The Teardrop Method

by Simon Avery

  The woman who stepped through the door was Felicity Annenberg. The leather jacket, the red dress, the high heels, the pale, porcelain skin, the delicate features and the tousled red hair: she was pretty, so very, very pretty. She looked like an exotic butterfly trapped in the porch. Susanna could see quite clearly how Dave would have fallen hook, line and sinker for her. She disliked her immediately.

  It took the interloper a moment to realise that she wasn’t entering an empty house, although when she glanced up and finally spotted Susanna, she didn’t look altogether disconcerted by the fact. Susanna cuffed the dust out of her eyes. She felt a bit scruffy, a bit dowdy. Had she ever been this pretty? She realised she was trying to dismiss the visual of Dave and Felicity in the back garden, fucking in the mud. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she said, aware that her voice was high and brittle, that she was slipping into the role of the intolerant ex-wife. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with that.

  “Are you Susanna?” Felicity said. The smile was quick to mask the discomfort of the situation. She slipped the keys into her bag and then she was filling the hall with her perfume and elegance and an extended hand. “I’m Felicity.”

  “Yes I know,” Susanna said. “Why do you have keys to my house?”

  “Well there’s no need to be so…I don’t know…prickly, is there?” Felicity’s smile began to slip. “Dave and I reconnected in the past year. It felt like the dust had cleared.”

  “Yes, I know,” Susanna said. “I’ve read his journal. You introduced him to cocaine and Christ knows what else. It’s what sent him mad. It’s probably what killed the stupid bastard.”

  Felicity was trying hard not to look like she was studying the kitchen, the front room, the stairway. Susanna felt the same way. She had been constantly glancing behind her all morning. “I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot,” Felicity said. She withdrew the keys and offered them to Susanna. “Look, take them. I won’t be coming back here again.”

  Susanna took the keys and pocketed them. “What are you doing here?” she asked quietly.

  There was a moment then that Susanna realised that Felicity was on the verge of tears. The silence widened. “It won’t leave me alone,” she said finally. “That thing. It won’t stop following me.”

  Susanna studied her, lost for words. Then, she sighed and said, “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  6

  They both stood in the backyard, bundled up against the chill as Susanna fed the fire. She caught herself casting sidelong glances at the other woman, mentally checking off all the things a lifetime of denial gave her cause to find distasteful. Aside from Dave, they had precious little in common. Felicity lived in London, in a cottage near Camden Town, and spent her days working as a freelance journalist. It was generic fluff that she produced; interviews with B-list celebrities, beauty product reviews and articles like How to Please Your Man in Bed. She was aware of her own journalistic shortcomings and admitted to using what she referred to as her ‘feminine wiles’ to get ahead, to get a better interview from her subjects.

  “Is that what you did with Dave while we were married?” Susanna asked. “Use your feminine wiles?”

  “At first I suppose,” Felicity said. She hadn’t stopped glancing behind her since she’d arrived. She looked out of place standing ankle deep in leaves in a grey backyard. “But then we went out and I realised how much I liked him. I didn’t realise he was married then. Really I didn’t. And I genuinely liked him.” She smiled. “He was sweet. He was attentive. He didn’t just want to go to bed with me.”

  “He did,” Susanna said. “He was just being patient. Some men can wait until after dinner before they get their leg over.”

  Felicity glanced at her sadly then looked away. It made Susanna feel unkind finally. It served no real purpose being angry with this woman. What was done was done. Dave was dead and that was that.

  “I didn’t realise that he’d react the way he did to the drugs,” Felicity said. “He seemed so po-faced about it and I’d gotten so blasé about coke that it felt like a challenge. And it was just a bit of fun. It made the sex better.”

  “What happened to him?” Susanna said. “After the LSD and the mandrake?”

  Felicity kicked at the leaves, pushed her hands into her hair and paced around the fire. “He had a bad experience on the acid. If you go into it with a bad mental state, then your mind will find a way to fuck with you. And it did. He got obsessed with what he’d seen while he was tripping and then he got something into his head about the mandrake and the folklore.”

  “And then he lost interest in you.” Susanna felt uncharitable saying it, but she said it anyway.

  “Oh, he never really had any interest in me anyway,” Felicity said. “He was always at a remove. He said he hadn’t dealt with all of that business five years ago properly. He talked about you quite often. He had regrets about how he’d treated you. I do too, for what it’s worth. He mentioned the name Millie a lot.”

  Susanna nodded. She tossed the last of the wood on the fire. “He never told you the first time around? Why he was with you and not me? Why everything was fucked up in our lives?”

  “No,” Felicity said. “He never did.”

  Susanna sighed.

  “The last time I turned up here, the place was lit up,” Felicity said. “All of the lights on. He was locked in his study. He was absolutely bloody terrified. He said he’d made something. He wasn’t certain that it was a mistake at that point. But it was. It wasn’t what he wanted.”

  “What did he think he wanted?” Susanna said. Her voice had grown shrill.

  “He told me he’d wanted to control the aspect of his life that he hadn’t been able to control. He thought that he could rectify the past somehow. But when he decided he couldn’t, and that he didn’t want what it was, he couldn’t be rid of it. It was just one more mistake. It didn’t go away. It couldn’t.”

  “So what is it?” Susanna asked.

  Felicity stopped and stared at the disturbed earth. “Tell me who Millie was first.”

  7

  “Millie was premature,” Susanna said. “I was only seven months pregnant.” They had returned to the house, but Felicity was so nervy that they decided to walk to Cannon Hill Park. “We both knew we were in trouble. I was in labour for three hours. Dave held my hand after they’d taken him aside to explain the risks and probabilities to him. I remember watching them, the doctors and nurses, as they helped me through the birth. And I remember how silent it became when they delivered Millie. That was her name. We’d chosen it early on once we knew it was going to be a girl. They took her away and I looked at Dave’s face as he watched them working on her. They were huddled around our baby. They’d said she’d go into an intensive care incubator because she would be so small. But there was no time for that.”

  Susanna stared hard into the park, at the children kicking a football around, at the joggers, the old couple on a bench eating a sandwich. “They said they’d done all they could, but her lungs were so undeveloped. They said they were sorry and the world fell away from me, from us. I held her for a while. She was tiny. Immaculate. Tiny fingers and toes, closed eyes. She was beautiful…

  “But she was dead. Dave took her and held her in his hands and I watched him disappear. He just faded away. They sedated me and he left, picked me up the next day. He dealt with the funeral. He took care of it all. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face the photograph the nurse had taken of Millie to help us through the grieving process, so Dave took that too. And he seemed to leave me. We left each other somehow.”

  They’d come to sit on a park bench, and at some point Felicity’s hand was linked with Susanna’s. How had that happened? She thought of the weeks afterward. Pacing the rooms, filled with moods neither of them could comprehend. No relief. There was no relief from that kind of grief. It clung to you. You went to sleep with tears in your eyes and you woke with a stone in your chest and you stumbled through the day l
ike the dead walking.

  “I took to leaving the house and catching the bus, getting off at random stops around Birmingham at the last moment, as if to surprise myself. I’d sit in crowded shopping centres where the world didn’t give a damn about my sadness; or in lonely squares with just the pigeons for company. Sometimes Dave would come and find me, worried out of his mind, and just hold onto me; then after a while he stopped coming out altogether and I’d arrive home the next day, bedraggled and bewildered. That was when he met you. And we both realised that it wasn’t going to work anymore.”

  There were tears in her eyes. “You couldn’t really see how life would return to normal until a year or so later, and you saw that it hadn’t. Everything was changed. We had separated and we were both alone.”

  8

  They both sensed it following them back to the house on Edgbaston Road. The dark was chasing them too. The light was receding over the rooftops, car headlights coming on, the rain and the wind chasing them up the road, leaves skittering at their ankles; Susanna realised that she was glancing behind her as much as Felicity was. Somehow, some alchemy of shared fear and belief and acknowledgement of grief had bonded them, despite their reluctance.

  The house was not welcoming. In their absence, the shadows had taken hold of the rooms. As Susanna fumbled with the key in the lock, she realised that she no longer wished to be here, but there was something that had to be done, something that had been seeded in the back of her mind as they’d walked back from the park. She sensed that Felicity knew what had to be done too; it was why she had returned. What other choice did they have? They could go back to their old lives but it would come with them, haunt them, watch them, follow them; the regret they’d never be released from, the guilt they’d never assuage, the damage they’d done to all of their lives, the shadow they’d never be able to put any real distance between. Perhaps there was a solution within that notion.

  She ventured into the hall, switching on the lights as she went. The darkness seemed to be taking hold of the rooms faster than she could light them. Beyond the kitchen window, the shorn trees in the garden swayed in the wind, and the hole in the mouth of upturned earth looked like a toothless socket. Felicity hesitated behind her, uncertain where to place herself in the space of the room.

  Susanna knew what they had to do. She turned to Felicity. “We need more of the mandrake,” she said. “And a ritual of our own.

  9

  Dave had a supply of mandrake. It was in a safe box along with a stash of blotters containing acid at the back of one of the filing cabinets in his study. Susanna and Felicity discovered it after an hour of rooting through the chaos of dusty files. By that time the darkness outside the windows was absolute; when Susanna looked at it, it seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. The house was lit up but they could hear the sounds commencing on the floors below them: the subtle creaks and groans, the soft padding of feet on the staircase, the sound of snuffling breath and whining. And then the sudden sharp scent of upturned earth, pricking at their noses. Without realising, they were almost touching in the small room by the time they found the drugs.

  “I don’t understand how we can possibly engage in a magical ritual when we have no idea what we’re doing.” Felicity’s voice was small and brittle against the silence. She was aware that she had no other option other than this blind attempt to undo what Dave had brought into the world; it was why she hadn’t simply fled as the darkness took hold, and instead had followed Susanna back into the house and upstairs. There was nowhere to run. No place that it wouldn’t follow. The normal rules didn’t apply to this thing. It could be anywhere. It haunted you because it was guilt and it was grief and it was shame and fear manifested and anthropomorphised; it was everything that Dave and Susanna and Felicity had carried around with them already. How could you remove that from the world?

  “Dave didn’t understand what he was doing either,” Susanna said. “That was why he made such a mess of things.”

  “So we take mandrake and what?” Felicity said. “Strip off and dance naked in the garden until the little fucker goes back into the ground?”

  “I don’t bloody well know!” Susanna said. “I don’t know. I think the mandrake will suggest what it is we have to do.”

  Felicity was standing at the threshold of the study, staring into the pool of shadows in the stairwell. Susanna suddenly felt a strangely maternal instinct towards the woman, despite herself. It didn’t matter how worldly she appeared, how full of people and places her life was, she was, like Susanna, a frightened woman struggling with the decisions she’d made for herself. Well, they were in this together now. Dave was gone from their lives and they’d have to trust in each other. She handed Felicity the mandrake. “Take this and prepare it,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

  10

  Susanna let Felicity place the dropper under her tongue and she felt the liquid fill her mouth. “Let it sit in your mouth for a minute and then swallow it,” Felicity said and then tilted her head and dropped the tincture into her own mouth. They had sat on the floor of the landing, staring down at the staircase. After a couple of hours’ preparation, Dave’s study was emptier now.

  Felicity leaned back on her hands and sighed. “This isn’t going to end well,” she said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to go into these things in a positive state of mind?” Susanna asked. The liquid was bitter and dry on the palate.

  After a moment, Felicity said, “I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “For what I did. What we did. I never thought I was the sort of woman who’d have an affair with a married man.”

  Susanna shrugged. “What’s done is done I suppose. We all make mistakes.”

  She could hear it waiting for them behind the bend in the staircase. She heard its ragged breath. It was biding its time. It had as long as they were alive, as long as they carried this pain and grief around. “It’s what we do afterwards that matters,” she said. “I didn’t deal with things after Millie. I ran away from life. I suppose I never stopped.”

  “You’re not the woman I thought you’d be,” Felicity said.

  “Is that a good thing or not?”

  “You’re stronger than I imagined.”

  “Stronger?” Susanna snorted. “Christ.”

  “You don’t see it I suppose. You came out the other side and you don’t realise. You’re different now. It made you a stronger woman.”

  Susanna sighed. “I don’t feel like that.”

  “I suppose that’s the thing isn’t it? We don’t ever notice the change in our own lives.”

  Susanna felt the air of expectation begin to cloud her reason. There was a flush of heat blooming in her belly and her chest, reaching out to her extremities, making her light, lighter than the air itself. It seemed to be radiating out of her fingers and toes. In between the fluttering of her eyelashes, something was forming. She could feel a tremor of anticipation rise up and out of her and she felt the urge to stand. She took Felicity’s hand and the other woman rose too. Below them, there was a scratching at the walls and the floor that set her teeth on edge but she felt impelled to venture down the staircase to find its source. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realised that something had come loose inside her, and when she lifted her head again she realised that they were already downstairs. She glanced back and realised that she was alone. She felt a surge of fear that twisted in her chest and then was gone, for Felicity was ahead of her in the kitchen, her arms full of the papers that they’d collected from Dave’s study. “Come on,” she said to Susanna.

  They’d agreed to burn all of the things that referred to the making of the homunculus in the back garden. Susanna followed Felicity out there and the cold was bracing; it brought back some of her reason. They’d constructed a makeshift magical circle around the fire that they’d found in the same book that Dave had used to construct his wards over the doors and windows. Felicity was throwing the papers and books onto the wooden pyre. She took hold of Susanna�
��s hand. She had the matches in her other. She seemed very far away, as if she was floating up into the night. The stars were gone; they were all obscured by a grey cloak of cloud. Susanna dug her heels into the soft earth, willing gravity to hold her down. But there was nothing to stay for; nothing to hope for. Millie was gone, and now so was Dave. All that remained was this huge old house with too many memories and the ghost he’d made for himself. She was afraid of letting go, of falling into the unknown alone. But she’d been doing that for five years already. Floating. Drifting.

  It came to her then. Susanna felt the hairs prickle at the back of her neck and she was watching Felicity start the fire from indoors. It was huffing breath out of its lungs, spitting earth across the floor. She felt it scratch at her legs with the ragged nails it had used to claw itself out of the earth with. She could see its distorted reflection in the window as Felicity tossed paper onto the fire. It was nothing more than a sketch of a life, a crude memory of something that had never lived. It was the Polaroid that the nurse had taken after Millie had been delivered, the picture that would help in some small way with the grieving, except that it hadn’t. She’d only ever looked at it once, and then given it to Dave. Obviously he’d clung to it over the years, given it too much power. And now it had flesh on its bones. There was an urgent fluttering in her belly as the mandrake threatened to remove the last of her reservations, her doubts, her fears. But that was what she needed; the last step away from her old life and into something new. She told it she wasn’t afraid and hoped it believed her.