The Life of Death Page 4

  ‘I need this to end. I want my life.’ I feel like one of the sulky, monosyllabic teenagers who populate the modern-day streets with their moodiness.

  Still nothing.

  In a small voice, I continue: ‘I want my soul back. Please.’ A little courtesy can’t hurt.

  He smiles. A smile cold, pitying, contemplative, oddly paternal, all at once.

  ‘Oh, Little D, Little, Little D …’

  I hate it when He calls me that. He may as well team it with a ruffle of my hair and a chuck under the chin.

  ‘And what do you propose I do about this? About your having “had enough”? Shall I pat you on the back, wave you on your way, wish you a merry life? Perhaps we could have a yearly get-together? Reminisce about the old times over a cheese board and a glass of the finest port?’ He laughs, a mirthless, derisory snort. Contemplates me down the length of His long, thin nose.

  I open my mouth to speak, to explain.

  ‘Don’t.’

  One word, a gunshot. I stay silent.

  ‘Why now, Little D? Why now, after all these years … ?’ Looking down at me through narrowed eyes, long finger stroking His chin. He reaches to cup my own in His other hand, forcing my face to tilt towards His. Forcing my eyes to make contact with His own. He stares into them. Blue eyes freeze the air between us.

  ‘You idiot.’ He sighs. ‘You foolish, stupid girl. You’ve fallen in love. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?’

  My eyes drop, look off to the wall beside him, to the polished flags, to the long stone bench. I need not speak, He has answer enough.

  His hand releases my chin. ‘Fool.’

  He takes my arm, hustling me along the corridor, round the central garden and back into the body of the church. Although the throngs of tourists can’t see us, they sense the menace in their midst – an imperceptible shiver as we pass, a votive candle breathing its last and sending a plume of smoke spiralling above it.

  As we enter the church, His pace slows. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Pausing to admire the odd carving, stopping to frown at the memorials of the people who have defied Him. I’m not the only one who knows the inhabitants of the Abbey inside and out.

  Eventually, He speaks.

  ‘So. That’s it, is it? You want your life? Your soul? You do know I can’t just hand that to you on a plate, don’t you? You do know that if I am to give you what you are asking for, I need to know that you deserve it? You do know that I am going to have to make you earn it? You do know that, don’t you, Little D?’

  I do. I do know that. But it’s been too long. I have served this role for an eternity and I can’t do it any more. I know the stakes are high, but the thought of another yawning expanse with no escape is almost too much to bear. Now it’s out there, and now He’s even contemplating it, this is my chance. If I don’t take it now, He certainly won’t give me another.

  ‘Do you remember what I said to you? Back in that cell?’ He studies my face through narrowed eyes, chews on His lip while He considers His options. A woman passes – brushing His coat with her handbag. He doesn’t flinch. She pulls her cardigan tighter around herself and hurries off in the direction of Poets’ Corner.

  ‘You do remember, don’t you, Little D?’ He asks, cocking His head to one side. ‘Back in that squalid little cell of yours all those years ago? Foul place …’ A muttered aside. ‘What did I say? What did I tell you? Hmm?’

  He doesn’t even bother to wait for an answer. He’s taken centre stage, is throwing himself into the role. And all I can do is watch and wait.

  ‘For every action, Little D, there must be a reaction. Yes? You remember that?’ He stops in front of the Isaac Newton memorial, looking up at the golden globe heralding the heavens hanging above his head. ‘D’you know, I mentioned that very thing to Sir Isaac once. Every action having a reaction … I think he might’ve seen something in it … Anyhow, I digress. There was more, wasn’t there? Hang on, let me think …’

  He taps a long finger against His chin. I hear Him muttering under His breath, playing for time, ever the showman. ‘For every action … a reaction … Yes! There was more, wasn’t there, Little D. I do remember what else I said. Yes, I distinctly remember this bit. If you take me up on this, I said, if you take me up on this, I will own you. If you wanted to get out of our little arrangement, there must, by the very nature of your wishing to abandon me, be consequences. Yes, that’s it. For every action, there must be a reaction.’

  The pacing continues. Finger tapping against cheek, face turned to the ceiling in contemplation.

  ‘After all, Little D, if you’re depriving me of the nourishment of your soul, I’m going to need something to fill the gap, aren’t I? Until I find myself another willing volunteer. So, what do you say to a challenge? How do you feel about that, my little one? I shall set you a challenge, and if you pass with flying colours, you shall have your life. This “soul” of yours will be back intact and unharmed. And you can live your life. Live your life, love your man. And then die like the rest of them.’ His nose wrinkles in distaste at the word ‘die’.

  I nod. I was expecting nothing less. When I offered up my soul to Him all those hundreds of years ago, I should have known getting it back wouldn’t be so easy.

  ‘What do you propose?’ My voice cracks and I clear my throat – He always has this effect on me. I try to be strong, to stand up to Him, but He terrifies me.

  ‘Five deaths. That is all, Little D. Relatively easy I would think, given your … what shall we call it … ? Speciality … ? Your field of expertise … ? You will bring about five deaths. Five deaths of my choosing. If you do them well, if I am satisfied with the way you handle yourself, with the way you kill these chosen five, then what you desire will come to pass. God knows I can’t abide the idea of mortality and I have very little idea why you would want such a thing, but if you want your precious soul, these five deaths will be your price.’

  I stand facing Him, the chequerboard of the tiled aisle between us.

  ‘Your move, Little D.’

  A deep breath. I accept. It sounds too easy to be true. Of course it does.

  ‘So, our first candidate … Now, where shall we start? No time like the present, eh?’ He’s almost avuncular. It’s unnerving.

  He strides off to the North Aisle, leaving me running to catch up. Along its length glass-topped wooden desks are laid out, strewn with the scarlet poppies of remembrance. In each one a huge book, neatly engraved with the names of the fallen. Hundreds upon hundreds of names, meticulously listed. I know them all. I have met them all.

  He leans against one, casual, indifferent.

  ‘There’s a gap, Little D. The one that got away, you might say.’ He runs His fingers down the Ws – Wall, Walters, Weatherby, West, Weston, Williams. He stops. Between Williams, F. R. and Williams, J. P. A gap. Not something the casual observer would ever see, but a gap sure enough, an infinitesimal gap.

  ‘He outsmarted me, that one. All his life he’s been getting the better of me. And I think it’s time we put a stop to that, don’t you, Little D?’

  Williams, H. I.

  Number 1.

  5

  I’VE MET HYWEL IFOR WILLIAMS BEFORE. QUITE A few times, in fact. And my friend the Devil is right: Hywel has ‘cheated death’, as they say. I’ve been there, ready and waiting, and each time he’s slipped away, righted himself, taken that lungful of air that blows me out of the room. And good for him, I’ve always said – I’ve never wanted to be where I’m not wanted. Until now.

  Tuesday, 16 February 1926.

  It’s a cold day. A freezing, bitter, cold day in a Welsh mining village in the Rhondda Valley. Frost blurs the cobbles on the main street and a scream rings out. A guttural, base, animal scream. A sob. A groan. A whimper. Whispered voices reassuring, calming. ‘Good girl,’ I hear them soothe. ‘Just one more push.’

  The voices slip through the small gap of an open sash window on the first floor of a mid-terrace house. A tiny opening despite the cold
of the day outside. But where frost blooms in spiky petals on the windows of the houses either side, here condensation runs in streams down the panes to collect in a puddle on the cracked-paint windowsill.

  Despite the freezing day, the air inside the bedroom is thick, stifling. The fire in the hearth is ablaze. Logs hiss and crackle in the grate, throwing out sparks that chase each other up the chimney bright as fireflies before burning out to nothing.

  A woman in bed, shivering and convulsing but with sweat pouring from her brow. Her nightdress is soaked with sweat and blood. Sweat and blood, smeared with mucus and tears. Naked knees drawn up to her chest, every sinew in her neck straining. She screams again, grunting, head thrown back – the animal yowl of a fighting mother.

  More whispers. Shadowy figures move around the room. She hears snippets. Glimpses of what these figures know, of what they can see.

  ‘Wrong way round.’

  ‘Cord wrapped round his neck.’

  ‘Losing blood.’

  Her scream turns to a whimper. A moan. A soundless sob. Her head sags against her shoulder. Exhaustion is taking over. She’s been doing this for hours. Blood is flowing freely on to the sheets. Her face is pale, waxy. Hair plastered in strands to her cheek. The shadowy figures take their positions around her bed – one holding her shoulders, murmuring words of encouragement into her ear, the other reaching between her legs, rearranging the unborn child, trying to turn him, free his head from the cord encircling his tiny throat. She can see me now, standing in the corner, fading in and out – now lit by the flare of the fire, now imperceptible in the shadows. As the seconds tick by, as her breath becomes laboured, rasping, I become clearer to her – she can see my face. The face of her mother, so very like her own. The black dress and high collar of turn-of-the-century fashions. I move to the edge of her bed. Sit to take her head in my lap, smoothing her sodden hair away from her forehead, plaiting the sweat-soaked strands between my fingers. Humming her favourite song from when she was a tiny girl. She is ready now – she can’t fight any longer, she knows that this life has done for her. But she can’t go yet, can’t move on without seeing her son. So we sit and we wait. And we rock gently to and fro, to and fro as the midwife works around us to extricate him from his slippery noose. As they pull him out and his first squawking, mewling cries rend the cold February afternoon, she rests her exhausted head on my shoulder, and with a whispered murmur of love to her tiny son, Dorothea Maeve Williams slowly, quietly, fades to black.

  And so, from the very beginning his life, from those very first seconds, I knew Hywel Ifor Williams. And he knew me.

  *

  I didn’t see him for a few years. If truth be told, I forgot all about that tiny child who’d fought his way into the world. I had other things to worry about. When I saw him again he was a man.

  Tuesday, 6 June 1944.

  Well, I say a man. More like an eighteen-year-old boy who had seen too much, who already knew too much of the hellish way of the world. An eighteen-year-old boy who had seen more than any man twice, three times his age should see. An eighteen-year-old boy with death in his eye.

  He shouldn’t even have been there, shouldn’t have made it this far. He should have been turned away in that community hall in Swansea. Drawing himself up to full height and presenting his forged documents to the recruiting officer. Smooth cheek ignored in favour of broad shoulders and a body accustomed to hard work. He was enlisted into the 2nd Battalion South Wales Borderers that day in October 1941. A fifteen-year-old boy gifted three extra years in a single handshake.

  Leaving home meant leaving Angharad. They were inseparable, those two. Clambering up coal heaps together, lying for hours in the meadows pointing out shapes in the clouds floating through the cornflower-blue skies of a Welsh summer. She’d hated him for signing up. As much as she could bring herself to hate him. Shouted at him again and again that he was too young to die, too young to fight. But he was convinced that he had to do his duty and go and join the thousands of others on the front line. And he made her promise that she wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t tell his Da what he’d done until he was far away. Far, far away and the ham-sized fists and deep baritone ring of a furious father were left well behind. So she promised, and she hated herself, but she kept her promise and didn’t say a word.

  And now, tonight. Two and a half years of training, fighting, watching friends die, helping friends live. Two and a half years to bring Hywel here, to the Normandy coast. To bring him here, for this night of nights.

  I’m sitting in the dunes – waiting for the distant drone, the hum and whirr of planes crossing the Channel, troops swallowed in their bellies. The sky is black, heavy with thunderous clouds and midnight. I’ve been waiting. Their arrival has been delayed by the weather, but I know they’re coming. I know they’ll be coming to me in their hundreds. Boys, mere boys, all of them.

  The first wave passes overhead, parachutes like a swarm of jellyfish bells against the blackened sky. If I didn’t know how this ended I would think it almost beautiful. And with this swarm, so my work begins. In fields and dunes, forests and villages. Time is of no consequence to me – this night is endless and there is much to be done. A second can last a minute, an hour, a day. Each of those following days lasts a month, each month a year – a gritty, cold, harrowing year. A minute, a day, a month of tears and helplessness and laughter and songs and heaving, racking sobs. Minutes, days, months when boys become men, and where those men come to me to die.

  I am everywhere and nowhere. Ushering souls from the cold wet sand, lying low as bullets whistle overhead. Cradling bodies in blood-churned mud. Collecting those boys as they lie strewn across the fields, blood bubbling on their lips, choking from their lungs. Some are calm in the face of inevitability – they smile at me as we hold hands, kiss me as their bodies slump. They’re expecting me – they’ve seen me in the faces of the friends who have gone before them, in those other boys who never made it this far. Grateful for the solid warmth of a comforting breast and a final reminder of their humanity in all this hatred and waste. Happy, most of them, to see the girl they love for the very last time. To be scolded by a mother who’s not seen them for months and who arrives armed with a freshly baked cake for one last feed.

  Then, of course, there are the others, the ones who haven’t prepared for this, who weren’t expecting the savage hand of fate to hit. The ones who had blithely refused to countenance the very real truth that it could be them. They run from me, shove at my chest, hit at my face, rip at my clothes. Push me with all of their dwindling strength. Bite at hands that try to embrace weary bodies.

  Then, when they can hit out no more, they collapse against me, sobbing and shuddering in the dark of the Normandy dawn. The pain lasts longer that way – the searing heat of the bullet in their chest pulses as long as they fight, until that too fades. And one by one, over the seconds, minutes, days, they fade to black. This is no place for a woman, I’ve heard it said. I’ve never seen a place a woman was more needed.

  Hywel comes from the sea – the second wave. Ships loom on the horizon in the gun-metal Atlantic, ‘Men of Harlech’ singing in their veins. I see him from a distance, hauling himself out of the surf, the shock of the freezing water causing him to check himself for the briefest of moments. Heavy wool trousers cling wetly to his massive frame. That child, who had such a rocky start in life, has grown into a mountain of a man. He stands six foot two, broad-shouldered and straight-backed. His movement is solid, assured – he looks around for his fellow men, dragging one forward, checking over his shoulder for another. Head low in his tin hat, running up the beach for cover. Shots fire out around us, men fall as bullets zing and ping. From somewhere in this melee, the reedy notes of a bagpipe dance on the cold air. Mines explode, showering sand, wood, scorching metal that burns into young skin. He has magic in his feet, young Hywel, missing missiles by millimetres. He runs on through the confusion and desolation, past the bodies lain prostrate, the severed limbs lying own
erless. Right past me. He sees me, he recognises me. Pauses for a second, a look of confusion on his face. He rights himself, shaking his head and runs on. Passes a friend in my direction. He has no interest in me, now is not his time.

  Tuesday, 8 October 1963.

  Fast forward nineteen years and the boy is well and truly a man. Back from the hell and the hatred to the open arms and unquestioning love of Angharad. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about me, doesn’t wonder if he was going mad all those years ago when he saw his mother in the middle of the mayhem and the mines. I have no way of explaining, you see, until that final day when we meet and everything falls into place.

  Angharad was waiting when he returned – the fourteen-year-old girl was an eighteen-year-old woman at the end of the war, petite and pretty, warm and witty. Gleaming conker-brown hair impeccably set, cobalt-blue eyes twinkling. She always knew he’d come home and she would have waited until the end of time for him to do so. Sometimes, in that awful war, it felt like she would have to. They were bound, the two of them – she, a tiny acorn inextricably linked to her oak. They started planning the wedding as soon as he arrived back from France. Not another second to lose. Not another moment to waste. A simple ceremony in the local chapel, photographs on the steps outside. Angharad, traditional in the hand-stitched lace of her mother and her mother’s mother before her, Hywel in his father’s old Sunday suit worn to a shine at the elbow and knee, but he has a new shirt for the occasion – crisp, white collar starched and stiff.

  Their marriage is a happy one. He’s a man of few words – he’s never had much to say – but since the war his desire to speak has waned even further. Angharad makes up for it, chirruping and singing her way through the day as she waits for her boy to come home. She loves being a wife, loves looking after their simple terraced home and waiting for him to come home at the end of every long day at the mine. Even now, seventeen years on, she still gets butterflies at ten past five knowing he’ll be back in twenty minutes. Her love. Her cariad bach. And when she sees his massive frame looming through the pane of glass in the kitchen door she is happy. Her man is home and she is content.