Over

by Margaret Forster

  *

  We have two new children in the class. It’s unusual to admit new pupils at this stage of the term, and not a good idea from their, or my, or the class’s point of view, but I gather there are extenuating circumstances. They are twins. Girls. Shalima and Sima. They come from Iraq but speak a fair amount of English, which is a relief. They are small for their age, and slight, with enormous dark eyes dominating their thin faces. I don’t think they are identical – already I can spot clear differences – but they are very alike. They were brought into my classroom by a woman I recognised as a foster mother, accompanied by a social worker I know well. They didn’t seem frightened exactly, just blank and stiff, their faces void of all expression and their little bodies held rigid. They were holding hands. I held out a hand to each of them, watching their reaction closely. When anyone did that to my twins, they used to grasp the offered hands with their spare hands forming a circle. They never dropped their own tightly gripped hands to allow anyone to come between them. But Shalima and Sima did let go of each other. They did so, it seemed to me, as an act of obedience. I took hold of their freed hands, squeezing each one very gently, and led them into the classroom.

  All day they stayed close to me. They wouldn’t hold Jeremy’s hand and were clearly alarmed by his presence, though he is the least alarming of men. They wouldn’t let any of the children touch them either, shrinking away at any approach. It was lucky that I was wearing a skirt today – it gave them something to cling on to when I needed my hands free. I liked the feel of them, the pull on my skirt. Tomorrow I will have to encourage them to move around the classroom and playground without me. They will still have each other, of course, the biggest comfort of all. Whatever has happened to them, which I will doubtless soon be told, they are together.

  *

  There was a case, last year, maybe the year before, when a man was found on a beach, just standing there, apparently lost. He didn’t speak, and the police took him to hospital where it was discovered that all the labels had been cut out of his clothes. He was looked after, and came to be known as the Piano Man, because he made gestures of playing a piano and when he was taken to one he was said to have played beautifully. Weeks went by, and still he had not spoken a word. It was assumed he’d lost his memory. Great efforts were made to establish his identity with his photograph – he was quite handsome – widely circulated. Eventually, he spoke. It turned out that he was German. The whole thing had been a deliberate hoax, though why it was carried out was never revealed. No one could understand what the point had been.

  I dreamed of the Piano Man last night, only he was not a man, he was Miranda, and she played a flute, not a piano. This dream was like one of the fantasies which I had constructed to keep me going: I imagined Miranda had miraculously been washed ashore somewhere and had lost her memory. I could see her quite clearly, staggering out of the water, and I could see, though less clearly, another figure, another woman rushing towards her and wrapping her in a coat and leading her to a cottage at the end of the beach. This woman lived on her own and was a recluse. Miranda couldn’t speak, she’d lost her voice, as well as her memory, from the shock, but the recluse hardly noticed because she rarely spoke herself. The two of them got on well. Miranda recovered her strength and began helping her guardian angel gather driftwood and do other simple tasks. In my imagination she looked so well and happy. Sometimes I made her wave at me, and I made her mouth the word ‘soon’. I nodded. I made it clear that I was content to wait. I wouldn’t hurry her. I knew that one day she would speak and regain her memory and she would leave her kind rescuer and walk to a telephone and call me. I loved that fantasy, re-enacting it again and again, but I never told Don about it.

  Then last night I had this dream, which began like my fantasy. I was enjoying it until I realised the figure approaching Miranda was not a woman but a man. I cried out, to warn her, but she was smiling and her arms were open wide as he went towards her. My anxiety was intense – would he be kind, or was he dangerous? He reached her, and hugged her, and they swayed together on the sand, and suddenly I knew that of course it was Don. He’d found her. I woke up drenched in perspiration. The dream had spoiled my fantasy, but why? I ought to have been happy, comforted by this new vision, but I wasn’t. I had a feeling of alarm: Don had found her, Don would keep her. She wouldn’t find a telephone and ring me.

  It was a hope we had both clung to for ages – that Miranda was not drowned, that she’d survived and been swept ashore somewhere miles and miles away from the marina and was wandering on a beach until found by some fisherman, who would have taken her home and would be ringing the police any minute. At first, during the first hours after the boat was found smashed, and then the lifejacket was washed ashore, such a scenario was a possibility. Miranda was a strong swimmer. She could have clung to a piece of wreckage and survived. But then, after helicopters had taken over from lifeboats and scoured the entire area, it was no longer sensible to think like this. But we were not sensible, we were not thinking logically, and so we allowed ourselves to go on imagining she was still alive. When no body was washed ashore, we didn’t acknowledge that this meant she had drowned and been washed far out to sea instead of to the shore, but we saw it instead as evidence that she must be alive. Other possibilities didn’t enter our heads. Not then. Later, when it was all over, but not then.

  There was a report of a girl being eaten by a crocodile, somewhere in Africa. The horror of it almost made me scream – the teeth, the hideous teeth, sinking into her flesh … How could her parents bear it, knowing the pain their daughter experienced, the terror she died in. And then I thought of what was in the sea where Miranda disappeared. No crocodiles, certainly, no killer sharks, but what about whales? Were there whales around? Or some man-eating fish I knew nothing about? Don said there were no fish like that in those cold northern waters. He said that was one thing I needn’t torture myself with. She drowned, instantly, he said. But I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe this. He didn’t know if she had been injured and died in great pain, her limbs perhaps broken, her head perhaps cut open and bleeding – he didn’t know. And the drowning might not have been instant. I thought about it: drowning cannot be instant. Surely it must be long-drawn-out? She would fight it, she would struggle to swim through the huge waves, it wouldn’t be instant at all.

  It is the hardest thing, to tell myself that, since she is dead, it is now irrelevant what the process of her dying was like. How does it help to try to imagine it? It doesn’t. It is pure masochism to think about it. But it happens, the endless re-rolling of the story. The screen comes up, Miranda sets sail – she looks so athletic and healthy, adjusting the sails, tanned and fit, lithe and supple – and then the storm comes and my eyes widen at the height of the waves and I see the little boat lurch to one side and I hear the roar as the sea crashes down upon it, and then Miranda is swept away and … the screen is blank. I can’t leave it blank. I insist it must continue with the story. I fill it with alternative images: Miranda with her eyes shut, slowly sinking, dead before she sank, unconscious, knocked out by the blow from the mast splitting and catching her on the head. But then I see her clutching a rope, desperately trying to haul herself onto the deck, her eyes wild, her mouth open in a scream no one can hear, and …

  Nobody knows. Nobody will ever know. It isn’t like the girl and the crocodile. So is it better, I wonder? Not to know? To be spared the detail? It’s something I’ve heard people say, when describing a death from a disease kept concealed by the sufferer – ‘Thank God I knew nothing about it.’ Ignorance is a comfort, then. But I’ve never found it comforting. Not knowing added to my distress for a very long time. Don said he didn’t allow himself to imagine exactly what happened – he just closed his mind to that. I couldn’t do that. Only by imagining my Piano Man scenario could I stop tormenting myself. I learned to switch on that image – Miranda on the beach, the woman finding her – to eliminate the others.

  *


  ‘You’re the bride,’ Paige was saying to Lola today in the playground. I lurked, and listened, trying to catch their words above all the general shrieking and shouting. ‘Do I have a white dress and a veil and flowers in my hair?’ Lola asked. ‘No,’ said Paige, ‘you’re a corpse, your dress is black and your veil grey and you have no face.’ ‘What’s a corpse?’ asked Lola. ‘A dead body,’ said Paige. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you what happens and then we do it, yeah? Right. Victor is going to marry this beautiful girl but he’s worried he won’t put the ring on properly, yeah, and he goes into the wood and he practises putting it on the branch of a tree, but it isn’t a tree, it’s a hand, and it comes alive and drags him down to the underworld, and you run after him …’ The rest was lost because a fight broke out between a couple of boys and I had to intervene. But once back in my classroom, I asked Paige about this game. It turned out she’d been recounting the plot of this year’s Best Animated Feature Film, The Corpse Bride, Certificate PG. Her dad took her to see it on Saturday. He, her dad, laughed a lot but Paige thought it quite scary – so scary she hasn’t stopped trying to act out the story ever since. An example of an imagination successfully stimulated? Over-stimulated? But her dad laughed, after all. An animated-cartoon-death can surely be safely laughed at. Maybe I should watch it. Laugh at death.

  *

  Walking to Judith’s takes me nearly an hour, but I like to walk, not just because the route is interesting and pleasant but because it makes me feel better, more up to facing Judith. Going from my block of flats to her house means crossing two main roads, going through the park, and then negotiating a complicated pattern of minor, quite countrified, roads, before I arrive. What fascinates me is how I go from our street, full of small shops, most of them Greek- or Italian-owned, and cafés, usually crowded with people, and then to the thundering main road until I come to the park where all this frantic activity drops away. The expanse of green, and the background of trees, is miraculous.

  After that, the other side of the park has a suburban feel to it. The roads – crescents and groves – are achingly quiet. Most of the houses are detached and have front as well as back gardens. I can hear my footsteps on the pavement, click-clack in the strange silence. I rarely meet anyone. The occasional person, usually a woman, rushes out of a front door but always straight to a car. There never seems to be a postman or a delivery van, and certainly no vagrants. And yet, although I appreciate the gardens, and enjoy the hushed peace, I’m never entirely at ease on this stretch. It feels to me as though there is something hidden behind this composed face, a hint of menace of a different kind from the danger that might lurk in the park or in my own crowded street. I keep thinking there might be an explosion. But what could explode? And why on earth would I think like this?

  As you come out of this suburban labyrinth there is a long incline up to Judith’s house. It isn’t a steep hill such as the one we used to live on, but it is a long, slow climb. There are houses on one side only. Then, just before I reach Judith’s house, there is a gate and through it a perfectly framed view of the canal, and across it a church and a factory, and behind and around these buildings are more houses. I feel I’ve travelled through several cities, not just a section of one. Driving there, I never feel that. Driving, it is all of a piece, just a muddle. Like life.

  *

  At least Judith was not distraught today. Molly’s discovery that Don has been to Durham to visit Alex, and that Alex had said he seemed well, had calmed her. She managed to smile as she opened the door and there were no tears trembling in her eyes. We ate in the garden, in the shade, under the chestnut tree. She had a little table set there and two white wrought-iron chairs, comfortably padded with soft, bright pink cushions.

  It was her birthday. Not a special one, but we agreed that at our age every birthday starts to become special. She isn’t having a party this evening but her sons and Finn are taking her out for dinner. I was invited too, but declined, inventing another engagement. It didn’t matter, somehow, that Judith would not believe I was busy – she was probably glad of the lie. It meant she would have the boys to herself. They are all very fond of her. I gave her some earrings and she put them on and seemed pleased. We ate the salad she had prepared and had a glass of chilled white wine and chatted, mostly about Molly. And now we come to it.

  Molly, said Judith, had become ‘odd’. Didn’t I think so? ‘She’s changed,’ Judith said. I said that of course she had, how could she not have done, coming back from Africa and what she had been doing there. No, said Judith, it is more than that, she isn’t herself any more, she’s lost something. It is always the way with Judith – she can’t explain what she means, yet she has this instinctive knowledge which is usually right. I’ve spent hours in the past trying to drag out of her what she has sensed, and often I never succeed. Her conviction that something is odd or strange or weird or just plain wrong hangs in the air until something happens to make her say ‘Remember, I knew, I had this feeling.’ It can be maddening.

  I tried today to be patient. I pressed Judith gently on what she might mean. She didn’t know, but she was disturbed. She asked if Molly and I had had a ‘heart to heart’. I lied and said of course we had, we had had long talks about what she was doing, and she’d described to me what Zambia was like and – ‘No,’ said Judith, ‘I don’t mean all that. I mean, how she’s managing without her twin, how she’s coping.’ I know I frowned and sounded cross when I said we didn’t need to talk about that, we’d done it, ages ago, afterwards. Judith said that didn’t count. She said everything had changed since then. Molly would be feeling different. ‘Think of yourself, Lou,’ she urged. ‘You’ve changed in how you feel. You’ve changed for the better, but has Molly? Don hasn’t. I think that girl’s in trouble, as well as her father. She doesn’t feel right to me. She was too brave, too stoical, straight afterwards. It wasn’t natural. Then she ran away. Have you thought about that? About what she left and what she’s come back to?’

  It was Judith’s birthday. Only that fact stopped me becoming angry with her. She talked such nonsense, and all with that special ‘caring’ look on her face. But of course, as ever, her words carry a sting. I can feel it, pricking me. It hurts. Has Molly become ‘odd’? I tried to think about what Judith might mean. It was true that there was a new abruptness about Molly, which I don’t remember being present before. She breaks off conversations suddenly with a rather sharp ‘whatever’ and a dismissive gesture of her hand. She doesn’t seem to want to discuss anything. There’s a distance between us, which she is placing there, that didn’t exist before. Or am I imagining it? Is Judith imagining it? And even if it is true, can it all be explained by a natural growing away due to her new life in Africa, even if Judith thinks not?

  But she’s right about Molly having been too brave, too stoical afterwards. She was so quiet, so calm, and yet not catatonic, as Finn was, briefly. She kept herself together admirably. I never saw her distraught. We depended on her, during those first dreadful weeks. She was the sensible one. Don never took into account what it might be like to lose a twin, the significance of it. I think he may even have thought that he had been closer to Miranda than anyone was. Wrong. He didn’t recognise Molly’s particular brand of suffering. When she insisted on going to Africa, he took it as a sign that she had severed all connection with her dead twin – as if she ever could.

  I must watch Molly, look for signs of this ‘oddness’ Judith senses. Is she in trouble? And if she is, what on earth can I do about it?

  8

  FINN HAS A girlfriend. I can’t quite believe it. It makes me laugh. Well, that’s one good thing.

  Even more surprising, Finn brought her to meet me. It seemed formal and quaint, the way he asked if he could drop in ‘with my girl’. He wasn’t embarrassed about this either, but quite nonchalant and pleased with himself. It can’t, I suppose, be his first girlfriend, but with Molly abroad and Miranda not here – dead, I should write dead and not be afraid of the word. With
Molly abroad, and Miranda dead, I’ve had no one to tell me. They’d have teased him rotten, passing on names of whoever he had been with. I’d have known all about it, and would have been protecting my little boy from their mockery.

  So, he brought her here today, Sunday, not for anything as old-fashioned as tea, though I did offer it. He said they were just passing. Her name is Shivaun, but she isn’t Irish and doesn’t spell it the Irish way. It gave us something easy to talk about. I said I liked the sound of her name. She said she didn’t like the way it got shortened to Shivi, which made her think of ‘shiver’. I said I had the same trouble, with Louise shortened to Lou. She seems shy, blushes easily. And she’s small and quite plump. I hadn’t thought Finn would be attracted to a shy, small, plump girl – how unkind that sounds, how ‘lookist’ as the twins would say. I ought to have learned by now. I did the same with Alex. I said at the time that I hadn’t thought Miranda would be attracted by ‘that type’, and got a terrific telling-off from Molly (even though she was surprised herself that Miranda found Alex attractive). I think Molly had been expecting someone like Alex to come along, though. She herself never seemed interested in boys, or if she was she hid it well. The phone rang often for Miranda from about the age of fourteen – boys asking her out, boys wanting just to chat to her. But until Alex she had never seemed interested in any of them, though she went to plenty of parties, and to the cinema, and pop concerts, with boys, though always in a gang, with other girls. Molly was never one of them. Slowly, Miranda was separating herself, and Molly knew it, but until Alex I don’t think she felt any real sense of loss. Miranda wasn’t being particularly influenced by any of the boys she socialised with – it was still Molly’s opinion that mattered to her, still Molly to whom she turned for advice and support. It gave her such confidence to have Molly always in the background, someone utterly dependable to return to, someone who always put her first. And then along came Alex, and suddenly it was what he thought and wanted that mattered.