She gets up. Stretches out her back, bending each arm behind her shoulders and pushing down on the elbow. Then she proffers her hand to Solomon, saying, ‘Quick dip in the sea?’
Sol rises from his squat and puts his tiny sandy hand in hers and she thinks, Oh please put your little hand in mine forever. It is the very best feeling, enclosing your child’s soft hand in your own.
Her writing pad is on the lounger, pen resting on it at an angle.
February
Birdie
It took a while for the body to be released from the coroners. Moukie was named next of kin on Saskia’s passport so he’s organised the funeral. DS Melissa Harcourt told me the date and time when I handed over my recordings to her for use in her investigation. She said I could email them to her as an attachment (as if I know how to do such a thing) or burn them onto a CD (again, bewildering).
I said, ‘Actually I’ve got tapes. Little mini ones, you know, the type that go in a dictaphone. Quite a few of them. Shall I drop them off?’
‘Tapes?’ she said, as if I’d said ‘parchment scrolls’. I suppose hers isn’t a cassette generation, never having taped the Top 40 off the radio. She looked even more bemused when I handed her the little boxes.
‘These will be very useful,’ she said. ‘I’ll contact you if I need to fill in any gaps.’
I’ve got into the habit, now, of narrating my life. I do it all the time in my head.
Here I am at Hampstead Cemetery under a spattering rain, at a graveside that resembles Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ video.
Never seen so many long legs in sheer black tights, so many red lips, so many dead eyes. This is the sexiest funeral I’ve ever been to and I bet none of these giraffes will make a play for the sandwiches.
Your lights are on, but you’re not home
Your mind is not your own.
People are being poked in the eye by other people’s umbrellas but the rain is hardly rain, more like a fuzz of moisture held in the air. I don’t bother with umbrellas because I don’t have a hairstyle to protect.
People are looking at the coffin and thinking about her body. I know this, because it’s what we all think about at funerals. The body, the state it’s in, how the person you knew and loved, who moved about and laughed and talked and whose brain had thoughts is now an inanimate object inside a box.
I think about how she filled my flat with her complicated life, her drinking and her curtain-twitching and cooking burgers or macaroni cheese and watching The Hotel and how much I loved it. How quiet my flat is now.
And what’s bothering me is not just her body but the fact that no one here knows who I am. I spent her final weeks with her, and no one knows about it. No one knows how much it mattered to the both of us, or about the plans we made, and I know it shouldn’t be important – in fact it makes me sound like a baby, putting myself at the centre of the grief – but actually it does matter. The acknowledgement of the part you played in the person’s life does matter.
I don’t know anyone at the graveside and I don’t know where the reception will be, or even if there is one, so I’m not going. I’m walking out through the high iron gates of the cemetery, onto Fortune Green Road. Manon was right about the postmortem. Whatever they did to her, and I’m in no doubt she was killed by the Titans lot, was covered up by the booze in her system.
‘Right, as predicted it’s an open verdict,’ Manon said on the phone. ‘Basically, they found massive alcohol levels in her blood. Coroner’s theory is she was hammered, she fell down the stairs, knocked her head on the skirting, was knocked unconscious and bled to death. It’s possible the bleed was from the opening of an historic injury, maybe from when that car hit her. Anyway, they didn’t do toxicology or anything. We’ve got the Latvian chap in custody here, so I’m trying to get some pressure put on him to confess. Y’know, say you did this one as well and we’ll be more lenient about the other matter. That kind of thing. At the moment though, it’s Bez komentaˉriem all the way.’
‘Bez—?’
‘No comment. In Latvian.’
‘So if I hadn’t sat there in that stupid police reception, if I hadn’t gone to the cash and carry …’
‘Don’t go there, Birdie. Doesn’t get you anywhere. We all could’ve done things differently.’
Past Tesco Metro and a strange bathroom shop, enormous and seemingly without any customers. The thought of opening the Payless fills me with tiredness. I can’t be bothered. Moving to Spain like we planned, well it holds no appeal now she’s gone, except the prospect of change ahead – that I miss. I’ve had a chat with a commercial estate agent, who said I could sell Payless easily, and he’d even look out for a small salon for me, let me know if anything comes up locally. Change doesn’t have to be seismic, after all. It can be by degrees.
A going concern, as opposed to a joint enterprise, that’s what I’m after.
It’s downhill all the way to Kilburn from here and the gentle decline down Mill Lane and the Kilburn High Road would carry me along, like the flow of a river, but I wait for the 328 bus instead.
May
Manon
The baby was breech, born by caesarean section. In the hot post-natal ward, Manon was paralysed from the waist down, in support stockings and dry-mouthed. The baby slept in a transparent plastic box on wheels beside the bed. And slept. And slept. I am a natural at this, Manon thought. Always knew I would be. So calmly maternal am I that my baby is sleeping through on day one. She pitied the poor screamers in the next bay who did not have her knack. Mark brought her M&S mini trifles and while he was shopping, she tried to make herself look presentable to him, which was ridiculous after having abdominal surgery.
Day two and the baby still didn’t do much waking. The hippy manuals she’d read claimed everything would happen naturally – the baby would ask to be fed, and would find the breast and suckle there, adorably.
Manon cuddled the baby a bit, talked to him, did a bit more expert mothering while he slept. The midwives, surprisingly disdainful and brusque, ignored the pair of them, only occasionally stopping by to dole out painkillers or empty her catheter. They seemed to her unkind almost to the point of contempt – was Manon over-sensitised by hormones, her feelings gaping like her abdomen?
It was on the second night, while she was still immobilised by the surgery, that the baby began to scream. He screamed and screamed, a bloodcurdling cry of torment, which turned him red with the effort of it. Manon held him, kissed him, forced herself up dragging the catheter. Perhaps this is what people meant when they described walking babies up and down in the night. When she tried to put him to the breast, the baby seemed to only half open his mouth, then fall off. And nothing seemed to be coming out.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Manon said to a midwife, but the midwife wasn’t listening.