The Tyranny of Lost Things

by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

  They had only kissed once, Stella said. One autumn they had made blackberry wine from the brambles in the garden, and the following August it was ready to drink. ‘I’m not sure where your father was,’ said Stella. ‘We were in the house alone.’ They had sunk several bottles while listening to soul records, she said. ‘Harmony used to roll these incredibly thin, elegant little joints, but they were very potent.’

  They were both dreamily high and very drunk when they stood up from where they had been sitting on the rug to dance, and that was when it had happened. Just one small, soft kiss that was open to interpretation: a declaration of intent, or nothing at all.

  ‘There were never any threesomes or anything like that,’ she said, and I believed her, though it didn’t really matter to me either way.

  ‘Why does Coral blame you for Harmony’s death?’

  Stella exhaled slowly. ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘Not in so many words. She’s very cagey, she wouldn’t tell me everything. She liked Harmony, didn’t she? I could tell she was fond of her. She told me about the miscarriage.’

  ‘I handled that badly.’

  ‘How could you do that to someone?’

  Stella gave a shamefaced shrug.

  ‘And I was happy for her. I was. Though I did worry how it would all pan out for our unconventional little family. To be honest, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t think I gave it much thought. Perhaps on some level I thought I was saving her. From us, from her attachment to you. You could see it was hurting her. She had her whole life ahead of her. There was so much she could have done. I imagine Coral feels like we sucked a young, relatively naïve girl into our fucked-up relationship, and there was an element of that, yes.’

  ‘She seems fairly fucked up herself.’ I was in the process of explaining about the screams when, as if it had been engineered from above, Coral’s bizarre, feline wailing forced itself through the open window.

  ‘What on earth?’

  ‘It’s her,’ I said, and explained how Josh had told me what was happening to Coral.

  ‘And you’ve just sat by and listened? None of you has thought to knock on the door, or call the police?’

  I shrugged. Coral had never seemed exactly balanced, but neither had I been overly concerned. Coral had never given the impression that she needed my help and made it quite apparent that, had she been in trouble, the last person she would have asked for assistance was the daughter of a woman she hated who lived in the upstairs flat. Or perhaps I am being disingenuous, a selfish child caught up so much in finding the truth of her own story that she failed to take notice of someone else’s.

  ‘She seemed ok to me,’ I said. Stella was already heading out of the door.

  Sosmix

  Empty Sosmix (vegetarian sausage mix, 350 g) box from the early-1990s. Cardboard (cream & purple). Reads: ‘Vegan & Vegetarian – Cruelty Free & Meat Free, Free From:dairy, egg, lactose, GMO.

  Easy to use to make: Veggie sausages, burgers, pies, kievs, sausage rolls, breakfasts and more, just add water and herbs/spices. Ingredients: Vegetable Oil, Rusk [Wheatflour, Salt, Raising Agent (E503)], Textured Soya Protein [Soya Flour, Zinc Oxide, Niacinamide, Ferrous Sulphate, Copper Gluconate, Vitamin A, Calcium Pantothenate, Thiamine Mononitrate (B-1), Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (B-6), Riboflavin (B-2), Cyanocobalamin (B-12)], Salt, Stabiliser (Methyl Cellulose), Rice Flour, Soya Flour, Modified Potato Starch, Flavourings (contain Wheat), Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, Colour (Beetroot Powder), Wheat Flour, Yeast Extract, Spices.

  Nutritional Information per 100 g: Energy 1949 kJ / 467 kcal, Protein 18.5 g, Carbohydrate 33 g, Fat 29 g.’

  ‘The funeral was awful,’ Stella said, as we all sat on Coral’s floor, twilight noises floating through the open doors. ‘It was the worst day of my life. And what a setting. The grey Hartlepool docks, the dense lead clouds, her parents standing there, looking so old, stumbling as though every slight move pained them in an indescribable way. Mark’s cool fury. I will never forget it.’

  ‘They blamed you.’

  ‘They blamed all of us,’ said Coral. ‘But I blamed you, for leaving that poor girl at her most vulnerable, after she had lost her baby – all of yours’ baby, really – and then toying with her like she was just some . . . thing to be picked up when you felt like it and then chucked out on the dump. All your toing and froing. You went and gave her hope. She loved you all to death.’ She said this simply, with no anger left in her tone. The dusk was drawing in, and the raised voices had long lulled, the tears dried in sticky streaks across the older women’s faces. Now they sat, side by side on moth-eaten velvet cushions on the floor, necking from a dusty bottle of brandy. Not friends, exactly, but two people unpicking their shared history after decades of discrepancy, and attempting to re-stitch it in a way that forged some sort of peace.

  When Stella had gone downstairs, she had tried banging loudly on Coral’s door, and even threw herself against it as I watched with nervous detachment. I had spent the past few months skirting the periphery of Coral’s life in the way a child dips the very tips of her toes in the lapping edges of a forbidden pond, taking from her the information I needed while staying enough outside her destructive orbit that I didn’t get sucked in. I never asked about her circumstances, or the pain behind her cries. In some ways I considered her squalid existence a natural consequence of the person she was: a poor, washed-up alcoholic who frequented dodgy pubs and even worse men, and who had never worked a day in her life. I created a picture of Coral’s life in the same way Josh had, because of the comfort offered by a known, familiar narrative. We were both wrong.

  I doubted Coral even heard Stella’s attempts to break her door down, so loud was the demented howling that came from within. ‘There’s a side gate,’ I said. ‘She never closes her French doors.’ We went around the back, negotiating the brambles until we made our way to her cracked patio, the glare from the sunlight so vivid that we could perceive only darkness within.

  ‘Where is he?’ I had an old brick in one hand, and was ready to brain him if necessary. I expected Stella to echo my demand, but instead she just stood there and started to laugh. Coral was alone in the middle of the room, wearing a pair of paisley silk harem pants and a greying bra that revealed a sagging belly, her fingertips outstretched at her sides and her pallid face tilted upwards. She was still screaming. No one else was there.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still engaging with that bullshit,’ said Stella.

  Coral said nothing. She didn’t even look surprised to see my mother, she just stared.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I placed the brick gingerly on the floor and stepped towards them. Coral inhaled. My mother turned to me.

  ‘Primal therapy. She used to do it years ago. I can’t believe I forgot.’ Stella was still laughing. ‘Thinks having a good old scream lets all the childhood trauma out. Utterly ridiculous of course, and long discredited.’

  I was open-mouthed, ‘I thought you were . . . ’ I began to laugh too.

  ‘I see you’re still the same stuck-up bitch you always were,’ said Coral. Then, ‘You have two minutes to get the hell out of here before I do you damage.’

  Stella stayed where she was, still in the dimness of the near-empty room as I waited for something to happen near the relative safety of the French windows. It was in the flatness of that moment that I saw the room as it had once been: our kitchen, with its sacks of lentils on the floor and the cats sleeping on an old batik cushion beneath the large wooden table as I lay by their side stroking their fur. Instead of curtains, an orange Indian bedspread muted the incoming sunlight; in the dark corners of the room the dust-coated spider plants loomed like monsters. I was seeing it all as though from below; up there on the counter stood several boxes of Sosmix, a substance I had long forgotten but which somehow more than any other foodstuff seemed to sum up the tragedy of my childhood. I could even taste its salty, granular texture all those years later, the artificiality of it that made it both moreish
and faintly sickening. I used to stand on a chair next to a bowl on the top and roll it between my chubby palms into cigar shapes, ready for one of the adults to fry, afterwards sucking the pink crumbs from my fingers.

  Stacked up next to the sink were piles of cracked, floral pottery. Plates I recalled eating endless lentil curries from, bowls we used to mix interminable nut roasts. The air was thick with the scent of patchouli joss sticks, the dresser littered with poetry periodicals and copies of The Ecologist. But I was too big to hide underneath that kitchen table now.

  The sound of Coral slapping Stella around the face brought me back. My mother was rubbing her cheek with a mild look, but I could tell she was afraid by the wildness in the other woman’s face. Coral was speaking in a low hiss. ‘You killed that poor girl. She needed you.’

  ‘She did it to herself,’ Stella said, but she had started to cry now. Coral moved her face closer.

  ‘Good. I’m glad you’re crying. You should be crying. He should too.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You left her, still bleeding. What kind of person does that, Stella? You’re heartless.’

  ‘I loved him. I loved my child. I just wanted peace. We didn’t know she was ill. We didn’t know.’

  ‘You knew. How could you not know? You killed her. I have thought about that night we found her every day of my life since. Her hanging there. You don’t get a picture like that out of your head. Not ever. And then your daughter moves in and starts asking questions when I’m just trying to live my life.’

  Coral had built up some momentum now, and as the words tumbled out, Stella stood and sobbed harder. I felt sorry for her, then. It was a feeling that was unfamiliar to me. I had spent so many years scornful of her inept mothering that I did not know how to comfort her; the physical expressions of compassion seemed alien, as though they were a foreign language. Should I walk over to her, lay my palm on her arm? I did not want to draw Coral’s eyes in my direction in case I became the focus of her rage, and so in the end I stood and watched as though it were playing out on a stage, as though afterwards I could rise from my seat, push open the fire door and stride into the cool darkness of the night away from it all.

  ‘I think about it every day too. I couldn’t function. Believe me, you can never blame me as much as I blame myself.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  I don’t know how long I stood there as Coral berated my mother and she cried, her only retaliation coming in the form of frantic bouts of nodding to indicate that yes, she accepted the blame, but eventually Coral paused and stood exhaling heavily, as though unsure what to do next. Stella was pale and shaking, so I went upstairs to our kitchen to fetch her a brandy, noticing only vaguely as I was up there that the sky had darkened and the rooms were all lit up.

  ‘I thought I had better bring the bottle,’ I said. So we sat down, and I listened to them talking of the past, of Bryn and Mikey and that Swedish groupie (what was her name?) and all the other souls who had passed through that house over the years, refusing to accept that the revolution had not happened, that the others had laid down arms, rejoined the ‘straight world’, and were looking forward to full pensions. Apart from one young girl who never got the chance.

  ‘I hated you,’ said Coral. ‘I felt like you’d destroyed all that was good about this place, the dream that we could all live together in a haven free from our desire to possess things. But as time has gone on I see that it would have all gone wrong whether you were here or not, because if not you, then it would have been somebody else. We were naïve.’

  It all seemed so idealistic. An experiment designed to fail. How could they have failed to acknowledge the inherent graspingness of romantic love? Did they really think that you could simply choose not to feel? But when I thought about my own experiments, the men who had wandered fecklessly in and out of my bed and I theirs as though we were all on our way to somewhere else, I saw that I had been trying to do exactly that. We all were. You learn from the best.

  After a while I left them talking. There would be time to go over it all again, to try and scratch out some accord with Stella. Could I blame her for wanting what she had been taught to want? They were careless, but neither of them could have known the inner workings of that poor girl’s wretched heart. How could anyone?

  It was late by the time I went upstairs, and Josh seemed to have gone out, so I was surprised the lights were all still on. It was only when I walked through the kitchen and the living room that I noticed that Lucia’s door, which had been closed for weeks, was wide open, revealing the chaotic squalor of the pit she had been living in. The other two bedroom doors were also open; only the bathroom’s was closed.

  ‘Lou?’ I tapped lightly. I heard a groan, and then a retching. Then, a low guttural ‘shit’.

  ‘Lou darling. Can you open the door?’

  There was a hoarse croak in reply, then the sound of a body pulling itself across the linoleum and reaching up to trip the lock.

  Bear

  Get well soon teddy bear (bought from gift shop in the Whittington Hospital, Archway, N. London. This 20.5 cm (5”) teddy bear is made of soft shaggy gold fur and has a blue nose and patches on his head and body. He wears plasters on his head and holds a green felt first aid case printed with the greeting ‘Get Well Soon’.

  Lucia’s face was a pale, waxy mask looking up at me from the floor. She looked horrid, her skin visibly clammy. The toilet wasn’t just full of vomit but also surrounded by it. The smell burned the back of my throat.

  ‘Oh darling,’ I said, wiping her matted hair from her fringe. ‘We’ve all done it. Let’s get you into bed.’ I put my hands under her armpits and tried to haul her up, but she was a deadweight, a rag doll stuffed with lead. Her eyes were rolling back in her head. Just how much had she had to drink?

  ‘You’re going to have to help me here sweetheart. Come on.’

  Lou retched again, and was sick all down her front. Her gaze was objectless, unfocused. ‘How much have you had to drink?’ She wouldn’t look at me, and had closed her eyes, so I slapped her lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Not . . . drunk,’ she eventually said, in a vague slur. ‘Ambulance.’

  ‘Lou. What did you take? You need to tell me now. Coke? MD? 2CB? What was it?’

  I grasped her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Lou, you need to tell me. Now.’

  ‘Panadol extra.’ She was crying now, and the words were coming out in painstaking gulps. ‘I just . . . didn’t want to feel any more. I just wanted it to be dark, and quiet, and nothing. I wanted nothing. I thought I was done.’

  ‘You’re not done, Lou. You are very much not fucking done. I’m going to call an ambulance, ok? And we are going to go to hospital, and they are going to sort you out. And you are going to be fine. I promise. You are going to be fine.’

  I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my phone, but first I shouted down to Stella. ‘Mum!’ I brought out the word after years of neglect, and far from sounding childlike and pleading it sounded right. ‘Coral! Help!’

  Stella stood at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’

  ‘My flatmate has taken an overdose. She tried to kill herself. She needs an ambulance, now.’

  ‘Is that her car outside?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know where the keys are.’

  ‘Find them. There’s no time. Let’s take her up the Whittington. Coral,’ she shouted into the doorway, ‘we’re going to need your help moving her. Let’s go. I’m not letting another young girl die in this house.’

  We were lucky that the keys were next to Lou’s bed, as were several empty packets of paracetamol, and a note that I pocketed. After getting her down the stairs, we laid her along the slightly damp back seat of the 2CV. She was conscious, but not really with us. All that was left when she retched was fluid.

  It was only a ten-minute journey, but in that old banger, which barely went above forty miles an hour, it felt like forever. As always in that car, you had th
e disturbing sensation that all that was separating your feet from the tarmac was a piece of carpet. Stella, who didn’t have a car and had never driven much, stalled several times on the Junction Road, swearing. But eventually, she pulled in with a screech to the ambulance bay and we rushed into A&E.

  ‘She’s taken an overdose of paracetamol,’ I was shouting. The woman in scrubs looked barely older than me. ‘She needs her stomach pumped now.’

  ‘We don’t do that anymore,’ said the doctor. ‘What’s her name? Lucia, can you hear me? What time did you take the paracetamol? How much did you take?’

  ‘I changed my mind. I changed my mind,’ said Lou. ‘Stupid. I’m. So. Stupid.’

  ‘It must have been in the last hour or two,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t in when I went upstairs at around ten.’

  ‘That’s good news. Right, let’s get you sorted out. We’re going to measure her levels. If you could stay in the waiting area, we’ll come and find you when we know more. Are you family? No. You need to get in touch with them if you can.’

  We waited. At some point, Josh joined us in the greyness of the A&E lobby, but we didn’t speak after the initial retelling of events. Stella was frantic, moving and twitching constantly. I welcomed the stillness of him, pressing my face into his chest, its solidity grounding me when the urge was to float away. Who knows where, somewhere happier, I suppose, somewhere where Lucia’s pain was not etched on her face. I wondered if there was something I could have done to help her, rather than leaving her to suffocate under the weight of her sadness alone in the sultry chaos of her room as I moaned and pirouetted next door, Josh turning my body this way and that.