I asked him yesterday what kind of music this is that sobs and wails and isn’t quite jazz and isn’t quite anything else, and has its own way of tugging at you. I asked him if it was gypsy music or what, and he took the reed from his mouth long enough to smile and say ‘If you like’ and started up again.
At the far end of the wood we reach the church in a burst of evening sunlight. I pull the horse to a stop and get down. Abigail follows me into the porch. I lift the latch. When I open the door, the monkey scampers out and chatters off among the gravestones. There’s that Anglican smell of hassocks and musty hymn books. Beyond the pews, beyond the chancel rail, Django is sitting on the altar, legs hanging, the flared end of his clarinet making shapes in the air. Behind him, in the stained glass, bodies in loincloths rise from their graves to join God or to be pitchforked into everlasting torment. I turn the other way, towards the tower, pushing through the velvet curtain. Between a rail of cassocks and a stack of chairs the bell ropes dangle, and there’s Simon in a haze of dust jumping and swinging.
‘All right, Si?’
‘I’m…’
‘Django taking care of you?’
‘Django says I’m…’ His neck tightens and he sucks in breath through his nose. He’s doing his w-face, which makes him look as if he’s about to hoot like a baboon.
‘Whizzing through the jungle?’
‘Not that.’
‘Walking on the moon?’
‘Not that either. Django says I’m…’ And his neck tightens again.
‘Have you eaten?’ Abigail asks him. ‘Did someone feed you?’
Simon lands on his feet, totters but stays upright, and walks over to Abigail. ‘You have to listen to me.’
Abigail smiles at this. ‘You have big lungs for a little boy.’
‘I’m not little. Django says I’m… wonderful.’
Abigail’s still taking this in and Simon is looking at her with big solemn eyes, when Deirdre pushes through the curtain. Aleksy follows, gasping for breath.
‘Did you see someone?’ Deirdre turns from me to Abigail. ‘Is that why you rang the bell?’
Abigail asks her who she means, who we might have seen.
‘Looters, scroungers. You didn’t see them?’
‘No,’ I tell her, ‘we’ve seen no one.’ Abigail looks at me, surprised at the lie, but I’m not inclined to feed Deirdre’s fears. ‘It wasn’t us rang the bell. It was Simon.’
‘Well I hope you’re going to smack his bottom,’ Deirdre says, ‘teach him a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.’
Abigail takes her hand and she stops moving about. ‘There’s no harm done, Deirdre.’
‘Maybe not, but you shouldn’t ring the bell, do you hear, Simon? Not unless there’s danger. Tell him, Jason.’
‘Hear that, Si?’ I said to him. ‘You shouldn’t ring the bell.’
Simon’s fighting to say something. His lips are open and I can see his teeth. He feels the injustice but can’t defend himself. He’s glaring at me, trying to say my name.
‘And there is harm done, actually, Abigail,’ Deirdre says. ‘My journal’s gone missing.’
‘It’ll turn up,’ I tell her.
‘How do you know?’
‘Either it will or it won’t, but there’s not much we can do about it.’
‘But someone’s been in my room, going through my things. It gives me the creeps.’
‘Who – who’s been in your room?’
She gives me a withering look. ‘Well obviously I don’t know who.’
Simon hasn’t given up yet. He’s shaking with fury. He points through the curtain, and I see it’s not Jason he’s trying for, but the other J.
‘Was it Django?’ I ask him. ‘Did Django tell you to do it?’
He nods emphatically.
Deirdre snorts with annoyance. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Jason, if you’ve got nothing useful to contribute…’
‘Look, everybody,’ Aleksy says, ‘I understand this. Deedee’s journal. It’s personal. We can respect that, Jason, yes? We can promise, each one of us, if it comes into our hands, not to look, not to read. OK?’
He’s looking at me, so I make a submissive gesture and say, ‘Yes, obviously.’
He turns to make eye contact with Abigail.
She says, ‘Of course. We’re not to read it. What is it, a newspaper?’
There’s a pause while this sinks in, that Abigail doesn’t know what a journal is. I hear the monkey clambering on the roof. Beyond the curtain the clarinet is still bleating and bubbling.
Abigail looks self-conscious. ‘An old one, I thought, maybe, that Deirdre likes. Is it something else?’
‘It’s just a kind of notebook,’ I tell her. Then I ask Aleksy, ‘What about Django?’
‘Here we go,’ Deirdre says. ‘It’s always the same with you.’
‘I only said…’
‘You just can’t stand that Django’s happy and you’re not. That he’s full of life and you’re… the opposite.’
‘I only meant…’
‘What about Django? Like a child who thinks he got the smaller piece of cake.’
‘I meant, what about asking him…’
‘Django would never take something of mine without permission. He’d never take anything. I’ve never met anyone less interested in things.’
‘What about asking him not to read it if it turns up, like Aleksy said – that’s all I meant – the same as he asked all of us. Jesus Christ.’
There’s more I want to tell her, if I can get my thoughts in order, but suddenly she’s crying. Abigail gathers her up, one hand around her shoulder, the other smoothing her hair. She catches my eye and I decide to say nothing.
Between sobs, Deirdre says, ‘It’s not about that. There’s nothing for anyone to read. I haven’t written anything yet. Not anything. That’s what I can’t bear – that my whole life is just a blank.’ For a while she weeps against Abigail’s bosom. Then she pulls away and starts talking more clearly. ‘It was a present to myself for my birthday. I went on a course called Writing the Spirit, and the teacher said write every day, keep a journal. So I bought it and it was so beautiful and I wanted something really significant to happen – not just, you know, went for a lovely ride, Pedro lost a shoe, blah, blah. I wanted to have a significant thought. Then people started getting sick and I didn’t want to write someone died in our village today – not on the first page, like the first ever thing I wrote. And we were all scared. I was so scared it made me sick. People said you have to eat. They said eat fresh fruit. My mother phoned to tell me they were saying on Facebook to eat ginger. And I didn’t want to just write that, about eating ginger. It was meant to be about my life, and my life had been suspended while these horrible things happened. Then my mother died, and that evening I opened the book and was about to write, my mother’s dead, but I stopped and wondered who am I writing this for? Because suddenly everyone was dying, and I didn’t know who’d be left to read it, who’d be left who knew or cared anything about me.’
It’s quiet for a while. The clarinet’s stopped. The light is going. If there’s birdsong still it doesn’t reach us through the walls. We stand in the heavy indoor silence thinking or not thinking. And it’s not like silence used to be. It has no meaning. It’s like the silence of cattle. We’re just waiting for the next thing, whatever the next thing might be. And I’m back at Abbeymill Farm, the dead with their sunken faces and the flies drunk and reeling. I’ve no patience with Deirdre and her journal. The smallest loss is a window on catastrophe – by now we all know this – it’s everybody’s story but she claims it as her own.