‘My parents died when I was eighteen,’ she said, unsure as to why she felt able to tell Maggie this, remembering James telling her he used to talk to Maggie too when he was young. ‘I have no one else.’
‘What about friends? Siblings?’
‘No,’ she said, and thought of how sad that must sound, how pathetic. ‘I didn’t need friends, I had James.’
‘He was always a wary child,’ Maggie said, eyeing Nuala sidelong, ‘always liked to be the focus of attention. Not in a crowd, or a group, but when it was just you and him. He always liked to make sure your attention was fully on him. It’s what he was used to at home, of course, when his father wasn’t there causing trouble. He was used to it being just him and Lois, to being the centre of that young woman’s world.’
‘You don’t know anything.’ Nuala looked out at the grass, the mist on the window nearly cleared, James nearly in full view. Any second now his face would appear, his beautiful, sharp features, and Nuala would know it was all lies. That he discouraged her friendships because he loved her company. That he dissuaded her, time and again, from getting a job because he genuinely didn’t want her to have the stress, that he understood she was set for life if she was careful with her inheritance, that she could spend her time on hobbies and reading books. Not because he wanted to keep her his, in his control, bending her to his will alone. (‘Yes, just like that!’ he had said, when she had got his dinner just right, whilst he watched her from the kitchen stool. A baked potato; simple but cooked to perfection. Crisp skin, butter melted throughout and so tender that, when pressed at the edges, the fluffy insides plumed from the cut in the top. He had spun her around, held on to her waist and looked into her blue eyes with his. ‘I knew it,’ he said, kissed her softly on the lips, one of the kisses that made her stomach turn over with lust and relief. ‘I knew you’d get it right, eventually.’ And his hands skimmed upwards, brushed her breasts. He made love to her on the kitchen counter, wrapping her legs around his waist. Afterwards he threw it away, the potato. It was cold. Nuala had stared at it, eyes brimming, and he had laughed at her sentimentality. ‘You know how to do it now,’ he said, rubbing the base of her back with his knuckles. ‘No excuses.’ But she had never made it again, that simplest of meals.)
‘So you came here looking for a family? I thought you said James told you what Lois was like; why did you think you could rely on her?’
‘I thought she might have changed. I thought we could comfort each other.’
‘Lois will never change, you’re better off without her.’ Maggie swallowed a bite of her roll, held out a matching paper bag. ‘I’ve another, look, if you want it?’
Nuala looked away.
Maggie filled her mouth, turning the second sausage-roll sideways and shoving it in in one go. She looked at Nuala, then away, sucking and chewing on the mouthful.
Nuala didn’t say anything, couldn’t, somehow. Her mind only lingered on home, on the rose bush at home, on the precious boy buried beneath it.
She flicked the heater back on, turned it up full blast and watched the glass clear. Slowly, slowly, there was her husband. She just needed to see his face, and she knew all the doubt and worry would disappear. She would know she had been right to trust him. That his love for her was real. That he moved in with her because he wanted to, really wanted to, not just because he had nowhere to go. Her hands tore at each other, picking at her nails, reopening the wound on her finger until the blood oozed, wanting to feel it.
Maggie turned the heater off, used her greasy fist of paper to clear the windscreen, wiping it across the glass, replacing the mist with streaks of distorting fat and pastry crumbs.
‘No!’ Nuala batted her away but it was too late. James looked up at her, highlighted by the headlamps from the car, his face and body writhing, ugly through the film of grease and a smear of blood from her finger.
Swaying in the wind, his face grotesque, the grass whipping around him. Nuala flicked off the headlights, but the darkness did nothing and still James stared back, his mouth a gaping black hole, sucking into it the last of her hope.
‘What about Emma?’ she asked, knowing now what she had to do, that she had to find that girl, talk to her, make her tell the truth. Make her tell Nuala why, seven years on, she was still writing to the man who supposedly abandoned her, begging him to come home, take her with him.
The wind picked up. A light pattering sound hit the windscreen.
‘Emma?’ Nuala asked again.
Maggie stared outside, her eyes following the pattern of the leaves. ‘She saved my life, do you know that?’ She turned towards Nuala, the gear stick disappearing into the rolls of her belly. ‘I fell apart after my husband died, shortly after Emma’s fourth birthday. For years afterwards I was a mess. I drank, I didn’t look after myself or my … I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Emma moved in with me when she was fourteen, after all this business with the pregnancy had blown up, and even though she had so much to contend with she still managed to look after me. I was her godmother, her responsible adult, her carer but it was she who cared for me. She forced me to look outside of myself. She stopped me from falling apart completely because I had something in my life again. I had her. And she’s never complained about it once; not about me, not the treatment from her father or Lois, not about what happened to poor Elaine. And she’s the only one, save for Lois, not to say a bad word against James. Despite everything she still loves him, still believed that what they had was real love. I don’t know what she’ll do when she finds out he’s gone.’
Nuala straightened her posture, lifted her chin. ‘Do you promise to tell her?’
Another shotgun sounded and this time Maggie jumped, her knees smacking into the glove compartment.
‘You better go home before the weather turns,’ Maggie said. ‘They say rain’s coming. Look, you can let me out here and I’ll walk back, take the short cut over the stile and back through the fields, I’ll be home within an hour. You can go straight on, save yourself the petrol.’
Nuala closed her eyes, her right hand moving to her temple. ‘Promise me that you’ll tell her.’
‘I promise,’ Maggie said and felt inside her coat. ‘I’ll tell her as soon as you’ve gone.’
Nuala could see, in the moonlight, the shape of a hip flask in Maggie’s breast pocket.
‘There’s a small bag of my things, just a change of clothes, a few toiletries—’
‘If you leave me your address I’ll send them to you, in the post. If you go now.’
Nuala nodded. ‘Emma has it already,’ she said, testing Maggie’s resolve with the lie. Emma would have told Maggie if she’d had her address, she was sure of it, but Maggie didn’t challenge it, didn’t even ask for it again just in case. Instead, Maggie’s face lightened with relief. She opened the car door, let herself out, waved to Nuala as she climbed over the stile, watching keenly, waiting far too eagerly for her to drive off.
And Nuala knew, as Maggie turned her back and took a swig from the flask in the shadows, that she was lying.
Maggie wasn’t going to tell Emma about James.
Nuala could drive home. Forget this place, burn any letters that arrived. Move on.
But she thought of the rose bush, her baby, her empty home, the memories, the loss and despair she felt there.
She thought of what she had tried to do to herself a few weeks ago, the oblivion she had craved.
She couldn’t go back, not yet. She couldn’t face those empty rooms, give in to despair all alone, all by herself.
It was time for Nuala to take control, one last stab of control. James wasn’t there to show her the way any more, to tell her what to do. She had to do this, alone. It was time to find out the truth.
Nuala had an hour, by Maggie’s own estimate, to find Emma.
Two months ago
Nuala
Friday, 15th September, 2017
The smell woke her before her eyes opened, before she could scrape away the sleep and crust th
at glued her lashes to her cheek.
Her nose told her she was still alive, still very much alive. The smell of vomit, the acidic notes of bile, the sweetness of Calpol, told her she’d spewed it all out, all hope of escape, of an end.
She hadn’t even managed to do that properly. She couldn’t even end it all without messing it up like an idiot.
She knew what her mother would have said. Too much too soon, a weak stomach saving her life. Remembered her lamenting the loss of a patient to an overdose, the despair in her mother’s face when she had recounted that the dead woman had taken just the right amount, not so much that she would sick it all up, not so little that she came round and died slowly of the after effects of liver and kidney damage. Just the right amount.
Nuala had been told this, she knew this and still, she had messed it all up. What a pathetic idiot.
The first thing she saw, when her eyes opened, was the blood stain on the bedroom carpet. Up close the smell of the blood was erased by that of the vomit.
Darkness outside, the room grey around her. Sick on the carpet, hanging in lumps and sticky drips from the duvet, sprayed out against the door and the wall. Sick down her front, in her hair, on her back, in her hands.
She had no idea what day it was or what time. Didn’t know if the sun was setting or rising again. Had no clue as to how long she had lain there, face squashed into the blood on the carpet, body languishing on urine-soaked pile.
Her whole body ached, arms weak as she pushed herself up from the floor. Legs shaky as she moved to the window, gripping the sill to keep from falling.
The sun was coming up, she could see that. It was rising over the park, highlighting the trees and bracken fronds, illuminating Nuala’s long stretch of garden, picking out the rusted trowel in the sage pot, its wooden handle turned black with rot, the hemlock taking over the borders.
Looking down on it all, from the window upstairs, she could see the sad little grave. The ground still uneven from digging, the rose above it dry and failing to flower.
The rose was dying.
It was meant to flourish, thrive, wrap its roots around Maxwell and keep him. It wasn’t meant to die. It couldn’t die.
Maybe she had watered it too much. Perhaps the roots had never recovered from all the digging. Or maybe it had got tired of her, lying with her face to the dirt, ants crawling into her hair, her earlobes and nostrils.
Her knees finally gave way. She took a step towards the bed, keeled over. Landed, belly down, on the old, dark splash of meconium.
Her eyes closed, room dark, impassive to the smell of stale vomit.
Outside jackdaws crowed, cars passed, rain fell and Nuala lay asleep, oblivious to it all.
The sun rose, set, rose again before Nuala awoke.
The curtains were still open and from her place on the bed, she could make out the garden outside, the herbs and the grass and the hemlock.
She could see the rose, its failing buds, dried-out thorns.
A test, perhaps. A sign.
Maybe it was James, telling her not to give up yet, to look after the rose and when she’d looked after the rose she should look after herself.
Her clothes were stinking, crisp as cardboard from dried fluid, the remnants of vomit gritty against her skin. She pulled them off, one by one, piled them into the basket in the bathroom (the toilet still unflushed, the smell rank) and layered new, clean clothes over her dirty body.
Up the stairs, to the top floor.
It was meant to be a studio, one day. A place for Nuala to paint, draw, write, sculpt or whatever the hell she wanted to do with all her time because wasn’t she lucky, so lucky, that she didn’t have to work, that her parents left her everything, everything, she could ever need whilst James had grown up poor, cold, hungry. (‘But I’d rather have them,’ she’d told him. ‘I’d rather have no money, a small house, cheap clothes but have them.’ And he scoffed at her and walked out of the room, and she’d never said it again. Not worth the risk of losing him too, because then what would she do? Who would look after her then? ‘You’re such an idiot, you can’t even look after yourself,’ he’d told her, when she’d burned her thumb on the edge of the hob. ‘Aren’t you lucky, aren’t you so lucky, that I’m here?’ He’d held her thumb under the cold tap, his hand tight on her wrist, smiling.)
The room stretched across the top floor of the house, windows at either end letting in light all day long. A desk at one side, the computer she used to sit at whilst James was at work, use Google, Facebook, Twitter, the lot to try and find out something about the place he grew up in, find anything more about why he left, wouldn’t go back.
Until, one day, he’d found her search history. He was angry, of course, so disappointed in her, but he didn’t hit her, didn’t lash out. He wasn’t abusive. In the end, when her tears had dried up, when his anger had subsided, he’d laughed at her. Wasn’t it funny that someone as stupid as her thought she could find something out?
As if Nuala could do that.
As if she could do anything.
And then he’d forgiven her, kissed her, and made nice, told her all that she needed to know, all the things he’d already told her about his mother being terrible, someone he wouldn’t want her to know, about Maggie who was story-book kind, about the hot summers, the cold winters, the lack of friends for poor James to play with. Told her again that, whilst she was sunning herself in Greece with her wealthy parents or riding the pony they’d bought her, he was huddled under a shared duvet with his mother, no money for central heating, his shoes lined with cardboard insoles cut from a cornflakes packet. And he would never go back to that life, he’d told her. He wouldn’t take her to see his humble origins, the people who would latch on to her wealth like leeches, who would suck the goodness, the purity, from her simple soul.
‘This is the last time,’ he’d said to her. ‘Understand? We’re never going there, we’re never meeting any of them, we’re going to leave the past where it belongs, far behind us. And Nuala …’ His thumb and index finger held her chin, she couldn’t look away. ‘I’m not going to tell you again.’
They’d watched a film afterwards, Point Break, his arm round her on the sofa, him filling her wine glass, fetching her popcorn, saying, ‘Isn’t it nice when we just get along?’
Beside the desk was the old sea chest, dark brown wood with black iron hinges. It was her father’s, once. Nuala had kept it after she’d sold all the other furniture that still smelt of her father and sometimes smelt of her mother’s perfume too. James had liked it, claimed it, used it to store his paperwork, his certificates, his gardening manuals that could possibly, possibly, tell Nuala how she could save the rose that was dying in the garden, its roots wrapped around her lost child.
She had to save the rose.
The house was cooler up here, draughty despite the Velux windows and extra roof insulation. It didn’t have the hot, sour atmosphere of the rest of the house, or the stink of the master bedroom.
The chest’s black iron clasps unlocked with a click. A flurry of dust as the lid was lifted.
And inside she could see all his things, all James’s papers, papers she’d read many times before. (He didn’t know that, that she’d been through his things in those early, early days when the look of fear in his eyes had made her curious, when she thought that, if she knew the truth, she could help him release that fear and be free. But that was before she’d learnt to appreciate her own limitations, her stupidity, her inability to do anything right. It was before she’d been caught out.)
She lifted out the papers, put them to one side and picked up the jumpers that were beneath them, placing them on the floor. She took a blanket that lay inside too, wrapped it round her shoulders, stroked it against her cheek, held it beneath her nose and smelt him.
In the grimy half-light James’s fingertips walked along her skin, stroking the soft down of her belly, tracing the arc of her ribs. His hair brushed past her collarbone, resting near her ear as he kis
sed her.
She could feel him, the smell from his clothes in the trunk forcing him back to life, reawakening his tongue inside her mouth.
She curled her toes against the blanket wrapped around them, the same woollen blanket they used to lie on before the fire, or in the woods where no one would find them. Its scent invaded her nostrils, removed the insults and criticisms from her mind, made her remember only her bare skin against his.
She stroked her finger over the wooden chest, remembered her finger stroking him, let it glide against the hard flat surface as though it were his stomach, his tight muscles, his skin.
She forced her eyes closed, tried to hold on to that feeling, that good feeling of him, how he loved her. Kept the tears, the gut-wrenching reality, out of her mind, tried to pretend, to feel him with her, inside her.
She arched her neck, thought of his hands on her throat, on her breasts, held her chin up to the ceiling as though he were kissing her.
Her hair fell across her face with the movement, the strands catching her nostrils, her nose smelling the vomit from downstairs.
Her eyes opened.
Pretending was useless.
Her gaze landed back on the chest.
There were the gardening manuals, thick and well thumbed. But, beside them, something else.
A cardboard box, dark brown with a swirl of white writing across it. The shoe box for the Louboutin pumps she braved when she had to see her lawyer or accountant in person, the smart shoes for dealing with her dead parents’ generosity.
She lifted it out, felt the weight inside shift and slide as she lifted.
The lid was soft and frayed at the edges, one corner broken at the seam from frequent lifting.
Beneath the lid were sheets of paper, folded in half and stacked in date order. Dozens of letters. Forty-nine in total addressed to James’s university, the place he’d stayed at less than a term.
He must have paid for them to be redirected.
He must have wanted the letters to come.
And then he had hidden them, kept them secret, not wanting his wife to find them.
Never Go There Page 13