morning, content in our chatter. I remembered the joy of her smile and her body, when it had writhed from pleasure not pain, and of trying to be quiet so her sister wouldn’t wake. I remembered long walks back from Bankside, dodging the stray dogs and slithering in mud, comforted by nothing but the thought that she would be at the end of the journey home, and be the point of it.
All those times, all those talks, all that everything, reduced to the simplest most elemental truth.
‘We were . . . I love you, Rose. I love you so much.’
I wanted to hold her up and feed her a rabbit pie and some cherries and make her well again. I could see she was in so much pain that she just wanted to die now but I didn’t know what that would mean. I didn’t know how the world would stay together.
There was also something else I wanted. An answer that I hoped dearly she would have.
‘Sweetheart, where is Marion?’ I asked.
She stared at me a long time. I readied myself for some terrible news. ‘She fled . . .’
‘What?’
‘She was like you.’
It took a moment to sink in.
‘She stopped growing old?’
She spoke slowly, between sighs and coughs and whimpers. I told her she didn’t have to say anything, but she felt she had to. ‘Yes. And people started to notice when the years went by and she didn’t change. I told her we would have to move again and it troubled her greatly, and Manning came to us—’
‘Manning?’
‘And that night she ran, Tom. I ran after her yet she had vanished. She never came back. I have no idea where she went or if she is safe. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . . Pray, be strong now, Tom. You find her. I shall be fine. I shall be joining my brothers . . .’
I had never felt weaker, and yet I was ready to give her anything, even the myth of my strength and future happiness.
‘I will be strong, my Rose.’
Her breath was a weak draught. ‘You will.’
‘Oh, Rose.’
I needed to keep saying her name and for her to keep hearing it. I needed her to keep being a living reality.
We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone . . .
She asked me to sing to her. ‘Anything in your heart.’
‘My heart is sad.’
‘Sing sadly, then.’
I was going to grab my lute but she just wanted my voice, and my unaccompanied voice was not something I was particularly proud of, even in front of Rose, but I just sang it for her.
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow, Her frowns the Winters of my woe . . .
She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going. I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.
‘I will look for Marion.’
She closed her eyes, as if she had heard the final thing she had wanted to hear.
She was as grey, now, as a January sky.
‘I love you, Rose.’
And I searched her mouth, and the line between her pale, blistered lips for the slightest curve, the slightest response, but she was still now. The stillness was terrifying. Motes of dust were the only things moving.
I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.
London, now
I still feel weak. My head throbs. I walk. I think it will help ease the memories of Chapel Street. I walk to the antidote: Hackney. Well Lane. Now called Well Street. The place where Rose and I first lived together, before the years of misery and separation and plague took over. The cottages and stables and barns and pond and fruit orchards are long gone. I know it isn’t healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over, but I need to see it.
I keep walking along. These must be among the busiest streets in Hackney. Buses and shoppers bustle past. I pass a phone shop and a pawnbroker’s and a sandwich bar. And then I see it, on the other side of the road – the spot where we must have lived.
It is now a windowless red-brick building, with a blue and white sign outside. HACKNEY PET RESCUE SERVICES. It is depressing to feel your life erased. The kind of depressing that requires you to rest against a wall near the cash machine, causing you to apologise to the old man guarding his PIN number, explaining that you don’t want to rob him, and deal with his stare as if he still isn’t sure.
I watch a man with a Staffordshire terrier leave the building. Then I realise what I can do. How I can make a little peace with my past.
I can cross the street and go inside.
Every other dog in the place is barking. But this one is just lying in its undersized basket. It is a strange grey creature with sapphire eyes. The dog, I feel, is too dignified for such modern garishness, a wolf out of its time. I related.
The dog has an untouched chew toy beside him. A bright yellow rubber bone.
‘What breed is it?’ I ask the dog shelter volunteer (name badge ‘Lou’). She scratches the eczema on her arm.
‘He’s an Akita,’ she says. ‘Japanese. Pretty rare. Bit like a husky, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
This is the spot, as far as I can tell. This kennel, this one with this beautiful, sad-looking dog inside, is where the room used to be. The room we slept in.
‘How old is he?’ I ask Lou.
‘Pretty old. He’s eleven. That’s one of the reasons it’s been hard to find a home for him.’
‘And why is he in here?’
‘He was picked up. He was living on a balcony to a flat. Chained up. Horrid state. Look.’ She points at a red-brown scar on his thigh where there is no hair growing.
‘A cigarette burn.’
‘He looks so depressed.’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘We never knew his name. We call him Abraham.’
‘Why?’
‘The tower block where we found him was called Lincoln Tower.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Abraham. It suits him.’
Abraham stands up. Comes over to me and stares up with those light blue eyes, as if trying to tell me something. I hadn’t intended to get a dog. That hadn’t been part of today’s plan. And yet, here I am, saying, ‘This is the one. I’d like to take him home.’
Lou looks at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want to see the rest?’
‘No.’
I notice the blotched skin on Lou’s arm – crimson and sore – and in my mind it was that cold winter’s day, in Dr Hutchinson’s waiting room, amid the other patients, as I nervously waited for a diagnosis.