‘I wish you could meet them,’ I say to Ella.
When I left university I desperately wanted a place of my own. I’d had a taste of independence – seen a world outside of Eastbourne – and I liked it. But the charity sector is built for job satisfaction, not salary goals, and the property ladder remained stubbornly out of my grasp. I moved back home, and never left.
Dad was fond of reminding me I didn’t know how good I had it.
‘Kicked out at sixteen to learn the trade, I was. You’d never have caught my old man doing laundry for Bill and me past our teens.’
I was fairly confident that Granddad Johnson had never been near a washing machine in his life, his wife having been the sort of woman who revelled in home-making and shooed intruders from the kitchen.
‘I worked twelve-hour days for years. By the time I was your age I had a flat in Soho and a wallet full of fifties.’
I exchanged a conspiratorial grin with Mum. Neither of us pointed out that it had been Granddad who had lined up the apprenticeship at a friend’s garage, and Granny who had sent food parcels up with the trade platers. Not to mention the fact that in 1983 it was still possible to buy a flat in London for fifty grand. I changed the subject before he claimed he’d been sent up chimneys as a schoolboy.
I was never academic, but I’d inherited my parents’ work ethic. I admired them both for the hours they put in to making the family business a success, and did my best to emulate them.
‘Find a job you love,’ Dad was fond of saying, ‘and you’ll never do a day’s work in your life.’
The trouble was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got a place at Warwick to do sociology, scraped a 2:2 and left with no clearer idea. The first step on my career path was an accidental one. I took a job with Save the Children, collected a red body-warmer and clipboard, and traipsed the streets, knocking on doors. Some people were kind, others less so, but I soon discovered I did have a little of my parents’ charm, after all. I recruited more monthly donors that first month than the rest of the team put together. A temporary promotion to regional supervisor ended when a position became vacant for the national post, and I slid into a desk that felt a world away from the exam halls of an undiagnosed dyslexic teen who would never amount to anything. ‘Chip off the old block,’ Dad said.
I worked closely with the fundraising team, thought up innovative ideas for raising awareness, and looked after my three-hundred-strong team of door-knockers across the country. I defended them fiercely from middle-class complaints about ‘chugging’, and praised each and every one of my staff for the contribution they made to children around the globe. I loved the job I’d found. But it wasn’t well paid. Living at home was the only option.
Besides, uncool though it might have been to admit it, I liked living at home. Not for the clean washing or the home-cooked meals, or my dad’s infamous wine cellar, but because my parents were genuinely good company. They made me laugh. They were interested and interesting. We chatted late into the night about plans, politics, people. We discussed our problems. There were no secrets. Or so they pretended.
I think of the vodka bottle beneath my parents’ desk; the others secreted around the house. Of the kitchen table littered with empty wine bottles, yet always spotless by the time I got up in the morning.
Towards the end of my first term at Warwick I spent the weekend with Sam, a friend from halls, at her parents’ house. The absence of wine at dinner felt strange, like they’d dished up a meal without knives or forks. A few weeks later I asked Sam if her parents minded her drinking.
‘Why would they?’
‘Aren’t they teetotal?’
Sam laughed. ‘Teetotal? You should see Mum on the sherries at Christmas.’
My cheeks burned. ‘I thought … They didn’t drink when I came to stay.’
She shrugged. ‘Can’t say I noticed. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they don’t. Like most people, I guess.’
‘I guess so.’
Most people didn’t drink every evening. Most people didn’t fix a gin and tonic when they got home from work, saying it was ‘six o’clock somewhere, right?’
Most people.
‘All set?’ Mark gets into the car and puts on his seatbelt. He looks at me in the rearview mirror, then twists around to see me properly. He clears his throat, a subconscious habit I recognise from our early meetings. It’s a form of punctuation. A full stop between what’s been said and what he’s about to say. A way of saying: ‘Listen to me now: this is important.’
‘After we’ve been to the police …’ He hesitates.
‘Yes?’
‘We could make an appointment for you to see someone.’
I raise an eyebrow. See someone. The middle-class euphemism for go find a shrink – you’re going nuts. ‘I don’t need to see another counsellor.’
‘Anniversaries can do funny things.’
‘Hilarious,’ I joke, but Mark doesn’t smile. He turns back around and starts the car.
‘Think about it at least.’
There’s nothing to think about. It’s the police I need, not a shrink.
But as we pull out of the drive I take a sharp breath and lean across Ella to put a hand on the window. Maybe I do need a shrink. For a second, that woman walking … It isn’t Mum, of course, but I’m shocked by the intensity of my disappointment, by the very fact that a part of me thought it might be. Yesterday, on the anniversary of her death, I felt her presence so strongly that today I’m conjuring up ghosts where none exist.
And yet I have the strangest feeling …
Who says ghosts don’t exist?
Doctors? Psychiatrists?
Mark?
Maybe it’s possible to summon the dead. Maybe it’s possible they return of their own accord. Maybe – just maybe – my mother has a message for me.
I share none of this with Mark. But I stare out of the window as we drive to the station, willing myself to see ghosts, to see some sort of sign.
If Mum’s trying to tell me what really happened the day she died, I’m listening.
SEVENTEEN
I’ve been here too long. The longer I stay, the more likely it is that someone will see me.
But I have to do this now – it could be my only chance.
Mark straps the baby into the back of the car, and Anna slides into the adjacent seat. Mark closes the car door. He stands for a second with his palms flat on the roof of the car. Like that, he’s concealed from Anna, but I can see the anxiety on his face. Is he worried about Anna? The baby? Or something else?
He walks back to the side of the house, where Robert is lingering, pretending to move some pots about. I feel panic building inside me, even though he can’t touch me, can’t even see me. The two men talk in low tones through the railings, and I wonder if Anna can hear the same snippets I do.
‘… still grieving … very difficult … a touch of postnatal depression …’
I wait.
They drive away. Robert abandons his plant pots and goes back inside.
And then it’s time.
A single breath later I’m through the locked door and standing in the hall. Instantly I’m overwhelmed with sensation, assaulted by memories I never imagined would have lingered.
Painting the skirting boards, kneeling awkwardly over my growing bump. Piling duvets on the stairs for a pint-sized Anna to sledge down, you egging her on, me with my fingers over my eyes.
Playing happy families. Hiding how we really felt.
How easily life changes. How easily happiness disintegrates.
The drinking. The shouting. The fights.
I kept it from Anna. I could at least do that for her.
I check myself. The time for being maudlin is long gone; too late now to dwell on the past.
I move quickly and silently through the house, my touch feather-light. I leave no mess, no prints. No trace. I want to see the papers Anna put to one side. My diary. The photographs that only tell a story when you know the way it ends. I look for the key that will tell everyone why I had to die.