Page 56 of Pictures of Him

‘You’re not really going home, are you?’ Liv asks, lookingonly at Catherine. ‘You’re not going to leave me here on my own, surely?’

And Catherine starts to cry, half collapsing into Liv’s arms.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, tears turning to laughter. ‘How embarrassing. It’s just that it’s such a relief to see you.’

‘Look.’ I seize the moment. ‘Why don’t you go upstairs with Liv and show her where she’s sleeping. I’ll ask Mary to bring you some tea.’

‘All right.’

Catherine is smiling as she links her arm through Liv’s, and I notice, with a little surge of hopefulness, that as the two of them make their way up the staircase, the overnight bag goes with them.

Now

Greg has this theory about trapped grief and how it’s partly responsible for my mutism. He’s probably right. Years ago, when my mother died, I was physically unable to talk about it, as if there was a blockage in my throat. Liv and Sam used to say, ‘You should talk about her. You should tell us how you’re feeling.’

But every time I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’

And it was true, I couldn’t. Because to talk about her was to start crying, to feel the pain of absence, and I didn’t want to do that. I knew a better way. Block it, box it off, bury it. Pretend it hasn’t happened. So, Greg says, I was learning the patterns of mutism and dissociation even then.

At first my father tried to talk to me too. He’d assumed, I think, that something of our tight-knit triumvirate would continue, that I’d return home in the holidays to our house with its squeaking front door and the apple tree my mother loved whose blooms we now took as an insult, and we would talk and cry and try to keep her memory alive. This, after all, was what he did while I was away at university, crying with his friends and visiting her grave on an almost daily basis for more tears. He placed a framedpicture of my mother and me on my bedside table, the kind of photo that kills you with its portrayal of incidental love. We’re sitting on the deck of our beach hut, me slumped on my mother’s lap, her arm around my waist, the other hand raised towards my father with its glass of beer. Cheers, the photo says. I looked at that photograph for a long time, burning the image onto my brain: the faded red of my swimsuit with its white frill, my father’s blue-checked shorts, my mother’s cat’s-eye sunglasses. Then I put it away in a cupboard.

‘I’m sorry, Dad, it hurts too much to talk about her,’ I said, stonewalling every attempt at conversation. His brow would wrinkle and he’d do that buttoned-up frowning thing he does whenever he tries not to cry.

Soon, indecently soon in his case, we chose the same route to escape: I carved myself into a life with Sam and he married an American, an art dealer who was ten years younger than him. There was never any question that Carrie, as he calls her, would move to England. And although he drove to Bristol and took me out for dinner to say, ‘Carrie and I would love it if you came with us. You could finish your degree in New York,’ that dinner was really goodbye.

We used to phone each other every week or so for casual information swaps, nothing personal, nothing dark, and Sam and I stayed with them a few times, getting high on yellow taxis and takeaways in cardboard cartons. But really the relationship was reduced to labels, like those paper figures Daisy used to cut out. Here’s a father. Here’s a daughter. Let’s find some clothes for them to wear.

It’s never too late to grieve, Greg tells me, explainingyet again the five stages of bereavement. I’m stuck in the first one apparently – denial. He makes a lot of sense, this psychiatrist who is probably only a few years older than me. I am all about denial.

He uses a technique where he tries to get me to inhabit a difficult memory. Sam has chosen my memories for me since I don’t speak, and it happens that today’s trouble spot is bang on. Greg describes the twenty-four hours when I rang and rang my parents’ house but there was never an answer. Sitting on the stairs with the phone on my lap, ringing the same number again, and then again, and then again, as if I was deranged, as if these two people who had been the centre of my world were simply choosing not to take my call. Eventually I got hold of my father. ‘She’s gone into the hospice,’ he said, his voice breaking on the word. Hospice: even its consonants seem to contain sorrow. A tear breaks free, a solitary one, and Greg is far too professional to comment.

Fifteen years earlier

I’d never really had a hangover before, not like this, a savage sickness that seemed more psychological than anything else. I woke expecting to find you curled around me, wanting the comfort of your slow, quiet breathing, your warm skin. The shock of your absence made me fully aware of other things. I was wearing my bra but nothing else. My jeans and T-shirt were scattered around the room – nothing unusual there – but your clothes were not. What were you wearing last night? Jeans, dark blue ones, a washed-out black T-shirt with Bob Marley’s face on it. Those clothes were nowhere. I lay there rewinding my memory, but I couldn’t remember getting to bed and I thought you must have carried me. My head was hurting, my mouth was dry and there was no glass of water by the bed. But worse was the feeling of fear, of paranoia. I needed you so badly right then.

I got out of bed and I realised my body felt bruised. I thought I might have fallen over, perhaps when I was dancing, the last thing I could clearly remember. But I was bruised inside too, and I had a sense that we’d had sex but not the kind we usually had. I felt deeply ashamed. Ithought I must have encouraged it, pushed you into acting more aggressively. My instincts had been right: I hated the person I became on tequila.

It was Thursday morning and I thought you must have got dressed and gone to a lecture, which was so unlike you, and that gave me an even more intense feeling of panic. I thought perhaps we’d rowed, that you were angry with me, even that I had disgusted you.

I was vowing I would never drink again, not just tequila but any form of alcohol, as I walked through to the kitchen. Jack was there standing by the kettle and he grinned as I came in.

‘Morning! How’s your head?’

‘Terrible. I’m never drinking again.’

‘Tea?’

I didn’t like his smile; there was something off about it.

‘Where’s Lucian?’

The kitchen clock said 9.30, I noticed. You never got up before ten. Another brutal surge of panic, no breath left in my lungs.

Jack looked at me. ‘What do you mean, where’s Lucian?’

My heart was banging hard against my ribcage. I think even then I knew the answer.

‘He went to his uncle’s. You must remember that. You thought he was too drunk to drive but his uncle sounded odd, he said.’

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