by Jane Healey
‘I can’t believe you, I can’t— You knew it was wrong, you kept it secret, you sneaked around. How could you do this?’
‘I didn’t do anything to her. She modelled for some photos, that’s all.’
‘Am I supposed to believe you? You think that’s convincing?’ I shriek. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes to see what’s going on, before all the guests tumble out of the house, their late lunch ruined. Me ruined. Maeve ruined.
He turns his head, rubs a palm over his mouth. ‘You ignore her, you know – Maeve.’
‘Don’t say her name.’ His horrible eyes and his calm mouth and his aged skin. His hands on her. ‘God, and there I was sympathetic to you, listening to you talk about wanting a family. Jesus Christ. You’re a predator.’
‘She’s seventeen.’
‘And you’re old enough to be her father, talking absolute shit about loneliness—’
‘You do ignore her,’ he barrels ahead. ‘You and Alex. She’s hurting, she’s struggling, and you turn a blind eye. She needed someone.’
‘That’s a great story.’
‘It’s true.’ He moves closer, his hand clutching the top of the gate.
‘I have a better one. That you were obsessed with me, the younger me. That you saw her and thought you’d have another chance.’
He shakes his head. ‘Not everything is about you.’
‘You dressed her up as Ophelia.’
‘Among other Pre-Raphaelite paintings.’
I make an incredulous sound. ‘How fucked up are you? To do this after what happened?’ I shove at his shoulder and the gate groans loudly as he rocks back. ‘How could you do this? We opened our home to you! All your overtures of friendship, talking to me like you cared.’ I should have trusted myself, I should have known not to trust him, God.
‘I did care, I do care about you, Ruth. I can’t help it if I fell in love.’
‘Love—’
‘Like you never fell in love with a girl.’
‘When I was a girl too.’
‘Are you going to tell Alex?’
‘You’re worried about that now? Where the hell is Maeve?’
‘She ran down the hill, she was upset,’ he says, with an intimacy in his voice that outrages me. ‘You should go after her—’
‘Don’t fucking tell me what to do! You don’t know anything about my daughter. She’s my daughter, I know how to comfort her. Get away from the fucking gate—’ My fingers miss the catch on the gate and I yell and kick it and then manage on my second try, shoving it open as the hinge squeaks.
‘Can I have them back, the pictures?’ he asks, standing back like I might claw at his face. I might just.
‘Can you have the pictures back,’ I repeat. He’s so small, pathetic, that’s what makes it worse.
‘I’ll switch?’ he says, holding something out.
‘Polaroids too?’ I spit. ‘Jesus Christ . . .’ But my voice trails off as I see the top picture.
A girl with black hair. A sun-dappled river. A familiar face.
‘I need to tell you something,’ he says.
As if in a trance, I snatch them from him, the other photos slipping from my hands. Greedy and unnerved, I stare at the square images.
‘It’s something I should have told you a long time ago,’ Stuart continues.
I had forgotten how young we looked. Joan, Linda. There I am with my long hair, my wide grin. Did I ever smile that bright after that summer? Was I ever so hopeful?
And there she is, Camille, reaching towards me across time. A vision of girlhood, frozen. Sinking me right back, pulling me under.
One photograph, and I remember a dozen things I had forgotten. Her laugh, her crooked front tooth, how she beat us all whenever we played cards on the riverbank. That she liked to eat the whole core of her apples, seeds and all. That the fine hairs on her thighs caught on mine when we swam next to one another in the river. How small her body looked when it was pulled from the water.
‘Where did you get these pictures? Do you have more?’ Everything feels very slow now, my mouth, my words. The wine and shock a sludge in my limbs.
‘No.’
‘I thought I burned them all.’
A private bonfire in the bathroom the day after the night before, once all the families had fled, cutting their holidays short. A pile of pictures in the sink and a whole box of matches needed to turn them into ash because the thin drip of the leaky tap kept putting out the flames. Then I had opened the tap all the way, let the water curl the mess down the plughole, leaving a black smear behind that I wiped at frantically with my hands, terrified of someone finding it, scrabbling with black fingers in the sink, rubbing my hands raw against each other to try to get them clean.
‘It’s about Camille.’
‘What?’ I ask, forgetting he was there, forgetting that she isn’t.
‘She was pregnant. When she died.’
‘You’re lying again.’
He shakes his head, looks pitying. ‘No, I heard your father talking to the police. She was about three months gone. They assumed she had been with someone at school, a boy or a teacher or something.’
‘This is a sick joke.’
‘You can read her files, ask the police. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
I shake my head and peer closer at the image of her, her blouse loose, her skirt long. I close my eyes, remember her body pressing against mine, tugging her towards me, the round flesh of her hips.
‘It’s why she did it,’ he says. He just keeps talking.
‘No. She would have told us, told me. And if it is true, she didn’t know, she was . . . naive, neglected by her parents.’ The threadbare clothes, her parents’ nonchalance, her surprise at our offers of friendship; clues I only learned how to read later.
But how many other clues had I missed?
The day with the storm, the way she gulped down neat spirits, her talk of stealing a summer, of a secret she needed to tell me—
‘She threw herself down the stairs, don’t you remember? She had bruises,’ he says.
‘She tripped.’
‘I know you had feelings for her, but there’s lots that people keep secret. You only knew her a few weeks.’
‘Shut up, just shut up. You were jealous of her, you . . . Why did you never tell me?’ I grab his t-shirt and he tries to break my grip, the veins in his neck standing out as we tussle. ‘You wanted me to blame myself for what happened, didn’t you? You wanted me to feel guilty.’
‘No, I just didn’t know how to tell you,’ he insists. ‘I just didn’t know how to talk about any of it. That night, her body. You didn’t want to talk about it either.’
‘My fault again then.’ I laugh acerbically, pushing him away. My stomach heaves and my throat is sharp with acid. What am I doing wasting my time with him? ‘Fuck off, Stuart, fuck off and get out of my house before I call the police and have you arrested.’
I hurry away from him, swat him away from my thoughts. Easy when there’s a mental refrain getting louder and louder, a sick guilt rising inside me. It’s my fault. It was my fault. Camille had wanted to tell me something, she had been waiting for me, she needed me.
And this, Maeve. I failed as a mother, failed again, was blind.
Of course she’s gone to the woods, of course she has. Where else could she be, I think as I sprint down the hill, my hand clutching my roiling stomach and my breath sour. Where else could she be but the woods and the river?
In the corners of my mind, memories are creeping forth, rolling forward as though the glasses that held them have been knocked over by an errant elbow, an accidental kick.
My father, what he said at the gallery, the implication that I had a death wish, that I got pregnant with the twins to tempt fate, to follow my mother. I didn’t, I swear that’s not true. But it’s true that I did think of her, I did when I was in labour, when Maeve entered the world blue and I felt myself struggle for breath too, the midwives crowdi
ng around me and her, blocking my view of her, this strange blue creature I had called into being. I did think for that too-long minute before the oxygen did its work on her, and she breathed her first dry-land breath, that my mother’s curse had found me and her, that it was a foolish thing to imagine I could be a mother when I had killed my own.
I’m not a good mother, I’m not a good wife. Alex will divorce me and we’ll have to sell the house. Iza and Michael will be inconsolable without the garden and the fields where they can run and play, the family home where their parents are together. I did this, no one else. I let Stuart come here, let him hurt Maeve.
I’ve entered the woods now. I call out her name and it echoes back towards me. It’s still light, the night isn’t encroaching yet. The last time I was here it was dark. It was dark and they carried her out, head lolled back, her wet hair like ropes in the air, her pale wrist dangling down. They crowded around her, and couldn’t they tell that she wouldn’t be able to breathe with them there like that? Didn’t they know to step back and let her have space? Let her have some space, I said, walking over and pushing at shoulders. Let her breathe, you’re crowding her.
Everything else of that night is flashes, sounds. Weeping and torches flickering. Barking voices, the smell of vomit. Standing in the kitchen of my house while someone in uniform asked us questions. And then the dawn creeping in, blue. The summer birds. The grass tracked in through the house. The cups I washed so that every visitor could get a drink. It only felt real, I remember, when I saw my own reflection for the first time, catching it in the bathroom mirror and coming to a jolting stop. It was only real when I saw an image of myself, when I knew that I was real and so was she.
I’m at the river now, in the present, older, here. I’ve been calling but she isn’t answering. It doesn’t look the same; the bank isn’t smooth with grass and moss but gnarled by weeds and low bushes, roots and fallen branches. The water level is lower too, murkier.
The heatwave has dried it up. Or maybe it’s been drying up for years. Maybe it was never that deep and we just misremembered. Maybe when we floated in it, our backs were always grinding against the pebbles of the riverbed, bruising our spines. Maybe when it looked like we were treading water we were really crouched down with our knees hard against rocks, their imprints dug into our kneecaps.
I slide down and into it, cold on my feet, slick against my knees, flowing past my thighs. I had forgotten the current, the way the water is never still but travels. How had we never been curious about where the river came from or where it went? A river isn’t static like a pond or a bath; it flows, it moves. A river goes on and on and on.
Was she really pregnant, like he said she was? And if she was, could I have helped her? Did she love me? Did I her? Does love ever not hurt, does my love, or lack of it, never not hurt people?
I call her name again and turn around and around, scanning the banks, peering into the trees. I pace up the river, the muscles of my legs burning against the flow, the weight of it, until I reach the part where it slips into the undergrowth, where the trees crowd too close for me to squeeze between and then I walk back down, down and down, the water pushing me, tugging me forward.
Then I slip on rocks, of course I do, and fall, bashing my ankle on something sharp, inhaling a mouthful of water.
I’m in the river and it tastes of metal and moss. It tastes of stone and mud.
I am in the river again. Did I ever leave? Was everything just a dream? The bright sky hurts my eyes and the cold of the water hurts my skin, the bump of the ground, the pebbles, painful on my hips.
Every mother knows that a child can drown in the shallowest of water – a bath, a pond. I made my father dry up the pond in the garden so that Maeve couldn’t accidentally fall in. I ferried all three to swimming lessons even when they cried and complained. I haven’t brought the twins to the woods; they don’t know the river is even here. You can drown with a tablespoon of water in your lungs, isn’t that what they warn? And pneumonia can make you drown even though you’re nowhere near the water. Even though you’re in a hospital bed and your mother is standing in the hall while doctors try to save your life, make you breathe again. Breathe, Maeve, I told her as her face went blue, as her chest heaved. Breathe.
I’m tired. My body is awkward now in the water, sinking, not floating, and the river is washing over my face. Up into my nose, across my mouth.
I duck under where it’s loud and the light is green, where each of my movements kicks up silt and stones. It hurts to hold a breath. The pain starts in your sinuses, in your mouth, and then spreads outwards; you can feel the inside of your skull, your lungs, and every hope you have turns to panic. Holding a breath underwater feels like being buried alive.
There’s someone else here, I think, as my head roars. Someone else in the water. I can feel the wake of their movements, can see something, a pale shape coming towards me.
And then a hand, small and cold, grabs me by the shoulder and tugs me up, and I breach the surface with a deafening gasp, breathing in and in, my limbs flailing as I cough, as someone shouts at me and tries to prop me up.
‘What are you doing?’ she demands, righteous and tearful. ‘Mum, what are you doing?!’
‘Sorry,’ I say, wiping my eyes. ‘Sorry.’
Maeve tugs me again and I get my feet under me and look at her, properly. Pale and frightened, and too young for any of this.
‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘I just slipped. I was looking for you and I slipped.’
‘No, you weren’t.’ She shakes her head.
‘Are you all right? Stuart said you’d run off to the woods. I saw the photographs, Maeve. Did he hurt you?’
‘He never hurt me.’
‘Maeve.’
‘I’m fine.’
I wade over to the bank and clamber out, Maeve following. I reach out my hand for her but she doesn’t take it, the line of her mouth hard, her eyes wide in their sockets.
‘It’s my fault, I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I invited him to stay. I shouldn’t have.’
She doesn’t reply.
We’re both soaked now, river water flooding onto the ground behind us as we trudge away from it.
My teeth are chattering. The heat of the day is drying the top of my head already.
‘I’m not keeping this a secret,’ Maeve says, her voice cracking.
She walks ahead of me up through the field. The dust and grass are sticking to my damp clothes, my skin. A cut on the bottom of my foot makes each step hurt.
‘I’m telling Dad,’ she insists, and when she glances back the devastation on her face makes me feel sick. ‘You need help, Mum.’
No more treading water, Ruth. No more solo late-night swims, in dreams or otherwise. No more drowning, enough.
Chapter Thirty-Three
At the gate, Maeve gestures her mother forward and follows her sodden footsteps from the field. Ruth is shivering, her teeth clinking together like a shaking hand lifting a china cup from its saucer.
Stuart’s car is gone. Maeve stands where it was, in front of the house, as Ruth vomits next to the flower pot outside the front door.
‘Mum’s ill,’ Maeve says to her father when he comes to see what’s happening.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘Jesus Christ.’
He looks frightened in a way that Maeve remembers from hospital, pale-faced, mouth thin, as he helps Ruth upstairs to bed.
‘How much wine did you have at lunch?’ he asks Ruth, when Maeve carries the bucket that he told her to get into the bedroom.
‘Not much,’ Ruth groans.
‘Not much.’
‘She was drinking in the morning,’ Maeve interjects.
‘Your clothes are soaked,’ he says to Ruth, ‘what the hell happened?’
Ruth closes her eyes.
‘Where’s Stuart?’ Maeve asks.
‘I don’t know, Maeve,’ he says, as if she’s asked something unreasonable. ‘He packed up and left, said he
had an urgent job.’
‘Mum was in the river.’
‘What river?’
‘In the woods.’
‘The river in the woods,’ he repeats. He blows out a breath. ‘Just – just watch her for a moment, OK,’ he tells Maeve.
Maeve stands just inside the door of the room while Alex says goodbye to the guests downstairs.
‘Is Mum going to die?’ Michael asks from the hall.
‘No, don’t be silly,’ Ruth replies croakily, lifting her head with a wan smile. ‘I’m just feeling a bit poorly this afternoon. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’
Michael’s question, the matter-of-factness of his voice, cracks open a new seam of loathing inside Maeve.
‘C’mon,’ Maeve says, ‘let’s play some Lego,’ and she leaves the room, and her mother, and sits cross-legged on the floor of the twins’ bedroom, building houses with them, trawling through the tub of bricks so that Iza’s walls can all match.
The heatwave doesn’t break for another week, but even when it does, the days feel heat-hazed, bleached-out. Visitors come – a doctor, a lawyer, an aunt and uncle – and boxes pile up in the hall. Diana dies on the news. Maeve breaks her Discman, throwing it on the floor. Iza loses another tooth. Ruth leaves for a treatment centre.
Her parents are divorcing and selling the house; the family is moving back to London.
‘It’ll be good for us,’ her father tells her, rifling through papers in the kitchen, in the same tone he used to tell her that the move here, to the countryside, would be good for them. ‘Do you have to do that, Maeve?’ he snaps, as she crunches on the ice cubes she’s just scooped out of the tray.
She started eating ice cubes after the ice cream in the freezer ran out and now she craves them all the time. The painful crack between her teeth, holding them on her tongue until it feels bruised, the cold slick of water running down her chin.
Her father hasn’t mentioned what happened between her and Stuart but his discomfort is clear, he can barely look at her some days. When she’s feeling particularly sour, she thinks of asking him why what she did is in any way worse than what he did, cheating on Ruth.
‘You’ll be good when we get to London, won’t you,’ he says wearily.