Multitudes

by Lucy Caldwell

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘Do both then. I don’t need them to be any good, I just need to show I’ve done them.’

  I started on the magnusiana, a thick purple spike and frail silvery leaves. For a while, both of us drew in silence. ‘Did I tell you I bumped into Veronica?’ I found myself saying.

  ‘Veronica?’ Molly said. ‘Veronica Moore?’

  ‘Yeah. Veronica Moore.’ Veronica had been our babysitter when we were younger, in our old house, when her family lived next door. Sometimes, if she was looking after us during the day, she’d take us to have orange squash and biscuits in her house. We’d watched over the hedge between our front gardens as she’d spray-painted her Doctor Martens purple then had to spray-paint them again a week later, black this time, when her boyfriend said he couldn’t stand the colour.

  ‘Where did you bump into her?’

  ‘In a bar, just.’

  Molly waited for me to go on. ‘And?’ she said, when I didn’t.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, and she rolled her eyes.

  ‘It was funny to see her,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly said, vaguely.

  *

  I couldn’t explain how strange it had been to see Veronica Moore, to see her and to think that there was hardly any difference between us now. The handful of years had been a gulf, but it had shrunk, to the extent that we could find ourselves in the same East London bar. It had seemed impossible, somehow – magical.

  ‘Hi,’ I’d said, drunk and incredulous. ‘Veronica, it’s me,’ and I’d insisted on dragging her through the crowds to meet my friends. ‘This is Veronica,’ I’d announced. ‘She used to be my babysitter.’ A couple of people had greeted her, polite but uninterested, and the others sized her up and dismissed her. I’d felt my face burn for her. ‘She used to be my babysitter,’ I said again. She was wearing a neat fitted dress and nude court shoes, too much make-up, straightened hair. She looked like a secretary, I realised, and my face burned all over again on my own account. I had tried to think of something more to say and couldn’t think of a thing.

  ‘Well,’ she’d said eventually, ‘I’d better get back to—’ and she gestured at the man she was with, flustered now, and I’d wondered if I had interrupted a date.

  ‘Okay!’ I’d said, then, not knowing what else to do, blurted out, ‘We must swap numbers and meet up!’

  She’d blinked. ‘Sure,’ she’d said, and recited her mobile number to me. ‘Right, well. Say hi to your mum from me.’

  ‘I will do!’ I’d said. The exclamation marks were too loud at the end of every sentence I spoke, I could hear them.

  ‘She spray-painted her DMs purple once and then had to spray-paint them black because her boyfriend said he couldn’t stand the colour purple,’ I’d said, to no one in particular, and no one had heard or bothered to reply.

  *

  I stood up. I walked across the dining room to the sideboard, where Molly’s mail-order tillandsias sat in their sealed plastic bubbles in individual polystyrene blocks. They made you think of moon landings, of other worlds. Cape Canaveral on Blue Peter. Of the craze in primary school for astronauts’ ice cream in freeze-dried powdery blocks. Molly’s project was a good project.

  ‘Are you going to do Art?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Like for A Level.’

  ‘Nu-uh. To do biology you need to have Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths. It’s just to show I’m well rounded.’

  ‘It’s a good project,’ I said.

  She looked at me. We’d been close as children, despite the four years between us, but I’d been awful to her in our teens. I’d banned her from wearing clothes like mine, even from doing her hair like mine. We didn’t look alike, not enough that you’d know straight away that we were sisters, and when she started secondary school I’d refused to acknowledge her in the corridors. She’d had buck-teeth and glasses; I’d feared she’d be social death for me.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, still wary, still suspecting a trap.

  *

  For the rest of that week, I helped Molly with her sketchbook after dinner. I even redid her hasty charcoal drawings for her, copying her style as closely as possible, so Ms Donnelly wouldn’t suspect. Then it was finished and there was no more to do. I wandered through to the kitchen where Mum was folding laundry. ‘Mum?’ I said, leaning my head into her neck.

  ‘Yes, love?’ She stopped folding for a moment, stroked a loose strand of hair back from my forehead. Her fingers were dry and calloused. I thought suddenly of the tub of Atrixo on the window sill above the sink when we were growing up, of sinking my own fingers into the greasy cold white cream. The memory was so vivid that for an instant I could smell it. Atrixo, onions and garlic frying, the chill damp air when you pressed your nose up against my father’s herringbone overcoat. It all welled up inside me, what I’d done, what I’d lost. My throat ached. ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ my mother said.

  *

  We’d seen the Leah Betts video at school, in Third Form. The youth worker who visited the school to screen it had one ear pierced to show he was cool, but his bad stubble rash and obvious embarrassment at being in an all-girls’ school let him down. We sensed his discomfiture and during his introductory talk we were merciless, outdoing each other with scenarios in which people might offer you drugs and saying ‘No’ would not be possible. The scenarios were outlandish, preposterous. It was nigh-on impossible to get drugs in Belfast then anyway; that’s what people said. Thank heavens for small mercies, is what my parents said.

  The mood changed when he showed us the video. Even as Leah Betts blew out the birthday candles on her own cake and the camera flashed and clicked to capture it, she only had an hour left to live. ‘She said that her head was hurting,’ Leah’s best friend said, ‘and she couldn’t feel her legs, and she wanted her mum.’ That had been the scariest thing: it had happened in her own home, in her living room, with her family there. The video made a lot of this, showing a still of the peach bathroom sink where Leah Betts had got the water that killed her, then a lingering close-up of the cold tap itself with its acrylic handle, the plug chain slung casually around it. You were never safe. Afterwards, the youth worker Blu-tacked up a poster of her, slack-jawed on a ventilator, already brain-dead, and we all cried and hugged each other and promised him and each other and ourselves that we’d never take drugs. ‘Just Say No’ was all you had to do. It was like an amulet, a magic spell to keep you safe. So long as you went through life just saying no, no harm could come to you.

  *

  There was no reason why I said, ‘Can I?’

  The first time, I’d just watched, and no one had tried to pressure me. I’d smoked a joint instead, though I didn’t like the heavy, nauseous feeling it gave me, and no one laughed or said anything about me being provincial, or conservative, or any of the other things I knew I must seem – was. The next time it was passed round, I just took it. That was the thing: you didn’t have to Say No, you didn’t even have to say yes, and besides, no one really cared. Can I? Sure. No biggie.

  They were smoking it in a bong, a trick someone had read about online, to be more economical: you needed less, and it was stronger. There was no blackened tinfoil or teaspoons and certainly no syringes. They called it ‘opium’ and had spent the past week talking about Coleridge and Shelley and Thomas De Quincey, about The Velvet Underground.

  I took the bulb and clamped my lips around the wet nozzle of the pipe and inhaled. Almost immediately my skin started tingling, then prickling, like pins and needles, and I thought that I might vomit there and then, in front of everyone, all over everyone, and I couldn’t stop thinking of Leah Betts. Ten minutes from now she’d be screaming in agony. Within half an hour she’d be dead. She thought she was fine: she was laughing and dancing and enjoying her party, but the clock was ticking for her now, and these were the last minutes, the only minutes, she h
ad left to live.

  But the shaky feeling passed, and the next time the vaporiser came round, I took it again, and this time I felt my breathing lengthen and all of the awkward, cumbersome parts of me fall away, as if for years I’d been holding my breath tightly balled in my chest until finally I could let it go, and I thought, This is it. A woozy half-hour later, I was loose-limbed and nauseous but fine. I had done it. Heroin. There was a before and after to my life now – something there’d never been before.

  It didn’t seem to change anything for the rest of them. I couldn’t get my head round that at first. For them, I realised, even as we talked about it the following day, it had been an adventure, something to do because we were young and at art school and it was the end-of-term party. There was no reason it should have been any different for me. I couldn’t explain what it was, or why it might be. It wasn’t that I had any trauma to wipe out. I hadn’t had any strange or striking ideas either, like people talked about so longingly, but then I hadn’t, anyway, before. It had been a blankness, a sense of afterwards, an atonement for something I didn’t even know needed atoning for, and it had been so easy, too easy.

  That was the thing that scared me most, in the following days, as I thought and thought about it and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Now I had done it once, what was to stop me doing it again, and again, and again? I decided I had to leave art college, and London. Maybe it was overreacting. Maybe it was just an excuse for something else entirely. But what if it wasn’t?

  *

  Molly finished her terraria project, and we went to see it at the school’s open day. The big terrarium and the cluster of little light bulbs didn’t look like they had enough space, in among all of the other GCSE and A-Level art: the photographs of someone’s pregnant aunt; the huge, Francis Bacon-inspired canvases of hanging animal carcasses; the dress riveted out of beaten, flattened Coke cans. Someone else won the Art Prize. Molly said it didn’t matter. We all, Mum, Dad and me, said she should have won it. I had won it. Molly said it really didn’t matter, she wasn’t going to do it for A Level, anyway.

  Ms Donnelly said hello but deliberately didn’t ask how I was or what I was doing. I smiled and said I hadn’t liked London, I’d missed home too much, I might reapply for the University of Ulster next year. It came out easily, and it sounded true, or at least as if it could be. I felt my parents not-glancing at each other as I said it, heard every word of their silent conversation of relief. ‘Ah, so you’re still painting, then,’ Ms Donnelly said, and I smiled and nodded, and everyone was too busy not making a big deal out of the University of Ulster to notice the lie.

  Back home, I lay on my bed, gazing at the slowly twisting terrarium. For a brief moment, I thought of smashing it, of freeing the Lego Amazon and her handful of bricks from the clutches of the spidery fern. But I thought it might hurt Molly’s feelings and so I didn’t; I just let it hang there, still turning.

  Inextinguishable

  THREE DAYS BEFORE MY DAUGHTER DIED she comes running into the kitchen, Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music.

  I would have been doing the ironing at the time. Two sons at secondary school and a husband needing a clean shirt every day, there are times when it feels I do nothing but ironing. Even your so-called non-iron fabrics need ironing.

  So in she comes, You really have to get hold of it, Mum, and she writes down the name on a piece of paper and sticks it to the fridge. And, needless to say, I immediately forget all about it.

  *

  We weren’t a classical-music sort of family. Her daddy’s tone-deaf, and as for me, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it. The children did Music in school – recorders and that – but that’s about the extent of it. Carols at Christmas. The Wheels on the Bus. My husband likes a bit of Frank Sinatra. But aside from that, the only music we really listened to was on The X Factor, or Cool FM when it came through the floorboards of one of the boys’ rooms upstairs.

  My daughter’s interest in music was unexpected, and very new. It started when she got the car. She was so proud of that car, and we were so proud of her. She hadn’t really the grades or inclination to go to university, and, besides, she’d her heart set on being a nursery assistant: she loved being around the little ones. Her brothers are five and seven years younger than her, and she just doted on them.

  She’d got a place on an early years course, only it was in the city centre, and it would have taken two buses and too long to get in and out each day. So for the whole of the summer after sixth form she worked three jobs to earn enough money to buy her own car. Daytimes she worked at the chemist’s, then four nights a week in the hotel bar, and on Sundays she worked at the old people’s home. The whole summer long. Her friends were all in Magaluf and that, Tenerife, but she just worked, and she never complained, and we were just so very proud of her.

  By the end of August she’d saved up enough, and we gave her £400 towards it too, the insurance and what-have-you, and she bought a cherry-red Citroen Saxo, five years old but hardly anything on the mileage. The only thing was, the radio was banjaxed. It was jammed on a classical station, and when you tried to tune in to CityBeat or Cool FM, all you got was static.

  When she told us this, we said that for her birthday we’d buy her an in-car CD player, but she said she actually didn’t mind, that she quite liked the classical music in the mornings. The roads are awful in the mornings, worse it seems each year, jam-packed with cars and angry people late for work, and she said it was soothing, that it helped her drive more safely.

  *

  Two days before, she says to me, Have you ordered it yet, Mum? And when I said no, she goes, For heaven’s sake, Mummy, just log on to Amazon and order yourself a copy, I’ve the name of the composer and everything written out for you. I promised I would, and I did intend to, but I didn’t.

  The day before, she logged on to Amazon and clicked and bought it herself. It arrived three days after. Three days … after.

  *

  I’m not going to talk about how she died, and immediately after. I can’t think of her like that. I don’t want anyone to be left with those images in their head, or even to have the chance to think of her like that.

  *

  We didn’t know what music to play at the funeral, and it didn’t even occur to me to look at the CD. In the end, we went for hymns the priest suggested – ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ended’ – and her schoolfriends chose one by your woman from The Pogues, her name escapes me, singing Thank you for the days …

  Back at the house, one of her friends who played the guitar did a sort of – I suppose you’d call it reggae – version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, and those of us that weren’t crying before were broken by the end.

  The CD just stayed in a pile, with all the other post that came for her, bank statements and junk mail, clothing catalogues and her magazine subscriptions, none of which I could bear, not even the charity begging letters, to open and throw away. It was at least a few months before I brought myself to deal with it, to go through the stack and contact everyone who had her on their database. And even then I didn’t throw away the envelopes, or even the plastic wrapping with her name sticky-labelled onto it, because how could you just throw it in the bin?

  When I finally opened the cardboard package and took out the CD, that Tuesday night came back to me, the damp smell of the ironing, a casserole in the oven, the boys fighting upstairs and the radio on with the news, and when she came hurrying in I told her to mind where the finished shirts were piled over the back of the chair, that she didn’t knock them off; and I didn’t properly listen to her or even ask her why. It would have been so easy to, but I was busy and dinner was going to be late, and her coming in all bursting to tell me was just one more thing adding to the noise and the chaos. Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music. How easy would it have been just to put down the iron for a second and say, Oh really? That sounds interesting, I’m a
ll ears, tell me why.

  I’d love to say I got it straight away, but the truth of it is, I didn’t. You’re sort of straight in with no warning, and it’s all clashing drums and sounds like sirens, shrieking strings. I was first of all taken aback then horribly disappointed. It wasn’t nice music – it was only noise, demonic discordant noise, and I couldn’t for the life of me hear what she’d heard in it, and I wondered if maybe she’d made a mistake. I thought maybe she heard something else entirely, and she misheard the announcer – or the announcer announced a piece that was coming up later – or even the announcer made a mistake – and I wondered was there a way to contact the station and get a list of everything they’d played that afternoon and evening on that date, because I was sure the piece she’d come in raving about could not be this. Yet she’d been so sure, and I’m certain she would have double-checked when she was buying it, listened to the clip on the website, made sure she was getting the right recording. She was like that.

  For that reason, I couldn’t quite bring myself to turn the music off. So I knelt there for her on the living-room floor, in front of the CD player like I was praying, and listened to the whole thing through, wondering over and over why on earth this, and wanting to cry. When it ended, I played it again, in despair, and I had just tried it for one last time when the boys came crashing in from school. No: not ‘crashing’, crashing’s what they used to do. Those days they tiptoed, or at least tried to. Closed the door properly rather than slamming it. Shoes wiped on the mat and off in the porch, blazers hung up. There were times I wanted to scream at them to hurtle in like they used to, muddy footprints through the hall, coats discarded where they fell, What’s for tea and straight to the fridge to see what they could scrounge and fighting over it. That afternoon they came in quietly, and when I wasn’t in the kitchen checked my bedroom, and finally found me there in the front room.