“Are you coming?”
We’re waist-deep before her sentence is complete. The water surges and unbalances me. Zenna clasps my hand, preventing me from fleeing back onto the shore.
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
She laughs, breaking away from me and swimming a few strokes on her back; diving into the waves and re-emerging behind me.
“Boo!” She ducks under and jumps up.
I’m terrified every time she’s out of sight. She dives again, and again, and again.
“Stop it. I don’t like it,” I plead, the briny sea masking my salty tears.
“Coward!”
She dives again. And again. But this time she doesn’t reappear.
“Zenna? Zenna.” Voice quaking, I dip down and stir my hands around the water.
She rises, triumphantly, several feet away; her arms and legs thrown up, somersaulting in the water with sheer joy.
Her face darkens, eyes widen. “Jo!”
She goes under, feet first, as though yanked from below. She doesn’t emerge, and the water is agitated as she kicks and writhes against the unseen assailant. Bubbles dance on the surface as her breath escapes in measured spurts.
“Zenna!”
The water’s completely clear, and she’s vanished. I need to swim further out, in case she drifted away, but I can’t. I’m frozen.
“Zenna.” A whisper, a plea. Come back, don’t leave me here.
I’ve got to find her. I’ve got no choice.
Filling my lungs with air, I dive. I’m so far from shore, the beach is a pinprick. The sea’s too deep for me to touch the bottom. I sink into the calm, turquoise ocean alone. I call out, and my voice carries for miles.
Mum’s beside me. I sob, gagging on seawater, unable to catch my breath. Residual panic compels me to keep searching. I endeavor to explain the urgency, to push Mum away so I can continue. Gradually, my surroundings reassemble themselves. My terror alleviates, my confusion dissipates.
Mum perches on the edge of the bed. Her hand hovers before brushing hair from my tear-damp, sweat-soaked face. I nuzzle into it. “Sssh,” she hums.
How long has it been since my mother soothed me from a nightmare? I don’t recall, but I imagine she must have done, once upon a time.
“I was drowning.” No, that’s not right. “She was drowning.”
Mum sits up straight. “She,” she repeats softly. She has tears in her eyes she doesn’t wipe away. She smiles weakly and rests her hand on my arm. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
The images are fading. I don’t know how to begin; I don’t know how it started. I shake my head.
She kisses my forehead. “Get some sleep.”
On her way out, she glances back and steadies herself on the door jamb. Silhouetted by the landing light, her expression is concealed, her body elongated.
***
Mum’s already out when I get up. I didn’t sleep for much of the night, scared of what I’d find lurking in my nightmares. I heard her alarm, and her padding to and from the bathroom, and up and down the stairs. I heard her gently tap on my door and ask if I was awake. I heard the front door close with a mixture of relief and trepidation.
Alone, but not. The house is restless; Zenna inside my head is excited and badgering. Her voice is a long, low grumble of thunder.
My vision is sleep-blurry as I scroll through my Facebook feed to distract myself until I’m just re-reading the same posts over and over. I message Lily, but she doesn’t reply—she’s probably already at work. Nathan says: Hey, can I get back to you? I’m at the gym, but he’ll probably forget.
I make myself a coffee and bring it back upstairs. On the landing, I stop at the closed door of the spare room—guest room, I suppose Mum calls it these days, decked out in neat but neutral furnishings, ready to be used at a moment’s notice. Like mine was when I arrived. Perhaps she calls them both spare rooms.
We used to play in there—another space where we’d be out of Mum’s way. Zenna would wait in the wardrobe and jump out to scare me. And when I yelled, Mum would tell me off.
“But Zenna did it,” I’d wail, with the faith only a small child can achieve.
I turn the handle and push the door open. I squeeze my eyes shut, afraid of Zenna appearing in front of me—not the childhood invisible friend but the volatile accomplice of my nightmares, with her hair dripping with sea water, enticing me to follow her. The vague swell of water passes over me, the subtle dizziness.
The room is empty. The carpet is worn and sun-bleached; the curtains are thin and ugly. Only the tall mahogany wardrobe remains, the exact one where I played—the only item I hoped not to see ever again.
The hand which reaches for the handle isn’t my bony, lined, adult hand. It’s soft and plump, and the doorknob is palm sized. The wardrobe towers over me again—how young I was, how tall it was. It creaks and squeaks, and a child chuckles from inside. I fling the door open.
No one there.
Of course.
Just boxes. Stacked to the top, jammed together like a Tetris game; things without boxes slipped into the odd-shaped gaps. One of the boxes, which once housed a new DVD player, has my name written on the side in black marker.
I shimmy it out—Jenga-style—and, one by one, lay the contents across the floor. School photos, exam certificates in envelopes, reports right back to my first year at primary school, participation medals from various sports clubs. I touch each of them, as though memory through osmosis may occur.
In another, there are newspaper clippings with my name either in the headline or in the body text. They mention a career I don’t remember, of selling art to a couple of A-list actors. Beneath it, a photo of Mum and me in front of a large painting—LCCA, 2004, Untitled, written on the back.
There’s a brochure from my exhibition, the corner discolored and pulpy where red wine splashed on it. She was there! My estranged mother, who hasn’t told me so herself, has seen my collection in London. She’s been there. In London only a few days before I turned up on her doorstep, and she hasn’t said anything.
I look again and flinch at the similarities between the painting and my dreams—I hadn’t noticed before. Which came first, my nightmares or the rendering of them?
A larger box contains birthday cards and tiny boxes tied with ribbon labeled First Tooth and First Hair Cut. So many photos. I’m a baby with a shock of black hair, with bright red teething cheeks and a dummy. I’m walking tentatively, gripping my father’s hand. I’m posing at the front door in a school uniform a fraction too big, my hair in tight, high bunches. At a party, on a beach, on Santa’s knee. I recognize myself but have no attachment, no nostalgia for these captured moments.
I sit back on my heels and scan the boxes with incredulity. The breadth of memorabilia is astounding.
From the growing heap, I find a photo of Mum and me when I’m about five or six. She’s so young, mid-twenties perhaps, but no older. She’s holding my hand and beaming into the camera. She’s being pulled out of the frame by someone on her other side. But I’ve only got half the picture in my hand—the edge is frayed, neatly torn. I don’t know who’s holding her other hand.
Mum fills the doorway and casts a broad shadow over me.
I show her the brochure from the Zenna exhibition. “You were in London?”
“You shouldn’t be in here.” But she kneels beside me and brushes her hand through the piles. She glances at the brochure, still held high in reproach. “I almost bumped into you. The next day, on my way to the station. You came out of a shop with a friend. I almost shouted out to you.”
“Why?”
“Why did I almost shout?”
“Why were you there? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh.” Yet again, she doesn’t answer.
“What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Oh, Jo—I wish …” She glances at the wardrobe, at the mess I’ve made on the floor, and is suddenly gray and exhaust
ed. “Okay,” she says at last. “Okay.”
She stands and lifts a box down from the top of the wardrobe, pushed back to the wall so I didn’t even notice it. It’s hefty, taped at the edges where the corners have torn. She brushes away the dust and peels back the flaps.
There are framed photos in this one. The first is of me and another girl, on rough sepia-tinted 1980s Truprint paper. We are sitting at the patio table, with colored beakers and plates in front of us, wearing summer dresses and squinting against the sun with big toothy grins.
Mum stares at the picture and wipes a tear.
I stare at the picture, at Mum, at everything spread across the floor.
And I remember.
Remember me.
I do. I do remember.
I had a sister. A younger sister.
She died.
She was Zenna.
TWENTY-TWO
Memories flood the room. My childhood unfurls in haste, hitting me, making me gasp.
I’m sitting for my GCSE Maths exam, on the hottest day of the year in the stuffy sports hall, nauseated because I forgot my water bottle and can’t remember how to calculate the surface area of a sphere.
I’m watching Dead Poet’s Society for the seventh time one Christmas, weeping at the “O Captain, my Captain” line. I bought the DVD for Mum because she loved it so much, and we saw it together the first couple of times. I’m obsessed with Robert Sean Leonard.
My parents argue downstairs, while I crawl into a ball and rock myself to sleep.
I’m painting. And painting. And painting.
I’m above myself, peering down. We’re frozen, Mum and I—shifting from one reality to the next with increasing speed. Bombarded and battered. An avalanche I can’t control.
I’m giving my mother a bouquet of flowers I picked from the side of the road on my way home from school. I’m huddled with extended family for a group photo at a fortieth birthday barbeque. I’m in the choir for the Christingle.
Memories. These are my memories. After so long living in a vacuum, they saturate me. I can’t direct them, or conjure up specific events at will, or cast aside those I dislike. I’m a spectator.
Every walk to school, and argument with Mum, and juvenile joke. Playing rounders with friends, climbing trees, watching TV, and listening to music. Homework and sandcastles and being bridesmaid at Cousin Ruby’s wedding. Sneaking home drunk, far too young.
The significant things mingled with the mundane, the poignant with the tedious.
And I’m painting, and painting, and painting.
“Stop!” I cry out when the persistent images consume me.
But they don’t.
They crash over me like the tide. They rain down on top of me until I can barely breathe.
Zenna’s there, too—my baby sister, inserting herself into my life. Fighting for the remote control when I was watching Art Attack, stealing chips from my plate when hers were gone, blaming me for breaking Mum’s favorite lamp. She’s shouting at me or following me about. She’s having a tantrum in the supermarket and making Mum cross; she’s coiled on my lap, sucking her thumb.
She’s a looming, evocative presence. A constant companion, until …
“Stop. Make it stop!” I cling to my mother, the way I did as a child.
It used to concern me how much of my life was locked up. I saw a therapist for a year or so, but it didn’t work. I resented paying her bill; I should have been grateful.
How do people cope with so much inside them?
I’m rendered immobile by the deluge, pinned to the spot with the burden of it all.
There are simultaneous versions of my mother, all industriously getting on with their day. A continual sequence of placing plates in front of me, of firmly braiding my hair before bed, of telling me off for a thousand different misdemeanors. Images layering themselves upon each other like cheap 1980s TV special effects.
Zenna’s a baby, and a toddler, it’s her first day of school and she’s proudly showing off her new patent black Mary Jane shoes. She’s spotty with chicken pox; she’s putting a tooth under her pillow. But she’s not dead. I don’t remember the day she died.
“You were there,” Mum says dolefully.
“You lied. I asked you who Zenna was. I drew her, and you never told me.”
“You drew a woman.”
“No. Don’t even.”
“It’s complicated.” She’s stricken, aghast; caught in a moment she thought she’d moved away from.
It serves her right, for lying. She’s put me through all this when she could have told the truth. I stare bleakly at these mementos scattered across the floor, my life packed away into the wardrobe like unwanted ornaments and unused tea-towels, and I think I hate her.
“I’m listening.”
“We’ll talk about it later, when you’ve calmed down.”
“Calmed down! I’m not a child. You had no right to keep this from me. I had a sister! I ought to know about her. I ought to know why I can’t remember her.” I’m flushed and furious. My arms wave uncontrollably and my voice rasps. My thoughts tumble from my mouth until they no longer make sense.
The obstacle, this thorny one I visualize between us, becomes tangible and impossible. It expands, pushing us further apart. The longer I remain in front of her, the more repulsed I am.
I scramble to my feet and push her hand away from me. I rush from the room, from the suffocation of the house. I run and I wish I didn’t have to stop.
TWENTY-THREE
The infernal mist cuts off the top of the hill behind Mum’s house, fraying into it, leaving it unfinished. It’s ceaseless, encompassing, ever closer.
My car keys are back in my room—I kick the wheel with frustration and grimace against the pain. How seamless would it have been to just drive, all the way back to London, right now? No emotion, no overwrought goodbyes. Maybe that’s what happened before; maybe I already had my keys with me. I lay my hands on the roof and press my forehead onto the cold metal.
Dizziness returns. More concentrated than anything before. A shadow passes through me, chilling me from within. It’s too much—too many emotions welling up, inflating inside me until I explode.
Mum’s at the window like a ghost, like Zenna. Like all those paintings of Zenna when deep down I knew who she was but couldn’t articulate it. Because I must have known, mustn’t I? People don’t just vanish from our lives; we carry them with us, we make them important because we remember them. Every single one of us, so essential to the world we inhabit. That energy can’t just fade to nothing. We talk as though they’re here, we tell each other little stories about them. Their existence and experiences are hoarded by those left behind, like exhibition pieces in a gallery.
Except I forgot.
I lurch toward the beach, encircled by dog walkers when I hit the sand. Their easy conversations drift toward me on the opaque air. One or two nod courteously, turning away quickly to avoid the requirement to speak.
Waves collapse against the sand, rolling onto the shore before the previous one abates, a thunderous collision. Something catches my eye, something red in the surf—someone in the water? In those rough waves, it’s not safe.
Maybe I imagined it. I glance around to check if anyone else noticed. But they’re focused on the beach ahead, or each other, or throwing sticks for their dogs to retrieve.
A dense knot swells in my stomach as I scan the water, adrenaline pumping.
An arm stretches out of the sea, waving at me. They’re in trouble.
The swimmer bobs in and out of view. Blink, and they’ve gone. Blink, and they’re back. I scan around for someone else to confirm what I’m seeing. No one’s close enough to call out to; my words blow out to sea. I turn back, and the water’s empty. Either I’ve lost my bearings, or they’ve ducked under again.
I wait for them to wave, or for anything resembling a person to appear. There’s a gnawing ache in my chest, a grave foreboding. I jump up and down, trying to see
further out.
“Hey!” I shout, accosting a couple walking past with a Doberman. “Is it safe to swim out there today, do you think? I thought I saw someone.”
They glance over my shoulder toward the water, a cursory acknowledgement of my increasing alarm, then dismiss me with pleasantries and a shrug. They call their dog and hurry onwards.
But I can’t walk away—I have to do something. I drop my bag on the sand and remove my coat, shivering as I acclimatize to the wintry air. I run forward, ankle-deep in the surf, and gasp—it’s much colder than I expected. I attempt to keep my eye on the spot where I last saw the swimmer.
Further in, one wading step after the other. Slowing as the current pushes against me, as I become aware of how deep I’m going. Every part of me is solid and stressed and scared. The water’s up to my knees. Further in, to my thighs.
“Hello? Hello?” I’m not sure if I’m loud enough. I strain to catch a reply.
The current’s so strong out here, my whole body is involved with the mammoth task of each step. Up to my waist, my jumper heavy and billowing. My feet are numb, my fingers are cramped into tight claws. I slip on seaweed and lose my footing, catching myself before I fall.
I bend forward, peering through the murky, foaming surf. I barely see my hands as I stir them around in the water, hoping to brush against the swimmer, to catch a flailing arm or leg.
Still nothing.
They’ve been under too long. They’ll be unconscious, or worse.
I have to check beneath the surface. I have to dive, to swim. I have to save them.
I lower myself slowly—my arms, my chest, my shoulders. Only my head is above the water, tilted to the sky, being sprayed. I jump back abruptly. Shivering, shaking. I can’t. I can’t do this.
If I don’t, they’ll die.
It’s up to me.
But I can’t.
I cry out with shame and anguish, the death of a stranger on my conscience.
“I’m coming,” I yell, psyching myself into action. Simultaneously, a huge wave swells up and knocks me off my feet.
The bottom of the ocean is surprisingly calm, almost blissful. Bright sunlight sparkles on the surface and filters down, creating shadows on the golden seabed. Zenna’s waiting for me. Dreaming, not dreaming; alive, not alive. I’m not cold anymore.
Small Forgotten Moments Page 11