The Lives of Women Read Free

river, like a tailor’s scissors cuts through a bolt of new cloth
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    We come to the ditch at the tinker’s shrine and I decide to cross over and take a proper look at it. Clipping the lead onto the collar, heaving the poor dog over and up, we both stand there and stare in, one of us panting slightly more than the other.
    It is obviously an ongoing work of art, this shrine: some trinkets are weather-beaten, others appear to be recent additions. Blue is the colour – all shades of blue. From a high, thick branch, a huge set of wooden rosary beads hangs, and from lesser branches, other more delicate sets dangle like Christmas tree decorations. Along with pieces of threaded glass and wind-chimes, they tinkle and whisper. Blue and white ribbons are spiralled around the bedposts. Inside the rails, in the centre of the plot, there is a small statue of a piebald pony and, behind it, a framed photograph of the dead man. He has a look about him of Burt Reynolds in his heyday. I’m guessing he either died here or was injured here and later died. I guess, too, that this shrine is dedicated to his spirit and that his body lies in another place – a plot in a formal cemetery or in an urn on a shelf in a tinker’s caravan. The small carved cross stuckinto the earth gives the year but, for some reason, not the month of his death. Long after I left anyhow. Long before I came back.
    Whoever he was, and however he died, great lengths have been taken to ensure that he is never lonely. Plastic see-through Holy Marys filled to the chin with holy water are posted around the tree. Little toy angels guard his picture. In a blue heart-shaped frame, a small girl, a daughter – or by now, more likely, a granddaughter – is frilled to the brim in a white first holy communion dress. A glass jar, etched into the clay, is stuffed with what appear to be small folded notes which I take to be messages for Burt. In another jam jar, a single tight-headed rose reminds me: November has arrived, month of the dead.
    I am moved by the love that’s expressed at this shrine and continues to be expressed, fourteen years after the tinker has died. And I am moved, too, by the lack of shame in his death. Even a death that may well have been by murder, or as a result of some sort of violence anyhow, deserves to be both cherished and mourned.
    Apart from two weddings in upstate New York, I haven’t stepped inside a church since I left here and, if I can help it, never will. Nor can I say I believe in, or even approve of, prayer. But I say a prayer here for Karl. I say a prayer for Rachel. I even say one for Paul and Jonathan. And Agatha, of course – I say a special prayer for her.

    In my half-sleep, I sometimes see myself walking. A long, narrow path that veers into the distance. The ground is uneven, gnarled bythe reaches of old tree roots and ancient worn-down stones. On one side of me, a high grey wall shawled with ivy. On the other, a stand of oak trees.
    I stop and turn to look back along the considerable way I’ve already come. There’s a figure in the distance that has also stopped to turn and look at me. She is young, but not a child.
    Or again, just as I’m about to doze off – on a crowded city street at rush hour: hundreds of faces coming towards me, each, in its own way, distinctive. Yet only one stands out. There is something about her, a certain expression – what it is, I couldn’t say.
    I have this overwhelming need to understand her anyhow; to know who she is or why she is here. To know her story. To forgive it, even, if that’s what it should come to.
    But how do you tell the story of yourself as you were more than thirty years ago? How do you know what you were like then? The workings of your troubled mind and heart – how do you begin to resolve all that?
    I have looked at a photograph – the only photograph I could find in all the rooms of my parents’ house. She has