Chapter Twenty-Four
‘In any graveyard there is always the one corner. Sometimes it’s more than one, sometimes they are dotted around like small punctuations in the sentence of living, but they are there. Every line in their stone is carved so deep with their parents’ unhappiness that it is hard to read, not because of illegibility but because of sympathy. In one grave, in one churchyard, there are nine children from one family, all gone within the space of six months, the result of a bout of typhoid that swept the region. In another lies ‘George Smith, son of Henry Smith, aged 32 weeks’. How agonised those parents must have been, only able to count out the existence of their child in weeks . . .’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2
* * *
It took me two weeks to pluck up the courage to step outside the front door, and when I did I found the world had been brushed with snow. The far hilltops looked like iced puddings and the pavements of Great Leys had frozen lines on their edges where the snow had melted back. Nobody looked at me. It felt almost as though they averted their eyes, becoming interested in shop windows or the slippery conditions underfoot rather than look at the mad woman in their midst.
Sense tried to tell me that they’d always been like this, that I was just being paranoid, but it didn’t stop me feeling as though I was moving in a giant circle of black loneliness that no one dared touch. I walked down the street and on to the churchyard to take a last look at the stones under their cardigan of frost before I packed my car and headed away. The stones were a constant, they’d still be here when I was gone as they’d been here for hundreds of years before I came; now they were also doubly immortalised by being in my book.
I stood in the corner of the graveyard where I’d first met Scarlet and Alex and rested my hand on Beatrice’s stone, wondered how she’d feel if she knew that her inscription and history were, even at this moment, being read over by Dan in his London office. That the words I’d so carefully written to give her context and to show readers what her world had been like were being highlighted and underlined, crossed out and adjusted.
A pigeon clapped its way free of a tree above me as I walked out onto the frozen grass. It cracked beneath my feet into the quiet air and I saved up the sounds and the smell of cold air which tasted like metal on my tongue to tell Daisy. Daisy . I tried to force her image into my mind but it kept being overridden by Dan’s face, that awful, sad, destroyed expression he’d worn in the hospital when I’d told him that I couldn’t live without my sister.
I bent down and traced Beatrice’s inscription with a fingertip. ‘You’re going to be famous,’ I whispered to her. This little corner of a rural churchyard, with its sagging shoulders of wall and centuries old yew trees, now immortalised in the book, would be visited by readers from all over the world, if Book of the Dead was anything to go by. I’d had so many letters of thanks from parishes all over London who were now able to refurbish their churches from donations given by my readers that I was thinking they might make a book on their own.
‘W-inter?’
I straightened up, almost guiltily. ‘Alex?’
He shrugged. ‘D-on’t sound so s-urprised, I do live here.’ A glance around. ‘W-ell, not h-ere , but you know w-hat I mean.’ He sounded different and it took me a moment to realise that his stammer was getting better. A slow delivery rather than a stoppered one. He looked different too, wearing a lumberjack shirt which didn’t so much cover his muscles as focus the eyes on them one square at a time. ‘C-ome and have a c-offee.’
I looked at him. ‘I can’t.’
I can’t face you now you know. You’ll stop treating me as just another person and start using that ‘quiet’ voice that people use when they think your sanity is in question. Treating me as if I’ve got a huge crack running through me that might blow open at any moment.
‘S-o what? Y-ou were just g-oing to leave ?’ Alex came across the grass towards me. His footsteps tracked alongside mine in the frosty vegetation leaving a trail as though two ghosts had walked behind us. ‘W-inter? Were you?’
I couldn’t take the expression in his eyes and had to look away. I shrugged.
‘S-carlet wants to see you. I m-ean properly see y-ou, not l-ike through binoculars.’ He grinned and the tension that I’d been feeling began to seep away. ‘But I w-arn you, it may be B-obso related.’
‘She’s home?’ At least talking about Scarlet meant that we didn’t have to address the Daisy-shaped elephant, although the presence of the tombstones meant that everything that had happened in the hospital was hovering just behind my eyes.
‘Yep. Once th-ey established there w-as no brain d-amage, just b-roken bones and c-oncussion. H-ome and bored and c-onfined to bed. Well, s-ofa. Bed s-eemed un-necessarily p-unitive.’ Alex held out an arm. ‘Please.’
‘What about what happened at the hospital?’ I took two steps forward.
‘Look. We’re f-riends. Friends are allowed to screw up b-etween themselves, y-es? Your h-ead, my head, p-rivate spaces. We all d-o what we h-ave to to k-eep going.’ He crossed the space between us and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘I’m just s-orry that you and D-an . . .’ He stopped, and it wasn’t a stammer stop.
An embarrassed silence fell. At least, it was embarrassment on my side, I really had no idea what Alex was feeling, although his arm across my shoulders was comfortable and reassuring. ‘Yeah, well,’ was all I could think of to say.
‘So, c-offee? And S-carl? And p-robably Bobso?’ Alex gave my shoulders a little shake. ‘Come on, W-inter. At l-east say g-oodbye properly to a l-ittle girl who th-inks you’re amazing.’
‘Ah, guilt. Nice one, Alex.’
He grinned again and the feeling that I was tiptoeing along on drawing-pin tips finally left. He wasn’t going to mention the whole Daisy thing, he was content to just let it be ‘one of those things’. He didn’t seem to regard me as being one step away from the psych ward, and he was prepared to let me see Scarlet. And he was right, I should say goodbye properly, it wasn’t Scarlet’s fault that I couldn’t stay here any more.
No, it’s Dan’s fault. But Dan is gone. Over. If you’d had any doubt about that, then the way he walked off in the hospital, the way he blew your life apart in front of everyone who cared about you should have told you that.
He said he loved you and he walked away.
* * *
Scarlet was sprawled across the sofa, clearly wrestling ‘taking things easy’ into the ground. She’d got a set of model ponies spread out on the cover and was having a showjumping competition with them when we came in. Light Bulb, wearing a fabric rug that looked as if it had once been a dog-coat, was propped against one arm. His expression was now a re-stitched grin that looked as though he’d been at the vodka.
‘A-nother visitor, Scarl.’ Alex ushered me in. ‘All the g-irls from school h-ave been round, it’s been like P-iccadilly Circus. Or a T-opshop sponsored One D-irection fan f-est.’
‘Winter! You came!’ Scarlet leaped up but sat back down at a look from Alex. Her near-miss with death had clearly given her a temporary appreciation for discipline. ‘Did you see Bobso? Is she all right? Are the babies all right?’
‘Alex and I looked in on her on the way.’ I perched on the sofa arm, a wary distance from Light Bulb. Falling on top of him in the hospital had given me some interestingly BDSM-style bruises on both legs which were only slowly fading. ‘They’re all fine.’
‘I’m g-oing down to make c-offee,’ Alex said. ‘And to t-ell the guys to s-stand down from l-istening out for you, S-carl. Back in a m-inute.’
Scarlet waved a plastic-coated arm. ‘I broke my wrist,’ she said, when I looked at it. ‘And my collarbone, and my ankle.’ The cast was a mass of scribbles, pictures and get well messages written in glittery ink. ‘No one else at school has ever broken so many bones.’ There was a note of satisfied pride in her voice.
‘Did anyone get into trouble?’ I asked. ‘Those girls who were bullying you?’
Scarlet bit her lip and her fingers fiddled with a plastic Shetland. ‘Shari said Mr Moore made them all go in his office and told them all I could of died . Emily Goodyear and Marissa Cheam cried, Shari said. I think Shari cried too, but she wouldn’t say that, ’cos Shari is cool. Then they all came here and brought me chocolate and crayons and wrote on my casts.’ A sudden broad smile. ‘Emily said it was like magic that I didn’t die. And Shari is my friend now, we’re going to do riding lessons when I’m better, Alex says. Shari’s got a pony called Dylan, but he was her sister’s, so she has to learn to ride him properly, and I can ride him too, Shari says.’
I’d forgotten that, about primary school. I’d got so used to grown-up life, where you could just walk away from people you disagreed with; I could hardly remember what it was like to have to shrug off those slights and squabbles and then clean-slate your way into the future. ‘Well, I’m glad it turned out for the best,’ I said, moving a couple of equine outliers so that I could sit next to her, careful to avoid her equally-decorated ankle cast.
‘I pretend that Mummy lives in my cupboard with Light Bulb.’ Scarlet was looking back down at the plastic ponies on the coverlet, changing the subject with the ease of a child for whom all subjects are equal. ‘Grandma and Alex and Lucy all told me not to talk to you about Daisy, but I think that’s wrong. Like they don’t let me talk about Mummy in case it upsets me, so I didn’t tell them that I play games with her when I’m supposed to be in bed.’ Now those grey, shrewd eyes met mine. ‘It helps, doesn’t it?’
My mouth twisted disobediently. ‘Nothing really helps,’ I whispered, fighting those hooks trying to pull emotion out of me. They stopped tugging for a moment, but when Scarlet looped her cast arm round the back of my neck, they gave one last, sudden jerk and everything came up at once, tears like sickness, welling in my throat and then pouring from my eyes, my mouth, driven by sobs that sounded like dry heaves.
Scarlet sat, half on my lap, resting her head against mine. She cried too, for a few minutes, but then stopped, seemingly impressed by the sheer longevity of my tears. I felt guilty, crying like this in front of a child, in front of anyone , usually my emotions were reserved for private occasions. Me, alone, supporting the weight of the loss of my sister. There was something curiously cathartic in having an audience.
Finally I reached the point of blankness, where there were no more tears and I’d stopped feeling. I’d cried my way beyond the pain for the first time, and there was a strange relief in its cessation. I’d got so used to that sensation that I was only half a person, that I was flapping about on the end of some balance whose counterweight had gone, its leaving was like losing five stone from my heart overnight.
Scarlet mopped at my face with a corner of her duvet and gave me a little birdlike kiss on the cheek. ‘You’ve got snot all up your eyebrows,’ she observed.
‘Thanks,’ I sniffed and furtively tried to do some damage limitation with the edge of the cover.
‘Daniel said you never cried.’ Another simple observation. ‘About your sister.’
‘He was right. I didn’t cry at first because Mum and Dad . . . they were so devastated and I guess I was in shock. And then . . . then she was here.’ I tapped at my chest. ‘I never needed to cry because she was still here.’
Unselfconsciously Scarlet blew her nose on the duvet. ‘I cry all the time about Mummy. I don’t think she’d mind that really, she never told me off for crying before, but I don’t want to feel sad because it used to make her sad when I was sad. I know Mummy’s dead, I mean, we go to her grave and everything, but sometimes I can hear her voice talking to me. And she didn’t mean to die, so I try to be happy.’
I put my arms around Scarlet’s bony body and hugged her, hard enough to make her squeak and turn her injured side away. ‘You could have died too.’
‘But I didn’t. And if I had died, I wouldn’t have known how much everyone missed me, so I’m really glad I didn’t.’
‘You might have done.’ I pushed her sadly chopped fringe out of her eyes. ‘You might have been looking down on us all.’
Scarlet picked up a couple of the model horses. ‘And then I would have been sad that you were all sad, and I couldn’t do anything about it,’ she said, reasonably.
‘You’ve got a point there.’
Alex came back in balancing a pair of mugs. ‘B-bloody machine, s-orry Scarl. Nearly t-ook my head off. Have y-ou two b-een crying?’
Scarlet bounced, within plaster cast limitations. ‘Yes, but it was good crying, not bad crying, wasn’t it, Winter?’
I took the mug that Alex held out to me. His raised eyebrows called for more than a simple ‘thank you’. ‘D’you know, I think it was. Scarlet was telling me about’ — a quick glance from her and I realised that our conversation had been ‘off the parental-figure record’ — ‘things, about losing someone. About them not wanting us to be sad.’
Alex smiled. His face crinkled along those sun lines and made his smile look even wider. He was attractive, he was cute and gentlemanly and understanding, but Daniel was stuck in my heart like a fish bone in my throat.
‘Lucy s-said, oh, y-yeah, Lucy and I, we’re g-etting back t-ogether . . . she said th-at’s why my s-tammer is getting b-better. Because I’ve l-ost the “survivor g-uilt” I had when Ellen d-ied.’ He took a swig of the coffee. ‘Nearly l-osing Scarl m-ade me realise, s-ometimes shit h-appens.’ Another swig. ‘S-orry, Scarl.’
‘You shouldn’t swear. It sets a bad example,’ Scarlet said, solemnly.
He nodded agreement over his mug. ‘You d-on’t mind?’ he asked, quietly. ‘A-bout me and L-ucy?’
I eyeballed him, then Scarlet, and jerked my head toward the kitchen area. He took the hint and followed me. ‘Seriously, I’m really pleased that you and Lucy are together again,’ I said, at a hopefully Scarlet-avoiding volume. ‘She’s really mad about you and she cares about Scarlet, I mean, she’s been fixing Light Bulb all this time . . .’
Alex looked over at the drunken, irresponsible expression sewn onto the corduroy face. ‘Oh. I th-ought that was y-ou and Mum.’
‘Seriously? You think I sew? For the record, Alex, I don’t iron or cook either. Lucy will be good for you and Scarlet.’ Memory threw up that image of him naked, all muscle and tan lines. ‘Have you worked off your frustration yet? I’m so, so sorry about that night, I wouldn’t have gone that far if I hadn’t thought you were right but it wasn’t you, it was me, being stupid.’
A really broad grin now. ‘We . . . err, we g-et by,’ he said and winked.
‘They send me to Grandma’s.’ Scarlet chimed in, concentrating on arranging the ponies by size on the cover. ‘They think I don’t know, but they’re,’ she lowered her voice, ‘ making babies .’
‘ She’s eight! ’ mouthed Alex, with extreme emphasis and an astonished expression.
‘Work cut out there.’ I smirked back over the rim of my coffee mug.
‘You l-ook better.’ He tipped his head on one side and stone dust fell out of his hair. ‘Somehow.’
I made a face. ‘Thank you for not minding.’ I kept the volume low, although it hardly seemed necessary when Scarlet had such acute hearing. ‘That I lied about Daisy.’ I dropped my gaze so I was staring at the blackness of the coffee in my mug, where bubbles rose and fell and swirled.
‘Dan d-idn’t tell, if y-ou were w-ondering. Not until the h-ospital. He j-ust said y-ou had p-problems, d-epression. He k-ept your s-ecret.’ A smile. ‘Even f-rom me and he kn-ew I was in-terested in you. He c-ould have really sc-rewed that up b-ut I think he w-anted you to t-ell me y-ourself.’
‘I should have. I just can’t . . . couldn’t. If I tell people, then she’s really gone, you know?’
Alex looked sadly over at Scarlet, who’d now brought Light Bulb into the game and was forcing him to take part in the competition taking place on the cover. It was like bringing a T. Rex to a dog show. ‘Yes,’ he said, softly. ‘I kn-ow.’
* * *
Back at the House of Tiny, I sat on the bed. Well, part of me did, the other buttock had to wobble unsupported in the air, but I realised I’d got used to it. In fact there was something comforting in the confinement of the place — not just the house but the town, caught in its basin under the hills. London was great for invisibility. I could meet new people all the time, people who didn’t know about Daisy, whereas here I suspected that it was only a matter of time before the gossip-grapevine meant that my entire life history was spread among the community, but there was a comfort in that.
I’d seen from Alex’s experience how a small town enfolded itself around you. He could have moved away, gone anywhere, but he’d have had to explain every time, about the accident, Ellen’s death, the cause of his stammer. Whereas here, all right, everyone knew your family back ten generations and remembered when your great-great grandfather had nothing but a pig and two bits of sheet metal, but everyone just shrugged and got on with it.
Living in a place like this means never having to say you’re sorry. Whereas the anonymity of the big city means never having to say anything at all.
‘Winter?’
‘I can’t do this any more, Daze. I know it’s not you. I know it’s just me, trying to put words in your mouth, remembering, not wanting to let you go.’
‘Well, of course. But you’ve always known that, haven’t you? It’s not, like, a new realisation, is it?’
‘No. But it’s wrong. I need to . . . I need to stop. I need to face things. I need to stop imagining you as you would be now, with a great fashion job and a fabulous flat, all cutting-edge and stylish. I have to remember you as you were before . . . before you . . .’
‘Say it, Winter. Say it.’
‘Before you died. ’ There were no tears, not now. I’d cried them all out over Scarlet’s pony-patterned duvet. ‘When we were twenty-four and living at home. You were still making your own clothes out of boot sale leftovers and I was writing press releases for people who made plastic widgets, and I just wanted you to have the future you never had, Australia and famous people and a brilliant job in design!’
‘You don’t know what I would have done with my life. Maybe I’d have got pregnant by the boy down the road who smelled of cucumbers. Maybe I would have turned to drugs and vanished into a series of squats and unsuitable friends . . . you don’t know. Stop trying to live a life for me and start living a life for yourself. Remember me as I was, okay, maybe I wasn’t exactly living the high life, but I was happy. We were both happy. Remember me as happy, Winter. That’s all.’
I smiled. ‘Yes. I can do that.’
‘And there’s one more thing you have to do. You know what it is, don’t you?’
I shrank inside myself with a feeling almost like nausea. ‘I can’t. Truly, I can’t.’
‘But you have to. Otherwise this isn’t over, and it will never be over. You have to , Winter.’
You have to, Winter.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
I need to talk to you. There’s so much I need to say, but I don’t know how. I don’t think I’ve ever known how, not since Daisy died.
I’m coming back to London for a few days to sort things out but then I’ve decided to buy a little place up here in Yorkshire. It’s time I started living again . . . properly, but I don’t think I can do that in London any more. I like it here. It’s big and peaceful and there’s just so much sky . . . There’s a house for sale a couple of doors down from Margaret’s place, nothing grand just a tall, thin terraced house near the river, but I think it’s time I put down roots. Stopped floating around in that state of denial I was living in.
I know that too much has gone on between us for us ever to go back, but I’ve seen the way Scarlet has thrown off all the memories of the bad stuff she went through at school, a kind of ‘forgive and forget’ thing that seems so easy when you’re eight, and I wondered if . . . if we could do that. If you could ever work with me again. I just want you to understand that I couldn’t stop talking to Daisy, no matter how much I wanted to back then. She was all I had. And I owed it to her to keep her alive, here, inside me.
But now I know. I talked to Scarlet, about her mother and how she put part of her into Light Bulb to keep her alive, but now she’s moving to real horses and Light Bulb is just a toy again. Just a reminder, a lovely, sweet reminder that her mother loved her. And I’ve got the memory of Daisy, I will have that always. Remembering us growing up, remembering what great times we had, how fabulous it was to have a sister that was a mirror image of me. But she wasn’t me. She was herself, and I had no right to put a life on to her that she may not ever have lived. May not even have wanted.
You were right. I needed to let it change me. And I think I have.
Can we meet, one last time? There’s something I want to show you. The fifteenth of next month, about ten a.m. www.FleetHill.co.uk.
Winter
From: [email protected]
Subject:
I don’t know what to do, Bethie.
DBx