Lydia Bell

Perpetual Summer

The summer grass on the steppe is long and thick, like reeds. When you lie down, it flattens, making the softest bed. Wild flowers are everywhere, and I have never known such space. As far as the eye can see in all directions, and it is only our small party against the elements, lights sent up into the ether.
    When I touched his sides yesterday, he shuddered. I could have slept there beside him, but I feared we would be seen. I couldn’t make a noise; I might have woken the children. At night, the sound of the wind wraps itself around the Ger, but it’s not quite enough to muffle a shout or a scream, a woman or a child crying. Besides, it’s summer, and the air is more still. The smoke from the stove rises in a column. We will have to stay here tonight again, near Bridge of Zaamar, near Tuulcol River, filthy dirty and sleeping with the goats. The boys are happy eating fermented sheep’s yoghurt at least.
    The Mongolians don’t need their privacy. There is no such thing as a non-family unit. They are never, never, never alone. It makes me lonely.

***

    The nursing home was a place of perpetual summer, Anna mused to herself as she approached in the car, her elbows swinging as she negotiated the never-ending obstacle course of mini roundabouts in the old Ford.
    It was winter, but you had to quickly take off your jacket, scarf and gloves when you entered, often sweating anyway by the time you made it to the room. In summer it was positively Club Tropicana – minus the cocktails.
    The smell mixed old-fashioned talc and decades-old sweat. The bouquet was familiar to her. It had lingered on the clothes that clogged up the attic room above the Oxfam on Tavistock Hill where she had sat on the till on turgid Wednesday afternoons in sixth-form days, reading her way round the rotating Mills and Boon rack, lifting small items of interest that took her fancy; a bone amulet, a green suede jacket that belted at the waist.
    Add that to that the strong whiff of oxidising pureed vegetable matter that sat cooling on trolleys, and the smell of disinfectant that didn’t quite cover up the smell of Mrs Lacey, who had just shat her pants in room 13, and we haven’t quite got her to the bathroom yet: ‘well, we have all these mouths to feed, and I’m supposed to be going home at seven’. They were kind enough, the nurses, but this was how it was.
    The sound was muffled, like the quietness of an airplane lounge in Bahrain at 3am. The atmosphere was similar: dominated by a sense of waiting for an as-yet unscheduled departure. The silence was punctuated by the staff’s wheedling banter and the old people’s cries, which couldn’t be hidden, but could be ignored.
    It was a strange, slumberous sort of place, and one that Anna did not revisit in her conscious mind, let alone in her dreams. No, Anna did not think of the place at all when she was not there. Her mother was dead, she didn’t have a father and she was an only child. Her family had dwindled to herself and Nan, so there was no one to ask how Nan was.
    One night, stumbling home slightly drunk on the street where she lived, she heard a terrible cry. She reeled around. The sound was coming from an open window above her. It was like an animal caught in a trap. Then she realised for the first time that she lived five doors from a nursing home and she remembered her Nan, her Nanny there alone in the bed, in the perpetual summer.
    Anna pushed open the glass door to the home, careful not to let out Mr McGovern, who always waited there with a forlorn smile on his face, a small scuffed bag wedged between his legs. To leave the premises you needed to use a code made up of numbers and letters, which Mr McGovern didn’t know, though he was once a professor in genomics.

    A nurse was at reception.
    ‘Come to see Candace? Your Nan’s been a bit upset this morning, asking where Ralph was.’
    ‘Oh right, OK.’
    ‘Yes, she said it was typical of him to abandon her to the natives when she couldn’t speak the language.’
    ‘She thinks she’s in Mongolia. They lived there. My grandfather built railways for the Russians.’
    ‘Oh yes, we know all about that!’

***

    They don’t speak my language these people. It’s a little too warm in here, where I’m convalescing, but I don’t know how to tell them not to add further logs to the stove, and I don’t want to go through all the rigmarole of silly hand gestures. I’m just too tired. And who’s that rattling a stuck drawer? The children in their Ger will wake. Then I won’t be able to sleep. And dream. Of what happened last night.
    The two tubby nurses are bumping against the beds in the room, bringing things, taking them away, always busy. The woman in the corner has no nose. Could it be leprosy? What on earth is she doing here, on the plains? She’s so terribly old.
    But I’m not on the plains, am I. That was long ago. I remember — and my body remembers. It is now a monument to love lost. And age has laid it to waste. I lie still, like a ruined temple. The source of melancholy’s river is inside my chest; it runs right through me and slows me down to nothing, and washes over the stones that are my eyes. The beautiful columns and inner chambers of my temple have crumbled and fallen, like my atrophied legs and arms, and I deserve it, I deserve it. Once I was beautiful and powerful. Once I was good. The same old feelings coming back to me, feeling new, as if it were yesterday. But it is yesterday.

***

    Nan wasn’t in the room. Ethel with no nose was there, her little walnut head peeping over the covers, and the other woman whose name Anna didn’t know, who moaned in time to music, but Nan’s bed was neatly made. The other old people irritated her. You came to see someone you loved, but had to see all these walking wounded too.
    She found Nan in the TV room, parked in front of a screen with the sound turned down, dressed neatly in a cream man-made-fibre blouse with a frilly collar, a red hat pulled over her ears, and circular plastic earrings pinned to her ears.
    She kissed her gently on the cheek and her absent face revived momentarily with the attention. ‘Hello,’ she responded shyly, her still-youthful voice breaking the taut skin of silence.
    ‘What are you doing in here, watching telly?’
    ‘They’ve got us lined up.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Don’t ask me. Something. Always moving us here and there.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know. I might be losing the plot. Do you think we’d better get a move on? Am I holding you up?’
    The man next to Nanny was dribbling onto the lino, his head slumped at a 45-degree angle to his body.
    ‘Nanny do you want to go back to the room?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Back in the room, she positioned her grandmother by the window. It had a beautiful view of the winter garden, which her eyes weren’t good to enough to see. First frost.

***

    Tonight, he taught the boys and I the game played with sheep bones. Each little bone represents a different animal. Each animal tells a different story, and throwing them to see how they land will tell you how the story of your friendship with that person. After playing the game this evening, he told me that I was a horse, and he was a camel, and we would only see each other this one time in our lives. I’m ashamed that I have slipped the camel and the horse in my jacket pocket and am sleeping with my hand curled around them tonight.

***

    ‘Help’.
    She was going to start again.
    ‘Help, help, help, help, help, help.’
    Her voice was tiny but her body jerked forward with every utterance.
    ‘Shhhhhh. It’s ok. What are you thinking about?’
    She held her granddaughter in her gaze, her once-violet eyes the colour of washed denim.

    Anna went to make herself a cup of tea in the kitchen filled with cheap biscuits; viscous milk, cut-glass vases crowded on the shelves.
When she came back her grandmother was asleep. She drank the tea looking at her; the soft white hair close to the skull, the once-sharp jaw blanketed by an overhang of peach-bruised skin, the rider’s hands, held protectively together, the small, shallow breathing of this quiet person.
Nan slept while Anna watched her. The bed where she slept at night was surrounded by what the nurses called ‘her bits and bobs’. There was a small collection of Thornton chocolates in a battered old tin that looked like it used to house Russian cigarettes many moons ago, replenished regularly by Agnes, Nan’s former neighbour. There was a hole-in-one golfing trophy and a chipped bowl of bananas. One was half-eaten, its skin neatly wrapped over itself.
    She was keen on wildflowers, so there was a framed print of a desert orchid, pinned to the wall by Agnes. On the wall there were two other pictures. One of the family, back in England: Nan, reverted to the drab English garb, her hair pinned back, pearls at her throat; Daniel and James, her uncles, to her left, and Virginia, Anna’s mother, and the youngest, to her right. Grandpa was absent – probably gone fishing. The light was fading behind the stone farmhouse in the picture. It picked out the blonde haloes of Nan, Daniel and James. Virginia’s dark, brooding face was half in shadow, her ebony head bent to the ground, picking at earthworms or something.
    Her mother, when she was alive, had often complained that as a child she had been ugly and unwanted by the boys, including Grandpa Ralph. In many family pictures, she was looking sideways off into the distance, or her stocky arms were shielding her face, or she scowled down from the saddle, her legs hooked into the stirrups, indifferently, insolently. But in the Sixties, there had been a brief but successful period as a model.
    There was a photograph that Anna still came across occasionally in coffee table slabs about the era or in the weekend supplements. Her mother stood on the Thames riverbank at low tide, her black hair cut into a bowl, her black angled eyes slathered with kohl, glaring. It was called ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and was made by quite a famous photographer. As a child, Anna was disturbed by the picture, which hung in the downstairs loo, probably to impress men who came to the house — though surely they could not reconcile this fierce beauty with the woman in the other room, who, Anna realised even as a child, touched them too easily and had a drink waiting too readily. Before her mother died, she had not spoken to Nan for five years — since Grandpa died — and Anna could not forgive her this final grand act of selfishness.
    They had sat together all night the day after Grandpa had died, Nan and her mother, and her mother had returned to London in the morning, her pupils dilated, and had said, ‘Just so you know, I won’t be speaking to your grandmother anymore.’
    Anna, then 21, had begged her mother to tell her why. ‘We just had a falling out. You can still see her if you want.’
    She kept her word. If Anna ever mentioned visiting the home, her mother would simply take another puff of her cigarette, blowing out the smoke in a long, smooth line, and would look into the middle distance. Last year, her mother had finally died and reached the place she had been drinking herself towards.
    There was another picture on the wall: of Nan as a young woman, much admired by the nurses. Anna studied the black and white photo. It was taken somewhere in Central Asia; probably Mongolia. She was in thigh-high riding boots and jodhpurs, her buttercup curls bent over a Russian saddle.
Anna had always been in awe of this picture, intoxicated by the elegance of another era. Her life there must have been exciting. Just a small collection of expatriates who rode and painted together and set up their tents where they pleased. At least that’s how she always pictured it.
    She pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table. Another tin, this time full of jelly babies and ginger nut biscuits; some handkerchiefs; some CDs — Irish love songs, the Beverly Sisters, war time tunes; and a plain flat, crudely made wooden box. It had to be prised open. There was a tatty-looking white envelope, which seemed to contain something. Anna shook the envelope open and let its contents fall onto the table. It took some time for her eyes to adjust. A wave of confused revulsion passed over her.
    Could this be bits of human bone? What were they doing in Nanny’s bedside drawer? Had she, in some strange mental state, hoarded the remnants of a recent meal? She fingered the desiccated bones. No, they were too old.
    She saw that the envelope was inscribed with a word, written in the faded brown ink of a fountain pen. BILGEHAN. It looked like her grandmother’s writing — before it had become spidery and errant.
    She was about to draw the nurses’ attention to the box, but stopped herself, perhaps out of some desire to preserve some tattered corner of her grandmother’s privacy.

***

    The next day, the men who killed the sheep for us to eat come back with horses for us to try, dappled beauties. I am flustered, and the last person to get on, and I can’t meet his eye, though he helps me into the saddle.     The other Mongolians loll in the grass, smoking tobacco rolled in the pages of Russian newspapers. We now have four more horses, but it looks like we won’t reach Ulan Bataar next week, as the whole of Selenge province has been sealed off because of foot and mouth. Someone has gone to send word to Ralph, but I wonder if we will get there before the messenger does. There is a certain liberation in being held up by nature itself. It’s out of my hands.
    I finally get up the courage to look at him, but his head is turned away from me, eyes are fixed at a point on the horizon. I am disappointed. There is nothing to look at for miles, except flatness.
    Over tea, I find an excuse to ask the female translator about his background. I ask about all the men. She responds in English to my rudimentary Russian, her eyes coy, dancing. ‘He is Durud. Minority tribe. Out of 15 Duruds, only two are good. They keep everything on the inside. You never know, truly, what they are thinking.’ She rolls the R, lavishly. I am a fool.
    Later, when we return to the city, I don’t see him again, as he has returned to his own family in Lake Khovsgol, and that’s when Mongolia ends for me, even though it’s a month before Ralph finishes his project and we board the train to Moscow for the last time.

***

    Anna let herself out of the room under the silent witness of Ethel, and padded down the quiet corridor to the car park, carefully shutting the door shy of Mr McGovern, who muttered ‘anytime now,’ as she passed.
    Two minutes later, she was swerving vigorously back through the mini roundabouts, her index jabbing the car radio to get something normal to hear, something alive; her thumb coursing the contacts in her mobile. She dialled her best friend’s number. They would meet tonight and Anna would gloss over the details of her visit. ‘Oh but that’s saaadd,’ Katy would say, her mouth pulled down at the corners, her eyebrows hitched up. ‘It’s OK, I’m used to it.’ Anna didn’t like talking about her family. She guessed it was just her genes. She was just too Anglo-Saxon.
    There was nothing bearable to listen to on the radio. She exhaled, and watched the roundabouts recede into the middle distance. ‘Bilgehan,’ she said tentatively to herself, trying it for size. She arrived back at her flat, and with an hour to kill before going to meet Katy, sat down at her desk.

***

    We have left Mongolia. All I want is home now. I can’t stand the idea of six days on the train to Moscow with the boys under my feet, constantly trying to spy on my thoughts. Ralph is now obsessed with the idea of getting off the train in Siberia and spending a couple of days there, swimming in Lake Baikal and touring the Buriyat Republic. I seem to lack the will to dissent. You beat your wings and still you end up with the rest of the birds; all flying in the same direction. Yesterday morning, we woke to the sight of the lake flickering through the trees. Ralph picked up a young Russian man, Jenya, in Irkutsk. He was on the platform, plying himself as a local guide, and the two of them are already thick as thieves. This morning they conspired to take us to a Buriyat Shaman.
    It was a long drive from the lake. I have not yet recovered. So light-headed. Maybe if I lie here a little longer I will feel better. There is a young woman in the carriage with me. A white woman, must be Russian. Maybe if the children come they will be shy of making a noise.

***

    Anna drummed her fingers on the table and switched on her laptop, becoming aware of her pathetic grouping of family photographs huddled there. Nanny, about ten years ago, laughing, with blackberry stains around her mouth. Grandpa Ralph with his head poking out from behind a newspaper. She clenched her fists as the laptop connected to the net, realised her pulse was quickening as Google loaded. She typed in ‘Bilgehan’ and ‘Mongolia’. The Encyclopaedia of Britannia informed her that ‘Bilge’ had been a Mongolia Emperor. A couple more searches and she learned that ‘Bilge’ was a common Mongolian men’s name, which meant ‘Wise Emperor’. Anna slid open a drawer in her desk and gently brushed some letters off a large photo frame lying flat underneath them. She drummed her fingers on the laptop keyboard. Her mother’s proud stare burned out of the frame, her knowing face shrouded in dark, the twilight Thames, four decades removed, twinkling behind her.

***

    The shaman house is like the gingerbread house in the fairy tale, but its timbers are rotting, and its garden is full of sickly peasants, waiting. The boys are transfixed by the old man’s face. ‘Mummy, his face is so lined, is he the oldest person in the world, do you think?’ Daniel asks. This practised performer could unfold his art, on any soul, in any place, but his faded brown eyes, beyond their workaday jollity, are kind, and I don’t resent him. He takes Ralph’s offering of cheap Mongolian vodka, and pours some into what looks like a chipped eggcup. And then he lights some kind of herb. Smoke drifts towards my face. A wave of nausea passes over me. ‘What is your name?’ he asks me, in Russian. ‘And where are you from?’ ‘Candace. England.’ He retreats into Buriyat, and I cannot catch what he is saying, just that my name and my country are being used as shamanic kindling, making his other, secret words flicker up more fiercely. He is gaining confidence. I don’t know when I realise that I am only aware of him, and that his face and eyes are lit from the inside, and the rest of the room is dark, and there are so many more people in the room than just the six of us.
    I am retching into a bowl. I don’t know how it arrived in my hands. ‘You are alright,’ states Jenya, in an impassive voice. ‘It is over now.’ He is looking at the Shaman angrily.
    ‘Thank you,’ I say to the man.
    He says something to Jenya that I can’t catch.
    The Russian man turns to me. ‘He says, don’t thank him now. He says to thank him next year. When you have your daughter.’
    The Shaman passes me the small shot of vodka, which I must drink to appease the spirits. The children seem very pale. He speaks to me in Russian, in an even voice.
    ‘You can sleep now. I have taken your demons away.’ The words he uses can also be taken as paid off your demons. In the motor car, on the way to Irkutsk to pick up the train, Ralph is quiet for once. As the journey goes on, a small smile grows around his lips. Near the railway station, he twists round in his seat, incredulous, to where the boys and I are sitting behind. ‘He didn’t want my money, you know.’

* * * * *

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