Wish You Were Here Read Online Free PDF Page B

cemetery in Shanklin, Ellie’s mother—or her ashes—lies buried, under a memorial slab placed there by her then husband, whom Ellie would one day refer to as ‘Uncle Tony’. Ellie has lived now for over ten years in her mother’s and Uncle Tony’s former home, but has never been to see her mother’s nearby resting-place, and until recently this would only have expressed her mixed feelings about her once renegade mum: blame, tempered with unexpected gratitude and—ever since that September day years ago—an odd, grudging admiration. She hadn’t quite condemned, but she hadn’t quite forgiven either, and she wasn’t going to go standing by any graves.
    And until recently this would only have expressed Ellie’s position generally. The past is the past, and the dead are the dead.
    But two mornings ago when Jack had departed, all by himself, on an extraordinary journey whose ultimate destination was a graveside, Ellie had felt rise up within her, like a counterweight, the sudden urge to pay her long-withheld respects. She’d even had the thought: As for Jackand his brother, so for me and my mum. The only trouble was that she didn’t have the car, Jack had it, and she’d baulked at the idea of getting the bus. But she has the car now—she has unilaterally commandeered it—and, only within the last desperate hour, Ellie has attempted that aborted journey once again. And failed.
    She’d driven blindly hither and thither at first, sometimes literally blindly, given the assaults of the rain, and because much of the time her eyes were swimming with tears. How could Jack have said that? But then how could she have said what
she’d
said, and how could she possibly, actually act upon it? Then the thought of her mother had loomed, even more powerfully, once more. Shanklin. Forget Newport. Forget Newport police station. That had just been a terrible, crazy piece of blather. Shanklin. And now, after all, might really be the time.
    Hello Mum, here I am at last, and look what a mess I’m in. Any advice? What now? What next?
    And if no answer were forthcoming, then at least she might say: Thank you, Mum, thank you anyway. I’m here at least to say that. Thank you for deserting me and Dad all those years ago. Thank you for leaving me to him, and to the cows. And the cow disease. Thank you for being a cow yourself, but for coming right in the end, even if you never knew it. Thank you for giving me and Jack—remember him, Jack Luxton?—these last ten years. Which now look like they’re coming to an end.
    And thank you, if it comes to it, for offering me your example.
    Rolled up in the back of the car is one of the oversizedumbrellas they’d had made for use around the site and to sell in the shop. Yellow-gold segments alternating with black ones displaying a white lighthouse logo—meant to represent the vanished beacon—and the word LOOKOUT at the rim. The umbrellas matched the T-shirts and the baseball caps and the car stickers—all things that (like the name ‘Lookout’ itself) had been her ideas.
    It would have gone with Jack, she realised, on his journey. She suddenly hoped it hadn’t rained on him. What a fool he’d have looked putting it up at a funeral. Let alone at a military parade. But driving madly just minutes ago through the blinding rain, Ellie had seen herself clutching that same wind-tugged Lookout umbrella as she stood by her mother’s rain-soaked remains.
    Hello Mum. What a day for it, eh?
    But what a fool
she’d
look. And what a miserable exercise it would be. Picking her way through some wretched cemetery, through the puddles and mud. In
these
shoes. All to find some little, drenched square of marble, while a seaside brolly tried to yank her into the air. Jesus Christ.
    And as for that advice, that example, did she really need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future—rainy—day. She could hear her