If I Should Lose You

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If I Should Lose You Page 5

by Natasha Lester

Sarah doesn’t see me arrive at the café. Jack Darcy does. At least, I assume it is Jack and then he smiles at me so I know that it is.

  ‘I suppose the red hair gave it away,’ I say to him as I sit down without shaking his hand.

  As I lean across and kiss Sarah’s cheek, he says, ‘Even without that I’d have known. ‘You’re just like her.’

  And I know that he actually means what he says; he has painted my mother so he knows her bone structure, the tone of her skin, wrinkle patterns, everything, and he would see the differences straight away, if there were any.

  Sarah breaks the silence. ‘Camille, meet Jack Darcy.’

  ‘I’ve made some notes,’ I say, more to Sarah than to Jack. ‘I’ve listed all the pieces I think we should show and in what order I think they should be exhibited.’ I pass a sheet of paper to each of them. Then I hand a document to Sarah, a document I had fussed over and edited until after midnight, trying to decide what to leave in, what to take out. I was ruthless in the end, deleting paragraphs. But I felt as if I was cheating so I restored some of the text, unsure if I was exposing Alix and Dan or if I was only exposing myself. ‘And here’s a draft of the beginning of the exhibition notes for the catalogue.’

  ‘Do I get to see those too?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply.

  And Sarah, who knows a little but not too much about Alix and Dan and Jack, but who knows me well enough to sense that I need to speak to Jack alone, takes her coffee and the pile of notes over to another table, saying, ‘I’m just going to read through these while you two talk.’

  As soon as she leaves, Jack begins to speak. ‘I wasn’t sure about the whole idea at first. But when Sarah said she’d ask you to curate I thought it might work.’

  As he talks I study him, wanting to see the man my mother loved. He is not young any more, probably in his late sixties, but there is no doubting his charisma. I am reminded of George Clooney, old but ageless, greying but the better for it, eyes as clear blue as a child’s, smile that is both devilish and enticing. Debonair, I think, which is not a word I have ever used to describe anyone.

  I have been silent for too long and he knows I have been appraising, so I say, ‘You’re better looking than I thought you’d be, now.’

  The smile lingers. ‘You sound as if you’d be happier if I was an ugly old man.’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t know why.’ I am honest; my displeasure is not due to loyalty to my father, who was also a tricky combination of the cheeky but dashing artist – perhaps my discontent is due to this similarity. I shrug and respond to his earlier comment about the exhibition. ‘It’s a romantic idea. I’m sure it will be popular.’

  ‘But not with you.’

  I sip my tea and try to raise my voice so that it conveys even a hint of the excitement I had previously felt about curating the exhibition. But it won’t come, not here with him. ‘That’s not true. I like romance as much as anybody.’

  ‘But you think it’s a fiction best left to art to depict.’

  His blue eyes are studying me now, just as I studied him before. I want to turn away, to squirm, to see what he is seeing: a woman with a frown etched between her eyebrows, jaws strung together, angry at romance.

  ‘Maybe.’ I finish my tea. ‘Because in real life, romance isn’t always enough, is it?’

  And he surprises me by agreeing. ‘No, it’s not,’ he says.

  And I want to blurt out: but you’re the artist. You’re meant to defend romance and passion and the impossible. To say that it makes us better people to see the world through art, to imagine that it is not all artifice, that there is something of substance lurking within. Instead I say, ‘You weren’t enough to keep Alix alive.’

  The silence that comes after is not tense, which I thought it might be. It is just full, full of the past, the things that Jack knows and that I don’t know.

  But then he says, ‘She was scared, Camille,’ and I stare at him, perplexed. Of all the words I have heard used to describe my mother, scared is not one of them.

  Of what? is the obvious question to ask. But that is a bit like asking, What really happened? and I’m not sure that I’m ready to find out. Because there’s that whisper again, Louisa’s whisper: What will I tell Camille? and that slippery feeling that what she told me was not the truth.

  Jack takes a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘After Sarah rang me, I looked through my things to see if I had anything left, from Alix. I found this. Alix never sent it to me. Louisa found it when she was sorting out Alix’s stuff. You can use it, if you like, for the catalogue notes.’

  When I unfold the paper I can see that it is a letter. I begin to read.

  Dear Jack,

  I depend upon dead people. In my line of work, someone has to die so that someone else can live. But it was not supposed to be Dan.

  You say that you don’t know if I love you – I do, you see, but I still love Dan and you will always lose when pitted against him. The fact that you are living renders you unfixable, whereas he has the benefit of being set in the stilled moment of death, a moment at which fantasy gilds memory and he becomes whatever I want him to be: the man whose plaster face I now hold in my hands as once I held his face of flesh and blood and bone.

  Here again you cannot compete. The plaster skin defies ageing; he will not frown, he will not rage or cry or scorn. He is luminous in a way you can never be, would never wish to be, because you value the story of the deepening crease around someone’s mouth, the varying shades of pigment in a person’s skin, the particularity of the blueness of a subject’s eyes.

  If you knew I had his death mask, what would you say? Would you think of it as sculpture or as the bizarre act of a woman who cannot let go of what is gone? That is not why I keep it; that is not why I cast it.

  I love you as much as I can and I keep his face because he will need it when he comes back.

  Love,

  Alix

  ‘She made a death mask?’ is the first question, of the many, that drops from my mouth.

  ‘Apparently. I never saw it. You should ask Louisa about it.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘If you find it, you should show it in the exhibition.’

  ‘But it’s so ... private. She didn’t show it to anyone. How can I? Like this letter. It’s private too. Why didn’t she send it to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes things become more than they need to be if you keep them secret. I think if you don’t show the mask, the exhibition will seem like,’ he pauses, ‘something is missing.’

  My phone rings. It’s Addie’s consultant. I have no choice but to say goodbye to Jack and to Sarah, to step outside, to not give Jack my reply, which was, I always feel like something is missing.

  I return home long enough to go for a quick run, get changed, read to Rosie and put her to bed. I’m an automaton, but luckily Julie has taken Rosie to the swimming pool earlier in the day and she is too tired to notice. At 7.00p.m., Louisa arrives with a parcel of food, homemade pizza this time. ‘Hi love.’ She kisses my cheek and busies herself with putting the pizza in the freezer and washing the dinner dishes, waving me away when I tell her to leave them, that Paul will do them when he gets home.

  ‘He’ll be too tired and so will you. Off you go.’

  I pick up my keys, hesitate, and say, ‘I met Jack Darcy today. About the exhibition.’

  Louisa looks up from the sink and waits, knowing that there is more to come. It is this that I love about her, the quiet patience, the lack of pressure, the absolute trust that I will talk to her. And I always do, I always have.

  ‘It was awkward,’ I say. ‘We hardly talked about Alix. Well, we did. But not really.’

  ‘Sounds like the kind of first meeting you’re bound to have in that situation. See how the next one goes.’

  ‘Louisa?’

  ‘Yes love.’

  ‘You know how you used to tell me stories about Dan and Alix?’

  Louisa nods.

  ‘How did you kn
ow everything that you told me?’

  ‘When Alix went out at night with Jack, she would drop you off at my house first. She always came a little early and we’d sit out the back, watching you and Fliss on the trampoline and then she’d start to talk. Sometimes she’d talk so much she’d be late for her date. It was as if she’d forgotten where she was, like her mouth was speaking by itself without her mind putting the words there in the first place.’

  I shake my head. ‘Surgeons aren’t impulsive people.’

  ‘Alix was different after Dan died.’

  I look at the clock. I’ve started a conversation that I don’t have time to finish but I can’t help asking, ‘Did Alix make a death mask? Of Dan?’

  ‘Have you looked through those boxes I gave you years ago?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like prying. What if I find something that I don’t want to find? Once it’s found, I can’t just shut the lid on the box and pretend it’s not there.’

  ‘You don’t have any of Dan’s things. Imagine if you had none of Alix’s either.’

  ‘I have Dan’s sculptures.’

  ‘That’s not the same as having his possessions. Look in the boxes, love.’

  Another question comes tumbling out. ‘It’s funny that Alix and Dan both died in car accidents. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No funnier than Alix falling in love with two artists. Coincidences do happen.’

  ‘So you really think she loved Jack Darcy too?’

  ‘I know she did.’

  ‘You were always so fair to Jack. Didn’t it upset you, that maybe she was replacing Dan with Jack?’

  ‘So long as she was happy, it didn’t matter. Because if she was happy, then you would be too. And you were the most important thing.’

  I give her a hug, like one Rosie would give me. Then I have no more time left. ‘I’d better go. Don’t do too much work.’

  I leave, knowing that in the half hour it will take for me to get to the hospital and for Paul to come home she will have put on a load of washing, cleaned the kitchen and made my bed.

  When I get to PICU, Paul is asleep in the chair, mouth open, face revealing an exhausted sadness that is never there when his eyes are open. I wonder where it goes when he is awake, where he puts it, whether he has also had to turn away or leave rooms today so the tears stay hidden.

  Once, I would have found this a tender scene, been touched by discovering something buried deep within my husband. But now as I look at him I wonder if all mothers stop loving their husbands after their children are born, whether any of them admit to having found, in their child, something more enthralling than a love they once thought was their greatest.

  ‘How was your day?’

  Paul’s eyes snap open, he pats around wildly for his phone and begins scrolling through screens, desperate to regain the hour of lost time that he missed while sleeping. ‘Fine,’ he mumbles, then he shakes his head. ‘Fuck.’

  I raise my eyebrows at him and point at Addie.

  ‘She can’t hear me,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks for pointing that out. Miss something important while you were stuck here?’

  He chooses to ignore the sarcasm and replies to my question as if I actually care about the answer. ‘I’ve been waiting for an email all day and of course it came half an hour ago. I can’t believe I fell asleep.’

  I remember the way he looked in the chair when I came in. Shattered. Splintered into so many small pieces he might never be able to put himself back together again. ‘Maybe you’re tired,’ I say.

  It’s his turn for sarcasm. He repeats my earlier words. ‘Thanks for pointing that out. I’m going to work.’

  ‘I told Louisa you were coming home,’ I call to his departing back. ‘Ring her.’ I pick up my phone and dial home, knowing Paul will forget because he will spend the whole drive from the hospital to work on the phone to people more important than any of us.

  I drag a chair over to Addie’s bed, lay my head forward onto my folded arms, close my eyes and drift off into an episodic sleep that is always broken by ICU bustle. Then I sense the tiny movement of her eyes opening and I am immediately awake.

  ‘Hi darling.’ I smile at her, knowing that smiles are the things she needs to see. I let the fear sit at the back of my throat, hidden behind my epiglottis, where she cannot see it and where it will not make her cry, which would cause everything to unravel.

  She doesn’t look around, she doesn’t ask where she is, she just says, ‘Don’t go Mummy,’ as if the entire time she has been asleep she has known when I have been there and when I have not.

  I kiss her cheek. ‘I won’t go until you can come with me.’

  Of course I am lying; mothers lie all the time – if you don’t stop pulling your sister’s hair you won’t be allowed to come to the park, but of course you always end up taking them both to the park because when there are swings and slides and sand there is never any hair-pulling. But this is the answer she wants and so she closes her eyes again; her three year old body can do nothing but sleep when it is being attacked from within because of the randomness of her being the one child in the statistic, not the fifteen thousand healthy children. I wait a few minutes and then go to find the doctor, breaking my promise to Addie just moments after it has been made.

  ‘She’s woken up,’ I say to the doctor when I find him, in the middle of his rounds, probably on his way to see us anyway but I know, as a nurse, how to make him see Addie first because, as a mother, I do not care about anyone else.

  ‘We’ll get her prepped for the endoscopy in the morning,’ he replies. ‘Her FBC also suggests hypersplenism so we’ll do a CT to check.’

  I nod and walk back to Addie’s room, realising that we have run out of complications; she has contracted everything and the only thing to do now is suppress them for as long as it takes to find that one perfect, almost triangular, russet-coloured organ.

  SIX

  I break my promise to Addie once again the next day when she goes to have her endoscopy because she is sedated and does not know whether I am there or not and I need, after sitting with her for fourteen hours, to stretch my legs, to walk, to see life that does not require intensive care. I ask the nurse to call me as soon as Addie is out, before she wakes, because she is always scared, always howling in recovery.

  There is a small garden on the north side of the hospital where everything is miniature, the right size for children: gnarled bonsai, a fairy grotto inside a stump, a handful of primary-coloured chairs made for bottoms smaller than my own. Nobody is there and so I do laps of the path, shivering in air that is not climate-controlled.

  I imagine, as if I am in the room, an endoscope, a tube like a snake with an eye at each end slithering into my daughter’s mouth, down through her oesophagus and into her gut, sending pictures of swollen and bursting veins though to the doctor. I will the doctor to stop the bleeding, to fix this complication for now, to let her bruised body take its chance to heal.

  And it works. They do stop the bleeding. Addie is asleep and stable and worry should loosen its grip. It lets go of Paul; he smiles when the doctor gives us the news.

  But of course I have to go ahead and say, ‘The cirrhosis will never go away, the hypertension is still there and the varices can come back.’

  ‘She might get a new liver before that happens,’ Paul replies.

  I don’t know why I want him to stop smiling but I do. ‘Do you know how many paediatric liver donors there are in a year? Almost none.’

  ‘You said she can have part of an adult’s liver.’

  I could just nod at this point because what he says is possible. But not likely. ‘She’s so small. Even the left lobe from an adult liver might not work.’

  ‘Geez Camille, no one could ever accuse you of being optimistic.’ And he walks away.

  Inside my closed mouth I am shouting, But all these thoughts are in my head and I don’t know how to get them
out other than to share them with you.

  Ten years ago, I could not imagine a time when Paul would not wish to know what I was thinking.

  We met at a party given by a friend. I saw him as soon as I walked in to the room. He was so tall and his eyes were like the deepest part of the ocean, dark blue and impassable, and I thought of the guys I’d been out with before and how insipid their too-revealing eyes were compared to his. I found a wine and made sure I was always chatting, always laughing, always busy just in case he noticed me. Then we both went to get a drink at the same time and we spoke as we reached for the last bottle of wine.

  ‘I’m Camille,’ I said.

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  By this time the lights were low and people were dancing so I hooked my finger through the belt loop of his jeans and looked up at him, feeling his groin pressed to mine, our upper bodies separated by a hand space.

  ‘How do you know Sarah?’ I asked as I took a sip of the wine.

  ‘I don’t. A mate of mine is her cousin. You?’

  ‘We went to uni together.’

  ‘Any more formalities?’

  ‘I think that’s it.’

  Then we kissed by the bar, not caring about anyone who needed to get past us to find a drink.

  But I wanted more so I said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we caught a cab back to my house and soon we were naked on my bed and his hands were on my breasts and he was pushing one of my legs up against my chest so that his tongue could find its way between them and it took only a few minutes before I wanted to come so I pulled him up and rolled him onto his back and then sat astride him, moving fast, so we both came, together, almost as soon as he was inside me.

  Like my mother with my father, I moved in with Paul and we became engaged soon after we met. We were gluttonous with each other back then, not just when it came to sex, but also when it came to excavating one another’s minds until we felt we knew everything about our pasts, our memories, our dreams and our thoughts. We ignored our friends, our families, the world, because none of those things satisfied us the way our love did.

  He was not an artist, for which I was grateful. But I wanted someone with an artistic sensibility and how lucky I was, I thought, to fall in love with a journalist who crafted words and who shared my love for collecting drawings, paintings and sculpture.

 

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