Lily closed her eyes, thinking about all the times over the years that Jess’s behaviour had tested her reactions. All the times her mum had cancelled arrangements because of some eleventh-hour emergency of Jess’s. All the extra help her mum had given Jess because she was a single parent who’d messed up her life. And not once had her mum acknowledged the irony that Jess – who had torn their family apart – was awarded the lion’s share of maternal time and attention.
She thought about her mum, just a few minutes earlier, sitting on the sofa holding her hand, and suddenly found herself imagining the gaping absence her death would leave behind. It was as though something was pressing down hard on her windpipe: an assault, a compression, panic inhaled with each breath.
She was forty-three years old, she told herself. She must have known this day would come eventually, that there would likely be years – decades – when she would be alive and her mum would not. She knew that most children, at some point, became orphans.
Opening her eyes, she looked out of the rain-streaked window to the street ten floors below: miniature figures hurried along the pavement beneath a canopy of umbrellas; car headlights illuminated the glistening tarmac; further down the river the London Eye continued its almost imperceptible rotation.
Lily knew there was only one person in the world who might understand how she felt about the prospect of losing her mum, just one person who might comprehend how great a loss it would be. But that particular conversation was impossible. These days, she couldn’t even imagine how it might feel.
Lily swung her chair around and pulled it close to her desk, tucking her legs neatly underneath. Focusing on the empty presentation in front of her she began to type, but as her fingers tapped at the keyboard she couldn’t help noticing that her hands were shaking.
Eleven hours later Lily woke with a jolt and sat bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding, beads of sweat gathered at her temples. She looked around the darkened room and glanced at the clock beside her bed – 3.04 a.m. – a voice in her head reminding her that it was just a dream.
Switching on the bedside light, she reached across for a glass of water and wrapped her clammy palms around it, sipping gently, her mouth desert-dry. She was desperate to lie down and sleep but every time she blinked, they were there: those tiny blue hummingbirds.
The dream was always the same. She is standing in a darkened room, silent save for the gentle rhythm of flapping wings. In front of her there are thousands of tiny blue hummingbirds: small, fragile, beautiful. She studies them, unsure whether she is unable to move or simply unwilling to disturb them. They flutter in the tentative light of early morning, their tiny bodies a miracle of nature, the speed of their wings too fast for the eye to follow. There is something meditative in watching them, their miniature movements hypnotic. But suddenly they are swarming towards her, beating their wings against her cheeks, her hair, her neck. She raises her hands to protect her face, but the birds are so small they inch around the gaps, their long beaks pecking at her flesh. She closes her eyes, tries to bat them away, but there are too many, all flapping and pecking, and she feels the first sting of a beak piercing her skin, followed by another and then another: the bridge of her nose, her forehead, her scalp. And then they are pecking at her eyes and she is flailing her arms, trying to escape their assault, but there are too many and there is nothing she can do to stop them. She feels the blood trickle down her cheeks, tastes its metallic flavour on her tongue, hears their wings beating in her ears. And then she wakes up.
Lily gulped at the water, willing the images to release her now she was awake. She’d been having this dream for years yet still she woke every time panicked, sweating, scrabbling for air.
She lay down again and stared up at the shadow of the chandelier on the ceiling. It had been Daniel’s anniversary present to her last year: bespoke hand-blown Italian glass, a thousand separate clear pendants hanging from a central stem like an exotic crystal tree, the kind of chandelier you might find in the lobby of a boutique hotel or a Michelin-starred restaurant. Lily had seen the receipt lying on the desk in Daniel’s study, had balked at the cost, but Daniel had needed to give her something extravagant to assuage his guilt at being abroad on their anniversary for the third year in a row.
Lily stared up at the chandelier, imagining that perhaps the two men who’d come to install it hadn’t done the job properly, that it might come crashing down on her head one night as she lay sleeping.
Reaching over and switching off her bedside lamp, she curled her limbs into a foetal ball, held herself tight, and implored herself to go to sleep.
Chapter 15
Jess
Just over two miles west of where Lily lay awake, Jess raised her head from the pillow and looked at the clock.
3.22 a.m.
From the room next door she could hear the rustle of a duvet. There had been so many nights since her mum moved in that Jess had been aware of her restlessness in the early hours of the morning. So many nights she had sensed them both lying awake in adjacent rooms, barely fifteen feet apart, separated only by a line of bricks, two thin layers of plaster and three decades of unspoken conversations. On many occasions she had listened to her mum tossing and turning, knowing she should get out of bed, put her head round the door and offer to make her some cocoa. But she hadn’t, not once. And Jess didn’t know whether what stopped her was the fear of discovering the reason for her mum’s insomnia or the anxiety that she might disclose her own.
Jess heard her mum attempt to stifle a cough. She lay completely still, hardly daring to breathe, remembering all those childhood nights curled up alone in bed. All those nights she had listened to her mum sobbing in the bedroom across the landing. All those nights she had heard hissed conversations from the floors below. She remembered sitting at the top of the stairs, hearing Lily’s voice from behind closed doors, knowing she should not have been eavesdropping but being unable to tear herself away as she listened to her sister’s pleading: Please, Dad. Please stop it. You have to. Please.
Light glared into the room from the gap between the wall and the curtains, and Jess pulled the duvet high over her head, her breath circulating hot and damp in the confined space, but still the images kept coming. She scrunched her eyes until her forehead ached, but instead of forcing the memories from her mind, it sharpened their focus until she was back in her childhood home on the day it had happened.
Chapter 16
September 1988
Jess opens the shed door and peers around in the darkness, her eyes accustoming to the gloom. She steps inside, wary of spiders and their webs, but decides she would rather not see them even if they are there. Reaching towards the flowerpot on the middle shelf, she pulls it towards her and hears the key rattle before her fingers find it. She grabs it and backs out of the door, heads across the garden and through the side gate, round to the front of the house.