Tideline (35 page)

As I riffle through, looking for the report my mother requested, I find a bundle of envelopes addressed to me, Sonia, in that small neat handwriting that was so familiar to me. I experience the
flutter of excitement I got back in the days when a letter from Seb would appear for me in the niche in the wall along the alley.

My stomach flips, as excitement turns to realization. Someone – my mother? – must have found our hiding place, and stashed some of his letters away before I could read them. I
freeze. They’ve been opened with a paper knife, the slit along the top of the envelopes cleaner than any I’d have made in my impatience to tear them open. The letters are in order, with
the latest, dated 5th February on the top of the pile. I pull apart the sides of the envelope, my hands shaking. A frail piece of paper, yellow with age slides out.

I read the words.

I look again at the date, then hurry across the landing to the spare room.

I pull the shoebox off the shelf, the one in which I keep Seb’s things. I find the letter I read the day I came to get the mouth organ for Jez. It’s postmarked 1st February.
I’d always thought it was the last letter Seb had ever written to me. Now I’m learning there was another later one that I never got. I open this first letter and read again.

He said to bring
Tamasa
and so I’d brought
Tamasa
. I always did as Seb told me. I craved his admiration, of course. And I wanted to prove my affinity with
the river. But if I’d got this letter, this real last letter, dated 5th February, everything would have been different. I was enslaved to Seb. I would have done anything to maintain his
respect. But I never got it and so I had taken the raft.

I read them both, all over again. And when I’ve finished, it’s as if all the jumbled images that have come back to me since Jez arrived, pop together in the right order, like
Kit’s carefully constructed string of beads.

The evening I went to fetch Seb comes back to me, all of it, even the parts I haven’t been able to think about since, roaring in like the tide.

Once I reached the other side the weather had changed. The wind had got up and the clouds had closed in. It was impossible to get near the pilings to moor. The waves were relentless, lifting
Tamasa
and smashing her against the walls. Rain swept across the river into my face and hammered on the landing stage. At last I managed to throw the painter around a post and haul
Tamasa
in. Then to get up on the wooden platform. The heavy clouds meant it had grown dark more rapidly than usual. I’d never known the river so noisy, the crash of waves and the
creaking of chains and the squeal of the whole wooden structure I was now standing on. Seb was shouting at me, but I could not hear his words. I remember dimly that he looked angry, not pleased to
see me as I’d expected. He shouted again and I caught the words, ‘No time to lose.’ I held the wet rope while Seb jumped down onto
Tamasa
and stood there for a minute,
trying to regain his balance. That was when the biggest wave rolled in, roaring, a sound so deafening we could no longer hear each other’s voices. It was quickly followed by another, and
others sluiced into these so they collided, lifting
Tamasa
up and flipping her over like a paper boat. I held onto the rope with all my might though it was wet and slimy and chafed against
my palms. The raft emerged from the water but Seb was already in the river.

‘Seb!’ I shouted.

My hair lashed around my face in the wind and stuck to it so I couldn’t see. I couldn’t take my hands off the rope to sweep it out of my eyes. When I did manage to flick it away Seb
had become an indistinct shape in the gloom, the pale oval of his face appearing then disappearing under the water, clinging with one arm to
Tamasa
, to her pathetic buoyancy bag. I pulled at
the rope again, trying to haul
Tamasa
back to shore but the waves pulled back against me, so we were caught in a dreadful tug of war that I knew, as my arms weakened, I was going to
lose.

‘Help!’ His words only just reached me through the clamour of water and wind and rain, ‘Don’t let go, Sonia. Hold on! For God’s sake, hold on.’

And, as he retreated from me, towards a tangle of chains and ropes beneath the next row of pilings, I gripped tighter to the rope and I pulled with all my might.

Sonia

‘I’ve brought your things.’

‘Pass that . . .’ My mother waggles a limp finger at a hand mirror on her bedside locker.

One thing my mother will never be too old or ill for is her vanity. I’ll have to take care of this because there’s no one else to do it. Nurses don’t have time for hands-on
care these days. It’ll fall upon me to wash her hair, clip her nails, brush her teeth. A peculiar intimacy when we’ve barely touched each other in our lives before. She plucks
pathetically at a long white hair growing from her chin and frowns. I reach for her tweezers. I wonder whether I should not bother her with the letter after all. Let the past remain buried in the
old grey box file, as we have always tacitly agreed to bury everything to do with Seb.

I powder her nose and apply the rouge she has worn for the last twenty-five years. She nods when I hold up the mirror. I pour her a glass of water.

I place the package of school reports on my mother’s hospital bed next to the other things I’ve gathered: her clean underwear, a spare nightie, her favourite night cream. She looks
up at me through one fading blue eye. Is it my imagination, or has she deteriorated even since my last visit?

She may not have long. I make a decision.

‘Mother. Look at this.’

I let her examine the letter for several minutes.

‘See who this is from?’

‘Is it . . . don’t Sonia,’ she says.

‘What do you mean, “don’t”? It’s from Seb, Mum. Your son.’

She says nothing. I continue, ‘And who is it addressed to?’

‘I can’t see. I can’t see the name.’

She doesn’t want to see the name.

‘It’s addressed to me. Look. Sonia. A letter from your son, to your daughter.’

She stares at me, her good eye widening in shock. As if this is the first time she’s realized.

‘From my brother to his sister. I never got the letter.’

I stop, examining her to see whether my words make any sense to her at all. She tries to turn her head away from me. ‘I’m going to read it to you.’

My mother takes the letter in her one good hand, looks at Seb’s handwriting. She stares at it silently for several minutes through her one good eye. Eventually she rests
her hand on the hospital blanket and lets the thin paper flutter onto the coverlet. Then she lifts an arm, pats her hair into place, puts her hand on her chest.

‘We sent Seb away to stop you. A brother and sister doing unthinkable things.’ A wave of hot shame rolls over me. ‘But then you persisted in writing to each other.’

‘Seb hated that school. He wrote and asked me to fetch him. I got the letter telling me to take
Tamasa
. I did as he wanted me to do. I never got this letter which would have saved
his life, because someone, and I guess it was you or Dad, hid it from me!’

‘This is upsetting me. I’m ill, Sonia. You’re going to kill me if you keep on.’

There’s a long silence. A tear has escaped my mother’s eye and is rolling down her cheek. The rouge runs. For a few horrible seconds I imagine she’s crying blood.

‘I would have taken the dinghy with Mark,’ I whisper more emphatically. I feel a sudden euphoric sense that I have been wronged. That I am not solely to blame, as I’ve always
believed, for Seb’s terrible death. ‘Seb would have lived.’

The repercussions pop into my head, reaching far into the future.

My mother seems to shrink before my eyes, to become flatter under the hospital blankets, as if her body were made of paper. She has never talked to me properly about anything, I realize now. She
weaves and dodges and quotes poetry, but she never says what she means.

‘You sent him away. Then you stole his letters. When you could have talked to me. To us.’

My mother looks directly at me now, determined to regain some authority, taking on her cold schoolmistress persona.

‘How could I talk about that kind of thing. It was shameful, it was animal!’

‘We were
children
, Mother.’

‘I tried, Sonia. I tried to stop you both. I brought Jasmine home when I realized. Have you forgotten?’

I ignore this. She knows what happened. By the time she brought Jasmine onto the scene it was too late.

She suddenly sits up, screws up her face and takes off.

‘We only took the letters. We didn’t read them. We didn’t want to read them. Of course if we had read this one we would have stopped you from going on the raft. We would have
stopped him running away at all!’

She turns her face away from me. I wait.

When she finally looks back at me, she seems startled, as if she hadn’t expected me still to be here.

‘The letters have been opened. Look. With a knife. Who opened them?’

‘When you left for university, your father wanted to clear them out, start again. That’s when he read them and realized the terrible mistake he had made. That’s why, I believe,
he took his own life.’

‘And you never told me!’

‘What was the point in telling you? It was too late. Seb was dead anyway. We couldn’t bring him back. Knowing things could have been different would only have made things worse for
you. That’s what I decided.’

The sky outside the hospital windows is lowering. Inside the strip lights are too harsh. She looks up at me, a pleading look, the kind of look a small child gives its parent when it knows
it’s done wrong. Surely she must be about to give me what I’ve asked her for. An admission. A chance to share the blame before she dies. Then I can forgive her, too.

She says, ‘Your father left you the River House. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Enough?’

I look at my mother, hoping for something else, some sign of love or forgiveness or
comfort
. I feel the first stirrings of sympathy for her that she finds this so hard.

I want to say something to her, something that will draw us together at last. I want us to share the grief we’ve both been carrying around all these years. But I don’t have the words
either. So I just say, ‘Mother, speak to me.’

She just looks back at me through the one eye that will open and the words I long for don’t come. I stand up, take a step towards the door.

‘Sonia.’

I turn around. She’s holding one frail old hand out to me.

I go back to her. Our fingers touch, briefly. I bend down and kiss her hair. And then I leave.

I need to go to Jez now, to unlock the door, because I never wanted to force him to stay. He’ll have regained his strength. But he won’t want to leave. We will
wander down to the river together, walk up to our calves in the water, not bothering to roll up our jeans. He might go a bit further, right in, reach the barges, clamber aboard. Shout at me to join
him. Stare back at the River House and tell me again how he wishes he could live there. The river will lift the barge suddenly, so he rocks up and down and he will laugh and pretend to fall.

‘We’ll build a raft, Sonia,’ he will shout. ‘And get away from them.’

And we’ll paddle on our tummies across the glassy water looking for one of those hidden inlets between dark wharves. We’ll spend the evening on a secret beach as the river turns
fiery in the sunset. Hunt for clay pipes on the tideline. Dig in the mud for treasure. Follow swans with cygnets tucked under their wings. They won’t find us. It’ll just be us, the
swans and the river, forever.

Sonia

On the bus on the way home from the hospital I remember the package that arrived today. I will go straight up to Jez. I can’t keep him. The only way I can stop them
taking him from me is to do it myself, end it all now. This is what I must do. Keep Jez poised for ever, at the point Seb was when he died. And then they can do what they like to me.

As soon as I get home I open the package and take out the rolls of Modroc bandage. I take a bowl up to the music room. Jez watches me.

I fill the bowl in the shower room with warm water and place it at his feet ready to soak each bandage as I go.

The windows have gone tangerine in the evening light. Like boiled sweets. Occasionally this happens over the river, the sky seems scorched, the burnt tinge caused by the pollutants in the air,
blurring the sunset. Then this chemical glow bounces off the water, dyeing the banks and bathing the room with the same dazzling amber light.

‘What are you doing?’ Jez asks. He’s smoking a joint. His tea is laced with drugs because I need his cooperation in what I’m about to do, though he’s stopped
putting up resistance since he returned to the music room on Monday. I think he even mildly enjoys being in the room, while he’s unwell, the not having to take responsibility for
anything.

The last time I saw Seb, he was embalmed in his coffin, on the table in the living room, his youth caught for ever. I don’t think Seb ever looked in a mirror or had any idea of his own
perfection. But even in death he was beautiful. His hands folded on his chest, his mouth turned down a little at the corners just as it was in life, as if he were saying, I knew you’d all let
me down. I knew you’d never get it.