I’d realized he was no Prince Charming while I was in the bathroom, but his sudden viciousness, his sense of entitlement, still managed to be an unpleasant surprise.
Shit, I thought, this guy is practically my boss. What have I done?
Still, he didn’t get to speak to me like that.
‘How sweet. Do you kiss your wife with that mouth?’
‘What are you talking about, you crazy bitch?’ But his anger was now laced with panic, and he sat back down on the bed.
I’d made an enemy tonight, that much was clear. And I had no idea what the fallout from that would be.
I should have been more careful.
‘Night, Benjamin,’ I said, blowing him a kiss. ‘Don’t wait up.’
* * *
As the bus roared and jolted along, I let my head rest against the dirty window and closed my eyes.
Another married man. Bloody hell.
As I looked down at my phone, my mother’s call stood proud in the log. I had brushed her off for some chancer, a married chancer no less. I felt a clammy sense of shame.
We were approaching my stop, and I pressed the button and swung to my feet, feeling unpleasantly sober and clear-headed. She might have been summoning me home for no good reason, but she was still my mum. I didn’t need to hang up on her like that.
That, at least, was something I could fix.
I trudged down the steps, pushing myself out past the steamy, booze-smelling crush at the doors and into the night.
Chapter Two
It was morning, and I was speeding towards the coast in my little purple Ford KA. I’d been driving it for over ten years now and it was held together almost entirely by rust and willpower.
If I’d been less hungover and cranky, I would have enjoyed the rolling Suffolk landscape, the winding tree-shadowed roads, the orange burst of the nascent sun streaming through the thin barred sea clouds. It was going to be a beautiful day.
I had barely slept, tossing and turning until I could stand it no more. In the end I’d given up and staggered upright. The pale haze of dawn was just beginning to cast a weird pall through the bedroom curtains. In the kitchen, I tinkered with the expensive coffee machine the salesman had talked me into buying instead of the one I’d wanted, and after ten minutes I finally managed to extract three syrupy thimblefuls of espresso.
I sipped this mournfully at my kitchen table. In front of me, the plans from my latest project – a new visitors’ centre for Scottish Heritage, which was going to be built on a tiny, rocky islet in Orkney and would need to be a) eco-friendly, and b) impressively storm-proof – were up on the laptop.
For a while, I sat there, pretending I was achieving something and likely to do some work, before coming to my senses and grabbing the car keys.
It was roughly a three-hour drive, and I tried to support my caffeine hit by switching on the radio, but within ten minutes my pounding temples had vetoed the idea. Instead I drove along to the soundtrack of an irritating tapping that had started somewhere in the back of the car about a month earlier, and which a friend had assured me was probably due to shot wheel bearings.
I was nearly twenty-seven years old. It was high time I stopped wasting money on expensive coffee machines and upgraded the car.
High time I stopped living like a student.
Stopped living like my parents.
I crushed this thought down with a hot flash of guilt.
You shouldn’t have hung up on her.
I didn’t know why this was bothering me so much. Mum used to call me two or three times a month, usually between seven and ten at night, overcoming her horror of the telephone to breathlessly urge me to return to the fold, to leave London in general and Brixton in particular and come home to her.
‘And do what?’ I would ask, exasperated.
Her eyes would roll doubtfully sideways – I couldn’t see this, of course, but I knew she was doing it. ‘You could help me and your dad in the gardens. You’re always saying you want to update the café.’
‘I know I am. And you’re always saying it would cost too much. Look, why don’t you come down to Brixton and visit for a weekend? We could go do clichéd London things together, like afternoon tea and the London Eye and a show …’
‘Oh no. No, I don’t think so. No thank you.’
I turned off the A12 on to Moncton Lane, noting that the weathered sign stuck into the grass reading EDEN GARDENS AND CAFÉ 300 YARDS was now broken and skew-whiff – someone must have clipped it with their wing-mirror when they’d turned the corner.
I pulled up just past the sign, switched off the ignition and let myself out into the cool morning.
Birds sang all around me, as though they had been waiting for my arrival. The sea, though still a few miles away, was a salty tang mixed in with the grassy scent of hay. Breathing it in, I could feel something within me relax and settle.
I walked over to the broken sign, my blue pumps sinking into the soft, dewy mulch. It lay in two pieces, one sporting a wide tyre track, dissecting GARDENS AND from CAFÉ. It had happened recently; with a sigh I uprooted the post from the ground and carried both pieces to the boot of my car.
I was vaguely surprised that my dad, a perennial early riser, hadn’t been out this way on his daily visit to the north field and done it already. I shaded my eyes and peered towards the gates of the gardens, just a few hundred yards down the road.
They appeared to be still locked.
* * *
At the gates, painted a cheerful apple green but now starting to show rusty patches, I drew out the keys and undid both locks, the metal still chill despite the warming morning sun. They swung open with a creak.
I glanced at my watch – it was 8:27. I felt as though I’d been awake for ever. The gates were normally open earlier, in order, as my dad would say, to capture any passing custom. Though, of course, any passing custom that did actually stop and approach, looking for herbs or plants or even a cure for chronic insomnia, would then be treated with the utmost surly suspicion, since my dad would have to interrupt his early-morning routine of maintenance and watering to serve them. It was Mum that supplied Eden Gardens’ human touch, and she never got out of bed before nine.
Yet somehow the place remained in business, despite my plaintive urgings to add a new tea room instead of the corrugated, spider-haunted shed that currently served this purpose, with its mismatched chairs and draughty windows; or to consider stocking more mainstream gifts and houseplants as opposed to their weird collection of dusty bric-a-brac and yellowing greetings cards.
I let the gates clang shut behind me and moved off along the gravelled path, with its pots of marigolds and ceramic fairies, to the shop itself, rimmed with a little circle of white stones like tiny megaliths. Two mouldering picnic tables sheltered under the cheap awning at the front, as though cold or embarrassed.
‘Dad?’ I shouted out, though he was clearly not around – the stable door to the shop was bolted shut, the padlocks in place. I frowned at the blue painted wood, turned up the path, my footsteps crunching beneath me, and headed for the house beyond.
* * *
The house was accessible through another blue painted door set in a wooden fence that had long since been given over to trellising. Heavy apricot roses, just past their best, nodded their scented heads above my own as I let myself into my parents’ private garden.
The house was suddenly visible, like a magician’s trick – the perspective from the gardens and the frowsy thatch of thorns and blown roses shielding it from public view until you opened that final blue door with its rotting wooden sign marked PRIVATE.
This was not only a description but a personal injunction. When I was a little girl, it seemed to me that the world of the house and my parents was a kind of fantasy kingdom, separating us from the milling visitors in the nursery outside. It was an enchanted place, small enough to be hidden in a glass bottle, a realm accessible only to those who knew the right words or where the secret key
was kept. Visitors who accidentally wandered out of the grounds and ended up here were given very short shrift by my dad.
I was under strict instructions at all times to keep the garden door locked, the key tied around my neck so I wouldn’t lose it or give it away. Even as I grew older, this feeling that we lived in our own tiny private universe never left me, though by the time I was a surly teenager with a brow full of storm clouds, the downsides of inhabiting a magical pocket island were already starting to become clear.
‘Hello!’ I sang out across the small square of lawn, the one patch that my mother had saved from my father’s all-consuming lust to plant more practical species, either for eating or selling.
No one answered.
The house had been beautiful once, a handsome Georgian building constructed for a prosperous miller – the millstream still wound through the public part of the gardens, bridged by chicken wire and wooden paths my dad built over the top of it. But perhaps that beauty was simply a projection of my memory. All I knew was that in my visits as an adult it seemed ever more ramshackle – the white portico of my childhood was now damp-stained and rotting, and as I climbed the steps I could smell its decay.
As I drew near, I saw that one of the little stained-glass panels in the door had been smashed and boarded over with plywood, which was neatly nailed into the window frame. I ran my hand along it – the wood was still pale and new. This could only have happened since my last visit a fortnight ago.
How strange that Dad hadn’t fixed it already. Mum wouldn’t be pleased.
They were an odd couple, my parents, both unlikely and yet somehow well matched, and they had muddled along together all my life. They had met, my dad told me, in a café in Cambridge. My mum had been heading east; my dad was heading north. He’d liked the look of her and asked her to come with him. She’d said yes. She must have been a bolder creature in those days.
I had followed them, nine months later.
They’d never married – the pair of them had a horror of paperwork and viewed all government services with suspicion and dread. I bore my mum’s last name, as my dad wouldn’t set foot in the registry office. At one point Mum seriously considered home-schooling me, but in the end common sense prevailed. I’ve lost count of the times this intractable paranoia has made me want to tear my hair out by the roots.
The key was no longer around my neck – I had slipped that shackle long ago – instead it was attached to my keyring with the lucky rabbit’s foot, a gift from my dad. I let this assemblage rattle in the lock, hoping to give my perpetually late-sleeping, perpetually nervous mother sufficient warning that someone was entering, especially since my dad would be out in the grounds and fields for hours and wouldn’t return to the house until lunchtime. I also knew that when I got in and shouted up to her, she’d reply in a startled gasp, as though I was the last person in the world she expected to appear.
‘Mum, it’s me,’ I called out into the pale hallway.
Silence greeted me. Now I was inside, I noted with disapproval that the patches of damp above the dark wooden stairs had grown exponentially; indeed they now met, like two little branches reaching out, as if holding hands. The house smelled of dust and curry powder and the ghost of sandalwood incense. An untidy row of shoes littered the foot of the staircase, and I spotted my mum’s work boots, caked in mud, one lying on its side, like it had given up.
I clumped up the stairs, the carpet dusty and littered with mud, shaken loose from the cuffs of jeans and hand-knitted socks. On the way up, I stopped and wrestled a window open to let the fresh air in.
‘Mum? Are you up there?’ I glanced at my watch. At this time of the morning, it would be hard to imagine her being anywhere else.
Still no answer. I sighed and mounted the remaining stairs, heading for the master bedroom at the end of the corridor.
But as I drew near I saw that the door to her room was open. Sunlight streamed through it, illuminating piles of books and curios and ugly sideboards in gold.
‘Mum?’
The bed was made – well, pulled together – and as I poked my head in, I saw that this room, which like the rest of the house was usually in a state of dishevelled shiftlessness, had been tidied. No, not only tidied but cleaned, and thoroughly, since my last visit. The dresser had been dusted, the bottles of perfume and make-up, some so old they probably pre-dated my birth, had acquired a shiny order I had never seen before. The wardrobe was shut, the stacks of books and papers beneath the big bay window were now in neat piles.
I gazed about myself in confusion. The rest of the house was as scruffy as ever – why was this room so tidy? The unkempt disorder of this strictly maternal space was something I always associated with my mum, its condition mirroring that of her mind. To see it neat and clean, while the rest of the house continued to moulder, was like happening upon her dressed in a safari suit, as though she had become a different person, or rather, that a different person had been lurking beneath, ready to spring out.
The tiny hairs on my arms stood up. Where was she?
‘Mum?’ I called out with more urgency.
The soft creaks of the boards beneath my feet as I moved to the big bay window were the only reply.
I looked out over the lawn, past the rows of bean poles and netting tents and sprouting green shrubs that grew the food I’d been raised on. My gaze tracked down to the shed at the bottom, where my father spent 90 per cent of his spare time, then to the weather-stained trestle table where we ate family meals, all overshadowed by thick-trunked trees of all kinds, as though we dined in a sacred grove.
The branches of these trees were festooned with small fairy lights all year round, and I noticed uneasily that they were still lit.
‘Mum?’ I shouted again, though I knew the house was empty, and once more I heard that note of alarm in my voice.
Something was wrong in the grove at the back. Something was there that shouldn’t be there.
I leaned against the window, peering hard through the grass. There was a shape amongst the trees – a human shape, barely visible through the leafy branches.
A shape with extended, dangling feet.
It becomes harder to remember now, because everything in the world was suddenly replaced by this sick, sinking panic. I breathed it in as I ran along the corridor, stepped on it as I tumbled down the stairs; it buoyed me up as I fell through the door and raced down the garden, crushing sprouting carrots and squash and turned earth beneath my stumbling feet.
And as I drew nearer, my mouth dry, my heart hammering, there was no mistaking it; that hideous, obscene bundle I had seen from the window, in my mother’s floral yellow blouse and grey-blue jeans.
My mum hung suspended from the branches of the big sweet chestnut, the stepladder sprawled on its side, discarded.
I let out a noise – a kind of elongated animal wail.
I snatched up the stepladder, righted it and clambered to the top.
I couldn’t see her face and she made no sound, there was nothing but the rustling leaves and the faraway rattle of a magpie. From the branch above, the thin electrical wire we used to hang the lights on was wrapped twice, three times, around the tree limb, biting into the bark, and she swayed slightly from it, the cord descending and hidden at her neck by her long dark hair.
I dragged her into my arms, trying to take her weight off the spiteful cord, and that was when my heart knew what my mind had instantly understood. She was cool and stiff and incontrovertibly dead. As her hair fell away the sight of her wine-dark face was like a punch in the gut.
I toppled from the stepladder, landing hard on my back on the mulch below, incapable of feeling anything. Above me, my mother’s purpling feet dangled, swinging now that I had disturbed her, accompanied by an eerie, horror-movie creaking as the branch took her weight again. I lay below her, transfixed with disbelieving terror. I think I was waiting for this to be revealed as a nightmare, something I had dreamed, the price of being a terrible daughter who w
ould awake, like Scrooge, with a chance to make amends.
But waking didn’t come, just one leaden, sickening second after another. My mouth was open and nothing was coming out, not even breath.
Then a noise – a kind of choking. I grasped, helplessly, at the idea that it might be her, that in spite of all I had seen and felt and experienced, she might yet live, because she could not be dead. That was unthinkable, impossible. But instead it had come from the mulch, somewhere to my side.
I turned my head, wondering what new nightmare this could be.
My father was lying in a small huddle behind another of the trees, curled up into a ball, and his arms and chest were stained crimson.
‘Dad?’
He was absolutely white, as though he’d been carved from marble. But he made the noise again, and his bloodstained shirt moved, just a fraction, and I realized that he was still alive.
Chapter Three
I barely remember what followed next. Maybe I just prefer not to.
I do know that I spent most of my time in the hospital. I sat next to my dad on a little white plastic chair while he breathed into a tube, lost in the depths of a chemically induced coma, oblivious to the world and its woes.
I stared at his white, lined forehead, where it emerged from the mask, waiting for it to wrinkle with a sign of consciousness, but there was nothing – no feeling, no emotion.
Some desperate, gnawing part of me envied him.
People in white coats explained things to me with gentle tact, as though I was a bomb that might go off.
My father was very badly hurt, they said. He’d been stabbed twice, once in the lungs and once in the stomach, and this last wound had ruptured his bowel. Sepsis had followed. No one said as much, but it was not clear that he would live. The secret of those last hours of my mum’s life might go with him to the grave, following her as he had followed her in life, a morose presence drifting behind her as she moved through the house, his mouth in a permanent frown under his dark beard.
I would reach out and take one of his cool, limp hands in my own, and weep, but quietly, because I knew he didn’t like drama.
Everything Is Lies Page 2