Hush

by Sara Marshall-Ball

‘And he wasn’t able to help?’

  ‘No, he did help, but she had to leave before she was ready. They – there was an incident.’

  The doctor eyed him, his expression sceptical. ‘I have to say, if the problem is mental, you’d be better off discussing further treatment options with Dr Hadley.’

  ‘He was treating her until recently, but he didn’t seem to think she needed anything further.’

  ‘Well, then, maybe it’s worth looking into possible physical causes. I can schedule some tests. If you like.’ The doctor’s voice was sceptical, but Marcus nodded.

  ‘If you think that would be helpful.’

  ‘Well, it’s good to explore different options, I suppose. I can give you some leaflets as well, about psychiatric services in the area.’

  Lily tuned the conversation out. She watched people walking past the windows, and realised the glass was half-mirrored, so that people looked like shadows as they walked in front of it, grey and not quite fully formed. She wondered what it looked like from the other side.

  ‘I’ll request those tests, then. Someone will be in touch. Ask at Reception on the way out about those leaflets.’

  Marcus thanked the doctor and stood up, taking Lily’s hand as she did so. Looking up at him, she thought he looked exhausted.

  She looked back at the doctor as they left the room, but he was already buried in his paperwork, and he didn’t look up.

  now

  There was a distance between Connie and Nathan. A remoteness, an estrangement, a standing apart. A sense, real or imagined, of a space between them: unbroachable, unencroachable. Their paths seemed to circle around each other but never cross; there was no moment where they met in the middle.

  Even when the children were around, they couldn’t seem to communicate in any meaningful way. They were civil and almost friendly: they discussed dinner arrangements, future plans, schools and work and their neighbours. But there was something missing. An absence of feeling. In the evenings Connie went to bed early and read, or sometimes just lay there for hours, feeling as if a chasm had opened up somewhere inside her. Nathan sat downstairs, listening to his music, reading back issues of New Scientist, wondering where his wife had gone.

  Wondering if it was his fault.

  He couldn’t think of a time when he’d ever felt so estranged from her. He was a private man, and used to keeping himself to himself, to a certain degree, but Connie had never been like that. She was a woman with Opinions. She liked to discuss things. She wanted everything out in the open, dissected, analysed, shared. He’d always assumed it was some kind of adverse reaction to having Lily for a sister.

  He wanted to recommend some form of help. Counselling, perhaps. But he couldn’t seem to broach the subject. She was the woman with whom he’d always felt comfortable talking about anything, and suddenly he was finding it difficult to discuss the logistics of cleaning the bathroom.

  He knew she had a lot on her mind. Knew she was still coping with the death of her mother, knew she was worrying about Lily, probably even missing her, though considering the nature of their relationship he found it hard to understand why. He guessed that she was missing Richard, too. And it wasn’t as though he thought he could fill those holes in her life. But he wanted to help.

  Unfortunately, tact had never been his strong point. He was direct, forceful, to the point. He could tell her what to do to make herself feel better, and she would resent him for it, and do the opposite of whatever he told her. And so they coexisted, quietly, meaninglessly. When the children weren’t around, a sleepy silence descended over the house, and thickened, almost imperceptibly.

  He sat up at night, thinking about being there, thinking about not being there. He thought about where he could be, if he wasn’t sitting alone in his house, like an absurd and ineffective guard dog.

  She was always asleep when he finally went to bed.

  ‘Are we going to see Uncle Richard? I made another map and he promised to come and hunt with me for treasure.’ Luke was hopping from foot to foot in the hallway, looking like a miniature Michelin Man in his shiny blue padded jacket. Connie, hunting through her handbag for her keys, looked up distractedly.

  ‘Um. Not today.’

  Connie shook the bag in irritation to see if it jangled. Somewhere, deep within, it did.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Uncle Richard and Auntie Lily have gone to live in Grandma’s old house for a while.’

  ‘Why can’t we go and see them there?’

  ‘Well, er…’ In frustration she turned the bag upside down and dumped the contents on to the post table. Wallet, phone, wet wipes, chewing gum, receipts, loose change and a whole plethora of random objects that Luke had found and insisted on keeping. And, finally, her keys. ‘We can. But not today.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Daddy’s taken the car.’

  ‘We could get a bus to Grandma’s house,’ Tom suggested. He was perched on the stairs, tying his shoelaces, similarly insulated against the late November weather.

  ‘Yes, we could, darling, but we’ve got other things to do today, I’m afraid. Mummy needs to go into town and buy some things. And you both need new shoes.’

  ‘I don’t want new shoes,’ Luke said, sulkily. ‘I want to see Uncle Richard.’

  ‘How are we going to get into town if we don’t have the car?’ Tom asked.

  ‘We’re going to walk. You do both remember how to walk, don’t you?’ Connie started shoving objects back into her bag, fighting to keep her temper. Intoning the mantra that she couldn’t help reciting every time she saw all the calm, collected, permanently in-control mothers she came across at school. I am a good mother; losing my temper does not make me a bad mother; they are all just lobotomised gibbons and I am a real person. On reflection it wasn’t a particularly good mantra, but it had a calming effect all the same.

  ‘I can’t remember how to walk,’ Luke said, predictably, dropping to the floor and beginning to crawl towards the front door. ‘We’re going to have to crawl into town.’

  ‘Well, I suppose at least you won’t need new shoes if you’re going to be crawling everywhere. Right, are we ready? Tom, have you finished with your shoelaces yet?’

  Tom held out his shoe-clad feet for inspection, proudly.

  ‘Good boy. Right. Come on, then.’

  Saturdays were usually family days. For the last few weeks they had been the only days that Nathan and Connie had managed to communicate with any semblance of normality, generally because they were around Richard and Lily – or, more often, just Richard. Lily, who had always taken genuine pleasure in spending time with her nephews, had abruptly stopped coming with him. Richard explained that it was nothing personal; that she was struggling to do much of anything.

  Connie felt like saying that she knew exactly how she bloody felt. This week, with Nathan away at a conference and Lily and Richard still settling into the house, Connie had felt somewhat at a loss. She loved spending time with her sons, of course, but she felt so generally unsettled that the disruption to her routine was entirely unwelcome. She wanted to spend time with Nathan, pretending that things were fine. She wanted to watch Lily communicating with her sons in the only language that seemed to come naturally to her. She wanted to talk to Richard, to know that he was okay, that they were both okay.

  She wanted a distraction from thinking about herself.

  The fifteen-minute walk into town was relatively peaceful. Tom enjoyed taking charge of Luke when they were out and about, holding his hand when they crossed roads, instructing him to wait for the green man. Connie watched them and tried to savour snapshots of memory. She wanted the image, forever, of her two boys looking out for each other, mittened hands clasped together, on a nondescript street on a grey winter’s day.

  She wanted, inexplicably, to cry.

  It was how she’d felt for weeks: a constant veering from perfect normality to utter despair. Nathan would say it was grief, of course, and not
to worry about it. She would heal in her own time. She needed to talk about it, to bleed the wound or squeeze the pus from the memory or whatever the fuck else it was that he had been advising lately. He would tell her, in his calm and unintentionally patronising doctor’s tone, about all the other patients he’d seen who were suffering from grief. He’d almost certainly embark on a conversation about the five stages and drive her to the point of suicide.

  This was why she couldn’t communicate with him; this was why they’d been feeling like disparate elements of a thing that had once been a whole concoction. Because he saw her as a set of symptoms, as a patient. The same as any other. And that was probably the sensible way for him to look at it, if she was honest with herself – it was better that he look out for her mental health objectively than try and involve himself in it.

  Except that she didn’t need a doctor. She needed her husband. She needed someone who didn’t know the scientific ins and outs of grief and depression and the official stages of mourning. She needed someone who would hold her and tell her that it didn’t matter that insanity ran in her family because she had turned out fine, she was okay, she would be okay; that everything, basically, would be okay.

  Her sons stopped to cross the road, and she bent down abruptly and wrapped an arm around each of them, squeezing them to her. They wriggled when she tried to kiss them, saying that the cars had stopped and that they needed to go before they started again, and she released them, gently, keeping a hand on each of their shoulders. Keeping them close to her.

  Hoping against hope that, whatever other failings she might have as a mother, she would not bring them up to be the same as the rest of her family.

  Richard had gone out. Lily had forgotten to ask him where. No idea when he’d be back. It didn’t matter, much.

  The shadows of the house closed around her, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn the lights on.

  She was in the kitchen, which had been Richardified: he’d made it into a place unrecognisable from its previous life. There were all their belongings, neatly lined up on the counters: the tea and coffee jars with their colourful striped patterns, the notice board which advertised the public parts of their life. The calendar, with his distinctive scrawl filling in all the important details. The things Not To Be Forgotten.

  She seemed to be forgetting everything, lately.

  Funny, how the recorded things, the Important Things, the Appointments and Events and Birthdays, were the things that you least needed to remember, once they had passed. Was it possible to keep a calendar to record the things that you really cared about?

  She could keep a diary. She’d tried, once. Hadn’t got much further than Dear Diary, Today I went to school and…

  She’d found there wasn’t much she’d wanted to keep, then.

  But how useful it would be. If she could remember things as they’d actually happened. If things appeared in her memory correctly, with Cause and Effect being the way round that they were supposed to be, so it was all ordered, organised, collected. If she could dip into her narrative and remember what day an event had happened, what had preceded it, what had followed it. Instead of this random collection of things which were contradicted by all common sense.

  Like the bar stools. She remembered it one way. Knew it was another. Connie probably remembered it differently from that. And that was just one detail. Completely irrelevant.

  She didn’t know whether she kept going back to it because of the discrepancy, or because of the fact that they were no longer there. Where had they gone? And why?

  Why didn’t she just ask Connie?

  She paced from one side of the kitchen to the other, frustrated. Tried not to look at the patio doors while doing so, but her eyes kept flicking towards them. The dark smudge of the patio, with the sprawling lawns and the borders beyond. All overgrown now; lavender rendered colourless by winter, intermixed with weeds, and the remnants of her mother’s once lovingly tended flowers. And, beyond, the darkness of the woodland, trees hulking over the house and casting shadows on the lawn.

  She was forcing herself to stay there, to face it down. No, she wasn’t doing anything of the sort. She was pretending it didn’t exist.

  To pretend. To profess, assert, maintain, originally. The playful aspect of the word didn’t exist until the nineteenth century. How did Richard’s knowledge get inside her head like that? She absorbed him. Did he do the same with her?

  Did it matter?

  She slammed her hand down on the breakfast bar. Felt the pain, blunt but still searing, shoot up her arm. A slight relief, nothing more. A reminder that she was still alive, awake.

  That there was more to existence than just the darkness creeping in from the patio doors.

  Richard would be home soon. Maybe she could talk to him. Tell him what was bothering her.

  Or maybe not.

  then

  The Christmas holidays were a subdued affair in the Emmett household. Connie, who had coursework due in the first week back at school, spent her time in her room, blasting music so loudly that the walls shook. Anna disappeared into the garden for long stretches of time, sometimes wandering into the woods and not coming back for hours. Lily sat in her room and tried to do the advanced work her maths teacher had sent her to keep her going, but she found the noise distracting, and after two days of suffering through it she retreated downstairs. She found her father sitting in the living room, watching a war documentary on TV. He looked up and smiled as she hovered in the doorway.

  ‘You can come in, you know. I won’t bite.’

  She sat down next to him on the sofa, nudging his arm until it came to rest on her shoulder.

  ‘Have you learnt much about the world wars yet?’

  Lily shook her head, following the flickering pictures on the screen with fascination. She recognised some of the faces, though the only one she could name was Hitler. ‘Grandpa told me a bit,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yeah, your Grandpa’s pretty knowledgeable on that subject.’

  They watched in silence for a while, letting the low, calm voice of the narrator wash over them. Lily thought of Christmas at her grandparents’ house, with tinsel sparkling on every surface and strings of cards decorating every wall. Her father had tried, but something about the house seemed flat and lifeless, as if even the decorations weren’t in the mood to celebrate.

  ‘Will Mama be making Christmas dinner?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie.’ Her father’s eyes were still fixed on the TV. ‘She might not feel like it. But, if not, then we can make dinner for her, can’t we?’

  That wouldn’t be so bad, Lily thought. The three of them could do dinner for Anna. Maybe it would cheer her up, to see them there, still acting like a family.

  ‘We could make cake,’ she suggested. ‘And Connie could help.’

  ‘Of course. If she wants to.’

  They sat quietly for a while. Lily watched the scenes flicker across the screen: a black and white parade of soldiers, and the billowing dust clouds of years-distant explosions.

  ‘I had something I wanted to talk to you about, actually.’ Marcus’s voice was hesitant, and Lily looked up, curious. ‘I was talking to your headteacher, before the holidays. She said she’s interested in you seeing a doctor when you go back to school. What would you think about that?’

  ‘Like Dr Hadley?’

  Marcus nodded. ‘Similar. It would just be someone to talk to. If you felt like talking, obviously. They wouldn’t force you.’

  ‘Why does she want me to see a doctor?’

  ‘They just want to make sure they’re doing everything they can to help you.’ Marcus’s eyes were on the screen as he spoke, and Lily couldn’t read his expression. ‘Do you think you’d be okay with that?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

  Marcus squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘Good girl.’

  They fell silent. The programme changed to a soap opera that Lily struggled to follow, and an hour
later her father went to bed.

  Contrary to the atmosphere of the previous week, Christmas morning was genuinely festive. Marcus got them all up at the crack of dawn, insisting that it was ‘tradition’, though it had been so long since they’d spent Christmas together that it was hard to remember whether they’d ever even had traditions. They put on a tape of Christmas hits, opened the living room windows so that the house was flooded with cold air, and sang along so loudly that the few dog walkers who passed the house turned back to stare.

  ‘People will think we’re mad,’ Marcus said, sounding delighted.

  ‘They’d probably be right,’ Anna said dryly.

  ‘Surely everyone goes mad at Christmas, though?’ Connie said. ‘All that time locked up with their families?’

  ‘Who was it who said “hell is other people”?’ Marcus was grinning.

  ‘I dunno. Some philosopher. Do you think they meant all people, or just the ones you’re forced to be around every day?’

  ‘Like us? Are we your idea of hell, Connie?’

  ‘Have I looked like I’ve been enjoying myself lately?’ But she was grinning too.

  They opened their presents, and then they made dinner together, Connie and Anna chopping vegetables alongside one another as if they did it every day, Marcus stuffing the turkey with slightly too much enthusiasm. Lily hung back a little, hovering around the table, not quite sure where she slotted into the scene. ‘You can come and help,’ Marcus said, encouraging, but there was nothing to do that wasn’t already being done, and she ended up standing awkwardly at his side.

  Once dinner was in the oven they sat on the living room floor and played games. They started with Scrabble, but Anna quickly grew frustrated, not being able to get beyond four-letter words. Connie decried the game as ‘stupid’, and Lily said nothing as they packed it away and got out Monopoly instead. She didn’t enjoy Monopoly much – it was difficult to play without a lot of talking – but she joined in half-heartedly, pushing her silver dog round the board and handing over baffling sums of imaginary money. She lost quickly, and sank into the background with relief; she was much happier watching.