The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘Harsh, Hattie. A bit harsh.’

  ‘You can go on thinking he’s a tortured creative soul if you like. But he’d better watch out if I ever run into him.’

  She huffed and I was reminded of her giving some boy from St Simon’s short shrift because he wandered off during the eightsome reel when he was supposed to be my partner. (‘It’s okay,’ I’d whispered, tugging on her sleeve. ‘He had sweaty hands anyway.’)

  ‘I keep coming up against this longing for him. I keep thinking I’ve done it, that I’ve moved on, and then suddenly I’m back there again. Back where I started.’

  ‘It might just take time to let him go.’

  ‘But this “letting him go” is like a staircase that should lead somewhere, somewhere in the open where I can breathe. But just when I think it’s opening up it winds steeper and darker and tighter.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Then maybe it’s because you’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe you should try going down the staircase.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Do you mean try and get him back? You just said he was a twat.’

  ‘What I think doesn’t matter. What you think probably doesn’t matter all that much, either. You have to feel your way, with something like this.’

  ‘I can’t pin him down. I can’t understand exactly who he is or what he’s going to do. I think he’s one thing, and then he’s something else.’

  ‘People aren’t just one thing. You can’t grasp them, and keep hold of them. They change, they’re a little bit different from one day to the next, with one person to the next. I hate to sound like Miss Fortune, but think about music. A note can change, depending on what other notes you put in front of it, underneath it, behind it. People are more like a tune, really, than a single note.’

  ‘He couldn’t say that he loved me. He couldn’t say it.’

  ‘But what about you? Where are your feelings in all this? Do you love him?’

  ‘Oh God, Hattie. I can’t help it. I’ve tried to stop, but it slams into my chest every time I hear his voice, or see his name on a text. It’s like my body, every part of me, is saying yes, even though my mind is trying to be sensible.’

  Hattie flumped onto the table and rolled her eyes. ‘Well then? It hardly takes a love expert to know what that means.’

  ‘But I don’t know if I can trust it. Things aren’t always what they seem to be. When I think about how he sat right by me while I did those drawings and didn’t say a thing, when he knew all along. All the time he knew.’

  ‘He knew what? He knew what the drawings were about, did he?’

  I looked at the table.

  ‘So what are the drawings about, Janey? Are we going to talk about this now?’

  I met her eyes, just for a second, before looking away again. Her expression was steady, and frank. Too frank. This friendship business was hard going.

  ‘Have you still got them, Janey? Have you still got the first one?’

  So I fetched it from its shelf in the box room: that first drawing I’d done with Steve, with those few lines of spiky writing underneath, listing to one side of the page as though the words were being dragged down.

  ‘Are you sure this is a skipping rope?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘It’s just that it starts in the middle of you, and joins on to her tummy.’

  ‘What? No, that’s just because my hand was jerky when I was drawing it. The line goes through my hand, see?’

  ‘It goes across your hand but it starts here.’ She pointed. ‘And don’t you see? The other figure is so small.’

  There was a long silence, in which I struggled with myself. Of course, part of me had always known. But that part didn’t know how to find words, and fought them down, even when they tried to form.

  Then she whispered, ‘What were you going to call your baby, Janey?’

  ‘Hattie,’ I said at last, when I could speak. ‘Of course I was going to call her Hattie.’

  49

  Janey

  The sun shone low in the sky that Christmas Eve afternoon, slanting through the basement window at Regent’s Crescent and onto the worn kitchen tiles.

  I’d come to talk to Hattie. Not the girl sitting next to me, but the other Hattie, that small voice who’d somehow got lost in the middle of all the noise. She’d been so many things, over the years, to different people. To Granny, she’d been an ‘abomination’. To Miss Fortune, she’d been a ruthless reminder of her own miscarried babies. To Mrs Potts and other well-meaning people, she was ‘never meant to be’.

  To me, she’d become an imagined version of everything she might have been, had she lived. I’d tried so hard to guess, with all those sad cuttings from magazines, supplements and catalogues over the years. Whenever I’d come across a picture of a baby, or a little girl, that made me think of her, I’d been overwhelmed by the need to cut it out and keep it. To keep it safe in my blue cardboard folder. Because if I simply turned the page I’d lose her all over again.

  I’d explained all this to Hattie, my dearest friend, who’d been sitting by my side at the kitchen table, listening as it all poured out. Pip was curled up in the window seat, fast asleep after the excitement of seeing Santa at Dobbies that afternoon. And now it was time.

  I took the pen in my left hand.

  ‘Are you there?’ I said.

  My hand felt warm. And this time, when it moved, the movement seemed to come from somewhere inside myself, like a river that had finally found where to flow.

  HERE

  ‘Hattie?’

  HERE

  ‘I want to know what you would have looked like, whether your hair would’ve stayed dark or grown lighter, whether your eyes were green or grey or blue.’ The words came out in a rush once I’d started. ‘I want to know what you would have felt like, sitting on my knee. Whether you’d have been sturdy, or thin and spindly like Pip. If you’d have been one of those contented children – a good sleeper – or edgy and wriggly and curious. What things you would’ve liked to eat. What games would’ve made you laugh. I’ll never know you. Not in this lifetime. Makes me yearn after another lifetime. Another chance. And it makes me feel so guilty, that this lifetime isn’t enough, when Pip’s in it.’

  I glanced over at him, curled up on the windowseat. Still fast asleep.

  ‘And you never knew me. You never even knew what I looked like. Or how much I would’ve loved you.’

  YOUR VOICE

  YOUR HEARTBEAT

  ‘I want you to stay with me.’

  THE TREES OF GLEN EDDLE

  ‘I want you to stay.’

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  LET ME GO

  No.

  I would fly apart into a million pieces if I let her go.

  I wrapped my arms around and held myself. I gathered my old selves into me. The Janey who’d hidden from love all these years, only to let Steve in and then lose him. The Janey whose nightmares and panic attacks had ended her music dreams. The Janey who’d miscarried alone in a cold marble bathroom. The Janey left shaking and bleeding by James. The twelve-year-old Janey stunned at the loss of Hattie. The bewildered eleven-year-old kept away from Grandpa’s funeral. The six-year-old who’d waited, stomach churning, on Sunday nights, for her mother to call. The four-year-old who’d felt who knows what when her mother left to follow her own dreams.

  And then I cried for that other girl who’d never quite had a place in this world. For my little Hattie. I cried for her lonely place on the edge of my consciousness, existing only as a shadow of what could have been. I cried for the petulant two-year-old who liked apples, the one-year-old with the velvet pink flushed cheeks, for the mischievous toddler who threw biscuits at Murray and drew spiky pictures. And as I cried, they flew off like pet
als in the wind. I tried to grasp after them, but they spun and spun around me, away from me, until I was crying for the thing in the centre of it all. The scrap of a human being who’d gripped my finger, just once, as I cradled her on the bathroom floor. The creature who’d offered, within the span of her tiny body, more heartbreak than my fourteen-year-old heart could hold. Who I’d wrapped in my white Aertex PE shirt, and buried, in the grey light before dawn, by the cherry tree in Hattie’s garden.

  *

  ‘Remember the tune thing,’ said Hattie, when the room was quiet again. ‘It’s such a sad thing that happened. Sometimes terrible things do happen and there’s no fixing them. There just isn’t, and it seems like a great dark hole torn out of your life. But it’s part of your tune, you see? She’s part of it. Little Hattie. And your tune’s beautiful.’

  I couldn’t speak. I just sat there watching the light playing against the kitchen wall, the slow dancing shadow of the clematis that had grown across the window.

  ‘Well,’ I said finally. ‘If I’ve got a tune, God help anyone who has to listen to it. I lost the key and the timing a looong time ago. Miss Spylaw would put me in detention for “wilful deafness” like that time with the chime bars.’

  Hattie shook her head. ‘You just don’t listen. If you did, you’d hear it. And you’d hear where it’s going.’

  I thought of all the ways I’d changed, since Hattie had come back. No, not changed, just become more myself. She’d briskly pulled aside the curtains, on those shadowy corners of my mind, without even knowing it. She’d laughed along empty corridors and thrown open doors to long forgotten rooms.

  Then I remembered one of those first, nerve-racking lessons with Miss Fortune, and my relief when Hattie had arrived for her five o’clock slot, bringing the chill of the October afternoon in on her clothes. Miss Fortune had made me finish off a tune for her, made me find the key. ‘The root chord,’ she’d said. ‘The home chord. The tonic. Melodies behave just like us. They always find their way back home.’

  *

  It took ages to get Pip to sleep, what with the nap he’d had at Hattie’s, and the long, reassuring conversation we had to have about Santa. In the end I suggested a ‘Santa Lite’ option, where the presents would be dropped down the chimney without the need for a home invasion. Pip had nodded in relief and finally closed his eyes.

  When the flat was quiet I sat on the couch wondering what to do. Everything was tidy, the presents were wrapped, and there was no food to sort since Murray was hosting Christmas dinner at his house. He’d even invited Hattie, as though she was some elderly spinster aunt with nowhere else to go. He was paying his Latvian housekeeper triple time to cook dinner and clear up afterwards, so that we could sit around playing with Pip’s new toys, laughing over board games, or dozing by the fire into the evening.

  It was a glimpse into a life that was mine for the taking, a life of comfort and warmth and ease. There’d be no more moving around for Pip at the weekends and all his things could stay in one place. There’d be pancakes on Saturday mornings. Long walks with the dog on Cramond beach, or in the Pentlands, stopping for Sunday lunch in a country pub somewhere. Perhaps a tentative coming together, as a couple. All the quiet happiness that would go along with that. And when Pip grew up and left, Murray and I could travel the world, see all the places you were supposed to see before you died. We’d have dinner together in New York and Rome. See the opera in Vienna or Sydney Harbour.

  It wasn’t as if I’d ever really settled in this flat. At best it had been an uneasy, temporary home. What would it feel like to pack up all our stuff? To empty out Pip’s toy cupboard, our wardrobes, the bookcases, and pack all the contents into boxes? It wouldn’t take long. I could probably do it in an evening if I wanted to. Murray could come down and help. I could imagine him rolling up his shirt sleeves and getting stuck in, telling me to throw out this old thing or that, because he’d replace them with new ones.

  Boxes, though.

  A memory comes into my mind.

  Boxes piled in the hall, being taken out of our house, one by one, by two big men I’ve never seen. One of them’s called Jim Strachan and the other one is called Honey. They’re putting the boxes in a white van. I’m watching Mummy, who is fluttering around, pointing to boxes and running her hands through her hair. I’m watching through bars, which are the banisters in the stairs. I’m sitting there with my Mickey Mouse suitcase on the step below, pretending to be on a bus. And then all the boxes are gone.

  Now Granny’s arrived, and she picks up my suitcase. She looks cross.

  She says to Mummy: ‘Do you really have to go straight away? You should come and get her settled in at least.’

  ‘We need to get there by five to pick up the keys.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s so exciting, poppet,’ Mummy says, taking both my hands in hers and jiggling them up and down. The freckles on her face are standing out against the white. Under her eyes the skin is purple and bruised, like the skin on Grandpa’s turnips.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’re going to Granny’s, and I’m going to London, poppet. Remember?’

  I picture a soldier in a furry black hat. Christopher Robin going for tea with the Queen.

  London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.

  ‘Will you be back tomorrow?’

  ‘Not for a while. You’re going to stay with Granny and Grandpa.’

  I struggle with the impossible.

  ‘But it’s okay!’ she says, eyes wide. And she leans in close. ‘You’ll be able to see me on the television!’

  I nod in relief, finally understanding. Understanding why she can be doing this. Mummy will come on the television every night, instead of the news. She’ll talk to me, and read my bedtime story, which she hasn’t done for a while actually. I’ve been waiting since last Christmas to find out the ending of ‘The Magic Porridge Pot’. And I want to find out. Will the town be drowned in porridge, or not?

  ‘Will I be in the telly too?’ I ask, wondering how I’ll be able to talk back, how she’ll be able to see me. Or will I be invisible?

  ‘Oooohhh,’ she says, laughing and hugging me tight. ‘One day, darling. If you work hard, and follow your dreams.’

  I’m confused.

  ‘Stay, Mummy.’

  Granny takes my hand in hers. I hate it. It’s rough and smells of onions. She’s been making mince again.

  Wood and clay will wash away, wash away, wash away.

  ‘Come on, Janey. Your mother’s in a hurry.’ She gives a sharp little nod like a pecking chicken. ‘Goodbye, Martina.’

  Granny doesn’t like Mummy because her voice is too loud, ‘too showy for her own good’. My voice is quiet, so she doesn’t mind me. I keep my singing in my head.

  Mummy’s eyes fill with tears. The green part looks greener, shiny, and the white part looks a bit pink. She looks pretty when she cries.

  Silver and gold will be stolen away, stolen away, stolen away.

  She glances at her watch. ‘So you don’t mind waiting here for—’

  ‘Waiting for the letting agent. I said I would do it, didn’t I? Come on now, Janey, let’s go up and fetch the rest of your things.’

  Granny walks me up the stairs. But at the turn of the stairs I stop, and look back at Mummy through the dark wooden struts of the banister. I watch as she half lifts, half drags her suitcase over the threshold, and bumps it down the front steps, lifting one hand in a backwards wave.

  Look back, look back, look back.

  But she’s gone, and the door slams shut behind her, echoing off the blank walls.

  And I’m an empty girl in an empty house. Nothing but Granny’s hand to keep me there, to keep me from floating up, up, away into nothing.

  *

  I went to bed, and I didn’t turn on Christansen. I lay there, listening to the sound of my own breath, shushing in and out like waves on the beach. The tide, coming in gently.r />
  For the first night in months I didn’t dream.

  In the morning I woke to the sound of my own voice, saying his name. Always the name on my lips, since the first day I saw him.

  50

  Janey

  ‘Play on swings first?’ asked Pip.

  I pushed him gently, the creak of the metal chains loud in the silent morning air. There was nobody about – nobody at all – until he appeared, rounding the corner from the main road.

  Steve.

  He made his way quickly along the street, up the short front path to Esme’s door, drawing keys out of his pocket to unlock it. He was wearing a black parka jacket, his head hunched down into the greyish fur of the hood. He looked about twelve years old, legs skinny in his jeans.

  He’d come to see Esme on Christmas day.

  ‘More swing, Mamma,’ demanded Pip.

  We played for another ten minutes before crossing over the road, walking up to her door as Steve had done. One of the net curtains hadn’t been pulled all the way across, and I could see the two of them. She was sitting in her armchair, and he was opposite, on the sofa, sketching her.

  He’d started drawing again.

  He answered the door, and when he saw me, he put his hands on the top of his head, and exhaled, long and loud, as though he’d been holding his breath.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We came to say Happy Christmas to Esme.’

  ‘She’s in here,’ he said, ushering us along the hall and into the music room.

  ‘Jamie!’ She stood up when she saw him. She looked so comfy today, in a long-sleeved navy jersey dress, and a silk scarf with grey and green leaves on it.

  ‘Janey and Pip have come to see you, Esme,’ said Steve. I liked how he said it in his normal quiet voice, not the loud booming voice most people seemed to use around her.

  ‘Merry Christmas!’ I said. ‘I thought I could play some carols for you, if you like?’

  ‘Way in a manger, little lord manger,’ began Pip, in his reedy little voice.

  ‘A-way! A-way!’ sang Miss Fortune. ‘A lovely major fourth, if you listen carefully with those little ears. A-way!’