Chapter 8 #2
The thing is, my secret Welsh dresser looked as sturdy a piece of furniture as my dad ever lugged from a house clearance and then despaired of selling.
Its front was carved with urns of flowers and foliage and its drawer handles, cupboard handles, and fat wooden feet were solid balls of walnut.
Flanked on one side by that barricade of full filing cabinets, impenetrable and off-putting with the rolls of barbed wire along the top, and on the other with the long side of the twenty-foot shipping container, it seemed the most impossible corner of Lord’s Yard to dream of getting into.
But I knew better. As solid as the front, back, sides and even the decorative touches of this dresser might be, as square and true as the hinges and catches might have been made back in the factory where it was carved and glued and polished, the base was loose.
Maybe it was interchangeable with a zinc one, if this cupboard ever stored meat, or a mesh one to keep grains aired but, in any case, there was a groove along the back and, when you gave it a good tug, the whole base slid out like the lid of a domino box.
Then, if you were small like me, you could wriggle into a secret cave.
I would crouch for a minute in the thrilling dark before I pushed open one of the doors and emerged in the yard proper.
I can still remember the excitement mixed with soothing comfort of pausing there, no one in the world knowing where I was.
I made sure never to appear suddenly enough to make John wonder how.
He might never have wondered anyway. Because the reason it stayed all mine wasn’t him teasing me about how I climbed the tree.
I was lying when I told myself that. The truth of it is, I hadn’t found the dresser by the time John started to pull away from me, to boys his own age, to football games in the park, or in the school playground once they’d vaulted over the gates.
To bus shelters, litres of cider, cigarettes hidden in your palm.
I couldn’t forgive him. I was still in the land of adventure, where our Menstrie childhood was no different from the boarding schools and hiking holidays in the books we read, and he was ruining it for me, fleeing into the base and tawdry life that was waiting for both of us once the bright covers of our paperbacks closed for good.
That world is certainly all that’s here now.
There’s no magic to be found wandering around the dripping lean-tos leaking onto the headboards they’re supposed to be protecting; the soggy, disintegrating heaps of cushions and sleeping bags that even mice surely can’t nest in as they rot; the half pallets of odd roof tiles and shrink-wrapped sheets of plasterboard, every nick in the plastic backed by a bloom of damp and decay.
I know it’s always been this way. Stuff either sells or rots.
The sights and sounds, even the smells, are exactly what they were when this was Treasure Island, the chocolate factory, and Oz rolled into one.
This sad, closed-up, shut-down feeling deep in my bones is a normal response to the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives. The wonderland is gone.
But at least the nightmare is not what it was. Maybe John’s had the right idea all along: Stay here and face it down. Maybe if I hadn’t run away so far, I wouldn’t be right back—
I gasp so loud that even the clustered junk and packed-in layers of endless stuff can’t absorb the sound. I’ve been judging John for denying his memories and, all the while, I’ve been saying this visual stuff is new and scary and God knows where it came from.
The truth is both bigger and smaller than anything my wild imagination could have conjured for me.
Because it’s happened before. I did it when I was a kid and it was absolutely deliberate.
I turned my world inside out so I could live in it, didn’t I?
I made my storybooks real—wondrous worlds where I had adventures that always ended well for everyone.
And this world? This world of Lord’s Yard and Dad and the caravan?
I turned it into flat paper nothings that I could close and lay aside as I walked away.
It’s happening to me again because I’m back where it happened last time, and now I’ve brought grief and exhaustion with me. That’s all. Nothing more.
And I bet it wouldn’t be if I hadn’t bid for that job.
If I hadn’t tried to read that self-help book, it might all have stayed buried where it belongs even after I got back here, no need to remember that I turned the real world into stories and stories into my whole world.
No need to think about how I did it. No need to ask why I did it.
I don’t exactly know how John did it. And I won’t ask him again, in case I stop it from working. I’ll never mention the caravan to him and make him go pale that way. We’re lucky, John and me. We made it! We never even stopped loving Lord’s Yard and our adventures here.
Still, I think, looking around at the sets of five sundae glasses, the chipped platters and lidless tureens here on the old shop fitments, right now maybe isn’t a good time for me to be reminded day after day that everything comes to an end and what’s left behind doesn’t matter.
My phone buzzes, bringing me back to reality. It’s Chloe video calling me.
“Right,” she says when I answer. “We’re on.”
“Weren’t we already on?” I say. “But I’m glad you phoned because I’m having a bit of a breakthrough here—they’re never what you think they’re going to be, are they?—and I want to ask you something.” There’s no one else in the world I could ask, but Chloe is unshockable.
“If it’s about why John and Shelley are so worried about you . . .” Chloe says. She’s got me on her laptop and she’s texting someone else on her mobile at the same time.
“Are they though?” I say. “I’m not so sure.”
“Meaning?”
“Never mind,” I say.
“Yeah, there’s a delicate balance between caring for a bereaved person and treating them like a child,” she says, still texting. “Not everyone has my instincts.” She is so deadpan, I can’t always tell if she’s joking.
“Well, speaking of children, funnily enough,” I say. “That’s sort of what I wanted to ask you. I’m in a kind of a turn-round-and-face-the-future mood and . . . what would you say is a decent interval?”
“Between kids? Three years?”
“Between relationships,” I say. “Between mourning and dating.”
She looks up. I have made Chloe Crozier look up from a phone. “You?” she says. She looks intensely interested but not appalled.
“I’ve been having steamy dreams,” I tell her. I always could tell her anything.
“Who about?” she says.
“Faceless mystery man,” I say.
“And it’s been . . . three months?” Chloe says.
“Almost.”
“Technically,” she adds.
“Exactly!” I say, letting out a huge rush of relief. Technically shows that she understands. I did so much of my grieving, and quite a lot of celibacy too, before Kai actually died. And I’m thirty-six and the truth is I do want kids.
“Can you do sex on a one-night stand, though?” she asks. “I can so I wouldn’t judge you, but . . . you’ve always been such a sap.”
“I love you too,” I tell her. “So is that how things are with you at the moment? You haven’t mentioned anyone and you’re usually pretty on it when you’re single.”
“On it?”
“Like a heat-seeking missile, yes.”
“Or—just a thought—maybe I haven’t been rubbing your nose in my burgeoning love life because you’re my friend whose husband just died.”
“You don’t need to tiptoe around me,” I say. “If you’re just about to get engaged, I’m up for being your best maid and, if you’re still shagging your way through the county, I could use the entertainment.”
“Right,” she says. She’s staring at me and I can see the mechanism working.
“Don’t set me up!” She’s chewing her lip and her gaze has drifted off over my shoulder. “Chloe! Seriously. Do not set me up.”
“I’m thinking about the house,” she says. “And something’s just occurred to me. I might need to shoot off.”
“What kind of something? I don’t believe you.”
“Got it,” she says. “Later, Linds.” And she’s gone.
And what would you think? I ask Kai when I’m getting ready for bed that night.
He made me promise to be happy, but he must have meant there to be a bit of a gap before it started.
If it was me, if I was gazing down from my candyfloss cloud and it was three months after my funeral, what would I think of Kai looking around at his options?
Maybe time works different in heaven, though.
Maybe it’s been an eternity for him and he’d be fine with it.
Or maybe it’s been a blink and he’ll think I didn’t really love him.
Or maybe time is the same up there as it is down here and he’s been watching me through every sleepless night and bleak impossible morning.
If only any of those was true. But I don’t believe he’s watching. I don’t believe he’s gone, like everyone says, gone to another place where eventually I’ll be joining him. He hasn’t left me, or moved on, or passed over. I was there when it happened and what happened was that he stopped.
I finish up and go down to tell them the bathroom’s free. All four of them are packed onto the couch together watching something violent. At least, John and the boys are watching it. Shelley’s scrolling on her phone, but she tucks it away as I come into the room.
“We’ve had a talk,” Shelley says.
“Who?” I ask her.
“Shoosh, Mum!” Zak says and grabs the remote to turn the volume up even though it’s only gunfire and explosions.
“The patriarch and me,” Shelley says. John doesn’t react until she reaches out and pokes him.
“Right, sorry,” he says. “Shelley’s convinced me that you need your own place again. And you’re not going far—for some daft reason, even though you could go anywhere—so I should stop bugging you.”
“And Zak and Nicky get their rooms back,” I say, but their eyes are glued to the screen and they don’t hear me.
“Anyone want anything out the kettle?” I ask, but John lifts his beer bottle, and I can see that the boys have got cans of something horrible so I leave them to it.
They’re so snug, the four of them. I’m really glad Chloe didn’t say it was wild to contemplate moving on already. I want what they’ve got. I do.
What I get, though, is another night of horrors.
Some of it is the kind of thing that’s a horror in the dream but you don’t know why.
Why would watching someone lather his face up, standing at a bathroom sink, fill you with dread?
Who knows but I run from the sight and search through empty rooms until I find Peggy, or my best attempt at dreaming about a stranger I only met once anyway.
John’s there somewhere, watching a screen.
Shelley’s there, skulking in the background, scraping mud off her hands with a .
. . it looks like a cutthroat razor. I don’t know where the boys are and, in the dream, I’m trying to find them.
Or maybe I’m trying to find Kai. He’s lost, like he always is, but this time he’s a child.
I can hear him crying, wailing like a toddler, except when I wake it’s me.
There are tears on my cheeks and my bedroom door has just clicked open.
“I’m okay,” I croak. “Just a bad dream. Sorry.”
I can’t tell if it’s John or Shelley out there on the dark landing and the longer they stand there the more sure I am that it’s neither, it’s no one. I’m still dreaming.
When I get myself truly awake, I text Chloe. Might need 2 back off on evrythg. Head fried.
The dots tell me she’s still up and I wait for her answer, but I’m planning to ignore whatever she orders me to do. I need to sleep without horrors and, if that means I don’t move, or find Peggy, or work, or . . . anything else I’ve been contemplating, then so be it.
But she surprises me. Course it is, wee sausage. Let’s do smthg totally diff this wknd. Member nice g.c. with walled bit???
I do remember but I can’t believe Chloe’s suggesting it. Garden centre? R we 80??? I text back.
Smell flwrs toes in gr grass creamcakes, she texts me.
I text her back a thumbs-up and a wow face, then give myself five minutes of the latest listings and drift off to dreamless sleep.