Inheritance

by Thomas Wymark

I put the picture against my forehead and let the cold glass soothe me. My mother and father together, taking away some of my pain. I could smell the years on it. Its age. She was a young woman with a dream. With the hopes for children and a life. Family and love. I extended my arm again. Took in her beauty.

  And I knew I had seen her before. Sitting at the table, writing. A look wide with fear on her face. Snapping her writing book shut. It was her. She was a younger me. A different me. She was my mother. I looked into her face. Into her eyes. I looked for a sign of the evil that was to take everything away from her. What was she telling me? What was she trying to say, even then? Her face had the innocence of a child about it. Unsure of what the real world might have in store, but full of hope.

  I couldn’t help looking behind her. Over her shoulder to the church. Not so green and overgrown as now, but still surrounded by thin trees. Did she know? Could she have known that she was just a few metres from her future? Her permanent resting place? Did she know how awful the journey was going to be to get there? Did she hope that one day her daughters would come and find her there? Would clear away the years and give her the love she had wanted to give them?

  I don’t know how long I lay there in the dust, gazing at my parents, taking in their youth. I think I could have slept there, let the photo rest on my tummy and just close my eyes. Sleep with them until the morning. But I didn’t. I sat back up, put the photo frame to one side and reached over to the rest of the folders and papers in the pile. Now that I had already found my prize, I flicked through the loose papers and contents of the remaining folders much quicker than I had previously. So quickly, in fact, that in the last folder I checked, I almost missed it.

  The folder was pale yellow. Apart from the date, it was identical to all the other folders in the boxes. Just another collection of business papers from that year. My fingers flicked rapidly through the papers, even passed over two or more at a time, my mind now taken up with the image of my young mother and father and therefore barely paying attention to anything else. And so I almost missed it. In fact, I did miss it with my mind. It was only the difference felt by my fingers that registered deep within me. They had passed over something different to just paper. Touched something firmer and thicker. Something buried within the business papers. Hidden within them. My fingers reversed their action and moved back to whatever it was they had touched. They waited there for my conscious mind to catch up.

  If I had thought the photo frame had been my prize, I had now died and gone to heaven. My free hand shot straight to my mouth, clamped over it. As I breathed in through my nose a lightness came over my mind. I thought I might pass out from the lightness. A gentle vibration travelled from my fingertips, up my arm and from there, all around my body.

  Her image blasted into my mind. Slammed into me.

  She was sitting at that table, concentrating, working hard. Putting all her efforts into writing. Her face was tight, her brow furrowed. She hunched over the table, her pen gripped so tight in her hand it looked as though it would be clenched in that position for ever. She was in the kitchen. Looking over her shoulder towards the front door, then back to her writing. Then back to the door again.

  I knew the look of someone writing a diary. Recalling what had happened to you, smiling as you remember, then scowling as you remember something else. She hadn’t been writing a diary. Her demeanour was all wrong. She looked more like she had been writing a letter. Telling someone about something. Writing in earnest about something important to her.

  Then her head snaps round to the door. She slams her writing book shut, rests her arms on top of it. That look of fear again, her eyes wide but reflecting nothing.

  And I know that I have found her book.

  Rather than pull it straight out from the folder I peel back the papers on either side of it and look down at the cover. Faded, coloured, vertical stripes. It reminded me of parties and paper plates. The book was slightly smaller than A4 size and about a centimetre thick. It was like a child’s exercise book. It was the one from the dream.

  As I slid it out from the folder my hand grew warm. It felt as though the heat came directly into me from my mother’s book. I held it in my hand for a few moments, gazing at it. Then I put it to one side. If there were any more shocks to be found in the folder I would rather get them all out of the way at the same time, rather than coming across new things piecemeal.

  But there was nothing else for me in the folder.

  I picked up the exercise book and ran my fingers over it. I held it under my nose, searching for the scent of my mother. A cloud settled in my stomach, ready to carry me away, or to fill me with rain. I was scared to open the book. What if there was nothing there? Just blank lines and pages? What if there was too much there? The full horror of her madness? I was sure that whatever happened when I looked inside, it could only be an anticlimax. How could it be anything else? My expectations were already too high. I already hoped to read about how much she loved me, about how heartbroken she was to let me go, about how her life just crumbled after I was gone. I already expected to read about a fairy tale love between her and my father. About the beautiful days on the beach, how he rescued her from her family and tortured life, like Neil rescued me from the drunks in the pub when we first met.

  And if none of that was there — what then?

  I opened the cover.

  A small black and white photograph of my father was stuck on the inside of the cover, below that was a black and white one of my mother. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. Either just finished or just about to start a day of work. My mother smiled out from her photograph. Her hair long and loose. She wore dark trousers and a lighter jacket. It was difficult to tell the colour. Her right arm and hand rested over the handlebars of a bicycle. Black frame, silver pedals and a wicker basket on the front. I looked over at it leaning against the loft wall.

  The first page, opposite the cover, had her name, written by her, and the date the book was started. I ran my finger over her name, traced the letters as she had written them, wrote her name with her. I turned the page. The two page spread before me was full of writing. Every line covered. It was as though she’d thought she might not ever get another exercise book, so she had to use every available space. I wondered why she had wasted so much space on the first page by just writing her name and the date.

  It wasn’t messy, just busy. Even words written up the side of the page. I wondered if this was the product of a tortured mind. She was OK writing her name and the date, but horrendously out of control with everything else. I studied the pages closely, touched the full stops and commas. Looked for recognisable names. Place names, person names, thing names. I turned the next few pages. All the same. All jam-packed with words, every space used, and virtually all impossible for me to understand. She had written in her native language — French.

  Of course I understood some words. But French was not really my thing. I had been better at German, reasonable at Spanish, but not really French. It seemed bizarre to me that I had been so bad at it, now that I knew I had some French blood running through my veins.

  I turned back to the first page and struggled through it the best I could. But I wasn’t getting a sense of anything. I couldn’t even make out one in ten words. I flicked the pages over one by one. I needed Cathy from the school. She was fluent in French, taught it brilliantly. I needed her there with me right then, sitting in the dust next to me, reading my mother’s words out loud, taking me back to the kitchen where she wrote them, enabling me to sit next to my mother all those years ago.

  Turning more pages. More tortured writing. Heavy crossing out on some words so that it was impossible to read what had been there. The ink changing colour as she changed her pen. Blue to black, then back to blue. Red for a few pages, then green, then blue again.

  I turned the page and my heart stopped.

  A terrible chill instantly covered my entire body. I retched but nothing came up. I tried to draw in breat
h but couldn’t, my lungs weren’t working.

  The exercise book fell to the floor and I scrabbled backwards away from it, kicking my legs out to propel myself. A sharp pain dug into the palm of my right hand, a splinter had embedded itself, blood creeping round the edges. I heard a noise, a clattering, something downstairs. And up in the attic too. Something loud, coming for me. I didn’t know where to run. I had to get away from up here, but I couldn’t go down there. More pain in my hand, another splinter. Blood now dripping onto the dusty wooden floor of the loft. Still moving backwards, away from the book, away from what I had seen. Almost at the loft hatch, but I can’t go down there. I called out. Shouted loud. I called out a name.

  ‘Neil!’

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