Creeping back into the house I bump into mother in the hallway. She gives a shriek and covers her mouth with her hand. For a minute she just stands like that, staring at me, round-eyed with horror. Here is confirmation at last of my unbalanced state.
‘Your beautiful hair,’ she says through the hand. ‘What have you done?’
‘Er, yes,’ I mumble, ruffling the chewed edges of my hair. ‘I’ve cut it off.’
‘What’s your father going to say? He would never let me cut your hair when you were little. This will break his heart.’
What do you care about his broken heart? Or mine, for that matter, I think. She walks round me, taking in the catastrophe from all angles. ‘Whatever possessed you?’
I shrug. ‘I wanted to get rid of it.’
‘Oh, well,’ she says, adding without any attempt at irony, ‘on your head be it.’
Mother has given me twenty pounds to get my hair sorted out. I have never been to a hairdresser’s in my life and I don’t know the drill. There are two local salons: one is neon-lit, white-tiled and staffed by people with leather trousers and platinum-blond mohicans or shaven heads. The other is decorated in tones of beige and has a row of hood dryers in the window, beneath which old ladies sit waiting for their perms to cook, like seedlings under cloches. I choose the beige one. Inside a woman in a flowery apron is sweeping up clippings. She steers the growing pile of grey fluff towards a door, which she opens, and then pushes the whole lot inside, broom and all, and slams the door smartly.
When I am directed to the basin, which has a curious bite taken out of the rim, I go to kneel on the chair the way I do at home over the sink, and the astonished hairdresser has to tap me on the shoulder and turn me round. She brings me a cup of coffee and a copy of Cosmopolitan to read while the conditioner soaks in. The coffee is placed just out of reach, but I peel across the pages of the magazine until the following line in bold type catches my eye. The cure for heartbreak: a haircut! 75% of women who have split from a partner change their hairstyle. ‘It’s a control thing,’ says Amanda, 22, whose relationship broke up last year. ‘It’s about taking command of one area of your life.’
I close my eyes and put my head back on the block. A drop of well-conditioned water trickles down my neck and between my shoulders to my bra-strap. It will take me a while to come to terms with the banality of my suffering.
40
It is early September. Nothing has happened to me. Birdie has called a couple of times, but is frequently unavailable. I suppose it is only to be expected. She has other friends, and her loyalty to me is only half-strength. I have been to visit father. He is dreading the approaching school term, but is otherwise cheerful. Mother has summoned him for a meeting tomorrow, which he takes as a good sign. They need to discuss money, apparently. He is sorry to hear about Rad and can be relied upon to say the right thing. ‘I rather liked him. Perhaps he’ll come to his senses.’ As I leave, it occurs to me that he hasn’t even noticed my haircut. Perhaps his eyes look straight at the soul; or perhaps he’s got other things on his mind.
On the day normal life stops I am sitting in my bedroom gazing out of the window into the middle distance – a recent hobby of mine – when I see the familiar green Citroën pull up, and Rad limps down the driveway. My heart lurches: it’s here, the moment I’ve waited for, he’s back. I take the stairs in three bounds and open the door as the bell rings. He looks terrible – pale, greasy-haired and unshaven. I haven’t anticipated quite this degree of contrition.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’ We go into the sitting room. He waits until I have sat down before sitting on the couch opposite. ‘What have you done to your foot?’ I can’t help asking. It is fatly bandaged and he is wearing a pair of old-man’s slippers.
‘What? Oh, cut it. It doesn’t matter.’ There is a silence. ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ He is avoiding eye contact. I don’t care how he says it. I only know that there will never have been such a grateful recipient of an apology, and that I will make it as easy for him as I can. Any minute now I am going to be happy again; I can sense myself preparing for it. He stands up as if to give himself courage, but it doesn’t work so he sits down again, abruptly.
‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. I understand.’
He looks at me at last with the faintest expression of hope. ‘You’ve heard already? Who from?’ The air between us is thick: his words seem to take a long time to reach me.
‘Heard what?’ I am starting to grasp that what is coming is not an apology – nothing like it.
‘About the accident?’
‘What accident?’
The glimmer of hope has gone. ‘Oh, I thought you meant you knew.’
‘No. I don’t know anything. What’s happened?’
‘Birdie’s–’ his voice goes high and he stops for a second and swallows. ‘Drowned.’
‘Drowned?’ For a second I can’t remember what the word drowned means. It sounds so strange. ‘You don’t mean she’s dead?’
He nods. ‘Yesterday night. I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’
‘How drowned?’
‘We took a boat out on the lake at Half Moon Street, and it capsized. I tried to save her, but I couldn’t even find her.’
As with hurricanes and tornadoes, in the midst of calamity there is a terrible calm. And so in spite of what I am hearing, I don’t burst into tears or collapse. Instead I say something so despicable that it will haunt me for years to come: ‘Why were you at Half Moon Street with Birdie?’
Rad peers at me as though he can’t quite understand what I’ve just said. ‘What does it matter why we were there?’
‘I meant, what happened? How did it happen? Are you sure she’s dead?’ I babble. ‘Can’t they do something? Doctors.’ There is such a pounding in my ears that I don’t take in a quarter of what he says. It is only much later that I am able to piece together the events. One image gets through, though. Rad, soaking wet, running the half-mile back up the lane to the pub, now dark and shuttered, and beating on the door screaming, ‘My girlfriend’s in the lake. My girlfriend’s in the lake.’
‘Will you be all right?’ He is getting up to go. ‘I’ve got to go and see her mother. She knows, but only from the police.’ He is keeping the muscles in his face tense to stop himself collapsing into tears. We could comfort each other, I think. But we don’t.
‘I’ll be okay. My mother will be back in a minute. I’ll sit and wait for her. I can’t believe she’s dead. I can’t think properly. I can’t …’ My mind is so leaden that I can’t even say what it is I can’t do.
Rad doesn’t even say goodbye, he just sort of shakes his head and then he’s gone and I’m alone. I lie back on the couch and look at the ceiling through a kaleidoscope of floaters. I can hear Granny moving about upstairs. I think of Birdie, my sister, whom I have known for just three months and will never now know any better, and then of her mother, the Samaritan, whose years of counselling the bereaved and the desperate will now prove of so little help.
41
What happened was this: Rad had driven Birdie to the pub at Half Moon Street. They had a meal in the restaurant and then at closing time went for a walk around the lake. He was surprised to find that she knew the place already; her mother had brought her there as a little girl.
The cottage was still empty and boarded up, and they had gone inside for a while. It was a warm evening and there was a bright moon on the water and Rad had suggested they go skinny-dipping, but Birdie had refused. Like me she couldn’t swim. The old boat was still tethered to the NO BOATING sign, so Rad had waded out and dragged it back to the jetty. It looked sound enough, and was dry inside, so Rad rowed Birdie out to the middle of the lake. He pulled the oars in and let the boat rotate slowly, and the two of them lay back and watched the stars and talked. The conversation had turned around to me and the two of them had started to quarrel, lazily. Rad, half-teasing, said he was goin
g to swim back and leave her marooned in the boat. She said, fine, go ahead, I’ll row myself back, but don’t expect me to jump in and save you if you get stuck. Rad took off his jeans, shirt and shoes and dived off the boat, swimming down as deep and far as he could underwater, hoping to come up so far away that Birdie wouldn’t see him. But when he broke through the surface and shook his wet hair out of his eyes he saw that his dive from the boat had capsized it – the oars were floating on the water and Birdie was nowhere to be seen. He had called her until he was hoarse, and then for the next fifteen minutes he dived under the boat, threshing the reeds at the bottom with his arms, coming up only for a gasped breath before plunging back down again, taking in wider and wider circles. The water was as black as hell and his frantic searching stirred up the mud from the lake floor so that he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face in the soupy darkness. After what felt like hours, but was in fact minutes, when he had found nothing but a single muddy deck shoe and was on the point of expiring himself, he struggled back to shore and ran, dripping wet and nearly naked, the half-mile to the pub. His cries for help roused the landlord who came to the door holding a snarling Dobermann, to find Rad slumped on the step with blood pouring from one foot. He had trodden on a piece of broken bottle in the lane without even noticing. The landlord wrapped him in a towel and left him sitting in the dark in the bar while he phoned the police. Rad was taken to hospital where he had his foot stitched and so was not there when police divers brought Birdie’s body up at five minutes past one.
42
Until the funeral itself I find it impossible to absorb that Birdie is dead. I have cried, of course, often, and I have willed myself to understand, but there is a degree of detachment about my grief. I feel as though I’m somewhere deep inside my own body, awaiting excavation: nothing that this body does is real any more. It’s too early to miss her, to realise at any but the most superficial level that I’ll never see her again however much I want and need to, that I will grow old and die myself, and still won’t have seen her, that everything else will carry on except Birdie.
I am not strong enough to break the news to father. He hears it first from mother, who has surprised me by crying great rending sobs herself and arranging for special prayers to be said at church. My father comes home to comfort me and be comforted. We sit on the bench together in the garden, surrounded by the scent of dying roses and the whirring of bees, and talk. He seems absolutely stricken by the mention of Half Moon Street. Mother hasn’t passed on this detail in her account.
‘You used to meet Val there, didn’t you?’ I say. We don’t look at each other as we talk, but straight ahead across the lawn.
‘Yes,’ he says quietly. ‘I wanted you to see the place because I knew you’d like it, not because it meant anything to me. It was wrong of me to take you there.’
Mother brings us tea but otherwise allows us our privacy. ‘I must write to Valerie tonight,’ father says, thinking aloud. Composing such a letter of condolence will almost break him, I know, but even this penance is preferable in his view to a personal visit.
When it is time for him to leave, mother comes out to say goodbye. ‘Thank you for the money,’ she says, referring to some transaction of the week before.
He waves away her gratitude. ‘If you need any more …’ They walk up the garden, slightly ahead of me. ‘The roses must have been good this year.’ He has missed the best of them.
‘Yes. I’ve been ignoring the hose ban,’ says mother. ‘Unfortunately the lawn keeps growing.’ She draws a parting in the long grass with the toe of one shoe.
‘Would you like me to cut it while I’m here?’ asks father, pleased to be useful, and even more pleased with himself for recognising the cue.
‘Would you?’ says mother. ‘That would be wonderful.’ And within seconds father is struggling out of his jacket and making for the shed, and mother is putting an extra chop in the casserole. I don’t know whether it is grief or guilt or a need for comfort that effects this reconciliation, or what unwritten contract is drawn up in the privacy of their room, but father doesn’t go home that night, and only returns to his grim little bedsit the following day to collect his belongings and take a last thankful look through that nailed-up window on to the eviscerated garbage bags and broken down bikes in the alley below.
43
The dead have many friends. Practically the whole of Birdie’s school has turned out for the funeral. From the car-park where father and I sit, having arrived far too early and almost gatecrashed the wrong service, we can see armies of girls and boys converging on the chapel. Nearly all of them are in black in spite of Valerie’s suggestion that people should wear normal, bright clothes. The older generation have complied, but the young are superstitious. Some of the boys don’t have mourning wear and are in their school uniform instead. A few of the girls are wiping their eyes already. I look away hurriedly: I can’t afford to cry now when there is so much worse to come. A ripple runs through the crowd as the hearse pulls up smothered with flowers like a carnival float, and when I see that box inside an icy drop of fear runs the length of my spine. To think of the lid just inches from her face. From the accompanying car Birdie’s mother emerges, tottering, on the arm of a friend. I remember her as being strong, athletic-looking, but now she appears shrunken – her skin like cloth on a wire frame; a cough could blow her away. Even the largest of the three assembly rooms at the cemetery isn’t big enough and it is standing room only at the back: father and I, the first to arrive, are the last to enter, and take our places by the doors which are then closed upon us. Even at a moment like this I catch myself looking out for Rad, and am filled with shame and self-loathing. But there he is, just a few rows in front of me, next to Frances and Mr Radley. He keeps his head down, as well he might.
Birdie’s mother has chosen a secular version of the traditional service. If she ever was a believer she certainly isn’t now. Meditations rather than prayers will be led by a man in grey trousers and a sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows, who looks like a schoolteacher. He gives himself away as a mere functionary as soon as he opens his mouth by welcoming us to what will be a time to recall and celebrate the life of Elizabeth Cromer. At the mention of the name Elizabeth the congregation stiffens as one. Birdie never, ever used her real name. Half the people present probably don’t even know what it was, but no one has the courage or presence of mind to correct him and he is allowed to compound this terrible blunder by referring throughout to a total stranger. Elizabeth wanted to be a lawyer; Elizabeth loved to discuss politics; Elizabeth’s friends are now going to read for us. All around I can sense people bracing themselves every time the name comes up. A schoolfriend of Birdie’s takes over the lectern to read a poem by Christina Rossetti, and another reads ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ in a voice that never wavers. There is a constriction in my throat that swallowing cannot shift. The bravest performance of all comes from a girl of about fifteen who sings, unaccompanied, the aria ‘Ach ich fühl’s’ from The Magic Flute in a creamy soprano that finally springs the lock. The tap tap of her shoes on the tiles as she returns to her seat is accompanied by muffled sobs and choking sounds from every corner of the room. I can feel my eyes starting to sting, and a prickling sensation in the top of my nose that gives me a few seconds’ warning before the tears come, and once they’ve started nothing can stem the flow. In front of me Rad brushes his shirt cuff across his eyes and slumps even further forward; Frances’ shoulders are heaving. The heat in the hall is intense: during the minute of silent reflection there is some scuffling from the group in the corner alongside us: someone has fainted and is carried outside to be revived. The sudden gust of cool air from the open door seems to turn the salt water on my cheeks to acid and my skin flares.
Though we are among the first out, father and I hang back before following the procession to the plot chosen for the burial. It is a long walk through the cemetery and the crowd has strung out in a straggling line by
the time the coffin has reached the graveside. Father offers me a large, white handkerchief – one of the ones I have painstakingly ironed as part of mother’s programme of occupational therapy. On the way I notice some of Birdie’s friends giving me sidelong glances, nonplussed by this unexplained resemblance. I keep my head up, bearing my likeness proudly. Let them wonder.
The crowd around the grave is five deep, so I am spared the sight of the coffin being lowered down. Instead I look up at the sky and watch the few clouds blowing across the sun. Where are you? I think. There has been no talk of the hereafter at the service. Only Birdie’s past is allowed to matter, which seems cruel to me. At a time like this surely even a nonbeliever can admit a whisper of hope? On the trimmed grass beside us are more flowers than I have ever seen: the individual wreaths and sprays have been packed close together to stop them overrunning the neighbouring plots; it looks as though the whole thing could be picked up by one corner and laid over the grave like a quilt.
I only realise it’s all over when the crowd starts to break up. There are small clusters of girls leaning on one another for support; their heads together like conspirators. White handkerchiefs flutter in the wind like flags of surrender. Father gives a great sigh and pulls at his beard; he is thinking the thoughts that lie too deep for tears. I have no more crying left in me, for the moment at least. I feel wrung out, like a used floorcloth. On the way back to the car we pass Frances and Rad, who nod at me, as someone they used to know.
Learning to Swim Page 30