She squeezed my hands. ‘I know. It’s okay. We waited for a little while, but we had to start without you.’
I saw our class list on her desk. My name was highlighted in yellow along with a few others. But the others all had ticks beside them, and mine didn’t.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry I was late.’
‘Sylvia, that doesn’t matter. What matters now is that you are with your friends. Are you ready to come with me, or would you like a few more minutes here?’
Suddenly, I wanted to be with Aoife, Niamh and Clare. My friends. ‘No, I’m ready to go now,’ I said.
She stood up. ‘Your friends will show you where you can leave a message of condolence for Daniel’s parents,’ she said. ‘That’s if you’d like to. And there are no classes for second years this morning.’
She handed me the box of tissues off her desk. I’d started crying again, every time I thought of his face.
‘Mr Nolan and Miss Burke will spend the whole day with you. You can talk to them on your own or with a group of others, whatever you decide. And there will be other counsellors coming too, later on this morning.’
I think I nodded my head. I’m not sure. I don’t think that I even said thank you.
‘And, Sylvia, I know that you and Daniel had a special friendship. Two of my most talented artists.’ And she tried to smile. ‘You can also come and talk to me, or to any of the teachers, at any time. Is that okay?’
I know I nodded this time. Then I followed her out of her office and down the corridor to assembly.
I spent all that Monday with Niamh and Aoife and Clare. I didn’t want to see anybody else. We texted you, they said. We tried to call, loads of times. I told them what happened. They brought me to a table in the mall where somebody – Mr Murray or Miss O’Connor, maybe – had put a framed photograph of Daniel along with some flowers and candles. There was a beautiful white cloth on it, with loads of lace around the edges. It was the kind of lace that Grandma makes. That made me cry so hard I thought I was going to be sick. Then there was a wall – a real wall, I mean, not a Facebook wall – where we could post messages about Daniel. There were some drawings there already, and some poems and then lots of short messages. And there was a Facebook wall later too, but I didn’t want to go there. Not after all the things that had happened. Later, Miss O’Connor told us that everything – I mean the real messages – would be put into a beautiful bound book and given to Mr and Mrs Grant.
I wrote them a long letter, but I didn’t put it on the wall. Instead, I cycled over to Daniel’s house and gave it to his parents myself. I didn’t want other people reading it. They were really nice to me, and made me a cup of tea.
I still don’t believe it. I can’t. I don’t want to.
I told Miss O’Connor afterwards about the day in May when we had the substitute teacher. The day when Daniel painted his ‘Flight’ picture. I told her what I saw.
And I told his parents, too. About that, and about the nasty emails from Daniel, except they weren’t, and about the text messages from Spain. I told them everything.
I had to.
Ella
WHEN ELLA WAKES that morning, she does so completely.
The need to know has been weighing on her like water. It has flooded her dreams. It is impossible to resist its pull, impossible not to swim up to the surface. Patrick lies very still beside her. She leans towards her husband, sees that his face is lined and shadowed even now. He stirs, as though he senses her presence. But she will not disturb him, not this morning.
In the past week, ever since that awful Sunday, Ella has slept three, maybe four hours a night at most. She has grown used to waking suddenly, her heart pounding, her eyes seeing shadows flicker above the bed. Or she has watched her dreams flee towards the darkened corners of the room: always just beyond her reach. As she glances over at Patrick now, something sad and tender clutches at her. His face betrays every one of his seventy years. Before he comes to, Ella slips out of bed, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor.
She makes her way to Daniel’s bedroom. She stands at the open door, looking in. Everything is in its place. The single bed, the chest of drawers beside it. The squat wardrobe that has been part of this house for as long as she has lived here. And the blue chair, standing silent in the corner. Her breath catches as she remembers.
‘See, Mum?’ Daniel is looking at her eagerly. He twirls the old chair around on one of its legs, an apprentice magician about to perform some sleight of hand. Ella has gone in search of him one evening to the garage: he’s done his usual trick of going missing just as dinner is ready. ‘I’ve fixed it. All it needed was a couple of new dowels. I asked Mr Byrne about it and he showed me how to do it today. What do you think?’
And Ella looks at the wooden chair, listing sadly again to one side: its white paint cracked and flaking. She falters. ‘It doesn’t seem very different,’ she begins.
‘No, but look.’ Daniel puts it right-side up and sticks the toe of his trainer under the one leg that is still shorter than all the others. Immediately, Ella can see the transformation. The solid, undulating seat looks steady once more. The broken spindle at the back has been replaced. Finally, it looks like a chair again. Up until then, it has simply been one of her father’s belongings, something hiding in the garage because she can’t bear to throw it out. Her father had thrown nothing out: he’d believed that everything could be mended.
‘The only thing I have to do is strip off all the old paint, glue a new piece to the front leg, and then sand everything back. Mr Byrne says one coat of primer, two undercoat an’ one topcoat an’ it’ll be like new.’
Ella laughs. ‘You are more like Granddad than you know! Well done.’
‘Can I have it for my bedroom, then?’
Ella nods. ‘Of course. It’s yours.’
Daniel stands back at once, making a pretend lens with his hands, squinting through the rectangle formed by his fingers. ‘Blue, I think,’ he said. ‘A really old-fashioned chair with a really modern colour. What do you reckon?’
‘I reckon that’s just fine,’ she says, taking her son firmly by the elbow. ‘Although the chair might die of fright: it hasn’t been painted in about thirty years.’
‘Deadly!’ He loops one arm around her waist and they walk back to the kitchen together.
Ella swallows now as the memory engulfs her. Just one short year ago: a happy boy, starting secondary school. Filled with enthusiasms new and old: art, woodwork, drama workshops. She has not been able to touch that chair since Daniel died. All she has been able to do in the days that followed, is to stumble to his bed and inhale her son. She breathes in the sour note of his sweat, undercut with the sharp, metallic scent of the violent-blue shower gel that he liked.
But this morning, she is finally ready. Something in here is waiting to be found. It feels urgent: she just doesn’t know what it is yet. It came to her last night as the sleeping tablet was beginning its work. In that drowsy, heady stage of oblivion, Ella had a sudden, blinding vision of her son’s bedroom. The walls with their posters and photographs. The furnishings that have remained resolutely closed to her since his death. It was as though her unconscious self had been getting ready to see it all again, but this time from a different angle.
As she struggled against sleep, something began to insinuate its way to the surface. She tried to swim towards it – a bright corner of alertness – but her limbs refused to cooperate. Then sleep had overcome her; or what passed for sleep these days. A thin, restless covering that wavered over and around her for a few hours and then disappeared, leaving her hot-eyed and exhausted. But she supposed that Gillian and Patrick were right: that it was better than nothing.
She should probably wait until Patrick wakes before she does this. He might be upset that she has come here without him again. But, right now, she is too impatient. She steps across the threshold into her son’s room. If there is something to be found here in this space, then she w
ill find it.
Even in the midst of her grief during those searing first days, Ella had worried about Daniel’s mobile phone. She and Patrick had searched everywhere for it. They’d wanted above all to make sure to switch it off, to avoid its ghost startling them with one of Daniel’s many alarms and reminders.
‘We have to find it,’ Ella said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of hearing it ring. And there have to be names, numbers, messages that he kept private. They have to tell us something.’
But they hadn’t found it in his rucksack, his jacket, or beside his computer: all the places where it normally lived. Last night and this morning the memory of that absence has begun to return with renewed insistence, a loose thread among so many others. Ella moves over to the bed and slowly, carefully, lowers herself onto it.
She glances at the wall to her right, the one behind the headboard. This space between the window and the corner is almost completely covered with one enormous collage: Daniel’s prize-winning photographic essay, from Christmas of first year. She can still remember the October evening when she and Patrick watched as Daniel had manhandled a large piece of plywood from the garage into the conservatory. His body was still slight, still compact. He hadn’t grown the coltish legs and arms that Ella had observed on other teenagers. He hadn’t yet acquired their awkwardness either.
‘Can I use the table here?’ he’d asked, breathless. ‘It’s wider than Granddad’s bench in the garage.’
‘Of course,’ Ella said, swiftly moving one of her mother’s pieces of porcelain out of the way. A shepherdess with sheep grazing forever at her feet. She’d never liked it: the coy smile, the knowing eyes, the colours that now seemed garish. For a moment, she regretted salvaging it. ‘What are you making?’
‘A collage. I’m going to use all the old photographs you said I could have.’
‘Any particular reason?’ Patrick asked.
Daniel had grinned. ‘For a competition at school. Someone has made an anonymous donation of a prize – it’s five hundred euro.’
‘For what?’ Ella was intrigued.
‘For an essay. It’s to be a narrative about the events and the people that have influenced your life.’ Daniel scrubbed at the plywood, smoothing and cleaning it with a damp cloth. ‘I’m going to sand this and paint the background white.’
‘A narrative?’ Patrick sounded puzzled.
‘Yeah.’ Daniel’s eyes had lit up. ‘A narrative. Loads of people are talkin’ about what they’re going to write.’ He paused. ‘But no one said it had to be written.’ He looked from one of his parents to the other. ‘You can have a visual essay, right? A visual narrative?’
Ella remembers nodding. Patrick didn’t look convinced.
‘Well, the prize is “to foster creativity”, according to Miss O’Connor. So I’m gettin’ creative. It’s to be finished by the end of November. Loads of time.’ His smile had been broad by then. ‘I can buy a deadly new camera for five hundred euro.’
‘Go for it!’ Ella said. ‘What a great prize!’
‘Do you need anything else from the garage?’ Patrick had asked. Ella remembers being taken aback at his response. He’d looked tentative, almost apprehensive. She asked him about it later.
Patrick shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s probably nothing. I’m sure it’s me, not him.’
‘How do you mean?’ Ella was curious. Patrick looked suddenly uncomfortable.
He half laughed. ‘Well, where I went to school, if you raised your head above the parapet like that, your life wouldn’t be worth living.’
‘You mean they’d make fun of you?’
‘Worse.’ His expression was grim. ‘Fun has nothing to do with it. It’d be hell. But,’ and here he paused, looking at Ella, ‘I guess times have changed.’
‘I guess they have.’ Ella remembers that conversation vividly now. She remembers how she’d turned and looked at Daniel, his head bent over the table, the photographs spread out all around him. She’d had a sharp stab of misgiving. But what were they to do? Curb their son’s enthusiasm? Dumb him down so that he wouldn’t stand out from everyone else? Her spirit rebelled at the notion. Nonetheless, she remembers the worry – remembers it all the more acutely now, this morning, in Daniel’s silent, empty bedroom.
She has deliberately avoided looking at that same collage until this morning. Now she examines it steadily. She does not avert her eyes. Instead, she searches it, looking for something, anything that might illuminate her son’s last days, weeks, months. She wonders if Jason MacManus appears in any of the photographs. She wonders if she’d recognize him: whether he looks like his father.
There are dozens and dozens of images making up the collage – each one carefully cut from larger photographs, all arranged into the jigsaw of Daniel’s young life. Most of them had once been part of Patrick’s photographs – innumerable boxes of black-and-white images that he had collected over the years. Ella concentrates on the pictures before her, wondering if she will be able to bear seeing them with different eyes.
There is the bridge over the stream where Daniel had taken his first steps. There are the bird tables in winter, as she and Daniel’s younger self leave out bread, hang up small nets of nuts. They are wearing wellington boots; there is a thin covering of snow on the ground. Daniel had considered each photo very carefully before cropping it; had taken hours to choose its final position on the board.
Other pictures were taken by Daniel himself: photographs of the bird sanctuary; of the Aurora, with Edward grinning at the tiller; of a young girl, with blonde hair that almost reaches to her waist. Ella looks closer. The girl is smiling into the camera, a direct, unselfconscious gaze. Ella has no idea who she is. She has no memory of this photograph. In fact, she is sure she has never seen it before. As she runs her finger over the edges, it seems that this photo was added later. It does not sit as smoothly as the others.
The image gives Ella pause. Who is this young girl? Although the photo is in black and white, Ella recognizes the girl’s uniform as belonging to Daniel’s school. They have to visit, she remembers suddenly, she and Patrick. They must go, and soon. There is Daniel’s locker to be cleared out, teachers to be spoken to, questions to be asked. Perhaps they can even get to speak to this young girl, whoever she is. She might have something important to tell them. Ella examines the other images before her, one by one.
Right in the centre – the fulcrum from which all the other images radiate – is the interior of her father’s garage. Daniel has photographed it as though it were an Aladdin’s cave. The garage with its tools and all its dark corners and boxes and jars full of bits of oddly shaped metal: it suddenly looks mysterious, alluring, full of treasures. If she looks closely, she can see a tiny image of her father and herself – the photograph taken on his eighty-fifth birthday party. Ella remembers the day Daniel borrowed it, the way he’d hugged it to him as he disappeared into the garage along with his camera. She remembers, too, how he’d replaced the photograph carefully in the conservatory afterwards. His young face had been alight with the excitement of this new project.
Ella stands up. She can’t bear any more of this. She will come back later. If she stays, she will feel all the strands of herself unravelling again. Besides, it has told her enough for this morning. Right now, she has to do something practical, useful; she needs to keep moving.
‘Where is your phone, Daniel? Where did you hide it?’ She moves towards the wardrobe, puts one hand on the handle and stops for a moment. Then, almost briskly, she pulls both doors open together and stands, foursquare, in front of the open shelves. One of the wooden doors creaks faintly at first, pulling away from her a little. Then it stops, suspended.
She reaches in and pulls out the tumble of clothes that crowd the bottom shelf. Sweaters, sweatshirts, single socks, tracksuit bottoms. She begins to fold each one, smoothing it against her as she does so. She has all of the shelves emptied, and part of the hanging-space, when she becomes aware of Patrick’s pre
sence.
She turns to see him watching her. She starts and feels immediately guilty when she sees his face. If anything, he looks worse than ever this morning: gaunt, haunted. It’s as though he’s kept going right up until the funeral was over, standing guard over her, over all his family. Now, he seems to have faded, to have fallen in on himself. He is looking at the piles of neatly folded clothes on Daniel’s bed. She can see by his expression that he is shocked, as though she has transgressed in some way.
‘What are you doing?’
Ella goes to him at once and takes his hand. ‘I’m searching, Patrick. There has to be something here that will help us understand what happened to Daniel.’ She gestures around her with her free hand. ‘We never found his phone. We haven’t even looked at his computer.’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe there are notebooks, or emails or something that will give us some sort of a clue. And there are so many photos that we need to look at more closely.’ Her husband’s face is impassive. ‘But it’s the phone above all. He loved that iPhone, sweetheart. Don’t you think it’s strange that we haven’t found it?’
Patrick sighs, and Ella thinks for a moment that his knees are about to crumple under his weight. ‘I need to sit down.’ She hurriedly pushes two towers of sweaters out of the way and Patrick sits, heavily, onto the single bed. ‘Don’t you think it’s too soon to be clearing out his room?’
‘I’m not clearing out his— Patrick, what is it? What do you mean? ’ Ella is shocked. She is able to hear the fear in her own voice.
Patrick turns to face her. His eyes are two deep pools of grief. His unshaven face is suddenly white, vulnerable. Old. ‘We didn’t see what was going on under our noses. We are guilty of not seeing things, of not intervening, of just being plain fucking useless. Both of us.’ He begins to cry. Great, gulping sobs. Ella kneels on the floor in front of him, places her arms around his waist and rests her head against his chest.
The Things We Know Now Page 24