‘So they’re not holding anyone responsible?’
‘Officially, no. Basically they don’t really have any idea how it happened, but there were no definite signs of foul play, so they just have to assume that it was an accident.’
There was no response to this. Connie tried to chew the food in her mouth, but it was suddenly tasteless, with the texture of damp paper. Lily was completely motionless, staring silently at her plate.
‘Anyway,’ Marcus said, his voice full of false cheer, ‘the main thing is, it’s over now, isn’t it? So we can all go back to normal.’
The conversation moved back to less painful subjects, and, if anyone noticed that Connie and Lily didn’t eat another bite, they chose not to mention it.
‘As I said yesterday, there are lots of different types of energy. We’ve looked at electrical energy, chemical energy and thermal energy. Does anyone know of any more?’
Connie didn’t look up, in case the teacher caught her eye. The lack of response wasn’t quite a silence; there were low mutterings, the odd giggle. The students weren’t not communicating, just steadfastly refusing to communicate with the teacher.
‘Anyone?’
In among the quiet murmurs she could pick out individual voices. The odd sentence here and there.
I heard she killed someone.
‘Okay, well, today we’re going to be looking at kinetic energy.’
Connie looked up, following the squeaking strokes of the whiteboard marker as it traced words across the board: ‘kinetic energy’. Except that the ‘r’ and the ‘g’ weren’t clear, had melded together to form an uncertain squiggle. If Connie squinted slightly, she could see the word ‘enemy’, emblazoned on the board for all to see.
I heard it was her sister that killed him and that she got sent away so they couldn’t put her in jail.
Connie closed her eyes. Tried to tune in to the teacher’s voice, while the whispers behind her seemed to scratch at the back of her mind.
‘Kinetic energy is motion energy. All moving things have kinetic energy, even tiny ones, like atoms, and huge ones, like planets. Today we’re going to do an exercise to look at the way kinetic energy is transferred, and why it might be of importance to us.’
There was a general shuffling as the teacher started writing instructions on the board. People turned to their partners, started talking more loudly. Connie leaned forward on her desk and switched on the gas tap for the Bunsen burners. Released a tiny cloud of gas into the air, with a minute hiss that only she could hear. She flipped it off again.
I thought her sister went crazy and they sent her to a mental institution.
She had a Walkman at home. Maybe she could bring it in. The teacher probably wouldn’t notice, so long as she looked as if she was paying attention. It would use a lot of batteries, though. Her parents would notice if she kept taking all their batteries.
‘Okay, so if you want to divide into pairs…’
Connie didn’t bother to look around for a partner. It had been nearly three months since she’d started secondary school, and every lesson had been the same. She would sit here until the teacher assigned her to a pair. A different one every time; it wouldn’t be fair for anyone to have to put up with her for more than one lesson.
Look at her. I think the whole family’s crazy.
‘Connie, could you make a three with Natalie and Emma, please?’
She gathered up her books, awkwardly levered herself down from the wooden stool. Taller than the plastic bar stools at home. And the noise the metal legs made, screeching across the linoleum. Grating her eardrums.
Natalie and Emma were two tables away. Far enough that she couldn’t hear the whispers of the girls behind. They didn’t talk to her, but there were no snide comments as there were with some of the others. This was fine.
She could get used to this.
Connie came in through the patio doors, hoping to avoid her parents. No such luck. They were sitting at the breakfast bar, a pot of coffee untouched in the space between their hands. They both looked up as she walked in.
‘Good day?’
‘Mmm.’
‘That’s hardly an answer, is it?’
Connie took a deep breath. Allowed the traces of bitterness left in the air by Anna’s tone to dissipate before she responded. ‘It was okay.’
‘What lessons did you have?’
Her father had evidently been training himself in asking questions that required direct responses. Can’t have two silent daughters. Keep this one talking.
‘English. Maths.’ She paused. Tried to pluck something out of the day that would be worth mentioning. ‘We’re learning about energy in science.’
‘What kind of energy?’
‘All kinds. I’ve got lots of homework.’
‘Okay. You’d best get on with it, then.’
Connie went upstairs, closed her bedroom door behind her, dropped her bag on the floor next to her bed. Went to the mirror that hung above her dresser. She looked the same as she had that morning. More tired, perhaps. She leaned close, examined the dark circles beneath her eyes. Some of the other girls wore make-up that gave their faces a powdery orange tint. Maybe she would get some.
She could sense her parents downstairs, talking about her. Talking about Lily. Or maybe they weren’t talking at all. Communicating via silent thought-transmissions.
It seemed that silence was its own mode of communication, these days.
She went to her bed, knelt down, and reached a hand underneath, fingers tracing the dust on the floorboards until she found what she was looking for. Her hand closed around hard plastic casing. The radio that her parents had given her for Christmas two years ago. That she had barely used since her father had finally relented and bought a television a year later.
She switched it on. A muted buzz whispered its way through the air. She twisted the dial, and found a voice. A man’s voice, joined a moment later by a woman’s. They laughed. Oh, Jim, you know me so well.
She turned the volume down low enough that she could hear the voices without being able to make out the words, and placed the radio on her windowsill.
She hadn’t been lying about the homework, but she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. Her parents wouldn’t check. The teachers wouldn’t comment. She was in limbo, outside the normal rules of society, temporarily. Temporally.
Lily had never been able to say temporarily.
Connie lay down on her bed and stretched out as much as she could without touching the wall. Not much leeway with a single bed. Sometimes, when her parents were out, she spread out on their bed like a starfish, trying to touch every corner. It was supposed to be a secret, but she could never make the bed as neatly as they could and they always knew. Her father didn’t mind. It was only Anna who complained.
She liked their room. It didn’t have the sense of emptiness that hers did, regardless of whether or not they were in it. Perhaps it was the fact that it was shared space, the lives of two people combined in one area. It gave a sense of conversation in the room, even when there was no communication between its living occupants.
Downstairs she could hear their voices begin to rise. She pulled a pillow around her ears to muffle the sound. Not that she could ever hear the words. But she could make out the vibrations in her mother’s tone that would indicate when she was near tears.
Through the open window she could hear the birds as they bade farewell to the fading day. The sound mingled with the murmurings from the radio, the low growl of voices from the kitchen. And Lily’s voice in her mind, stumbling over syllables she could not pronounce. Tempery. Temporally. Tempo-rarity.
Connie closed her eyes and wished: for silence or for graspable sound, she could not quite decide.
The following day she decided to go into town after school. Set off on the same route she took every day. The buses from Farnworth back to Drayfield went every hour, with one leaving straight after school. She usually took a later bu
s. Avoiding people she knew. And it was better to be out of the house.
She headed down the alley next to the school. Kept to the left, clear of the garages where older kids went to smoke. Concentrated on stepping around the cat shit which was liberally scattered among the gravel.
Didn’t notice the people emerging from the garages, walking behind her.
The first blow caught her on the ear and knocked her sideways, into the wall. She stumbled, dizzy, and someone grabbed her hair, pulling her to the floor. Face-first, so that the gravel bit into her cheeks and split her lip. She closed her eyes and tried to curl into a ball.
‘Coward. Weren’t so cowardly when you were killing that guy, were you?’
She didn’t know how many there were. At least three, she guessed. They kicked her repeatedly, until she lost count of how many blows landed on her body, and she could no longer feel the individual impact. Just the juddering of her whole body as shoe collided with skin.
‘We thought we’d give you a lesson in the transference of kinetic energy,’ said one voice. A hiss, venomous, but also amused. It was the amusement that made Connie feel genuinely afraid.
It didn’t last long. Maybe a minute before they spat in her hair and left her on the ground. She heard laughter as they retreated, and the lighting of cigarettes.
She lay there for just a few moments too long; when she got to the bus station the early bus was leaving, its brake lights waving cheerfully as they disappeared around the corner. She could think of nowhere else to go, and so she sat at the bus station for an hour, until the next bus arrived. The bus driver looked at her when he pulled up – dirt-smudged, gravel-grazed – but he made no comment, and she sat down without a word.
now
Lily was the first person in the department most mornings. She shared an office with two other members of the faculty: a lecturer in algebraic topology, Eric, who insisted on drinking out of a mug bearing the slogan ‘To a Topologist This Is a Doughnut’, and Marianna, a German who specialised in archaeostatistics and being quiet. They tended to work in near-total silence, which was only ever interrupted by Eric, whose opinions fluttered out of his mouth and settled ineffectually on the indifference in the room.
Lily treasured the early mornings, when she could work without interruption. She hated sharing an office; had several times considered moving to a new institution just for the privilege of having her own space in which to work. But Richard didn’t want to move. And when it came right down to it, nor did Lily. So she came in early, worked hard, taught for the required number of hours, and went back home to capture a few uninterrupted hours of productivity before Richard arrived home.
She set up the coffee machine, switched on her computer, and raised the blinds to let in the first struggling signs of daylight. The sky was blue-grey, without any genuine promise of becoming brighter later in the day. It was the claustrophobic darkness of mid-October, the kind that in the evenings carried with it promises of trick-or-treating, bonfires, hot chestnuts and tinsel, but in the early mornings merely pledged drizzle and murky, rain-bleached sunlight.
Checking her emails took considerably longer than usual. It was her first day back in the office. They’d offered her compassionate leave, but she didn’t see the point. The longer she was out of touch with the academic world, the harder it would be to fight her way back to the centre. Besides, excessive thinking without an object on which to focus thought was the quickest route to insanity, in her limited experience.
When she was most of the way through her inbox, Marianna came in, and they exchanged awkward conversation for a previously unheard-of length of three minutes. How are, where have, did you, and, here we are. Three minutes to establish that nothing in their working relationship had changed, or needed to change. Then back to the silence in which they were both most comfortable.
The phone rang ten minutes later.
‘Lily Emmett.’
‘Lils! Richard said you were going back to work today.’
Lily didn’t respond, but shifted the receiver to rest between her ear and her shoulder, so that she could continue typing while Connie spoke.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Yes, fine, thank you. And you?’
‘Fine. Well, you know, not fine, obviously not. I know you’re not either. We should meet up soon. The kids would like to see more of you, and of course Nathan…’
‘I’m at work.’
‘I didn’t mean now.’ Deliberately missing the point. ‘Look, Lils, there’s stuff we need to talk about. I was wondering if we could do dinner.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Don’t just make noises at me. What does that mean? Does it mean yes?’
‘Yes. Of course. When?’
‘When are you free?’
Lily was momentarily confused. ‘Um. Always?’
‘Oh, Lily, don’t make it sound like that.’ A pause, for Lily to speak, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. ‘How about tomorrow, then?’
‘Yes. Fine. At your house?’
‘Yes. Bring Richard.’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. See you tomorrow, then. Take care.’
‘Yes.’ A pause, before Lily remembered, and started to say ‘you too’, but Connie was already gone; a tiny click followed by an endless and impenetrable buzz.
then
‘I still don’t understand why we couldn’t all spend Christmas together.’
Connie was slouched in the back seat of the car, feet resting high on the seat in front of her, roughly in line with her mother’s shoulder-blades. Her mother stared out of the window and did a very good impression of not being able to hear anything. Every now and then she lifted a hand, to rub a clear patch in the condensation on the window; otherwise she was motionless.
‘Your grandfather was ill,’ Marcus said, his voice stubbornly calm. He was staring straight ahead, watching where he was going, and all Connie could see were his eyes in the mirror, dark and strangely expressionless. ‘It wouldn’t have been nice, to barge in on them when he wasn’t feeling well.’
‘They could have come to us,’ Connie said. She was aware she was being petulant. They’d been having the same argument all morning.
‘Yes, they could have done, but they didn’t want to and it would have made things difficult – ’
‘You mean Lily didn’t want to.’
‘Lily hasn’t said a word on the subject,’ Marcus said. Connie glared at him in the mirror. ‘Sorry. Bad time to try to be funny, I suppose.’
‘It would help if you were actually funny.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would.’ Marcus sighed, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel as he slowed the car to a stop at the end of a queue. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing to do with Lily. It was me and your grandmother who made the decision, really.’
‘And no one else,’ her mother said pointedly.
‘I asked you whether you wanted to go for Christmas, Anna – ’
‘And I said I didn’t want to go at all. And yet, here I am.’ Anna was still staring out of the window, her voice utterly expressionless. Connie shifted further down in her seat, trying to make herself inconspicuous.
‘What, you’d rather not see Lily at all?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Well, that’s basically what you said, isn’t it?’
Anna shrugged. The car juddered slightly as it waited to resume its movement. Outside, ahead of them in the queue, someone was honking their horn. Connie tilted her head to peer through the gap between the seats, trying to see what was causing the hold-up, but she was slouched too low to see anything but dashboard and sky.
Christmas had been a strange and dismal affair. Her parents had attempted the customary festivities, but there had been a flatness in the air, a lack of enthusiasm. Connie had failed to get out of bed at the usual time – she was usually woken early by an excited Lily. She’d lain awake for almost an hour, listening to the wind stirring outside the
house, before she remembered that it was traditional at Christmas for the children to drag the adults out of bed. When she’d knocked on her parents’ bedroom door she’d found them both awake, as puzzled and uncertain as she was.
There had still been presents, of course, and they had still made dinner; but, where once it would have been Anna’s job to cook while Marcus entertained the girls, Anna now seemed unable to remember what she was meant to do, and she’d left most of it to Marcus. Connie had stayed in her room until late in the morning, reading a book with the radio on low, only stirring when she heard the sound of the patio doors slamming shut beneath her. She’d climbed off her bed and gone to the window, just in time to see her mother striding through the garden, past the lavender borders – all overgrown now, and nothing but a collection of grey-green weeds at this time of year – straight into the depths of the woodland beyond. Connie had watched her until she was out of sight, even her shadow slipping away beneath the trees, and then she’d pulled herself away from the window and joined her father downstairs.
Her mother had come back in time for dinner, and they’d made a valiant attempt at good cheer, before disintegrating into silence and stupor, and eventually retreating to separate rooms.
Connie couldn’t help thinking about what it had been like the year before, when Lily had been given a pair of roller skates and Connie had pushed her up and down the patio for an hour, trying not to let her fall off the edges on to the grass. Her mother had watched them from the kitchen window while cooking dinner, and Marcus had hovered with his camera, shouting encouragement from all sides. After dinner Billy and his father had come round, and the adults had sat around drinking wine, getting louder and more out of control. They’d forgotten to send them to bed, and Connie remembered crouching in the doorway to the kitchen, watching them, with Billy on one side and Lily on the other. Billy had whispered in her ear, ‘We could steal some of their wine; they wouldn’t even notice,’ and for a moment Connie had been excited by the prospect, until she’d realised that Lily was there – Lily who she was supposed to be responsible for – and she’d shaken her head. Instead they’d gone upstairs to Lily’s room and Billy and Connie had taken turns reading her stories until she fell asleep, twisted in her duvet, left thumb in mouth, right arm thrown out recklessly above her head. Not long after that, Billy’s dad had called him downstairs and they’d gone home.
Hush Page 3
