Her sister, Stephanie, had wanted to sell the minute their father, our grandfather, had died in 1982. Lawyers’ letters came in the post thick and fast; and although I didn’t really know what they were about, I could see how just the sight of the distinctive airmail envelope would make my mother’s hands tremble. Mum had refused to sell, she wouldn’t budge. She had her reasons, we never knew them, but whatever they were, perhaps she planned it this way, because she had left her half of her family home to Pea and I. And now – just when we need it – there is money waiting to be accessed. One trip to Bay Ridge, put the building on the market, and there should be enough from the proceeds to get my sister back on her feet, this time for good. And perhaps I can find answers to questions I’ve always had, even if I haven’t quite known what they were.
Pea – I’ve called her that since she was born – sits nervously, her fingers twitch in her lap, her nails are broken and bitten down, knuckles pinks and grazed, with combat, but not a fist fight. These are the scars of her daily battle not to reach for a drink or a pill. Twenty-four years old and eight weeks clean this time. Last time she stayed sober for eighteen months, and I thought maybe she had cracked it, but then Mum died, suddenly and shockingly. I fought so hard to hold on to her, against the tsunami of grief and chaos that we could both see was coming to sweep her away, but I wasn’t strong enough.
This time I won’t let my sister down.
This time, I will keep her safe. If I can just hold on to what matters, what is real, then I will be able to save her.
Resting the weight of my camera on my thigh, I reach out and take her hand, stilling it. She looks at me from behind the pink, heart-shaped sunglass she bought at the airport.
‘What did you bring that old thing for, anyway?’ she asks me, nodding at the camera, my dad’s old Pentax, the one he was looking through the very first time he set eyes on Mum. ‘You couldn’t even get fifty quid for it on eBay. I know, because I tried once. It’s all digital now, you know.’
‘I know, but this is more than just a camera it’s a … relic. It’s a little piece of Mum and Dad’s story, and besides, I like looking at things through a lens. I thought I could shoot the places that Dad shot, recreate the images for him. He might not have been up to making the trip but his camera could, I thought he’d like it.’
‘He will like it,’ Pea nods. ‘You should have been a photographer, not a scientist, you’re too artistic to be a scientist.’
‘I’m a physicist,’ I remind her. ‘And actually a lot of what I do is art. How are you feeling?’
‘Like I’d really like a drink, a hit or both,’ she says. ‘But then again, I’m awake, so nothing new there.’
We let the road slip under us in silence for a few moments.
‘But how are you?’ she asks finally. ‘I mean really.’
I hesitate, if I were to answer that question accurately I’d say full of rage and grief, terrified and lost, unsure and unable to find a sure-footed place to stand. But I don’t. Our beloved mother died from an overdose, and, even after a lifetime of a family that revolved around her depression, we didn’t see it coming in time to save her, and I can’t forgive myself for that. And more than that, there’s a stranger inside me, a stranger who is me, a crucial part of me I don’t have any reference for, and that unnerves me.
‘I think it will be a challenging few days, being here without her,’ I say instead, choosing my words carefully. ‘I’d always thought we’d come back here one day all together, you, me, Mum and Dad. I always thought there would be an end, like a resolution, and she’d be better, be happy. I never thought the ending would be that she’d …’
‘Kill herself,’ Pea finishes.
‘Christ.’ I bow my head, the now familiar surge of sickening guilt rises in my throat, that I didn’t see what she was about to do. ‘How can it be real? How can that be what’s really happened? I didn’t see it coming. I should have seen it coming. I should have … but she seemed, better, brighter. Free. I relaxed, I shouldn’t have relaxed.’
‘Maybe it’s better that you didn’t,’ Pea says. ‘That we didn’t.’
‘Pia, how can you say that?’
‘Because. Because it wore her out, all that effort at being happy. For our whole childhood, painting on smiles just for us and Dad. She was exhausted by it, but she saw it through, because she loved us. I’d been clean for more than a year, you’d got your doctorate, and were going to move in with Brian. Dad was through the cancer scare. Don’t you think she finally thought that now we were all OK, she could just go? Just stop feeling the pain, and go. Don’t you think that’s why she seemed happier? The end was in sight.’
I don’t know how to answer, so I don’t speak.
‘Seen Brian?’ Pea changes the subject with ease, from one thing I can’t bear to talk about to another.
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘I’m glad I haven’t seen him. He isn’t the sort of person you want to see when you’re … conflicted.’
Pea snorts. ‘Conflicted. Yep, our mum tops herself and we’re “conflicted”. I take it back, you are the perfect scientist – analytical to the last.’ The spasm of hurt her words cause must show on my face, because she takes off her glasses, and leans into me. ‘You know I don’t mean it,’ she says. ‘And, anyway, it was a good job you found out what a flake Brian was before you ended up marrying him. It’s good to know if someone will be willing to stick by you in a crisis. And he, well … you know.’
I do know. I’d discovered Brian was on a minibreak in the Lake District with another woman on the day of Mum’s funeral. It should hurt me more than it does; after all, we’d been together for two years and talked about making it official. But somehow I am numb to that petty betrayal. It took me leaving Brian to realise that, as much as l liked him, and respected him, I was never in love with him, and he knew that. When I think back, I doubt that he was ever in love with me either, it was more that I fascinated him, I was atypical, an anomaly and as a neuroscientist he liked that about me. I was a woman immersed in the most rational of sciences, determined that my sex wasn’t going to hold me back, even when most of the rest of the world I moved in was.
I can see, now, the reason I was drawn to him was because I thought he understood me. I thought he was like me, but that was a mistake. It wasn’t our similarities that he enjoyed about me; it was our differences that he liked to study.
It probably didn’t help that I told him my secret. I shouldn’t have told him. That just after Mum died something started happening to me that hadn’t happened since I was a little girl. That sometimes, more and more just recently, I see things; people, places … things.
Impossible things. Things that are not there.
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Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2017
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published by Ebury Press in 2017
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ISBN 9781785033186
Looking for Captain Poldark Page 7
