by Sarah Jasmon
I don’t stop until I am by the water’s edge, where I crouch down, holding on to my stomach. I am retching as if I’m going to be sick, but what comes up is a howl with roots in the base of my being, torn out by forces beyond my control. I am the person curled in a ball by the side of the canal, and the noise that is twisting out and spiralling up towards the sky is from me. I keen for all that is lost: for Pippa, for my dad. For the world of the summer, for myself and for all that might have been. I have been holding it inside for a very long time.
A man with a spaniel walks by on the opposite bank. He turns his head as he passes. The dog runs ahead, spotting something in the undergrowth and jumping on it with all four feet at once. I watch the dog as if, by not letting him into my field of vision, the man will cease to exist. Somehow Victoria is next to me.
‘My dad disappeared.’ I turn to Victoria. ‘Did you know?’
Victoria plucks at some grass.
‘I didn’t, no.’ She sprinkles the grass stems over the water and we watch as they bob and separate. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘He said something about negligence.’ I close my eyes, trying to recall his words. I hear the sound of the ice cubes rattling in my drink, of Dad’s voice coming out of the darkness, and I start to cry again. ‘I thought he was talking about me …’ My voice cracks as the memory continues to unroll.
Victoria is a stillness beside me.
‘And before, when you said about him taking you in, it made me remember how he didn’t want me around. I never understood why.’ The words come out in jagged clumps, as painful to produce as they must be to listen to. ‘But he meant the petrol bombs, didn’t he? That he was responsible for not getting them out of the way?’
I am rocking, my knees pulled in to my chest so that I won’t fly apart. ‘I always knew it was my fault he left.’ This is the abyss. This is the knowledge I have been avoiding for the whole of my adult life. I say the words for the first time. ‘He killed himself. And the very last thing I said to him was that I never wanted to see him again.’
‘Helen, you were sixteen.’ Victoria speaks with absolute conviction. ‘You were hurt and confused and nobody was telling you what was going on.’
I feel the weight of her hand on my shoulder.
‘He was the one who rescued Will, you know.’ Victoria draws up her legs and wraps her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. ‘They all went in – your dad and Piet and Seth. The firemen said it was a miracle anyone got out.’ She is staring out across the water, across to where the trees hide the end wall of the cottages. ‘The smoke was so thick that they couldn’t find the stairs. He’s never got over it.’ Victoria’s voice continues as if from a great distance. I think she is talking about my dad, but it doesn’t make sense after the first words. ‘Losing his twin, his mother. He’s only ever been half a person.’ Will. Victoria is talking about Will. ‘The fact he’s the one who’s alive. He can’t forgive himself.’
Everything around is quiet, the distant barking of the spaniel the only sound. I fill in the silent half of my mother’s sentence. My dad. He never forgave himself for not rescuing Pippa.
‘I can’t imagine him going anywhere. Your dad, I mean.’ Victoria tilts her head so that she can see me. ‘This place, he loved it so much.’
He did. I think of him, watching me go past on the bus, then walking home, untying the boat.
‘I didn’t believe it. Not for years. I kept expecting him to come back.’
Victoria reaches for my hand. ‘I kept expecting Alice to come back too.’ She’s turned back to the canal. ‘You wait for ever, and then realize it’s not going to happen.’
We sit there together. After a while, the waitress comes out from the door of the coffee shop. She is bringing me the box.
It’s sealed with thick brown parcel tape that goes over and over and covers every gap; I can’t find an end, and my fingernails aren’t sharp enough to get through. Eventually, Victoria produces a small penknife from her shoulder bag, and I dig through with that.
The first thing I notice is the smell of home. It is out and around me and gone almost before I have realized it is there, air that has been sitting in this box since the time my father disappeared.
The contents are not a surprise, in some strange, equally inexplicable sense. I have been carrying the box since I left my mother’s flat, have felt the weight, computed the empty space and picked up the tremors of how the contents shifted as I walked. My subconscious has been busy.
They are items from another age, dusty and small, with no explanation, no letter. I wonder who collected them all. Not my dad.
‘She emptied the house straight away, you know.’ I hold my hands over the open top of the box, so that nothing blows away. ‘I used to listen to her telling people how it was best to accept the situation.’ I dredge up a laugh. ‘I suppose it helped her.’
‘Did you never come back, after he’d disappeared?’ There is almost more sympathy in Victoria’s voice than I can bear.
‘No.’ I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that red speckles dance behind the lids.
Victoria nods with understanding. ‘Did you find out anything about how he left?’
‘Some people saw him heading down the canal.’ I nod my head to the right, downstream, away from the cottages. ‘And the lock keeper said he seemed normal when he went through.’
I wouldn’t listen at the time. The sight of my mother with her head next to the liaison officer used to make me want to scream. And if I didn’t believe it, then he would come back. It was simple.
‘Which lock was that?’
‘It’s about five miles down.’ I nod in the direction I mean. ‘Not the one we found, the broken one. He only had one way to go.’
The lock he went through led into the river, and from there, eventually, to the sea. I found the bare details years ago on a microfiche in the library of the local newspaper. There was a high tide on the night of the last sighting, followed by several weeks of calm and unseasonably warm weather.
‘Nobody ever saw the boat again. In the end, Mum told me she’d throw everything away if I wasn’t prepared to help. So I told her to go ahead, and I didn’t speak to her again for about a month.’
‘I can see why.’ Victoria’s hand closes around one of mine, and I grasp it tightly.
‘I was never going to talk to her again, but, you know …’ My voice trails off. ‘And then I ran away. I never wanted to see her again.’
‘And here you are, she kept all this for you.’
I lift my hands away and we bend our heads to see inside. There is a diary, letters, the box I kept my earrings in. One sheet of paper is a faded purple, and I know before I unfold it that there will be a printed cartoon rabbit decorating one corner. I hold it out. It is our book list.
Victoria snorts. ‘Bloody Ulysses. I don’t think I read any of them properly, you know.’ She shakes her head.
‘I read them all.’ I fold the paper up and drop it on the ground. I doubt I’ll be reading them again now.
In amongst the scatter of papers are some pencil sketches, and I pick them up with the delicacy of a bomb disposal expert. Most are Piet’s. He spent an afternoon trying to teach me, and his drawings hold so much life that my heart aches: Seth bending over his guitar, Pippa on her tummy, reading a comic, Alice sitting. One or two are my attempts. Mine are crude, cack-handed, but, even so, there is the odd line that makes the moment recognizable.
Victoria leans across my arm to look. ‘I forgot about you doing these.’ She takes one from me. ‘You always said that Piet was a cowboy.’
Piet is standing with his back turned, slouched with one shoulder against a wall as if he’s thrown his Stetson down on the ground.
‘You lost all of your photographs.’ I have the briefest sensation of smoke passing in front of my nose. ‘When I went back to the cottage, that’s all I could think about. The photos and the records …’ A sob rises in my throat as I remember how much else
was lost. ‘You should have these.’ I hold the papers out. ‘Take them.’
‘I’ll be seeing them tomorrow.’ She has tears in her eyes. ‘Piet hasn’t changed at all.’
I have a flicker of a thought, the briefest image. I could go with her, be part of it. It’s what I’ve always wanted.
‘What does Seth do now?’ I study my hands, aware of the old feeling of giving myself away.
‘He’s a psychiatrist, would you believe.’
‘What really happened to your dad?’ After all this time, the question feels simple but somehow unimportant.
‘Which version did I tell you?’ Victoria is shaking her head. ‘He died, there were drugs, a fight. All a bit sordid.’
‘I heard Piet talking to Seth once.’ I remember the heat, the roughness of the apple tree beneath my fingers. ‘They didn’t know I was there, but I imagined all sorts. Murder. Intrigue.’
‘And you never said.’ Victoria’s voice holds a ghost of a laugh.
‘I thought Piet might be the twins’ dad as well.’
‘Nah.’ She examines at the sketch. ‘There wasn’t ever much of that between them, if you ask me. Piet’s pretty good at stories as well.’
There is one more sheet of paper in the box, folded into four, and I pick it up and open it out. It is Seth’s sketch of me, my hair tumbling down from a loosely knotted bun. I fold it up again and hold it tight between both hands. I don’t think I can manage any more memory. But Victoria is reaching into the box. Half hidden under the flap in the base of the box are two photographs. She eases them out, and I take them from her despite myself.
In the first, I am a small girl in a blue cotton dress, and I am holding my father’s hand as we crouch on the bank of the canal while he points to something on the other side. The other is upside down, but I don’t need to turn it around to know what it is. It’s the square white of a Polaroid snap, and on it, Pippa and I are smiling for the camera, and in the background is the boat.
‘You should have this as well.’ I hold it out to her, keeping the snapshot of my father and me in my other hand.
As I feel the Polaroid pass out of my grasp, I stand up and step on the sides of the box to make it collapse. The sky is rich with sunset now, the rain clouds from earlier gone completely. Victoria stands as well. It’s as if we’ve changed places. For the first time, I am leading the way. She follows me back across the footbridge.
‘Helen—’ There is a shiny four-by-four parked in the lane. The Victoria who drives that feels like a stranger. She doesn’t know what to say.
‘It’s been nice seeing you again.’ I hold out my hand. I need her to go, right now.
‘Helen, are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I rub my hands up and down the sleeves that cover my arms. ‘Say hello to the others.’
I walk away from Victoria, along the path that leads to the sea. I feel her eyes on the back of my neck, and it takes all the strength I have to keep walking. Pippa once told me I was like Helen of Troy. I used to think, if I tried hard enough, I would be as beautiful as my namesake, as desirable and desired. I forgot about Helen’s main achievement, destruction.
You’re never far from a canal. Often you don’t know it. Canals don’t shout out. They’re flat and self-effacing and, once they get away from the flourish of a lock-flight, they hide behind factories or disappear at the far end of fields. Sometimes you catch a glimpse from a train, or they slip past the corner of your eye as you drive over a bridge. But once you know, once you begin to look out for them, the slow bends appear around unexpected corners. This canal has been waiting for me to come back.
I follow in the wake of a white lifeboat’s stern, which disappears behind the bend of the willows before I can catch it. I force myself to keep at a walk as I, too, follow the curve of the bank. As the sun begins to spill sunset-red across the horizon, I pull off my hat and feel the breeze in the rough ends of my hair. My dad isn’t there. He is never going to be there. But I carry on following the old lifeboat, watching as she swings out for the turns and drifts down the straights with her engine throbbing slowly, and a faint twist of diesel smoke curling up from her far side.
What I didn’t tell Victoria, in that last moment as she stood by her fancy car and I saw the lines of age on her face, is what I have remembered. It came out of the box, the final link with the night of the fire. It wasn’t triggered by the smell of smoke and ashes. It was triggered by the smell of the past.
I remember seeing Seth, made naked and reeled in by Moira. I remember the feel of Victoria’s cheek underneath my hand, the raw and crawling shame as she pushed me away. I remember Mick in a deckchair, snoring, Piet walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I remember standing in the shed, picking up the bottles and I remember lighting the rag in the neck of one and I now see myself tossing it down the path by the side of the house. That’ll show them. My voice echoes in my head.
I turned around, laughing in joy and in pain, and Alice was standing there watching me. She was so beautiful. She was the one men went crazy for, she was the one they crossed oceans to find. She was laughing too. She took my hand and we danced, the bonfire throwing its flickering light over us. And when we fell on to the ground, we could both see the same stars, and she held my hand as if I was keeping her from floating up to join them.
Beautiful girls. I hear her voice, husky and bewitching. Her fingers are squeezing mine. I squeeze back. She is telling me something, she is giving me a piece of wisdom that I can hold in my hand and take out like a jewel. I strain to hear her. It’s something about the universe. We have to do what the universe wants.
She is saying it wrong.
‘Universe.’ I try it for her. ‘Yes, that.’ But she’s not happy now. I hear her voice wobble, see the tears that are making her face shine as the light from the flames catches them as they run.
I want to make her happy again.
‘Don’t cry.’ I’m holding her hand between both of mine now, shaking it up and down to make my point. ‘You shouldn’t cry.’
‘He left me.’ Her eyes are holding my gaze. ‘My Jakob. My Jakob. Why didn’t he come back?’
It’s so easy. Alice is my friend. Not Victoria. Not Seth. She wants to know. I can help her. I have the answer. I hold her other hand, and feel the smile cross over my face.
‘He didn’t leave you!’ I feel a surge of joy. I am taking all of her troubles away. ‘He’s dead. I heard Piet talking about it.’ I give her hands a shake, and let my own version of events take me further. ‘He always loved you, he would never have left you alone.’
Vows of secrecy crumple like paper before a flame, words turning to the grey of ash after the burn and the flare.
I’m not even sure Alice has heard me. She has the traces of a dream on her face. I wonder if I should tell her again. I close my eyes.
My hand is empty, lying on the floor with nothing in it. And someone is moaning. I can’t turn my head, though, and I don’t know what is happening any more. The moaning is almost like words. Myjakobmyjakob. I turn my head and Alice has her face next to me, her mouth drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. And I feel her anger, I take it for myself. This is what the universe wants. I am holding the last bottle, and yellow flowers grow out of the top as I press it into Alice’s hand. She is throwing it for me, for all of us who have been lied to.
In slow motion, I watch as Alice’s arm goes back, and then there is the blossoming orange, and then I know nothing.
My name is Helen, and I destroy people.
I stand by the canal with the ghost of a boat sailing away from me, and see what I have broken. Rain is falling again, in cold lines that slide across my head and run down my neck and I want it to keep falling, to make the water rise until it laps at my knees, at my chest and finally covers my shame. And yet I am standing, and the canal stays where it is, where it has always been. Somewhere, in amongst the ruins, is a small clear space. It is a space with no secrets, no hidden memory. It is
a place where I might be able to start again.
Another shred of memory floats back. I am lying on my back, smelling smoke, too much smoke, and feet run past me. All I can see is the feet, but I hear a voice, a high voice full of panic.
My special things! I have to get my special things!
And I don’t stop Pippa as she runs by, and I don’t reach out and tell Will to catch her more quickly. They disappear into the darkness and in my hand it is as if I can feel the shape of a tiny spoon.
Acknowledgements
Debut novel = a lot of people to thank.
For instance, grandmothers. In my case, Doris, who passed on her love of books, and Bridie, who told tales and read me The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies as often as I asked. Then there’s my Mum and Dad, who let me grow up with my head in a book, and have always seen writing as a positive thing. Happy childhoods are a gift, and I’m very grateful for mine xx
I’ve got amazing friends, especially Jo Sutton, who saw more than one false start; Katy Quayle, who has given unending support; and Esther Batchelor, who kept on at me until I sent my MA application form off.
That leads on nicely to my cohort and tutors from the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University, where the serious stuff began to happen. You, especially, Steve Galbraith.
To the maniacs from Moniack: you rock. Those writing weeks saw me through to the end of the first draft, and I always wrote better after spending time with you all. May the Gimtos never run dry!
The writers in the North West are an incredible bunch. The spoken word nights and festivals and the overall solidarity and friendship have all been a tremendous encouragement, and an essential part of Keeping Going.
My second official edit happened mostly on Anglesey with the Ann Atkinson Writers. They’re another amazing bunch, especially fellow boater, Jo Bell, who has been unfailingly generous and generally splendid.
I’m so happy to have moored up at Conville & Walsh with my fabulous agent Carrie Plitt: many thanks to Jo Unwin for the introduction! Working with Transworld has been a delight, also, where I’ve had two incredible editors in Katy Loftus and Bella Bosworth. Thank you all so much for making this a better book than I could ever have done by myself.