by Joanna Nadin
I press PLAY again. “I’m not able to answer the phone, but please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And again. And again. This is her, I think. These are the only words I will ever hear her say. No telling me I’ve grown, no feigned shock at my outfits, no whispering she loves me. I press the button again. Addicted to the sound. To the sense of belonging and loss. I am so caught in it I miss the front door opening, the shaking of clothes, the kicking off of shoes. Before I have time to hide it, to press PAUSE, she’s right there behind me. Her face is pale, set. And in an instant I know what she’s going to do. But I still plead.
“Don’t.”
But she does. She clicks the buttons, all of them, again and again. Until the automatic American accent echoes along the hall. “Outgoing message deleted. All messages deleted.” Then she pulls the wire out of the wall socket.
“We need some peace,” she explains. “We’re on holiday.”
There it is again.
“Besides . . .” She shrugs. “Who’s going to call us?”
Luka, I think. Nonno. Anyone. But I say nothing. Just wait for her to start humming again, to put the kettle on. Then I plug the phone back in.
HET RINGS him late at night, when she knows her father will be asleep, and her mother too out of it to notice. Will is out. At Jonty’s, or more likely drinking at the Golden Fleece. Leaning against the wall, legs stretching out catlike across the hallway, she talks softly into the receiver.
His brother Jimmy answers, laughs when he hears her whispered “Tom?” but fetches him anyway, both of them only just back from the fairground, working the Tilt-A-Whirl and the win-a-goldfish stall. Real jobs, Het thinks. They’re not the Gypsies Will calls them. Or worse.
She hears the phone clatter, words exchanged. “Tom?” she says again, hesitant this time.
But it is him. His voice hushed, too, though he has no need; his mum gone, his dad in the pub till closing every night. Maybe it’s because of Jimmy being there. She knows what his brother thinks of her. That she is stuck-up. A student. Too good for them. Not like the town girls he goes with. Hair pulled back and tops pulled down.
“When can I see you?” he asks. “Can you come now?”
She shakes her head, forgetting he can’t see her; her salt-dirty hair curling tendrils around her tanned face. Her longing.
“Het?”
“I can’t,” she says aloud. “Not tonight.” Then she pauses, thinks, decides. “Tomorrow. At the pier at ten.”
“What’ll you say?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Something. I’ll think of something.”
In the morning she tells her mother she is going to look for cowries.
Eleanor turns from her dressing-table mirror, eyelids heavy from the little white pills and rimmed with pink from crying. She looks at her daughter in the doorway. Nineteen years old, yet still lying like she did when she was nine. Keeping her skeletons, her secrets, buried inside. Eleanor wants so much to put her arms around her, to tell Het she knows where she’s going, and who with. That she understands. That she’s happy for her. But in her head she hears him. His measured words falling like fists, bruising her pale skin. That it cannot be allowed. That he will not be responsible for his actions if she condones it.
So instead she draws breath quickly, smiles, and says, “That’s nice, dear.”
THE HOUSE is full of secrets.
Over the next two days, the rain drums endlessly against the windows, its rhythm only breaking for the gusts of wind that blow it out to the sea for a few seconds before it comes back around to the glass again. Mum works out how to conjure up heat from the ancient boiler while Finn and I unearth things: a recorder, a felt kitten, a jar of cowrie shells. Mum smiles at them, at our delight in them, says, “Oh, that’s from school . . . I made it . . . I collected them.” But I can see the flicker in the corner of her eyes, the tightening of her jawbone, wincing, as though someone were pinching her slowly, secretly behind her back. And I am scared that this is just the tip of it. That somewhere in this house lies that Pandora’s box, full of things that will make her start with the pain of remembering.
I find it in the attic. Finn has begged and begged to be allowed up there, to dig around in the dust and cobwebs. Mum says, “Not now. Later.” Repeats it like a mantra. Until in the end he gives in. But then, so does she.
My timing is textbook. Finn is watching television, some program that was forbidden at home. But not here, not on holiday. And Mum has lost something, an earring, is on all fours trying to find it in the thick green wool of the carpet. I say I’ll be careful, that I won’t touch anything that might break, that I’ll watch where I put my feet.
“Fine,” she says.
I shrug, not quite believing my luck, but not saying another word in case she realizes what she’s said, changes her mind.
The ladder slides down, attached to the loft floor by a pulley system so I can’t get trapped. There is electricity, too; a single bulb lights up the rafters. Wasps’ nests cling to the beams, their paper intricacy intact despite the owners’ long-since departure. But it is what lies beneath that draws out the gasp. I expected stacked boxes, the contents detailed in fat marker pen on the sides, shipping trunks, a rail of clothes. Even old furniture, a broken chair or a long-defunct cot. But instead there is a cavernous space, echoing with silence, and, under the spotlight of the bulb, a single unmarked box.
I am sure then, in that second, that this was left for me, the rest of the junk cleared out months ago, in readiness for this moment. This is it, I think, a skeleton in a closet, or in cardboard. Maybe a real one. I knew my grandfather had been a doctor, a surgeon, after all. But when I open it, I see not the creamy yellow white of a rib cage, of a Yorick skull, but soft red leather, edged in gilt. Not a skeleton, I think. Not bones. Photographs.
I flip slowly through the stiff vellum pages, peeling back the tracing-paper sheets in between to reveal the faces of this strange family, my family. At the table at Christmas, party crackers held out in their hands, Will’s pointed like a gun at the lens. It is only the second picture I have seen of him; the first, a cracked, faded thing in a drawer at home, his name and a date in blue-black ink on the back. A school photograph, his teenage years belied by spots, his tie loosened just enough to know that the sneer isn’t an accident. A single memory, the others too painful, or too much to carry from here to London. Here he is a boy, seven or eight. Still playing cowboys and Indians, I guess. Or gangs, like Finn and his mates back in London, whooping around the street with lightsabers, until they see the real thing, or something like it.
There is one of Will and another boy, the same blond hair and ruddy cheeks as him, flushed with cold and flanking a snowman. It actually has a carrot for a nose, and a pipe. At home they wore bandanas, before the snow melted in the city fug and turned to dirty slush.
There is Mum. Aged five, aged fifteen, the same haunted look on her face. Not smiling; sullen.
And this must be Eleanor. Her mother. My grandmother. She is beautiful, like Mum. But different, too. Her hair straighter, swept back in a tight chignon, her face tighter. But her smile is as absent as Mum’s. I see the lips move in my head, form the words I heard on the answering machine: the clipped accent, the crisp consonants. And I wonder what she said to Mum. To make her scowl. To make her leave. Or was it him?
There are just four photographs of the man I take to be her father: my grandfather. Two of him stiffly holding newborns: Will and Het. Then one of him in a surgical coat shaking hands with a man in a suit, both looking into the lens. A local newspaper kind of shot. I wonder if he’d won an award. Or retired. Yet he looks young still. His hair dark, his face unlined, yet severe.
I turn to the last page, to a family shot, all of them posed together, lined up on the lawn. Eleanor smiling, her husband’s arm around her shoulder. Yet still she looks uncomfortable, strained. Next to her Will is making a face again, the collar of his rugby shirt turned up. Then Mum.
Lost. Her face turned away, looking blankly at something in the distance, to the left of whoever was calling out “Say ‘Cheese.’”
I look at the date underneath. It was taken the summer before I was born. I look hard at Mum’s stomach, but I can’t see the trace of me yet. I wonder if she knows, if they know. If this is the last time they were all together. Before I came and put some unbreachable wall between them.
This isn’t ephemera, I think. Not fleeting. Even though the bodies are gone, the bones buried or burned, the people are preserved. Captured in a single Kodak moment.
I close the album, its heavy binding snapping and sending motes of dust whirling in the beams of light. But then something bigger flutters down, a paper square, a Polaroid, twisting to the floor like a sycamore seed. It lands faceup, and I start. Because this isn’t a stranger. This is almost identical to a picture that was stuck to our fridge door with a magnet shaped like a cob of corn. Taken a second before, or a second after, its subject is the same. A fat-faced baby, mouth open, eyes tight shut, held in its mother’s arms, her face chopped off by white edging.
This is a picture of me.
“SMILE,” SAYS Martha.
And Het does. Motherhood becomes her, she knows that. Even with the cracked sleep, the endless washing and drying and feeding, she shines somehow. The weight she felt before, the torpor, a ceaseless dragging at her chest, her legs, has gone. The midwife warned her about baby blues. Fussed about having family around to help, what with the father gone. Het shook her head. Said she didn’t need them. That she had everyone she needed. Martha, and now Billie.
Billie chooses that moment to yawn. Martha laughs as she clicks the Polaroid shutter, jolts the camera, and the image spat out is missing part of its subject.
“Doesn’t matter,” says Het.
She holds the photograph between two fingers, fanning it back and forth to dry the ink. “No one wants to see me anyway.”
Martha drops her head to one side, beseeching. “Come on, I’ll take another.”
Het groans. “She needs feeding.”
Martha ignores her, holds the camera up anyway. “Say ‘Cheese,’” she says.
Het rolls her eyes, but obliges.
This time the photo is complete.
But this isn’t the image that Het chooses. It is the cutoff photo that she will send. On the wide white strip underneath she writes her daughter’s name and weight. No birth date. Because that would mean birthday cards and a knot in her stomach every year. So she picks her words carefully. Just enough so that they know she is real. And she is beautiful.
Eleanor recognizes the handwriting on the envelope. Has seen it morph from meticulously copied a’s and fat, open b’s to the close, sloped script it is today. Her delicate fingers tremble as she slides the knife under the flap, pulls it sharply away. She hears the rip of paper, the clatter of the knife as she drops it onto the table, leaving a dent that cannot be polished out, that he will poke at later, worry over. But it is the thud thud of her heart that resonates loudest, and she is glad he is already out, worries the sound would betray her.
She slips her still-shaking fingers inside the brown paper and takes out a single glossy rectangle. A burst of color, of life, it hits her full square, knocks the breath out of her. Because now she knows she has lost not just a son and a daughter, but a granddaughter, too.
She doesn’t let him see it. Of course she can’t. Instead the Polaroid hides in her handbag, thud-thudding away, a still-beating thing, reminding her, begging to be let out every time she fumbles for change or reaches for a lipstick. Then, one morning, in a burst of belief, of faith, of wanting, she knows who she can show it to. He will understand; will smile and hold her, tell her she should be proud, that she is a beautiful baby. With a beautiful grandmother.
She can see him through the gallery window. Sitting behind the wide wooden desk, his forehead creased, mouth drawn into an O as he studies a print held at arm’s length. Eleanor touches her gloved hand to the handle of the door. But she cannot go in. Her belief has deserted her, drained away, and instead she scuttles back up the hill, ashamed, empty. The photograph she slips into the torn leather lining of an album, where he will never think to look, or want to. She knows this is the last of Het. That there will be no more pictures, no more envelopes. So she places the album in a box and carries it up to the attic. It will be safe there, she thinks. He won’t find it. Then she lets the trapdoor slam shut, and gradually, in weeks, months, the thud of her telltale heart fades until all she can hear is the tick-tocking of the clock, and the screaming silence of what her world has become.
I WATCH Mum as she peels carrots at the sink. I haven’t said anything to her about the photo. Because I don’t know what words to use.
Cass used to say I wasn’t missing anything, not having a nan, seeing as hers only ever sent her kids’ stuff: kitten-covered cards and gift certificates. And anyway, I had Nonna. But now this is eating away at me. I wonder if he knew, too. My dad. If there were three photos, three fat-faced baby Billies. If he had one, still has it maybe, taped to a fridge or hidden away.
It’s raining again. An endless murky drizzle that seems to drip into your lungs, permeates your clothing until you can feel it trickle coldly down your skin. But I can’t breathe in here anymore. Need to get out. Need to start looking.
Mum looks up as I open the door. “Where are you going?”
“Just out,” I snap at her, then regret it, wish I could swallow it back. It’s not her fault, I think. She did what was best, she used to say. And I believe her.
Mum lets the words slide off her. “Be careful,” she says.
I laugh, despite myself. I’ve done sixteen years in Peckham without getting shot. Or pregnant. What can happen here?
But Mum’s not laughing. “Just. You know?”
I roll my eyes, pull my coat around me, a long wool Burberry, begged off Martha and finally relinquished in a fit of benevolence and bourbon. “I’ll watch out for wolves,” I say.
“You do that,” she says. “No wolves.”
“No wolves,” I repeat.
But I forget about the sheep’s clothing.
Seaton does what it says on the tin. The damp seems to have soaked into every surface, soaks into me as I trudge down the hill into town, collar turned up, a poor barrier against the mist of wet that runs rivulets down my neck. It has leeched the color out of everything it has touched.
I study the pale faces that pass me, checking for . . . for what? My nose? My hair? I thought I’d recognize him. That there would be that lightbulb moment, that something would shift in me and I’d know that I was part of this person. But all I see are strangers. Gray faced as the granite and pebble dash of the buildings, as the sea.
A flat, murky thing, halfhearted waves spatter onto muddy-looking sand. There are no deck chairs or donkeys here. A peeling sign on the rusting pier tells me the fairground is shuttered up until Easter. Yellow cellophane covers windows, shading out a nonexistent sun, casting a sickly jaundiced glow on everything, on dead flies and velvet Elvis pictures, china milkmaids. Only the palm trees remind me I’m in paradise: odd, air-dropped things, so out of place I have to touch one to know it is real. Like me, I think. Air-dropped exotica. Only I’m not: exotic, I mean. I pull my coat tighter around me, wishing I’d worn more. London got cold; colder even. And wet. But it was a different sort of rain. This kind drives into you, finds every seam; it even creeps into the lining of my boots so that my toes squeak damply with every step. I shiver and look around for somewhere warm, somewhere to wait in case the rain eases, though I know this is just wishful thinking.
I pass a row of arcades. I’ve been in places like them before. With Cass and Ash. Crowded around a fruit machine in Magic City, cheering and jeering at every nudge and hold. There they seemed like palaces, treasure troves; bright happy places, all fake crystal chandeliers and gilt-edged mirrors and the endless chink chink of coins clattering on metal. The promise of riches.
H
ere, a fat, pasty-faced woman sits at a one-armed bandit, feeding coins from a plastic grocery bag while a toddler dressed as Tinker Bell leans, bored, against a pinball machine. The swirling carpet isn’t thick and lush but worn and sticky with spillled soda. Spilled dreams. This isn’t a palace. No chandeliers here. Instead, fluorescent lights just reveal a patina of grease and dust on the walls.
I keep walking, and next to a locked-up gallery is an Internet café, or an attempt at one. Two computers and a Coke machine squeezed into the back of a copy shop. I buy an orange Fanta and then hand another pound coin over to a greasy-haired man who points at one of the aging Dells with nicotine-stained, nail-bitten fingers. The fingers of the incurably addicted.
I check my e-mail account, and among the spam offers of Viagra and university degrees and hope is a single message from Cass.
Where’s my bloody postcard, beeyatch? You won’t believe what Ash has done now he’s only gone and taken Stella up the Ministry of Sound and blah blah blah.
No “What’s it like? How are you? Have you found him yet?”
I hit REPLY. Type in some stuff about the house, the rain. Saying nothing, like Cass, but taking four paragraphs to do it.
Then I click on Google.
I type in all I know. Two words and a number. Tom, Seaton, and the year I was conceived.
I don’t know what I was thinking. That somehow these three magic ingredients would work like a chemistry set, conjure up a picture, a name, a person? That somewhere in the ether he would be waiting for me to uncover him? But it’s not enough. I need more clues. Need to know when he was born. Where he lived. God, I don’t even know if he came from around here. I laugh at my idiocy, at the wild-goose chase of it all. And defeated, I log out.
