‘Is it . . . don’t Sonia,’ she says.
‘What do you mean, “don’t”? It’s from Seb, Mum. Your son.’
She says nothing. I continue, ‘And who is it addressed to?’
‘I can’t see. I can’t see the name.’
She doesn’t want to see the name.
‘It’s addressed to me. Look. Sonia. A letter from your son, to your daughter.’
She stares at me, her good eye widening in shock. As if this is the first time she’s realized.
‘From my brother to his sister. I never got the letter.’
I stop, examining her to see whether my words make any sense to her at all. She tries to turn her head away from me. ‘I’m going to read it to you.’
5th February
Sonia,
I hadn’t realized, there’s going to be a spring tide on 12th Feb. The forecast is terrible. It will be far too dangerous to bring Tamasa. Get in touch with Mark and come with him in the dinghy, not the raft. I’ve spoken to him and he agrees there’s no point in taking unnecessary risks. I must be growing up over here!
Anyway, there’ll be plenty more chances to go out on Tamasa once I’m free of this place. The whole summer ahead of us! What a thought. But please bring the boat.
Seb x
My mother takes the letter in her one good hand, looks at Seb’s handwriting. She stares at it silently for several minutes through her one good eye. Eventually she rests her hand on the hospital blanket and lets the thin paper flutter onto the coverlet. Then she lifts an arm, pats her hair into place, puts her hand on her chest.
‘We sent Seb away to stop you. A brother and sister doing unthinkable things.’ A wave of hot shame rolls over me. ‘But then you persisted in writing to each other.’
‘Seb hated that school. He wrote and asked me to fetch him. I got the letter telling me to take Tamasa. I did as he wanted me to do. I never got this letter which would have saved his life, because someone, and I guess it was you or Dad, hid it from me!’
‘This is upsetting me. I’m ill, Sonia. You’re going to kill me if you keep on.’
There’s a long silence. A tear has escaped my mother’s eye and is rolling down her cheek. The rouge runs. For a few horrible seconds I imagine she’s crying blood.
‘I would have taken the dinghy with Mark,’ I whisper more emphatically. I feel a sudden euphoric sense that I have been wronged. That I am not solely to blame, as I’ve always believed, for Seb’s terrible death. ‘Seb would have lived.’
The repercussions pop into my head, reaching far into the future.
My mother seems to shrink before my eyes, to become flatter under the hospital blankets, as if her body were made of paper. She has never talked to me properly about anything, I realize now. She weaves and dodges and quotes poetry, but she never says what she means.
‘You sent him away. Then you stole his letters. When you could have talked to me. To us.’
My mother looks directly at me now, determined to regain some authority, taking on her cold schoolmistress persona.
‘How could I talk about that kind of thing. It was shameful, it was animal!’
‘We were children, Mother.’
‘I tried, Sonia. I tried to stop you both. I brought Jasmine home when I realized. Have you forgotten?’
I ignore this. She knows what happened. By the time she brought Jasmine onto the scene it was too late.
She suddenly sits up, screws up her face and takes off.
‘We only took the letters. We didn’t read them. We didn’t want to read them. Of course if we had read this one we would have stopped you from going on the raft. We would have stopped him running away at all!’
She turns her face away from me. I wait.
When she finally looks back at me, she seems startled, as if she hadn’t expected me still to be here.
‘The letters have been opened. Look. With a knife. Who opened them?’
‘When you left for university, your father wanted to clear them out, start again. That’s when he read them and realized the terrible mistake he had made. That’s why, I believe, he took his own life.’
‘And you never told me!’
‘What was the point in telling you? It was too late. Seb was dead anyway. We couldn’t bring him back. Knowing things could have been different would only have made things worse for you. That’s what I decided.’
The sky outside the hospital windows is lowering. Inside the strip lights are too harsh. She looks up at me, a pleading look, the kind of look a small child gives its parent when it knows it’s done wrong. Surely she must be about to give me what I’ve asked her for. An admission. A chance to share the blame before she dies. Then I can forgive her, too.
She says, ‘Your father left you the River House. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Enough?’
I look at my mother, hoping for something else, some sign of love or forgiveness or comfort. I feel the first stirrings of sympathy for her that she finds this so hard.
I want to say something to her, something that will draw us together at last. I want us to share the grief we’ve both been carrying around all these years. But I don’t have the words either. So I just say, ‘Mother, speak to me.’
She just looks back at me through the one eye that will open and the words I long for don’t come. I stand up, take a step towards the door.
‘Sonia.’
I turn around. She’s holding one frail old hand out to me.
I go back to her. Our fingers touch, briefly. I bend down and kiss her hair. And then I leave.
I need to go to Jez now, to unlock the door, because I never wanted to force him to stay. He’ll have regained his strength. But he won’t want to leave. We will wander down to the river together, walk up to our calves in the water, not bothering to roll up our jeans. He might go a bit further, right in, reach the barges, clamber aboard. Shout at me to join him. Stare back at the River House and tell me again how he wishes he could live there. The river will lift the barge suddenly, so he rocks up and down and he will laugh and pretend to fall.
‘We’ll build a raft, Sonia,’ he will shout. ‘And get away from them.’
And we’ll paddle on our tummies across the glassy water looking for one of those hidden inlets between dark wharves. We’ll spend the evening on a secret beach as the river turns fiery in the sunset. Hunt for clay pipes on the tideline. Dig in the mud for treasure. Follow swans with cygnets tucked under their wings. They won’t find us. It’ll just be us, the swans and the river, forever.
CHAPTER FORTY
Wednesday
Sonia
On the bus on the way home from the hospital I remember the package that arrived today. I will go straight up to Jez. I can’t keep him. The only way I can stop them taking him from me is to do it myself, end it all now. This is what I must do. Keep Jez poised for ever, at the point Seb was when he died. And then they can do what they like to me.
As soon as I get home I open the package and take out the rolls of Modroc bandage. I take a bowl up to the music room. Jez watches me.
I fill the bowl in the shower room with warm water and place it at his feet ready to soak each bandage as I go.
The windows have gone tangerine in the evening light. Like boiled sweets. Occasionally this happens over the river, the sky seems scorched, the burnt tinge caused by the pollutants in the air, blurring the sunset. Then this chemical glow bounces off the water, dyeing the banks and bathing the room with the same dazzling amber light.
‘What are you doing?’ Jez asks. He’s smoking a joint. His tea is laced with drugs because I need his cooperation in what I’m about to do, though he’s stopped putting up resistance since he returned to the music room on Monday. I think he even mildly enjoys being in the room, while he’s unwell, the not having to take responsibility for anything.
The last time I saw Seb, he was embalmed in his coffin, on the table in the living room, his youth caught for ever. I don’t think Seb ever lo
oked in a mirror or had any idea of his own perfection. But even in death he was beautiful. His hands folded on his chest, his mouth turned down a little at the corners just as it was in life, as if he were saying, I knew you’d all let me down. I knew you’d never get it.
I tell Jez I need to make a statue of him. He stares at me for a minute. Takes another drag on the joint.
‘You want a sculpture of me?’ He sounds a little alarmed. Even through the dope. I want him to be calm now.
‘Yes. That’s all, Jez. That’s all I want. To capture you as you are now.’
Of course, he’s seen me transfixed by him. By his arms, by the way his Adam’s apple rises and falls in his honey-smooth throat. I’ve tried to keep my admiration covert. But once or twice in the last couple of days he’s blinked, and looked up, or turned his head just as I thought he was absorbed. He’s caught my gaze, and though I’ve moved quickly to hide my rapture, he’s seen it. I think part of him has grown to enjoy it. He probably knows the power he holds over me. This new-found vanity is useful for what I want to do. It means he’ll comply. Yet it spoils the very essence of him that I want to capture. The lack of awareness of his own beauty and youth. This frustrates me to the point of desperation. In getting what I want, I destroy it.
‘It won’t hurt,’ I tell him. ‘This is a gentle process. Women use this stuff to model their pregnant bellies.’
‘Why do they do that?’
‘They want to remember themselves as they’ll never be again.’
He stares at me, wide-eyed. My words have the opposite effect to what I intended. He’s frightened again.
‘I’d be no good to you dead. You do know that?’
‘Jez! Please! Try to trust me. This is the last thing I’m asking of you.’
‘The last thing? What do you mean?’
‘The last thing before you change.’
I feel a cavernous hollow of sadness gape within me.
He’s still so weak. His illness has left him wrung out, drained. He can barely resist as I peel off his jeans and his T-shirt. Everything.
‘I’m cold.’
‘I’ve lit the wood burner. And it’ll be warm once I begin.’
For a few minutes I can’t move, pinioned to the spot by the vision of his body on the white sheets.
Then I smooth on the petroleum jelly, first onto and between his toes. They curl as I do so, a fine bone in his caramel-brown foot twitches. I lift each foot in turn, hold it close as I spread on the jelly and as my warm breath touches his sole, his calf muscles tighten, and a smile flickers across his lips. He’s like a litmus paper, his response is instant. I wrap his feet individually in the bandages, working up his legs one at a time. I dip my hands in the warm water so they are moist as I smooth and press on the bandages then wrap them around his feet, round and round so they are caught. The wet plaster has to be eased through the fabric then stroked down so it’s like another layer of skin, fine, but opaque, over his own.
I think of those spider skins caught in the webs in the garage. The detail of the spider remains in perfect replica after the spider has walked away, suspended in the moment. I reach the concave area of his pelvis, where his muscles are drawn in, and his whole body shudders as I lay on the bandages. I ignore his response and move on up, smearing the petroleum jelly over his pectoral muscles, feeling the sharp protrusion of his nipples as I go, then up to his neck where I press the plaster into the runnel of his clavicle, lingering a little here. My fingers caress his collarbone, the tender cartilage in his neck, his ears. They stray over his square chin, to his face. Soon he’s a white silhouette, only his contours visible. He’s caught at the exact age Seb was the last time I saw him.
‘It’s weird. It’s going all heavy,’ Jez says. His voice is succumbing to the drugs, his tongue must feel like leather. His eyes widen. He looks as if he’s had enough.
‘It’s the plaster drying out,’ I tell him.
‘I feel trapped. Not sure I like it. It’s hot.’
‘It’s just the chemical reaction between the wet plaster and the air. It won’t be for long.’
‘What about my face?’ he asks.
‘Don’t speak. You mustn’t move or it won’t work.’
‘But – you can’t cover my face. I won’t be able to breathe!’
‘There’s a straw. Take it in your mouth.’
I place the bandages over his face, pushing with my fingertips into the valley between his chin and lips. Lay pieces of bandage over his nose and cheeks. I stroke them over the sockets of his eyes, and with one finger, ease the plaster along his eyelids. Every rise, every dip. At last he’s done. He lies, a white shape in the fading orange light immobilized. I’ve done it. I’ve got him.
They come to the River House in the early hours of the next morning. The windows in my room throb with flashes of blue light. I get up and go downstairs in a trance. They’ve already smashed the door in the wall down, and are battering the hall door with crowbars while others bang on the barred windows and helicopters circle overhead. They start up the stairs, heavy boots, protective vests, tasers in holsters, leather gloves. I watch them go. One of them holds me in an armlock, while others mount the steps to the music room. I hear them bang on the door, rattle it. Boot it open. I smile because I know what they’re going to find. The Jez in the music room is static and lifeless, every pore of his skin produced in perfect replica. A spider’s husk, suspended in a silken web, so that it will never grow old. The live body gone. Not a trace of the real Jez remains, it’s as if he were never here. I go with them quietly, because there is nothing left to be done.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A year later
Sonia
You don’t know what season it is in here, or even what the weather’s doing. The light outside has been pale all day, but it’s waning now. The branches on the stubby tree are bare again. And there’s not much else to see. A high fence topped with barbed wire, the concrete wall of a multi-storey car park. No river. They took me away from the river.
He comes to me after the teacups have been carried off on trays. He comes into the room in a scarf and wool jacket and I realize it really is winter out there. He sits on the green plastic armchair and looks at me with the same old gaze, eyes half shut as if he’s trying to understand. I don’t speak, I just look straight back at him. I remember the brush of his eyelashes against my finger-tips. His hot skin under my lips. The warm scent behind his ear. But this is not the boy who lay semi-conscious between the pilings where I let him go free. He’s larger, broader. I remember the barely there stubble, see that now it’s blacker, coarser. His youth’s past, like the Clipper hurtling along the river, out of sight and earshot, rocking everything in its wake as it disappears round the bend towards the Thames Barrier.
He stays a while. Tells me he’s compelled to return to the River House. Often sits outside on the wall opposite. He feels it’s an extension of him. He doesn’t know the people who live there now. Greg and Kit left of course to live in Geneva. I only hear from them from time to time.
I open my mouth to explain that even if I’d kept him there, even if the police had not finally deduced from Maria and Mick and Alicia that Jez must be in the River House, it could not have worked. What I wanted was dissolving in my own hands. But the words won’t come.
So he asks what happened the night I let him go. And I try to tell him.
It was almost dark when I got back to the music room. I’d tied the dinghy to the chain beneath the wall by the stone steps. The tide was in. Jez was slumped in the wheelchair, ready to go. He slouched forward as I pushed him out, over the alley, to the top of the steps. I’d balanced the oars across the handles of the wheelchair. I took him along the path, under the dark shadow of the coaling pier, to the top of the steps where my boat was waiting. I felt light, fearless. Unlike the night I let Helen’s body fall into the hungry river, petrified by my own actions. The tangerine glow had long since dissipated. It was dark. Orange lights from the
buildings on the other side pierced the water. The dinghy was tied up at the top of the steps, nodding gently on the spring tide as if it were impatient for us.
He slipped easily into the boat. I left the wheelchair at the top of the steps, it wouldn’t be needed again. Someone would take it, nothing gets left on the alley. It’d end up at Deptford market or some lost soul would make use of it as a shopping trolley or a pram.
I climbed into the boat behind him, slotted the oars into the rollicks. Then I took a few minutes to arrange him. I’d released him from the plaster. His skin was still warm from its encasement, slippery from the petroleum jelly. I arranged him symmetrically, his head in the bow, feet almost touching the stern. It was only a small boat.
I used my oar to push off across the dark water. We glided easily upriver as I knew we would now the tide was coming in. It was a balmy night. One of those freak days you get in February when you think spring has arrived. Pubs full, people standing out on the wooden platforms. I could hear laughter, snatches of conversation as we passed. All the pubs familiar to me from the years I’d spent on the river, The Trafalgar, the Prospect of Whitby on the north, the Mayflower on the south. Memories of me and Seb reflected like the lights in the water as we passed each one. I rowed upstream, the water dripping off the oars lit up by the lights glittering on either bank. I was in a state of deep peace. Jez at my feet, supine. I wanted that journey to last for ever. The river was gentle, rolling. Jez and me together on the boat, complete. Drifting back east as the tide turned.
We reached the north side, under the overhang of the road, and I took us into its shadows through the pilings. These days, there would have been ghastly, wilting wreaths lashed to them to mark the spot. But we never marked it once they’d released Seb from the rope that had caught around his neck. The rope that was throttling him, as he shouted to hold on to him. As the raft sank beneath the tide. I tugged in the dark. The wake from a passing river-bus rolled over him, and I pulled tighter to stop him from being dragged away. I had no idea that the rope I pulled was strangling him.
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