The Last Words of Madeleine Anderson

by Helen Kitson

  Many of the students asked me for reading recommendations and I tried to tailor these to their individual tastes and styles.

  ‘You’re a big hit,’ Viv had told me. ‘I’m getting all sorts of interesting requests at the library for books you’ve recommended.’

  I dared not ask if anyone had requested The Song of the Air. I rather hoped not. Occasionally someone would mention it during a workshop session and I would refer to it lightly as juvenilia, something that existed independently of me and which I no longer recognised as my own work.

  ‘If you write about your own life,’ one student asked me, ‘but change the facts, make it different in significant ways, is that cheating? Is it still fiction?’

  I told her that we all make fictions of our lives to some extent. In everyday life this would be called lying. In the context of fictional writing, it becomes a transformative act. Reasonable, allowable. We touched on the subject of libel and I explained how outraged some of Sylvia Plath’s relatives and friends had been when they recognised their fictional selves in The Bell Jar.

  ‘But were they right to be offended? And didn’t their complaints simply draw attention to correspondences most people would otherwise not have seen?’

  ‘I’d be a bit annoyed if someone put me in a book,’ the questioner said. ‘But if they’d changed all the names and it was about stuff only me and the writer would know about, I don’t see that it matters much.’

  Viv told me after one workshop session that I was a “natural” and would have taken to academic life “like a duck to water”. She asked me if I’d consider studying for a degree with the Open University and perhaps go in for teacher training.

  ‘If I were fifteen years younger, maybe,’ I told her. ‘I don’t really see the point now. I’d spend too much time regretting all the years I wasted when I could have been – I don’t know – a lecturer or whatever. Besides, I think I’m of more use in the workshops. I like the mix of ages and abilities. Though I do feel a bit of a fraud – I’m not qualified to do what I’m doing.’

  It was all something of a lark, really, and since I wasn’t paid, I felt under no obligation to be brilliant. No homework to set, no targets to meet. I had no formal job description, thus I was free more or less to make it up as I went along, suiting the sessions to the needs of the students. I kept the sessions going long after they were supposed to finish because I enjoyed them, and because my students wanted me to do so.

  Lisel scoffed when I fed her the “bit of a lark” line.

  ‘You can say that if you like,’ she said, ‘but it’s clear you’re dedicated to your students – albeit in a disinterested way, which is how it should be.’

  ‘You’re not going to suggest I start training to be a teacher, are you, like Viv keeps doing?’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it. If what you’re doing is enough for you, then stick to that. Save your ambition for your novel. It’s going well, is it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Hard to tell until I get to the editing stage. But I’m not sure I mind if no one wants to publish it – I’ll have written it, that’s the main thing.’

  She poured me another glass of ginger wine. We met often, our friendship growing gradually, quietly. The kind of friendship I suspected I would never have had with Madeleine. Lisel and I never imposed upon each other, and if we broached painful subjects it was with tolerance and honesty. Lisel could be blunt, but she was never boorish.

  I’d once dreamed of living with Madeleine, a sort of idyllic Ladies of Llangollen existence, quite apart from the world. Only now did I see how ridiculous this notion was, even as a fantasy. Two women, whether or not they’re lovers, can live together perfectly happily, but Madeleine wasn’t the type to rub along with anyone. She wouldn’t have been content with such a tranquil, cow-like existence. I would have smothered her; she would have diminished me even further.

  Lisel was more self-assured than I, less interested in what anyone thought of her, and I doubt she would have encouraged my friendship if she hadn’t enjoyed my company. Perhaps I’d fooled myself into believing that a friendship wasn’t worth the name unless it had the intensity of glowing, molten glass.

  Simon’s room was now my study. It no longer mattered that the room reminded me so much of him – he was at the heart of the story I was writing. This wasn’t therapy, a working out of my feelings; nothing so crude as that. My story was about an imaginary Simon, and the more I wrote, the less of the real Simon I recognised in the character taking shape on the page.

  On a table next to my desk were piled several reams of paper. Good quality, eighty-gram paper. Blank pages no longer frightened me. They represented possibilities, stories to be told. I’d also pinned a photograph of myself with Madeleine on to the cork board: a picture taken when we were both about fourteen on a trip to Warwick Castle with her parents. Cheesy grins for the camera, Madeleine’s arm draped around my shoulders, her head resting against mine. A photograph I’d always loved, but it showed nothing more than a brief moment in time. Seconds later Madeleine had been moaning that her feet hurt, her mum reproving her for wearing strappy sandals instead of sensible trainers like mine.

  I worked on my novel until I’d written my thousand words. With a bit of luck I’d write another thousand when I got home from work. I took my coffee cup downstairs and swilled it out; I rarely drank the whole mug. My story would distract me and the coffee would sit forgotten on the table, a greyish skin forming on the top.

  The parcel had arrived while I was at work. The “Sorry you were out” card gave no indication of the sender or the nature of the parcel’s contents. I hadn’t ordered anything; I was expecting nothing.

  I was no wiser when I presented myself at the sorting office with my ID. My address had been typed on a sheet of white paper and taped to the parcel. No return address. The postmark claimed the parcel had been posted in Leeds, which meant nothing to me.

  I carried the parcel to my car and opened it there and then. Clipped to a stack of papers was a handwritten note, in Simon’s hand.

  I couldn’t destroy it. How could I? Nazis and religious maniacs burn books. It took me a few goes to work out the code, but it’s the date on which we first met, isn’t it? It’s all here, everything I took from you, including your confession. I just wanted to frighten you, have that power over you. But you already know that, don’t you? It was my own story I burnt on that bonfire, the rotten words that clumped together and wouldn’t fly. Do with her book whatever you want, just don’t burn it. I don’t understand all the stuff that went on between you and M, but if this book belongs to anyone, it belongs to you – not morally, not ethically, just because it does. Maybe we’ll meet again some day? You probably hope we don’t. I hope you can think of me fondly and I hope you wish me luck. Maybe one day I’ll write a book. Maybe I tried too soon, before I had something to say. Don’t worry about me (you won’t, why should you?). But don’t forget me.

  He showed his youth in this message, but there was something there, hints that he might be a writer one day. And what to make of the substance of this long paragraph? Sentimental nonsense, though I did wince when I read the line It was my own story I burnt. Was I reading too much into that phrase? Surely I was.

  He would expect me to publish Madeleine’s book as my own – wouldn’t he? But I wasn’t sure if I could bear to read it, let alone pass it off as mine. In any case, I’d no intention of doing so. What, then, to do with it? Another gift I didn’t want. Another novel that should never have been written.

  I could make no decision until I’d read it, of course.

  I turned to the first page.

  A few words, scribbled symbols, nothing that made sense.

  I turned to the next page. A drawing of a bird sandwiched between two dense but apparently unconnected paragraphs.

  Another page. More scribbles and some gnomic phrases repeated three times. Ciphers? A coded message?

  Simon had told me this book was even finer than The Song of the A
ir, but this was no novel at all. The notes on many of the pages were written in Madeleine’s hand, but taken as a whole it was little more than a disconnected accumulation of phrases, ideas, intricate sequences of symbols, sketches and word pictures.

  What, if anything, did it mean?

  Was this a joke? Whose? Hers, or Simon’s?

  I turned to the final page.

  It was blank. Not even a page number.

  I turned to a random page about a third of the way through the typescript with one paragraph written in the middle of it.

  Birds follow a particular pattern of flight, I read. They do what they must do. (Not all birds fly. Not all birds sing.) A world without birds would be a worse one. No birds sing, they say, near the sites where concentration camps once infected the land. Birds know. But how can they? Have you ever wanted to fly? I did, when I was a child. If I just tried hard enough… now I prefer the water to the air. To swim. To sink. Dragging weeds. Down there where no birds sing.

  The whole paragraph had thick black lines driven through it. Was this an experimental novel, a work in progress, or…

  If you tell me your secret, I’ll tell you mine. And what will you choose to reveal? And why? And do you think I will believe you? Because I won’t. Because I don’t know the difference between truth and fiction. I tell lies all the time. We all do. We do it because it makes life easier to bear.

  I shook my head, allowing the pages to drift to the floor in any old order. I had nothing more to fear from either Madeleine or Simon. And even as my shoulders slumped with relief, I felt my eyes welling with tears. Elusive to the last, my Madeleine: the girl no one would ever be able to pin down, whose life no one had figured out.

  I would never have visited the swimming baths if it hadn’t been for Viv. She had some loopy idea it would be good for me, that it would help me to relax. I told her I couldn’t swim and she insisted it was about time I learned.

  ‘You’ve got a cossie, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I hadn’t, but I feared she would offer to lend me one of hers if I said no. I bought the plainest black costume I could find, the sort we’d worn for school swimming lessons, our school having had the dubious luxury of its own outdoor pool.

  A plain rubber cap. Goggles.

  My hackles rose the moment we entered the sports complex. The stink of chlorine, the damp tiles, the cramped changing rooms. Too many women gathered in one place, brushing their hair, wet feet slapping against the tiles, carrying on conversations as they changed.

  ‘All set, then?’

  Viv strode ahead of me. I tried to keep my unkind eyes from the cellulite on her thighs. I doubted I looked much better.

  ‘You’d better stay in the shallow end,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind if I go and have a dive, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’ll just paddle around until I feel more confident.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ She pointed to the kickboards and noodles, swimming aids that had replaced the oblong foam floats I remembered from childhood. ‘Help yourself.’

  A lifeguard grinned at me and asked which one I’d like. I chose a kickboard and settled myself on the edge of the pool, watching Viv waddle towards the diving boards.

  Cautiously I twisted and eased myself into the water. My feet firmly on the bottom of the pool, I remembered my father’s impatience when he brought me here as a child. A strong swimmer himself, he insisted on taking me to the baths every Sunday morning. It took me a long time to stop resenting those early mornings, on a day when I could have lazed in bed till ten, coming home with my hair still damp, my eyes pink and stinging.

  I lurched forward, arms in front of me, trying to forget that Sunday morning when Dad encouraged me to swim beyond the shallow end. How I’d panicked, thrashing in the water as manically as a shark with the scent of blood in its nostrils. Why hadn’t he come to my aid? Why did he simply watch as my head went under, again and again, until I was certain I was about to die?

  I wondered what expression had been on his face as he gazed at me. Terror? A sense that he’d gone too far? Or perhaps determination, that I must see this through, just like the time when he took his hand from the bike I was riding without stabilisers for the first time. The horror when I realised he’d let go. The sheer joy of hurtling across the field, just me and the bike. I’d done it! I could do it!

  I was heading towards the deep end, but I was no longer frightened. My limbs understood what they needed to do; it was just me and the water. I imagined my father’s face relaxing, tender pride replacing anxiety. He’d always known the right time to let go.

  The kickboard forgotten, I turned under the water and powered back the way I’d come. The lifeguard was speaking to a teenage girl. I could see the glint of a pierced navel every time my head turned in their direction.

  Behind me I heard a loud splash and turned back to see Viv spluttering in the water after her dive, choking and laughing at the same time. My hands felt for the side of the pool. Viv would be astonished when she saw the progress I’d made.

  Acknowledgements