That eight-year-old, drawn from her bed in the middle of the night to find her mother bleeding, her father white with anger. Bundled sleepily into her mother’s car, tucked up in bed in a dim, shadowy house in Spitalfields, a house filled with treasures and secrets. Choosing an attic room in a new house a hundred miles away, not understanding, yet, that her father would not be joining them.
That twelve-year-old, back from a weekend at her father’s. There’s a woman living at Dad’s house now. She’s called Jenna. She’s all right, I guess. Not meeting Cass’s eye; chewing at a loose strand on the sleeve of her cardigan. So desperate, of course, for her father to love her; as Ivor did, in his own damaged, distracted, and fractured way. That shifting sequence of women—Jenna, Natalie, Kristin, Amy, Leah, and who knew how many others. Each one young, showily beautiful, hungry for Ivor’s attention, uninterested in the daughter left behind by his failed marriage. How had those weekends in London, in the house on Hampstead Grove, really been for Anna? How hard had Ivor tried to make her see that there was still a place in his life for her? Not hard enough. Not hard enough at all.
That fourteen-year-old, directing her anger outwards. Too easy a victim: Polly O’Reilly, meek-mannered, cowed. Lace-edged under-slips and short skirts; smudged make-up and bottles of Hooch. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Club nights in Soho, Anna and Tasha slipping off to London, each employing the excuse of staying at the other’s house: photos in the newspapers, blowing their cover. The calls that came in after that, for Tasha: those modelling agencies, renewing their careful, calculated assaults. Name-calling by the other girls at school. Show-off. Pisshead. Think you’re so great, don’t you? Well, you’re not. You’re a freak. You’re a weirdo. The knowledge of this coming to Cass piecemeal, refracted by a concerned teacher. (Not Mrs. Baker this time, thank goodness, but Anna’s form tutor, meaning well.)
Are you all right, Anna?
Of course I’m all right, Mum. Why wouldn’t I be all right?
That fifteen-year-old, back from her father’s American tour, carrying the intolerable burden of his illness—for that, Cass was beginning to force herself to admit, was what they must understand it to be. The terrible things Ivor had said to her resounding in her head, drowning out all other sound. Watching him fall apart, from a distance. A drunken rage caught by cameras in the Holly Bush pub. Police called to Hampstead Grove in the middle of the night. Leah pictured with bruises, cuts. Charges pressed. Their separation. His disgrace.
Ivor’s entry, finally, into rehab, splashed again across the tabloid press, laid out, as always, by Sally Jarvis in the village shop. The neighbours’ eyes unsubtly averted whenever Anna or Cass passed by. Kind Sheila and Roy, in the Royal Oak, defending them from unquiet tongues. If you’re going to talk like that in here, Sally Jarvis, then I suggest you take yourself off for a drink elsewhere. Yes, it was easy to say that it had begun then. Anna’s lies; her deceit; her obsession with exercise. Twice-weekly matches with the school hockey team, practices three times a week, and each morning, before school, a run around the Home Farm grounds. The weight falling from her, gradually, until her skin was stretched taut over rib and bone.
Anna had never been overweight, and yet she behaved as if she were, as if she were determined to punish herself for some perceived failing; turned on her mother whenever Cass asked what she’d had to eat that day at school.
Why are you always nagging me, Mum? Why don’t you trust me? I’m just being careful, all right. Tasha does the same, and look how skinny she is—why aren’t you having a go at her?
Tasha had come to Home Farm with Kim, one afternoon while Anna was at hockey practice, and had asked to speak to Cass privately.
Cass had taken Tasha into her office—slender, beautiful, celebrated Tasha, whose face was now splashed across the covers of magazines. And there, sitting before her, Cass had seen for the first time how different Anna had begun to look from her friend: how unhealthy, how gaunt and hollow-cheeked.
“She’s really unwell, Cass,” Tasha had said. “She’ll hate me for telling you this—she might never speak to me again. But she’s my best friend. I can’t let Anna do this to herself.”
A hard-won visit to a Harley Street clinic; Anna furious, disbelieving. But there, finally, in that wood-panelled room, with tasteful modernist sculptures lining the bookshelves and an original Hockney staring down at them from the wall behind Dr. Eleanor Lichtenstein’s desk, she had broken down, lowered her defences. Her sudden surrender seemed to take them both—Cass and the doctor—by surprise.
“It’s all slipping away from me, Mum,” Anna had said, between fits of sobs. “I feel like it’s all slipping away.” And Cass had held her, and cried with her, and whispered into her hair, “I’m sorry, my darling. I’m so sorry.”
Tea at Johnny’s afterwards—Uncle Johnny, whom Anna loved, and who had taken her in his arms and said, “Now, now, little thing—whatever have you been doing to yourself?”
A long, damp summer: Cass and Anna, alone at Home Farm, pushing the world away, secure behind those high stone walls. Talking as they had never talked before: not properly, not truly. Talking about Ivor, and his father, Owain, and how deeply Ivor and Cass had once loved each other. Talking about Margaret, and Francis, and Lily and John, and how profoundly they were missed. Talking about music and art, and Cass’s old fear—confessed honestly to Anna, for the first time—that she would not have the capacity to be both an artist and a mother.
“But I am both, darling, I am,” Cass told her. “And I wouldn’t have missed having you for the world.”
Stroking her daughter’s hair; holding her meagre weight as they lay together on the sofa, Anna’s head on her mother’s lap.
“I know, Mum,” Anna said, and closed her eyes.
A trip to Mull, to the cottage by the sea. Fresh air and small, protein-rich meals, following Dr. Lichtenstein’s instructions. Anna’s recovery coming slowly, inch by inch, pound by pound.
“She’s doing very well, Cass,” the doctor said in September, back in her clinic on Harley Street. “You should be proud of her.”
Looking at her daughter—the sheer, unadulterated beauty of her, the bloom already returning to her face.
“I am so proud of her,” Cass said.
There had been, they all agreed, a slippage, a loss of footing. It happened to so many young women these days (some young men too), and it could have been so much worse. Anna had not missed too much of school: she would sit her GCSEs, study for A-levels in art, English, French (and actually take her examinations, as her mother never had).
“How do you think she’s doing now, Cassie?” Ivor asked over the phone. “Do you think she’s all right?”
Cass, sitting in the office in Home Farm, put a hand to her forehead, and sighed. So much to say; so much that could not be said.
“I think so. But we need to be there for her now, Ivor. Both of us. We need to be careful.”
“Careful,” he repeated, as if testing the word.
She pictured him, sitting alone in his big, empty house, and said, “Yes, Ivor. Careful. We’ve both made our mistakes. Let’s just be careful with her, please.”
Eighteen years old. Still slimmer than she had been before it all began—still cutting her food into small pieces, still running six times a week—but healthy now, the worst of the danger passed.
A boyfriend: Ollie Patterson, who was at the boys’ school in Tunbridge Wells and wanted to apply to art college, too.
A tricky moment—Ollie rejected from Central Saint Martin’s, where Anna had been offered a place; Anna considering rejecting her own offer, and following him to Sheffield. Anna deciding, finally, that her heart was set on London, and that she and Ollie would make their relationship work at a distance. Johnny offering Anna his attic room, with the tacit understanding, comprehended by them all, that he would keep an eye on her.
How clearly Cass
can picture Anna as she’d been the day she left for London: wrapped in Cass’s old Afghan coat, packing her CDs, her books, her art materials into boxes. Kim had hired a van: the Polish driver, a man of about their own age, was drinking tea with them in the Home Farm kitchen.
“My wife love your music, when we are young,” he told Cass, beaming, adding, as if surprised that this should be so, “You seem very ordinary for famous person.”
Tasha and Anna coming down the stairs together, their differences set aside. Embracing in the hallway: Kim and Cass standing together, a few feet apart, watching them, unable to believe that these young women before them were once their babies, their toddlers, their grinning, screaming children.
Cass stepped forward to embrace her daughter. “Good luck, darling. Enjoy every moment of it.”
Anna laughed. Such youth, such vivacity in that laugh: the sound of it flooding Cass with relief.
“Mum, I’m only going to London. And I’ll be living with Uncle Johnny. You’ll probably see me every other weekend.”
“Good,” Cass had said.
Then the driver had come through from the kitchen, and asked whether he should start loading the van. And too soon after that, Anna had climbed into the passenger seat beside him, waved as he turned the key in the ignition; and then the van had spun on its wheels, spitting gravel, and sped off up the drive.
Ivor had been sober again for just over a year.
“No anniversary party, this time,” he said, offering Cass a wry smile. “That was probably too much. I can see that, now. I was setting myself up for a fall.”
Anna’s graduation show. High, bare concrete walls. Chilly electronica thrumming from invisible speakers: the disconcerting realisation that Cass couldn’t identify the music, or its author. Angular, bored-looking young men and women dressed in a uniform spectrum of black, white, and grey.
Nobody, it seemed, painted any more, including Anna: her own exhibit was a large, wooden-sided cube, swathed in black fabric, inside which a video and sound installation was playing on repeat. There was space inside for only two people at a time, so Cass and Ivor were standing close to the entrance, awaiting their turn.
“Well,” Cass said, “that’s probably sensible, Ivor.”
Ivor Tait at fifty-seven. A tall, lean, loose-knit man, with a thick crop of greyish hair. Face still enviably unlined, his age evident only in a certain loosening of the flesh around the chin and neck. A light sweater of grey merino wool; discreet charcoal jeans; a well-cut black jacket that would, in a more formal age, only ever have been worn with a suit. He fitted in here, might easily have been taken for a lecturer or a mature student, or a critic for one of the more fashionable magazines. But Ivor would never, of course, be taken for anyone other than himself.
“So,” he said. “How’s the album coming along?”
It was not, in all honesty, coming along at all. It wasn’t that Cass couldn’t write, but that what she was writing didn’t much interest her. Her new songs seemed insubstantial, somehow: unfinished sketches, lacking the potent urgency that she believed her best work had always contained.
So often, when she sat down at the piano, or placed her guitar on her knee, she found her thoughts wandering to Anna. It was almost a year now, since they’d shared that curry in the Indian restaurant on Brick Lane: Anna had seemed all right—had insisted she was all right, and had done all she could to prove it. But it was clear that Johnny’s intervention, well intentioned as it had been, had offended her. Anna had spent that summer in London, staying with friends—she hadn’t come back to Home Farm once. And then, in late August, she’d informed Johnny that she was moving out, that she’d found a room in a house with friends in Turnpike Lane.
“I can’t relax, Uncle Johnny,” she’d told him, “with you breathing down my neck all the time. You and Mum shouldn’t worry about me, you know. I’m fine. I just need to be left alone.”
Now, Cass took a breath, and said, “Oh, it’s going all right, I suppose. Yours?”
Ivor shrugged. “Much the same. I’ve been thinking of spending some time in the States—Charlie wants me to meet some of these hotshot young producers. And when I say young . . .”
She nodded, smiled. “They’re all far younger than they have any right to be.”
They were next in line now. From the gap below the closed door of the cube, Cass could make out a series of twisted, disembodied sounds; a strangulated, altered music, yet one that seemed, despite its strangeness, faintly familiar. Her eyes met Ivor’s, and his eyebrows lifted, quizzical.
“Odd,” he said. “That sounds like the opening bars of ‘Just Us Two.’”
“Yes,” she said, “it does.”
The couple inside the cube emerged, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the light; the young woman seemed startled to find her gaze alighting on Cass.
“So brave of Anna,” she said, placing a hand on Cass’s arm. “So truthful.”
Cass and Ivor stepped inside, blinking now too as the darkness enveloped them. The soundtrack had briefly fallen silent, but now recommenced its loop. A layered, clamorous din: fragmented scraps of voices, disembodied, not quite audible, and seeming, for that reason, not quite human. Sections of music, played backwards, or distorted, overlaid with thickets of white noise. Cass heard her own voice, or something like it; then Ivor’s, too. Heard, yes, the opening chords of “Just Us Two,” but reversed, muffled by what sounded like the crashing and breaking of waves; heard herself saying, just audibly in the ensuing moment of stillness, “Anna, darling, it’s me. How are you?”
Where had Anna drawn the voices from? Her mobile phone? Her answering machine? It occurred to Cass then that perhaps Anna had been recording both her parents’ voices for years; storing up their most banal conversations—and their arguments. But that was ludicrous. This was an artwork: as layered and artificial as any recording Cass or Ivor had ever produced; and just as true to Anna’s own experience, of course. This was the realisation that drew the breath from Cass’s throat.
After what seemed an age, a screen on one wall of the cube came to sudden, startling life. An empty, white-walled room; Anna standing expressionless before the camera in a white T-shirt and blue denim dungarees. She did seem thin, Cass thought, almost as a reflexive action: she had grown used, by now, to this strange new reality, to measuring her daughter’s body against the image Cass carried with her in her mind. Anna’s clavicles were visible through the thin cotton of her high-necked T-shirt; her upper arms carried only the barest quilting of flesh, but they were muscular, too, and had lost that brittle quality they’d had in the worst months of Anna’s illness.
Her daughter’s image stood before them, staring directly at the camera, unsmiling, inscrutable. Then she reached into her pocket, took out a marker pen, and began to draw it, slowly, back and forth, in front of her face, aiming the coloured tip towards the camera. With each stroke, a broadening black line began to obscure the shot. Line by line, Anna’s face disappeared from view; then her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her chest. Cass was reminded of those narrow black bands, placed across the faces of those who didn’t wish to be filmed, obscuring, however flimsily, their identity. But this was obscurity taken to its limit: a body slowly, painstakingly erased.
When the whole screen had turned to black, and Anna was no longer visible, the soundtrack wound to the end of its cycle, and the end-credits were briefly displayed. Birth, in Reverse, announced in white Helvetica. A graduation film by Anna Tait. Filming by Chris Polarski. Soundtrack and post-production by Anna Tait and Chris Polarski.
Cass and Ivor stepped from the cube. She looked down, and saw, to her surprise, that she was holding Ivor’s hand. Gently, she let it go.
“My God,” he said, running a hand through his hair. He had turned pale, and his face had a haunted quality. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, Ivor. I really don’t.�
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There, across the room, was Anna, wearing a loose black sack of a dress, and surrounded by a small knot of people: a woman and two men, one of whom Cass recognised. Chris Polarski: one of the four other students with whom Anna shared the house in Turnpike Lane. Her boyfriend, Cass suspected (Ollie and Anna had not survived the distance between London and Sheffield), though Anna hadn’t told her so. My friend Chris. He’s a brilliant artist, you know. The best in our year. A visionary. He’s not afraid of anyone, or anything.
Chris was a short, humourless man who reminded Cass of Kate’s ex, the banker, Lucian: they had something of the same zealot’s conviction, the same brutal, uncompromising confidence. Cass had met Chris only twice, and disliked him, but had known better than to betray a trace of that to Anna. And she had found herself, too, thinking of Lily; of that warm summer’s evening on the terrace at Atterley, Lily offering the cautious warning that Cass had refused to hear. I suppose I’m just trying to tell you, because I care for you very much, to be careful with him.
Anna turned towards her parents, preparing to cross the distance between them; and as she did so, her eyes fell upon her mother’s face. She did not smile: her expression, in that moment, was as hard and ungiving as it had been on the screen inside the cube.
So now you know, it seemed to say. Now, perhaps, you understand.
And Cass, watching her, felt herself weaken; faced by the knowledge that she could offer her daughter only a silent, voiceless response.
I’m sorry, Anna. I’m so very sorry. Forgive me. Forgive us both. Was that the moment, then?
The second beginning; a song played on repeat, a looped recording spooling back to its start.
White noise and fractured sound. Discordance, distortion, dissonance. The shriek and wail of feedback. Hiss, spit, pulse. The slowing of a heartbeat. The blank-eyed stare of machines; the fractious blur of electromagnetic waves. A cymbal crash, a drum, and then, finally, silence.
Greatest Hits Page 35
