And if the price of that is that I will spend what should have been my wedding anniversary alone, at my computer, crying as I write… that’s a price I’m more than willing to pay.
Posted on 26th April 2016
Filed to: Family Life
Tags: parenting journey, family life, marriage, divorce, missing people, support for families, Susannah Harper, Joel Harper
Chapter Fourteen
Friday 1st December 2017
The screaming and the rocking and the hurting myself have passed. Perhaps it helps that I’m already so hurt, my barely healed hand still pink and tender from the mirror, my leg still marked where the car made contact with me outside the park, and now a little chain of bruises around my wrist and that single, terrifying flat mark where John’s hand reached out and held me in that tight, lover-like clasp beneath the water. I deserve all of these punishments, but I don’t feel the urge to add more. I think this must mean I’m still sane. Only the very far gone would resort to hurting themselves when they’ve already been battered and injured as much as I have. Surely that’s true.
“Hi, it’s Susannah,” I say into the silence of the hallway, testing to see how my voice sounds. I hardly recognise myself. I take a deep slow breath, hold it, let it go. “Hi. It’s Susannah.” That’s better. Soon I’ll be ready to talk to real people again. “Hi, it’s me. Can I talk to you for a bit? Hello, it’s just me.” Yes. That will do. I glance at the handset on the floor beside me, but I don’t feel ready to pick it up, not yet. The phone call from Joel might have saved me, but I don’t think I can forgive the technology that so utterly failed to capture his voice. I stagger to my feet and make a shaky journey upstairs to where my mobile is. See? I can walk. I’m doing fine.
“Hello?” Melanie answers within two rings, but she sounds as if she’s not sure who I am.
“Hi. It’s just me. Um… I was wondering if I could talk to you for a bit, I’m having a bit of a bad night.”
“Have you thought about what I said to you?”
When did we last speak? What did Melanie say to me? I remember standing outside the hospital with my hair wet and no coat on, trying not to shiver as the cold burrowed through my flesh to get at my bones. In the background, Richard murmurs something, nothing I can decode into speech, just a low bass rumble.
“You do remember, don’t you? Susannah? The last time we talked?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Are you ready to get some help? Shall I come round and take you to the hospital?”
“I don’t want to, I just… Something weird happened to me, that’s all. I was running a bath and I forgot about it and all the water came down through the ceiling.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You’re forgetting things, you’re seeing things, you’re acting completely unlike yourself. Please, let me come round and help you. I’ll stay the night if you want and we can go to the GP in the morning and take it from there.”
“I don’t want to see the GP, I don’t want to see anyone, I just want to talk for a bit.” No reply, just a small whispering that’s clearly not meant for me. “Melanie, can you hear me? Are you there? I said I just want to talk for a bit.”
“No, shush, be quiet.” She’s talking to Richard, whose words I still can’t interpret but whose tone is growing angrier. “She’s my sister, okay? No, don’t try and tell me what to do. Yes, I know what I said. Of course I’m going to stick to it. Look, just shush and let me talk to her, okay? Sorry, Suze, I’m with you now. I’ll come round right now, shall I, and stay over? And then in the morning we’ll see someone. Please. Let’s get this sorted so we can all enjoy Christmas, yeah?”
“No, that’s not what I want!” I sound childish and petulant even to myself. “I just want to talk to you. That’s all I need, that’s all I’m asking.”
The silence is terrible.
“Are you still there?” I whisper.
“If you won’t see the doctor then I can’t help you.” Melanie’s voice is taut with pain. “I told you, Suze. I love you and as soon as you’re ready for some proper medical help then I will drop everything and come and help you. But until then I can’t talk to you. Okay? I love you. I love you so much and as soon as you—” Another interjection from Richard. “Yes, I’m winding it up, for fuck’s sake, what do you want from me, this is my sister, okay? Call me when you’re ready to get help. I love you. I love you. Please call me soon and say you’re going to get some help. Oh, God, this is so hard, Richard, can you—”
And then I’m alone in the office staring at the bright bland colours of my phone screen. My sister has refused to talk to me. My sister thinks I’m mad. I’m alone.
Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps I am mad. But how else would I be? How can Melanie understand, when she’s never lost a child? We all think we can imagine but we can’t. She was the wrong person to call. I need to call someone else instead. But who? Who else is there? Jackie. Jackie will understand.
A brief pause, as my phone sends out its little electronic signal. Will the owl hear it as it passes by? Does it disrupt the perfect silence of that cool gliding flight? I have no way of knowing. So much of the world is hidden from us. My phone rings, rings, rings in my ear. Please, Jackie. Pick up the phone and talk to me. I need you. But when I finally hear her voice, it’s not her at all but simply the recorded greeting on her voicemail.
I dial again, hopeful and hungry for contact. Voicemail again. Do I dare to call a third time? As my finger hovers over the screen, her text message drops into my inbox: So so sorry love I can’t talk right now Georgie’s sick will call you tomorrow ok? Take care sorry again J xxxx
Jackie’s lucky. She has others to keep her busy. We mourn our sons equally, but her life is less empty than mine. Her marriage will last or it won’t and the statistics say it probably won’t, but she’ll always have her other children to stand between her and the screaming dark. Whereas I…
I’m being pathetic, but who’s going to stop me or tell me to pull myself together? If John was still here… but no, I don’t want John. Do I?
I hold my phone to my ear once more, and this time I know the call will be answered. It’s a kind of hypocrisy to call him given what I’ve begun to suspect about him, but isn’t this what investigators do? Perhaps he’ll give himself away. One ring, two rings, three and then John’s voice on the end of the phone, blurred and urgent with hope.
“Susannah? Is there any news?”
“No. No news.”
A sigh then, of weariness or of relief or perhaps just of irritation. It doesn’t matter. I have contact. I still exist.
“I just needed to hear your voice,” I whisper.
“Hang on a minute.” I hang, breathless, on the sounds that fill my ear. A rustle of fabric. The creak of wood. John’s breathing, steady and slow. The faint change in sound as he moves to a different room. I’ve only been inside their house three times, but the brief forbidden peeks I’ve taken behind the closed doors of the upstairs rooms are burned into my brain. Does Nathalie know he’s left their bed to talk to me? Does she mind? Of course she minds, how could she not; but she’ll allow it, because she has everything and I have nothing. Nothing apart from her husband, who still comes to me whenever I call.
“Susannah? Are you still there?” John’s question is folded securely inside a yawn, and I feel a twinge of guilt at waking him, but only a twinge.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“So what’s happening?”
He’s answered my summons and now I have no idea what to say to him. “I… I just… I just needed to talk to you. Is that okay?”
“I thought maybe you’d heard something,” he says. Is that reproach in his voice?
“No, nothing. It’s just the weather, I think. I was thinking about Joel when he was a baby. Do you remember that first winter when we took him for a walk and we had him bundled up in three layers with his snowsuit on top? And he cried the whole time and we thought he was freezing, so we k
ept on piling on blankets?” I want John to join in with this memory, but there’s only silence. “And when we got him home we took his snowsuit off and his little head was all sweaty and we realised he’d been crying because he was too hot? That was a good day.”
“It was.”
“He was our Winter’s child, wasn’t he, John? Our beautiful perfect Winter’s child. We met him at the heart of winter and we knew straight away he was ours.”
“Susannah, have you been drinking?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you sure? Because you don’t sound quite like yourself.”
This isn’t what I want. I want John to join me in resurrecting the happiest days of our lives, to soothe me to sleep with the well-worn memories of those months when we were a perfect contented family of three. Why won’t he do what I want?
“Susannah? Are you still there? Melanie called me yesterday.”
This isn’t right either. John and Melanie are connected only through me. They’re not meant to speak to each other independently and without my knowledge. And what did they find to talk about?
“She’s worried about you. She thinks you’re, um, she thinks maybe you’re having some problems with stress. Something about the hairdressers?”
Melanie will have described exactly what happened at the hairdressers, but John being John, the good clinician, the gentle healer, is leaving me the space to explain the experience in my own words. I won’t be a good patient. Instead I sit in stubborn silence and let the moment stretch out. How dare they talk about me behind my back?
“Okay, it’s none of my business,” John says at last. “But if you want to talk about it, I’m happy to listen. Oh, Lord, hang on a minute.”
“What? What is it? What?” John isn’t listening, he’s concentrating on someone else. There’s a clunk as he puts his phone down somewhere and then all I can hear is his voice murmuring, It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s okay, just a nightmare, all right, Daddy’s here. There’s teddy, look. That’s it… Back to sleep… “Is everything all right? Is it Joel? Is he all right? Does he want me?”
“Susannah.” The pain in John’s voice tears at my heart. “That was Emily. Joel isn’t with us any more. Remember? Susannah? Can you still hear me? Susannah?”
I can’t bear this. It’s too much. I need to matter to someone, to have their undivided attention for once, not just the little scraps left over from everyone else. I hang up. Then I sit and wait. He’s going to call me back. He’s going to call me back. He’s going to call me back. He has to call me back. He always calls me back.
He’s not going to call. Of course he’s not going to call. He has his own new life to return to. His new daughter and his new wife in their new warm beds. Everyone’s busy with their families but me. Everyone has someone to call them away from the desperate neediness of the neighbourhood madwoman, lost in fantasies of her vanished son. No wonder they don’t want to talk to me. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. Who is there left?
“Susannah?”
“Nick. I’m sorry to call so late, there isn’t any news. I just, I needed to talk to someone and I know this isn’t right, for me to call you like this, I just needed to hear your voice, all these things are happening to me and I keep seeing things and hearing things and I don’t know what any of it means, I think I might be going mad, Nick, but what if I’m not? What if this is me remembering something really important?”
“It’s all right. Where are you?”
“I know you can’t just drop everything and turn out to see me, you’ve got a life too—”
“Never mind where I am, that doesn’t matter. Where are you?”
“I’m at home.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Are you safe?”
“I—” I look at the tender boiled pink of my arm, the pale handprint, the chain of tiny bruises like a lover’s tattoo. “I don’t know. Something’s happening to me. I don’t know what it is but something’s happening to me and I don’t know what to do.”
“All right. Sit tight. I’m coming round right now, give me twenty minutes.”
He hangs up on my protestations. Tonight is not a night where I get to choose who talks to me and for how long.
Nonetheless, he’s coming. Where is he starting from? I can’t tell. I’ve seen the private lives of everyone else I’ve called tonight. I’ve spent time in their homes, I’ve met their partners and their children. In my hunger for human contact, my longing to escape into their own more satisfying worlds, I’ve glanced furtively into their medicine cabinets and crept like a thief into the rooms with the doors they kept closed. I know what their bedrooms look like. I’ve even laid my face against their pillows to catch the scent of their sleep. Only Nick remains a sweet mystery, a man in a good suit and expensive aftershave, with a sick wife I’ve never met and a house where I’ve never been. And yet he’s coming to save me. How strange and how beautiful.
Now that I know he’s coming, my aloneness becomes something to be cherished, the way a child will cherish the timeless limbo between the first of December and Christmas Day. Twenty minutes, he said. How far away is he? A few minutes of Googling takes me to a website that lets me draw a radius around my home. The driving will be urban and suburban, but it’s late and the roads will be quiet; can he get as far as ten miles in the twenty minutes he’s allowed himself? Perhaps not. Perhaps he’s only five miles away. I zoom in and study the maze of streets in fascination. Which of these is Nick’s home? Or perhaps he was at work after all, and he’s only coming to me from the police station.
I leave the chilly little office and sit on the stairs to watch the front door. This is like being a teenager again, watching for the shadow in the glass that will announce the arrival of a boyfriend. It’s late and my son is lost, and everyone else has abandoned me and the dining room ceiling is a watery mess, but there’s a small dark spot of happiness in me. Nick is coming to help me. I matter enough for him to come when I call.
In the utter silence of the freezing night, I can hear every sound. The car slowing and stopping outside my house. The creak and click of the gate. Am I imagining it, or can I hear the crunch of his shoes on the frosty leaves that line the garden path? The shadow behind the stained glass looms almost as large as John’s used to do.
He comes into my house in a cloud of cold, smelling of aftershave and clean frost. He’s wearing the smart suit and very crisp white shirt that I associate with his working persona. In the living room, I tell him I’ll make coffee for us both, but he surprises me by shaking his head and leading me gently but firmly to the sofa. Then he vanishes. I sit quietly, my feet on the floor, my hands in my lap, and wait to see what will happen next.
What happens next is that Nick appears with two steaming mugs. He’s taken off his jacket, which gives him the appearance of a man home from work. I fumble for coasters; he sits beside me, close but not intrusive. When he looks at me, I feel as if I’m made of glass.
“You found the coffee,” I say, for something to say.
“I’m quite domesticated when I have to be. I think you have a water leak in your dining room, though.”
“Yes, I know, it’s a mess.”
“I’ve mopped up a bit, put some towels down.”
“Oh? Thank you. You didn’t need to—”
“So,” he says, with a quick friendly smile, “what’s been going on?”
Those words, that smile, are all it takes to break me. My face crumples into ugliness and instead of the words I meant to speak – Well, I’ve had some more strange experiences and I’m not sure what they mean – the sound that comes out of me is a horrible mad-sounding howl. I want to throw myself into his arms and bury my face in his chest but I’m not quite far gone enough to do that, so instead I fold over onto my own lap and hide my face in my battered hands. What will he think of me now?
After a minute, there’s a hand on my back and another reaching gently into the damp ta
ngle of my face and my arms and my hair, unfolding me and turning my face towards his face.
“Let me help you,” he says. “I want to help you.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“You said you’d been seeing and hearing things. Tell me about that.”
So I tell him. I tell him everything, from the visit to the fortune-teller to the message I heard on the answerphone. I show him the bruises. I tell him about finding the files on my computer that I have no memory of creating. Then I take a deep breath, and I finally confess the secret I have been holding onto for so long: the way it was between John and Joel, the fears that haunt me sometimes in the long still silences of the night.
When I’ve finally finished he sits quietly for a minute. At some point in my long disconnected monologue he has taken my hand, I think to inspect the tiny chain of bruises and the tender pink texture of the skin, and that one astounding piece of evidence, the handprint. He places his hand over the shape of it, trying it out for size, then takes my other hand in his and gently, very gently, as if he’s trying not to frighten me, he fits my fingers over the marks. They’re a good match. But then, so were his.
“Does it matter that I didn’t tell you at the time?” I ask at last. The words cling to my tongue and lips. I have to force them out.
“About John not getting on with Joel? No, it doesn’t matter. I knew anyway. And besides, when it’s a child we always have to look closely at the—” he stops, but not quickly enough. I’m already back there in that terrible little room with its closed door and harsh lights, the illusion of intimacy that grew despite the one-way mirror on the wall, the microphone on the table between us.
“Does this hurt?” he asks, resting his fingertips against my scalded skin.
“Not really. Not much. Well, a little bit.”
“I don’t think it’s going to blister, but it’s bigger than your hand. That means you should probably go to hospital.”
The Winter's Child Page 20