by Ali Mercer
Becca looked from her father to her mother on the other side of the kitchen table. She seemed relieved that Rachel had agreed to go. Still, her voice faltered as she asked, ‘Are you going to get a divorce?’
Mitch considered this for a moment. ‘Yes, I think we might.’
Becca said, ‘Can I live with you, Daddy?’
‘Mitch,’ Rachel said, ‘please don’t. Not like this. We need to talk about all this. Not in front of Becca.’
‘Just let us salvage something from what’s left of the day, will you? Get what you need and leave us in peace. We can talk tomorrow,’ Mitch said.
And so Rachel got to her feet and made her way out of the kitchen and went upstairs to the bedroom. Her bedroom. The room she shared with Mitch. Had shared, until now.
Maybe things would look different in the morning, or in a day or two… he might give her another chance?
But they had seen her as a monster, the way she’d seen her father. What chance was there?
The part of her brain that made lists and did practical things was still almost functioning, but haphazardly, like something broken or squashed that keeps on trying to move. She found a bag and picked up this thing and that thing to put in it. Work clothes. Hairbrush. Underwear. She put in the painting Mitch had done of her years ago and given to her as a present, the study for Persephone. ‘Heaven help anyone who tries to keep you locked up,’ he’d said at the time. He had been so much in love with her then…
She picked up the framed photo of her with Becca that sat on the top of the chest of drawers, the one that Mitch had taken the day they first came to see the house, and put it on top of the painting before zipping the bag.
It was like salvaging mementoes from a fire.
Downstairs, the kitchen door was open. Mitch was sitting at the table, resting his bandaged hand on it, and Becca was on her feet and leaning across to light the candles on her thirteenth birthday cake, the one that Rachel had iced that morning.
They looked comfortable together. Peaceful. Best off without her.
She bolted from the house into the cool of the evening, and sat in the car outside and cried.
It didn’t change anything. The cottage was right in front of her and her husband and child were both in it and she couldn’t go back, and she didn’t know where else to go. Everywhere else seemed lifeless and unreal, as if she was at the bottom of an ocean, too far down to ever be found. As if The Deep had claimed her for good.
She had lost her daughter’s trust. Would Becca ever want to see her again? It seemed impossible.
There was no one to turn to. She’d have to try and find a cheap hotel for the night. Or sleep in the car. But if she couldn’t go home, what did it matter where she was? Or who she was, or what she did next? She was nobody, and nowhere at all.
Fifty-One
Mitch turns up at the weir just after she does; the minute she and Becca let go of each other she sees him, waiting patiently on the island between the weir and the lock and watching them.
Becca goes over to him and mumbles an apology, and he holds her and says he’s sorry, too. Then Leona heads towards them and says something Rachel doesn’t quite hear. Mitch agrees with her, and when Rachel joins them on the island he says, ‘I’m going to take Leona back to the house. Would you like to bring Becca? You could drop Henry off on the way.’
Well, yes she would. She would like very much to be with Becca for a little bit longer, and she doesn’t mind having Henry along for the ride; and if Leona and Mitch want to have a heart-to-heart, she’s very happy to leave them to it.
She sets off across the lock with Becca and Henry, with Mitch and Leona a little way behind. Mitch’s car is just behind hers, which is parked haphazardly in the turning circle. She hadn’t even remembered to lock it.
Henry offers Becca the passenger seat, and she politely declines and gets in the back. They don’t speak on the way. Henry is on his phone, presumably messaging his mother. They are back at the Chadstones’ house in no time, and he says to Becca, ‘Well, bye. I’ll see you around, I guess.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Becca says, and gets out so she can take his seat in the front.
Henry waves before going inside; his face has that unmistakable hangdog look that a boy gets when he’s near a girl he likes – the awful vulnerability of the young male who’s new to love, who hasn’t yet survived heartbreak and has no defences against the prospect of disappointment.
Becca says, ‘What was he doing with you? Did he just come along for the ride?’
‘Oh, he just wanted to help. We were going to look for you in town, but as soon as I’d parked I got a call from your dad saying Leona had found you.’
Rachel turns, pulls out onto the main road and heads for Rose Cottage. It’s the kind of evening that feels nostalgic even as you witness it; the hedgerows and houses are bathed in the golden haze of a still summer evening.
It’s over. Becca is here, beside her, and she’s safe. The silence between them is different to the many silences there have been between them in this car before; there is some new quality of understanding in it, as if one or other of them, or maybe both, has let go of something, and is at the beginning of something new.
Rachel feels contentment seeping into her, as warming and gentle as soft sunlight on skin. This is who she is – a mother of a daughter, taking care of things, doing what needs to be done. It’s someone she thought at one time she had forgotten how to be. But maybe, in spite of everything, it’s who she has been all along.
Becca says, ‘When we get back, do you think you could stay?’
‘I think you should all just get some rest,’ Rachel says. ‘But anyway, I’ll be seeing you really soon.’
Becca sighs again. ‘I wish I lived with you.’
And Rachel knows immediately that this is a dangerous wish, for her as well as for Becca. It is what she has yearned for ever since Becca rejected her. But to win Becca back and leave Mitch bereft would be the hollowest of victories. It would hardly be surprising if, now that her father has another child to love, Becca should seek to play off one parent against the other.
It’s not as if Mitch and Rachel have merely failed to present a united front, the way that good parents are supposed to do. They have been enemies, and Becca’s heart has been what they were fighting for.
‘I’ll talk about it with your father,’ Rachel says. ‘We might be able to look again at the arrangements. But there’s no rush, Becca. First you need to get home and have something to eat and get a good night’s sleep. Everything else will keep.’
They zip along the road that forms the outer boundary of the town and turn onto Rose Lane. Rachel pulls up in front of the little bridge and the front door opens immediately; Mitch must have been looking out for them. He comes out and Becca gets out of the car and mooches towards him, and he puts an arm lightly around her shoulders, a little gesture of affection and regret like someone greeting an injured friend, and both of them wave at Rachel before going back into the house.
Leona is looking on from the bedroom window. Rachel waves at her, too, and Leona raises her hand and holds it still in the air like a stiff little salute, and then waves back.
Afterword
Aidan
Two years after the loss
He still minds Mum not coming but he has got used to missing her, which means that he recognises the weird feeling he gets when he remembers she won’t ever visit again. There is a hole in everything and it doesn’t go away and nothing else fills it up, but other things go on round it and that is why it is sometimes possible to forget. Anyway, it isn’t Mum’s fault or because she doesn’t love him any more. She is carrying on being dead, so has had to stop everything, but he is still going and that is probably how it will be until one day when he is very old, too.
It is bad not being able to touch or smell her but he has plenty of pictures of her that he can go through. Sometimes he has to remind himself that all the pictures are old ones and that they�
��re only in his mind. The pictures don’t change, but everything else always keeps changing, usually just when he has got used to it.
Everything is like words, which buzz around like bees and don’t stop long enough for you to get a proper look at them, unless you have them safely written down. Written down is like being dead and left behind as a picture in someone’s mind, but one that other people can try to see. It is being stopped, but without the rot, like an Egyptian mummy. Or just very slow rot, too slow to see.
Rachel isn’t dead yet and probably has quite a long time to go, even though she’s a little bit old and has a few white hairs which she turns to brown, but they grow white again. He first knew her when she used to drive Mum in the green car, and she flickered on and off like a light bulb that is nearly going out. Now she glows all the time, like somebody plugged her back in, or maybe she managed to do that herself, which is not something a light bulb can do. He would like to know how she made herself different, but she might not be able to tell him. People often don’t know, or don’t know how to explain, and sometimes it is best just to let them all just carry on and not ask too many questions, especially when it is about something good like glowing when you used to be nearly going out.
Even when Rachel is just sitting down or walking along, even when she isn’t saying anything, she buzzes. She’s very busy, always running round – like Mum in that way. Maybe she’s worried about stopping if she slows down. She’s making a new business and he would like it if that meant her name was on the side of a van or on the top of a shop or on a thing, but she says it isn’t like that. It is on her website, though. She has shown him that.
He isn’t sure about the Christmas visit. It might not be a good idea. But he goes with her anyway because she’s living in the house his mother used to live in, renting it, which means paying money for now but not getting to own it in the future. Becca lives there as well. And he lived in the same house, too, once, when he was a little tiny baby, before he went to the home.
For other people, the place where they live is just home, or his home, her home, your home, their home, depending on who is talking and who they are talking to. For him, it is the home. This is just one of the differences between him and the other people in the home and most other people in the world.
But once upon a time, a long, long time ago, he did live at home, and this was it. It was his home. He can’t remember it, but once he has been there he will have lots of pictures in his mind and he will be able to take them out and look at them whenever he likes.
Rachel takes him round the downstairs first. It is brilliant. He spends ages in the kitchen, which is the most interesting room. Rachel is in and out, in and out, taking food to the dining room, and someone comes in and does talking and goes out again. He is told who it is but he can’t really take it in, so he pretends to pay attention but doesn’t really.
Then Rachel asks if he would like to go to the table and he says he will try.
There are candles on it and he decides to watch them; everything else is too weird, too much. The talk, chat-chat-chat, too fast and then too slow. Everything the others are thinking and feeling and saying is a horrible messy jumble, like tangled wool or the squiggly stuff that brains are made of, the colour of clay. Or like those puzzles in the magazines where you have to follow the path all the way through the maze to the prize and there are dead ends, or sometimes there are several right paths but each path is only right for one pair of things, at the beginning and end of the line.
But the candles are good. He can also watch them in the shiny glass in front of the picture on the wall opposite him, which is called a reflection and is like shadows. The picture behind the glass is of a cold garden with nothing much growing, and the candles look like little lights in the lawn. Next to that picture is a smaller one with no shiny glass, of a tired lady lying on a bed who looks a bit like Rachel. Someone must have taken a long time painting it. Nobody else really notices the pictures or the candles, probably because they are too busy doing all the talking.
There is an awful smell in the room; it turns out to be brussels sprouts. But Rachel has put baked beans and sausage on his plate, and that is OK. The candles carry on being good. They do what they normally do: they burn, and they flicker, and they melt.
He eats a bit even though he isn’t really hungry, and the others eat too and keep on saying things. There are four of them, including him. Not too many. He is next to Rachel and opposite Becca, who he recognises though she has changed a lot, which is because she’s getting grown up. She’s wearing a fluffy jumper and smells of peaches, though not real ones, and she says a few things, not much but a bit more than him.
The fourth person is the one he doesn’t know, an old man with white hair called Frank. It would be nice if he was called something like Grandad or Whitebeard, so his name matched what he looked like a bit better, which is how the names work in some of the programmes Aidan likes. But in real life names mostly don’t fit like that, unless you’re an animal. Frank smells of lemons and leather (not real – it is perfume, but a different one to Becca’s) and he keeps looking at Rachel the way a dog or a cat looks at a person when they want something. Rachel doesn’t seem to mind this. She keeps on glowing, and buzzing. She’s happy, which is catching, like yawns and sneezes.
In between eating their strange dinner they pull noisy crackers and put on hats and read out some jokes, and they give him the cracker toys to look at but they’re not particularly good and he doesn’t really want them. But nobody is disappointed. They’re all smiling a lot as well as everything else, which is a lot to do, more than he could manage.
When he has had as much as he can he asks if can go back to the kitchen, and Rachel says yes. He opens a drawer and looks at the things in it. Rotary whisk, cheese grater, ice cream scoop. The cooker is quiet now. He turns the handle of the rotary whisk for a while, admiring the silver blur it makes. Rachel comes in and makes a pot of coffee, which smells of old plants and burning. It is beyond him how they can drink something like that, but they seem to think it’s nice.
The stairs creak. Someone is going up and talking at the same time in a light, high voice. It must be Becca and as Rachel and the old man, Frank, are still downstairs, she must be on her phone. Other people are usually quiet unless they are saying something to someone, unless they’re whistling or humming or singing. Aidan isn’t like that himself, and doesn’t see why you shouldn’t have fun with the up-and-down of words just like other kinds of noises.
The door is open and he can hear what Rachel and Frank are saying and suddenly it starts making sense. Or more sense, anyway. At least now he can make out the words and figure out who is speaking.
Frank says, ‘She seems to like him.’
‘I know. I thought it would have blown over, especially since Henry’s that bit older. But they’re still friends. Becca insists that’s all it is. In fact, I don’t dare ask her about it any more. Last time I mentioned it, she wanted to know if I had a problem with it and I had to insist that I didn’t.’
‘Do you?’
‘Well, it isn’t exactly ideal, given the history. But I don’t want her thinking it’s some kind of Romeo and Juliet situation and anyway, as far as I know, they’re just friends. It’s an unusual friendship… what teenage boy wants to be just friends? But there we are, stranger things have happened, and he does seem to be fond of her. Apparently Amelia teases him about it all the time.’
‘Is Becca still in touch with her?’
‘Not really. She’s been a lot happier since she left St Anne’s. I still feel bad about not having realised that it didn’t really suit her – I was so busy worrying about paying the fees, it didn’t even occur to me that she might be better off at a different school. And she’s found Sophie, the counsellor, really helpful.’
Rachel sounds like Coral at the home when she’s reading him a story and comes to the last page. It’s the way people speak when the up-and-down part of something is evened out, and
it’s time for the ending.
She carries on talking, but is it definitely Rachel? Maybe not, she’s breaking up, going fast and then slow. He finds an interesting straw in the utensils drawer and rolls it fast between his palms so that it looks like something else, its loops all turned into a kind of fuzzy spindle.
You can’t really tell what things are like when they’re moving, only when they stop. The thing is the same, but it can look completely different, and it can look like something that isn’t quite there. Even though it is.
What is around you can trick you, and sometimes you just have to remember and be sure. He is superimposed over where his mother used to stand; he can’t see her, he will never see her, but he can almost feel her. It’s as close as they can come to touching.
And then he is happy and he forgets all about everybody else until Rachel comes to him and says that it is time for them to go, and would he like to say goodbye to Frank?
Goodbye. He manages it, and Rachel looks pleased. Then Rachel says, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ and puts a Tupperware box of cupcakes into his hands.
‘I saw these already,’ he says. They were hard to miss, on the worktop next to the tea and coffee things.
‘For you,’ she tells him. ‘If you’d like to take them home.’
He isn’t sure. Should he say yes? He takes the lid off and sniffs them. They don’t look quite so good as his mother’s – not quite so perfectly cake-like. But Coral will probably help him eat them anyway.
He says, ‘They’re not like Mum’s,’ and Rachel puts her sad face on so he tries to give her a little hug and she looks startled, which is better, funny even. He sits next to her in her car with the Tupperware on his lap and Becca goes in the back, which is right because she is younger. They drive out to the edge of town and stop at a house he remembers, on the other side of a bridge. There is a big For Sale sign in front of it. He knows that this happens sometimes, but he doesn’t understand – how can you sell your home, a place that belongs to you like your body does?