فصل 30

30

PART TWO Tuesday, 18 August

LOUISE

Louise’s grief was like the river: constant and ever-changing. It rippled, flooded, ebbed and flowed, some days cold and dark and deep, some days swift and blinding. Her guilt was liquid, too; it seeped through cracks when she tried to dam it out. She had good days and bad.

Yesterday she had gone to the church to watch them put Nel in the ground. In reality—and she ought to have known this—they didn’t. Still, she got to watch her slide away to burn, so that was what passed for a good day. Even the outpouring of emotion—she had sobbed throughout the ceremony, despite herself—was cathartic.

But today was going to be a bitch. She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence. The elation she’d felt at first, her vengeful satisfaction, was already waning. And now, with Nel burned to ashes, Louise was left with nothing. Nothing. At no one’s door could she lay her pain and suffering, because Nel was gone. And she worried that in the end the only place she had to bring her torment was home.

Home to her husband and son. So. Today was going to be a bitch, but that bitch had to be faced, stared down. She had made up her mind; it was time to move on. They needed to go before it was too late.

Louise and her husband, Alec, had been arguing about this—the sort of low-level, quiet arguments they had these days—for weeks. Alec felt it would be better to move before the new school term started. They should let Josh start the new school year in a completely new place, he argued, where no one knew who he was. Where he wouldn’t be confronted with his sister’s absence every day.

“So he’ll never have to talk about her?” Louise asked.

“He’ll talk about her with us,” Alec replied.

They’d been standing in the kitchen, their voices strained and hushed. “We need to sell this house and start over,” Alec said. “I know,” he said, raising his hands as Louise began to protest. “I know this is her home.” He faltered then, placing his big hands, mottled with sun damage, on the counter. He hung on as if for dear life. “We have to make some kind of new start, Lou, for Josh. If it were just you and me . . .”

If it were just them, she thought, they’d follow Katie into the water and be done with it. Wouldn’t they? She wasn’t sure Alec would. She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did. Alec felt the grief, of course, but she wasn’t sure he felt the despair. Or the hatred.

So the fault lines were already beginning to show in a marriage she’d thought unshakable. But of course she’d known nothing before. Now it was obvious: no marriage could survive this loss. It would always sit between them—that neither of them had been able to stop her. Worse, that neither of them had suspected a thing. That the two of them had gone to bed and fallen asleep and discovered her empty bed in the morning and had not for a single second imagined she’d be in the river.

There was no hope for Louise, and little, she thought, for Alec, but Josh was different. Josh would miss his sister every day for the rest of his life, but he could be happy: he would. He would carry her with him, but he would also work, travel, fall in love, live. And the best chance he had was to be away from here, away from Beckford, away from the river. Louise knew that her husband was right about that.

Somewhere inside, she’d known this already, she’d just been reluctant to face it. But yesterday, watching her son after the funeral, she had been gripped by terror. His pinched, anxious face. How easily he startled, flinching at loud noises, cowering like a frightened dog in a crowd. The way he constantly turned his gaze to her, as though he was retreating back into early childhood, no longer an independent twelve-year-old, but a frightened, needy little boy. They had to get him away from here.

And yet. This was where Katie had taken her first steps, spoken her first words, played hide-and-seek, cartwheeled around the garden, fought with her little brother, soothed him afterwards, laughed and sung and cried and cursed and bled and hugged her mum every day when she got home from school.

But Louise had made up her mind. Like her daughter, she was determined, although the effort was immense. Just to get up from the kitchen table, walk to the bottom of the stairs and then climb them, to place her hand on the door handle, to push down, to enter her room for the last time. Because that’s what it felt like. This was the last time it would be her room. After today, it would be something else.

Louise’s heart was a block of wood; it didn’t beat, it only pained her, scraping against soft tissue, tearing through vein and muscle, flooding her chest with blood.

Good days and bad.

She couldn’t leave the room like this. Hard as it was to think about packing up Katie’s things, putting away her clothes, taking her pictures down from the walls, tidying her away, hiding her from view, it was worse to think of strangers in here. It was worse to imagine what they would touch, how they would look for clues, how they would marvel at how normal everything looked, how normal Katie had looked. Her? Surely not? Surely she can’t be the one who drowned?

So Louise would do it: she would clear the school things from the desk and pick up the pen that once rested in her daughter’s fist. She would fold up the soft grey T-shirt that Katie slept in, she would make her bed. She would take the blue earrings that Katie’s favourite aunt had given her for her fourteenth birthday and tidy them away into her jewellery box. She would take the big black suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the hallway, she would fill it with Katie’s clothes.

She would.

She was standing in the middle of the room, thinking all this, when she heard a noise behind her, and she turned to see Josh standing in the doorway, watching her.

“Mum?” He was white as a ghost, his voice caught in his throat. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing, darling, I’m just . . .” She took a step towards him, but he stepped back.

“Are you . . . are you going to clear her room now?”

Louise nodded. “I’m going to make a start,” she said.

“What will you do with her things?” he asked, his voice rising even higher. He sounded strangled. “Will you give them away?”

“No, darling.” She went to him and reached out to smooth his soft hair from his forehead. “We’ll keep everything. We won’t give anything away.”

He looked worried. “But shouldn’t you wait for Dad? Shouldn’t he be here? You shouldn’t be doing this by yourself.”

Louise smiled at him. “I’m just going to make a start,” she said as brightly as she could. “I actually thought you’d gone round to Hugo’s this morning, so . . .” Hugo was Josh’s friend, possibly his only true friend. (Every day Louise thanked the Lord for the existence of Hugo and Hugo’s family, who took Josh in whenever he needed an escape.)

“I did, but I forgot my phone, so I came back for it.” He held it up for her to see.

“OK,” she said. “Good boy. Are you staying there for lunch?”

He nodded, and he tried to smile, and then he was gone. She waited until she heard the front door slam before she sat down on the bed and allowed herself to cry properly.

On the bedside table there was an old hair tie, stretched and worn down almost to a thread, long strands of Katie’s glorious dark hair still entwined in it. Louise picked it up and turned it over in her hands, lacing it between her fingers. She held it against her face. She got to her feet and walked over to the dressing table, opened the heart-shaped pewter jewellery box and placed the hair tie inside. It would remain there along with her bracelets and earrings—nothing would be thrown away, everything would remain. Not here, but somewhere; it would travel with them. No part of Katie, nothing she had touched, would languish on a dusty charity-shop shelf.

Around Louise’s neck hung the necklace that Katie had been wearing when she died, a silver chain with a little blue bird. It bothered Louise that she’d chosen that particular piece of jewellery. Louise hadn’t thought it a favourite. Not like the white-gold earrings that Louise and Alec had given her on her thirteenth birthday, which she’d adored; not like the woven friendship bracelet (“brotherhood bracelet”) that Josh bought for her (with his own money!) on their last holiday to Greece. Louise couldn’t fathom why Katie had chosen that—a present from Lena, to whom she’d no longer seemed particularly close, the bird engraved (most un-Lena-like) with love.

She’d worn no other jewellery. Jeans, a jacket, far too warm for the summer evening, its pockets filled with stones. Her backpack similarly laden. When they found her, she was surrounded by flowers, some of them still clutched in her fist. Like Ophelia. Like the picture on Nel Abbott’s wall.

People said it was tenuous at best, ridiculous and cruel at worst, to lay the blame at Nel Abbott’s door for what happened to Katie. Just because Nel wrote about the pool, talked about the pool, took pictures there, conducted interviews, published articles in the local press, spoke once to a BBC radio programme about it, just because she said the words suicide spot, just because she talked about her beloved “swimmers” as glorious, romantic heroines, as women of courage meeting easeful death in their chosen place of beauty, she could not be held responsible.

But Katie didn’t hang herself from the back of her bedroom door; she didn’t cut her wrists or take a handful of pills. She chose the pool. What was truly ridiculous was to ignore that, to ignore the context, to ignore how suggestible some people can be—sensitive people, young people. Teenagers—good, intelligent, kind children—become intoxicated with ideas. Louise didn’t understand why Katie did what she did, she never would, but she knew that her act hadn’t happened in isolation.

The grief counsellor she had seen for just two sessions told her that she shouldn’t seek to know why. That she wouldn’t ever be able to answer that question, that no one could; that in many cases where someone takes her own life, there isn’t one reason why, life just isn’t that simple. Louise, despairing, had pointed out that Katie had no history of depression, she wasn’t being bullied (they talked to the school, they went through her email, her Facebook, they found nothing but love). She was pretty, she was doing well in school, she had ambition, drive. She wasn’t unhappy. Wild-eyed sometimes, excitable often. Moody. Fifteen. Most of all, she wasn’t secretive. If she had been in trouble, she would have told her mother. She told her mother everything, she always had. “She didn’t keep things from me,” Louise said to the counsellor, and she watched his eyes slide from her face.

“That’s what all parents think,” he said quietly, “and I’m afraid all parents are wrong.”

Louise didn’t see the counsellor again after that, but the damage had been done. A fissure had opened and guilt seeped through, a trickle at first and then a flood. She didn’t know her daughter. That was why the necklace bothered her so much, not just because it came from Lena, but because it became a symbol for everything she didn’t know about her daughter’s life. The more she thought about that, the more she blamed herself: for being too busy, for focusing too much on Josh, for failing so completely to protect her child.

The tide of guilt rose and rose, and there was only one way to keep her head above it, to keep from drowning, and that was to find a reason, to point to it, to say, There. That was it. Her daughter made a senseless choice, but pockets filled with stones and hands grasping flowers: the choice had context. The context was provided by Nel Abbott.

Louise placed the black suitcase on the bed, opened the wardrobe and began to slip Katie’s clothes off their hangers: her bright T-shirts, her summer dresses, the shocking-pink hoodie she wore all last winter. Her vision blurred and she tried to think of something to stop the tears coming, she tried to find some image on which to fix her mind’s eye, and so she thought of Nel’s body, broken in the water, and she took what comfort she could from that.