If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  What did I expect to find? There could only be more woods, and more woods, until eventually I reached the fence to the lake and the caravan park. Under the cover of the trees the air was cold and still, the light dim. My hands were ripped. I stopped, gasping for breath. I wanted Jack, I wanted him to help me. I looked up and saw a flash of sky above. I longed for a hand to stretch down and lift me up into the light. This is just your imagination, I thought. Your memories are all confused. You need to calm down, go to bed, see a doctor. But still I went on.

  My foot caught on the stump of a tree – or was it a brick? I looked down. Yes, it was just as I’d known it would be. A line of bricks ran through the undergrowth, their jagged tops standing up from the sandy earth. I could only see three or four bricks but, when I edged some brambles away with my foot, I saw more. And here the woods were less thick. A path. Traces of gravel under my feet. I shuffled my shoes, testing the reality of this place. Branches of yew and laurel scratched at my face as I moved forward. I knew what I would find – a door in a brick and flint wall, with ivy growing thickly across it. And there it was. The door was shut but I ran my hand down over the rotted wood. I wanted to be able to touch the long-ago shadow which once slid down that frame.

  I stood there listening and the wind called my name. A wall of earth had built up against the bottom of the door. I kicked at that, wanting the door to open just a crack. You must never go through that door. I fell on my hands and scratched the earth away. In my mind I could see the lake – the path down to the jetty, the black water, and, in the far distance, the boathouse. Standing up, I thrust my fingers into the gap beside the frame, but still the door wouldn’t open.

  ‘Mum, in the woods – there was a path, wasn’t there?’ I tried to stop myself from shouting but my voice was shrill. I was sitting in my bedroom staring at the threads of red on my hands where the thorns had cut me. The smell of pine needles clung to me.

  ‘A path where?’

  ‘A path to the lake. To a door – and the lake.’

  ‘Eva, you’re going to have an asthma attack.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I don’t have asthma. Tell me – I want to know. There was a path, wasn’t there? It went through the woods to the lake.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Don’t you remember? When you were a child we used to walk that way down to the lake.’

  ‘But then what happened? What happened?’

  My mother crashed a tray of tea down on to my desk in frustration. She spoke as though I was a child who couldn’t understand properly. ‘Well, the land was sold, and Wyvelston Hall was demolished, and the new owners didn’t want people from the village using the lake so they put up fences everywhere and boarded up that gateway.’

  ‘And so then how did the path in our garden get covered up?’

  ‘Well, I had it closed up.’

  ‘But why? Why?’

  I’m shouting now because I’m frightened that I’ve got this all wrong. Perhaps there are no symbols carved on trees, no kidnapped princess, no piranha lake.

  ‘Because the path didn’t lead anywhere,’ my mother said. ‘Think about it, Eva. Why would anyone want to walk down a path leading to a boarded-up door?’

  ‘But the gate with the spider-web pattern? It used to be at the entrance to that lake path.’

  ‘Yes, it was moved. There was an old wooden gate leading out to the lane, and it was rotten right through, and so when the lake path was closed up, we decided to move that iron gate there. It was the obvious thing to do.’

  I remembered Rob’s voice. This isn’t the Montezuma Mystery. Jack, Jack, please make this stop. I leant my head back against the wall. The rocking horses on the wallpaper spun around. I gripped my hands over my eyes. I thought of that book lying on the shelf. The story of Bluebeard and the new bride discovering the castle with the fountains and peacocks and chandeliers. But there’s that one locked room and she can’t leave it alone. She has to know what’s inside. A room full of dead and rotting brides. And now she knows the secret, she must join them.

  From somewhere far away I could hear a heaving sound. Was it the distant roar of the sea, or that sound my father had heard as we stood on the beach? The monster, far out in the evening distance, but waiting, waiting.

  ‘Eva. You’re making yourself ill.’

  She was right, of course. I needed to stop imagining things. People who imagine things have court orders made against them. They get sent away. They go down paths that don’t lead anywhere. ‘Mum, I invited my father to the wedding. Rob got in touch with the solicitors.’

  ‘What?’

  In the distance, a whistle blew and a dog started barking. At the window, the sky was a garish blue. My mother’s face broke open and tears spilled over her cheeks. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and immediately she was calm again. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all right. I’ll get in touch with your father – I’ll explain.’ She kept repeating those words. ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll explain.’

  Leningrad Station, Moscow

  August 1991

  It’s only two weeks now until we leave Moscow so I won’t see Jack again. I mustn’t hope any more. That’s what I’ve decided. So when I see the outline of a head which looks like his, I take care not to notice. The head remains poised above us on the Metro steps. Rob and I are ten steps below, rucksacks on our backs, feeling too hot. We’re pushing our way up the side of the staircase, close to the rail. A throng of people elbow their way down towards us. The outline of that head touches on the edge of my vision. But Moscow is such a vast city you never bump into anyone you know.

  A checked shirt, a brown case with a broken strap. He comes down towards us, but still I’m sure it isn’t him. I hold on tight to Rob’s hand. A Tannoy announcement echoes up into the roof of the platform above. The straps of my rucksack cut into my shoulders. Two steps more and I hear his voice. I don’t look at him. He’s the ogre with the blank eyes, the jabbering lips, the long brown teeth. Rob is talking to him. I wrap myself up tight inside. The air around us is wrinkled by the smell of hot bodies and soot. I look down at my foot resting on the concrete step, worn into a dip by years of tramping feet. Rob and I have become small and white, our bodies shapeless, our muscles slack. We are the rag doll and the plastic soldier. Leave us alone, Jack. Leave us alone. Let us have our small world of occasional shy sex, and cooking supper together. Leave us alone in the attic bedroom, with the model aeroplanes, and the biscuit-tin drum and the pine-cones in the grate.

  He asks me something, and the rag doll opens and shuts her mouth, but I still don’t look at him. Instead I watch his hand gripping the metal rail beside us. His sleeve is rolled up and my eyes follow the route of a familiar vein which stands up on the back of his hand. I see us together in Room 815. The sheets on the bed are tangled. I’m standing between his legs and his hand reaches out to touch my hip. My heart is beating between my legs. A train sweeps in and the crowd surges towards it.

  ‘We must go.’ I grip Rob’s hand. ‘We need to get home.’ Again an announcement echoes through the station. Rob and I are swayed by the movement of the crowd. A man in a dirty military uniform pushes against us, cursing at the obstruction we cause. Above us, someone shouts and metal clanks against metal. Jack says that perhaps he’ll write down his address for me. I look up at him then and he isn’t an ogre. Instead he’s a man with death staring from his eyes. His cheekbones are sharp, his eyes far back in his head. A part of me is disappointed. The ogre image is easier to deal with than a real person.

  ‘It’s all right, I have the address.’

  ‘No, you don’t. I’m staying in Malakhovka.’

  I don’t have any idea where that is. Ahead of us, we can see people pushing and stumbling onto the Metro. Jack’s hand is fumbling with the strap of his bag. His skin is thin and the colour of putty. The blade of his collar-bone sticks out where his shirt is undone at the neck. He pulls out one of his blue notebooks, his hands fumbling as he tries to rip a page from it. I support t
he weight of his bag. His fingers tremble as he takes off the lid of his fountain pen. He writes clumsily, then hands the piece of paper to me. The side of his finger brushes against the pad of my thumb. The touch of it fizzles up through my arm. Again I see the hotel room, the tangled sheets, his hand reaching out to me.

  I turn and Rob pulls me towards the waiting train. But we’re too late and the doors close. When I look back, Jack has gone. I keep his paper held tight in my hand. The departing train seems to have sucked all the air off the platform. Only a few people sit on benches, or pace along the wide platform. Rob is watching me as though he’s never seen me before. His eyes are clouded by a look of quiet horror. I push Jack’s address into the pocket of my skirt. Both of us struggle for words and can’t find any. Rob knows, somehow he’s seen. Perhaps it was there in the way that Jack fumbled with his pen, or in the touch of his finger against mine.

  I want to talk but my jaw is locked. I stand staring at Rob, my tongue straining. Then words come and I gabble, trying to push back the silence. Rob responds but his voice is empty. Our eyes come together, move apart. I may be scared of the accusations he may make, but he’s more frightened of what I might admit. I want to take that knowledge back from him. I want him to pretend he hasn’t seen anything. ‘Only two weeks to go now,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t it feel strange?’ Another train sweeps into the station, bringing with it a gush of hot air. I keep talking, even in the silence of the carriage.

  As we walk back to the flat through the evening sun, we talk about our week in Leningrad. How good it was to get away. How strange it feels to be back. The two cities are so different. This afternoon we must start to pack. Tomorrow he’ll fly to Kiev, but he’ll only be there one night. We both know all of this but still we repeat the details again and again in voices as serious as prayer.

  We’ve been away for a week. Our landing is piled with fly-infested rubbish bags, doubtless left there by our next-door neighbour. His dog lies stretched across the landing, chained to the stair-rail, slobbering. In the flat, dead flies lie on the sitting-room windowsill and the loo smells bad. Rob and I rattle from room to room, opening windows, chasing the dust and the stillness away. I unpack some bread, pickles and smetana we brought in Leningrad. My mouth still babbles comments about how we should do this – or perhaps that? But Jack’s sunken eyes flash in my mind again and again. The piece of paper he gave me rests against my thigh. In my mind I’m already on a train going to find him.

  It’s six o’clock and Rob and I didn’t have much lunch so I make sandwiches and we sit down to eat. I cough and my head thumps. I must be getting a cold or flu. Even with the windows open, the air wraps around me, tight as a woollen jumper. While Rob and I were in Leningrad it seemed possible that we might slip through the barriers unnoticed into happiness.

  ‘That guy – Jack,’ Rob says. I wince, ready for the blow. ‘He looked ill, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he did look bad. I think he’s been ill for some time, in fact. I was thinking I ought to try and see him before I go.’

  ‘You won’t have time.’ The way Rob says that is so calm and definite, a statement of fact. But I hear it as an instruction and it makes me angry. I must see Jack. I want to see him now. It’s Sunday 18 August today and we leave on the twenty-ninth. Twelve more days.

  The phone rings and I go to answer it. It’s Maya and she wants to know about Leningrad. Yes, we went to the Hermitage, and the Akhmatova Memorial Museum. Yes, the city was spectacularly beautiful. Yes, we took a boat along the canals. As we talk my mind calculates – if I make an arrangement to go and see Maya this afternoon, then could I use the time to go to Jack instead? But the address he’s given me is somewhere miles out of town. Maya asks me if Rob and I want to go round for supper on Wednesday. I say I’ll ask him and ring her back. Rob has finished eating and is sitting behind a newspaper. ‘I’m busy that night,’ he says.

  The heat and my cough make me so irritable that I feel ready to scream. Some demon inside me wants to punish Rob for having seen too much. ‘Why don’t you like Maya? What’s the problem with her?’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with her.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  He lowers the newspaper and glares at me. ‘OK. You want to know? She doesn’t know where her life stops and another person’s begins.’

  ‘Why? Why do you say that?’

  I wait for him to say, ‘Oh, I can’t really remember,’ but he doesn’t. ‘When you were ill she wouldn’t listen to what I said. And she was just the same with your mother.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t.’

  Rob sighs and, for a moment, shuts his eyes. ‘Eva, she insisted on his having exhibitions, and parties, even when your mother didn’t want it and your father had been ill. Even when people were grieving …’

  ‘Yeah, but Rob, Maya wasn’t even in England then. She went away to Rome the summer before.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. She organized that exhibition, didn’t she?’

  No, no, no. The kaleidoscope is turning again. Maya did go away to Rome the summer before, I’m sure she did. I stand staring at the back of Rob’s newspaper. I go into the bedroom and take out that photograph which is in the back of my address book. I’m close to my father now. Soon I will know him. Fear breaks like sweat over my skin.

  From upstairs, a sound like splintering wood judders through the air, followed by a crash which makes the ceiling vibrate. A scream hangs in the sullen air. It’s followed by another, then another. The sound is like an animal in pain. Oh my God, Mrs Balashova has murdered her husband, I think. But it’s a man making that sound.

  Rob runs up the stairs ahead of me. Mr Balashov is stumbling against the banister above us. Bent double, he’s screaming, his hand flailing against the wall. Other doors open below us. The Communist medal man and his wife appear and stand holding hands, uncertain whether to come up the stairs or not. The man with the shaved head crashes out of his flat, unties his dog from the stair-rail and pulls it inside.

  In the Balashovs’ flat, the yellow plastic flowers stand up stiff in their vase, the goldfish still swim in their bowl. Orange hair spreads on the floor. Mrs Balashova is lying face down, filling all the space in the kitchen. Her flower-scattered dress has risen up to reveal an expanse of mottled thigh. Her inflatable arm lies stretched to one side. Her leg is twisted, her red stiletto bent against the kitchen cupboard.

  Rob goes to her and, kneeling down, starts to take her pulse. Behind me, people hurry up the stairs, crowding forward. The heat clings to my skin, a sour smell fills my nostrils. I cough and steady myself against the wall. Voices are coming to the boil. Mr Balashov is on his knees, his head pressed into a corner. I go to him and lay my hand on his shoulder, but he doesn’t know I’m there.

  Rob comes to me. ‘She’s dead.’

  His words vibrate inside me. ‘She can’t be.’

  This is all so senseless and random that I suppress a desire to laugh. The bottles of pills, the visits to the hospital … but I’d never thought it was serious. I’ve seen a dead body before in a street in Lima, but that wasn’t someone I knew. People I’ve never seen before are coming up the stairs. Mr Balashov pushes towards his wife. A space is cleared for him. He kneels beside her, kissing her hungrily, pressing his lips against her red-painted mouth.

  Hours seem to pass before anyone in authority arrives. Under the strip-lights people hurry back and forth. Silence, then weeping, then silence again. Everyone wants something to do, but there’s nothing to do. I start to cough and can’t stop. A grimly festive air develops. People make bitter cups of tea and pass around vodka. A woman I’ve never seen before starts mopping the floor. The Communist medal man and his wife continue to stand outside their flat, stiff and formal, heads bent in respect, as though they’re already attending the funeral. The shaved-head man tries to get Mr Balashov away from his wife’s body, but he won’t be moved. The goldfish swim round and round in their bowl.

  Eventually, men dressed in a collection of differen
t uniforms arrive. Two of them stand smoking while the others assemble a stretcher which is nothing more than a patched piece of canvas between two poles. The corridor is narrow and the door of the flat narrower still. They push and pull at Mrs Balashova but without success. ‘Nyet, poverni yeyo siuda.’ No, move her this way. They pull her around so that one of her legs sticks out of the doorway. ‘Nado budyet dver’ sniat’.’ They argue about whether the door should be taken off its hinges. From above I hear shuffling and swearing, then something scraping along the floor. I start to cough again and my throat burns.

  Mrs Balashova is no longer a person, she’s debris to be cleared away. They sit her up and, with two men shoving from behind, and one pulling in front, they push her lolling body through the door. Spit runs from the corner of her mouth, down her chin, and into the folded flesh of her neck. She’s stripped of her watch and jewellery. Her rings are more difficult – the men twist at her fingers, pulling them off. Mr Balashov lies in a heap on the floor, moaning. As they try to take her down the stairs, one of her legs slides off the stretcher and her red stiletto falls to the floor. They heave her leg back into place, but the shoe is left on the stairs.

  Mr Balashov gets up from the floor and staggers down the stairs after the stretcher. His hands grasp the jacket of one of the uniformed men. He’s shouting and trying to tug the man back. He’s reaching out for his wife’s body. The shaved-head man takes hold of him, but grief has made Mr Balashov strong. I expect Rob to help them but he doesn’t. He’s standing watching and his face is green. Finally, some of the neighbours manage to drag Mr Balashov away from the stretcher. Now she’s gone and the crowd on the landing stand, hands hanging by their sides, uncertain what to do. No one looks at the shoe. Mr Balashov is lying on the floor of the flat, exactly where she lay, his fist thumping up and down, as he sobs and yells.