فصل 86

86

SEAN

I am not what I think I am.

I was not who I thought I was.

When things started to fracture, when I started to fracture, with Nel saying things she shouldn’t have said, I held the world together by repeating: Things are the way they are, the way they’ve always been. They cannot be different.

I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man. When I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man, I became a police officer; I married a decent and responsible woman and lived a decent and responsible life. It was simple, and it was clear.

There were doubts, of course. My father told me that after my mother died, I didn’t speak for three days. But I had a memory—what I thought was a memory—of speaking to kind, sweet Jeannie Sage. She drove me back to her house that night, didn’t she? Didn’t we sit, eating cheese on toast? Didn’t I tell her how we’d gone to the river in the car together. Together? she asked me. All three of you? I thought it best not to speak at all then, because I didn’t want to get things wrong.

I thought I remembered all three of us being in the car, but my father told me that was a nightmare.

In the nightmare, it wasn’t the storm that woke me, it was my father shouting. My mother, too, they were saying ugly things to each other. Her: failure, brute; him: slut, whore, not fit to be a mother. I heard a sharp sound, a slap. And then some other noises. And then no noise at all.

Just the rain, the storm.

Then a chair scraping across the floor, the back door opening. In the nightmare, I crept down the stairs and stood outside the kitchen, holding my breath. I heard my father’s voice again, lower, muttering. Something else: a dog, whimpering. But we didn’t have a dog. (In the nightmare, I wondered if my parents were arguing because my mother had brought a stray dog home. It was the sort of thing she’d do.)

In the nightmare, when I realized I was alone in the house, I ran outside, and both my parents were there, they were getting into the car. They were leaving me, abandoning me. I panicked, I ran screaming to the car and clambered into the backseat. My father dragged me out, yelling and cursing. I clung to the door handle, I kicked and spat and bit my father’s hand.

In the nightmare, there were three of us in the car: my father driving, me in the back, and my mother in the passenger seat, not sitting up properly but slumped against the door. When we rounded a sharp bend, she moved, her head lolling over to the right so that I could see her, I could see the blood on her head and on the side of her face. I could see that she was trying to speak, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, her words sounded strange, as though she were talking in a language I didn’t understand. Her face looked strange, too, lopsided, her mouth twisted, her eyes were white as they rolled back into her head. Her tongue lolled from her mouth like a dog’s; pink, frothy saliva oozed from the side of her mouth. In the nightmare, she reached for me and touched my hand and I was terrified, I cowered back in my seat and clung to the door, trying to get as far away from her as I could.

My father said, Your mother reaching for you, that was a nightmare, Sean. That wasn’t real. It’s like that time you said you could remember having kippers at Craster with your mum and me, but you were only three months old then. You said you remembered the smokehouse, but it was only because you’d seen a picture. It was like that.

That made sense. It didn’t feel right, but at least it made sense.

When I was twelve, I remembered something else: I remembered the storm, running out into the rain, but this time, my father wasn’t getting into the car, he was putting my mother into it. Helping her into the passenger seat. That came to me very clearly, it didn’t seem to be part of the nightmare, the quality of the memory seemed different. In it, I was afraid, but it was a different sort of terror, less visceral than the one I felt when my mother reached for me. It troubled me, that memory, so I asked Dad about it.

He dislocated my shoulder knocking me against the wall, but it was what happened afterwards that stuck. He said he needed to teach me a lesson, so he took a filleting knife and cut cleanly across my wrist. It was a warning. “This is so you remember,” he said. “So you never forget. If you do, it’ll be different next time. I’ll cut the other way.” He placed the tip of the blade on my right wrist, at the base of my palm, and dragged its point slowly towards my elbow. “Like that. I don’t want to discuss this again, Sean. You know that. We’ve talked about it quite enough. We don’t mention your mother. What she did was shameful.”

He told me about the seventh circle of hell, where suicides are turned to thorny bushes and fed upon by Harpies. I asked him what a Harpy was and he said, your mother was one. It was confusing: was she the thorny bush, or was she the Harpy? I thought of the nightmare, of her in the car, reaching out to me, her mouth open and bloody drool dripping from her lips. I didn’t want her to feed upon me.

When my wrist healed, I found the scar very sensitive and quite useful. Whenever I found myself drifting, I would touch it, and most times, it brought me back to myself.

There was always a fault line there, in me, between my understanding of what I knew had happened, what I knew myself to be and my father to be, and the strange, slippery sense of wrongness. Like dinosaurs not being in the Bible, it was something that made no sense and yet I knew it had to be. It had to be, because I had been told these things were true, both Adam and Eve and brontosaurus. Over the years there were occasional shifts, and I felt the tremor of earth above the fault line, but the quake didn’t come until I met Nel.

Not at the beginning. At the beginning it was about her, about us together. She accepted, with some disappointment, the story I told her, the story I knew to be true. But after Katie died, Nel changed. Katie’s death made her different. She started talking to Nickie Sage more and more, and she no longer believed what I’d told her. Nickie’s story fitted so much better with Nel’s view of the Drowning Pool, the place she had conjured up, a place of persecuted women, outsiders and misfits fallen foul of patriarchal edicts, and my father was the embodiment of all that. She told me that she believed my father had killed my mother and the fault line widened; everything shifted, and the more it shifted, the more odd visions returned to me, as nightmares at first and then as memories.

She’ll bring you low, my father said when he found out about Nel and me. She did more than that. She unmade me. If I listened to her, if I believed her story, I was no longer the tragic son of a suicided mother and a decent family man, I was the son of a monster. More than that, worse than that: I was the boy who watched his mother die and said nothing. I was the boy, the teenager, the man who protected her killer, lived with her killer, and loved him.

I found that man a difficult man to be.

The night she died, we met at the cottage, as we had before. I lost myself. She wanted so much for me to get to the truth, she said it would release me from myself, from a life I didn’t want. But she was thinking of herself, too, of the things she had discovered and what it would mean for her, her work, her life, her place. That, more than anything: her place was no longer a suicide spot. It was a place to get rid of troublesome women.

We walked back towards the town together. We’d done it often before—since my father had discovered us at the cottage, I no longer parked the car outside, I left it in town instead. She was dizzy with drink and sex and renewed purpose. You need to remember it, she told me. You need to stand there and look at it and remember it, Sean. The way it happened. Now. At night.

It was raining, I told her. When she died, it was raining. It wasn’t clear like tonight. We should wait for the rain.

She didn’t want to wait.

• • •

WE STOOD AT THE TOP of the cliff looking down. I didn’t see it from here, Nel, I said. I wasn’t here. I was in the trees below, I couldn’t see anything. She was on the edge of the cliff, her back to me.

Did she cry out? she asked me. When she fell, did you hear anything?

I closed my eyes and I saw her in the car, reaching out for me, and I wanted to get away from her. I shrank back, but she kept coming at me and I tried to push her away. With my hands in the small of Nel’s back, I pushed her away.