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A small part of my mind remembered an alternate pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream.
Mrs. Hempstock got back into her ancient Land Rover, so bespattered with mud (I could now see, in the light above the front door) that there was almost no trace of the original paintwork visible, and she backed it up, down the drive, toward the lane.
My mother seemed unbothered that I had returned home in fancy dress clothes at almost eleven at night. She said, “I have some bad news, dear.”
“What’s that?”
“Ursula’s had to leave. Family matters. Pressing family matters. She’s already left. I know how much you children liked her.”
I knew that I didn’t like her, but I said nothing.
There was now nobody sleeping in my bedroom at the top of the stairs. My mother asked if I would like my room back for a while. I said no, unsure of why I was saying no. I could not remember why I disliked Ursula Monkton so much—indeed, I felt faintly guilty for disliking her so absolutely and so irrationally—but I had no desire to return to that bedroom, despite the little yellow handbasin just my size, and I remained in the shared bedroom until our family moved out of that house half a decade later (we children protesting, the adults I think just relieved that their financial difficulties were over).
The house was demolished after we moved out. I would not go and see it standing empty, and refused to witness the demolition. There was too much of my life bound up in those bricks and tiles, those drainpipes and walls.
Years later, my sister, now an adult herself, confided in me that she believed that our mother had fired Ursula Monkton (whom she remembered, so fondly, as the only nice one in a sequence of grumpy childminders) because our father was having an affair with her. It was possible, I agreed. Our parents were still alive then, and I could have asked them, but I didn’t.
My father did not mention the events of those nights, not then, not later.
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.
I did not ever go down the lane all the way to the end. I did not think of the white Mini. When I thought of the opal miner, it was in context of the two rough raw opal-rocks that sat on our mantelpiece, and in my memory he always wore a checked shirt and jeans. His face and arms were tan, not the cherry-red of monoxide poisoning, and he had no bow-tie.
Monster, the ginger tomcat the opal miner had left us, had wandered off to be fed by other families, and although we saw him, from time to time, prowling the ditches and trees at the side of the lane, he would not ever come when we called. I was relieved by this, I think. He had never been our cat. We knew it, and so did he.
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. But I was seven when all of these things happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the begi
Some things changed, though.
A month or so after the events here, and five years before the ramshackle world I lived in was demolished and replaced by trim, squat, regular houses containing smart young people who worked in the city but lived in my town, who made money by moving money from place to place but who did not build or dig or farm or weave, and nine years before I would kiss smiling Callie Anders . . .
I came home from school. The month was May, or perhaps early June. She was waiting by the back door as if she knew precisely where she was and who she was looking for: a young black cat, a little larger than a kitten now, with a white splodge over one ear, and with eyes of an intense and unusual greenish-blue.
She followed me into the house.
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl.
My parents, who had never noticed the ginger tom’s disappearance, did not initially notice the arrival of the new kitten-cat, and by the time my father commented on her existence she had been living with us for several weeks, exploring the garden until I came home from school, then staying near me while I read or played. At night she would wait beneath the bed until the lights were turned out, then she would accommodate herself on the pillow beside me, grooming my hair, and purring, so quietly as never to disturb my sister.
I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek.
She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.
Epilogue
I sat on the dilapidated green bench beside the duck pond, in the back of the red-brick farmhouse, and I thought about my kitten.
I only remembered that Ocean had grown into a cat, and that I had adored her for years. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I thought, It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.
A door opened in the farmhouse, and I heard feet on the path. Soon the old woman sat down beside me. “I brung you a cup of tea,” she said. “And a cheese and tomato sandwich. You’ve been out here for quite a while. I thought you’d probably fallen in.”
“I sort of did,” I told her. And, “Thank you.” It had become dusk, without my noticing, while I had been sitting there.
I took the tea, and sipped it, and I looked at the woman, more carefully this time. I compared her to my memories of forty years ago. I said, “You aren’t Lettie’s mother. You’re her grandmother, aren’t you? You’re Old Mrs. Hempstock.”
“That’s right,” she said, unperturbed. “Eat your sandwich.”
I took a bite of my sandwich. It was good, really good. Freshly baked bread, sharp, salty cheese, the kind of tomatoes that actually taste like something.
I was awash in memory, and I wanted to know what it meant. I said, “Is it true?” and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have asked, I had asked that.
Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.”
There was another question I needed answered. I said, “Why did I come here?”
She looked at me as if it were a trick question. “The funeral,” she said. “You wanted to get away from everyone and be on your own. So first of all you drove back to the place you’d lived in as a boy, and when that didn’t give you what you missed, you drove to the end of the lane and you came here, like you always do.”
“Like I always do?” I drank some more tea. It was still hot, and strong enough: a perfect cup of builder’s tea. You could stand a spoon straight up in it, as my father always said of a cup of tea of which he approved.
“Like you always do,” she repeated.
“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. I mean, I haven’t been here since, well, since Lettie went to Australia. Her going-away party.” And then I said, “Which never happened. You know what I mean.”