Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
scenes moulded into the unleavened bread. And then, and only then, had they sat down to dinner, to the twelve meatless courses, one for each apostle. The family had visibly sighed with relief. Some of them had expected Zygmunt to make a speech, to talk about the mistakes and the sins of the last year, as he said his father and grandfather had always done, listing all the things the young people had done wrong before forgiving them and wiping the slate clean for a new year.
If Zygmunt had done that, it would have made things difficult. It was easier to pretend things hadn’t happened when they weren’t spoken out loud.
Grace took one last look at Zygmunt, to assure herself that he was still breathing, and backed across the passage. Peter was in the conservatory, among his cacti and the pelargoniums. There remained a thin covering of snow on the glass panels of the roof, and the light beneath it was pale blue.
‘Is Dad all right?’ he said, without turning from his inspection of a spiky monstrosity on a high shelf. His hearing was attuned to the sound of her chair. Even Zygmunt had acute hearing; Grace wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had known she was there, in the doorway of the room, all the time she had been looking at him. It would have been just like him to pretend he was unaware of her. It was like Peter, too. She could imagine him being exactly the same when he was a decade or two older. They were stubborn and hot-headed in turns, immovable or flying into tempers. His unpredictability had been one of the things that had attracted her to Peter. But recently his temper had been kept firmly in check, corked up inside.
‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s been looking at the photo albums.’
It hardly seemed necessary for Grace to say it. The photographs had been in front of Zygmunt on the table where they stayed almost permanently. They were photographs of the family, the bits of the Lukasz history pieced together as best they could be, given the gaps, the sudden ends to so many lives. There was nothing that could be said to explain the page on which a young man of eighteen stood smiling and full of life in one photo, while below it the rest of the page was blank but for an almost indecipherable shot of a metal plaque.
At Wigilia, there had been many quiet prayers as the Lukasz family had tried to connect with their relatives overseas. They had been thinking mostly of Zygmunt and Krystyna’s cousins in Poland, but now also of Andrew. Everybody had spoken of him as Andrzej in the presence of the old people.
Krystyna said she always tried to conjure the memory of her dead parents back in Poland to strengthen the connection. Grace wanted to ask her if the prayers actually worked. But a glimpse of Krystyna’s face in an unguarded moment told her what she wanted to know.
As always, there had been midnight Mass at the Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa on Harrington Street, under the images of the Black Madonna. Alongside the church was the Polish Saturday School, where a handful of pupils still kept the language alive, studying for their Polish GCSE exams, learning the history of Poland and the Catholic faith. It was the children of the Saturday School who would stage the Nativity play at the oplatek dinner next Sunday.
In church they had all joined in the singing. Some of the men smelled of vodka, and even some of the women were flushed too. But they all tried to sing, nevertheless. The Poles never seemed to have good singing voices, but they made up for it with enthusiasm. Even Zygmunt, in his croaky voice, had joined in with his favourite Koledy, the Christmas carols that followed Mass.
There had, of course, been the conversation – the catching up on the latest news. All their Polish acquaintances loved a bit of gossip. It was futile to try to keep the intrusion out of their lives. Grace was glad of the snow as an excuse for keeping to the house, because she didn’t know what to say when their friends asked after Andrew.
She watched Peter stroke the firm leaves of the cactus and touch the tip of his finger to the points of the three-inch long spikes. He pressed on them until the spikes looked as though they would pierce his skin like nails.
‘There was a phone call earlier,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘It was that man, Frank Baine.’
Grace froze. Irrationally, she wanted to reach out and grab the pot the cactus was in, to hurl it against the wall and smash it. She wanted to fling it through the glass on to the flags in the back garden. She wanted to crush its ugly, vicious spikes and watch the fluid spurt from its swollen body. But she couldn’t even reach that high.
‘She’s arrived then, has she?’ said Grace.
‘She flew into Manchester this morning.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Let him rest a while longer,’ he said. ‘He needs his rest.’
Grace recalled the extra place that had been set at the Wigilia dinner. For an unexpected guest, Krystyna had said. The old lady never tired of explaining that it was the tradition, that it meant they could provide hospitality for any wanderer who might be travelling along the road that night, for any stranger who might knock at the door, whoever that person might seem to be. For at Wigilia, the stranger could be Jesus himself. Grace wanted to laugh out loud at the idea of Jesus wandering along Woodland Crescent, Edendale, on Christmas Eve and deciding to ring the bell at number 37. Surely he had better things to do, just as her parents had told her Santa Claus had at Christmas.
But Grace had said nothing. It had been Zygmunt who had shaken his head and smiled at his sister’s words. Then, in his quiet, barely audible voice, speaking in Polish, he had insisted the extra place was set for those who were absent, for members of the family who had died. What he meant, of course, was that this place was for his cousin Klemens. It had been set at Wigilia when Zygmunt had first become the head of his own household, and every year since.
But Grace knew this year had been the last time. Next Wigilia, the extra place would no longer be for the absent Klemens. It would be for Zygmunt.
It might have been more than the cold that made Alison Morrissey shiver and pull her coat closer around her shoulders. In fact, the sun was already rising over Stanage Edge and Bamford Moor. In another hour it would have eased some of the chill from the air and melted away the mist that clung to the black rampart of Irontongue Hill. Morrissey looked as though the sun would bring her no warmth, as though it would take much more than a dose of winter sunlight to do that.
She was looking across a few yards of rough grass to a snow-covered peat moor and an eruption of bare rock. The wind was scraping across the moor from a more distant mountain to the north.
‘The rock there is Irontongue,’ said Frank Baine. ‘In the distance is Bleaklow.’
‘This place certainly looks bleak in the snow.’
‘Even without the snow, it’s still bleak.’
It was Irontongue Hill that took her attention. Baine had already told her that it got its name from the eruption of black rock on its summit, an uncompromising slab of millstone grit thrown up by ancient volcanic activity.
Morrissey turned away. The valley below them looked vast and mysterious in the darkness. It lay like a rumpled sheet tugged into peaks and valleys by a restless sleeper. But gradually the lights of scattered villages and farms were vanishing into the grey wash of dawn. The shadows of the hills deepened and began to spread dark fingers across a patchwork of fields, groping and fumbling among the yards of stone farmhouses and the gardens of invisible hamlets.
‘I didn’t anticipate it would be so cold in England,’ she said. ‘I didn’t bring the right clothes.’
‘None of your clothes would have been the right ones,’ said Baine. ‘The weather changes by the minute in these parts. This snow could be gone completely tomorrow.’
‘Let’s hope so. I’ve got to see the site. That’s very important to me.’
‘I understand that,’ said Baine.
‘The Lukasz family,’ she said, ‘will they agree to talk to me?’
‘No,’