by Sarah Moss
She sighed, as if letting something go. ‘OK. It does feel amazing to be out. I’m going to remember this. Just the sky and the filthy canal and the lights in the wind. It’s all really weird. Like, extraordinary.’
I caught Emma’s eye. ‘Ordinary extraordinary,’ I said.
May we forget. It is a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greetings cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love— May we live long enough to despise the clichés again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.
Mimi had picked up the menu. ‘Can we have the mixed starter? And seaweed? And then can I have the squid thing?’
‘Anything,’ Emma said.
Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘Even Coke?’
‘Yep.’
The girls looked at each other, as if we were breaking their rules, as if something had gone wrong.
‘Not the sugary one,’ I amended, for reassurance rather than because sugar seemed important.
‘What about champagne?’ asked Dad. ‘On me, of course?’
Emma and I exchanged glances. One day soon, I thought, we would be able to talk again, would not be always with a child or a nurse or my father and would be able to use words. Not for me, I said, thanks, Dad. No, said Emma, but it’s a kind thought. Hey, what about mocktails all round? With paper umbrellas? I bet they have them here. I’ll go ask at the bar if they have little sparklers, the girls would love them.
Rose and I needed to get the train home because she had school the next day. Miriam, despite her epiphany, soon fell silent and seemed tired or somehow absent. But before that, in an ersatz Thai restaurant at the back of the business district, overlooking a canal that was once the main artery of English manufacturing and is now brimming with stolen bikes and shopping trolleys, it was good. The drinks came, with paper umbrellas and sparklers and tinsel tassels, and nobody minded when Rose set fire to her umbrella. The girls ate so many rice crackers and prawn toasts that they hardly touched the real food but then found room for ice-cream. Miriam, who used to fold piles of paper into cranes for Hiroshima Day every year, as if they might make things better, produced a family of napkin birds for Rose, who had them talking to each other and squabbling over the menu. Dad talked to Emma about American healthcare and its reforms, which is what Dad and Emma always talk about, and I sat there and watched them all breathing and eating, their hearts and lungs and digestive systems working to keep them alive.
When we left, hurrying for the train, leaving Emma to take Miriam back into the hospital for her last night’s confinement – last for now, there will probably be more – Dad touched my arm.
‘Adam? Do you think I could come back with you? Sleep on your sofa, just tonight? I think there’s something we need to talk about. Once Rose is in bed.’
He must have seen my face change in the darkness, or sensed my blood brace for some further pain. ‘It’s nothing new, Adam. No news. You asked me if anyone on my side of the family had any major health issues, do you remember? I’ve been thinking about it. That’s all.’
That’s all. More bad news, more of the story of my sperm and Emma’s egg.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘OK. But I want to get things ready for Mimi too. Clean her room. Maybe bake a cake. We should have eggs. Unless Emma ate them.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Emma’s not looking well, is she?’
‘I had noticed. I can’t be cooking for her while I’m with Mim in hospital. I can’t make her eat.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t blaming you. Let me help, that’s why I came. I can put Rose to bed. I’d like to spend some time with her too.’
Emma, of course, had been working again, and had not done much with the house again. She had run the dishwasher but there were dirty plates on the counter waiting to go in, and the washing machine was full of wet clothes including the school uniform Rose needed for morning. The skirts are made of some kind of carcinogenic Teflon and dry overnight on a radiator even when the radiators are off, and the blouses can be ironed dry. Another late night. There were crumbs on the kitchen floor and the prints of wet shoes in the hall. I stood there, listening to Rose splashing in the bath and to my father’s voice talking to her, to the rumble of next door’s television, the passing of cars on the main road. People going places, a sound I thought I missed all my teenage years in Cornwall but which I now categorise as a distraction. It doesn’t matter where they are going. You are here. I listened to the silence in Miriam’s room and imagined how it would be the next day, and the next, how we would always now be listening for her breathing, how we would be stealing in to touch her skin to know it was not cold and grey. We’ve tested her pretty thoroughly, Dr Chalcott said, of course we’ll follow up in Outpatients but whatever she was reacting to, it’s not coming up, I did tell you that sometimes you never know what it was.
I left the dishes and the laundry and went up to see Rose.
She wanted to go through the story of what happened to Miriam again. People breathe in air and their lungs pass oxygen into their blood so that the blood can take energy to their eyes to see and their ears to hear and their legs to run and their hands to draw and paint and cook, and also to their hearts to pump the blood so that it reaches the muscles and the brain. But in some people, if the body thinks something dangerous has got in, the lungs narrow and the throat and skin swell up so that air can’t get through, and quite quickly everything runs out of oxygen and stops, which is why we have the epipen, so that we can put adrenaline into Mimi’s blood and get everything started again, before it stops. Yes, it does hurt to have a needle pushed into you, but not much and not for long and Mimi would rather we did it than not. I stroked her hair, kissed her, sang Scarborough Fair, sang Amazing Grace, started to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and stopped because I no longer liked the words, sang Summertime instead. Good night, Rosie-pose, sleep well, see you in the morning. I did not say, see you several times between now and morning as I look in to make sure that you are still there.
Dad had emptied the dishwasher and washed the dirty dishes by hand, found the drying rack folded behind the bathroom door and set it up in the bath for the wet clothes. He was sweeping the kitchen floor. Thank you, Dad, I said, you didn’t need to do that. Tea? Wine? I opened the fridge; we did have eggs, and butter. Sugar, cocoa powder, self-raising flour. I had not baked since before— I’ll get the cake in the oven, I said, and then iron Rose’s clothes for tomorrow while it bakes. Do you think I can iron tights? They won’t dry by morning otherwise.
Adam, he said, Adam, I need to talk to you. About your mother.
I know, I said, you don’t need to tell me. I think I know.
the strange singing of the seals
Once upon a time, on a peninsula off a peninsula at the far edge of England, there was a beautiful young woman, and she lived in a big, old house, so close to the sea that on a stormy night she could hear the waves on the shore while she slept. A group of people lived in that house, and among them were the woman’s husband, who had come from across the sea and loved her very much, and their small son. The woman made many of her son’s clothes by hand, and almost every day she took him down to the beach to look for treasures, bottle-glass and driftwood worn into pebbles, bits of china from long-ago shipwrecks, because once this coast had been famous for its wrecks, and for the men said to appear with lights on the clifftop in bad weather, luring ships and men to their deaths. The woman liked shells, especially slightly broken ones with the Fibonacci spirals inside: look, she said, they’re more beautiful broken than whole. In summer, they took nets and a bucket to the rock pools, and the boy learnt to recognise all the small creatures of the tidal zone. The woman loved to swim, too, and was always the first one to enter the water in the spring and the last to stop swimming in the autumn, and even then she made it a tradition for most of the people at Bryher Farm to swim at l
east a few strokes every Boxing Day. There is a sequence of photos of her, from the days when photos were often blurry and unfocused, rising from the waves with a cold grey sky behind her and, one year, a dusting of snow on the headland to the west. She was slim and curvy, a 1950s shape, and she wore a businesslike black swimsuit and bundled long hair on top of her head. There aren’t many other photos, because the people living there weren’t much interested in documenting their daily lives, but her husband took a few on the day the boy was born in their bedroom overlooking the sea, the white walls glowing in the light of the long summer afternoon. Her hair was shorter then, her face bowed over the new person whose head was still bloodied but whose eyes are wide and already steady on his mother’s face.
She died, as the beautiful young wives in stories are wont to do. One summer morning, when white light glittered so bright on the sea that you couldn’t look at it, she left her gardening tools lying beside the tomato plants in the vegetable plot, went up to her bedroom to put on her swimsuit, put her shoes back on and threw a pink towel over her shoulder. She put her head round the kitchen door on the way out, telling Ian, who was making a big salad for lunch, that she’d be back in time to eat it and remember the olives in the fridge. She walked down the track towards the beach, pausing to talk to Mr Trelawney when he stopped the tractor to say hello, lovely weather at last, getting the hay in while we can, could do with a good year after the last two, oh, and the missus said to tell you she saw a fox in the yard the other morning, you’ll want to keep an eye on those hens with the dawn so early. The tide was high, though going out, and she left the towel spread out on one of the big granite lumps at the top of the beach, so it would be warm when she came back to it. More evidence, the coroner observed, that she had every intention of returning.
She did not return.
The boy was still at the village school then, being not quite ten, and he and his friends heard the helicopter come and go and then come back again. Visitors, probably, grockles, the sort of people who go to sleep on an inflatable mattress on the beach at low tide and wake up to find themselves half a mile out and caught in a current, or who start exploring the caves and don’t notice the turn of the water. Probably. A few of those children had dads who still tended the lobster pots in small boats. The helicopter wasn’t going away, but the boy didn’t think of his own parents. The classroom faced away from the sea, across the playing field and towards the road out of the village. Good visibility, the children thought, not much wind, but several of them knew well enough that the sea is dangerous however pretty the day.
There was a police car in the drive when he and James and Petroc turned up it. None of them thought about the helicopter, which had retreated somewhere up the coast but was still audible, almost unnoticed, like the sound of a distant woodman in an alpine forest. Cor, said James, do you think they’ll let us see inside it? They ran up the drive, past the hedges now covered in fuchsia, the chamomile smell of cow parsley too sweet in their heads. The driver’s window of the police car was open and they peered in, wondering which button made the lights and sirens go. The radio chattered, nothing that made any sense. Then the boy’s dad, the beautiful young woman’s husband, came around the house. You could see from the angle of his neck, from the way he breathed in and out, that something was wrong. Then the boy remembered the helicopter. Adam, his father said, Adam, I need to tell you something. Come.
Two days passed before walkers on the coast path reported a body in the water, floating in a small inlet near where the boy and his mother had once stopped to watch a pod of whales passing out into the Atlantic. In those two days, the adults learnt the difference between knowing that someone must be dead and knowing that someone is dead. The boy, who was almost old enough to know better but probably just young enough to pretend otherwise, remembered the selkie stories his mother read to him, folk tales in which men living on the edge of the sea fall in love with strange women who come out of the waves at night. The women slip away from their sleeping fishermen before dawn, until one night a man finds his love’s smooth pelt on the floor and locks it away so she can’t return to the sea. Then a seal-husband and two seal-children rise from the water, calling and crying for their lost wife and mother, but without her pelt she cannot return. After some months, she seems to settle into life in a house, and eventually bears human children. But still, when the man of the house is belated on the road one night, she finds her true skin and goes straight back to her first family, bound to spend the rest of her days mourning one set of children or the other. The boy did not quite tell himself that his mother was, after all, a selkie, that she had read him these tales and delighted in the tidal zone and especially in the strange singing of the seals over on the north coast because she was never at home on the land. He was nearly ten, and he knew that no-one is too young for the truth when the truth comes to your house. But he remembered the stories. Since he did not have to go to school, he sat on the broad windowsill of the half-landing, overlooking the drive so he could see as soon as police cars turned up it, and held the selkie book open on his lap. He looked especially at the last picture of the selkie-mother, after her return to the sea, creeping back to the cots of her land-bound children to watch them while they slept and to cry.
No-one had hurt her. The marks on her body came from the waves and the rocks, afterwards. The pathologist thought she hadn’t drowned. There was no alcohol in her blood, nor any kind of drug. Not much stomach contents, but she was known to have eaten a bowl of the same porridge as her son and the two other children at half-past seven that morning. She was an excellent swimmer, had won races and represented her school and then her university, and was not in the habit of swimming far out. Death by misadventure. An accident of some kind, of the kind that will happen when land-dwelling mammals enter the water, and perhaps, I see now, the accident was in her own body, in, for example, the betrayal of her blood.
history with ethics
Is it genetic, I’d asked Dr Chalcott, do we need to worry about Rose too? Probably not, he’d said, not if she has no allergies, it seems to be at least as much environmental as genetic. But she does, I’d said, she is allergic to certain sunscreens, or at least she develops a rash if they are applied to her skin. And my daughers, after all, share an environment as well as genes. And Miriam had no allergies, not until suddenly she did, and if we don’t know what caused her anaphylaxis, how can we know that it wouldn’t have the same effect on Rose? We can’t, he said, not for sure, there are only probabilities. I’m sorry, Adam, but we can’t always give answers, make sure she carries her pen and Miriam will be as safe as she can be. If Rose has no symptoms, there is no reason to expect any trouble. But there was no reason, I did not say, to expect trouble for Miriam either. Reason is not, under these circumstances, reassuring. What about my mother, I said, you’re not telling me that’s a coincidence? He met my eyes; he is, I believe, a good man and a good doctor, one who has time to tell the truth. I’m afraid I’m not telling you anything, he said, I’m afraid we don’t always know as much as we would like, as much as we one day will. I’m sorry, uncertainty is hard, but sometimes that’s how it is.
And he could not tell me, of course, how safe Miriam could be. I could log into the university library and read the medical journals, but they couldn’t tell me either. Very few people go into cardiac arrest as a result of idiopathic or exercise-induced anaphylaxis, so few that there’s no meaningful data about their families. Bad luck. Medical science wasn’t giving me a way forward and I went back to history.
Because the cables had melted and there was no electricity, the All Clear couldn’t sound. Most people stayed underground well past dawn, waiting for someone to tell them it was safe to come out.
The city had gone. There were no landmarks. There were no streets. There were flames and craters, littered with unexploded ordnance. There were some body parts and pieces of clothing among the rubble.
I stopped. I don’t know how to do this so that it soun
ds new. It looked, I wanted to write, like Gaza in 2014. It looked like Damascus in 2016. It looked, for the matter of that, like Dresden in 1945. It looked like a city full of people that had been bombed from the air for several hours. We know how it looked. It smelt of smoke. Where there had been tobacconists, the smoke smelt reassuringly familiar. (I remembered the sweet smell of my father’s pipe-smoke drifting in from the garden on summer evenings.) Where there had been butchers, it smelt, to those people in that place, appetising. It was pretty quiet. No traffic, because there were no roads. Near the food warehouse, you could hear the tins popping as they burned.
Most people went to look for their houses. Many people found that they had no houses. Many people found that they had missing walls, blown-out windows, half a roof. Some people found that their friends and extended families had already gathered in the ashes to mourn them. Being English, many people would recall with particular distress the number of singed cats pacing the sites of destroyed houses.
It is an old problem that it’s hard to care about ‘many people’ and ‘most people’. The stories in the hospital visitors’ book of the slow sickness and loss of individual children, of Jack and Kayla and Milly, are more upsetting than the news of another bomb at another market far away. It is a newer problem that we incline to treat the historical past as a mood board. I didn’t want to tell endearing little stories about Blighty in the Blitz. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm. I’ve heard lectures on Ethics for Historians, which are sermons on amorality for historians. It is unprofessional to judge. Historians who make moral judgements are recreating the past as a sequence of fairy tales, not practising an academic discipline. Noble princes, wicked queens, young men brave in a lost cause: nursery tales, imperial self-justification. Interesting, the equation of ethics with fiction, the rejection of both as fairy tales. Fiction is history with ethics: discuss.