Swimming Upstream

20

They buried Uncle Silbert two weeks later, a sunny Tuesday morning in late June, “they” being the vicar and a taciturn but ostentatious middle-aged man whom I suspected to be his grandson. He was dressed in a long suede jacket with a fur collar, and had a portly stomach and a long shiny black car. I thought his car was the hearse when it first arrived but that came along afterwards, rolling reverently over the gravel towards us. When it stopped he got out and stood by the car door and waited without saying a word, and it seemed as if there was going to be no-one else; so we three girls led the way inside, followed awkwardly by the small crowd in the porch.

All in all there were fewer than a dozen people: us, a handful of neighbours, two district nurses, and the man in the suede jacket, who had to keep going outside to answer his mobile phone. It would have been more if you'd counted the six pallbearers but they didn't stay for the service. I found myself feeling glad for the first time that Uncle Silbert had died with nothing; nothing, at least, that his family could get their undeserving hands on. I hoped that the funeral had been expensive.

We took the front row and stood and watched as they lowered the coffin down solemnly onto the empty grating before the altar. The nurses were in the middle somewhere behind us, the neighbours huddled apologetically into a pew at the back, mumbling into their prayer books. Shelley, Zara, and I sang out loudly, to compensate, our voices echoing plaintively around the empty chapel.

When the service was over we tramped over the springy mounds of grass that covered the graveyard and watched as they lowered the coffin into the ground. Zara was standing next to me, crying softly, while the vicar talked a lot about Jesus and only very abstractly about Silbert and it even made me wonder for a split second if they'd got the right person, if anyone really knew who it was laying there anonymously in the coffin in the ground.

“I can't remember what he looks like,” I burst out in a loud whisper to Zara, then looked up, worried that I had interrupted the vicar's monologue. I felt a sudden surge of fear, fear that he would slip away and I'd make myself forget him and that then I wouldn't be able to grieve again for another twenty years.

I felt Zara slip her hand into mine. “Just close your eyes,” she whispered.

So I did. I stood there holding Zara’s hand and wobbling slightly on the uneven ground, the brim of my hat shading my face from the already warm morning sun. I closed my eyes and then I saw him quite clearly, lying there with his pale face and his thin lips and his aquiline nose, dressed in Zara's red jumper with his bony arms sticking out at the sleeves.

When I opened my eyes again, Tim was standing opposite. He was wearing a long dark coat and black boots despite the heat and his head was bent down. It struck me how handsome he looked, like some hero from a period drama. Sensing my eyes on him, maybe, he glanced up briefly and I smiled at him. He smiled back and winked at me, and I felt such a warm glow inside that in that moment I wondered if I loved him, maybe, after all. Tim’s eyes continued to meet mine. I blushed and looked back down again into the ground.

“...and Jesus said unto them,” said the vicar, “this is the gateway to heaven. And therein will you find your salvation.”

Then he added something about holy washing and I had to let go of Zara's hand and turn away under the pretence of a coughing fit, but really I was trying to stop myself from laughing because all I could see when I closed my eyes was a row of mine and Catherine's knickers hanging over a radiator in some heavenly bathroom, glowing ethereally in the everlasting light - which in turn triggered a knot of pain in my chest, because Catherine wasn’t here, and I was pretty certain that I would never see her underwear draped over the towel rail in my bathroom again. Heaven only knew if I would ever see her again, at all.

When the service was over, Zara and Shelley stopped to talk to the vicar and I headed off with Tim through the gravestones and through the trees until we reached a stile crossing a fence into the car park beyond. My high heels were sinking into the soft turf. We stopped for a moment and I pulled off each shoe in turn, and scraped off the moss and earth with a finger.

“Here,” said Tim, as I wobbled, and offered me his arm. I grabbed hold of the sleeve of his coat, and Tim steadied me, with an arm around my waist. I glanced back briefly towards the church entrance where the girls were waiting. Zara was standing on the path, shading her eyes with her hands. She nodded towards the car park, then pointed to the church and she and Shelley wandered off up the path towards the vestry.

Tim was climbing over the stile, his coat sweeping the fence.

“Sit a minute,” he said, pulling me down next to him on the stile. We sat silently for a moment, watching as Zara and Shelley disappeared round the corner.

“Zara seems well, given what’s happened,” I commented. “I thought this might set her back, losing Uncle Silbert. But it doesn’t seem to have done.”

“She’s been good,” said Tim. “She seems to be on the mend.”

“She certainly looks happy.”

“How about you? Are you okay?” asked Tim.

“Not really,” I said. “I feel like some kind of rug has been pulled from underneath me. Everything’s falling apart.”

Tim took my hand and held it tight. “You mean Uncle Silbert?”

“Partly, yes.”

I paused. And then I told him about Martin. I wasn’t sure how he would react, but I owed him an explanation, or something. Or maybe I just needed to connect with him, with my remaining friends. I needed to not feel so alone. But when I’d told him, Tim looked hurt and angry, and he let go of my hand. I realised that I’d done the wrong thing and isolated him instead.

“The bastard,” he said.

“It’s really hurt Catherine. And now she’s gone.”

“She’ll get over it,” he said.

“I doubt it.”

Tim stared away up into the trees. I knew that he was angry with me as well as Martin. I knew that he felt betrayed. I knew that he was secretly wondering whether I really wanted Martin. I now regretted having told him.

“I never wanted it to happen,” I said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. I knew he liked me, it’s true, I could sense that. But it was all one way. I swear. And even if it wasn’t, do you seriously think I would have risked hurting Catherine, risked my friendship with her? Apart from Zara, she was the best friend I ever had.”

“I’d like to punch his face in,” said Tim.

I sighed. Tim was no different from any other bloke in this respect. His pride was hurt because he felt that I was his. And that was all that he could think about.

Tim sat and looked at the church in silence. I turned away and put my head in my hands.

“It’s not just about him,” I said. “It’s triggered things. Other things. I just can’t stop feeling frightened. I feel like something terrible is about to happen, every minute of the day.”

Tim didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Let me look after you.”

I swallowed hard and wiped my eyes on the back of my hand. Tim put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round to face him. “I love you Lizzie,” he said. “I've loved you from the very first moment I set eyes on you.”

I looked up at him and smiled, briefly. For a few moments we just sat there, the air around us warm and still, the sweet, sickly smell of cow parsley, clover and knapweed mingling and rising up from the hedgerows.

Then Tim said, quietly, so that I almost didn't hear him, “But you don't love me.”

I looked up again. “I do ...” I began, but I was too slow.

Tim got up and looked me squarely in the eye. I could see he was angry again.

“Bullshit,” he said, and jumped off the fence and into the car park.

“Tim!” I yelled after him, but he was gone.

Back at the house we sat in the living room, where we ordinarily never sat, and surveyed each other in gloomy silence. It was a big room. There were a couple of paintings propped up on the floor against the wall and dustsheets over the furniture. The room, which was cold and never got enough light anyway, was suitably funereal. It looked like the front room in an American horror movie.

Zara kept getting up and making tea. Every time she got up and went out to the kitchen I jumped, thinking there had been a knock on the door and that she was going to answer it.

“He's got a key,” said Shelley, after a while.

“I know,” I said. “I just feel bad, that’s all.”

Zara came back in with the teapot.

“He'll come back,” said Shelley. “When he's ready.”

Zara put down the teapot and stared at her, her tear-stained face illuminated with hope.

“Do you really think so?” she said in a whisper.

“She doesn't mean Uncle Silbert,” I told her. “She's talking about Tim.”

“Oh,” said Zara. “I see.” She sat by the window and stared out onto the front lawn. “I can't believe he's gone,” she said.

“Who are we talking about now?” asked Shelley.

“Uncle Silbert,” I offered. “And maybe he will. That’s what Catherine would say. Maybe he’s here with us now.”

“He is,” said Zara. “I know it. I can feel him around us.”

“You’re spinning me out now,” said Shelley. “I’ll go and make some more tea.”

When Shelley was out of earshot Zara grinned and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

I felt something tighten inside my chest, a fluttering of my heart. I seemed to have been in this semi-permanent state of anxiety since the day after the party, since Uncle Silbert died. It felt as though I was waiting for something bad to happen at every turn.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“You bet,” said Zara. “I’m more than okay.”

“More than okay?” I said. “Doesn’t that mean “not okay”, for you?”

“No,” laughed Zara. “It doesn’t. It means I’m pregnant.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“I’m certain. I’ve been to the doctor. I thought it was just what with being ill and everything that I was so late. It didn’t even occur to me that that was what it was. But the doctor confirmed it. I’m ten weeks gone.”

“Oh my God! That’s… incredible.”

“I know.” Zara grinned happily.

I hesitated. “So … well, you’re having it?”

“Of course I’m having it Lizzie!” Zara looked at me as if I was stupid. “This is what I’ve always wanted, all my life! You know that. You know I always regretted not having the baby before, Doug’s baby. Now I’ve got a chance to get over that.”

“But… what did the doctor say?”

“He said I’m having a baby.” Zara was starting to look cross.

“But… what about the illness? And the drugs?”

“He’s taken me off the mood stabiliser and put me on a different anti-depressant.”

“So, the doctor said it’s okay?”

“Yes.”

“I mean did he say you should have it?”

Zara hesitated. “Yes. Of course. You don’t kill a baby just because you’re depressed.”

“I know that. But you weren’t just depressed, Zara, you were psychotic.”

“It’s my choice. He said it was my choice.”

“But what did he advise?”

Zara was silent. I looked across at her, sitting curled up in the armchair in the corner, her legs underneath her, her hands in her lap and her golden hair tumbling over her shoulders. She looked calm and peaceful, more so than I’d seen her in a long time. “He said it wasn’t going to be easy,” she admitted. “But that it was my choice.”

I sighed. “Well, of course. That’s true.”

“Life changes direction,” said Zara. “You just have to go with it. You have to “Feel the Fear and do it anyway””.

I said, “That book’s not for people with manic depression, Zara.”

Zara grinned back at me and we both burst out laughing.

“See? I’m well now,” said Zara. “I feel well. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” I paused. “Are you going to tell James?” I asked her. “I assume it’s his?”

“No. I mean, yes, it’s his. But I’m not going to tell him. He doesn’t want me. And I can tell you right now, he won’t want the baby. He’ll think it’s a trap. And he’ll pressure me to get rid of it. Like Doug did. I’m not having that.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Oh yes I do. He’s young. He’s ambitious. He doesn’t want a family. And if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want a baby with me. Not with my genes. The last time I saw him he looked at me like I was crazy.”

“You were,” I smiled. “A bit.”

Zara smiled. “I know. But I’m not any more. My nurse said that I may not have another episode for years.”

“Was that really what she said?”

“Okay. She said I could also have one again next week.”

“And coming off the medication?”

“She said that it was a possibility that the pregnancy hormones would keep me “buoyant””.

“But?”

“But that I could get ill again.”

“So, about James… well, I just thought, if you get ill again then… maybe you could do with the help.”

“No. He won’t help. He won’t want it.” Zara’s face suddenly lit up. “Hey, though. Here’s an idea. You could help me. We could do it together. Didn’t you say that you’d have to move out of Lynne’s at some point? You could move in here, have Clare’s room. We could bring it up together!”

As Zara turned away from the window to face me her golden hair caught the light and glowed like a buttercup and for a second I could see her aura spread out all around her. I watched her little chin jut out and her big blue eyes wrinkle up the way they did whenever she asked a question. I thought about Tim. And I thought about how safe and secure it would be, the four of us living here like a family, with Zara’s baby.

And then I thought about Larsen, about Catherine, and Uncle Silbert and the fear came creeping back again. It was like a sick feeling that just kept rising up in my chest like bile, and never really going away. But I couldn't talk about how I was feeling because I knew that Zara would try and reassure me, and there was simply nothing anyone could say to make it go away. So I sat there on the sofa in the dusky living room which smelled of joss sticks and dust and Zara's oil paints which were spread out across the table, and I just smiled and said, “Maybe we could,” because I didn't know how to tell anyone that I was terrified that they’d gone, Larsen, Catherine, Uncle Silbert, and that it could happen to anyone at any time; that it could happen to me, and to Zara and to Tim too, and that eventually it would, to all of us; it would happen to all the people that you cared about and the more you cared the worse it would be, when one day they just weren't there any more.

“Lizzie? So what do you think?”

“It sounds like a plan,” I said. “But quite a big one. Let me think about it for a bit.”

“Okay, okay,” Zara laughed.

I stood up and looked round the room. “You're painting. Those are yours,” I said to Zara, realising suddenly. “You're painting again. That's what the dustsheets are for. “

Zara grinned at me coyly. “Well ... I'm giving it a go.”

I threw a cushion across the room at her.

“Okay, okay,” she smiled. “I'm painting again.”

“These are really good,” I said, getting up and taking a closer look at the ones against the wall. They were all of flowers again, but they were different from the still-lifes I'd seen in her room before. These were abstracts, and really atmospheric. There was one of a row of daffodils on a hill, with a big white cloud floating up above.

“Wordsworth,” said Zara. “I wandered lonely as cloud…”. I'm experimenting with poems about flowers.”

“That's great. Really great.” I picked up a gloomy canvas with a single blood red velvety rose, wilting against a black background.

“William Blake?” I smiled. “Oh rose, thou art sick…”

“Yes!” said Zara, excitedly. “That’s it!”

I turned to face her. “Maybe this is the right thing for you,” I said. “You seem really happy.”

“I am,” said Zara. “I really am.”

I caught the tube home. When I got to Baker Street it was already dark. I hurried through the empty back streets, glancing over my shoulder all the while. I’d never been nervous about walking home on my own late at night, and yet tonight I was alert to every sight, every stranger, every sound. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of fear and vulnerability that had been with me all day.

As I reached my front door, someone moved out of the shadows and up the steps behind me. I stifled a scream then realised who it was.

“Oh Tim,” I gasped. “It’s you.

Tim put his arms round me. “Who did you think it was?”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “Come on in.”

Tim stood in my kitchen in his long black coat and boots while I made hot chocolate for us both. He watched me as I opened cupboards and moved around fetching mugs and teaspoons from the sink. I spotted one or two bits of broken plastic that Zara had missed, on the floor below the cooker. As I bent down to pick them up, I had to steady myself with one hand on the floor.

“You're shaking,” Tim observed.

“I know. But I'm okay, honest.”

Tim looked at me suspiciously. I handed him a mug and he followed me into the living room.

He took off his coat and sat down. “I'm sorry about today,” he said. “What I said.”

“What did you say?” I smiled.

Tim put down his mug and smiled back at me. “Are you sure you haven't got anything stronger?”

I got up and fetched two glasses and a bottle of wine from the kitchen.

When I returned, Tim was standing by the window with his back to me, misting up the glass with his breath. I stood and looked at him for a moment, at the familiar tall lean back, the muscled forearms, the black curls at the nape of his neck. I walked up behind him and put my arms around him.

“You're wrong,” I whispered. “I do love you, you know.”

“But not in the right way,” said Tim.

“I don't know if I can love anyone in that way right now,” I told him. “There's too much I have to sort out.”

“Is that an excuse?”

I shook my head. “This isn't about you, Tim, this is about me. I've always depended on someone else for my happiness, and blamed them for my misery. I need to take control of my own life. I need to know I can survive on my own.”

“No man is an island,” said Tim.

“I know that. And that's true. But... this may sound crazy, but I don't feel I can be really free to let anyone love me properly until I don't need them to anymore.”

Tim turned to face me. “I can't help it,” he said. “I still want you.”

I sighed. “I don't know Tim. I don't know if I can promise you anything.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said and put his arms round me. And as I kissed him and as he unbuttoned my blouse I wondered if I were the one that was crazy and if I was giving up the securest thing I'd ever had for the freedom to face the world alone.

The radio was playing softly in the background. Tim was making a rollup with one hand, his other arm round me. He lit it and settled back against the pillows. I leaned forward and kissed him on the stomach.

“What did you think of the funeral?” I asked him.

“Gateway to heaven,” he said disdainfully. “Looked like a hole in the ground to me.”

I didn't say anything. “When I go,” he continued, “I want them to chuck me in the sea.” He took a puff of his rollup. I craved a puff myself, but took a deep breath instead

“Not a bad place to end up,” I agreed. “In the sea, your soul free and floating around with all the fish.”

“Lizzie, what happened to your father?” asked Tim. He asked this hesitantly, as people always did, because they weren't sure that they should be asking. I only minded that they might not really want to know.

“He died,” I said. “He was hit by a car. I was six. He collapsed, as he was crossing the road, and a car hit him. I was there outside our house, waiting for him on the pavement. I saw it happen.”

“Oh God,” said Tim. “I'm sorry. You've never really mentioned him before.” He squeezed my hand.

I said, “I suppose the subject just never came up. Until you asked, that is. I’ve never known how to talk about it without worrying that I’m upsetting someone else.”

“Someone else?”

I nodded. “No-one ever seemed to want to talk to me about it. It’s as if they think you’re going to crack up if they do. I just got used to shutting up about it. Until I met Catherine and Zara, that is. That’s the first time anyone wanted to talk about me. Before that… well, I got attracted to other people's problems and tried to solve them instead. It’s like some kind of self-nurturing by proxy. But it doesn’t really work.”

Tim nodded, so I carried on.

“It’s like everyone else’s pain was always out there needing attention. You seek out people who are the same as you, the walking wounded, because that’s what you know, what you’re comfortable with. But then they are so wounded too that they can never give you what you need. Larsen's father left when he was six, the same age as I was when I lost mine. When I told him about my father he dismissed it. Told me that having a dead father was preferable to having an absent one, in that a dead one was rejection only by default. I accepted what he said; I could see his point. But in the end it doesn't really matter who does the leaving. You still have to learn to live without them just the same. And if that's too painful ...”

“What?”

“You just convince yourself you never cared about them in the first place. Forget them. Replace them. Only, of course, that doesn't quite work. Not in the end, because there'll always be one day when you end up alone, when you have to face your ghosts.”

Tim looked up. “Is that what’s happening now?”

“I think so. Everything’s started coming back to me. Things that I had forgotten. Or if I did remember, it was just in a factual, anecdotal way. I’d lost the associated feelings. I could remember standing outside our house, the trees that lined the street, the sun shining down, even the dress that I was wearing that day, my favourite pink dress. But I couldn’t remember how frightened I was when the ambulance came, or what happened in the days and weeks that followed. It’s a bit like freeze framing scenes from a movie with no sound. “

“So what did happen, to you, I mean, when your dad collapsed?”

“A neighbour called an ambulance, and I stood there on the pavement and watched as they were both taken away.”

“Both?”

“My mother went with him. Pete, my brother, was at school. I was taken into a neighbour’s house. Then the police came and told me my dad was dead and my mum was staying at the hospital. They said she had had an asthma attack. She never really told me what happened. I stayed at the neighbour’s house for a few days with Pete. And then my mum came and took us home. But it wasn’t mentioned, wasn’t talked about. I suppose my mother just couldn’t.”

“So how did it feel, losing your dad like that?”

“Frightening. I know that we had to move. We couldn’t stay in the house, my mother told me that later. But all I remember at the time is we left suddenly with no warning. I still can’t remember anything much about it. Except feeling frightened. The whole time. Feeling… just scared. Pretty much what I’m feeling now, as it happens. I think my dad dying so suddenly like that… I think I must have thought that it was going to happen to my mother, and then to me too. I’ve always had these nightmares, about ghosts. I think that’s what they were about. Death. Ghosts coming to claim me, just like they claimed my dad.”

Tim hugged me to him. “That makes sense.”

“But that wasn’t the end of it. My mother then met the man who became my step-dad. He hated us, me and Pete. His pleasure came from making us unhappy. It wasn’t just the random, unpredictable violence, the times he hit us, pushed us from behind, so that we stumbled and fell, the times he kicked us up the backside, humiliated us, smacked our heads into walls….” Tim looked shocked, aghast. “It was the bullying, the teasing, the way he belittled us, called us names. It just erodes your self-confidence. Eats at the essence of you. It was as if he was trying to destroy me as a person. If I complained, tried to tell my mother, he would just say I was weak, couldn’t take a joke. My mum couldn’t cope with it, any of it. Nobody talked about what was going on. I think Pete felt so humiliated and angry that he didn’t want an ally in me; he just alienated himself from the whole family. Who could blame him? Nobody could acknowledge it. But that made it even more isolating. Sometimes I would watch my mother, I would know she wasn’t happy, and I would wonder if she would have it in her to leave. But then along came Keri. So we stayed. I just went to school to get away. Then Pete left, went to live with friends, and I realised that I could do the same. On my sixteenth birthday I packed my bags and left home.”

Tim was silent, taking it all in. He held me tighter. “What a bastard,” he said.

“I know,” I agreed. “But it wasn’t until Martin came along that I allowed myself to remember, relive it. How bad it had all been, you know? It’s not just the actual violence. It’s living with that permanent threat of it hanging in the air; that’s worse in so many ways. I spent most of my childhood treading on eggshells, trying not to upset him, trying to make him like me. It’s like those people you hear about who are kidnapped and then start to identify with their kidnappers. Violence, the threat of it - it makes you stop being yourself and start being what you think they want you to be.”

“You were just a kid,” said Tim, shaking his head. “I want to kill him.”

I nodded. “I know Pete felt that way. For a long time. Probably still does. He did the right thing, allowed himself to be angry, to hate him. Me, I just adapted, tried to be good, blamed myself when I wasn’t, when I made a mistake, got things wrong. My mother left him eventually. And I escaped it all, in the end, before then. I moved in with my boyfriend, David. I lived with him and his family for three years and realised for the first time what a normal family was like. Then I got a grant and went away to college and had the confidence to leave David behind. But the past crept back in. I was scared of being alone, facing myself. Until I met Larsen that was, and then it felt like I had finally found what I had always been looking for. That bond. That indescribable closeness. The thing that I had never had with a man, with a father, the thing that I had been missing all my life. That person who loved me so deeply, so passionately that he could never let me out of his sight. We were inseparable from the very start. It felt as though he was what had been missing all my life.”

Tim took his arm from round my shoulder. “So why did it end. With Larsen, I mean?” He picked up his Rizla papers and started to roll another cigarette.

“I think that what attracted us to each other was the thing that destroyed us in the end: we needed each other too much, to fill a void. We were literally each other’s “other half” when what we needed to be was whole. Neither of us had faced our ghosts.”

Tim was silent for a moment. He finished rolling his cigarette and turned to face me. “And now?”

I pushed back the bedclothes and stood up. I pulled on my dressing gown, drew back the curtain and stood for a few moments by the window looking out at the black chimney tops over the fire escape and at the bright, white full moon that sat alone in a vast and empty indigo sky. “I think now it’s time to face the truth about what’s happened and be who I really am again. And it’s something I need to do alone. Being with you is….” I paused. “You make me feel…”

“Brand new?” suggested Tim, with a smile.

“Brand new,” I smiled. “Like a movie star.” I turned to face him. “But I’m sorry, Tim. I mean it when I say it. I’ve got to do this alone.”