The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  There were so many parties. They blend into one in my head. Entering Vanessa’s house was like entering a different universe and I loved it. I loved all those people. I loved Vanessa, with her circus of beautiful dreams.

  This is all so long ago. I think of them all, bursting across my life like an explosion of elusive colour, so far from everything else that I’ve ever known. So far from now. I think of Vanessa, sitting on a stool in the centre of the room, with the party going on around her. Perched there so still, with her legs crossed over, just watching, and laughing. I see her face, so ethereal, so serene in its beauty; I see her skin the colour of milk, stretched tight across her bones, and her eyes, so guileless, so blue. And when she closed those eyes she saw lights, flashing behind her eyelids, and she’d carry on seeing them, long after the party was over. She told us all about it: sparkling orange lights, fizzing up inside her eyes, bright as fireworks.

  ‘Rachel,’ she said to me once, with her arm draped around my shoulder and her breath whispering across my cheek, ‘do you believe in ghosts? I have a ghost. I see it all the time.’ She took her arm away from my shoulder and held her two index fingers up in front of us. ‘It goes like this,’ she said. And she drew an S-shape in the air with her fingers. ‘It starts just like two dots, then they join together and make this shape.’ She moved those fingers fast, swirling them through the air. ‘Like a genie.’ And she started laughing. ‘I think it must be my guardian angel.’

  She started seeing double. There you’d be, talking to her, and her eyes would roll inwards so that she’d be almost crosseyed. I saw it happen.

  ‘Stop it,’ I laughed.

  And she laughed back, ‘I can’t.’

  We all knew that house was haunted. Vanessa heard voices, calling her at night. Leanne said she came to school one day with a huge great bruise on her cheek; she’d woken up, apparently, to hear someone calling her name, over and over. And then she got out of bed and walked smack into the wall, because she couldn’t see where she was going.

  ‘Even the cat won’t sleep in Vanessa’s room now,’ Leanne said.

  So we planned to have a seance. Me, Vanessa and Leanne. It was my idea, because I believed in all that stuff back then. Ghosts, dreams, the whole lot. Show me your hand, I’d say, and I’ll read your future. Write me a sentence, and I’ll see through your lies. And if there was chill in the room I’d feel it. A bad omen, tapping on my shoulder.

  But it never happened. It turned out there were no ghosts at all.

  Vanessa had a brain tumour, spreading its roots inside her head.

  She ended up so boss-eyed that she started walking into things. Her mother took her to the doctor, the doctor sent her for a scan. And there it was, the size of a plum. That’s what caused the bright lights. That’s what doubled her vision. No ghosts, no guardian angels, just cancer, eating its way down her spine.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about her. About Vanessa with her beautiful thick, long hair, spun out like gold. I thought of it being hacked away and of her head being broken into; of her paper-white skin and her thin, delicate bones. I thought of the bright lights that she saw and of the voices calling her at night. Vanessa, Vanessa.

  I mouthed her name, whispered it over and over.

  And I remembered how I felt that first time I met her; like she was too beautiful to be real.

  She died on the first Sunday in November, a week after her sixteenth birthday. I didn’t go to the funeral. I wasn’t invited.

  Yolande sent out the invitations, but she didn’t send one to me. Why would she? She didn’t know my name or where I lived. I doubt if she’d even noticed me at all, on the few times that she’d passed me, drifting through her house.

  Leanne told me about it afterwards. Apparently everyone from their class went and the church was packed.

  But I had been at college that day. I cried, but I cried on my own when I walked through the woods at lunchtime. My grief was aimless; it had no home.

  I wasn’t part of their world. I’d just been there for a while, that’s all.

  THREE

  The run-up to Christmas is busy – busier than ever, now that Jono is at Hensham Boys’. As well as all the shopping for food and presents, there are the end-of-term events to attend: concerts and carol services, and extra activities for Jono. Things to remember; that he has after-school rehearsals on Tuesdays and Thursdays, rugby practice on Wednesdays, school Christmas lunch on the last Tuesday of term, class party on the last Thursday, uniform not needed on that last Thursday, half-day on the penultimate Monday (concert in the evening) and again on the very last day, when the boys will all leave before lunch.

  So much to remember. So much for me to write all over my calendar, as if it was me having such a busy life, and not just Jono. At this time of year, as at Easter, and in the runup to summer, I am almost able to convince myself that it really is a full-time job looking after a child. Even just one child.

  There is a class get-together, for the mums. Stephanie Rawlings, the class rep, is hosting it. My invitation comes home via Jono.

  We’re meeting for drinks at my place, Thursday night.

  Do hope you can make it. RSVP Stephanie.

  PS Husbands welcome, but not essential!

  Which means of course: don’t bring yours, if you have one. After all, who’s interested in husbands? It’s each other we want to size up. I analyse this invitation. From it I glean that some of the mums already know each other well – hence the use of the word ‘we’, as in We’re meeting for drinks. And so I am aware that there is already a tight club formed, of which I am not a part, though I am invited along now to observe. And I note that there is no phone number after Stephanie’s name, but this is no accident. Everyone who is anyone will have Stephanie’s number already keyed into their phone. To admit that you haven’t is to admit that you are a no one.

  Stupidly, I point this out to Andrew.

  ‘Do you have to read so much into things?’ he says, and immediately he regrets it. He knows it was the wrong thing to say. He knows this because he sees my face, which I turn away from him.

  ‘Don’t just dismiss me,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not dismissing you,’ he says. ‘But why even go, if you dislike them so much?’

  ‘I don’t dislike them. I don’t even know them.’

  I look up Stephanie’s number on the class list, and phone her, and get the answerphone. ‘Hi,’ I say in my breeziest voice. ‘It’s Rachel Morgan here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I’d love to come. Look forward to seeing you.’

  I spend forever thinking what to wear. I stand in front of the mirror in various possible outfits adopting various different poses, trying to make myself appear confident and capable, friendly and relaxed. I have clothes especially for such occasions, clothes bought in the shops that other women shop in, in the styles that other women wear. The right trousers, the right sweaters, the right jackets and the right heels. The uniform of the middle-class mother. I look at myself in the mirror and I see myself disappear.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jono asks suspiciously when I kiss him goodbye.

  ‘To drinks at Stephanie Rawlings’s house,’ I say. ‘Your friend Isaac’s mum.’

  Jono grunts and says, ‘Isaac’s not my friend.’

  Stephanie lives in Richmond, in a house that makes Amy’s look suburban. The inner circle are already there when I arrive, gathered in Stephanie’s vast steel-and-glass kitchen. A teenage girl answers the door to me and I can hear them straight away, the easy laughter, the smooth, confident voices. I fix a smile on my face and ignore the butterflies breaking loose in my stomach, and walk into this huge, echoing space. There are ten or so women standing in the middle of the room, sipping wine and chatting animatedly, and apparently admiring the domed glass ceiling above the dining table. Amy is there, and Stephanie of course, and I recognize a few of the other faces from various school things, but there is no one I really know.

  Stephanie separates herself
from the group when she sees me. Like a perfect hostess, she sweeps over to me and says, ‘Hi, now you must be . . .?’

  ‘Rachel,’ I say. ‘Rachel Morgan. Jonathan’s mum.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she says. ‘Let me get you a drink. Did Lucy let you in?’

  ‘Is Lucy your daughter?’ I ask.

  ‘One of them,’ she says and hands me a glass of champagne, which I clutch in front of me like a shield. ‘Now, I’m sure you must know everyone.’

  The others stop talking as we approach. I feel them scrutinizing me.

  ‘This is Rachel, everyone,’ Stephanie says by way of introduction.

  And stupidly, infuriatingly, as if it weren’t enough that I am simply Rachel, as if I can’t exist just by being Rachel, I have to go and qualify this by adding, once again, ‘Jonathan’s mum.’

  The woman to the left of me says, ‘Hi, I’m Nicola. I don’t think we’ve met.’ She puts out her hand for me, but she doesn’t tell me whose mother she is. It is assumed I should already know. ‘We were just discussing the square footage of this house,’ she says. ‘Lizzie’s just bought a new house, and we were trying to work out if it’s the same size, overall, as this.’

  ‘What’s your square footage?’ asks the woman on the other side of Nicola, whose name I also do not know.

  I’m not sure if she is being serious. ‘I really wouldn’t have a clue,’ I say.

  ‘Well, where do you live?’ She’s an incredibly thin woman with piercing blue eyes and pale blonde hair scraped back in a twist.

  ‘In Surbiton,’ I say.

  She waits for clarification.

  ‘London Road,’ I add, a little reluctantly.

  ‘Oh, I know!’ exclaims one of the other women, because they are all listening, all wanting to know. ‘Those 1930s houses. Yes, we looked at one of those before we bought our last house, but we thought the bedrooms were too small. And there was only one bathroom.’

  I can’t stop myself from saying, somewhat defensively, ‘We’ve got two.’

  ‘You must have extended then,’ she says, dismissively.

  ‘Do you work, Rachel?’ Nicola asks.

  ‘No, not really.’ I force myself to laugh. ‘Unless you call running around after Jono work.’

  She smiles a short, quick smile. ‘What about your husband? What does he do?’

  ‘He’s an accountant.’

  ‘Oh, in the City?’ asks the woman with the intense blue eyes.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He works for a telecoms firm in Guildford.’

  I see the sums going on in her eyes. I swear, I literally see them.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s nice.’ And she turns to speak to someone else. She is done with me.

  My heart is thumping. I drink my champagne and wish that I could have another, but I’m driving. And then I thank God that I am driving, so that I can get away from here, soon.

  Still, I try not to give up.

  ‘Jono had a lovely time at your house the other day,’ I say to Amy. ‘I’m so glad they’re friends.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Amy. ‘Oli has so many friends. He always has had. Steph and I were just saying, he and Isaac are quite a pair, aren’t they, Steph?’

  ‘What?’ says Stephanie, who had been talking to someone else.

  ‘Oli and Isaac,’ says Amy. ‘Ever since prep school.’

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ laughs Stephanie. ‘The terrible twosome, always have been.’

  And thus Jonathan is excluded, along with me. We are put in our place. And isn’t that the trouble – that people like me, and my family, should always stay in their place on the sidelines, on the outside, forever looking in, and longing. I hate myself for even trying. I hate myself that I should care.

  Suddenly I see myself at Vanessa’s house, at sixteen years old, doing my best to join in with the rest of them. I see myself admiring them so with their easy drugs and their easy sex. I see myself so enchanted; passing around the joint, sniffing up the coke, knocking back the tequila, doing whatever I could to be like them. I was infatuated, almost. But it didn’t work. Not really. I only had to speak to one of them to know that I didn’t belong. But these women now, they’d have been perfectly at home in Vanessa’s living room. They’d have been to the right schools, spoken the right language.

  And yet Vanessa herself, how different she was.

  Vanessa didn’t cut me and measure me. Vanessa didn’t judge me or shut me out. She was far, far above all these people and above those people, too, back then; those needy, drugged-up kids filling up her house weekend after weekend.

  But Vanessa went and died, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

  I leave as soon as I politely can, but instead of going straight home I take a detour. I can’t help myself. It is not far from Richmond to Kew, and within minutes I am driving slowly through the quiet streets to Mrs Reiber’s house.

  I can’t stop thinking about Vanessa, and about that old woman, questioning myself over and over: is it her? Is it Vanessa’s mother? It is as though a door has opened in my mind and the past has come spilling out. I cannot just shut it again. I cannot just let it go.

  Andrew says I am obsessive. He says it all the time. He hurls it at me as an accusation when we’re rowing, and when we’re not rowing he aims it lower, in a voice of pseudo-concern, though really it’s to undermine me and keep me down.

  Rachel, don’t be so obsessive about things.

  Rachel, you’re obsessing again.

  Andrew with his cool, calm reasonableness. Andrew who doesn’t fight properly, out in the open, but stands before me like an implacable wall, frustrating me all the further. Andrew who freezes me out with his silence, and turns away from me in bed.

  But Andrew isn’t here to stop me now. He isn’t here to know.

  I crawl past Mrs Reiber’s house. Twice I drive around the block. I do not know what my purpose is.

  On my third time round I pull up, opposite the house. There is nowhere to park on the street, so I block someone’s drive, and I turn off the engine, and the lights. I feel like some kind of stalker. I feel like I am half-mad, but there is no one to see me, no one to know. And so I sit there, and I stare at the house, and I ask myself again and again: is it her? There is a light on in the living room, and another upstairs. The curtains are all drawn. I wonder what she is doing in there; I wonder if she is alone.

  Sometimes, after Vanessa died, I’d get a bus into Oakley and walk past her house. I could get a bus there from near my college, and sometimes I did, instead of going home. I’d get off the bus, walk to the cricket green and sit myself on a bench. Her house was one of only five town houses, the second one in from the right. On the first floor, where the living room was, there was a small balcony, overlooking the green, with full-length windows that you could open and step out of. From my bench on the green the glass looked black, but the light moved across it so that it seemed to move, like sunlight on oil. I imagined I could see her there, waving. I imagined she knew I was there. I wanted her to know.

  And then I’d walk down into the village, past the sweet shop and the baker’s and the smart ladies’ dress shop; I’d walk where she would have walked. And it was as if she was in the air all around me. I expected to turn a corner and see her.

  Suddenly I realize that the person whose driveway I am parked across is watching me. The front-room curtains have been pulled apart and there is a man standing there, with his hands on his hips. Quickly I dig my phone out of my bag and put it to my ear, as if I am making a call, then I put it away again and start up the car. He watches me the whole time. I look over my shoulder, careful not to catch his eye, and pull away.

  And then I drive around the block again.

  When I come back round, the man is gone and his curtains are closed. Even so, just to be safe, I stop across the next driveway along. From here I can still see Mrs Reiber’s house, though to do so I have to turn in my seat. In the short time it took for me to go once around the block the downstairs lig
hts have all been turned off, and just that one upstairs light remains on, as far as I can see. It is gone eleven now; she will be going to bed. As I watch, I see the shadow of a shape moving behind the curtains in the upstairs window. Suddenly the curtains are opened a little, and there she is, looking down at the street. I can just make out her face, ghostly, lit up from behind. She glances up and down the road, as if searching for something, as if she knows she is being watched. I slink down in my seat and my heart is pounding. The next time I look round the curtains are closed again, and the shadow behind them has gone.

  I know I should go. I know I should just stop being so stupid and go home. But I can’t. It’s like a door has opened inside my head, and I can hear them all, see them all. Leanne, at fifteen, squeezed into the tightest, tightest jeans with her layered fair hair crimped into zigzags, throwing her head back and laughing, open-mouthed, her breath smelling of peppermint; Annabel, barely five feet tall, with her cute baby face, wrapping her arm cat-like around mine, or Vanessa’s or Dominic’s. Annabel, always keen to get the dope out, and always there would be a little cube of dope to be found, maybe in Dominic’s pocket, or Tristram’s. ‘Ooh, goody,’ she’d purr, like a child after sweets. And brown-haired, brown-eyed Fay, who preferred to sniff coke because the dope made her cough, but who could down a bottle of wine and still seem completely sober. And the boys, so good-looking, all of them, gilded and interchangeable, so willing to be passed around. How sophisticated they all seemed to me.

  And again and again Vanessa, so quixotic, so slightly removed, presiding over them all like a queen. I picture her; I can feel her, see her, smell her. And now I can hear her, too; laughing, putting her arm around my shoulder and whispering, ‘God, Rachel, how bad you must think we all are!’

  But I didn’t think they were bad. I thought they were wonderful, like butterflies flying close to the sun.

  I never saw any of them again, but I did hear about them, for a while, from Leanne.

  I heard that Dominic got too heavily into drugs and was expelled from school, and drifted away. Annabel went the same way till at eighteen she shot herself up with a dirty needle and died of blood-poisoning in her boyfriend’s Notting Hill flat. That one made the papers: Record Producer’s Daughter in Heroin OD. Only it wasn’t an overdose, it was a stupid, careless infection.