The Soul Room (11 page)

‘The sea’s like play-dough today, Mum.’ I followed his gaze.
Post-storm, the sea looked opaque, pitted and moulded, it’s colours somehow
hyper-real.

‘What’s it like in here all by yourself? Don’t you get lonely?’

He swivelled his forehead against the glass before he faced me and
smiled. ‘No. Things are always changing.’

‘But couldn’t I bring you something to keep you company?’ I nodded
towards the blackness that hovered above us. ‘From up there?’

His face lit up. ‘Maybe you could! I don’t know.’

‘I want to try something.’

‘What is it?’

‘When I was a little girl I used to get night-terrors. I trained
myself to wake myself up if things got bad. Let me try it now.’ I started to
focus my attention inwards. Imagined myself in bed dreaming.

‘Mum!’ He sounded distressed and somehow far away. ‘Mum, you’re
fading!’

‘It’s all right. Just wait.’ My voice drifted away and I felt myself
kicking up through thick cold darkness. My lungs were tightening, I desperately
needed to breathe. I pushed up as fast as I could, panicking that I was going
to have to open my mouth and try to breath, just for it to be filled with
blackness. And then finally I saw the gloom start to thin and just as I broke
the surface I woke up. As soon as I did, I launched excitedly out of bed, and
went over to my old chest-of-drawers and rooted about in the top drawer until I
found him. I held him tightly to me and went back to bed. I was adrenalised and
anxious to return to my son, so it took me half an hour to get back to sleep;
but finally I felt the darkness close around me again, swallowing me gently
down its deep throat, until I felt my feet touch the tiles. He was in the same
chair, his legs crossed.

‘Don’t do that again Mummy! It was scary.’

‘Sorry sweetheart, but look what I’ve got for you!’ I drew my hand
from behind my back.

‘It’s your cheetah!’

‘That’s right. I’d forgotten that he was in my old bedroom at your
Granddad’s house.’

His face glowed. I held the animal out to him. He came over, gingerly
but eagerly. As his hand touched the other end of the teddy I felt a small
thrill go up my arm and into my heart.

‘I just couldn’t bear the thought of you down here so much of the time
without a friend’ I said hoarsely.

‘Thanks Mum! He’s beautiful.’ He took him and squeezed him tightly,
burying the cheetah’s face in his neck. ‘He smells of you Mummy.’ He said,
going over to the sofa and cuddling up contentedly in the corner. I would have
given anything to have swapped places with that teddy, but the degree of terror
he showed if I so much as nearly brushed past him was so great that I didn’t
dare break his rule. At that moment, a beam of sunshine came from behind a cloud
and back-lit his shiny black hair, creating a silvery halo. I felt a huge wave
of love break over me and tried to gulp it down. He was my boy. And he was
beautiful.

‘Something’s happening isn’t it Mum.’

I went over and sat down next to him again. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Something’s wrong, you’re hurting inside again. I’ve felt it.’

‘It’s your uncle Dan. He phoned me. He was asking for help, then some
bad men stopped him using his phone and smashed it up. We don’t know where he
is or why they’ve got him. But one thing we do know now is that he’s been
kidnapped.’

He frowned and squeezed cheetah even tighter. ‘He must be very
scared.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going to do something aren’t you? Something dangerous?’

‘No, no. I’m just asking questions – trying to help the police.’

‘You’re going to do something dangerous, you’re thinking about going
back to Italy.’ He looked at me anxiously, without thinking I went to stroke
his hair but diverted my hand just in time, turning it into a reassuring
gesture.

‘I’m not going to do anything dangerous, but I need to help. He’s my
brother and I love him, and it wouldn’t be much of a world if we didn’t do what
we could for those we love; even if it is a bit dangerous. I’d do anything to
defend you – you know I would. Wanting to help my brother is part of the same
thing, and it’s something powerful and necessary. Part of having a soul.’

He watched me, a little puzzled, but seemed placated. ‘I think I
understand,’ he said screwing his eyes up tight, ‘maybe you do have to go to
Italy, I’m not sure, I’ll have to think about it a bit more.’

Mum and Dad have been in bed with the curtains drawn
for two days now, ever since we heard that the last lot of chemotherapy didn’t
work. The weather is muggy and grey and the house is quiet and nothing and
no-one is moving in it. When I walk home from College it looks like one of
those Plague houses. All shut up, somehow shamed. This is a house where we
couldn’t all stay well, where we didn’t have the strength to keep death out.

Mum said it was ok to go to College, that
she understood, that
life goes on
. But it doesn’t, does it? Not always.
I only went to College because I can’t bear to stay here, because I don’t know
what else to do. You can hear her and Dad talking all the time behind the door,
their voices are hushed and gentle. It sounds private, like I shouldn’t go in.
Dan has gone into himself, he’s sitting in his room reading, he doesn’t want to
talk. I’ve gone in a couple of times and just sat next to him and put my arm
around him. He doesn’t seem to mind, even though he’s 13 now and a bit funny
about being touched.

There’s a big shiny silver car outside the house
today, an Audi. When I go in the house there’s a sweet, slightly spicy smell in
the hall, and although it’s still quiet, there’s a feeling in the air, as if
something’s changed. Dan appears from the living room. He face looks a bit
squashed, like he’s been crying.

‘That guy from Italy’s here.’

‘Which guy?’

‘Amarena, Collette’s Dad. He’s been up
there for about half an hour.’

‘Why would he be here?’

‘He said he’s in Brighton on business,
that he heard about Mum and wanted to see her. Because they were old friends.’

‘He hasn’t seen her for about fifteen
years. Why would he fucking care?’

Dan shrugs. ‘Dad’s out, said we had to
start eating properly again. I think Mum’s had enough of him just lying around
with her. She shouted at him and said he had to stop moping, to be strong for
us. That if
she
could get on with it, he bloody could.’

A big bubble of anger shoots up from my
tummy and into my mouth. It’s hot and bitter. I kick at the front door. ‘It’s
all so fucked up!’

‘I know, I hate it too.’

My face is burning. I lean it against the
glass of the door, still kicking pathetically at the base of it, making the
glass bump painfully against me cheekbones.

‘It’s going to be alright sis.’ Dan has
come up behind me and slipped his arm around my waist. I’m five years older
than him but he’s already as tall as me. I lean back and feel his cheek against
mine, wet with tears.

‘Excuse me.’ His voice is deep and
velvety. We spin around and there’s Mr Amarena. His suit is shiny and perfectly
ironed. His shoes are pointed and polished to a finish like glass. I recognise
the smell of his aftershave as the sweetness I had detected earlier. I wipe my
eyes angrily on the back of my hand.  He is staring at us. Somehow he looks
unsettled and a paleness hangs over his usually dark face. He looks genuinely
upset.

‘I am sorry, so sorry about your mother.’

I nod wordlessly and Dan and I move away from
the front door. He nods awkwardly back then opens the door and leaves.

‘Maddie…Dan?’ Mum calls us from upstairs,
her voice is thin and strained, it must have taken a lot out of her to shout.

‘We’re coming Mum.’ Dan bolts up the
stairs two at a time. I rush to keep up with him.

‘Open the curtains Maddie, would you?’ Mum
has propped herself up in bed. She looks so thin, I feel my heart breaking just
a little bit more.  ‘I want a bit of light in here. I think I’ve lain around
long enough now.’

‘You’ve got to be careful Mum,’ says Dan,
frowning hard, ‘You don’t want to overdo it.’

Mum smiles and beckons to him. He goes
over and sits on the bed. She reaches her other hand out to me. I take it and
she pulls me gently onto the bed. ‘You are both so beautiful you know, so
terribly beautiful. And you have good hearts and are going to grow up to be
good people. I really can’t tell you how incredibly proud you make me.’ She swallows,
looking for a moment like she is going to crumple up, but she doesn’t. She just
takes a deep breath and gazes at us both, one by one. Her eyes are still clear
and beautiful. Her face has shrunk around them though, so they stand out even
more, making her look a bit like an animal, or something out of a fairy story.

‘Now I know, know that I’m going to die.’

Dan whimpers, Mum hushes him and strokes
his cheek.

‘You’ve got to hear it Dan, I’m dying. You
know that, we all know that and have to accept it.’ She swallows again and
winces. ‘Can I have some water, Maddie darling?’ I can feel what this is
costing her, but it’s like I’m watching everything through the wrong end of a
telescope. I pass her the water and she drinks from it and and sighs. ‘What I
want to tell you is that now I know what is going to happen, that I’m not going
to beat this, I feel suddenly at peace. That may be a hard thing for you to
hear, but I’m hoping it might also bring you some comfort. For the first time
in ages I’m not scared, and I know exactly what I need to do. I can’t tell you
how I know everything is going to be ok, why I’m not scared; I can only tell
you that I know, bone-deep, that it is. Perhaps I’ve found God, or maybe just
being this close to death helps you to see things more clearly, I don’t know.’

‘I understand Mum, I do!’ Dan is sobbing
now. Mum smiles at him, she looks sad and happy at the same time, like an
angel, and pulls his head down onto her chest. Dan clings tightly to her, like
he’s drowning.

‘Look after him, won’t you Maddie?’ she
whispers, her breath making the hair on Dan’s head tremble. ‘He’s not as strong
as you. Not deep down.’

I nod mutely then lie down the other side
of her. She strokes my hair with her free hand. The light in the room darkens a
little and it starts to rain and with a knot of misery growing in my tummy, I
know this is a moment that will be with me always

Over the next
couple of weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about Dan and Sergio; my two lost
men. I would swing between feelings of guilt (why hadn’t I been able to love
Sergio quite as much as he loved me) and gut-wrenching anxiety about Dan.
Sometimes, particularly at night, it was almost unbearable, and my time with my
son was the only escape from self analysis and doubt. I didn’t feel able to be
alone and had convinced my father not to move to my flat until after the baby
was born.

I began to go through Dan’s stuff more systematically, looking for
anything that might shed more light on where he’d gone and why. I’d also
quizzed my Dad and Nicholas after Sunday dinner, about Dan’s recent behaviour.
Following an hour’s interrogation (oiled by a very nice bottle of Sancerre,
that I allowed myself one glass of) the most promising thing they could come up
with, was that Dan had been going through a couple of boxes of Mum’s
possessions that were kept in the loft. This was something that in all our
years of grieving he’d never done before. Dad assumed that he’d come to a point
where he had healed enough to risk the painful nostalgia of seeing her things.
I wondered if that was the only reason.

After a particularly bad night where I had barely managed to scrape
together two or three hours of sleep, I found myself heading down to the
seafront at the first sign of morning, driven by an intense need for space and
sea air. I fell into a loose, comfortable pace, breathing in deeply and soaking
up the light. It was an irridescent morning, cool-aired with hazy sunshine. I
felt the anxious traces of restlessness starting to erode as I walked, and
there was a little swell of pleasure as I approached the sea. It was one of those
rare and startling occasions when the tide is so low that acres of virgin sand
become exposed below the usual bank of Brighton shingle. I loped across the
virtually empty road, gently cradling my growing belly (which I did
instinctively now). I took off my shoes as soon as I reached the sand. It was
an indescribable pleasure to feel it cradle my feet after the hard tarmac and
shingle.  The tide had retreated to such an extent that the first half of the
West Pier was completely exposed, its jagged frame sticking out of the sand
like a blackened spine. I set off towards it, fascinated. The morning was
amazingly mild, and every now and then a little tributary of warm water
trickled over my toes and through the sand towards the remote waves.

As I approached the pier, I caught my breath again. The sea and sky were
incandescent pink, and the rising sun was leaking gold on the easterly horizon.
Silhouetted against these layers of light was an unprepossessing but neat
looking middle-aged man. He had a tall stick in each hand and was using them to
etch in the sand. He’d already drawn hundreds of circles, nestling one within
the other as far as the eye could see. The perfection of the circles was
uncanny considering their scale, and I looked at them wonderingly for a long
time. A young woman came over and stood beside me.

‘Amazing isn’t it!’

‘Yes.’

‘Apparently he does it every time the tide is this low.’

‘Like an offering.’ I answered.

We weren’t the only people to be stopped in our tracks. Several people on
the upper prom had risked getting to work late and were standing watching the
sunrise, and the artist at work. Others had gathered on the shingle, one taking
photographs with his mobile.

I carried on with my walk, carefully picking a path through the giant
circles so that I didn’t step on them, still wondering at how the man had made
the different sizes fit so perfectly within each other without any obvious
measuring tool. They could be representing the circular waves emanating from a
pebble dropped in a lake, but were they emanating out or in? Were they a
contraction or an expansion? I wondered if the artist himself even knew what he
was representing, or why.

I walked on, deciding to get a mackerel for tea from the little
fishmongers in the Kings Arches. I found myself ransacking my memories of
childhood, looking for a clue to anything that would explain Dan needing to
look through mum’s old things, to leave suddenly. We mostly had a happy time
growing up. Our parents had loved each other (or at least it appeared that way)
and they had treated us the majority of the time with tolerance, respect and
good-humour. Dan and I had both been bullied for a short time at school, but
then we’d both been a bit quirky in our different ways, and children have a
notoriously low-threshold for quirkiness.

Maybe whatever was happening was driven by Mum’s death; but despite the
shock of losing her so young, and the many horrors of cancer and its treatment,
there hadn’t been anything left unresolved between her and Dan. If he wanted to
feel closer to her, why didn't he write a memoir? Why walk away from his
family? He was clearly in some kind of danger, being held against his will, but
how did he get to that? What had happened? Had he been threatened? Forced to
leave the country? Had he knowingly gone into a situation where he was at risk?

I started to feel a bit dizzy and sat down on a low wall that marked the
boundary between the prom and the shingle. Now only a few weeks off being
two-thirds through my pregnancy, I had become an eating machine. Every few
hours I would start to feel hollow and fuzzy round the edges. I delved around
in my handbag and found a chocolate bar that I had stashed there for moments
such as this, and bit off a chunk appreciatively.  

Pregnancy had sensitised me to a new level, as if the implanting of the
egg had been an evolutionary event; heightening my sense of smell, and giving
me something akin to a sixth sense. Perhaps it was down to hormones and
maternal protective instinct, but I felt transformed. I analysed every
substance I put on or in my body; I worried that the noise of pile-drivers
digging up the road could damage my baby’s developing hearing. I skirted around
rubbish as if it might emit spores that could enter my body and infect him. And
yet despite all this, I didn’t dream of giving up chocolate or the odd glass of
wine. Not only did my body crave them (and when you’re pregnant, I was finding
out, you learn to listen to your body) but the baby seemed to share my
pleasure. He would kick and stretch in an ecstatic way. I imagined the sugar
coursing through the placenta, and him looping the loop, gloriously stimulated.
So to counteract these mutual moments of Bacchanalian pleasure, I watched my
diet and took every vitamin and supplement available.

Later that day,
after demolishing the sweet-fleshed Mackerel with a hefty salad and home-made
chips, I made myself cosy on Dad’s sofa. Nick had finally found Mum’s boxes at
the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, and I had steeled myself to go
through them. It shocked me how much it affected me to have them near me. Grief
is like that. You can visit your loved one’s grave, go through the anniversary
of their death, or their birthday, and not shed a tear. And yet, you can pass
someone in the street that walks the same way they did, or come across
something of theirs unexpectedly, and find yourself heartbroken all over again.
In the first year or two after her death I had gone through these boxes
regularly. It had now been over a decade since I’d looked at them, and I felt a
twinge of guilt.

I allowed myself to cry myself dry and then wiped my eyes, blew my nose
and made a cup of sweet tea. I needed my wits about me, this was investigative,
not nostalgic.

The first item was a long slim silk scarf, deep red with small
rust-coloured roses. We’d kept this because Mum wore it a lot, wound several
times neatly around her neck and pinned with a small gold leaf brooch. I
pressed my nose into it – the scarfe was still haunted by the aroma of her
daytime perfume – a Calvin Klein - vaguely sweet and lemony. I laid it gently
to one side. Next was a shoe- box full of old photos of her and her sister as
children. Her parents too – her mother looking prim in a tweed pencil skirt and
buttoned-up blouse, her father, handsome and nonchalant in shirt and braces; a
roll-up sticking jauntily out of the corner of his mouth. Then another box,
about the size of a paperback book inlaid with mother-of-pearl. This one defied
my self-control as it contained (as I already knew) mine and my brother’s name
tags saved the day we were born (impossibly small), each of our first teeth and
two (surprisingly still glossy) locks of hair. I had another cry and was
comforted by Jip who had trotted in to see what the fuss was about. 

I spent a good hour looking through the rest of Mum’s things and had
started to feel emotionally and physically exhausted, but still I couldn’t see
anything unusual or potentially meaningful.
What would Sherlock Holmes do in
this situation
I found myself thinking and then laughed out loud at the
absurdity of it. But it did strike me that I was so used to everything in the
box, they all had such intense and personal resonances, that it was very
difficult for me to see them objectively. I closed my eyes, then reopened them,
and willed myself to imagine I was seeing everything for the first time. I let
my hand hover over each item in turn; the scarf, the photos, a tortoiseshell
hairbrush, a bundle of letters from my Dad from when he and mum were at
College, a fawn lambs-wool beret (very sixties) a lovely old leather-bound copy
of Dickens’
Our Mutual Friend
tied up with a green ribbon…KICK.
Suddenly, right under my ribs, KICK. And again, KICK. My heart started to beat
very hard. I picked up the book.
What is it? Why this?’

At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. I was expecting the close
typescript of an old novel, but instead was looking at loose, looping
handwriting, which, after a few seconds, I recognised as my mother’s. After a
few more seconds I realised that the book was not
Our Mutual Friend
after all, but in fact a diary that had cleverly been made to resemble the
Dickens’ classic. I wondered if it was just a charming joke, or if the deceit
had a more practical purpose. I remembered the old saying, the best place to
hide things ‘is in plain view.’ It took me a while to decide whether or not to
read it. On the one hand it felt like a sacrilege, on the other, in the
circumstances, it seemed irresponsible not to. If I was honest with myself
though I realised, there was no way I could resist reading it. How could a
child turn away from the chance to hear the thoughts and feelings of a parent
they had lost forever?

MAY 21
^st

Finally it’s been arranged. We’re going on holiday as soon as the kids
break up from school. We’re tempted to go a week before then so we can get
cheaper flights. We’ll see. Fabrizio has been so kind. He knows our finances
aren’t great, so his offer is like manna from heaven. What could be better than
a whole month in a beautiful unspoilt part of Italy – and at a vineyard to
boot? It will be great to get away from this country as well. Things are so
grey and depressing here at the moment.

I need this holiday so much. Sometimes I feel like I
am disappearing. Most of the time I’m so busy with Maddie and work that I don’t
even notice. But in the rare, quiet times I sometimes feel like I have quite
lost my edges. I think Duncan senses something is wrong, but it scares him so
he doesn’t mention it. So long as I keep saying ‘yes I’m fine’ when he asks me,
he’s never going to take it any further. It’s as much my fault as his so
there’s no point complaining. What I really, truly hope is that this holiday
will help me get myself back a bit. And then I’ll have the energy and courage
to
do
something!

A boy at school came up to me today and asked who
the devil was. I explained that some people believe there is a god
(personification of ultimate good) and a devil (personification of ultimate
evil); that the devil used to be an angel in heaven but had been disgraced and
banished to hell etc. etc. I finished – like any good socialist atheistic
mother would with ‘I believe however that it is within people that evil
sometimes lives, rather than some kind of mythical being.’ He looked at me with
some consideration for a few seconds and then said ‘Oh no, the devil definitely
exists. I’ve seen him’.

Something
slipped from my hands, and then a sense of weightlessness came over me as I
felt the familiar sensation of my dark descent into the lighthouse. I couldn’t
see my son anywhere. I scanned the room, looked through each of the windows,
then heard a giggle above me. He had climbed up one of four stone pillars set
into the wall and was perched precariously on the stone capital that topped it.
He was holding his cheetah and swinging his feet. The sight of it sent my heart
leaping up into my throat.

‘Oh God, you mustn't do that. It’s too high!’

‘I’m all right Mum. With these trainers on I can climb up like
spider-man because they kind of stick to the stone.’ I held my breath,
imagining him slipping and falling the fifteen or so feet to the ground, his
head smashing against the tiled floor. I begged him to come down. In the end,
he tucked cheetah up his t-shirt and clambered nimbly down the column, hugging
it, the soles of his feet pressed on the stone, allowing himself to slide
slowly, a foot or so at a time. As usual I repressed the impulse to hold him as
he came closer.

‘It’s cool up there Mum. I can even see the tunnel, where you come
down but it’s all dark. He looked up at me and smiled. God he was so beautiful.

‘Would you read me a story Mum’?

‘I'd love to, but I haven’t got any with me.’

‘That’s OK – I’ve found a load, look – over here.’ He reached out,
gesturing for me to follow him, as if out of habit I instinctively went to hold
his hand, our fingertips brushed. He let out a terrible scream