An Unremarkable Body

by Elisa Lodato

  Helen clenched her teeth and dug her heels in. She wouldn’t let go. My mother pulled until her head and neck were jutting over the chasm of the stairs. She saw the look of contemplation in Helen’s eyes too late. A decision in the making. She tried to right herself, but Helen’s arm was straight and strong. Pulled into position by my mother. Helen did as my mother asked: she let go and the book slipped from her grasp, pulled away down the stairs by my mother’s body; a confusing mass of legs, back, head, legs, back, head. It went on and on until an accident of revolution, a grim turn of the wheel, brought the full weight of her body down on the delicate ring bones at the top of her spine. Helen heard the dry crack of the atlanto-occipital joint as her neck was broken, her spinal cord severed by the heavy mass.

  She remained on the landing, stunned by how quickly gravity had accepted her final move and declared her the winner. My mother’s eyes were open and flickering in neurogenic shock as Helen rushed down the stairs and knelt beside her.

  ‘Kathy! Kathy! I’m sorry.’

  My mother was gasping, choking as saliva and bronchial secretions accumulated in her throat.

  ‘Please, Kathy. Don’t. Wait. I’m going to call an ambulance.’ She ran down the hall to the kitchen table where she’d left her handbag and retrieved her phone. The choking sounds were slowing, and as she dialled 999, she saw the copy of Tess that had landed, face down, on the doormat. In that moment she knew the call was impossible. My mother was about to die. And she would have to somehow explain the tussle for the book at the top of the stairs.

  She walked back to the foot of the stairs and quickly put the book in her bag. The action – altering the scene of an accident – appalled her. The terrible fact of my mother’s fall still so recent it could almost be undone. Deleted. But she knew an urgent consideration of the present was now necessary. Helen reached out, her hand shaking and tentative, to touch my mother’s neck. Keeping her fingers away from the hair splayed on the floor, she lightly probed for a beat she suspected had gone. The blood, in silent loyalty to the defeated heart that had pumped it for over half a century, became motionless in lividity. Helen had no knowledge of the changes taking place inside my mother’s body – that rigor mortis would soon set in and determine the time of death – but she knew that Katharine, her best friend and lover, had gone. That no ambulance could save her. And with this new certainty, she stood up, walked back into the kitchen and washed and replaced her teacup. She grabbed her coat and all the keys from the table. Then slowly, and with deliberate care, she walked towards the front door and opened it just enough to create an exit. As she stood on the doorstep, her hand poised to pull the front door shut behind her, she hesitated before locking herself out. She knew that I would be the next person to put my key in the lock. That the sight of my mother’s broken neck at the bottom of the stairs would begin a search for answers that only she could end.

  If you want to find Katharine, look for Helen. My grandmother, for all her confusion, had been spot on. The journalist in me – perhaps in a subconscious attempt to supplant the grief that had felt too normal, too ordinary – had got busy, sifting through the fragments of her life, and in the end it had been a bitter old woman with advanced dementia in a care home who had delivered the truth. Katharine Rowan, 51, had been murdered by her lover in her own home.

  Except it wasn’t murder. The charge brought against Helen was manslaughter; she hadn’t wilfully pushed my mother down the stairs, but her failure to call an ambulance and the action of leaving her where she lay were enough, in the police’s eyes, to justify charging her.

  The trauma of those days; not just Helen’s arrest and the hearing, but the slow trickle of her account of what happened that morning. The only saving grace was Tom. He stood beside me, first as a reluctant friend and then as an even more reluctant boyfriend. We have come back together, slowly, and while his caution pains me, I am grateful for his gradual forgiveness.

  But I can’t forgive Helen. Despite the police’s best efforts, the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of prosecution. The evidence against her was largely circumstantial and, with the absence of any other witness to my mother’s fall, there was no real way to challenge her version of events. And in many ways, I don’t want to challenge them. Strange as it may sound, I believe her. I believe that in a moment of madness, she let go of my mother. Driven to exasperation by a lifetime of dependence and denial, she gave my mother what she wanted. A way out. The book. I don’t know.

  She never tried to get in touch with me. She never made any attempt to really explain. To me. To the child my mother had wanted and loved despite all it cost her. Her body had been my way into the world, and then the means by which I was able to understand how she lived and died. Passed away. The euphemisms sit more easily now.

  On 20 January 2013, almost a year after her death and what would have been her fifty-second birthday, I scattered her ashes in the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park. It was early in the morning and the sun was just starting to warm the frozen ground. I had informed Christopher of my plan the week before but, unable to justify another expensive flight to the UK, he was content for me to perform this final ceremony alone. And so as I walked past the dormant camellias to the shallow stream that skirted the larger pond, I thought of all that my mother had been before she was an unremarkable body or a weight of incinerated dust in a cardboard box and as I stood on the bridge and tipped her ashes over the side, leaving all that remained of her to the wind and the water, I forced myself to smile, knowing – as I did so – that tears would rise to meet my emotion. I’d given her to a place where I knew she had been happy. The breeze, in an act of unexpected generosity, took some of the fine dust and scattered it on my hair. As I walked to the other side of the bridge to watch her flow downstream and away from me, I was able to say my own goodbye.

  My father divided up the money from the sale of the house equally between Christopher, Ellie and me, keeping enough in reserve to pay off his own mortgage and other debts. He and Jenny are currently looking at houses in Guildford.

  Christopher and Steph have put a down payment on a bigger house in Melbourne and, perhaps as a result of doing so, finally decided to set a date for their wedding. The ceremony will be in Steph’s hometown of Cranbourne, about twenty-five miles from central Melbourne. Tom began researching flights before I’d hung up with Christopher. He’s already booked the time off work and is busy devising hikes through the Alpine National Park. The purchase of a cork hat is, I fear, inevitable.

  Ellie has disappeared into another busy semester at Kingston University. My father bought her a car so she can commute between New Malden and Kingston. She’s already put a deposit down on a house she plans to rent with some uni friends next year.

  Andrea is going out with a Polish builder called Aleksander. He bought the flat above hers in Tooting and quickly set about renovating it. Andrea was on hand to offer tea, biscuits and a curiosity in building materials that even Aleksander – relatively new to the country and with limited English – could see was disingenuous.

  ‘So how did you do it, then?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Get him to take you seriously.’

  ‘I invited him downstairs to see the damp patch.’

  ‘Is that some horrible euphemism?’

  ‘No! You know, the bit behind the sofa, just above the skirting board.’

  ‘OK. And what did he say?’

  ‘He started talking about DPCs. And how he’d have to take the skirting board off to have a look. So I said I’d make him some lunch if he got his tools out.’

  ‘Christ.’

  We’ve been out to dinner – the four of us – and had them over to ours once. Tom spent so much of the preceding afternoon fretting over the state of my flat, nailing cable clips to the walls and resealing the kitchen work surface, all in anticipation of Aleks’s judgement, that I vowed never to do it again.

  Two we
ekends ago we drove out to East Grinstead to have lunch at his parents’ house. I’ve met them once before; they stopped by his flat in Wimbledon one Saturday afternoon on their way into London. But this was my first visit to his family home. He was keen to show me his bedroom, a carpeted blue box with single bed (skirted by valance) and a Nirvana poster on the wall.

  He sat down and invited me to join him. I closed the door behind me and sank down beside him. The mattress was old and soft with age. He put his arm around me. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What am I thinking?’ I whispered.

  ‘That you never thought you’d make it. Here. To the cave of carnal pleasure.’

  I laughed loudly. ‘I didn’t realise I was about to be pleasured. Don’t you want to play with your Transformers first?’

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘Not at all. This is a very sexual room. I mean, look at the Bart Simpson pencil case. That’s dangerously arousing.’

  ‘Yes, OK. It’s a bit adolescent. But in all seriousness, it was the scene of many a great wank.’

  ‘Such history.’

  ‘I know. And it doesn’t end there. I’m very happy to announce that you’ve been selected to perform a quick but rigorous handjob. As a thank you for coming.’

  ‘That’s very gracious of you.’

  He nodded in agreement. ‘I’m a giver. But you do make me happy,’ he said.

  I looked steadily at him. I knew not to flinch this time. ‘And you me. Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the second chance.’

  He smoothed my hair down behind my ear with his right hand and kissed me gently on the mouth. I kissed him back, my mouth open in answer. ‘You’ve missed your chance,’ he mumbled as we fell back, the mattress yielding beneath us.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For a handjob. You’ve missed your chance. I won’t accept anything less than full sexual intercourse now.’

  ‘In that case, I think you’d better ask your mum and dad if I can stay.’

  Last week I covered a student march along the Embankment; they were protesting against government plans to raise tuition fees. As I walked with the crowd, swept along by shouted slogans and chanting, I looked across the river to the South Bank and remembered, in the midst of all that noise and activity, my mother’s head bent low over the books under Waterloo Bridge, quietly looking for a title she recognised. And then telling me to do the thing that would make me happy. So I understand, in a way I couldn’t before her death, that while nothing is unremarkable and there’s plenty that’s worth shouting about, there is also a lot to be said for quiet. And I am quieter now.

  Acknowledgements

  In order to thank people for their involvement in this book I must explain that I wouldn’t have had the idea if it weren’t for my aunt, Teresa Cummins. I went to visit her in January 2007, eleven months after the death of her mother, my grandmother. Teresa lit the fire and showed me the post-mortem report. And as the flames kindled, so too did the idea that a story about how somebody lived could be just as compelling as how they died. That an unremarkable body does not mean an unremarkable life.

  To my mum, Mary Lodato, who listened to my idea with excitement and encouraged me to get writing. I am so grateful for you and your belief in me.

  To my dad, Giuseppe Lodato, for promising to buy all the books I ever write. Literally all of them. Your pride in me is a precious gift.

  To my brother, Paul Lodato, for his legal knowledge and enthusiasm for my story.

  To my sister, Emma Lodato, whose good humour, love and loyalty make me wealthy.

  To my uncles, Kevin and Paul Hegarty, and my aunt, Fionnuala Forbes, I know your own stories are closely bound up in the chapter headings of this book. Thank you for lending me pieces of you.

  To my husband, Jim Cowell, who made this new life possible for me. You are the very best of men. It was my great fortune to marry you.

  To Maddie and Thomas, your arrival in this world helped me find my place in it. This book is for you.

  To my mother and father-in-law, Jennifer and Bill Cowell, for cheering me on and helping me find the time to write.

  To the teachers in my life: James Orchard, Polly Evernden and Niels Kelsted, for their red pen and reassurance.

  To my early readers: Shumon Basar, Rosie Cowell, Donna Dove, Anna Banicevic, Dahlia Basar, Charlotte Morton, Caroline Aird-Mash, Janine Coombes and Sarah Hodges, who encouraged me – in their different ways – to keep going.

  To my friends: Louise Patke, Jess Starr, Alex Knights and Alice Thatcher, for their love and support.

  To Linda Rothera, for giving her time and expertise so generously.

  To Lucy and Simon Jones, Louise Qureshi and Richard Cove, for their medical insights and guidance.

  To Rich Coombes, for his photography.

  To Kevin Boys, for his inspirational sculpture in Angel tube station.

  To Dexter Petley of the Writers’ Workshop: my first reader, champion and voice of reason.

  To Jane Cobley, Martin Wallis and Kevin Rhoades, for a final steer in the right direction.

  To Caroline Ambrose and the Bath Novel Award.

  To my agent, Alice Lutyens, whose close eye and perceptive edits turned my dream into a reality. I will never be able to thank you enough.

  To my editor, Arzu Tahsin, for writing an email that made me cry with happiness. I know I landed safely with you.

  To Jennifer Kerslake, Rebecca Gray, Craig Lye and the rest of the team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  And Ursula Hagerty. Always Ursula. Whose life was a lesson in courage and death a lesson in loss. Your absence peoples these pages.

  About the Author

  Elisa Lodato grew up in London and read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After graduating she went to live in Japan, where she spent a year teaching, travelling and learning to speak the language. On returning to the UK she spent many happy years working for Google before training to become an English teacher. Helping pupils to search for meaning in a text inspired Elisa to take up the pen and write her own. An Unremarkable Body is her first novel and was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award 2016. Elisa lives in Surrey with her husband and two children.

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  Copyright

  A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This ebook edition published in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Copyright © Elisa Lodato 2017

  The right of Elisa Lodato to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  978 1 4746 0636 3

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

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