Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

There would be more to do, of course. Michael lay out on the grass for a long time, dozing and thinking, the sun washing him with calm. He glanced at the pool once or twice, fascinated by the tinting of the water around Gordon Brookes’s submerged head, until he vomited again. He got up and stretched, made his way into the bathroom of the pool pavilion and washed himself all over. He thought further. There was so much to think about, so many crucial details that he must get right that his head was now filling entirely with them; there seemed to be no space left now for simple terror about the next stage. Nor could he afford to be appalled. He was beginning to realise that if he carried on being sick he would not be able to see the thing through. So he would have to behave as if a part of himself were simply absent. It would be like acting. Neither outrageously callous, nor miraculously calm, just acting. Only in that way would he be able to do what had to be done, but it would not be him . Something at his core would be uninvolved.

He presented himself almost nonchalantly at the kitchen door. Inside, the heat was as thick as paint. Steph and Charlie were dozing in the Windsor chair, apparently stupefied by strawberry fumes and just waiting to melt down completely. Jean looked up, with a hot frown, from stirring the glooping, crimson, boiling bath on the stove. She scraped a tide of scum off the surface of the jam with a wooden spoon and blatted it into the sink, then moved over to the fridge and took out a saucer.

‘There are some things we have to do,’ Michael said, uncertainly. Steph opened her eyes and murmured. She had not been asleep, after all.

‘Oh! Oh, at last it’s done! It’s setting!’ Jean stood with one forefinger held up. ‘Steph, it’s done it, it’s set. We’ve got a set!’

‘Well, thank God for that,’ Steph said.

It takes forever to get a set on strawberry jam, I know that now. That day, as I got tireder and tireder, and hotter and hotter, watching the fruit boiling and waiting for a set, I began to regret embarking on the whole thing. I was tempted to tip the whole sticky mess in the bin and forget about jam altogether. Steph thought I should. It’s not worth it, she said. She went completely floppy that day, as if she were suddenly too exhausted to take anything in. Bin it, she said. But you can’t, can you? You think: if this next little test on a saucer popped in the fridge for a minute doesn’t set, it’s never going to. If this one doesn’t set I’m binning the lot and I’m giving up on jam, full stop. And of course the next test doesn’t set, but you don’t carry out your little threat to yourself. You realise the threat came from the part of yourself that wants to see you fail, and the better side of you thinks: oh no, I’ve gone this far- I’ve picked fruit and hulled it, measured sugar, washed and warmed jars, I’ve stood here stirring and testing till I’m at boiling point myself- I’ve made too much mess to give up on it all now. But even as you stand there knowing you’ve got to see it through, you’re starting to wish you’d set about it differently. Added pectin from a jar, used some apples or red currants, something. You begin to think you’ll never, ever get a set and somehow it’s your fault. And then suddenly it sets. So it’s all come right in the end, and the struggle has been worth it. Then you understand that this combination of self-chastisement and wisdom after the event was not helpful in any way whatsoever.

We very much regret the vicar, all of us. I’m going to put down as exactly as I can what happened, and then you’ll see that although Michael did it, it’s impossible to say who was responsible. Was it Steph’s fault for bringing the vicar here? She had no idea that he and Michael had, as it were, met before. Mine, perhaps? I’m practically an old woman, but could I have done anything to prevent it? The shock of this stranger turning up with Steph and Charlie was considerable, the shock when he suddenly lashed out at Michael more considerable still, but I am not saying I was too shocked to know what was happening. It simply did not occur to me to do anything other than what Michael asked of me. I wanted to do as he asked. But suppose I had resisted, or said something to Mr Brookes right at the beginning such as, Oh, now, let’s all calm down, we can sort this out, surely? But no, I just went back into the house as Michael told me to. And look, even if Michael had instead forced me into the house and threatened me with violence if I tried to interfere, I still wouldn’t have been able to prevent what happened, so where’s the difference? So I, and Steph too- we did what he told us to. We went into the house and got on with the jam.

So, was it Michael’s responsibility, entirely? Not in my opinion. He responded to a crisis, that is all, and in the only way open to him. Because that man would have got the police down here, and that would have been the end. By then there were too many things to answer for: the church figures, Miranda, the house, the money. Not to mention Michael’s previous misdemeanours, of which I had heard the gist. What would have happened to us then, Charlie included? Michael was only seeking to protect his own, and why should that be considered an admirable impulse in some circumstances and not in others?

But it was a puzzling, upsetting day, and the difficulty in getting the jam to set was just a small part of it. And it may sound trivial, but when I got the jam to set it changed my outlook. I suddenly believed that we could achieve anything, and come out of this mess all right, and more than that, I saw that we absolutely had to. Had to. It all became clear.

What happened was this. We had to give immediate consideration to the unpleasant fact that it was a very hot day. Now please do not think I write of this with anything like relish. We were all horrified by what had taken place, all but immobilised by the magnitude of it, as well as filled with disgust at its implications. But it had to be thought of. The degrading of flesh is horribly quick. Well, you know what would happen to meat left out on a hot day. In a matter of a few hours the man’s presence would be obvious. So after we had talked the whole thing over and made decisions about how to proceed, Michael went back outside, pushed the wheelbarrow into the shallow end of the pool, then he dragged the body to the edge of the steps and hauled it up into the barrow and managed to pull it back up onto the grass. Then I helped him drag Mr Brookes’s clothes off him. That was when I first cried, at the sight of his dripping fawn socks and sorry green underpants. It was so sad. I thought of him getting dressed that morning, not knowing what would happen, and it seemed so unfair. The world is deceptive, it looks so solid, yet people can leave it so abruptly. Perhaps that is the purpose of vicars, actually, to explain that to the rest of us. Steph picked up his broken glasses and the panama hat from the front drive and I took the hat with the clothes, got the worst of the stains out and hung everything over the Aga to dry off. Together she and I raked over the gravel where they had kicked it about fighting, while Michael took the wheelbarrow with the body in it and pulled it off the grass and up the steps into the pool pavilion, out of the sun. The bathroom had no window and was quite cool, and he managed to tip the man into the bath, where at least he would be out of sight, for the time being.

Then I had a brainwave. At least the other two said it was a brainwave, but to me it seemed suddenly obvious. I remembered that there were sacks and sacks of salt tablets for the water softener lying stacked in the utility room. I had been reading up about preserving methods; the jam, you see, using sugar, is one way of preserving fruit, and of course salting is what you do to meat or fish. The sacks weighed a lot, over 20 kilogrammes each. Steph could barely lift one, and Michael did not let me even try. But she and Michael between them, using the barrow again, fetched nine or ten sacks of the salt and emptied them over the sorry sight in the bath, packing it in all around him. He was completely covered, which made us all feel much better. Even more important, we could be confident that he would not smell.