by B P Walter
When I woke, I had that strange, dazed feeling you get when you’ve been in a very deep sleep. A feeling that took me back to the days when I would wake up as a kid and not know how I’d got back to my own bed after being out late with my dad. How my memories of the night were blurred, as if scrubbed away by sleep.
My back hurt from my odd position and I ached as I stood up to face a bright, hot but horrible morning. The laptop was still open but had gone into hibernation and when I clicked it, part of me hoped it would never come back to life. But it did, of course. The screen glowed instantly at my touch and the BBC website refreshed itself to show a new headline:
STRATFORD ATTACKS:
DEATH TOLL RISES TO 37
I knew what I needed to do. It had been a while, but the scab was still there. I opened the little drawer of my desk and reached right to the back and pulled out the cold metal compass. It still had blood on the point, dried to an almost-brown colour. I stared at the sharp tip for a few seconds, then, my eyes filling with tears, I brought it down and pressed. Hard.
Chapter Six
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
We’re going to Denise’s fiftieth birthday party. I had fully intended to ignore the invite, but now, for reasons best known to the inner workings of my brain, I’ve decided we’re going. That is, if I can convince Alec to come too. Initially, I text Rob – not to ask him to come, but to just get some emotional support in the decision. A hope that someone would acknowledge how hard it is for me to even contemplate going to something like that, but encourage me all the same. All I wanted was a nudge in the right direction. But my message went unreplied to for a good hour (unusual in itself), then came back with a response that made me feel furious with exasperation:
You should do what you feel comfortable with.
It was such a useless piece of vague, wishy-washy advice, I almost flung the phone across the room again. And now I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to find the right words to broach the subject with Alec.
Much as I’d love to leave him behind, I think I know deep down I would need him if it all went to pot, even if he was just on chauffeur duty. As I expected, he isn’t best pleased when I tell him. He has just come from one of his ‘evening walks’. His face once again has that flushed look and the collar of his shirt is bunched and crumpled at the back. I realise I should have picked a better time (he usually doesn’t want to talk when he’s got back) but the words spring from me before I have a chance to stop them.
‘Denise’s fiftieth birthday party is tomorrow. We’re going.’
He looks at me as if I’d just told him we were going to Raqqa. ‘What the fuck?’ he says, and follows me into the lounge as I start to walk away from him. I settle onto the sofa so that I’m comfortable while he rants. I don’t say anything; just watch him go from sheet white to ruby red in the space of ten seconds.
‘We’re not going.’ He is pacing around the room now, gathering momentum. ‘I can’t… I just can’t.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I say, sounding far more confident than I feel.
‘It’s not happening. I’m not going to spend three hours standing in a room with those smug, posh twats while they all point at me – at us – and say how awful they feel to our faces, and then go away to thank God that it didn’t happen to them. That it didn’t happen to their daughter.’
This is predictable. I could have written this beforehand on a piece of paper and practically every single word would be verbatim as he was saying it right now. He pauses the pacing and stands awkwardly, leaning up against the mantelpiece, avoiding looking at the photos of Jessica that are just a head-tilt away from his line of vision.
‘You don’t even like Denise. You said she was a two-faced, old cow who still thinks she’s twenty-five. Christ, you even invented a character in a television show that was bloody based on her. I mean… what friend does that?’
I fix him with a stony stare. ‘I believe at the time you said it was a “genius move” and laughed for days about it. I thought I did it quite well.’
‘You did,’ he says, rubbing his forehead. ‘And you’re so bloody lucky she never watches crime dramas otherwise she’d have spotted it for herself. You even had her living at a place called Four Hedges House.’
‘It’s a little different.’
‘Not by much,’ he snaps.
Denise lives at Three Trees House, christened thus, one presumes, on account of the three large oak trees that surround her beautiful property.
‘Don’t pretend you care what I write about Denise. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference.’
‘So why do you want to go?’ He is down on his knees now, almost begging, holding onto my legs. I can smell him – the Ralph Lauren scent he uses, along with something else, something sweeter. Something feminine.
‘Caroline, are you listening to me?’
I take my time to answer, then eventually say, ‘I just need a change. We can’t go on as we are. Surely you know that? We don’t do anything. You go along to your… walks,’ I see him look away at this word, as if something on the carpet has caught his attention. ‘I go to therapy and the gym and that’s it. I’m not writing anymore. I’ve tried and I can’t. I just can’t, ever since…’
I can’t bring myself to say it. We still haven’t got there yet. We haven’t found a way to articulate what happened to our daughter – unless it’s within the heat of a blazing row – without stumbling and backing away. How do you condense something so terrible as that into a short, accessible phrase? You can’t. And so we just flounder and grasp at words in the air.
He looks at me and I think he’s going to cry, then he looks at the floor and says quietly, ‘I think… I might go on another walk.’
I can’t cope with that. I just scoff. ‘Oh come off it. Walk? Who’s next on your list? That receptionist at the dentist I saw you making eyes at last time you picked me up? Or that “old work friend” you refer to carefully so as not to give away their gender – or the fact she’s only twenty-eight!’
I shout these last words, recoiling away from him. It was about three weeks after the Stratford attacks, when we’d had time to digest, at least to a small extent, what had happened and who was responsible, when his ‘walks’ started back up again. It was the day they’d properly identified all the terrorists that had taken part. We’d even heard their names on the radio and seen their faces splashed across the front page of every newspaper in Britain: ‘FACES OF EVIL’; ‘BUTCHERERS OF THE INNOCENT’. The headlines seemed to revel in it all – the horror, the fear, the outrage. Alec, to my surprise, seemed to swallow all this tabloid hysteria with an enthusiasm that rather dismayed me, and started to regularly trot out bizarre rumours about ‘immigrants’ and ‘extremists’, as if the two things were inextricably linked. I greeted his preposterous, untrue statements with all the respect they deserved – a look of disgust and a refusal to talk. The only time I did properly respond was when he made a comment about most of London and the south being now ‘overrun with immigrants’. I snapped back at him that it must be ‘awful to be married to one’. This did make him pause a bit, then he said, ‘Well, that’s different; you’re Australian.’ I couldn’t help but laugh, ‘Oh I see, so some countries are OK, are they? You do know I spent most of my childhood in Saudi Arabia, don’t you? I’m surprised you haven’t tried to have me deported just for that.’ He didn’t respond. We settled into a tense silence on the subject after this discussion, but it didn’t last long, and finally, when it all got too much, we had another explosive row about it. He accused me of being a weak-willed liberal with my head in the sand and how I, of all people, should want all the ‘vile monsters’ removed off this earth. Then he slammed out of the house, shouting inevitably that he was ‘going for a walk’.
Now, confronted with the image of him in front of me, looking both angry and sad, I fall back on my main coping mechanism when I no longer have the strength to cont
inue fighting with him: I get up and walk away. He then has to make the choice to follow me, which he often does, but it speeds up the process. It means he can get hysterical and, as a result, reach his apex quicker than he would normally.
‘So, that’s settled, right?’ he says, following me into the library as I walk towards the end-most bookshelves. I survey the titles before me, an array of hardbacks and paperbacks, all jumbled together, no rhyme or reason. ‘We’re not going, OK? I can’t begin to imagine why you ever thought it would be a good idea.’
‘I think I’m going to start reading again. There are so many here I haven’t read. And I’ll rearrange them, too. Alphabetically. And who knows, with the reading might come the writing. Maybe I could find something nice to adapt – something less violent.’
He raises his hand to his hair and runs it through it, messing it up, making him look like a teenager who has just returned back home after a wild night out.
‘I am trying to have a conversation with you about a single important issue, so can you please not try to distract me and change the subject?’
‘It was you who wanted to stop talking and go out and roam the streets! You’d like me to start writing again, wouldn’t you?’
‘Er… I… well… yes, of course…’
‘Well then, just leave me to get on with it,’ I say, pulling the little step stool to my right so I can climb up and reach the top shelf. ‘I’ve always meant to try my hand at adapting a classic novel. Like a Brontë, or maybe an Austen. But I got distracted by brooding crime thrillers.’ The book I’ve reached for is Little Women. I’m not even sure why I have it here amidst a bunch of Edinburgh-based murder mysteries, but that’s the case with most of the books in our library. I have an expensive habit of ordering up mountains of books. Even if I don’t read them, it still makes me feel like I’m keeping my finger on the pulse of the literary world.
Alec sinks down into one of the tasteful cream armchairs that are dotted about the room. ‘Caroline, please, please. Denise’s party. Can we talk about it?’
‘We have,’ I say, climbing back off the stool and then sitting down in a chair at the other end of the room. ‘We’re going. Or at least I am. Do as you wish.’
He does his teeth-clenching thing when I say this, which usually means he would really like to say something back that’s both hurtful and intelligent but, as always, fails under the time pressure. And then he comes out with something that does actually make me gasp. ‘Do you know,’ he says slowly, in a low, dangerous-sounding voice, ‘you’re really starting to remind me of your mother right now.’
I stare at him, stunned into silence for a second. Then, when I regain my voice, I splutter back: ‘What? How can I? You’ve never even met her.’
He surveys me, folding his arms in a belligerent way. He knows he’s got to me now, and I’m kicking myself for letting it show. ‘I have a pretty good idea, from what you’ve said in the past. You know what I mean.’
I feel defiance inside me and I become determined to hold his gaze, to not back down. ‘No, actually, I don’t.’
He pulls a weird face, like a half-grimace, half-smirk. It makes him look uncharacteristically ugly. ‘Well… unhinged. I just wonder if I need to watch my back when I’m around you. I don’t know what you might do next.’
The blood surges into my face and I feel myself going red – red with rage, with hatred, with pure, hot fury. ‘Get out!’ I shriek at him.
At first he doesn’t move, then after a few seconds he gets up and marches out of the library, slamming the door behind him.
I take some deep breaths, calming myself down. It’s strange – before the disaster, I wouldn’t have dared speak to him like that. Even when he occasionally went to nasty, bellow-the-belt places. Even when he tried to make out I was stupid or conniving or crazy. But now the worst has happened, I find a spirit within me I never knew existed. The spirit to fight.
Trying to stop myself trembling, I turn the book I’m clutching over in my hands. It’s a Penguin English Library edition – one I think I bought a few years ago when I thought I’d start collecting the series. I remember reading Little Women when I was at school, but my memory of it has been mixed with various adaptations I’ve seen – one with Winona Ryder I think, and another with Emily Watson, and a more recent one at the cinema.
Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.
The first line brings with it a wave of warmth and familiarity, tinged with the same sweet sadness one feels at the end of the summer holidays, when the golden days are over and the funfair is packing up its wares.
Remarkably, I make it through the whole novel without crying once about Jessica, even during the moments of death from scarlet fever. It might be because the time and setting, with the American Civil War backdrop, are far removed from our lives here. It’s because I’ve got my writer’s eyes in. I do this sometimes. Alec accuses me of doing it when I’m watching TV. If we’re in the middle of a drama or film and he sees me crouched forward, my eyes squinting slightly, he says, ‘You’re doing it, aren’t you? You’re writing the rest of the plot for them. Figuring out the mechanics of it.’ I’ll nod vaguely in response, slightly embarrassed to admit it, but it’s true. And now here I am, doing it to Little Women. And I’ve become serious about the thought of an adaptation. I think it will help. It will give me a motivation, or purpose, something to wake up for. In some way, I might be able to give myself some sense of peace. I’m not delusional enough to think I’ll ever get real peace or total mercy from this terrible world we live in. But at least it will offer me something new – relief from the fear that Alec and I might carry on forever as we are now, floating our way towards a new normal, carrying on like automated androids, sniping at each other, testing each other’s tempers and then falling into a stony silence when we can’t think of anything else to say.
Jessica used to read. She was an outspoken critic, but she regularly found a series she liked and threw herself headfirst into it, devouring book after book. As soon as she was old enough, she read The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, and a little later, The Lord of the Rings, cover to cover and memorised all the characters and place names. ‘Maybe you could be an author when you grow up,’ I once told her. ‘If you like fantastical characters and magical lands, you should make up some of your own.’ She used to nod and giggle at this when she was very young, but if I hinted much about any future careers once she had hit her mid-teens, she smiled but her mouth twisted in that way that told me I’d best not pursue the subject. She never liked to think about adulthood, her future, life beyond being sixteen and carefree.
My legs have become stiff and I feel a bone click as I get up off the sofa. It has become dark as I’ve sat there, immersed in Little Women for the past few hours, the only light coming from the small reading lamp I turned on halfway through. I have no idea what the time is, but Alec is still awake. I can hear the TV in the lounge playing some documentary about sharks. I decide to leave him to it.
Upstairs, I instinctively move towards Jessica’s bedroom. I used to come in here every day, each time like climbing a big, emotional mountain, only to find a cold, cruel abyss on the other side into which I’d fall. I keep myself together tonight, as I wander round, taking in the books, the neatly folded clothes, the movie posters on the walls – dystopian science-fiction films like The Hunger Games and Divergent. She put these up when she was twelve or thirteen and I’d been happy she’d kept them up. I thought it was sad so many teenagers would strip away their childhood passions and interests when they hit their late teens, as if embarrassed they ever cared so much about something. I move over towards the books, all of them neatly stacked in alphabetical order; a smaller model of my grand plans for the large library of titles we have downstairs. She kept all her books from her early teen years, as well as others that go back further to when she was in primary school. Enid Blyton jostles for space up against the likes of Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer, along with the C.S
. Lewis and J.K. Rowling favourites.
I turn away to her desk, where her laptop and iPad have lain untouched for months. She had her phone on her during the attack and the screen shattered at some point, probably when she hit the floor. I haven’t even tried to get it working; I don’t know if it still would. Curious, I feel along the side of the desk for the charger and connect it to the bottom of the iPhone. Nothing happens at first, then the screen lights up with a battery symbol, telling me the phone is chronically starved of power. But it seems to be charging. Eventually, after a glimpse of the Apple logo, the home screen appears and Jessica’s face greets me. She is in a bikini and smiling, standing next to me and Alec. We were in Florida on a beach and she had the phone extended on one of those plastic arm things so she could take a photo of all of us. I’d thought at the time how ridiculous it was that young people couldn’t do as we used to when we were young and wanted a group shot: we just asked someone else to take the photo. Jessica just rolled her eyes when I said this.
I don’t know her password, but it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any need to go any further. This photo is enough for now. I take the phone with me and in my room plug it into my charger so it can be with me throughout the night. A little piece of my beautiful daughter, sitting quietly on my bedside table as I drift off to sleep. She’s there, in cyber form; a little hard drive of memories. Waiting to be unlocked.
Chapter Seven
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
On the morning of Denise’s party, I wake early and attempt to do some yoga. I consider going to the gym, but decide doing it in the conservatory will take up less time. I want to leave the house by 8am.
