The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘Of course,’ I soothed. ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘Don’t say it wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and now I lifted my hand, and stroked the back of his neck with my cold fingers. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  The touch seemed to release something in him. He turned to me, and I pulled him in.

  Waves of some unnamed emotion rolled over me, over and over till my heart felt it would burst. Pain, for his pain, palpably there under my hands. But in the middle of it all, a sharp bright shard of joy. This was him. He’d let me in.

  40

  Janey

  ‘Poor guy,’ said Hattie when I told her. She closed her eyes as though she was picturing it, as I had been all week since he told me, the thin Spider-Man limbs, the sound of a tumble and then the thud of impact.

  We were sitting in the kitchen, with an empty pizza box on the table between us. Pip, mischievous in his pyjamas after an uproarious bath presided over by Hattie, had even tried a slice. It was still there on the edge of my plate, with a tiny, teethmarked half-moon taken out of it.

  ‘I’m glad he didn’t actually see the fall,’ she said. ‘Or maybe that makes it worse. Just to see that little shape, lying at the bottom. God, I don’t know.’

  ‘A bit like the falling woman,’ I said carefully.

  She blinked as though I’d caught her out, reached for the wine bottle and filled up first my glass, then hers.

  ‘What was it all about? It wasn’t just nothing. I know that now, after reading your letters and everything. Tell me, Hats.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just that house. It messes with your mind, that’s all. As soon as this “retrospective” party thing is out the way I’m outta there, I tell you.’

  She laughed and rolled her eyes. I said nothing.

  ‘Did I tell you we had to cancel the Usher Hall? They couldn’t sell enough tickets. So now it’s just a drinks do at the house. I’ve managed to organise a couple of musicians, so they can come and perform some of his songs in the drawing room. Mum’ll be livid, but it’ll have to do.’

  I reached my hand over the table and touched my pinkie to hers, as I’d used to do in lessons when I needed to get her attention. ‘Tell me, Hattie.’

  I could hear her swallow. The tick of the clock as the moments passed.

  And then: ‘I’ve got this thing. It’s pretty weird.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. But you know our old saying.’

  ‘Quelle dommage?’

  I tutted. ‘It’s just like telling myself.’

  ‘Inklings,’ she said loudly, with a shrug. ‘That’s what I used to call them. I’ve never said it out loud before.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I used to see things that nobody else could. It started while I was still at St Katherine’s with you. That last term. When I got to Ramplings, they got worse. Clearer, I mean. Sometimes, the inklings were of things that were going to happen.’ She shuddered.

  ‘And you didn’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Mum knew I’d been getting these visions, or hallucinations.’

  ‘The falling lady.’

  ‘She was really freaked out. She thought you and I were egging each other on, with thinking the house was haunted and so on. She panicked. A full-blown Renee Marlowe panic. Nothing by half measures. So she decided to pack me off to Ramplings, as if that would ever have made any difference.’

  ‘Really? You think she moved your whole family because of that?’

  Hattie’s eyes dropped down. ‘Not the whole family, remember. Dad had already gone. James was at Ramplings already.’ She began playing with her fingers, squeezing the knuckle of each left finger with the thumb and forefinger of her right.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Are the inklings multisensory?’

  She looked up and smiled. ‘Multisensory. Absolutely. We should note it down in the Shapiro book.’

  ‘More wine.’ I stood up quickly, scraping the chair against the tiles. I pulled the bottle out of the fridge and glugged some into her glass.

  ‘So what happened? They stopped, these inklings, after you started taking the tablets from Noel Edmonds?’

  ‘Yeah. And started straightening my hair and everything. They did stop. Mostly.’

  ‘Do you think it helped, you getting away from me?’

  She traced a careful finger around the rim of her glass. ‘You made me feel more myself than anyone else. More switched on. So yes. I think I was more prone to inklings when you were around.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You know when you came back? That first day at my flat? I knew it. I knew it then, that the inklings would start again. You see, at Ramplings I learned that—’ She broke off, tears wobbling on her lower lashes. ‘I couldn’t get too close to anybody. Because any strong feelings seem to set it off. Oh, the likes of Thomasina and that crew didn’t have much effect. Even Ernie, bless him. It’s ironic that I’ve ended up in a career that’s all about appearances, and trying to stop the processes that are going on underneath. I started off loving it, the way I could help clients to feel better about themselves. But more and more I envy them, because none of them have as much to hide as I do. I want to scream at them to forget about their wrinkles and their saggy skin, and go home to the people they love. Because that’s what I don’t have. For me, the barriers always go up before I get too close. Because what if I see something? What if I see something about them?’

  ‘Like you saw about me? The pool of blood and everything? Was that an inkling?’

  She nodded, leaning down to pull a tissue out of her bag. She blew her nose loudly.

  ‘That’s how I knew about the baby. That you’d lost it. All that pain, echoing round the hallway when you were trying to tell me about James.’ She closed her eyes and let the statement just sit there for a second. ‘How were you, after it happened?’

  It was a question nobody had ever asked.

  ‘We were talking about you, Hats.’

  ‘But tell me, how were you?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I paused for a moment, taking myself back to that time of my life that somehow felt like a dream, even now. ‘There was an awful fuss for a while, of course. The police were involved, asking who’d got me pregnant, what Miss Fortune had done that day, what I’d done with the . . . remains, after . . . you know. There was a social worker with terrible bad breath called Barbara, even a psychiatrist, because I wouldn’t tell them anything, I wouldn’t even open my mouth. Until one day when I got tired of it all. I wrote a statement saying I’d been attacked by a man in the woods on Corstorphine Hill, that Miss Fortune had given me my piano lesson as usual, and that I’d thrown the baby’s body in the river. Things quietened down after that. Though everything changed. For the better, in some ways. The boarding thing worked out quite well. I went back to Granny’s for the holidays, to begin with, but by sixth form I was pretty much boarding over the holidays too.’

  ‘Oh, Janey.’

  ‘No, no, it was good. I liked it.’

  I told Hattie how I’d enjoyed the feeling of company around me, without having to participate too much. I’d shared a sunny, L-shaped dormitory with a set of twins from Skye and a shy, studious Chinese girl. And I drifted towards ‘the music crowd’, a group of girls whose lives revolved around choir and orchestra. Unlike most of the St Katherine’s girls, they didn’t have boyfriends, or romantic crises, or heart-to-hearts requiring them to spend all night on the phone. Oblivious to their uncool A-line silhouettes, they didn’t even bother to roll their school skirts up around their waists to make them shorter. They clattered back to the Victoria House every afternoon, rosy-faced with their violins, tubas and hockey sticks, and gathered to drink cocoa in matron’s kitchen every night like a crowd of extras from Malory Towers. I sometimes slipped in to join them, perching at the end of the stout wooden bench with a glass of water (I never liked cocoa). Eventually, one of them would cut in with a line from the latest Chamber Choir piece and the others
would put their mugs down and fill in the other parts, chins dipping earnestly with the beat.

  What nobody knew was that I’d kept the baby alive, after she’d gone, gave her a little place of her own in my mind. In some older, sweeter, safer world, my belly kept growing, as though that horror of blood and pain had never happened. I let myself drift there at night, in the long grey nothing-hours after lights out, the only girl in the dorm who couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to sleep. Because that was my time. Her time.

  I remember waking up one Sunday morning in February and looking out the window, rubbing at the creep of condensation with the back of my hand. The trees outside were still stark and bare, but a few snowdrops were starting to peep through on the grassy bank by the playing fields, and I realised that it was nearly spring, and she would’ve been born by now. I skived off church, saying I had a stomach ache, so that I could go back to bed and think about her, with her dark hair and tiny hands, and the curious, grey-blue eyes I’d imagined for her. All the next week I doodled during lessons, drawing baby clothes, a white cot with a heart carved into the side. The cellular blanket with a satin edge that she liked to sleep under.

  A few weeks later I found a book in the Oxfam shop called The First Year: Day by Day with Your Baby. I learned when she’d begin to eat solid food, sit up, grasp at objects. I even filled in the blank pages at the back, writing down each small milestone as it should have happened.

  She grew, she reached age one, took her first steps on cue.

  And then, when she reached two and a half, it stopped.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon and we were gathered in the gym hall, waiting to greet our French pen friends. I was looking forward to meeting mine, Celine. She’d seemed friendly in her letters: interested in music, and ponies and gymnastics, oppressed in a comical sort of way by her big brother. They lived with their mother in a big house near Paris.

  Even as she walked over, I knew I’d got it wrong. It wasn’t the nose stud, or the snake tattoo just visible where her top slid off her right shoulder. It was something to do with the slow blink when we stood face to face, the twist of the mouth.

  I gasped then – I actually gasped – at the power of my own imagination. The Celine I’d written to disintegrated, as insubstantial as dust. I’d read into her letters what I’d wanted to hear, searched for the voice of the friend I’d been longing for.

  Moments slid past. The September sunshine slanted through the high gym windows, warming the wooden floor, releasing a sweet gummy scent that reminded me of circuits, and Hattie, and one long summer afternoon when we’d been allowed to lounge on the crash mats watching Wimbledon instead of doing games. Madame Malo clapped her hands and started giving instructions. The three o’clock bell went. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed.

  Because none of it was real. My baby hadn’t grown into an adorable but mischievous toddler. She didn’t like puréed apple, or Winnie the Pooh. She didn’t have a mop of unruly curls that frizzed up at the back when she’d been sleeping, or eyes like the sea in winter. She was dead. Worse than dead. Had never lived.

  Occasionally, in the months that followed, she’d pop into my mind, with a pouty face, her bottom lip sticking out, banging her feet because I wouldn’t let her grow any more. And sometimes I’d hear a child shouting and laughing at the swing park, or having a tantrum at the shops, and my heart would contract, because it was her. And then it wasn’t.

  I got good at stopping such thoughts in their tracks, pushing them back inside that little room and locking the door.

  But years later, when Pip was born and placed in my arms, she was there all around me. I saw her in his tiny fingers, furled around mine, before I shoved the thought away. And once, when he’d woken in the early hours for a feed, just a few months old, I’d gone to him, in that half space between sleeping and waking, and thought it was her pink round cheek against mine; her skin, velvet like rose petals.

  ‘So that’s it really,’ I said to Hattie now. ‘That’s how it was.’

  The room fell silent. I could hear the buzz of the fridge, and the tread of footsteps where somebody was walking about in the flat above.

  ‘Sometimes . . .’ I began, and then stopped, swallowing hard. ‘Sometimes it still happens, even now. I just get this sense of her. Or I think I see her. It could be some random toddler at the play park or the coffee shop that sets me off, or one of those “miracle baby” articles about premature babies with their little woolly hats and all those tubes.’

  ‘It’s grief, I suppose,’ said Hattie. ‘When you lose someone, they’re never really gone. Not in your mind.’

  ‘What do you think happens to babies who never have a chance to live?’

  She sighed, and fiddled with the bracelet around her wrist. ‘What happens to any of us?’

  ‘But, not to have any life at all.’

  She wriggled on her seat. ‘I saw something on TV once, with women who’d had miscarriages. It was on This Morning or something. One of the women said her baby’s soul had gone back to the universe. To the earth and the trees and the sea and the stars. And, you know, that he would wait quietly to be born again, when it was the right time and place.’

  ‘But not to her.’

  ‘Maybe to her. Maybe not. I don’t know. Or maybe’ – her voice softened into a childlike tone – ‘well, maybe his soul would go to heaven.’

  I sighed. ‘All alone. Have you seen how newborn babies get without their mothers?’

  ‘Oh Janey, I don’t know.’ She clunked her glass down onto the table. ‘I’m not exactly an authority on spiritual matters. Maybe other people would look after her. Dead family members. Maybe your grandpa.’ She said it emphatically, as though to say, ‘That’s it, there’s your answer’.

  ‘Grandpa? He wouldn’t have a clue! He’d try and teach her about photosynthesis or something, and forget to sterilise the bottles.’

  ‘In heaven, the bottles probably come pre-sterilised.’

  My heart tugged at the thought of a baby who would never need milk, in a sterilised bottle or otherwise.

  But Hattie, my oldest friend Hattie, was here. She was warm, and impatient, and smiling, and here.

  ‘You know what we need to do?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I leaned to rest an elbow on the table, missed, and sloshed wine onto my lap. ‘Oh bugger. What?’

  ‘I know you think this is all somehow connected, my inklings, and the stuff that’s been going on with you. The stuff in the flat. But inklings, ghosts, whatever they are, don’t buy jars of jam. This is someone trying to screw with your head. We need to do a Shapiro job on this flat. We have to escalate the investigation.’

  ‘We’ll definitely need more wine then.’

  *

  I’d been expecting to have a lie-in, but the doorbell rang at the crack of dawn. I pulled a dressing gown on and winced as I tugged a brush through my wild hair.

  The light, as I opened the front door, sent a buzz of pain through my head.

  ‘Gretel? Why are you here?’

  She looked past me into the flat, an urgent look on her face. My legs felt weak suddenly.

  ‘Is Pip all right?’ Half a dozen scenarios had already run through my head: Pip lying crumpled in a heap at the bottom of a set of steps, Pip linked up to an array of bleeping machines in the Sick Kids Hospital.

  ‘Where are his salopettes?’ she demanded.

  My brain went into ‘do not compute’ mode, struggling to think of a near-death scenario that would be alleviated by the prompt fetching of salopettes.

  ‘W-what?’

  ‘I told Murray to tell you to pack his salopettes. We’re taking him skiing.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have any.’

  She frowned, but in an amused way as though I’d said something funny.

  ‘Surely he must? Gulliver has two pairs, and that’s just for nursery.’

  He bloody well would, wouldn’t he, at his stupid forest nursery.

  ‘Yes, but mayb
e that’s because . . .’

  She walked past me into the hall with an ‘I’ll sort this out’ look, bashing me slightly with the corner of her enormous handbag. Maybe she thought that her presence in the flat would make salopettes materialise.

  ‘He’s also been going on about his “milky-bottle”. To begin with I thought it was some glitch with his language, and that he meant a sports bottle or something. But no, Murray tells me he still drinks milk like a little baby.’

  ‘Oh God, did I forget to pack his milky bottle? Oh no, you should’ve phoned. I would’ve brought it over.’

  ‘Nicky Aitchison-Palmer’s goddaughter had the same issue, she was also dependent on a baby’s bottle until the age of three. Her teeth started to rot away at the front. The dentist suggested a fluoride supplement, or at the very least toothpaste with 1,400 parts per million of fluoride, which is what you find in adult toothpastes but not those ridiculous children’s toothpastes which nobody should ever use. They can contain as little as 500 parts per million in some cases. But when the dentist found out about the milk addiction he just laughed, and tore off his mask, you know, the masks they wear, and said they shouldn’t be faffing around with extra fluoride when the problem was quite clear and they should stop the milk immediately. When did Pip last see the dentist?’

  She started marching towards the kitchen.

  ‘No! Don’t go in there . . .’

  I wasn’t thinking of the three empty bottles of wine, one lying on its side on the table, or the smashed glass in the sink. It wasn’t even the post-it notes I was worried about: we’d drawn skulls in black marker pen on each of them and stuck them carefully on the ‘hot spots’, including the fridge door, the shelf where I’d found the strange jam, the table where my left hand had written nonsensical messages. The newspaper Hattie had ‘prepared’ was also fairly innocuous – she’d solemnly cut eye-holes in it, ‘Just in case you need to spy on anyone unnoticed.’

  No, it was Pip’s Early Learning Centre easel I didn’t want Gretel to see. It stood in the middle of the room, with an incident-room-style diagram drawn by Hattie in pen.