by Katie Lowe
Far be it from us to demand more scandal, and more drama – in fact, much of the water-cooler conversation among media types is divided on whether Byers’s choice to tell something of a slower, less tabloidesque tale is a positive thing for audio storytelling, in a world that demands plot twists and instant gratification. But there’s a difference between narratives that are purposefully careful and slow, and those that are self-indulgent and dull. And at this early stage in the season, the consensus is that Conviction seems to be leaning a little too much towards the latter.
I look up, my face set in a grimace: another mask. The truth is, I don’t know how to react. ‘Wow.’
Evie’s careful, when she speaks. ‘I think they’re being kind of unfair. Not that I’m exactly for them doing it, but … I actually didn’t think it was as bad as everyone’s saying. Although I guess …’ She pokes her thumb through her sleeve and bites it. ‘I guess I’m probably biased.’
I feel a sharp stab of guilt. My daughter wants to hear her father’s voice. Of course she does.
‘Well, that’s fair enough. I mean, even I found it weird hearing him talk,’ Dan says. ‘It’s going to be a whole different experience for you two, but … I don’t know. Some of the inflections he had reminded me of you, Evie.’
He’s right. I’ve noticed it, little fragments of her father in her voice, things that make no sense given he’s been dead since she was nearly six years old. I can’t help but bristle at the comparison. At the idea of her finding a connection with him, after all this time.
‘Do you remember much about him?’
I look at Dan, surprised that he’s asked the question outright. It’s one I’ve wanted to ask Evie myself, several times, over the years. But I’ve always lost my nerve. I’m afraid of hearing something I’d rather I didn’t know.
‘Not really. Random stuff, like … I had a playhouse, right?’
The room lurches around me, and resettles. ‘Yeah. It was … It was a Christmas present.’
She beams. ‘I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined that. But I do remember it. He used to do puppet shows at the windows, didn’t he?’
‘He did.’
‘And I remember him coming home from work. Not, like, one specific memory. I just remember it was always part of our day. He used to pick me up and throw me in the air, as soon as he got in.’
It’s amazing, how vividly she remembers these details. But it makes sense. He loved her. That, at least, was true.
‘I used to tell him off for it,’ I say, faintly. ‘When he got back late. I’d have finally managed to get you to sleep, and … he couldn’t help himself. He had to wake you up.’
A brief, unmistakable sadness crosses her face. She blinks it away. ‘What an asshole.’
‘Total asshole.’
Evie’s phone lights up, and she reaches for it. ‘Do you mind if I …?’
Dan nods. ‘Dinner’s nearly ready. Be quick.’
She slips out of the door with impressive speed.
Dan places a mug of tea on the table beside me. ‘We’re going to need to get in touch with the insurance about your phone. I’ll dig out the details in a bit.’
I reach up for a kiss. ‘Thank you.’
‘It’s really not as bad as you think, you know. Conviction, I mean. It’s fine.’
‘I know. I’m just … nervous, I guess.’
He bends to pull a tray from the oven, hot air filling the tiny kitchen. ‘Would it help if we listened to it together?’
‘No, it’s fine. I will listen to it. I just …’
‘No pressure.’ He smiles, the same smile that I know, so well, after all these years together. The one I fell in love with when he brought Evie to my door, after she’d slipped through a gap in the dry-stone wall at nine years old. I assumed he’d think I was a bad mother, for failing to notice my little girl had run away.
But he didn’t. He thought the best of me from the start.
‘Change of subject.’ He bites into a stray pepper, escaped from the tray, and smiles. He chews, open-mouthed, a thing he knows I hate, but loves to tease me with. ‘A little birdie told me someone here is in love.’
‘Dan!’ Evie’s voice rings through the house. ‘I am not.’ She reappears at the top of the stairs. ‘He’s a liar. Don’t believe a word he says.’
‘Pffft.’ He grins. I know how much he loves these moments, these play-fights.
‘Evie’s got a boyfriend,’ he sings, nasally. ‘K-I-S-S-I—’
‘Oh my God,’ she groans. ‘I hate you.’
He makes kissing noises as she sits at the table, a pleading look in her eyes. ‘It is like having two kids here sometimes, you know that?’ I say, gently.
He lays down the plates between us, delivering mine with a kiss. ‘That’s why you love me. I keep you on your toes.’
‘Ah – I knew there was a reason I kept you around.’ I look over at Evie, her eyes fixed on her food. She knows what’s coming next. ‘So … Who’s this secret fella?’
‘No one. I don’t know what he’s talking about.’
Poor Evie. She’s never lied to me before – or at least not about anything important. Even the little white lies she’d tell as a child – the ones every child tells to test boundaries, the ones necessary for their development – she’d quickly admit, before I could turn them into a teachable moment.
What this means, though, now, is that she’s terrible at it. The lie is written all over her face.
I glance at Dan. He winks. Drop it, he seems to say. I’ll fill you in later.
I don’t want to, of course. The therapist in me wants to dig deeper. To keep questioning her until I find out what I want to know.
But she isn’t a patient. She’s my daughter.
I can’t make her do anything – or at least, not in quite the same way I can with the girls on the unit. For them, giving me what I want is part of the game they have to play in order to be signed out – to return to their homes, their families, and friends.
Whereas in real life – no matter how much I might want things to be otherwise – people can walk away at any time.
‘All right,’ I say, after a pause. ‘Never mind, then. Let’s move on.’
I leave them in front of the TV. They know where I’m going, without my having to say it. I take my laptop up to the bedroom, and untangle the headphones from my bag. My heart thumps as I click to the Conviction page, the new banner a photo I haven’t seen in years, though the memory surges back with it, instantly.
I see the Polaroid flash in my eyes. I feel the cold press of Graham’s hand, his lips on my face. I’m laughing, open-mouthed – both of us soaked to the skin. For years after, he’d say he was saving my life that day. I’d insist it was the other way around. Either way, we were drunk – students, dressed in our graduation-ball finest – and while we’d intended a romantic, photo-opportunity kiss at the edge of the lake, we’d failed to account for the slippery mud on its banks.
I feel a laugh in my throat. We’d been so happy back then. An email alert bubbles up in the corner of the screen. I stare at the subject line for a moment. You have 455 connections awaiting your response! My stomach churns as it disappears.
I draw breath. Before I can lose my nerve, I press play.
There’s a shuffle of papers, somewhere close to the mic. A distant cough, further away.
I can see him, in my mind. His hands gripping the lectern, glancing down at his notes. Dressed the part – clean-cut, pushing his hair back from his face each time he made a point he wasn’t quite sure of.
The only person who saw that tic for what it was, of course, was me. To everyone else, he was all confidence. All knowledge. All smiles.
‘“She had left the last blood of her husband / Staining a pillow. Their whole story / Hung – a miasma – round that stain.” We can hear the detachment in Hughes’s narrative voice throughout the poem, in which he and his wife take “possession” of a house which is contaminated by the ghosts of its pr
evious inhabitants.’ He draws breath. A draught flutters the curtains. ‘There’s an inevitability to it, as though, by finding the omens, their “sour odour”, he might have sensed even then that only one of them would make it out alive, though they would be haunted by their memories; their guilt, their complicity, their shame.’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ Anna Byers begins, ‘what exactly drew Graham Catton to talk about this particular poem during his inaugural lecture: a departure from his usual research which, according to his colleagues, resolutely avoided “biographical” readings of his authors’ works.
‘And yet,’ she goes on, ‘on the night of his inaugural lecture – a defining moment in any academic career, where family, friends, and colleagues would have been invited along to hear the newly minted professor’s work – Graham Catton took a wholly new tack: a long, impassioned talk on communication and intimacy in which the poet Ted Hughes deals almost exclusively with his relationship with his wife, the troubled poet Sylvia Plath, and her impact on his life.’
I remember him writing that piece. I can see the papers spread across the countertop; can hear him whispering the words to himself, rehearsing. I see him looking up at Evie with a smile. I see her, eyes fixed on his lips, opening and closing hers in imitation.
The music shifts to a minor key. I feel the change in the air; see him reaching for his jacket, slung over a chair. Not meeting my eye, as he turns to leave. ‘In this, his final lecture, he spoke of the pain of a failing marriage, to an audience which did not include his wife.’ She says the word ‘wife’ with a kind of disdain: a blade in it. ‘He couldn’t have known, then, that he was foreshadowing his own death: describing the scene of the crime in which he would be the victim, the pillow stained with his own blood.’
The familiar violins return, Conviction’s twitching theme. Another email bubbles up. Darcy Burke. Subject: Come visit? But I’m paralysed. I watch it disappear.
‘Police concluded it was an intruder – a burglary gone wrong. A random attack, terrible and senseless – like a bolt from the blue. And, sure, that’s possible. Terrible things do happen to ordinary people. Some horrors you just can’t predict.
‘But Professor Catton did predict his own murder. In the months – years – leading up to his death, the people who loved him, and the students and colleagues who admired his work, all saw changes in him. They describe a man doing his best to keep his life together, all the while aware of the heavy sword of fate hanging, terribly, over his head.’
Graham coughs, lightly, clearing his throat. ‘And yet, no matter how in love we may be; however intimate our relationships, our ways of seeing into the other’s soul – as Hughes does, almost by accident, in “Visit” – we are trapped with only our own stories, and the hope that others may hear them. As he writes of Plath’s journal: ‘“You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story.”’
11
The next morning, I shower in water so scalding, my skin burns, hot to the touch. I haven’t slept; only watched Dan’s sleeping form, playing Graham’s words over and over in my mind.
I dress in my work clothes, rolling tights on to dried-out legs, only pausing to examine a glossy blue vein that seems new. ‘You’re old now,’ Sarah said. And today, I feel it. As though I’ve aged ten years overnight.
Still, I shuffle into a pencil skirt, and adjust the collar of a crisp, white blouse. I straighten my hair, with a little more attention than usual. I wear foundation and mascara. I feel like a child playing dress-up. Like an actress, playing a part.
At the kitchen table, I reopen my laptop, the screen just as it was last night, after the episode, when I’d clicked – or rather, slammed – it shut. Now, in the pre-dawn darkness, my screen and the blinking coffee machine LED are the only sources of light.
I click on my email. The red dot reads a helpless 999+. I’d known it wouldn’t be long before the pieces fell into place – before someone attached my married name to the person I am now. But I hadn’t expected it to happen quite so fast.
Joseph Kent and 861 others are awaiting your response! the first message says. I click.
Among the faces that stare back at me as I scroll – The world’s largest professional network, the banner declares, in rippling blue and white – there’s not a single name I know.
They’re rubberneckers, professional or otherwise: journalists, bloggers, ‘personalities’, mixed among people with no link, whatsoever, to me. A data analyst from Cairo. A Melbourne-based chemical engineer. A ‘tech pirate-slash-innovateur’ from California.
I wonder what it is they’re expecting to find, among the bones of the LinkedIn profile I never use; that hasn’t been updated since I first set it up, years ago.
I close the window. I delete one email, and the next, and the next.
And then, I stop.
I stare at the subject line. Come visit?
The text beneath is short, to the point – sent from a phone. Am sure you’re not free tomorrow, but I’m away for a week or so after that, so … Would love to show you around. Come any time – on my own there all day, company v welcome! I glance at the timestamp. It was sent last night.
I click on the attachment. It takes me a moment to work out what, exactly, I’m looking at: darkness, broken by shafts of light so thick they look like paintbrush strokes. I zoom in, and the details begin to turn real. It’s one of the hallways in Hawkwood House, the light sweeping in from the dorm rooms, heavy with dust. The floor is littered with chipped plaster and curled wallpaper. Glossy green ivy creeps into the ornate mouldings, appearing through the cracks in the walls.
It’s eerie. And it’s gorgeous. I’m lost in it, desperate to walk through its halls.
‘You’re up early.’
I jump, and snap the laptop shut. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d order a new phone, rather than just lying there thinking about it.’
‘Fair enough.’ Dan shuffles to the coffee machine. It growls, coming furiously to life.
I know he’s going to ask me about Conviction. I can feel it. I felt it last night, when he crawled into bed beside me, while I pretended to sleep.
But I can’t talk about it.
Not yet. Not to him. So, I change the subject. ‘Tell me about this boyfriend situation.’
He turns, leaning against the sink. ‘You know about us? He’s just a fling, Hannah, I swear. You’re the one I want to be with.’
I roll my eyes. Normally, I’d play along.
But today I’m exhausted. I don’t have the energy for it. ‘Come on. Before she wakes up.’
He looks chastened, and instantly, I feel guilty. He doesn’t deserve to be snapped at.
‘I don’t actually know that much. She’s texting someone. I asked her who it was. Put my investigative hat on, asked the right questions …’ He taps his nose. ‘I can spot a telling blush a mile away. It’s why they pay me the big bucks. Or why they used to, anyway.’
I smile. It’s an apology, of sorts. ‘What’s the saying? “You can’t kid a kidder”?’
‘Hmmm. Nope, never heard that one.’
Overhead, an alarm rattles on. Evie’s bed creaks, and her footsteps pace across the floor into the bathroom. Dan sits beside me, his face still craggy with sleep.
‘I’m worried about her lying about it,’ I whisper. ‘It’s not like her.’
‘Oh, come on, Hannah. You know as well as I do, as far as teenage girls go, she’s an angel.’
‘That’s exactly why I’m worried.’
‘Didn’t you have a secret boyfriend when you were her age? It’s a rite of passage.’ He rolls a crick from his neck. ‘Mine was Lauren Abbott. We skipped school and made out instead of going to Chemistry. That’s about all I remember, but at the time, I thought she was the love of my life.’
I laugh. Somehow, it sounds cold. ‘Good to know.’
‘Are you jealous? Because you needn’t be. Last I heard, she was on her fourth husband. All of whom are far richer and better-lo
oking than me.’
‘I guess I should be grateful for that.’
‘Oh, definitely.’ He grins, playfully. ‘I am a catch in other ways, after all. Like …’ He leans in towards me, a suggestion on his lips.
‘Mum?’ Evie’s voice rings through the cottage.
Dan pulls a face, and leans back. I look up. ‘Yeah?’
‘Where’s my netball kit?’
He stands. ‘Get that phone ordered. I’ve got this one.’
As he leaves, I reopen my laptop and look again at the picture of Hawkwood House. The pieces seem to shift with each viewing, like one of those Magic Eye pictures I could never quite make out.
The photo just isn’t enough. I need to stand there, to touch it; to breathe it in.
I send one email, then another. When Dan and Evie come downstairs, I’m in the final phase of ordering my replacement phone.
‘Have a good day at work,’ Dan says, a kiss planted – as usual – on my head.
‘Thanks. You too,’ I say in reply.
It’s been just a day since the first episode aired.
And already, I’m spinning a lie.
12
I look up at the iron gates, their black paint now furred with rust. My car purrs, behind, as I stand frozen, palms curled around the bars. It’s the only sound; even the birds have gone quiet.
I’ve wanted this for years: to step into the grounds of Hawkwood House and walk there, taking it in. Making it mine. But now, on the verge of doing so, my chest feels tight, the urge to turn and drive away hot in my blood.
I know what this is, of course. It’s guilt. For calling in sick – not calling, in fact, but firing off a single-line email. I blamed my missing phone, but the truth was, I didn’t want to hear Sarah’s voice; didn’t want to speak to anyone at all.
I’ve worked so hard – since Graham died, and Sarah took me on – to be the picture of professionalism. And for the most part, I’ve succeeded. I’ve gone about my job with jaw-clenching determination, like a woman making up for something: focused, punctual, reliable.