Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  ‘You and whose army?’ I shouted above the wind, derisively.

  ‘That’s it!’ he yelled. ‘You’re the bane of my life, you’re going over!’ He slung one arm beneath me and wrenched me off-balance.

  This, too, was a joke he had pulled several times on our walks together, grabbing me and dragging me towards the cliff edge. David had inherited his Aunt Lorraine’s love of robust physical comedy. Pretending he was going to throw me off the cliff was a prank he never tired of. He was also fond of pointing at a button on my jacket, mid-conversation, then flicking my nose with his finger when I looked down. This always made me smile, no matter how often he did it. When I got wise to the pointing-at-the-button trick, he would invent new ways of getting me to look down; telling me I had a mark on my shirt, asking me about my brooch. It delighted him when I fell for it.

  Before, on the clifftop, I had always shrieked in alarm quickly enough to make him stop: but that day, something was different. Perhaps I had heard the joke once too often, or I was simply in a provocative mood after his neglect because instead of shrieking for mercy I yelled into the wind, ‘I’ll take you over with me!’ I wanted to push him, to see how far he would go, to unsettle him after his fortnight of silence.

  He pulled me right up to the cliff ’s edge, where it sloped sharply upwards and there was a dangerous overhang. Even then, I let him do it, thinking still that it was the old joke, that it meant nothing – but as we reached the edge and the first tickle of real alarm fluttered in my stomach, he did something he had never done before. With one swift movement of his arms and shoulders, he spun me round, so that instead of holding me face to face, he was grasping me from behind, both arms wrapped round me at chest height and holding my arms pinioned to my side. He bent forward, so that I had to bend forward too – and I could see right over the edge, to where the waves heaved and chopped against the rocky shore and the brown foam frothed beneath us. There were great, jagged lumps of concrete dumped among the rocks at this part of the coast, deposited years ago to protect the bottom of the cliffs from erosion. They were as big as cars, their corners and edges pointing menacingly upwards. If you went over at this point, you wouldn’t stand a chance. Your skull would split as easily as an eggshell.

  I let out a cry of fear, real fear, out into the freezing wind and air, and shrieked his name – I was dangling, completely off-balance, as helpless as a puppet, with only his weight behind me as counterbalance. I couldn’t believe how reckless he was being. Beneath us, the waves leapt and broke apart over the concrete blocks, grey beneath but slimy with algae. The sea smelt acrid. Gulls shrieked and dived above us.

  ‘Scared?’ he yelled into my ear. ‘Are you scared? You should be, LD!’

  ‘David! David!’ I hollered. ‘Oh my God, we’ll go over!’ He didn’t know the cliffs as well as I did. He was misjudging the overhang. For the first time since I had known him, it came to me that there was a touch of real lunacy in him – a lack of caution that could not be explained by impetuosity, a small link or wire missing in his brain in the place where most people tempered their impulses with the knowledge of the effect those impulses had on others.

  Then, just at the point when I was departing from him in my head, baulking at my own collusion with his behaviour, he straightened and pulled back from the edge. ‘We are, we are…’ he said. He wasn’t yelling any more. He still had his arms wrapped tight around me from behind. His face was buried in my hair. When he spoke, his voice was broken. I heard his words through my hair. ‘We’re going over. I’ve decided. Okay, okay?’

  He pulled me back, away from the cliff edge, and turned me to him, then held me out at arm’s length. I was shuddering from the cold, from fear, from disbelief. There was a moment when we stared at each other – him still holding me away from him. I gazed back, a question in my look. He gave the smallest of nods. I burst into tears.

  He drew his head back, laughed at me, suddenly the old David again. He pushed me away from him, then grabbed me again and gave me a small shake. ‘It’s not supposed to make you cry, LD, it’s supposed to make you happy!’

  If the overhang had given way that moment and dropped us both into the sea, I think my last thought would have been that it was worth it.

  *

  My mother got her wish. She lived to see me settled. She was wheelchair-bound by then and unable to speak. She sat at the top table, next to me. One of the nurses from the home came with her to look after her, a young black guy called Ken who mashed her salmon with a fork and chatted to her in a strong Glaswegian accent while he spooned it down her. He was a patronising boy but sweet enough. He had God, big time, and took my mother very seriously.

  After the speeches, one of David’s uncles stepped forward with a clarinet and played a passable version of ‘Stranger on the Shore’. David took my hand and pulled me on to the dance floor, a square of parquet tiling around which the tables were arranged, in a room at the back of the Milton Hotel; white tablecloths, heavy chintz curtains, the doorways and light-fittings festooned with broad ribbons tied in bows. Like most rooms in most hotels, it was overheated. The air was heavy with the scent of Aunt Lorraine’s musky perfume, mixed with a hint of the cigars David’s father and a friend had been smoking outside on the patio just before the speeches began. All day, I had been waiting to feel disappointed, waiting for a sense of anti-climax, but instead, all I felt as David pulled me towards him was an enormous and satisfied feeling of exhaustion. I allowed myself to be pulled in, folding into him and laying my head on his shoulder. He wrapped his hand around mine and held it against his chest, then bent and kissed my head. ‘I love you, Laura,’ he whispered: no sarcasm, no wit – a statement of fact, private and simple. The aunts and uncles slowly joined the dance around us and the wheezing clarinettist wheezed tunefully on. I closed my eyes, and let David lead me in a slow shuffle. Ken the nurse was pushing my mother in a gentle orbit around us. David held me close against his chest, as if nothing in the world would ever hurt me again. I couldn’t believe he was mine at last.

  PART 2

  After

  4

  Three days after my daughter has gone away; my house is full of people. I find I am thinking of Ranmali incessantly and praying she will not come to the house. Ranmali was the last person to see Betty alive.

  Ranmali and her husband have run the newsagents on Fulton Avenue for as long as I can remember. It is the nearest shop to school and stocks milk and bread along with sweets and newspapers, so most of us local mothers see Ranmali several times a week. If we aren’t dashing in at 3.25 p.m. to grab a necessity or two, we are ambling in at 3.40 p.m., distractedly attempting to calm our offspring as they shove and bump each other beside the El Dorado of the ice-cream cabinet. Ranmali is tiny, with a smile wide enough to plump her cheeks. ‘Good afternoon,’ she always says formally, with a nod, and although I know her name I cannot remember when I learned it and am sure she does not know mine. I am simply one of the herd of mothers who pass through, minds elsewhere. Lots of shops round here have signs in the window, no more than two schoolchildren at any one time, or no unaccompanied children. Ranmali seems to welcome the noisy gangs that descend on her every weekday afternoon – to me they seem more alarming than a crowd of drunks after closing time. She must know that the older boys lift stuff, from time to time. Maybe she thinks that is the price she has to pay, an occupational hazard. Maybe she likes children – she doesn’t seem to have any of her own. Her smile never falters.

  Her husband is a different matter. While Ranmali serves behind the counter, he comes out from the back room to stand and watch us all, arms folded, grim-faced. I have said hello to Ranmali for many years but I still haven’t a clue what her husband is called. We are all a little afraid of him.

  It is not Ranmali’s fault that her shop is immediately after the sharp corner where Fulton Road bends irrationally and becomes an avenue. It is not her fault that a driver came around the corner at that particular moment but all the same, I cannot
bear to see her. She was there. Perhaps she cradled my daughter’s head on her lap. Perhaps she fell on her knees in the road beside her, hands lifted palms upwards in the air. Maybe she stood by, for a moment or two, gazing down, then looked around wildly and screamed for her husband. Perhaps she stroked Betty’s face. I have imagined the scene with a thousand different variations. Ranmali’s presence is one of the few facts I have and therefore the only constant in my imaginings. My daughter, lying in the road: I should have been there, but Ranmali was there instead.

  I know that the driver was a man. I know he has been questioned and that he was not drunk and that an investigation is under way. I do not want to know any more, for I know enough to know he is not human – he is no more animate than a bolt of lightning. He did not exist until his life collided with that of my daughter.

  My house is full of people. I think about Ranmali. I think about her smiling face, transformed as she ran out of her shop after hearing the screech of brakes and a thump. Perhaps she was looking out of her window at the time. Perhaps she saw Willow being flung on to the grass verge and cannot now get the image out of her head. I think of Ranmali crying in her flat above the shop, unable to cook for her husband, rocking in a chair. I wonder if their shop is still open for business, if the other mothers fall quiet as they enter. Toni has told me people have been laying flowers on the pavement outside. I am not sure how I feel about this but think I am, in some oblique way, affronted. Toni has said she will take me to see the flowers whenever I feel ready.

  Toni, Antonia Saunders, is the blonde policewoman who broke the news to me. After she took me home that night, she sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea and explained that I would be appointed a family liaison officer who would guide me through the procedures that followed.

  I looked at her. ‘I want you,’ I said.

  Gently, she explained to me that it was usual for the family liaison officer to be someone different from the person who brought the news to a family’s door. ‘I’m not FLO-trained,’ she added.

  The acronym reminded me of my professional life – the NHS, an organisation that would collapse in a puddle of taxpayers’ pennies were it not for acronyms. ‘This FLO-training,’ I said, ‘how long is it?’

  She gave a small, tight smile. ‘Six days,’ she said softly.

  ‘I want you,’ I repeated.

  ‘I’ll speak to my Inspector,’ she said. ‘We’re a small unit out here.’ I wasn’t sure whether she meant that they were short- staffed as a result, or whether she was close enough to her Inspector to get what she wanted.

  I didn’t tell her the real reason why I wanted her: it wasn’t in spite of the fact that she had brought the news to my door, it was because of it. She and the young male officer together formed the bridge I had just crossed, from my old life with Betty in it to the new, unimaginable one without her. Bridges can be crossed both ways.

  My house is full of people but Toni is the only person I can bear. I am neurotically attached to her. She has given me her mobile phone number, along with an explanation that it will be turned off when she is off-shift, but she is around a lot anyway. I find her vastly preferable to the people who know and care for me, who have filled my house. David is here all day but leaves at night to go back to Chloe and the baby. He plays with Rees a lot. Rees understands only that Betty is not around and that lots of people have come to be with him so he won’t be lonely. There is a lot of food in the kitchen, so as far as he is concerned, the atmosphere is festive. He is enjoying the attention.

  Julie from across the road has taken charge of my kitchen, which is the hub of activity in a busy house. When friends and neighbours come with food in plastic tubs or Pyrex dishes – which they do a lot – she labels it and puts it in the fridge. Mrs Cracknell, a widow from the end of the road, sits at the kitchen table dressed in the sort of dark brown dress my mother would have called a frock, wringing a hanky in her lap. Julie gives her tasks from time to time out of kindness – making hot drinks usually. We all drink hot drink after hot drink: tea, coffee, herbal infusions. Some of them, I don’t even recognise the taste. I drink whatever I am given – the hotter the better as I am frozen to the core – but I cannot eat a thing. Between them, Julie and Mrs Cracknell run a wellorganised outfit, dealing with the physical needs of our many visitors. I might feel a vague sense of gratitude were it not for my low-level but persistent anger that anyone is in the house at all. These people are here because Betty is gone. I want them gone and Betty back.

  My role in all this activity is simply to exist, to breathe and to carry on breathing. That is all that is expected from me as I move from room to room. If I go up the stairs, for instance, and meet someone such as Aunt Lorraine descending, she flattens herself against the wall and allows me to pass without comment. When David’s father comes into the hallway from the kitchen and sees me standing there alone, in front of the mirror, he stops, then turns and goes back into the kitchen, even though he has his coat on and is clearly attempting to leave the house, as if I am an empress whose frown holds mortal sway, someone to be skirted with great care. Once in a while my son, wearying of the attentions of others, approaches me and clambers on my lap, or comes and stands next to me and hugs my legs. When he does this, I am aware of the other people in the room watching surreptitiously, holding their breath almost, as if I am made of glass and Rees’s fleeting but ardent affection might shatter me. At such times, I want to scream at them all to fuck off. But there is no energy for screaming. There is no energy for anything except the motions of the day; sit in a chair in one room, sit in a chair in the other; drink the hot drink I am given and ignore the food on a plate before me.

  At night, there are fewer people but there are always several who stay over. The Empress must not be left alone. I sleep in Betty’s bed now, as I have done since the night I came back from the hospital, her duvet with the overblown purple flowers on it tucked tight around me and her impressively various zoo of soft toys lined across the foot of the bed. My bed, which I cannot bear to lie on, is available for guests. Aunt Lorraine uses it sometimes. Often, someone sleeps downstairs as well, sometimes David’s sister Ceri, sometimes Julie or another neighbour. The spare duvet is rolled up each morning and stuffed behind the sofa. Someone has brought round extra pillows. I lie awake at night, staring at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars on Betty’s ceiling, imagining that I am her. During the day, I want nothing but sleep.

  Apart from the regular visitors, there are people who come only once, and those are the people I hate most of all. They come for their own reasons, all needing affirmation from me, wanting to touch the hem of my garment. Sally, Willow’s mother, is one of them. She is in the kitchen when I descend mid-morning, three days after what has happened. I stand in the doorway and stare at her. She comes to me and holds out her arms. I stay stock still while she puts those arms – her fat, hot arms – around me.

  I realise something is expected of me, so I say, ‘How is Willow?’

  Sally steps back from me and has the nerve to look coy. ‘She’s still on the special ward, the one where they…’

  ‘The HDU,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, the High Dependency Unit, they just want to make sure.’

  I look at Sally’s round, owlish face, with her big blue eyes all wide and open, stretched alarmingly with the effort of not saying anything inappropriate.

  Still alive then, is what I want to say, on the HDU all strapped up with drips and whatnot and next to the nurses’ desk where they can keep a close eye, but still alive. They don’t allow parents to sleep on put-you-ups in the HDU. They have to keep the spaces next to the beds clear in case they need to bring in a crash team unexpectedly, so the parents with the most ill children get the least sleep, but still it’s better than having your child in intensive care. I can picture my Betty in the HDU. I can picture how annoyed I would get having to sleep in a chair beside her bed and be woken up every few minutes by the nurses’ chatter at the desk, how I would plead for
her discharge, not realising how lucky I am, how much worse it could have been.

  I look at Sally oozing sympathy and think, I’ve never liked you. We were only friends because our daughters were friends, and now everyone will think I avoid you because my daughter has been taken away and yours hasn’t but actually it’s because I never liked you in the first place and it’s a relief not to have to pretend I do. I turn away, stiffly, and Sally gazes at me as I turn, her face open and distressed, and if I had the energy I would punch her with a closed fist.

  *

  Then comes the horror of Betty’s funeral. It comes in a series of pictures: Aunt Lorraine and Julie dressing me in my bed room, like a doll, buttoning my blue jacket and slipping on the kitten-heeled shoes I have only ever worn for job interviews – they have silver bows on the front, so even though they are black, I think of them as my silver shoes. Then, the town is passing by on the drive to the crematorium, the world unnaturally hushed from the inside of our sleek, sealed car. There is a single cloud in the sky. A boy cycles along a pavement sitting upright, with his arms crossed. All is quiet as we drive yet at the same time it is obvious that for others, outside the car, normal life is continuing. Two women walk down the street. They cross the road when we pull up at the lights. Other people drive past in other cars: talking, laughing, as if nothing is wrong. Then we are inside the crematorium and the next picture is the procession of the coffin. Why white? Why not blue, or purple – colours that she liked? I hate the white. I can’t understand why everyone seems to require so little of me. David stands next to me, his brother-in-law on the other side, like bodyguards. David’s sister holds her own children and cries. Chloe has come with the baby and is two rows behind, weeping audibly, in bits. David’s parents are in the row between me and Chloe, alongside Aunt Lorraine, who is holding Rees on her lap. I want him on my lap but he seems all right where he is. Tears run down my cheeks throughout but I do not sob, I do not give way. It is an event that has nothing to do with my daughter. It is an intoned series of references to someone who is in a white box with gilt handles and who lived life to the full, apparently. I have grasped that Betty has gone but it is as if she has been vaporised. This ceremony is hell, but a hell for no reason, unconnected with the girl I loved and what has happened to her. It is just something to be got through so that I can get back to thinking about Betty. When I pray, and I do, I pray merely for this appalling charade to be over.