When Fraser turned in that morning, Marilyn was still piecing together what remained of their life in 36b.
‘Baby what’s -?’ Fraser began, as he walked through the open door, but then the look on Marilyn's face told him all he needed for now. He came over to where she was kneeling, amid smashed family photographs and letters. He encompassed her shivering body and she felt herself crumble into his warmth. ‘It’ll be okay, Sweetheart, it’ll be okay.’
Marilyn awakened in his hold. ‘No it won’t Fraze, you didn’t see what they did - the things they wrote.’ Fraser’s gaze fell on the bucket of red soapy water in front of her. In spite of Marilyn’s efforts, he could see with a single glance at the well-scrubbed door and the murky windows the impact of what had happened. ‘It’s not our stuff, Fraze. It’s us. It’s everything.’ Marilyn looked up at Fraser challenging him to contradict her.
‘They can never take us, Lynnie, no matter what else, okay?’ He kissed her. Marilyn picked up a photograph of her mum, and one of herself as a teenager.
‘I guess these seem fairly useless now’, said Fraser, handing her the crumpled wrap of flowers from underneath his arm. Foxgloves – they’d been her favourite flowers since she was a little girl. Nanna had said they healed sick hearts.
‘I love you, Fraser’, she said, taking his hand to help herself up, and moving towards the kitchen in search of an unbroken vase. The formica work surface was strangely clear. She couldn’t think why she’d not checked their savings jar hours ago - it was of course gone. ‘Fraze.’
‘Darling.’
‘Fraze – our savings have gone’, she said. How long had they been counting the pennies? Priding themselves on their frugal lifestyle, saving everything for the future – for what? ‘The adoption agency won’t even look at us now.’ Staring out at the yard below, she recalled the last time they’d been robbed, when they first got married and were still living with Pa. The pillar-box savings had been taken and their honeymoon had been postponed forever. She’d been sad because she’d always hoped to find the owner of the box... Annie R 1957... Annie R! That was why the name had stuck in her mind. She’d so longed to meet the lonely owner - perhaps only to find her today, exhausted, fearful and disrespected in the wake of her new child?
She looked at Fraser. She had so much to be thankful for, so many blessings that couldn't be taken away from her, no matter how much hatred burned outside.
‘Fraser, I know it seems weird’, she said, ‘but would you mind if we went down to Arnos Vale? It’s just my mum; it was 30 years ago today.’ Fraser walked towards her, took her hand and kissed her. They closed up the flat as best they could and started the walk down to the cemetery, leaving the police - and all that would entail - until they returned.
‘I always figured there must’ve been a day when it happened’, said Fraser, ‘but – ’
‘I know’, said Marilyn. ‘I went once, twenty years ago. But it disturbed me. Before then I wasn’t really aware that I was missing something. Something I could never have.’
The world was beginning to wake up: the morning sun shone hazily, curtains were pulled across revealing sleepy faces, doors opening to usher in milk from doorsteps. A few early risers were outside already, de-icing their cars in the February frost. Marilyn held Fraser’s hand tightly; they said little but to Marilyn they seemed closer than ever. As they plodded towards Arnos Vale she could just as easily have been ten years old again, scrambling towards the cemetery with Pa. But this time she was approaching from a different direction, and she was leading the way. Twenty years on, she ought to have a renewed perspective, and she thought that maybe finally she did.
Hovering by the gates, she was aware of her body, of her awkwardness - her inability to explain what was going on here. In one hand she held the foxgloves that Fraser had given her.
‘Is okay, Lynnie. You go ahead’, he said. It was enough. Taking both his hands she squeezed them, hoping to borrow from his warmth some of the calm, the logic, into her own veins. Then she released him, thanking him with her eyes.
She tried not to rush, pacing briskly like she remembered Pa doing a score ago. Her eyes fell on the stones around her as she walked: Beloved Mother, Dearest Mum, Loving Ma. She thought again of Annie’s photo with her mother and child, then of herself as an individual in the midst of space, unconnected with the past and the future. Was she really so disconnected?
She knelt down at her mum’s grave, as she’d watched Pa do decades before. Sorrow crept into her being. For the woman lost in her prime of life, the woman she’d treasured stories and pictures of, the woman she’d never known yet knew intimately. Accepting that Lulu was once alive, that she should have been an integral part of her life, Marilyn at last felt able to grieve. She was inside the scene she’d observed back in 1964; she was a participant and it didn’t frighten her any more.
She looked up at Lulu’s solemn gravestone. Murky with tears, she read the words Pa must’ve had to choose in the opening of the grief he would wear forever. Beloved Sweetheart and Mother. She thought of poor Annie, how unbeloved she seemed, and then it struck her. Not death, bareness, racism, poverty, prison, injustice - none of these evils on this long hard day, in this long hard life, could take away what she had with Fraser.
She placed the foxgloves carefully on the grill, blew a kiss and planted it over Lulu’s name. She drew herself back onto her feet, elated with the exhaustion of sobbing. Then she ran, faster and faster, back to Fraser. Seeing his figure in stillness on the bench, suddenly so small in the fierce morning light, she could wait no longer.
‘You’re right Fraze!’ she screamed through her breathlessness. ‘You’re SO right! They can’t touch us - and ain nobody gonna get their mits near us anymore!’ Fraser swung her around, her feet coming off the ground, and she felt she was made of candyfloss, so light she might fly away.
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