by Fiona Neill
‘You look lovely, Mum,’ says Rex.
She really does.
‘Shall we head out together, Maxi?’ suggests Ava in her syrupy tone. ‘Like old times?’
I realize how much we were all relying on Max to see us through this. Although he’s younger than the rest of us he’s always been the linchpin. But he’s even more on edge than me.
‘If you’re sure we’re going right now, I’ll fetch Connie,’ he tells Ava.
Gregorio stands up. He’s wearing long, flowing white and purple robes with huge sleeves and has painted weird hieroglyphics on his arms.
‘I didn’t realize we had to come as extras from Life of Brian,’ Rex jokes.
Hamish starts muttering something about the Knights of Ni and how they should have bought Dad and Lisa a shrubbery as a present and looks all hangdog when Gregorio accuses him of belittling the spirituality of the occasion.
When Max returns with Connie we head outside. I don’t understand why she agreed to come when she clearly wants to be here even less than the rest of us. We troop through the back garden, past the shed towards the gate that leads to The Wild. Crocuses and daffodils poke their heads through the soil and a warbler serenades us with his soulful song. I’m uplifted by the way I notice all this because not only does it mean I’m living less in my head but it shows I’ve learnt to look for the signals that might help me repair the broken part of my brain.
It’s warm for March. Dad always says it gets hotter every year. But this year he’s right. The weather is one of his specialist subjects when conversation between us flags. The sky is cobalt blue, the spring sun hangs low and defiant, and it’s difficult not to feel the promise of summer in the air. Even at my sickest, the sun could force my obsessions into the shade. Rex and I are at the front of the pack and we gradually pick up pace until the rest of the group is well behind us. The last words we hear Gregorio utter involve instructing Dad and Lisa to face east during the ceremony because the sun represents their new beginning.
‘Does he ever stop?’ asks Rex.
The dunes lie ahead. They seem bigger than when I was last here. I spot the white lozenge-shaped roof of the pillbox right away because it’s the same one I see in my dreams. Rex effortlessly starts to scramble up the sandy knoll and I can’t help wondering if this is how it would have been if he had turned up all those years ago. I can’t get any purchase in my slippery-soled shoes so he waits for me, sticking out his arm to haul me up like a stubborn donkey through the deep sand. As we get higher our legs sink up to our calves, slowing our progress to the summit. I grab on to the marram grass for support and wince as it cuts my hands.
At the top we stop to catch our breath and survey the landscape around us. The North Sea is on one side and Mum’s house on the other. I’ll always think of it as her house. Thinking about Mum being alone reminds me that I’ve fallen behind with my routines. As Rex circles to take a panoramic shot on his phone I run through the special words in my head but they are an afterthought, like an insurance policy you’ve suddenly remembered to renew. There’s no emotion attached. For today, at least, I’ve managed to break the loop. I turn round to check the progress of the rest of our group. We’re way ahead of everyone else. Max and Connie are just stick figures in the distance.
Rex takes my hand again and we track across the tallest dune towards the pillbox. It’s buried so deep that it looks as though it’s being slowly entombed in the sand. Only the top quarter of the arch at the entrance is visible, making it completely impossible to crawl inside. It used to be a challenge to climb up on to the roof but now it’s no more than a step up. We jump in and out of Gregorio’s shell circle like children, recklessly kicking the cockles out of the way, shouting to make ourselves heard above the noise of the wind and the methodical crash of the waves below. That sound was the soundtrack to our childhood.
‘It’s like returning to a crime scene,’ says Rex breathlessly as we survey the broken circle.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I used to meet girls here. You guys used to spy on us all the time. Remember?’ He looks away shyly but it’s more that he’s conscious of the absurd gulf between the overconfident seventeen-year-old with the big dreams and the uncertain twenty-six-year-old standing before me now.
‘Why didn’t you come that day?’ I suddenly ask him.
The question hangs in the air. I fix my gaze towards the sea, wondering at the way the horizon looks as though it has been drawn with a ruler. It feels like ancient history, as if I’m asking about something that happened centuries ago when Vikings landed on this beach, but there’s a wistful tone that Rex picks up on.
‘Which day?’
I turn and search his face for answers but there’s that blank look men adopt when they worry a woman is about to make emotional demands they can’t respond to. I think back to my thirteen-year-old self, waiting inside the pillbox, and remember how euphoria curdled into despair when Rex didn’t arrive. I can still conjure up the dank acid smell inside the pillbox, and recall the pathetic way I played house by burying the rubbish and sweeping the floor with a piece of driftwood. Most of all I remember my anger and distress that Dad and Lisa had robbed me of the role I was meant to be playing. I remember it all in such detail that I wonder if a version of me remains buried inside the pillbox along with my old white knickers.
‘I waited so long for you. It felt like a lifetime.’
‘You’ve completely lost me, Small.’ Rex turns his head and narrows one eye, as if he’s trying to corral his memories in case he’s missed something. ‘Nope,’ he says finally.
‘The two sentences you wrote on that note were pretty specific.’
‘What note?’
‘The one you left under the lamp beside our bunk bed.’
He shakes his head emphatically. ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. What did it say?’
‘It said to meet me here at three p.m.’
The temperature dips a little as the sun slips behind a cloud and I shiver. Rex suggests we take shelter in the basin in the sand until the others arrive. He keeps walking and I follow him. I never imagined that I would return to the spot where I saw Dad and Lisa wrapped around each other, but maybe coming back with Rex appeals to my love of symmetry.
‘So what did it say on the other side of this note?’
I wait a beat. The words are still coated in shame. We’ve reached the hollow in the sand. It’s more concave than I remember, hollowed out by the wind over the intervening years. Rex steps down and pulls back the swathes of marram grass as if they’re curtains and we step inside.
‘You make me hard.’
It’s good he’s in front of me so I can’t see his face, but I feel his grip tighten around my hand.
‘For real?’
‘Verbatim.’
‘I would never have written something like that to a thirteen-year-old. You didn’t even have breasts back then, Daisy. No wonder you didn’t want to see me for all those years. You must have thought I was a complete pervert.’
‘I thought you liked me.’
He hears the unevenness in my voice.
‘I did like you. But never in that way. You were like a little sister to me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry all the time.’ He sounds almost irritated. He pauses for a second weighing things up. ‘But I was here that day, Small. I spent the whole afternoon with the girl from the caravan site. We always met in the same place. In this hollow in the sand. Maybe you heard us. I hope you couldn’t see much. That could have been a little disturbing to someone so young.’ He snorts with embarrassment at the memory.
We glance over at the window of the pillbox at exactly the same instant. I frown. It’s much further away than I remember. And the angle is slightly offset, so I couldn’t have been facing the scene head-on. I realize right away that those close-up shots of Dad and Lisa’s face weren’t accurate. It wasn’t possible to have seen the sweat on her fa
ce or the way his trunks wrinkled around his ankles. The realization makes me feel sick, as if I’m the one with vertigo. It dawns on me that it wasn’t Dad and Lisa at all. It was Rex and the girl. How could I get this so wrong?
The fragments come back in the wrong order, as if they’re on shuffle, so I have no time to absorb one before the next reveals itself. Some of the memories must be reliable: the animal noise, the instructions to fuck harder, stronger, faster. I know this is possible because Ava and Rowena have reached the top of the pillbox and their words are carried to us on the breeze.
I feel breathless as I try to catch up with all the permutations of this revelation. This isn’t what Lisa was planning to tell Mum. It wasn’t my failure to perform my rituals that meant that I didn’t protect Mum from Lisa. Dad is flawed, but not as malevolent as I had assumed. In fact, no more flawed than the rest of us. Thoughts fly through my head like the wind coming off the sea.
I remember what Dad says about our memories being unreliable and how the point of them is that they help us define how we act next. And I realize that I need to speak to Max and tell him I got it all wrong.
‘So if not me then who?’ asks Rex.
I’ve almost forgotten he’s here with me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If it wasn’t me who wrote the note then who was it?’
I think of Max’s angry frustration the other night. And I know that it was him.
18
Nick
Black holes are stars that have collapsed under their own gravity. They produce gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape. This is how I feel as I stand on top of the old World War Two pillbox holding hands with Lisa inside Gregorio’s sacred seashell circle. Fortunately Gregorio doesn’t stop talking and everyone’s too busy trying to fathom out what he’s rambling on about to notice that I am trapped at an event horizon, unable to go forwards or backwards. For a minute I wonder if he has cast a spell and turned me to stone.
‘May your love be as constant as the never-ending waves that wash up on the shores of human consciousness,’ he says loudly, turning to take a deep bow in front of the North Sea, before bending down to scoop up sand in a giant conch. ‘Each grain of sand represents a unique decision, event or feeling that helped shape Nick and Lisa. Let’s take time to feel our quantum consciousness manifest itself through fractional vibrations of these tiny particles.’
The way he mixes scientific terminology with his quantum bunkum is shameless. I’m riveted by his creepy manicured nails, carefully topiaried hair and beard. He resembles a human bonsai. The thought makes me smile for the first time today. Lisa grins back. I try to focus on her. My eyes move but my body remains stubbornly frozen, even though it’s a benignly warm spring day. She looks radiant in her long cream dress. Her hair is pulled off her face and twisted into a bun garlanded with wild flowers that blow in the breeze. And the spring air has brought colour to her cheeks and lips. My gut twists and the wind makes my eyes water but I can’t lift my hand to wipe them. Tears pour down my cheeks and I see Rowena and Hamish dab at their eyes with handkerchiefs.
Gregorio continues. I zone out. For once I’m grateful to him for his ability to spout utter nonsense. In fact, I hope he never stops. I have the urge to prostrate myself at his feet, cling on to his robes and ask for redemption. I want to confess to everything and submit to his authority. I want to believe in him like I used to believe in myself. I close my eyes so that I don’t have to witness Daisy or Max’s bitter indifference any more.
The irony that, after everything we have gone through, my children hate me for what I haven’t done, rather than what I have done, isn’t lost on me. Maybe it’s no less than I deserve. I simply can’t account for what Daisy told Max. I’m an expert on how emotion and stress influence the formation of memory. So I understand that sometimes people fictionalize memories to protect themselves from recalling experiences that threaten their beliefs about themselves, or exaggerate a miserable experience to make their fight back seem even more impressive. But the sweet, flirty connection between Lisa and me on the beach that day bears no resemblance to what Max outlined. It’s like Daisy eerily turned my sexual fantasy into her reality. My professional opinion is that she has filled in the narrative gaps with sleights of mind based on what she imagined happened afterwards. The failure of episodic memory to replicate experiences is an adaptive design to create order out of chaos. And Daisy’s teenage years were very chaotic.
I wonder how much of the past eight years of her life has been constructed through the prism of this inaccurate memory. It’s no coincidence that the OCD really took hold after the holiday in Norfolk. It must have undermined her shaky confidence after Ava dumped her and undoubtedly accounts for some of her hostility towards Lisa and me. I remember the mutilated underwear that I found in the garden shed and how she told Max she gave Ava the spiked water hoping she would die. No wonder she felt so protective towards Rosie.
A few hours ago I thought this injustice, this mangling of fact and fiction, was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Now I know better. Because since then I have learnt that what Daisy and Max don’t know is way worse than what they think they know. God, I’ve turned into Gregorio, talking in riddles! I’m not a religious man but for a moment I close my eyes and pray for oblivion. My misery is unremitting and all-consuming. As Gregorio might say, I am caught in a cosmic vacuum. I hear someone giggle weakly and realize it’s me.
I was sitting beside Lisa on the edge of the cane recliner in the conservatory when Daisy and Max arrived from the train station earlier today. I stood up awkwardly, partly because I was dressed in a suit and tie ready for the ceremony, but also because I hadn’t seen or spoken to Max since the other evening. I noticed his left knuckle was now expertly taped up, like a boxer’s. I didn’t ask any questions. I could feel the force field of his aggression repelling me. I’ve grown immune to Daisy’s barbs over the years but this was something new and therefore more unbearable.
Lisa got up excitedly to welcome them, compensating for my stiffness. The wedding has given her an injection of energy and she has spent the past few days organizing the house with Ava and obsessively doing paperwork. There are vases of lilies everywhere that spook me with their funereal whiteness and heady scent. She has also finally agreed to see the original oncologist before we leave for Mexico. I’m encouraged by this renewed zest for life and the way it suggests Gregorio might be losing sway. I was even quietly confident that if the appointment with the doctor goes well we might cancel the honeymoon in Mexico in favour of a mini-break in the chemotherapy unit in Norwich. For a few days it had felt like getting married was the best decision I had ever made.
I hugged Daisy as long as she would let me and did a round of hollow back-slapping with Max, feeling almost irritated that he could be so angry with me about something that hadn’t even happened. Still, I felt grateful to my children for coming at all, and tried not to be hurt that they hadn’t bought us a card let alone a present. Lisa immediately herded Daisy and Max deep into the kitchen to show them some old photos that she had dug out during her clean-up.
‘Look at the four of you in the bath together. So sweet, don’t you think?’
I didn’t hear their answer because I was suddenly aware of another person, stranded amidst the bags that Daisy and Max had dumped by the kitchen door. I had almost forgotten that Max had said he was bringing a girlfriend. In fact, with all his virtual dating, I wasn’t completely certain he was even in a real-life relationship. Frankly, I had been more curious to meet Daisy’s boyfriend; however, he had called off at the last minute. Although I had initially been grumpy about Lisa’s decision to widen the invitation to include outsiders, I now understood their vital role in diluting tension. So I went forward to welcome her with a dose of cheery bonhomie appropriate to the father of a new boyfriend.
I saw her a couple of seconds before she noticed me. Even before she looked up from her phone I knew it was Connie. There was something
about the tilt of her head and the curve of her neck. So I had the agony of panicking not just about my own response but also her reaction. At least I had the presence of mind to step forward so that my body obscured hers. She was wearing a short dress with long sleeves and the brooch that I had bought as a gift for Lisa but had impulsively given to her after she happened to mention that she was interested in Indian art. I still don’t understand why I did that, because her tastes were so inconsistent that it was like meeting a new person every time I saw her. Her likes and dislikes were fickle. Her thoughts untethered.
She had dyed her hair and cut it even shorter since my last abortive attempt to find her. She looked up from her phone and saw me. Her face didn’t flinch, apart from a tiny muscle that flickered just below her right eye. She betrayed nothing. I recognized myself in her ability to dissimulate.
‘You.’ That was all she said.
I stuck out my arm to shake hands, but really it was to prevent her coming any closer. My own mouth was fixed in a rictus grin, the corner of my upper lip curling nervously.
‘Let me show you your room,’ I offered. My voice quivered.
I could see Gregorio watching from his perch. But he was too busy imbibing Connie to notice my discombobulation.
I closed the door behind me and we walked up the wooden stairs in silence. I took it slowly – to allow us both to adjust to the gruesomeness of the situation. I tried not to look at the way her hips swung in front of me and her dress clung to her buttocks. I remembered that first time her finger drew a line down my forearm when I was buying papayas. It had felt like a religious experience, as if I had been brought back from the dead. We had gone out dancing and had drunk so much, the only way we could stay upright was to cling on to each other.
