was in the ascendency, but she had known for many years that she was performing her role out of habit. She had lost the feeling that she cared whether her students did well in life and whether they understood the world they had chosen to make their own. She thought an end to the professional performance would bring relief, but the removal of the distraction of a demanding career gave her too much time for other thoughts. Cracks began to appear in the walls she had built within herself, the internal prison cell that held her grief.
Her daughter, Caitlin, has been dead for nearly ten years. Killed, apparently manslaughter – so slaughtered, then – aged nineteen years old, by her boyfriend, Ryan.
Caitlin’s death caused a split, a warp that skewed Anna so she no longer fit the smooth planes of her life. She was changed by her loss. But so was everything. Grief shone a different spectrum of light; it revealed the well-formed, polished facets of normality as flawed, treacherous, deceitful. The world did not respond in a way that made sense. Her daughter had been killed, and no one beyond a small circle of family and close friends seemed to care. Where once life had run on guidelines of tolerance, understanding and certainty, now misery and hatred set the rules. She had never known such hate before. For Ryan, for the parents that raised him and stood by him, for the jury who believed his explanation of an accident. For a world that didn’t find it a tale that was worth telling. Hate reshaped her.
In the long-ago months immediately after Caitlin’s death and the court case that followed, Anna blasted out her sorrow with an exhausting frenzy that was at least a partial distraction from the greater pain of loss.
This early rage was further fuelled by the response of the criminal justice system. She had not been able to accept the conclusion of the court and the men and women of the jury, whom she had particularly relied upon to understand the terrible loss of her girl. They decided that Caitlin was dead by accident, that a man who violated her body with kicks and punches, demonstrably over time, hadn’t meant it. This bewildering blunting of his crime almost killed Anna. Those men and women had decided that Caitlin wasn’t supposed to die. She was just supposed to be cowed, controlled by the pain Ryan caused, frightened enough to do his bidding. And this somehow lessened the gravity of the offence.
Slowly, time passed and the abstract, animal efficiency of the will to survive overcame and then subdued Anna’s flailing strategies. Memories of her daughter became distant, fleeting, irregular. She gradually twisted grief away. The only direction for such a motion to take was inwards. Burning anger and the parched, agonising cold of sorrow were bound together and banished to the deep dark space inside, the emptiness created by her loss. All that she felt was screwed up tight, a dense pebble of cold and heat lodged at her core, baulked and buttressed with the betraying forms of normality. For long stretches of time she felt only the pernicious and pallid warmth of the blended extremes.
Worthwhile distraction, a successful career a vital component of the mortar in these walls, allowed them to stand almost always unregarded, for many years. But now the gaps are beginning to show, and the effort of managing the constant mending, though unconscious, weighs heavy on her.
In retirement, Anna has in part achieved diversion with an endless string of domestic chores and petty errands. She shops, fusses in tetchy boredom about the house, changes cushion covers, taking weeks to decide which colour, pretending she cares. Nothing really changes; the house is much the same as it was when Caitlin died, when Anna’s husband Michael still lived there, but she finds ways to string out the ordinary acts of maintenance.
She meets with a small group of friends, drinks coffee, drinks wine. She thinks about ways to fill her time. She walks almost daily in the fields and woods near her home. And she writes portraits of dead people she has never met.
*
Nine years before, when Ryan was convicted and jailed for causing Caitlin’s death, Anna searched newspapers for a report of the crime and the court case, for signs that the world reflected her fury or had at least marked her loss. She found one short paragraph in the local paper. An explanation: he was of good character, he had snapped, he had caused death by accident; being jilted had provoked him, made him lash out. Provoked. As though it were Caitlin who was responsible, as though she had pushed violent death upon herself. Anna read this and vomited, her skin prickling with heat and cold. This disingenuous framing and the indifference of its bland retelling acted as an accelerant to her wild grief. Caitlin was mentioned only as a component in Ryan’s story. No more than that.
In the ruined months after the court case, when nothing worked, Anna pored over newspapers and watched news programmes. Could it really mean so little that people died? Could it really be of such little interest? She picked over the news, online and in print, archive and day-to-day, scouring the local and national papers for references to women killed as Caitlin had been, by men who had once claimed to love them. She discovered quickly that there were many of them – the statistics were readily available. But the women were, like Caitlin, as good as invisible. Women murdered in English towns, by exes and husbands, deaths too commonplace to rouse even curiosity. Mothers, sisters, daughters. Complex, beloved lives that, if they appeared at all, were marked only as an administrative round-up of local court activity. Anna’s black focus drove those around her to despair. Let it go, Anna, let it go. We know she mattered; we care.
Such cajoling tenderness, such love and frustration, such gentle holding down eventually told and Anna became compliant. She turned away from the terrible absences, the reminders of her girl. She quieted herself, externally. The turmoil inside soon could not be seen or heard. But in her quest, she had noticed others. Strangers in distant lands who died in terror attacks and checkpoint shootings. They were not even given a name. Multiple deaths from drone strikes, terrorist bombs, war, passed over as a tally of the activities of one side or the other. Death, it seemed, was only of interest if it excited the morbid thrill of the unusual, the lavish fetishising of television crime dramas. Domestic violence was certainly too drab a crime. Distant strangers were too insignificant to warrant the care of mourning as well as counting.
As grief slowed and stilled her, pulling her away from reminders of her daughter, she kept quiet attention on these other dead. It was a salve, of sorts. The news, this most ungentle showing of the world as an arena, a place of skirmishing and destroying, provided a strategy that allowed her, with unnoticed subterfuge, to tame her own grief; whilst reading, her anger came out, but as a response to news. The outrage she felt acted both as a reassurance that she remained alive to things outside of herself and as a substitute reason for her fury.
At first she noticed only that these people were not being noticed. Fifteen people, thirty-seven people, two people. She drew her private attention to their insignificance, to the careless passing over of their lives. She damned up her own anger and poured it by the ladle on their behalf. She felt a true connection, kinship, with their unknown families. Nineteen people were killed today. There has been a bus bombing; reportedly there are twenty-three dead. After a number of slowly becalming years, she went further than simply noticing them. She began to imagine what the people were like, eventually writing portraits for each. Inventing them gave weight to her care.
She calls them her invented ghosts. They have, in stealth, become a chorus, a quiet crowd, subtle sentinels of her grief and guardians of her homeless love. Over the last six years her collection of portraits has grown. Nine notebooks and journals are now filled with them. The latest one, an old green exercise book found in the attic, is nearly full.
It began on a morning much like this one, a cold and sunless day six years before and a little deeper into the winter. Christmas, itself a burden, had been passed with relative ease, though the relief of that was tarnished by the anticipation of the greater test to come. The most appalling of anniversaries was looming, a few small squares in the calendar away. Four years since Caitlin’s death, aged just nineteen.
On this
