“Marvellous,” I nodded. They really were. Well-schooled, utterly in tune and time, they transcended themselves as individuals.
This might be something I could try - something that used to give me pleasure. Perhaps this was one path back to some of the things I had lost through the years. And it felt a safe path – I would be one among many, a voice in the crowd, but holding a part in this world.
London: the present
Our abraded lives
The next evening I was back in Marni’s riotous kitchen, allowing myself to relax into the colourful jumble of warmth.
“Did you have a good time at the beach? You hadn’t had a break in such a long time. I was really glad to hear you’d gone down,” Marni said.
“I’m sorry – I should have seen if you were free. I know you’d mentioned coming away with me sometime,” I replied.
“It’s fine, Evie! I mean it when I say I’m glad you took the time, and I think you needed that time on your own, not with me. I’m always here. But was it good?”
“It was good. I think I needed it. But…”
“What?”
“Well, it just affected me a little more than I thought it would. I thought I’d go down, have a bit of a break, take some time to slow down, and come back feeling ready.”
“Ready?”
“For all this. Just ready, you know, to get back into the fray.”
“Oh, Evie.” Marni stopped fussing with the shopping and came to sit down next to me, reaching for my hand. I didn’t stiffen as I would with that contact from anyone else. I gently clasped Marni’s hand back.
“Tell me?” Marni prompted.
“Oh, so much seemed to happen down there. I mean, nothing actually happened, it was all up here.” I tapped the side of my head vigorously, almost angrily.
“With everything I’ve been talking about with Claire, and with you, it felt very different. I usually go down there to just stop and think, let it all out, really, but this time I’ve come back with more questions, more things that I want to unearth.”
Marni waited as I searched for the right words to express what was going on.
“I’ve felt so certain of how I should be all these years – what works for me, how it all fits together to keep moving forward. But now my head is full of questions that just keep going around and around. Look at this.”
I slid my hand into my pocket, and pulled my little piece of sea glass out on to the table. I tried to explain my thought process about the transformation of this tiny thing, what it meant to me, how its abraded form spoke to me so deeply.
“But I keep coming back to this question, now, Marni. What happens to those bits of us that are worn away? Where do they go?
“I’ve read so much about how we are all products of the relationships that we have, that it makes me wonder all over again who I am. If we really are forged by the relationships we have, what does their death mean for our individuality? If parts of us are only accessible through that relationship shared with another, do parts of us get lost forever? I know we are altered, but…lost? Am I always less now because I’ve lost them?”
“Eves.”
“And then, well…and then I just wonder whether there is any point at all in feeling any of this, if it’s so painful. It’s making me question so much, but I’m not finding any peace or relief at all. I’m wondering what I’m doing, Marni, and now I’m not sure I have the choice to pack it all away again. I feel like I’m stuck on a speeding train, somehow, and I know the driver is missing, and I’ve got to get up there and drive this damned train, but I haven’t got a clue how to. I just know it feels necessary. It’s like something is speeding up inside me – an unstoppable force – and I hate that.” I smiled wryly at Marni, my tears close to the surface now, but trying to pull a little emotional distance back.
“Evie, it might feel like this for now, but it won’t feel like this forever. I think you’ve kept your feelings so hidden away for so long, that they are bound to feel overwhelming.”
“But what do I do, Marni? I can’t concentrate at work, I feel this restlessness running right through me. I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t need to do anything until it feels clear, and right. I know you are going to find this time horrendous, and really unsettling, but I am always here for you. Please let me help where I can. Even if you just want to come and stay with us for a while, Evie. We’d love that; Peter would love it, too!
“And just do what you need at work – no more – and then let it go. You’ve given them your sweat and tears over the years, Evie; they owe you a bit of slack. Try to stop worrying about letting them down. That is not the measure of you. It’s never been the measure of you.”
“I’ve been thinking of doing some other things again, just seeing how that feels,” I said hesitantly, wondering what Marni’s reaction would be.
“That sounds like a good plan. Do you have some ideas?”
“Well, I loved the concert that Vi took me to actually. It made me think about joining a choir again. And I thought I would start swimming again. Something different to the gym – and I used to love it so much.”
Marni nodded her encouragement. “Why not come along when I take Peter for his swimming lesson?”
“Yes, I might just do that,” I said, feeling drawn to the idea.
Dream
Metal monsters
Aliens lived among us, vicious and calculating, taking pleasure from killing. They were chilling: masters of disguise, roaming the streets, looking like any human most of the time. But just before they killed, they assumed their real form, with whirring metal appendages, and sharp integrated blades. All these elements were permanently attached to them; part of their being. They butchered people.
I was part of a team trying to stop them. But we had no useful weapons, and no real sense of how we could stop them. We heard that they were planning a massacre at a crowded theatre – more like a football stadium. For some reason we allowed the game to go ahead, and we mingled with the crowd. I watched as people poured out of the town below, winding up the hill towards their death. I felt helpless, but strangely resolved to try.The theatre/stadium had rich red velvet seats, and a ceiling of sorts.
I suddenly spotted one of these camouflaged creatures sitting a few rows ahead of me, off to the left. He knew who I was. This amused him, as he knew we had nothing with which to stop him. He deliberately looked over to a young, blonde woman seated several rows behind him. She caught his eye, and smiled and flirted with him. I suddenly saw a flash – a telepathically-transmitted message from the creature – telling me what was going to happen to her in the next few minutes. She would be brutally slaughtered, and her head severed, her arms torn out from her shoulders. Blood would be everywhere. This world of people, all excited about the match, would change in that beat of time, into a hell of blood, terror, agony and unspeakable sadism. The shift of life to death.
The creatures, led by the one who had communicated with me, left their strategic points around the room, and started to move. They were to spring into action at a pre-arranged signal, and annihilate everything. And they were going to enjoy it – their metal, jagged-edged faces hysterical with pleasure and blood-lust. They thought it was very funny.
I don’t know why we hadn’t sent everyone out of town. There was a sense that we had a plan, but I had no idea what it was, or what we were going to do when the creatures attacked. I felt an overwhelming responsibility and impotence, mixed with deep sadness and anger. Outrage, and a desire to protect. I knew deep within myself that the creatures could not hurt me in any way. I was definitely human, so I was unsure what was protecting me, but I knew I was untouchable by them. Yet I was rooted very firmly within this unfolding tragedy; very much a part of it.
London: the present
Exhaustion
“I wish grie
f could be more like a marathon,” I said to Claire one morning.
“Can you tell me what you mean by that?”
“I mean, it already feels like a marathon, but it doesn’t have an end. You wake up each morning, and the grind just starts again. I see those runners crossing the finishing line; I see the elation and the sense of release that they have earned themselves. And I wish for that; a feeling of crossing the line, being able to stop running, that the ordeal is done. I feel cheated, as if the effort I put into every day never brings me to a finishing line – never brings me that moment of fulfilment.
I’m not exactly sure what it would look like, but I yearn for it just the same.”
“I can hear that – like a need to rest, to have a defined ending.”
Yes – exactly. But it’s ludicrous, I know, because grief won’t suddenly disappear. Yet that doesn’t stop me wanting it to – so much.”
“I think it is a very normal longing. Like the need people have to hold a ritual to mark a death – it provides a defined moment to attempt to express the inexpressible. It works as a socially accepted moment to feel release.”
“Yes. But then those moments dry up, and there is an endless desert ahead of you that you need to keep trudging through, with no more of those moments, no more of those rituals ahead that you can push on to for another pause.”
As I walked home, I could feel that things were changing, shifting, moving into new positions. An army reassembling, waiting to advance. I knew what I would do that evening; I would look through the box of memories that I kept locked tightly away.
London: the present
Conduit
It wasn’t something that I did very often – just a few times, actually, over the decades. Enough to keep it torturous: not enough to take the sting out of it in any way. The fallout from it affected me deeply for the next few days. But occasionally, I felt a pressing need to prise open the lid of that box, and sift through the contents.
I kept it in a drawer, under piles of clothes, so that even getting to it was an effort, and there was never any chance that I would catch sight of it inadvertently. Acknowledging it was always a premeditated, controlled choice.
With the door locked, I felt prepared. I knelt down to rummage through the bottom drawer, my hands blindly seeking until I made contact with it. I withdrew the box and sat back on my heels. Simply looking at its carved exterior was enough to start my mind reaching for those dark places. I wondered whether I should be doing this at all, and I very nearly put it back out of sight, where it couldn’t hurt me.
Then I moved abruptly, decision made, and brought my legs forward, crossing them in front of me as I had done each day at primary school. With a decisive click, I undid the little metal catch on the box. It felt as if I had opened myself.
There wasn’t much in the box – everything I had had at the time had been lost – but there was a collection of photos that my aunt and uncle had kept. Christmas shots that my parents must have sent to them each year, occasional pictures of proud moments of our lives that my parents had wanted to share: a fancy-dress party we had all been to, me covered in rosettes on sports day, my brother leaning out of the window on his birthday, beaming widely at the camera and waving. Priceless stills of a lost life.
My fingers read them as much as my eyes, stroking down the shiny images, the shiny faces, the shiny life, tracing the paths that I hoped my parents’ fingers had made as they had looked through the pictures, chosen the ones to send, packaged them up for England, and sent them on their way. I could close my eyes and imagine the smiles on their faces as they looked lovingly on the moments of life that they had captured. And now, decades on, my hands were where theirs had once been, and that meant something to me.
The box also contained a few precious letters and cards written by my parents when I had come over to England for a few weeks one summer. I hadn’t wanted to go, but they had thought it would be a good opportunity for me to feel a little grown up, a little independent, and I had actually hugely enjoyed the trip. I had stayed with my aunt and uncle, and while they had seemed very old to me, they had taken my visit to heart, and made a huge effort to take me around all the local sights, even making a journey to London with me that had set my senses reeling. My parents had written to me every few days, and each letter also included scribbles from little Laila, and a few brief lines from Hugo. I had always felt confident in Hugo’s love for me – basked in it as I grew – but he was no letter writer.
There were other things in my box; darker places. A coroner’s report on each of their deaths. Although we had lived abroad for many years, we had remained UK citizens, and these things had to be done properly. So a land that did not know us, and had no comprehension of what had happened to us, signed their epitaph: ‘unlawful killing’.
Then the newspaper cuttings. Even once I had left and come here, the war followed me. On the news every day, it had saturated my day and my mind, despite Vi’s attempts to rush the newspapers into the recycling, or swiftly switch the TV off when any coverage came on. At first I used to creep out of my bedroom at night to the recycling bin, to cut out and preserve parts of my life. The need for some form of connection was strong. This petered out over time; there hadn’t been a definitive moment when I felt I no longer needed to do it any more – it was more a question of a squirrel filling its stash for the winter months ahead. There comes a point when any more just becomes pointless. The paper the stories were printed on was too fragile to provide any sustenance.
I had also uncovered a place in the library where my aunt or uncle – I was never sure which – had filed away news reports of me, of the time I had been brought over here to live with them. I had felt furtive, stumbling across something that I shouldn’t, but which was all about me, my life. Although they had probably sought to shield me from the pain of it all, the fact that one of them had hidden these things away here, secretively, reinforced my feeling that these things were best left unspoken, closeted away. I had taken some of the cuttings, added them to my stash. If my aunt or uncle had ever noticed that some pieces were missing, they had certainly never mentioned it. Again, I was never sure if that left me feeling resentful, or grateful.
There was a grainy image of me in one of those cuttings – shocked by the flashing bulb, taken as I had arrived in this country. I found it hard to look at. That girl looked hollowed out; a shell. She had not yet learnt to hide her vulnerability, and the level of exposure in the photograph appalled me. She looked so raw that the slightest touch would leave her screaming.
I quickly moved on, not wanting to fully absorb that one. I returned to the photos of before, seeking some relief. But the laughing faces and crinkled eyes cut deeper than the documents of officialdom. The pictures were a far more final death knell to the enormity of what had been lost. ‘Unlawful killing’ didn’t stand a chance in the tsunami of emotions that the images created.
Suffocating with that wave, I was wracked with sobs that shook my whole body. It was burning, a pressure inside that I could not get out enough to relieve the pain. I clutched my chest, terrified by the beast growing inside me, pushing outwards. Even my ribs ached as I fought to regain control.
Later, much later, I lifted my head from the floorboards, pushed myself up to sitting, packed it all away again carefully, snapped the box closed and went downstairs to obliterate it all with drink. Tonight I would get dressed up, go out to some anonymous bar, and go home with anyone who asked me.
24 years ago
Numb
I had been there several times before, had even lived there for those few weeks of holiday one summer. But the whole place was alien to me. I didn’t understand that at first. It was as if I saw everything through a piece of broken glass, at a distance, slightly dream-like with muffled sound. Even my aunt’s voice sounded muffled to me, as if it was reaching me through layers and layers of foam. I was always half s
urprised when I turned towards the faint noise and did indeed see my aunt’s lips moving in time with those sounds.
I remembered the music that my mother had loved to play in our home. There was one piece in particular that I often thought of now: the Enigma Variations. My mother had always had a certain look, a certain awe and reverence when she explained the power of the Variations – the magic of them – but now I saw that it could also be a poison – the same things could be severed from you, rather than enriched – depending on the journey.
Perhaps that was what was going on here. It wasn’t that Vi’s house had changed at all; it was just that I saw it with different eyes. The house was exactly the same as when I had visited as a child – perhaps too shockingly the same. I half-imagined that everything should be different, that things should have profoundly changed, in acknowledgement of the vast shift in the world. The fact that nothing here had fundamentally changed felt wrong. It made me doubt which reality was real – made me even more aware that I was the one out of step here, the outsider. I didn’t know whether I felt as if I was looking into this safe world that was wrapped in a bubble I couldn’t break through and enter, or whether I was the one trapped in a bubble, and couldn’t get out. I resented, and yearned for, this bubble world in equal measure.
Dream
Collapsing house
We had a house with one large kitchen-type room, and all the other rooms downstairs. We all had to pack a bag. Then our house collapsed. Only my room survived, and you had to crawl to get in, as the ceiling (kitchen floor) had fallen at an angle. We had to leave.
Years later, I was on a walk, and we stopped for lunch where our house used to be. I went in and it was all so strange. Everything was cobwebby and sad; mine but not mine.
London: the present
Into the wild garden
The Shifting Pools Page 5