by Molly Flatt
Her mother stared at her for a moment longer and then, with a tiny fluttering sigh, put the Astra in gear. ‘You and your father,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘blood from a stone.’ She embarked on a determinedly cheerful stream of local gossip as they stop-started down the zebra crossings on the High Street.
Murmuring responses on autopilot, Alex stared out at the double row of charity shops and grocers and chemists. The street looked more dilapidated than ever, window after painted-out window gaping like knocked-out teeth. As the Astra passed over the controversial rumble strips at the outskirts of town, the stagesets of Alex’s youth juddered by. The crumbling community hall, where she had clapped her hands and stamped her feet through dozens of birthday parties. The primary school with the yellow slide, down which she had forced a screaming Andrew Bullen, splitting his lip. The park where she had dragged their ageing terrier, getting yelled at by the cool kids doing drugs under the monkey bars. But there was no sudden outpouring of emotion, no in-situ lightning bolt. And now the dizziness was starting to rise.
‘Mum,’ she said, turning away from the window.
‘ . . . don’t seem to realize that they have to be built somewhere,’ her mother was saying. ‘And, really, I think the Poles have been a godsend. My boiler man is very good value, and the woman in the place that used to be Hollingsworth’s does an excellent rye.’
‘Mum, why did I change my name when I was eleven?’
Her mother glanced sideways. ‘Goodness! Where did that come from?’
Alex took a deep breath. ‘It’s this research project. The Orkney thing. I’m trying to fill in some gaps.’
‘Gaps?’
‘They’re trying to identify the characteristics of high achievers.’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘Like hard work?’
‘Do you, though? Remember why?’
‘Well, no, in the sense that you never told me. But then you never told me anything back then, darling. Plus ça change. It wasn’t hard to guess that it was some sort of adolescent bid for independence, though, with you being about to start at St J’s.’ She paused. ‘Your father was terribly upset, because of Gramma Dot, although he would never have admitted it.’
Alex gazed at a cordoned-off building site that had once been a field. ‘That was the beginning of my downward spiral, don’t you think? Going to St J’s? Wouldn’t you say that was the first time in my life I failed, and badly? Enough for me to form a horrible new self-belief inside?’
‘Nonsense.’ Her mother stared fixedly at the mini-roundabout ahead. ‘You did perfectly well. And look at where it’s got you now. Anyway, I’m not sure that I approve of all this navel-gazing, darling. People aren’t jigsaw puzzles, you know. You can’t just click them together, piece by piece.’ She hesitated. ‘Although—’
‘What?’
‘Well, I will admit that for years I wondered if we had made the right decision. With St J’s. You were so moody that summer before you went that your father and I talked seriously about turning down the scholarship and sending you to Fring. But Dad said that we shouldn’t clip your wings before you’d even given it a try, and once you were there’ – she swept the wheel round – ‘well, you eventually settled down.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I’m sure that whole phase started the day you had to miss the Kapurs’ camping trip.’
‘The camping trip?’
Her mother glanced across. ‘Oh, darling, you must remember. That same summer, ’95 it must have been, mid-July? Diya and her father had gone out to the car with the bags and you were almost out the door, too, when you dashed back up the stairs. You didn’t come back down, so I followed a few minutes later, only to find you throwing up all over the bathroom, poor thing. You were awfully dizzy, you could barely move. I had to tell them to go without you. You spent the whole week in bed, and even when you finally emerged, the funk never seemed to lift.’ She chuckled to herself. ‘My goodness, what fun we had from then on. The silences! The rows! In retrospect, I wonder if perhaps it was something Diya had said – something that made you scared at the thought of starting St J’s. All I knew was that my bright little girl seemed to switch from light to dark in the course of a morning. And from then on, that was that.’
Of course she remembered the aborted camping trip; she had Read the technicolour version only three days before. She had hunched with her eleven-year-old self over the toilet bowl. Lain curled with her in bed. Tasted the hot Ribena that her mother had forced her to drink. Watched her scribble her angst into her diary as soon as she was alone. At the time, inundated with hundreds of Memories, she hadn’t given that one a second thought. But now, as she lowered the window and stuck her face into the breeze, the significance of her mother’s words hit her with visceral force.
She’d been sick. She’d become dizzy. And, more to the point – stupid fucking idiot – she’d had a diary.
Seconds later, 20 Cedar Drive rose over the hedge like some half-forgotten childhood dream. Its mismatched extensions looked diminished and dirty in the morning glare. The lawn was singed from the heatwave. Even the trees seemed somehow to have shrunk and bowed. Gulping down bile and fighting off a rush of light-headedness, Alex slammed the car door and crunched doggedly over the gravel to the front door.
‘Before we go in,’ her mother said, coming up beside her, key in hand, ‘It’s probably best not to mention your five minutes of televisual glory to Dad. He hasn’t said anything, of course, but you know what he’s like. I suspect he’s feeling a little sensitive, considering the things that presenter woman said.’
Alex thought of what Dom had said in the club. ‘I think you underestimate Dad, Mum. He’s tougher than you realize.’
Her mother snorted. ‘You both like to think you’re tough, darling, but I know better. Those Moore hearts bruise like September plums.’
Alex stared into a withered hanging basket, feeling the tears start to sting yet again. ‘Please, Mum,’ she mumbled. ‘Can we just get out of this sun?’
In the cool dark of the hall her mother turned into the kitchen, already talking about lunch. Alex continued straight up the stairs, shouting that she was going to dump her bag.
Her bedroom had been a guest room for over ten years, but when she opened the door she was still surprised to be greeted by the scent of a freesia reed diffuser, instead of the whiff of Eternity stewed with mouldering tights. She slumped onto the embroidered cream throw that had replaced her old purple duvet cover and wondered helplessly exactly how she expected to have a Proustian epiphany when all traces of her younger self had been so efficiently excised. The posters had long ago been stripped from the walls, the Blu-tack marks covered with paint, the books on her shelves replaced with Homes & Gardens back-issues. Her desk, once littered with hair bands, novelty mugs and caseless CDs, held nothing but a box of tissues and a single framed photograph.
Forcing herself to her feet, she went over to the desk and picked up the photograph in a rush of mingled hope and dread. Of course. The familiar faded image had been taken on that fateful afternoon: Saturday, 16 July 2005. There they were, the two of them, standing in the downstairs hall. Her father was cocking one eyebrow, wearing a horrible floral shirt and holding a glass of champagne. Alex was smiling grimly in an unflattering brown dress, gripping his arm like a prison guard. In the background, various family friends could be seen progressing from the lounge to the kitchen; one side of the frame showed an encroaching bulge of purple belly that was unmistakably Dom. Dom, about to break the news of his coup in New York.
But as Alex stared back through ten years and into the face of her twenty-one-year-old self, trying to fathom the feelings encoded into that brittle smile, nothing came up to greet her. No sudden revelation, no moment of emotional engagement, no flash of self-discovery. Just the same old sickening symptoms of an encroaching episode. She would have been about the same age in the photograph, she thought dizzily, as Finn MacEgan was now. Did they allow cameras on Iskeull? Or would they not even risk s
ome blurry analogue shot with a background sliver of Stack finding its way Outside? Had Finn MacEgan ever posed for an awkward family photo? Had he ever pretended to look happy for the camera and clung onto his father as if he might be about to disappear?
Abruptly she replaced the frame on the desk, face-down. The boy might have attacked her four times in the space of four days, but she owed him more than self-pity disguised as sympathy. She began to search the room, opening drawers and rifling through guest linen, poking about in the wardrobe. Pushing aside the empty hangers, she realized she couldn’t think of a single non-clothing-based item that had survived her move to London. She found herself wondering whether the comprehensiveness of her cull had really been due to the cost of square footage in Zone 2. She was the one who had insisted on being so ruthless. Her mother, muttering about grandchildren, had spent most of the sort-out taking things back out of bin bags and squirrelling them away. Could her own desperation to make a clean break from her past have been prompted by her first, failed Reading? Had she been reacting to some subconscious intimation of exactly what it was that had been growing inside her all those miserable years?
She got down on her belly and groped around under the bed. A coffer of heated rollers. A stack of board games. A crate full of foreign editions of The Switch. A bag of her mother’s old clothes. Then she felt the corner of a large shoebox, and even before she had pulled it out and brushed off the dust to reveal the words Dorothy’s Tresures scrawled across the lid in marker pen, she knew she had found what she was looking for.
A silk scarf that had belonged to Granny Jean. A thumb-sized good-luck bear. A Blue Peter badge, worn to blank plastic. A pair of clip-on enamel earrings that she’d made at Brownies. And then, right at the bottom, a fat book with a squashy pink-and-purple cover.
The Diary of Dorothy A. Moore began on 1 January 1995. The first page offered a list of thirty-six resolutions in neat new-stationery handwriting (23: Stop eating licourish allsorts in bed). Subsequent entries were sporadic and random, covering everything from reasons she loved Diya, to the lyrics of charting pop songs. There were several big gaps in the chronology, and as Alex turned the pages she began to fear it would turn out to be yet another dead end. Then, about three-quarters of the way through, she stopped breathing.
Sunday 16 July 1995
I want to tell someone. I want to tell someone so much it hurts.
But its a SECRET
MY SECRET
Sick and sick and dizzy and black and lonely and horrible inside.
To think that I was supposed to be camping with Diya today. How can I ever be with Diya again? How can I be with Mum and Pippa and Mrs Mulvony and everyone doing all those normal things like camping and homework and eating and playing, how can I pretend that evrything is normal and that I am OK when I am NOT OK.
I WILL NEVER BE OK AGAIN.
I am going to say I’ve got a bug so I can stay at home. If I can stay here at least I can keep watch. I can keep control. But how can I stay at home my whole life?
I’m so scared. I wish I was still happy stupid little smiley baby Dorothy but I’m not.
Dorothy is dead.
Its like a lump a big lump inside me and I cant tell anyone and one day its going to birst.
But if it birsts theyll all get hurt. Way way worse than Me.
The day her mother’s bright little girl had contracted mysterious germs and switched, just like that, from light to dark. The day that the Story-surging mutation, finding a new Memory fertile with her blossoming fear of St Joseph’s, must have planted itself inside. Worse: the day she had realized.
Alex blundered up from the carpet and lurched across the corridor, just in time to vomit her train-station granola into the toilet bowl. When the heaves were over, she remained kneeling on the bathroom floor for a few seconds, her head too heavy for her neck, the bones of her knees sharp against the tiles. Swilling her mouth out at the sink, she was shocked to see how bad she looked: not only thin and tired, but positively feverish, her eyes too big and too bright. She could also make out, she was sure, a yellowish tinge to her skin.
‘Kansas?’ A tap on the door. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine, Dad,’ she croaked. ‘Dodgy takeaway. Sorry. Give me a sec.’
She listened to the floorboards creak as her father walked away, then sat on the side of the bath and gathered her strength. When she felt steady enough to stand, she went back to her bedroom and retrieved the diary from the floor. Every page since the entry on the 16th was blank. She stuffed the diary in her bag, then climbed the stairs to the top floor and pushed open the study door.
Her father looked up from his mess of papers: black coffee in one hand, black Fineliner in the other, framed by the dark wooden beams that met in a peak high overhead. He dropped his pen and gave her a worried beard-crease. ‘You okay?’
She bent to kiss his cheek. His skin was warm. He smelled of soap and ink. She found herself having to turn away and feign interest in the Cy Twombly calendar on the wall. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine,’ he said gently.
‘I’m just tired, Dad,’ she said, not meeting his eyes. She leaned against the desk and fiddled with a stack of Post-its. ‘How’s the book?’
Her father waved a hand over the papers spread across his desk. ‘Fine, Kansas. Everything’s fine. I’m more interested in how you are. You’re not dieting for the wedding, or something dumb like that?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just a . . . a bug.’ She swallowed, started to fold one of the Post-its into a crane. ‘The wedding. You don’t think it’s a bit . . . rushed?’
‘Not if it’s what you really want. What you both want. Although I have to say I did find a spelling mistake in our laminated itinerary.’
Alex snorted. They locked eyes. She quickly looked away. The things she could not say to him, the knowledge that he knew there were things she was not saying to him, felt like a clamp on her heart.
‘Dominic told me that you two met.’
‘Mmm.’
‘He said you asked him some questions?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause.
‘The other—’
‘Dominic—’
They both spoke at the same time, both stopped.
Get it together, Alex. Your father isn’t your protector any more. You’re thirty-one years old and you’re not built like him – or anyone else on the planet, as it turns out. This is your burden. Your Story. Leave his alone.
‘Look, Dad,’ she said brightly. ‘About the other day – how I was on the phone. And Dom . . . whatever Dom told you. I don’t want you to worry. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking for this research project, that’s all. And I wanted to ask you something, about The Switch.’
She looked up. Her father – brown eyes riveted on her face – had gone very still.
‘I know it annoys you when people try to draw real-life parallels, but was there a reason why you wrote it, when you did? I mean’ – she pinched the crane’s beak – ‘this might sound odd, but did you see something strange in me, when I was born?’
‘Strange?’
‘Because,’ Alex rushed on, ‘I was rereading it the other night, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Lyman. About how he’s born with all this anger inside him, even when he’s a tiny baby, and how he manages to hide it away for years, but how eventually, when he becomes a teenager and all that stuff happens with his dad, it starts to come out.’
‘Alex. What are you trying to ask me?’
She folded the tail. ‘Am I Lyman?’
‘Alex.’ Her father reached out and squeezed her hand, crane and all. ‘Stop.’
‘LUNCH!’ her mother bellowed from the hall.
‘Lunch!’ Alex cried, thrusting herself away from the desk and flinging open the door. What the fuck was she doing? she thought, as she thundered down the stairs. Even if he had seen it inside her – her painfully perceptive father – even if he had seen some
sort of terrible difference waiting to grow, what good would it do to let him know that she had finally seen it, too? What good would it do to let him know that his lifelong attempts to protect her had failed irrevocably?
In the kitchen, her mother was bending to take a roast chicken out of the oven. Alex was instantly reminded of that other photograph, the one she’d called up on her iPad on the train to Edinburgh, the one from New Year’s Eve. It was all too easy, now, to see a direct line from the tortured adolescent of the diary to the haunted woman captured by Harry’s flash. The woman who had known what was inside her, and who had spent almost twenty years trying to stop it bursting out. But then it had broken free with the help of a brilliant Reader, and neutralized her memories, and for six short months it had succeeded in setting her free, too. Six months of freedom in twenty years. With a God-awful catch.
Alex sat heavily at the kitchen table and stared, fizzing, breathless and nauseous, at the pears and partridges on the PVC cloth. Her mother placed a glass of Prosecco in front of her. There was the shuffle of slippers as her father walked in. Serving dishes slid onto the middle of the table, then chairs scraped as her parents took their places at either end, with Alex in the middle, just as they always had.
‘Darling!’ Her mother raised her glass. ‘To you and Harry! To TRM and LM getting the Waterloo train next Saturday at o-six-hundred hours!’
Alex realized they were waiting for her to lift her glass. She lifted her glass. Her mother clinked and took a sip. Her father silently drained his glass in one and reached for a refill. Alex stared into the bubbles. Oh God, had she avoided drinking all those years because she suspected it would make it easier for her to ‘birst’? Slowly she returned the brimming flute to the table.
