Friend Fraley by Eamon Walsh
A cartoonist sees his estranged mother on a train, and reflects on the unusual calamities that drove his family apart.
I was reading the Advocate, and it was all about The Reaper. The Reaper - the wind that comes across the lake in the winter, gathering speed and ice before it whips through the streets of Landreth, my home town. From December to March it is a brutal thing. It kills people, older people mainly, in the poorer areas like Greek Fields and Labone, people who cannot afford enough heat to see them through to spring. It was January and according to the figures ninety-six had died so far, and there would be more. If you were poor, you just prayed for it to stop.
That was what I was reading about when I saw her. I was on the four-ten from Smartwater, due into Landreth South at six-forty-two. I had been in Smartwater for a meeting with Parax Publications, the people who publish my work. I draw and write comic-strips. If I am known at all - I'm told I've now got a Wikipedia entry, so I suppose I must be known - it is mainly for the Gaffer Winston stories.
Gaffer Winston, along with some other characters, has paid my bills for over twenty years. He is a Sixties-type marijuana enthusiast, who frequents the dens and dives of East Landreth. He listens to the likes of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and wears dark glasses indoors. Gaffer Winston is profane, lewd, and a perverted lecher. He is very popular among men and boys aged from their mid-teens to late-forties - Parax does the research. The stories mainly concern the efforts of Gaffer and his friends - mainly Spliff Payola, Gross Zimminy and Arrie Daffo - to impress the few women who come into their orbit, to obtain enough money for their drink and marijuana without resorting to legit work, and to get gigs for their band, Soup in my Hair.
There are Gaffer Winston conventions - Gaffergathers they call them. They have them in Los Angeles and New York and, I think, in London, also some smaller towns I've never heard of. I've never been to one, although Parax sends people to them - they've got the photographs on the office walls - men dressed like Gaffer and Gross and Arrie, dark glasses and outsized joints; women done out like Gloria Go-Go, one of the backing singers from Soup in my Hair. I myself prefer not to go to those things, I couldn't stand to be recognised in the street.
The thing was that on the train coming back from Smartwater, I found I was in the same carriage as my mother. At first I wasn't sure, I didn't see her get on and she was wearing one of those French-style berets which rather threw me, though it shouldn't have done. I was at one end of the carriage, she was at the other. I kept looking, and the more I looked, the more I thought it was her. Then she lit a cigarette and that clinched it. When I was a kid, she used to smoke brown cheroots and light them in a theatrical way, finishing with a kind of wave which extinguished the match. When she did that on the train, I knew it was her. I didn't know at first if she had noticed me, it had been a long time. Would a mother ever forget what her son looked like? I suppose if any mother would, it would be mine.
I was wondering whether to approach her. But as I was rehearsing what I might say, the train stopped at a place called Brann Hills and she got out. I looked out onto the platform and as she passed she smiled and blew a kiss in my direction. And then she was gone. I wondered if he might be meeting her there, but I didn't see him. A few miles further on we passed Spoon's Junction, where my father had stood on the tracks. I suppose I should feel a stab of pain whenever I pass that place. But sometimes I don't even think about it when we pass there. It was sad, but it was a long way in the past.
I told Jess about it when I got home.
'What do you mean?' she said. 'You didn't even speak to her?'
I knew that would be her reaction.
'I didn't speak to her, no.'
'But why? Your own mother?'
'My own mother who I haven't seen in twenty-seven years. I wouldn't know what to say.'
'Are you crazy? Weren't you even curious?'
Jess believes in talking, so it bothers her that I don't talk about what happened - the things, the thing - that happened. She thinks I'm keeping something in, I'm repressing something which will burst out one day in a diabolical form. She says she wouldn't be able to sleep if anything like that happened in her family.
Jess and I have been together over twenty years, since ten minutes into our first meeting. It was at a Parax Comics party (there was one recently when they sold Henry the Woad Man, who you may have heard of, to Japan). Jess was a publicity person. Back then I was just a comic-strip writer on a comic-strip writer's money - not one of the big-shots, so I could barely ignore the chance of free food and drink. I barely knew anyone. I noticed her early though, as I was arranging a tower of sandwiches on my paper plate. She smiled at the spectacle of my gluttony. An hour or so and several drinks later, I was again facing her at the food table. I placed one sandwich delicately on my plate and raised the plate to indicate my moderation. She smiled again - I liked her smile - and she made a point of filling her plate as I had filled mine the first time. That was introduction enough and we took our plates to the same table and have been together since. We've got a kid. That night, when I got back from Smartwater, Jess wanted to know 'The Story' again. She never tires of it.
So, again I told her my family stuff. And when I refer to my family, I'm talking about my parents and my sister, Dill. My mother, the person I saw on the Smartwater-Landreth train, who was - is - Teresa, but always Tessie for some reason. She was a dabbler in the arts. She painted, was in a drama club, wrote unpublished - and possibly unpublishable - poetry and short stories, did pottery classes. And from an early age she tried to get Dill involved in those things. She took her to ballet and sculpture classes, enrolled her at the Emily Jarr Mini-Thespians. It was the time when it was fashionable to tell your kids how great they were at everything and that they could be and do whatever they wanted. What horseshit that turned out to be. The fact was that neither Dill nor my mother had any outstanding talent in those things. And so what?
My father was a principal at the Landreth Design College and made decent money. He was Robert and everybody liked him. He had what they call charm, he was easy with people, and so people were easy with him. I even liked him, although after what happened I came to feel sorry for him.
They sent us to separate schools. They sent Dill to St. Ann's, an all-girl's with a reputation for the encouragement of the arts. It was said - and believed by my mother - that Georgia O'Keeffe had taught there. So when Dill started there, whenever the subject of schooling came up, Georgia O'Keeffe would be mentioned, as in Dill is at St. Ann's where Georgia O'Keeffe used to teach. When I was old enough to doubt such things, I doubted that. For one thing, Georgia O'Keeffe was American, why would she be teaching in Landreth? For another, I looked up Georgia O'Keeffe in one of my mother's art books and there was no mention of her teaching anywhere. She didn't need to apparently, she was loaded. My mother could have checked that for herself if she wanted, but I suppose that would have ruined the story for her.
They sent me to Finn High where there was a special enthusiasm for the sciences and sports. Science ok, but surely they knew that I was far from sporty - it was their money though, so who was I to argue? It was there at Finn that I met Gallus Fraley - always Fraley, never Gallus except to his family - to them he was Gallus or Gallie. Fraley is important to all of this, because I suppose that that was where it all started. On the second day we happened to be sitting next to one another in a maths lesson. I had noticed him in the yard - Fraley was the kind of kid you noticed; for a start, he shuffled in a hunched sort of way, his feet barely seeming to leave the ground; and his hair was thick and flopped down over his eyes and so he kept flicking his head back to shift it. And although we all wore the school uniform - red blazer with badge (Sapere Aude), grey pants, black shoes - his seemed to be better cut and more expensive than anyone else's. His tie was knotted differently also - Italian-style he said. Some of us, the cool few, adopted the Italian style.
That second day, as I was copying equations from the board, I noticed he was drawing strange figures in a separate book which it turned out he carried for the purpose. So I drew one of my figures - which was not entirely dissimilar to his - a kind of human and bird hybrid with Picasso features - and we skewed the books toward each other. Then he leaned down and pulled up a comic up from his bag, just high enough for me to see the title - MAD. I pulled up a Zap and that was it, we were friends before we spoke.
It turned out that Fraley came from money. By a good way he was the youngest of five - I got to know all of this during the first weeks and months of our friendship. They were doctors and lawyers and such and they came from the Old Powers district. Old Powers itself meant money, and he told me that theirs came mainly from shipping, although no one he knew of was still involved in that. It seems that Fraley was unexpected, born when his parents were well into their forties - they say I am their little miracle, he told me, but I was their little accident. He had a cackling laugh, which sounded like bubbles frothing in his windpipe. Pretty soon we started going to each other's houses. It was only him and his parents by that time, his brothers and sisters were gone. And even though they were around the sixty mark when I met them, his mother and father were pretty liberal people. I got the early impression that they were unused to Fraley having friends round and they were very welcoming to me. It was with them that I had my first taste of wine, and Fraley got me on to cigarettes, although I don't think they knew about that. We used to smoke them out on his bedroom balcony.
And he came to our place a lot. We were three or four miles away in Tuppertown, on the other side of the Japanese Park - not Old Powers standard, but nothing to complain about. And right from stepping in the door he seemed at home. My parents liked him and he liked them; he and my mother clicked, as I thought they might. He had the kind of natural eccentricity that my mother gravitated toward. Even Dill liked him; Dill who had previously and on a matter of principle taken against any friends of mine who came to the house - the principle being that I could never have a friend worth talking to. She always gave the impression that they were beneath her, and before Fraley she was probably right. Dill had standards, she was a bright kid, and two years older than me - two years mattered a lot then and she had a tendency to intimidate my visitors, asking them serious questions about politics and the environment and what they believed in. She scared people off. She scared me sometimes.
Fraley and I kept drawing together and it was in the second year at Finn that we got the idea of starting a comic-book of our own. But as far as we knew all the good stuff was in America, there was nothing like that in Landreth. We wanted to be the ones to get things going. We were thirteen, who the hell did we think we were? But we spent months, evening and weekends, drawing and inventing characters, coming up with ideas, and copying some from other comics. We made each other laugh out loud with what we thought was our outrageous invention.
By that time we were hanging around places like Roney Records and Revolution, where they were selling the American comics. We were big Robert Crumb fans - nobody else we knew had heard of him, and we were glad to constitute a club with two members. And on weekends we would go down to the South Station area - where the freaks and lunatic preachers hung out, and the whores and dopeheads, the people you didn't usually see in other parts of the city. We loved it. From there we got characters with names like Southside Cindee and Holy Joe Crow; characters who, although I didn't know it then, were the forerunners of Gaffer Winston.
We tried to get stuff in the school magazine - the Finn Forum. It was edited by a fifth-former called Cathie Urmigon - she later became a politician - and what she said went. What went was mainly hokey love poems - many of them by her - and Wordsworth kind of stuff about flowers and suchlike; or it was news of the sports teams, the occasional essay about some supposed vital issue of the day - some fifteen-year-old from Bellahay writing about why the bombing of Cambodia should end. All pretty miserable stuff and we let our feelings be known. But Cathie Urmigon would not at first put our stuff in - said it was too immature for her requirements. We told her that it was meant to be immature, that we were immature, and that that was the point and was what made it funny.
But at some point she was obviously struggling for material and she gave in - we got a Holy Joe Crow story in there. Against her better judgement, she said. Cindee we couldn't get in on account of the fact that she was a whore. But it was a thrill to see Holy Joe in there - a person who we had come up with, who we had drawn and given life to, taking up two pages - two pages that might otherwise have contained poems about a pond, or a denunciation of the capitalist system. Even if the stories were on the puerile side, the drawings were worth showing, even back then we were more than ok, the art teachers knew that and my father knew it, he gave us a lot of encouragement.
And when Cathie Urmigon went off to the university, we took the thing over. Out went most of the poems and the nature stuff, and we cut the sports stuff down to the latest results. We made it a rule that fifteen-year-olds were not allowed to give their views on anything. And pretty quickly our stuff - our work as we had taken to calling it - took up half the magazine. Looking back, I don't know how we got away with so much of it, but Southside Cindee went in and nobody made any fuss. And we changed the name to The Delacroix Review, just in case anyone doubted that we were serious.
When we were fifteen Fraley's mother died. She, with Mr Fraley, was coming out of a restaurant in the west of the city when they were hit by a drunk-driver. She was nearer to the drunkenly driven car and took the main force of it. The car hit her, she hit her husband, and they both fell into the road. Falling onto his wife, he was bruised and shaken up. Under him, she was dead.
Fraley stayed away from the school for a couple of weeks, and when he came back we took up where we left off. He didn't mention what had happened and I didn't ask. But it had been in the papers where, in order that the people of Landreth would know the types they were reading about, his parents were described as an Old Powers couple, and the drunk-driver was said to be from the Greek Fields area. Greek Fields - south of the river, immigrant and poor, the type likely to be driving a stolen car while out of his mind.
Fraley and I started to spend even more time together - almost to the exclusion of any other friends - and he started coming away with us. We had a VW Camper and we used to go away during the holidays. By that time, Dill wasn't coming on family trips, she was at the university doing comparative religions or somesuch. We used to go out to the coast, or up to the north-east where it's mainly forests and rivers. Pretty wild country.
On one of the trips, Fraley was ill, nothing serious but he was coughing and spluttering and was laid up for a few days. Although he said it wasn't necessary, my mother insisted on staying behind in the van to look after him while me and my father went off hiking and canoeing. My father was keen on that sort of thing, he knew the names of stuff and his plan was that they would live way out of the city when he retired from his work.
I don't know if it was on that trip when things took a turn, but looking back there was a change around that time. Fraley was pretty much ok by the time we got back, but the mood around the place was different. Things weren't so easy-going somehow, my parents had always been lovey-dovey types, which could be embarrassing, but they were not so lovey-dovey after that trip.
He stayed with us a lot over that winter. He took over Dill's room when she wasn't there, which was most of the time. He said he didn't like to be at his place when it was only him and his father. His father was keeping himself to himself in another part of the house, drinking whisky and listening to Bach. I still went over occasionally, but I never again saw his father. The Old Powers place wasn't the same, it was like the house had died and I could see why he would want to spend more time with us.
But anyway, our routine continued and we got some strips into some of the local comics which were sprouting up at that time - underground comics they were called - things like Rupert the Raver and High were the most popular, this was before Parax - and they sold in the cooler record shops and in some of the kiosks around by the station. We even got paid by Rupert the Raver. It was a small amount, but getting paid was a big step, it gave us the idea that we could just do this for the rest of our lives, rather than going through the rigmarole of college - we were seventeen at this point and both unenthusiastically heading toward art college.
Then one weekday in the February, when The Reaper was taking lives and I had been into town, I came back around seven. My father was the only one at home and the place was silent which in itself was strange, there was usually music, either from the radio or the record-player. He was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a letter in front of him, and a glass of whisky with the bottle next to it. He was not usually a weekday drinker.
'What's up?' I said.
'This,' he said, and he slid the letter across the table. 'This is up.'
I read it. It said:
I don't know why, it must have been a kind of nervous thing, but when I read it I laughed.
'You think that's funny?' he said. 'Your pal goes off with my wife - your own mother - and you think it's funny. Come on, son.'
'Is this serious?' I asked. 'It's mad. It cannot be true.'
'You've read it.' He looked dazed and distant, as if he had been whacked across the head by something heavy. 'You didn't know anything?'
'Course I didn't know anything. Jesus. It's too weird. Fraley?'
'Fraley. Your friend Fraley. You didn't know?'
'I've told you, I didn't know. Anyway, he's not going to tell me, is he? Christ, what would he say?'
He stared across the table at me, as if I was not telling the whole truth. Then he said, 'Suppose not. Drink?'
I didn't want a drink.
'Amorous fucking attentions,' he said as he poured himself another whisky. I don't think I'd heard him curse like that before.
He phoned Dill that night and she came home next day. I got the impression that they blamed me for something, although nothing specific was said. Maybe it was my imagination.
Straight after that, I got my own place. Not because of that, it was just coincidence, but I can't say I wasn't glad to get out, the atmosphere got a bit awkward. For a while though I felt responsible for him, and I visited him a lot. I would usually go round on Sunday afternoons, between masses - he had been brought up Catholic and had started going to church again. He was chirpier on a Sunday, whatever they did there seemed to lift him out of his despair and humiliation. And Dill came home a lot and she went to mass with him. And pretty quickly Dill started to take the whole church thing very seriously. Maybe that shouldn't have been a surprise. She always had a kind of piety about her and thought the pope was one of the good guys. As a kid she would bring fallen birds home, and mice, and rabbits she found in the fields, shot but not killed outright. She would keep them by the kitchen fire and try to persuade them back to health. And sometimes, though not often, her rubbing and feeding and exhortations to live paid off.
And her kindness was not just bestowed on animals. She would also have table-top sales on the street to raise cash for kids in Africa, or someplace that had had an earthquake or a flood. She had a sympathy for distant people, people she would never meet. She would sell her toys and books, and I don't mean stuff she no longer used; I mean stuff she liked, sometimes stuff she had only just been given for a Christmas or a birthday. She shamed me when I thought about it; I knew things were tougher for most people than they were for me, but what did I do about it? I sat and drew figures and made up stories. That's what I did, and still do, for the wretched of the earth.
When he seemed to be getting back on his feet, I stopped going round so much. I was busy by then anyway. I was making a name for myself - and by myself of course with Fraley out of the picture - in the world of underground comics. I had come up with Gaffer Winston and I wasn't just sending stuff off to people. People were asking me to do stuff for them, and paying me to do it. There was so much work that I barely had time to think of anything else. I still got cards from my mother via Dill - Christmas and birthdays - that all said the same thing - Greetings, We Love You, Forgive Us. And there were addresses, first in the Carlisle Hill area, and then one in Bellahay. I never replied, not because I had resentment for them, but because it was just too strange, sending a card like that to my mother and my friend - my friend who was sharing a bed with my mother. I couldn't bring myself to think about that. I like to keep my weird stuff for the comics; real life I like straight and without unnecessary complications.
Last time I saw my father, which must have been three years after it all happened, he seemed happy and back to his old charming self. It was a Sunday and he had asked me and Dill to go round for dinner - Dill was living with a woman at that point, south of the river. I hadn't seen him for a while. So we went and he had made quite an effort - he had baked a chicken pie and we had it with potatoes and vegetables. He had also got some expensive wine in and it was all very agreeable. After a few drinks he started saying how he harboured no grudges, how it had all been tough at first but he had come through it and put it all behind him. Dill put her hand on his as he talked. We played some records and drank too much and he told us how much he loved us and was proud of us. And Dill said she was proud of him also. He was laughing about something as he waved us off and we thought he was going to be ok. And the next morning he drove to Spoon's Junction and stepped in front of the Bellenberg-Landreth Express.
By that time Dill had become a postulant - I didn't know what a postulant was either - and a year or so later I received a letter to say that that was now going to be her life, walled away about four-hundred miles south, dedicating herself to God. She asked me if I'd like to visit, and sent directions and instructions. She told me there was no station within fifty miles of the place, so I drove. And it took some finding, miles from the highway, onto smaller and rougher roads.
I signed in at a small office and was shown up the short drive and into what I assumed to be a dining room, long tables and benches, three on each side. I could hear the metallic sounds of a kitchen nearby and there was a lectern at the top end. As well as the usual iconography, the high walls held photographs of nuns. I stood and looked - Sister Josiah, Sister Michael, Sister Gregory. I wondered what name Dill had.
Then the door creaked and the noise echoed around the room. I hadn't seen her in eighteen months and she had lost weight. Dill had been an attractive kid, boys were interested, but as far as I know there was no reciprocation. Now, she was covered by a rough grey habit, and only her face was visible. 'Don't be shocked,' she said as she approached, so I tried to rearrange my expression. We sat at one of the tables and made the usual enquiries. Then I asked her:
'You sure about this?'
She thought a while.
'I'm sure.' She gave me a big smile to confirm her certainty.
'Won't you miss anything? Outside I mean?'
She thought again, this time for a good long while. And then she said, 'Chaucer's Caramels.'
'Chaucer's?'
'You remember them?'
I remembered. When we were young, our father used to bring them home with him when he came in from work each Friday; candy cigarettes for me, Chaucer's Caramels for Dill. It was a weekly treat. Our mother didn't approve of us eating junk as she called it - she had things to say about diet before such opinions were fashionable - but for some reason she didn't put up a fight about the Friday indulgence.
Had Dill continued to buy them? Or was she just talking about that time, remembering our childhood?
'You can't get them here,' she said.
'I'll bring some next time. You allowed?' The question stuck in my throat, the strangeness of asking an adult - an intelligent adult in the case of my sister - whether or not she was allowed to have Chaucer's Caramels. Anyway, she didn't say yes or no. I could tell though by the quick way she looked at me and then away that there wouldn't be a next time.
'You want the guided tour?' she asked. 'I'll show you my suite.'
'Why not,' I said. 'Seeing as I'm here.'
We seemed to walk for miles, along stone passageways, past heavy wooden doors and niches housing the figures of saints. It took about five minutes and we saw one other nun. They passed without acknowledgement.
'Here we are,' she said. 'Chez Dill.'
It was as I had imagined. Small, darkly shadowed, the only light coming in through a small leaded window high up on the wall above her bed. There was a bedside table with a small lamp; and opposite the bed was a kind of raised rail and a hassock which she knelt on when she prayed to the Virgin Mary in plaster who was standing in a niche which also held a coffee-cup in which flowers were neatly arranged.
'Well?' she said.
'I've seen worse,' I said, although I wasn't sure that I had.
Then I noticed it; the coffin, lying on the floor beneath the Virgin. It had no adornment, just bare boards. She saw me looking. 'Pine,' she said, as if answering a question I was too polite to ask.
'Nice,' I said.
We went back to the refectory, and as we hugged under the marble cross, I said, 'I love you, Dill. You know that don't you?'
'I know it,' she said. 'And I love you.' I felt like crying, knowing that in all likelihood I would never see her again. Her last words to me were, 'You take care of yourself, brother. Have a good life.'
'I will,' I said. 'And you.'
And that was that. I haven't seen or heard from Dill since.
Coming out to my car, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed on the way in - a tight community of headstones, enclosed by a waist-high wall, with cypresses on three sides. An older nun, dressed like Dill but wearing a pair of oversized boots, was cutting the grass with a petrol mower. As far as I could tell, all of the small headstones said Sister. And I thought it strange and sad, that Dill would know that this patch of earth was here, waiting for her at the end of her chosen life, and that someday someone in big boots would be cutting the grass around her.
I told Jess all of this again.
'Weird,' she said. 'How can you not even be curious? Don't you wonder what happened to them? We have a daughter who has a grandmother and an aunt that she has never seen.'
The fact was that, going through the thing again had made me curious; not obsessively, but I did start to wonder about them. I noticed that they were not in the phone-book. And I became curious enough to take a detour the next time I was in the south of the city and saw the sign - Brann Hills Nine Miles. I don't know what I expected. Nothing probably, but at least I could tell Jess that I had made some effort.
I hadn't been in the area before. It was a quiet suburb, not Old Powers but not cheap, and not many people about - the kind of place where people live their comfortable lives indoors, separated from their comfortable neighbours. I drove randomly through the tight streets for twenty minutes and then for no good reason stopped by a park - the park was on one side of the street, a short row of solid three-storey houses, on the other. I sat for a good while, and then feeling conspicuous I muttered the word Idiot.
I was just about to turn the key when I saw them. They came from the park, through a gate about fifteen metres ahead of me, and my heart almost stopped. It was her, older-looking - old in fact - but it was her. And it was him at her side - an aging Fraley, but the same shuffling walk and the hair, now lightened by time, flopping down. She had her arm through his and was pressed tight against him. He was carrying a grocery bag and they were laughing. As they came close to the car - I had my head down, my face shielded by my hand - I could hear them talking but couldn't make out what they were saying. I heard Fraley's laugh, though - that gurgling noise. And glancing sideways I noticed, sticking out from the top of his bag, the latest Parax comic. I had the same copy on the seat beside me. It had four pages of Gaffer Winston and a page for a new character, Chester Best the Playground Pest (I had been reading Lolita). I watched them in the mirrors as they crossed the road behind me and went up the steps and into one of the houses opposite. The door closed and the street resumed its silence. It took a while for my breath to return to a normal rhythm.
As the sky darkened above the park, and a light came on behind their window, I felt an odd sensation - it was I suppose a kind of warmth. If it was that, it was a warmth connected in some way to them, and maybe toward all of us who were connected to each other back then. Here they were, in the suburbs, still together and still finding things to laugh about. I imagined them unpacking their bag and settling in for the night and, although I knew that we could never again spend time with each other, I felt a great kindness toward them. At least something had endured, it had not all been for nothing, they looked like people who should be together. There remained some things I cared not to imagine, certain aspects of their domesticity, but I was glad to have seen them like that. I wondered if she still called him Fraley, or now that his status had changed, was he Gallus, or maybe Gallie. I would never find out.
And sitting there, with the evening coming on, it occurred to me that someone might knock on the window and ask my business. It seemed like it might be that kind of street - the sort where a stranger with no obvious business there might be noticed. And if that happened, I wouldn't know what to say.
So I found my way out of Brann Hills and drove back home to tell Jess about who I had seen. I thought she might think me less strange, having done what I had done, and maybe I was starting to feel that way myself. I don't know why, but I also made a point of going past Spoons Junction. Maybe I thought I was bringing everybody back together in some way. Stupid, I know, but that's the way it seemed.
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That was what I was reading about when I saw her. I was on the four-ten from Smartwater, due into Landreth South at six-forty-two. I had been in Smartwater for a meeting with Parax Publications, the people who publish my work. I draw and write comic-strips. If I am known at all - I'm told I've now got a Wikipedia entry, so I suppose I must be known - it is mainly for the Gaffer Winston stories.
Gaffer Winston, along with some other characters, has paid my bills for over twenty years. He is a Sixties-type marijuana enthusiast, who frequents the dens and dives of East Landreth. He listens to the likes of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and wears dark glasses indoors. Gaffer Winston is profane, lewd, and a perverted lecher. He is very popular among men and boys aged from their mid-teens to late-forties - Parax does the research. The stories mainly concern the efforts of Gaffer and his friends - mainly Spliff Payola, Gross Zimminy and Arrie Daffo - to impress the few women who come into their orbit, to obtain enough money for their drink and marijuana without resorting to legit work, and to get gigs for their band, Soup in my Hair.
There are Gaffer Winston conventions - Gaffergathers they call them. They have them in Los Angeles and New York and, I think, in London, also some smaller towns I've never heard of. I've never been to one, although Parax sends people to them - they've got the photographs on the office walls - men dressed like Gaffer and Gross and Arrie, dark glasses and outsized joints; women done out like Gloria Go-Go, one of the backing singers from Soup in my Hair. I myself prefer not to go to those things, I couldn't stand to be recognised in the street.
The thing was that on the train coming back from Smartwater, I found I was in the same carriage as my mother. At first I wasn't sure, I didn't see her get on and she was wearing one of those French-style berets which rather threw me, though it shouldn't have done. I was at one end of the carriage, she was at the other. I kept looking, and the more I looked, the more I thought it was her. Then she lit a cigarette and that clinched it. When I was a kid, she used to smoke brown cheroots and light them in a theatrical way, finishing with a kind of wave which extinguished the match. When she did that on the train, I knew it was her. I didn't know at first if she had noticed me, it had been a long time. Would a mother ever forget what her son looked like? I suppose if any mother would, it would be mine.
I was wondering whether to approach her. But as I was rehearsing what I might say, the train stopped at a place called Brann Hills and she got out. I looked out onto the platform and as she passed she smiled and blew a kiss in my direction. And then she was gone. I wondered if he might be meeting her there, but I didn't see him. A few miles further on we passed Spoon's Junction, where my father had stood on the tracks. I suppose I should feel a stab of pain whenever I pass that place. But sometimes I don't even think about it when we pass there. It was sad, but it was a long way in the past.
I told Jess about it when I got home.
'What do you mean?' she said. 'You didn't even speak to her?'
I knew that would be her reaction.
'I didn't speak to her, no.'
'But why? Your own mother?'
'My own mother who I haven't seen in twenty-seven years. I wouldn't know what to say.'
'Are you crazy? Weren't you even curious?'
Jess believes in talking, so it bothers her that I don't talk about what happened - the things, the thing - that happened. She thinks I'm keeping something in, I'm repressing something which will burst out one day in a diabolical form. She says she wouldn't be able to sleep if anything like that happened in her family.
Jess and I have been together over twenty years, since ten minutes into our first meeting. It was at a Parax Comics party (there was one recently when they sold Henry the Woad Man, who you may have heard of, to Japan). Jess was a publicity person. Back then I was just a comic-strip writer on a comic-strip writer's money - not one of the big-shots, so I could barely ignore the chance of free food and drink. I barely knew anyone. I noticed her early though, as I was arranging a tower of sandwiches on my paper plate. She smiled at the spectacle of my gluttony. An hour or so and several drinks later, I was again facing her at the food table. I placed one sandwich delicately on my plate and raised the plate to indicate my moderation. She smiled again - I liked her smile - and she made a point of filling her plate as I had filled mine the first time. That was introduction enough and we took our plates to the same table and have been together since. We've got a kid. That night, when I got back from Smartwater, Jess wanted to know 'The Story' again. She never tires of it.
So, again I told her my family stuff. And when I refer to my family, I'm talking about my parents and my sister, Dill. My mother, the person I saw on the Smartwater-Landreth train, who was - is - Teresa, but always Tessie for some reason. She was a dabbler in the arts. She painted, was in a drama club, wrote unpublished - and possibly unpublishable - poetry and short stories, did pottery classes. And from an early age she tried to get Dill involved in those things. She took her to ballet and sculpture classes, enrolled her at the Emily Jarr Mini-Thespians. It was the time when it was fashionable to tell your kids how great they were at everything and that they could be and do whatever they wanted. What horseshit that turned out to be. The fact was that neither Dill nor my mother had any outstanding talent in those things. And so what?
My father was a principal at the Landreth Design College and made decent money. He was Robert and everybody liked him. He had what they call charm, he was easy with people, and so people were easy with him. I even liked him, although after what happened I came to feel sorry for him.
They sent us to separate schools. They sent Dill to St. Ann's, an all-girl's with a reputation for the encouragement of the arts. It was said - and believed by my mother - that Georgia O'Keeffe had taught there. So when Dill started there, whenever the subject of schooling came up, Georgia O'Keeffe would be mentioned, as in Dill is at St. Ann's where Georgia O'Keeffe used to teach. When I was old enough to doubt such things, I doubted that. For one thing, Georgia O'Keeffe was American, why would she be teaching in Landreth? For another, I looked up Georgia O'Keeffe in one of my mother's art books and there was no mention of her teaching anywhere. She didn't need to apparently, she was loaded. My mother could have checked that for herself if she wanted, but I suppose that would have ruined the story for her.
They sent me to Finn High where there was a special enthusiasm for the sciences and sports. Science ok, but surely they knew that I was far from sporty - it was their money though, so who was I to argue? It was there at Finn that I met Gallus Fraley - always Fraley, never Gallus except to his family - to them he was Gallus or Gallie. Fraley is important to all of this, because I suppose that that was where it all started. On the second day we happened to be sitting next to one another in a maths lesson. I had noticed him in the yard - Fraley was the kind of kid you noticed; for a start, he shuffled in a hunched sort of way, his feet barely seeming to leave the ground; and his hair was thick and flopped down over his eyes and so he kept flicking his head back to shift it. And although we all wore the school uniform - red blazer with badge (Sapere Aude), grey pants, black shoes - his seemed to be better cut and more expensive than anyone else's. His tie was knotted differently also - Italian-style he said. Some of us, the cool few, adopted the Italian style.
That second day, as I was copying equations from the board, I noticed he was drawing strange figures in a separate book which it turned out he carried for the purpose. So I drew one of my figures - which was not entirely dissimilar to his - a kind of human and bird hybrid with Picasso features - and we skewed the books toward each other. Then he leaned down and pulled up a comic up from his bag, just high enough for me to see the title - MAD. I pulled up a Zap and that was it, we were friends before we spoke.
It turned out that Fraley came from money. By a good way he was the youngest of five - I got to know all of this during the first weeks and months of our friendship. They were doctors and lawyers and such and they came from the Old Powers district. Old Powers itself meant money, and he told me that theirs came mainly from shipping, although no one he knew of was still involved in that. It seems that Fraley was unexpected, born when his parents were well into their forties - they say I am their little miracle, he told me, but I was their little accident. He had a cackling laugh, which sounded like bubbles frothing in his windpipe. Pretty soon we started going to each other's houses. It was only him and his parents by that time, his brothers and sisters were gone. And even though they were around the sixty mark when I met them, his mother and father were pretty liberal people. I got the early impression that they were unused to Fraley having friends round and they were very welcoming to me. It was with them that I had my first taste of wine, and Fraley got me on to cigarettes, although I don't think they knew about that. We used to smoke them out on his bedroom balcony.
And he came to our place a lot. We were three or four miles away in Tuppertown, on the other side of the Japanese Park - not Old Powers standard, but nothing to complain about. And right from stepping in the door he seemed at home. My parents liked him and he liked them; he and my mother clicked, as I thought they might. He had the kind of natural eccentricity that my mother gravitated toward. Even Dill liked him; Dill who had previously and on a matter of principle taken against any friends of mine who came to the house - the principle being that I could never have a friend worth talking to. She always gave the impression that they were beneath her, and before Fraley she was probably right. Dill had standards, she was a bright kid, and two years older than me - two years mattered a lot then and she had a tendency to intimidate my visitors, asking them serious questions about politics and the environment and what they believed in. She scared people off. She scared me sometimes.
Fraley and I kept drawing together and it was in the second year at Finn that we got the idea of starting a comic-book of our own. But as far as we knew all the good stuff was in America, there was nothing like that in Landreth. We wanted to be the ones to get things going. We were thirteen, who the hell did we think we were? But we spent months, evening and weekends, drawing and inventing characters, coming up with ideas, and copying some from other comics. We made each other laugh out loud with what we thought was our outrageous invention.
By that time we were hanging around places like Roney Records and Revolution, where they were selling the American comics. We were big Robert Crumb fans - nobody else we knew had heard of him, and we were glad to constitute a club with two members. And on weekends we would go down to the South Station area - where the freaks and lunatic preachers hung out, and the whores and dopeheads, the people you didn't usually see in other parts of the city. We loved it. From there we got characters with names like Southside Cindee and Holy Joe Crow; characters who, although I didn't know it then, were the forerunners of Gaffer Winston.
We tried to get stuff in the school magazine - the Finn Forum. It was edited by a fifth-former called Cathie Urmigon - she later became a politician - and what she said went. What went was mainly hokey love poems - many of them by her - and Wordsworth kind of stuff about flowers and suchlike; or it was news of the sports teams, the occasional essay about some supposed vital issue of the day - some fifteen-year-old from Bellahay writing about why the bombing of Cambodia should end. All pretty miserable stuff and we let our feelings be known. But Cathie Urmigon would not at first put our stuff in - said it was too immature for her requirements. We told her that it was meant to be immature, that we were immature, and that that was the point and was what made it funny.
But at some point she was obviously struggling for material and she gave in - we got a Holy Joe Crow story in there. Against her better judgement, she said. Cindee we couldn't get in on account of the fact that she was a whore. But it was a thrill to see Holy Joe in there - a person who we had come up with, who we had drawn and given life to, taking up two pages - two pages that might otherwise have contained poems about a pond, or a denunciation of the capitalist system. Even if the stories were on the puerile side, the drawings were worth showing, even back then we were more than ok, the art teachers knew that and my father knew it, he gave us a lot of encouragement.
And when Cathie Urmigon went off to the university, we took the thing over. Out went most of the poems and the nature stuff, and we cut the sports stuff down to the latest results. We made it a rule that fifteen-year-olds were not allowed to give their views on anything. And pretty quickly our stuff - our work as we had taken to calling it - took up half the magazine. Looking back, I don't know how we got away with so much of it, but Southside Cindee went in and nobody made any fuss. And we changed the name to The Delacroix Review, just in case anyone doubted that we were serious.
When we were fifteen Fraley's mother died. She, with Mr Fraley, was coming out of a restaurant in the west of the city when they were hit by a drunk-driver. She was nearer to the drunkenly driven car and took the main force of it. The car hit her, she hit her husband, and they both fell into the road. Falling onto his wife, he was bruised and shaken up. Under him, she was dead.
Fraley stayed away from the school for a couple of weeks, and when he came back we took up where we left off. He didn't mention what had happened and I didn't ask. But it had been in the papers where, in order that the people of Landreth would know the types they were reading about, his parents were described as an Old Powers couple, and the drunk-driver was said to be from the Greek Fields area. Greek Fields - south of the river, immigrant and poor, the type likely to be driving a stolen car while out of his mind.
Fraley and I started to spend even more time together - almost to the exclusion of any other friends - and he started coming away with us. We had a VW Camper and we used to go away during the holidays. By that time, Dill wasn't coming on family trips, she was at the university doing comparative religions or somesuch. We used to go out to the coast, or up to the north-east where it's mainly forests and rivers. Pretty wild country.
On one of the trips, Fraley was ill, nothing serious but he was coughing and spluttering and was laid up for a few days. Although he said it wasn't necessary, my mother insisted on staying behind in the van to look after him while me and my father went off hiking and canoeing. My father was keen on that sort of thing, he knew the names of stuff and his plan was that they would live way out of the city when he retired from his work.
I don't know if it was on that trip when things took a turn, but looking back there was a change around that time. Fraley was pretty much ok by the time we got back, but the mood around the place was different. Things weren't so easy-going somehow, my parents had always been lovey-dovey types, which could be embarrassing, but they were not so lovey-dovey after that trip.
He stayed with us a lot over that winter. He took over Dill's room when she wasn't there, which was most of the time. He said he didn't like to be at his place when it was only him and his father. His father was keeping himself to himself in another part of the house, drinking whisky and listening to Bach. I still went over occasionally, but I never again saw his father. The Old Powers place wasn't the same, it was like the house had died and I could see why he would want to spend more time with us.
But anyway, our routine continued and we got some strips into some of the local comics which were sprouting up at that time - underground comics they were called - things like Rupert the Raver and High were the most popular, this was before Parax - and they sold in the cooler record shops and in some of the kiosks around by the station. We even got paid by Rupert the Raver. It was a small amount, but getting paid was a big step, it gave us the idea that we could just do this for the rest of our lives, rather than going through the rigmarole of college - we were seventeen at this point and both unenthusiastically heading toward art college.
Then one weekday in the February, when The Reaper was taking lives and I had been into town, I came back around seven. My father was the only one at home and the place was silent which in itself was strange, there was usually music, either from the radio or the record-player. He was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a letter in front of him, and a glass of whisky with the bottle next to it. He was not usually a weekday drinker.
'What's up?' I said.
'This,' he said, and he slid the letter across the table. 'This is up.'
I read it. It said:
Dear Bob,
Please forgive me. I know this will come as a terrible shock but I had to make a decision. I have to leave you. I'm sorry. My amorous attentions have been diverted. You know me for the passionate person I am and you will also know that I can do no other than to be guided by my instincts. It's how we Pisceans are. So I have gone. We will sort out the details later.
What might be an even greater shock - to you and to our children - is that I have gone with Fraley. You know that I became something of a mother to him after what happened. Well the fact is that the mothering turned into something much deeper. I know we have an age difference but since when did conventions like that ever concern the likes of me and you.
So, on behalf of myself and Fraley, I apologise to you and to our children for any hurt this may cause but I also hope that when the shock has been absorbed we can all be friends again. Please don't hate me.
Love
Tessie.
I don't know why, it must have been a kind of nervous thing, but when I read it I laughed.
'You think that's funny?' he said. 'Your pal goes off with my wife - your own mother - and you think it's funny. Come on, son.'
'Is this serious?' I asked. 'It's mad. It cannot be true.'
'You've read it.' He looked dazed and distant, as if he had been whacked across the head by something heavy. 'You didn't know anything?'
'Course I didn't know anything. Jesus. It's too weird. Fraley?'
'Fraley. Your friend Fraley. You didn't know?'
'I've told you, I didn't know. Anyway, he's not going to tell me, is he? Christ, what would he say?'
He stared across the table at me, as if I was not telling the whole truth. Then he said, 'Suppose not. Drink?'
I didn't want a drink.
'Amorous fucking attentions,' he said as he poured himself another whisky. I don't think I'd heard him curse like that before.
He phoned Dill that night and she came home next day. I got the impression that they blamed me for something, although nothing specific was said. Maybe it was my imagination.
Straight after that, I got my own place. Not because of that, it was just coincidence, but I can't say I wasn't glad to get out, the atmosphere got a bit awkward. For a while though I felt responsible for him, and I visited him a lot. I would usually go round on Sunday afternoons, between masses - he had been brought up Catholic and had started going to church again. He was chirpier on a Sunday, whatever they did there seemed to lift him out of his despair and humiliation. And Dill came home a lot and she went to mass with him. And pretty quickly Dill started to take the whole church thing very seriously. Maybe that shouldn't have been a surprise. She always had a kind of piety about her and thought the pope was one of the good guys. As a kid she would bring fallen birds home, and mice, and rabbits she found in the fields, shot but not killed outright. She would keep them by the kitchen fire and try to persuade them back to health. And sometimes, though not often, her rubbing and feeding and exhortations to live paid off.
And her kindness was not just bestowed on animals. She would also have table-top sales on the street to raise cash for kids in Africa, or someplace that had had an earthquake or a flood. She had a sympathy for distant people, people she would never meet. She would sell her toys and books, and I don't mean stuff she no longer used; I mean stuff she liked, sometimes stuff she had only just been given for a Christmas or a birthday. She shamed me when I thought about it; I knew things were tougher for most people than they were for me, but what did I do about it? I sat and drew figures and made up stories. That's what I did, and still do, for the wretched of the earth.
When he seemed to be getting back on his feet, I stopped going round so much. I was busy by then anyway. I was making a name for myself - and by myself of course with Fraley out of the picture - in the world of underground comics. I had come up with Gaffer Winston and I wasn't just sending stuff off to people. People were asking me to do stuff for them, and paying me to do it. There was so much work that I barely had time to think of anything else. I still got cards from my mother via Dill - Christmas and birthdays - that all said the same thing - Greetings, We Love You, Forgive Us. And there were addresses, first in the Carlisle Hill area, and then one in Bellahay. I never replied, not because I had resentment for them, but because it was just too strange, sending a card like that to my mother and my friend - my friend who was sharing a bed with my mother. I couldn't bring myself to think about that. I like to keep my weird stuff for the comics; real life I like straight and without unnecessary complications.
Last time I saw my father, which must have been three years after it all happened, he seemed happy and back to his old charming self. It was a Sunday and he had asked me and Dill to go round for dinner - Dill was living with a woman at that point, south of the river. I hadn't seen him for a while. So we went and he had made quite an effort - he had baked a chicken pie and we had it with potatoes and vegetables. He had also got some expensive wine in and it was all very agreeable. After a few drinks he started saying how he harboured no grudges, how it had all been tough at first but he had come through it and put it all behind him. Dill put her hand on his as he talked. We played some records and drank too much and he told us how much he loved us and was proud of us. And Dill said she was proud of him also. He was laughing about something as he waved us off and we thought he was going to be ok. And the next morning he drove to Spoon's Junction and stepped in front of the Bellenberg-Landreth Express.
By that time Dill had become a postulant - I didn't know what a postulant was either - and a year or so later I received a letter to say that that was now going to be her life, walled away about four-hundred miles south, dedicating herself to God. She asked me if I'd like to visit, and sent directions and instructions. She told me there was no station within fifty miles of the place, so I drove. And it took some finding, miles from the highway, onto smaller and rougher roads.
I signed in at a small office and was shown up the short drive and into what I assumed to be a dining room, long tables and benches, three on each side. I could hear the metallic sounds of a kitchen nearby and there was a lectern at the top end. As well as the usual iconography, the high walls held photographs of nuns. I stood and looked - Sister Josiah, Sister Michael, Sister Gregory. I wondered what name Dill had.
Then the door creaked and the noise echoed around the room. I hadn't seen her in eighteen months and she had lost weight. Dill had been an attractive kid, boys were interested, but as far as I know there was no reciprocation. Now, she was covered by a rough grey habit, and only her face was visible. 'Don't be shocked,' she said as she approached, so I tried to rearrange my expression. We sat at one of the tables and made the usual enquiries. Then I asked her:
'You sure about this?'
She thought a while.
'I'm sure.' She gave me a big smile to confirm her certainty.
'Won't you miss anything? Outside I mean?'
She thought again, this time for a good long while. And then she said, 'Chaucer's Caramels.'
'Chaucer's?'
'You remember them?'
I remembered. When we were young, our father used to bring them home with him when he came in from work each Friday; candy cigarettes for me, Chaucer's Caramels for Dill. It was a weekly treat. Our mother didn't approve of us eating junk as she called it - she had things to say about diet before such opinions were fashionable - but for some reason she didn't put up a fight about the Friday indulgence.
Had Dill continued to buy them? Or was she just talking about that time, remembering our childhood?
'You can't get them here,' she said.
'I'll bring some next time. You allowed?' The question stuck in my throat, the strangeness of asking an adult - an intelligent adult in the case of my sister - whether or not she was allowed to have Chaucer's Caramels. Anyway, she didn't say yes or no. I could tell though by the quick way she looked at me and then away that there wouldn't be a next time.
'You want the guided tour?' she asked. 'I'll show you my suite.'
'Why not,' I said. 'Seeing as I'm here.'
We seemed to walk for miles, along stone passageways, past heavy wooden doors and niches housing the figures of saints. It took about five minutes and we saw one other nun. They passed without acknowledgement.
'Here we are,' she said. 'Chez Dill.'
It was as I had imagined. Small, darkly shadowed, the only light coming in through a small leaded window high up on the wall above her bed. There was a bedside table with a small lamp; and opposite the bed was a kind of raised rail and a hassock which she knelt on when she prayed to the Virgin Mary in plaster who was standing in a niche which also held a coffee-cup in which flowers were neatly arranged.
'Well?' she said.
'I've seen worse,' I said, although I wasn't sure that I had.
Then I noticed it; the coffin, lying on the floor beneath the Virgin. It had no adornment, just bare boards. She saw me looking. 'Pine,' she said, as if answering a question I was too polite to ask.
'Nice,' I said.
We went back to the refectory, and as we hugged under the marble cross, I said, 'I love you, Dill. You know that don't you?'
'I know it,' she said. 'And I love you.' I felt like crying, knowing that in all likelihood I would never see her again. Her last words to me were, 'You take care of yourself, brother. Have a good life.'
'I will,' I said. 'And you.'
And that was that. I haven't seen or heard from Dill since.
Coming out to my car, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed on the way in - a tight community of headstones, enclosed by a waist-high wall, with cypresses on three sides. An older nun, dressed like Dill but wearing a pair of oversized boots, was cutting the grass with a petrol mower. As far as I could tell, all of the small headstones said Sister. And I thought it strange and sad, that Dill would know that this patch of earth was here, waiting for her at the end of her chosen life, and that someday someone in big boots would be cutting the grass around her.
I told Jess all of this again.
'Weird,' she said. 'How can you not even be curious? Don't you wonder what happened to them? We have a daughter who has a grandmother and an aunt that she has never seen.'
The fact was that, going through the thing again had made me curious; not obsessively, but I did start to wonder about them. I noticed that they were not in the phone-book. And I became curious enough to take a detour the next time I was in the south of the city and saw the sign - Brann Hills Nine Miles. I don't know what I expected. Nothing probably, but at least I could tell Jess that I had made some effort.
I hadn't been in the area before. It was a quiet suburb, not Old Powers but not cheap, and not many people about - the kind of place where people live their comfortable lives indoors, separated from their comfortable neighbours. I drove randomly through the tight streets for twenty minutes and then for no good reason stopped by a park - the park was on one side of the street, a short row of solid three-storey houses, on the other. I sat for a good while, and then feeling conspicuous I muttered the word Idiot.
I was just about to turn the key when I saw them. They came from the park, through a gate about fifteen metres ahead of me, and my heart almost stopped. It was her, older-looking - old in fact - but it was her. And it was him at her side - an aging Fraley, but the same shuffling walk and the hair, now lightened by time, flopping down. She had her arm through his and was pressed tight against him. He was carrying a grocery bag and they were laughing. As they came close to the car - I had my head down, my face shielded by my hand - I could hear them talking but couldn't make out what they were saying. I heard Fraley's laugh, though - that gurgling noise. And glancing sideways I noticed, sticking out from the top of his bag, the latest Parax comic. I had the same copy on the seat beside me. It had four pages of Gaffer Winston and a page for a new character, Chester Best the Playground Pest (I had been reading Lolita). I watched them in the mirrors as they crossed the road behind me and went up the steps and into one of the houses opposite. The door closed and the street resumed its silence. It took a while for my breath to return to a normal rhythm.
As the sky darkened above the park, and a light came on behind their window, I felt an odd sensation - it was I suppose a kind of warmth. If it was that, it was a warmth connected in some way to them, and maybe toward all of us who were connected to each other back then. Here they were, in the suburbs, still together and still finding things to laugh about. I imagined them unpacking their bag and settling in for the night and, although I knew that we could never again spend time with each other, I felt a great kindness toward them. At least something had endured, it had not all been for nothing, they looked like people who should be together. There remained some things I cared not to imagine, certain aspects of their domesticity, but I was glad to have seen them like that. I wondered if she still called him Fraley, or now that his status had changed, was he Gallus, or maybe Gallie. I would never find out.
And sitting there, with the evening coming on, it occurred to me that someone might knock on the window and ask my business. It seemed like it might be that kind of street - the sort where a stranger with no obvious business there might be noticed. And if that happened, I wouldn't know what to say.
So I found my way out of Brann Hills and drove back home to tell Jess about who I had seen. I thought she might think me less strange, having done what I had done, and maybe I was starting to feel that way myself. I don't know why, but I also made a point of going past Spoons Junction. Maybe I thought I was bringing everybody back together in some way. Stupid, I know, but that's the way it seemed.
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