The Grave Tattoo

‘I wanna be like you, Jane.’ It was a plaintive cry that Jane had heard from Tenille more times than she could count.

‘So go to school,’ she said, trying not to let her exasperation show.

‘I hate the useless stuff they make us do,’ Tenille said, a lip-curling sneer transforming her unselfconscious attractiveness into a mask of scorn. ‘It’s not like what you give me to read.’ Her speech had shifted from street to standard English, as if leaving the confines of the estate allowed her to slip from persona to person.

‘I’m sure it isn’t. But I’m not where I want to be yet, you know. Working part-time in bars and seminar rooms while I get my book finished so I can land a proper job is not what I had in mind when I started out. But I still had to go through the same crap to get even this far. And yes, mostly I did think it was crap,’ she continued, drowning whatever Tenille had been about to add. She wished there was something she could offer apart from platitudes, but she didn’t know what else to say to a thirteen-year-old mixed-race orphan who not only adored but also seemed to grasp the significance of the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and De Quincey with an ease that had taken Jane herself a decade of close study to achieve.

Tenille sidestepped to avoid a buggy containing a moon-faced toddler, chocolate smeared across its cheeks, a dummy jammed in its mouth like a stopper designed to keep the chubby child inflated. The pram pusher didn’t look that much older than Tenille herself. ‘I’m not going to make it that way, Jane,’ Tenille said despondently. ‘Maybe I could use the poetry another way. Be a rapper like Ms Dynamite,’ she added without conviction.

They both knew it was never going to happen. Not unless someone invented a self-esteem drug that Jane could pump into Tenille’s veins ahead of the heroin that kept what seemed like half the estate sedated. Jane halted at the bus stop, turning to face Tenille. ‘Nobody can ever take the words out of your head,’ she said.

Tenille picked at a chewed fingernail and stared at the pavement. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ she almost shouted. ‘How the fuck else do you think I survive?’ Suddenly she spun round on the balls of her feet and she was off, scudding down the uneven pavement like a gazelle, long limbs surprisingly elegant in motion. She disappeared into an alley and Jane felt the familiar mixture of affection and frustration. It stayed with her on the ten-minute bus ride and it still nagged her as she pushed open the door of the wine bar.

Five minutes before noon, the Viking Bar and Grill felt hollow with emptiness. The blond wood, chrome and glass still gleamed in the halogen spots, evidence that nobody had been in since the cleaner finished her shift. Harry had put Michael Nyman’s music from The End of the Affair on the CD player, and the strings seemed almost to shimmer visibly in the calm air. In twenty minutes’ time, the Viking would be transformed as the city slickers piled in, desperate to cram as much food and drink into their short lunch breaks as they could. The air would thicken with conversation, body heat and smoke, and Jane wouldn’t have a second to think about anything other than the press of bodies at the bar.

For now, though, it was peaceful. Harry Lambton stood at one end of the long pale birch curve of the bar, leaning on his forearms as he skimmed the morning paper. The light gleamed on the spiky halo of his short fair hair, turning him into a post-modern saint. He glanced up at the sound of Jane’s feet on the wooden floor and sketched a wave of greeting, a smile animating his sharp, narrow face. ‘Still raining?’ he asked.

‘Still raining.’ Jane leaned in and planted a kiss on Harry’s cheek as she passed him on her way to the cubbyhole where the staff hung their coats. ‘Everybody in?’ she asked as she returned to the main bar, corralling her long dark corkscrew curls and pushing them into a scrunchy.

Harry nodded. That was a relief, Jane thought, slipping past Harry’s tightly muscled back and checking everything was where she needed it to be for her shift to run as smoothly as possible. She’d landed this job because Harry’s boyfriend Dan was a friend and colleague at the university, but she didn’t want anybody accusing her of taking advantage of that relationship. Besides, Harry claimed that managing the bar was only a stopgap. One day he might decide what he wanted to do with his life and Jane didn’t want to provide her co-workers with any excuse to grass her up to a new boss as lazy or incompetent. Working at the Viking was demanding, exhausting and poorly paid, but she needed the job.

‘I finally came up with a title,’ she said, tying the long white bistro apron round her waist. ‘For the book.’ Harry cocked his head interrogatively. ‘The Laureate of Spin: Politics, Poetics and Pretence in the Writings of William Wordsworth. What do you think?’

Harry frowned, considering. ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Makes the boring old bastard sound halfway interesting.’

‘Interesting is good, it sells books.’

Harry nodded, flicking over a page of his paper and giving it a cursory look. Then his dark blue eyes narrowed and frown lines appeared between his sandy brows. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Isn’t Fellhead where you come from?’

Jane turned, a bottle of olives in her hand. ‘That’s right. Don’t tell me somebody finally did something newsworthy?’

Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘You could say that. They found a body.’

I am minded tonight of the time we spent at Alfoxden, & the suspicion that fell upon Coleridge and myself, viz. that we were agents of the enemy, gathering information as spies for Bonaparte. I recall Coleridge’s assertion that it was beyond the bounds of good sense to give credence to the notion that poets were suited for such an endeavour since we see all before us as matter for our verse & would have no inclination to hold any secrets to our breasts that might serve our calling. In that important respect, he was correct, for the events of this day already ferment within me, seeking an expression, in verse. But in the more important respect of maintaining our own counsel, I pray he is mistaken, for my encounter within the secluded bounds of our garden has already laid a heavy burden of knowledge on my shoulders, a burden that could yet bear down heavy on me and on my family. At first, I believed myself to be dreaming, for I hold no belief in the ghostly manifestations of the dead. But this was no apparition. It was a man of flesh and blood, a man I had thought never to see more.

2 (#u86e8445f-01f0-5922-83c2-7bb42df83cf0)

Matthew Gresham gulped his last mouthful of coffee and dumped the mug in the sink. Members of staff were supposed to do their own washing up, but Matthew reckoned there had to be some advantages to rank so ever since his promotion to head teacher he’d left his dirty crockery for someone else to deal with. Besides, he had more important things to occupy him. So far nobody had commented on his presumptuousness, though he’d noticed disapproving glares from Marcia Porter more than once. But Marcia was a busted flush. When he’d leapfrogged her into the top job, she’d stopped trying to get the world to bend to her will. It was as if she’d thrown in the towel. She might not like what Matthew did, but she didn’t attempt to challenge him. Not like before, when they were theoretically equal except for her constant assertion of her seniority. These days, she gave him as wide a berth as was possible in a village school with a staff of five teachers and four teaching assistants.

Teaching assistants. That was a joke. Mothers with time on their hands and the misplaced notion that somehow, merely by giving birth, they had the inside track on how to educate kids. But they’d gone through the school system before SATs and the National Curriculum. They didn’t have a bloody clue about the pressures that real teachers like him had to live with on a daily basis. Matthew missed no opportunity to remind them of how much the world had changed. The main result was that, as with the rest of his staff, they spent as little time as possible slacking in the staffroom. That suited Matthew fine; his office was, to his way of thinking, barely adequate for his needs. He much preferred working in the staffroom, where he could brew himself a coffee whenever he felt like it.

He had to stoop to glance in the mirror above the sink which had been placed to suit the stature of female teachers rather than six-foot headmasters. Dark blue eyes stared back at him from olive skin a couple of shades darker than the local norm. The legacy of his Cornish grandfather, passed on to Matthew and Jane from their mother. He ran a hand through the dark mop of mutinous curls, inherited from the other side of the family. They looked glorious on his sister but simply made him feel like a poor man’s Harpo Marx. He smiled wryly, thinking of the lesson he was about to teach the top two classes. Genealogy and genetics, those twisted strands that wrapped around each other like the double helix of DNA, complete with the kinks that could have all kinds of unforeseen consequences. There was no doubting his relationship to his sister nor his parentage. Their father had the same corkscrew curls, as had his father before him.

The bell rang for afternoon classes and Matthew hurried out of the staffroom. As he approached the classroom, he heard a low murmur of conversation which stilled when the fifteen children saw him appear in the doorway. One of the benefits of small rural schools, Matthew thought. They still learned manners along with the National Curriculum. He didn’t envy the poor sods who had to teach the kids on the estate where Jane lived. ‘Good afternoon, children,’ he said, his long legs quickly covering the short distance to his desk.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Gresham,’ the class chorused raggedly.

He opened up his laptop and hit the key to take it out of slumber mode. Immediately the interactive whiteboard behind him showed a screen which read Family Trees. Matthew perched on the edge of his desk, from where he could easily reach the keyboard. ‘Today we’re beginning an important new project which will form part of the village Christmas celebrations. Now, one thing every one of us has is ancestors. Who can tell me what an ancestor is?’

A small boy with a thick mop of black hair and a face like a baby spider monkey shot a hand into the air. He bounced on his chair with eagerness.

‘Sam?’ Matthew said, trying not to sound weary. It was always Sam Clewlow.

‘It’s your family, sir. Not your family that’s alive now, but all the ones that came before. Like, your grandparents and their grandparents.’

‘That’s right. Our ancestors are the people who came before us. Who made us what we are. Every one of us is who we are and what we are because of the way our genes were combined down the ages. Now, does anyone know what a family tree is?’

Sam Clewlow’s hand rose again. The others looked on in indifference or satisfaction that Sam was doing all the work and saving them the bother. This time, he didn’t wait to be asked. ‘Sir, it’s like a map of your family history. It’s got everybody’s birthdays, and when they got married and who to, and when they had children and when they died and everything.’

‘You’ve got it, Sam. And what we’re going to do over the next few weeks is to try to map our own families. That’ll be easier for some of you than others–those of you whose families have lived locally for generations will be able to track them from parish records. It will be harder for those of you whose families are relative newcomers to the area. But one of the things we’ll be doing during this project is exploring the many different ways we can go about mapping our past. The thing about this project is that it’s one where you’ll have to work with the other members of your family, especially the older ones such as grandparents and great-aunts and–uncles.’ Again, Matthew felt grateful that he wasn’t stuck in some inner-city sink school. A project like this would be impossible to contemplate there, with its fragmented lives and alternative views of what constituted a family. But in Fellhead, either they’d lived in extended families for generations or else they were incomers from the sort of nice middle-class family where, even when they pretended to be New Age, marriage certificates were still the order of the day more often than not.

‘To show you the kind of thing we’ll be doing, I’m going to show you my own family tree.’ He clicked the mouse button and his name came up on the screen. Underneath it was his date of birth. He clicked again and this time his name was linked to Diane Brotherton with an ‘equals’ sign. ‘Can you guess what that sign means? Jonathan?’ he asked a chunky red-haired boy, ignoring Sam’s eager hand.

Jonathan Bramley looked faintly startled. He frowned in concentration. ‘Dunno,’ he finally conceded.

Trying not to show his exasperation, Matthew said patiently, ‘It means “married to”. Mrs Gresham was Diane Brotherton until she married me.’ He clicked again and a vertical line appeared, connecting them to Gabriel Stephen Gresham.

‘That’s your baby,’ one of the girls piped up unprompted.

‘That’s right, Kylie.’ Matthew clicked again. Now little thumbnail pictures appeared beside each of the names. ‘We can even add photos. That way, we can see how family resemblances move between generations. Now, we can all start our family trees with what we know already.’ He tapped the keyboard and brought up another screen. This showed his parents and his sister, complete with photos, places of birth and occupations.

‘But we’re going to do more than that. We’re going to delve into the past and trace our family trees as far as we can.’ This time, the family tree he displayed included his grandparents–one grandfather an incomer, a refugee from the Cornish tin mines who had come to the Lakes to mine slate, the other a Cumberland shepherd–and his aunts, uncles and cousins.

‘And one of the things we are going to learn about is the way a community like ours has grown through the years. We’ll find all sorts of connections between families that you might not even have known about yourselves. You may even discover common ancestors, and you’ll start to get a sense of how people’s lives have changed over the centuries.’ Matthew’s gift for sharing his enthusiasm was working on the children now. They were hanging on his words.

‘We’re going to begin with your immediate family. Look at my family tree on the board so you know how to lay it out on the page. And tonight, when you go home, you can ask the rest of the family to help you fill in the gaps. As we continue, we’ll explore different ways of discovering more information about your history and your ancestors. Now, find a fresh page in your workbooks and make a start.’

Matthew waited till they had all got going, then he sat down behind the desk. He pulled a pile of maths workbooks towards him and started marking the children’s work. His absorption was disturbed by a muttering and sniggering that ran round the room. When he looked up, Sam Clewlow was flushed, his eyes bright with unshed tears. Jonathan Bramley looked gleeful.

‘What’s going on?’ Matthew demanded, getting to his feet. Nobody met his eye. ‘Jonathan? What’s going on?’

Jonathan’s mouth compressed in a tight line. He didn’t know it yet, but he would spend the rest of his life being caught out by his own stupidity and the concomitant inability to dissemble. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered eventually.

‘You can tell me now or you can stay after school and tell me then,’ Matthew said, his voice hard. He’d never understood the complaints of teachers who claimed they couldn’t control the kids. You just had to show them who was boss, and keep on showing them.

‘I just said…’ Jonathan’s voice trailed off as he looked around desperately for support that was not forthcoming.

‘You just said what?’

‘I said we all knew who Sam’s ancestor was,’ he mumbled.

‘I’m fascinated to hear it,’ Matthew said. ‘And who exactly did you have in mind?’

Jonathan’s ears were scarlet and his eyes were fixed on the floor. ‘The Monkey Man up on the moor,’ he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

‘You mean the body in the bog?’ Matthew guessed. The grisly discovery had been the talk of the village for the past few days.

Jonathan nodded and gulped. ‘It was just a joke, like.’