The Scrapbook (20 page)

He tries to keep his hands on me but I shrug him away and step back. ‘Well?' I demand.

‘You know exactly what I mean. This. You tell me that you've barely spoken to your mother for years but then you find out you're pregnant and you take off at a run and hide behind her. You close the door on me. You tell me all about your lovely dad and then I find out he's not your dad at all. Come on, Fern, you know exactly what I mean.'

‘So you're calling me a liar, that's what you're saying, that I'm nothing but a liar.'

He spreads his arms helplessly. I watch him for a moment and then turn and start to walk back to the house. ‘I think you should leave. I don't want you here.'

Tears are already filling the dark crevice behind my eyes. My cheekbones feel puffy with the effort not to let them fall, pressure bowing the spaghetti-brittle bones that cage my brain until I think they're going to crack open and spill their contents. I concentrate on the small crunch-crunch of my footsteps across the grass, concentrate entirely on the sound so that I can't hear Rick speaking behind me and I don't turn back.

Mum must have caught at least part of our argument because she calls out to me as soon as I'm in the hallway. ‘Fern, is that you? Is everything okay?'

His coat dangles from the newel post. His car keys are on the dresser. I turn around slowly. No sign of a bag. I'm outside again and he's standing in the lane, face rendered grey by moonlight. He starts to say something as I hand him his keys
and the tears almost come then but I don't let them. I press my hands to my eyes to keep them from swelling out of their sockets and springing loose like a couple of ghoulish jack in the boxes.

He gets in his car and starts the engine. ‘I'll find somewhere to stay for the night. I won't leave the island until I've spoken to you.' And then he drives away.

A bend in the lane and he's gone. Too late to run after him. Too late to call him back.

Mum's waiting at the front door. ‘What's going on? Where's Rick?' She follows me inside. I empty the sink and refill it, testing the water until it's slightly hotter than I can bear. I start to wash the plates and she grabs the tea towel and stands beside me.

‘What did you do, Fern? You sent him away, didn't you? He was a lovely man and you ruined it for yourself, just like you used to ruin all your nice things when you were little.'

I can cry now if I want to. Or I can shout at mum, blame her for everything that's ever gone wrong with my life, for the mistakes that are hers, which I seem destined to repeat. I slide to the floor and let the tears come.

‘He's gone, mum. I don't know why I did it but I couldn't stop myself, and now he's gone.'

She squats beside me with a grunt and puts her good arm around me. ‘Then get him back, love. Tell him you're sorry. You can do that if you let yourself. You've got the baby to think of now. I didn't have a choice with your father but you do.'

A tendril of her hair brushes against my mouth and when I take a breath in it slips inside, feathering my tongue, choking me. I try to push her away but she clings on.

‘Don't, Fern.'

I can barely speak for sobbing. ‘But I'm just like you, mum. I tried so hard to be different, I hated the way you lived, but I'm just like you.'

She rocks me gently, rubbing my back. ‘No, you're nothing like me, love, don't be so stubborn. Just say you're sorry and everything will be okay.'

I pull away slightly and look at her. ‘He's married, mum. I
am
just like you. I've done exactly what you did.' Then I lower my head back to rest on my knees.

Above me, she rocks and mutters.

A Creased Page From A Map Book, With A Wooded
Area Ringed In Red

Our shadows stretched grotesque beside us. We were a misshapen monster with four arms, four legs, writhing in agony. Collapsed down and ripped apart to create two human forms, and then coupled again as one monstrous beast. I liked to keep my eyes open and watch you glide and swoop above me, arch and twist below me, or else turn my head to the side and watch our shadow creatures wrestle.

Are they still there, I wonder? Our favourite place, moss soft and honeysuckle sweet, and our shadows locked forever in silent passion. I've never been back but I like to imagine them there, even now when the sun's shuttered by cloud.

And is it still the same? Or is it now a children's playground? A concrete walkway? A private garden? Do people sit where we used to lay and arc sandwiches through the centre of our ghost-selves, dragging parts of our past into their mouths with each intake of air? Do they scatter cool drops of water over the dim kick of my shadow-legs?

Our favourite place. Sorel. The furthest you ever took me from home, a ferry ride away, another island. Similar but not the same. Sorel. I loved the way it sounded in my mouth. I'd whisper it when you were gone from me, turn away from my mother's flinch and close my eyes. Plunder my memories until my kneecaps melted down my shins and I had to leave the room. Sorel.

Walking up the gangway onto the ferry, clutching camera and basket and each other's hand. Trying so hard not to look at you or I'd rush too soon in my mind to our place, to what we'd do there
,
and strangers would see it on my face. Walking away from the ferry and out to the growl of waiting taxis, a few inches of space between us on the back seat, intercepted glances, tightened fingers, tightened breath.

A picnic in a wooded valley, two tourists enjoying the sun. A generous tip and a pause to wave and watch until he was gone, and then we'd dive into the undergrowth, trample bluebells, part trails of ivy until we arrived at our secret place. Our favourite place.

You undressed me slowly, circled me as I stood and waited. You pulled me down onto the moss and we didn't undress at all. You lay at my feet and I stepped around you, over you, shedding clothes piece by piece.

We stayed for hours and murmured fairy tales into each other's stomachs. We gave the taxi driver instructions to wait on the roadside. We stayed the whole night and tried to light a campfire, shivered through the pre-dawn chill.

I always cried a little when we left, and pretended I had an allergy to the ivy, and you always believed me, or said you did.

How often did we go there? How many times in all? Thirty? Forty? Surely that's enough to imprint our reflections on the thick forest air, the spongy forest earth. Surely that's enough to leave a trace of what we had and what we did.

I never speak its name now. Sorel. And if I hear it I flinch as my mother used to, but then I think of our shadows still lying there, still clasped, and I can't help but smile.

9

I was twenty-one when I collapsed beneath an accumulation of dissertation deadlines and revision notes. I hadn't realised that paper could weigh so much. First a tremble started in the tendons around my ankles. Within a week it had skittered up past my calves. It was as if someone were tickling me lightly with a palm full of brambles. Then a quiver rippled out from the soft meat tucked inside my kneecaps and they tap-tapped their own rhythm when I walked.

Within a fortnight I was shaking so much I needed to use both hands to light a cigarette. I couldn't grip a pen. Hours spent locked in my room with the
Family Medical Encyclopaedia
, furtively looking up diseases, convinced I had something terribly wrong with my nervous system. Convinced I was going to die.

My friends stayed awake with me through night after night, holding my hand and spoon-feeding me cornflakes. They searched the house and found the yellow slips for tardy attendance I'd stockpiled over the months, and they met with my lecturers to beg for essay extensions. I kept the curtains closed and stayed in bed every day until teatime, floating like litter across my bed sheets. In the evening they'd persuade me downstairs to study with them at the kitchen table, box me in with textbooks and quote passages from Browning and Keats. Hands fisted against my cheeks, poetry smirched like soot across my vision, I'd scream and sweep the books from the table.

I can't do this! I can't!

Finally they made an appointment for me at the student health centre and frog-marched me there when I refused to leave the house. Flanked by bodies on either side, pummelled by a spring sun at my back, I flinched forwards on divining-rod legs. Cracks in the pavement loomed like caves that I could creep inside but I wasn't allowed to slow my pace.

Come on, Fern, you can't stop now. This isn't fair on us either, you know. We've all got our finals in a few weeks.

I spat reproach at them as they hustled me through the doors and handed me over to a nurse. I wilted as I watched them walk away from me. Their smiles were pink and plump with relief as they turned to wave goodbye.

The nurse led me into a side room and took my blood pressure. It was only when she hushed me, hands gentle on the sides of my face, that I realised I'd been doubled over in the chair, hair brushing the carpet, making that high-pitched sound my mother used to. And that's when the reality of what I'd let happen, of how much damage I'd done to my future, really hit me.

The nurse helped me undress and tucked me into a hard, high bed. She told me to rest. The blinds at the window slatted the sunlight so that it cut sharp strips of shadow into the walls. I closed my eyes and started to drift. The smell of antiseptic. Low voices in another room. My left ankle began to throb and the shaking in my limbs settled and then stilled. It was going to be okay, I was only seventeen. It was all still ahead of me. I hadn't ruined anything, not yet.

When I opened my eyes the wall was all shadow and I was twenty-one again. A different nurse stood by my bed, leafing through a cardboard file that had my name inked on the cover. She smiled down at me.

Well, we've spoken to your mother and let her know where you are. She's very worried about you. When was the last time you ate a proper meal?

She brought me a glass of milk and a couple of neat, white tablets on a tray, then pulled up a chair and sat by me for a while. She knew about the crow chasing and the balancing rituals and she thought she understood me.

You're not the first, you know. Lots of our more fragile students suffer a breakdown when it comes to their finals. The pressure can get too much.

She used her words like White Spirit, scraping layers from the glossy new skin I'd painted myself with over the last three years, scrubbing at stubborn patches until the old skin re-emerged, wincing and raw. The new Fern, so carefully constructed, and so quickly stripped away.

I lay and watched the sun cast its lemon rectangles around and around the room as arrangements were made to send me home. I signed papers and offered excuses for why mum couldn't travel to collect me. My clothes were brought in by my friends and folded on a chair by the bed, but the effort it would have cost me to get up and dress myself was too much. I needed to channel all of my energy into relinquishing the me who might have been. Inside me, a parade of tablets fizzed and emptied their contents into my bloodstream at regular intervals, keeping me remote and sleepy.

Maybe I could have fought the process, insisted that I was well enough to sit my finals. Maybe I should have. But the nurse had been wrong; it wasn't the prospect of the exams that had shattered me, it was the prospect of the world beyond them. For those years at university really were the best years of my life and so I'd begun grieving for them before I'd even lost them.

All of my friends came to visit, pockets stuffed with promises to never lose touch. I nodded and hugged, gazed over their shoulders or down at the floor so that they wouldn't see into my eyes and frown their confusion.
You're not Fern. Where is she?
They surrounded me, balanced on the balls of their feet, ready to sprint into their futures. I wanted to grab their wrists and pull them down to their knees beside me, force them to fail in their dreams so that they would stay with me and live mine.
We could do it all again. Stay just as we are and re-sit next year.
But I didn't speak. I was colder than I needed to be when they said goodbye.

An escort drove me to the train station and found me a seat. I saw him speaking to a guard on the platform, the shared glance towards my window. I'd be plagued by curiosity disguised as concern throughout the journey home now.

The landscape segued from grey to brown to green. The occasional ruddy blotch of deer feeding in the fields. I tucked my feet up onto the seat opposite and chain-smoked as I watched it all flow past the glass. My muscles were stiffened against the first jolt of the truly familiar. Only then would I be able to accept that this was happening to me, that I really was going home, returned to my past like an unwanted package.

But when it came I had my eyes shut, half-dozing, and I wasn't prepared. The smell of the sea. It grasped my ankle and pulled me down so that I spluttered and thrashed in my seat. Then upright once more, nose against the window. I couldn't see it, not yet, but it saturated my senses.

The ferry crossing was quicker than I remembered, the ferry shinier and louder. I stayed below deck, squinting through cigarette smoke, so that I wouldn't have to see the mainland slipping away from me and Spur looming towards me. I didn't think I'd be able to bear seeing that.