Brighton 2007
Over the next couple of weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about Dan and Sergio; my two lost men. I would swing between feelings of guilt (why hadn’t I been able to love Sergio quite as much as he loved me) and gut-wrenching anxiety about Dan. Sometimes, particularly at night, it was almost unbearable, and my time with my son was the only escape from self analysis and doubt. I didn’t feel able to be alone and had convinced my father not to move to my flat until after the baby was born.
I began to go through Dan’s stuff more systematically, looking for anything that might shed more light on where he’d gone and why. I’d also quizzed my Dad and Nicholas after Sunday dinner, about Dan’s recent behaviour. Following an hour’s interrogation (oiled by a very nice bottle of Sancerre, that I allowed myself one glass of) the most promising thing they could come up with, was that Dan had been going through a couple of boxes of Mum’s possessions that were kept in the loft. This was something that in all our years of grieving he’d never done before. Dad assumed that he’d come to a point where he had healed enough to risk the painful nostalgia of seeing her things. I wondered if that was the only reason.
After a particularly bad night where I had barely managed to scrape together two or three hours of sleep, I found myself heading down to the seafront at the first sign of morning, driven by an intense need for space and sea air. I fell into a loose, comfortable pace, breathing in deeply and soaking up the light. It was an irridescent morning, cool-aired with hazy sunshine. I felt the anxious traces of restlessness starting to erode as I walked, and there was a little swell of pleasure as I approached the sea. It was one of those rare and startling occasions when the tide is so low that acres of virgin sand become exposed below the usual bank of Brighton shingle. I loped across the virtually empty road, gently cradling my growing belly (which I did instinctively now). I took off my shoes as soon as I reached the sand. It was an indescribable pleasure to feel it cradle my feet after the hard tarmac and shingle. The tide had retreated to such an extent that the first half of the West Pier was completely exposed, its jagged frame sticking out of the sand like a blackened spine. I set off towards it, fascinated. The morning was amazingly mild, and every now and then a little tributary of warm water trickled over my toes and through the sand towards the remote waves.
As I approached the pier, I caught my breath again. The sea and sky were incandescent pink, and the rising sun was leaking gold on the easterly horizon. Silhouetted against these layers of light was an unprepossessing but neat looking middle-aged man. He had a tall stick in each hand and was using them to etch in the sand. He’d already drawn hundreds of circles, nestling one within the other as far as the eye could see. The perfection of the circles was uncanny considering their scale, and I looked at them wonderingly for a long time. A young woman came over and stood beside me.
‘Amazing isn’t it!’
‘Yes.’
‘Apparently he does it every time the tide is this low.’
‘Like an offering.’ I answered.
We weren’t the only people to be stopped in our tracks. Several people on the upper prom had risked getting to work late and were standing watching the sunrise, and the artist at work. Others had gathered on the shingle, one taking photographs with his mobile.
I carried on with my walk, carefully picking a path through the giant circles so that I didn’t step on them, still wondering at how the man had made the different sizes fit so perfectly within each other without any obvious measuring tool. They could be representing the circular waves emanating from a pebble dropped in a lake, but were they emanating out or in? Were they a contraction or an expansion? I wondered if the artist himself even knew what he was representing, or why.
I walked on, deciding to get a mackerel for tea from the little fishmongers in the Kings Arches. I found myself ransacking my memories of childhood, looking for a clue to anything that would explain Dan needing to look through mum’s old things, to leave suddenly. We mostly had a happy time growing up. Our parents had loved each other (or at least it appeared that way) and they had treated us the majority of the time with tolerance, respect and good-humour. Dan and I had both been bullied for a short time at school, but then we’d both been a bit quirky in our different ways, and children have a notoriously low-threshold for quirkiness.
Maybe whatever was happening was driven by Mum’s death; but despite the shock of losing her so young, and the many horrors of cancer and its treatment, there hadn’t been anything left unresolved between her and Dan. If he wanted to feel closer to her, why didn't he write a memoir? Why walk away from his family? He was clearly in some kind of danger, being held against his will, but how did he get to that? What had happened? Had he been threatened? Forced to leave the country? Had he knowingly gone into a situation where he was at risk?
I started to feel a bit dizzy and sat down on a low wall that marked the boundary between the prom and the shingle. Now only a few weeks off being two-thirds through my pregnancy, I had become an eating machine. Every few hours I would start to feel hollow and fuzzy round the edges. I delved around in my handbag and found a chocolate bar that I had stashed there for moments such as this, and bit off a chunk appreciatively.
Pregnancy had sensitised me to a new level, as if the implanting of the egg had been an evolutionary event; heightening my sense of smell, and giving me something akin to a sixth sense. Perhaps it was down to hormones and maternal protective instinct, but I felt transformed. I analysed every substance I put on or in my body; I worried that the noise of pile-drivers digging up the road could damage my baby’s developing hearing. I skirted around rubbish as if it might emit spores that could enter my body and infect him. And yet despite all this, I didn’t dream of giving up chocolate or the odd glass of wine. Not only did my body crave them (and when you’re pregnant, I was finding out, you learn to listen to your body) but the baby seemed to share my pleasure. He would kick and stretch in an ecstatic way. I imagined the sugar coursing through the placenta, and him looping the loop, gloriously stimulated. So to counteract these mutual moments of Bacchanalian pleasure, I watched my diet and took every vitamin and supplement available.
Later that day, after demolishing the sweet-fleshed Mackerel with a hefty salad and home-made chips, I made myself cosy on Dad’s sofa. Nick had finally found Mum’s boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, and I had steeled myself to go through them. It shocked me how much it affected me to have them near me. Grief is like that. You can visit your loved one’s grave, go through the anniversary of their death, or their birthday, and not shed a tear. And yet, you can pass someone in the street that walks the same way they did, or come across something of theirs unexpectedly, and find yourself heartbroken all over again. In the first year or two after her death I had gone through these boxes regularly. It had now been over a decade since I’d looked at them, and I felt a twinge of guilt.
I allowed myself to cry myself dry and then wiped my eyes, blew my nose and made a cup of sweet tea. I needed my wits about me, this was investigative, not nostalgic.
The first item was a long slim silk scarf, deep red with small rust-coloured roses. We’d kept this because Mum wore it a lot, wound several times neatly around her neck and pinned with a small gold leaf brooch. I pressed my nose into it – the scarfe was still haunted by the aroma of her daytime perfume – a Calvin Klein - vaguely sweet and lemony. I laid it gently to one side. Next was a shoe- box full of old photos of her and her sister as children. Her parents too – her mother looking prim in a tweed pencil skirt and buttoned-up blouse, her father, handsome and nonchalant in shirt and braces; a roll-up sticking jauntily out of the corner of his mouth. Then another box, about the size of a paperback book inlaid with mother-of-pearl. This one defied my self-control as it contained (as I already knew) mine and my brother’s name tags saved the day we were born (impossibly small), each of our first teeth and two (surprisingly still glossy) locks of hair. I had another cry and was comfor
ted by Jip who had trotted in to see what the fuss was about.
I spent a good hour looking through the rest of Mum’s things and had started to feel emotionally and physically exhausted, but still I couldn’t see anything unusual or potentially meaningful. What would Sherlock Holmes do in this situation I found myself thinking and then laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. But it did strike me that I was so used to everything in the box, they all had such intense and personal resonances, that it was very difficult for me to see them objectively. I closed my eyes, then reopened them, and willed myself to imagine I was seeing everything for the first time. I let my hand hover over each item in turn; the scarf, the photos, a tortoiseshell hairbrush, a bundle of letters from my Dad from when he and mum were at College, a fawn lambs-wool beret (very sixties) a lovely old leather-bound copy of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend tied up with a green ribbon…KICK. Suddenly, right under my ribs, KICK. And again, KICK. My heart started to beat very hard. I picked up the book. What is it? Why this?’
At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. I was expecting the close typescript of an old novel, but instead was looking at loose, looping handwriting, which, after a few seconds, I recognised as my mother’s. After a few more seconds I realised that the book was not Our Mutual Friend after all, but in fact a diary that had cleverly been made to resemble the Dickens’ classic. I wondered if it was just a charming joke, or if the deceit had a more practical purpose. I remembered the old saying, the best place to hide things ‘is in plain view.’ It took me a while to decide whether or not to read it. On the one hand it felt like a sacrilege, on the other, in the circumstances, it seemed irresponsible not to. If I was honest with myself though I realised, there was no way I could resist reading it. How could a child turn away from the chance to hear the thoughts and feelings of a parent they had lost forever?
MAY 21st
Finally it’s been arranged. We’re going on holiday as soon as the kids break up from school. We’re tempted to go a week before then so we can get cheaper flights. We’ll see. Fabrizio has been so kind. He knows our finances aren’t great, so his offer is like manna from heaven. What could be better than a whole month in a beautiful unspoilt part of Italy – and at a vineyard to boot? It will be great to get away from this country as well. Things are so grey and depressing here at the moment.
I need this holiday so much. Sometimes I feel like I am disappearing. Most of the time I’m so busy with Maddie and work that I don’t even notice. But in the rare, quiet times I sometimes feel like I have quite lost my edges. I think Duncan senses something is wrong, but it scares him so he doesn’t mention it. So long as I keep saying ‘yes I’m fine’ when he asks me, he’s never going to take it any further. It’s as much my fault as his so there’s no point complaining. What I really, truly hope is that this holiday will help me get myself back a bit. And then I’ll have the energy and courage to do something!
A boy at school came up to me today and asked who the devil was. I explained that some people believe there is a god (personification of ultimate good) and a devil (personification of ultimate evil); that the devil used to be an angel in heaven but had been disgraced and banished to hell etc. etc. I finished – like any good socialist atheistic mother would with ‘I believe however that it is within people that evil sometimes lives, rather than some kind of mythical being.’ He looked at me with some consideration for a few seconds and then said ‘Oh no, the devil definitely exists. I’ve seen him’.
Something slipped from my hands, and then a sense of weightlessness came over me as I felt the familiar sensation of my dark descent into the lighthouse. I couldn’t see my son anywhere. I scanned the room, looked through each of the windows, then heard a giggle above me. He had climbed up one of four stone pillars set into the wall and was perched precariously on the stone capital that topped it. He was holding his cheetah and swinging his feet. The sight of it sent my heart leaping up into my throat.
‘Oh God, you mustn't do that. It’s too high!’
‘I’m all right Mum. With these trainers on I can climb up like spider-man because they kind of stick to the stone.’ I held my breath, imagining him slipping and falling the fifteen or so feet to the ground, his head smashing against the tiled floor. I begged him to come down. In the end, he tucked cheetah up his t-shirt and clambered nimbly down the column, hugging it, the soles of his feet pressed on the stone, allowing himself to slide slowly, a foot or so at a time. As usual I repressed the impulse to hold him as he came closer.
‘It’s cool up there Mum. I can even see the tunnel, where you come down but it’s all dark. He looked up at me and smiled. God he was so beautiful.
‘Would you read me a story Mum’?
‘I'd love to, but I haven’t got any with me.’
‘That’s OK – I’ve found a load, look – over here.’ He reached out, gesturing for me to follow him, as if out of habit I instinctively went to hold his hand, our fingertips brushed. He let out a terrible scream
I woke up with a convulsive jolt, cradling my belly. I was sweating and panting and my bump was tightening with horrible cramps. Jip howled, bringing my father downstairs within seconds.
‘What is it Maddie? Are you OK?’
‘Oh God Dad, I’ve done something terrible, I’ve killed him!’
‘What do you mean sweetheart? Killed who?’
‘My baby!’ I was delirious with terror. ‘He told me not to but I did it! I touched him’
‘You’re not making any sense Maddie. Please!’ He held my hand tightly and stroked my hair. I was bent double with the cramps, but started to think rationally. How could I explain it? He’d think I was ill again, that I had become psychotic. I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t stand him watching me and worrying about me again. And not now, when there was so much to do, so much to hope for. If there still was, if I hadn’t killed him. What if my baby had died inside me? What if I had ruined my one and only chance? The thought was more than I could bear, I started to weep.
‘It was a nightmare. I had a nightmare. But please, we need to go to hospital, I think there might be something wrong.’
I felt like kissing the doctor when he said he could hear the baby’s heartbeat, and everything was OK. He said it happened sometimes and was most likely a bout of Braxton Hicks, simply practice contractions. I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved about anything in my life. I was shocked by the power of my love. I realised at that moment that I would give my life for my child’s without a second's thought, and it frightened me a little. It was as if someone had reached deep inside me, taken my centre of gravity and shifted it a foot or so outside of my body – no longer in my control.
The low light of the house was welcome after the unforgiving white lights of the hospital. I put the kettle on then sank down on one of the dining chairs with a sigh. I heard Dad welcoming Jip and locking the front door, his now slightly shuffling step head towards the kitchen.
‘I’d forgotten how much Mum loved Dickens.’ He appeared at the kitchen door, the diary held loosely in his hand. I had a strong desire to take it off him, quickly. Somewhere deep inside I knew there was a very important reason why he shouldn’t find out what it really was, though I had no idea myself why that should be. I willed myself to keep my voice level.
‘I struggled with his books when I was younger, too long and detailed I suppose,’ I held out my hand, ‘but I love them now. I think I’ll make a start on this one, help me get to sleep.’ To my immense relief he simply smiled and passed the diary to me.
‘You’d better get to bed sweetheart. You and the baby need a proper rest. Try to lie in Tomorrow if you can. I’ll take Jip out for a walk early so the house is quiet.’
I took my cup of tea and got up wearily. ‘Thanks Dad, I do love you.’ I gave him a kiss then went upstairs. I was so tired, maybe I could sleep after all.
I kicked and squirmed, trying to will myself down quicker, but it didn’t work. As the dull glow of the room appeared beneath my
feet I started to call for him. My mouth was bone dry making my voice sound hoarse and desperate. He didn’t reply. I tore around the room as soon as I touched the ground, my heart pounding. At last I saw him, lying on his side on one of the window seat sofas, Cheetah tucked neatly under his arm and his thumb clamped in his mouth. His eyes were closed, I hardly dared to breath.
‘Sweetheart. Sweetheart can you hear me?’ He stirred slightly, his thumb slipping out of his mouth, leaving his lips in a perfect ‘o’. ‘I’m sorry to wake you up but I've got to talk to you.’ Eventually he opened one eye and looked at me sleepily.
‘Hello Mum.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, just tired.’
‘I’m sorry sweetheart. I didn’t mean to touch you. I was so scared I’d hurt you, it was awful.’
‘It’s OK Mum, I forgot it’s not the time to hold your hand yet. I just really wanted to show you the books.’
‘Why don’t you show me now? I’ll read as many as you like.’
He got up slowly and stretched. As he did so his t-shirt lifted to reveal a lovely little belly, smooth and perfect – little muscles standing out from under the light brown skin. I wanted to smother him in kisses; the strength of my desire took my breath away. He reached under the cushion of the window seat and pulled out a handful of books. The sky through the adjacent window was starting to clear, and a shaft of lemony sunlight spilled through and lit his face. He beckoned to me and I leant cautiously over his shoulder.
‘Look, there’s loads of them!’ I studied the books, all favourites from my childhood: ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, ‘Mog the Forgetful Cat’, ‘The Enormous Crocodile. I smiled, remembering many cosy bed times being read to by my parents. Dad would always read me more than one story, but Mum always did the best voices.
The Soul Room Page 11