The House of Whispers

by Anna Kent

  I hung my head in shame.

  ‘And turning up drunk, or smelling of alcohol? It’s not on. It’s simply not on, Abi.’ Her voice rose here and I realized how angry she was. I’d thought she hadn’t noticed. ‘Imagine what the relatives think when they see their loved ones around someone who looks and smells like she slept rough.’ Moira paused and stared at me until I squirmed, then she began again in a gentler tone. ‘If you need help, I can recommend people. We can get you the help you need. Alcohol’s a highly addictive substance. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’ She opened the desk drawer and held out a leaflet: Am I an alcoholic?

  ‘No, thank you. I… I’m not an alcoholic. I’m fine.’ My voice was a whisper. Everything was so much effort this morning. ‘I’m just painting for an exhibition. It takes over everything.’

  Moira sighed. ‘Well, that may be. I’ve no idea how the artistic mind works – but I’ve thought about this and discussed it with the powers-that-be and I’m sorry to have to ask you not to come back until you’re able to guarantee your reliability and focus on the job in hand. I’m not saying never. I’m saying take a break, and get in touch once you have things under control again. You’re a good volunteer and I don’t want to lose you. But we can’t continue like this. Does that sound reasonable?’

  Tears sprung to my eyes and I squeezed my lips together to try and stop them from spilling out. ‘Yes, yes it does. Thank you.’

  Moira pushed a box of tissues towards me. ‘All right. Well, stay in touch. Let me know how you’re getting on. And if you need help, it’s here.’ She pushed the leaflet towards me again and, with that, she was gone, leaving me with a devastating sense of failure and loss.

  It was a feeling I knew well.

  Thirty-Six

  The decision to kill myself hadn’t been one I’d made slowly. I’d simply woken up one morning a few weeks into the first term of university with the weight of the world on me and known I couldn’t surface through it. I couldn’t carry on anymore. It had been that simple. The decision on how to do it had taken far longer.

  I’d lain in bed and looked at the window that morning and it had struck me how easy it would be to jump out of the window and never feel anything again. A few moments of fear as I fell, maybe, then the sweet release of oblivion. I’d lain there thinking about how the nightmares would finally stop, and how I wouldn’t have to deal with anything anymore, and I’d got up and opened the window to see how wide it went. I’d peered down at the grey pavement below and imagined myself, splayed and broken on it, blood oozing from my head, and found the image morbidly pleasing.

  But I was also practical. It would be no dress rehearsal; no cry for help. My room was only on the second floor: I’d have to go higher up, or maybe try to jump headfirst in order to make sure I did actually die. Were there methods for these things? It was oblivion I craved, not sympathy. Later, I googled ‘best way to jump suicide’. I knew that the world would be a better place without me. It was as simple as that.

  That morning – the morning I calmly searched the best way to jump – marked the beginning of a phase during which I’d find myself thinking about how to kill myself many times a day. I’d look at the buses passing on Marylebone Road or Oxford Street or wherever I was and think: I just need to step out right now – and then the moment would pass and I’d almost be washed with disappointment that I hadn’t done it. Every failure served only to refuel the idea that I was worthless: that I didn’t even have the guts to follow through. Same with the Tube, and with trains. A dithering moment of dazzling possibility, then the whoosh of the train and I’d missed my chance. A coward, that’s what I was. Unworthy.

  And then I might buy something and find myself looking at those warnings on plastic bags that say ‘Danger of suffocation’ and think: really? Is it that easy? Could you do it yourself? I had no access to a gun; couldn’t picture myself using a knife. Slashing your wrists takes too long. I learned the word ‘exsanguination’.

  I continued to go to lectures and seminars; to smile at people. I continued to hand in assignments; to do my best. It didn’t occur to me to tell anyone what I was thinking. It didn’t occur to me to talk to Grace. To seek help. I was ashamed.

  When it came to me, the answer was much simpler than I’d imagined. Pills.

  I did my research; I found out what I could buy over the counter that would do the job and calculated how many I’d need. I became an expert at buying the tablets. I walked the streets, finding new pharmacies; places where they didn’t know me; pharmacies with kind-faced staff who’d hand me more pills without suspicion. I’d explain that I’d hurt my back playing hockey. I’d hold my back, yawn and say I couldn’t sleep at night and then I’d nod attentively while they gave me the usual warnings. My patter became slick. I almost believed I’d hurt my back: if I concentrated hard enough I could almost feel the pain. If only injuries inside your head, your heart, were so obvious; so easy to treat.

  And, as I’d walked back to Halls that day – the last batch of little boxes burning a hole in my backpack – I remember I’d noticed everything: the pattern of the paving slabs, the drain covers, the dirty weeds fighting for life at the base of filthy brick walls. It had seemed as if the whole of London was covered with the soot of city life; everything was tarnished. The sun, which might have made things better by gilding the edges of the city, had tried, and failed, to break through the clouds, and I’d seen even that as a sign. There was no going back.

  I’d decided to do it on a Wednesday. Hump day, late November. Grey sky, naked trees stiff like skeletons, rain sliding down the window of my room in Halls. I’d lain in bed listening to the sounds outside my window: the cars, the hoots, the sirens – always the sirens. In the corridor, doors had banged as people went off for breakfast, and I’d caught snatches of conversation, voices I’d come to recognize although I still couldn’t match them to faces. The one with the American drawl; the Scottish one; the guy who shouted everything as if he were addressing a stadium.

  Oh, shut the fuck up.

  I’d stacked my books and folders neatly on the desk; tidied my room. I got up, made the bed, went for a shower, and dressed. I opened the window, then I sat at the desk and pressed the tablets out of their packets. I arranged them in lines of five, ready to take and, when they were all laid out like rows of soldiers, I picked up the first five tablets and was rattling them in my hand thinking that this was going to be relatively easy after all when the door burst open.

  Grace paused only for a fraction of a second before leaping across the room like a martial arts ninja. She swept the tablets off my desk with her forearm, making them fly through the air and rain down all over the carpet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she yelled. ‘You fucking idiot! You selfish cow! How dare you?’

  She slapped my hand hard – the one that still held five tablets.

  ‘Let them go! How many have you taken? How many?’

  ‘None,’ I mumbled, and Grace prised open my hand, snatched the tablets and flung them across the room so hard they bounced off the wall. She grabbed one of the packets. ‘You didn’t take any? Are you sure?’

  I shook my head miserably. A failure again.

  We stared at each other. Grace had her hands on her hips and she shook her head at me in disgust, her nostrils flaring and her face squashed with anger. Two spots of colour had appeared on her cheeks.

  ‘You have no idea!’ she yelled, her voice hard with passion. ‘You have no idea how lucky you are to be here. To be alive! To be healthy! To be here, studying for a degree. Some people never get that chance!’

  I clamped my hands over my ears to dampen her words but still I could hear and, all the while she went on at me about getting through this together and making the most of my life, I stared at the floor, looking at the pills scattered on the carpet, feeling smaller and smaller. I tried to swallow but I couldn’t. My face was hot and my throat thick with shame. Tears pricked at my eyes and my nose throbbed with the effort of hol
ding them in. And still Grace’s words rained down on me, hot and acrid, like lava, ramping up the self-disgust that built in my belly because, underneath everything, I knew what she was saying, and I knew that it was true: I was selfish.

  Getting up to leave Moira’s office, I remembered those desperate times in the first year – the utter blackness that had so nearly consumed me; the pointlessness of life that had swum through my veins; the emotions that had tried to destroy me – and recalled how Grace had pulled me through. Without really knowing how, and certainly not knowing why, it was Grace’s tough love that had ultimately saved me.

  ‘You need to make your life count,’ she told me when the dust had settled, and I was back on track. ‘Do something worthwhile with it.’

  The thought that I’d let Grace down grew inside me as the Tube rattled me towards home, until it was a balloon that filled my insides, squashing my organs and choking me. I pressed my hand to my throat, swallowing again and again, to try and rid the feeling that I couldn’t breathe but I knew there was only one way I could puncture that balloon and create the space to breathe: I needed to strip Grace of that power she had over me. I needed to bury the past.

  Having someone save your life is a powerful thing, but there comes a point when you need to draw a line under it and move on. This was the mistake I’d made last time we lived together: I’d subsisted in Grace’s shadow, always believing that I owed her; always believing that I should be grateful to her – but she not only knew that, she took advantage of it. She knew how I felt, and she took that feeling and walked all over it. She used me. She abused me. My life was a constant battle against the nagging feeling that I was letting Grace down but I was an adult now. Married. I had to move on.

  Thirty-Seven

  Grace and I ate dinner at the kitchen table that night: I hadn’t done a shop so it was toasted cheese sandwiches. I’d cut the mould off the cheese before Grace got home. And off the bread.

  ‘Are you going to meet up with anyone else at any point?’ I asked her as I ate hungrily, the bright red ketchup oozing out the back and sides of my sandwich like blood. Grace was still in her white work shirt; I told her she was playing Russian roulette to eat ketchup in a white shirt but she didn’t seemed to care. ‘I’m the only one you’ve seen since you’ve been back.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on it.’

  ‘But your other friends must be dying to see you? Luna, Steve?’ I struggled to think of the names of the medics she used to hang around with.

  She shrugged. ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  ‘Why don’t you look them up and go for a long weekend or something? You’ve been working so hard.’

  Grace put down her sandwich and looked at me. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’

  I gave myself a silent pep talk: be strong. ‘Rohan’s coming back for the weekend soon,’ I said as casually as I could. My palms were sweating. I really needed her to toe the line with this.

  ‘Oh lovely!’ Grace said. ‘I can’t wait to meet him.’ I didn’t reply. I just looked at her until she got it. ‘Oh,’ she said, slapping the table. ‘You don’t want me here – is that what this is about? The two lovebirds want some space? Am I right?’

  Well, there is that, but I also don’t want you stealing him.

  I smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I haven’t seen him for weeks. You can meet him another time, once he’s back for good.’ I paused. ‘I’m happy to help pay for your train ticket.’

  Grace pouted while she looked back at me with her eyes narrowed, then she smiled. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If it means that much to you, I’ll get out of your hair when your hubbie comes home. Maybe I could go to a spa…’

  Did she say it just to annoy me? To remind me? We’d gone together to a spa once when we were students – her idea, of course. It wasn’t my thing at all so I’d flopped about, bored and out of place, in the plush white dressing gown as she’d ricocheted from facial to massage to pedicure to spa pool, then she shot back to London early, claiming work, and left me with the bill.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a smile. ‘Why don’t you?’

  Thirty-Eight

  Rohan was taking the red-eye out after work on the night of 30 October, and was due to land in the morning of 31 October: Hallowe’en. I stayed up all night painting yet, as the sun rose, my concentration faded and I paced the attic, brush in hand, unable to work. Grace was faffing about in her room and it worried me that she might suddenly change her mind and stay. The thought of her meeting Rohan – of her saying something snide – of her voicing her opinion of him at all – was too much to bear.

  I looked down at the street from the attic window. It was a grey day, a day in which the slate of the sky leached the colour from everything. A handful of houses had made the effort to decorate for Hallowe’en, the hedges gradually disappearing beneath the tangle of white, shop-bought cobweb. On pathways and front walls, pumpkins had appeared, so roughly hacked at by the children of the houses that their toothy grins were more gruesome than perhaps intended: lopsided gashes in the flesh and eyes in places too horrific to be natural.

  After an hour of looking at my canvas and failing to land a single brush stroke, I downed tools.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, knocking at Grace’s door. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She was sitting on the bed, a small overnight bag open next to her. ‘Checking I’m really going?’ she asked with only half a smile.

  I tutted. ‘’Course not.’ I stood with my back to the window so I didn’t have to look at the creepy row of toys. ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Raw-food and health retreat.’ She paused. ‘Down in Kent. Near Canterbury.’

  I swallowed. ‘Nice. Got your yoga pants?’

  She laughed. ‘There is a lot of yoga. Meditation, too. Sound meditation and chanting. I’ve always wanted to try those.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ I looked at my watch, my heart chittering with anxiety. ‘So, do you have a cab coming?’

  ‘I’m taking the train.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  Grace looked around the room, then zipped up her bag. ‘Right. I think I’ve got everything.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll have anything you might have forgotten,’ I said. ‘As long as you have your wallet.’

  She peered into her handbag. ‘Yep. Got that.’ She looked around the room again and exhaled loudly. ‘Should I take Teddy? I’ve kind of grown fond of him.’

  At that point I was happy for her to take the kitchen sink as long as she left. I picked up the bear. ‘Here, take it.’

  Grace opened her bag again and put the bear inside, pressing its ratty ears carefully under the zip. Finally, she picked the bag up off the bed and heaved it over her shoulder. ‘Right, I’ll be off out of your hair then.’

  We clattered down the stairs and I opened the front door for her. She turned on the doorstep.

  ‘Have a good time with hubbie. Maybe this’ll be the weekend you make a baby.’

  My smile was as fake as hers. ‘Maybe.’

  With Grace gone, I was itching to paint. I had five completed canvases lined up along the attic wall. After the aquatic effect of the fourth picture, things had taken a darker turn and it crossed my mind on many occasions that maybe there really was something in what Meena had said. Maybe an unseen energy was entering my body because I didn’t know where the ideas, the feelings and the colours came from: when I worked, my eyes were half closed and my hands moved to a rhythm that came from the universe. It’s not as if I planned what I was painting. It just came. When I opened my eyes and regarded the canvases properly, I was often surprised – stunned – at what I’d actually painted.

  In the fifth portrait Grace was older again, perhaps in her thirties, though it was hard to tell because her features were so perverse. She had four eyes and three sets of lips, all of which were blurred as if she’d moved – struggled? convulsed? – while being captured for a photograph, and yet I’d somehow also managed to put a look
of disdain on her face, her chin lifted and her eyes looking down with such contempt it made a shiver run up my spine.

  But the thing that scared me most about this portrait – the thing I had no idea how I’d managed to paint – was the way I’d created the illusion that her face was trapped beneath something more solid than water. Yes, this version of Grace was trapped beneath the canvas itself; as if it were a barrier she couldn’t pass. She was struggling, suffocating in a way that made me imagine that her unseen hands might be trying to claw their way through the fabric to let in some air. The colours blurred and merged; her deformed features distorted by the material that stopped her from surfacing, the three sets of blood-red lips slightly parted as she struggled to get a breath between them.

  It was suffocating to look at and had been suffocating to paint, reminding me of that feeling I’d had on the Tube that a balloon was filling my insides, choking me. It was when this feeling became too much and I found myself gasping for air that I went over to the window and looked down at the street; at the bare branches of the oak trees reaching up to the grey sky, an invisible wind whipping the dead bodies of the leaves into eddies at the kerbside and buffeting the house; at the ghoulish decorations that brought horror to the street. On the roof, the extractor outlet banged with the stronger gusts: knock, knock, knock. The attic window wasn’t double-glazed and, up close to the glass, I could feel the sharp coolness of the air as the panes rattled in their frames. I raised both my hands to the glass and pressed against it: the woman in the window. Let me go.

  The sixth portrait was coming along frighteningly well. In it, Grace appeared to have escaped from behind the canvas, at least that quality of suffocation that I’d managed to infuse into number five was no longer there, but her beautiful face – because she was, without doubt, beautiful – was smashed, broken and pulled apart, the flesh distorted, deformed, melted, and bleeding out of itself, the skin dripping towards the edge of the canvas, the textures and colours of the paints I was using suggesting pain, horror and destruction. Stepping back to view my progress, I realized that although the image was undeniably horrific, it was going to be perfect. I’d been up all night and the walls of the attic seemed to pulse beyond the periphery of my sight as if the room itself were breathing and I were the heart of it – but I couldn’t stop painting now. I put my brush once more to the canvas.