As soon as I step into the hallway I feel it – a sense of otherness, a presence that is intense and strange, and yet not quite a presence at all. The air is heavy and thick, as if suffused with invisible smoke.
The door to the lounge is ajar. I walk up to it, softening my footsteps. My lips form a question. Are you there? But I barely have the chance to begin before a flash of something through the crack in the door catches my eye – a flutter of green, whipped across the gap and then withdrawn – and the flat of my hand is pressing against the door and opening the room to me.
She’s hanging from the ceiling light, swaying slightly in the breeze that blows through the open balcony window. The scarf that I last saw illuminated by headlights, blown darkly back by the wind, is fastened tightly around her neck.
She’s about fifty years old and she has shoulder-length brown hair and slim limbs. She’s wearing a discreetly stylish shirt dress, pale blue, the same colour as her open eyes.
I stand there motionless for a minute, and then I sit down on the carpet close by and watch her. I watch for the slightest uncurl of her fingertips, a minute twitch of her eyelids to show me that it’s not quite over. There’s nothing. She’s left me her last message.
I say it then.
I’m so sorry.
The words are small and clear in the silence. It isn’t enough, but it still needs to be said. I stay there next to her for a while – looking at her face, the sad lines of her mouth – and I wonder who she once was. Before she became a mother without a child. In her place, I can’t say I wouldn’t have done everything that she has done. I have no idea what it might have driven me to.
I get to my feet and go and look out of the window, down to the car below. I think about calling Francis, calling my mother, calling the police. I know that, when I do, these moments of silence will snap and the calmness of this shock will dissolve. Everything will change. I don’t yet know how. All I can see ahead is mist and shadows, and I’m walking into the darkness and the strange freedom it offers – opening myself up to it, and giving myself to my future on trust.
Leaving Home
Caroline, September 2015
THE ESTATE AGENT arrives bang on twelve – a sharp suit and a slicked-back haircut, looking barely out of his teens – and hovering behind him, a young couple smiling shyly, the woman’s hand resting on her pregnant stomach.
‘Still all right to take a look round?’ He’s elbowing his way through the front door, throwing out an expansive hand to showcase the living room, as if he’s the one who owns the place.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘If you want to know anything,’ I add, turning to the couple, ‘just ask me.’
I linger in the hallway, listening to the salesman’s patter: great south-facing light, original features, sound foundations. I’m not even sure how much he knows of what has happened here but, if he’s aware, he gives nothing away. A suicide doesn’t make for a great sales pitch, even one that has been wrapped up so neatly and smartly by the authorities; filed away and dismissed, with no need to probe further beneath the surface. Nothing to see here.
From where I’m standing, I can see the couple moving from room to room, and I’m watching the woman’s face and the emotions flickering across it: her eyes keen and thoughtful, narrowing as she takes in the space, as if she’s imagining it stripped of everything it contains and filled with her own things, moulded into somewhere new.
They finish up in the living room again, and the estate agent retreats to take a call on his mobile, barking instructions to some even more junior colleague. The couple are talking quietly to each other, gesticulating and sizing up, reading each other’s reactions. I watch the woman drift over towards the balcony window and stand beneath the ceiling light, and for a moment her expression blanks and she half shudders, as if someone is walking over her grave.
‘I think I’d paint this side of the room paler,’ she says. ‘Lighten it up a bit more.’ As she speaks, she glances over towards the doorway, seeing me in the hallway beyond, and her face flushes, caught criticizing. ‘It’s a lovely place,’ she says, louder, smiling tentatively at me.
‘Thanks.’ I take a few steps forward, hugging my arms around myself.
‘Are you staying local?’ the woman asks.
I half nod. ‘Renting around here in the short term,’ I say. ‘Just seeing how things go.’
‘I see,’ she says, though of course she doesn’t, not at all.
Outside, there’s the sound of scuffling; Eddie’s excited voice raised high and talking fast, his fists banging on the door. The key turns in the lock, and Francis comes in, letting Eddie run ahead of him to embrace me. I bend down and pull him against me, feeling the sturdy warmth of his body, his hair soft and sleek against my cheek.
The estate agent barrels back into the room, tucking his phone into his pocket. ‘Sorry about that,’ he says. ‘All done?’
The couple murmur their agreement and make their goodbyes, thanking us as they go. Francis turns to me, eyebrows raised. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asks. ‘Did they like it?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘It’s hard to tell.’
‘I guess we’ll see.’ He hesitates fractionally, then leans forward, drawing me against him and kissing the side of my mouth in a belated hello. I kiss him back, our lips not quite touching. Three months on, we’re still careful with each other – careful to the point of slight awkwardness. We don’t quite fit together yet, but it seems that the rough edges are being sanded off, eroding and smoothing into something more than serviceable.
Another brief pause, and then he nods towards the phone sticking out of my shirt pocket. ‘Anything today?’ he asks, his voice light.
I shake my head. ‘No. Almost a week now.’ I think of all the messages Amber has sent me in the past few months; dozens, maybe even hundreds. At first I thought she was practising the principle of keeping your enemies close, but lately I’ve started to wonder if the reason she wants to keep these links alive is because, just as I once saw an echo of myself in her, she now sees herself in me. I’m the only other one who’s been close to the person she loves, and she’s starting to realize that what she’s taken on isn’t easy. I never reply to her messages, but I haven’t blocked them, either, and I know exactly why. I think that, someday, I’ll be strong enough. That I won’t want this connection any more.
Francis lets it pass without comment. ‘I’ll get the lunch started,’ he says, raising his bag of shopping. ‘Eddie, do you want to come and help out?’
Eddie scampers after him to the kitchen, still chattering about the film they’ve seen. I listen and feel a smile lifting the corners of my mouth, feeling suffused with love for him, and hot on its heels is the dark weight of guilt that is its chain reaction; the fear that what I have is so much more than I should and that this precarious tightrope of luck is one I don’t deserve to walk. I’m used to this now. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, and wait for it to lift.
When it does, I wander over to the balcony window and look out on to the street. The young couple are still waiting at the bus stop down the street, bodies turned towards each other, chatting animatedly. The woman’s hands are making shapes in the air, as if she’s slotting the pieces of a puzzle into place.
I think of her face as she stood here, the sudden vacancy of it and the way she shivered. It could have been a coincidence, but deep down I believe that some trace has been left, some remnant that won’t be purged by coats of paint or pretty lampshades. I feel it often in the middle of the night, this force field. The presence of the woman who was once here, the pull of it drawing me magnetically to this window from my bed in the dark. And sometimes, I wonder if the same is true in that other house, hundreds of miles away and just across the road from where you still are; if some hint of the few days I spent there lingers, and if some ghost of me shakes whoever lives there now awake from uneasy dreams, filled with love and loss.
Acknowledgements