The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  Then Diego arrived.

  He clamped his arm around Julia’s shoulder and she stopped talking, and, as we walked, his arm slipped down and fell off right off her.

  Someone out at sea?

  A hand like in my poem?

  I couldn’t ask.

  In case Diego didn’t know.

  Because husbands are supposed to know everything, and I couldn’t risk it, especially with things so strange.

  I’d find a way to bring up the conversation when I next saw her.

  Which was never, the time I next saw her.

  ‘Chin up,’ Diego said to her the following morning as she sat on the bed.

  The sun rises.

  The new day always comes.

  Yet you don’t always want it.

  Sometimes you know you don’t want it, and sometimes you don’t.

  But it doesn’t make any difference.

  ‘Why did I say chin up?’ Diego asked me.

  Julia’s chin, when he looked back on that last moment together, had not been up. It had been down. Her eyes had been down too. Looking at the floor, and not at him.

  Again.

  He should have asked her to look up, that’s what he said, because he might have seen something in her eyes, something which would have told him, which could have stopped it, which would have made him go with her to Amy’s.

  Or I should have warned him, that’s what he said later – did I see any signs?

  I didn’t tell him about the newspaper cutting she’d given me, in case that was a sign, and I’d missed it.

  ‘Aren’t twins supposed to feel these things?’ he said.

  Julia, eyes down, fiddling with the towelling belt of her bathrobe, as Diego remembered it, said, ‘I’m going to walk over to Amy’s later and give her the pram. I don’t want to have the pram in the hall any more. I think it will be a step, don’t you? A step forward.’

  Diego liked the sound of a step forward that morning. Because they’d stepped endlessly backwards.

  ‘I’m being repaid,’ said Julia.

  ‘You’re not being logical,’ Diego said.

  ‘My baby died and you talk to me about logic!’ she said.

  ‘I feel like I’m going mad,’ said Diego.

  ‘You’re going mad?’ said Julia.

  ‘Well, perhaps we both are.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m going to take the pram to Amy’s. She’s two weeks away.’

  ‘Is that hard for you?’ said Diego.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And I’m sorry,’ said Julia. ‘For how horrible I am these days.’

  Diego didn’t tell her he forgave her.

  He wanted her to feel bad.

  He wanted her to know how horrible she was these days.

  He was late for work, and he hated his job.

  Because he hated everything.

  So all he said was, ‘See you later, darling. Chin up.’

  ‘Chin up,’ said Diego. ‘Who says “chin up”?’

  ‘You could have said much worse things, Diego,’ I said. ‘Think of all the things you managed not to say that morning.’

  ‘She was always saying I mustn’t try and fix things. She told me not to give her solutions.’

  ‘Don’t try and fix it, Diego,’ said their counsellor, black-eyed Virginia. ‘Show you’re listening by repeating back what she says to you. Let’s try. Julia. Say something.’

  ‘I keep thinking about a secret I carry,’ said Julia.

  ‘Repeat it back,’ said Virginia.

  ‘You keep thinking about a secret you carry,’ said Diego flatly.

  He was weary.

  He couldn’t stand Virginia, and he couldn’t stand reflective listening.

  ‘Actually, why don’t you tell Virginia about the secret?’ said Diego. ‘It might help to get it out, rationalise it somehow …’

  Virginia shook her head vigorously.

  ‘No no no, Diego,’ she said. ‘That’s not reflective listening.’

  ‘No!’

  That’s what I shrieked down the phone when I heard.

  I didn’t let Diego finish.

  I was standing in our bedroom.

  The little silver jewellery box was on the bed in a bag.

  I dropped my phone.

  And the wardrobe door was open.

  I was watching myself in the mirror.

  The way my face stilled, drained, paled, crunched up.

  The way my arms hung.

  I lifted one up.

  To my face.

  Like a puppet.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said.

  To the pale face.

  I felt a strange swelling at the base of my spine, in my coccyx.

  I turned around.

  It was still light, a golden glow of late afternoon sun.

  It was hard to believe that the sun would still be out.

  I walked to the window.

  My mother had put a vase of late-flowering chrysanthemums on the window sill, bright yellow.

  She’d cut them from the garden.

  I picked one flower out of the vase and stared at the way its stem had been cut on the diagonal.

  It looked alive but actually it was dead.

  Julia.

  Julia.

  The garden was still there.

  A drop of water hit my sock.

  Through the window, I saw my mother open the back door.

  And her hand came out.

  She didn’t know.

  Her hand reached for her wellington boots.

  What a joy for her.

  To be bringing in her wellington boots.

  Her last moment of peace, it came to me.

  Of the peaceful ordinary.

  Dead leaves blew across the lawn, little flurries of wind lifting them – they rose and they fell.

  Because my father couldn’t use his rake.

  And the pain of that had seemed.

  Until now.

  So big.

  The pain of Rose.

  So big.

  Until now.

  Everything, in an instant, had changed size and shape.

  We’d never had all these dead leaves blowing around our garden before.

  Because my father liked it tidy.

  They both did.

  They liked tidy.

  And there was no tidy.

  Julia.

  Julia.

  But I didn’t cry.

  The tears didn’t come.

  There was only the terrible pain at the base of my spine.

  ‘My mouth still tastes of salt,’ Julia said to Diego before he left.

  ‘Kiss me,’ said Diego.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Julia. ‘Go to work.’

  And Julia took that step forward.

  Straight into the train.

  The train had always been coming.

  It was timetabled.

  It came down the track from London.

  As it did so, I was at the counter of the jewellery shop, picking up the locket with the ringlet of Rose’s blonde hair, a white rose petal and the engraved date of her birth: 10 July 2014.

  The woman handed me the silver box and she said, with a cheery smile. ‘I hope your sister likes it.’

  But I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I was buying her a locket which I was planning to give to her in a silver box later that day, or maybe the next.

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ I said.

  I walked home.

  To Willow Crescent.

  A three-minute walk.

  Went up to my room.

  Put the box on my bed.

  Took off my shoes.

  Time driveth onward fast,

  And in a little while our lips are dumb.

  Let us alone. What is it that will last?

  She’d been eaten up.

  By the mouth of the train.

  The empty pram was mangled in its jaws.

  It was 5 November,
and we were twenty-four years old.

  And Julia would only ever be twenty-four years old from now on.

  And Jules.

  Weren’t we going to?

  Weren’t we going to?

  So much.

  I’d planned my whole life being with her.

  Isn’t that what she said?

  And I hadn’t understood.

  I would be twenty-five.

  Twenty-six.

  Fifty-six perhaps.

  Who knows?

  Or seventy-six.

  She would forever be twenty-four.

  And I wasn’t a twin any more.

  I was already older than her.

  I didn’t sense it.

  I was her twin, and I should have done.

  Everything should have stopped.

  To mark her stopping.

  But nothing stopped.

  Except the traffic which queued at the level crossing.

  People hooted and got out and shouted at the policemen.

  They said they had a fireworks show to go to.

  Open the bloody gates.

  Diego sat without her kiss, with her voice saying over and over again, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.

  His un-kissed lips felt like ice.

  As if they’d died too.

  He shivered.

  Diego said to my parents that she was getting better, she was taking the pram to Amy’s – it’s only that she never got there.

  ‘She’s always day-dreaming,’ said my mother.

  We sat staring out of the window, our shaking hands trying to hold cups of tea, our shaking mouths trying to form words and sentences although there were no words in the whole of the dictionary that were suitable for this day.

  My parents looked at me, and I looked at them.

  What we felt, I think, though this is odd, was embarrassed.

  By the way we weren’t OK.

  We weren’t at all OK.

  We were supposed to be normal.

  We weren’t this kind of family.

  We had no setting for drama.

  Or for feelings.

  Feelings like this, which wanted to explode through our skin and shatter us, like a grenade.

  We needed to pull ourselves together.

  I tried to act normal.

  My mother made more tea.

  The tea tasted of copper.

  ‘Did she kiss you goodbye?’ said my mother.

  ‘Yes,’ said Diego, lying.

  ‘It’s the anti-depressants,’ said my mother. ‘They blur your mind.’

  Diego didn’t answer, and for a second I thought we were talking about anti-depressants, a conversation we’d had before, she’s depressed, it’s quite normal, it’ll pass.

  Then it came at me.

  My phone lying on the floor.

  The stem cut on the diagonal, with its last drop of life.

  The bag with the locket in a silver box on the bed.

  My mother’s hands reaching out of the back door for her wellington boots.

  The first people to come and ring on the doorbell at number 1 Willow Crescent were Jim and Barbara Cook.

  ‘We came to say that there are no words.’

  That’s what they said, not alluding to the fact that there had been no words from my father for the past twelve years.

  Other people, though they knew, they knew, all of Willow Crescent knew within minutes, were pulling on their coats and gloves and climbing into their cars to go to the fireworks at Tattershall Common, giving themselves time to go the long way round, avoiding the incident at the level crossing.

  They would keep going.

  They would keep putting on their gloves.

  ‘Put your gloves on!’ they called to each other in hallways.

  If they put their gloves on, they wouldn’t be frightened of the kinds of things that could happen in life, their lives too. Like when someone tells you they have cancer, and you want to feel more scared for them than you do for yourself.

  Life couldn’t stop, they thought, on Fireworks Night, not for a death. Death is what happens to other people – let’s go to the fireworks display to show that we’re alive. Bang bang bang!

  Barbara opened her arms, and my mother clenched her teeth, you could see her jaw under her skin, tightening – and she stared at Barbara.

  ‘Let me give you a hug,’ said Barbara.

  ‘I don’t know how to,’ said my mother.

  ‘Julia,’ she said, looking around her.

  Barbara didn’t know what to say.

  ‘She’s always here,’ said my mother. ‘Isn’t she? Round at our place? Even though she’s married …’

  ‘She …’ Barbara hesitated – the present tense, the past tense, how could one switch over so quickly?

  ‘She’s such a perfect daughter,’ said my mother.

  ‘She is,’ said Barbara, wincing, at the tense, the wrong tense, the right tense. ‘Yes, she is.’

  I stared at Barbara as she took my mother’s hand.

  I noticed the veins standing up on it, and a little brown age spot in the shape of a kidney bean.

  Jim bent to the wheelchair.

  My father clung to him.

  ‘I told her she’d have more babies,’ said my mother.

  I’d told her that too.

  I’m not sure it helped.

  She didn’t want her dead baby to be replaced.

  My father was crying.

  She had perhaps preferred to die and be with Rose.

  She’d wanted to be homeward bound, ever since she lost her, like the song.

  Where are you? I thought, and the fear of it sent me running up the stairs, to our bedroom, where I got into Julia’s cold bed, deep deep down, all of me, under the duvet, which was too tight because my mother always tucked the bedspread in under the mattress.

  Parfait

  Oddly, this little spot at the back of the beach had become home. Despite what happened here, or perhaps because of it. Because sometimes it’s the pain of a place that draws us to it.

  Every home has known pain, I guess. It’s what gives it texture.

  When I turned onto the beach road, I could hear the waves and smell the pines, and I felt a tingling in my stomach.

  I parked, and I climbed onto the roof of the coach to check Africa was still there. Then I looked the other way – to the cows in the fields. The moon was in the sky, though it wasn’t quite dark, and its light shone on the egret tree, where the birds were flying in to roost.

  That’s when I had the idea.

  A Refugee Tree?

  Deeds, deeds, that would be a deed.

  Not as good as actually going there, but still.

  Maybe this Christmas?

  Augusta

  When I went to see her body, which they had tried to put back together again, I couldn’t look.

  I didn’t look.

  I did look.

  Between my fingers.

  She was under a sheet.

  Like her baby.

  All except her hand.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  We used to say it so fast that the words blurred into each other.

  I peered from under my hand, between my fingers, and I stared at her hand, the only part of her undamaged, they said.

  ‘Of course she didn’t kill herself,’ my mother kept saying to me – she’d passed over to the past tense as you have to, you just have to. ‘How ridiculous that anyone would say that. She had everything to live for.’

  Her diamond ring.

  I will always remember her hand.

  So will Diego.

  ‘She kissed Diego goodbye,’ said my mother on the phone. ‘Everything was quite normal. It’s a freak accident.’

  I couldn’t see the freckle on her left ring finger.

  And I didn’t want to turn her dead finger to find her dead freckle.

  In
case it wouldn’t move.

  I didn’t want to touch her.

  And find her cold.

  I didn’t know what dead people felt like.

  I didn’t want to take my own hands from my face.

  I didn’t want.

  Anything that was here.

  I turned around and left.

  And still the tears didn’t come.

  I’d turned to lead.

  To osmium, the densest of all elements.

  My legs wouldn’t move.

  My heart was so heavy it sank into my bowel.

  They tried to find the chain with the double ring and the A and the J, which had been around her neck, but they said they were sorry, it obviously got damaged. Was it valuable?

  ‘It didn’t use to be,’ I said.

  I didn’t want to think about her damaged neck.

  Olly Macintosh could snap a bird’s neck with his hands.

  We gathered around the hole into which Julia’s pale birch coffin would go now we had taken off the arrangements of white roses, abundant and pressed together like her wedding bouquet. I tried to calm myself by remembering facts about doves, a word that (rightly) rhymes with loves.

  Facts facts facts facts to blot out the fear I felt inside.

  Fear, all the time.

  I never knew grief felt so much like fear.

  Somebody else said that.

  I thought grief would feel like sadness.

  Where are you, Jules?

  I need you right now.

  To help me get through this.

  Which is.

  Obviously.

  Absurd.

  I closed my eyes.

  I must tell Julia.

  A pain in my chest, too intense to breathe at first.

  About this terrible day.

  She’d know what to say.

  And she’d hold my hand.

  A little shard of glass had lodged in my heart.

  I felt it every time I breathed.

  I guess this feeling is ordinary.

  We smiled on the day of the funeral, greeting our friends, like robots – what did we care who came?

  ‘We wanted to be here,’ they said, one after another.

  Did you? I thought.

  Thinking nothing.

  Other than that I didn’t.

  Other than that I had this piece of glass in my heart, which hurt every time I breathed.

  I looked up at the doves, and I saw a tiny aeroplane higher up, tracing a white line in the sky, and I thought that there must be a line from me to her, if only I could see it.

  Doves have exceptional eyesight, I thought. They can see things our eyes can’t see. Is there some way of seeing her, or feeling her, I wondered. Wherever she is.