You

by Joanna Briscoe

‘Some unsubtle reference to “biological offspring”, meaning Zeb, thinking I was as thick as they were.’

  ‘You’re not thick.’

  ‘I know, my little princess.’

  ‘You’re one of the cleverest people I know.’

  ‘Well let’s not push it too far,’ he said. ‘But – yes, well, I knew I was a bit more switched on than those thick-as-pigshit dipsticks.’ He started to laugh, coughing with exaggerated sounds. ‘Brains fried.’

  ‘Don’t do that! You spook me sometimes. They’ll hear. What else happened?’

  ‘We moved everywhere, and I was always yanked from these smelly village schools, these pits, just as I’d started a halfway interesting project or something. Drove me mad. Then they tried to “home school” me,’ he said in a stronger version of the accent he adopted for the clientele of his market stall. ‘But they couldn’t teach me the first basic thing. Oh well.’

  ‘It must be really, really weird not to know always who your parents were,’ she said, and she stroked his cheek, his unshaved skin rough against her fingers. ‘My mum told me right away.’

  ‘I always guessed,’ said Dan, ‘always kind of knew I was adopted, must have come from somewhere else, but turned out so did half the other people at school. We couldn’t all be little unwanted bastards.’

  ‘So where is she? Your mum?’

  He shook his head and suddenly looked weary, his mouth a tight line that gave his face an unfamiliar expression.

  ‘You don’t want to tell me? OK, babe,’ said Izzie, running her hand through his hair and watching its tufts spring back up in the wake of her strokes. ‘Who was your dad?’

  ‘No idea. I used to dream about her, never him. Some cock. Someone who fucked her when she was a kid.’

  ‘My real dad was a randy waiter! Ha ha.’

  ‘Who can just give away their baby?’

  ‘Mine was a teenager,’ said Izzie, fiddling with her tobacco pouch.

  ‘Mine was a whore.’

  ‘Dan,’ said Izzie. ‘Babe. Come on. You get all harsh. You’ve got me to look after you now. No one else matters.’ She kissed him. ‘You’re a bit shaking still.’ She stroked him. ‘Babe?’

  ‘Ruth!’ shouted Cecilia. ‘Ruth!’

  She swerved out of Ruth’s bedroom into the bathroom on the children’s side of the house, but she could see in the moonlight that it was empty. She rapped on Izzie’s door, and when there was no answer, she pushed her body against it and tripped into the room, wrenching away the lock that Izzie had carelessly attempted to hammer into place. She looked blankly at Izzie and Dan lying in a tangle on the bed, the tang of sex on the air.

  ‘Mum,’ said Izzie in panic, staring. Dan gazed at her, then turned away.

  ‘Where’s Ruth?’ said Cecilia rapidly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Izzie.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She went to her room. Like, a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘She’s not there.’

  ‘Fuck,’ muttered Izzie.

  ‘Oh God. Ari!’ shouted Cecilia, racing along the passage. ‘Romy!’ she called as she ran past her room. ‘Where’s Ruth?’

  ‘Ruth?’ said Ari groggily, emerging from bed.

  ‘She’s not in her room.’ Cecilia clutched at him. ‘Where – Where is she?’

  ‘Search the house,’ said Ari, beginning to run down the stairs, two steps at a time. Romy followed.

  Cecilia ran into every room on the upper floor, shouting Ruth’s name, calling out endearments rising to commands, pleading, ‘Come to me.’ Floorboards vibrated in a chaos of thumping and whining the length of the house; Izzie emerged crying; doors banged open.

  ‘She’s not here,’ shouted Ari. ‘Run to the cottage.’ He whipped round. ‘Look in the gardens,’ he said to Romy.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Cecilia. She ran down the stairs, stumbling and nearly falling on the last two steps.

  ‘Ruth! Ruth!’ Ari called loudly.

  ‘Darling, darling,’ called Cecilia. ‘Come back. You won’t be in trouble. Come here. My darling. Ruth!’ she shrieked, hurting her lungs.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ said Ari, and picked up the phone.

  ‘Quickly, quickly,’ said Cecilia. ‘Ruth!’ she screamed.

  Izzie stood in the garden in her night T-shirt, sobbing. ‘Go to the pond,’ snapped Ari, pushing her back quite roughly. ‘No – I will. Look up the lane. And Dora’s. Shoes on,’ he snapped. He began to run.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Cecilia. She bent over and hot liquid trickled up her throat. She ran through the garden. Please please, she thought, memories of the last hour of melancholy and conjecture slapping at her in garish tatters, punishing her. These are my children. Here. Now. She tasted vomit in her mouth. She ran faster. I chased shadows. Oh, God. Please.

  ‘Ruth!’

  Dan sidled out from the porch as a tall slanting shadow, his footsteps barely audible, and Cecilia saw him from the corner of her eye and jumped. ‘Help me,’ she shouted at him.

  ‘She wanted to float,’ he said flatly.

  ‘What?’ said Cecilia.

  ‘She was talking about floating,’ he said in the same voice. ‘Go to the river.’

  ‘God,’ said Cecilia, beginning to run down the path. ‘Ruth!’ she screamed again.

  Dan overtook her. ‘Get a torch,’ he hissed. He ran ahead of her, dissolving into the shadows of the river field.

  ‘Izzie! A torch!’ Cecilia shouted, and dashed back into the house, where she snatched the torch from Izzie’s hand, then ran, shoeless, slithering on the mud and waterlogged grass of the field. She fell, her toe catching a root, bit into her lower lip and tasted blood. ‘Oh Ruth,’ she said. She prayed. She begged. ‘Ruth.’

  Her feet plunged into a stream, a stone cutting her ankle; she slid on the mud bordering it, clambered out and ran towards the river whose rush threw up a mist of sound.

  ‘I think she’s there,’ called Dan from further downstream, beginning to lower himself into the water. ‘Can’t see. Shine it.’ He pointed towards the flat stone mid-river on which Ruth and Izzie had constructed a wigwam of sticks. Cecilia shone the torch across the black curves of the surface with its jostlings of foam, illuminating a tangle of hair and arm submerged in water by the rock. Ruth’s hand clutched the stone, her head bowed, plants dragging over her neck, the purse she had knitted tangling with leaves. Cecilia scrambled into the river.

  Dan plunged ahead of her.

  ‘Ruth, Ruth!’ Cecilia called.

  The water had twinkled to Ruth when she had arrived there, shining at her, and it was so soft and warm and smooth-wrinkled like a bed. He had said it would glitter, the strange man. The water wanted her and she was ready and she glowed. She couldn’t stop giggles rising like fizz bubbles in her brain. She remembered words of Izzie’s and laughed aloud in little coughs.

  She had hovered on her way there. However many times she had fallen in the river field and hurt her ankles, she floated above it and saw new things, and the water folded her in. Libation. Ophelia. She had read now of river gods.

  The water froze her to icy heat. She was stiff, hot, splintered. Soon, she knew, she would float because she would be a board, a stiffness of ice like an iceberg, and she half-lay on a rock midstream like a polar bear and watched the water storm past. It rushed rushed rushed. How lovely, how beautiful, how funny. She was almost tired. The South Sea Islands. She folded herself in, bit by bit.

  The river carried her.

  She floated. She swirled. The flowers from the field wiped her face. Hot tears sprang from her as she reeled with the coldness, and the river carried her.

  Then the water gulped into her lungs with a choking of weed stink, and she gasped and burped and struggled, and the petals were in her mouth, and Mummy was not there, and Izzie had left her, and she screamed a black mouthful of Stygian; the water’s back reared like a whale, threw her and crashed her on to the wigwam stone. Autochthonous. Her leg was like metal, anvil on the horse’s sho
e, and the flowers had fallen and drowned.

  ‘Hold her,’ said Dan, and he steadied himself on the rock and then hooked his arms beneath Ruth’s and dragged her with Cecilia supporting her legs as they pulled her to the bank.

  Her face was puffed and white yet more pinched than it had ever been. Her lip ballooned. She looked like a dead girl, swollen and bloodless.

  ‘Talk,’ instructed Cecilia, putting her mouth to Ruth’s.

  Ruth moaned.

  Oh God. Please please please. Thank you.

  ‘Talk,’ said Cecilia, kissing Ruth all over her face, licking water from her, bending over her to warm her.

  ‘I can’t,’ murmured Ruth.

  ‘Give me your clothes,’ Ari shouted at Romy and Izzie as he arrived on the bank, and he stripped his top off, and the older girls stood there, hesitant as they undressed while Cecilia unpeeled what wet fabric she could from Ruth and covered her in their dry clothes.

  ‘Don’t move her,’ said Ari. ‘Her back could be broken.’

  ‘Run. Phone for the ambulance,’ said Cecilia, stuttering, and Romy ran.

  ‘Darling,’ said Cecilia, pulling Ruth’s hair out of her eyes, kissing her frozen cheek, blowing, kissing again, attempting to warm the flesh with her own stiff lips. ‘I love you.’ She shivered violently. Ruth tasted of mucus and river weed, blood seeping from her mouth and catching the edge of Cecilia’s tongue.

  Thank you. Thank you, God.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Ari. ‘Ruth.’

  ‘I think she must have broken her leg,’ said Cecilia. Ruth’s blood met her tears, the river water dripping from her own hair. She wiped it with her fingers from Ruth’s face.

  ‘So do I.’

  The other one doesn’t exist.

  ‘Ruth Ruth Ruth,’ said Cecilia, covering her in kisses and breathing on her. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Thought I’d float,’ said Ruth, her voice a small husky shivering. Mucus streaked with blood shone beneath her nose and on the bulbous swelling of her lip.

  ‘Where’s that boy?’ said Cecilia suddenly. Bats flew in a staggered arc from trees lining the river.

  There was silence. ‘He was further up the field,’ said Romy.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Izzie in a croak. Ari turned abruptly to her.

  Ruth shivered more steadily.

  ‘You’ll be in bed soon,’ said Cecilia, holding her in her arms on the grass, her tears sliding into her hair, her breath warming her face. ‘Oh I love you.’

  ‘We’ll take you back,’ said Ari gently to Ruth. ‘Wait for the ambulance.’

  ‘I’m cold,’ Ruth whispered.

  Cecilia arched herself over her. ‘Get a blanket,’ she said, not looking up.

  I’ve abandoned two of my children, the first and the last. I’ve barely seen what I have.

  She leant over and covered Ruth with kisses again. ‘I’ll do that till you’re warm,’ she said.

  ‘We have to check if you’ve broken other bones first,’ said Ari. ‘Does your back hurt?’

  Ruth shook her head.

  I will do anything. I will do anything. Here they are. My children.

  ‘Darling,’ she said. She brushed her own tears impatiently so that they didn’t fall, hot and alarming, on Ruth. She heard an owl; a second answered it from beyond the hill as the river tugged relentlessly behind. Shivering took over her body.

  ‘I need a wee,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Do it,’ murmured Cecilia into her cheek, the river water pooling from her hair into her ear as she lowered her head.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Just do it here. You mustn’t move.’

  Ruth smiled up at Cecilia through her big gappy teeth. ‘It’s warm.’

  Cecilia whispered in her ear and kissed her. She looked at her family, gathered on the bank, bent over Ruth, stroking her and kissing her. She clung to Ruth. She smiled at them.

  Thirty-five

  July

  ‘I missed you,’ James Dahl said, placing his hand on the small of Cecilia’s back and steering her towards the azalea path. The afternoon was mobile with rising warmth and insect crossing. Hay from the meadows banking Elliott Hall drifted on the heat into the gardens, moving over honeysuckle baking on walls, and in her tiredness, the scene looked like an illusion to her, rippled and unsteady.

  ‘I missed you as I lay on my hospital camp bed,’ she said. ‘That creaking little cot.’ A butterfly landed on the toe of his shoe. It seemed to bloom to magnified proportions. She remembered the grass on his shoes in a different century, petals wet on the ground. ‘Ari is sleeping on it tonight.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I have to go soon to pick up Romy.’

  Tension passed rapidly over his face. ‘Don’t leave.’

  ‘I won’t yet.’

  ‘How is she now?’ he said.

  ‘Romy?’

  ‘Ruth.’

  ‘Ruth,’ said Cecilia, and she bent towards him and he held the back of her head, running his fingers against her scalp so that her hair clung hotly with electricity to his hand and her temple lay against his shoulder. ‘Ruth. I –’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, stroking her without stopping.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s much more than all right. She’s alive,’ she said with elation into his shoulder. ‘She’s alive,’ she repeated, superstitiously. Hot tears streamed over her cheeks, unseen by him. She bit a ridge of his shirt, rumpled it and let her saliva soak it. ‘She’s safe. That’s all that matters. Thank –’

  He drew her further towards him. ‘How is she now?’

  ‘The worst are the breaks in her leg. They operated on the one on her wrist,’ she said. ‘Only one stitch on her lip, the rest inside her mouth. Why did she do this? It’s so terrible that she could do this.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I think I begin to understand,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘Partly.’

  He pressed her head, and his shirt warmth mingled with the breath of hay, with the old roses that clambered over the arches by the azalea path.

  ‘I need to be with her. Even more. Much, much more. Oh God. Ruth. She was always my troubled little girl,’ she said, and he settled her head closer to him, on to his shoulder, against his neck. ‘There’ll be months of physiotherapy.’ She breathed in a skin scent known for over twenty years.

  ‘Poor you,’ he said. He kissed her.

  ‘No, no. Lucky me. We’re so lucky,’ she said.

  ‘I hate to imagine.’

  ‘She can have all the counselling in the world, but . . . I need to focus on her, to forget – forget – you know.’ She couldn’t look at him. ‘I won’t see her again. I know –’

  ‘But we’ll keep her alive by talking about her.’

  ‘Even that, I’m not sure. I think I have to put her away. Oh, that sounds so cruel. Let her rest in my mind.’ She spoke more rapidly. ‘I loved her. I – Even the house,’ she said, pulling her head away from him. ‘You know, even that house, I think being at that house isn’t good for me. It’s past; it’s in the past.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go somewhere new,’ he said.

  ‘I think I should. I think I should. Not too far from Dora, though a little distance . . .’ She brushed her eye. ‘We don’t get the life we thought we wanted, do we?’

  ‘We should all change,’ he said.

  He gathered flowers as they walked – stolen roses in a rough silky bundle, lilies, anemones, ferns – and he continued to hand them to her one by one.

  ‘The gardener’s over there,’ she said, tilting her head. She smiled.

  ‘Do I care?’

  ‘Last night, lying in bed,’ she said, ‘I realised how very short life really is. We all like to say it, but it is – it really is. Whole portions of it suddenly gone.’

  The light that angled from the sundial passed over his face and he walked to its far side and stopped and looked down at her.

  They both paused.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said playfully. ‘Tell me, what is it you
plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?’

  ‘Be with you,’ he said.

  The following afternoon, Elisabeth Dahl let herself in at the gate and walked through the garden of Wind Tor Cottage. Dora was bending over, ineffectually hauling up Japanese knotweed in one of her old denim skirts, while the squat figure of Katya mowed the further section of the garden, her hair floating.

  ‘I’ve come for you,’ said Elisabeth, her mouth curving into a smile of suppressed exhilaration or agitation. Her hair smelled damp with recent washing, and her movements were subtly jerky as she picked up a dropped key and walked towards Dora.

  Dora stood up, easing the base of her back with her palm, and gazed at Elisabeth through the haze of sunlight while high in the sky a buzzard hovered and, momentarily, she perceived it as an eagle. On the lane behind the gate Elisabeth’s car was parked, its back windows obscured with piled-up cases and boxes, sun swarming across its windscreen.

  Elisabeth laughed.

  Dora paused. She frowned.

  ‘Take me,’ said Elisabeth, her mouth twitching with a self-conscious irony that threaded the smile. ‘I’m all yours!’

  Dora remained motionless.

  ‘I’m free! I’m truly free,’ said Elisabeth, and caught Dora in her arms. Unusually, Dora could smell her perspiration.

  ‘You’re not,’ said Dora.

  ‘I am. He’s gone. He’s leaving me. All yours.’

  ‘He’s gone? You’re not,’ said Dora, her voice cracking, then trailing into uncertainty.

  ‘Silly darling! You don’t understand, do you? I really am free. Yours. He says he wants to leave. I can’t say that this hasn’t been brewing for some time . . .’ She glanced at the ground and her features seemed to sag, or age, then harden; she smiled again, looking Dora directly in the eye.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Dora. Elisabeth’s perfume seemed over-heavy in the warmth.

  ‘We can be together. We can live together if you want.’

  ‘No,’ said Dora thinly. She eased herself into a straighter position.

  ‘No?’

  Dora shook her head, trying to smile, but she was veiled by the shadow of her gardening hat, which seemed to form a barrier between her and Elisabeth.