by S. E. Lynes
I’m sorry.
Thirteen
It started in his room, not mine. I didn’t mean to go in, and he wasn’t even in there at first. I only went in because I couldn’t find my pencil case and I thought he might have borrowed it, because sometimes he stomps around the house shouting, ‘Has anyone got a pen?’ But my pencil case wasn’t in there. I looked under the bed in case it had fallen on the floor and been kicked or something. But it wasn’t there either. And that’s when I found the magazines.
I only looked at one. It was disgusting. I thought it was disgusting. I was only a child. I couldn’t understand why he would want to look at these things. I wanted to close it up and put it back, but I couldn’t stop turning the pages, shocking myself with each new photograph.
I didn’t hear him come in. I only saw the light dim, but it wasn’t the light, it was him, standing in front of the window, standing over me.
‘Like those, do you?’ he said.
‘I… I was looking for my pencil case.’
‘Well you’re not going to find it in there, are you?’ He sat down next to me on the floor.
I was burning. I couldn’t move.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to…’
‘Don’t want to what? Come on, it’s only pictures.’ He took the magazine from me and turned the page slowly. ‘What about that one? Do you like that one?’
I shook my head. ‘I have to go.’
‘No you don’t. Dinner’s not for ages yet.’ He turned another page. ‘What about this one? She’s pretty, isn’t she? She has nice breasts.’
I got up. ‘I have to go.’
I ran out of the room.
But that was the start of it. Thinking about it, that was the start.
Fourteen
Toni
I’m going to hold your hand. There. I hold it to my cheek, and at its warmth, at the thought of it ever being cold, the tears come. I rub a little lip salve on your pale mouth. Your shoulders look so small under the white cover. Saline drip drip drips into your arm. My God, the tissues here are like tracing paper. Tell you what – if you got the corner of one in your eye, you’d blind yourself.
Will you be the same when you wake up? Will you still be shy, yes, outside the house, but inside it so funny, so clever? You were always clever, Rosie. At two you could dress yourself. You could make me a cup of tea by the age of five – five! – when other kids were barely able to hold a piece of toast, blow their nose, write their own name. When you ate ice cream, you hardly got any around your mouth. I’ve known adults eat more messily than you. Packets of baby wipes lasted months, nappies no longer necessary by the time you were thirteen months old. And when that day, no more than six years old, you came downstairs wearing my gold top as a dress, when you went into the shed and brought out the hard plastic picnic-tabletop and laid it on the living-room carpet and stood on it and announced you were going to be an actress, I knew in my bones that you could do it.
I know, I know. I know what you would say now if you could speak.
‘All mothers think their children are talented,’ you would say. You’d probably throw in an eye roll for good measure. ‘All mothers think their children are special. Oh, Mum, you’re so embarrassing.’
* * *
The nurse came a moment ago, to check on you.
‘Can I get you some more tea?’
‘No thanks.’
I can’t drink any more. I don’t want to go to the loo until Bridge or Emily gets here. I don’t want to leave you. If Richard were here— You remember Richard? From records? I’d text him and ask him to pop up to Jupiter Ward while I take a break. But he won’t be in until tomorrow. I hope Bridge remembers my phone charger. I texted Emily, did I say that? She texted back to say she’s on her way. Emily or Bridget – I’ll calm down at the sight of one or the other of them. But I won’t get this knot out of my stomach until you open your blue eyes and talk to me. And then… and then we’ll have to find a way to go forward.
Anyway, where was I? Your acting, that’s right. It was Auntie Bridget who suggested that we get you into a theatre group.
‘It’ll be great for her confidence,’ she said. This will have been one Sunday, her and Helen over for lunch when we lived in the house on the river. You will have done one of your tabletop plays, your Bratz and Barbie dolls your co-stars. ‘She’ll love it,’ Auntie Bridge said. ‘She’ll make friends outside school – it’ll widen her horizons.’
I never minded Auntie Bridge giving me advice when it came to you – still don’t – and to be honest, I agreed, not because of talent or anything like that, but because it hit me in that moment with particular force that the little plays you used to make up were always about sisters. And you would never have one. Your daddy and I tried. But it wasn’t to be, even before. Before. Afterwards. We both know what we mean when we say those words on their own. It’s our shorthand, the door to the abyss, a way of acknowledging the door without having to go through it. Before. Afterwards.
Before, when my biggest worry was the fact that you were an only child, I thought that a social group that had nothing to do with winning or achieving and everything to do with camaraderie would do you good.
‘If you really think so,’ I said to Bridget, ‘I’ll look into it.’
* * *
Someone is being sick in another ward. It started a few minutes ago and I can still hear them retching. I almost went to help – old habits and all that – but then a porter scurried past the entrance to the ward with a bucket and a mop. It could be worse. There’s an old lady in one of the wards moaning constantly. You can hear it all the way down the corridor. It’s hard to tell if she’s in pain or delirious or horribly aware. It strikes me that being oblivious would be better. Oblivious, that’s what I’d like to be, at the end.
Not very cheery, am I? I’m worried I’ll fall asleep and miss you waking up. If you wake and I have fallen asleep, for God’s sake say something. Make a noise. Fart, even. Go for it! I guarantee you won’t hear a word of complaint from me.
You never joined a drama group, not when you were six, because soon after, everything changed. Soon after was afterwards. Just as well you can’t hear this bit actually, but who knows, it might do me good to talk about it, even to myself. I haven’t been there for a very long time. After all the therapy, and to put it in therapy speak, I put it in a box and closed the lid. There was no other way to move on.
But now I need to go there. Because I need to get to the place where I can tell you I’m sorry and ask for your forgiveness, and to get there I need to travel through this – our life, the story of me and you. And Bridget, of course; your beloved auntie Bridge.
I know the accident wasn’t long after Bridget said about the theatre group, because I’d already booked you in for drama club after school, starting in the September. You were going to be seven in August. You were the youngest in your school year. It was the summer – July. We were going camping to our favourite place: the Isle of Purbeck. Your dad and I couldn’t wait to get there, throw the tent up, then walk over the fields to the Square and Compass, our usual pub, and sit in the garden and look out over those sheep-dotted fields, the stone walls sloping down, defining the green, the old-fashioned telegraph poles, the mottled cottage roofs, and the sea, the sea! Oh, Rosie, if I close my eyes… that sky, so wide, a liquid blue you could drink and feel it sustain you.
‘What’s that thing supposed to be?’ I remember saying to your dad one of those times, gesturing towards the weather-wrecked wooden sculpture in the middle of the pub garden. You were clambering all over it while chickens clucked about on the scrappy grass.
I remember him looking at me, amused, quizzical. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘No. Why, do you know what it is? Looks like a star or something.’
‘It’s a square and a compass, you bloody eejit.’
‘Oh God, as in the Square and Compass pub? Duh.’
We got the giggles so badly I had to run to the loo.
But I remember that sense of peace, Rosie, which tells me I once felt it. I remember your dad sitting on the bench, his raincoat collar sticking up around his neck, his hair thickened by the salt air, his face freckled by the sun. I can see him so clearly, more clearly than I have for a long while. Your daddy – your lovely, kind, funny dad.
It is scant comfort to know that it wasn’t his fault, nor that the bloody imbecile checking his phone while driving was also killed in the collision, crushed by the wheel of his stupid pimped-up Escort. When I try to remember it, I find it vaguer each time, as if I’m losing the before, losing you as you were then, losing your daddy. Stanley Flint. My Stan. I see him turn to me. I know he’s smiling, but his face is fading. I feel his hand on my leg, a squeeze.
‘All right, Bun?’ Him looking at me, his hand on my leg. That’s all I remember.
Bun. Bunny. He called me that after Rabbit in Winnie-the-Pooh – the overthinker, the worrier to the point of confusion. I called him Stan, or my love, or darling, or honey. If you could hear me, you’d be kicking your feet in horror or grimacing or something. You can’t stand soppy talk, let alone the thought of my romantic life, even if it’s long passed into history, left in the before like an artefact. What is it you would say? Urgh, Mum, gross. Barfs into sleeve.
Your dad said things like:
‘Hey, Bun, why don’t we go to the Witterings at the weekend?’
He’d say:
‘Hey, let’s get chips and eat them on the beach.’
And:
‘Bunny. Wake up. Look at the sky.’
His lips on my pregnant belly, kissing me, kissing you, through my skin.
I was never a great looker, never anything special. But your dad made me beautiful. Your dad made life beautiful.
‘All right, Bun?’ Him looking at me, his hand on my leg, a squeeze.
Then nothing.
I woke up in the place I work. But this time I was strapped to a bed.
* * *
I met your dad here. Well, not in this ward, in A&E. You know that. He’d broken his left femur playing football.
‘Truth be told,’ he said a little later, grinning while I cleaned the blood off the cut on his forehead, ‘I tripped over a sports bag on the way, so I did. Never made it to the pitch.’
I was still a nurse then. He asked me to write my number on his plaster cast. Which I did. Can’t imagine doing anything so reckless now. But I did then. He was the first man who, when I told him I’d always wanted to be a nurse, didn’t say: So why not a doctor?
I have often wondered why it was your dad, particularly, who finally settled me. There were so many men before him. Too many. But it was as if we knew each other instantly. That’s the only way I can describe it. Like we knew everything important and fundamental about each other in those first moments. The rest, the stuff that came later, as we peeled off one another’s layers, was, if not irrelevant, then peripheral. Detail. Decoration. Nice enough, but not relevant or necessary.
Me and your dad were so different. Me a fusspot; him so laid-back – chill, as you would say. Me with dark hair, brown eyes, skin that tans; him with freckles, blue eyes, skin that blistered after five minutes in the sun. So maybe there was an element of opposites attracting. But do you know what I loved most about him? It was that he never needed me to be anything other than exactly who and what I was. I never felt that I had to explain myself to him, and maybe because of that I wanted to explain everything.
I told him about the missed school years, the social workers. I told him all the things I swore I’d never tell you: the alcohol-soaked chaos and drug-fuelled promiscuity, the police warnings and petty crime. I told him about my uncle Eric.
And he took it, my love. He carried it as if it were no more than a bag of apples.
‘Of course you did,’ he’d say, or, ‘Stands to reason,’ or, ‘You were just a kid,’ or, ‘Well, yes, you were in pain, weren’t you?’
I would never tell you this if you were awake. Or maybe I would now. Maybe this is the next afterwards. The post-after. The beyond. What good can come of what’s happened if not that we, you and I, get to know each other? As people this time. I have not let you know me, I think. You needed a mum, and I was the best mum I could be.
But perhaps I forgot to be a person.
Fifteen
Bridget
Bridget remembers the call. How could she forget it? Toni hadn’t rung from Dorset to say she’d got there safely like she always did – one of their silly habits from the old days, one that had stuck. So Bridget was calling her, getting no reply, and then finally Toni called back. But it wasn’t Toni, it was a doctor calling from Toni’s phone: she was at West Middlesex A&E, was this Antonia Flint’s next of kin?
‘I’m her sister,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m Bridget, Bridget Casement.’
It was only later that she realised she should have said, ‘No, that’s Stan. Stan Flint’s her next of kin.’
Later still that she was hit with the knowledge that what the doctor had said was, after all, the truth.
‘OK, Bridget, I need you to listen. Your sister’s been involved in a serious accident. I need you to come in as fast as you can.’
‘Is she… is she alive?’
‘She is. But she’s been seriously injured. If you could come as soon as you can.’
Too much to think about, even now. They’d only made it as far as the M3, less than twenty miles away. Rosie had not one bruise, not one scratch, had stayed safe in the back seat of Toni and Stan’s rusty old VW Golf.
Memories come in flashes. Sometimes Bridget can’t place them accurately in time. Toni saving up painkillers in a jar is one. Toni asking Bridget to smother her with a pillow.
‘Please, Bridge.’
‘I can’t. You can’t ask me to do that.’
Those dark nights in the house on the river, before they moved to the flat. Bridget would go to her in the dark. She would stroke her hair.
‘Go to sleep, Tones.’
‘I want to die.’
‘I get that. But Rosie needs you, and the sun will come up, and by then it’ll be tomorrow.’
‘You won’t leave, will you?’
‘Of course I won’t leave. Go to sleep.’
Little Rosie slept at the foot of Toni’s bed on her camping lilo. Bridget wonders how she never woke up, especially when the nightmares came. God knows, Bridget could hear Toni shouting from the next room. But Rosie refused to sleep anywhere else.
‘I want to sleep with Mummy.’
Bridget wasn’t about to argue with that. The poor kid had lost her dad. This was in the days and weeks after Toni came back from hospital, when they were gathering up the pieces, seeing what they had.
Bridget took Rosie’s room until they moved into the flat. Bridget took her to school, picked her up, took her to Café Bellissimo for hot chocolate, to Helen’s sometimes. In the early months, Rosie would come in and lie on Toni’s bed, do her homework at her dressing table while Bridget made the dinner.
‘I don’t want Daddy put in the ground.’
How long afterwards did Rosie say this? Actually, it was further back. Tones was still in hospital.
‘It’s too cold in the ground,’ Rosie said. ‘Daddy hates the cold.’
Her little face at Toni’s bedside. A small girl playing guardian angel to her own mother. Sitting on a hospital chair, her scuffed shoes dangling on the ends of her little legs. She still had her uniform on and she smelled like kids smell after a day at school: of dust and dirt and the detergent they use to polish the floors.
‘All right,’ Toni said, glancing at Bridget, her smile so full of doubt, Bridget had to look away.
‘It’s dirty as well.’ Rosie spoke with the gravity of a lawyer, counted the points on her fingers. ‘And it’s got worms.’
But my God, the denial was worse.
‘Auntie Bridge? When’s Daddy coming home?’
Bridget stopping, squatting down on the pavement on the way home from school, meeting Rosie’s blue eyes. ‘Remember, Squirt. Daddy’s gone up to heaven, hasn’t he?’ And her, Bridget, an atheist, but you do what you can.
‘But you said he’s in the hospital.’
‘He is, poppet. But he’s in the morgue, isn’t he, yeah? And that’s just his body, isn’t it? His soul is in heaven, which means he can see you but he can’t come back in his body, and if you need to talk to him you have to pray.’
She nods, so solemn there on the pavement as life ploughs forward around them, people so oblivious that some days Bridget wants to shout: What are you all doing? How can you carry on when this has happened? Have you no shame?
Rosie’s face, the penny seeming to drop. But then: ‘So when will Daddy come home?’
Bridget standing up, holding out her hand. ‘Shall we go to the café? How about a hot chocolate?’
Rosie’s tiny hand, a hand you could crush just by holding it too tight. Yes, Daddy’s coming home next week, Bridget wanted to tell her. But she couldn’t, could she? And then one day in the hospital, like that, Rosie said about the ground being cold. It was maybe a week, maybe two, after.
‘Remember I said about making special ashes,’ Bridget said gently. ‘So that we can keep him at home with us?’
Rosie nodded. ‘Are we going to do that then?’
‘I think so.’ Bridget looked to her sister for help, but Toni couldn’t even nod. She still had the chin support, was still being fed mush on account of losing most of her top teeth, breaking her soft palate. All she could do was whisper yes and blink, which sent two fresh tears coursing down her cheeks. Bridget thought of Stan’s clothes, still hanging in the wardrobe, of his book still on his bedside table, his glasses folded on top – he had forgotten to take them on holiday. She wondered if she should move these things, clear them out, if she should ask whether or not Toni wanted her to. What would be worse to come back to – evidence or absence?
