Sworn Secret

by Amanda Jennings

  The sting fired up her arm.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered.

  She lifted her hand away from the window and the half-dead body of the wasp fell on to the sill, its legs scrambling helplessly, its wings buzzing irregularly against the paintwork.

  She looked down at her hand and saw the deep purple mark where the sting had punctured her skin. She clutched her throbbing hand to her chest. Her throat was already tightening as it swelled with the poison. Her mind seemed to drift away from her body, and then Lizzie thought about trying to reach for her bag. Her knees buckled. She fell on to the carpet. She needed a shot of adrenalin, but she realized she’d floated too far from her body to make herself move. She thought of her bag lying on the bed and tried to sit up. She caught a glimpse of it before it faded away like a mirage in the desert. Then she was aware of herself lifting upwards, like an astronaut weightless in space. She looked down and saw her body collapse backwards. Her reddened hand fell across her chest and her legs were splayed uncomfortably. She looked at the window sill. The wasp was dead now, its tiny black corpse curled up, still. She looked back at herself and was surprised to see how tranquil she looked considering how hard it was to draw breath, that iron-fisted hand tightening fraction by fraction around her lungs, squeezing the oxygen out of them, turning her lips and the tips of her fingers the purple of blueberries.

  Then the door opened. It was her mum. When she saw Lizzie on the floor she dropped to her knees beside her suffocating body. Then she screamed. It was the same scream she’d screamed when she answered the phone the night Anna died. Lizzie’s blood froze.

  Her mum gathered Lizzie’s limp body in her arms and held her tightly. Lizzie saw her own head flop backwards, the blueberry lips a fraction open. Her mum kissed her over and over, and tears fell from her eyes that cooled her burning skin. She could taste their saltiness even from way up where she was. Then her mum began to shout for help. She tipped her head back and opened her mouth and bellowed, at least she looked like she was bellowing, because although Lizzie could read her lips and make the words out she could no longer hear any actual noise, it was like her ears had been stuffed with cotton wool. Her mum looked right up at her then. Lizzie smiled but her mum didn’t see her, she just called out for someone to do something.

  There’s not much I can do from up here, Mum, Lizzie tried to say. But she couldn’t make her mouth work and the words didn’t come out.

  Lizzie started to point frantically at the bag on her bed, but her mum just closed her eyes and rocked Lizzie’s stifled body.

  Then there was someone else at the door. Oh my God. Haydn!

  Lizzie waved at him, but he was only looking at her empty body as it struggled to breathe on the carpet below. She watched him step closer to her. Her mum went crazy then. She screeched and started to beat him away, while curling Lizzie away from him behind a protective shoulder.

  Lizzie tried to shout at him to tell him the bag was just there on the bed, but still nothing came out. He took his phone out of his jeans pocket and dialled. His lips moved, but of course she couldn’t hear a word. It was so peculiar to watch them like this, from up where she was, like two characters on a muted television screen. Then suddenly Haydn saw the bag. He grabbed it.

  Clever Haydn, she thought. Clever, clever Haydn.

  He fell to his knees and emptied the contents all over the carpet like he was searching a stolen handbag. He shouted at her mum, but she didn’t respond. Maybe she couldn’t hear him either. Haydn shook her shoulder, thrust a handful of the pills and syringes that lay scattered on the floor out towards her, right under her nose. He didn’t know what to do.

  Oh, Haydn, Lizzie tried to shout, there’s a piece of paper, a folded one. It’s got instructions on it. Can’t you see it?

  Haydn shook her mother again, harder this time. At last her mum seemed to get it. Lizzie watched her eyes focusing on the syringe. She held Lizzie’s body tight to her chest with one hand and with the other pointed quickly. Then she looked at Lizzie’s face and cried out. She slid her fingers between the freezing-looking lips and tried to make room for air to pass around the tongue, which was so swollen it nearly filled her mouth. She saw her mum’s lips moving, but she was so far away from her now, out of the room and through the roof, and it was hard to make out the words. She definitely said I love you, and then please don’t die, please don’t die, but then she started to mumble, which was impossible to read.

  Lizzie looked back at Haydn. He had the syringe. He spoke to her mum. She didn’t respond. He took her face in his hands and turned it towards him. Then he spoke again, slowly and clearly.

  ‘What do I do?’ he said. ‘You have to tell me what to do.’

  Even from where she was, high up in the sky with the clouds, she could see her mum’s eyes lock on to Haydn for a second time. She spoke to him, and Haydn nodded and tipped the syringe upwards. He tapped it with a finger. Lizzie was amazed how perfectly she could smell the old tobacco on that finger.

  She winced as Haydn jammed the needle into her body on the floor and watched the syringe depress. The clear liquid powered into her bloodstream and began to shoot around as each pump of that slowing heart pushed the adrenalin to the outer reaches of her feeble body. Then she felt herself falling downwards, out of control, like an enormous ball that had reached the height of its bounce and was coming back down. As she neared her body she picked up speed. Sound returned, slowly at first, then loud as anything. Her head began to pound. She heard her mum crying. She felt hands around her body. Kisses all over her face. She heard Haydn panting next to her. She was aware of his exhausted body shivering with effort and emotion. She twitched her fingers just to see if they still worked. Her mouth loosened and the fist around her lungs at last began to ease its grip. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be nailed shut.

  Then she heard people in her room, strangers with serious voices, the static crackle of a radio, hands that weren’t her mother’s all over her. Then straps and wires, something placed over her mouth and nose, and the cool, smooth breaths that followed. Footsteps thumped heavily on the stairs. A man said her name. She heard someone talking behind him.

  ‘Mum . . .’ Her voice struggled out in a whisper and the last thing she heard before she gave in to the blackout was her mother’s strangled cry of relief.

  Freesias and Roses

  Kate stared at the grey liquid in the polystyrene cup she held. It had long turned cold, and the familiar disc, synonymous with the countless cups of untouched tea of the past year, floated listless on its surface.

  The hospital waiting room was quiet. It was Saturday and hot, not blistering, but easily warm enough for T-shirts and shorts. Kate imagined most people would be lighting the barbecue or mowing the lawn or filling paddling pools, enjoying this beautiful gift of a day.

  Watching Lizzie dying in her arms, her lips losing colour, her mouth, throat and tongue swelling before her eyes, left her drained of everything. Numbed. She thought she’d lost her. Another dead daughter.

  And all she did was watch.

  She shuddered when she thought about Haydn, about what might have happened if he hadn’t turned up, if he hadn’t run all the way from his house to theirs when Lizzie had hung up on him. What if he’d been too worried about bumping into Kate? What if he hadn’t loved Lizzie enough to fight to see her? And what would have happened if she’d remembered to put the latch on the front door, or he’d stopped at the newsagent for gum or cigarettes and arrived five minutes later to find Lizzie lifeless and cooling, her heart stilled?

  Kate was aware of somebody sitting down beside her. She glanced up. It was Barbara. Kate was shocked by how different she looked that day. The glamour had left her. The snow-white hair that used to sit immaculate, with every silken hair brushed and set in place by the tortoiseshell comb, was dishevelled and without its lustrous shine. Her skin hung in loose grey folds and her eyes were rheumy, rimmed red with tiredness. Kate looked down at the cup of cold tea. />
  ‘How are you?’ her mother-in-law asked.

  Kate nodded and tears brewed.

  Barbara rested a hand on Kate’s knee.

  ‘Don’t say anything nice,’ Kate said quickly. She bent to put the polystyrene cup at the foot of the chair. ‘If you do I’ll cry, and I don’t deserve to cry.’

  Barbara didn’t reply.

  ‘I couldn’t help her,’ whispered Kate. ‘I did nothing. If Haydn hadn’t arrived, I . . . I . . .’ Kate shook her head. ‘She would have died, Barbara. I’d have let her die, like Anna.’

  Barbara tutted. ‘You have absolutely no idea what you would have done. It was a matter of minutes. You would have got it together. You would certainly have called the ambulance. And I’m convinced you would have reached for that syringe within moments. You were dealing with the shock of finding her. You can’t be so hard on yourself. And anyway,’ she said, ‘he did arrive. And thank God he did. That boy, by all accounts, is a hero.’

  Kate nodded. Haydn’s rational calm had saved Lizzie. His enduring love had brought him to her in her time of need. He was her guardian angel, and Kate owed him everything.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate.

  ‘I told you, you have nothing to be sorry for. Everybody reacts differently in an emergency, and given what you’ve been through . . . well, let’s just say it was a miracle you were able to tell the boy what to do with that needle.’

  ‘I mean, I’m sorry to you. For how I behaved at Anna’s funeral. And since.’

  ‘There’s no need to talk about it,’ said Barbara. There was a level of emotion in her words that tore Kate in half.

  ‘I want to,’ struggled Kate. ‘It’s important. I need you to know I’m sorry. Anna’s death has unravelled me. I’m so eaten up by it I can’t see anything else.’ Kate rested her head in her hands and sighed. ‘I miss her so much, Barbara. Every day, every minute, I miss her. Some days I wake up without the pain in my stomach, thinking everything’s fine, and then it hits me like a shovel in the face and I remember she’s not in her bed and I’m never going to be able to feel her again, or kiss her, or smell her, and this horrific deprivation smothers me.’

  ‘She was a special child, Kate. And so like you.’ Kate looked sideways at Barbara, who smiled. ‘Wasn’t she? Like you in every way.’

  Grown in a Petri dish, Jon used to joke. A doppelgänger. A clone.

  ‘All passion and vitality,’ said Barbara. She patted Kate’s knee. ‘Beauty inside and out. It spilled out of her. But my goodness, there’s a wicked streak to you both.’

  Kate nodded. ‘And then my good girl Lizzie, like Jon.’

  Barbara smiled again. ‘Yes, Lizzie so like Jonathan.’

  Kate had a picture of Lizzie and Jon together. They were in the kitchen making sandwiches. They held their knives the same way, stood the same way, their shoulders hunched just a little, taking the business of making lunch so seriously. They both cut the crusts off, as finely as possible so as not to waste too much bread. She and Anna wouldn’t even get a plate out; they’d just grab a slice of bread and a bit of ham from the fridge, fold the two together and take a bite whilst they kicked the fridge door shut. Lizzie and Jon, though, would sweep the crumbs off the worktop, put their knife in the dishwasher and their plate on the table before sitting down to eat. They were both so desperate to please, needing to do the right thing, so conventional, loyal, with such a powerful sense of right and wrong, the moral and immoral.

  ‘When Jon first met you he was so overwhelmed he used to make me talk to him for hours on end to try and make sense of what he felt. Then he’d tell me everything funny that you said, what you did, even what you ate or drank. Of course, I’d pretend I wasn’t interested, that I disapproved of you.’ She smiled.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Disapprove of you?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘A little. I’m a dreadful snob.’ She lifted her hand off Kate’s knee and took her hand. Then she squeezed it. ‘But I could see that as far as he was concerned you were the one, and that was obvious from the first day he brought you home.’ Barbara sighed deeply. ‘He loves you very much.’

  There was a maternal pleading, a protectiveness, in Barbara’s words that sent a wave of guilt surging through Kate.

  ‘I love him too. It’s just . . .’ She tailed off as she tried to work out exactly what had happened to that enviable love. ‘I seem to have forgotten what to do with love. I feel spent, like an empty shell, dead, if you like. It was only when I was holding Lizzie, when I thought I’d lost her too, that I realized how much love I was still capable of feeling.’

  ‘I understand that more than you would imagine.’ Barbara’s voice stumbled.

  Kate looked at her, but her mother-in-law made a point of looking away. Barbara brushed her hands repeatedly up and down her lap, desperate to regain control of her emotions. Kate suddenly felt very close to her. The last time she had felt like this towards her was the day before the funeral. Kate was supposed to be doing the flowers. It was a job she was determined to do. It seemed right for her to do it for Anna, to make the place look fresh and young. But faced with her living room full of flowers, all of them cut in their prime, she had folded, backed away into the kitchen and collapsed. By chance Barbara arrived at that very moment and found her trembling on the floor. She sat with her and held her hand and waited patiently until her shivering sobs stopped. Then she led her into the living room to the buckets of freesias and roses in pinks, purples and whites, their sweet scent filling the room, and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder in silence and arranged the bouquets and vases.

  ‘You’re a special person, Barbara.’

  Barbara shook her head. ‘No. Not special at all.’ She looked at Kate, and Kate saw a deep sadness in her.

  ‘What’s wrong, Barbara?’

  She didn’t reply.

  Kate rubbed her lower back. ‘It’s OK,’ she soothed. Then she put her arm around her mother-in-law’s shoulder and drew her in. ‘What you do with Peter, it’s amazing. But you need help. You have to ask us for help. Jon finds it hard, but he means it when he says he’ll help. All you have to do is give him some guidance. He’s not sure about it. Seeing Peter like this unnerves him. It’s been a rough year – neither of us have been any use to anyone, least of all ourselves. But we are here.’

  Barbara looked at her and smiled. ‘I know you are.’ She patted Kate’s knee. Kate took hold of her hand and squeezed it. At the sound of footsteps she turned to see Jon, and caught his happy surprise at the sight of his mother and wife holding hands.

  Barbara straightened her back and let go of Kate. She smoothed her skirt. ‘Jon, darling, would you mind dropping me home? I should get back to your father.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’d love to.’

  An Important Smile

  Jon stood next to Kate in the doorway of Lizzie’s room watching her sleep. The bedside lamp threw a warm glow across her face. Kate had tucked the covers around her body so she was snug and warm, cocooned in the safety of her bed. The carpet was vacuumed and a small vase of pink roses sat next to a giant tin of Quality Street on her desk.

  Jon would know when she was better because she’d start to rifle through the chocolates for the Golden Pennies. It was a standing joke. Whenever Quality Street came into the house, Christmas-time generally, he and Lizzie would declare war on each other and the Golden Pennies were the booty. When one of them opened the tin and found the last penny stolen, the loser would bow in mock deference to the other. Jon had once found Lizzie sitting behind the sofa, aged eight, with a fistful. She was carefully unwrapping one at a time, popping it into her mouth and then starting on the next. Beside her was a neat stack of wrappers, flattened and piled perfectly in line.

  ‘Thank God she’s OK,’ whispered Kate. ‘What would we have done? How would we have coped?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jon in a matched whisper. He had spent the day in a daze, wrestling constantly with that sam
e haunting thought: how would we have coped?

  He wasn’t there when it happened. He was at the hardware store trying to find a piece of rubber tubing to fix the water butt. It was all part of his new idea to collect grey water from the baths and sinks to water the plants. That morning he’d woken and resolved to finish the project. He was desperate to give himself something to do, something to think about other than his collapsing marriage and Stephen Howe and the look of hatred that Lizzie had given him as he tore her off Haydn, but of all the times to be away from the house, pointlessly trawling aisles and aisles of plumbing paraphernalia . . .

  He arrived home to the ambulance pulled up outside his house, the front door open, paramedics talking urgently. His heart stopped when the stretcher came through the front door. Kate followed after, her face stricken and puffy from crying. Then came the Howes’ son.

  Lizzie.

  There was a blanket over her, a drip in her arm and an oxygen mask covering her face. Her skin was a bluey-white, apart from one exposed arm, which was inflated to the point of rupture and as red as a telephone box.

  Jon grabbed the closest paramedic. ‘What happened?’

  No answer, just a concerned face monitoring the mobile drip. He grabbed at Kate. She had a foil blanket around her shoulders. She looked dazed, shattered. It terrified him. His stomach soaked with dread and bile swelled.

  ‘She’s OK,’ she said then. ‘It was a wasp. But she’s OK.’

  He watched them load Lizzie into the ambulance, motionless, poisoned and swollen, and felt the floor beneath him begin to crumble.

  Now the drama was over and she was safe, her recovery certain, with no ifs or buts. All she needed was sleep. Kate’s hand reached for him and she laced her fingers through his. He held his breath. He didn’t speak; he couldn’t risk it. It was an almost perfect moment, the two of them together, watching their precious daughter breathing steadily in the warmth of her bedroom.