Page 67 of The Tapes
Vivian is out of her chair, at the window, fiddling with the blind in an attempt to peer into the distance. I think she’s the sort who needs to see something to be able to talk about it.
‘I lived over there,’ she adds, pointing towards a gap in the trees that I know leads towards the river.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you directly at the time. I wasn’t really paying attention,’ I reply. We look to one another with a shared understanding. We were both going through different, terrible things. Vivian’s daughter had been murdered, and it sounds like she almost lost her home to a flood. I was desperate to find out what had happened to my mother. Or maybe it was simply that I was drinking too much.
Vivian taps a spot on the wall roughly halfway up the window frame. ‘The floodwater was up to here,’ she says. ‘It happened so quickly. In the morning, they were saying they were hoping to hold back the water with sandbags, then, by noon they were saying we had to get out. There was no time to pack; I grabbed a few things and left.’
She’s still at the window, and again taps the patch of wall where she says the water reached. I have a feeling she does thisoften – but then I likely would if I’d been evacuated because of a life-threatening flood.
‘Lots of stuff got ruined at the old house…’ Vivian says, almost absent-mindedly. It’s as if she’s talking to herself, before she focuses back on me. ‘Your mum never directly handed me a tape but there’s a chance that she posted me something and I never got it. Or never opened it.’
A chance.
Vivian keeps talking, explaining. ‘The house was almost destroyed. It was more than a week after the flood until we were allowed back. Even then, I was living in a hotel for a while, trying to deal with the insurance company. It was chaos. Eventually the house was rewired and renovated and I managed to sell and move here – but there were boxes of things I never unpacked. The old house was still getting mail that I never opened because I didn’t see the point. It’s hard to worry about a water bill when your house is wrecked and you’ve been in a hotel for six weeks.’
Vivian had lost her daughter, then almost her house. Easy to see that she would stop caring about things like mail.
‘Have you still got all the mail you received back then?’
A nod. ‘Somewhere. Not just mail. There were a few things like fridge magnets and ornaments that were downstairs but survived. I didn’t really need them but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it all. I was focusing on the big things, like replacing furniture.’
The timing might work.Maybe. If Mum recorded the tapes a day or two before she went missing, she could’ve left one for me – and then mailed another to her friend. It would have taken a day or so to arrive, which would have been close to the time Vivian was evacuated.
We’re both nodding, having apparently come to a similar conclusion.
‘Were you writing the book then?’ I ask.
Vivian’s sideways flicker betrays her as she glances to the photo of the teenager with the nose rings. ‘Yes and no. After Pamela was killed, I kind of only wanted to talk to the other people who’d been affected. There were husbands and boyfriends; parents, witnesses, all sorts. I think it was my way of coping. I didn’t feel so alone. Then I started to think that, maybe, I could tell their story. People kept saying Pamela was number eight, and I wanted to say “No, she wasn’t.” And the more I talked to other families, the more I realised they were the same. They didn’t want the victims to be a number.’
She speaks quickly and there’s suddenly a gravelly, frustrated tone. Then Vivian takes a breath and starts again. ‘I started planning the book and I did ring your mum, for the first time in a long time. I left a message. We’d argued so much about books that, for some reason, I thought she’d want to know I was thinking of writing one. But I never heard back.’
Hardly a surprise, considering Vivian was evacuated not long after – and Mum disappeared. If Mum heard the answering machine message, she could’ve already stolen the jewellery box with the earrings.
‘If she did send you a tape…’
‘What’s on it?’
I can’t tell her it could be the identity of the Earring Killer, partly because I wouldn’t want to get her hopes up. And yet, if Mum reallydidhear an answering machine message from Vivian, maybe that explains why she’d send that tape. Who better to trust?
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. It’s a lie, maybe, but I catch Vivian’s eye and there’s something there. Perhaps she has an idea. Perhaps I’m a bad liar. Perhaps she just wants to make me happy because I’m my mother’s daughter.
Either way, it’s a long shot. ‘Where would everything be?’ I ask.
‘That’s easy,’ Vivian replies, peering upwards. ‘It’s all in the attic.’
I don’t have a fear of spiders, as such – but I think anyone would give a little shriek if they lifted their head, only for it to be immediately swamped with a mass of sticky, clammy webbing.
For the most part, I left the spiders to monopolise Vivian’s attic as I lifted down six boxes marked ‘flood’. The optimistic part of me thought we’d open the first to find a cassette tape, but nothing’s that easy.
Instead, the pair of us sit on the floor of Vivian’s living room, our joints and limbs creaking to various degrees as we pick through unopened electricity bills; crispy dried-out copies of theRadio TimesandKays Catalogue, plus things like cutlery and rolls of sticky tape.
‘It wasn’t me who boxed up all this stuff,’ Vivian explains as we pick through it. ‘The insurance company had someone who was going house to house. Some sort of liaison person because there were so many of us. She arranged this clean-up squad who went into the house and pulled together everything that was salvageable, while clearing out the stuff that wasn’t. I got given those boxes while I was still at the hotel, but didn’t think there was any point in unpacking them. I had nowhere for anything to go. By the time I was finally allowed to move back, I was stuck with these boxes.’
I hold up the plastic spatula from one of the boxes. The end is curled from heat and there’s a dried egg splatter on the handle. ‘I guess that explains this.’
Vivian looks to it and laughs. ‘Why did I keep all this stuff…?’ She holds up a snowglobe as if to emphasise the point. ‘I don’t remember ever owning this.’
We unpack but, really, we talk.
