by Helen Fisher
“I don’t understand that,” she’d answered, still concentrating on her cutting.
“I mean that sometimes the best bits are attached to the not-so-good bits, and we just have to accept that.”
“I know what it means, I just don’t understand why we can’t just have all good bits. We’re all good bits: you and Daddy, and me and Evie, and our house. There’s no bad bits.”
“What about when I tell you off?” I’d said.
And she’d stopped cutting and looked at me thoughtfully. “Even when you tell me off, that’s a good bit, because I know you love me. If it was another mummy telling me off, then that would be bad.”
“It really would!” I’d agreed.
But once Esther had trimmed off all that gold, the diary looked worse than before, and the little bundle of shiny strips didn’t look any good either. She’d cried, and we’d cuddled, and I’d thought of my own mum and how Esther was right: how I would love for my mother to be here even if it was just to tell me off about something.
“This box is a bit important to Mummy,” I said to Esther, and just then Evie came into the study, thumb in mouth, wrinkled from having been in there for so long, and her messy hair made her look like she’d just risen from a nap, when in fact she always looked like that: dreamy and warm. I sat properly on the floor and Evie climbed into my lap, head to one side, and stretched out her hand to touch the box as well. For a moment it felt like we were all connected to the box: Esther and Evie touching it, me touching it by virtue of holding Evie, and even Eddie, who was sitting there with arms folded, watching us as though we were a bunch of kittens, connected to it through the carpet that it was sitting on, radiating up through his feet.
“Why is it important, Mummy?” Esther asked, and Eddie leaned down to pass her the photograph.
“Who do you think this is?” he said, and Evie shuffled forward in my lap, her thumb loosening but still slightly wedged behind her teeth. The girls peered at it.
“Is it me?” Evie said around her thumb.
Esther looked from the photo to her sister. “It does look a bit like Evie, but that’s not her dressing gown.” And it was true, Evie was about the same age as me in the photo, and apart from a different haircut, we looked very much alike.
“It’s me,” I said, leaning forward and taking the photo gently, thinking they might pull at it or get spit on it. “And can you see what I’m sitting in?”
“The box!” said Esther.
Evie looked at the taped-up, battered box. “That’s old.”
“Oi! Same age as me, roughly,” I said, squeezing her and pretending to be offended.
“But that’s just a silly old box,” said Evie, “and you are our cuddly mummy.” She snuggled into my armpit, and I felt a rush of joy at the warmth that was coming at me from all directions: from Esther and Evie, and from Eddie, watching over us. And as always, when I was in these moments, I felt an emptiness. As though there were a corridor inside me with a door at one end, and when the rest of me thought everything was wonderful and perfect, the door would open and cold air would rush through and I would remember what I’d always missed. My own lovely mother. My eyes filled with tears and I looked up at Eddie, who nodded and smiled like he knew what I was thinking, but he didn’t, not all of it.
“So can I have this box?” said Esther.
“No,” I said softly. “I need this, and I don’t even know why.”
Evie—pouncing on the fact that she knew I hated to say no—picked just the right moment to ask for something.
“Mummy, can we have some popcorn and watch a film?”
“Now, that is a yes,” I said, and the girls cheered.
Eddie put his headphones back on and turned to the computer. Going to the kitchen, I popped the corn, and the girls snuggled up on the sofa to watch Mary Poppins. Again.
While my family were occupied, I decided to put the box back in the attic where it would be safe from scissors and bins. Upstairs, I stood on a chair in the hallway and pressed the hatch in the ceiling. It clicked and released a heavy ladder that flew down like it was worried I’d change my mind, metal scraping against metal as it descended, trying to take my fingers. I climbed up, the box dangling lightly from one hand while I used the other to grip the cold rungs. At the top I felt about for the cord and pulled it so that the single bulb gave a weak glow, lighting up first one side of the space and then the other as it swung about. Near the edge of the hatch was a chunky yellow flashlight. I turned it on and crawled in, dragging the box in with me.
* * *
THE ATTIC WAS warm—the summer sun was beating down on the roof—and it had a comforting smell like a mechanic’s workshop, both fresh and old, reminding me the attic is not a part of real, everyday life, but a place for storing the past: things we can’t part with, but that we don’t keep at the surface of our lives. Oh, and the Christmas decorations.
I sat cross-legged with the box in front of me, wearing a thin, baggy old sweater—one of Eddie’s—and jeans. The sweater swamped me, but I loved it. I was barefoot but glad my arms and legs were covered, in case something brushed against me. I pulled my unruly hair into a messy ponytail and pointed the beam of the flashlight around the dark space. The attic is not a place I often go. Like the recesses of my mind, it was a part of my house that I felt reluctant to visit in case the remnants of the past opened something up inside me that was better off shut away. For me, the attic is a challenge, one I am usually happy to let Eddie deal with. But I didn’t want to trust the box to anyone else, so I took it up there myself to make sure it was safe. And while I was up there, I decided I might as well look around. The first sign of a spider, I promised myself, and I was out of there.
The space became a series of snapshots as I used the flashlight to highlight objects in turn. There were stacks of plastic boxes with layers of books and papers inside. Brown cardboard boxes with writing on them like KITCHEN. A couple of small cardboard boxes, tied with string, that said IMPORTANT, DO NOT THROW OUT.
There was a plastic McDonald’s container that looked like a house, but the size of a soccer ball, and when I pried open the roof part of it, it was full of marbles, all different colors. Why do we keep this stuff? I thought. But I admit, I didn’t want to take it downstairs and trash it. There was a memory here, too hard to discard, too easy to keep.
When we go to the beach, Evie and Esther pick up stones and give them to Eddie and me. Finding the smoothest stone, a perfectly round one, or one that looks like a face, or a dog, or the shape of a heart, all these things transmit treasure status onto these small, ordinary objects. The moment they’re picked up and admired—the longer they’re held on to—the harder they are for the girls to throw away. The stones end up in my pockets, Eddie’s pockets; and holding his hand in one of mine while rubbing the stones between my fingers in the other is the feel of the beach to me. When we get home, cardigan pockets misshapen by the weight of these stones, I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t throw them away. Eddie’s happy to put them in the garden, but I feel like that’s abandonment too. So I started having jars of stones around the house. I even bought some vases to display them. I just couldn’t put them in the attic—it would feel like an insult to the girls and our days at the beach. But we do have a lot of stones. I guess one day they’ll have to go.
We keep stuff in order to hang on to what’s important, but it’s an illusion. My pain at the thought of throwing away those stones is my pain at losing those days with my daughters. The pain of knowing that one day I will look back and they will be so far in the past that I’ll feel like a balloon that has silently unraveled itself from the hand that’s holding it, and drifted out of reach into the sky. As long as I have those stones, I can persuade myself that I still have those days. What I can’t admit is that those days are already gone. Stones or no stones, the past is as far away from us whether we’re talking about ten minutes ago or ten years. These objects are not bridges to the past, they’re bridges
to memories of the past. But they are not the past.
That was how I felt before I went into the attic.
By the time I left it, I’d changed my mind.
The flashlight created a tunnel of light from me to the far side of the attic, and in truth, even then it was like reaching out to a different place and time. I saw a brown suitcase I’d taken to Greece as a teenager. Inside were the girls’ baby clothes, too sentimental to give away. But now the idea of preserved clothes felt like Miss Havisham’s stuff; it would have been better to pass them on. The suitcase had a worn-out sticker on it of Shaggy in his green T-shirt and maroon trousers, saying “Scooby-Doo, where are you?” My boyfriend at the time was a bit of a hippie. He had the same green T-shirt as Shaggy and the same haircut, and he’d smoothed that sticker onto my case, saying, “Send me postcards. This sticker is to remind you that I will be wondering where you are and what you’re doing the whole time.” I’d forgotten about that, and probably would have gone my whole life never thinking about it again if I never saw that case.
The tunnel of light fell on other things that made me smile: a proper old telephone, cream-colored with a rotating dial and heavy handset; a tennis racket with a wooden frame, must have been Eddie’s; a basketball that looked a bit gray, but with a wipe might be orange again. I decided to take it downstairs with me; Eddie could put up a hoop at the back of the house. I’m a pretty good shot, and the girls would love it.
I have so little of my mother, missed out on so much. I don’t blame Em and Henry, but I think they could have told me more, should have talked about her with me. When they took me in, they were already old and had no children. They were kind, and I was lucky that they were there for me, and later they adopted me. It was like living with sweet grandparents, and life could sometimes feel very quiet, but they treated me well, and what they did, I suppose, was try to ease my mother’s death for me by never mentioning it. They said she became ill, which I knew, and then died, but I didn’t know a person could die from a cough and a cold. When I get a cold myself these days, I worry so much that I make myself even sicker, wondering whether my children will grow up without a mother, when all I’ve got is a sore throat and a high temperature.
I realize now that it must have been something more serious, but at the time I allowed myself to believe it was as simple as that and I didn’t question it. Maybe I had more memories of her at the time, but my mother was like a fairy tale to me, and as I grew up I suppose she became what fairy tales become to all adults: an illusion, a magical story that seems to say one thing, but mean something else. There were very few bridges to my mother. I suppose that’s why the photograph was so important to me, even though she wasn’t in it.
I sighed. I knew that coming into the attic would make me think, make me remember. Wanting to remember and not wanting to remember at the same time. All of a sudden I longed to be downstairs, back in the real world, the present, the place I understood, with my daughters, whose laughter I could faintly hear, and Eddie, whom I wanted to kiss again.
I stood up and lifted the box, wondering where would be best to store it, and whether to fold it up or keep it as it was. Being short, I could have stood upright, but I instinctively ducked as I went along, placing my bare feet carefully. I would paint my toenails later, I thought. As I stepped backward, I hit my head on the light bulb. There was instant darkness except for the flashlight beam, and a tinkling sound as the glass fell around me. I automatically squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them I felt my face. I was fine. I shone the flashlight on the floor. Tiny shards of glass were scattered everywhere, over the wooden slats and yellow insulation, all around my feet—surely this was more glass than makes a single bulb! If I moved, I knew I was bound to step on it, and pictured tweezering slivers of it from my skin. I set the box down carefully, and stepped inside it: a safe zone, a glass-free area.
I opened my mouth to shout for Eddie, hoping he could hear me with his headphones on—then closed it again before I made a sound. Standing in the box had given me the most extraordinary feeling of nostalgia. My photograph was still in Eddie’s study, but I pictured it perfectly, myself as a child, grinning out over the edge of the box. And like that girl on the front of the box who was bouncing out at me from the past, here I was, the girl from the future, back inside the box of my photograph. The tiny child I had been would never have imagined that one day she would be standing in that very same box, too big to sit right inside it now, and having grown up entirely without the sweet mother she had loved so very much.
And then I felt myself drop just slightly to the right; the feeling was unnerving, like when you sit on a chair and one leg is a fraction shorter than the others, and the world feels completely off-kilter for a moment. But I was standing in the box, and there were no legs to be shorter than the others. Then it happened again; this time the left side felt like it jerked slightly downward. I realized the box must be on a weak part of the attic floor and I was about to fall through. I froze, I held my breath, I closed my eyes, but none of these things could make me lighter or levitate. And then, as Eddie had predicted, it felt as though the bottom fell out of the box completely.
I dropped fast, and I dropped vertically. My breath was whipped away from me so quickly there was no chance to scream. I shot straight down like a silk scarf being whisked from a hook on a wall. And it was pitch-black.
I knew I hadn’t fallen through the ceiling—if I had, I would have hit the upper hall floor already. My legs scrambled in the air, instinctively seeking something to connect with. Sheer velocity yanked my arms from my sides straight above my head, and the rush of air pulled my sweater up and over my chest. It caught on my chin; then the wind ripped it over my head and away.
The air streaming upward flooded my nose and mouth; it was like trying to breathe in through your nose with your head hanging out of the car window (which I don’t recommend, by the way). The roar in my ears reminded me of a time I stood behind a waterfall, intense, powerful. I know it’s hard to believe, but the fact is that one moment I was standing in a box in my loft, and the next I was falling at high speed, in the dark, and showing no signs of reaching the ground.
I sensed a slowing; the air felt thicker and I was able to take a breath through my mouth. As the slowing increased, my legs took on a more graceful swimmer’s kick. I was doing a front crawl, but vertically. A glimmer of light appeared below me.
Remember in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, when Alice falls through the rabbit hole at such a casual pace she has time to look at all the other things in the hole? I think there were lamps and clocks and playing cards. I was falling that slowly now, but there was nothing to see. Like a cave animal, I felt my eyes getting bigger in order to eke out any morsel of light available. Below me—a long way off—a multitude of colored lights spun like a lethargic kaleidoscope. I watched as those colors gathered, seeming nearer and more focused, and my feet continued to kick. For a moment I decided I must have fallen through the attic, hit my head, and passed out. Eddie would find me and revive me.
But just as I started to feel confident with the idea that I must be unconscious in the real world—surely the only explanation possible?—I found myself fighting for breath as though I had a corset on and it was getting tighter and tighter. I scrabbled at myself, trying to get my fingers between my skin and whatever was suffocating me. But there was nothing there. I couldn’t breathe in or out. Eddie, find me soon, otherwise I’m going to die. The rushing sound of water vanished, and the silence was broken by another sound, soft and menacing: a rhythmic thud like wild horses running on a beach. Or the heartbeat of a giant when he’s just swallowed you whole.
In my suffocating descent, I curled into a fetal position, my lungs ready to burst. I sped up again—free-falling—hair flying upward. The fear of not breathing superseded my fear of anything else. If I didn’t breathe soon, I would die. I watched the colorful lights below as I spun: they charged toward me, and I squeezed my eyes shut again,
expecting impact.
I hit the ground so hard I felt like part of me had gone through it. The force of the landing split my invisible corset and I took a noisy, desperate breath. I was in the fetal position; the muscles and bones on my right side shrieked, and I gulped in oxygen.
I managed to turn my head and look up from the floor. It was night. I had landed on a Space Hopper box—although this one looked newer—and practically crushed it, and above my head, twinkling festively, were the fairy lights of a Christmas tree.
I didn’t move for a few minutes. Breathing in and out hurt. I thought maybe if I just lay there, some explanation would make itself known. I’ve watched plenty of movies where the seemingly inexplicable was ultimately explained. I was hoping that would happen, right about… now. But it didn’t.
I looked up into the tree, and the face of Father Christmas—glass bauble version—moved gently, close to me. His beard looked like shiny whipped meringue, his tiny pursed red mouth glinted through his mustache, and his scarlet hat glimmered in the tree lights. The holly around the rim of his hat gave me pause. I knew this face—correction, I knew this bauble, I had hung it myself on this tree, about thirty years ago.
I looked at the carpet, flat and gray, and as familiar as the bauble, more so. This was the carpet I had felt under my feet every day, a long time ago. I lay there, certain that I was about to discover that I had died and gone to heaven.
Or something even more unbelievable to me than that.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES passed, I guess, and then I carefully eased myself out of the box. When I stood, pain shot through my hip like a bullet and it felt like my wrist was broken, though it wasn’t. I looked around the room, turning on the spot like a damaged ballerina in a musical jewelry box that starts up when you lift the lid.
I knew this room. When I looked at the tree, I saw what was in my photograph, but it was the things that lay outside the border of the photograph that shocked me. Too familiar. Like my own bed, or my coat, or the smell of my children’s hair; this room was practically a part of me. When people say that something is like coming home, it’s that powerful sense of belonging, intensely normal. And here I was. Home.