Click

by L. Smyth

  That first night, alone, I lay in my room thinking about Marina. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about the tantalizing proximity of her bedroom. One easy flight of stairs above me. I thought about the purple door I had stood outside earlier in the day and the question of what lay behind was like a sharp, weight lodged inside my brain.

  I rolled over and looked out of the window. In the distance, through a thin veil of rain, I could see the row of marble statues filing out against the horizon. They looked somehow menacing, like an approaching army. My thoughts turned back to the attack in my parents’ house – to the rock, to the poem, to smashed glass. Swiftly I opened the window, closed my eyes and leaned out. I felt the balmy air on my cheeks. I breathed in, breathed out.

  The feeling of sweet warm air against my face sent me into a kind of hypnotic daze. I felt a strange, excitable urgency. I closed the window, climbed out of my sheets and wrapped myself in a dressing gown. I walked across the floor in the darkness. Then I opened my door a crack and looked out.

  It was dark in the hallway. Everything seemed very still. I strained my ears but could hear no sound from upstairs. And so I crept out, carefully closing the door behind me, and then made my way down the corridor. I passed the study and turned towards the stairs. My feet pressed into the carpet. I slid the soles along the step, slowly, gently unfurling my injured foot so that it didn’t make any sound, and began to ascend.

  Outside the rain flung itself with increasing strength against the window. The bannister creaked as I went upwards, forwards. I didn’t dare look at the chandelier, but I could hear a faint whisper of beads each time my weight shifted. My toes edged along the carpet.

  There was a dim light shining from the bathroom, and I figured that if I opened the door to Marina’s room, it would provide just enough light for me to see what was inside. I would only take a glimpse, I told myself, and then go back down to my room. Just a glimpse.

  I slid my hand towards the handle and twisted it to the side. It seemed a little stiff at first, but eventually it gave, and the door opened with a small chirring sound. I peered into the room.

  Marina’s childhood bedroom looked exactly that: like a room for a child. There was an enormous window at one end that opened out onto the garden. The bed sat beside it, then there was a bookshelf, then a large zebra print pinboard scattered with photos and funny little notes. I edged inside, leaving the door open a crack, and tiptoed to the board to read the notes. They were a mixture of the personal and educational: lots of poetry scratchings from Edward Lear and Michael Rosen, but also invites to parties, postcards from her French and Spanish exchanges, Polaroid selfies of carefully made-up girls with luvvie captions scrawled underneath them.

  I noted the difference between this room – so personal and kitsch, so crammed full of cutesy memorabilia – and her sparsely decorated, brutalist ‘cell’ in Northam. It was astonishing. No wonder Marcus had felt so shocked seeing what that place looked like. Whoever had lived and grown up in this room was a completely different person to the one I had known. I realized, looking around, with a sense of sad revelation, that I really had only seen one side of her. Perhaps she really was the sweet and lively girl they had commemorated at her funeral.

  A noise outside the window alerted me to what I was doing.

  Quickly but quietly I walked back towards the door. But just before I reached it, a wall hanging caught my eye. It sat low down, next to the drawing board: a framed piece of paper with a silver plaque at the top. I squinted through the darkness to read the gold embossed letters:

  Darling Marina, Happy 6th Birthday. Love mum

  Inside the frame was a piece of parchment paper with writing on it. It was a swirly font, carefully set out within the frame, and as I started to read it I realized it was a poem. My eyes fell to the first line:

  What seas, what shores, what grey rocks what granite islands towards my timbers

  And woodthrush singing through the fog

  My daughter

  I froze. It was the same poem I had read on the night I had been attacked, the same poem that I had found marked in Marina’s books. I felt mesmerized by this revelation, convinced that somehow here was the key to something, and I found my fingers reaching out to trace the letters. I continued reading:

  I made this, I have forgotten

  And remember

  The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

  Between one June and another September.

  There was a creak along the landing. Not from outside this time – but inside the house. Panicked, I looked over towards the door. The light from the corridor had been smothered by a human shadow. It grew taller, longer, and then was still. It hovered for a second. I tried not to breathe, not to move anything, tried to act as if dead. I was so sure that I was going to be found out. But then the shadow shrank again, and moved towards the bathroom. The light snapped off. Pitch-black descended. I heard the floorboards groaning and the wind rattling through the trees outside. The footsteps slowed, shuffled. I heard them go downstairs.

  I breathed in a sharp sigh of relief. My palms felt sweaty. I was dimly aware of an animal flapping behind the blind. It cast a strange dark shadow over the room, black on black.

  Slowly, very slowly, I found my way towards the door.

  I made my way down the stairs, stepping over the floorboards cautiously, using the faint glint of the picture framings as a guide in the darkness. When I was halfway down, I noticed a light rising from the entrance to the study.

  Very, very carefully, I found my way back towards my room. I leaned my back against the smooth cream wall, feet gliding over the floorboards. As I passed the study, I saw Marcus standing in front of his bookshelf, and the sight of him sent a shiver of terror through me. But I kept moving, as if over ice. I opened the door, slipped inside and closed it firmly behind me. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  I couldn’t sleep. After several minutes of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, I walked to the door again and opened it a crack. I looked out to see that the study door, down the corridor, was still open.

  Then something moved to my left.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ It was a man’s voice.

  I turned to see Marcus standing a few inches away from my door. The moonlight glistened over his face. His blond hair was uncombed, his eyes bleary. It was so dark, and yet his eyes seemed bright, shining with an electric intensity. We stared at each other. I met his gaze and we both refused to blink.

  ‘I was up, and I saw the light was on in the study,’ I stuttered.

  There was a Thermos in his hands, shimmering silver in the darkness.

  ‘I struggle with insomnia too,’ he said. ‘Especially at the moment.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. The silence stretched between us, and I watched as his eyes tracked from the stairs, to the door of the study, and back to me. He looked old in that light: his hair was so faint that it could have been white, his eyebrows seemed tinged with grey and his wrinkles were etched deep into his face.

  ‘Well,’ he said after a while. ‘I’ve just made a pot of Ovaltine. Perhaps it will help you sleep?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, and I followed him down the corridor.

  In the fresh light of his study, I was able to inspect Marcus properly. He seemed different without his polished shirts, his combed hair, the slick of expensive aftershave wiped over his neck. The sight reminded me, for some reason, of the first time I had seen Marina without her heavy make-up on.

  I shuffled in past him and sat on an armchair near the back of the room. He put the Thermos on the desk, unscrewed the lid and began to pour it into two cups. I listened to the thin trickle of the liquid.

  I waited for the confrontation.

  Instead, without prompt, he said: ‘Eva, how well do you know Henry?’

  It was an unusual question – and my reaction must have alerted him to the fact, for he waved his hands apologetically and then answered it himself.


  ‘He’s a nice boy, I suppose.’ He whistled against the rim of his mug to cool the contents. ‘Ah, yes, nice.’

  I was disarmed by how reluctant he sounded. In spite of myself, I smiled a little.

  Marcus caught my expression.

  ‘You disagree?’ he said.

  ‘Oh – no, no I think he’s … fine.’

  Marcus raised his eyebrows. ‘I think I catch your drift.’

  I was careful not to give myself away. I said nothing.

  ‘We’ve known him for a while – Henry. He lives around here, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I lied.

  ‘Yes, well he’s a childhood friend of Marina’s.’

  I listened with a keen ear as Marcus went on to explain Henry’s connection to the Bede family. The Bedes and the Bewells had known each other since before their children were born, he said. The mothers – Rowena and Sara – had apparently met at a prenatal yoga class and bonded over the fact that they had the same due date. Sara had given birth to Henry; Rowena had miscarried. Yet the women remained close, and when Rowena became pregnant again the following year, this time with Marina, Sara was made Marina’s godmother.

  ‘The families were close after that, but for some reason Henry was always a bit of an odd fit.’

  He didn’t quite click with the family grouping in the way that the other members did. He tried to get close to Marina at first, but she perpetually brushed him off, and so after that, whenever their families met he tended to sulk in a corner.

  ‘You know,’ said Marcus, straightening his neck and mouth in an acute impersonation. ‘In that way he does.’

  I laughed then. I liked listening to Marcus talk about Marina’s family history. He was a smart and lively narrator, peppering his anecdotes with jokes and impressions, and his performative manner reminded me of Marina. I also liked the fact that he obviously didn’t like Henry. I liked the way that he exposed and laughed at traits of Henry’s which had annoyed me too – lampooning, for example, his delight in alienating people; his snobbery; the grandiose generalizations that he wheeled out to intimidate people. That last point had always been a particular source of irritation for me and, more often than not, embarrassment too. I felt that Marcus understood this.

  ‘I think Henry feels threatened by a lot of women, to be honest with you, Eva.’ Marcus laughed again. ‘Young men – especially those who pretend to be trendy feminists – get defensive.’

  While I liked listening to him, however, I found it strange again that Marcus didn’t delve more into what had happened to Marina’s mother. I could understand that it would have been difficult to talk about, particularly now Marina was gone, but it still seemed odd to avoid the subject entirely when he was talking about the family history.

  ‘I say all this … but I feel guilty about being too harsh on Henry. He’s had an extremely hard time. It was just … awful after he found Marina.’ Marcus’s tone was no longer jokey and flippant, but serious and sad.

  The light in the room seemed very bright then. I stared at a spot slightly behind Marcus’s head.

  Marcus absentmindedly smoothed his dressing gown. He continued speaking, as though in a daze:

  ‘It’s so strange to think of what happened, the way that it all panned out.’ The words were almost whispered. ‘I still feel guilty about it, Eva. I shouldn’t have sent him up there. But I didn’t know who else to call. It happened so quickly. We had a party on New Year’s Eve, then a brief argument … then she was gone.’

  The conversation was going too quickly. The words washed in and out of my ears, and I wanted to catch them – to make sure I was processing the right information.

  ‘Do you mean to say that Henry found Marina? That he was the first there?’

  Marcus didn’t seem to register my words. He carried on, speaking quickly, guiltily:

  ‘We thought that she had run away again. The plan was just for him to go up and bring her back.’

  My mind flashed back to the phone conversation I had had with Henry on the day Marina had been found. Had that been the third of January?

  ‘It was a reckless thing to do, perhaps, but he seemed to be the only person who might be able to reason with her. No one else was able to get through to her. Not me, not her mother, no one.’

  The lights in the room became unbearably hot. The walls seemed to sway.

  ‘Elena, you mean?’ I said.

  Marcus looked up at me for the first time since he had started speaking. There was a long silence.

  Finally he said: ‘Sorry?’

  I tried to steady my breathing.

  ‘Elena,’ I said slowly. ‘Not Marina’s mother.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Marina’s mother … your ex-wife … I thought she was …’

  Marcus was still staring at me.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh dear.’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said again.

  Marina’s mother was not dead, as she’d led me to believe. She was alive and well, living in Australia with her new family. She had never even had cancer – only a scare, in 2003. Though she had always been ‘fond of alcohol’, Marcus said – it was this, he assured me, which had caused them to split up – she had never had any serious health issues while she was living with him. When she and Marcus divorced, she had moved to Australia, where she met her second husband. She had then become increasingly distant with her previous family, and Marina’s response was to wipe her out of existence.

  Marcus explained all this without looking me in the eye. But I could still tell that it was hard for him. He scratched his cheeks and coughed a lot.

  He went on: the lie about her mother had been regular, even notorious. So many people at Northam had heard her mother had ‘died’ – including, even, Professor Montgomery, despite having met Rowena – that it eventually had got back to Marcus.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was a coping mechanism. By telling everyone she’d died, it gave her a feeling of control over the way Rowena rejected her.’

  That word ‘rejected’ seemed an oddly brutal way to put it, I thought, and I noticed that he’d also slipped into using academic jargon – like a broadcaster. I didn’t know how to respond to that. Was this an intimate conversation or an analytical one?

  He stood up and move carefully towards the door.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you something.’

  I walked behind him through the hallway, past the gilded photographs, past the portraits, past the little china vases along the mantlepieces. We didn’t speak. I listened to the sound of the wind outside, the clip of his feet against the tiles. Until they stopped. Marcus stood in front of a photograph.

  ‘This,’ he said softly, ‘is the only family photograph in the house. Marina wouldn’t allow any others.’

  I peered closely at the picture. I recognized the outside of Mosebury Court, the flat cap on Marcus’s head, the grin across Marina’s face. My eyes fell to the dark blonde woman stood next to Marcus in the photo. I took in her sharp pale neck, her grey-green eyes. But then I saw that Marcus’s finger was pointing somewhere else. He was pointing towards the woman the other side of him. The woman who had two teeth slightly protruding over her puckered lips. There was a scarf crossed over her neck, and a plait twisted in her long red hair. She was stood next to Henry.

  I realized that it was the red-haired woman whom I had met at the funeral.

  She was not Henry’s mother – she was Marina’s. I had met her. I had met Marina’s mother.

  The room was cracking with violet heat. The air was thick, too thick. It was like seeing a ghost.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Marcus.

  I couldn’t answer him. I was distracted thinking of a particular moment, back in November in Northam. I was thinking of the time that Marina had first told me that her mother had died – the confessional, reluctant tone she had affected. Her hand had done that dis
missive swatting movement, as though discrediting any emotional slippage – it’s not a big deal. I remember now how touched I felt seeing that. I loved that she had confided in me. I remember sitting on her bed, stroking her hair gently – all the way from the crown to the curls at the base of her spine. I remember saying that she could talk to me about it, if she ever wanted to.

  Thanks Eva, that means a lot.

  Her response – indeed her performance – now rang hollow. It hadn’t mean a lot. It had meant nothing.

  I put my hands over my face to stop the blurring. As I did so I felt my shoulders sliding forwards and beginning to shake. I tried to quell a sob.

  ‘Eva?’ said Marcus.

  The sob rolled up my throat and came out in a thick choke.

  ‘Eva,’ said Marcus. ‘Eva, what’s wrong.’

  I took in a large breath.

  ‘I just think …’ I spluttered. ‘Sometimes it seems as though we weren’t friends at all, that she didn’t like me.’ I spoke through wet fingers. Some kind of liquid was smearing around my nostrils and the top of my lip.

  ‘Oh,’ said Marcus. ‘Don’t think that. It’s shocking, I know. It’s a lot to take in.’ He hesitated and then said again: ‘Don’t think that.’

  I continued to cry, louder and louder, and as I did so I sensed him coming closer. I felt his shadow fall over me. Then his arms were around my shoulders, his hand was patting my back, and I was leaning forward and crying into his shirt. He smelled warm, I remember: sweet with cologne and dark fresh sweat.

  How did I really feel, in light of all this information?

  There are four main factors to consider when recalling a situation: 1) what you remember doing 2) what you remember saying 3) what you remember thinking 4) emotional memory. It is emotional memory which is the hardest to verify. When you think back to a specific event, you might be able to remember what you said word-for-word, and what you did action-for-action. You might be able to trace, too, the rational thought process behind it – how you figured out each step of the situation. But it is much harder to pin down exactly how you felt. You might say that a situation made you feel scared. But at what precise point was shock replaced by anger? At what point did fear shift into lust? Even if you latch an emotion to a specific action or a specific word, it is often impossible to figure out where one began to replace the other.