Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

died,’ she said.

      ‘Died? How?’

      She dabbed a crumb from the corner of her mouth. ‘Killed himself.’ She got up, went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, rummaged under tablemats and photographs. ‘I kept the paper. I thought I’d sent it you.’

      I knew I had been pulling away; I knew I had been extracting myself bodily, piece by piece, from my early life. I had missed so much, naturally, and yet I thought I had missed nothing of consequence. But Philip, dead. I thought of the stones he threw, of the puzzled squint of his eye, of the bruises on his gangling legs below his short trousers.

      ‘It’s years now,’ my mother said.

      She sat down again, opposite me at the table, and handed me the paper she had preserved. How quickly newsprint goes yellow; it might have come from a Victorian public library. I turned to read, and read how Philip had blown himself up. All the details from the coroner’s court: and the verdict, death by misadventure.

      Philip had constructed, in Bobby’s garden shed, a sugar and weedkiller bomb. It was a fad of the time, making bombs at home; it had been popularised by events in Belfast. Philip’s bomb – the use he had for it was unknown – had blown up in his face. I wondered what he had taken with him in the blast: I pictured the shed splintered, the stacked flowerpots reduced to dust, even the cows in their field lifting bemused heads at the noise. An irrelevant thought slid into my mind, that Ireland had undone him at last; and here I was still alive, one of life’s Provisionals, one of the men in the black berets. Philip was the first of my contemporaries to die. I think about him often now. Weedkiller, my brain says back to me: as if it needed replication. I am burning on a slower fuse.

       Destroyed

      When I was very small, small enough to trip every time on the raised kerbstone outside the back door, the dog Victor used to take me for a walk. We would proceed at caution across the yard, my hand plunged deep into the ruff of bristly fur at the back of his neck. He was an elderly dog, and the leather of his collar had worn supple and thin. My fingers curled around it, while sunlight struck stone and slate, dandelions opened in the cracks between flags, and old ladies aired themselves in doorways, nodding on kitchen chairs and smoothing their skirts over their knees. Somewhere else, in factories, fields and coal mines, England went dully on.

      My mother always said that there is no such thing as a substitute. Everything is intrinsically itself, and unlike any other thing. Everything is just once, and happiness can’t be repeated. Children should be named for themselves. They shouldn’t be named after other people. I don’t agree with that, she said.

      Then why did she do it, why did she break her own law? I’m trying to work it out, so meanwhile I have a different story, about some dogs, which perhaps relates to it. If I offer some evidence, will you be the judge?

      My mother held her strong views, there’s no doubt, because she herself was named after her cousin Clara, who died in a boating accident. If Clara had lived she would have been 107 now. It wasn’t anything in her character that made my mother angry about the substitution, because Clara was not known to have had any character. No, what upset her was the way the name was pronounced by the people in our village. Cl-air-air-ra: it came sticky and prolonged out of their mouths, like an extruded rope of glue.

      In those days we were all cousins and aunts and great-aunts who lived in rows of houses. We went in and out of each other’s doors the whole time. My mother said that in the civilised world people would knock, but though she made this observation over and over, people just gave her a glassy-eyed stare and went on the way they always had. There was a great disjunction between the effect she thought she had on the world, and the effect she actually achieved. I only thought this later. When I was seven I thought she was Sun and Moon. That she was like God, everywhere and always. That she was reading your thoughts, when you were still a poor reader yourself, because you were only up to Far & Wide Readers, Green Book III.

      Next door to us in the row lived my aunt Connie. She was really my cousin, but I called her aunt because of her age. All the relationships were mixed up, and you don’t need to know about them; only that the dog Victor lived with Connie, and mostly under her kitchen table. He ate a meat pie every day, which Connie bought him specially, walking up the street to buy it. He ate fruit, anything he could get. My mother said dogs should have proper food, in tins.

      Victor had died by the time I was seven. I don’t remember the day of his death, just a dull sense of cataclysm. Connie was a widow. I thought she always had been. Until I was older I didn’t know widow meant a husband had once been there. Poor Connie, people said, the loss of her faithful dog is another blow to her.

      When I was seven I was given a watch, but for my eighth birthday I had a puppy. When the idea of getting a dog was first proposed, my mother said that she wanted a Pekinese. People gave her the look that they gave her when she suggested that civilised people would knock at the door. The idea of anyone in our village owning a Pekinese was simply preposterous; I knew this already. The inhabitants would have plucked and roasted it.

      I said, ‘It’s my birthday, and I would like a dog like Victor.’

      She said, ‘Victor was just a mongrel.’

      ‘Then I’ll have just a mongrel,’ I said.

      I thought, you see, that a mongrel was a breed. Aunt Connie had told me, ‘Mongrels are very faithful.’

      I liked the idea of fidelity. Though I had no idea what it implied.

      A mongrel, after all, was the cheap option. When the morning of my birthday came I suppose I felt excitement, I don’t know. A young boy fetched the puppy from Godber’s Farm. It stood blinking and shivering on the rug before the fire. Its tiny legs were like chicken bones. I am a winter-born person and there was frost on the roads that day. The puppy was white, like Victor, and had a curly tail like Victor, and a brown saddle on his back which made him look useful and domestic. I put my hand into the fur at the back of his neck and I judged that one day it would be strong enough to hang on to.

      The boy from Godber’s Farm was in the kitchen, talking to my stepfather, who I was told to call Dad these days. I heard the boy say it was a right shame, but I didn’t listen to find out what the shame was. The boy went out, my stepfather with him. They were chatting as if they were familiar.

      I didn’t understand in those days how people knew each other. They’d say, you know her, her who married him. Constant was her name before she married him, or, her name was Reilly. There was a time when I didn’t understand how names got changed, or how anything happened, really. When somebody went out of the door I always wondered who or what they’d come back as, and whether they’d come back at all. I don’t mean to make me sound simple, my infant self. I could pick out reasons for everything I did. I thought it was other people who were the sport of fortune, and the children of whim. I was the sole heir to the logic in my head: sole heir and beneficiary.

      When my stepfather had gone out, I found myself alone in our front room, before the slumbering and low-burning fire; and so I started talking to the puppy Victor. I had read manuals of dog training in preparation for his arrival. They said that dogs liked a low, calm, soothing tone, but they didn’t suggest what to say in it. He didn’t look as if he had many interests yet, so I told him about the things that interested me. I squatted on the floor next to him, so my great size wouldn’t intimidate him. I looked into his face. Know my face, I prayed. After a certain amount of boredom from me, Victor fell to the floor as if his legs had been snapped, and slept like the dead. I sat down beside him to watch him. I had a book open on my knees but I didn’t read it. I watched him, and I had never been so still. I knew that fidgeting was a vice, and I had tried to combat it, but I did now know stillness like that was in me, or calm like in the half-hour I first watched Victor.

      When my stepfather came back, he had a worried frown on his face, and something under his overcoat. A foxy muzzle poked out, noisily snuffling the air. ‘This is Mike,’ my stepfather said.