The coroner’s office released Betty’s body for burial in mid-July. The ceremony took place on a Wednesday afternoon. There were neighbours, and men from Bob’s factory, and some of Betty’s family had driven across from Wakefield. Stella had already said she would not come and there was no one turning up from the nursery in London. Not that anyone from Medicine City would have been made to feel at all welcome. Bob had even insisted that Betty be buried in an adult-size coffin. He was after an ordinary and present sadness, on this day of all days. Nothing remarkable. Nothing out of true. He had spent too many years trying and failing to accommodate the future.
The hearse crawled past us as we climbed the hill to the cemetery. Bob was ahead of me, walking arm in arm with Billy Marsden. I was making conversation with a Wakefield cousin whose name I had already forgotten. The road was muddy, slippery from recent rains, but the weather could not have been brighter. White shreds of cloud lay over Snay Booth while here, in the lee-side of the valley, the air was all mown grass and woodsmoke. The lane rose between high hedges and came to a plateau overlooking the southeast corner of the town. The hedges fell away and a low dry-stone wall marked the cemetery boundary. There was nothing special about the place, no planting, no effort at funerary architecture. The headstones, all of an equal height, suggested a bizarre crop left ignored in a field gone fallow. But smoke from the chimneys below the hill was filling and swilling the valley with washes of desaturated blues and pinks, and with such a view before me it was possible to feel attachment to this land. Even love.
The coffin was absurdly light, of course. How little Betty was secured in that great big black box I could not imagine. I took the head end, Bob beside me, some cousin of Stella’s at the rear and Billy Marsden beside him, and it was no effort at all for the four of us to process across the damp, uneven ground to where the earth had been heaved up. I was afraid she’d shift, slumping to the foot of the box, or its head. But the weight, though absurdly little, stayed steady on my shoulder. What, I wonder, did the other bearers think? Down the coffin went, into its hole, and far too slowly. The weight of the box had the workmen confused.
And Betty’s burial was only the beginning. There was tea to get through at the Arms, and seeing the Wakefield mob off at the station, and back to the Arms for a drink with the fellows at the factory.
By the time I’d tucked Bob in and set off for my own room, I was much too tired to deal with Jim. And Jim, of course, having spent the whole day stuck inside (I wasn’t risking him being discovered on this day of all days) was just about ready to climb the walls. Failing them, the curtains.
‘Come down. Now.’
Jim stuck his plastic tongue out at me.
‘You’ll get me into trouble.’
‘Nah.’ Jim swung from fold to fold, idly, experimenting. His whole environment was one giant climbing frame. He was only five inches high and can’t have weighed much above a pound. This gave him a power-to-weight ratio even more monstrous than the one he’d expected to enjoy on Mars, gambolling about like a toddler in less than half Earth’s gravity.
‘We’ll go to the cemetery together in a couple of days,’ I promised him. ‘You can say your proper goodbyes to Mum.’
Jim swung, missed and dropped onto the dressing table, knocking my wallet onto the floor.
‘For heaven’s sake.’
Jim sat on the edge of the table, swinging his legs as he watched me retrieve it. ‘Sorry, Stu.’
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.
Jim’s restitution was not total, and Jim himself was aware of the gaps. He frowned, struggling to assess this great imponderable: how did he feel?
‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Angry, mostly. That she went through all that, only to die like… that.’
Jim’s sincerity shortfall was partly real (he was only a toy, after all), partly a problem of perception. However profoundly he might feel things in his plastic state, he could only ever express those feelings through a plastic mouth, and at a comically high pitch. How deeply can you rate the grief of someone who sounds like a cartoon mouse?
Jim sensed our conversation was going nowhere and, ignoring me, climbed up onto the shelf under the window. He traversed along my books, looking for something to read. I think he was after some inspiration for his storytelling because the volume he lit on was Betty’s pocket hardback edition of the Aeneid. He grabbed the top of the spine and leaned back, angling it out from the shelf.
I stepped forward and rescued the book before its binding tore any further in Jim’s tiny, crudely articulated hands. Jim, dangling one-handed off the spine, let go. He fell, picked himself up and ambled over to the fireplace, where he had his cushion. ‘I could have got it.’
‘You were breaking it.’
‘I’m careful.’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘I’ll be full-size again one day, so just you watch it.’
‘And back in your right mind, I hope.’ I laid the book out for him, not too near the fire, for fear his joints might soften, and while Jim read, scooping back the onion-skin pages as delicately as he could with mitten-fused fingers, I laid out the paints I had bought that day in Halifax. Humbrol’s enamel range offered good approximations of the regulation colours of Jim’s uniform. Jim’s appearance seemed to have been based on his last moments aboard the Victory. His overall was of a piece with his flesh, his boots sealed seamlessly around his calves. His face, though rendered impassive, still carried – unless this was just my imagination – a faint ghost of my brother’s death-terror.
I tested the brushes I had bought against my palm. Jim watched me, suspicious. ‘If it tickles, I’m not doing it.’
‘All right.’
‘I don’t know, Stu. Aren’t all those colours going to mark me out?’
‘Desaturated blues and black? This lot will camouflage you, if anything.’
‘What colour are you going to paint my face?’
‘I’m not going to paint your face.’
‘I’m not having that flesh-pink stuff. I’ll look like a Band-Aid.’
Downstairs, we heard movement. Other tenants, maybe, or the landlady herself. We sat in silence, waiting for the coast to clear.
‘This is odd,’ Jim murmured. I glanced over and saw he had worked his way through the book to the bookmark – Betty’s appointment slip from the Gurwitsch Hospital. He had it spread out over the start of Book Six. I came over.
‘Look at the date.’ Kneeling on the paper, Jim reached and tapped its top right-hand corner.
‘What?’
‘Mum was already reborn by then, wasn’t she?’
I looked at the date. ‘So?’
‘So she wasn’t attending appointments at the Gurwitsch. She was well past all that.’