Abernathy’s Sorrow

by Alan Frackelton

conclusion

“And?” Abernathy said. He’d joined me behind the desk, sitting in the chair Stephen had dug out for me when I started working at the shop, his feet up on a box of science fiction paperbacks.

“She took me to her studio. We spent the whole weekend there. I think I’m in love with the smell of oil paints.”

“And what about her?”

I thought for a moment, and then grinned. “That’s a hard question to answer.”

Abernathy doffed a make-believe hat. “What else?”

“What else... Oh, she taught me about colours.”

“What about them?”

“It’s the way Kelly sees them. For her they’re like memories. Tubes of oil paint all have their own names, yellow ochre or vermillion hue, but Kelly gives them new ones. A red might be Apple-Red or Flag-Red or Blood-Red. Or Sleeve-Red, that’s...”

But I stopped, suddenly guilty for almost saying too much. Abernathy saw this, and seemed about to ask something anyway, but then he simply nodded.

“You’ll have to introduce me some time,” he said, bringing the conversation to an end. “Perhaps she could paint my portrait.”

But I spent most of the morning thinking about the things I hadn’t told him. Sleeve-Red; Kelly had told me it represented the exact shade of the dress her mother had been wearing the last time Kelly saw her alive. We’d been sitting together on the paint-stained futon in the corner of her studio closest to the single working radiator, Kelly dressed only in my T-shirt, me wearing only my jeans. In the air around us was the thick, warm odour of oil paints and the Chinese takeaway we’d ordered at three o’clock in the morning.

“What happened to her?” I’d asked, carefully. It was clear that something in what she was saying pained her deeply.

When Kelly was six her mother, after years struggling with depression, overdosed on vodka and sleeping pills. She’d died in the ambulance a neighbour had called when he heard Kelly crying for help through the thin walls of their flat.

There was no other family; Kelly was sent to live with the first in a series of foster parents, but all she would say about those years was the colour the world had turned to while she did her best to survive them; “Rain-Silver,” she said, so quietly, “Rain-Silver.” Before I could respond she’d suddenly leapt off the bed, insisting she wanted to show me how she made her colours.

I watched her face, not her hands, as she mixed paints and pigments to make Iris-Blue, for the colour of my eyes. “I could fill a palette with you,” she told me. There was such naked honesty in her voice that I could not think of a single thing to say.

* * *

All of that happened over a weekend, just three short days. I kept being amazed by that, even after I’d seen Kelly a second time, and a fourth, and a tenth, and it was still so good, and I still wanted it. I talked about my father, Stephen, Abernathy, trying to let her know that she did not have to hide her own past from me.

Thinking back to that first weekend we spent together in her studio, how the things she told me about colours sprang as much from her enthusiasm for her paintings as her own surprise at what was happening between us, I realised she had been caught off guard by the little she had revealed about her life after her mother’s death. It was all still there for her, close under her skin, like the sketch beneath a finished painting. But she never spoke of it again, despite all my efforts to get her to share it.

* * *

We had been seeing each other for two months when she started spending more and more time alone at her studio. She had always been working before that, half-moons of paint trapped beneath her fingernails when we met for drinks or dinner or a new exhibition she wanted me to see, but this was different. Now the bed was as empty when I awoke in the morning as the flat when I came home at the end of the day, and when — if — Kelly finally appeared she was always exhausted, her hands covered in paint, always dark colours, as if she dipped them into bruises. Hardly speaking. Hardly sleeping. She refused to let me see what she was working on, refused to even listen when I asked her about it. I actually started to feel jealous, as if her paints were stealing her away from me.

I’d given her a key to my flat, and when I came home one grey afternoon after closing the bookshop early, I was surprised to find her sitting in the kitchen. The last time I’d seen her we’d argued about her work, the distance I felt it was creating between us. I joined her at the kitchen table, but for a while we did not speak. There were streaks of paint like tarnished silver on her face and in her hair.

“It’s the darkness,” she said at last. “It gets into everything.”

And I knew she was right. It was in all of her paintings. The crow flying from the farmhouse with something torn and bloody in its beak. The powder-blue teddy bear hidden in the snow-scape, black thread stitched across its mouth. The mask screaming behind the woman in the portrait.

“I wanted to get rid of it all,” Kelly told me, “put all of it into one painting. Only I’d forgotten how much of it there is...”

I looked at her closely, trying to see if what I’d heard in her voice was really there. She looked like her own portrait of sorrow. But I had heard it, a strange, broken joy behind her words, as if she had held a theory all her life and only at that moment proved it right. She smiled, but not for me, and instead of being afraid, I was angry.

I told her to go back to her studio and destroy the painting. In my mind I was watching a loop of imaginary film, Kelly splashing a vast dark canvas with turpentine before setting it alight, standing there watching it burn as I appeared beside her and held her hand.

“I can’t,” she said.

I told her to get out, to leave her key and not to come back. I could feel her eyes on me, even though I couldn’t lift my own. I wanted to smash something, throw things at the wall and scream as they shattered, but the only sound was Kelly opening the door. And then closing it behind her.

* * *

Abernathy hadn’t been around much recently — or at least I hadn’t seen him — but the next morning he was waiting for me. Standing in the doorway of his shop, leaning against the wall of the shallow recess with his hands in his pockets, he looked like he was posing for a photograph that could have only been taken a hundred years ago. I was only there because I couldn’t decide what else to do; because it was something to do. I’d stayed up till nearly four a.m., but Kelly hadn’t come back.

“Spare a few minutes?” Abernathy asked me.

“It’s a bit early for a drink,” I said.

“You drink tea, don’t you?”

He opened the door and I followed him through to the back room. He made the tea and then sat down, watching me.

“Your uncle was in love once, too, did you know that? He couldn’t hide it any more than you can.”

“Susannah,” I said, taking a moment to recall the name. “I never met her.”

“No. She died long before you were born.”

“What was she like? Dad’s mentioned her once or twice, but Stephen never spoke about her.”

“Like your uncle. Kind, and very smart, and intense about the things that mattered to her. A beautiful woman.”

“So what happened? She sounds like someone Stephen would never shut up about.”

“When Susannah died,” Abernathy said, “your uncle couldn’t bear it. They’d been married less than two years. One night she went out to dinner with her brother, and walking home she was hit by a car. Your uncle did everything that had to be done, but inside a part of him had died too. In his own heart, he felt like he was betraying her.”

“How?”

“He wanted to live. That was the betrayal. So when I saw that he couldn’t find his own way out of that, I offered to help him.”

“What do you mean, Abernathy?”

“I took the rest of Susannah away from him. I made it so they had never met, never fallen in love, never married. I made it so your uncle never had to know what it felt like to have a stranger in a white coat tell him his wife was dead.”

As he told me this, Abernathy smiled his usual smile. I remembered my first impression of him, a man who knew sorrows but could always see through them, as if they were nothing more than ghosts. I believed what he was telling me. It seemed incredible, but it was the truth. I don’t think Abernathy even knew how to lie.

“Drink your tea,” he said, “before it gets cold.”

I emptied the mug and left it on the floor between my feet.

“Now,” Abernathy said. “Ask away.”

“How do you do it? Is it magic?”

“Everything’s magic, Thomas. So yes, you can call it that. It’s not difficult. The person who wants to forget does all the real work. I just hold the ribbon in place while they tie the bow. It’s a trade, of sorts. They get a life they can live without whatever pain has been eating away at them, and I get a new piece for my collection.”

“What collection?”

“You still think of this place as a shop, don’t you,” he said.

“Well, yes. What else...” And then I got it. “But...”

I didn’t want to say junk, but there was no better word to describe the contents of Abernathy’s shop. Or collection. Or whatever it was.

“But why?” I finally asked him. “Why would you want to collect all this... stuff?”

“It’s not the object, Thomas, but what it represents. I couldn’t very well have a room filled with actual memories, could I? They have to become something else. And for some reason they always become ‘stuff’. These broken things. I don’t know why.”

“Are my uncle’s memories of Susannah here?”

Abernathy nodded. “Third shelf from the top, just inside the door. A charred piece of oak with the word ‘happy’ carved into it.”

“And Stephen had no idea? He’d forgotten everything?”

“Everything. That was the trade. That was what he wanted.”

“Hold on,” I said, struggling to make sense of it all. “What about my father? He hasn’t forgotten. Neither have I.”

“Of course not. But tell me something. Your uncle was never around when your father mentioned Susannah, was he?”

“No... no, I don’t think so.”

“That’s because wherever Stephen was, Susannah couldn’t be. Not even the memory of her. That’s part of the trade, too.” He smiled. “Or the magic.”

“I’ve got another question,” I said. “Why are you telling me this now?”

He sat back, fingers loosely curled around the edges of the arm rests. “What happened last night, Thomas?”

And just like that, I told him.

“You’re terrified,” he said, once I was through.

“Of what?”

“You’re terrified that you can’t save her from this darkness she’s trying so hard to tear out of herself, because she’s terrified there won’t be room for you if she holds onto it. But she’s even more terrified of letting it go.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” I couldn’t hide the desperation from my voice.

“Help her through, Thomas. The way I once helped your uncle.”

“Oh it’s quite painless,” he went on, when all I could do was stare back at him in silence. “It’s a little like dreaming. You shut your eyes, and when you open them-”

“I get it,” I said, a little too harshly.

“Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to give me an answer right away.” And he smiled. “Can I get you another cup of tea?”

I shook my head, already getting to my feet. “No, don’t bother. I need to... I should go.”

I was back in the shop before Abernathy could respond. It seemed darker to me now, more confined, the shelves overcrowded to the point of collapse. I reached the door and turned the latch, but I paused before I opened it.

Third shelf from the top, Abernathy had said.

I found it leaning against a battered pewter candlestick. The thing that had became my uncle’s memories of Susannah. It was a small, rough disk of oak, blackened around the edges. It even reeked of smoke and burning. The word HAPPY had been carved into it, the letters deep, ugly, disjointed.

Holding it, I seemed to hear Abernathy’s calm voice whisper, he lived a good life.

* * *

But I wasn’t so sure.

Outside I turned in the direction of home, but in the end I kept walking. I thought about my uncle. Older than my father by four years, he had still only been sixty one when he died. I didn’t know if he had ever believed in God, or if whatever faith he may have had had been taken away along with his memories of Susannah. He’d seemed to have peace at the end, but now I couldn’t help wondering where that peace had really come from.

What did Stephen regret, at the end? Anything? What had he been thankful for? Yes, he had lived, and I was glad of that. But even if he was blind to it, something important had been missing. He couldn’t remember the agony of losing his wife, but neither could he remember the day they met, the first time they kissed, the heft and fit of her ring on his finger. He couldn’t take the pain and file it down to nothing with the good memory of the time they had shared. And he couldn’t find the better peace in the knowledge, even the possibility, of being with her again.

He’d lived, but he’d been empty. That was the real loss.

I thought these things, grieving for my uncle all over again, and felt them to be true. But it seemed so easy. Just close your eyes...

And, of course, Kelly would never know.

* * *

Half an hour later I was standing outside her studio. I could hear music from the open window above me, a Beth Orton CD, so I knew Kelly was working. I found the spare key she kept hidden in the empty doorbell housing, and went inside.

She was sitting on a stool in front of a tornado.

That was my first impression of the painting she had been working on for the past six weeks. A twisting raging storm of silver and black. The canvas was huge, ten metres by five, filling the wall before her like a door.

It was only the light catching the wet paint that made it seem to glimmer.

Looking at it, I didn’t notice the music come to an end, but when Kelly got up to change the CD, she saw me.

“Hi,” I said.

The painting seemed to fill the world behind her.

“I’m not finished,” she said.

I felt like crying. I felt like holding her.

“I know,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

After a moment, she nodded. I went to the phone, sorting through the pile of takeaway menus, while Kelly washed her hands. She played the CD again. We waited. I held her.

That’s how it started.

* * *

I didn’t see Abernathy again. I opened the bookshop as usual the following morning, passing the curio shop which looked closed and deserted, just as it always had. Empty.

Two days later the windows were hidden behind sheets of chipboard, a TO LET sign hung expectantly above the padlocked door.

I thought about him often, wondering where he had gone to. There were times when I even missed him.

But I never once regretted my choice.

* * *

Months later, when Kelly agreed to move in with me, I told her about Abernathy and his collection, and she said it sounded like a place I had visited in a dream. She never mentioned anything about painting it, but when she brought me to her studio a fortnight later I could smell two things, one familiar scent wrapped inside another; oil paints, and scorched wood.

She called the painting Abernathy’s Sorrow. It hangs on the wall in the room where I go every evening to write.

Like a window.

Like a memory.