by Lulu Allison
Mum – I feel it spooling out from her even here – is reshaped by sorrow. When I died it broke her heart. Her heart has stayed broken; that break has handicapped the rest of her. It is terrible to see that pain-filled vastness inside her. She has pulled tight around herself to keep it all hidden, the sorrow that marbles her bones, coats her organs, decides her fate. She is diseased with sorrow. Yet I see her smile, talk, laugh. I have seen her with the usual group of old friends, laughing and having fun. It felt as comforting to me as if I were a child going to sleep in her lap. Those adult faces that accompanied my childhood, contributed guidance and steps and gifts to my growing up. And my darling mum, loved by them and laughing happily in their company. But I could still see her disease. It glittered through her skin like the darkness waiting. Sophie knows her so well; I think she sees it too. She is such a gentle worrier, such a kind and loving friend, she would know what is plain to see. I wish I knew what to do, to pull that blackness out. The blackness is for me. Not for Mum.
There. I catch, suddenly, a thread. A time when I was younger, sullen in that ordinary way of a teenager, but not opposed to walking in the woods with Mum. As we walked through the part of the woods where the bluebells were thickest, Mum suddenly turned off the path and walked into the middle of them.
‘Look, Caitlin!’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘No, I mean just the colour, look at it! It’s wonderful.’ She stood with her arms vaguely lifted outwards to encompass the yearly manifestation of colour that billowed across the woodland floor, buzzing in an ecstatic hover between purple and blue. Her face held a blissful half-smile of idiot pleasure, and for once I could see what she meant. The colour was wonderful. For the rest of the walk and when we got home, eating our pizzas and cheesecake that Dad went out to buy specially, Mum was in a happy, almost elated mood. It was easy to absorb her joyfulness, and soon Dad and I were as elevated as she. It was a very happy evening. Today’s happy evening was brought to you by the colour purple.
She would do that quite often. She would stop to absorb the sight of something that she suddenly found irresistible. She would always offer up what she was seeing for us to share, but I knew that in those moments she was expressing part of herself that didn’t need company. As an art history lecturer, she spent her life looking at paintings, artworks, filling her eyes with arrangements that had been created, if not inevitably to please the eye, to fill it. To be made sense-full by the cast of a human eye. She was serious about her work, absorbed, critical, excited often, irritated or angry at least as often. But it was only with scenes that happened by accident, or without the human view in mind, that she seemed to have this welling-up of wonder. She rarely articulated any thoughts about what she was looking at, certainly never subjected it to the dismantling analysis that in her work life she applied like a knife to various artworks, both to revere and revile. But she did offer the chance to share in her looking. Look, Caitlin, how beautiful it is! It might be a distant view, the accidental coincidence of building materials in an old part of a town, a decaying leaf. It might be something I couldn’t spot at all.
It tears at me. To see my mum like this, to know how unhappy she still is. As weak as he is, as ineffectual in life as he is, he remade my mum. He tore her inside out and remade her. She is remade by the consequences of his acts. She is battered by my death. My death, my death, my death. Not even my absence, but my death. My death has killed something in her. As death has caused me to cede all of myself to hurtling and rushing, it has caused her to be bound in rigid stillness, held immobile under weighted coils of grief.
Chapter 5
The trip to London, though unproductive, was a useful escape from the confines of home. There was no expectation of seeing Ryan, and for that time, he was not the central black spot of her thoughts. Back at home, he once more takes up her whole view. She retraces her sighting of him so often, so minutely, desperate for clues that would tell her things are not going well for him, equally desperate for signs that he prospers. She torments herself with how young he still looked, how much life still lies before him. She thinks he can only have been out of prison a little while, though she has made a policy of ignoring any mail that may have given her concrete information. She didn’t even know if she would have received any. But she had known somewhere, without deliberation, that the time for his release was due. It had been easy to think that shame would keep him away. It had been easy to hope.
She has been fending off messages and calls from Michael, from Sophie, from other friends. If only she were somewhere with no phone contact. If only she did not have to deal with it all. She listens to their messages impatiently, not liking to worry them. But it is impossible to talk about. What is there to say? They would begin their careful herding, their Anna-management. She knows it is love that orchestrates their actions; she knows herself how hopelessly far she could fall and understands her friends wishing to stop her falling again. But there he is. It takes more than common sense and self-preservation to know such a thing and understand how to live with it. He will live his life. And she is meant to believe that he has paid.
Dark thoughts chatter and scratch. Revenge is too grand a term. But retaliation, the lashing of violence sent back to its sire… Stop. She reaches, in spite of her frustration with the strategy, for the whisky bottle. The whisky soothes. She finds a calmer wish, for absence, not death. Yes, if she were in another place, she could at least guarantee she would not see him. She should just leave. She thinks briefly in terms of opportunity, of dreams from long ago – a move to mountains, a long slow drive down the northwest coast of America starting with an old friend in Seattle, a sabbatical in Barcelona. Plans that included a young Michael, a young Anna. Plans that depended, she sees quickly, on lapsed opportunities. And she doesn’t want to plan a grand trip or a relocation; she just wants to be somewhere else. A holiday will do – it will provide a quick fix and a way out of the stultifying, stressful drag of the last few days. If she leaves in a couple of weeks, she can avoid Christmas too. She leaves the whisky unpoured and makes tea before settling with purpose at the kitchen table.
The small screen lights up, a gateway if not to oblivion then at least to retreat. With just a few words entered in the search bar she has a multitude of choices. For some time, she lazily paddles through the keenest advertisers, the ones who have got themselves to the tops of pages. Endless swipes of electric blue seas, water that looks potent, like toilet cleaner, beaches that are empty enough to presume human life (and all other garbage) has been Photoshopped out. Or destroyed, along with ninety-nine per cent of all germs. There is so much choice that choice seems impossible. She decides to search for breaks that include spas and retreats, the kind of holiday that a middle-aged woman can buy without qualm or attention. The kind of holiday that she could tell her friends was not a panic-driven running away, but a longed-for treat, something desired rather than necessary. Though usually cautious, she is financially comfortable on a good pension and with savings from Michael’s share of the house. Sophie is always trying to get her to be reckless, spend a bit, live a bit. If she throws in the idea of luxury, they will understand her sudden change of plan in cheerful terms. It will, ludicrously, she thinks, make more sense to them than the simple wish to be elsewhere.
She sweeps through the choices. More palm trees, more massage and yoga sessions, more fat towels and cold drinks, more elaborate and enticing dishes glinting with oil in warm light. Anna has decided that she wants to be gone; having to decide where to go is tedious. Now she has given herself permission to be excessive, the choice is mind-numbing. But after all, numbness is precisely the offer. Numbness of mind and soul, a blanket of comfort to numb out the real world. She can’t disapprove of a state of numbness, a state she has assiduously cultivated in herself. But this version has a richness that is unpalatable for her dry-stick appetites. Numbing down with a smile, a contented baby, drifting into milky-bliss sleep. She doesn’t want comfort and luxury;
she wants value-pack oblivion.
Could she leave for good? Curiously, it is also love that blocks the perfect escape. Love blocks in front; cowardice and habit, chained weights, drag behind and slow her down. Love for those dear, meddlesome friends whose goodwill sometimes proves so vexing. She does not want to say goodbye to them – she simply wants to be free of their solicitous intrusion. She blames herself, of course, her rattling, reeling and careening sometimes really did require the attention of others. She has been so steady for so long. But now and then, when a storm blew through a window it was no longer possible to fully close, she spun and teetered ever closer to the edge, and it was their steadying hands that stopped her falling. It was too often, too recent, for them to have given up the duty of care. But it was long enough ago for them all to be encouraging her into more productive ways of spending her time.
Poor Anna, they must think, she needs to fill her time with something valuable. Hence Moira’s dogged pursuit of the idea that Anna write about her research into female mediaeval artists, and Sophie’s transparent enthusiasm for almost anything that seemed to be even remotely an opportunity, a reason to be busy. And yet, it is the care her friends give her that creates value, that stops death or oblivion being a reasonable proposition. In seeking to fill her time, they fill her with love. She is precious enough to them for them to stop her falling. She is a thing of value to her dear friends. To herself, she is a stubborn puzzle, a confusion and a chore.
Back to the holiday search. Sunny skies and sparkling seas swish by under her languid, sweeping hand. As if she is already there, gently paddling a lilo across the flat, lurid pools. Far from assuaging wants, these perfect brochures create them, a restless unfulfillment forever ensuring return. A sleight of hand, to create a sense of want by providing something, a subtle, small trick practised on an enormous, ubiquitous scale. If what was on offer was really what we wanted, they would not need to seduce so ferociously. But want it she does. Luxury is the disguise, a cashmere coat thrown over the ragged tracksuit of her cherished isolation. She is buying off those dear friends by throwing out a bit of cash; exorbitance is the proof of her authentic desire.
The electric blue is hurting her eyes; no ikat-strewn cabin or palm-shaded bar stands out. She turns from the screen, looks instead to her thoughts. Where does she want to go? She doesn’t want to go anywhere. Where would she want to go if she wanted to go somewhere? That useful, annoying trick question. Turkey, Jamaica, Zurich, Morocco, Barbados, Slough, Baghdad, the woods, home, nowhere. She flip-flops between encouraging Scout leader and recalcitrant, sarcastic teen. She is not helping herself very much. Another cup of tea, another search term. Where to go when you don’t want to go anywhere, when you just want to not be here. No answers. Where to go. Away from the danger of seeing Ryan again. Away from the cardboard charade, the grime-edged enactment of unity, harmony, family. She has no family. Christmas, with its oblivious cheer and goodwill, is a curse, a slap, an outrageous reminder. So, back to the blue promise. Where are the holidays where retreat means just that? Not a retreat with massage, with oils, with hot tubs, with meditation classes, with painting, with mindfulness. No no no, just retreat. Not moving from one table of riches to another table groaning under the weight of a different cuisine. She wants to retreat under the table, with a blanket and a book.
The holidays that work often do so because they provide simplicity, narrowing life to its more basic components. The complications of regular daily life unreachable, irrelevant, blown away in an instant like a ball of dandelion seeds. A simplification of surroundings, a lessening of voices. Perhaps amongst the happiest times of her life were the two weeks spent in a cottage in East Anglia with Michael. They saw no one, did nothing, went nowhere. She remembers the mornings – his young dark head on a worn pillow, the fine planes of his shoulder under the mothy sheet. Clear, flat light held at bay by their laziness and the limp, floral curtain. The bedroom was small, unexciting, shabby, with strange angles to bump heads where the roof intruded backwards, into the house. The kitchen, mismatched and gloomy with sputtering gas rings and far too many browned china basins; how many steamed puddings can one kitchen produce? There was a fire and an uncomfortable sofa, a garden with a broken cement path and ragged borders, what might have been neglected raspberry canes draped in fallen green netting. They walked, went out to shop for food, but mostly they stayed inside, happy to be on this grown-up adventure of a holiday. Where it all began. She was very happy those gentle honeymoon weeks, the softening time, when they melted, became one, cemented themselves to each other. Impossible to imagine then how that bond would break, how it would fracture like the path from the back door of that worn, blissful little house. But not then, not for a long time. Many years for which she senses, elusively, that she could be grateful. But some things are too hard and too far away. Some things are hooped by such angry coils.
Search: self-catering holiday Christmas. Looking for a self-catering break over Christmas? Want to unite your family in one place? No, she wants to sit in a tidy, bland room on her own. Try again. Still more about meeting up with your family, organising your family get-together. Solo holidays: even worse. The first option offers carol singing and sparkling festive fun with fellow solo guests. Mature singles holidays: they insist relentlessly in presuming that she wants to mingle with like-minded travellers. Back to hotels. Search: hotels where no one talks to you. No result. So, perhaps a big, anonymous hotel, in Slough or anywhere else. Big, quiet hotel. First option is in Cambodia, could be interesting. Next possibility, Portugal, south, though in winter not a believable choice. What floats, what is she likely to do? Something she has done before and wants to repeat – she hasn’t the imagination now to invent a new idea. She thinks of the places she has been. France, too close. Turkey, she was too happy with Michael when they went to Turkey, that may seem like she is creeping back to the edge, perhaps. Alarms will sound. Klaxons of concern summoning her keeper-friends. Though all who know her understand that she does not yearn for their former relationship, they might construe that she yearns nostalgically for happier days. America, so many options, too much Christmas. Fiji. Beautiful Fiji, she always wanted to go back there. One day she will. This time she doesn’t want her escape to require planning; she wants an easy, quick trip. She wants to go to the airport and be gone. Tenerife, where she had taken a break with friends many years before. It is an easy flight. Hot and dry, that volcanic landscape was odd enough to love, curious enough to warrant a return. And the steady sun would warm her bones. Tenerife is the place to go. That steady sun will be her visa, her pass out of here. She searches long enough to find and then book the flight, the hotel, a taxi even. After all, she leaves in less than a fortnight.
*
I sift the ribbons, find the beginning, before the fray and pull. When all was beauty, all was love. The amber glow of ordinary happiness ushered in the gold of summer, the beginning. The time when the impossible end became the possible. In beautiful warm spring, I was waiting for my plans and dreams to become the same thing. I wanted to be an engineer. Working hard, studying, waiting for my world to gloriously expand. Learning, for me, was a pleasure, a self-paced adventure in new worlds. I worked hard to build a structure, ordered but readable, familiar enough to allow the free swoop of learning. For me, this was adventure. Give shape to the world then let me fly through the spaces, a swallow returned to a happy summer home. I worked hard, yes, I was steady in my body, I kept my shape, I knew my paths and my boundaries. I am learning wilder ways now, as I am propelled through unknown realms. No familiar ground below, no reference grid.
But perhaps I am learning a little of these new protocols. To begin with, all the words I could make, memory and knowing, were on elastic, slow to leave with me when I was shot forwards into another racketing ellipse, catching up when I unpredictably stalled once more. Slowly – over years, it may have been – I began to hold together better, leave less of myself behind. I travel in a more compact shape, lose less on the
way. What a thrill it would be to have a body as curved as a swallow, a bird black all over, built with the same gigantic majesty as the darkness that holds the stars. The leading edge of wings the radius of a planet, calibrated to swoop through the inclines and lifts, the densities and vacuums of black space. To master these migrations and head for the burning heart of a star. Perhaps I would fly a little first.
I thought he was a beautiful swagger, a bold adventure. I thought his dreams grand. I thought them worlds that were waiting for both of us. He didn’t care for his failure; he wasn’t impressed too much with my own success. So I thought. These tiny glints of the goodness I first found, the pay dirt, the river siftings. I have misplaced them in the dark swell, the ravage of what followed. But I delve, rinse, sift, in the words that I can pull in to tell. I have to find the telling. The shivers and glints of gold. I did see them, treasure them. Then, my loving eyes magnified their wealth. They shone like heavy nuggets.
His own learning had not prospered. He did not have my love of it. When he returned from a politics degree in Portsmouth, his time at university ending less successfully than he had hoped, he made a new plan, teaching English in one of the numerous language colleges in Oxford. For now. Until the big plan was to start. A master’s, some writing, travel. A book, of course. All these proposed in uneven rotation. Word – stories, world plans. I thought he believed them possible. My girl –understanding, my child – heart, thought he knew how to build stories into life. But he just made the shape of them with his mouth.
