Even then, I lied to tell the truth.
He didn’t beg. I thought he would. I’d imagined him crying, hooking me back by my heart, but there was just a lot of silence, thin air, light-headedness. I even goaded him, asking didn’t he care, didn’t he want to save me. After a long pause in which he stared at his open hands laid across his knees, he said that he couldn’t try to stop me saving my life, but that I had to leave. He didn’t look at me, he just pointed at the exit and broke off a piece of me in the process. That’s a hurt that can’t be fixed. I told myself and him that I was within my rights to decide how I wanted to live my life, and anyone that didn’t want a part of it wasn’t worth my time. He never returned the piece of me he kept.
I didn’t reach out to him again after that, what was the point? He made it clear that he didn’t want me to, and he never reached out to me either. It would’ve been pointless anyway. How could I build a life with Art when I was in love with Luke? How would it have made me look – leaving him behind when I lived my best life? I would have had to watch him die.
Aubrey never forgave me for what I did to him. Maybe she cared for Luke more than she did for me. She smirked and squinted her eyes at me when I told her I’d ended it, as if she was waiting for the punchline of a terrible joke. She didn’t speak for a few minutes, and neither did I. I waited, tasting my bitter coffee in tiny sips and strong-arming my mind back to when we lived together, and when silence meant peace.
Her first words said it all. She asked how Luke was. When I said he’d be OK, she clasped her hands to the back of her neck and glared at her knees. I was Prometheus on the rock, and already I could see her sharpening her eagle’s beak. She knew I was split, hurting, with hardly a minute to stitch my wounds and yet she still flew at me full force – rising on a storm of contempt.
I’d confused her, I get that, she thought she knew me and I’d betrayed that.
Slowly she stood, and without a word picked up her rucksack and strode to the door, her red heels sitting on the folded backs of her shoes.
Initially I was speechless. She was turning her back when I was most alone. I had no one, no one, and she was walking away as if she was better than me. But then I got angry. In that split second, I remembered every time I’d seen her at her worst – twisting with jealousy or hawking cruelties, and before I realised what I was doing I was screaming and screaming and screaming at her. My throat burned and I spat blood.
I must have terrified her.
“I’m going to see him,” she said, quietly. “I can’t believe what you’re doing.”
If you have to chain someone to you, it’s not worth them being too close. No trust. The two most important people in my life had left me behind, and both with the same last look over their shoulders. A glistening look, pale and perplexed, as if the me they’d known had died.
That day in the museum was the first time I’d seen Luke since that night in his flat, and in heart and soul I was right back there, self in shards. He might’ve even been wearing the same clothes. It was unbearably hot inside my layers, and though I longed to loosen them, find myself some air, I couldn’t even shuffle an inch in case he saw me. His hands and face were all I could see, the rest of the gallery was all wavy, as if we stood on a griddle.
Remembering to breathe, I took long slow drags of air through my nose. I wondered if he’d help me if I fainted right here on the floor. Would I look the same to him now? Should I speak? Go up to him and face him through the case, a ghost incanted back?
All of his attention was on the display, the stuffed figures inches from his face. I watched as he wrapped little pieces of wire around the bird’s tiny claws, strengthening their connections to the twigs and branches they called home. Occasionally he’d stop to fiddle in the metal case for a tool before looking up again, flicking aside his fringe and closing his right eye, just like he did when painting his little people.
I moved my hands along the bench and gripped the edge, leaving a trail of misted fingerprints. My heart was too loud. Surely he could hear me? Every word in my head banged on my skull like a drum. I shuffled forwards on the bench. As I drew closer to him, even by imperceptible fractions, I began to feed from the current between us in the air, and grew stronger with each draft. I would have guzzled forever in my attempt to satisfy the bottomless cavity inside. I began to feel giddy, and my legs tingled – desperate to spring, or leap or jump. I had no idea what I was going to say, but I needed to show him that he was still with me. Maybe he’d return my shard of heart.
I held my breath before moving, but just as I began to lurch forwards a figure walked up behind Luke. I sat back again, craning my head to see who it was. A woman, about my age, wearing a deep red front-of-house fleece. She leaned in close behind him and kissed him on the ear. He leaned back and said something quietly to her, his eyes still on the starlings. She pointed at something I couldn’t see inside the case and he moved his hands there. Their two faces side by side peered into the case, cheek to cheek. His new curls coiling into her swinging ponytail.
You know, now I think maybe she hadn’t kissed him. It could have been a whisper. He didn’t look at her once, and when I think about it, she didn’t look him in the eye, either. But the closeness of them drove me out, and I didn’t wait to find out what Luke did next. I don’t even remember the drive home. It’s a miracle I made it back whole.
Once I returned to the house, I threw open the front door and strode straight through the hallway, the kitchen, and out through the back door. No need to lock doors behind me now.
I leaned into the shed and picked up the garden axe, testing the weight of its swing as I strode across the wet grass. When I reached the far edge, I got to work on the berry bush, hacking to pieces that persistent fucking bush that I’d never planted, that I’d never wanted, and that kept coming back, again and again and again, like a vampire rising from the grave.
21
What did I originally ask for? At the beginning? I haven’t forgotten.
I never saw Mum die. I never saw her slow decay into grey. I never saw the end of her life because I wasn’t there. After the last November I visited, I didn’t go back. For all those months I let her wilt on her own, drowning in her own body. I only returned when she was already gone.
Maybe this is why I’m alone now. Why I have so little time left, but I’m still waiting with the hot taste of sweet milk on my tongue. Why I’m wearing my “hello” dress, my “I remember all of your sisters” dress. It’s threadbare, thinning like the skin on my face, the last white hairs on my head. If I hold up the hem they’re all still there, ghosts in the silk scent of talcum. My blue bracelet dangles from my wrist, many times mended, but never fully repaired. I’m no seamstress. One final time, I’m waiting for a white van, stamped with the bronze ankh and “E.G.” on its side-doors. This is my last day, my last day of all, and I’m waiting for men whose faces I don’t know to bring our daughter to me – in a box.
Where are they?
I’ve been waiting such a long time. They should be here.
Below the window an immaculate blanket smothers the road, houses, hedges. It won’t stay pristine for long, it never does. Cars are white mountains now, but soon they’ll be dusted with ash. You could draw your name in it. No one’s passed by since dawn, when single figures clad in black marched against the blizzard. Their footprints are hidden under the drifts.
There’s nothing coming yet.
The last moments of life are a room. I can’t be in that space, that dying space where I know she’s been. There’ve been times when I’ve opened the door just a crack, just to see, and I can taste her misery on the air. Yet a spark in the mire – I know she wants me there with her. In her swirling world of oils and watercolours, she centred me in its eye. Those racks of unfinished paintings, some still sticky with oil – most of them were of me. She didn’t know who I was going to be in years to come, but she still tried countless times to capture a piece just for herself.
&nb
sp; You see, I can’t be with her in that room. The day I meet her there is the day I come face to face with the shame of it, the blame I placed on Mum for causing her own end when I have done so much worse.
Mum’s end was an end through joy – and are there worse things? I now think there are. Her blood danced in her veins in all the vibrant shades she shaped into poetry. My own blood hardly runs at all, yet I feel the dull slick of it, all the time ticking towards the point when I slow so much that I stop. Stop thinking. Stop being anything that can make a difference or leave anything behind. I’ve become grey, without ever being sick.
We tell our stories to make sense of what we’ve done.
Can you still hear me, daughter?
I see a tree. A tree which once was a home to birds, beetles, bats – all taking the bit they need to survive, nothing more. The tree quivers with a multiverse of life, each species coming and going with hardly a twig snapped or leaf dropped.
But we don’t do this. We take all that the tree will ever have to offer and zip it in a bag or lock it in the bank. And soon, no spiders. No birds. All the glorious greens we’ve sacrificed for the assurance of an empty hand. And always we eat, we drink, we bloat.
And now the earth is bitter. But here, inside, wrapped in each other’s flesh, we can survive.
Nut didn’t come home, Art did. He wrote his great novel. It took him fourteen years to do it, fourteen years when I hardly saw him at all. And everything he wanted happened. It was published to great acclaim, nominated for prizes here and across the sea – though it didn’t win any. He thrived off the book tours, panels, and never ran out of words when it came to interviews. There was a point when people started to recognise him when we went out together. He’d be picking up a coffee and be prodded on the shoulder by a bashful fan, wanting his autograph. His face never wavered, and he always remained cool and crystalline. Afterwards, in private, he’d be grinning from ear to ear, his voice somehow louder and quieter than it had been before.
Bookshop windows were decorated just for the launch. Illustrators were commissioned to paint frescos of chalky bones and skulls entwined with ivy. Easton Grove issued a release to the press about his success, which hiked up the book pre-sales even further. I met its cover in every corner of life, from my lunchtime walks and the stacks of copies in our hallway, to folk in cafés – sipping on cappuccinos with their heads buried between the pages. Even shops that I didn’t know sold books set up special displays near their entrances.
On my way to work one day, I passed a cardboard box of them outside a café with no one around, and I – as casual as you like – bent down, picked one up, and slipped it into my handbag. When I reached my desk, I pulled out the book and laid it on my lap. I liked the weight of it, how the physicality of it between my hands reminded me that it was done. It was over.
I didn’t read it that day, and I’ve still never read what Art wrote. I used to wonder if I was in there somewhere or whether Nut appeared in some shape. Art’s daughter. His first daughter. But how can we really know how we exist within each other’s minds, really? Who were we to Art, when it all ended?
During that year of success he was away a lot, talking, talking, always talking, a cuckoo in a nest of wrens. But, as it turns out, no one records anything anymore, and words die off remarkably quickly. Art’s come-down was a slower process, and he talked about the book’s glory long after the cover was no longer gracing the bestseller shelves. Easton Grove had gone quiet, and no matter how many times he contacted them about doing another interview or seminar they kept putting him off. Eventually the consultants stopped replying entirely, and had the receptionists refer him to the date of our next joint appointment, when we’d discuss the future of “things like that”.
And in all that time of triumph, he never picked up a pen or wrote so much as a shopping list. It took a few further years of sitting around the house waiting for offers that wouldn’t come before he realised that it was over, and his great work had been buried beneath hundreds, or more likely thousands, of other great works published before and since.
I don’t think Art ever accepted that his magnum opus was now simply one lost voice in an overcrowded chorus. He reluctantly returned to his study, picked up the pen again and tried to repeat the cycle. I can’t blame him for a lack of conviction. He thought the world would be different after literary success, but it wasn’t. Even if he wrote another great work that too would fade, and he’d be faced with the same blank space again. He never said this out loud, but I know it’s what he thought. I told him so, again and again.
I tried to encourage him. I brought him food and hot tea, and rubbed his shoulders as he sat staring at the empty page. I needed him to keep writing, to help fund the programme, for both of us. Mum’s lump sum would run out one day, and though my salary paid for some of the fees, it was never quite enough. So I spoke soft words in his ear, told him that readers still loved him, that he needed to keep going. My eyes though, they would be looking out to the garden, the berry bush, the sprawling ivy. Art never wrote anything else, not even his penny dreadfuls or pulp fiction. He got by, editing other people’s books and occasionally teaching the storytelling craft at universities, colleges or conferences. He never went into why he couldn’t write anymore, but I always thought it was because he’d tied himself up so much in his great novel that he was continuing to run a marathon even though he’d crossed the finish line. Art was in a phase of unnatural life. He used to say that he’d lost his voice, and as the years went by, whenever he tried to write or speak he could hear hundreds of different mutterings, grumblings, and incomprehensible mewlings all at the same time, translating his thoughts into a chorus of different languages, none of which he quite understood. If his own American drawl was amongst them he couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t hear it. Though he tried to be good-humoured about it he was never the same, and pottered about the place in a style much more senior than his years. By then we slept in separate rooms, Art living in a new little annex built into the back of the house. I still don’t go in there, it’s not my space. It’s a foreign land and exploring such a thing is of no interest to me now.
But what did I ask for? In the beginning?
I asked for nothing.
Maybe this was the reason they chose me. When the doctors dug down, sure that I must harbour some deep-seated motive, some ambition I was scared to speak up about, I told them straight, “I’m not asking for anything, because I don’t know if I have anything to give.”
Despite what they tried to make me feel, I’m nothing special. I’m normal. I’m not driven or obsessive over success. No matter how many pastimes or sports I try, I’ve never expected to find one that I’m a secret genius at. I’m every day. I’m you. I’m me. I’m a world, complex and unstructured. Perhaps that was the point. I was a beta for Joe Public. This has been my purpose. I’ve always been a glass of water, poured back and forth whenever they tipped the wrist. They see right through me, know my insides.
But there was something I wanted. I just didn’t know it then. And I got it.
I wanted somewhere safe. This house is part of my body, and without it I’m a thin and weedy thing, a tortoise without its shell. I’m never without my security.
I had Art, the longest marriage of all my friends. Art was my home just as much as the brickwork. Ours was a true partnership, and every time he needed to use our ovum organi I understood and gave him my blessing. Art has not been well over the years. By the time he died at ninety-eight, he housed a hundred different souls inside him. They said it was dementia, but I know it was just too many voices for him to cope with. He couldn’t hear himself. He forgot who he was.
The Easton Grove programme gave Art exactly what he wanted, and me too. To live a life of few surprises. I needed protection and time to work myself out. It’s not their fault that I’ve never worked out who I’m supposed to be.
But maybe none of us do. Maybe that’s what we find out when we live.
I h
it a low patch in my fifties, after we’d been together for twenty years or so. I remember it as the first time I stopped leaving the house, answering calls. I still hear Art’s voice, clear as day:
“It’s like we’re on a cliff with a lake under us. You’ve got to jump, Norah, jump in and through the meniscus. I’ll hold your hand. We’ll pass through our reflections and see we were there all the time in the water.”
I wonder if a lack of mistakes means I’ve never broken through the glass. I’m not myself.
The spring after Rosa saw Nut at the New Year’s Eve party, a car Mike was driving went through a red light and hit the back of a transit van. It was late and they’d both been drinking. Mike was under the limit and walked away from the scene whereas Rosa had been broken in two. The bus was empty apart from the driver, so no one else was hurt.
I’d only seen her once after the New Year’s Eve party, a month later when Eleanor had invited us both for a meal in an attempt to bring us back together. Eleanor looked thin, tired. Rosa was late, and she arrived drunk. She told us she’d been for a “few drinks” with Aubrey just around the corner, and when Eleanor asked Rosa why Aubrey hadn’t come to say hi, Rosa just shrugged and said, “She’s got places to be, people to see. You know how it is.”
Mike read a passage at Rosa’s funeral. He acted like he’d written it himself but the words seemed too familiar. I struggled to remember where I’d heard them and I still don’t know, even now. I can still see him, unfolding those little pieces of paper, the sheets rattling between his hands.
“Rosa De Louise lived lightly,” he called across the crematorium. “She hardly had a footprint at all.”
He gasped, and his lips peeled back over his gums. I could see strings of saliva linking the rows of his teeth. The last few words were spat rather than spoken, but I think I heard them right.
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