by Lily Graham
She looked at it and frowned. ‘This was your grandmother’s?’ she said, taking a seat and holding the photograph in both hands as she stared at the grainy, sepia-toned image of an old white house surrounded by a wild sea. Her dark eyes were solemn.
I nodded. Sage hadn’t met my grandmother; she’d died not long after my daughter was born. ‘A long time ago. She escaped in the Spanish Civil War in the thirties, I think, and not long afterwards she met my grandfather and they came to live in his home country. The house – Marisal – was lost somehow. I’m not sure of the details, she never really told us much, but I know that it hurt her that it wasn’t in the family any more.’
‘Didn’t she ever tell you what happened?’ asked Sage, turning to look at me with a frown.
I shook my head, gave a small sigh. ‘No – she didn’t like to talk about the past. Especially the tough times. But she loved it there.’ I knew that much at least. ‘And she would have been pleased at the thought that it ended back with us somehow, particularly through Dad.’
I couldn’t help thinking of what it would have meant to her.
Sage smiled. ‘She liked him?’
I shook my head. ‘She adored him. It was embarrassing. He was always trying to speak to her in his terrible Spanish, and she loved him for it.’
‘That sounds like Dad.’ We shared teary grins, and dashed away the moisture from our eyes.
‘So when are you going to go? To Formentera… to Marisal?’
Not an if, I noted. I suppose we both knew there wasn’t much choice in it. Though the thought of jetting off there now seemed impossible. Too bright, too beautiful… too much, really.
‘In a couple of weeks, or months, maybe,’ I hedged. Perhaps when the urge to ask them to cremate my body, too, passed. I didn’t say that, of course. ‘Maybe you could come out when you have your next break, see it for yourself? I don’t know what sort of state it’s in so we’ll just have to see. The lawyer, you know, Steve Linberg?’
She nodded.
‘Well, he didn’t mention if it was habitable or not when I checked in with him but I got the sense that it’s a bit neglected. He said that no one has lived there for a few years.’
Sage snorted. ‘When you blasted him to find out what the hell Dad was thinking, you mean?’
I grinned. She knew me very well.
‘Pretty much. Anyway, who knows, maybe we’ll have somewhere to spend Christmas this year. Margaritas on the beach?’
Her eyes widened. ‘That could be good.’
It could. I hadn’t done much thinking about the future, apart from just trying to keep breathing and getting from one day to the next, but Christmas away from the memories of our family home seemed like a good plan, I thought.
I’d got hold of some of the details behind James’s decision to buy the house from Steve. Including the name of the estate agent he’d used when I’d tried to follow up James’s short, mysterious note.
I’d found out that Steve had been the one who’d taken care of everything for James when he’d told him what he wanted to do. His plan for buying Marisal.
I’d told Steve that perhaps he should have consulted me, but he assured me that James had been of sound mind when he’d instructed him to look into buying the house several months ago, when he’d discovered that it had gone to auction.
Financially, it had been a good deal. The money had come from James’s own private fund, from when he sold off his design business, so he had been within his right to buy it. It hadn’t caused any financial strain to us, which was a relief. I just wished he’d told me what he was doing, or what he’d been thinking. It didn’t feel right leaving our home to fly to a Spanish island right now. Especially when all I felt like doing was going to bed for the next year. At least when I dreamt, James was still there. Perhaps that’s what he’d been afraid of.
The thing that no one says about death is what a toll it takes on your liver. I just didn’t really know how to face it sober. It was so much worse when Sage left. I hadn’t quite realised just how much I’d been keeping it together for her until she wasn’t there.
The other thing no one tells you about is what happens after the funeral. When the casseroles stop coming and the phone stops ringing. That’s when it hits you. In the silence. When you wish everything would just stop, but it doesn’t. The sun keeps rising. The tides keep turning. The birds keep singing. And the mail just keeps on coming.
I jumped as the mail came through the letter box, landing on the pile I hadn’t had the will to clear the day before. Fliers. Advertiser editions of weekly papers. Catalogues.
It took everything I could not to open the door and shout at the postie to have some respect. That I didn’t fucking need a half-price window-cleaning special right now; I needed more vodka and perhaps he could add that to his rounds tomorrow?
But I didn’t. Instead, I just sat on the stairs staring at the brown envelopes, the ones addressed to James, and cried.
Even though we’d changed everything to my name, and cancelled everything else, it was like no one had listened, because they still kept coming, addressed to someone who was no longer here.
It’s those little indignities that drive you mad.
When the phone did ring in those first few weeks it was usually my mother or Allan, checking in. As if I was in a coma, my body trapped inside this silent house, and they were just making sure that I was still breathing.
I was. Just.
‘What have you been doing?’ asked my mum.
I paused, looking at James’s urn in my hands; I’d got into the habit of taking it with me to every room I visited. He’d told me, ‘You’ll know when to scatter my ashes when the time is right.’
He’d want to be somewhere close to us, somewhere with a view, I knew. Right now, though, I was just keeping him close. I didn’t know if the time would ever be right to let him go.
I didn’t think my mum would approve if she knew. She’d probably want to do some weird ceremony, with crystals or something.
‘Darling, perhaps I should come over again? Perhaps we should get out?’
Despite Sage’s warnings, you couldn’t stop my mum. She kept coming around, even if we just sat on the sofa not saying much and trying not to get into an argument. Whenever she came over I took James’s urn to another room, though; if I couldn’t be spared, there was no reason he had to be subjected to it, too. I figured he had enough on his plate, being dead and everything.
The only place worse than home, though, was ‘out’.
Out was magnified; the world rushed past and people laughed and spoke and slammed into you and no one noticed or cared or realised that the very worst thing in the world had happened to you. That you had seen what hell looked like and were still standing. Except there was no telltale wreckage or explosion that others could point to, to know or to understand, just the broken shell of you, left behind.
Going out wasn’t good for others either. It wasn’t great for the people who had the misfortune of being in my path. I’d lost that switch, you know? The one that prevents you from telling people what you really think.
So home was best, really. When I was at home, I could lie. I’d become rather brilliant at lying, at the pretence that I was doing ‘just fine’. In fact, my life was busy, and quite full. It was devastating, of course, but I’d been preparing. I was surviving. I was going to be all right. Which was wishful thinking, of course.
I figured people like to hear about progress. When it doesn’t happen, it makes them uncomfortable. As an ingrained people-pleaser, lying seemed to me the best, and the simplest way forward.
So, I told my friend Terry that I was going to look into that Zumba class that helped his mate Steph when she lost her husband at the age of seventy-three, when really I was just planning on drinking some more vodka that night. I told my mum that I would get in touch with that counsellor – the one she left the number of on the fridge – when instead I did a practice round with James’s ashes, with
James playing the role of the therapist.
‘You’re depressed because I’m dead? How strange.’
‘I know, it’s a shocker. It’s almost a month. I should have won the charity bake sale by now if this were a novel, you know?’
‘Yes, but you don’t bake, remember?’
‘True.’
‘Maybe you should try therapy?’
‘Maybe… or I could just have some more wine?’
‘Sure, that’ll work, too…’
The worst, though, was how I lied to Sage about how well I was coping, while I worried about how she was doing, hoping that she wasn’t falling apart like me. But she seemed to be coping in her own way, getting stuck into her studies, spending time with her friends. So I didn’t let her know that some days the only responsibly adult thing I’d done was to check in with her to see if she was okay. Then I’d hang up, and cry and get back in bed with James’s urn.
To chase away the shadows, I watched a lot of bad TV, though I’m not sure I took much of anything in. Perhaps because I drank my way through a lot of it, with Allan popping in every so often, as well as my best friend, Hannah. I didn’t mind them coming over. Hannah came over every couple of days whether I wanted her to or not, like a carer making sure I wasn’t getting any bedsores. She was that kind, you know? She didn’t take offence if I opened the door with hair that hadn’t been washed in a week, wearing James’s bathrobe, a drink in my hand as I sighed, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ when she interrupted an episode of Doctor Who.
She’d just nod. Then steer me towards the shower.
Hannah was my oldest, no-bullshit-between-us friend. You know the kind?
She was the one who could tell me just about anything, the one who saw things in me that I didn’t even know about myself. The one who saw through everything I said.
She was tough. Straight-talking. A powerhouse. Kind to those she cared about. To the rest of the world, she was pretty terrifying.
Hannah was the one who told me to go to Marisal.
Just when I’d thought that I’d got great at lying.
‘You’re not bloody fine,’ she said, looking at me, a month after I’d found out about the house.
‘Yes. I am.’
Her dark eyes remained unconvinced. ‘Charl, you look like a ghost, you’ve got scary thin, frail thin, like you’re fading away. He wouldn’t want this, you hiding away in here like Miss Havisham or something.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘What did you expect, Han? That by now I’d be joining in the local bingo and bake-off? My husband has died – I’m sorry if I can’t just pull myself together by snapping my fucking fingers.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
I huffed and looked out of the window as she continued. ‘No one expects you to be okay, but you don’t have to go through this on your own. Besides, I think you should go and see the house he bought. It might do you some good to get away. James—’
‘Wasn’t thinking,’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘I can’t just fly off to some bloody Spanish island and start making merry with a villa – this isn’t some bloody romcom, it’s real life.’ I took a shuddery breath. ‘I never wanted any of this, Han – not without him.’
Which was when the sobs came. I was angry. Angry at James. Angry at the rogue cell that had mutated in his traitorous body, which had decided to check out before me. It wasn’t meant to be that way. How did I go on without him?
Hannah put her arms round me. ‘Oh God, Charl, I’m sorry I made you cry. You always were a tough nut to crack.’
I half sobbed, half laughed. ‘Not any more.’
She smiled, smoothed back my hair, then fetched my bag, where I was keeping the cigarettes I hadn’t told her about. ‘Shall we go have a fag in the garden?’
How had she known?
I laughed. It reminded me of when we were thirteen, the first time we’d done just that with her mother’s fags, how we used to sneak out and puff away on them.
‘I’m going to take these with me when I go though,’ she said sternly, after she handed me a lit cigarette. I nodded. She was right, as usual. Some things a person didn’t want when their husband had died from cancer: picking up a habit that could give it to you too and make your only child an orphan. Bloody Hannah. Like I said, death is absolute hell on the liver.
In the end, I bought the ticket at 2 a.m. after I’d finished the last of the whisky, wrapped up in James’s old bathrobe, which I pretended still smelt a little like his aftershave. I had been busy contemplating throwing myself off the nearest bridge with his urn in my hands so we’d go together. Going to Formentera instead seemed the saner option.
Allan drove me to the airport a few days later, mumbling all sorts of things as we sped along the motorway.
‘You’ve got your passport, Twig? And the motion sickness tablets for the ferry? What about towels, I doubt there will be anything like that there, did you remember to pack some? Maybe you should have just booked a hotel instead? What if there’s no electricity or running water and you’re stuck? Maybe I should come with you? I can’t just let you run off by yourself.’
He said all this rather fast and I stared back at him, panic beginning to creep in. His anxiety was catching.
I’d packed a bag for a week, though I hadn’t booked a return flight. My reasoning was that I didn’t want to be too committed, despite the fact that I’d promised Allan that I’d give the place a chance before returning home to my bathrobe, whisky and illegal fags. At least with a no-return trip, I could get the next flight out if I wished.
Chapter Three
The air smelt like the ocean, wild rosemary and that first whisper of summer.
There was a warmth to the air that was a surprise after the cold of London, making me sling my jacket over my arm, and my skin itch from sweat; making me realise that I hadn’t packed properly for the weather. It had been hard to imagine sunshine after such a long, hard winter.
I’d docked at the port of La Savina, which teemed with bars and with tourists renting mopeds and bicycles, all with thoughts of a holiday in mind. I was eager to get away from the sunshine-dwellers, away from the easy smiles and puzzled looks of people who saw something in me, something perhaps that announced I didn’t belong.
I didn’t have much to go on, just the name of the house and that it was located in an area known as Can Morraig, one of the more remote parts of Formentera. I’d managed to get a taxi and it had stopped on the street where the driver thought my villa was meant to be. I waved him off telling him I’d walk the rest of the way and only realised my mistake once I had to walk up a long, barren road that stretched for half a mile, surrounded by low stone walls and farmland.
My suitcase was small and wheeled. I traipsed up the hot tarmac, dragging it behind me, wiping the sweat from my eyes.
I was grateful for the lack of people though. At last I could breathe, and stop forcing my pained smile. Ibiza had been an overload for my strained senses, and the ferry had been much the same. Too many partygoers, excited teenagers and people whose happiness only seemed to highlight my own deep sorrow, as if they were in colour while I had faded to black and white. It was a relief to be away from it all. To let my face sink into its comfortable, though all-too-familiar, sorrowful folds.
As I walked, I passed by whitewashed houses, some modern, some neglected and old. Here in this older section it felt a little as if this were a place that time had forgotten, and here I felt a little more of a sense of release.
As I made my way up a slight incline next to a low wall, I saw it. Just the lip of the house at first – and then there it was: a small white villa, with pale pink bougainvillea trailing along the old stone.
Marisal.
Nature had had its way with the small front garden; there were hedges and weeds that obscured the path, and a large orange tree stood next to the front door, heavy with fruit, the scent offering a taste of the summer still to come.
I bent down beside the tree to find the fat bl
ue flowerpot, which held the key to the villa, as I’d been instructed.
In his letter, the estate agent had explained little about the house’s present condition, and I saw now why; perhaps he’d been afraid that I would change my mind. Although considering that buying it and coming here was the last wish of my husband, he can’t have thought that was likely.
Besides, it didn’t matter what state it was in. This house had been a part of my family once, and a part of me couldn’t help feeling like I was looking at more than just four stone walls.
I opened the weather-beaten door, which was sticky with age. The air inside was musty, that scent of years of oceanside dwelling, reminding me of childhood summers spent by the coast. I made my way to the small front window and opened one of the shutters, then jumped back as it fell apart, crumbling onto the flagstone but offering a chink of warm, lemon-coloured sunshine that brought the shadows to life. Most of the furniture was covered in thick, cloying bands of dust, which coated everything, making me sneeze. I’d been told that the house had been sold in an auction, after whoever had lived here left or died. I guessed that was why there was still furniture here. My eyes trailed around the room, noting the fireplace in the corner, the small window that overlooked the ocean, the thick stone walls and the coolness of the interior. There were discarded newspapers stacked in the corner, and on the windowsill several old wine bottles remained.
Still, there was something beneath the dust, that kind of warmth that some houses have, welcoming you in.
I stepped through the house, perhaps less reverently than I would have imagined earlier, certain that I would be stepping in the shadows of ghosts; but though I looked in cupboards, and in corners, I found no trace of them here.
