And I picture Vanessa’s mother opening the front door to more guests and sending them up the stairs to join us. ‘She’s entertaining in her bedroom,’ I hear her call in her lush, theatrical drawl.
And Vanessa laughing back, ‘Mummy! You make me sound like a whore!’
‘Can we just
go
?’ Jonathan pleads now behind me, and I drag my eyes away from that house and look at him in the mirror. I see his face flushed and petulant. He is tired. He wants to go home. Jonathan lives in a world where there is just himself to think about; just his own wants and needs, and I am merely ancillary to that world. That I could be anything more than just his mother – nurturer, facilitator, recipient of blame – is unthinkable to Jonathan. That there could ever have been anything more to my life would never enter his head. It’s just not possible.
Andrew is sitting at the kitchen table, attending to some mail. He looks up when we come in.
‘Hello, Jono,’ he says. ‘Have a good time, old boy?’
I notice that Jonathan doesn’t scold his father for the use of his nickname. I notice also the way in which Andrew’s face lights up when he looks at his son, his eyes warm with open love, a hunger almost. This must be the same expression that I wear, too, when I look at Jono. We feast upon our son. We drink him in, his every move. He is the essence of our lives, our morning, noon and night. Is he happy, is he hungry, is he doing well at school? Does he have enough friends, too many video games, the right things to eat? We worry and we fret and it holds us together.
And this is what Jonathan must see: two sad and anxious people forever watching him. This is what he rebels against.
‘I’m going upstairs,’ he says now, and pulls away.
That light in Andrew’s eyes dims a little when he looks at me. His face becomes guarded, and careful. ‘What did you do?’ he asks.
And I say, ‘Christmas shopping.’
And he accepts this. He doesn’t probe for more. He doesn’t say,
But where did you go?
or
What did you buy?
Andrew always accepts what I say without question, and I don’t know if that is because he trusts me, or because he doesn’t really care.
He turns back to his letters now, and I open the fridge to take out the chicken and peppers for supper. I put a pan upon the hob for rice, I turn on the oven, I start to chop, and Andrew sorts his papers into piles. For a moment I want to tell him about what happened in Kew, about the woman and how I followed her.
Do you think it could be Vanessa’s mother?
I want to ask.
And he would say,
Who is Vanessa?
And I would tell him. I would; I would tell him.
But Andrew doesn’t ask. ‘I’ll go and see what Jono’s up to,’ he says, and he leaves me alone.
Later, I lie in my bed with my body very, very still. I am not asleep, but I am not fully awake, either. I lie on my back, and sink myself away.
Vaguely I am aware of the click of the bedroom door as Andrew opens it, and of the pause as he checks that I am asleep. Then he creeps in, and from my still place I open my eyes for a moment and watch as he undresses, careful to make no noise. I see the shadow of him, stooping in the dark, struggling to pull first his socks and then his trousers off over his feet. He goes into our bathroom and I listen to the running of taps, the brushing of teeth. When he comes back out, he closes the door quietly behind him, and again he pauses and I know that he is looking at me. I am so still that I am barely breathing and behind my closed eyes the darkness is a funnel, spiralling away, like space, going on and on.
I feel the dip of the bed as Andrew gets in beside me, and the gentle tug of the duvet. I hear him sigh. And so we lie there, both of us, each locking the other out. I wish that he would touch me, but I cannot make the first move. I cannot bring myself to come back to him. And soon he is asleep, as he supposes me to be. And then I am truly alone.
I picture myself inside an envelope; I tuck myself in, the sides, the bottom, the top. I fold myself away. But the ghosts come anyway, weaving their way through my dreams.
I was fifteen when I met Vanessa. I knew her for less than a year. I was a friend by association, that’s all. A friend of a friend.
And yet.
She was Leanne’s friend, from school. Leanne lived opposite me, in the big house with the mismatched extension over the garage. And we were like sisters, Leanne and me, wandering in and out of each other’s houses, sharing each other’s things. Like sisters, and yet so different; her family so unlike mine. I think of her parents – so glamorous, so modern, so often not there. I think of Leanne and me, creeping into her parents’ bedroom and opening her mother’s wardrobe to see all those dresses hanging there, so many of them, shimmering and sparkling and swooshing against each other as we touched them. I think of the ashtrays on the bedside tables, and the glasses, and the decanter half-full of wine, and of her mother’s jewellery box (the size of our TV), with all its drawers and trays and secret compartments crammed with earrings and bracelets and beads.
And I remember one summer’s evening, just as the sun was going down; I must have been about ten, and I was balanced on the wall outside our house. My parents were out there, too, watering the garden; I remember the soft, gentle hiss of the hosepipe, and the patter of water hitting the grass. As usual, I was looking over at Leanne’s house in the expectation of something happening. And then a taxi pulled up in our quiet, dull street and the driver got out and knocked on Leanne’s front door, and my parents stopped what they were doing and stood there and stared. And they carried on staring as Leanne’s parents emerged from the house, her mother in a long blue dress, her father in a dinner suit with a white jacket and tie. And so we were all staring: me in admiration, my parents in a sort of dumbfounded amazement.
‘Well, hello there,’ Leanne’s father called, and he raised an arm high in an exaggerated greeting. And then Leanne’s mother bent down and got into the car, and Leanne’s father patted her cheekily on the bottom and got in, too. And we heard them laughing.
I watched them drive away.
‘More money than sense,’ my father said.
And my mother said, ‘Mmm.’
I think of this now. I think of them all with fondness: my parents so quiet, so very, very ordinary; Leanne’s parents, so not the same.
I went to the comprehensive in Ashcroft where we lived, along with most of the kids from our junior school, but Leanne’s parents sent her to the private girls’ school in Westbury. And whereas I grew up skulking around Ashcroft at night with my school friends, finding dark corners in which to drink cheap vodka from the bottle and smoke cigarettes bought by the ten, Leanne’s friends – well, they were from a different world entirely.
She told me about them. About Annabel, whose father was a record producer and was forever having pop stars round to their house; and about Fay, who’d lived in Kenya till she was eleven and could speak Swahili. About the boys they passed around among themselves – friends of Vanessa’s brother mostly, so easy, so happy to be shared. And about Vanessa, of course, whose house they all went to in Oakley.
Soon I started going to the parties, too.
I remember the first one, the first time I met Vanessa. She opened the door to Leanne and me; she draped her thin arms around our shoulders, said, ‘Hi, come in,
come in
. . .’ I remember the clink of her bracelets next to my ear, and against my face the soft press of her hair, which she’d back-combed into a wild Pre-Raphaelite mass. She smelled of White Linen, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know it until years later, when I was walking through a department store and the girl on the Estée Lauder counter slipped a perfume sample into my bag, and when I got home and split it open, it was like she was there in my room: Vanessa, the smell of her, the sound of her voice, the memory of her, so real. For years I kept that tiny perfume bottle. For years and years, long after the scent had all faded away.
She was dressed all in blue – I remember that, too – in a baby-cord jacket and matching low-waisted trousers, and on her feet the most amazing shoes: six-inch cherry-red patent stilettos that made her taller than ever. And there was me, in a black ra-ra skirt and ballet pumps. We followed her down to the den in the basement, and there they all were, all these people I’d heard so much about. There was Annabel, so out of it already, hugging me like she’d known me all her life and saying, ‘Rachel, your skirt is so sweet . . .’ And Tristram – who, according to rumour, had three testicles and therefore three times the sex drive – sitting on a sofa with one ankle crossed over his knee, and patting the cushion next to him, saying, ‘Rachel, Rachel, come over here with me.’ Tristram, with his huge brown eyes fringed with such thick, dark lashes. Tristram, who two years later sat alone in his bedroom and inhaled the butane gas from a lighter refill, and turned blue, and died. I did sit next to him for a while, and he did put his arm around me. His body, next to mine, was warm in his soft cotton shirt.
And there was Vanessa saying, ‘Be careful, Rachel, he’s a naughty boy.’ And to Tristram, laughingly, ‘You leave my friend alone.’
My friend, my friend.
When the party got going, they drank cocktails mixed with tequila and vermouth and fizzy white wine, and Vanessa made punch, into which everything went. And the girls smoked Consulate menthol cigarettes because they came in all different colours to match their clothes, and
everyone
smoked dope. Vanessa’s brother had a deck system, complete with projecting lights that flashed over the people dancing in the middle of the room; and around the edges of the room, where it was dark, people melded down together in twos. You couldn’t see who was with whom, but it didn’t matter because it felt just like
everyone
was with
everyone.
There were so many parties. They blend into one in my head. Entering Vanessa’s house was like entering a different universe and I loved it. I loved all those people. I loved Vanessa, with her circus of beautiful dreams.
This is all so long ago. I think of them all, bursting across my life like an explosion of elusive colour, so far from everything else that I’ve ever known. So far from now. I think of Vanessa, sitting on a stool in the centre of the room, with the party going on around her. Perched there so still, with her legs crossed over, just watching, and laughing. I see her face, so ethereal, so serene in its beauty; I see her skin the colour of milk, stretched tight across her bones, and her eyes, so guileless, so blue. And when she closed those eyes she saw lights, flashing behind her eyelids, and she’d carry on seeing them, long after the party was over. She told us all about it: sparkling orange lights, fizzing up inside her eyes, bright as fireworks.
‘Rachel,’ she said to me once, with her arm draped around my shoulder and her breath whispering across my cheek, ‘do you believe in ghosts? I have a ghost. I see it all the time.’ She took her arm away from my shoulder and held her two index fingers up in front of us. ‘It goes like this,’ she said. And she drew an S-shape in the air with her fingers. ‘It starts just like two dots, then they join together and make this shape.’ She moved those fingers fast, swirling them through the air. ‘Like a genie.’ And she started laughing. ‘I think it must be my guardian angel.’
She started seeing double. There you’d be, talking to her, and her eyes would roll inwards so that she’d be almost crosseyed. I saw it happen.
‘Stop it,’ I laughed.
And she laughed back, ‘I can’t.’
We all knew that house was haunted. Vanessa heard voices, calling her at night. Leanne said she came to school one day with a huge great bruise on her cheek; she’d woken up, apparently, to hear someone calling her name, over and over. And then she got out of bed and walked smack into the wall, because she couldn’t see where she was going.
‘Even the cat won’t sleep in Vanessa’s room now,’ Leanne said.
So we planned to have a seance. Me, Vanessa and Leanne. It was my idea, because I believed in all that stuff back then. Ghosts, dreams, the whole lot. Show me your hand, I’d say, and I’ll read your future. Write me a sentence, and I’ll see through your lies. And if there was chill in the room I’d feel it. A bad omen, tapping on my shoulder.
But it never happened. It turned out there were no ghosts at all.
Vanessa had a brain tumour, spreading its roots inside her head.
She ended up so boss-eyed that she started walking into things. Her mother took her to the doctor, the doctor sent her for a scan. And there it was, the size of a plum. That’s what caused the bright lights. That’s what doubled her vision. No ghosts, no guardian angels, just cancer, eating its way down her spine.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. About Vanessa with her beautiful thick, long hair, spun out like gold. I thought of it being hacked away and of her head being broken into; of her paper-white skin and her thin, delicate bones. I thought of the bright lights that she saw and of the voices calling her at night.
Vanessa, Vanessa.
I mouthed her name, whispered it over and over.
And I remembered how I felt that first time I met her; like she was too beautiful to be real.
She died on the first Sunday in November, a week after her sixteenth birthday. I didn’t go to the funeral. I wasn’t invited.
Yolande sent out the invitations, but she didn’t send one to me. Why would she? She didn’t know my name or where I lived. I doubt if she’d even noticed me at all, on the few times that she’d passed me, drifting through her house.