Thirty-One

‘Have you thought of seeing someone about what’s happened? I mean, you know…’

Sarah was sitting at my kitchen table, making sandwiches. She’d brought cream cheese, ham, tomatoes, avocados – real food – and was now layering them between thick slices of white bread. She was one of the few people I could stand to have around me. She was straightforward and talked about emotions objectively, as if she were a mathematician puzzling over a problem. Now the sun was streaming in through the windows, and we had the afternoon to ourselves before Elsie came home from school and Sarah returned to London.

‘You mean,’ I took a swig of beer, ‘go and see a trauma counsellor?’

‘I mean,’ Sarah said calmly, ‘that it must be hard to get over what’s happened.’

I stared at the crooked metal eye of the beer can.

‘The trouble is,’ I said at last, ‘there are so many bits to it. Anger. Guilt. Bafflement. Grief.’

‘Mmm, of course. Do you miss him a lot?’

I often dreamed about Danny. Usually, the dreams were happy ones, not of losing him, but of finding him again. In one, I was standing by a bus stop and I saw him walking towards me; he held out his arms and I slid into their empty circle like coming home. It was so physical – his heartbeat against mine, the warm hollow of his neck – that when I woke I turned in the huge bed to hold him. In another I was talking to someone who didn’t know about his death, and crying, and suddenly the stranger’s face became Danny’s and he smiled at me. I woke and tears were streaming down my face.

Every morning, I lost him all over again. My flesh ached for him, not so much with desire as with loneliness. My homesick body recalled him: the way he would cup the back of my head with a hand, the rasp of his roughened fingers on my nipples, his body folded against my folds in bed. Sometimes I would pick Elsie up and hug her until she cried out and struggled to get away. My love for her felt, suddenly, too big and too needy.

Too often I would take out the letter he had written to his sister. I wouldn’t read it but would stare at the bold black script and let phrases come into focus. I only had a few photographs of him; he’d always been the one behind the camera, the way most men are. There was one of both of us in shorts and T-shirts; I was looking at the camera and he was looking at me. I couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture. There was another of him lying on his back and holding Elsie up on his lifted legs. His face was out of focus in the sunlight, a bleached-out blur where his eyes should be, but Elsie’s mouth was agape in panicky delight. Mostly, he was turned away from the camera lens, hidden. I wanted a photo of him that would stare directly at me, like a film star’s glossy publicity, for I was terribly scared of forgetting what he looked like. Only in my dreams did I see his face properly.

‘Yes’, I answered Sarah, picking up a sandwich that disgorged tomato as I lifted it to my mouth, ‘yes, I miss him.’ I chewed a bit, then added, ‘I don’t know how to restore him to his proper size in my memory. If you see what I mean.’

‘What about her?’

‘Finn, you mean? God, that’s complicated. First of all I almost got to love her; she was part of the family, you see. Then, I hated her; I felt almost sick with hatred and humiliation. And then she died and it’s as if that’s stopped all my emotions in their tracks. I don’t know what I feel about her. At sea.’ I shivered at the figure of speech, remembering again the dark waters. I saw Michael Daley standing on the breaking boat and, in slow motion, I saw again the metal pole hitting him, the boom striking him, his long body buckling.

‘The police keep saying how pleased they are that it’s all cleared up, and never mind the loose ends, they can deal with those bit by bit, but I feel bothered. That’s too little a word. I can’t get it right in my head. There are things, I mean, I don’t see how it was possible that…’ I stopped abruptly. ‘Let’s have a game of chess. I haven’t played for ages.’

I put the chess-board on the table and slid open the lid of the dark wooden box, picking out two smooth-headed pawns. I held out my fists and Sarah tapped my left hand.

‘White,’ I said, and we arranged the pieces on their squares. They stood there stalwartly in their ranks, the wood gleaming in the shafts of sunlight; a bird chirped outside, not the lonely cry of a seabird that sent shivers down my spine, but the homely mundane chirrup of an English garden bird sitting in a small tree whose leaves were just about to unfurl.

∗

Later, after Sarah had left for London and I’d collected Elsie and settled her with Linda, I made a trip to the supermarket. I had been only a few days previously and the shelves and fridge at home were groaning with convenience food. But it calmed me to wheel my trolley up and down familiar alleys, picking out the solid comforting objects which were always in their proper place. I liked to compare the prices of reduced-sugar baked beans, washing powder, peanut butter.

I was hovering over a freezer full of puddings – should it be another pecan pie, or a lemon meringue? – when I heard a voice behind me.

‘Sam?’

I took both puddings and turned.

‘Why, hello, er…’ I’d forgotten her name again, just as I had done the last time we’d met. The memory of Finn’s shopping expedition surfaced briefly and painfully. That was the day I’d believed she’d started opening up to me. Now I knew it had been just part of the charade.

‘Lucy,’ she prompted me. ‘Lucy Myers.’

‘Of course. Sorry, I was miles away.’ I balanced the puddings on the overflowing trolley. ‘How are you?’

‘No, how are you? she responded eagerly. ‘You’ve been having such an awful time. I’ve been reading all about it, well, we all have. We admire what you did so much. So brave. It’s all anyone’s talking about at the hospital.’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She pulled her trolley in from the centre of the aisle, so that it blocked my path. I was trapped beside the freezer by our trolleys’ brimming cages, with Lucy as my beaming keeper. In her trolley I saw dog food, mineral water, leeks, deodorant, kitchen roll and bin-bags. I suddenly felt a bit sick and furtively discarded my lemon meringue pie. ‘I mean, I can’t believe you’re so famous now. People must recognize you on the streets and things.’

‘Sometimes.’ I returned the pecan pie too.

‘You nearly drowned. How awful.’

‘It was,’ I agreed. I must remember cat food for Anatoly.

‘And do you know the really amazing thing?’

‘No.’

She opened up the trolleys and stepped inside, putting her face close to mine. I could see the circles of her contact lenses.

‘I knew her.’

‘Who?’

She nodded emphatically at me, triumphant to have her own special slice of this delicious drama.

‘I knew Fiona Mackenzie. Now isn’t that weird, to know you and to know her too?’

‘But…’

‘It’s true. My mother and her mother were friends. I even babysat for her when she was little.’ Lucy giggled as if it were the most thrilling news in the world, that she had babysat for someone who’d later slaughtered her parents and then been burned up in a car. ‘I hadn’t seen her for a few years, maybe three years. She came to my sister’s wedding with her parents. She…’

‘Hang on, Lucy.’ I spoke slowly as if she didn’t understand English very well. ‘You met her.’

‘That’s what I’ve just been saying, Sam.’

‘No, I mean you met her with me. The last time you saw me, in Goldswan Green, I had a young woman with me, remember?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘Finn. Fiona Mackenzie.’

‘That was Fiona? She was so slim, but I heard something about her problem.’

I nodded. ‘Anorexia,’ I said.

She looked at me, her round face creasing, and then a fat man, with his paunch hanging over his belt and sweat spreading under his armpits, heaved his trolley into our parked group.

‘Mind where you’re standing,’ he barked.

‘Mind where you’re walking,’ I snapped back, then looked at Lucy again. I wasn’t about to let this woman get away; here at last was somebody who had actually known Finn Mackenzie. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Describe her? Oh dear, well, she was,’ she held her hands apart as if she were grasping a beach ball, ‘rather round, you could say, but nice. Yes’ – Lucy looked at me as if she’d given me some kind of key – ‘very nice.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Nice?’

‘Yes. Quite quiet, I think, she didn’t push herself forward. Perhaps she was a bit shy.’

‘So she was nice and quiet?’

‘Yes.’ Lucy looked as if she were about to burst into tears. How did this woman ever get through the ward rounds? ‘It’s so long ago.’

‘What did she look like then? How did she dress?’

‘Well, I couldn’t say really. Nothing outrageous, you know. She always looked quite pretty, I think, although she was very plump, of course. She wore her hair long and loose. Look, Sam, it’s been lovely seeing you but…’

‘Sorry, Lucy, your shopping awaits you. See you soon.’

‘That’d be lovely.’ The eager note of friendship came back into her voice now that we were parting. ‘Hey, wait, Sam, what about your trolley?’

‘I changed my mind,’ I called as I strode empty-handed down the aisle towards the exit. ‘I didn’t need anything after all.’

The house was absolutely quiet. Upstairs Elsie lay asleep, clean in her ironed pyjamas. I sat on the sofa, Anatoly on my lap, with only a single lamp to illuminate the room. I remembered one evening here with Danny, a few days after I’d moved and was still surrounded by packing cases and bare boards. He’d rented a video and bought us an Indian take-away which he’d spread out on newspaper in front of us. We sat cross-legged on the floor and watched the film, and I’d laughed so much that I started to weep. Danny had hugged me to him, pushing away the silver-foil containers with their slop of dark-red meats and sinister vegetables, and told me he loved me, and I’d gone on laughing, weeping. And never said it back. Never said I loved him. Not then, not later. So now I sat in his gown, with the cat and the darkness, and I said it to him. Over and over again I said it to him, as though somewhere there in the darkness and quiet he was listening, as though if I said it enough I could bring him back. And then I picked up a cushion and pressed my face into it and cried, heaving my heart out into a plump square of flowered corduroy.

And after that, I thought about Finn. She’d stayed in this house for nearly two months and she had hardly left a trace. She’d burned all her old clothes and taken her few new ones. She’d left no bits and pieces of her life. I looked around the dim room where I sat: its surfaces were cluttered with stuff I’d accumulated even in the last couple of months. The wobbly clay pot Elsie had made for me at school, the papier-maché peach Sarah had presented me with today, a glass bowl I’d picked up in Goldswan Green because I loved its pure cobalt-blue, the ebony cat, yesterday’s list of tasks, a wooden candlestick, a dying bunch of anemones, a box of Lil-lets, a pile of magazines, another pile of books, a pewter mug holding pens. But her room had always looked like a hotel room, and she’d entered it and left it without disturbing its anonymity at all.

What did I know about this girl who’d lived under the same roof as me for two months, shared my meals and charmed my daughter? Not much at all, although I realized as I thought that she had extracted a good deal of information from me. I’d even told her about Elsie’s father. What had Lucy called her? And those schoolfriends of hers that I’d met at her parents’ funeral? ‘Sweet’, was it; ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’. And those family friends – they called her ‘lovely’ in that patronizing way that means ‘no trouble’. She seemed memorable to me, with her youthful, soft-skinned radiance. Death usually fixes people, pinning them on to their finished life. But death seemed to be dissolving Finn, dispersing her like a cloud.