man. He would only allow me to give him a kiss on the cheek perhaps once or twice a month. Now that he must be a man, I wonder if he wishes that I could kiss him still; that I was there for him to hold on to.

It feels as if I am rising up to the surface sometimes, my face beneath the tangle of grass-roots and stones. This dark container falls away and I can almost see light. Then I plunge again into the blackness and all hint of light is lost.

*

Who was I? It seems as if an age has passed. I was a daughter, a mother, a wife. I played with dolls, I got dolled up. I doled out affection, food. Who was I? I was like every woman and no woman that you have ever known. I had a mind that took its time to make itself up. Once made up, it very rarely unmade itself.

I liked insects and spiders. How many women, how many people can say that about themselves? I loved all living creatures. I was not frightened of life. I wanted to be an entomologist when I was growing up, but this life that I loved somehow diverted that plan. Too much living to do to study beetles and grubs. I think that I can hear them rustling in the soil all around me now. This box will not let me out. This blackness will not let me see. This creeping silence wearies me.

My husband, Michael, was a good man. I was too young to settle down when we met, but settle down we did. I did not think that, if I waited, he would wait for me too long. I did not think that I would find someone else like him again. He was kind, gentle. He was an apprentice in an engineering firm in those days. We were together for three years before we married. When I left him, he was chief engineer.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Something is scraping at my skull. Rat-teeth or mouse-teeth are gnawing at my bones. There is a sharp echo in my head.

When Michael proposed, we were sitting on top of May Hill. It was June. I was twenty and he was twenty-two and the sun was shining. We had walked up the hill slowly, him swinging a wicker picnic basket laden with food. I remember his bare brown forearms bulging with the weight as he shifted the basket from one hand to another as we walked. By the time that we had reached the top of the hill, his hair was singing with sweat. I loved him for his strong forehead framed by that golden head of hair.

The white wine was warm. We looked out over the Severn’s river-plain, at the farms and the hamlets spread out below us. The river ran like a vein of silver ore through dark green stone. Michael was very quiet, just looking at the view and slowly chewing his food. The high sun shone through his hair like a halo. Suddenly he was turning to me; I could feel his warm breath on my cheek. He pressed something hard and cool into my hand and closed my fingers around it, whispering “Will you marry me? Say you’ll marry me.” I looked at him, then down at my open hand that held the diamond ring. I could not speak at first. “How did you ─? Yes, I will. I’ll be your wife,” I said at last.

My memories unwind like orange peel. I have no thoughts, just life’s afterglow. The gravediggers are tearing at the soil somewhere. I can feel the thud, thud, thud of their spades as they dig, as if the heart is coming alive in my chest again. Sound vibrates dumbly through solid earth. I would not want to be a mole.

You can never get used to this blackness. It consumes you, eats into who you are. I am becoming soil. I am becoming soil.

*

A child came to play hide-and-seek around the gravestones today. I could hear its high voice like a little bell. Perhaps it gathered flowers ─ daisies, forget-me-knots and bluebells ─ in the grass and beneath the trees as it ran and hid. Its bright voice faded away the more that I listened. Who was the child? I cannot say. I had not heard its voice before.

When Lucas was little, he used to lie in the grass in the garden and try to count each blade. “One, two, three,” he went. He always stopped at three. By the time that he had learnt how to count beyond that number, he did not want to count blades of grass any more.

Lucas: how I miss your face. Would I recognise it now if I saw it again? Something in your eyes would tell me that it was you, however old you have become.

It feels as if I am being levitated where I lie. Rising, turning, falling; there is no rest for me here. The mice have started their assault on my bones again. I am being rearranged.

My name is Rose. My name is Rose.

A sudden voice comes down: “Dad, look at her eyes; look at her eyes. They’re open. They’re following us as we walk around the room. Press that red button and call the doctor or nurse. I think mum’s waking up.”