The House of Memories

by Monica McInerney

  She kept talking but I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t believe someone had asked her if they could use Felix’s death to promote a comedy TV cooking show.

  I finally interrupted. It was hard to keep my voice level. ‘No, I don’t think so, Mum. Could you both excuse me now? This is our busy time.’ I stood up.

  Mum tried again. ‘Ella, please, don’t go yet. Let us help you. Don’t shut us out too.’

  ‘Too?’

  Another glance passed between her and Walter.

  Mum put her hand on my arm. ‘We spoke to Aidan again last night. He told us you still won’t answer his calls or his emails. Darling, please talk to him. We need to stay close as a family at a time like this. Get through it together by helping each other, not hurting each other.’

  ‘Did you think of that line yourself or did the publicity department write it for you?’

  This time Walter gasped. I said goodbye, turned and walked away, into the kitchen. I didn’t come out again until I was sure they’d left. I worked my shift, stayed an extra hour inventing more work and then went back to my apartment. It was only when I was in my room, the windows shut tightly and music playing loud enough to mask any noise, that I cried and cried.

  I cried for Felix, as ever. But I cried for myself too. For the self that had died when Felix died. I hated what I’d said to Mum and Walter. Oh, I felt justified, angry even. What they had proposed had been so clumsy, so unfeeling. But in my heart I understood what they had been trying to do. Stay connected with me. Help me move on in the only way they could think of. I didn’t regret saying no to them. Of course I had to say no. But I hated the way I’d done it. I wasn’t that mean person, saying hurtful things, hitting out at people, walking away from people, was I? I’d never been like this. Yes, Jess had driven me crazy over the years, Mum had exasperated me, Walter had, well, Walter had been Walter, but I had been able to laugh about it, hadn’t I? Joked with Charlie? Let Aidan tease me about my reactions to my family?

  Now, though, it was like I was outside myself, saying cruel things, deliberately. It felt like it was beyond my control.

  Mum rang me the next day. She apologised again. I listened, pressing my nails into my palms. I murmured that it was fine, even though I was lying. Then she hesitated and I knew she was about to mention Aidan or Jess again.

  ‘Ella, please, can’t you —’

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry. No.’

  She begged me again. I said no again. Eventually, she lost patience. I heard it in her voice. ‘What if it had been Charlie babysitting that day? Would you have been like this with him?’

  ‘If it had been Charlie babysitting that day, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  There it was, said out loud, the words that had gone unspoken until now.

  ‘Ella, we’re a family. We need to —’

  Stick together? Why? I had had my own family. Now I had nothing. There was no rule that said families stayed together. I was proof of that.

  I knew she was trying, as Walter tried when he rang the next day to plead Jess’s case again. ‘She is devastated too, Ella. She cries all day and all night. You must talk to her.’ But I couldn’t do what they wanted. I couldn’t make things better for her. She had done what she had done and now we all had to live with the consequences. Jess. Aidan. Me. I couldn’t go back in time. I couldn’t fix the moment I most wanted to change in my life too.

  Jess wrote to me then. I only got halfway through her letter.

  Ella, I’m so so so so so sorry. I can’t sleep for the guilt, I haven’t been able to learn my lines for the new play I’m doing, or remember my steps. I think about it all the time —

  Her lines. Her steps. She was back on the stage, and I could barely dress myself.

  That same night I dreamt Jess, not Mum and Walter, came into the restaurant. She was happy, laughing, dressed in a stage costume, her face made up, her curls bouncing. She’d come to tell me she’d written a musical about Felix, that she was going to star in it, that she wanted me to come to the premiere, to watch her sing and dance her way through Felix’s life story. In the dream, I smiled at her, said it sounded lovely, that I couldn’t wait to see it. And then I took up a knife from the kitchen bench and I stabbed her. In the heart. It happened in slow motion, and she died in front of me, in theatrical fashion, like a victim in a silent movie, mouth open, eyes wide in shock and pain, before slowly, gracefully collapsing into a bloodied heap at my feet.

  I woke up at two-thirty a.m. In those first moments between the dream and the real world taking over, I felt a strange, comforting calm. Jess was dead. Good. Then reality rushed in. No, Jess wasn’t dead. Felix was dead. I remembered my dream and became even more upset. My wanting to kill Jess, wanting her to feel terrible pain, was dangerous and sad and I had to stop those thoughts. It was then that I knew I had to leave Melbourne. I had to get as far away from my family as I could. I had to try to outrun the pain and the anger. I got up, turned on my laptop and opened a bottle of wine.

  I looked up bus timetables. Job agencies. Houses to rent. Housesitting websites. I took note after note. I saw job vacancies for waitresses, fruitpickers, vineyard workers, all over Australia. I worked in a kind of mania. This type of work will help me, I remember thinking as I took a sip of the wine. The more I drank, the less pain I felt.

  I finished the first bottle and opened another one. I felt good. I felt great. Everything was going to be okay! My brain felt quiet, at peace, cushioned, the spikes of grief flattened. I had six glasses of wine, more than I’d had since Felix died. More than I’d had in years. I don’t remember going to bed. I woke up again at five a.m., nauseous and disorientated. I couldn’t work out where I was. I think I was still drunk. And there, in my dark room, lying in my bed, there was a moment – just a moment, but it felt like the longest moment of my life – when I couldn’t remember what Felix looked like. I was lying there, wanting to think about him, and I couldn’t picture him.

  I panicked. I got up and found all the photos I had of him. I stared at each of them in turn, until his face, his beautiful, smiling, cheeky face, was imprinted on my mind again. One photograph in particular stayed with me, one I’d taken of him aged thirteen months, first thing in the morning, clambering out of his cot, one leg over the rail, both hands reaching out, ready to get going, wanting the day to start now, quickly, come on! It summed him up, his zest for life, the energy he’d had —

  At the funeral, the priest had spoken of Felix’s energy and of our sorrow. When God takes a child, we are all forced to re-examine our lives … I didn’t hear any of it at the time. One night, quite late, a week after I had left Canberra, I rang the priest and asked him to tell me what he had said. I needed to know it wasn’t a generic speech. That he didn’t have stock words of consolation. That Felix had mattered.

  Mum rang me the next day. The priest had rung her, worried about my mental health.

  I told her what I had told him. I needed to know what he’d said about Felix.

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked me?’

  ‘I needed to hear it from him.’

  ‘Ella, would you like to come and stay with us for a while?’

  ‘No.’ I tried to be nicer about it. ‘No, thank you.’

  The next day, Charlie emailed and asked me if I wanted to come and stay with him. I pictured being there in Boston, with Charlie and Lucy and their four happy, healthy, living, breathing children. Tim, the youngest, was just a year older than Felix would have been.

  I rang rather than emailed. ‘Charlie, I’m sorry. I know you mean well —’

  ‘But you can’t.’ A long pause. ‘I understand.’

  I thought about suicide. Several times. What was the point of going on? What kind of life was this? But I couldn’t go through with it. Not because of me, or my family, but for Felix’s sake. I didn’t want him – wherever he was, in heaven, in the galaxy somewhere – to need me, to be looking for me and me not be there for him. It made no sense, I know. I knew he wasn’t coming ba
ck. I knew he was dead. The knowledge of it was like a piece of glass in my heart, throbbing every second, every minute of the day. But while I was alive, I could remember him being alive and that was the only thing, in the early months, that stopped me.

  I kept moving instead. From the moment I got up until it was time for bed, I made myself stay busy. I changed cities. I changed careers. How could I be an editor any more? How could I spend hours each day on my own in a quiet room, carefully going through lines of words on a page or on a screen, moving phrases around, asking questions, querying facts, when that was already what I was doing every single minute of every day, going over and over an afternoon in a Canberra park, wanting to change every single thing about —

  I was in London, thousands of kilometres from Canberra, but the bad feelings began to rise inside me again. I had to get out of Lucas’s house. Now. Be outside, be moving, be as busy as possible. Quickly.

  I turned off my computer. I pulled on my walking shoes. I went down the stairs, outside, down the street, across Bayswater Road and into Hyde Park. Quickly.

  It was a mistake. I’d come in near a group of children, from a nearby creche, perhaps. They were older than Felix would have been, but it didn’t matter. I had pictured Felix at all the ages he would never reach. Any child I looked at would remind me of him.

  The park seemed to be filled with children.

  I kept walking, moving from Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens, past the fountains, ponds and statues of the Italian Gardens and on to one of the tree-lined pathways.

  Distract. Observe.

  The sky above me was heavy with clouds. The sun was visible but it was haze rather than light. I walked, and breathed, walked and breathed. My pulse rate began to slow. In the distance, I could see the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. I passed a group of middle-aged joggers. The man at the back was very red-faced. By a small copse of trees, a woman was exercising with her personal trainer. He had a stopwatch and an American accent. I passed people walking dogs of all sizes, shapes, species and colours. It was like a mobile dog show. One young woman had five small dogs on leads and was getting into a tangle with them as she passed me. The dogs were barking and leaping. ‘Bloody hell!’ she said as one nearly tripped her up. She was laughing.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Aidan and I were shocked when I got pregnant so quickly. We’d thought it could take months or years. I’d stopped taking the pill after we got married. We went back to work, Aidan to his translating job, me to my editing projects. When I started feeling nauseous four months after our wedding, I did a test.

  That night, I told Aidan.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Already.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’

  ‘It’s good news, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s bloody great news. It’s bloody brilliant! Bloody hell!’

  The funny thing was that Aidan never swore. His business was language. He always chose beautiful words to express his thoughts. And now, on hearing the news that he was going to be a father, all he did was swear. It made me laugh and laugh that night.

  ‘Ella?’

  I looked up. Lucas had come up beside me, so silently I hadn’t heard him. It was his walking hour.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I realised he looked worried. ‘Why?’

  ‘You were laughing to yourself.’ He smiled at me. ‘Please, Ella, show some restraint.’

  It was very good to see him. I looped my arm through his and we walked together back to the Italian Gardens, taking a seat at one of the wooden benches. The clouds had cleared above us, a weak sun now visible, adding a pale glow to the stone borders, a sheen to the water tumbling out of the fountains. The statue of the vaccination pioneer Dr Edward Jenner across the water looked polished by the winter light. There was another famous statue not far away. A bronze of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Lucas had told me all about it in one of his earliest Astounding Facts faxes. I’d been entranced that the statue had been installed secretly, in the middle of the night, as a May Day gift from Barrie himself to the children of London. I was just as entranced that the author of Peter Pan had lived around the corner from my uncle. Lucas sent me a photograph of the house at 100 Bayswater Road, showing the blue plaque. He’d sent me all of J.M. Barrie’s books too.

  In later years, I’d read about the inspiration for Peter Pan. I’d cried when I learned that Peter had been inspired by James Barrie’s own older brother David, who died in an ice-skating accident the day before his fourteenth birthday. His mother had never got over it. James had done his best to cheer her up, even going so far as dressing as David and learning to whistle the way he had. But she never stopped mourning her first son. The boy who would not grow up. That line was written on a plaque at the base of the Peter Pan statue too.

  ‘Shall we go back?’ I said, standing up.

  ‘Let’s stay here for a minute, Ella.’

  I knew he was about to mention Aidan again.

  ‘Ella, please, sit down.’

  After a moment, I did.

  We sat beside each other looking out over the water. A minute passed before Lucas spoke.

  ‘Ella, you’re my niece and blood ties will always be stronger, but Aidan is still my friend. I can’t stop caring about him even if you want me to.’

  ‘I can’t talk about him.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to. But I’d like you to listen.’

  I concentrated on the falling drops from one of the fountains as Lucas began to speak.

  ‘I told you he stayed with me on his way to Ireland, to see his parents.’

  Aidan’s parents. In the past twenty months I’d barely thought of them. Their relationship with Aidan and me had been distant, physically and emotionally. Yet they of course had lost their grandson too. Had I even spoken to them afterwards? I couldn’t remember.

  ‘His mother was very sick. She had an operation – her heart, I think. She’s frail but recovering.’

  Lucas was giving me answers to questions I wasn’t asking.

  ‘Aidan went to see them on his way to America.’

  I looked at Lucas then. ‘America?’

  ‘He’s living and working in Washington D.C. now, with a large translating agency.’

  ‘Charlie didn’t tell me.’

  ‘You told Charlie not to tell you anything. Aidan was offered the job about three months ago. The man who runs the agency is an old university friend of his.’

  I knew who he meant. Aidan’s friend had often tried to lure him to the US. It seemed he’d finally managed it. I’d never been to Washington D.C. I knew it only from news coverage and films. I did know it was where good interpreters and translators often ended up. And Aidan wasn’t just good at his job, he was something special. I’d seen him in action more than once, switching between languages, interpreting simultaneously. I’d been so proud of him.

  ‘Ella, all Aidan wanted to do was talk about you. He asked for every detail about you that I could give him. He wanted to talk about you and about Felix. That’s all.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘He needs to see you. He needs to talk to you. Even one phone call.’

  ‘Lucas, I can’t.’

  ‘Ella, I know how you feel —’

  ‘You don’t, Lucas. You can’t.’

  ‘I’m trying. I’m not a parent, but I have an imagination. I know you, and I can see how much you are hurting. I saw it in Aidan. You were inseparable once. I don’t understand how you can be apart, when you are both feeling the same pain … Ella, I know you think he was to blame. That he and Jess were equally to blame —’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘Ella, it was an accident —’

  ‘Felix died because of the two of them, Lucas. How can I ever forget that?’

  This time it was Lucas who didn’t answer.

  We walked back to the house together in silence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From: C
harlie Baum

  To: undisclosed recipients

  Subject: It’s Been a Noisy Week in Boston

  The weekly report from the Baum trenches is as follows:

  Sophie (11): Sophie announced at breakfast that she has a boyfriend. ‘I’m not sure how long it will last, but so far, so good.’

  Ed (8): Skirmish in the playground. Another boy attempted to steal a football from him. ‘I stopped him but I had to get my temper out,’ Ed said.

  Reilly (6): Reilly (with serious, sad look): ‘Dad, in my class, I’m smaller than everyone.’

  Me: ‘Yes, I guess you are.’

  A pause, then Reilly again (cheery now): ‘But I’ve got a smile bigger than all of them.’

  Me: ‘Have you? Who told you that?’

  Reilly: ‘My teacher.’

  I like his teacher.

  Tim (4): If any of you are curious about the velocity of a four-year-old’s vomit following a secret but lengthy ice-cream binge, I estimate 100 kilometres per hour.

  Lucy (36): Amount of overtime at work plus amount of study for her marketing degree now equals a joke. Neither of us laughing. (Fighting, but not laughing.)

  Charlie (36): Doctor has suggested – let me rephrase that – doctor has insisted I get serious about my diet. I am serious, I said. Seriously good at eating, I meant. He has given me leaflets for six weight-loss organisations and two folders of dietary info. Lost nearly a kilo carrying them out to the car. This might be easier than I thought!

  Snip the cat (kitten age): Another mouse. Another tail. Or worse, the same one??

  Until next week, everyone please stay sane.

  Charlie xx

  From: Charlie Baum

  To: Lucy Baum

  Subject: The fight

  I’m sorry.

  If I was flexible enough to lie down and prostrate myself at your feet, I would.

  I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. But that’s no excuse. It was my fault. I should have realised you were trying to study and me and the kids choosing that moment to rehearse our marching saucepan band wasn’t helpful. Tim was very impressed, by the way. (So was I.) He’s never heard you yell like that. (Nor have I.)