BRAYKE'S YARD

‘The table…’ she said once, when I mentioned the wormlike scar, butting its way through the wrinkles crowding her jaw, ‘its edge is what cut me.’ As if I hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen the blood, when she got to her feet, pouring its delta down her throat. Hadn’t seen my father step forward, his fist still raised from the blow, and spit into her face, white meringues that slid down till they joined the red current. I was fifteen. My fifteenth birthday.

#

Brayke’s Yard hid its world. Fenced off from the houses that surrounded it by plywood hoarding, its acres of potential building land languished in a stalled planning application that drifted on into all the years of my growing up. Part dump, part scrag end relic of a mechanic’s yard, its weeds and bushes had flourished in abandonment. Locals came there to drink and fuck and inject themselves among the peaceful patches of town sun that lit the lapsed Yard’s secret places, warming the lost hours. Kids fought and trapped animals, smashed bottles, lit fires and fireworks, carved their initials and profanities into the trunks of the few mature trees fringing the Yard, the oaks and ash and the lone beech, huge and storm-scarred, unlimbed down one whole side.

My father came to the Yard on an afternoon when I was about twelve and should have been home and found me throwing stones at half a pane of glass. Lifting my hand to ward off his blows, my little finger was broken. Afterwards, with my other hand, he made me clear up the glass, blood dripping off my fingers by the time I’d finished.

When I think of him, his colour was red. Declaring him. His flag.

#

She has become a great starer. Sat by the French windows, she scans the gardens where the other residents shuffle along with their sticks or glide in their chairs, propelled by staff or family. Her face when she watches is very serious, with a hint of judgement withheld. She will lift a twisted finger now and then, one of the two he broke, as if to indicate something or someone.

#

It seemed that Sean and I were friends because of what he’d seen. My Dad making his Mum cry out in the middle of the afternoon. He told me this when I first found him sitting in the mouse-holed, wheel-less driver’s seat of the looted Cortina that had been left in one of the Yard’s rusted corrugated iron workshops. Grasping an imaginary wheel, he was pretending to be a taxi driver. He offered to take me and I climbed in, among the dust and the smell of rodents. I’d never spoken to him before. I asked him to take me to the airport and, as he drove, he told me that he’d seen them together, my Dad between his Mum’s bent legs, making her cry out in their front room. He’d seen them when he’d come back early from school. Her knees, he said, were red.

Sean had no brothers or sisters. Just him and his Mum. His father had gone before he could remember him. When, a while later, we found a half-torn porn mag that someone had chucked over the hoarding round the Yard, Sean pointed to the hair between the first pair of open legs, saying that she had that, his Mum. Once, he’d seen her come out of the bath and there was blood running down her leg from the hair and I thought to myself, if that’s where Dad had been, making her cry, then the blood was no surprise.

#

Her favourite spot is by the little pond, where the acers spread delicately-fingered leaves that redden with autumn. ‘Each tree like a dress’, Mum says. ‘I always think of curtseys when I see them, of ladies at old-fashioned dances.’ They surround the whole pond with red dresses, in a show of velvet and taffeta, all curtseying to each other. We sit there sometimes, near them, in the last of the warmth.

#

One morning, in the school holidays, I found Sean with a man. In the Yard’s furthest workshop, it’s fallen wall covered in nettles and bindweed, its rotten timbers sagging. Someone had put a car seat in there and a large plastic drum, its torn label still warning that its contents were corros…

That spring, I’d seen a rat, with its young, emerging from a under sheet of plywood that covered one corner of the floor behind the car seat. They’d followed the edge of the corrugated iron wall till it gave way to nettles. When the last of them had gone, I’d taken a stick and slashed at the nettles, which had grown back since, higher than the car seat where Sean now sat in front of the man whose back was to me where I crouched, silent. The man had Sean’s hand in his, making it judder and shake. I could just see one side of Sean’s face, its expression of blank concentration. I waited, but the shaking didn’t stop. I crept away. When I next saw Sean, I asked him who the man was. He said there hadn’t been a man.

I went back to the workshop, to the car seat. I sat in it and looked at the ground which was scuffed, half a shoe print still visible in the dirt. Nothing else was there. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what I’d seen, but when I opened them, there was only the marks in the dirt. Sean wouldn’t meet me again outside school. I called at his house several times, and waited in the Yard by the wrecked Cortina, but he never came. I never saw the man again.

Someone burned the workshops the following year, piling up all the dead wood they could find. Some of the hoarding had to be torn down to let the Fire engines in. After that another man, a tramp, slept in a hut he made out of pallets and plastic sheeting near where one of the workshops had stood. I hid and watched him. Once, when he’d wandered into town to beg, I looked into his hut. Three carrier bags, stuffed with clothes, lay next to a torn sleeping bag. There was a sweaty smell, something overcooked, sour-damp and old. It was familiar, though, the smell of so much else in the Yard. It’s here, now, in the home that Mum’s in. It’s in the corridors, when the staff and their smiles have passed. In any of the rooms when you first enter. The smell of being forgotten.

#

He started digging the allotment when the bleeding had put her in hospital. Radishes and perpetual spinach. New potatoes, carrots, cabbage, sweetcorn that grew but was planted too late. Neat rows of all of them, separate, though the cabbages fattened, covering the earth between. I think of them still when I hear the word internal. ‘Inside’, my father said. ‘It’s inside her is what it means.’ How could the blood be inside you, I thought, when it was already inside you? Where was there inside you for it to bleed? He kept mine outside me, in the weeks while she healed.

The potatoes when he dug them were like treasure, white and the size of an egg. There was dark earth and then a sudden white egg, an earth-egg. Internal. When he dug the beds over that autumn, I watched him jab the fork in, stamp it in with his boot. What if there was still a white egg there, I thought? Internal.

Mum was back at home by then, her blood back on her face, like mine.

#

When I read to her, she nods at the words now and then, as if greeting them. She likes historical fiction: muskets and red uniforms and love in the big houses. Coaches she is especially fond of. ‘I would have liked to ride in a coach,’ she’s said, more than once, the vision of it taking her gaze to the window, out to where the bleak moors of her imagination are rutted by spoked wheels and galloping hooves hurrying for love.

#

‘I see you! I see you!’ As he shouted this, he held her face down, into the supper plate, smearing the mince and vegetables she’d made us across her squashed cheek and mouth. I half-stood, though I didn’t move closer. ‘What?’ he said, looking at me where I crouched until I sat back down.

#

‘We would like her to mix a bit more.’ Mary’s voice is moderate with concern. She manages the home. ‘Nothing too much, you know, but to stop her seeming so… cut off. Are you with me?’

I nod.

#

‘Shula’s left me.’ I was only half looking at Dad as I said this. He was weeding among a row of lettuce, their very green, very fresh leaves pointing proudly at the summer sky. ‘Did you hear me? Dad?’

He nodded without looking up. ‘Not surprised, much.’

‘I was.’

‘No, not surprised.’ He straightened up as he said this, looked at me, sniffed, then bent back to his lettuces.

By then, he had come to see himself as a provider. His allotment had grown over the years, amalgamating with three others. He planted every inch with vegetables, all varieties and sorts, spending his days here. He distributed his produce among local charities, entirely for free, earning only a crop of thanks, a mention in the local paper and a civic award for the reception of which he had worn a tie and jacket. Mum accompanied him in a burgundy outfit Shula chose, with Shula’s make-up covering the bruise beneath Mum’s ear.

‘Well,’ I said again, ‘I was.’

That was fifteen years ago now, and ten years after I’d smashed a full vase of carnations against his head, its thick glass and weight of water stumbling him to the ground enough for me to hit him with it again, breaking it this time and bringing him to his knees, where I had kicked and kicked him till he lay, in blood and broken glass and smashed blooms, not unconscious but not getting back up either, while Mum screamed and tried to pull me away.

#

They got a hundred and forty homes on Brayke’s Yard. Apartments, houses, garages, rectangular patches of lawn. Rich, black tarmac, exactly edged, crisp yellow lines painted along the curb, the bricks of the houses all red. Cars shone in the late spring sun when I stood there, turning slowly to see if I could find any sense of what I’d known.

Sean died in his car. Drunk, no one else involved. His mother had moved to Spain, with a man who built golf courses. She moved back recently, Mum said, to a home like hers. Another town, though, she thinks. Not too far.

Like me, Sean didn’t have any kids. Mum has told me this often, as if comparing us. Last time, she looked out of the French windows in the silence after she’d repeated, ‘No, he had no children either.’ The clouds were restless, small and white, sliding quickly west over a pale blue plane. The pond couldn’t be seen from her room, but I knew it’s surface would be scuffed by the gusting wind, the azaleas in the nearby rockery juddering with its caress.

Shula wanted children. Has them now. Three. Sean’s mother, like mine, never had any more. There were lots of children in Brayke’s Yard when I went. Playing on bikes and on the neat, narrow pavement and on the green, new-looking grass. A couple of the mothers cast suspicious glances at me when they saw me staring, trying to recognise anything of what I remembered.

I saw Sean last a few years after I’d left home. I’d brought Shula back to meet Mum and Dad. We were in the supermarket, buying some wine and chocolates to take. Sean worked there, now. I hadn’t seen him since before I left, and then only infrequently. He seemed much older, not unfriendly but guarded.

Dad sat silent through most of that meal, Shula and I offering to help with carrying the dishes because of Mum’s arm. ‘I am a fool to myself,’ she said. ‘My own hoover lead.’ Wordless, he stared at his plate, at the vegetables that he’d grown.

#

She goes once a month to his grave. Lays fresh flowers, re-arranges the dozen small white pebbles she placed there shortly after his funeral and which have, surprisingly, remained. Mostly, I don’t take her but pay for a taxi. When she returns, the staff say she’s more withdrawn than normal. When I last took her, I stared at the pebbles as she placed them back in a line at the base of the headstone. I suppose birds or vermin had moved them. Or the gardener, perhaps, the one I help pay for. He cuts the grass, attends to the shrubs and yews, plants fresh bulbs. There are no vegetables, of course, fattening among the dead. There is also very little red there.

#

It is Dad’s birthday. I’d forgotten, but Mum has placed the framed photo of him in his allotment on the small side table, under the lamp, next to her chair. He looks straight at the camera, a garden fork in one hand and the other open, spread slightly towards the vegetables growing in abundance all round him. I can never tell whether it is a deliberate pose, a modest gesture to his efforts, or simply a trick of the shot. Not long after I sit opposite her, she picks the photo up and looks at it.

‘Did you not remember?’

‘His birthday?’

‘Yes.’

‘No. No, I didn’t. Not till I saw you’d put the photo there.’

‘No.’

There’s a calmness about the weather today. Though autumn and overcast, it’s warm, and the lack of any wind has given an intimacy to things. There seems no difference between indoors and out. Not quite hushed, yet there’s a respectful, almost tender, quality.

‘D’you want to sit by the pond, Mum? It’s so still outside.’

She looks at me and for a moment I don’t think she’s heard me. ‘You broke him, you know. You did.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You broke him. You took him from himself, that time when you… the beating you gave...’ She stares from the picture out, onto the garden. ‘You took his dignity. He wasn’t the same, not again. Not after. Never. You shouldn’t have done that.’

I follow her stare out the window to where, though I can’t see them from here, I imagine the acers, in their red autumn dresses, are poised in the stillness, as if waiting for us to join them before they can start the dance.

Craig Dobson had fiction published in Active Muse, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Black Works, The Delmarva Review, The Eunoia Review, Flash, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Frogmore Papers, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Interpreter’s House, Literally Stories, Rue Scribe, Runcible Spoon and Short Fiction Magazine. He lives and works in the UK.