by Abigail Dean
‘Lex,’ she said.
‘Are we still in Hollowfield?’
‘Not far from there.’
‘Where did they find me?’
‘Between the town and the old house. A factory worker had just finished the night shift. Not far from where you were rescued the first time, I suppose. You were disorientated – exhausted.’
‘Lucky again, I guess.’
‘The hospital called me at five. It would appear that I’m still your emergency contact.’
‘Don’t read much into it,’ I said. ‘Other than a lack of viable alternatives.’
I understood that it was still my turn to speak, but not what I was supposed to say.
‘I didn’t want to worry anyone,’ I said. ‘I was just there to see the house. You’ll have heard about Mother. She made me executor. We have these plans for Moor Woods Road. I was there to sort things out. Being there – I must have been overwhelmed.’
She rested her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist. I hadn’t said what she was hoping to hear.
‘My parents,’ I said. ‘Are they here?’
‘Yes,’ Dr K said. ‘Greg and Alice.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
‘In a moment,’ said Dr K. ‘I think that we should speak first. The man who found you – you told him that you were looking for your sister.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes.’ She started to say one thing, then stopped, and said something else. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you since you landed,’ she said. ‘But I could never get through. I was concerned – as soon as I heard about your mother – that something might happen.’
I turned my head away from her. ‘I don’t think I was ready,’ I said, ‘to take your call.’
‘That,’ she said, ‘I understand. We should see that as a positive thing. Don’t you think? I believe – I believe you knew what I would have to say.’
A lump clotted in my throat.
‘I appreciate how my methods may seem, Lex,’ she said. ‘Many years later. It was different, at the time. In those first few months following the escape. It helped you. I thought that by the time I told you everything – all of it – you would be in the right state of mind to process it. To recover.’
‘You lied to me,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what you mean?’
‘Yes. For a short period of time. And since then, I’ve spent a long time asking you to accept the truth.’
She drew herself up in the chair and looked through me.
‘Tell me,’ Dr K said. ‘Tell me what happened to Evie, Lex.’
‘You used to tell me that the ends had justified the means,’ I said. ‘Well. Look at us now.’
The tears rolled down my face and into my ears.
‘Lex,’ she said. ‘I need to hear you say it.’
The police reached the house thirteen minutes after I left it. The smell of it made the first responders recoil from the doorway. They found Father slumped by the back door, as if he had tried to run and then thought better of it. Mother was with his corpse, of course, and wailing. They found Daniel like an afterthought, in a plastic bag and bent into a kitchen cupboard; he had been matter for many months by then. Noah was in his crib, matted with his own faeces. Gabriel and Delilah were wide-eyed and skeletal. Ethan waited calmly on his bed, considering exactly how much he would say. Evie was still in our room, and still in chains. She was unconscious. When a policeman lifted her, she felt as light as his own daughter. His own daughter hadn’t started school. He went against protocol, and broke the chains himself. He carried her from our room and down the stairs, and out into the road for the arrival of the paramedics. Girl C. Ten years old. She was pronounced dead at the hospital, a day later, having never regained consciousness. For me, that was the worst part of it. The last thing she could have known was that room.
After two nights in hospital, there was little left to do but to go home. Mum and Dad collected me from my room and walked me to the car, and I sat in the back seat, observing their hair over the headrests, like a child.
When I woke up, we were in Sussex, and close to home.
The cottage is at the end of a shady track, off one of the roads out of town. There is a bench next to the front door, with Dad’s papers spread across it, each supplement weighed down with garden stones. When it rains, articles break off and dissolve between the slats. Behind the cottage is the garden, stuffed with bees; herbs; trampoline. From the cottage, you can cross a stile to a great field, stretching across to the Downs. A single white windmill turns whimsically against the sky.
It was some time before I understood what had been sacrificed in the relocation. Just before I left home, I found a set of photographs of the old house outside Manchester, which had three floors and an elaborate mosaic path leading to the door. Here, we had two and a half bedrooms, and the land bulged with my parents’ projects. Something was always dying because it had been eclipsed by something else. Mum had been a lead nurse in accident and emergency; now she worked in a general practice, dispensing vaccinations and conversation.
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Dad said, when I questioned him.
‘It looks pretty simple to me.’
‘Believe it or not, there are some things that you don’t understand.’
At the cottage, he extracted himself from the little car and took my suitcase from the boot. ‘Let me,’ I said, but he shook his head, and lugged it through the door.
‘Home again,’ Mum said.
The sun teetering on the ridge of the Downs. We passed into the shadow of the house and beneath the hanging baskets, and set about making tea.
The first time that I had come here, Dr K and Detective Jameson were in the front of the car. Me in the back, with Detective Jameson’s wife. During the drive, her hand hovered between us, as if she was frightened to touch me. At the service station, she bought me a packet of Quavers, and told me that I could call her Mum – if I wanted.
There was still a For Sale sign outside the cottage, which I didn’t like; Dr K had told me, in no uncertain terms, that this place would be my home. ‘Perhaps you could take a photograph?’ Mum had said, and the three of us, my new parents and me, huddled at the doorway, unsure whether to smile.
‘I took a few,’ said Dr K.
Once the photograph was done, the three of them ducked into the house. I stood at the threshold, a bedraggled vampire, waiting to be invited in.
I spent September reading and sleeping. The sleep of the dead, happily dreamless. In the morning, sunlight puddled across the duvet and illuminated childhood books; posters; the framed certificate of my degree. I woke up knowing exactly where I was.
On Saturdays, Olivia and Christopher spilled from the train. Edna called, questioning my whereabouts and financial prudence; paying for an unused room, she said, indicates poor monetary policy. Devlin sent flowers and emails. Her messages read like extracts from a particularly direct self-help guide.
Don’t be embarrassed. Think of all of the shit that didn’t get done because of embarrassment.
Fuck those stale swamp nuts. I’m keeping you on the payroll.
Jake is asking for you, so marrying a millionaire remains a viable option.
I replied asking for details of autumn deals, and she sent those, too.
I refreshed my inbox as many times as I could stand it, hoping for news from Bill. Whenever I did, I thought of him in front of a battered laptop, refreshing his own inbox, waiting for my apology.
I read, ran, masturbated, bathed, ate. That was the problem with coming home: you also had to come home to the self which resided there. When I talked to my parents, we discussed the easier things. There was the weather, of course: the summer was always just about to end. Mum asked about Olivia and Christopher; about Devlin, and the wilder clients in New York; about JP, with disdain. I accompanied her to the supermarket and to the newsagent. I spent some days with her in the surgery, assisting with her filing, the two of us sitting on the floor, bac
k to back, besieged by paper. ‘Expect an invoice,’ I said.
We didn’t talk about Hollowfield. We didn’t talk about Ethan’s wedding.
I recognized that my parents were older, and that some of that was my fault. The unanswered messages. The phone call from Dr K, in the early, early morning. Weren’t those the things that aged people, more than the fact of time? Sometimes I listened to the tone of their voices, in their bedroom in the night, and knew that they were talking about me. The pockets beneath Dad’s eyes had descended, like an extra set of jowls, and he had developed the habit of following me from room to room. He would wake from an afternoon nap and rush up the stairs, tapping at my bedroom door, or arrive in the kitchen with inexplicable urgency, to stand sheepish over my breakfast. ‘What are you worried about?’ I said, and he shook his head, unable to say it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
On a warmer afternoon, I took a bucket of water across the garden and cleaned the trampoline. The best spot in the house for reading. I brushed away the leaves and started to scour it, first the mat and then the springs and the legs. It was just sturdy enough to support me when I was still; if I jumped, I’d land on concrete. I gathered a blanket and a cushion, and read until the light in the garden was hazy and soft. Not long before Dad came out to find me. I watched him cross the garden. The slow, careful steps of him. His hands held against his back. When he reached me, he turned back to the house and heaved his body next to mine.
‘Dad. What are you doing?’
‘Joining you. How’s the reading?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Do you remember the hours that we used to spend on this thing?’
‘Of course.’
‘I thought that you would kill me.’
‘Come on. You liked it.’
‘I did. I really did. We were so sure – well.’
I put down my book and turned to look at him.
‘Lex,’ he said. I waited for him to say something else, but he only lay there, watching the lull of the branches.
‘You can stay,’ he said, finally. ‘You can stay for the rest of the year.’
‘Dad—’
‘Stay, Lex. Don’t go to the wedding. I mean it. You can stay for for ever, if you want.’
‘I can’t, though. You know that I can’t.’
I could have done, though. Above us, the Downs were patched green and gold, stitched with hedgerows and chalk paths. I could see myself in ten years’ time, and then twenty, living in the perpetual childhood which I had missed. The posters in my bedroom bleached by decades of sunshine. Still sleeping well, in a bed which had sides to it.
‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘I have to live in the real world.’
He was nodding. It had been worth a try.
‘I’m a pain,’ he said. ‘I know that.’
‘You’re not a pain, Dad.’
‘When you first came to us,’ he said, ‘I’d have this dream about you. You were always so little. We’d run into each other, as if we already knew one another, and we’d talk for a while. Sometimes we were at the supermarket, or you’d be in the garden, on the trampoline. You were tiny. Just six or seven. Long before I could have known you. They started off as nice dreams, really. But then there would always be the moment when you would have to go. It was like I knew all along that it was coming. And somehow – somehow I knew what you would have to go back to.’
He was crying. I turned away, knowing that he wouldn’t want me to see it, and he pressed his eyes with his hands.
‘I would always wake up then,’ he said.
‘Dad.’
‘God,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘And once you’re awake,’ he said, ‘even if you try – once you’re awake, you can’t get back into it.’
A condition of my freedom was that I would agree to see Dr K. She was in the process of finding me a psychologist in New York, she said, but it would take time. It had to be just the right person. In the meantime, we would meet once a week.
We would talk.
I didn’t want to visit her office in London, and I hated the thought of her in the cottage, assessing our dynamics. Greeting Dad as an old, lost friend. We came to a truce with a cafe in town. It had dismal service and artfully distressed furniture, but excellent coffee; on that, we agreed.
She no longer concerned herself with pleasantries. She was usually there first, with her handbag on the table and her trench coat occupying a spare seat. She had always already ordered, a coffee delegating my place. She didn’t stand to greet me.
Above our table, a chalkboard said: Live. Laugh. Love.
‘How are you?’ she said, and I answered the question as she required: simply, sticking to the facts of it. I was fine. I was looking forward to resuming my work. I was preparing to return to New York. Evie had died many years before, shortly after we escaped from the house.
‘And why do you think that you’ve been unable to accept this,’ Dr K asked, ‘for such a long period of time?’
Some days, I entertained this line of questioning. The body is notoriously efficient at forgetting pain, I said. Is it any great surprise – with a little encouragement – that the mind can do the same thing? Or just: because you gave me the chance. In the destitution of those early hospital days, you offered me a lie, and I staggered inside it and closed the door behind me. By the time you told me the truth, I was already living there. I had unpacked, and changed the locks.
On other days, I couldn’t see the worth of conversation. I had told myself stories: that was true. What of it? What of convincing yourself that certain things had happened in a different way? Ethan and Delilah and Gabriel and Noah: they each had their own fiction. Who didn’t tell themselves stories, to get up in the morning? There wasn’t so much wrong with it. Those days, I considered leaving Dr K at the table. Let me stay in this fiction, I would say. Like this.
The only thing we didn’t discuss was the wedding, and the reason we didn’t discuss the wedding was because I had told Dr K that I wouldn’t be attending it. She had asked about each of my siblings under the guise of academic curiosity, but when I was talking, she had the look of a parent at the school gates, comparing other children with their own. I described Ana, and Ethan’s various successes; I softened the scene in the bedroom, and emphasised the protagonists’ love story.
‘I hear that Ethan’s getting married,’ she said.
‘Yes. In October.’
‘A family affair?’ She wasn’t smiling.
‘I think that he wants the spotlight,’ I said, ‘without sharing it with the rest of us. You know Ethan.’
She nodded. ‘Ethan,’ she said, holding his name in her mouth, like she was trying to identify a particular ingredient. ‘I hope that he gets the life he deserves,’ she said.
I consoled myself with legal theory: it was more of an omission than a misrepresentation, and there was little wrong with that. The Devlin in my skull raised an eyebrow. In that case: I hadn’t wanted to waste a session on something happy and mundane.
But before Dr K left, she paused at the table, her coat buttoned and tied. ‘About the wedding,’ she said. She didn’t look at me: that made it easier.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘I’m glad that you’re not going.’
At other times, it was as if we were there for her own sanity. She spoke more during these meetings than she had across the years I had known her. In the blunt light of the cafe, she was haggard and illuminated.
‘I don’t forget the expression on your face,’ she said, ‘when I first told you the truth. I think about it all of the time. It was during your third month in the hospital. You had been asking about her for days. You’d become wild. This thought of her, installed with a new family. You asked again and again – you know – why can’t I join them? Now that you were so much better, I had started to question my approach. There was no ending to it, you see. Or rather – there was
only one ending. To tell you.
‘So I did. We visited our courtyard, in the hospital. And when I said it, you didn’t say a word. You just looked at me, with this – pity, I think. As if you felt sorry for me – that I could say something so stupid. You started off on another topic, something different altogether. The quality of the hospital lunches. Like you hadn’t even heard me.
‘After that, it was as though we started again every day. You would remember the writer of an obscure poem that I mentioned, in passing, or the name of an animal which you’d never seen. But this – you were always capable of forgetting it.
‘We tried time and again. What was there to do? You had a new family, and a new school in September. You were walking again. You were doing so well, Lex. Just as I had hoped. The Jamesons had their child, and I had my vindication. And to tell you the truth, I think that we assumed you would grow out of it.’
‘Like a comfort blanket?’ I said. ‘Or – what? Sucking your thumb?’
‘Do you know what Alice used to say? “An imaginary friend – what child doesn’t have one of those?”’
The loyalty of that. I tried not to smile, but I could feel it on my face.
‘Eventually,’ Dr K said, ‘I stopped asking about it. Why? Well, I think that now. But it’s obvious. Isn’t it? Because in every other way, you were my greatest success.’
At first, there had been failures, too. There was, for example, a great deal of concern about my lack of friends.
In the late summer, Mum had accompanied me up a wide driveway lined with trees. We walked from sunlight to shadow, each of us nervous. Her hand bumped against mine. A clock tower waited for us at the end of it, and beneath it a headteacher, with his hand outstretched.
That morning, I sat in an empty classroom and completed three examination papers. Lawnmowers hummed across hidden courtyards, and a bored young man gave me notice when I had half an hour left, and then ten minutes. Afterwards, in a bright wooden study, I spoke with the headteacher, who asked me, in turn, about what I was currently reading (The Magus, by John Fowles; my parents knew only that it was about Greece, but not about the sex scenes); the Bible (where to begin?); whether I knew what philosophy meant (yes); and the most interesting place to which I had travelled (Blackpool). A week later, and six years late, I had my school scholarship. For the purposes of the national curriculum, the headteacher said, I would need to join the school two years behind my age group. Academically, I might find that I was a little bored; if that was ever the case, then I shouldn’t hesitate to make it known.
