But surely if I keep going, if I keep looking, keep summoning that magic, I will be able to find Candy again. If I can sort my past into cool, dispassionate, descriptive sentences, she will be there, hiding in the gaps, the white spaces.
People only hide because they think they will be found.
I don’t need to see a therapist, I decide, I can just do this instead. I set aside my fantasy novel and start writing stories about my past.
I write about junkies and smoky rooms and overfull ashtrays and feeling alone even when my parents are with me. I write about swimming pools and broken tables and sweet squirty cream. I remember how things tasted, smelt, felt. I remember my eyes wide and my heart fast as I watched it all and tried to work it out: what should I be doing, where is the danger? I remember my mother, slumped and sad; my father, jittery and bug-eyed, always with an excuse, a joke. I remember the porn mags, the violent films. I remember seeing things that I did not understand. I do not remember Candy, but I do remember fear.
I try to write elegant, controlled prose that will somehow make all these memories manageable.
As the week progresses I begin to feel strange, anxious and dislocated, my mind churning with difficult emotions. Memories rear up out of the darkness. Writing these things down hasn’t made them safe, it hasn’t contained them – quite the opposite, it’s given them a life of their own. At night I lie in my small room overlooking dark woods and I cannot sleep. I feel tired and yet full of adrenaline. I feel as if I am thinning out, because now part of me is in the past, a place I have worked so hard to escape, running and running and not looking back.
The feeling does not pass when I get back to London. I am a stranger when I walk into my home and hug my children, who jump and shout, so excited to see me, and my husband who holds me close. Who are these people? How did I get here?
This is what thinking about the past has done to me.
And yet I still write.
Every day on the train to work I write about my childhood, my broken family, the things that happened before Candy died, the things that happened after she died, circling round, trying to find a lost girl in all the madness that I don’t seem able to put in order even though I write and I write. On Saturday mornings I sit in a café with my laptop and type up all that I have written during the week. I walk home, to my husband, to my children, in a daze, my body in the present, my brain in the past, my heart who knows where.
8
1989, London
On my first day back at school after the holiday in Tunisia I was so happy. I felt light as I skipped down the stairs, away from our flat, where Candy’s suitcase still stood unpacked in her unchanged bedroom, with the teddies arranged in rows and naked Barbies having a barbecue in their pink plastic condo. I wore my new shoes and carried my new bag. Mum and Dad had gone mad buying me new things. ‘You’re an only child now, so we can spoil you,’ they said as if this was some sort of silver lining.
I stood at the bus stop and listened to Hounds of Love by Kate Bush on my new yellow waterproof Sony Walkman. It was my first day, but everyone else had gone back yesterday. I’d stayed at home so that an announcement could be made without me. This was something that had been decided by Mum and the headmistress. One day away from school so that I would not have to be there when Mrs Rudland made her speech.
‘I have some sad news, pupils,’ she would begin, and their ears would prick up; they would wriggle with anticipation, sitting cross-legged on the golden polished parquet. ‘I am sorry to inform you that Gavanndra Hodge’s younger sister died very suddenly on holiday during the Easter break. Candida died of a virus which is not contagious. Can we please do our best to help Gavanndra during this difficult time.’
There would be a communal gasp, a ripple of whispers, five hundred heads turning to see if they could see her, the girl whose sister had died suddenly, on holiday of all places.
I was glad I didn’t have to be there for that bit, for the moment when they all turned to look at me.
I got off the Tube and walked towards school.
Cars blocked the road, mothers honked their horns, girls in short grey skirts and black loafers gathered at the entrance shrieking, hugging, kissing.
Venetia had shiny golden hair and shiny tanned legs and ran across the road, not checking for traffic. She grabbed my arm with both hands and started talking. ‘Cammy has a new boyfriend and we’re going to meet him at McDonald’s after school. But my mum has told me only to eat chips, because she doesn’t want me to get mad cow disease. How are you?’
‘I’m …’
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t stop watching.
‘I’m fine.’
She pulled me into the dark muddle of the cloakrooms, where all the loos seemed to be flushing at once. We walked up the stairs to our form room. There were jumpers and bags slung across the carpet-tiled floor; everyone was sitting on their desks chatting. ‘Hi,’ a couple of people said.
‘Can everyone please sit down and be quiet for register!’ shouted our form mistress.
Miss Von Haniel nodded at me when I answered ‘yes’ to my name, but didn’t smile or make a sad face or anything. Then we all traipsed down the stairs to the assembly hall and it was like the noise of an incoming army, all the heavy black-soled shoes on the wooden steps. Nothing seemed different. There were girls with bad acne, girls with nice hair, the handsome new English teacher who looked like something from a Merchant Ivory film. Anya walked up right behind him, so close that they were virtually touching. She pretended to bump into the back of him and I was laughing so hard that I was still giggling by the time we had to sit down, cross-legged, on the floor.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ said Mrs Rudland from the stage at the front of the hall. Her glasses were so thick they made her eyes look double the size. ‘This morning we are very lucky because Maggie Chan is going to give us a short clarinet recital.’
Anya pinched my arm and rolled her eyes and Venetia groaned and we leant on each other and pretended to go to sleep because we were so bored by the clarinet recital.
At break, after morning lessons, I bought myself a packet of Skips and a cup of tea. I blew on my tea to cool it and laid a Skip on my tongue and enjoyed the fizzy feeling of it dissolving. Priti had a bandage on her hand.
‘I was trying to give myself a tattoo,’ she said.
‘Damaris has a tattoo,’ said Sarah, staring over my shoulder.
We all turned to look. Damaris was a sixth-former with dyed black hair down to her bottom and perfectly applied black liquid eyeliner. She was wearing a leather biker jacket, a packet of Marlboro Reds hanging from one pocket. She looked like the sort of person who could handle anything that happened to her.
‘It’s a dolphin, on her ankle,’ said Sarah.
‘You fancy her, you lesbian,’ said Venetia.
‘I fancy her too,’ said Priti.
‘I want to be her,’ I said.
‘You’re all lesbians,’ said Venetia.
After break I had Latin. Our teacher was Miss Yeats, who was very small with painted-on eyebrows so she always looked supercilious (super meaning above, cilium meaning eyelid, therefore, supercilium, eyebrow). Her skirt was so long that I couldn’t see her feet, so it looked as though she was moving around on rollers. She rolled to her desk and picked up a pile of burgundy work books, and then rolled around, throwing them at us. Before any of us were allowed to sit down we each had to get a bit of vocab right.
‘Aquila.’
‘Eagle.’
‘Sit down.’
We talked about The Aeneid Book Two. We talked about a city crashing to the ground in a hot country far away, death all around, horror and blood and implacable gods who watch people suffering and do nothing to help. For some reason people think it is OK to talk about these things just because they happened a long time ago and Virgil has arranged them into neat lines. But it doesn’t seem OK to me. Two thousand years is nothing and poetry just makes things scari
er (‘ut tandem ante oculus evasit et ora parentum/concidit ac multo vitam cum sanguine fudit’, meaning ‘and then his parents saw him and he fell to the ground dead, his life flowing out of him with much blood.’)
In the dining hall at lunch we packed ourselves around a narrow table to eat lasagne, chips and salad and drink tap water out of ridged plastic cups. Venetia told us that her brother had worked out how to get high inhaling Tipp-Ex thinner, but no one had any Tipp-Ex thinner so we couldn’t try it.
‘Look at Jane,’ Anya whispered while the others were talking.
Jane was in the year above. Her father had been a famous television actor. He had died suddenly. We all knew about that; it had been on the news, in the papers. He had died years ago, but ten years ago is nothing and over the holidays she had lost too much weight so that now she was just bare bones really, her cheekbones protruding, the sinews in her neck straining, her hair mostly fallen out and the few dry strands that remained backcombed and teased into a bun on the top of her head to give the impression of density where there was none.
I couldn’t help but stare, although I looked away when Jane caught my eye.
‘What is she doing in here anyway?’ said Venetia.
‘She probably just wants to smell the food,’ said Sarah, and we all laughed.
I had chemistry after lunch. No one mucked about in chemistry: we were dealing with dangerous chemicals, acids that could burn and metals that could explode; but if they were contained, if they were kept behind glass, they could be controlled, lithium in a test tube, all that wild intensity made safe.
‘So whose house shall we get ready at?’ said Sarah.
We were sitting around a speckled Formica table in McDonald’s. I had a strawberry milkshake and some French fries. Anna was smoking, flicking the ash into the foil ashtray. The rumour was that she had already lost her virginity.
‘Mine,’ I said.
They were quiet. They looked at each other.
‘What, you’re coming to the ball?’ said Anya.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘My dad can drive us.’
‘Cool,’ said Venetia.
At home Mum was sitting on the sofa.
‘How was it? Were they kind, your teachers? Was everyone kind?’
She had come home early from the model agency in Covent Garden where she now worked as an accountant on this, my first day back at school, to make sure I was all right.
‘It was fine,’ I said, throwing my school bag into my bedroom, my bag which was full of new textbooks, the comforting weight of normal life resumed.
‘I had Latin and chemistry today, so that was great.’
‘OK,’ Mum said. ‘That sounds … good. But, you know, were they kind, your teachers?’
‘Yes, they were kind,’ I said and walked away from her into the kitchen. I didn’t tell her that they had been so very kind that no one had mentioned Candy, that five hundred people had spent all day acting as though this momentous, terrible thing that had happened to us hadn’t actually happened at all.
No one wanted me to talk about my dead sister; no one wanted me to have a dead sister. They wanted me to pretend my sister hadn’t died, and in order to do that I had to pretend that my sister had never lived.
So that is what I would do.
‘Oh, by the way, everyone’s going to come round here to get ready for the ball next week,’ I shouted from the kitchen. ‘Dad can drive us.’
‘You’re going to the ball?’
‘I don’t want to waste the ticket.’
‘You mustn’t worry about that.’
I walked from the kitchen, went to stand in front of her, tried to look purposeful.
‘I want to go.’
Dad let us drink cans of beer in the car on the way to the Hammersmith Palais; even though we’d already finished a bottle of white wine at home. He let us smoke too, so that when we drew up outside the Hammersmith Palais, sunglasses on, fags and beer, we felt like the coolest kids there. Venetia had a flask of whisky that she’d tucked into the top of her tights, and we went straight to the loos so we could drink it and put on more lipstick, more powder, our spots hidden under layers of greasy cover-up, stripes of blusher on our cheeks, our eyelashes clagged with black mascara.
We walked out into the heat and music.
‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League was playing.
The floor was a damp black carpet, the ceilings were low, the walls were black and sweating. There were sofas in the corners writhing with bodies, boys and girls, the boys in black tie, their shirts untucked, their bow ties lost; the girls in watered silk and crushed velvet, their netting underskirts pushed up to reveal stockings into which were tucked packets of cigarettes and ten-pound notes. The boys lay on top of the girls, between their legs, their faces were pressed together, their jaws moving, their eyes closed, hands roving, as though it was all so urgent and important. As we moved around the edge of the dance floor, a shadowy place where there were more of these sofas, so many more of these bodies, I saw a pack of boys steal the money from a girl’s stocking; then I saw a girl on top of a boy, her legs astride him, covering his lap with red taffeta, and she was sitting up and he was lying back and they both had their eyes closed and were moving hardly at all, just the occasional jerking motion. They’re actually having sex, I thought. A schoolboy materialized out of the darkness and took Anya’s hand, led her to one of the sofas, then the same thing happened to Sarah, to Venetia, and finally to me. I didn’t really see his face or ask his name – those things didn’t matter. But he did have a can of Coke that smelt like rum, which he offered to me and I drank before we kissed.
And this felt better, this blurry intensity, this way of trying to forget: alcohol and music and boys; this was it.
9
2014, London
It is a Monday morning at work and we are having the weekly meeting in which we go through the forthcoming features for the magazine, the entire editorial staff squeezed into Kate’s office. During the meeting my phone rings. It is my mother. I decline the call but I feel agitated as the meeting proceeds, assuming something is wrong and wondering what it is. As soon as the meeting is over, I call her.
‘Hi, Mum!’
‘Hello?’
She sounds distant and confused.
‘Mum, hello, are you OK?’
My mother lives in sheltered accommodation in Norwood Junction. She has type 2 diabetes, has lost most of the sensation in the soles of her feet and has injections in her eyes every couple of months to stop her from going blind. She is a deacon at the local Baptist church, a modern building where I watched her being submerged in tepid water for her rebaptism. She enjoys singing in the church choir and ordering random gizmos from QVC that clutter her small, over-heated flat. She collects my children from school two days a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and looks after them until I get home from work.
‘I feel dizzy, I think … I can’t breathe.’
My mother has some sores on her leg that she has been treating with sugar and manuka honey. Every time I have seen her lately I have asked how they are getting on; wounds take a long time to heal when you are a diabetic. She keeps saying that the bites are getting much better, even though I can see them weeping pus through the dressings.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ I say.
The ambulance is on its way. I call Mum to let her know and tell her that I will meet her in the hospital. I call her accommodation manager and ask her to sit with Mum until the ambulance arrives. Twenty minutes later she calls me to say that the ambulance is taking Mum to the hospital.
I call the childminder who looks after the girls on Mondays and Wednesdays and ask if she can cover for Mum this week. I fizz with organizational energy. I am good in a crisis, fast-moving and unemotional. When the apocalypse comes I will be in my element.
I phone the emergency services. ‘Hello, you have my mother in an ambulance, could you tell me which hospital you are taking her to, please?’
‘Jan Hodge. You just collected her.’
‘No, sorry, we have no record of that.’
‘But you just collected her.’
‘Call back in twenty minutes. The system might have been updated by then.’
I try to do some work, but I find that I can’t concentrate. My mother is the only other person left in the world who really knew Candy, but now she is in an ambulance somewhere in South London and I cannot find her. I phone the ambulance service again and again. After an hour they are able to locate her.
‘Ah yes, she is at Lewisham.’
I get a cab there and find Mum in a wheelchair in the waiting room. She seems so old and disorientated. I buy her a tea and she holds it loosely in her elegant hands, too exhausted to lift the polystyrene cup to her lips.
Eventually we are seen by a young female doctor. She talks to my mum about the sores on her legs and how long she has had them. Mum tells the doctor about the anti-bacterial properties of manuka honey. The doctor asks my mother to lie on a bed and starts to unwrap the bandages. I hear the doctor gasp and I can suddenly smell the rotten tang of pus.
‘You really should have gone to your GP with this,’ the doctor says. She almost sounds angry.
Mum, it transpires, has cellulitis and sepsis. She is admitted to hospital and put on an antibiotic drip. I promise to collect some things – a nightie, her Kindle – and bring them to her.
I feel shaky as I walk to the bus stop. I can’t stop thinking about how my mother looked in her wheelchair, so weak and diminished. I can still smell the stench of her wounds. What is wrong with me? Normally I am so good at this stuff. I am like a robot in an emergency. Don’t feel, don’t think, just act. It is how I have survived, again and again. More than once my husband has said that he wishes I would cry now and again, show some emotion. When he says this I get defensive, but really I am thinking I cannot start crying, because how would I stop?
I wipe the unexpected, unbidden, unwelcome tears from my face and get on the bus, but still they fall.
The Consequences of Love Page 6