by Sarah Jasmon
‘Come on.’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but set off up the staircase, beckoning Helen to follow.
She came to a stop by Alice’s door. Helen, expecting to go straight on to Victoria’s room, fell into her.
‘Ssh.’ Victoria pressed her ear up to the wood, holding on to Helen’s arm. Helen held her breath, unable to hear anything to begin with, other than the blood rushing past her eardrums. Then, slowly, noises began to float through: a low voice, the creak of feet across the floorboards.
‘They’re coming out,’ she whispered, the sound too loud in the waiting air.
Victoria took a tighter grip of her arm. ‘In a minute.’
It was easier to stay than make a fuss by pulling away, but Helen kept her gaze fixed on a dusty cobweb swinging from the corner of the ceiling, trying not to listen. Finally, Victoria turned around.
‘He might even get her out of there. He usually can.’
There was a pause, as if she was about to go on, but Piet’s voice sounded right next to them, and they fell into Victoria’s room, stifling each other’s laughter. It wasn’t funny, though. Helen felt Victoria’s hand over her mouth as Piet spoke again.
‘See you in a few minutes, sweetheart.’
Alice did join them, sitting at the table by Piet, sometimes leaning her head on his shoulder. As the colours leached out of the day, Seth lit candles and shadows filled the corners. They’d had party food: crisps and sausage rolls, a bowl of jelly mixed with mandarin pieces, chocolate fingers. Following the rules of the food, they should all be overexcited and feeling sick by this time, but then again, they hadn’t had pass the parcel or musical statues so it wasn’t actually a party. Helen giggled to herself, wondering if she’d had too much of the golden French cider. Her head felt light, as if it wasn’t entirely real. She leaned it on one hand and picked at fragments as laughter swirled around her. Piet’s face was long in the dusk, his eyes retreating into the sockets as he turned to listen to Seth. Victoria butted in and made Piet laugh and Helen tuned in to hear what was clearly a family story, the punchline chorused by Pippa and, from under the table, Will. The stories grew wilder and funnier, Alice and Piet missing a train connection, bucketing across Istanbul in the back of a car with blacked-out windows in the company of men in dark glasses; a small Victoria in Italy, running away to join a goatherd and his flock in the mountains; Seth falling asleep on a ferry on the way to Mykonos and finding himself back in Athens.
In a lull, Piet turned to Helen.
‘I’m sorry about this, Helen. Listening to other people reminisce gets very dull.’ His eyes crinkled at her. ‘Come on, it’s your turn. Tell us about your family.’
She felt her cheeks grow red as they all turned to her.
‘Mum got locked in the toilet on a cross-country train once, but that’s about it.’ She lifted both hands in the air. ‘Honestly, those sorts of things don’t happen to us.’
‘Tell Piet about your dad’s boat,’ said Victoria, her stool wobbling under her as she tried to pull her feet up into the lotus position.
The atmosphere of the evening inspired her. The story of the day Mick had bought the boat had never seemed so funny. There was Mick, madly pumping away in midstream to stop the boat from sinking, while various passing dog walkers and cyclists hauled on the ropes to bring her into the bank. In reality, Helen had been too small to have any real memories of the event, but it was a tale Mick liked to tell, and she embroidered without shame. It was liberating to laugh at the boat that had signalled the beginning of the end of her parents’ marriage, now landlocked in a garage with her father the only crew member, sitting in his chair down in the hull, a crate of beer the only ballast.
‘So he’s been working on it all this time?’ asked Seth. ‘What a waste, with the canal practically at the bottom of the garden.’
‘It’s why they bought the house, because of the canal. Dad always wanted to live by water. But Mum hated it. And now …’
‘Aluminium hull, you say?’ asked Piet.
Helen nodded. ‘You have to be careful what you build onto it, other metal eats away at it or something.’
‘I spent a few years in Holland once, worked in a boatyard for a bit, learning the trade.’ He turned towards Alice. ‘Do you remember? The family business, building boats. I almost stayed there.’ Alice made no response; her face was expressionless again, withdrawn. He turned back to Helen. ‘I’ll have come and meet your dad. Be good to have another try.’
It was late when Helen left, and dark enough to make her want to run fast, to outpace the shadowy threats behind the hedges. She forced herself to walk, not wanting to misjudge the water’s edge even though she knew the towpath ran some distance up from the bank. There was only a tiny sliver of moon, but it somehow gave enough light to silver the water whilst leaving the edges blank and formless. Dark tree shadows trembled on the surface and she remembered her fancy of the mirror land beneath the water. It felt ominous tonight, hands waiting to grab her feet. A splash made her stop, heart pounding. It was a moorhen or duck. Telling herself this didn’t make the rustles along the lane any easier to ignore as she headed to the house. She broke into a run.
There was no light from the garage, so Dad must already be back in the house but, she reassured herself, he’d be asleep in front of the television. It wasn’t as if he noticed her lately anyway. It had always been her mum who had cared about curfews and homework. All the same, she tried to tread lightly as she went down the side of the house.
He wasn’t asleep. He was sitting at the table in the kitchen, a whisky bottle in front of him. The fluorescent light was playing up again, the tube flickering at one end. Helen’s stomach tightened; she closed the door.
‘Your mother called.’ His voice was steady, but each word was pronounced with a touch too much care. Helen’s eyes went to the bottle on the table, then back to his face. ‘She wanted to talk to you, and I had to say I didn’t know where you were.’
His head slumped down on to the table. Helen began to sidle around him. If she could get to the hall, she could leave him to calm down. Before she reached the door, though, his hand slammed down flat on the tabletop, and both she and the whisky bottle jumped. He turned around.
‘Do you know how stupid that made me sound?’
And she was back to last Christmas, the screamed accusations, the broken glass, the anger in the air turning her insides to water. Arguments raced through her head. She had said where she was going, and he couldn’t have said that to Mum because she’d have had the police in. And he knew where she was anyway because where else would she be? The words rolled helplessly around in her head, crossed paths and confused her. She should have left a note, or double-checked. The memory of the candle-lit cottage floated through her mind and was snuffed out as if it had never been.
‘I’m sorry, Dad, I thought you knew, I thought … The words came out by themselves; she was finding it hard to orientate herself. She focused on the door handle, solid and real in the small of her back; a remote part of her brain was pointing out that he wasn’t listening anyway. The table tilted as her father lurched to his feet, the bottle smashing unheeded to the floor.
She had never seen him like this before, even in the weeks before her mother left. She wanted to scream at him, make him stop, but her mouth wouldn’t do it. He was pacing, pulling his head from side to side holding great handfuls of his hair. Instinct told her to be small, hidden, and she slid down to the floor, wrapping herself tightly in her arms and pressing her eye sockets against her knees. She heard the table turn over, tried not to see as this man who wasn’t like her father any more slammed his fist into a cupboard door then swung around to pick up a pile of plates from beside the sink and hurl them across the kitchen.
She was staring at a smear of egg and ketchup on the wall. It reminded her of a bloodstain, the sort of thing a detective would examine in the aftermath of a crime. The house was silent now; she felt as if she had been holding her breath for a very long
time. She watched her father as he pushed himself upright and stood with his head bent, one hand resting on the kitchen counter; he seemed about to speak, but eventually turned and went in slow motion out of the back door, knocking into the frame on the way.
The shaking started in her arms. It was autonomous, out of her control. It pushed itself through her tightly wrapped body, down her legs, over the back of her skull. Then came tears, and with the tears a great sweep of rage, ballooning out from her chest, forcing her breath into heaving gasps. This was pain that wanted to be howled out, to be scored into the walls of the house. She could feel her skin stretch with the pressure, ready to split at the slightest touch.
The despair and anger lifted her up from the floor in the end, taking her round the room, feet crunching on glass, fists beating on the sink. It dropped her in a chair, where she wanted to put her head in her arms and weep it all out, but she couldn’t because the table was over there on its side so she sat with her hands on her knees and rocked backwards and forwards and cried out for someone, anyone, to come and put it all back together. It felt as if hours had passed when the telephone rang. The glass of the window was black, reflecting the mundane ordinariness of the kitchen, but it had been dark when she’d got back, hadn’t it? She was no longer sure about anything.
The ringing was insistent. It clamoured round and round her head, urging her up, but she couldn’t do it. There were a few minutes of silence before it began to ring again. This time she pushed herself upright and forced herself towards the hall. Her legs felt as though they weren’t going to work, as if her thighs were too short to keep her upright, and her feet didn’t seem to belong to her. She reached the hall table.
‘Hello?’
‘Helen, it’s Mum.’ Her mother’s voice rang out, sounding too loud against her ear. It was unfamiliar, harsh. ‘I called earlier but you were out. Your father didn’t seem to know when you’d be back, I was worried.’
‘I’m fine.’
The emptiness of the telephone line stretched between them. Helen wished she’d go away. Her voice was the outside world, it was everything Helen wanted to forget about. Why couldn’t she leave them alone?
‘I was wondering …’ Her mother’s voice tailed off. There was silence on the line, then she continued briskly: ‘I wondered if you’d like to come to stay for a night or two. In my flat.’
‘No.’ It wasn’t hard to say. Helen could feel more words bulging at her throat, shapeless and incoherent. In the end it seemed easier to simply put the phone down.
It was strange to be there, in the silent house. The conversation with her mother already seemed unlikely. Maybe none of it was real. In a daze, she found herself back in the kitchen, her hand on the switch to turn out the light. There was the proof it had happened, crunching under her feet.
Chapter Nine
2013, Manchester: 11 a.m.
There’s someone at the door. I journey up through layers of sleep too fast, identifying the sound as knocking the second after it stops. By the time I am conscious, I have lost hold of the dream where the sound had been – what? The dislocation of the moment opens up a space too big to contemplate, the sort of space nightmares create.
I’m on Larry’s sofa, in the small room behind the shop. It will always be Larry’s sofa. The curtains are full length and heavy, there to shut out the world. It’s the room where he cut telephone deals with collectors, shuffled orders and invoices. It’s where he slept, and where I found him slumped sideways after he had the first stroke. It’s one of the few places where I feel safe. I don’t want to open my eyes. I could have been asleep for one hour; I could have been asleep for twelve. This is how it must feel to emerge from stasis, with vision and consciousness struggling to align with where the body is in space. If I could stay here, I would, resisting the siren call of the past, closing my ears and letting the current drag me beyond its reach. Everything I have lost is buried so well that I can no longer be sure what I will find if I go looking. I’m not sure I have the strength to try. But the gallery is there. Victoria is there. It will happen whether I choose to act or not. The weight of this knowledge sits on my pelvis, reaches up and under my ribs.
Sounds float into focus: a reversing delivery truck, a sudden shout, the low hum of the computer. I separate the levels of dust, the dry age of books from the shop, the heaviness of old upholstery, the cold notes coming from the unused rooms upstairs. Over the years, I have imagined the path of the Dovers through life. Victoria has travelled the world, a chameleon equally at home in a sealskin tent or an Eastern palace. Seth’s band was successful in a non-mainstream way, but he became a writer, or perhaps an architect, always surrounded by beautiful women but never finding a soul mate. Will and Piet build boats together, smoothing the wood with practised hands while Alice watches with her otherworldly smile. To Pippa, I give children, dressed in corduroy pinafores and hand-knitted jumpers. She has a husband who loves her and a dog that runs after a ball in a sunny garden. From her shabby, comfortable kitchen, with walls covered in children’s drawings, she smiles at me.
If I see Victoria, my imaginary Dovers will melt away. By letting them go, perhaps I will find their solid replacements. The risk is that I will lose them for ever. The problem chases round my head with no answer in sight. I do what I’ve done ever since I got here when things get too much for me. I go up to the roof.
The first flight of stairs lead up to the kitchen, a cramped box of Formica and chipped enamel unchanged since the forties. The pipes bang and shudder as I run the tap. Up again is a storage room, stacked with misshapen cardboard boxes. At the top, right under the roof, is my bedroom. There’s a single iron bed made up with blankets and a blue candlewick spread, the pillows covered in pink striped ticking. The books are the only mark I have made. Piles of them, filling the space between bed and wall, stacked on the chest of drawers, spilling out on the tiny landing. Most have been siphoned up from the shop, but sometimes I’ve had to go further afield to complete whichever list I’ve been reading through. One hundred books to read before you die. Books to create a perfect library, or change your life, or see out a prison term, or make you want to live. Books in translation or out of print; the longest ever written or the shortest, the most depressing or obscure or wrongfully lauded. A dusty, stacked record of the person I have tried to be.
When I first arrived at the shop, Larry took me on a tour, finishing in this room. Leaning in the doorway, wheezing for breath, he told me his heart couldn’t take the stairs. When he half offered to let me have it as a sort of bedsit, I jumped at the chance. I wonder if he knew what it meant to me, how grateful I was. The room has been mine ever since, even though sometimes I feel like ghosts are clogging up the space so much it’s as if there’s no room left for me. Other people’s ghosts. It’s not as if I need them. I am my own ghost. Out through the window, on the square of roof space, was where I found my place to be. Going there now is an automatic response.
I always sit with my back against the wall, so that the only thing I can see is the sky above the low surrounding wall, and the chimney pots and TV aerials. I’ve never brought anything up here, no pots or plants, no candles or cushions or jingling wind chimes. I like it the way it is. I’m a character in a nineteenth-century novel: the child in the garret, the prisoner of circumstance. The escapee, even. I ran away from home and landed here. I suppose I was luckier than most.
Were the Dovers running away? Once I asked Victoria how they’d ended up in the cottage by the canal. She shrugged. Piet knew someone, it was empty, and they’d had to get out of the place they’d been in London. The cottage had been a wreck, with bulging walls and dodgy electrics. A boatman’s house, damp, dark and leaky. But it was summer after all; it only rained enough for the drips to be funny and it didn’t matter that the doors all stuck because they were never closed. It would be renovated now, along with the rest of the row, extended and polished and desirable. The Dover summer will have been washed away as if it had never been.
There are only the tidemarks in my head to show that it ever existed. I meant to be like them one day. Victoria hadn’t had to work hard to convince me that change was good for its own sake.
I see the other side now, though, the chanciness, the chasms of not knowing what will happen, and I’ve never been able to trust in Providence. Or perhaps I knew that finding Larry was my quota and I was too tired to try for more.
The roofing is rough beneath my legs. I lean my head back and reach for the stash of tobacco I keep here. This is the only place where I smoke. It’s what I need right now. I roll a cigarette. It’s not a good one. I’m out of practice, and the tobacco is so dry that it’s on the edge of breaking through the paper. My hands are shaking as well and I give up and start again. A picture pops into my head: an afternoon by the canal with Victoria, a shared smoke leaving shreds of tobacco sticking to my lip, and then it is gone. I try to bring it back, to pin down where we were, recall what was happening around us, but the moment has gone. It takes until the third go to achieve a usable cigarette. The draw, the smoke in my lungs, is vicious.
The morning’s events begin to settle into a pattern I can negotiate. If I am careful, I will be able to manage this. One thing I am certain of: I cannot believe the photographs in Victoria’s exhibition will be unconnected to me. I close my eyes to picture it again: the poster, with the photograph, the name. And in the darkness behind my eyes I can hear their voices, always beyond earshot. Victoria swings from a branch. Pippa holds out a bunch of daisies. Piet’s laugh rumbles as he ruffles someone’s hair. The summer had never had much hold on reality and its abrupt end, that total, final, underlining cut-off, has left it floating there, a fairy story so enclosed that I am never quite certain what was real and what I have created for myself. Except that I have been on the outside ever since.