I was holding my biro, aware of a sense of doom in my stomach. I had to kill that feeling before it could unfurl and grow. I chucked my pen on the floor. I wanted the plastic to smash and shard, but it just rolled under a desk.
‘You weirdo,’ said Anya.
It was over. Our last exam. We flew out of the exam hall into the sunshine. We ran, like a pack, out on to the empty hockey pitch. The air was thick with pollen, the earth hard and sun-baked, studded with old hockey-boot indentations. We lay in the middle of the pitch and lit Silk Cut cigarettes. Lucy produced a bottle of vodka that she had stolen from her dad’s drinks cabinet. It was warm and tasted medicinal but we drank it anyway. We had taken marker pens from our form room, green, red, blue and black, and we wrote on each others’ school shirts: swear words, shit, fuck, bitch; we drew pictures of tits and penises. Then we tore the shirts off each other, tore the arms off the shirts, tore them into shreds, so we were just in our bras. I felt as though I could do anything at that moment. I felt as though I could break anything that came into my hands; I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I wanted to set fire to something – all those tattered school shirts, that would be fun. Someone put a joint between my fingers and I took a drag, blew the smoke up to the blue sky. Younger girls stood on the opposite side of the fence, fingers curled around the wire, watching us. There were a couple of teachers too, but they wouldn’t do anything.
And then suddenly it all became boring and uncool, and what were we doing on the hockey pitch when we could be somewhere else. The vodka had run out and we needed more cigarettes. I pulled on my jumper, the grey wool scratchy against my skin. I stuffed my torn and defaced school shirt into my bag, a memento of something. We walked out, past the few pupils who had stayed until the end, leaving fag butts and bottles and scraps of uniform for someone else to clear up. We stalked through the corridors, aggressive and restless. There was dry grass in our hair and dirt smudged on our cheeks. We bought more vodka and big bottles of Coca-Cola at the corner shop, cans of beer and cigarettes. We swaggered along hot pavements to a nearby park, dog shit and patchy grass and overflowing dustbins. We swallowed pills with the vodka and soon I was talking too quickly about things that I thought were very important and urgent, and life felt like a moment, followed by a moment, followed by a moment, all unconnected and meaningless. Someone had brought along a can of Elnett and a towel for old times’ sake, and we passed this around. I inhaled the cold, tacky air from the aerosol and I kept drowning, then coming back into consciousness laughing, the canister no longer in my hands.
New people arrived: Polly and her friend Julia. They hadn’t been doing exams today, their uniforms were intact, they looked smug and fresh.
‘I won’t actually be at Godolphin next year, we’re moving to Chichester, my dad’s bought this really big house,’ said Julia.
‘But you live with your mum,’ I said, reminding everyone of Julia’s ugly secret, feeling triumphant and mean as I did it.
Julia’s parents were divorced, and although she talked a lot about her dad, who was a lawyer, she lived in an ex-council flat with her mother. Julia’s uniform was second-hand and she didn’t have a nice tennis racquet. Poverty was something to be ashamed of at our smart school. I knew that better than most.
‘I’m moving in with my dad now, into a really big house,’ said Julia.
‘Yeah, you said,’ said Anya, who was lying next to me on the grass, her head on a small, neat pillow she had made by folding her jumper.
I took a drag on a joint, the smoke molten in my lungs. I squashed the joint into the grass, burning my fingers. It was getting cold.
‘So what’s the plan? Shall we go down to the salon?’ said Polly, looking at me. She delivered this line as though it didn’t matter, but they all twitched with interest, because it was what they all wanted to know, what they had all been waiting to hear. This was the only power I had left. I was still the one who decided when we went to my father’s salon. Once we were in the salon my power evaporated, because there was nothing I could offer my dad that seemed to interest him any more.
‘I don’t fancy it,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Sarah.
‘Why don’t we go to the pub or something,’ I said, finishing the vodka.
Polly and Julia soon slipped away. It was dark by the time we walked back up to the high street. We snuck into the pub loos so we could get changed into black miniskirts and denim shirts, so we could redo our eyes and pick the grass out of each other’s hair. We found a table, lit cigarettes and soon enough some older boys came to sit with us. We lied and told them we were eighteen, in the last year of A-levels. The boys didn’t believe us, but they bought us Bacardi Cokes anyway and there were only two of them and I could just tell that one was interested in Sarah and one was interested in Anya and neither were interested in me, they never were, so instead of enduring the familiar humiliation I left, taking the Tube home, my bag heavy with books and files and uniform that I would never need again.
It was past eleven when I got home. I was surprised to find that Dad wasn’t back yet. I shouted out to Mum that I was fine, she should go to sleep, and I slumped on the sofa. I turned on the television, watched whatever was on. The contents of my stomach felt toxic, slopping and steaming, but I didn’t have the energy to make myself toast to soak it all up. All I could do was smoke more cigarettes, breathe heavily through my nose, feel my skin alternate between heat and chills, wish I was someone else.
Dad came back later, whistling as he opened the door.
‘You’re here!’ he said. ‘Where’d you get to? We had fun, me and the girls. They said they’d seen you, that you were going for it, celebrating finishing your exams, rolling around in the grass, getting high like a nutter, they said!’
He sat down next to me, making me tip into his side of the sofa.
‘Which girls,’ I mumbled.
Dad had taken the remote control from me and was flicking between channels.
‘Which girls?’ I said again, wanting to be heard but worried that the effort of speaking too loudly would make me vomit. I was suddenly aware that the sensation had not returned to my limbs, not since turning over the exam paper. I was still just a torso, my chest constricted, my breath short. Maybe I was going to die; maybe tonight was the night.
‘Polly and her mate, you know, the one with the nice hair.’
He lit a cigarette and coughed out smoke, a sound like strangled laughter.
‘Julia.’
19
2015, London
I used to think I was more happy than sad, but not today. I used to wake up and feel optimistic, even though there was no good reason for it, but not today.
I feel as though I am experiencing all the emotions I have ever suppressed, all the things I have witnessed, all at once. It is as if I am made of wires, blue and red, thousands of them, bunched and knotted. These wires are emotion, memory, twisted to make limbs, a neck, a head, not bone and muscle, that is not what I am made of. It is painful to be made of wire, the broken ends flickering and sharp, everything muddled together and impossible to prise apart so that one memory gets tangled with a different emotion and the overriding emotion and memories dominate everything, all the disappointment and sadness.
I cannot do this by myself any more. I don’t want to do this by myself any more.
When I get into work I close the door to my office and write an email to Julia Samuel. I ask if she will counsel me for suppressed grief and trauma. She emails back at once. She is apologetic but for various reasons (she is already counselling someone I know well) she cannot be my therapist. Instead she suggests someone called Fiona.
I send an email to Fiona. I explain that I have never grieved for my dead sister, that I cannot remember my dead sister, and that I am scared of how detached and isolated I have become.
Fiona replies. We arrange the first session.
Fiona’s consulting room is on the King’s Road, close to where I grew up, close
to where Candy and I went to primary school and where Candy and Dad are buried. In our first session I tell her about Candy’s death, about how I cannot remember her, how sad this makes me feel, how I have been trying to write about my childhood, how mad I am feeling and how it feels as though all these things are connected.
Fiona has long white hair, a soft Irish accent and a tattoo on her inner wrist. She tells me that my memories are still in my body somewhere, hidden or buried or submerged. We talk about Candy as if she is in a dark cellar, one with a trap door that had been shut, locked, weighted down under the heavy things that have been piled upon it so long ago that the whereabouts of the trap door has been forgotten. We talk about the days, weeks and months following Candy’s death, how my family dealt with the tragedy and how the people around us responded to it. I explain how I used all my energy and all my determination to forget her so that I could fit in, so that I could survive the world in which I found myself. I tell her about all the drink and the drugs and the boys, the desperation for oblivion, the destruction of the brain cells that contained Candy.
‘I did this to myself.’
‘She is still inside you,’ Fiona insists.
‘Where? How do I find her?’
‘Start by looking at photographs. Sit by yourself and let yourself feel any emotions that come up. Sit with the feelings. Put photographs of Candy up around the house, maybe carry one around with you, maybe bring some to the next session and we can look at them together.’
I get home after work, bathe the girls, put them to bed, read them stories, kiss their creaseless brows. They are so flamboyant in sleep, arms slung above their heads. Mike is out, so I make myself an omelette and salad, something quick and easy, and then I go into the living room, shut the door, light a couple of candles, posh ones from work. This is a ritual I am taking seriously.
It is a strange thing to be the person who holds the physical remains of a lost family. My mother still has most of Candy’s possessions, but I have everything else, things that were in the flat in Battersea where we grew up, paintings and plant pots, figurines and even Dad’s old porn magazines (hidden in a cool bag in a cupboard; I am convinced they will be worth something one day). Sometimes our flat can feel like a museum, each item – candlestick, broken clock, bronze Ganesh – with its own history and emotional power, potent with memory. Perhaps all this stuff should be labelled and put into chronological order too, I think as I survey the mad jumble on the mantelpiece.
But the most important artefact is the family photograph album. We only had one, red leather, gold-embossed cover, thick cardboard pages. The album was used and reused, old pictures taken out, new ones stuck in, captions written in biro which don’t refer to the photograph they are next to any more. When we first had it Candy was alive and by the end of it she is dead. The first two-thirds of the album are densely packed with memories, but in the final pages the pictures are loose, yet to be attached, as if we gave up on this impossible business of trying to be a family.
The album is now in my possession, stacked with other albums that I have filled over the years. It is frayed at the spine, there are random black splodges on the red leather, and the gold is almost rubbed away.
I carry the album to the sofa. It weighs heavily on my lap. As I begin to turn the creaking pages I realize that I cannot remember the last time I looked through it. And then I find her. A brown-eyed baby in pink gingham with a dummy around her neck, straining out of the arms that hold her. A little girl in a too-big white woollen cardigan holding a blue plastic lunch box. In a nightie, being hugged by my mother who smiles with her eyes closed, pressing her face to her little girl. Dressed for school, eating Rice Krispies off the glass table. With Dad feeding the ducks in the park; with her Big Yellow Teapot toy on Christmas Day; asleep; on holiday, eating an ice-lolly; holding her nose as she splashes out of the bottom of a slide, just about to hit the water, caught in time and movement. I realize how much she looks like Minna. On the day before Minna was born, when amniotic fluid was trickling out of my cervix, I walked through Brompton Cemetery to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital trying to jog along the birth. I stopped at the grave where Candy’s ashes were buried along with Dad.
‘I’m about to have another baby!’ I told them.
At the end of the album, among the unstuck photographs, are pictures from our final family holiday in Tunisia. There is a photograph of Candy on a camel, the day before the night when she died, and she is waving and it is as if she is waving goodbye.
I cry and I cry, the sobs wrenching my body. My eyes are raw from crying and the muscles in my cheeks ache.
But the next day I feel as though something I have been holding has been let go, all those tears, waiting to be released, fresh as the day they were made.
In the weeks that follow I try to remember Candy. I sit down and scrunch my face, straining to find the faintest scrap of her. I have a momentary vision of plastic dummies, two or three, strung on bits of ribbon around a child’s neck, but other than that, nothing. I try harder, and find that I am starting to animate the photographs of her. At first I am elated, thinking: This is it, this is a memory! But then I realize I have merely fixed an image of her in my brain and made it speak. Many of these pictures were taken when I was not even present, so I know these are false memories.
I go for dinner with my old friend Bella and tell her about what I have been doing. I tell her that I have no memories of Candy.
‘But I remember Candy. She was so cheeky. She was always trying to get into your bedroom when we were in there. You would tell her to go away but sometimes she would just come in anyway and sit on the bed. She drove us mad. I think she just wanted to hang out with us.’
That night I have a dream about Candy.
I cannot remember dreaming about her before.
In the dream I am in a house, on the ground floor. The house belongs to my friend Annabel. It is a place I like and feel safe in.
As I realize it is Annabel’s house, Annabel appears.
‘What are you doing down here? You are upstairs,’ she says.
I am confused by this, so I go up the stairs to find out where I really am. At the top of the stairs there is a closed door. I open it. There is a room. In the room there is a bed and on the bed lies a child. At first I don’t know who she is. She looks like she could be mine, but I know this is not Hebe or Minna.
‘Who are you?’ I ask.
‘I am Candy,’ she says.
‘But you’re dead,’ I say.
She looks at me as though I am an idiot.
‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,’ she says in a silly high-pitched voice as if she is trying to annoy me. I’m angry with her, and scared too. I want to stuff the words back in her mouth.
When I wake up I’m freaked out. I tell Mike about my dream.
‘I’m really glad you have started talking about your sister,’ he says. ‘It has been so weird for so long.’
Mike is open-hearted; he doesn’t keep secrets. When we were first together he would sometimes suggest that we visit the almond tree that my parents had planted in the garden of Candy’s school, Bousfield, to commemorate her life. On the anniversary of her death, or on her birthday, he would say, ‘Isn’t today the day when Candy died?’ or ‘Isn’t today Candy’s birthday?’ And I would grunt yes, annoyed that he seemed to want me to do something or say something when I had nothing to give. Mike soon stopped mentioning Candy and her special days. He allowed me to go on pretending that nothing was wrong, because that was what I seemed to want.
20
1991, London and Portugal
‘One for the road,’ said Dad, and he filled Anya’s glass with wine which spilt down her nightie when she brought it to her mouth.
It was past midnight and I was tired and drunk but I didn’t care because it was more fun to be awake with Dad than to be asleep. We were flying to Portugal in the morning. We would be in a different country by lunchtime, which made staying up and getti
ng drunk feel like something without consequences.
Anya and I shared a single bed and she kicked me in the night so I barely slept.
I had no idea what time it was when Mum woke us, but it was still dark.
‘The minicab will be here in twenty minutes,’ she said.
Dad listened to his Walkman all the way to the airport, mouthing the words to songs that only he could hear. Mum was in the front with the cab driver, checking her handbag, moving bits of paper with her fingers as though she was doing filing: tickets, passports, cash; tickets, passports, cash.
Dad was still listening to his Walkman when we got on the plane. When I tried to talk to him he shouted ‘WHAT?’, pointing to his headphones. He started snoring as the plane took off, a jagged exhalation. His lungs were in bad shape; I could hear it. He’d once told me that when he was little his asthma was so bad that his mum often thought he would die. She would lie next to him on the carpet and say, ‘Come on, Gavin, breathe, come on, stay with me.’
We walked down the steps from the aeroplane. The air smelt of sunshine and dust.
‘We’re here!’ I said, as if it was some sort of achievement.
We collected our suitcases and Mum found our tour-operator representative, a blonde in a tight red skirt suit who talked about the weather, the food, the nightclubs as the tour bus bounced from side to side on winding foreign roads. When we saw the flat hazy blue of the sea the people on the bus went ‘oooh’.
By the time we got to our holiday village the sun was right above us, baking the earth. It was a relief to go into the air-conditioned office. Mum had to sign bits of paper and hand over our passports. Anya sat on a chair, her cheeks blotchy with heat, her eyelids drooping. When Mum was finished Dad leant over the white counter to talk to the receptionist, his heels popping out of his espadrilles.
‘Do you have a phone here, my darling? Because there are a couple of work things I need to be keeping tabs on, so I’ll be putting in a few calls.’
The Consequences of Love Page 11
