I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make tea, a job made slower by unfamiliarity. Sitting on the sofa with the hot mug in my hand, my mind skated around the evening’s events, trying to make sense of what had happened. I was haunted by how fragile and helpless Lacey had been. How different. I had seen no awareness or recognition in her. I didn’t know where her wounds had come from, where she had been, what had happened. I was out of my depth and filled with worry.
I took my tea into the lounge and went to the telephone table, searching through it for some clues, some answers as to what I could do next. But all the time I searched I could hear Lacey’s voice repeating in my head that there was no-one but her, no friends, no family. I remembered her saying about the vicar, a mad old fruit she’d said but it was something for me to grab onto, something I may be able to use.
I found a little phone book and went through its pages; the entries were pitiful, highlighting even further a life with scant company. It didn’t take me long to find the entry for Father Thomas and I tapped the digits into my mobile, knowing that it was too late to call him now but that I could make use of it in the morning. I needed someone to shed some light on what had happened, someone who could give me guidance and tell me what needed to be done.
I decided not to use the number I found for her doctor just yet. She was calm and sleeping and I was worried that if I called someone out they would wake her, confuse her further. I worried that a stranger in her house might scare her and make her retreat further into her fragile state. I copied the number down but only intended to use it if there were no other way. I would see how she was in the morning and go from there.
I wondered about Charlie. That mystery only seemed to get deeper as time went on. It was obvious that no-one other than Lacey lived here, and yet she had seemed so forthright, so genuine in the way she spoke about him. I still held on to the belief that somewhere along the way there had been a grave misunderstanding. I thought about the evening’s events, the empty bedrooms, the layers of dust in the room that should be his, but the more I tried to focus, the more the images evaded me. I curled up into the sofa and finished my tea, placing my cup on the floor as my eyes grew heavy and I drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 40 ~ Lacey
She is lost. There is water around her ankles, fish with sharp teeth beneath the surface that bite at her. She feels them tearing into her skin and side steps quickly and finds herself on dry land, in a fog so dense she cannot see her own hand in front of her face. She falls to her knees, feeling harsh fingers grab for her, she reaches up to brush them away and her hand closes around thorns that mark her palm with droplets of red.
She feels heavy, so heavy and she cannot resist the lure of the ground as it twists and shapes itself into a pillow. She lies down and the fog closes in around her, she feels it almost solid against her skin. She drifts and floats and then she is gone and the darkness takes over. Only this time when she wakes she is safe in her bed. She is warm and dressed in her pyjamas, it is different and the fear and confusion seems less. She wonders if any of it was real and looks at the palm of her hand, at the scratches that tell her she was somewhere else – somewhere other than this – for a while at least.
She goes down the stairs and Rachel is there. Her stomach becomes a black hole that her heart plunges into, as she stands barefoot and dishevelled. She feels like a stranger in her own home. She stands and twists her hands together, waiting for the sleeping girl to wake up, waiting for her judgement. She wonders if this young woman who has come to matter to her, has borne witness to her absence.
She fetches a blanket and places it over the sleeping form, wanting her to stay comfortable, to stay asleep. She doesn’t want to face judging eyes that will condemn her now as so many have done, she doesn’t want to be alone again.
She feels caught out, vulnerable. Did she say anything as she floated in the blackness and this girl held her hand? How many stories has she told? How many lives has she lived that aren’t her own? She isn’t even sure anymore what her life is, how to define the truth, what she has become.
She looks at the sleeping girl on the sofa and wonders for a moment if she is real. She is sure that she is but she can never really be certain. She cares about her as if she is real but sometimes she wonders where the truth actually lies. She thinks about the empty room upstairs, of brown eyes and sadness, of a tiny cold hand taken quickly from view. She thinks of what it means to love and to feel, she thinks of the vastness of nothing. She thinks of an orange glow on the horizon and bruises that bloom on pale skin. Sometimes she wonders if anything is real.
Chapter 41 ~ Rachel
When I woke up light was peering round the curtains and a soft blanket had been placed over me. I shook my head a little to rid myself of any remaining sleepiness and sat up, as I did so I noticed Lacey sitting in the chair near the window, her features soft and indistinct, darkened by the light behind her. Her shoulders hung heavy and her chin lowered. She looked defeated.
“I’m sorry if I woke you.” Her voice was subdued but rational, and I felt a lurch of relief in my chest. The air hung heavy with her shame and I watched as she turned away to look out into the garden, seeing the pinch of her lips. I sensed her hesitation, her lack of certainty in not knowing where to begin. She stood and walked to the kitchen. I heard her rattling about, heard the kettle boiling, the stirring of the spoon against china. She returned with a cup of tea that she placed in my hands before sitting down again, this time on the opposite end of the sofa to me.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want her to be embarrassed but had no idea how to avoid it, how to make it alright. So I sat nursing my cup and waited for her to fill the space left by my contemplation. She cleared her throat and I waited for her to speak, but the moment dropped away into nothing and the silence remained. I sipped at my tea.
“Charlie junior died just before he was born.”
The words emerged in a tumble as they clamoured over each other, louder than they needed to be. I turned towards her quicker than I should have and made her flinch a little. Reaching out my hand I brushed it against her forearm, offering comfort as my mind raced through the things she had said previously about her son. I saw the truth and the lies, separate strands that I failed to understand. I was no less confused. I watched a tear roll down her cheek as she clasped her hands together and squirmed beneath my confusion.
She stood and left the room before returning with a box of tissues. She looked at her hands, at me, at the window, before taking a deep breath and looking somewhere else.
Chapter 42 ~ Lacey
She returns home still aching and sore to a dark, quiet house and a different life. Her father tells her that everything is in the past and won’t be mentioned again. She thinks he is trying to be gracious. She meets his eyes and refuses to look away and eventually his eyes slide from hers. She says nothing. She is determined that she will never speak to him again.
The days become uncomfortable as the silence grows like a spectre that haunts them all. Her mother buzzes between them like a bee. Everything has changed. Attempts to draw them both into conversation falter and die and the silence becomes greater than they are. She watches her mother’s fluttering hands and pale skin and she pities her, but it is not enough to make her speak.
In the days that follow her father speaks to her directly and she turns from him, slowly, deliberately. He takes his belt to her. She flinches as it bites into her but she is still silent. Her mind travels beyond him and the pain becomes subdued. He cannot hurt her more than he already has. She fixes her eyes on a mark on the floor and pretends that she is somewhere else. When he has finished his breath is heavier and as he puts his belt back on she straightens up and walks away without looking back.
Over the following weeks it happens again and again until she loses count. Wounds and welts pile up, half heal and split open, fade and renew until eventually it all stops. He no longer tries to speak to her, he no longer beats h
er; he couldn’t find the way to break through the barrier she placed around herself. She feels as though she has won, as though she has proven that he has no power over her. She believes it for a long time. She believes it for years.
The silence stretches and grows, the house becomes a shell in which they move and breathe. When her parents talk, they use hushed tones and worried eyes, as though someone died here and they must stay quiet out of respect. She drifts through it all, through the mist of it, the quietest of all of them.
Time passes and she barely speaks to her mother too. This time it is not out of ignorance or anger. Her voice simply turns inwards. As she speaks less and less in the physical world her voice grows bigger in her emotional one. The voice in her head becomes louder, more real somehow, because there she can say what she wants, she can talk about what matters to her. She is the only one who cares about what she has to say.
She spends hours with nothing but her own company and she talks to the poor, dead little boy. He becomes real to her and as she thinks about him, he takes on physical characteristics. She can see the greenish blue of his eyes, the soft pink of his lips. He is perfect and she can see him vibrant and smiling and alive. She forgets about a blue hand in a worn blanket.
She drifts through the days, she does her chores, sings nursery rhymes, and moves from place to place, room to room. She pays little attention to the world around her and it begins to drift. Her mind is a happier place to be. She barely notices that people start to cross the street to avoid her on the rare occasions that she ventures out; it wouldn’t matter to her if she did. All that matters is Charlie junior and she holds him in her head while her arms stay empty.
She doesn’t notice that the lines between her life and her mind are blurring, that her hold on both is tenuous. She exists in both places but in neither is she solid and real. When she reaches for something tangible it is like grasping at cobwebs. She thinks that maybe they are all ghosts.
Her mother becomes sick and she barely notices. She will feel bad about that for years to come, in the moments when she notices her absence. She will wonder if her mother cried out for her, if she felt her distance. She cleans her up but cannot remember speaking. She is nothing more than a shape that moves at the edges of her mother’s failing vision. She does not remember saying goodbye, she does not remember if she held her as she faded away. But she remembers the wetness of the cloth in her hand as she wipes it across her mother’s pale face, she remembers the tears on her mother’s cheeks as her eyes screwed up in pain.
She will remember the graveyard and the voice. She will remember that it was the beginning of a different time. And she will feel disloyal. She knows that her mother deserved more than a callous, cold husband and a silent, drifting daughter. She knows that she would do things differently if she could.
Sometimes she drifts and she imagines that she has, that she changed things and painted a different past. She sees herself tell her mother about Charlie, about love and about how he was wrenched from her with bombs and fire. She tells her about blood on towels, about her father and needles. She sees her mother holding a warm, pink baby, cooing softly. She tells her of the old stable and a sound like thunder in her head as she lay on the floor. They sit by a fire, smiling and sharing some time together. She looks up at her mother and she tells her that she loves her, because she knows that in the end, love is the only thing people remember.
Chapter 43 ~ Rachel
How painful the sunlight was as I walked back down the overgrown lawn towards my own house. The rain of the previous night had faded, leaving glassy surfaces and crystal clear skies. I had spent the morning with Lacey and as afternoon approached she had insisted that I go home for some proper rest.
When it became apparent that she could remember little of the night before I chose not to tell her how I found her, opting instead to tell a little white lie to save her embarrassment. I told her simply that I had called around to her house and found her hurt and confused. She didn’t need to know more than that. I found that I cared for her very deeply, that her vulnerability had somehow pulled me closer and I carried her words, her story, like a heavy cloak about my shoulders. She had a way about her that I couldn’t define but when she spoke I found it easy to get lost in her past. I could feel for myself the utter weight of her sadness.
Her memories came home with me. Walking straight into my studio, I mixed them with acrylics; different shades of blue and deep, swirling turquoise that I threw at the huge canvas as I painted her sorrow, a raging, tumultuous thing that, when I was finished, left me breathless and empty.
When I was done I cried for her, an achingly painful feeling as I thought of her, alone and lost with no-one to turn to. I had thought her similar to me in some ways but the more I learnt from her, the more she opened up, the more simple my own story became by comparison until I felt self-indulgent for ever thinking there were similarities.
I picked up the receiver and dialled the number I had taken from Lacey’s house. It rang so many times that I was about to hang up when the receiver was snatched up by a breathless voice.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, is this Father Thomas?”
“This is indeed he.”
“My name is Rachel Moore, I moved into Dove Cottage a little while ago,” I began.
“Ah, the village’s new blood! How may I help you?”
I explained about the previous night’s events avoiding mention of the way I had found her. I felt disloyal somehow, as if I were telling tales and indulging in little more than petty gossip. I tried to explain how helpless I had felt and how concerned I was that I hadn’t managed the situation very well. He was silent for a moment before speaking.
“Of course, you understand that I am limited as to what I can tell you without speaking to Lacey herself and getting permission. Confidentiality, you know.”
“Yes of course, Father, I understand that completely. What I am concerned about is that I should have handled it differently. Called a doctor perhaps, I’m not sure. I just felt at a loss really.” I could sense him nodding at me down the telephone line.
“The only thing that I can tell you without fear of Lacey’s privacy being breached, is the stuff that is already common knowledge around the village, the truthful aspects of it of course, not the gossip mongering rubbish. Several years ago – hmmm well actually I should say decades, it was in the sixties after all – Lacey suffered a rather significant brain injury during an operation. It took her several years to recover from it. She now has what she refers to as blackouts, lapses of reality, so to speak. It sounds like that is what happened yesterday.”
“But what happens to her during these blackouts? How long do they last and how often do they happen? Does she ever become angry or noncompliant even? I’m just concerned because if it should happen again I want to make sure I do the right thing, call her doctor perhaps.” The words came out in a rush and were greeted with the sound of teeth clicking together.
“They don’t happen very often to my knowledge and I’ve never known her to be angry with them, it’s more like a kind of absence, like her mind has tootled off and left her physical self behind. I think the worst that happens is she wanders off if the door isn’t locked. I’ve had to come out a couple of times before because I’ve been called by someone in the village who’s seen her, dishevelled and confused. I usually just take her home and wait until she comes out of it. I don’t know what medical help she receives and I know that she is incredibly distrustful of doctors, so I find that the best thing to do is keep an eye on her until it passes.”
“So what I did was the right thing then?”
“It certainly sounds that way, my dear. Often there isn’t any problem because Lacey has a kind of early warning, in the form of a migraine or a severe bout of tinnitus, something like that. She gives me a ring then and either myself, or April, that’s my wife, will come out and give her a hand. Sometimes though, there is no warning and that’s when she’s been found out and
about. In that respect it is probably a little like dementia. Perhaps it would be easier if you thought of it in those terms.”
“But it doesn’t happen often?”
“Once or twice a year if that, less so without warning, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it that I can see. I couldn’t tell you exactly how long it’s been going on because I’ve only been the vicar here for twenty something years, but certainly as long as I’ve known her she’s had this little problem,” he says, as if she has nothing more than psoriasis or restless legs.
I couldn’t think of anything else that I could ask him without feeling as if I were prying into Lacey’s business, so I thanked him for his help.
“You’re more than welcome, my dear. Just let me know if I can help in any other way, won’t you?”
I said goodbye and hung up the phone, staring at it for several minutes while I tried to get my thoughts in order. But in the silence that followed all I could think of was Lacey, of her mother and a painful death in a darkened room.
Chapter 44 ~ Rachel
Dear Diane and Richard,
I do not even know where to begin. I am lost for words and I know that no matter what I write, it can never be enough.
I am truly, truly sorry for everything. For my ignorance so many years ago and for the last letter that I wrote to you which was so totally unforgivable. All I can say is that my words came from the mind of an angry child and were never meant. I am older now, wiser perhaps.
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