by Jane Healey
‘That’s not— That’s ridiculous, Ruth, you have to see that. You were the one who offered the annexe, I didn’t invite myself.’
‘Alex did.’
He mutters something under his breath, but I’m done with this, with him.
‘You didn’t have to take him up on it, you didn’t have to do any of it,’ I say. ‘All these things that have been done to you. Your father, my father. It doesn’t matter, you’re in control, you chose to do what you did. I called because I wanted answers but you’re just giving excuses. I never want to speak to you again, Stuart, ever.’ I hang up the phone.
This is a dry facility, but some days I’m fucking parched for a drink. Just one. A small one. A sherry, a few sips of white wine, the dregs of a bottle of gin.
I am in control. The past shapes me – my flaws, the patterns of my mistakes – but I’m the one who can make choices now, to learn from it or not, to change or don’t.
Fine words.
Do I believe them?
I’ll try to. Because there’s no soothing depths to drown in here, to get wilfully lost in, no pool of water to float in, weightless, untethered. Just my own squat body and the ground, just me.
Perhaps – like the clay from my art classes that I press my thumbs into, that I knead and roll and shape – there’s a chance for me still to mould myself into something better, something stronger. Perhaps.
Epilogue
I go back and back to him to have his fingers [. . .] clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning
– Angela Carter, The Erl-King
2004
It’s warm on the train south. The dry landscape through the dusty windows looks sepia-toned, looks the same as it did seven years ago. Maeve hasn’t explored much of England; she’s been swallowed up by London, and has only left for weekend trips to European cities and summers in French villas and Italian hotels. Summers of hot nights and bitter mornings, summers which, until two years ago, were documented artfully by a camera that caught her looking lovely and sullen, burned and sun-fevered, drunk and tired.
When she first went on holiday without him, she found it strange. To spend the day at the beach without thinking about how she was posed, what story a picture of her might tell. To not think of herself at one remove, a figure with a backdrop. Even now, she can feel herself slipping into it, gazing out of the window unseeing, wondering what she looks like to the woman inching down the aisle of the train with her hands full of shopping bags, the image she makes: curly red hair over one shoulder, sandaled feet propped on the empty opposite seat, crumpled stonewash jeans, and a green men’s t-shirt tied in a knot at her waist. Maeve had briefly considered wearing a sundress for this excursion, dressing for the part, for the scene, but couldn’t muster the energy this morning to try one on, to shave her legs properly. Or is that a lie? Is her apparent dishevelment artful too? This is the problem with being alone sometimes, she thinks wryly, it gives you too much time to think.
This morning, she had slipped out of the house before her flatmates were awake, breathing in the thin summer’s day, zipping up her jacket against the breeze as she walked to the Tube, taking note of passersby with lazy interest, smiling at the sausage dog being walked by his yawning owner. She likes her life in London, the rented Victorian terrace, her small circle of friends who don’t demand of her more than she’s willing to give, or probe her for things she doesn’t want to talk about. She likes the job at the art charity – even if she has to schmooze rich idiots, even if sometimes when she reviews a guest list she holds her breath just to check that he isn’t included. It would be fine if he was, she tells herself; he’s not going to cause a scene and neither is she. It might hurt a little, a pinch to the gut, a wave of shame, but she’ll get over it, she’ll survive. She’s good at that, after all.
When the train stops at the station closest to her mother’s old house, her grandfather’s old house, she feels her breath tighten. She takes her feet down and crosses her legs, staring at the platform with a nonchalance she doesn’t feel. She hasn’t been back here since they sold the house and moved to London. It was hellish, moving weekly between her father’s house and her mother’s small flat that last year before university. But then any location, any setting, would probably have been hellish after dragging her mother from the river, and after her parents had found out how Maeve had spent the summer, what their houseguest had done.
As the train moves on, she shuts her eyes and remembers. Her father looking at her as though she were a stranger, his mouth twisting awkwardly, unable to cope with her not being a girl any more. Her mother treating her as if what had happened were a punishment for herself. All the silences and sighs and pained looks. All the attempts to get her to ‘talk’. You don’t really want to know about it, she told her mother, for the brief satisfaction of seeing her hurt again, you don’t really want to know about all the sordid details.
They only wanted it to be over, for Maeve to put the past behind her, to move on, to become an ordinary teenage girl again. But what teenage girl is ordinary? Maeve thinks now, and – having heard some of the stories, given in crumbs and drunken outbursts, hinted at by her friends – why would getting drunk with girls her age and staggering out of clubs have been any better? There are dangers everywhere for young women and they come in so many shapes and sizes, forms, ages.
It was supposed to be the end that day, after Stuart’s revelation that he had, at the least, had feelings for her mother when they were teenagers, and after he ran away and left her. With her broken heart, she felt like she was back to floating around inside the shell of her body, an invalid, her limbs trembling at intervals, her breath catching on jagged dry sobs at any odd time of the day. All she had were her thoughts and her memories of the summer, her memories of him and what he told her in the field and every other moment they had shared. She believed him when he said it was different between them, that they suited one another, that Maeve was special. She wanted to believe it. She didn’t want to be alone, to be stuck with her parents or with her peers, to be dragged back to those first few months out of hospital when living seemed like the hardest thing she’d have to do, when she didn’t know how she would go on.
She didn’t even have to do the work of reaching out herself, although she imagines she would have, soon enough. It was only a month after they had moved to London that Stuart called her at her father’s house on the listed home number, told her to phone him again sometime and gave her his London address, said he wanted to see her, and that was that. No further seduction was needed. She was easy pickings.
It’s not fair to think of herself like that, she reminds herself, as she drinks from the water bottle she bought from the cart, the plastic crinkling under her hand; she should have more compassion.
Easy, foolish, blind, young. She was young, but she felt old, maybe all sick children do. She struggled to muster enthusiasm for school, for people her age, finding it easier just to hunker down in his flat and let herself be cared for, subsumed. When her parents found out where she was going after school and on weekends, they tried to stop her but she wouldn’t let them, and they could hardly lock her up and throw away the key. If they had, she would have only thrown down her hair and he would have climbed up to get her. And at the end of her first year of university, she gave up pretending and moved in with him full-time.
Young, Stuart liked that she was young. The prospect of her growing older, evolving beyond him, terrified him. She remembers one evening when she came home from an event she had attended without him.
‘Nice lipstick,’ he had said in the kitchen as she gulped down the water he had poured, ‘don’t you look all grown-up.’
He had seen her wearing make-up before. She had worn it for him sometimes; red lipstick, pink, and wings of dark eyeliner, thick mascara. But she wasn’t wearing it for him now.
‘Should I not want to grow up?’
He smiled tightly.
She imagined him reaching out to smear it across her cheek with his thumb. But that wasn’t his style. ‘All grown-up,’ he said again, and leaned back against the countertop, and she felt humiliated just the same.
‘You’ve ruined me, you know,’ she told him once, kneeling over him in bed, looking at all the lines in his face, the patches of stubble, the folds of his neck. She wanted him to feel remorse, to see what he’d done to her, but not enough remorse, maybe, to regret it either.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he laughed, ‘don’t you know that it’s you who’s ruined me? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you – what have I got but growing old and grey and useless?’
‘What has you being old got to do with me?’ she said, to make him flinch.
‘You can be a cruel little girl, you know that, sweetheart.’
I’m what you made me, she wanted to reply, even though that wasn’t true. She wasn’t some blank page before he arrived that summer, an empty vessel for him to pour his fantasies into. She was hungry, ravenous, filled up to the brim with stories that he was only too willing to act out. Yes, he had moulded her – bought her clothes, guided her tastes in food and drink and culture (tripping down the street with him after seeing a play at the Southbank, sitting underneath his heavy arm in the back row of a slow arthouse film, falling into a taxi after a party in Hackney and starting an argument with him that ended in tears), influenced her opinions, her behaviour – but she thought that she had done the same to him too. He had been guided by her own desires, changed himself into what she wanted. I’ve always been eager to please, he joked once, without realizing it was a confession. The child of an alcoholic mother, he liked to be wanted, to feel useful, needed. And who could need him more than a waifish teenage girl who wanted to be scooped up and taken away from her life, from living? She had taken from him greedily – time, money, attention, love – just as he had stolen things from her that she would never ever get back.
Her mother had seen a villain and she a saviour. But in the end he was just a man. Kind, mercurial, complicated, cruel, charismatic, damaged. Still, untangling herself from him was the work of years. Moving out, moving back in. Leaving him, calling him up at 2 a.m. to save her. Telling him that she had slept with someone else, listening to him tell her she had only done it to make a point to him and knowing he was telling the truth. Changing her number, leaving pleading text messages unsent.
She can smell the sea before the train pulls into the last station and hear the raucous call of seagulls overhead. The town feels familiar, even though she’s never been here before. Fading, whitewashed, with narrow streets and a wind that whips in from the thin strip of the sandy beach. It’s three weeks after the exhibition opened and a weekday morning; she might even have the gallery to herself, she thinks, as she arrives outside the unassuming building, which doesn’t have a poster hanging outside as she feared it would.
The invitation in the post, inside the envelope addressed in familiar handwriting, only had one image on it, a hand in water with a white ribbon threaded around its fingers. Her hand.
She wasn’t surprised, only that it had taken him so long to put the exhibition together. She knew that she’d have to reckon with the images someday; she had signed a release form years ago, after all. A younger version of her might think that he arranged the whole thing as a message to her, a way to win her back. Perhaps part of her does think that, the part that still sighs over myths and stories, that dresses up sometimes only to stand in front of her bedroom mirror and mouth along with the crooning of a sad song.
Photography has never been her favourite artform, to his chagrin, and to her mother’s relief. Maeve and her mother have monthly trips to galleries and museums now, meeting at weekends when Iza and Michael are busy with their friends. The rift between them has eased; Maeve has forgiven her, or at least come to realize that her parents are both fallible adults, their own people, and not just the possessions of their children. Over lunch, her mother talks about her work, about the twins and their teenage dramas. Maeve talks about her job and her friends and the health niggles that crop up now and then, her fears of what the future effects of such strong doses of chemotherapy drugs might have on her body. The only thing she and her mother don’t talk about is dating – the women that Ruth sees, or Maeve’s current lack of it – but she can tell that Ruth is happier, more settled, and she’s quietly relieved each time her mother hands back the drinks menu and asks only for water.
Maeve is waved ahead by the bored attendant and enters the first room, her sandals slapping on the concrete floor. As she gazes around she lets out a laughing breath. She isn’t here – not her face or her body.
The first image is of the bath near the annexe, flowers floating in a shape that suggests a girl might have been lying there before she vanished. The second is of her sodden dress in its heap on the floor, the coil of the black ribbon peeking out from the lace. The third: her wet footprints on flagstones. The fourth: a hairbrush with wisps of red hair. The fifth: the back of her head on the pillow, a water glass on the table in the foreground next to a posy of flowers. The sixth: the field, the depression in the grass made when she lay down for that first photoshoot, the echo of her body.
Two young women who look like art students enter from the second room and take a last glance around.
‘Ana Mendieta did it better,’ one of them says dryly to the other.
‘I was going to say,’ her friend replies as Maeve hides a smile, ‘I’m almost offended, but not really, because it’s so derivative. Typical man to think he’s doing something new when really he’s just copying second-wave women artists.’
Maeve will wait to see the other rooms before drawing her opinion, but right now, she agrees. She thinks of the Polaroids she saw in that snatched moment, the ones of her mother and the other girls. She’s sure that no picture Stuart took could be better than theirs. Stranger, purer, angrier, more unsettling, lovelier. A perfect snapshot of girlhood. Even the accidental blur in those shots was artful, the river a suggestion of light, their outlines glowing.
The light is dimmer in the second room of the gallery, the photographs picked out by spotlights. She feels her face get warmer as she circles the images in this room, her shoulders hunching, aware of the two other gallery visitors standing studiously in front of photographs of her that aren’t quite PG. Close-ups of her body in the bath, in the shower, lying by the side of the pool – shoulder, leg, chest, hip. Always clothed, but then wet dresses and slips and t-shirts don’t hide much of the shape underneath. They’re about colour and form, line and shadow, she hears him explain in her head. They’re about vulnerability, she thinks in counterpoint, voyeurism, a camera consuming its subject. Sex.
Maeve had tried to read a biography of Lizzie Siddal once, thinking that she might find herself in there, that it might help her understand. But she never got past the first dry paragraph. What she wanted to know was how Lizzie felt when the water got cold, when her body started shivering. Did she feel there was no point in leaving the water, that she had made her choice already? Did she just want to please him, to be beautiful for him, and would have accepted any discomfort that might be owed for that? Or did she want to be beautiful for herself, to be immortalized, young and lovely? Or was she thinking of nothing much at all, stoic, doing as she had been told? Or thinking of dinner, humming a song in her head, cursing the man whose brush flicked back and forth across the canvas?
She enters the third and last room. In contrast to the smaller size of the pictures in the others, the image here covers a whole wall and is impossible to ignore: Maeve, head to toe, in her white dress in the bath, clutching flowers in a loose grip and looking up at the camera, the jeans of the photographer’s legs two dark shapes against the paleness of her skin, the cream of the enamel. Of course he had to include himself in this image, she thinks with an inward scoff, as she considers it, tilting her head. Considers herself, looking younger than she thought she had been.
The gir
l in the picture isn’t looking at Stuart at all, she realizes, but through him, at the viewer and beyond them. She’s looking at herself, this future self. Asking her to be a witness. I see you, she wants to say. I see your hunger and your sadness, the things you don’t think you should let yourself want. I see how scared you are of living, of leaving girlhood behind.
Someone walks through from the previous room, another young student, with a camera hanging around his neck. He comes to stand beside Maeve, looking at the picture and then at her and back to the image.
‘Excuse me,’ he says, clearing his throat, ‘do you mind if I take a picture of you in front of that? It’s just, your hair—’
Does he realize that she and the model are the same girl, or does he think they’re close enough to look interesting?
‘No, sorry,’ she says, and studies herself as he walks away.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this novel have lived in my head for fifteen years or more, and writing it felt like the most wonderful, hazy fever dream of an experience; I loved it from the very first words of that first draft, and all the way through edits and copy-edits and final read-throughs, so thank you to this novel (if one can thank one’s own novel) for bringing me so much satisfaction and joy, and to the characters for keeping me company into the small hours at my desk as I unknotted their plots and wove together their stories.
Thank you to all of those who made the book you hold in your hands possible:
The women and girls whose self-portraits of Ophelia inspired this novel and whose photos seemed to haunt me wherever I went on the internet.
Maggie Bridge, for an electrifying conversation on a bench by the lake in Regent’s Park five years ago that made me think this novel might have a readership, and for your enthusiastic response to an early draft.
Hayley Steed, for your warmth and your shrewdness, for championing this book from the beginning and for being the best agent a girl could wish for. Liane-Louise Smith, and everyone at the Madeline Milburn Agency, for your indefatigable energy.