The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  Dinner: dressed fish.

  Wednesday, November 22nd

  I heard the whoosh again this morning. Only this time, it was between the first floor and the ground. Janey asked me what was wrong, during cross-country. She grabbed my arm and pulled me to a halt behind the holly hedge.

  ‘It’s safe to tell me things,’ she said. ‘It’s just like telling yourself.’

  And when I did, she said she thought maybe I had a whooshy ear. And then I remembered that I did go swimming at Glenogle on Saturday, so maybe there is water stuck in it. That must be it.

  Too tired for dinner. Dizzy.

  17

  Janey

  I took the pen in my left hand: a nice, normal black Biro. And we had mugs of tea, and a plate of syrupy homemade flapjacks. The kitchen was quiet, apart from the swish of the dishwasher, and lit softly by just the cabinet lights, gleaming off the worktops.

  Steve sat watching me, his arms crossed and his chair pushed out from the table. His jacket was slung over the back of the chair, as though he might need to depart at a moment’s notice. And he’d accepted his tea only under duress, as if he could see straight through my cosy scene-setting and didn’t want any part in it.

  I met his eye and was struck with a sudden urge to snap the main lights on. What if he thought I was trying to lure him into bed, with my rose-sprigged mugs and Nigella flapjacks?

  Ridiculous.

  ‘Okay, so what do I do? I can’t remember what to do.’

  ‘Don’t think about it. Just let your hand do whatever it feels like.’

  I drew a little stick figure. So far, so predictable.

  With a box round it.

  And another box, harder and blacker.

  And another.

  My hand ached. I pulled the pen off the paper. ‘Are you Hattie?’ I asked.

  Another box.

  ‘Keep talking,’ said Steve softly.

  Another box.

  ‘Where are you?’ There didn’t seem to be enough air in the room. Each word came out tighter and thinner than the last. ‘Where did you go?’

  My hand stopped. There seemed to be no answer to that. No answer in this whole wretched world.

  I thought of the pictures in my ‘Hattie’ folder, spilling over the bed after that first art class. Face after face.

  ‘Are you . . . okay, wherever you are?’

  The hand shifted and drew a sharp upwards spike, with a scribble at the top.

  I shot a glance at Steve. ‘What do you think that is?’

  He was staring intently at the paper, half of his face in shadow. After a moment, he shook his head. I looked at the paper again.

  ‘A tree?’ I said. ‘You’ve drawn a tree. Is it?’

  The pen started to write.

  THE TREES OF GLEN EDDLE

  ‘No, no,’ I said, turning to Steve and shaking my head. ‘This can’t be real.’

  A lurch of dizziness. I closed my eyes.

  ‘What does it mean, “The Trees of Glen Eddle”?’

  ‘It’s a piece of music.’

  Neither of us moved. The air seemed to crackle and whine. I thought of Grandpa, with his portable radio, turning the dial to find the right frequency as he carried it out to his vegetable garden.

  But this wasn’t Grandpa. This feeling was little-girl-shaped, and standing so close I could feel her breath on my neck.

  ‘I wrote it, The Trees of Glen Eddle, I mean. My music teacher, Miss For—’

  ‘Tell Hattie,’ said Steve.

  The pen flew out of my hand and skittered against the floor tiles.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You know you can stop any time you want to.’

  ‘Yes.’ The atmosphere in the room had changed now. I forced a laugh. ‘I think that’s quite enough from you for one night, Miss Hattie.’

  He sat for a few moments, watching me. ‘Finished?’ he said. ‘You’re sure?’

  And then: ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’

  Don’t ask me. Just stay.

  ‘Thanks for the tea.’ He stood up, reaching for his jacket, which emitted a breath of stale, leathery air as he pulled it on. Would it feel cold, I wondered, against the cotton warmth of his shirt. I wanted to slide my hands around his waist, feel the muscles of his back, the nubbly bones of his spine under my fingers.

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Yep, I’d better head. Early start. I’m bushed.’

  I felt small, a nuisance, for dragging him out on a rainy Thursday night, forcing him to watch as I drew stick figures and black boxes.

  But when we reached the front door, he handed me a business card with a number written across it. ‘You can call me. Any time.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  He eyed me: detached, evaluating. ‘You look done in. Will you be okay? I could get hold of something to help you sleep, if you like.’

  I shuddered. The thought of being stuck inside a chemically induced sleep wasn’t appealing.

  ‘No, no. Thanks. I’ve got Christiansen.’

  ‘Aha! I quite like that.’

  It was a subtitled Danish series about an educational psychologist, the latest big thing, just going into its fourth series on BBC 4.

  ‘I’ve only got the first series, so I’m watching them over and over again. But when I close my eyes it doesn’t really matter. I usually just drift off to sleep. I’m hoping I might become fluent in Danish.’

  He smiled politely.

  ‘And maybe even be able to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome and stuff like that.’

  Don’t go.

  Because the dream would be waiting for me, in the still of the night when the Christiansen DVD had finished and those soothing, confusing voices had given way to the stubborn silence of the flat.

  How I wished I could ask him to lie down beside me. Stay with me until I fell asleep.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  Maybe he could stay all night and I could just lie there, breathing in and out, still and safe. Warm and calm. Next to someone who’d known Hattie, even if only for a moment, as a scribble on a sheet of paper.

  ‘Nothing. See you sometime.’

  His hand rose and hovered by my arm, and I braced myself for his touch. But he pulled it back, shuffled in his pocket for his car keys, and left.

  18

  Hattie’s Diary

  Thursday, November 30th

  Since last week, the whooshing has been happening every time I go down the stairs. I’m ready for it now, though, and have been practising turning my head just as I hear it, to see if there is anything behind me. There isn’t. Not really. Except today I saw a fluttery streak of dark. Just for a millisecond. It might be my eyes are going funny. I told Janey about it in biology. We were taking turns to look at a water flea – Daphnia – down the microscope.

  ‘Such a beautiful name,’ she said as she peered down the microscope, her left eye all screwed up. ‘For such a disgusting thing. It’s totally still but if you look carefully, its heart’s beating away really fast. It’s got a little secret life that none of us know about. I wonder if it’s thinking.’

  ‘I saw a sort of dark thing, falling down the middle of the stairs.’

  Janey lifted her face and looked at me. Perplexed. That’s what she was. Not disbelieving, but perplexed.

  It’s funny, because to begin with she was really into all this stuff, the strange goings-on and everything. It was she who suggested Miss Fortune could be a witch. But now she looks perplexed any time I mention something weird.

  I wanted to tell her about the other thing. The music I heard last night – a waltz or something – ringing through the house at three o’clock in the morning. It started off cheerful and then went off into a minor key, all sad. I went out into the hall to check the piano and the noise stopped dead. But I could still hear it ringing around, echoing off the walls and down the stairwell. Echoing round my own head. Even now.

  ‘Do you think I’m going mad
?’ I asked her.

  She reached her hand across the desk and touched her pinkie against mine. Mrs White was looking out like a hawk, so we had to pretend to be discussing Daphnia. But she was trying to let me know she was there.

  I was about to tell her about the waltz, and even about TL, because it’s like being sick, sometimes it’s better to get it out. But then something dreadful happened. Janey’s face disappeared. I could see the biology lab, and Mrs White at the front, and hear everything that was going on around me. But when I looked at Janey, her face was just a circle of nothingness. Not even grey, or white, or black, just kind of background coloured.

  I looked over to the window. Everything to the left of it – Fiona and Rebecca – dissolved into nothingness.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I could hear her voice, though I couldn’t see her.

  ‘Janey. Don’t panic, but I’ve gone blind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t tell Mrs White.’

  ‘Okay, but Hattie . . .’

  ‘Have you got that mirror? Your gold compact?’

  She did, of course; she keeps it in her schoolbag, even though it’s against the rules.

  I looked in it, and it confirmed my fears. My face had disappeared.

  So I just sat quite still for the rest of the lesson, pretending to write in my folder. Janey pretended to examine the tadpoles, too, but she kept whispering ‘are you okay?’ and she wasn’t really concentrating.

  When the bell went, she took my arm and led me out of the classroom.

  ‘You two are like a couple of old ladies,’ said Mrs White. ‘A couple of old dears. Girls, I want your diagrams finished for next time, please, and six characteristics of Daphnia.’

  Janey wanted to take me to the nurse, but I wouldn’t go, so she took me to the fire escape and just sat with her arms around me. When I closed my eyes, I saw a bright zig-zaggy thing crawling across the blackness inside my eyes. I leaned against her because I felt too awful to do anything else, and fell asleep.

  I woke up when the bell rang for the end of break, and I could see again.

  ‘It might be stress,’ said Janey. ‘Or maybe it’s hormones. Maybe you’re going to start your periods!’

  I moaned in horror.

  She laid her cheek against my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. I still have a free sanitary towel in my schoolbag from that talk last year. It’s a bit fluffy but it’s yours if you want it. If it’s not that, maybe you should go and see the doctor.’

  ‘I can’t go without telling Mum.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. Even though Janey kind of worships my mum, she knew it would be impossible to tell her about the whooshing and everything.

  But suddenly my head started hurting horribly like someone was stabbing me behind my eye, and Janey pretty much dragged me to the school nurse. She offered to pretend to be ill, too, so she could stay with me, but I said no. It was English next, and she likes English.

  Mrs Potts put her cool, plump hand on my forehead again, and took my pulse with the little watch thing fastened to her dress. I loved her so much, just for a second, that I asked if she would phone Miss Fortune and cancel my piano lesson. She looked at me for a moment, curious, as though she was trying to guess what I was thinking.

  ‘So will you?’

  ‘It’s not my place to do that, as you well know, young lady. But I’ll put it to your mum that you’d be best off going home to bed.’

  I was allowed to lie down in the sick room bed, then. She pulled up the covers for me, and stroked a bit of hair back from my forehead, and looked so kind that I nearly told her about the blindness.

  In the end, she wasn’t able to get Mum on the telephone, but I left at quarter to four, saying that I felt much better and that I’d go to my lesson. I didn’t go, though. For the first time, I skived. I went to one of the rooms behind the school hall, full of bits of scenery and rails with costumes from plays. It had a comforting musty smell like old warm wood and polish. I curled up in a corner, on a big red furry dragon’s tail, and closed my eyes.

  Hattie’s writing ends. The rest of the diary consists of blank pages.

  19

  Janey

  On Friday afternoon the sun appeared for the first time in weeks, so when Murray came round we took Pip for a walk round Inverleith Park. He loved visiting the duck pond, and counting the dogs that walked past with their owners: ‘One, two, ’leven, sixty-eighty . . .’

  ‘Is he still enjoying nursery?’ Murray asked, nudging a loose stone off the path with his golf umbrella.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s made friends with a little girl called Sophie.’

  He nodded. ‘It’ll do him good to spend some time with other children. He can do some more mornings, if you like. Don’t worry about the cost, I’ll cover it.’

  ‘No, I like to have him with me. I can work in the evenings.’

  ‘Look, just do whatever you think is best for him. I’ve told you, you don’t have to worry about money. It’s because of me that you lost your job, I know that, and I want to make my contribution. Do you need me to increase the direct debit?’

  ‘Thanks, but we’re fine. I’ve still got some of the, er, the settlement from the firm.’

  They’d paid well over the odds to get rid of me without a fuss, after Gretel – whose father was the head of the Frankfurt office of McKeith’s – had decided I shouldn’t work at the firm any more.

  ‘But I want to help. What the hell am I doing all this for if I can’t support my fam— my son properly. I want him to have his mum around.’

  He mumbled the last part, clearly embarrassed by the word he’d almost said. Something about the autumn light, and the shouts of children in the playground nearby, made me think of the family we might have been. If only I could take his arm and walk by his side, closing the space – the polite, careful space of eighteen inches or so – that we always left between our bodies. And if only I could confide in him, as I would if he were mine, about the Hattie questions that were looping round my mind.

  But why shouldn’t I confide in him? It wasn’t as though I’d be using up something that belonged to Gretel. It was hard to conceive of her asking his advice on anything, especially not lost, longed-for best friends.

  So I told him about my search, editing carefully, keeping it light. He listened without interruption, eyes following Pip as he meandered ahead of us.

  ‘So I’ve drawn a blank. But Steve thought he might be able to track her down.’

  ‘Who exactly is this Steve?’

  ‘Well, he’s an art tutor. I met him at his workshop thingy, “The Art of Love”.’

  Murray looked as if he’d bitten into a rotten apple.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to go to it. I was trying to go to a class about how to write a killer CV. I saw some fliers at the nursery, and I just thought it would be a good idea to think about, you know, workplace skills and all that kind of thing. For when Pip’s a bit older. And I must have put in the wrong course number because . . .’

  ‘ “The Art of Love”.’ Murray shook his head.

  ‘Really, I had no intention of going to an art class. Ha!’

  Although that wasn’t entirely true. The flier had caught my eye because of the Monet thumbnail on the front and the advert for an art appreciation class: ‘A Riot of Light: The French Impressionists’. And I’d thought why not? Why shouldn’t I do something like that? Something for myself, for once.

  But that perky little burst of enthusiasm hadn’t lasted long. Later that night, when I’d gone home and looked up the website, I’d been assailed by the list of sensible, practical courses on job skills. Shame had come over me, for what good would the French Impressionists be to a jobless single mum? I could almost see Granny, sighing and shaking her head, as Murray had just done.

  ‘So this Steve is some New Age, beansprout-eating freak, no doubt.’

  ‘No! It wasn’t like that at all. I only went to two of the sessions but they were really . . . interesting.’ I fo
ught down an image of Steve’s body, pressed against mine, the hardness at the crotch of his jeans. ‘And then we ran into each other and he came over for coffee.’

  ‘Has he met Pip? I hope bloody not.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine. Jody and Molly from Jungle Jive go to all his workshops. They swear by his techniques.’

  He muttered something that sounded like, ‘I’ll bet they fucking do.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘So he’s in with all the yummy mummies then? Hmm. Well, tell him thanks but no thanks. I’ll look into this Hattie business myself. Should be able to track her down. I’ve got a few contacts.’

  He pushed his bottom lip out slightly, just the way Hattie used to when she was feeling stubborn. Suddenly I felt like the me I’d been back then.

  ‘What, are you going to ask around at the next Law Society dinner? What is it with you men and your “contacts”?’

  ‘The firm uses PIs all the time. For litigation cases. I could get one of them on to it. Don’t worry, Janey. We’ll find her.’

  We.

  I wondered what Gretel would say if she knew that Murray was embroiling himself in a search for a wild-eyed, giggling girl-ghost when he was supposed to be playing golf with an overweight property lawyer named Brian.

  ‘You know, it might be easier if you just tell Gretel about our Friday afternoons.’

  ‘Look, Janey. After the Thomas train I explained to her about having tea at yours on a Friday. She accepted that gracefully, as I think I mentioned to you before.’

  ‘And it only took a weekend in Paris and a Tiffany bracelet.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But she wouldn’t like it if she knew I was spending every Friday afternoon with you, Janey.’ He gave a slight shudder. ‘She really wouldn’t like that at all.’