by Julia Gray
He did not say goodbye, you see. To either of us.
But I don’t want to go into this now. My point is this: I am very tuned in to my mother, and I had a feeling that she was going to do something different, and possibly dangerous.
And I was right.
We’d been staying with Petra and Bill for two nights, maybe three. Visiting Nana by day, playing board games by the fire in the evening. Petra had put me in the attic, which had a low sloping roof, a collection of hideous porcelain dolls and a sofa bed that looked more uncomfortable than it actually was. Although he had no shortage of baskets all over the house, Oscar, for reasons he kept to himself, insisted on sleeping with me.
That night I woke up – straight up, as if someone had cracked open the blinds or smacked me on the side of the head. I was out of breath. Maybe I’d been dreaming about falling. I sat up; Oscar growled at me sleepily.
I got out of bed, listening.
It wasn’t raining, for once. Maybe I’d been woken by silence. An owl hooted, somewhere quite far away. I put on my slippers and dressing gown and opened the door to the attic. There was a minuscule landing just outside, and a tiny, curtainless window. Through this window you could see the driveway at the front of the house and, over to the left, the octagonal studio.
And in the studio there was a light.
I did not think it was burglars. I’d been into the studio, and there was nothing to steal but a pile of fraying yoga mats and a carved Buddha. I shut Oscar in the attic, in case he misguidedly thought we were going for a night-time walk, and went down the stairs, slowly, avoiding the floor-board that creaked and the rumpled carpeting. Snores floated from Bill and Petra’s room, but masculine snores, I thought. Evie’s room was down at the opposite end, where all the paying-guest bedrooms were. Her door stood partially open. No snores, and no breathing. I went over to the bed. No Evie.
What were she and Petra doing in the studio in the middle of the night?
I made my way down to the ground floor, glad of my slippers on the cold damp stone. Not drugs. Playing music, perhaps. My pace quickened a little. Not drinking; surely not drinking. My mother would never. And Petra would never let her. I went out through the kitchen door and around the back of the house. A pathway led to the studio, some fifteen or twenty metres away. The private secluded studio.
Not for the first time, I reflected that I am in many ways much less of a teenager than my mother is. Here I was, like a stout matron, about to break up their party. Whatever they were up to in there, they were doing it very quietly; I could hear none of the shrieks and giggles that usually accompanied Evie and Petra’s conversations. Maybe they were having a KFC. With all her devout commitment to vegetarianism, eating a bucket of breaded chicken was definitely something that Aunt Petra would need to lock herself away for. Bill Quick hadn’t eaten meat since 1994.
But my radar was pure and incredibly clear: something is up with Evie. Check on her now.
They were kneeling on round meditation cushions at the centre of the room. Each in her own way looked rather uncomfortable: Aunt Petra is too wide, and my mother is too tall, to kneel with ease on a small round cushion. Three candles burned in front of them; there were further clumps of candles, always in groups of three, in the octagon-corners of the room. The air was misty and pungent: jasmine, geranium, something I couldn’t identify.
When I opened the door, they both opened their eyes and jumped.
And then, in a way that was almost funny, they both said, ‘Nora!’
I stood on the threshold in my dressing gown, feeling like Mrs Danvers in Rebecca. ‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘Close the door,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘Come in. Grab yourself a cushion.’
I closed the door and stepped forward a pace, no more. ‘Mum?’ I said. I never called her ‘Mum’. I hoped it would jolt her.
She was looking guilty and pleading and obstinate, not quite meeting my eye.
‘We are opening a channel of communication with the Spirit World,’ said Aunt Petra, with the glib air of someone reciting from a book.
‘You mean,’ I said, coming closer, ‘you’re trying to contact the dead. My dad. Am I right?’
‘The Spirit World,’ said Aunt Petra again.
‘On the basis of one half-baked seminar!’
‘It was a two-day course. They have an excellent reputation …’
I said to Evie, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it. I thought you said it was nonsense.’
She was still looking guilty and pleading and obstinate. Now she got up and came over to me and bent down to hug me; despite the enormous difference in our heights, it still seemed that she was the child.
‘I wanted to try,’ she said, so quiet I could barely hear her. ‘I couldn’t resist. All this with your Nana, and thinking about him, still thinking about him so much, after ten years … I just wanted him to tell me why. You must understand.’
‘I do understand,’ I told her. ‘I do. But this is really dangerous. Stupid and dangerous.’
They both seemed to be considering this.
‘Perhaps she’s right,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘We ought to have someone to guide us, a professional medium. It’s always best with three people, so they say.’
But that wasn’t what I meant. I was thinking of the wall of sadness, of the vault inside Evie that could open up again and swallow her. And there would be no Nana to coax her back; there would just be me. I couldn’t allow Evie even to attempt it, whatever they were about to do.
‘What exactly were you planning?’ I said.
‘What they taught us,’ said Petra. ‘To open the chakras, one at a time. To find a place of great stillness. To wait … Evie was going to speak to Felix, to see if he was out there.’
‘And then?’ I said patiently. ‘How was he going to respond? You don’t have a Ouija board, do you?’
Please could they not have a Ouija board. Please. I’d seen horror films, even if they hadn’t.
‘Writing,’ said Evie. She had something in her hand; she held it up. It was one of her cloth-covered notebooks with hand-cut pages, a biro clipped to the spine. ‘They call it automatic writing.’
I wanted to explain to them, in words of one syllable, what – ideally – should happen next. We would blow out the candles; we would go back inside and make hot chocolate, or Ovaltine or whatever Aunt Petra had mouldering away in her cupboards, and then we would go back to bed. But as I planned this all out in my head, I thought: but I’m supposed to leave on Saturday morning. And they’ll try again. I can’t stop them from trying again. And then I saw that Evie was crying once more, those helpless, colourless tears.
‘Evelyn, don’t cry,’ said Petra, struggling up from her cushion and coming over to join us. We stood in a huddle, three witches of different sizes, in the candlelit dark.
‘What if I do it?’ I said. ‘You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. You said I’d be good at it, with my imagination. All the chakras and stuff.’
Why they agreed to this, I am also not really sure. Personally, I think that Petra was more afraid of the Spirit World than she claimed to be. As for Evie … I think she understood that I didn’t want her to venture into territories she might not come back from.
Also: I had no intention of doing anything other than putting on a performance. It would be a very convincing one.
10
Stopping just short of clapping her hands in delight, Aunt Petra took charge of the choreography.
‘We’ll rearrange the cushions in a wider circle, just so,’ she said.
Outside, a wind had started up, and it was wailing against the walls of the studio. Under my dressing gown, I felt ripples along my skin; it was late February and the studio was cold. I could feel my breath coming in miniature snow-drifts. The points of the candles winked and danced. While Evie dried her face and hugged her knees, Aunt Petra explained to Nora the Non-believer how to open and close the chakras. This was long and complicated, and I will give
only a few of the details here. She told me to imagine a focus of energy at seven points of my body: the base of my spine, my sacrum, my solar plexus, my heart, my throat, my ‘third eye’ on my forehead, and my crown. In order to be fully opened up to the possibilities of what lay beyond my own body, I needed to imagine each chakra opening up like a flower. Some people found it helped to concentrate on the colours: red, for the root chakra, was first.
It was difficult, and it was also easy. I listened to Petra’s instructions, to the wind and the sound of Evie’s shallow breathing. Keeping my eyes closed, I followed what Petra was saying. I pictured the flowers – strange, geometric balls of petal and light, with bound-up energy cycling inside them like writhing ribbons. I pictured opening up each one, letting the ribbons of energy reach out and around me: beanstalks, beams. To picture each flower – each chakra – was easy to do. To keep concentrating was not. Never have I more fully realised the expression: suspending your disbelief. And yet, I did not want to suspend my disbelief. Or not entirely. I needed to stay in control. I needed to be able to make up something good for Evie. Something believable.
‘And now moving up to your solar plexus,’ murmured Aunt Petra. ‘The solar plexus is yellow. A yellow flower, like a buttercup, opening up …’
Beyond the flowers – they had glossy, vinyl leaves that extended into miniature points – was a universe of absolute darkness. I congratulated myself for doing this on Evie’s behalf. Even though she claimed her imagination wasn’t as good as mine, I wouldn’t trust Evie alone with the flowers and the darkness. At first, it seemed like it had a strange beauty. But the longer I stayed there, opening up each flower, the darker the darkness became.
And we hadn’t even met any spirits yet.
Picture me now: eyes shut, wrapped in my towelling dressing gown, holding my mother’s notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. Assume that my chakras are on high alert and that my mind is a big, blank page. I am ready to receive a message from the Great Beyond.
This is how I hope I appeared, to Evie and Petra. But inside, I felt physically altered: chest hot, mouth dry, head curiously light, as though I were coming down with a serious fever. My heartbeat kept doubling and halving, doubling and halving. All of a sudden, I found that I could see a tightrope, travelling forward and into the distance. And there, on the tightrope, on a small, shiny unicycle, was me, cynical Nora. And I kept my eyes trained on myself, as I balanced on the tightrope. I could not lose sight of myself. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but I was beginning to find it stranger, more alienating, more frightening than I could have imagined. It was like My Little Pony gone horribly, horribly wrong. I was right: a person could get trapped there.
‘Evelyn,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘I think you should talk to Felix now.’
And so my mother, as husky as a forty-a-day smoker, started to speak. Some things she said in English, others in French. For a while she talked about costumes, things she was planning for her next job; it was as though she were on the phone to him, filling him in about her day. Something funny that Mrs DeAndrade had said on the stairs. How beautiful I was getting, and how brave I was. (At this, I winced; the tightrope shook. She was referring to Jonah Trace.) Then she began talking about Nana; how she’d never heard the phrase myocardial infarction before, and now it was all she could think about, over and over; how he’d always been so sweet with Nana, driving her to the church on Sundays although he hated to drive.
‘And will you look out for her, please? I don’t know how it works. I don’t know when she’ll come. But I know … she’ll be so glad to see you. You and Brando and Boots.’
Brando and Boots were Nana’s long-deceased collies. I noticed that my mother had left out all of Nana’s dead husbands. That was probably for the best. Nana hadn’t seemed that keen on any of them.
‘I love you,’ said Evie. ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry that I was so angry.’
All the time she was talking, I wrote in the notebook, keeping it close to my stomach, curled in my hands. Sometimes I swapped hands, as I do when I’m under any kind of pressure; I do it in exams without realising. I was doing it now. It was getting harder and harder to focus on the image I had of myself on the unicycle in the middle of the tightrope. It was getting harder and harder to keep myself from falling off it, and into the flowers and the deep. Feeling sick and light-headed with the effort, I kept myself travelling forwards. My mother’s voice faded in and out, then gradually stopped.
‘I think we should bring her back,’ said Aunt Petra, the great expert. ‘Nora, love. Nora?’
‘I’m going to be sick,’ I said, before I could stop myself.
I felt the rush of air as my mother moved towards me.
‘No. Wait. I’m OK,’ I said, taking control of myself, bit by bit.
‘Don’t open your eyes just yet,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘The chakras must now be closed.’
From head to foot, we went through the same process, just in reverse. I shrink-wrapped each flower with iron-clad haste. Never again, never again, I was thinking. Never again will I do something so rash and so stupid. Between the unicycle and the edge of the tightrope there had been less than a millimetre; one blink, one slip, was all it would have taken. I thought about everything real: the sofa in our living room that Evie cherished like a pet, Oscar’s whiskery rat-face, the big iron gates of my school. Real and material. Real and safe.
I opened my eyes.
On the page in front of me were three or four lines of writing, almost unrecognisable as mine.
‘A natural. She’s a natural,’ Aunt Petra was saying, as Bel had done. ‘So smooth, the way she was writing. That’s the beauty of youth. Although I fancy Nora has a very old soul.’
Slowly I tore out the page, and gave it to my mother. She read it in silence. Then she read it aloud.
‘I am very proud of you, Evelyn. I watch over you and Aliénor all the time. Alison will be all right, I promise you. Do not be afraid. I wish I could tell you why I am gone. But there are some things that are hard to explain. One day, Evelyn, you will understand. In the meantime, think of the red and white kite on the beach.’
‘“I am gone”,’ said Evie, repeating. ‘He always said “I am gone”, not “I have gone”. It was really him. He was really there. It even … it even looks like his writing.’
She was tearful, lit-up, sad-happy.
‘Did you see him?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What I saw was a kind of unending darkness, with these ribbons of rainbow-coloured light all around me, and vague shapes, sort of floating.’
I did not mention the tightrope, that thin link between me and sanity that I’d needed to hold onto for dearest life.
Aunt Petra was nodding intelligently. Could they really believe it was that easy?
‘But I heard his voice,’ I said. ‘It was definitely him. Quiet at first, but it got louder. What did he mean about the kite? What kite?’
‘You were too young to remember,’ said Evie. ‘We were all on the beach one day, the one near the Normandy cottage. We found a kite, half-buried in the sand. We thought it was broken, but it wasn’t; it just needed a bit of repairing. It was half-red and half-white. He said it was just like us: me and him. He was red, I was white. Like Lancaster and York. Together we were whole. And we fixed it, and we made it fly.’
And now Aunt Petra was crying. I realised the only person who hadn’t cried was me. I could have cried with exhaustion. I could have cried with relief: they believed me completely. Even about the kite – the kite had been important, a vital, credible detail in what was otherwise a pretty predictable note. I remembered the kite well enough, but I was only about two at the time. I knew that Evie wouldn’t have thought it possible for me to remember something from so long ago.
I had succeeded; I had succeeded so well that I could at that point have carved out for myself a career in taking money from fools, for passing on more messages from those who had died.
We blew out th
e candles and went back to the house. Aunt Petra made hot chocolate, and I drank a whole cup of it. Then I kissed them both goodnight, and climbed upstairs to the attic. The things I do for my mother, I thought to myself. But I was pleased, because I knew, in the tuned-in way that I had of knowing things about Evie, that I had averted whatever crisis might have been about to happen. Nana would die, sooner or later, but the wall of sadness would not be an impossibly high one; the vault would not bury her for ever.
Evie had forgotten, in her joy and her tiredness, to ask for her notebook back. And that was good. Because I had only shown her what I’d written with my left hand, as I focused on the tightrope that spanned the flower-filled void. On the opposite page was something else, something I only noticed afterwards – and luckily did not show Evie or Petra. The writing was cryptic, inexplicable and messy. I had no memory of doing it at all. But I must have done. With my other hand.
O angry flame.
Attention, Aliénor.
Oscar made way for me, grudgingly, as I peeled back the blankets and sheet. Before I turned out the bedside light, I looked at the words again. They sent a cold little current along my limbs.
Attention. It held a different meaning in French, I knew.
It meant ‘beware’.
A message from the Spirit World, Petra would declare, I was sure. But from which spirit, if so? And why? It could only be Felix Tobias. And that had implications I couldn’t bear to consider. No. Séances were show business. Everyone knew that. Wherever my father was – and I wasn’t sure he was anywhere, but personally I imagined him on a Normandy beach, paintbrush in hand – I hoped he was, finally, happy. I’d achieved what I’d set out to achieve, which was to convince Evie of this. No one had been present in the octagonal studio but the three of us and the carved Buddha.
