The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone by Alex McCarthy

Author:Alex McCarthy [McCarthy, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529900316
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

15

Catrin

THERE WASN’T JUST THE image of Rosalind. There was another, looking down into the bowl of the pit yard, where a hundred people, miniature in black and white, had made way for stretchers cradling the bodies of the dead. Catrin turned the dial on the machine to zoom in but the picture lost focus. She re-read the report and the names of those who had died, looked at the images and wondered which body was his. Her grandfather’s.

Mam didn’t like to speak much about the past. Catrin knew he’d died in the pit before she was born. She’d been taken to the memorial stone, where his name was engraved with the others. And there was a picture on the mantelpiece of her grandparents’ wedding day: stern faces and buttonhole roses; not much happiness. But she and Mam were not alone in having lost a man to the mine. It was seeing it all in print, as reported, photographed fact, and connecting the date of the photograph of Rosalind with the day of her grandfather’s death that shocked Catrin. For the first time, she felt she’d lost someone too. A part of her had been taken. She would have had a grandfather but for somebody else’s negligence.

Catrin collected the article from the library printer and looked anew at the picture of Rosalind Bone. It was titled ‘A village mourns’, but Catrin wondered if there wasn’t something disingenuous in it. Thought had gone into a pose, at a time when Rosalind’s thoughts should have been for her dead father alone. The image Catrin had worshipped for years no longer seemed beautiful but ugly and contrived. Rosalind wrapping a shawl around her head, as if she were acting a part.

Knowledge of the context made Catrin feel ashamed she’d been seduced by the image. Ashamed she’d wasted hours staring at it and searching her own face in the mirror, hoping for echoes of Rosalind Bone. No wonder Mam hid the photograph away.

Catrin made a fold around each edge of the picture, tore it from the rest of the article and threw it into the library bin.

On a bench outside, she drank her flask of tea and watched the cigarette ends rolling across the paving stones at her feet rather than think about what she’d found. People passed by, and Catrin analysed their body language, tried to catch snatches of their conversations, glimpsed into their shopping bags, guessed the sort of lives they led. What were their ugly secrets? Eventually, she took out her notebook and began to make sketches: the hunch of an old man, litter drifting down the gutter, the palette of ice-lollied stickiness on a little boy’s face. Anything to keep her mind off the bodies in the newspaper.

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