Precious You

by Helen Monks Takhar

  “Well, we’d all like a lot of things. My niece not to be dead, for starters. Where are her things? What have you done to them?”

  “Calm down, Gemma. They’re in here.” I let her get past me and walk into my bedroom. I follow her and, while her back is turned, I shove it under a pillow before sitting down on it.

  When Gemma sees your trunk, new tears take over her mottled face; she turns and flares her nostrils at me, before squatting down to wrap her arms around it. She starts to wrestle the thing backward across my bedroom floor then and out into my hall. I can hear she’s almost outside into the shared landing. I get up to slam the door behind her, but when I do she’s standing again, behind your trunk, which now blocks my door.

  “The curtains were drawn around her hospital bed. They’re not supposed to be on HDU wards unless by medical staff. She died exactly at the point when they couldn’t see her. Or you.”

  “Lily wanted some privacy.”

  “Why on earth would she want privacy with you?”

  “Gemma, Lily admitted what she’d done to me. She sabotaged my career, deliberately targeted Iain, lied to you about it all. I suppose the accident made her think about her life. All her mistakes and misdeeds. She apologized for everything she’d done to me, and then she said she was sorry to tell me she was having my partner’s baby. She became extremely emotional, it obviously got too much for her…Like the hospital said, I suppose she wasn’t as strong as she thought she was.”

  At this, she slams her hands on the top of your trunk. “You. You caused her death. She didn’t want you there, why would she? And why would she say sorry to you after your conduct at the funeral of the father of her baby? After you robbed me? I can’t believe she tried to help you. But you wouldn’t let her. I should have sacked you when I had the chance. You were deadweight from day one. How can she be gone and you’re here, sitting pretty, in the flat that’s half hers, with my money. You will pay for this.”

  “Please, Gemma, by all means start a new conversation with the police and I’ll be sure to highlight the lengths to which you went to help your niece when she was alive. Get out.” I feel the hate coming off her. “Now.”

  I push your trunk out of my flat, Gemma stumbling behind it, and kick the door shut.

  I hear your case being dragged away, thumping down the stairs like a dead carcass,

  Now I have nothing of you.

  I return to my bedroom and reach under the pillow to retrieve my manuscript, but there’s something else waiting for me there too. A yellow hardback book with a brassy pen attached to it by an orange ribbon. Your diary. It feels as if you have left me a gift.

  I read.

  I read every word of the writing in your own hand and barely notice when the sun goes down and the light in my bedroom goes from gray to a dirty blue.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S HARD FOR ME to breathe. A new dread descends, a new filter I have to view the world through. No longer beige. Now, everywhere I look, I can see only black.

  Your words, from your heart to the page; from the page to my heart.

  What you wrote for me at the Rosewood:

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why they don’t want me. They’re sending me away again. It always feels like someone wants to send me away, just for being me. My soul is thinking, here we go again. Being sent away is the only thing it really knows…

  And so many words from your diary, but it’s these that wound me deepest:

  When I know for sure she’s realized she has nothing left in the world, that’s when I’ll sock it to her. I’ll tell her about the universe of pain she’s caused, and why it had to be this way.

  Because it didn’t have to be this way.

  You.

  It was you.

  Her.

  Who else would want to ruin me as you did? You needed me. You always needed me, but I wasn’t there for you. I have my answer now.

  I had always meant to write an epilogue to my first manuscript, but I had buried that part of the story. So I’m writing it now, and maybe somehow you will hear it.

  CREEP FEEDER

  Epilogue

  There were no neighbors for miles. I’d sent the reporter on his way nine months ago. I was alone. So completely alone. A brutal pain ripped through me, my whole torso tightening, constricting, like an invisible snake had come from within to kill me again and again. Labor didn’t seem to hurt the sheep. That’s why I thought this would be easier than the alternative. I was wrong. I had so much to learn about life.

  The pain burned, searing through every bit of me. The baby, you, hung between two worlds, refusing to leave my body. I thought my frame would break, my body would split in two. A terrific push from my guts, using every last bit of strength in me to get you out of me. I caught you in my hands. You were slippery, just like a lamb. I nearly dropped you. But I didn’t.

  You started screaming, your angry gums vibrating. I wrapped you in a towel and put the bottle I’d made up in your mouth while the blood kept pouring out of me. You were so tiny and hungry and innocent. I thought about my own birth. How rough and cold my mother would have been. The tears fell from me as fast as the blood that followed your body out of me.

  I knew I’d never be able to do this again. How could I trust myself to know how to put a child’s needs first? I’d never seen it done.

  I couldn’t wait for the social worker to arrive. I needed to get you away from me. For your sake and for mine because every second I looked at you I risked committing the sleepy slate of your eyes and the sweet fullness of your cheeks to my memory. I inhaled the sweet, soft scent of your head and felt the pulse of milk in my breasts. I was desperate to feed you, Lily.

  But to survive, I needed to forget that moment, forget you ever lived. You would only hold me back, inhibit the freedom I’d made so many sacrifices for and I would only be bad for you. Thinking about you, knowing you, would only damage me more.

  Precious you, now I know why our blood leaped together, how our pulses found each other: Our hearts were the same, and you had come to punish me for giving up on that. I understand this. I punished my mother too. But it could have been different, Lily. We didn’t have to destroy each other.

  Imagine Iain and me, taking a walk across the park on a wintry afternoon in March. The day before I met you. The day you followed us, when you trailed me down Church Street, plotting to take away everything I’d worked for. Iain and I chat, sip our coffee, the steam puffing around our heads cheerfully, like nothing’s wrong in the world, though we know it is. Of course, we know it is.

  I hear a voice behind me. Yours.

  “Hello.”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Lily Fretwell.”

  “Hi.”

  “I think we might know each other?”

  “Sorry, I can’t place you.”

  “I don’t know how to say this. You know me from a really long time ago. I don’t suppose I look at all familiar to you?” Perhaps I would shake my head. “When you were eighteen…you…you had a baby. It’s me. Lily. I know you specified no contact, it’s just I know you’re a writer. I’m a writer too, or I want to be. I thought maybe we could—”

  I go to sit on a bench nearby, taking you with me, holding your hand to steady myself.

  “Sorry, I know this must be a shock.”

  “It is. It’s a surprise. A nice one. You’re just like me!” I might have said.

  “You’re just like me.”

  “Wow. You’re a woman. Of course you are. What the hell happens now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  “Three!” Iain would have said, in that ideal world where I could have trusted him to stay with me.

  “This is Iain.”

  And we
’d take it from there.

  You didn’t have to make me watch you and my Iain make another child together, under an apple tree in a nasty house that didn’t belong to anyone we knew.

  I howl alone into the blank white space around me.

  * * *

  —

  MY LILY, we could have protected each other from our pasts and then from the rest of the world. Instead, you took Iain away and you let your need to punish me end your life too. You and your baby too.

  Her.

  You didn’t get the chance to find out, but I know your baby was a girl. I know because I had the dream again last night. I looked like me now: ginger roots speckled with some gray, the black dye finally growing out. I still look down at my bony teenage feet, but this time, I finally push through the gate. The earth can’t contain me in its darkness, not yet, and my bleeding pain can’t stop me. In the black-red far paddock, I see an upturned quad bike. Trapped below it, my mother as I finally saw her, but there’s you and your little girl too, our baby, and all your bones and flesh are twisted together for eternity.

  And when I wake, my wrongness and my loneliness overwhelm me.

  * * *

  —

  I SPEND THE REST of the morning doing some research before sending an email to Mr. Okoh, the wills solicitor:

  Subject: The Intentions of Ms. Katherine Ross

  Dear Mr. Okoh,

  I would like to make it known to you that in the event of my death, it is my intention that: The property at Hercules Street, Holloway, London N7, should be bequeathed to my former colleague and friend Asif Khan.

  The rest of my estate, including the proceeds of the sale of the property at Portland Rise, London N4, should be used to establish the Feeder Trust, which should award bursaries for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to support their creative careers in London.

  In sound mind,

  Katherine Ross

  I imagine Asif, plonking down his bits of luggage in the hallway at Iain’s Holloway flat. He wrestles the sofa where Iain died up the steps from the basement, leaving it out on the street together with Iain’s ghost. He sets up his weight bench in its place while he waits on the Ikea delivery, all the time trying to focus on the chance he’s been given, forcing himself not to think about what happened in this flat, or about me.

  I fill my bag with Citalopram, my Mini with petrol and tap a familiar postcode into my satnav: Unnamed road, Matlock, Derbyshire.

  And I know when my sleep finally comes, I won’t have the nightmare about my mother and the farm anymore. Now that I’m putting right my wrongs, my sleep will be beyond guilt.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER FOUR HOURS, I finally reach that familiar gate in real life for the first time since I was eighteen. The rough rotting wooden version gone, replaced by something smart and modern; galvanized metal that won’t warp and ruin. The pasture on the far paddock has changed too. The grass is lush and spring green. Someone is finally looking after this land. I swallow a fistful of pills and feel I am closing in on peace.

  * * *

  —

  THE PILLS BEGIN to take hold, the sweet scent of the young roots provides some comfort as I ricochet through seizures toward oblivion.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY IS fading now.

  Such a beautiful word, as I say it to myself, before I can’t speak anymore.

  “Daughter…daughter…daughter.”

  * * *

  —

  BUT THEN: startling greens. Rich, yolk yellows. Illuminous blue. The squeak of fresh grass around me.

  Are these colors, these human sounds enveloping me real? Is there someone out here coming to drag me back into life again? I need this to be the final hallucination of my brain, but I know the world better by now. Life is never on my side, even now that I’ve decided I want to leave it.

  (DRAFT POST, 6:04 P.M., APRIL 26)—CONNECT THE DOTS, KATHERINE ROSS

  Sometimes all you have to do is sketch out the suggestion of a picture and people go right ahead and fill in the gaps. I’ve made this happen a hundred times before, but never on the scale I planned with you.

  A pretty girl, do anything to be a journalist. Red hair, sassy attitude. Won’t take a fight lying down. Great liar. Remind you of anyone yet, Katherine?

  This all starts with your sins, but the justice you experienced at my hand begins when I met Ruth.

  It was the summer before my final year. Ruth and I got talking at an exhibition at The Tetley. I was wandering around on my own, rinsing the last few days I could stay in halls before being chucked out to spend the summer in the dead center of another load of Gem/Mum mind games. It seemed to get worse after I’d been away, like they’d been plotting their next tactic in the fallow time without me. The minute I talked to Ruth, I felt better about everything. It was so natural, so easy. It was obvious we were going to be really important to each other.

  Ruth was about to start as a freshman and her parents had bought her a house in Headingley. She was already living in it and planning to rent the rooms to people she met and liked. She was beautiful and clever, she had loads of money and freedom and kind, normal parents, but I didn’t hate her. She became my true friend instantly. I’d never felt this way before.

  She was different. She listened to every word I said without any kind of agenda. With her as my best friend, I knew I could be happy. I loved looking at her, auburn hair that fell in easy waves down her back, her gap-toothed smile and bright blue eyes that seemed to dance when she was trying to find the right way to describe something. She could only see good where I saw the bad things. She saw the positive in everything. In me. After all the negativity in my life, I was hooked.

  We’d talk forever and both crash on the futon in the little living room when the sun came up and the Diet Coke and Doritos couldn’t keep us from falling asleep anymore. We started cooking meals together, shopped together, and built a little domestic bliss. Obviously, it wasn’t long at all before we made it official. I would move in. I chose the room right next to hers. The walls were thin and we could carry on our conversations, each in our own beds, until I drifted into the deepest, most restful sleeps I’d ever had, the sound of her duvet sweeping against the plasterboard next to me, the most blissful sound I’d ever heard.

  Peace. Home. A connection without conditions.

  I found I could tell her everything. For the first time, I actually understood what girls meant when they said best friend. The devotion, the infatuation, the closeness, and the relief of someone getting you and always being there for you. I told her all about me and my past. My mum. Gem. My mistakes. She still liked me. I guess it was a bit like counseling, only that Ruth talked too, about the good things she could see in the world and in me.

  I think she understood me better than I knew myself. Sometimes she’d finish a sentence for me and I didn’t find it annoying like I would with any other person, because she was always right. If I was struggling to find a way of telling her what it was really like growing up with Mum and Gem tearing me up into pieces, she’d get there for me. Somehow, she understood my pain.

  Ruth’s parents were academics and she wanted to teach too. She was a committed vegan and was looking forward to joining politically aware societies once she’d enrolled. I didn’t get people who joined things like that before, but if Ruth could see the positives, then there had to be something in it. I decided I would join the organizations she did. She signed petitions and cared a lot about getting the rubbish in the right recycling bin, so I did the same. She’d give any coins she had to homeless people all the time. I copied her. Perhaps I was a charity case to her, but if I was, I didn’t feel like it. This was real.

  The end began when I saw you for the very first time, Katherine.

  Ruth told me she’d been given away like me, but when
she was only a baby. Chucked away like a bit of rubbish. Treated like an inconvenience, just like me. I knew that’s why Ruth and I were soulmates. I knew she was the friend I’d been waiting for my whole life. Ruth’s birth mother didn’t want to know anything about her. I knew how that felt, in my core.

  Ruth’s biological mother had deliberately asked for no contact. But Ruth was smart and she was curious. She found out who it was who had produced a child and thrown her away without a glance over her shoulder.

  “She’s called Katherine Ross. She’s a magazine editor in London, which is incredible when you think about it, given what she’d been through. Here, do you want to see a picture? The social worker took it just before I was handed over. She looks so young. So lonely. I’m glad she managed to turn her life around,” Ruth told me.

  I took the photo from her.

  There you were.

  Thin, scruffy redhead with skin as white as milk. You looked away from the camera. You didn’t take any notice of baby Ruth. You never did and you never would. It was as if you didn’t want her to exist.

  You’re the same now. You only want to acknowledge people like me and Ruth when it suits you, when you need something from us. The rest of the time it’s trying to pretend we don’t exist. At best, you give us open disdain and at worst, out-and-out hate. The exploitation being the only reliable and permanent thing about how you interact with us.

  “When do you plan to confront her?” I asked Ruth.

  “Confront her? About what? I understand why she made her decision. It can’t have been easy, but it was the right thing for her. She was only eighteen. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like. It was the right thing for me too. I had a brilliant childhood. I don’t need anything else from her, now that I know how things turned out for her…Lily, are you all right?”