‘Do you know how I know my mother killed herself? Do you know how I know for sure?’ I shook my head. ‘Because on the day she died, we had a fight. It started over nothing, but it ended up being about Katie, like everything did. I was yelling at her and calling her a bad mother and saying that if she’d been a good parent she could have helped us, helped Katie, and then none of this would have happened. And she told me she had tried to help Katie, that she’d seen her walking home late one day, and had stopped to offer her a ride. She said Katie was all upset and wouldn’t say why, and Mum said, You don’t have to go through this by yourself. She said, I can help you. And, Your mum and dad can help you, too. When I asked her why she’d never told me about that before, she wouldn’t say. I asked her when it happened and she said, Midsummer, June the twenty-first. Katie went to the pool that night. Without meaning to, it was Mum who tipped her over the edge. And so, like that, Katie tipped Mum over the edge, too.’
A wave of sadness hit me, a swell so forceful I thought it might knock me from my chair. Was that it, Nel? After all this, you did jump, and you did it because you felt guilty and you despaired. You despaired because you had no one to turn to – not your angry, grieving daughter and certainly not me, because you knew that if you called I wouldn’t answer. Did you despair, Nel? Did you jump?
I could feel Lena watching me, and I knew that she could see my shame, could see that finally I got it, I understood that I, too, was to blame. But she didn’t look triumphant, or satisfied, she just looked tired.
‘I didn’t tell the police any of this, because I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to blame her – more than they already do, in any case. She didn’t do it out of hate. And she suffered enough, didn’t she? She suffered things she shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t hers or mine.’ She gave me a small, sad smile. ‘It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t Louise’s or Josh’s. It wasn’t our fault.’
I tried to embrace her, but she pushed me away. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please, I just …’ She tailed off. Her chin lifted. ‘I need to be by myself. Just for a bit. I’m going to go for a walk.’
I let her leave.
Nickie
NICKIE DID AS Jeannie told her to, she went to talk to Lena Abbott. The weather had cooled, a hint of autumn coming early, so she wrapped herself up in her black coat, stuffed the pages into the inside pocket and walked across to the Mill House. But when she got there, she found that there were other people around, and she was in no mood for a crowd. Especially not after what the Whittaker woman said, about how all she cared about was money and exploiting people’s grief, which wasn’t fair at all. That was never what she intended – if only people would listen. She stood outside the house a while, watching, but her legs ached and her head was full of noise and so she turned around and walked all the way back home again. Some days, she felt her age, and some days she felt her mother’s.
She had no stomach for the day, for the fight ahead. Back in her room, she dozed in her chair, then woke and thought that maybe she had seen Lena heading for the pool, but it might have been a dream, or a premonition. Later, though, much later, in the dark, she was certain that she saw the girl, moving like a ghost through the square, a ghost with purpose, fairly whipping along. Nickie could feel the split of the air as she passed, the energy buzzing off her, she could feel it all the way up there in her dark little room and it lifted her, stripped the years back. That was a girl on a mission. That girl had fire in her belly, she was a dangerous girl. The sort you don’t mess with.
Seeing Lena like that reminded Nickie of herself way back when; it made her want to get up and dance, made her want to howl at the moon. Well, her dancing days might be over, but, pain or no pain, she decided she would make it to the river that night. She wanted to feel them up close, all those troublesome women, those troublesome girls, dangerous and vital. She wanted to feel their spirit, to bathe in it.
She took four aspirin and got hold of her cane, then made her way slowly and carefully down the stairs, out of the back door and into the alley behind the shops. She hobbled across the square towards the bridge.
It seemed to take a very long time; everything took so long these days. No one warned you about that when you were younger, no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness. She should have foreseen it, she supposed, and she laughed to herself in the dark.
Nickie could remember a time when she was fleet of foot, a whippet. Back then, when she was young, she and her sister ran races by the river, way upstream. They tore along, skirts tucked into their knickers, feeling every rock, every crevice in the hard ground through the soles of their flimsy plimsolls. Unstoppable, they were. Later, much later, older and a bit slower, they met in the same spot, upriver, and they walked together, sometimes for miles, often in silence.
It was on one of those walks that they spotted Lauren, sitting on the steps at Anne Ward’s place, a cigarette in her hand and her head leaning back against the door. Jeannie called out to her, and when Lauren looked up, they saw that the side of her face had all the colours of the sunset. ‘He’s a devil, her old man,’ Jeannie had said.
They say you speak of the Devil and then you feel the heat. As Nickie stood there, remembering her sister, her elbows propped on the cold stone of the bridge, chin resting on her hands, eyes cast down at the water, she felt him. She felt him before she saw him. She hadn’t spoken his name, but maybe Jeannie’s whispering had conjured him up, the small-town Satan. Nickie turned her head and there he was, walking towards her from the east side of the bridge, cane in one hand, cigarette in the other. Nickie spat on the ground like she always did, and said her invocation.
Usually she’d leave it at that, but this night – and who knows why, maybe she was feeling Lena’s spirit, or Libby’s, or Anne’s, or Jeannie’s – she called out. ‘It won’t be long now,’ she said.
Patrick stopped. He looked up as though surprised to see her. ‘What’s that?’ he snarled. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, it won’t be long now.’
Patrick took a step towards her and she felt the spirit again, angrily hot, surging up from her stomach to her chest and into her mouth. ‘They’ve been talking to me lately.’
Patrick waved a hand at her in dismissal, said something she couldn’t hear. He continued on his way, and still the spirit wouldn’t be silenced. She called out, ‘My sister! Your wife! Nel Abbott, too. All of them, they’ve all been talking to me. And she had your number, didn’t she? Nel Abbott?’
‘Shut up, you old fool,’ Patrick spat. He made as if to come towards her, just a feint, and Nickie started. He laughed, turning away again. ‘Next time you speak to her,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘do give your sister my best.’
Jules
I WAITED IN the kitchen for Lena to come home – I rang her phone, I left voicemail messages. I fretted hopelessly, and in my head you scolded me for not going after her, like you’d gone after me. You and I, we tell our stories differently. I know that, because I’ve read your words: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning. You were heroic, without context. You didn’t write about how I got there, about the football game, or the blood, or Robbie.
Or the pool. When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, you say, but what a selective memory you have, Nel! I can still feel your hand on the back of my neck, I can still remember fighting against you, the agony of airless lungs, the cold panic when, even in my stupid, hopeless, drunken stupour, I knew I was going to drown. You held me there, Nel.
Not for long. You changed your mind. With your arm locked around my neck, you dragged me towards the bank, but I’ve always known that there was some part of you that wanted to leave me there.
You told me never to talk about it, you made me promise, for Mum’s sake, and so I put it away. I suppose I always thought that one day, far into the future, when we were old and you were different, when you were sorry, we’d return to it. We’d talk about what happened, about what I did and what you did, about what you said and how we ended up hating each other. But you never said that you were sorry. And you never explained to me how it was that you could have treated me, your little sister, the way you did. You never changed, you just went and died, and I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.