‘Nothing.’
‘You’re rocking. You’re making the whole boat sway. Stop it.’
She stops, unaware she had been doing it. Tries not to look as scared as she feels. Gordon’s eyes fill with unease.
‘Listen, I’m going to cancel this fishing trip with Jerry.’
‘What fishing trip?’ she says, suddenly alert.
‘I wanted to remind you yesterday, but you were so…’ He leaves the statement unfinished.
‘When do you leave?’ she says, trying not to look or sound too elated.
‘This morning. Jerry’s coming here to pick me up, but I’m going to tell him I can’t go.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘I told you, I’m not going.’
‘When were you planning to get back?’
‘Sunday.’
She counts them in her head like ripe fruit: six juicy days on her own. ‘It’ll do you good to have a break,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Honestly, I am.’
He hadn’t really wanted to cancel it at all and so he doesn’t insist. ‘Only if you’re sure you’ll be OK on your own.’
‘Of course I will. Why wouldn’t I be?’ she says, anticipating his absence and feeling only slightly guilty for how happy it makes her feel. He too is looking more than a little relieved, she’s pleased to see. He whistles as he goes back inside to start packing. And the thought occurs to her that she won’t have to listen to that for almost a week.
Jerry arrives as she is drying the last of the breakfast dishes, and the two men say goodbye and leave. Once alone, she scans the empty boat, feeling like an actor blindfolded and spun on to a stage without knowing their lines. She decides to hunt down the two photographs of Pete she knows are stashed away somewhere, though she can’t remember where exactly; she pulls the place apart in her search for them. On a mission. She panics at one point, thinking perhaps she had burned them along with the letters and forgotten, or binned them accidentally. They’d had to get rid of so much stuff when they’d moved on to the boat. It had felt cleansing at the time, but in the years since she’s found herself regretting the loss of some things. She locates them in her Hannah shrine, inside the copy of The Water Babies that Pete had given to Hannah when she was born: the copy he’d had as a child.
She lays the two snapshots out on the table like a winning hand. Or a losing one. And she stares into these portals to her past with a growing sense of vertigo. Pete stares back at her in all his handsome glamour. The first was taken in Aden, on the beach. He’s in a pair of trunks that leave nothing to the imagination, a Cheshire cat grin on his tanned face. When she’d shown it to the girls at work, one of them had said, ‘I can see why you’re marrying him!’ Looking at it brings back the day when there he was at last, after those two lonely years, there in her arms with his hot nutbrown flesh and sunlight hair, making himself real again with his mouth and his hands.
The second photograph was taken on their honeymoon. It shows the two of them outside a pub on the seafront. She flips it over and reads Pete’s handwriting on the back: Isle of Wight, August ’61. They’d been to see Eden Kane singing the night before, she recalls, and were both a bit hung over. Stopping off for a lunchtime hair of the dog, they’d befriended a Cockney in RAF uniform who’d agreed to take their picture. As they posed for the camera he’d said, ‘Say dick cheese,’ which had made Pete crack up with the laughter the photograph captured.
She barely recognises the nineteen-year-old girl sitting beside him. Fresh-faced and smiling and glowing with love. I look happy, she thinks, trying to recall how that felt. When her love for Pete was untarnished; before the first blow; back when she would tell him she wanted to crawl inside him she couldn’t get close enough, when she could still feel sheltered in his arms.
Poor cow.
The trilling of her mobile cuts into her thoughts. It’s her youngest, Jason. She takes a deep breath and answers. ‘Hello, love, how are you?’ she says, forcing a lightness into her voice.
‘Fine, how are you? I just had a call from Dad.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘He said you’ve been acting a bit strange.’
‘No more than usual,’ she says, trying to chuckle but instead producing a coughing fit. When it’s over she says, ‘What exactly has he been saying?’
‘Just that you weren’t your usual self.’
‘What is my usual self? And how would he know? He hardly sees me any more.’
‘What does that mean?’
Aware of anger rising, she moderates her tone. ‘Just because you spend your life with someone, it doesn’t mean you know who they are.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘Yes, I am. You’re not listening.’
‘I’m trying to understand.’
‘Well, beyond being a mother and a wife, who am I? Who am I to you?’
Taking his silence for an answer, she says, ‘Exactly. You don’t know. And Gordon doesn’t know, either. I’m not even sure I know, any more. I thought I did, but not now.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Life happened,’ she says. ‘My life. Only I feel like it happened without me, and I want it back so I can do it differently.’
‘You’re talking as if your life’s over.’
‘Maybe it is. I feel like it is. Or maybe it never even started.’
Maybe, she thinks, maybe, maybe, the word ringing in her head like a leper’s bell, with the bluntness of language hitting against the fine grain of experience.
‘Do you want me to come down?’ he says. ‘I can take a couple of days off work, or come at the weekend.’
‘There’s no need, love, I’m fine. You’ve no reason to worry. I promise.’
From outside she hears the rise and fall of a passing conversation. Then silence. Say something, she thinks, but nothing comes. She considers, momentarily, whether to tell him what is really going on, but before she can he says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor, Mum.’
‘Don’t you bloody start!’ She hadn’t meant to snap at him, and says in a calmer voice, ‘I don’t need a doctor.’
‘It might help, if you’re not feeling well. You know – you don’t want to end up… like before,’ he says.
Mad like before? Stripping off and eating soil?
‘Gordon had no right to go worrying you like that,’ she says, before changing the subject and asking about work. He hangs up, promising to ring again later. She thinks about his life, wondering if he is happy. Of her three children, he’s always seemed the most content. He never complains about his job, or at least not to her, but she has no idea if he likes or loathes being a PE teacher. Is there a girlfriend on the go? She doesn’t know. Whenever she asks he gets annoyed. She wishes he’d let her in more.
She dials Gordon’s number, and when he answers she says, with barely contained rage, ‘What the bloody hell have you been telling Jason?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, you must’ve said something, because he’s just been on the phone suggesting I need to see a doctor.’
‘I thought they should know, that’s all.’
‘So you rang Paul as well?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what have you told them?’
‘I’m just worried about you, Grace. No need to bite my head off.’
‘I told you, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine.’ She thinks about that joke: F.I.N.E. – Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic… something.
‘We care about you, that’s all.’
‘I’m fine,’ she says before hanging up. Emotional, that’s it. Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.
She brings to mind a woman she used to see wandering the streets back in Wythenshawe barking obscenities at passing traffic. She remembers sitting behind her once on the upper deck of a bus, watching her screaming, ‘Suck shit for your fucking fare!’ and wondering what must it feel like to have so much rage inside that you lost control. Am I lo
sing control? she thinks. Shall I lose control? Would it do me some good if I did? Should I swear obscenities at full throttle? Smash something?
A Polish friend of her mother’s who’d survived a death camp – a blurred blue serial number on her wrist – used to keep in her handbag at all times a china saucer wrapped up in a tea towel, along with a small hammer. In moments of stress she would remove them, taking the hammer to the saucer until it was in pieces and all her anger had disappeared, and her face would be serene. Going over to the cupboard by the sink, Grace selects an old, chipped side plate and wraps it up in a white cotton tea towel. She takes the hammer from the toolbox beneath the sink, feeling the muscles in her right arm flex with its heft. And then for five minutes she vents her frustration by pulverising the plate, emitting deep grunts and high yelps of exertion and frustration, and cursing like a navvy under her breath. She would have gone on for longer, till the plate was powder, but when the phone starts ringing she stops to answer it.
It’s Paul. She tries to calculate the time it is where he lives, but she never can work it out, even though they’ve been in Melbourne ten years now. ‘Hello, love,’ she says.
‘You sound out of breath,’ he says.
‘I just ran for the phone; it’s worn me out! Listen, Gordon had no right to go worrying you all; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me.’
‘What’s all this about you seeing Dad’s ghost?’
‘Take no notice, it was something and nothing. It’s been blown out of all bloody proportion.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You didn’t see a ghost, then?’
‘No.’
‘But why would he say that?’
‘So you’re taking his side?’
‘It’s not about taking sides, Mum, it’s about making sure you… you know, that you’re OK.’
‘I wish everyone would just stop worrying about me; I’m perfectly fine. I saw someone who reminded me of your dad, that’s all. Gordon’s gone and turned it into a full-scale drama. Just forget about it. How are you?’
‘I’m great. Working like a madman, as usual, but essentially great. We’re all doing great.’ He works as a hedge fund manager, whatever that is. He’s explained it to her umpteen times but all she really understands is that he makes lots of money. Lives for making lots of money. Always has. As a child he wanted to be the banker in every game of Monopoly, and would sulk if he didn’t win, more than once overturning the whole board in rage.
‘What time is it there?’ she says.
‘Ten-thirty at night.’
She asks after the wife with whom she’s never really bonded, and for whom she harbours a quiet resentment for taking her son to the other side of the world.
‘She’s fine; we’re all great.’
She asks after the grandchildren, Theda and Raffa, aged seven and five. She’s not seen them since they were babies, apart from the occasional photograph.
‘Did you tell them about Hannah yet?’
‘Caroline doesn’t think they’re old enough yet.’
She feels the boat tilt with the weight of someone stepping on to it and her body tenses.
‘They should know they had an auntie,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to say any more than that. You don’t have to tell them how she died.’ Her voice starts to crack as her throat tightens, and Paul hears it.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just…’ She pauses at the sound of a knock at the door.
‘Mum, are you all right?’
Another knock at the door, this time followed by a woman’s voice calling, ‘Hello?’
Grace says, ‘I’ve got to go, love – Pam’s just arrived. Give the kids a kiss from me.’ She hangs up. ‘Hold on a minute,’ she calls to Pam, and quickly puts the honeymoon photo back in the book. The one from Aden, however, she takes to the kitchen and stashes away in her purse, though for what reason exactly she doesn’t know; with every memory of her love for Pete comes a memory of how that love died.
She opens the door.
Pam is standing there with a look of concern. ‘Is everything OK, love?’ she says. ‘What was all that smashing?’
‘I had an accident.’ Grace’s head feels dizzy from the shame, the fear of seeming mad. ‘I broke a plate. No harm done,’ she says with a smile that strains to hide her nerves, wondering if she’s believed. Nothing in her body feels as though it is working properly: rusted cogs and creaky joints.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re OK, I’ll leave you to it…’ Pam says. Grace invites her in for a coffee. ‘Go on, then,’ she says. ‘Eric’s out metal-detecting.’
Pam moves her large frame through the door and follows Grace into the boat; watches her lift the bundled tea towel from the table and place it in the bin below the sink. She notices the hammer but chooses not to mention it.
‘So how long’s he been away?’ she says.
‘He left this morning,’ Grace replies, taking two mugs from the draining board and dropping a teaspoonful of coffee into each. In a rush of adrenalin she tells Pam all about smashing the plate. ‘You should try it some time, it felt bloody marvellous!’ she says, going on to explain about the Polish Jew. Becoming aware of a disturbed look on Pam’s face, she looks down: she’s lifted the hammer and is gently batting the handle into her open palm as she speaks. ‘Anyway,’ she says shoving the hammer back under the sink, ‘kettle’s boiled!’
She knows it’s futile to try to explain what’s going on inside her – she can’t even explain it to herself – so she makes no more reference to it, focusing instead on giving the best impression of herself she can. And as they chat she begins to feel a bit more like her normal self again, whatever that means: enjoying this communion with another soul, even laughing once or twice. But as soon as Pam leaves it returns: that rushing tumble of liberation and panic; the creep of a leaden pain, a hurtful ache. Hemmed in by her thoughts and the walls around her, she leaves the boat and catches the bus to Hampstead Heath, needing to clear her head with its open space, to lose herself in its colours and solid air. With her heart in the grip of some eager fever, she measures out with each footfall the progress of something she is still afraid to name.
The Heath never fails to lift her spirits. Today, though, she’s too weighed down with the memories and emotions that have been stirred up. Today, the Heath’s green fuse pushes through her like a blade. She wanders restlessly, chewing on her anxiety, the world no longer known, no longer safe. She retreats to that first day in Malaysia.
THE FIRST THING she saw on opening her eyes was two small lizards on the ceiling directly above her, fighting noisily. At that very moment one of them shed its tail, which landed on her face, making her jump up with a scream as she swiped it away. Looking up, she saw the scream had scared them off, and remembered something from Pete’s letters about how the geckos ate the mosquitoes. A mixed blessing, she thought, wondering how the children would react to them.
The unfamiliar room was filled with muted sunshine and sticky heat. Groggy from too much sleep, she looked around in search of something familiar. The skirt and blouse she’d travelled in were hanging on a clothes horse by the window and her suitcase was by the dressing table. She heard a telephone ringing through the walls, her mind a blank exhaustion of shapeless thoughts, a tangle of confused and confusing images. She could remember friends of Pete’s, Norman Bailey and his blonde wife Marilyn, meeting her at the airport. She could remember getting out of the car; could picture Norman standing there holding open the door. After that, nothing but vague fragments of dreams in which Pete chased her through hot, swampy forests. She had awoken in sweats and tears, only to drop back immediately into the warm mud of exhausted sleep. There were also fragments she wasn’t sure were dreams or not: someone – Marilyn? – undressing her and pulling a nightgown over her, and then a man she didn’t recognise – a doctor? – sitting by the bed; Hannah and Paul standing in the doorway of th
e room, watching her, eyes wide with concern and confusion.
Then it came back to her, what Norman had said just before she fainted.
Easing herself into that reality, she stared at her reflection in the dressing table mirror and said, ‘He’s dead.’ She slowly moved her head from side to side and rotated it slightly, hearing the twist and crunch of gristle. She looked at her slim arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if seeing it for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh.
A sudden cry from Jason stirred her, and she walked over to the cot in the corner; lifting him out, she began to rock him gently and sing him to sleep. Then, laying him back down, she went over to the window and drew up the Venetian blinds, just as Hannah and Paul burst into the room.
‘Mummy!’ they shrieked, rushing to clutch at her legs.
‘Shush, you’ll wake the baby,’ she said, noticing the small, pretty Malay girl who had stepped into the room after them. She said her name was Ayu, and she told Grace that an officer had telephoned to say he’d be over shortly.
When Grace found out she’d been asleep for three days she could hardly believe it. How could she have left the children with strangers for so long? She asked if she could have some tea, then sat on the bed, calling Hannah and Paul over to join her, one on each side. ‘Come on, give us a cuddle!’ she said, grateful for their warm familiarity. Everything else seemed too unreal. She kissed and stroked their heads, smelt their hair, holding them for as long as they would allow, which was never long enough.
‘Selamat pagi,’ said Hannah, the first to break away and climb off the bed, running over to the window.
‘What does that mean?’ Grace said.
‘Good morning,’ Hannah said, playing with the blind, letting it drop and then pulling it up, repeatedly.
‘Ayu has been teaching us,’ said Paul wearily, sliding out of her arms and off the bed to join his sister by the window.
‘Terima kasih,’ Hannah said.
‘That means thank you,’ said Paul.
Then he started repeating it in sillier and sillier voices, shredding her nerves until she had to tell him to stop.
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