William Brodrick: The Gardens of the Dead

‘Of course not,’ said Nancy sympathetically She stepped behind Riley to struggle with the toggles on the rucksack. She dropped the brick inside, and left the flap open.

They walked on, coming closer to the fire. Riley wondered, Could it really be that easy? Was the future an open field? He felt a shudder of excitement. With Prosser’s money he’d buy some new shoes. He’d chuck away that camouflage jacket.

Nancy bent down, complaining about her old knees. With more groaning about her limbs, she picked up two bricks, and said, ‘It was terrible when that boy drowned and the police tried to pin it on you.

The comment was like a smack in the teeth. Nancy had never referred to that before. Like Quilling Road, it was another crater in the dark. They walked around them. But now she spoke as if she were in the laundrette with Babycham.

Smarting, Riley said, ‘Cartwright has never let me go.’ He whistled quietly because he’d strayed to the edges of truth, close enough to fall in.

‘I kno-o-ow,’ sang Nancy sharing his indignation, and he could just see her, nudging Babycham’s ribs.

Nancy put the bricks in the rucksack and Riley shrugged the shoulder straps into a more comfortable position. After that drowning, he’d expected the Major to turn up at Poplar – to target him with that old, quiet urging. But he never came. Their last meeting had been at the Old Bailey when he’d said, ‘They can lock you up, but they can’t stop you taking that first step.’ The Major had been brittle and despairing. Where was he now? What would he tell him to say to Nancy?

It was dim now, and the edges of the canal had blended into its banks. The sky had lost its colour and joined the slate on the straggling warehouses. Nancy’s puzzled voice was muffled while she rummaged near a hedge of barbed wire.

‘So that’s why they hauled you in again?’

‘What do you think?’ Riley made it sound like a ‘Yes’. He didn’t know what else to say. They hadn’t spoken of the arrest since the day he’d been released without charge. She’d been off-colour afterwards, and he hadn’t been able to read her. Suddenly she was tugging at the rucksack.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Nancy as though she were anxious for his health.

‘Fine, absolutely fine.’

Carefully she laid three bricks on top of the others.

‘Steady on,’ he rasped. ‘I’m not…’ – Stallone, Mad Max, Bruce: the hamsters’ names ran into one another like a furry pileup but a name popped out, like it was shoved – ‘… Mr Universe.’

Riley leaned forward and increased his speed, as if to get away from that reminder of Arnold. At the fire, a gang of youths brandished flaming branches. They danced and whooped and stared. A car tyre lay smouldering near the bank. It was almost dark mow. The path narrowed and Nancy dropped back, leaving Riley to move on ahead. He looked aside into the dull, smooth water. And then he thought, as if tripped. Why do I keep remembering what the Major said? Why can’t I just forget an old soldier’s hopes, his insane confidence?

‘I wonder what happened to Arnold,’ asked Nancy faintly.

‘God knows.’

There was a long, withering pause. Then Riley heard Nancy’s feet in the grass, as if she were swishing a scythe. His thoughts became bitter, remonstrating: the journey from Paddington to this point by the Cut owed a great deal to John Bradshaw – for that death had marked his soul – but who took the laurel? The Major? No, that honour went to a hamster. Even in conversion, if that is what it was, I’m a contemptible specimen.

‘That’s the lot,’ she said with resignation. One after the other she placed four bricks into the remaining space.

‘Bloody hell, Nancy’ he gasped, ‘what are you trying to do?’ He fastened the clips across his chest, linking the arm straps. After a few steps, he glimpsed the hunched figure of a man by a wall… someone who was watching him. Riley swung around, wanting Nancy’s help. ‘I’m sorry, there’s too many’ he whispered, genuinely sorry, ‘I can’t carry this lot.’

‘Neither can I.’

‘What?’

Riley couldn’t see her face. She walked slowly towards him.

He knew what was going to happen. Nancy pushed him with a finger and he fell backwards. As he left the towpath, he wondered why it was that he felt relief.

At school, Anselm had met a Jesuit teacher who considered familiarity with the life and work of John Bunyan to be a valuable adjunct to the onset of adolescence. First, that exemplar, in his youth, had been haunted by demonic dreams; second, he’d suffered a strange sickness that had made him blaspheme atrociously and want to renounce the benefits of redemption. To counter these inclinations, so often manifest in the young, the amused Jesuit would read choice excerpts from Pilgrim’s Progress, the allegory of a burdened man, fleeing a burning city.

This warm memory touched Anselm because he was sitting on a bench near the author’s tomb in Bunhill Fields. At his side sat Mrs Dixon in a long overcoat of russet tweed. She wore sturdy shoes and thick socks. A paisley scarf had been tied around her head with a knot under the chin. She’d brought Anselm to this garden of peace without a word. Thousands of tombs stood crowded among the planes, oaks and limes. The light came to them through the rafters of these winter trees.

‘I had already decided to speak to you about my son,’ said Mrs Dixon finally.

Anselm presumed he would now learn why she hadn’t mentioned George’s name at their first meeting. A jitter of excitement made him impatient. Leave it to Anselm.

‘I told someone recently that Elizabeth’s last words to me were that she wouldn’t be coming any more. That wasn’t true.’ Mrs Dixon examined the backs of her hands. ‘Elizabeth said a lot more: that she’d found Graham; that the time of the lie was over.

For a second or so, Anselm didn’t understand what had been said. His mind lay with George Bradshaw, not Graham Riley When he clicked, it was as though he’d stepped out of a musty matinee into the chilling daylight. ‘Your son?’ he asked foolishly.

Mrs Dixon nodded. Her face became blank, as if all her emotions had been drained into ajar for safe-keeping. Decisively she said, ‘But that was not the lie.’ Mrs Irene Dixon spoke softly and resolutely ‘I wish I’d stayed in Lancashire, but I went south, to start over. All that I knew had changed, because Graham’s father died in the pit, under thirty tons of coal and rock.’

Mother and child came to London, encouraged by an aunt -a seamstress – who had a house with rooms to spare, and a business with more work than she could handle. These were hard times because Mrs Dixon was a widow at barely twenty. But then she met Walter, a big, handsome man with responsibility and a house of his own in Dagenham. He was the manager of a warehouse in Bow; he hired and fired. He ruled the roost. After courting for a year, they were married, and by the end of the second year, there was a child on the way.

This is the beginning, thought Anselm. From this moment onwards, it is all an unfolding. He understood everything, but with such speed that his insight into what would happen became foreshortened, and he lost the detail. He was left with the first simple realisation that Walter Steadman was Elizabeth’s father; that Riley was her half-brother.

The two children grew up under the one roof, but did not enjoy equal favour. Walter didn’t mean it, said Mrs Dixon, but he was hard on Graham, who was not his own, and soft on Elizabeth, who was. The inequality of affection was ever present and Graham simply couldn’t understand why: they were, after all (he thought), the same flesh and blood. As Graham grew older, it became obvious: he was not a Steadman.