Page 38 of Pictures of Him

Even so, I felt self-conscious walking into the lake in just my bra and pants; you, out of deference to me, I suspected, had also kept your boxers on.

‘Prudes!’ Jack shouted. ‘Hurry up. It’s fucking freezing.’

Alexa kicked her feet, sending up great white arcs of spray to splash us.

The water was cold, that deep, cutting bone-cold, butafter a minute or two of hard swimming we’d warmed up enough to float on our backs, the four of us in a row. I remember looking up at the clear blue sky and thinking that I had, finally, been accepted by your friends. Our remaining years at university stretched ahead, a glittering view of unhampered paradise. If only I’d known what was to come.

Now

It’s all about dissociation these days. The whys and the wheres and the how-to’s, as if I’m a floating balloon that has simply snapped its string. Greg seems to think he can fit all my pieces back together by taking me into the past, those times when I was known to disconnect. No easy task when you’re dealing with a mute.

He talks. I listen or don’t listen. But his words are in my bones, a slow-burning arthritis; they cut with the clarity of a scalpel.

He’s talking about my mother; he has a photograph of her that Sam must have given him and he asks me to look. One quick glance is all that’s needed; this picture lives beside our bed at home. She’s suntanned and laughing, head thrown right back; Sam used to say it reminded him of me.

‘I think you’re scared of pain,’ Greg says. ‘Lots of people are. You think that if you barricade yourself into this shell, into this wall of silence, you won’t feel the pain. Trouble is, you won’t feel anything else either.

‘When you lose someone you love,’ he continues, ‘their absence is everywhere. Every room you go into, every houseyou visit, every shop, every street, every park is marked by the fact that they are not there. But that doesn’t stop you searching for them.’

He lowers his voice.

‘I think you’re still searching, Catherine, aren’t you?’

Idiotically slow on the uptake, the day my mother died, I understood what absence meant. No more. Ever. No talking, no telling, no listening, no touching. My aloneness was infinite.

She died in the middle of the night, and on some instinct I woke up and walked out into the corridor to see my father putting her pillows and duvet against the wall. So I knew. Her bedding was no longer needed.

I went to see her, not breathing, perfectly still. No chance to say goodbye. To say, don’t go. Stay a little longer. Another hour, another night.

And then I was gone too, Greg’s snapped string, perhaps. There was a girl who floated somewhere watching the drama of this person in her father’s arms. ‘Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.’ He called her name, but for a moment she could not hear him. For a moment she could not see, hear, listen or feel. For a moment there was nothing.

Four months before: Catherine

We are just leaving the studio when my mobile rings and Sam’s number flashes up, sending me into a spiral of panic. I let the phone ring on to answer machine and then I go off on my own to the rose garden and sit down on a bench waiting for the message to come in, smiling with relief when I hear it.

‘Mama! It’s me. We miss you. Call us!’

Daisy on Sam’s phone. This I can handle. I love the way the kids sound much younger than they actually are whenever you hear them on the phone. When I call back, she picks up all breathy and excited, sounding about five years old.

‘Where are you, Mama?’

The question I’ve dreaded.

‘Sitting in a beautiful rose garden at a friend’s house.’

‘Which friend? Is it Liv?’

‘No, someone you haven’t met yet. Liv is here too, of course.’

My heart beats a little faster as I spin this version of the truth and quickly follow it with something else.

‘Tell me about your day. What have you been doing?’

They have been crabbing at Mevagissey, sitting on the harbour wall dangling lines studded with cubes of bacon. Cornish pasties afterwards and ice creams from a shop that had thirty-two flavours. I miss them suddenly, with a sharp, savage ache. Their smooth, suntanned skin, their high voices, their black-soled summer feet. Daisy’s laugh, surprisingly deep, a gin-soaked fishwife’s cackle, we always said. Joe’s obsession with absurd random facts and talking-dog videos.

‘I miss you,’ I say.

‘Then come and see us, silly.’

---