by Kate Helm
I hear the sound of a car door slamming. A revving engine. Down on the street, there’s movement. A saloon car – black? navy? – speeding away from me the wrong way down the square towards the sea. No lights. No way to see the registration number, even if I did have full vision.
Now, everything is still again. Did that even just happen?
I walk back across the room to turn on the lights.
The parquet is littered with cuttings and sketches and files, the doors to the armoire open. I didn’t leave it like that: I’d packed everything about my old life away last night. I’ve been burgled.
Jim?
Who else?
I slump down onto the floor and try to work out what’s gone. It doesn’t take long. The folder for the Fielding case is missing, and all the newer sketches I’d done, including the taped-together mind map that tried to make sense of everything that has happened at Ashdean.
But what about the DVD with the photographs?
My stomach drops as I realise my laptop has been taken, too. Whoever broke into the flat must have been here for some time.
My teeth start to chatter. The intruder must have come into my bedroom. Taken my mobile off the bedside table only centimetres from my body, checked for anything else he wanted.
Pink looks sad, as though she wishes she could have woken me earlier.
‘It’s OK. It might have been dangerous if I’d interrupted them.’
Them? Jim, or most likely one of his men – driving the threat home.
I see they haven’t taken Marion’s note, at least. But all it’ll take is a look through my latest search history to see not only that I’m going blind, but also how I feel about living with that. Or not.
I run through what I remember looking for . . .
How to make a will; how to leave property to a charity.
And the last search of all:
What it feels like to drown.
60
I don’t report the break-in to the police – I’m certain Jim’s people left no evidence behind. What they took makes it easier to ignore the outside world. I don’t even bother to buy a new phone or laptop. I record an anodyne message on my home phone:
This is Georgia. Sorry I’m not around right now. I’m taking some time out, everything’s fine, just need to drop out for a bit. Do leave a message and I’ll call you as soon as I’m back.
A woman from the hospital ophthalmology department leaves a stroppy message, asking why I missed an appointment. Oli and Neena leave voicemails too, but nothing they can say will help.
Once a day I go out: collect my post from downstairs and check my emails at the internet cafe on Western Road, blinking and peering and magnifying till they make sense.
I doze in the day, and at night, I walk from room to room, looking for somewhere to settle. My head aches constantly, and everything tastes metallic. Except coffee, which I mainline.
The caffeine gives me the energy to get my affairs in order. It’s not a huge job, but no one needs to be burdened by this, afterwards. There is perverse pleasure in choosing charities that could do good with money I didn’t earn and never deserved. I draw up a list – a local refuge, animal welfare, an art therapy trust. I consider guide dogs, but it seems too neat. Instead, I find a small charity that aids genetic research into Best disease.
All my donations will be anonymous.
It’s liberating, imagining a world without me. And maybe I might find another world where my brother and my mother are waiting. Though nothingness seems more likely. The handwritten draft of my new will is ready to send to the solicitor who handled my flat sale. As I put it in the envelope, I think of Robert O’Neill’s will, and how he felt when he wrote it. The careful words and handwriting seem to fit what I know about him now. A perfectionist.
What went wrong between him and Jim? I try to put it out of my mind, but it keeps creeping back. Was it just that Jim wanted Emma to himself? It doesn’t ring true that Jim would kill for that. Yet Jim virtually admitted to murder in our last moments together.
What if Robert knew something about Jim? They were friends as teenagers. Could Robert have known what Jim did at Copse View and tried to blackmail him? That could be why Jim took the blame for the joyriding and the thefts.
But perhaps that’s why Robert came back to Ashdean years later – to ask his friend for money? And Jim decided enough was enough.
I have to stop this, accept I’ll never know for sure.
Charlie comes, sometimes. He is a soothing presence, perhaps because I know he’s done OK in real life. But when Pink appears, it reminds me I never found out her real name or what Jim did to her.
Pip stays gone. That I am thankful for.
Each night I hear noises that might or might not be there. Check the locks on my doors and windows over and over: more as a tic than because I think someone wants to get in. There is nothing left for Jim – or whoever he hired – to take from me now.
At least my to-do list is getting shorter. Only the two tasks I dread remain.
See my father.
And one other thing. Something I can’t expect anyone else to do after I’ve gone.
*
‘Can you help me? I have the key, but I don’t know where unit 347 is.’
The guy on reception doesn’t even look up from the game he’s playing on his phone.
‘Third floor, turn right out of the lift.’
The building is all echoes and clanging metal doors; it reminds me of the prison where Daniel has spent the last thirteen years. The storage facility is in an old warehouse, the corridors painted a shiny grey, the hammered aluminium cubicles bolted in place. Hard even for a sighted person to navigate – for me, it’s a monotone maze.
I eventually make it to my unit. The padlock is pristine but stiff – it hasn’t been opened since it was first used, I suppose – but eventually it gives, and before I pull open the door I wait for my heart rate to slow.
I’ve avoided facing this stuff for twenty years. No more putting it off.
It’s emptier than I expected. Two-thirds of what I’ve been paying for is unoccupied space. Dead air. The unit is three metres square, equally high and deep and wide, a perfect cube. In my nightmares, it was stuffed with old furniture and pots and pans and suitcases full of dead people’s clothes. The mattress my mother was smothered on, the rug where paramedics fought to save my brother’s life.
I was most afraid of the smell of home.
Instead, order reigns. The removal men who shifted the boxes from Frome to here have stacked them neatly to the ceiling. It reminds me of a police evidence room. I move my head this way and that to read the labels on the dozen or so brown storage cartons:
Living room, kitchen, office . . .
Toys.
I had nothing to do with what was taken from the house. A friend of my mother’s took on that grim task, after the police left. She came to visit me at Marion’s to give me a few items in person: my paintbox; some clothes and school books; my duvet cover; plus an album of photographs and my Daler zippable art folder.
‘It has the painting you were working on inside,’ she’d said, ‘and also the one Pip had been painting the morning when . . .’
She broke down and I patted her back as she sobbed. I was used to adults crying by then. When she’d gone, I threw everything but the album and folder in the bin. The album just fit inside the vinyl folder, which I’ve taken with me whenever I’ve moved, but I haven’t looked inside once. I don’t need to. I remember every detail.
Enough. This job won’t get done if I spend my time looking back.
I set up two areas: one corner for charity donations, one for rubbish. In the centre, I put a plastic bag for things I will burn. I put my earbuds in and turn on a rock playlist, full volume, to drown out any emotion.
There’s an old metal stepladder next to the boxes, I move it into position and climb beside the first stack. When I look at my hands gripping the rail, I see dried
splashes of paint against the aluminium.
Ladybird red for Pip’s room.
Bumblebee yellow for mine.
I blink away the memories, and take down the first box of kitchenware. Mostly electricals – the toaster, the kettle, Mum’s Moulinex. For a moment, I picture them in their rightful places on the white melamine kitchen counter, next to a loaf of sliced bread always ready for me or Pip to make a snack.
I push the entire box to the rubbish corner and write ELECTRICALS FOR RECYCLING in black marker pen. Every box will be clearly marked by the time I am finished, ready for the clearance firm I’ve specified in my will. My father would be proud of my rediscovered skill for planning.
The next box is more KITCHENWARE. It’s mainly textiles: tablecloths, napkins. I wonder why Mum’s friend kept these, but not the plates or glassware.
They smell musty, though I am sure they were freshly laundered before going into storage, and little envelopes of moth-proofing chemicals have been tucked in at regular intervals. I imagine Mum’s grieving friend packing them for me, as though she was creating my ‘bottom drawer’. I hope she never finds out that I failed to have the future she thought I deserved to have.
When I take the tablecloth out, I remember: my mother made this at school, in needlework classes. The detail is hard for me to make out under the flat strip lights, but I can feel the care that went into it with my fingertips. There are summer flowers and bluebirds surrounding my mother’s name, embroidered in satin stitch in a pale lilac.
Deborah
I put it down.
I don’t need to save anything sentimental. After I am gone, none of this will mean anything to anyone.
My mother’s tablecloth has some value, though perhaps only for rags. But I hope the charity shop might price in the work she put into it. Vintage embroidery is fashionable with the boho set in Brighton, and it would be nice to think of it having another life.
Don’t think.
I lift the whole box and dump it in the charity corner.
Work faster, be ruthless.
As I go up and down the ladder, I try to pretend I am doing this for someone else. A box of my father’s books and files goes into a new bin bag without a second glance. The police already went through them, looking for clues to his state of mind. They found nothing but order.
My mother’s perfumes, handbags and costume jewellery give me an emotional jolt, but I refuse to give in to self-pity, to spray her scent onto my wrist, or wallow in nostalgia for dressing-up games. I have her few pieces of valuable jewellery at home, which will be sold. I’d considered giving her engagement ring to little Millie, but I changed my mind instantly. No kid deserves a victim’s things.
The effort makes me sweat. Behind the first stack of boxes is my woven Lloyd Loom nursery chair. I could sit down to get my breath back, but I am afraid of space to think, so I keep going.
Now, my own things surface – the Enid Blyton books I loved, Home Alone and The Lion King in impossibly chunky VHS boxes, and the sparkly pink TV-video combo that must have seemed valuable to Mum’s friend two decades ago but is now just a lump of cheap landfill.
I always had twice as many things as my brother.
The temptation to look in Pip’s toy box is almost overwhelming but instead I immediately shift it with my foot into the charity pile. That one, the charity shop people can sort through. Maybe another child, or more likely, a nostalgic hipster, can play his games, do his jigsaws, cuddle the second, pristine version of his favourite rabbit Mum bought in case he lost the real, ragged one.
The last box is just marked PIP and finally, my resolve hits rock bottom. I sit on the floor next to it and hold my breath as I take off the lid. Photographs in Toy Story frames have been protected with bubble wrap; thankfully, it obscures the images.
But underneath is what I knew had to be here. I push the photos to the side and pull out the sketchbook. One of my sketchbooks, but donated to Pip when he told me he wanted to learn to draw, and I said I’d teach him.
On the front, he’d written PIP’S MASTER PEICES. I remember telling him, ‘I before e except after c.’
Like that mattered.
I grab the rubbish, the bag of stuff for burning, and Pip’s sketchbook and pull the metal door shut. My hands fumble with the padlock. On the way out, I tip the sack full of my father’s stuff into a skip.
One step closer to being ready.
61
Each night the sunset is more of a heartbreaker. Tonight’s boasts a rosehip-red sky, the sea turning from mercury to navy. I watch it with a glass of wine in my hand.
I feel an urge to do a fresh painting: not for Millie, but for myself.
I set up my easel near the window. The sun has almost disappeared, but it doesn’t matter. The colours have burned themselves into my memory.
I take out a watercolour palette. Really, that was a sunset to be captured in oil paints, but I left those in Ashdean. So instead I will go with dreamy, misty colours: a fading light.
*
At first, I don’t quite register the buzzer, because I’m lost in my picture. When I do realise it’s for me, I step away from the window. It’s dark now, past nine. Probably a Deliveroo driver with the wrong door.
The buzzer sounds twice more, but the third time is less emphatic. I take a tentative step back towards the bay.
‘Georgia! Georgie, answer the bloody door!’
It’s Oli. I pause, hoping he hasn’t seen me.
‘I know you’re there. I’m not going until you let me in.’
Shit.
I wouldn’t put it past him to camp on the doorstep.
I run my hands through my hair, check my face in the mantel mirror: just this side of acceptable. I approach the window and stick my head out.
‘Which part of “I’m taking time out” is so hard for you to grasp, Oli?’
He’s red in the face and sweating, his suit jacket folded across his arm, briefcase resting between his feet.
‘I’m worried about you.’
‘I can take care of myself.’
‘Really? Your phone’s dead and no one has heard from you. I talked to Neena. I even called the publisher.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘I was worried. I am worried.’ He sighs. ‘Look, Georgie, I came down from London. It was murder on that bloody train. The least you can do is let me in. Just show me you’re OK and I’ll go. Plus, I’m dying of thirst. I might faint in the street.’
‘Western Road is full of pubs. It’s literally just up there.’ I point. ‘You’ll get a much warmer welcome.’
He sighs. ‘I get the hint, hurtful as it is. But at least let me in so I can tell you something about the Fielding case.’
I can’t stop myself.
‘Why? What’s happened now?’
‘I’m not going to tell you unless you let me in.’
‘That’s blackmail.’
He smiles. ‘I prefer to call it . . . mutually beneficial. Come on, Georgie.’
I’ve been outmanoeuvred. I fling a cloth over the easel, not wanting him to see how badly I am painting now. I never gave him the sunset picture I painted for his daughter, either. Why burden a child with something so flawed?
His face seems blurrier than before, but I can see grey shadows under his eyes. We hug and I soften towards him, realising he must have given up time with his baby to come here.
‘How’s Millie?’
‘Knackering. Life-changing. All the clichés.’ He nods at my glass of wine on the side table. ‘Can I have one?’
I realise he already smells of booze.
‘Not your first today, from the state of you.’
‘Nor yours. Some of the set took me out for lunch. Wet the baby’s head. Not that the actual baby was there, obviously.’ He sighs. ‘And then I couldn’t stop worrying about you and I got a bit maudlin—’
‘As you always do.’
‘As I always do, and I got on the train and, we
ll, here I am.’
‘And you want to keep going?’
He hesitates.
‘It’ll probably finish me off, but . . . yes. Have you got gin?’
Oli follows me into the kitchen, and I sense him watching my movements.
‘I’m no more blind than last time I saw you, you know.’ Though as I’ve not been back to the hospital, I have no way of knowing for sure.
‘Oh, Georgie. I can’t bear to think of you facing this on your own.’
His voice cracks. If he’s like this about my illness, what will it be like after . . .? No. I won’t weaken.
I hand him the tumbler and make one for myself.
‘I can still see the essentials, like how much gin and how much tonic to add.’
I squeeze out of the front window, onto my strip of balcony, and Oli joins me.
He puts his arm around my shoulder.
‘It’s so bloody unfair, G. You don’t deserve any of this.’
‘There’s no such thing as natural justice. We both know that, the years we’ve spent in court.’
‘Hmm.’
He takes a swig of his drink, then unfolds the little metal patio chair and sits down, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a pack of Silk Cut.
‘Would it be OK if I . . .?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’m not allowed to at home, for obvious reasons. But there’s something about sitting outside, in the sunshine, with a G & T . . . with you. Happy hour.’ He lights his cigarette and then holds his glass up to mine. ‘Chin chin.’
‘Chin chin.’
I’m back, for a moment, in Sri Lanka, and the ridiculous hill station where we’d stayed, a colonial relic with white-coated waiters and stuffed animals staring down at us from the walls. A pianist playing 1930s show tunes. And the pudding dome coming off and the engagement ring underneath, nestling in the hollow of a rum baba.
Maybe I’m not seeing him as he really is now, but am using thirteen years’ worth of memories to create an image of his beautiful face.
Smoke, juniper, ruby-red sunset.