A - The For Sale Sign

One thing you should know is that this place exists. It exists as
though it lives and it breathes, is given motion by those who move
through it and is tainted as though each inhabitant's evil and
prejudice were its own. Westfield to the untrained eye - as mine was
all that time ago - is just another small town in a vast landscape of
countryside, a mere circle drawn on a page marked with notary contours
and other townships, pinpointing an area of land that means nothing to
the casual observer.

Only as you approach the town, diverting off the now almost obsolete
highway along the dirt-flecked side road, through trees and shrubs that
seem conspiring to knowingly block out its existence from the outside
world, before traversing the bridge spanning the sunken river, would
you see the streets and buildings spanning out before you and the flat
square wooden sign staked into the mound of earth that looks
constructed for the purpose of declaring to the traveller that This Is
Westfield, population 2393.

I know it exists of course, because I have lived there and had lived
there for the first seventeen years of my life before everything that
happened had a chance to happen, before I changed within and outside
myself, before the real truth of myself and the town in which I lived
was revealed explicably to me; before the tears, the pain, and the
bloodshed.

The time before was my childhood, that very particular mix of innocence
and ignorance - lost years as I now see them in many ways, which is
surely too often the case. Then came the truth, a period of change,
adaptation or revelation - I am still unsure of the words to use that
will be in any way apt enough to describe what was, in essence I
suppose, a transition, yet far removed from any conventional rite of
passage or slow-burning realisation of maturity and growth.

My mother died when I was seven years old in childbirth, after
complications that had arisen during a prolonged illness. Complications
was always the word associated with my mother's passing, although I
never heard it used when anyone else died. It was as though only her
death could be talked of in that way. When other people were knocked
down by cars or had heart attacks, they were all clear-cut, quicker
ways to go, brought about by "tragic" accidents or circumstances. With
my mother it was "complications". I only began to use the word tragedy
when I was old enough to know its meaning and the implications and
consequences of my mother's death became all too apparent. I came to
learn of course, that every death is complicated - that when anyone's
life ends there is always pain and unresolved issues for those left
behind.

I knew she had been ill for a long time. She had never seemed to have a
great deal of energy, in the physical sense at least - certainly not
the amount of energy a mother needs to cope with a small child. But she
was a caring, outgoing and well-liked woman until the illness that had
plagued her sporadically for years finally took an all-consuming,
vice-like hold on her. I never knew the full details of her illness
back then, and still don't now. I was too young to talk about it when
it happened and there was no-one left to question when I eventually
became inclined to know the truth.

However, some of my earliest memories involve watching her being
treated by my father and Edith Kenyon, my mother's oldest friend, who
had been a nurse with my mother in their younger years and who owned
the grocery store in town with her husband. There had always been
candles in her room and they had previously represented warmth and
light for me until her final weeks. I can still see the pear-drop
flames that burned incessantly through the half-open door, creating
flickering shadows across the inner walls.

In those last weeks there was the overpowering smell of incense which
burned to take away the stench of impending death. Then, in the final
hours, the screams of agony that echoed through the house whenever a
contraction wracked her body. Edith told me my mother had gone against
the doctor's advice to not have the child, knowing she did not have
long left and hoping to further life by bringing a new one into the
world, even if it took her own.

I can still vividly recall the moment when my mother turned to face me
fleetingly as I hid in the shaft of light afforded through the door
which I had nudged slightly ajar. She stared directly into my eyes, her
own grey eyes glassed over and lifeless even then, before perspiration
was wiped away from her forehead by my father, her head turned, the
door was pushed closed, and she was gone from me forever. She didn't
even survive through the night after that final contact and the bundle
of joy she so desperately tried to bring into the world was little more
than a bundle of blood.

When she was gone, so was my father, who persevered to brew up all his
pain and lost faith into every subsequent bottle he drank and let his
problems drown. He was an alcoholic from that day forth, no doubt he
still is, I no longer know nor care, that chapter of my life is now
closed.

However, as with all such things, unlike the door to my mother's room
and deathbed, the doors to my early life can never be truly closed and
the memory and knowledge that it happened, along with the scars that
remain, compel me to write as I do now, the story of myself and my
town. "My town", how absurd those words seem when placed together when
they can never truly co-exist either as mere words or as a concept. I
once believed that I belonged to Westfield and that it belonged to me,
although the flaws in such a principle are so deep I could never have
imagined it to be true.

If I ever belonged to anyone, my nearest owner and guardian would be
Edith Kenyon, the woman who watched my mother die at close hand, could
do nothing to prevent my father's descent into alcoholism and
disillusionment and therefore became my adoptive mother, never by deed,
but always in creed. It was she who took it upon herself to continue my
mother's way of bringing me up, and she who was snatched from me by the
same cruel hand that snatched my biological mother from this
earth.

Edith Kenyon saw me through my earliest years, introducing me more
lucidly to Westfield's agricultural and pastoral community and all its
idiosyncrasies than either of my biological parents could have done.
She possibly felt more responsible for my care than a real mother would
for her child, a feeling exacerbated after having watched me
effectively turn into an orphan overnight, and I never resented her in
any way. I already had a mother I could remember, and with her, I had a
mother I could belong to and know.

When my mother had been alive, my father had been a much more genial
man. I still look back on the family days out, the fetes, Church and
farm gatherings we attended together, with great and enduring fondness.
When I was left in his charge by my mother I would watch as he worked
on his land and then, at the end of the day, be seated on the bar next
to him as he stood drinking in his then hearty rather than threatening
way in the town's only public house. Yet, with his wife and new
daughter now removed from any happy future scene, I was precious little
comfort of what was left.

My father rejected me from that day forth with twice as much vehemence
as the world had rejected his new child and then taken his wife. He
turned his back on his work, his faith, his life and his son with a
ferocity that startled everyone, especially considering the man he had
been before. Over the passing years I was given Edith's version of the
events, a piece by piece jigsaw that I assembled in time, informing my
ignorance and creating a picture that had beforehand been a blank space
concerning my family history. Edith believed my father's swift decline
and despair had been heightened due to the joy and relief he must have
felt after the uphill struggle he and my mother had faced over
conceiving again.

There had been complications during my own birth, which my father had
been able to overlook through his happiness over the final product, but
he had always wanted a large family and their worry over my mother's
ability to conceive again was only removed after seven years of
waiting. When further problems arose during the second pregnancy, the
storm destroyed the calm once again, his wife and child were gone and
the only remaining scapegoat was me. The bitterness he'd held inside,
ignored and fought for so long came rushing down on him in torrents,
flooding through him onto all those around. According to Edith even I
was not enough to deplete the pain, but I now believe my very existence
made the whole thing worse as I was a constant, hateful reminder of
what had been taken away from him.

I never knew the generation above my mother and father. My father's
parents both died when I was very young and the dispute between my
mother and her family was obviously so deep it was not alleviated even
when she died. I never knew who they were or where they were, if
indeed, they were even alive. My father and I were the only blood
relatives at the funeral and the day will remain for me forever as the
last time my father ever laid his hand on my shoulder, or any part of
me for that matter.

And so my only real family existed with Mrs Kenyon, her husband and
their grocery store, in which I practically lived from the moment my
mother passed away. My official residence still existed where my father
lived and I did try to care for him when I was old enough by bringing
him supplies sometimes paid for, sometimes donated by the Kenyons. Mrs
Kenyon also attempted both moral and medical help, which was very
rarely accepted.

My father did not take kindly to foreign entrance into his own private
desolation, even by his son, and, unless only half conscious as he
often was, accepted help and care sometimes with indifferent
irritation, other times with hostile aggravation. He still owned land
in the area, one of the main reasons he and my mother resided in
Westfield in the first place, and this, along with sporadic charitable
efforts by others kept him afloat on his alcoholic island without
seeing him sink into drowned oblivion.

Times with him were often too difficult to stand, and were it not for
his overall apathy, his hostile outbursts would no doubt have been more
frequent and violent. This new resentment, or maybe it had always been
there, that my father had for me generated an overall lack of
interaction between us, however, such actions were thankfully not
echoed by the other members of the town and while I lost my biological
parents, I gained something else from outside.

The majority of my time was spent in the Kenyon's store, whether
working, studying or otherwise employed, mainly in observing for myself
the town as Edith described it to me. Aspects of the Westfield life and
people were introduced to me and became more apparent much earlier than
I believe would have been possible had I not been positioned as I was,
in the centre. The store was the main retail outlet for most of the
townsfolk, and the personal and communal histories introduced to me
through personal experience and Edith's stories would no doubt have
remained elusive until stumbled upon later in life if I had not been to
introduced to them first-hand.

Working in the store, I had my own observations to intermingle with
Edith's words, accounting actions to possible motives, dialogue to
underlying meanings or hostilities. And, due to the dual mechanism of
my perceptions and integration, both by Edith's descriptions and my own
interpretations and interactions, I became to feel one with the town
and its people, accepted, belonging - a part of its present and its
future borne though a knowledge and understanding of its past.

And then came the day when a prospective aspect of Westfield's future
most markedly came into contact with its past. The day the For Sale
sign was taken down. The sign that had been fixed outside the old house
on the corner leading into the main strip of town a few weeks
beforehand. A sign that had predicted change in Westfield for it stood
outside a house that most of the town's residents had believed would
never be sold, never belong to anyone other than the original owner, Mr
John Rafferty.

Mr Rafferty's father had built the house and it had always been his
home, from a child to a grown man of nearly sixty. It was the house he
and his wife had lived in for the entirety of their thirty-five year
marriage, until the day Lillian Rafferty suffered a heart attack when
only 52 years old. Mr Rafferty continued to live there alone after his
wife's death, but he hadn't occupied the house for many years, more
years than I had been in Westfield, and so I had always just assumed
the building would remain as it always had for me, derelict and old,
with no-one taking any interest in the actual physical wood and glass
other than the gangs who used the place for their own pleasure when
they were in town since no-one else wanted it.

Edith had told me that many years ago Mr Rafferty had one day just
disappeared from the house he had lived in all his life. No-one knew
why or where to, but the evidence was there before everyone's eyes. He
had simply disappeared. No clothes had been taken and when his best
friend and work partner Mr Haggerty had gone to investigate why he
hadn't turned up at the farm, he saw that hardly anything was gone at
all. A table lamp was still on in the living room, illuminating a book
and reading glasses beside an armchair in front of a fire which had
recently burned out.

Rumours abounded that he had set off to Africa. He had often talked
about how he would love to return to Morocco, where he and his wife had
spent their first and second honeymoons. Edith was far from convinced
though, she had known Mr Rafferty well and did not believe he was the
sort of person to just up and leave. Besides, Mr Haggerty, the man he
had known and worked alongside since childhood, hadn't heard a word
about it and quite vocally refused to accept the verdict himself.

However, because Mr Haggerty could offer no replacement theory, the
idea his disappearance was simply due to an unexpected holiday and that
he would some day return stuck as there was nothing else to believe in.
His wife was long gone and now, presumed everyone, including the local
chief of police and his colleagues, was Mr Rafferty. He never returned
to Westfield though, and, after the house went into disrepair with the
infrequent but disruptive attentions of the work-gangs, it was boarded
up and forgotten about.

And yet, in the February of that year, work began on the restoration of
the battered building, and a few months later, the For Sale sign was
erected. This confirmed the idea that John Rafferty was never to
return, even in those people's eyes who still saw the mystery as a
piece of town folk-lore and fully expected Mr Rafferty to return one
day and wonder what all the fuss was about. And even though the story
had long held a fascination for me and I believed I wanted his return
more than anyone, the idea Mr Rafferty was never to come back was
confirmed to me when I was walking from my father's house to the Kenyon
store and I passed a removal van unpacking someone's worldly goods and
taking them to the house. As I said before, by this time, I was
seventeen years old.