Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

  In fact, our children are perfectly still, perfectly quiet. I had thought they might be restless but they’re not. Even Liv stays quiet in Mick’s arms, a string of saliva hanging from her soft, bunched-up mouth. Jordan sits with his small feet on the kneeler. He only glances around him when someone coughs or sneezes.

  Alex holds both his sons’ hands tight and stares straight ahead. I can tell that Connor has been crying, but he’s OK now. He seems to be in a dream, or else he’s tired, or both. I don’t look at Mick. Instead I look up, at the tall, plain, light-filled windows through which you can always see sky, blueish cloud, tops of trees. Then I shut my eyes and for the first time ever in my life I pray.

  Canon Cleve says that Lennie touched so many people. That was her gift. She will be remembered for her humour and generosity and her zest for life. When he makes a joke about her, a few people laugh. The laugh cracks the silence, lets everyone shift in their seats.

  He says he hopes and prays that Alex and his family will be given strength to rebuild their lives, that they’ll become a stronger family, bound together in love and grief by this tragedy.

  Then he says, Let us pray.

  A sudden memory comes to me, of Lennie making dough for all our kids in the kitchen and, when pieces of it got trampled all over the floor and the sofa and carpet, laughing and saying it didn’t matter. Her face as she says it: It’s only furniture. Her fingers and the wrists of her jumper covered in flour. When she pushes the hair out of her face, she has to do it with her arm, awkward, laughing.

  I feel myself trembling all over. Mick turns to me and mouths, Are you OK?

  I nod.

  Jordan’s kneeler is embroidered with beach huts—one red, one yellow, one blue. He traces their shapes with a finger, round and round, up and down, over and over.

  I rest my head in my arms on the hard polished wood of the pew and now the sea comes into view—wobbling and sparkling on a far-off day—and Rosa is hurrying up the beach, bringing me endless brown pebbles and demanding to know if they’re amber. And I wish that just one of those times, one pebble could be honey-gold and light as plastic and I could just say, Yes.

  Let us stand, says Cleve.

  Oh no, I hear myself mutter to Mick, I can’t do this.

  It’s the hymn Alex and Lennie had at their wedding. Patsy is weeping silently.

  Mick leans his mouth to my ear.

  Do you want to go out?

  I shake my head.

  I’m fine, I tell him.

  He does not sing—Mick never sings—but stares up at the carving on the choir stalls. The minutes pass and I won’t allow myself to think or look behind me. And then eventually I do, I look down at the grey flagstones and then I turn my head and see Lacey. He’s right back against the far wall on the left, standing there with a couple of uniformed officers and he’s looking straight at me. His face doesn’t change, but he doesn’t take his eyes away either. They are the last thing I see before Cleve asks everyone to kneel for the final prayers and Lennie’s floury hands fly back at me again just as the cold grey floor comes up to smack me in the face.

  The grave is almost three metres deep. That’s what Nat tells me in the wide, cold porch as Sue Peach brings me a glass of water and someone else holds a wad of Kleenex to the cut on my head.

  You got blood all over the floor, Jordan tells me as people shuffle past and try not to look.

  You might need a stitch on that, says Sue but I grab hold of the Kleenex myself and I look at it and say no. I can tell I’ll have a hell of a bruise tomorrow but the bleeding has already almost stopped.

  I’m fine, I tell them and no one disagrees. Mick takes the children out to the graveside and tells me to stay sitting for a moment. I tell him I’m coming.

  As the last mourners leave the church, Lacey is behind them. Up close his black suit is actually dark grey, his tie crumpled.

  He squats down next to where I’m sitting on the cold stone bench and asks me if I’m OK and I just look at him. That’s all. I just gaze and gaze at his kind face.

  The burial is just family, but this of course includes us. We are all family. The rest of the town stands out there on Bartholomew’s Green and watches as the coffin is lowered down on its ropes and put in the ground. Max can’t stop himself leaning forward a little way to see it go in. Con begins to cry loudly. Patsy puts her arms around him, hugs him close.

  In a pocket of deep silence, Alex takes some earth from the undertaker’s trowel and lets it fall and then, more slowly, Bob does the same. In the church, he was weeping and weeping as if he’d never stop, but now he’s calm, dry-eyed. Max takes some earth and lets it fall, but Con won’t do it, he refuses.

  When the trowel is held out to him, he turns and pushes his face into Alex’s clothes and Alex staggers back a second, caught off balance, and then takes his hand and holds him close. Patsy shakes her head. Tears start to come down Max’s face. Alex gathers him close as well.

  It’s over, I can see him saying. It’s OK, it’s over.

  This, I think, this is the moment. I glance hurriedly around the graveyard, at the rows of stones leaning back like teeth. Nothing. No sign of anything. Just gravel and shadows and stone.

  Then Patsy leads Alex and the boys away from the grave and out through the little gate that leads to the playground. It’s a funny way to leave the cemetery but there’s no other, not today, not if they want to avoid the crowd. We watch them take the long route through the playground, past the swings and the slide and the big tyre with the bark chippings strewn underneath, past the rough-mown lumpy meadow where on so many taken-for-granted summer evenings Lennie and I stood in the warm wind with mugs of tea in our hands and nothing on our feet, just shouting and shouting for our five suddenly deaf kids to come in for baths, or tea or bed.

  A cold late lunch is served at Alex’s, but we skip it. No one expects us to go. Even Alex has to be begged not to abandon it after half an hour and rush off to join in the search.

  And then, just after five, Mawhinney comes round with a piece of news. He says that Darren Sims of all people has reported seeing someone looking very like Rosa standing right on the groynes down beyond Gun Hill. Yesterday evening, just before dusk.

  What? I cry. Standing actually on the groynes?

  Mawhinney folds his arms and looks me in the eye.

  He says she was shouting at the sea.

  Christ, says Mick and he looks at me.

  Mawhinney says that Darren said it looked like she was perfectly happy and talking to someone.

  Talking? To someone in the sea?

  That’s what it looked like.

  But, for Christ’s sake, Mick says, who?

  Half an hour later, Darren is brought round to see us. He looks bothered, pink. His sweatshirt is muddy and on inside out.

  I couldn’t see anyone out there swimming or nothing, he says. I’m not being funny, but it looked like she was talking to the sea.

  He tells us that he yelled at her to get down off the groynes because everyone knows you don’t go on them, that they’re dangerous.

  You were that close? Mick says and his face is pale and slicked with sweat. You could call to her?

  Oh yes, Darren says. But she didn’t hear a word of it. Or at least she turned round once but didn’t do nothing, just looked at me and turned straight back again.

  I sit. My head is bursting.

  Ten minutes later, Darren’s mum rings us. She sounds very upset. She explains to Mick that Darren did go home and tell her what he’d seen but she didn’t believe him. She told him not to be daft and sent him off to pick up the two bags that needed collecting from the launderette.

  Now, of course, she’s kicking herself. All afternoon she’s been in tears and can’t concentrate on anything, not till she knows that little girl’s safe.

  The trouble with Darren, she says, is he’s always coming home with these strange stories and I’m used to it. They never amount to anything, I swear they don’t. I’ve learned
over the years that the best thing really is just to ignore them all.

  Livvy is crying and crying and won’t settle. I take her upstairs and change her. In her nappy is the first poo made of formula milk—hard, brown, solid, of the real world. As I fold the nappy away and put it in a bag and clean her, she goes quiet and still and fascinated, following my movements with her clear, dark eyes.

  Someone phones the squad to say a young girl has been seen getting into a blue van at Leiston, but from the description she is older than Rosa and Mawhinney says they’re not going to follow it up, not at the moment anyway.

  The six o’clock local TV news has Lennie’s funeral on it and this is immediately followed by a report about Rosa. The picture they use is a school portrait, an awful one, in which Rosa—a smooth and alien child—smiles smugly at the camera against a sky-blue plastic background, her hair smooth, her collar down, her cardigan neatly buttoned.

  You gave them that? I say to Mick.

  It was the only one I could find.

  From the tray in the hall?

  Yes.

  It was supposed to go back to school. You hated it, remember.

  Oh, he says. Oh well.

  I go and sit on the steps of The Polecat. I don’t bother unlocking it and going in, I just sit there in my coat. It’s all I’ve come for, just to sit.

  It’s dark. Seven o’clock. Seven or maybe half past. I don’t know. I’m very calm now, unafraid. I sit there and I stare and stare at the rolling mass of the sea till the darkness comes up inside my head and I think maybe I can see right into it. As you can see into anything if you look at it for long enough.

  I feel weightless, invisible, and in a strange way everything is clear to me now. I even think that maybe if I stop breathing and remember where to look, I might be able to see my Rosa.

  Eventually Lacey comes to find me, as I knew he would.

  Oh, I say quietly. Hello. I thought you’d come.

  He stands on the prom with his hands in his pockets. There is a strong wind blowing, a wind I must say I hadn’t noticed till he arrived. But I do see it now, it’s impossible not to, because of how his clothes flap, how he has to hold his coat closed. His big coat, the one he’s wearing, makes him seem very far away, just a tiny speck really, though I wouldn’t of course tell him that.

  I do want to tell him that his face looks terrible, just daunted and upset and worse than I’ve ever seen it look, but my heart’s fighting so hard with my mouth that I can’t get the words out.

  Tess, he says.

  I shut my eyes. I can’t look at him. I daren’t.

  I’m sorry, he says. Oh Tess, I’m so sorry.

  He puts his hands on my shoulders, which makes me feel a little sick, but I don’t stop him.

  No, I start to say but already it’s too late.

  Come on, he says. Come on.

  No, I tell him, pulling away now, suddenly frantic.

  I’m sorry, he says. I’m sorry. I have to take you back now.

  Chapter 18

  ROSA’S BODY IS FOUND BY A MAN OUT WALKING HIS DOG on Covehithe Cliffs. He spots her down at the edge of the water as he walks along the gorse path above.

  He says he isn’t really looking down at the beach at all, but his eye is caught by the bright purple of her sweatshirt. She is floating, face down, nudged against the rocks by the tide. At first he wonders if it’s perhaps an adult, in a wetsuit, swimming. But soon he realises the body is far too small to be out there bobbing around in the water alone.

  He scrambles down the steep cliffside using his stick to help him, but the dog gets to the body before he does and starts barking furiously. He never goes in, the man says, but he always gets excited when he sees people in the water.

  He is still hoping at that point that he has it all wrong and it’s someone swimming. But as he gets closer, he sees it’s a child, a girl. And that she has long fronds of seaweed grasped in her hands, he tells the police, her fingers wrapped tight around it, as if she’s been trying to hold on.

  A jutting rock is the only thing stopping her being washed back out to sea again, since the tide has finished coming in and is already on the turn. With some effort, the man pulls her out of the water and onto the beach. He turns her over. Her eyes are open and her mouth is blue. He feels for a pulse and thinks about trying to resuscitate her, but he’s scared. He doesn’t really know how to go about it. He can’t quite catch his breath himself.

  So he calls 999 on his mobile phone and then he goes a bit wobbly and has to sit down. He says it’s very lucky he has the phone with him. He never normally brings it when walking the dog as he worries about losing it or leaving it somewhere. But as it happens he’s expecting a delivery from Wrentham and grabbed it at the last moment, in case they arrived when he was out.

  He lives up on Holly Lane, he says. Twenty-eight Holly Lane, Covehithe. That’s the address. His name is Fitzgerald. The mobile phone is his daughter’s but he sometimes borrows it. He wouldn’t have one himself, he thinks they’re a waste of money. How ridiculous, that he never learned to do mouth to mouth. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself. He feels terrible.

  The paramedics assure him that Rosa has been dead some time—that no amount of resuscitation would have made a difference. But the man won’t listen. He is terribly agitated and upset by the time they get to him and has to be given a hot sweet drink to calm him down. He keeps on repeating the detail about the phone to the police, even when they tell him they’ve got the point.

  It’s hard to tell how long Rosa has been in the water exactly but police believe it’s close on twenty-four hours. It has to do with skin colour, how much water is in the stomach, how distended the lungs are. It’s easier to tell with children apparently, because the changes happen more quickly and are more dramatic.

  That night Lacey takes me all the way back from The Polecat to the kitchen at home.

  It seems like the longest walk in all the world, that distance from the beach hut to our kitchen. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll make it. I walk and walk but my legs don’t seem to touch the ground. But Lacey keeps his arm around me all the time, all the way up the street as we walk there in the dark, in the howling wind, the salt, the silence.

  Even when we get in the kitchen, he keeps his arm around me. No one says anything. Everything’s shifted and the rules have changed. There are no rules—there’s only a phone call from Covehithe.

  Mick is sitting there, crying. He is shaking all over and crying very hard, harder than I’ve ever seen him cry. Except for once—the time when Nat was born and for about half an hour we didn’t think he was going to be OK and I was too out of it to care, and then once it turned out he was fine, Mick wrapped his arms around me and just sobbed.

  Just like this.

  Mawhinney is there and two female police officers I’ve never seen before. One of them is gently holding Mick’s arm, touching his shoulder. The other’s got Livvy who’s holding her floppy monkey and gazing around at all the people.

  They’re bringing her, Mick says. In the ambulance. After the police have finished with her. They were going to take her to the hospital, but I said not to, I said of course we’d want her brought here right now. I told them we’d want to have her with us at home. I knew you’d want the same.

  I look at him and tell him that I do and then I open my eyes and my mouth and I scream.

  I had Rosa at home. Second baby, easy birth. So easy that I remember laughing all the way through it. My memory is of a high, hot summer morning, a perfect cup of tea and an even more perfect, fuzz-headed seven-pound child. And Mick having to shampoo the carpet where I, forgetting the waterproof sheet, simply bent over, crouched and slipped my daughter out, easy and certain as a flower opening.

  We carry her up and lay her on her bed, surrounded by all her soft toys and her Walkman, her private diary with the padlock. Maria the kitten comes and settles at the foot of the bed, ponching and ponching at the duvet with her claws just as if it was a nor
mal bedtime.

  In the end, Mick pushes her off and shuts her out. I don’t blame him but I know Rosa would have been furious. What’d you do that for? She’d have sulked. What’s Maria ever done to you?

  With a pair of sharp scissors that I normally use for cutting the kids’ hair, we snip off the wet clothes she’s wearing. Then I get the bowl the children use when they feel sick at night and Mick fills it up with warm water and together we wash her with a flannel and soap.

  I wish her small, brittle fingernails weren’t all broken and torn, but at least they are clean for once. Bleached, almost, like tiny shells—I’ve never seen them so white. I take her coldish blue hand in mine and try to slot my own hot, trembling fingers in among hers but I can’t. Already they’re getting stiff and hard—and the soft pad of flesh beneath her thumb is starting to feel different and not like flesh at all but like something more solid.

  Now and then, the room fades and I think I doze, but Mick nudges me awake.

  Come on, he says. Clothes.

  We can’t decide what to dress her in. Eventually we agree that her blue jersey nightie and Gap hooded thing are best.

  I don’t want her to be cold, I tell Mick and I know how it sounds, but I still have to say it. All through this, he doesn’t speak except when necessary and he doesn’t look at me. I watch as he struggles to do up the bottom of the zip on her hooded thing.

  I know Rosa likes the Gap thing, but I’m not so sure about the nightie. Being Rosa, wouldn’t she have preferred jeans? Except that trousers would be almost impossible to get on her right now. Her legs are terribly swollen and no longer move so easily.

  We leave the dolphin pendant round her neck. It’s her favourite piece of jewellery, the only one she’ll wear. Dolphins have magical powers, she says, it’s like a talisman, a protection against, well, against all sorts of things.

  There’s a tiny graze on her forehead and another larger one on her chin—probably from the undertow of the shingle, the paramedics said. There’s also a huge bruise on her shoulder but you can’t see that now. Her eyes are shut, her eyelids dusted with mauve.