An Honest Deceit

by Guy Mankowski

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked a police officer. He was clutching a walky-talky clasped to his fluorescent yellow jacket. His glasses were peppered with rain. Before he could answer a man in a green wax coat pushed in front of me.

  ‘Detective Inspector Grayson,’ he said, his nose wrinkling at the wind.

  Behind him was hunched man with a dirty grey hair, in an Arran sweater. He kept nodding for no reason at the policeman, stroking his chin, and then turning away from him.

  ‘She’s with the paramedics at the bottom,’ Grayson said. ‘Mr. Pendleton,’ he said, waving at the man in the sweater. ‘David Walker.’

  Walker turned towards us as his name was used.

  ‘Mr. Walker rushed back to fetch Marine after she fell behind,’ the policeman said. ‘He said she was looking for a -’

  ‘No, looking for some flowers by the cliff edge. Yes, yes,’ Walker said, as if agreeing with himself. The policeman turned his back to us as someone radioed him. Walker stepped forward. I got a whiff of carbolic soap and dried sweat. ‘I ran back from the rest of the kids to get her clear,’ he said, running a hand over his stubbly chin. ‘I shouted at her to get back from the edge, but she just kept getting closer to it,’ he continued. ‘I slipped and fell -,’ he pointed at a long mark of mud on his left thigh, ‘and when I got up I am sure I saw her fall off the edge.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Juliette whispered, grabbing my arm.

  ‘And she was wearing a red coat?’ said the policeman.

  Walker nodded.

  ‘Her grandma bought her that,’ Juliette said. I put my arm around her, and held her tight.

  ‘We may have to have to isolate this area for the CSI’s,’ Grayson said, to the policeman. ‘With this weather any evidence might well get swept away, but I want to preserve it as best we can. Is that understood?’

  The policeman nodded, before leaning into a murmur from his walky-talky. ‘They have Marine,’ he said. ‘The car park - let’s go.’

  Juliette ran ahead of me to the car park.

  In all my life I had never known her to be so determined. She ran so hard, it was as if she was drawing from a source of strength that she had never revealed before. Her white party dress clung to her slim body as she ran into the rain, her heels abandoned somewhere into the mud. As I followed her I had a flashing memory of that time I lost sight of her in the sea.

  The policeman ran, a few paces behind me. I was so frantic to get to the car park that I tripped twice, once catching my foot in a muddy pothole. Juliette ran stoically ahead of me, into the wind, and she never paused once.

  In the car park the coach with Katy had gone. A blue-flashing ambulance had replaced it. As I ran the final steps to catch up with my Juliette, I saw a paramedic stand up, and open his arms to me. As I got closer I saw a small, orange carrier, with Marine strapped onto it. Her eyes were closed. Juliette started sobbing, and when a paramedic told her not to touch Marine her sobs grew louder. I knew then that hell existed, and I’ve never doubted it since.

  We crouched down next to our daughter. My hand touched a bloody scar, lined with mud, on her little forehead. As I touched her skin, I called her my darling girl. Something plummeted in my heart as I realized she was cold. She looked just like she did on Sunday mornings, when we went into her room to wake her for a day of fun. Just as still, just as silent. ‘Marine,’ I said. Something seemed to break in my ribcage, and I knew I couldn’t replace it.

  ‘Is she in a coma?’ Juliette said.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ another paramedic said. ‘We’ve lost her. We think she hit her head on the way down.’

  Juliette wailed.

  ‘She couldn’t have suffered,’ the paramedic said. ‘She couldn’t have suffered at all.’

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  MARINE’S FUNERAL took place eight days later, on a bright Autumn morning. Given the vague circumstances surrounding her death, Juliette and I had some difficult questions to answer about her post-mortem. Neither of us were able to fully process them in the way that we should have done.

  That phone call at the party had instantly split Juliette and I back into separate entities, after all the work that had gone into our relationship. Juliette’s grief carved out new space that I didn’t trespass onto. Ever since the call I had stopped being a functioning member of the world. I didn’t work, and I barely spoke, except to those few people in our lives that we have to relate to in such instances.

  The night before the funeral I slept in Christian’s room, and was awoken in the morning by a piercing bar of white light at the window. It was insane to think that I now had to bury my little Marine, and the thought rendered me immobile. I looked out of the window, onto a landscape covered with the wet papier-mâché of leaves. Soon, I knew, the wind would blow that temporary beauty away and the ugly grey swell of the world would reveal itself again. I didn’t see why I had to deal with it any more. The world hadn’t played by the rules, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t see why I had to either.

  Juliette was a ghost. Throughout the service she didn’t speak, didn’t cry, and was barely able to even look up at me. I wondered why she had decided not to invite her parents to the funeral. I knew that they were both very elderly, and I wondered if she was concerned at the thought of uprooting them from the south of France for the journey. I wondered too if perhaps she, for some reason, did not want them to see her in such distress. But somehow, the manner in which she dismissed any possibility of including them made me reject the idea.

  I remember nothing of the funeral itself: except that it was one long black swell of agony. How could I comfort Juliette, when I knew that the nightmare wouldn’t end? We had lost a force for positivity in our lives, which we would never replace. We had had so little time to enjoy her presence in our lives. Consequently, I could only watch over these surreal events, too muted to even engage in mourning.

  The funeral, though functional, was a cosmetic event. People traded useless grief commodities with one another, and intimacy dictated the market forces of their transactions. People arranged themselves in a hierarchy of sympathy so absolute, that some deemed it insensitive to even approach me. People looked at me and expected me to cry, and they looked at Juliette and wanted, despite themselves, to see signs that she had finally been unhinged by the world. We all know how life wounds us, and its scars fester and make us act towards one another in an unkind way which we cannot justify. Such is our pain, that there is a part of human nature that wants to see evidence that another person has been dealt a mortal blow. I could see, from the way that people looked at Juliette, that part of them hoped to go away and say, ‘she’s a broken woman’. I loathed any sign of that tendency.

  Does it make me a bad father, because I was barely able to speak, let alone cry on that day? Is it wrong that I was consumed with merely creating an occasion fitting for my daughter? I desperately did not want to look back and regret failing to give Marine the event she deserved. But I went through that duty so bloodlessly, that I despised my own pragmatism. I wanted Juliette and I to look back on that day with sadness and pride, and I wanted her to be a part of my effort. We failed, and I lament that.

  It was not what a funeral should be – a monument, an abstract articulation of the essence of a human’s life. It was a hollow game, an empty pact, and I could not find Marine anywhere in the incense, the curtains, and the popular lamentations. My daughter had been vivacious, enigmatic, and charismatic. She deserved poetry, music, or at least some kind of artful representation that summed up the bright daubing she left on this world. I did not have the strength to ask God to usher me through the day, but I felt him standing over me, as mute as he was when she fell.

  Everyone thinks that their daughter is special, that their children somehow have something to offer that is irreplaceable. The difference is that Marine actually did have something unique to give to the world. Our lives are, too often, mundane and repetitive. People frequently lack courage or imagination, and color th
eir existence only with the unconvincing ink of bitterness. But Marine had an essence that could have illuminated the world. She was an inspiration; you only had to look at the way she inspired Juliette to emerge from her shadows too see that. And yet we were forced to commemorate her passing with a sudden, somber day of nothing.

  I had assumed that in the wake of this disaster Juliette and I would merge into one organism, which drew nourishment from a hidden source. I’d assumed that the myriad details of our mourning would be mirrored in one another. That our one comfort would be that we would transcend any of the barriers that usually separate human beings. But what was so ludicrous, so painful, was that we did not unite. Life had taught us to smile at our peers, to endure our private miseries, and to secretly harbor our own ambitions. It had taught us to keep ourselves clean and presentable, and perhaps how to occasionally even be beautiful. It had taught us how to sometimes make money. But it had never given us the equipment by which to traverse the bounds of skin and flesh that force us to merely bump up against each another.

  In the days after the funeral Juliette and I were wordless, because there now were no words now. Our house was a tomb, in which I felt sure there could be no light. Not when a reckless universe had played so wildly with our souls. The world, with all its petty bureaucracies, bruised us as much as it wanted to. Philip and Christine came to share in the silence, and to bite their lips with us. I noticed that whenever they tried to reach a consensus of sympathy in front of Juliette they completely lacked the language. Phillip dealt in dry, heartfelt statements of fact. He’d puncture the silence by saying ‘It is a tragedy’, or ‘let me know if there is anything can do’. Christine attempted to embark on quasi-spiritual riffs. ‘Why do these things have to happen?’ she would whisper.

  Regardless, people still needed paying. People’s obsessions still had to be tended to, and the world kept turning. We occasionally gripped each other in tears, like scarecrows propped against one another in filthy rain. But mostly we stood in silence, hunched at some sink or other. I felt I could not cry, because I did not know how or why my daughter was gone.

  The distant land that I had slowly coaxed Juliette from had become her home again. I needed comfort, but we were not at that time, able to offer that to one another. So, in lieu of comfort, I began to crave answers about what had really happened on the moor.

  SIX

  ‘MUM, WHERE do fish go in the winter? They’re not in the sea any more, I’ve checked.’

  It must have been close to four in the morning when I heard those words again. An hour which, I believe, no human should ever be awake for.

  I was woken by Marine’s words. Lilting, removed, as if uttered from a very different place. I wondered if I was dreaming. Juliette’s scent on the sheets - lavender, with a hint of conditioner - told me that this was real.

  Her side of the bed was empty - just a dismissed ruffle of sheets. Sitting up, I heard a shuffle in the living room. I stumped over to it, my bare feet twitching on the cold floor, on which every grain of dust was sharply felt.

  Juliette was there, in the window. Sat in the dreadful half-light of morning. The sun, leering in through the open shaft of window, lit her face into a pale shade of ivory. She was wearing her white pajamas and clasping Snugglepuss, Marine’s favorite toy, to herself. I stood on the threshold to the room for a moment, and hardly dared to step into its glassy surface. Juliette, shrouded in that strange light, seemed to me then like some evocation of the Madonna. Sacred in her own grief.

  ‘Mummy,’ she was whispering, rocking into Snugglepuss. ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy.’

  She was meditating, now. I knew the rhythms of her speech only too well. I recognized in her voice the timbre of her daughter’s, which she was trying to replicate.

  It was only as I restrained myself from disturbing her, that I realized Marine was alive inside Juliette. That Juliette was mining inside herself, to grasp her daughter once again. It was agonizing to watch her tunnel so ruthlessly into her own flesh, for an essence that could only retreat with time. Soon, I knew, Marine would become formless and then we should shape her through some mental communion. I knew that even with Juliette’s deep love, she could never master the discipline to reach for Marine’s pure essence at will. It was gone.

  But watching her rock, I also felt envious. At least Juliette had Marine somewhere within her. She possessed her in a way that I never could.

  Every time Juliette repeated the word ‘Mummy’ she captured the questioning, intrigued lilt of her daughter’s voice in a way my voice never could. Marine, was, in that ruined morning, there. She was in the fragile texture of the morning. Not yet fully formed. She embodied Juliette’s inflections, flitting in and out, too abstract to grasp.

  I stepped forward, and for a moment Juliette was enclosed in a beam of sunlight. She looked up, and I could see lines on her face, nuances of emotion that I had never seen before. ‘Mummy,’ she repeated, looking up at me. ‘Mummy.’ She was part of a landscape I would never reach.

  Juliette was not looking at me, but past me. Yet, at the same time, she held out her hand. Somehow, in this liminal state, Juliette was trying to draw me into this ritual. So that we that we could shelter in it together.

  I looked down on her, my eyes tracing her pastel lips, grey with grief. Finally, her eyes began to focus and they narrowed upon me. ‘Where do fish go in the winter?’ she whispered, crouching inside each word. Savoring each one. ‘They’re not in the sea any more. I’ve checked, Mum. I’ve checked.’

  I stepped forward. Juliette looked up at me, hungrily. The parts of her soul that I could see looked famished. I passed my arms around her shoulders and Snugglepuss fell to the floor. Juliette grasped me harder than she had ever done before. She sobbed, searching my back for muscular strength. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, the end of the sentence lost as she began to cry. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  I held her, tight. I tried to squeeze the grief from her delicate body until my shoulders were wet with tears, and amongst the tears I heard the same word repeated. ‘Mum, mum, mum’. Juliette repeated the word again and again, there in the window, as we moved the couch. Like animals sheltering from winter, we fell into one another’s arms. We slept as if we had been awake for days, and as if we had finally remembered how to do it. We slept ravenously, as if we believed we would emerge in the morning cleansed. With Marine standing there, smiling and bare foot in our kitchen. Forced from that lunar landscape because we’d earned her through grief.

  It felt delicious, just then, to dream of Marine. I saw no reason why I could not dare to dream for her return, and to dream that doing so might be enough.

  SEVEN

  IT WAS KRAVER who pulled me into his office.

  In retrospect, I’d returned to work too quickly. But I saw no alternative. Juliette needed regularity, in order for us to crest this dark wave. I didn’t want Christian to be pulled too far into our grief, and I thought it important we maintain a façade of formality. I saw no value in staying in in the house in my dressing gown, lamenting.

  I was midway through an English class, trying to describe continuous verbs to a class of Year 10’s. Some students had heard about what had happened, and a couple had even softly offered condolences whilst leaving a class. This had made me determined to grit my teeth and continue teaching them. But during that lesson, through the window, I saw a young girl in a red jacket, and my heart almost stopped.

  She was clasping her mother’s hand at the school gate. They were looking to cross to go the school opposite: Marine’s school. I stopped mid-sentence, and waited for the girl to look sideways. Waiting, as the whole classed watched, for affirmation that this was not Marine.

  ‘Sir?’

  I looked up. The class were all staring at me. ‘Sir?’ a boy said, sotto voce. ‘You were saying?’

  It was then that the door opened. Kraver, in a red satin waistcoat, held open the door and said ‘I’d like to see Mr. Pendleton in my office, right away
if he would so please.’

  His office was larger, and emptier, than I had imagined it would be. As I followed the direction of his hand, I noticed that he had also commandeered the office next door to his, usually reserved for the deputy headmaster. A young, blonde secretary was stationed there, sat rigid.

  His wood-paneled office, lined with boxes overlooked the empty playground. Lyrca cycling shorts seemed to be drying on the radiator, and he’d installed a small fridge in one corner. I noticed that the walls were bare, the pictures of his predecessors having been torn down.

  ‘You quite ready for all this teaching malarkey?’ He asked, skirting his desk. He pulled a cigar out of his top drawer, lit it, and nodded at me as he began puffing. He sat, and offered me the seat opposite with an impatient wave. I carefully accepted the invitation.

  I looked past him, at the empty space in the playground where the girl in the red coat had been. ‘I’m trying to do what I can to help the whole family move on,’ I said.

  ‘I see, I see,’ he said, rocking into the smoke. ‘And how is that going, thus far?’

  I reprimanded myself. His eyes narrowed in a manner that somehow warned me not to be candid.

  ‘I think Juliette and I can only begin to move on once we know how our daughter died.’

  He raised his chin. ‘But you know how she died, don’t you?’ he said, motioning with the cigar. ‘She ran to the edge to look at flowers, didn’t she, and then she tripped. That’s it. End of.’

  ‘I just don’t quite feel satisfied with that explanation,’ I said, watching closely for his reaction. ‘Marine just wouldn’t do that.’

  I was surprised at the instant change in the air, the sudden squeeze in the atmosphere. Kraver’s shoulders grew in size. I wondered if an imperceptible shift had occurred in my life, just then. It felt like the start of something. I heard myself say ‘She was always so scared of getting lost, and she never had an interest in flowers. I just find it hard to believe that she would lag behind the others like that.’