I feel done with it. The whole thing.
I’m glad Suscutin wasn’t around back then. I’m glad I don’t have to go on loving her. She has learned to quantify everything that I want to keep immeasurable. By the end of my time in her cosy flat, I’m certain that I loved her least of all too.
In the churchyard once more, there’s a sense that so much time has passed since I was last here. How can that be? And yet my entire relationship, my Sixdom, has changed in my eyes, in my memory. I can’t begin to articulate its alteration. I feel different, deep down different. I feel fresh, vulnerable. Ready to be made over.
I feel as if I’ve moulted.
I take up my position on the bench beside the church wall in the early morning, and they come in a steady stream, often in threes and fours, approaching without particular reverence. I watch them chat as they lay flowers in a fantail that radiates out from her grave, thickening and stretching wider and wider.
This isn’t as I imagined it; they don’t look like disciples. They gather, their numbers swelling, and they begin to talk louder about themselves. They turn their backs to the graves, and away from me.
I’m glad I hold my own bunch of flowers, carnations, and am wearing sunglasses, and dark trousers with my sharp shirt. I’m acting too, pretending to be properly bereaved so I can observe in peace. It’s working. Some glance at me, but nobody pays me much attention.
The morning passes, and still they assemble; I hear raised voices outside the graveyard every now and again. How does this end? With a celebration, or a riot? A news crew arrives and pushes its way through to Petra’s grave, training the eye of the camera on the flowers. The reporter, an older man, approaches one group. They speak animatedly to the lens, not to him. It’s powerful to watch.
The crew, satisfied, leave. Midday approaches, and I’m starving. She isn’t coming. She isn’t coming. Why should she come? How would I know her, anyway?
I should go to Devon. I should check on Gwen, and help her move into the hospice with the duck pond, and simply tell her that she should forgive herself, if that’s what it takes to be happy. I’m not cut out for this business of finding people and facilitating forgiveness.
The churchyard is packed, and the sun is hot; I’m sweating even in the shade of the wall. The voices outside are louder, more strident. Perhaps the sun is to blame. I heard once that crowd disturbances, riots, they mainly happen in summertime. Few rebel during rainfall nowadays.
Max could have silenced them. When he got annoyed on set, he used his trained voice to hold the crew to attention, but even he would have had trouble cutting through the police sirens that are drawing closer. There aren’t small groups any more; there is a large crowd, and they are organising themselves, becoming more ordered in their outrage. The grave is forgotten entirely and the flower fantail is being trampled upon. I see people unfurl banners from their bags and shake them out, red paint on white cloth, and others unzip tops to reveal T-shirts underneath, bearing bold red lettering.
A young woman, maybe a student, approaches me and holds out a T-shirt. She gets dragged back by the others; I catch the use of the word disrespectful. Then she is parted from her friends by an older woman with a worn leather pack on her back, pushing through, using one arm out straight in front of her to divide the crowd. People move aside for her as she heads for Petra’s grave.
She stands on other people’s flowers, makes no attempt to avoid putting her feet upon them, and places one white rose on the top of the stone. She pats the marble with a familiar, weary gesture.
I remember her.
I saw her once, at Max’s estate. He was filming, he broke off to speak to her, and we lost the light for the rest of the day. Nothing more could be shot. She stuck in my mind, perhaps because of the way he approached her, with a gentleness that was at odds with the control he exhibited on set.
Later, over beers in his luxurious living room, I said, ‘This is going to take ages if you break off a shot to speak to every hanger-on.’
And he replied, ‘How do you know she was a hanger-on? You’re talking about the love of my fucking life, Mik.’ Then he smiled, I smiled, and he dealt cards for poker. There was a beer ready for Gwen, placed on the table; she’d gone to do her last sweep of the house for the evening.
So here’s the love of Max Black’s life, the hanger-on, the person Gwen has to apologise to.
Rose Allington.
The crowd heave into action as my watch registers midday. As they stream from the graveyard she gets jostled. She bumps the white rose from its place upon the stone. I walk to it, retrieve it, replace it. The churchyard empties in a rush. They are off, striding, shouting, a sibilant mess of Suscutin-hating slogans, while through a loudspeaker I hear a man call for order.
Rose and I are alone.
‘Thanks,’ she says, but I can’t hear it over the crowd; I read it from the shape of her thin lips. She looks very tired and very angry, red-cheeked and bleary-eyed. Time has not been kind to her; her skin has sagged, and her hair is brittle, dry.
I nod, to show I’ve understood, then wait until the crowd is far away enough so that I can be heard if I raise my voice. ‘Petra would have hated this, wouldn’t she?’
Rose frowns, but nods back.
‘They’re using her as an excuse.’
‘You knew her?’ she asks.
‘No. I know what happens to people when they become famous. The way they have things hung upon them.’
I remove my sunglasses, and I see it – that familiar moment of realisation in their eyes. That recognition of who I am. Perhaps she’s placed me at Max’s estate that day, or from the Stuck Six stories, or even from that stupid skinny dip. I can’t tell.
She steps away from me and lifts her arms up in front of her; it’s a classic defensive position. Bodyguard training, perhaps.
‘We’ve met before,’ I say.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Well, we didn’t meet. We were in the same place at the same time. Max Black was a mutual friend.’
‘No, no, I’ve never, I didn’t know him.’
‘You’re not a very good liar.’
She’s breathing deeply. Dressed simply in jeans and a loose shirt, the straps of a small leather backpack pressing on her shoulders, she doesn’t look like she could defend herself, let alone another human being. ‘You’re Mickey Stuck.’
‘And you’re Rose Allington.’
‘My surname is Stacey, now,’ she says, eventually.
The crowd is a raucous background to our conversation, but they’re getting further away, and a measure of calm is returning to me now I’ve found her. ‘I’ve never been that close to an angry mob before.’
‘They’ve come every year since the fire. I shouldn’t turn up at the same time, but… I don’t want her to be alone with them, if that makes sense. They’re not all a bad bunch. I’ve met worse.’
‘People do strange things for causes they believe in.’
‘In Petra’s case, she just didn’t like people getting away with bad behaviour.’
‘Taking Suscutin leads to bad behaviour?’
‘You’re full of questions,’ she says. ‘And you tracked me down, right? What’s this for? The follow-up documentary about your film? Or just to find your own answers? You should be a private investigator. I could get you set up with a job interview.’
‘You were a detective?’ She looks wrong for that role, as welclass="underline" too nervous, too honest.
She narrows her eyes at me. ‘Well, now I’m intrigued. You don’t know a thing about me, but here you are. Why is that?’