Crushed

by Kate Hamer

  ‘You’re worthless,’ she goes on, her screaming vibrating the room. ‘You’re a useless, self-centred, disrespectful, nasty piece of work.’ She grabs onto her throat. ‘What are you staring at?’

  I don’t speak, just gently shake my head from side to side, feeling the same way as when I floated down the stairs – detached and strange.

  She lunges forward. ‘How dare you look at me like that.’ She grabs onto my wrist and presses her nails deep into the veins running up the inside. A sharp diamond on her ring has got twisted round the wrong way and it pierces me there, ripping into the skin. She grabs my face with her other hand, digging her fingers into my cheekbone and into the softness of the socket so it feels like my eye will be gouged out.

  And for a moment it’s almost as if we’re dancing together, with her grinding my wrist and face and us looking right into each other’s eyes. It’s a strange dance and in a way I know it’s one we’ve been doing for years in a hundred different ways. Close up, I notice her eyes have tiny flecks of green in them and I think how odd it is that I’ve never seen that before.

  Finally, she lets go and stumbles backwards and stands there, incoherent now, screams grating up from her throat one after the other, and the rage eating up her face, and still it somehow bounces off me. And I think it’s that, that I’m still just staring, that makes her do it. She picks up a glass vase from the coffee table and throws it at full force into the open door of the cabinet where it shatters the remaining glass door. The noise seems deafening. It stays ringing in my ears even after everything has finished breaking.

  ‘Emma.’ I’d almost forgotten Dad was in the room, so far in the background he’s stayed. He steps forward now. It punctures the room. She stops screaming and turns to him as if some spell has been broken. He puts his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You’re very tired. I’ll ring some glaziers and organise repairing the damage and see exactly what’s missing.’ He runs his hand over his hair. ‘We’ll make it good somehow. You go and rest. It’s been a long journey home.’

  She holds her throat and nods, and amazingly she does what he says. She walks past me without even looking and I hear her tread on the stairs.

  I turn to Dad. His eyes flick down to the red welts blooming on my arm, up to my eye that is so swollen now I can barely see out of it, back down to my arm where a trickle of blood runs from the cut of her diamond ring, and then he looks away.

  ‘She’s very tired,’ he says.

  I long for him to hug me with his strong arms or even simply murmur some steady, reassuring words, but then he’s got his back to me and he’s looking inside the cabinet to see what’s missing.

  41

  Orla

  How the season has changed.

  The summer swelled and died in a blink. The Himalayan balsam that lines the riverbanks flowered, then suddenly all the seed heads popped within a week. When I cupped my hand around them, the plant mechanism that’s as strong as steel and activated by warmth sprang forcefully inside my palm in a contained explosion – and left me with a handful of seeds that I scattered as I walked. By mid-August driedout nut cases already littered the ground. The blackberries began to purple. How could it all be so soon, I thought, and then wondered if this happened every year and I’ve only started seeing properly because now I look out into the world with a kind of dumb frozen wonder.

  Everything I see as before and after. In the world of before, even my grim encounter in the pet cemetery and the visit to the clinic I see in lush golden colours. It’s always summer there and the stalks on all the flowers are tight with sap, the hues are warm and subtle and the air is a pinky gold. In after land the world is completely changed. It is drained of proper sounds and colours. It’s not the simple change of a season. The world has transformed.

  The leaves have curled and wilted on the trees, and before I know it they begin to fall and perform their death rattle on the pavement. The grass looks shabby, its nap going this way and that. There are litters of brown twigs and pods beneath the bushes in the garden. I’ve left the bindweed growing in the beds and the open throats of their flowers are a startling white. Each day it moves on. The elderberries ripen and fall in a squashy mess to the ground. I watch it all for hours and it seems to speed along before my very eyes. Spiders weave their webs among the decay. They pop in and out of the crevices in the stone wall. The hard-packed soil grows cold as night falls.

  It’s nearly dark when Mum calls me in. She hugs me close. ‘What’s the matter with you these days, darling?’

  I nestle in as close as I can possibly get.

  I see Dad over her shoulder. ‘You looked like a statue out there,’ he says, smiling at me. At least I think that’s what he says. Sometimes I have to concentrate hard to hear what people are saying, like I’m underwater and seeing them speak above the surface down to where I’m submerged. Although he’s smiling I can tell he’s worried.

  Why did I never see the simple love shining out of them? Why wasn’t it ever enough? It could’ve sustained me, easily, for the next few years, nourishing me until I found new soil to grow in. If I could have just a fraction of it now, I’d bask forever in its warmth and be content. Those bright-lit days seem like an unreachable heaven.

  We sit down at the table and I pick at the chicken curry Mum’s made. The boys are told not to chew with their mouths full. The bowl of rice steams.

  ‘Come on, eat up,’ says Mum, looking at me anxiously. At first she wasn’t bothered about me going off my food. I knew she silently approved of the fact that I’d shed those extra pounds by the way she patted my newly slim waist and said how lovely I was looking these days. Now they’re worried. Dad jokes about sending me packing to his relatives in Ireland who’ll feed me up on stew and dumplings, followed by a greasy lardy cake and a Guinness chaser, and they won’t take no for an answer. I joke weakly about ‘no stereotypes then’ to divert his attention.

  I poke at the chicken and my stomach turns over. ‘I think perhaps I need to turn vegetarian,’ I say.

  I look up. Both their faces are perplexed but there’s relief on Mum’s too. She’s thinking she’s found the reason for the pickiness and the weight loss. It’s the obvious answer – teenage girl turns vegetarian. I can’t bear to think about if she ever knew the real answer.

  ‘Oh well, good.’ She blows out of her mouth. ‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow. What’s that stuff they eat? Quorn or something? I’ll stock up. I can do you a separate dish to go with the vegetables we have.’ She looks pleased, even glows a bit. This is my mother who can’t abide picky eating, who always made us empty our plates before we left the dinner table. That’s how much she cares about me; she’ll go against the grain of a lifetime. It makes me want to weep.

  I nod as if she’s found the solution and help her clear the table, scraping my almost untouched meal into the food scraps bin. She hums as she loads up the dishwasher, the tight-set curls on her head bobbing up and down as she works.

  ‘They still haven’t found that poor man,’ she says.

  Instantly every nerve in my body is electric. I swear the cat backs away from me. I concentrate on wiping the salt and pepper grinders. I do it minutely, getting into every single gap with the damp cloth.

  She straightens up and rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘His poor family. He had young children too. Just think, they could grow up never knowing what happened to their father.’

  In stories people turn and see the stricken looks on others’ faces when something like this happens. They can read everything there. I’ve found the opposite. All I have to do is turn my head slightly to one side and the moment passes without comment. If I do look terrible she doesn’t even see. It took an age for Raskolnikov to be uncovered as a murderer, despite his torment, despite his wandering St Petersburg in a state of fever. It takes him almost being split in two before anyone really notices.

  ‘Orla? You OK, love?’

  I realise I haven’t answered. I suck breath
in. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’

  ‘Good idea. First day back tomorrow so get a good night, then I’ll prepare a lovely vegetarian dinner for when you get home. How about that?’ Her cheeks are pink from exertion and cooking, from the fuggy warmth of the kitchen.

  I nod and call goodnight into Dad on my way up the stairs.

  ‘Goodnight, lovely girl,’ he calls back, and I know just from the sound of his voice – angled downwards and slightly distracted – that he’s doing the crossword.

  I lie in bed, thinking about tomorrow. I never did find out what Phoebe did with all his clothes. I borrowed her coat again to come home. She didn’t want to give it to me, became hysterical and said her mum would notice it was gone, but Grace slapped her round the face and made her do it. I was supposed to take it back and never did. That day was the last time I saw them both. Grace and I emerged from the house, blinking under a flat white sky. We looked at each other and I got the sense we were trying to trace something in the other’s face that might give some clue about ourselves. It was a deep look that cut so far beneath the usual I couldn’t breathe. We didn’t talk or even say goodbye. We just looked at each other like that and left.

  42

  Grace

  On the first day of term I wake to an unfamiliar sound.

  It’s a hiss, like the noise of the static on a TV. My mind turns over until I identify it, then it grabs onto what it is. It’s rain. Hard driving rain falling in waves all over the city.

  The summer has been dry and warm. Cracks have been noted in the baked earth. Gardens across Bath have wilted in the heat and at night there’s the tinkle of hoses as people try to resurrect them. Although it got cooler very briefly, the heat returned with a vengeance and it stayed dry as a bone. In some strange way it was like it was telling me something, that the fact of him being buried in water was causing a drought across the land and there would be no rain again ever because what I’d done had ended the world, which was doomed to die slowly by drying out. Fevered thinking, I know, and I’ve pushed it aside resolutely. I’ve made myself concentrate on what’s in hand. Look to what needs to be done, bitch, I tell myself. Look to what it is on a daily basis and think only about that.

  Yet I have so often wondered about the watery grave, the worry gnawing and gnawing away at me, that the level of the river has become dangerously low and left his body high and dry, exposed to the air and stinking like high heaven. Once, I contemplated going back to check but changed my mind. The idea of it was unbearable and what could I do anyway? Best left alone. So I spent my time looking to Mum. I cared for her as if my own life depended on it. The care I’d lavished before, after her fall, seemed nothing compared to this. I put the rest of my summer into it. I encouraged her appetite by reading the recipes in magazines and concocting treats. I saved up and bought some expensive soft satiny sheets. I took her out in her wheelchair any time I got the opportunity, planning out routes that took in flowers and greenery and ended in an afternoon tea in a sunny courtyard café, where I always made sure there was jam on the table to encourage wasps to come and feed on the sweetness.

  On the day I returned from Phoebe’s to the empty flat I sat shaking on the sofa for hours and when the intercom buzzed in the hall I nearly hit the roof. My heart pounded as I went to answer. I pressed the intercom button cautiously.

  ‘Hello?’ I whispered.

  ‘It’s your meals on wheels,’ said a voice from far below.

  I couldn’t stop laughing all the way down. A horrible hiccupping nervous laugh. I’d completely forgotten that besides the respite care and the visit to our place – that had turned out to be surprisingly brief and manageable – Miss Kinsella actually said she’d try and sort this out. She trusted me more each time she saw me, I could tell; could see how capable I truly was. So she’d finally pulled this off as well, except the two organisations – the one that provided breaks and the meals-on-wheels one – were clearly oblivious to each other because they didn’t know Mum was away in respite. Downstairs, a kind-faced old lady waited with cloth-covered stainless steel rings that steamed gently.

  ‘Here you are, dear,’ she said. ‘Same time next week – just wash these up and give them back to me then.’

  Did she see the dumb incredulity on my face? It was the idea that people were still running about as normal, delivering dinners, arguing over what to watch on TV, fucking, walking their dogs. I shook my head. I needed to enter that real world again some day. I stood with the tray in my hands and decided there and then that’s exactly what I would have to strain every fibre to do. There would be no letting up in that mission, no drift.

  ‘Enjoy your dinners, dear,’ she said, before zipping off back to her little blue van. I watched as she drove away.

  Upstairs, I scraped all the food into the bin. I still do, every Saturday when it’s delivered. It’s our McDonald’s night of course. Why would we be eating grey beef stew and sponge pudding on a Saturday night? Mum worries that it’s a waste and we should tell them we don’t want it any more. It makes them feel like they’re doing something, I tell her. Best leave it like that. In reality I want to cause the least ripple in the outside world as possible. I need to lie low until that real world can be entered properly again.

  That’s why I’ve gone back to school for the final year.

  I look out. The rain rolls in waves across the rooftops. It gurgles in rivulets down the windows. The balcony is awash. The building has become a giant waterfall as the rain lands on the roof, then cascades down the sides.

  ‘You can’t go out in this, chicken,’ Mum says.

  I reassure her and wrestle a huge old golfing umbrella from the back of the cupboard. It keeps my head dry on the walk to school. I look up and see the water streaming down the different-coloured plastic segments above. Soon, my trainers are soaked through. I can feel the water soaking up the back of my jeans, reaching upwards to my thighs. The traffic swirls through the flooded gutters so I walk as far as possible on the other side of the pavement. My heart is hammering. It will be the first time I’ve seen them both. What will they look like? I imagine our faces will startle at the sight of each other in the gloom of the corridor and our hearts will give a horrible lurch in tune. They’d better handle themselves all right. They’d better not break down. I’ll crack their skulls if they do, I swear I will. I wonder if we’ll have a silent pact not to speak or communicate in any way, almost like we’d never known each other. The closer I get to school the more sure I am that this would be best; it would be the safest thing to do.

  Seeing them both ends up being exactly like I thought at first. The corridor is damp from the rain being walked in and from the coats gently steaming on the pegs above the radiator. Because of the day being so dark, Phoebe and Orla’s faces rise up out of the shadows like bone moons. They float, uncertain, for a second and then we all move together and walk silently beside each other, falling into step. This is the opposite of what I’d planned and is against my better judgement, but we’ve cleaved each other like we’re made of the same stuff now. In this moment I feel we don’t need to say anything, that our dialogue will be in silence from now on.

  Because the school is a huge old house our assemblies are held in a tin church hall opposite. Usually when the weather is so bad they are cancelled so we’re not left soaked through in the morning to dry out for the rest of the day. Not this morning. We have to dart across the flooded road with hoods up, feet sloshing in puddles, and umbrellas in the tortoise formation of Roman soldiers with their shields over their heads. I sit between Phoebe and Orla, and the head, Mrs Reid, makes her shuffling way to the stage. There’s something wrong with her leg that makes her drag one foot behind her. The contrast with her deputy, who clops through the hallways like a pony, has always struck me as funny before, but today I can hardly bear to look at them both. The sadness of her dragging foot overwhelms me. It grows in my gut so it feels like it’s about to burst out of my mouth. I gag
a little and Orla reaches out and puts her hand inside mine.

  Mrs Reid waits for everyone to fall silent, casting her looks about the room until there’s a hush. Her high forehead, clean of a fringe or anything to conceal it, gleams in the grey watery light from the windows. The room smells of the parquet floor that has been polished during the holidays. It smells of chewing gum and the acrid shower gel on bodies. Beneath all that, the bottom layer, it smells of dust.

  ‘We begin term on such a terribly sad note,’ Mrs Reid begins and my throat closes up. I push Orla’s hand away and grip the seat of my chair with both hands. ‘Of course, many of you will know already, from the newspaper reports, or from being told by your parents and guardians, that the member of staff who has taught English here for nearly a year now – Mr Jonasson – has gone missing.’

  She looks down and rubs her hand over the plain wooden lectern.

  ‘It’s very distressing for us as staff and I know it must be for you also. All that I can say is that we must never lose the light of hope in our hearts. I know how popular he has proved among the students. We must pray every day that he will be found soon, safe and well, and be reunited with both his family and with us here in the school.’

  I wonder what our three faces look like and if Mrs Reid can spot us from the stage, looking stricken and pale. Stop it, bitch, I tell myself. Mrs Reid is as blind as a bat. She’s not wearing her glasses; she can’t see anything. We’ll be blurs to her, but all the same my heart won’t stop pounding. She pauses as if it’s a struggle for her to continue, as if she’s about to burst into tears. Just as she collects herself and opens her mouth to carry on, a low murmuring sets up at the back of the hall. It sounds like wind moving through cornfields. Mrs Reid frowns; she can’t hear it as well as us because of being further away. I see her deciding to ignore it and plunging on.