Twice the Speed of Dark Page 18
*
She wakes in the smudgy grey of morning. Gets up, sits at the kitchen table with coffee, scrolls through news, anxious to install her familiar barriers and distractions. The violence of strangers gives her an explanation for her own dark hates. Thoughts of revenge, particular and violent, are muted, camouflaged as a universal anger at injustice.
So many crises and disasters. Lives changing in a glitter-flick across the surface of the planet. A disco ball of transformation. Where are the lives that change for the better? She does not, as habit, seek them out. What would those stories be? Light-entertainment platitudes. Random sparks amongst the sweeping dark patterns created by politics and war. A child returned home from war would make a star pattern, an immeasurable improvement in the lives of parents, siblings, lover and child. They might extend that star to favour the next linked to them. A pay rise for employees in the mother’s business. An act of kindness from a sister to her neighbour. Little stars of luck, tender spokes of good fortune, trying to survive in all corners. But war and politics writes the surface with such bold designs. Blocks of misfortune and crisis visible from the moon. And there are subtler patterns too, subtle stars of misfortune, she thinks. When my girl died the world stopped, and no one even noticed.
*
The day arrives slowly, a flat stillness, a steady light. It is overcast and windless. Time for a walk. A visit later, a shop, another walk, TV. A lie down and sit up and stop thinking and turn away. Stomp and march and creep through the day with nothing to show and nothing to be seen, move along, there’s nothing here. Be so interested, Anna, in the low level of coffee in the jar, in the sudden desire to eat – what? Lemon meringue pie, it might as well be – that your mind shrinks to the size of a shopping list and the minimal ability to drive a car and count the change. Be so absorbed by this unpaid bill or that unwritten email that you see no more than a few sheets of A4 paper and a screen that tells you what you need to know. Be bored, be still, be bloody quiet.
Let the trees smooth out these wrinkles whilst you walk among them. Let them shield and shelter, let them be beautiful enough to soothe. She walks in the woods; the echoing emptiness of a cold day is comforting. The glimmers of her ghosts still glide between the trunks – they too seem soothed and a part of this landscape. What a strange journey, to be killed there and made anciently at home here. Anna feels guilt at having wrought such imperious alchemy on those unknown lives but remembers that they are her ghosts only. She is no stealer of souls. There again is the boy, dressed now for winter warmth, looking upwards through the lattice of bare branches as if waiting for another plane to cross, even though there is no shadow on a day like this, and the plane would fly high above the Tupperware lid of the clouds. Anna and he think in quiet communion about the birds instead, their hush in winter, as if they wait it out for the spring they know to be coming. For now, they fly this angle, that direction. Why? Where are they going? Why is that bird sitting there on that branch? It waits, it only waits.
Two days pass in boredom and uncomfortable uncertainty. She is not troubled by the question of the last few months: what shall I do with my life? It seems too absurd to examine such a grand question when she has lost the knack of knowing what she should do with the next few hours. She sinks into a hollow, absent kind of depression. Flat and bored and low. Pointless life. She ignores Sophie’s subtle, worried frown, tells other friends that she had a good time, puts off meeting for the time being, anxious lest they reveal that the news of Ryan’s return has reached them, hopeful it has not. She does not write in her book or add to her tribe of ghosts. But she sees them in corners, mourns their lost lives, as with each time she sees them she finds another part of the life they left behind. She buys teacakes on one of her shopping trips, for the little girl who likes to pick off the chocolate. They remain unopened on the kitchen counter. She thinks of the young man with the canvas bag, striding down the lane to discover her commonplace of woodland and muddy verge, her ordinary, flint-studded fields. He looks and sees it all as precious and new. She pulls on a coat and goes out into the lane, hoping to catch at his coat-tails a new sense of wonder, right now as good as purpose. But she walks a short way, turns into the field, and is halted by its emptiness and the cold. She goes home and sleeps on the sofa.
On waking, she looks at her email and sees she has a message from Estela. The message is short; she reads it as she waits for the accompanying image to appear. ‘Anna, it was very nice to see you in Tenerife. I hope you maybe come back one day. Here is the picture I say I will send you. I hope it is not too hard for you now in England. I hope you find a way to make it better. Estela xx.’ The photo is one of the ones Karl took as Anna was leaving, Anna and Estela in the square, lit up by flashlight against an aubergine-dark sky. They smile; Anna looks a little formal, Estela warm and cheerful. She smiles now, looking at the picture, glad that she has a copy. In the kitchen she opens a bottle of wine, pours a large glass and returns to the screen. The freedom of holidays, that absence of connection to the things that normally shape life, the undoing of ties. Why is it so hard, she thinks, for them to remain undone? We plug back into home like a socket shaped both to charge and restrain. She looks at Estela, her wide smile, tanned and freckled from hours outside. The silvers and stones of her jewellery shine in a jumble round her neck and the wrist, raised to pull a strand of hair back from her face. Anna notices amongst the necklaces a flower, a daisy. She zooms in to the picture. One of the chains has a daisy pendant. It is not, she thinks, exactly the same, but it is very like it. So hard to think of that sixteenth birthday. So hard to think of that precious time. Her heart starts to beat fiercely. She feels the danger of it. But she looks again at the photo and that little silver daisy. Where is it? Where is the one she gave to Caitlin all those years ago? Her heart beats; it warns her with its tattoo of beats, it warns her to be ready to run, but she doesn’t run. She picks up her glass and goes to the top of the stairs. There, ahead of her, is her own bedroom door. There, to the left, is the door to Caitlin’s room. Is the daisy necklace still in there? In one of the big cardboard boxes, or one of the small trinket boxes still sitting on the windowsill? Her heart warns her. It beats. It works as if she is running, but she is not. She walks slowly forwards, rests her unsteady hand on the door as if to feel its heartbeat. I am not steady enough for you, but are you steady enough for me?
Chapter 19
It isn’t the first time she has stood in this room. It isn’t the only time she has stood in the doorway, caught between retreat and advance. Caught in the evidence room of the past. Now and then over the years she has stood in the doorway, intent on finding something beyond the remaindering, the useless storage. At the beginning, she looked at surfaces that Caitlin had touched – a duvet cover, drawer handles, the tiny beads of a discarded necklace. She read diaries in despair, held scarves to her face. At the beginning, she sat on the bed and wept, she lay on the floor in catatonic grief, deaf to Michael’s distraught pleading, not heeding the weary trudge of his feet back down the stairs as he departed to grieve on his own once more. When the time came, some months later, for him to leave, he asked if he could take some things. Anna had by then removed all the photos from the rest of the house, the albums, the framed photographs given as gifts, all the images of the daughter who was gone. The only way to carry on was for her to be gone altogether, she thought. Excised. No, not excised, but absent enough for a barrier to form. She sat in silence, staring at the wall of unruly shrubs outside the living room window, did not say goodbye as Michael left for the last time, with a pile of framed photographs and a pair of tan boots held in an embrace before him, a link from his old life to the new one ahead.
Barriers formed, slowly, slowly. Barriers that were only visible from certain, carefully choreographed angles, barriers that did not bear rubbing up against. Since those early days, Anna has created a conspiracy in which absence is played out by concealment. But the ruse is thinning; her greatest fear is being reminded of the a
rtificiality of the refuge. The trick was as feeble as keeping a door shut, of setting guard dogs at the door of her own memory, setting them to nip at her own heels, to growl with tensed malice if ever she strayed too close. The door has remained shut. The boxes unemptied. The room is not a shrine; it is a guarded blank in her mind behind a shut door, a hiding place. The flat face of a shut door holding out for years and years against the dangerous intrusion of Anna’s memories.
She stands with her hand on the door handle, reaching for the unfamiliar position of the light switch. Her heart still beats at a gallop, a reminder that should she need to run, it is ready. But she holds still, looks across to the window, the partially drawn curtains revealing a row of boxes and trinkets on the windowsill, backed by the glass-smooth darkness of night. What was left over when Caitlin partly moved from home. She half remembers other containers of jewellery and adornment in the larger boxes still on the bed. She can’t remember if Caitlin wore the necklace, if it would have gone with her to the flat and to London. She has to hold herself rigid amidst the speculation, a force of will just to consider these slim details.
For courage, wine, she tells herself, going back downstairs in temporary retreat. The door stays open, the light on, a commitment to return shown in the unfamiliar shape of electric light spilled on the upstairs hall floor. Wine refills her glass. She takes the bottle up too. Do not blame her for the minutes spent sitting on the third stair, bottle in one hand, glass in the other, as if to weigh against each other. They both mean the same thing. She is a crossing point that links more or less of the same thing. Misery and misery, less or more. A sip from this, a slug from that. Get drunk on misery, risk being hungover for months. To look or not to look, this or that.
The bottle sits on the step beside her, the emptied glass turning gently, one hand cradling the oval top, two fingers of the other hand twisting the stem. She lets herself settle into knowing that she will look – she will open boxes and touch clothes, move books, search under photos and papers; she will be surrounded by what was left behind when her daughter died. Abruptly, she gets to her feet, picking up the bottle as she stands, and resolutely goes up the stairs and into Caitlin’s bedroom. She puts the bottle and glass down on a chest of drawers that used to be a shelf for Caitlin’s favourite books: Middlemarch, Alice in Wonderland, a dictionary that had belonged to Michael’s father. She searches her memory for the other titles, knows that the books, after their short trip out of the room, have made their way back inside one of the boxes on the bed, where they have been for nearly ten years. There was a nature book, delicately illustrated with pictures of wild flowers and silhouettes to identify trees by their size and shape. Novels and stories, a few hardback classics; elegant editions suitable for birthday gifts. To the left of the chest of drawers, up on the wall, there are other shelves where the other books stayed, not taken to those temporary homes. On the end of the lower shelf are old study books and ring binders, the residue of study that was not ecstatically binned and burned in triumph the minute the exams were finished but kept, for future reference, or just as a reminder of a learning she cherished.
Anna stands before the chest of drawers, looking at the spine of a candy-striped folder that she can remember on the kitchen table, part of the evening ritual of homework. How earnestly she worked, her neat sloping handwriting covering line after line, consuming facts and ideas with a gentle, persistent hunger. Whilst Anna cooked in the other part of the kitchen she would look at Caitlin’s bent head, the curtain of hair that fell to the tabletop, and marvel at her daughter’s quiet application, certain that with it, she could achieve anything she chose. Anna feels the muscles in her face tighten, her elbows pull in protectively to her sides. Her heart reminds her it is still there, working on high alert. How she wants to flee. She clenches her hands tightly, pulls her fingers as hard into her palms as she can. The muscles of her abdomen and chest tighten too, a buttress, a corset. Holding her to the task that came with the photo from Estela, its kind intention somehow exhorting her to this unprecedented exploration.
There is no rush. She pours another glass of wine and sits on the edge of the bed. Drinking slowly. Scattered images of Caitlin chase across the screen of her recollection and spill with weak light across the surfaces of the room. The million different girls – the tall and slowly graceful girl, the tiny, fretful baby. Michael holding her hand in the cold shallows of a Dorset beach, the two chatting amiably when Caitlin was grown up, father and daughter watching tennis together. These pictures collide, slide past; Anna sips her wine, takes in the unfamiliar sights of the room around her as the projected memories skitter over the worn and lifeless surfaces, dampened with age so that one could not guess at the potency of the relics within.
She goes towards the windowsill, hoping she will find the necklace in the inlaid wooden box in the centre. But it holds some bangles, a small key, hairbands and hair clips. The one next to it is smaller, an old-fashioned jewellery case that belonged to Anna’s mother. She caresses the surface, the black of the leather showing cracks of brown. She feels once more that she is a fulcrum, a link between these two women. Her mother, her daughter. A place-marker to show where they once belonged in the dreadful span of history. Her mother died before Caitlin. She is glad that her mother was spared the dreadful loss, but how much she would have loved to lean back into the past, to fold herself up in her mother’s love and let go of the habits, the conventions that held her upright, made her adult. How, when her own structure collapsed, she longed to regress into the cave of dependency, the blueprint of self that comes in the shape of parental love.
Inside the jewellery box are earrings, cheerful little concoctions of beads and metal, pocket-money buys and a few gold and silver gifts. There is one pair made of a mix of green and turquoise feathers. She wore them with her hair loose, two thin plaits down each side of her face. Aged seventeen, poised between girl and woman, a little unnecessary foundation on her perfect skin, a little mascara and lip gloss. A rib twists inside and spears Anna’s heart.
The next box is not jewellery sized; it is a tin, about the size of a shoe box. She takes off the lid. Inside are photos and letters, and Anna feels a stab as she recognises her own handwriting. She lifts the papers gently, afraid of what they might reveal, but there is no necklace at the bottom. She replaces the lid but lifts the closed tin from its place and puts it next to her as she sits on the bed. Her hand rests on the cover; the edge of her little finger feels the cold of the tin. She reaches across for her glass of wine, another smooth coldness. One for each hand. It is late, and though the beat of heart and heat of disturbed emotions have made her alert, she is very tired. She moves out, taking the tin with her. She goes to her room and puts on a long nightgown, a dressing gown, warm socks and slippers. Holding the tin, she goes not to her own bed but to the neutral space of the spare room. The red wine tastes ugly on her uncleaned teeth. She gets under the thin duvet, still wearing the dressing gown, and sleeps almost instantly, the tin sitting on the still, flat surface of the other side of the bed.
Chapter 20
She is woken into a new morning by her phone ringing. She stumbles back into her room to answer. It is Michael. Not too early, but not too welcome either.
‘Anna, hi, I was wondering if we could have a chat. I’m going to be over your way later and wondered if we could meet up for a quick coffee or something. Happy New Year, by the way.’
Anna shields her eyes with her free hand, an involuntary attempt to evade even as she answers. ‘I’m not sure, Michael. I’m busy.’
‘Ah. Oh. I see. Well, when do you think you’ll have time? Are you, well, what are you doing?’
‘Things. Does it matter what I’m doing?’
Michael bristles at this, though he attempts to hide it, his voice conveys his habitual, underlying impatience. ‘Do you want to plan for Caitlin’s birthday? It really isn’t that far off, and we’ve been talking about it for ages now.’
‘You’ve been talking a
bout it for ages now. Michael, I’ve told you, and you really should know by now, I do not want to have a celebration for the anniversary. I don’t want to celebrate Caitlin’s life, with anyone.’ Anna frowns, takes a breath to collect herself. ‘I have told you I will be there, but frankly I’m not sure if I will or not. I’m happy for you to do whatever you want. But you must please finally understand that I am not going to be a part of the committee, part of the team. I can’t get involved. I don’t want to.’
Unexpectedly, Michael loses his careful tone; his anger escapes, startling her. ‘Anna, for God’s sake, can’t you just let things go? Can’t you just make room for your daughter? Stop pretending she was never there. I mean, I know we’ve had this conversation a thousand times, but it’s like you’ve erased her from your life.’
‘I haven’t, you know I haven’t.’ She is taken aback by the accusation and searches for a counter. ‘I didn’t even get rid of anything physical, at least anything that you didn’t take with you. I just prefer not to talk about her. I wish there was no anniversary. I know you don’t understand how I feel. But it’s just the way it is. It’s not something to understand, it’s something to accept.’
‘Christ, okay, I know, it’s been going on long enough, after all. I wish you could see how sad it is. I would love to talk to you about Caitlin, our girl, to remember life when it was the three of us. I miss that so much, Anna. There’s no one else to share it with. When she was little. I know I have photos, but all this time I would have loved to talk to you. I still miss her so much, you know. I miss sharing my family – okay, I know, my first family. But I miss that.’