Story Keeper (2)

One

The black road glistened wet and shining, streaked with flickering wet rainbows. Fat wet drops danced on windshields and hoods and chassis. The two-storey brown houses huddled together, back to back and face to face, separated by crunching gravel driveways and black gates with peeling paint and rusted hinges. A bowed wire fence detached the neatness of suburbia from the wilderness of the wasteland, weighed down by brambles dotted randomly with blackberries waiting to ripen. The wasteland was barely visible from this side of the fence, but in brief glimpses a jungle of rusting and rotting machines, engines, cartons and bags, lay strewn in the long yellowed grass. No-man’s land reminded the residents that chaos waited for them if they forgot to mow their lawn or pick up their trash, take their old washing machines and fridges to the tip.

Across the road stood a grand old rambling building, golden-brown toasted brick and white cornices, landscaped gardens and electric gates. Old folks in their wheelchairs, or leaning on sticks and chrome frames, left their sterile rooms and were led out by the caretakers to appreciate the bright days. They sat on deck chairs on the smooth and perfect emerald lawn, looking out at the world, watered their personal patches of petunias, begonias, daffodils, pansies, or picked their tremulous way across to the more shaded benches.
Beside it, and removed by a row of concrete garages, a tall monstrosity of windows, neat sweeps of uniform grass out front where the ducks would come to lay their eggs in the spring under the old drooping willow tree.

The main road passed this sleepy little street in a blaze of sound and colour. Cars sped by in a confusing whirl of red, gold, green, blue, indigo and ebony. Engines rumbled and stalled, growling and screeching in a fierce battle between road, tires, and the enemies of friction. Plumes of silver spray drifted up in their wake and drenched the pavement. Looking peacefully on at this circus of noise and bustle, this riotous flaunting of shimmering metallic colour, the dead slept under the tall yew trees.
The graveyard waited so silent behind neat wooden gates and overhanging branches, the dead resting under engraved plinths and smiling stone angels. Cracked and overgrown paths wound between gravestones littered with gaudy glass stones, their patrons laid to rest before the sanitising organisation of alphabetising; a Rogers beside a Pater, a Malcolm-Smith beside an Arundel.

She road her bike slowly down the cracked and winding paths, avoiding the puddles which threatened to splash her bare legs with filthy water, letting the wheels drift lazily from side to side. Her head was bare and her flaxen hair hung limp and dripping down her back. She raised one arm up above her head, allowing the rain to run down her hand and trickle right to her shoulder blades. The branches which formed a canopy overhead sent cold drops shivering down her spine and made the path a mysterious, shadowy place in which she could hide.

She was the keeper of the stories. This place was ancient and old, full of stories without mouths to tell them. Few people now remembered those that were laid to rest here, and few people came anymore to clear their headstones. She told herself the stories as they appeared to her, keeping them alive by reciting them in her head. Nobody should be forgotten, and she would remember them all.

Two

         The attic was dusty, boxes stacked on boxes against every wall and forming precarious alleyways. The low eaves dripped with lacy cobwebs and long dead spiders balancing on their axis, the floor was just beams, planks set half a foot apart over thin sections of green baize and insulating material. A broken pram stood under a moth-eaten sheet in one corner, forlorn and forgotten. A cat scratching post with the stuffing pulled out of it nestled under the wheels, beside a typewriter with missing keys and inky blood pooling from it in a sticky gluttonous black mess.
Near the hatch and stairs, the boxes were plain brown cardboard cartons, some damp and misshapen from a patched-up leak that had been dripping all winter. A few were labelled in sexless block lettering, “Old Clothes”, “Books”, “Pictures”, and others were mysteriously blank. Near the back, the boxes were less organised, piled together haphazardly, less and less the modern cardboard cartons and more old-fashioned trunks and wooden packing cases.

         Sylva’s hair was dusty and streaked with cobwebs like strands of premature grey. Her hands were dirty from climbing across beams and eaves, opening boxes, and sitting on the floor to sift through their contents. Her pretty face was streaked with dust and her cheeks were flushed with exertion. Her eyes were lined and tired; the last few days had taken its toll on her.
Losing her favourite grandmother had been understandably a trying ordeal. It was the day she had always dreaded to imagine, had banished all thoughts of its possibility from her mind. Her grandmother was the smells of home cooking, fresh baked cookies and apple pie, the dusky Chanel perfume she wore on special occasions, and the musty smell of woollen cardigans kept in wooden drawers and cupboards. The sounds of instruction issued in her querulous voice, her knitting needles clacking away in time to the ten o’clock news, and radio plays chattering in the background while she cooked the evening meal. Now she was gone, and all that was left of her was this empty house.

She had spent the last few days sending books and clothes, jewellery, pots and pans, to the charity shops, to friends of her grandmother that lived nearby, and the local shelters. The rest of the family lived too far away to be much help, but they’d managed to come by to collect their behests nonetheless. The only time one of them mentioned her grandmother, was to say how sorry they were they couldn’t be there to help dispose of her things. Sylva was sad thinking about her grandmother not being there anymore, and equally sad that the vast majority of those that succeeded her were so unworthy.
She had loved her grandmother and spent as much time as possible with her, enjoying her quiet company as much as the safety and reminders of childhood in her home. She still couldn’t believe that she was gone, and going through her things, removing every trace of her, seemed like a gross violation.

         It was whilst amusing herself with her grandmother’s photo albums one evening in the quiet of her own tidy, perhaps compulsively so, and silent house that she had begun to feel the first shivers of unease. She really hadn’t known her grandmother as well as she’d thought. She couldn’t place or recognise half the faces in the pictures, especially in the older prints, and even when the writing on the back gave them a name she couldn’t remember her grandmother talking about them. She wished she had asked more questions, been more curious about her grandmother as a young woman, as a child, that she had known more about her as a person. She had only looked at her as the elderly grandparent that she saw before her.
The pictures were fascinating, telling a story that she could half hear, like reading a book with numerous missing pages. The first album contained posed black and white shots of people in silk ball gowns and tails, the women sparkling with jewels and the men with oiled and swept back hair. They stood in careful groupings in candlelit ballrooms, holding champagne flutes, sat on benches in sunny gardens under the trees, playing croquet on smooth manicured lawns, dressed in all in one bathing suits under sun umbrellas on windswept beaches with a cliff backdrop. Happy couples smiled outside churches, posing on the steps, by smartly polished Bentleys and carriages, sitting on ivy strewn gravestones, under bowers of roses. The same faces, a little older, stood by the altar holding babies wrapped in blankets, in lacy white gowns or tiny immaculate suits. Birthday and anniversary parties, balls, formal dinners, weddings, christenings, confirmations, family gatherings, holidays, picnics, school reunions, all documented and carefully pasted in meticulous chronological order.
In the later binders she began to see faces she recognised: her grandfather as a young man, then her mother as a baby and a child, her grandparents’ wedding anniversary with all the family smiling in their Sunday best. The albums got thinner through the years as the family moved away after her grandfather’s death and pursued their separate lives, beginning their own family albums.

There was one picture which puzzled her. Picking up the last album from the pile, it fell out and landed at her feet. She picked it up carefully, holding it by the edges so as not to make smudge marks on the image itself, and flicked through the pages of the binder trying to find its rightful place. Her grandmother had spent a lot of time carefully organising these folders and she didn’t want to spoil them. She knew how much they had meant to her. There were no gaps, no space at all for this errant photograph, but the binding was loose. Working it a little with her index finger she uncovered a cache of photographs, tucked into the leather album cover.
She began with the photograph which had escaped its hiding place and brought the others to her attention. It was a newish picture, no white edging like the older prints she had seen and the colours still bright. The subject was an unsmiling man she didn’t recognise, standing outside a cottage which rested on top of brilliant white cliffs towering over a stormy grey sea. He leant on a pitchfork, surrounded by trailing roses and neatly maintained beds of flowers. Turning it over the notation on the back, written in her grandmother’s careful hand, said “David, Sea Crest Cottage, summer 2008”.
This was all a mystery, and Sylva worked her way back through the other photographs trying to find some clue as to who this “David” was, and why her grandmother should hide his likeness.

         There were six pictures altogether. The first Sylva lay carefully face up on the table, before beginning her scrutiny of the rest. The next was older, a different man, in a tuxedo and bow tie. It had probably been taken at a party or event from the blurry faces and shining golden glasses of champagne in the background. He had grey wavy hair, a plump face with a smile barely touching the corners of his mouth, but he his eyes were cold and angry looking into the camera. There was no name on the back of the picture, from the hair styles and clothing of the people in the background Sylva thought this picture was taken some time in the 90s. She thought she detected a superficial resemblance between this man and “David” in the first picture.
The other pictures took this unnamed man back to his younger days. In the next he was standing by a pier eating chips from a newspaper packet, no smile, and the wind tousling his hair as he looked out over a grey and stormy sea dotted with tiny fishing boats. There were fewer lines on his face, and Sylva imagined him to be in his forties or fifties. The next he was in a park, holding a wriggling toddler, and looking directly at the camera. The next he was outside a cafe in the evening, the picture was sepia, dressed in a smart suit, smoking a cigar, his eyes lit up and his face alive with amusement at something unseen. The next was black and white, he was at a house party and had his arm slung round another man, they were both grinning at the photographer. The last he looked to be in his teens, the picture lined and worn, faded, and creased down the middle. He was wearing cricket whites and his face was tanned, he stood on a field beside an elderly gentleman in a pressed linen suit sitting on a bench. In the background the paraphernalia signalling cricket could clearly be made out, and the sun was obviously shining, yet neither man looked happy. The boy seemed uncomfortable, and the older man looked stern and brusque.

         Sylva didn’t know what these pictures meant. Why should her grandmother have hidden them? Why should she have kept them at all?
For the next few days, she was kept busy clearing out the old house and preparing for valuations, for buyers to call, and she didn’t think too much of the pictures. It was a strange phone call that next brought her attention back to their mystery.
It was late, Sylva had been working all day, and finally in the gloom of the evening she sat down in a house naked and stripped of its furnishings to look around her and take stock. The phone line was still connected, and Sylva had left the phone plugged into the wall jack in case she needed to contact anyone. Outside, the shadowy night began to gather strength, casting moving pictures onto the walls through chinks in the half-closed curtains. They played out a pantomime theatre in their own tongue, broken only by the sweep of headlights that passed in a soundless rush on the road outside. The bushes and trees in the garden took on nightmarish, monstrous shapes, their branches like spindly long dead arms and their shadows grey contorted limbs and sneering faces.
The bell call of the telephone broke Sylva from her reverie, sunk down on the floor with her arms resting on her propped up knees. She answered it in a rush.
“Hello?”
“Hello. Could I speak with Mrs Agnes Baker?” The man’s voice was correct, no discernible accent and no tone to distinguish it.
“Can I ask what this is regarding?” Sylva was tired and wary, assuming this was some sort of sales call or unfinished business of some kind.
“It is of a personal nature.”
“Could I have your name please?”
“She’ll know who this is. I’m an old friend.” It seemed an odd, cold of way to speak on the ‘phone, but Sylva knew she was left with no alternative but to break the bad news.
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Agnes died three weeks ago.”
There was silence on the line for some moments.
“Were you close friends?”
“No. No, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to bother you at this time.”
He was gone with a click of the handset at his end, and Sylva was left to stare at the phone in surprise.

This call took her back to the photographs. Could this be the man who she had seen there? He hadn’t been at the funeral; she had known almost everyone who attended, and she would have remembered a complete stranger. Over the next few days, with the estate agents clamouring to be able to make a quick sale, Sylva turned her attention back to the attic. She hauled down boxes, cases, old junk, and disposed of it. Her mother’s baby clothes, her uncle’s bike with training wheels still attached, her grandmother’s wedding trousseau, all kept neatly for many years, and now sent off to the tip, to charity shops, ready for new homes. It was a sad and thankless task, but she kept ploughing through. The last boxes were down, she loaded them into her car, and taking a last look at the familiar house which had now been sufficiently cleansed of all her favourite memories and associations, she drove away.

It was in going through these boxes at her leisure, some weeks later, that she came across her third clue. A box of baby clothes with a photo of a baby in her grandmother’s arms stuck to the lid of the small travelling case they were packed in. The man stood in the background, looking young and remote from the situation, unsmiling.