by Lisa Jewell
So there you go, gorgeous Jim. Another chunk of ME for you to play about with. Can you fix me? Could you? Please? I dream about your belt buckle, Jim, I dream about unclasping it …
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Monday 14th February 2011
Happy Valentine’s, Darling Jim! Not that I’m a fan of Valentine’s, really. I always thought that every day should be Valentine’s. Well, POTENTIALLY Valentine’s at least, if you see what I mean. You know, why wait for a certain day if you want to buy flowers now? Unimaginative really, isn’t it, buying overpriced roses on the same day as everybody else. You know, you see a woman walking home with a bouquet of flowers, you think, Wow, someone really loves her! You see the same woman with the same bouquet on Valentine’s and you just get the feeling that someone was going through the motions.
But anyway, that’s just me. Good luck to the rest of the world! And out of special consideration to my feelings on the subject I declare this email a romance-free zone!
So instead I shall regale you with the fact that I have spent the last twenty-four hours on the toilet. Sorry. Probably TMI, as they say. But there you go. Something I ate probably. Or maybe a bug I picked up from the swimming baths last time I went. Either way, YUCK. Horrible. And it’s times like this that I miss living with another human. Do you feel like that, Jim? So many advantages to living solo, until you’ve got a dire case of the squits. Then you just want someone there so you can say, Poor me, aren’t I a poor, poor, thing? And have someone stroke your back and say, Yes, YES, you are a poor, poor thing. And make you drink fluids and give you things to help. Ah well. Choices made. Paths chosen, etc.
No word from Rory since his last email. I’ve written a few times, but he still doesn’t have a proper email account set up. So I suppose I’ll just have to be patient. I spoke to Meg at the weekend. They’re planning a skiing trip for the Easter holidays, apparently. Skiing. Eugh. Can’t imagine anything worse. God gives you a pair of perfectly good feet and then you go and stick some big long bits of metal on them and throw yourself down the side of a mountain. No, thank YOU! And it costs a fortune. I try not to get too cross when I think of all those thousands of pounds spent in a fortnight that would last me all year probably. But Meg won’t give me any money. Says she’d like to but she’s convinced I’d spend it all on tat. And she’s probably right. Oh, God. What an absolute pain in the arse I am!
Well, on that note, I will leave you. I sincerely hope you’re not out on the razz tonight at a table for two with some lovely young thing clutching a bouquet. Oh, the very thought of it makes my blood boil and bubble! And, well, rest assured that I am here (close to a toilet!!), my thoughts with you, my heart with you, my everything with you, tonight and every night.
My love,
Xxxxxxxx
Tuesday 15th February 2011
Urgh, I am STILL not well, darling Jim. I have been pretty much glued to the toilet for the last forty-eight hours. I feel very weak with it. I am making myself eat (although I have no appetite WHATSOEVER) but it’s all just coming clean through me moments later. I suppose, if it’s still like this by this time tomorrow, I should make an appointment to see my GP. Yuck. I hate my GP. Big loud woman with meaty fingers. She’s very patronising, She calls me ‘dear’. As if I was an old lady. For God’s sake! I can’t bear her. And the thought of her putting those big meaty fingers of hers anywhere near my back passage. Oh, good grief, Jim! I think I’d throw up! So keep your fingers crossed for me that this all blows over very soon and I am spared that particular humiliation.
But I have an announcement to make. Jim, I have decided I am going to work on getting out of the house. I mean, properly, so that I can spend the night with you!!! I truly believe that all this is helping, you know, all this talking, all this analysing. I truly believe that. I was speaking to Madeleine yesterday, she’s Vicky’s eldest, she’s twenty. Delightful girl. We went through a rough time together when she lived here (my fault, all totally and utterly my fault) but we’ve made a kind of friendship now. She lives with her boyfriend just outside Cheltenham and I was telling her about you, about our chats, about your problems and my problems, and she said I should try a night at hers. Soon. You know, she’s only three-quarters of an hour away. If it was a total disaster I could always drive home. Obviously I’m making this sound a thousand times more straightforward than it was when actually, had you been there, you’d have seen me shaking uncontrollably in a coffee shop, halfway to a panic attack at the mere thought. I had to go outside for air! Daft COW!
Still, it is a start, it is something to focus on. I hope that makes you happy, Jim. I do so want you to be happy. But in the meantime, we must keep talking, we must keep this open, this incredible, life-changing connection we’ve made to each other. It’s becoming like oxygen to me, Jim, it really is. I need it more and more, every day. You are making me stronger. I love you so much, more than I’ve ever loved anyone.
Oh, here we go again, the toilet beckons.
More anon, beautiful man of mine xxxx
April 2011
The following morning all four of them strapped themselves into Megan’s people carrier and headed to the funeral parlour where Lorelei’s body had been sent from the Coroner’s Office. Megan had had a call the previous evening, while they ate in the pub in the next village along (too many curious gazes and awkward reunions in the local). ‘Your mother is ready,’ said an earnest young man called Samuel Moss. ‘We’ve made her look very nice. I think you’ll be pleased.’
Megan could not begin to imagine. She had never seen a body laid out for a funeral before. ‘Thank you very much,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll see you in the morning.’
They’d laid her out on a bed in a tiny room in the back corner of the parlour. She was surrounded by silk flowers and attended by the boy called Samuel Moss who was dressed in a suit, his thin hair greased down like a pensioner’s, and so theatrically respectful he was bordering on a character from The Fast Show. ‘I’ll leave you all to treasure your time with Lorelei. If I may call her that?’
Megan and Beth looked at each other and exchanged pained looks, their cheeks sucked in with repressed laughter. ‘Yes,’ Megan managed, ‘you may. Thank you.’
The laughter dissipated as Samuel left the room and they moved in closer to their mother’s body.
‘She’s so thin!’ Bethan cried out in a loud whisper.
‘Six stone eight,’ said Megan.
‘God.’
‘But she looks sweet, doesn’t she?’
Bethan put her hand against Lorelei’s hand and nodded. ‘So little.’
‘Like a child,’ said Colin, laying his hand against her cheek.
‘What the hell is she wearing?’ said Bethan.
‘Christ knows.’ Megan turned to check that Samuel wasn’t listening at the door. ‘It’s revolting – it looks like something an old lady would wear.’
It was a pale-blue dress, devoid of any of Lorelei’s precious colours. It sat loose around her handspan waist and ended just an inch too low below her knees. It had a row of three buttons on a placket down the front and long sleeves.
‘We should have brought her something,’ said Bethan.
Megan sighed. ‘They asked me to. I tried to find something, but honestly, as ridiculous as it might sound, I couldn’t find any of her nice clothes. I have no idea where she kept them. We’ll have to buy her something,’ she said decisively. ‘From that boutique. We’ll buy her something colourful. Bring it over later.’
‘Oh,’ said Colin, ‘surely that’s a waste of money. She’s only—’
‘No,’ Beth interjected. ‘Meg’s right. We’ll buy her something lovely.’
Colin nodded and smiled, happy to be outnumbered.
‘She looks pretty,’ said Molly.
Megan smiled and put her arm around her daughter’s waist. ‘She does, doesn’t she?’ She didn’t want to say that she thought her mother looked like an awful shrunken-down witch, her unkempt hair tamed i
nto a long grey plait, her skin the colour of cement. She had to remind herself of what her mother must have looked like before they’d worked their magic on her, this woman who’d starved herself to death and been found dead in her car on the side of the road with her insides eaten away by disease.
She should be grateful for small mercies.
They spent another half an hour in the room with Lorelei. Nobody cried. Not even Bethan with her body pumped full of hormones. But it was sweet and tender, nonetheless. The three women left Colin to talk about arrangements for the funeral with the director and drove into the village. They parked outside the funny boutique that had been there for always. Their mother had brought them here when they were young, left them to roam about the trailing jungle of clothes rails while she tried on brightly coloured dresses and an ingratiating woman called Grace said things like, ‘Oh Lorrie, that’s the one, it really sets off your amazing figure. Not many people round here could get away with something like that. You’re a natural clothes horse.’
The boutique had changed with the times and Grace, with her plume of silver hair and chunky paste jewellery, was nowhere to be seen, just a bored, beautiful young girl who looked as though she was home from boarding school for the holidays, perched on a stool behind the till.
The dress they chose, at £219, was ludicrously expensive. But it had been reduced from £395, owing, Megan assumed, to the fact that it was in such an unfeasibly small size, a tiny size 6 scrap of silk chiffon printed all over with peacock feathers in gemstone colours. On the way back to the funeral parlour they dropped Lorelei’s laptop into a repair shop.
‘This laptop belonged to our mother,’ she said to the jolly-looking middle-aged couple behind the counter. ‘She just passed away.’
They expressed their condolences in lush Cotswold burrs.
‘We need to access her laptop. We don’t have a password. Is there …? Do you …?’
The couple looked doubtful but keen to help. They mentioned a nephew, who lived in the next village. He might know someone. They said to leave it with them and tore off a deposit slip from a small pad underneath their desk. At no point did they suggest or imply that there was anything untoward about this request and Megan smiled as she tried to imagine the equivalent reaction in the laptop repair shop at the top of her road in Tufnell Park. The police would have been involved in moments, she suspected.
They took the dress to the funeral parlour and collected Colin, and then Megan drove them all back to the Bird House. It was around 11 a.m. as they pulled up on the kerb outside the house. The skip men had been and gone; two empty containers sat on the road. The sun shone on, the day stretched ahead. They turned the corner on to the garden path, talking loudly about plans for Lorelei’s funeral, laughing about Samuel Moss’s precocious obsequiousness, joking about how he probably met his friends in the pub after work in a hoody, talking like a South London gangster. And then Megan stopped and stared. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped and she looked at the wiry, blond-haired, leather-skinned man on the doorstep and whispered, ‘Rory.’
14
Sunday 27th February 2011
I’m coming, Jim. I really am.
I spent the night at Madeleine’s! The whole night! Well, to be accurate, I arrived at 10 p.m. and left in the pitch-black before she’d woken up, but I did manage a couple of hours’ sleep. I’m not saying that it was easy. It was, to be horribly honest, a bit of a nightmare. But God, Jim, it’s a start. What is it the psychiatrists say? BABY STEPS. Yes, baby steps. And I shall do it again, I promise you that. Baby steps towards you, Jim, and your body. And all the wonderful things we will do together in the blissful dark of night. Christ, I am yearning for you. For it. I truly am.
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Tuesday 1st March 2011
Darling, thank you, you are so encouraging and strong for me. I honestly feel like I could do anything for you. I am truly starting to believe I might change. Imagine that! I put my car in to be serviced today, Jim. If I’m to drive it all the way to you, the last thing I need is a blown tyre or a gasket or whatever all those other bits and pieces of cars are called! Wouldn’t that be tragic, to overcome these wretched demons of mine and then be scuppered at the last fence by a flat tyre! So I am selling a ring of mine to pay for it and having it done. Luckily the mechanics is the wrong direction from the shops so hopefully I won’t be tempted to go and spend the money before I pay for the repairs! And if I am tempted I will just think of you, Jim, standing tall and handsome in your doorway. I will think of me stepping into your big, strong arms, taking your hand and following you to your bed and that will be enough for me. That is all I want now.
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Wednesday 2nd March 2011
No, Jim, I do not want a penny of your money! You are a beautiful, wonderful man but you are as financially constrained as I am and there is no reason why you should have to pay towards my old banger. Cook me a lovely meal upon my arrival instead.
Well, I was going to have another ‘dry run’ at Madeleine’s house last night but I seem to have caught a nasty cold. I’m very phlegmy and hacky, keep getting terrible coughing fits. Really, it’s just one thing after another! I blame the public baths, I really do. I might stop going. They never look quite clean in there, black mould and all that. Horrible. So I will wait until I have shaken this cough and then make another plan with Maddy. Are you bored of waiting for me yet, Jim? Are you fed up with endless words and no action? I am doing all I can. I truly am. I am changing, for you, Jim. Slowly but surely.
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April 2011
Rory had no words at first. He’d forgotten how to talk to his family. He’d more or less forgotten how to talk, full stop. He’d spent six weeks at a Buddhist retreat; twenty-three hours a day of silent prayer and contemplation amongst whitewashed walls and shaved heads. No music. No television. No traffic. Just cicadas and chanting.
He did not want to be in this country. He did not want to be looking at these staring, gawping faces, at the tear-sodden cheeks of his father, at the confusion and curiosity of his sisters. But he’d had a moment of deep understanding halfway through the retreat. He’d come to understand that everything was his fault. Rhys had killed himself because of him, because he was such a bad brother to him. Kayleigh had been forced into the arms of her father by him, by his abandonment of her and their child. That union had brought about the events at Vicky’s funeral that Megan had told him about in a badly punctuated email shortly afterwards. And now his mother was dead because he had not come home to look after her once he’d been released from jail. He should have been here. And he wasn’t. And now she was gone. All his fault. All of it.
They all looked so old. His father looked ancient. His sisters were no longer girls. They looked meaty and matured. His younger sister was pregnant. He could not remember how old she was. He could barely remember how old he was. They looked fat. They weren’t fat, but they looked fat. Compared to himself. Compared to the people he’d eaten rice and broth with three times a day for six weeks, compared to the peasants and farmers who worked the land around them in a hundred degrees.
And this house, his mother’s house, the house where he grew up, where he lost his brother and then lost himself. It was everything that the retreat had not been. He had walked the perimeter of the house, again and again, waiting for someone to find him here. He had peered in through the windows, through the glass in the doors, seen the piles and the boxes. All the things. All the stuff. He thought how as a child he’d laughed affectionately at his mother’s ways. He remembered the trips to Poundstretcher and the cash and carry, the endless amounts of stuff coming into the house, the endless sums of money being spent, the endless, filthy accumulation. How could he have thought it was funny? How could he have thought it was cute? It was obscene. What his mother had done here, as poor people scavenged for food in landfill, as parents watched their children die, as disease wiped out villages and waterholes dried up, it subverted everything. I
t was grotesque. His sisters with their mascaraed lashes and daft shoes. His niece (he assumed she was a niece), with her big nest of blonde hair, her neon fingernails and spoiled demeanour. They looked alien to him, as alien as if they had green skin and tentacles.
But he needed to get over that. He needed to shut his mind to its complaints and outrage. Here he was, what remained of him, and he had a job to do.
He smiled, and he got to his feet and said, ‘All right?’
Colin brought Rory a box, like the one he’d brought for the two girls. But Rory shook his head and said, ‘No, thanks. I don’t want any stuff.’
‘You might be sorry,’ said Colin, ‘if you don’t. One day you might wish you’d kept something and it’ll be too late.’
Rory shook his head again and said, ‘No. I won’t. I don’t know much about me, but I know that much. And besides, I’d have nowhere to put it.’
‘I can keep it for you,’ said Megan. ‘Until you’re settled.’
Rory smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘honest. I don’t want it.’
‘Where are you going to stay?’ asked Megan.
‘Here?’ he said, looking from Megan to his father and back again. ‘If there’s room?’
His father took him upstairs to show him Rhys’s room, with talk of finding a mattress. ‘I can sleep on the floor,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on the floor for the past six years. I’ve got kind of used to it.’
The three girls turned to each other after Rory and Colin had gone.
‘He looks really sad,’ said Beth.
‘He looks terrible,’ said Megan.
‘I think he’s kind of cool,’ said Molly.
Rory’s presence galvanised them. By the end of that day they’d come almost to the back of the kitchen. They cleared the hoard all the way to the kitchen windows so that the sunlight finally had a way through and the sudden burst of daylight really spurred them on. Molly and Rory worked together as a team, being the youngest and the thinnest. Megan appraised them from a distance. They looked like father and daughter with their golden hair, their lean bodies and fine features. They talked a lot, and there was a lot of mutual laughter. In the presence of a grown man who she for some reason saw as being her peer, Molly reverted to some of her old teenagery habits, talking to Meg as if she was slightly subnormal. Megan couldn’t catch half of what they were saying but it was clear that Rory felt more comfortable with his niece than he did with his sisters and his father. Molly didn’t know him. She wasn’t a threat. There was also a sense that he aligned himself more closely with a teenager than with people of his own age, as if he was Peter Pan. And of course, Megan pondered, he hadn’t come close to growing up, had he? From home to commune, from commune to drug dealer’s lackey, from lackey to prison and from prison to a retreat. All his many experiences had been so one-dimensional, so cosseted. He’d never had to take responsibility for himself.