The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘Sorry. I don’t have a babysitter.’

  There was a long pause, then a noise like a door being creaked open.

  ‘Oh, just bring him with you,’ she said finally, in a ‘what the hell’ kind of voice. ‘Put him to bed upstairs, and stay the night. Then you can have a glass of wine and not bother about driving.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Tell me what ingredients you need and I’ll pick them up on the way.’

  *

  ‘Right, toots,’ said Hattie, ushering us into the hall and taking hold of Pip’s hand. ‘Want to see where you and your mummy are sleeping? Right at the top of the house?’

  He tilted his head back, his throat milky against the blue ribbed neckline of his jumper.

  She led him carefully up the stairs, and I followed behind with our overnight bags. On the first-floor landing we passed the double doors into the cavernous drawing room where the grand piano stood, its black bulk reflecting off the polished wooden floor, and then, towards the back of the house, the master bedroom suite where Renee had slept away so much of Hattie’s childhood. Maybe, if we were to open the door, we’d find her sleeping there still, black hair stark against the white pillowcase.

  On the second floor – Pip’s gaze kept drifting down the stairwell, as though in terrified awe of the distance he’d climbed – they stopped at the first door on the left, dark mahogany and tight shut.

  No. For God’s sake not in there.

  ‘Hattie, I think it might be better if—’

  But now she was leading him past it, on to the next door, the room adjacent to her old bedroom. She gestured inside. Double bed, bedside table, lamp. Otherwise empty. Fine.

  Hattie kept up a monologue about Farrow & Ball paint colours, and the difficulty in sourcing Victorian baths, all the time she was making dinner. She didn’t pause for breath until we were halfway through our pasta, or rather, I was halfway through mine, as she’d barely taken a mouthful.

  ‘But look at me prattling on! I want to hear all about you!’ She tilted her head winningly to one side.

  In truth I’d barely been listening. The process of feeding Pip, bathing him in the high-ceilinged, echoing bathroom, and settling him in a strange bed had left me feeling strung out and distracted. Sitting at the table now, I was acutely aware of the black square of window behind me, and preoccupied with the question of whether Hattie was going to close the blind or not. Or whether I should move round the table so I’d have my back to the solid wood sideboard, but on what pretext?

  Stop this right now. Say what you’ve come to say.

  ‘Hattie, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  She picked up the wine bottle – in fact, grabbed it – and reached across to refill my glass. ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Well. Oh God, this is a bit embarrassing. A few months ago I went to this art workshop. Kind of by mistake.’

  ‘Mmm?’ She twirled her fork in the spaghetti, then lowered her face towards the bowl to shovel it into her mouth. She ate in a way that was completely at odds with her elegant persona and it was achingly comforting.

  ‘And in the first session, this odd thing happened.’

  ‘Oh crikey. Don’t tell me you’re in love with the art teacher!’

  ‘Er, not exactly. But he got me to try writing with my left hand.’

  ‘Oh no, not some awful inner-child thing, was it?’

  ‘I think that was the intention, yes. But it wasn’t how it worked out.’ I stared down at my pasta, the red twisted clumps on my plate, and felt suddenly sick. ‘No, because, you see, it was another person who came through. I drew a picture of her, and then she started speaking. She said I had to listen to her. And she called herself Hattie.’

  I looked up at her then. Her eyes were fixed on me, her fork suspended halfway to her mouth.

  ‘Oh come on, Janey.’ Her tone was warm, rich, affectionate, laced with a smile that hadn’t quite made it to her eyes.

  ‘And I was just wondering whether it was actually you. Whether you did want to, you know, tell me something.’ My voice trailed off to a mutter.

  She looked charmingly bemused.

  ‘Janey, no. No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I asked who was there, and the writing said, “Hattie. Hattie. Hattie”.’

  ‘Oh how delicious! Like Mr Rochester crying out, “Jane! Jane! Jaaa-aaane—” ’

  She flung out a theatrical arm and crumpled over the table, a tendril of expensively tinted hair landing in her spaghetti.

  ‘You sound like a dying sheep.’

  ‘Ja-aa-aa-neyyyyy . . . Ha-att-ie-ee . . .’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could have been channelling a sheep of the same name.’ I wiped my mouth with a piece of kitchen towel. ‘I’ll put that to Steve the next time I see him. Right, I think I’ll just go and check on Pip.’

  I made my way up the basement stairs, and up the staircase to the second floor. Viewed through the banister, the chessboard tiles seemed to warp and bend. I’d need to lay off the wine and drink some water.

  On the way, I paused outside the door of the room next to Pip’s.

  Don’t. What good would it do?

  I grasped the round handle and twisted it to the side. Then the other way. It was locked. The house swayed under my feet. Dropping to my knees, I held my head in my hands until it passed. Alcohol. Just alcohol.

  In Pip’s room, the bedside lamp was still on as I’d left it, an ugly thing with a tassled, pollen-yellow shade. Pip was lying flat on his back in the middle of the double bed, arms splayed, mouth open, cheeks flushed. Too warm, maybe. I pulled the duvet down to his waist.

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said to Hattie when I got back downstairs. She was eating salad leaves out of the plastic bag they’d come in.

  ‘Is he a good sleeper? Or is he an utter nightmare?’ she added ghoulishly.

  ‘He’s not too bad these days. Sometimes he wants to come into bed with me, but I don’t mind that.’

  ‘What about when he was a baby?’

  I pictured Pip in his first soft blue babygrow, curled like a comma against my chest. After getting home from hospital, we’d retreated to my bed for a week or so, to feed and sleep and cry and stare at each other. I got up from time to time to make soup or toast, one-handed, as he slept against my shoulder. Or to answer the door, dishevelled and blinking, to the midwife.

  ‘He was—’

  On the table, the baby monitor interrupted with a loud burst of static. Hattie frowned at it, and gave it a shake.

  ‘Oh, the battery must be going,’ she said.

  Should I go up?

  Hattie put her hand over mine. ‘Leave it. We know he’s fine, you were just up there. It’s just —’

  From the monitor came a sound, a sob tailing off into a desperate little whimper.

  My baby . . .

  The noise came again, barely audible this time. But something made me take the stairs two at a time.

  Pip hadn’t moved – he was lying spread-eagled in the same position.

  I lay down beside him, tuning into the rhythm of his breathing, only just perceptible as a slight movement of his pyjama collar against his neck. Was he dreaming? I watched his closed eyelids, tracing the faint pattern of pearly blue under the skin, where the veins branched up and across towards his temples. I leant in close to inhale his salty, sleepy smell. He didn’t stir.

  Then came the thump of someone coming up the stairs. Someone running.

  Hattie swung open the door, out of breath.

  ‘What is it?’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Shhh,’ I whispered, getting up and ushering her out into the hallway. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Why?’

  ‘I heard you through the monitor. There was this thumping. I couldn’t work out what you were doing. I thought you were trying to move the bed around or something. And then there was crying. Really horrible crying.’

  ‘Well, Pip only cried out a couple of times. He was fine by the time I’d got upstairs.’

&n
bsp; ‘It wasn’t Pip.’

  I grabbed the banister.

  She stared at me, eyes swimming with panicky tears. ‘It sounded like you.’

  *

  ‘Could the thumping have been me running up the stairs?’ I said, once we were down in the kitchen again.

  Hattie handed me a steaming mug of tea and sat down, hooking the arches of her neat little feet over the strut of the chair.

  ‘No. I heard you going upstairs, and the sound of Pip’s door opening and closing. Which was when you went into the room. Presumably. Then it was quiet for a while before the thumping started.’

  ‘Maybe it picked up the wrong frequency. Maybe it’s coming from next door. Maybe Lady Smythe is babysitting her grandchildren tonight.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  The monitor burst into staticky life again.

  ‘What is that?’ said Hattie.

  I strained to hear. Were there deeper, darker shapes – words? – flickering behind the white noise?

  ‘My God. Is that . . . someone talking?’

  ‘No, Hattie. No. Your mind’s running away with you.’

  But I scraped my chair back and went upstairs again. Just to check.

  Once again, Pip was fast asleep and the house was silent, other than the static hiss and spit from the kitchen.

  Hattie was hugging herself when I came back down, her knees drawn up in front of her.

  ‘It’s going doolally,’ she said, twirling a strand of her hair round her finger and sucking the end of it, as she used to do in lessons. I’d always used to poke her arm, trying to pull her gaze away from the window and the blue Pentland Hills in the far distance. And on the back page of my jotter I’d write—

  ‘Hairballs! Yeah, I know. There were words coming through, by the way. When you were upstairs. I couldn’t hear most of them but—’

  ‘There were no words, Hattie. You’re imagining it.’

  ‘I definitely heard something.’ Her eyes drifted back to the hissing monitor.

  I sighed. ‘Okay, what did you hear?’

  ‘Danger Mouse.’

  She closed her eyes and laughed silently, harder and harder until she was gasping for breath.

  I smiled a tight little smile, wishing I could laugh with her.

  The static noise stopped abruptly. The green light – the one that showed the monitor was working – had gone out.

  ‘It’s dead,’ said Hattie, picking up the monitor and giving it a shake. She opened up the back of it, took out the batteries and turned them over to examine them, then slammed them onto the table with an irritated shake of the head, as though the evening’s disturbances were all attributable to the battery manufacturer.

  And with that she flicked back to her sophisticated self. How could I reach through it and bring her back? What would the twelve-year-old Janey have done? What would she have said?

  ‘Defective,’ I said in the deepest voice I could muster, with a correspondingly deep frown.

  ‘Oh Janey,’ she drawled. ‘You’re such a hoot.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Suddenly, I didn’t want to stay up with her, drinking wine and pretending into the long dark night. I just wanted to lie next to Pip and breathe him in. ‘Better get to bed, then.’

  ‘Indeed.’ It was only half past nine.

  But as I followed her up the stairs, something about her – about the way her shoulders seemed to droop when she’d forgotten anyone was looking – made my heart twist in my ribs.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Pig of a headache,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, Ernie gave me some of his uber-painkillers last week. So I’ll be dead to the world tonight, once I’ve taken a couple of those. If old Danger Mouse puts in another appearance I’ll snore right through it. Sorry!’

  28

  Janey

  Steve had just popped round, he said, because he was in the area. He hovered in the hallway, swinging a slim Waitrose bag.

  ‘Stay,’ I urged. ‘I can put your shopping in the fridge, if you like?’

  ‘Cool,’ he said, handing the bag to me. There was a plastic pack of Swiss cheese in there, a grapefruit and a small jar of capers.

  Now he sat against the living room wall, a bottle of Murray’s Amstel Light on the carpet within reach of a languid hand.

  I perched on the edge of the sofa, jingling a soft Iggle Piggle ball that Pip had been flinging around the room earlier in the day. I hadn’t had the heart to tidy his toys away.

  ‘Pip’s gone to stay the night with Murray and Gretel,’ I said, in a tone I might have used to discuss imminent root canal treatment, or the melting of the polar ice caps.

  ‘Oh, the dreaded custody issue.’

  ‘What dreaded custody issue?’

  ‘Well, it was bound to come up sooner or later, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No. Murray and Gretel just want more time with Pip, and I’m being very reasonable about it, so that everyone can stay calm and friendly. There won’t be any need for any drama.’

  I’d decided there was nothing to be gained from digging my heels in and antagonising Gretel. And everything to be lost, potentially, if she started throwing child-custody lawyers at the case. There were sure to be several at her beck and call, within the legal dynasty that was her family. So I’d agreed to Pip’s visit. I’d even bought housewarming presents: a Jo Malone scented candle for Gretel, and a shiny nutmeg grater, chosen by Pip for his father. He’d also insisted, going round Sainsbury’s, that we buy a jar of bone-shaped dog biscuits with a red ribbon round the lid for Trixie. We’d wrapped the gifts carefully and he’d put them at the bottom of his overnight bag, hiding them under his pyjamas, ‘for be surpwise, Mummy’.

  ‘Yeah, that sounds sensible,’ said Steve. ‘Keep everyone onside.’

  ‘What about you? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Oh, just work stuff.’

  ‘But, what do you do in your spare time?’

  ‘Dunno. Just madly busy with work, mostly. Nobody showed for my last class today, though, so I went up to town. I’m looking for a really good thick doormat for the front door.’

  ‘Oh? Do you live in a muddy area?’

  ‘No.’ He took a long drink of his Amstel Light, his gulps sounding loudly in the quiet of the room.

  I sensed that I’d crossed an invisible line again. You probably weren’t supposed to ask art tutors where they lived.

  ‘It’s a flat down near the Shore. It’s near Leith.’

  ‘So guess what. I found Hattie Marlowe.’

  ‘You found Hattie?’ His face lit up. ‘Hooray! That’s big news! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  I felt wrongfooted. Should I have phoned him, or texted him? It was natural, after all, that he’d be interested, after his involvement in the non-dominant-hand drama. But I wasn’t sure if we counted as friends, the type who texted each other over such things. I should have told him, though – maybe his friend who knew about missing persons was still scouring the country looking for her.

  Or maybe I hadn’t told him I’d found Hattie because . . . well, I didn’t really feel as though I had.

  ‘Was everything okay with her?’ he asked. ‘Did you tell her you’ve been worried? Did you tell her about the non-dominant-hand exercise?’

  ‘Yeah, she thought that was very funny. It doesn’t sound as though she was trying to send me telepathic messages.’

  Steve’s forehead creased into a concerned frown.

  ‘In some ways I wish I’d never found her at all. She’s not at all like she was at school.’

  He opened his mouth to speak, but then sighed, as if he didn’t even know where to start.

  ‘Do you think our personalities stay the same?’ I blurted out. ‘The same as when we were children? Or do we change into different people?’

  He blinked slowly, and his expression seemed to say ‘not again’ as though people had been trailing in and out of his workshop all day, all asking this same tedious question.

  ‘Hey,’ I said lightly. ‘You
’ll have to know about this stuff when you’re an art therapist, surely?’ I threw the Iggle Piggle ball up, but fluffed the catch. It tinkled onto the floor, only just missing the glass of red wine at my feet.

  ‘We could debate it forever. What do you mean by “personality” anyway?’

  ‘Well, who we are.’

  He sighed again, and downed the rest of his drink.

  ‘We’re a product of our environment. What people think of as a personality is just a pattern of learned responses. So, yeah. People change all the time. You have an idea of “Hattie” in your head that you’ve consolidated over the years, but what’s that based on? A mish-mash of memories from decades ago. All subjective. And selective, too, though you probably don’t realise it. If you asked ten people what her defining characteristics were, they’d all say slightly different things.’

  His analysis tended to back up what I’d felt, after meeting her again: that my memories must have played tricks on me. But something in me kicked against this notion.

  ‘Which ten people, though? Which ten people would have known Hattie as well as me? She was my friend. I loved her.’

  ‘Which is why you can’t be objective. Out of the ten people, your account would be the least reliable.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ I said. ‘And so like a man.’

  If Steve found this remark cutting, he gave no indication of it.

  ‘Think about it,’ I went on. ‘What would any of us ever be, if you only asked the people who didn’t love us?’

  ‘Well you tell me, then,’ he said. ‘You tell me what she’s like. Not what you remember about her, but what she’s actually like now.’

  ‘Okay. She’s got this incredible flat, all dark wood and chrome. It has a view right over to the Pentland Hills. And she’s very interested in Botox and glycolic face peels.’

  Even as I said it, I was aware how ridiculous it sounded. I seemed to hear a little giggle: the old Hattie mocking her well-groomed successor.

  ‘It’s tough to accept when people change.’ His voice was softer now. ‘What is it that you wanted to happen, though? To pick up where you left off? Carry on like you’re twelve again?’