journey from her shoulders, tiredly, with a few shrugs. She pulls the curtains across the black windows, a small barrier against the fathomless squares of dark. Fine rain is still softening the night. It is a gentle visitor compared to the frost.
Gathering into herself, curled up on the sofa, adrift, she resumes refuge, thinking again about the woman in Baghdad. She pictures her in the garden, still and calm, a warm hand resting on each thigh. Anna worries that she is intruding. She wants to reach out, but she is nervous. She doesn’t know if she has a right to be here. She wants to say she is sorry.
*
Sometimes I have felt Mum’s grief pulling me, pulling me into her. I am on the end of a rope; she is the post to which I am tied. She is so firmly set, so deeply anchored in that place that however far I am, I start to circle, circle, circle, at first with a carelessness that seems to have no direction or destination, but as the circle winds in, as the rope shortens, I speed up, I feel the pull, I feel the reducing arc of my movement. I feel the dizzying rush as I am pulled and pulled until I move so fast and so tightly pulled that even without weight or body I am eviscerated by it. I become lost in a tunnel, a funnel, a wind-sucked shrinking spin that ends suddenly at my mother’s feet. I look up and see that she is as still as rock. Bound tight from head to foot by a million miles of grief.
Mum – I feel it spooling out from her even here – is reshaped by sorrow. When I died it broke her heart. Her heart has stayed broken; that break has handicapped the rest of her. It is terrible to see that pain-filled vastness inside her. She has pulled tight around herself to keep it all hidden, the sorrow that marbles her bones, coats her organs, decides her fate. She is diseased with sorrow. Yet I see her smile, talk, laugh. I have seen her with the usual group of old friends, laughing and having fun. It felt as comforting to me as if I were a child going to sleep in her lap. Those adult faces that accompanied my childhood, contributed guidance and steps and gifts to my growing up. And my darling mum, loved by them and laughing happily in their company. But I could still see her disease. It glittered through her skin like the darkness waiting. Sophie knows her so well; I think she sees it too. She is such a gentle worrier, such a kind and loving friend, she would know what is plain to see. I wish I knew what to do, to pull that blackness out. The blackness is for me. Not for Mum.
There. I catch, suddenly, a thread. A time when I was younger, sullen in that ordinary way of a teenager, but not opposed to walking in the woods with Mum. As we walked through the part of the woods where the bluebells were thickest, Mum suddenly turned off the path and walked into the middle of them.
‘Look, Caitlin!’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘No, I mean just the colour, look at it! It’s wonderful.’ She stood with her arms vaguely lifted outwards to encompass the yearly manifestation of colour that billowed across the woodland floor, buzzing in an ecstatic hover between purple and blue. Her face held a blissful half-smile of idiot pleasure, and for once I could see what she meant. The colour was wonderful. For the rest of the walk and when we got home, eating our pizzas and cheesecake that Dad went out to buy specially, Mum was in a happy, almost elated mood. It was easy to absorb her joyfulness, and soon Dad and I were as elevated as she. It was a very happy evening. Today’s happy evening was brought to you by the colour purple.
She would do that quite often. She would stop to absorb the sight of something that she suddenly found irresistible. She would always offer up what she was seeing for us to share, but I knew that in those moments she was expressing part of herself that didn’t need company. As an art history lecturer, she spent her life looking at paintings, artworks, filling her eyes with arrangements that had been created, if not inevitably to please the eye, to fill it. To be made sense-full by the cast of a human eye. She was serious about her work, absorbed, critical, excited often, irritated or angry at least as often. But it was only with scenes that happened by accident, or without the human view in mind, that she seemed to have this welling-up of wonder. She rarely articulated any thoughts about what she was looking at, certainly never subjected it to the dismantling analysis that in her work life she applied like a knife to various artworks, both to revere and revile. But she did offer the chance to share in her looking. Look, Caitlin, how beautiful it is! It might be a distant view, the accidental coincidence of building materials in an old part of a town, a decaying leaf. It might be something I couldn’t spot at all.
It tears at me. To see my mum like this, to know how unhappy she still is. As weak as he is, as ineffectual in life as he is, he remade my mum. He tore her inside out and remade her. She is remade by the consequences of his acts. She is battered by my death. My death, my death, my death. Not even my absence, but my death. My death has killed something in her. As death has caused me to cede all of myself to hurtling and rushing, it has caused her to be bound in rigid stillness, held immobile under weighted coils of grief.
Chapter 5
The trip to London, though unproductive, was a useful escape from the confines of home. There was no expectation of seeing Ryan, and for that time, he was not the central black spot of her thoughts. Back at home, he once more takes up her whole view. She retraces her sighting of him so often, so minutely, desperate for clues that would tell her things are not going well for him, equally desperate for signs that he prospers. She torments herself with how young he still looked, how much life still lies before him. She thinks he can only have been out of prison a little while, though she has made a policy of ignoring any mail that may have given her concrete information. She didn’t even know if she would have received any. But she had known somewhere, without deliberation, that the time for his release was due. It had been easy to think that shame would keep him away. It had been easy to hope.
She has been fending off messages and calls from Michael, from Sophie, from other friends. If only she were somewhere with no phone contact. If only she did not have to deal with it all. She listens to their messages impatiently, not liking to worry them. But it is impossible to talk about. What is there to say? They would begin their careful herding, their Anna-management. She knows it is love that orchestrates their actions; she knows herself how hopelessly far she could fall and understands her friends wishing to stop her falling again. But there he is. It takes more than common sense and self-preservation to know such a thing and understand how to live with it. He will live his life. And she is meant to believe that he has paid.
Dark thoughts chatter and scratch. Revenge is too grand a term. But retaliation, the lashing of violence sent back to its sire… Stop. She reaches, in spite of her frustration with the strategy, for the whisky bottle. The whisky soothes. She finds a calmer wish, for absence, not death. Yes, if she were in another place, she could at least guarantee she would not see him. She should just leave. She thinks briefly in terms of opportunity, of dreams from long ago – a move to mountains, a long slow drive down the northwest coast of America starting with an old friend in Seattle, a sabbatical in Barcelona. Plans that included a young Michael, a young Anna. Plans that depended, she sees quickly, on lapsed opportunities. And she doesn’t want to plan a grand trip or a relocation; she just wants to be somewhere else. A holiday will do – it will provide a quick fix and a way out of the stultifying, stressful drag of the last few days. If she leaves in a couple of weeks, she can avoid Christmas too. She leaves the whisky unpoured and makes tea before settling with purpose at the kitchen table.
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