What is it to live without these things? Without love and laughter and friendship and hope?
I don’t want to know.
I don’t want to live that life.
I’m making a choice—that sounds bold; it feels bold—to recapture those things, whatever it takes, to make this life something worth living.
I won’t live like this anymore.
Which means that things are going to have to change.
The Seventh Lie
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Emma died less than a week ago.
That’s not very long, is it?
I’m still in shock. I must be.
And yet, at the same time, I think that I’ve already reached that theoretical final stage of grief. I know that she has gone; I can accept that she has gone.
I had always known, I suppose, that she would never grow old. I never assumed that she would become one of those ghoulish women with crepe-paper skin lying on a hospital gurney. It just never felt likely. Perhaps because she was already, in so many ways, like those old women tucked down hospital corridors.
She spent so much time alone. I had never before seen her as weak as she’d been in those last few weeks. Her bones seemed so frail. Her back ached and her knuckles were swollen and arthritic. She struggled to climb the stairs to her flat. It was her hips, she said. She suffered from such a complex menagerie of ailments that most of her adult life was spent balancing precariously at the boundary between life and death.
And so I had known for a very long time that this was coming. I could see it there in the stars every night, shining the truth, a moment waiting to be decreed. It is not the worst way to lose a loved one.
Those deaths that appear unexpectedly—the bolts of light against a dark night sky—are far worse. You glance out the window and suddenly it’s there in front of you, brighter than any of the other stars and falling fast. There’s no time to prepare or to ground yourself before the earth shifts beneath your feet.
Those are the deaths that you cannot accept. They are the fiercest and they land the hardest, destroying other lives and other futures and trailing devastation. Because you feel it all at once, in just one moment, as a life glides through the cracks in the earth like liquid through clasped fingers.
I returned home immediately after discovering her. I cried, but only a little. And then I fell asleep.
I woke up early—too early—and I felt horribly imbalanced, as though all the pieces that had made up my life before that moment had shifted position overnight. I pulled on my jeans and a jumper and went out into the street to remind myself that the trees were not shaking and that their roots weren’t quivering underground and that the pavement wasn’t being slowly peeled away from the surface of the earth. I wanted to remind myself that this was not the worst, that I had already survived far worse.
I saw that the sky was black, lit only by the moon shining overhead and the sharp, warm glow of streetlamps. I marched through the city, into the small squares of suburb hidden within. Parked cars were lined up along the curb, their wheels snug against the lip of the sidewalk. I walked past the curry house with its neon sign sparking fiercely against the night, the supermarket, its door chained closed and a single fluorescent bulb flickering within. I passed two real estate agents, three hairdressers, and saw that the city was unchanged.
I returned to my flat and I saw flecks of dust floating in my bedroom and in the kitchen and I started to clean. Because life doesn’t recognize small, individual losses. The dust still gathers. I had a shower and put on my favorite pajamas and I sat on the sofa and I didn’t move except to use the bathroom and to refill my wineglass and to make a few slices of toast. I told myself to be patient, to persevere, that this, too, would pass.
* * *
The following evening, I dragged a dining chair into my bedroom and stood it against my open wardrobe and clambered up, looking for the old photograph albums created by my mother decades earlier, when we were still a family. I found them there: thick and dusty and bound in red leather.
I sat on my bed and leafed through the pages, trying to find photographs of Emma and me together. There were dozens. There was one of me in denim dungarees and pink sandals nestled into the corner of an armchair, holding her in my arms and across my thighs. She must have been only a few weeks old, because there were still tubes bent into her nose and curled across her cheeks.
One was taken against a brick wall, the two of us hand in hand in matching school uniforms. She was standing beside me, her head at my chest. There was a lovely one of us sitting in a field, sausage rolls and sandwiches and biscuits laid out between us on a tartan blanket, a Frisbee in her fist, and cows standing sturdy in the background. There was one of us in matching orange swimsuits at a waterpark with monstrous slides twisting behind us. Then, her little body was a miniature replica of mine: the same straight thighs, the same square shoulders. There were two festive photographs toward the back of the album. In the first we were sitting side by side in our pajamas, presents piled around us in colored paper, the tree glittering behind us, and these bright, excited grins on our faces. In the second we were in matching duffel coats and Wellington boots beside a snowman with a carrot for a nose and twigs for arms. And, at the very end of the last album, one of us in front of our final family home, on the day we moved in, standing between our parents.
I knew that I needed to tell my mother.
It was a Wednesday. I had never visited her on a Wednesday before, but I knew that I shouldn’t wait until Saturday. I went to the station and I boarded the train, and I saw my own face in the window and that my eyes were red and swollen and my skin puffy and gray. I rubbed at my cheeks to revive them. I tried not to cry on the journey in the hope that they might look a little better by the time I arrived.
I pressed the buzzer at the desk, and the receptionist approached me and sighed loudly when I said that I needed to speak to my mother and that it was an urgent matter.
“We weren’t expecting you today,” she said.
“As I said,” I repeated, “it’s urgent.”
“She might be in the dayroom—”
“She won’t be.”
“We have allocated visiting hours . . .”
She trailed off as I turned and walked down the corridor toward my mother’s room.
She didn’t seem surprised to see me. She smiled as I sat down at the end of her bed; she probably thought it was the weekend. She was wearing that blue cardigan again, the sleeves rolled up around her elbows, and it seemed as though she still had her pajamas on underneath.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
She nodded.
“It’s not good news,” I said.
She nodded again.
“Mum,” I said, “it’s really bad news—the worst.”
I hadn’t called her “Mum” in years. The word always felt unnatural in my mouth, as though it didn’t belong to the woman in front of me.
She tilted her head to the left. She nodded again, more vigorously this time, urging me to say it, to tell her, to stop this unnecessary stalling.
“It’s about Emma.”
She stared at me. I continued.
“I went to see her,” I said. “Like I said I would, to check that she was okay. She hadn’t been answering her phone. And when I turned up, she didn’t answer her door. I had to call the police eventually because no one would let me into the flat, and then they arrived. They opened the door.”
I wanted her to say something, but she sat silent, and so I continued to tell her what had happened, reeling through the moments that happened next, my thoughts, my fears, all the ways this might have ended differently. I knew that she was bewildered, but I couldn’t slow down. I told her that her daughter was dead in words I’d never used before, words that were waiting within me but that I’d hoped would stay there always.
“Mum,” I said, “she’s gone. They think it was her heart.”
I think that then she finally understood, because she gasped and her eyes took on this wild, startled stare. She opened and closed her mouth, and then she turned away from me.
I tried to hold her hand, but she snatched it away.
I tried to speak to her, but she began to hum very quietly, and I knew that she wasn’t listening.
She wouldn’t look at me again after that. I stepped toward her, bent my head to see into her eyes, but she gazed, unfocused, as though looking right through me.
I knew that this was it, that the fungus she’d been fighting for the last few years was going to sprawl unimpeded across her brain. Holding on to herself had been such a battle; it required so much effort, every single day. And it wasn’t going to be worth it anymore.
And so I left.
Chapter Forty
I have been my mother’s only family for so many years. I have been her husband, her elder daughter, and her younger daughter, too. And yes, I begrudged it sometimes. And yes, it was unfathomably boring going to see her every weekend. And yes, it was frustrating that no one else felt guilty enough to do it.
They were all so selfish. They didn’t give a shit. They did not give a shit.
I shouldn’t have given a shit, either. I shouldn’t have fucking bothered; it was a waste of my time and my patience and my life, spending it with her and thinking I was doing something good and being something better and sacrificing for her and then the fucking cheek of her being unable to be there for me.
Oh.
I’m sorry.
Did I frighten you?
Please don’t cry.
I discovered my sister dead at the beginning of the week. And my mother retreated into her dementia two days ago. So if anyone should be crying right now, I really think it should be me.
She couldn’t exist without her younger daughter. She couldn’t exist for me.
It has been a very bad week.
* * *
This morning I received a message from Marnie. She said that she was very sorry but that she needed to cancel our dinner this evening, which seems to be the norm nowadays. Her excuse—and there’s always a good one, something that’s hard to challenge—is that Audrey has been unwell and was awake all of last night with a temperature over one hundred degrees.
I replied saying not to worry at all about me and sent love and get-well wishes.
But I didn’t feel sympathetic. I simply felt sad. Because we weren’t children with paper cups and a ball of string stretched between our bedroom windows anymore. We were so far apart, so disconnected, so far removed from each other’s lives.
Valerie had talked about a wrecking ball, as though there was something somewhere that would be the death of this friendship. I wanted to make our walls strong, sturdy, so safe that nothing—even something substantial—could shatter those bricks. I needed to reinforce our friendship, to underpin it and make it something that could withstand the force of the truth.
I was going to weave Valerie’s various findings into our conversations in a very nonchalant way, mentioning some noisy neighbors, that the walls and floors of her building were desperately thin, that sounds seemed to proliferate between the apartments. I planned to refer very casually to my week in the flat—to refer to my stay in some way: the creaking of the pipes at night or the ticking of the clock in her bedroom—and to be shocked by her inevitable surprise.
“Charles never told you?” I’d say. “It was his suggestion.”
I would tell her about the encounter on the train. I would reveal—and this bit at least would be true—that I had been followed, stalked even, by that menacing journalist and ask if she thought I ought to call the police. Valerie. I would say her name and I wouldn’t be afraid. Because this time her story would belong to me. And I’d be building her into something else, into someone unreliable, into a liar.
But I needed to spend time with Marnie in order to do these things.
While I was disappointed that she had canceled, I felt sure that she’d have time for me once she knew about my sister, about my mother. Because while death is the ultimate divider, it also unifies. You never know how loved you are until you’re at the epicenter of a grief so tall and wide that you cannot see beyond its edges. Because then, very quickly, faces begin to appear at the tops of those walls, passing down cards and letters and flowers and food. And those people are your people and they find a way to pull you out.
Marnie found a way to pull me out the first time.
I knew that she could save me again.
A friendship like that matters. You don’t give up on a love like that.
* * *
Valerie, too, seemed entirely unable to give up on a love like ours.
I discovered her waiting in the lobby of my building earlier today. I’d been to the supermarket and I didn’t notice her at first, but she called out to me after I’d collected my mail. She was perched on an old office chair that was awaiting collection, spinning in circles and leaving grubby footprints on the freshly painted walls. She had a new tattoo—a small illustration of a flower—beneath her left earlobe. Her jeans were loose, ripped at the knees, and she was wearing a tight black jumper.
She stopped spinning and smiled. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged on the seat. “I wanted to talk to you,” she said, “about last week.”
“This isn’t a good time,” I replied, standing by the doors to the elevator, my mail gripped in front of my chest. I wasn’t surprised to see her. I should have been, really, in a space that felt so completely my own, but something had shifted between us. I knew her a little better now—her doggedness—and so she couldn’t shock me in quite the same way.
“It’s important,” she said. “You upset me.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It felt lovely, a burst of relief, although the grief and the guilt quickly followed. “I upset you?” I said. “Really?”
“On the train,” she replied. “When you said all that about me being jealous.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
“No, I am,” she replied. “But that isn’t the point.”
There was something childlike in her sincerity, in her presence there, in the simplicity of what she was saying. In the preceding weeks, I’d tracked her through the internet, following her from her school days—she’d written a piece on pond life at sixteen that featured on the school’s website—and to university, where she’d edited the campus newspaper. I found her early social media platforms: her top friends and her interests and the list of people she’d like to meet. I traced her change in hobbies and homes and habits. She had taken up outdoor swimming in her twenty-ninth year. She went at least once a week. She had moved to Elephant and Castle at thirty after her marriage had ended. She’d had a new tattoo inked on her skin every birthday since; the one at the back of her neck had been her first.
But what was perhaps most striking—it’s something that didn’t register until that moment—was that every single one of her top-ranked friends, recorded as such at seventeen, had been absent ever since. They didn’t feature on Instagram. They weren’t following her on Twitter.
“Just answer me this and then I’ll let myself out,” she continued. “How are you still such good friends?”
I didn’t reply.
“Come on,” she said. “This is it. The last question I’ll ask you. Because it doesn’t make sense to me. To have a best friend. At our age. It’s a bit infantile, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s quite special,” I said.
“That isn’t what I think,” she began. “Because it isn’t real, it—”
“Don’t you have any old friends?” I asked. “Who are so much a part of you that you can’t remember your life without them in it?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“That sounds very lonely,” I replied.
She shrugged and uncrossed her legs, dropping her feet back onto the floor.
“I think,” she tried to continue, “that—”
“Not even one?” I asked.
“I want to talk about you,” she said. “I’m interested in you.”
“But I’m not interested in you,” I replied, holding my mail out in front of me, trying to seem indifferent. There was a letter from the bank, another from my university. There was a scrawled note from a resident who lived on the ground floor of the building insisting that we all take more care to close the front door properly.
I looked back at her and she was grinning. “And yet you’re asking me plenty of questions,” she said. “I know you, Jane. You wish that I didn’t.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I said, but I could feel the balance of the conversation slipping, she taking control, pulling at my strings.
She shrugged. “You’re lonely. Has she canceled your plans for this evening? I wonder if she knows how upset it makes you. I don’t expect she does. She doesn’t know you like I do, you see. And—”
“I need to go,” I said. I turned toward the elevator and I pressed the button.
She laughed. “If you say so. But if I know you—and I think that I do—then there’s nowhere that you need to be.”
“Are you done?” I asked, as one of the elevators creaked down through the shaft, inching toward us.
“Not yet,” she said. “I came here to tell you something else. Don’t you want to know what it is?”
Seven Lies Page 27
