by Lulu Allison
Weariness cascades over her, leaden, bleak. ‘Just do what you want, but do it without me, please, Michael. Just do what you want. I’m not trying to ruin your plans. I’m not trying to be awkward. I will come to the – what is it, a party? Or a celebration? I will come to whatever it is if I can. But you must just accept that I dread it. And before you interrupt, no, it won’t do me any good, it isn’t going to help me. I will come for everyone who loved Caitlin, I will come because one should. But not because it’s what I want.’ She resists, she resists. She resists Michael’s tone, his need, his sadness. She resists her own. ‘Every year we’ve had this. I know that how I am is disappointing for you. I know that—’
‘I’m not disappointed. How can you say that?’ Michael interrupts, unexpected sharpness in his voice. ‘I’m unhappy, sick of this whole thing, this charade. I’m sick of the way you are now, how you’ve changed. Wearing your loss like a fucking… like a concrete invisibility cloak. It’s poisonous, Anna. You never used to be so brittle, so distant. I know there’s no reason for you and I to be close any more, God knows, but I still feel loss too. I just want to remember her, to think about her with love, as a family, or at least as a group of people who all loved her. I wish you’d lose this stiff reserve you’ve become so bloody good at.’
‘I think there’s no point in talking like this.’ Anna’s voice is leaden, stubborn. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. I can’t rework myself to fit in. I’m not bloody plasticine. I am the way I am, and that is all there is to it.’
‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get angry. I just wish things could be different. I had hoped with time they would be. Call me when you want to.’
Michael hangs up abruptly. Anna is still tousled and uncertain from sleep. She hadn’t wanted to have an argument with him, but her words came before she could hold them back. And this time, so too did Michael’s. Usually, being cautious about upsetting Anna, he is diplomatic, even when trying to persuade. She is nonetheless irritatedly aware of when he disagrees with her, and though he is stubborn about his own wishes, he has developed the habit of mollifying, of treating Anna with caution. She goes down to the kitchen and makes tea, returning upstairs to the spare bedroom with a large cup. It feels safer to be in a neutral space, a guest in her own house. Less bound by the common rules of engagement. This is an uncommon time and makes new choreography of her presence in the house. Perhaps too, a small hope that in not acting entirely as herself, she need not be entirely herself. The blows that come may not fall on all of her. She opens the curtains and climbs back into the bed. The covers are thinner, cooler than on her bed, which has a thick and warm feather duvet. On the spare bed is a sheet, a cotton blanket like those in a hospital, a thin duvet. There is a spareness in the spare room. She is not sucked into the mud of herself on these flatter, smoother planes.
*
She lies in the flat bed. The room has a chill from being unused. She lies, feeling flat and cool, her hand resting on the yet cooler lid of the tin box. None of her things are in the room. A box of Caitlin’s things rests potent beneath her hand. But she lies still, letting memories creep closer, trying out her resolve. She pulls away the blanket and sits up in bed as a corner of morning sun slides through the window, pushing a skewed plane of light slowly along the wall behind the bed. She dips her hand into the colour of sun, casting a too-wide shadow. The light on her skin refines, renders more delicately the web of subtle networks beneath the skin. Not so the shadow-hand, a fat burr, a knot of large bone.
She picks up the tin and places it on her lap. You could start here, now, Anna, open the box. But she can’t just yet. An hour passes. And another. For the first half of the day, she lies in the cool calm of the room. As if in a hospital bed. As if in convalescence for an injury she has not yet sustained. She watches the sun move in the angles of light that enter the room. For some hours, she does not even think. She repairs herself in advance.
It is later afternoon; her drift is ended. She starts to think back to her phone conversation with Michael, realising clearly for the first time that he misses talking to her. She sees herself in a new way, as much a route to Michael’s past as he is to hers. In avoiding him, she has curtailed his access, blanked out some of his map, leaving large areas of featureless, indeterminate green. Areas that she gladly skirts and that he terribly yearns for. He stands at the fence she built, unable to walk across on terrain he once roamed freely. She doesn’t think that in all of the last ten years she has seen his need as anything other than an unwelcome obligation placed upon her. But this morning, she sees that she has taken something from him, that there is much selfishness in what she has made herself. Everything she does is ruthlessly orchestrated to mute. So successful has that muting been that she cannot be sure any more of what lies beneath.
She feels a prickling in her hands, a twitch of sorrow that starts in the heart and seeps down her arms, collects in corners, between bones, looping round tendons, little burning pools. A prickle in her palms. A shift of weights in her belly. If she cut herself, perhaps it would drain out of her. She would hang her cut hands into a galvanised bucket, sneak down to the lane after dark, in shame, and throw the poison into the ditch. It would take some time. Her arms feel leaden; she is burdened. She drags. She is a ghastly nurse, keeping a poisoned body just alive. A steady diet of callous harm and efficient patching-up ensuring that healing or death are both impossible. Now let it be the time for a new, ruthless approach. Let’s at least see what the damage is, under these layered and layered concealing repairs.
She is scared, feels as though she should lay down dust sheets or wound pads. She pulls the hospital blanket over her head. She is scared, but she reaches for the littlest scissors she can find and starts to cut.
*
How to think? Where to start? The beginning is perhaps a reckless step too far. The middle, then. She had hoped the last time she would see Ryan was in court. She has thought as little as possible of that place and time; she never thought she would choose to look closely again. Yet here she is, nervous, reluctant, but with her hand on the door. There’s a puck of noise as the tight seal is broken and the door swings open on a perfectly preserved scene. All is there, complete, intact. Nothing forgotten or hidden from immediate view. Ryan, his anxious face, his carefully smart demeanour, his pathetic, worried eyes looking up in beseeching hope at those who were deciding his fate. His reduced, frightened parents, folding into a small, coupled space, two magnets shrinking tightly into each other, she hoped in shame as well as fear. She looked for hours at her lap, at the ground. She remembers how the edge of her seat felt, the frame of dark shiny wood, the generous upholstery almost to the edge. Raw wood underneath the edge of the frame gripped by her clawed fingertips, rigid with the effort of keeping her silent and still. Though burning, she was too cold, too exposed to remove her coat. The second-to-last button of her beige mac rested on her knee, a swirl of chestnut brown and white, a cross of thread in the centre. What a lot of effort, that swirling, that carefully chosen detail, for a button. Next to that, Michael’s left knee, a slight dullness of wear on his corduroy trousers, ridden up a little as he sat rigid on the bench next to her. He sat straight, indomitable, a series of right angles, only moving sometimes to bow his head. Solid, stone, centuries-old and silent. She, in contrast, curved this way and that, pulled with constant tension, the skewed twisting of a faulty bow longing to loose an arrow. A volley.
She had hoped that would be the last she saw of Ryan. She had hoped he would go away and never come back. She wished him somewhere blameless between dead and disappeared. Obliterated like the pain he caused. But the pain, it is not gone, it is buried beneath shifting sands, under peeling bandages, hidden behind convoluted evasions. How futile an attempt, like a child’s unformed mind believing that eyes shut is the same as gone, that seeing is the same as knowing, that what you can’t see isn’t there. She is a grown woman. For nearly a decade she has been employing the futile strategies of a child. And how
powerfully those strategies, in spite of their feebleness, have shaped her life. What a terrible waste, what a travesty, what complex destruction he caused. But less of me, she speaks in frustration against herself. So what if he uprooted me? So what? He killed Caitlin. They decided in that room that it was an accident. He meant only to hurt her, humiliate her, make her suffer. They decided he didn’t mean to kill her. What was her death, then? An accident. He meant her to be alive for his begging, his needy bullying, alive to let him back in. He meant her to be alive for the next time he wanted to hurt her.
She flung spears silently. She hated him with all her being. Twisted into a machine for hating, with her beige mac and her husband, rigid and silent next to her. Those endless days of hate inside an elaborate box of dark, polished wood. She thinks it was there that she and Michael lost each other. She lost all her love. He lost his kindness. He could not keep a place for her, the loveless bitter twist of rage. Now she sees perhaps she was hurting him too. What began there ended inevitably, soon afterwards, in the quiet months that were supposed to be the time when life became normal again. He pushed her from him as an act of self-preservation. The momentum of that push didn’t move immovable her, but sent him, like a man on ice, away. He waved sadly as he moved away, still reaching, beseeching, still hoping she might halt him. He pushed himself away, launched himself as of necessity into a new life. She thought it a betrayal of their daughter and for some time hated him too.
There was an afternoon near the beginning of this time in court, a sunny day with air that flirted with the optimists, the hoping hearts, the open souls, promised the full warmth of summer. Nothing promised to those such as her and Michael, sitting outside a cafe near the court with Michael’s brother, Paul. It was late afternoon, and the sky was clear, almost completely, the sun behind a nearby office block. They had been there several times before in this, the new, inexplicable life. The day in the box had finished. It had been an undramatically awful day, a listless account of how her girl died, her million precious girls – the pigtailed, long-socked playground runner, the quietly studious young woman, the sleeping baby, the little girl bringing her a first cup of cold, weak tea, so proud. The future mother. The expert witness described the injuries that Caitlin received as if they existed on a blank canvas. The alchemy of transformation. She became a body, a subject, a victim, a site of injury. She became a passive recipient of harm. She went from a million facets of life to a blank page of death, written on in a new language. Contusion, bleed, haemorrhage, swelling. One could be forgiven for thinking it was these alchemies that killed her, not the violence of that well-behaved, beseeching man in front of them. After that hideous calm, the afternoon of dully intoned mysteries, numb and silent they headed for the outside, for air. Paul smoked and fidgeted, wretched with filial love. Michael moved chairs, got coffees, food they didn’t eat. He held Anna’s hand when he sat down. Her heart cracked open for a moment at the sight of his face, dark with shadows newly cast, pale with the awful strain. The new grey at the sides of his hair. His hand was holding hers, resting on her knee under the table. She squeezed and squeezed, screwed further down into herself against the horror of the loss of him too. She could not bear to see the man she had loved for so many years so bereft, so pained. She stopped looking. She rejected that further burden. Still she squeezed his hand. Such familiar, strong, well-turned hands. Perhaps she knew in the tightness of that squeezing that she was letting go of him. Banishing. So that when he pushed, he slid away, and she did not hold him. She held only herself.
These are the costs she holds against Ryan now. These are the costs that she, not he, has had to account for. The biggest to the smallest. He has accounted, apparently, for the biggest, has paid with a little under ten years of his freedom, and she presumes some discussion about his guilt, his sense of shame, his wish to make amends, never to them, but to the society he also somehow harmed. Scratched lightly, if at all. The biggest harm to society was the cost of making him pay. She holds it all against him still. She holds it against him for Caitlin, who does not, will never, demand recompense, will never measure the way that he must pay. But there is foolishness, for she holds it before herself, not against him. What is she to do with it? This incomplete accounting, a charge sheet of subtle wreckage. It is held so ferociously by her, woven tightly into the fibre of her body, carried secretly in her marrow. For all her blindness, she has always known it is there.
She thinks horribly about what Ryan might be doing now. She wonders if he is at home with his parents. A thirty-three-year-old man trying to get back on his feet. Even if it takes him several years, he has everything before him. Have they too, his parents, spent ten years banishing or avoiding thoughts, never telling people some things in case they ask others? Our son, he is in prison. He killed his girlfriend, very sad, lovely girl. But yes, we’d love to come for dinner. The state says my son is not a murderer, and it was a terrible accident. But still, you know, call me old-fashioned, it’s a little embarrassing. We are ashamed of our son; we have never got over the shame of what he did. We have forgiven him. It’s all in the past.
She thinks they must have forgiven him. She thinks he would only come back to the area where he used to live if they were part of the reason, the support offered to a man paroled. She believes, though, that he never felt himself guilty enough to need forgiveness. And if he has made his home a few miles from her own, what is she to do about that? She pulls the cotton blanket up, over her head. Pricks of light show through the soft weave. She can hear her breath in this small cocoon. What is she to do? She tries to picture his mother, Audrey, she remembers. Anna and Michael met them once or twice, were invited for a drink, the Christmas just before it happened. A shallow, well-meaning connection, like so many, designed to keep possibilities open. She remembers they thought the couple were nice enough the first time, though they laughed afterwards about a long and dull conversation about lawnmowers. We sent them a Christmas card, Anna recalls with wonder. Caitlin, she delivered it. But she is not going back to the beginning. What does it matter that there was a time when she didn’t hate them but merely found them somewhat dull?
She has seen Audrey only once since then. Once across the car park at a swimming pool in Oxford. Anna, heart racing, got straight back in her car and went home. She has not been to that pool for seven years. Most of the time she thought Oxford was big enough to avoid seeing them. God forbid they ever get close enough to speak. What could they say that would make any sense? Hello, how are you since my son killed your daughter? Hello, long time no see, have you worked out yet how you managed to bring up a son who is a murderer? What do you think of when you look at the interminable photo portraits you have of him on your living room walls? Or did you just leave up the ones of his non-murderer brother? The portraits were something she and Michael remarked on when they drove home from Christmas drinks; they were so numerous, and so charmless. Pity slashes through her. How do you deal with photographic portraits, a tangible manifestation of parental pride, when the pride has been, presumably, lost? Do you take them down? For the briefest of moments, she does pity them. She took the photos of Caitlin down. They are in the room next door, in one of the empty drawers where Caitlin kept clothes that returned in a box, sitting unopened on the bed.
Perhaps they did not lose pride. Perhaps they are as despicable as their son. Perhaps not one drop of Anna’s fury, her hatred, was wasted. Perhaps they deserved it all.
She can resolve not to go into Oxford again. He is more likely to be there than his parents. He may not stay in the smaller town they lived in. She can resolve to shop online and get a supermarket delivery, buy clothing on occasional London trips, visit other towns. She can resolve not to see. She may live another twenty, or good God, even thirty years, in that same house. She can do her shopping elsewhere, meet friends in other places. Just don’t go to Oxford. Or move to another place, as Michael has always suggested. Follow a modified version of his own medicine, one lacking the new family an
d new love that he found. The no-frills, generic version. Just a new front door, new Marks and Spencer, new hairdressers.
Moving house. Emptying, finally, that room. Finally looking at it all. What would she do with Caitlin’s clothes, that beautiful red jacket hanging on the bedroom door, the dressing gown underneath it? The boxes, the framed photographs and diaries? From here, in this cotton cocoon, in this uncertain stretch, it seems impossible. In this untethered place, this hiding-den. She reaches over to the tin box beside her and puts a hand on it. Can she look at it all?
She feels hollow, weightless, ungrounded. She makes herself a toasted sandwich and tea with three sugars. But she only eats half, only drinks half. There is a brandy bottle on the side; she reaches for it, wanting the heat to generate inside her, wanting to bring a sense of being back to her insides, burn and heat that she can feel from within herself. She takes the brandy bottle and glass and goes once more to the spare bedroom. She climbs back into the spare-room bed. Sitting against the wall, she is aware of the empty-room coolness against her back as she lets the medicinal liquor warm her throat and belly. The taste of the brandy reminds her of the beach in Tenerife, watching boys play football in the evening light with a heavy hotel glass in her hand; she thinks it was on Christmas Eve. Boys playing football in spare spaces every evening, all over the world. How many mothers expecting boys home, to a parental timetable or to refuel a hungry, energetic body? Everywhere, groups of people relying on each other to come home. Someone providing food, someone cooking it. A well-worn argument to be endured, prosaic chats about schoolwork and social dramas. You’ll never guess what she said. Shoes tripped over in doorways, fathers shouting for the millionth time. I thought I’d told you… You did, of course you did. Let me reassure you. Baffling, the expectation that once should be enough. Shoes kicked across the floor. Tiled floors, wooden floors, earth floors, underfloor heating. Families performing international choreography on endemic stages. She thinks about the house behind the woman in Baghdad; how does it look? She knows how it looks. To her it looks a certain way. It is emptier than houses she is used to, and she hopes that in seeing a grace and elegance in that emptiness, she saves herself from the charge of patronage. Her pathetic liberal hopes and meanings. Though she knows the truth is that nowhere in the world is life simpler. Life is always complicated.