The Coordinates of Loss

by Amanda Prowse

  Time heals. Time heals.

  Someone said that to me once and Lord knows I wanted to punch him! It felt like an insult, like I didn’t know my own mind! But he was right. He was. It does. And maybe at my time of grief I didn’t know my own mind.

  Despite our being together through this hardest and saddest of events, you still know so very little about me. I would like to put that right. I will try and distract you with my stories. I will try to show you that you are not alone in your sadness and that this little island is a wonderful place, a place where my history lives and yours too, because it’s where Oscar now lives.

  I think a lot about heaven. I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘You can go to heaven if you want, I’d rather stay in Bermuda!’ I used to fret over this sometimes in my more restless hours. Suppose this was as good as it got? Suppose my little island, shaped like a fishhook in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with its myriad of hidden bays and secret coves, edged with full and ancient palms, the icing-sugar sand and crystal-clear blue water, is the most beautiful place in the whole of creation? You see, I had banked on there being a place so breathtaking, so perfect, that when the Lord sent one of his messengers to take me under his wing on my final journey, I would see such splendour that I would weep! My concern was what it might feel like if, when I peek out from beneath those fine angel wings, my thoughts were, ‘Hmph, not as pretty as where I’ve come from! Ain’t a patch on Warwick Long Bay with a stiff breeze knocking up the foam against the rocks and the sun warming your skin as you lie on that soft, pink sand . . .’

  But I guess that whenever I arrive at wherever it is I am going, I shall just have to be polite and say that heaven is indeed the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! He’ll know though, the Lord. He’ll know cos I never could tell a lie. Nearly seventy-five years on this earth and my lack of guile and my trusting nature have been both my blessing and my curse. If I could have my time again, I would surely learn how to twist the truth a little, honey up the words that sit on my honest tongue, and have a bigger voice to fight for what is rightfully mine. I am damn sure if I had, I might have kept me a husband.

  I got it from my Grandma Sally, she couldn’t lie either, but Lord she had ten times my courage. As far as we all know, she spoke nothing but the truth in her ninety-four years alive! ‘Offend or please,’ she’d mutter, as if neither were of any consequence or interest to her. My grandma’s honesty was the reason my mom cried on her wedding day, and why my daddy refused to come in the house if she was visiting – and she used to visit a lot. On account of the fact that she lived next door, which was just as well for me, as my bedroom was in Grandma Sally’s house. This arrangement was partly out of necessity, with my mommy’s house being short on space, and partly because I was good company for my grandma; by all accounts I kept her young.

  ‘Him?’ She had, according to the story, pointed at my daddy when my mom brought him home, and near enough popped with rage. ‘Of all the boys on this island, some with brains in their heads and strength in their boots, you pick him?’ My mom didn’t so much as twitch. Instead, she placed her hand on my daddy’s arm and didn’t look back. Her choice was made!

  But I am racing ahead with my stories when you still don’t know some of the basics. Let me fill in the gaps for you, my dear.

  My name, as you know, is Cee-Cee Symmons. My mom (despite any protestations from her mom!) married Mr Symmons and she was, before marriage, a Tucker; this was my Grandma Sally’s married name. Cee-Cee is short for Cecilly. I don’t think I have ever been called Cecilly – well, maybe once or twice in church or way back at school when a new teacher didn’t know the convention that just because you had a name written in a register didn’t mean that was the name you were called.

  I am neither the only nor best example of this.

  My best friend Eliza-Jane Clara May Brown was, and still is to my knowledge, called Clara, on account of there already being an Eliza in the form. Thomas Ivor Newton was commonly known as Newton Junior – his daddy who ran the hardware store on Front Street was Big Newton, and Moses Temperate Mills was, and always has been, called Buddy, no matter that he now has a fancy job in government. He might walk every day with his head held high and neat creases down the front of his shorts, as he strides into the fancy building in Parliament Street, but he is still Buddy to those of us who have known him longest.

  I don’t know why we called him that.

  So, what else to tell you?

  Or, more specifically, what to tell you first?

  I was always skinny, not too tall, but stronger than any man has ever given me credit for, both physically and mentally.

  I have lived on Bermuda my whole life.

  And I have never left her shores. Not once. I have never been on a plane, nor a ship.

  This island – she is part of me and I am part of her and that’s just how it is; can’t imagine anything different.

  Despite what you might assume, I never longed for bright city lights or hustle and bustle. I was always more than content to wake each day and breathe in great lungfuls of the fine sea air that swept through the open window, blowing away the worries of the night-time and bringing with it the promise of something new.

  I have listened to tales of my family and can give you ten, maybe twenty examples of folk who had that itch; adventurers who left the island and spent the rest of their lives trying to figure out a way to get back to her. Some managed it, not all. Some now lie in rich earth or dusty soil the world over, nothing more than bones and dust. And this tells me all I need to know: why go in the first place?

  For me personally, I am sure that if there is anything in the whole wide world as good as diving into the cool, frothy Atlantic Ocean on a hot day when the cotton dress clings to your back like a second skin and the road home lifts under the gaze of the sun, then I am yet to hear about it.

  As a girl, I all but lived in that ocean. That same ocean that I know you despise was like a mother to me. It didn’t matter that the water might be swirling and fierce, so much so that you couldn’t see the eels, wrasses and blue angels sniffing around, waitin’ in the depths to graze your ankles and send a scream from your lungs that would fill the hot, still air. No sir, when your body, aching from chores, got dipped in that cool, cool water, it was as if you could breathe for the first time that day. It was like being baptised all over again in that sweet water that is as good as any I’ve ever seen in the holy font at St Anne’s Church, Southampton Parish.

  It was my favourite thing: to lie on my back in that water and stare at the big sky, watching the Bermuda longtails circle overhead, as the water lapped my ears and made the whole world echo. I didn’t know about desire or any man-made, grown-up carryings on – they were not part of my world.

  Not yet.

  I have always been just one woman, doing my best, struggling with all the good Lord put about my shoulders and placed in my hands, but as the saying goes, and as Pastor Raymond was always keen to remind us, ‘He never gives you more than you are able to handle.’ I’m not sure that this has always felt true, but I have to believe it is true.

  My momma always said, ‘All any of us has is our story. The other stuff ain’t of no ‘portance.’

  And I can now see that she was right.

  What else to tell you, Rachel?

  I’m thinking . . .

  I guess I should say that being the housekeeper in your home with that perfect view of the ocean has made me very happy, not only because of the view, but because of you and James and Oscar. I won’t ever forget the day you all arrived. Oh! That little boy! He was my darling! My joy! And he crept into my heart where I was more than happy for him to lodge. I never had the chance of a whole brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but Oscar filled that gap for me. He was a total wonder to me. I remember how he liked to keep me busy! Stories before bedtime and any spare moment during the day we’d play hide-and-seek. God only knows that boy had a love of it. I spent an age roaming the rooms and l
ooking behind curtains. I now wonder who was fooling who, as I skirted by his tiny feet sticking out from under the duvet or ignored his giggle from behind the wardrobe door, saying, ‘Now where on earth could he be?’ I sit here now on my porch, laughing to recall the pantomime!

  His loss has made me think a great deal about my own life, my own sadness and in some strange but comforting way it has helped me let go of certain things that sat in my mind like a pebble in a shoe.

  Funny, isn’t it, how we think our opinions, our expressions of distaste or approval, are so important? Until something truly big happens in your life and you look back at everything that has gone before and see it for what it is: insignificant. I know you will understand this more than most. And I am quite sure that when I slip away from this world, I will look back at its big, green, open spaces and its deep-blue, life-giving oceans and I will see just how insignificant! We are no more than tiny, tiny specks, nothing more.

  I have never been one for big-headed carrying on; didn’t think I was the cat’s whiskers like some I could mention. Miss Eliza-Jane Clara May Brown . . .

  Not that I will mind when I do slip away, not at all. I don’t fear it, Rachel. I remember Grandma Sally sitting me down on this very veranda and telling me this: ‘In Bermuda there are three steps between heaven and hell. Each step is more than a mile wide. On the bottom step sit those with an excess of money and an excess of time. These folk have the furthest to climb and you can spot them as they have clean fingernails and good shoes. On the top step sit those with a dearth of money and a dearth of time; these folks bear the calluses from a wooden tool held tightly against their palm and have sandals on their feet, but their journey will be swift, as reward for all they have endured. And on the middle step sit those that have meat once a week and enough money in their pocket for a little rum when the fancy takes them. These folk that sit on the middle step spend their time judging them that sit above and below.’

  I looked up at my grandma’s round, shiny face and asked, ‘Which step will I be sat on?’ I waited, eager to hear how far I had to climb.

  She took my grubby fingers inside her warm, dry palm and kissed my forehead, ‘You are going straight to heaven, girl, and when you get there I’ll be waiting.’

  And truth is, I kind of like the idea of that. I like it a lot.

  Cee-Cee looked up at the rumble of thunder overhead.

  Well, the evening is marching on and there is a storm coming in for sure.

  I like to remember Oscar hiding from me, happy, excited and both of us knowing I could find him any old time but playing along anyhow. He was a smart little boy, ain’t no question.

  Cee-Cee

  THREE

  It was eight weeks to the day.

  One thousand three hundred and forty-four hours.

  One thousand three hundred and thirty-eight hours over the record.

  The fact no longer made her sick or sent her hysterical, instead it simply provided another layer of numbness, the words forming a barrier like one of those preserving jellies – aspic and such – to glide over her thoughts, cementing the horror in its latest form. Layer upon layer of fresh imagery that was too uncomfortable to contemplate; smothering the very essence of her, until it was buried, nothing more than a tiny, unreachable kernel where a seed of happiness and rationality lay.

  Throughout the night, with the moon casting pools of silvery light on to their marital bed, she would look across at James with a mixture of envy, revulsion and deep sadness, and wonder how sleep like that was even possible for him. It gave an unpleasant tension to her muscles and a sour lick of distaste to her spit. Once or twice in the early hours he tried to reach for her hand; she would then hold her breath and roll slowly out of reach, unable, or more accurately unwilling, to give or receive comfort when everything felt so very raw. She could barely remember what it was like to fall asleep and wake with her leg cast over his hip, skin to skin. This was just another way in which she found it almost impossible to recognise him as the man she so loved, the man whose contact she had craved. The realisation saddened her less than it should. Her nights, by contrast, were busy with thoughts, memories, guilt and recrimination jostling to be heard. A jumble of images crowded her brain – recollections both loud and detailed. Sleep came pawing as dawn broke and seemed to fall deepest prior to the alarm that shook her husband from slumber.

  James did as he always had: swung his legs and sat on the side of the bed, checking his phone, stretching his back and rubbing his hair and face. It would have been hard for her to explain the rage that swirled in her gut and the hostility that danced on her tongue.

  How dare you! How dare you go through life as if it was any other day! Are you not aware? Are you healed?

  Instead she said nothing and closed her eyes tightly, feeling the ache in her eyeballs as she tried to keep them closed, and the hot burn of his fingertips on her shoulder as he left the room.

  ‘Shh, go back to sleep, my love. Just sleep . . .’

  Rachel rarely left the bedroom balcony. She was without the energy or inclination to do so. Shunning all normal conventions like washing, cleaning her teeth or brushing her hair – these tasks relegated to another lifetime when cleanliness and so much else was part of a ‘normal’ routine. Instead, she sat, day after day, in her crumpled pyjamas, her long hair wound into a greasy knot, ignoring the unpleasant dairy-like odour of herself and cradling her Tic-Tac box full of sand as she stared at the ocean in a constant vigil, calling to her boy.

  Her eyes darted to each crest of white, every flicker of movement, any boat travelling a little quicker than the last, as if it might be carrying an urgent cargo.

  Mayday! Mayday! We have on board a small child picked up from an unseen sandbar! A boy, no less, plucked from a sargassum mat. A miracle! Everyone listen! Oscar is coming home!

  She liked to picture the headlines and smiled at the thought of the photograph that would accompany it: her kissing her boy on the face as she held him tight.

  Cee-Cee moved quietly and slowly, as if her demeanour had shrunk to fit the mood of the house, depositing glasses of water or cups of chamomile tea on the nearest surface, running a sponge over the pristine bathroom and placing a tall vase of freshly cut agapanthus on the dressing table. Rachel could do no more than offer a whispered ‘thank you’, comforted by her presence and yet unable to meet her gaze, eyes fixed on the horizon. The tea would cool until an oily film sat on its darkened surface; the water would gather dust particles and the flowers wilted. Not that she noticed. She didn’t notice much other than what happened out at sea.

  Shifting her legs on the wooden stool that sat in front of her chair, she became aware of her husband standing in the doorway behind her. She pulled her soft, cotton shawl around her narrow shoulders.

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘Mmmn?’

  He walked forward and stood by the glass wall of the balcony, looking out across the ocean, joining her on her quest, whilst addressing her over his shoulder.

  She looked at the back of his head, his body inside the crisply laundered white shirt. The shape of him now changed, shoulders bowed, weight-loss rendering him diminished, slight even. The back of his dark hair peppered with grey that she hadn’t noticed before. He had returned to work a few weeks ago, which she found to be extraordinary. How he could entertain something so normal, familiar, routine and irrelevant when their lives had been irrevocably shattered was beyond her.

  ‘You are going back to work?’ she had asked with barely disguised shock.

  ‘I have to, Rach. I don’t want to, trust me.’

  Trust you? Trust you? You couldn’t keep him from leaving the cabin! You bought that boat! You told me it was safe!

  ‘. . . but I have to. I can’t lose my job as well.’

  He had told her that it was necessary and that whilst the words of condolence were sincerely offered by his peers, they were accompanied by nervous enquiries as to the state of projects and events for which he was responsib
le. He had to keep working, couldn’t let that aspect of his life unwind too. Watching him fasten his tie each day and reach for his car keys was mystifying when it was all she could do to keep her eyes open – not that she managed it all the time, still giving in to bouts of fitful sleep. He reminded her of the violin player on the Titanic, fiddling as the ship sank and all around gasped their last.

  ‘Is this how it is going to be?’ he asked flatly, pulling her from her thoughts.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She watched him grip the rails, his knuckles white.

  ‘Are you’ – she saw the almost imperceptible shake of his head and heard the sharp intake of breath – ‘are you going to stay up here, hiding away?’

  She placed her hand over her mouth, embarrassed by the small laugh that had escaped.

  Where else would I be? What else is there to do?

  ‘I am not hiding away, but there is nowhere else for me to be. I can see everything I need to from here.’

  ‘It’s hiding.’

  ‘Hiding?’ she repeated, staring up at him, as she pictured Oscar running into Cee-Cee’s arms. How many counts was that? How long did you look for?

  ‘Yes, Rachel.’ Her husband’s tone now a little more impatient, with an undercurrent of irritation for which she had no time, none at all. If he of all people did not understand this limbo in which she existed . . .

  He turned to face her. ‘I mean, is this it? You, sat up here, staring blankly out towards the ocean, muttering to yourself, and me excluded, pushed away. Nervous. Skulking downstairs, wondering whether to come up and check on you, whether it’s okay to even speak to you.’

  ‘I don’t even . . .’ And then the words fogged and she lost the point she had been about to make.

  ‘Do you want me by your side? Is it possible we can talk? Or is it better to leave you alone? I am at a loss and I feel like a stranger in my own home and it feels horrible. I am grieving too and it’s made doubly hard by you isolating yourself and excluding me.’