by Lulu Allison
Sliding away, slipping her mooring and drifting downstream, drifting across the surface at an indeterminate height. She sees the woman’s garden from her usual high vantage point, but this time she swoops down, to her embarrassment landing like a martial artist in one of the more mystical Hong Kong movies. One leg bent, toes and fingers pointed downward, alighting on the ground with the light touch of a snowflake. Balletic kung fu. She supposes she should thank her imagination for not landing her with a thud on her left shoulder and hip, though she feels silly. The woman smiles at her. Anna walks towards her with an almost religious care. She can’t escape slightly absurd spiritual stylings – she is even wearing some kind of gown. But after all, it is an escape, something able to exist outside of the tainted framework of real life, and, inexpert as she and her imagination are in such ventures, she accepts what comes. She is not yet in a position to dictate the terms. A novice director letting the cast improvise.
She walks cautiously towards the woman, and they regard each other with gentle curiosity. She sits on the corner of a low wall, hands clasped, elbows resting forwards onto her knees.
‘You know there is nothing I can offer you,’ the woman says as Anna sits, feeling the warmth of the air, feeling the freedom of real escape. Anna realises she is not disappointed.
Chapter 21
In the early grey light, Anna sits up in the spare-room bed. Another headache buzz-saws behind tired and scratchy eyes. Her shoulders are tight. Her mouth feels disgusting. She reaches for water, a beautiful big glass that she was self-preserving enough to carry upstairs the night before. It stands on the bedside table, next to an ancient radio alarm clock, either defunct or not plugged in. She reflects that this is the second night, the only two nights, she has slept in this room. Probably it is the longest time she has ever spent in here. Before, when she was not alone in the house and space was more pressed than now, she thought she might turn it into a workroom for herself. There is a smaller room that both she and Michael used and she now uses, opposite this one. But for a while she longed for her own space. Too much of what you want is killing, she thinks now. They used to have visitors who stayed for nights or weekends in this room, often Paul and Mar. They came before for fun, for family love. Then, when it was all difficult, they came to carry. In the beginning Paul and Marie made themselves available in the most generous way, offering to visit, to cook, to shop. Trying to be there for anything that would help. But after a while Anna resented their presence too, resented the stain of grief and loss she could read in their own faces. She resented the special fragile status their care bestowed on her. It was an effort she couldn’t summon, after a while, to be grateful for their care, to reassure them in their anxiety for her.
She kept in touch with them sporadically, visited them in London a few times, but it has been a couple of years since she had spoken to them. As much contact as she kept with anyone beyond the handful of immediate friends. They did at least spare her any talk about Caitlin; they seemed to understand her in a way that Michael could not. She cares about them very much more than her contact with them suggested, loves them both with a sadness as if she were no longer allowed to love them.
Perhaps she should get in touch. Perhaps, once the more difficult chore of finding the necklace is out of the way. She steels herself. She dresses, eats, takes aspirin. She chides herself for being hungover, for having drunk, again, too much the night before. She promises herself she will return Sophie’s call, go to see her, get some fresh air, turn outwards. Away from the skewed beacon, the unfamiliar spill of light on the grey carpet of the hall. But for now, it pulls her in. For once, turning away, though it may be the familiar habit, is not the answer. She runs her hands through her hair, easing herself into fortitude. She turns off the light that has been on since she first opened the door and pulls back the curtains to their full extent. In the corner of the windowsill behind the curtain sits Tiggy, a battered toy dog too beloved to get rid of, a part of Caitlin’s past, left for security in her old bedroom. In service of her augmenting briskness, her commitment to proceed, Anna offers it only slight acknowledgement. The room, having been closed off and empty, is not very dusty, though it looks flat and faded. She gives the sill a wipe with her sleeve pulled over her hand and straightens the two jewellery boxes in the middle. To the right are the bookshelves and a space where her desk had been. The chair is still there. On the floor are two cardboard boxes. Before looking in them, Anna goes to the kitchen and gets a duster. She wipes down the tops of the books and the shelves, then sits on the chair and bends over the boxes. Both contain folders, notebooks, papers. There is a pot with pens and pencils in it, several hairbands stretched around the outside. She puts it on the lower shelf, in front of the book spines, and leafs through the papers. The handwriting nearly halts her, but she persists, working her way through the boxes then stacking them neatly in the corner. The drawers in the chest are almost empty; there are a few T-shirts, odd items of clothing, none of which Anna remembers. The largest bottom drawer stays shut; it is where she put the photographs. The necklace won’t be there, and she is not ready to look at them.
She wipes the top of the chest of drawers and returns once more to the kitchen for more cleaning materials, an ancient sticky mark in the corner of its surface having caught her attention. Cleaning as she goes helps bring an air of efficiency and necessity. She is working her way steadily through a job that belongs to the practical body, not the unreliable heart. On the bed are two large laundry bags, most of Caitlin’s returned clothes. She puts them aside for now as being an unlikely place to find the silver daisy. They go on top of the boxes under the shelves. Two further boxes contain clothes and shoes, scarves and two coats. She wonders why Caitlin did not take the red jacket still hanging on the back of the door. She looked so lovely in it, Anna remembers. Next box. It is full of practical kitchenware, plates and cups, wooden spoons. Anna can’t think why it is there. Then, with a painful rush, she remembers buying the things with Caitlin, working out together what she might need in a new life, outside of her mother’s overstocked kitchen. She tightens her throat and jaw against the memory of carefree optimism, Caitlin’s grateful hug and the pleasure gained at her carefully chosen purchases. For a minute, she is alone with a memory that has sweetness as well as sorrow. But she travels the well-worn path back to the same destination. These stupid kitchen items, dumb chunks of china and plastic, these cheap materials, these stupid, useful shapes – Anna bought them to make Caitlin’s life with Ryan easier, to help make it possible. Why should she not have foreseen that she should do all she could to make it difficult or impossible? If you move in, I will steal your spoons and break your plates; if you move in, you will never be able to eat. I will erect barriers of carving knives and colanders before the door, I will shut you out with chopping boards and wooden spoons, tie your feet with this stupid, cheerful, striped apron. I will stop you. She clenches the thick cotton fabric in her hand. Steadies herself against her unreliable heart.
But why is this stuff here? Who thought it should be? She can’t remember much of the time after they got the news. Can’t piece together who did what and why. Who imagined, she thinks with anger, that I needed this stuff? Did I not already have enough to deal with? But a memory softens the ardour of her rage; she thinks she can remember Paul’s apologetic and tentative voice saying that he would just go and get everything, there was no need for decisions to be made, he would just clear it all out, from their house and from the flat, and Anna and Michael could decide what they wanted to do at a later date. She thinks, with sudden astonishment, is this, then, finally the later date? Certainly, beyond Michael’s retrieval of some photographs and those boots, she has prohibited any decision-making before now. She thinks once more of the map she has blanked out and her realisation that she made Michael a trespasser, shut him out of his familiar terrain. She has done more, wielded more, over these thin and unhappy years, than she ever thought possible. Not doing anything has, she sees, take
n a great deal more than she accounted for.
She puts the box aside. It can go, she thinks. There is a second box, more household items. On top is a small china vessel with a lid, an old-fashioned mustard jar. She remembers it from the table in the flat, sat permanently next to a little vase and a pepper grinder. She remembers it because Caitlin bought it when walking with Anna and Michael through a flea market in town one afternoon when they had gone to visit her. She picks up the pot and removes the lid. There, nestled in small coils of silver chain, was the daisy pendant. She lifts it out, curious about how it ended up in the mustard jar. The flower is very like the one worn by Estela in the photograph; the only difference was in this one having slightly longer petals. She holds it draped across her hand and stares into the small silver flower settled in the middle of her palm. She slowly folds her fingers over it and walks across the hall to the computer in her office. Without putting the necklace down, she opens up the photograph and zooms in. They are indeed very alike. Though not identical. Anna sits in the office chair, leans back into its sculpted, manly car-seat form. She holds the daisy in her closed hand, resting on her lap, and gazes at a tilt. The line where wall meets ceiling becomes, at this angle and with this unfocused gaze, a horizon.
Memories, unsaturated, watered down, fractionally opaque, begin to form way off, at the edge of vision, distant and so thin. So weakly do they play, and so far off are they screened on that ceiling-sky, that she does not immediately shut down. She is watching a watery, distant screening, an undeveloped film barely held on clear acetate. Ghosts, though only one of them dead. Caitlin’s sixteenth birthday, a regular day of school and work. They had pancakes for breakfast, Michael’s tradition for both Caitlin’s and Anna’s birthdays. He took liberties with the fillings, allowing a second tradition of predicting invented and absurd concoctions that he was about to put before them. Plum duff and sprout pancakes, prawn mayonnaise with ice cubes. Worms and gravy. This day they had raspberry with lime cream. A memory of the taste came through, stronger than the distant filtered pictures, a disconcerting landing in the body, inside her mouth, as she remembered the beautiful sweet sharpness. Too close, too close. Skip flavours; keep to distant, cellophane views. The necklace was in a small wrapped box on Caitlin’s plate. She seemed, Anna remembers, to be delighted with it. She put it on, wearing it beneath her school shirt. After that, she wore it often, or all the time? Anna can’t remember. She thinks of memories of photographs where the necklace can be seen. There was one of her and Ryan, close up – was it on the wall in the flat? She was wearing a thin-strapped summer dress, and the picture was cropped just below the gleaming daisy. Anna looks back at the screen, comparing her memory of a photograph with the image before her. Still with the daisy in her hand, she clicks on Reply and writes:
Dear Estela. Thank you so much for sending me the photograph, and for writing at all. It was so nice to hear from you, and to meet you. It made my time in Tenerife so lovely. I hope we can stay in touch. With thanks again, Anna.
She goes to the spare bedroom and collects the tin of letters and photographs, wanting to find further evidence of the little silver daisy. After all, to look for that, it is not the same as looking for Caitlin. But perhaps she does not really know what it is she hopes to find. It is a strategy, one that has already served to open that most closed of doors. She takes the tin back down to the kitchen table and carefully tips out the contents. She sorts two piles, letters and photographs. It is not that she has not seen a photograph of Caitlin for all these long years; she has not had, much as she would have liked it, the power of veto beyond these walls, in the homes of others who loved her. It is that she has not in that time actually looked at one. Most of the photos in the box are of others, but a few of them are of Caitlin too, with Michael, Ryan, herself, some other friends. There is one, taken in Paul and Marie’s garden, of father and daughter sitting at the small garden table with a glass of wine each, both smiling towards the camera. Anna doesn’t remember the occasion, perhaps a time when she was not there. It is a lovely photo. She falls in love with it, as if, having not been there, it represents a distant ideal. A man and his newly grown daughter, happy in each other’s company, sharing a late-summer evening. How beautiful they both look, she thinks.
There is a picture of Caitlin and Anna standing together in the garden, hugging each other and smiling. They too look happy in each other’s company. A black crow screams between her and the page. It lands, clawing on her chest, flapping ragged blackness before her eyes. She cannot look any more.
She puts the photos down, face down. A breath, a pause. She looks out of the window, watching bare branches move, the tips of trees reaching above the house up into the grey sky. She sees in the pile, just as she is ready to halt the dangerous experiment, what looks like the photo she remembers. It is a larger print than the others, and must be from the same time as the one that was on the wall. A close-up of Caitlin and Ryan standing next to each other in the sunshine. She is looking sideways at him and smiling. The silver necklace is bisected by the cropping of the picture. A half flower, a setting star. Ryan looks straight out of the photograph and into Anna’s eyes. She tears him away, leaving Caitlin looking trustingly, smilingly, at a ragged cliff edge.
After a moment she gets up, feeling the need for a break, a splash of outdoor air, a walk in the woods. Refuge amongst the tree trunks. But she knows this is an intermission, not withdrawal. In the woods, her thoughts are mosaic-paved with broken fragments, too distracting, the wrong medium for ghost visits. She doesn’t allow the fragments to become whole; small pieces are enough. She is thinking in tiny, intricate patterns. It is as if after years of thick beige carpeting, she has pulled it back to reveal a migraine-inducing interlock of tiny tiles. Each one a fragment of a picture, each one a potential for harm. They have to be small so as to remain harmless, and thus there has to be many, to fill the dangerous gaps. It is tiring, scratchy, unsatisfactory. But she finds that the beige carpet won’t go back. The years have made it too stiff and heavy.
Chapter 22
Once back from her walk, it takes the rest of the day to read the letters. Not because there are many words, but because each of them bounces through her in a slow, reverberating arc. Each word dazes her. Each word takes its own time to land in her understanding. She is powerless in the irresistible iceberg-drift of their arrival. The careless cheer and love of her own words, a postcard from a holiday that she and Michael took when Caitlin was eighteen and staying at home. A letter sent to her at her new address – PS: here is some money for you and Ryan to buy something nice for the flat. Love you darling, good luck in your new home. xxx How easy those words were to write. There are a few letters from Ryan. She creaks on the edge of discarding them. But it is impossible; she is compelled to read them. Three are fawning with love, full of it. She sneers at his ardour, his praise. She feels her fury rising. One of the letters tells her how sorry he is. How much he regrets. He asks if he can come to London and be with her; he longs to put everything right again if she will only give him a chance.
The slow spell of the words is broken. Anna is almost drowned in her anger. The storm of it swirls around her. She moves in an ungainly trance around the house, unsure if she wants to break it or hurt herself or both. Finally, she sits down at the table with the remains of the bottle of brandy and a glass, agitated and unhappy. A scorch of liquor opens her throat, burns past the constricting emotions, fries away tears. She doesn’t want to cry again. She hasn’t cried for years. Or she hadn’t, until a few days ago in Tenerife. It is not he that takes her so close to tears, but all that he is reminds her of Caitlin. She is getting closer to her. She is the fluttering in her throat, the choke. It is so unfair. Her poor darling girl never would cause such harm as has been done by her story. Poor Caitlin, her darling girl.
*
The telephone once more wakes Anna in the morning. Her friends are used to thinking of her as an early riser; they have not been close enough, since her ret
urn, to observe that she has drifted into new habits. She has kept them at a distance, as she does once more, almost revealing her irritation as she speaks. Tony notices the impatience in her voice, but it is not unduly unusual for Anna to be distant with her friends, and he knows that it is a time of year she finds difficult. He accepts too the explanation for her gruff and stuffy voice. She is run down. She doesn’t explain that the cause is the hectic, lonely consumption of a large amount of brandy. She hurries him off the phone, promising to call soon. A shower, a pull-together, a strong coffee, a grip got of the situation. Not an immediate success. The hangover is worse than she has had for some time. The poison of Ryan is one of the ingredients. What is the antidote? How can she fight it? A square fight, a pummelling. Would that help? Oh, but it would feel good. She is in the shower, but feels so weakened that she sits on the floor of the cubicle, knees stiffly bent up in front of her, pulled away from the door so it is not pushed open. She feels a fool. She sees herself as an undignified, hungover woman, bent up uncomfortably in the bottom of her shower, fantasising about a fight. There must be more than this. She tips her head back into the corner, feels the water falling past her chin and onto her chest, the patter meeting the skip of her heartbeat. She is a drum skin between two weakling thunders.