‘How can you find something so cruel, so pretty?’ I asked him, the first time I went back to his house, and he told me how every summer he was dispatched to see his father on the other side of the continent, and how that man, a poacher, would take him out to catch butterflies with a net.
‘You net it, and then you stun it by pinching the thorax between your thumb and forefinger,’ he said. ‘Then you put it in a jar, with mothballs,’ he said. ‘Or you freeze it. Then you relax it and pin it. We did all of those.’
‘Did you know that they only live for a day?’
‘That’s a myth.’
I had had something similar, once, when I was in my early teens. Given to me by my grandmother as a birthday present, were four butterflies in a gilt frame. In a fit of adolescent self-righteousness regarding animal cruelty, I had thrown them away. Though she died long before I reached my twenties, I had felt guilty about it ever since.
When I told him I couldn’t see him anymore, and that it wasn’t because of the kid, he had simply nodded. We both knew we’d have sex before I left – there was so little left to say – and when he walked over and kissed me I felt only familiarity, never regret. In many ways he had been like the Prozac of relationships: being with him dulled many of the negative emotions that I often felt without ever offering that exquisite serotonin high that Josh had taught me to need. When he was on top of me, or me him, I felt outside myself.
Our sex had always been fun, experimental and unhampered by self-consciousness, but still, I was surprised when he put his hands around my neck as we lay naked on top of his sheets for that final time. The first thought that crossed my mind as he did it was that it must have been something that he had seen in porn. It was at that time that we young women were starting to notice a shift in men and their demands, a desire to degrade that had not been there before. Certainly it didn’t feel as though he was trying to hurt me; when I looked up into his face his eyes implied that he was elsewhere, as though his hands on my throat were absent-minded, almost. His breaths were deep and heavy as he moved inside me, while, as my panic increased, mine became rapid and shallow. I could barely breathe, and when I tried to cry out all I could discern was a gargling noise at the back of my throat. At the same time, the edges of my vision became crowded with an encroaching blackness, the movement of which reminded me of iron filings drawn towards the magnet in a child’s toy. I was losing consciousness. Then – I was elsewhere.
There is no other way that I can describe it: I was transported. I was standing in the darkness of the hall of the house in Longhope Crescent, the warm air of the mid-morning motionless in the swelter, and I was looking for someone.
It was not déjà vu. I did not feel that I had already experienced the situation I was in, but that it was happening to me for the first and only time. I was there, it was now.
I was standing in the hall, calling out in the small anxious voice of a child when I looked up towards the ceiling and the only real source of natural light. The first thing I saw were the pale pink puckered soles of Harmony’s feet. How odd, I thought (for we so rarely see the undersides of people’s feet); I did not understand what they were doing there, far above me, swaying, casting a long shadow across the floor. I called her name but the arid air stayed silent, so I painstakingly mounted the stairs, two feet on each tread, continuing up until I was almost level with her face, which was blank and dipped off at a strange angle, like the head of an empty hand puppet. It was only then that it dawned on me she was hanging by a rope from the chandelier high above us.
I was screaming as I ran back down the stairs, stumbling, to find Gabs at the bottom, his eyes wide and glassy. He reached out for my hand, and together we sat on the cold cool tiles and wept, as Harmony’s dead body swung back and forth above our heads and the chandelier creaked and jingled.
And that is how they found us, three hours later, when the rest of the adults came back to the house.
Summer 1991
Coral wasn’t best pleased, when they came back. ‘We’d be within our rights to send them packing,’ she said, but she knew I’d never turn them away. When she phoned me crying from the service station, I wanted more than anything to comfort her. ‘Of course you must come,’ I said. ‘We’ll look after you.’
I couldn’t believe how much the bairn has grown – like a little person now, full of questions, babbling away to Gabriel as they play pirates and mermaids in the paddling pools. I lie on a blanket on the grass, ignoring my book in favour of watching them. I spend every day counting my lucky stars that she is here with me, again.
I may have lost my baby, the pain of that will never go. But at least I have her, will watch her grow from this sweet little sprite into a spirited, clever young woman – how could she not, with us all for parents? She’ll be released into the world with all the boldness of one who has been loved unconditionally, and it will answer sweetly back with opportunities and adventure. I want to freeze her in time here, now, but I also cannot wait to see what she does, who she will become.
Look at me, talking like a grandmother, when I’m barely halfway through my twenties. But that’s what caring does to you, I think. It ages you. I don’t mean physically, though of course the labour of it is tiring: the crying in the night and the arse wiping and the feeding and the comforting. The nuts and bolts of loving someone helpless. That’s all knackering. But I’m talking about a less visible metamorphosis, a maturity that comes from being schooled in a love that is verging on painful. It’s like when you bump into one of the girls in your class who, a year ago was doing pivots in a gymslip, laughing at a blow-job joke, and now is wrestling with a pushchair, sniffling kid in tow. It’s not the dark circles and the worn-down demeanour that strike you, it’s something else. She has learned the brutal lesson of loving that much: you are now forever vulnerable. There is no longer ‘I’ – the self-centeredness of childhood has crumbled, and there’s a knowing in her manner now. As though she’s had an extra dimension added. I used to watch these women – my mam, my aunties, my friends – in awe. The scars they carry. Now I think I’m one of them.
Stella stays mostly in her room. The split has been tough for her. She tried so hard to make it work. But I know that after several weeks she’ll be back to her old self. It’s home to her. And once she’s back to normal, we’ll be a family again. Harmony will be starting school in September. Perhaps I’ll even get a job, a proper one. I’d quite like to work in a library. I can see myself doing that. All those books.
All these grand plans. Maybe I’m running away with myself. But I can’t help feeling that things will be better without Bryn here. He means well, but he’s not good at taking care of people. Me, it’s what I’m best at. How lonely she was in that house, staring out at miles of sky and sea, with barely anyone to talk to. I’ll make sure she’s never that sad again. That’s what it’s for, family. We pick each other up, dress each other’s wounds. That is what it means.
Note
Suicide note on one side lined exercise book paper, faded.Blue ink. Author unknown.
Stella, Bryn
I’m sorry. All I can say is that I hope the children do not see me afterwards, or that if they do that they soon forget. It was my only chance while you were all out, and I was worried that if I did it with pills it wouldn’t be enough and I would go on living which is something I just cannot do anymore.
I was so happy when you both came home, Stella. I even thought we could make it work; you, me and the little one. I know you haven’t been feeling well. I could have taken care of you both.
This is the only home I’ve known, and I want to say thank you for opening it up to me, for sharing with me what is yours, for as long as you could. I know it wasn’t easy. And for giving her my name. It has meant everything to me.
Bryn, when you came back to get your girls last night I knew I couldn’t face them being taken from me again. I lost two babies. I know our child would have been beautiful. I know that if you had your way t
hings would have been different.
Tell her I love her, and that she is the most precious thing alive. I know she will grow to be brave and clever and good, like her parents. And know yourselves that I forgive you for hurting me. I wanted a family but I looked in the wrong place. It’s my fault.
Don’t let her forget me, even if you do.
Blackberry Wine
Empty glass bottle (circa 1970s) with handwritten label reading ‘Stella and Harmony’s Blackberry Wine’ in black biro.
That silence, before the line connects. You’re not sure if the words you speak are reaching anyone or just dissipating, unheard through the crackly ether. And so you call out, hello, hello, hello, as the person at the other end does the same in that slightly comical way, until finally the sounds from your mouth and the vibrating of your eardrums converge, and vice versa. Breakthrough.
All I said, when she answered, was one word: ‘Mama’. I hadn’t called her that for years; she was always Stella, even when I was really little, because that is how she asked me to refer to her (one of those parents). When friends at school said, ‘my mum’ or ‘my mummy’ I felt envious of the loving closeness it implied, like being tucked in. To say ‘my mother’ or ‘Stella’ conveyed not only an obvious distance, but a precociousness that mystified children and scorned adults.
‘Mama,’ I said, and then took one of those awful rasping breaths that make you sound as though you have been drowning.
The fear in her voice was almost a balm. ‘Harmony, my darling. Tell me what’s happened.’
Without going into detail about how the flashback came about, I told her in a hysterical staccato that I remembered everything.
‘I suppose I always knew this would happen eventually,’ said my mother. ‘Please, breathe for a moment. Take a deep breath. There. Another one. I had better come and explain.’
‘I’m at Longhope. Have been for a couple of months. I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might set you off.’
‘You must hate me. You’d be right to hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you. I mean, the whole thing is completely messed up, but I don’t hate you. I don’t understand. Coral’s been filling me in a bit . . . she still lives here, downstairs, though she’s a complete mess.’
Stella swore, was quiet for a moment, then said, in a businesslike tone that was barely familiar, that she would be there soon. If there was a hint of defensiveness in her voice then I didn’t notice it; for my part, I felt too grief-stricken to be angry that she had lied to me. All I felt was that I needed her, in a way that I hadn’t since I was a child.
I had left the academic’s house in a state of extreme distress, deaf to his pleas that I stay with him a while until I became calm again (for his part, having a girl start screaming in terror while you are in bed together would leave anyone shaken, his poorly-signposted experiments in sexual strangulation notwithstanding).
‘You could at least have fucking warned me,’ I shouted, as I bent over the bed hyperventilating.
I didn’t start crying until I was several hundred feet clear of his flat, but once I did it was in that ugly, insuppressible way that never seems to afflict female characters in Hollywood movies: huge, guttural honks of sheer despair that pay no heed to decorum or attractiveness. I sobbed like this standing up on a busy, bendy 29 bus all the way home, and, it being London and not some other city, no one cared to bother me or to enquire after my well-being. I have female friends who have cried all over town, in tube trains and restaurants and under the bright lights of the supermarket, and they say to me in bitter tones that not once, not once did anyone approach them to offer sympathy or assistance. One friend sat sobbing on the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus for an entire Saturday afternoon, and no one even thought to stare. The indifference of Londoners was infamous, but that afternoon I felt meekly thankful for it.
The word ‘trauma’, in Japanese, takes the form of two characters, one meaning ‘outside’ and one meaning ‘injury’. To be traumatised is to sport a visible wound, a pain that can be seen and perceived by others. But this was not the case for me. The trauma that I had suffered when, aged five, I had found myself shut in a house with the hanging corpse of a young woman was apparent, in hindsight, in a million barely perceptible ways. By coming back to the house I had forced a reckoning, had worried at the scab in the same way as I had with the childhood flea bites on my legs, the scars now bleached white against the tan of my shins.
Stella got the first train up from Cornwall, and turned up on the doorstep at around 9pm that evening with her arms spread outwards in preparation for our emotional embrace. I sidestepped this and beckoned her inside, where she stood in the hall for a moment with her face tilted upwards, inhaling the house and all its histories. ‘The old place still smells the same,’ she said. ‘Like a church.’
I tried to smile.
‘Christ. I never thought I’d be back here. So which one’s Coral’s?’
I gestured towards the door. ‘We can go and say hello if you like, I’m sure you both have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Perhaps not quite yet.’
We went up to the kitchen, where I immediately poured us two large gins, in that way you do when there’s a crisis, like someone dying, and your grief grants you permission, tells you, ‘You may smoke all twenty of those cigarettes.’
I had been crying for hours, but now I sat quietly at the table, my sorrow having given way to something more dense and simmering. I was struggling with the guilty anger I felt towards her, a legacy borne from years of tiptoeing around her vulnerability as though I was its captive. That’s what happens when you’re a child but there’s an adult competing with you for the role, pre-empting all your lines so that, instead of being the precious thing they worry about, your fear for them becomes a familiar hum, as prosaic and unnoticed as the drone of the fridge. It was perverse, after everything that had happened, but my main concern was for her well-being.
‘Are you sure you feel strong enough to talk about this?’ I said, but to my surprise instead of picking up this familiar, extenuating thread, she put down her glass and looked me in the face.
‘I want you to know, Harmony, that the consensus at the time was that if you forgot completely about what had happened, then so much the better.’ She reached a hand across the table, and to my surprise her eyes were wet. ‘Though we weren’t sure how much you had understood about what you saw, you wouldn’t sleep alone for months afterwards, and you had real separation anxiety. It was as though suddenly the world was set with traps that would take me away from you as well. You would follow me around the house – you and I moved to that place in Bristol, do you remember? – from room to room, because you were frightened, and you kept asking where she was, and why she had looked so poorly, and why we had come away. But then one day you stopped asking, and we thought it best to not remind you.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Bryn.’
Towards the end of the summer, my father had followed us back to London, turning up on the doorstep in the middle of the night, begging for us to try again.
‘It was Harmony who answered the door,’ said Stella. ‘And I think she knew we would patch things up. In fact, the day . . . it . . . happened, we had gone out for crisis talks. He said he would do anything; give me the monogamy I wanted, be a better father, live like a normal family. Grow vegetables to make perfect salads. And I probably would have gone, had it not been for her death.’
‘So you left him for good?’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ Stella downed the dregs of her glass. ‘After Harmony died, I just couldn’t cope any more. I’d been feeling down for months, but this was different. I was helpless. I thought about ending things myself. But I had you to think about.’
Stella, poured herself another gin. And so we sat in the fading light, and she told me all the things I had never asked but always subtly known: how young she had been when she had met my father at the protest, and the fasci
nating lure of his charisma and intelligence to an unschooled teenager from an all-girls grammar who had barely left the manicured enclosures of the London suburbs. ‘I romanticised him, of course, as only a girl can. And his desire for me felt like a stamp of approval, like getting the little row of As on my school report.’
She became, in some ways, his follower, or at least that is how her parents would have put it. They saw his radical politics and his Eastern-influenced philosophies, his strange girlish clothes, and essentially came to the conclusion that their young daughter had joined a cult. Where others were revelling in Thatcherism, the delights of marketing and money, Longhope remained steeped in the gauzy residue of the hippie era, a house in which barely anyone worked, and when they did the cash was pooled. They had come once or twice to try and get her back, but Stella was resolute. She had found her place.
‘I never imagined myself in an open relationship, and we never really described it in those terms,’ she said. ‘It was just a natural consequence of our stance on ownership. Why should another human being belong to you? Who are you to limit their bodily pleasures? That’s what your dad said anyway, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to contradict him, until I got involved with the women’s movement, that is. And then I started putting my foot down.’
She had joined a women’s group, which I already knew, though I didn’t know the role it was to play in their relationship. By the time Harmony moved into the house, she had started to assert herself about Bryn’s other women. His extracurricular activities had dwindled to one or two a year, and Stella had begun to dream of having a child. Then Harmony arrived.
‘Coral said you got on well with her, that you didn’t mind her sleeping with Dad.’
‘I didn’t really, at first. It was quite nice to have a break. He could drone on for hours, Bryn, as you well know. Having her there allowed me to focus on myself for a bit. And she was a lovely girl, a great friend, so caring and generous, which is why I felt so guilty about my jealousy of her. She never meant anyone any harm, and was so fragile. I was closer in age to her than I was to Bryn, and I felt a need to protect her. In this I failed, obviously. Sometimes I wonder if she might have been as much in love with me; we were very close, always cooking and drinking together. Would wear each other’s clothes and sometimes all shared a bed. She was very attractive in a striking sort of way, you know, that beauty that you want to bask in, regardless of whether you like men or women.’
The Tyranny of Lost Things Page 20