by F. G. Cottam
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I do. This place makes it easy to believe.’
‘Then perhaps this place found us, James. That might be the real miracle.’
‘We’ll be happy,’ James said again. ‘All four of us will be. And we will be safe.’
She is simply a character from a story you have not yet written. Well then, he would write her, he had decided. And then he would write her out. He could put her at the centre of a story and then, if he so chose, he could write that threadbare little apparition into some fate she could never return to him from. He could send her sailing off into the sunset or have her grow into a beautiful woman or a wizened old crone. He could condemn her to the tedium of a really boring occupation or he could kill her young by having her contract something tragic and fatal at a heartbreakingly tender age.
He would write a story about her that would preclude very firmly the possibility of a sequel. Killing her would be the best way, rather than having her mature or emigrate or disappear mysteriously. Death was unequivocal. It was final. She could not come back from the grave. Unless, of course, he brought her back as a ghost. But he would not. He would leave her to lie undisturbed in the lonely graveyard of his imagination, the arid badlands where his fictive creativity never roamed.
All he needed, really, was an opening sentence.
He had already done a couple of lines. There was no point wasting the stuff. He would not buy any more after the gram on his writing desk was gone. He was confident that the treatment planned by Eleanor Deacon would work. Her prognosis had been so matter-of-factly optimistic he’d felt totally reassured by it. But he had not yet begun that treatment. What he was doing now therefore did not qualify as a relapse. It was just a final evening of indulgence before the hard and sober remedial work began in earnest.
Robert lifted his credit card off the desk and chopped out more coke. It was flaky, crystalline, with the slightly damp character and almost bluish hue under his desk lamp of the really pure stuff; not dried out by being cut with any of the crap the street dealers used. It was the cocaine equivalent of a Cuban Cohiba cigar or the twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie single malt. He snorted it as he always did, through a pen barrel.
He closed his eyes and waited the seven seconds or so the hit took to get to the synapses of the brain. His heart was thudding along at about seventy beats a minute. That was no cause for concern. All his aerobic gym and roadwork had given him a resting heartbeat of under fifty. He reckoned it could go as high as a hundred and twenty stimulated by coke before he had to start thinking seriously about taking the edge off with a Valium. The only really unpleasant side effect was that for some reason the stuff made his feet sweat. He wasn’t entertaining anyone tonight. It was a price he was prepared to pay.
The drug hit his mind with a thrill of exhilaration and clarity. It did not deliver the first line of the story he intended to write to exorcise his imagination of that girlish little phantom. All at once, instead, he knew what had gone wrong with his relationship with Lillian Greer. All at once, he knew how to alter the balance to put it right.
She was a woman who liked to take care of the people she was involved with. She took fantastic care of her children. She was the main breadwinner, after all, in her household. Before finally running out of patience and straying, she had taken good care of her morose loser of a husband for years. She was one of those people who felt vindicated only if they could reach out and care for the people they loved.
He had denied her that opportunity. He was successful and confident and to her must have seemed invulnerable. His very perfection prevented her from establishing the empathetic bond she needed to cement with people. His flawlessness impeded her from becoming really intimate with him. He did not need her compassion and generosity, her strong instinct for giving without the expectation of getting any return.
Except that he wasn’t flawless and invulnerable. He was a long way short of perfect and his confidence had long been shot to shit. He was actually the perfect candidate for her compassion and generosity. All he had to do was provide a convincing demonstration of the fact.
He would get Eleanor Deacon to petition her on his behalf. He would sanction Eleanor’s approach to Lillian and in so doing wave his right to patient confidentiality. Eleanor could tell Lillian that he was addicted to a narcotic drug and that her help and support would be hugely beneficial in helping wean him off it. She could even hint that Lillian’s recent rejection of him had deepened his dependence on the drug. It would not be that much of an exaggeration. It was actually pretty close to the truth.
Robert opened a new Word document on his computer and composed a few notes as the basis for this new strategy for wooing and winning back the woman with whom he was besotted. He would still be besotted in the morning; but if he did not write this stuff down, by the morning he would have forgotten what all the excitement had been about. That was the trouble with coke. That was why it was so bloody addictive. The highs were ephemeral and you were forever trying to recreate them and the thrill and intellectual decisiveness they so briefly provided.
His hands stopped on the keyboard. He had experienced another flash of pure inspiration. He chopped out another line and snorted it and kicked off his shoes because his feet were unpleasantly moist now and he guessed that his heart rate had climbed into the mid-nineties. No cause for alarm. Nothing he could not handle.
He would write a suicide note. It was what he did; he was a writer, for fuck’s sake. He would write it to Lillian and engineer a way of her seeing it. Eleanor could present it as tangible proof of the fact that in losing Lillian, Robert O’Brien was losing the will to live. Never mind the penthouse dockside flat and the motorcycle in the garage and the list of bestsellers and the Hollywood studio retainer and the toned torso and the handsome face and the Rolex embellishing his right wrist. The note would stand as eloquent proof that none of it mattered without Lillian in his life. Without her love and, vitally, her care of him, his life was worthless.
Robert wrote, inspired. In his new mood of uncompromising honesty, sustained since his session the previous day in Harley Street, he was prepared to admit to himself that the inspiration owed itself to three separate influences. The first, of course, was the drug thudding expensively through his bloodstream and brain. The second was that the subject he was writing about, his own emotional suffering, was one with which he was endlessly absorbed.
The third impulse fuelling his words had a measure of nobility about it. It was not sordid like the first or selfish like the second. It was, simply, his love of Lillian Greer. That was true and profound and he knew in his heart that he would never now give up on it. Clever woman that she was, Eleanor Deacon had been wrong about that. Lillian was everything that was best about him and he would not rest until he had won her back.
He could not have said at what moment he became aware that he was not alone in the room. He had the mad thought that he was the subject of a drugs raid. He glanced at the now empty wrap and the powdery residue that was all that was left of the coke, lying under the pen barrel beside his keyboard. The police broke in, didn’t they? They used a steel battering ram. He looked swiftly behind him, aware of just how high he now was. And he saw the girl standing about ten feet behind him in her purple and grey, careworn and frayed, blonde and dead and staring curiously.
Fuck it, he thought, turning back to his keyboard and the words making their self-pitying way across the screen of his monitor. You were supposed to write a story killing her off. You were supposed to do that and you got sidetracked by the coke into composing something else. And now it’s too late because she’s here.
‘Hello, Mr O’Brien,’ her voice said.
He pressed ‘save’ and closed the file he’d been working on. ‘You’re not real,’ he said. He switched off his computer. And he saw her reflection in his darkened screen.
She did not reply. She just stood there, her reflection contradicting him, the room gr
owing colder and the lights seeming to dim and a rank smell festering like something dead washed up by a tide.
It must be something in the charlie, he thought. That bastard has cut it with something slightly hallucinogenic. I’ll really have to have a fucking word. I don’t pay a ton a time to have the shit cut with anything.
Her reflection in the monitor was growing larger. She was approaching him. He saw that her eyes did not seem to have any pupils and that she did not blink. Real children blinked all the time, much more frequently than adults did. It was one of the observations he had made about children on his school visits.
On his school visits they were deferential because he was famous and they were his fans. This ghost he kept seeing was not deferential. Her body language was hostile, even threatening. But that was just the gear, surely. He was jittery and a bit paranoid and it was exactly like Eleanor Deacon had said in his two-hundred-pound appointment. He was overwrought. She was just a character from his imagination he had not yet found a story for.
‘You are impertinent to think of writing about me, Mr O’Brien,’ she said. ‘You do not know me. You do not know my story. You are a writer of made-up stories and mine happens to be true. You are not qualified.’
There was something not right about her voice. It was like a disembodied sound, something not quite human that rattled, soughing, through her. He thought that if he did write a ghost, this would be exactly how she would speak; not with the use of her atrophied larynx; not with a voice powered by lungs full of air because ghosts were dead people and therefore had no need of the mechanics of respiration. They did not breathe, did they? Her voice was not really that of a little girl. It was thoughts made audible in diction remembered from life, pitched in that shrill voice only because she had died at the age she was now.
He turned. He saw immediately that her reflection flattered her. She could communicate after her fashion and she could deliver herself from place to place and she had summoned to his flat that rotten stench of tidal corruption. She seemed real enough, but she was not really alive. He thought that if she walked into a room of real children they would cower and scream at the dead, shambolic sight of her. Her skin had a greyish tinge. Her hair was coarse and dried out under the fraying hat. The ribbons tying her plaits were faded. Her mouth wasn’t right. It was just a black maw beyond the pretty cupid’s bow of her lips.
‘Am I making you up?’
‘I made myself up, Mr O’Brien. I tried and tried to remember what I used to be like and to put myself back together again. It was very hard to accomplish. I had to do it for my friend Olivia.’
‘Am I going to make up Olivia too? Is she like you? Are there more of you in my imagination?’
‘Your imagination is not needed.’
‘Except that you’re a figment of it.’
‘You think the world begins and ends with you.’
‘Doesn’t everyone think that?’
‘It would be truer to say your world is coming to an end.’
He was frightened, now. The stench in the room was overpowering, despite how cold it had become. And there was something about the tone of the apparition’s voice that sounded threatening. When it spoke, its voice sugested more than confidence. It suggested finality. ‘I made you up,’ he heard himself say. He had meant the words to sound defiant, but even to his own ears they sounded less like a boast than a plea.
‘You did not make me up, Mr O’Brien. I made myself up. Shall I show you who I am really? Would you like to see what I am really like?’ The lips drew back in a leering grin from the little black abyss, narrowing as it did so under her nose.
‘No,’ he said.
‘I think I shall show you anyway. You interference has to stop. I have to stop it. So I shall show you who I am. You will see what has become of me.’
Megan Penmarrick took after her mother. She was tall and quite serious in her demeanour and on her graceful and unhurried way to becoming a beautiful woman. Lillian spoke to her for an hour about her ambition to become an illustrator. They conversed in the garden, at a circular stone table so old it looked medieval to Lillian, in weathered rustic chairs hewn from the wood of an ash tree.
They drank homemade lemonade and ate water biscuits and Megan had to be coaxed into bringing her own portfolio from the studio her father had converted for her in a room under the eaves of the house. Lillian looked out over the descending trees and the sea, thinking what an idyllic place the Penmarricks lived in, hoping that the charming girl whose dreams she had just shared had the necessary talent to fulfill them.
Megan sat back down and pushed a folder of artwork across the rough surface of their table. She flicked hair out of her face in a gesture Lillian knew betrayed anxiety, because at the same age it was a gesture she had shared. She opened the file and the first of a pile of pictures was revealed and she experienced a feeling of relief that swiftly transformed itself into delight and then amazement.
This was the work of an eleven-year-old child. Some of the subject matter, the mermaids and unicorns and vapid princesses with ankle-length manes and the trolls and other creatures, were pretty stereotypical of a fanciful eleven-year-old’s enthusiasms. They were exquisitely done, though, her draughtsmanship and brushwork really skilled and remarkably mature.
Lillian assumed the work was filed chronologically. It became more sophisticated and original the further through it she explored. Towards the end of the portfolio were some exquisite seascapes and pictures of shells and sea life motifs. A small boat endured the odyssey of an Atlantic storm with a stoical old salt at the rudder. This series was so accomplished it was difficult to credit it as the work of a child at all.
At the very end of the images was a portrait of a girl on a swing hanging from the perpendicular branch of a tree in a garden. The garden was beautifully imagined, discarded tennis rackets in wooden frames and leather-bound books and a wicker picnic basket on the lawn giving it a lost, Edwardian atmosphere. The little girl on the swing was very pretty in purple and grey, almost white-blonde in bunched plaits and blue-eyed under the rim of a straw boater.
‘Who is this?’
‘Someone I made up. I call her Madeleine. I call her Maddy, for short. I’m going to think up some adventures for her.’
Lillian raised her eyebrows and shook her head and shuffled the illustrations neatly together and replaced them in the folder. She closed it and handed it back to its creator. ‘You are really gifted, Megan. It delights me to be able to say it, but I have never come across anyone so young with quite so much pure talent.’
Megan blushed. She brushed hair away from her face again. ‘You really think so?’
‘I know so. You need luck to succeed at what I do. You need good fortune and to develop contacts and timing is always very important, though you only ever become aware of that after the event. But I have never come across anyone better equipped to succeed at it than you are. And I will help you all I can.’
She surprised herself with this last sentence. She had not meant to say it. It was not necessary or even necessarily wise to make such an extravagant promise to an eleven-year-old. Six months down the road, Megan Penmarrick might decide she hated illustration and that what she really wanted to do with her life involved quantum physics or drama school. She had the kind of wealthy parents who could indulge her attempts to fulfil her ambitions, however unlikely or unrealistic.
Lillian did not think, though, that she would change her mind. The quantity of material in the portfolio suggested a strong and persistent work ethic went along with the precocious skill. She really would help her all she could and she would do it, if for no other reason than because she could.
Except that that wasn’t the only reason, was it? She felt empathetic towards Megan. She felt a part of something already in this blessed place. She very much wanted to move here and embrace what the bay offered and have that embrace returned. She did not even want to do the necessary going back that moving here would practically invol
ve. They had a house to lease and she had a studio to try to sub-let or sell. But she did not simply want to move here; she wanted to stay. She thought that she belonged, that she had found a missing piece of herself in the bay and that its discovery had made her complete.
She thought briefly about the old complications in her life. She pictured Robert O’Brien and the recollection of that episode made her shudder. Her involvement with him had been symptomatic of everything that had been wrong with her existence over recent months and that the bay would put right. James had been right about that, the previous night. They would be happy here, the four of them. They would be safe.
Richard sauntered across the grass towards where she and Megan sat. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a faded denim shirt and there was a silk scarf tied loosely around his neck and his feet were shod in wood and leather clogs. His abundant locks had been gathered in a ponytail and he had a pair of secateurs in his right hand. Lillian looked at him and squinted in the sunlight and smiled to herself. If Robert Plant could farm outside Stourbridge, she thought, Richard Penmarrick could prune Cornish roses. Horticulture: obviously it was the new rock ’n’ roll.
‘What’s amusing you, Lillian?’
‘Life generally is amusing me, Richard. Your daughter is a very special talent.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she is certainly a very precious girl.’
Lillian nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. You did not love them for their accomplishments.
‘Lunch is ready,’ he said, ‘if you are ready for lunch.’
The three of them strolled, through the midday sunlight, the distance to the house. Richard offered Lillian his arm and she took it. Megan asked questions about Jack and Olivia. Lillian was truthful in a fairly sparing account of what had recently happened to her son.
‘Is that why you are moving here?’
Lillian hesitated before replying. She thought that the honest answer was that the assault on Jack was more catalyst than cause. But she did not think it was a word an eleven-year-old would be familiar with. She said, ‘It was what got us from the daydreaming stage to the actuality of planning a move to the coast.’