Undertow (5 page)

At first I wonder if it’s Luka. If maybe Mum’s passed the number on after all. But when I press
PLAY
I realize my mistake. They’re not for Mum. They’re for her mother.

There are two of them. The first, a woman, clear and clipped, reminding her about “Tuesday”, hoping she hasn’t forgotten, telling her to call back when she can. It could mean anything. A cup of tea. A bank raid. There are no other clues. No paper trail to reveal anything about her. The second is different. A man’s voice. Softer and tinged with West Country. And just one word. “Eleanor…” Then a click and dialling tone. But that word. It’s a question, I think. “Eleanor?” Why just one word? And why didn’t she erase the messages, I think, after she listened to them? Unless she left them for a reason. To remind herself. Or someone else.

But then it hits me. A hard shot, and true, straight to the stomach. I’m so stupid. She never listened to them because she couldn’t. Because she was dead, crushed inside her car on a road miles from here. She never did call back about Tuesday. That man who said her name never heard her voice again. And I never heard it at all.

And I’m about to press
DELETE
when I remember something. If there are incoming messages, there must be an outgoing one. I press the button and pray to a God I don’t believe in that it’s not a generic American prerecord. I pray it’s real.

It is real. It is her voice. Eleanor’s. Cut-glass slicing through the cold air; I can almost see her breath. “I’m not able to answer the phone, but please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

It says nothing. And everything. That she lived alone. That she was rich. Educated. Privately maybe, her voice a mix of BBC and royal. Then I’m struck by how weird this is. That she is talking to me from the grave. And I remember when Dion Clark died. This boy in our class at school who got hit by the Number 12 on Walworth Road. Cass kept a message from him on her mobile for weeks. She kept playing it again and again. Crying over it. Even though he’d only kissed her once then dumped her for Rae-Ann Jackson. Then her phone got nicked and he was gone and some other kid has a dead person on their voicemail now.

I press
PLAY
again. “I’m not able to answer the phone, but please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And again. And again. This is her, I think. These are the only words I will ever hear her say. No telling me I’ve grown, no feigned shock at my outfits, no whispering she loves me. I press the button again. Addicted to the sound. To the sense of belonging and loss. I am so caught in it I miss the front door opening, the shaking of clothes, the kicking off of shoes. Before I have time to hide it, to press
PAUSE
, she’s right there behind me. Her face is pale, set. And in an instant I know what she’s going to do. But I still plead.

“Don’t.”

But she does. She clicks the buttons, all of them, again and again. Until the automatic American accent echoes along the hall, “Outgoing message deleted. All messages deleted.” Then she pulls the wire out of the wall socket.

“We need some peace,” she explains. “We’re on holiday.”

There it is again.

“Besides…” She shrugs. “Who’s going to call us?”

Luka, I think. Nonno. Anyone. But I say nothing. Just wait for her to start humming again, to put the kettle on. Then I plug the phone back in.

HET

HET RINGS
him late at night, when she knows her father will be asleep, and her mother too out of it to notice. Will is out. At Jonty’s, or more likely drinking in the Golden Fleece. Leaning against the wall, legs stretching out catlike across the hallway, she talks softly into the receiver
.

His brother Jimmy answers, laughs when he hears her whispered “Tom?” but fetches him anyway, both of them only just back from the fairground, working the waltzer and the win-a-goldfish stall. Real jobs, Het thinks. They’re not the Gypsies Will calls them. Or worse
.

She hears the phone clatter, words exchanged. “Tom?” she says again, hesitant this time
.

But it is him. His voice hushed, too, though he has no need; his mum gone, his dad in the pub gone closing every night. Maybe it’s because of Jimmy being there. She knows what his brother thinks of her. That she is stuck-up. A student. Too good for them. Not like the town girls he goes with. Hair pulled back and tops pulled down
.

“When can I see you?” he asks. “Can you come now?”

She shakes her head, forgetting he can’t see her; her salt-dirty hair curling tendrils around her tanned face. Her longing
.

“Het?”

“I can’t,” she says aloud. “Not tonight.” Then pauses, thinks, decides. “Tomorrow. At the pier at ten.”

“What’ll you say?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Something. I’ll think of something.”

In the morning she tells her mother she is going to look for cowries
.

Eleanor turns from her dressing-table mirror, eyelids heavy from the little white pills and rimmed with pink from crying. She looks at her daughter in the doorway. Nineteen years old, yet still lying like she did when she was nine. Keeping her skeletons, her secrets, buried inside. Eleanor wants so much to put her arms around her, to tell Het she knows where she’s going, and who with. That she understands. That she’s happy for her. But in her head she hears him. His measured words falling like fists, bruising her pale skin. That it cannot be allowed. That he will not be responsible for his actions if she condones it
.

So instead she draws breath quickly, smiles and says, “That’s nice, dear.”

BILLIE

THE HOUSE
is full of secrets.

Over the next two days, the rain drums endlessly against the windows, its rhythm only breaking for the gusts of wind that blow it out to the sea for a few seconds before it comes back round to the glass again. Mum works out how to conjure up heat from the ancient boiler while Finn and I unearth things: a recorder, a felt kitten, a jar of cowrie shells. Mum smiles at them, at our delight in them, says, “Oh, that’s from school … I made it … I collected them.” But I can see the flicker in the corner of her eyes, the tightening of her jawbone, wincing, as though someone is pinching her slowly, secretly behind her back. And I am scared that this is just the tip of it. That somewhere in this house lies that Pandora’s Box, full of things that will make her start with the pain of remembering.

I find it in the attic. Finn has begged and begged to be allowed up there, to dig around in the dust and cobwebs. Mum says, “Not now. Later.” Repeats it like a mantra. Until in the end he gives in. But then so does she.

My timing is textbook. Finn is watching television, some programme that was forbidden at home. But not here, not on holiday. And Mum has lost something, an earring, is on all fours trying to find it in the thick green wool of the carpet. I say I’ll be careful, that I won’t touch anything that might break, that I’ll watch where I put my feet.

“Fine,” she says.

I shrug, not quite believing my luck but not saying another word in case she realizes what she’s said, changes her mind.

The ladder slides down, attached to the loft floor by a pulley system so I can’t get trapped. There is electricity too; a single bulb lights up the rafters. Wasps’ nests cling to the beams, their paper intricacy intact despite the owners’ long-since departure. But it is what lies beneath that draws out the gasp. I expected stacked boxes, the contents detailed in fat marker pen on the sides, shipping trunks, a rail of clothes. Even old furniture, a broken chair or a long-defunct cot. But instead there is a cavernous space, echoing with silence, and, under the spotlight of the bulb, a single unmarked box.

I am sure then, in that second, that this was left for me, the rest of the junk cleared out months ago, in readiness for this moment. This is it, I think, a skeleton in a closet, or in cardboard. Maybe a real one. I knew my grandfather had been a doctor, a surgeon, after all. But when I open it, I see not the creamy yellow-white of a rib-cage, of a Yorick skull, but soft red leather, edged in gilt. Not a skeleton, I think. Not bones. Photographs.

I flip slowly through the stiff vellum pages, peeling back the tracing-paper sheets in between to reveal the faces of this strange family, my family. At the table at Christmas, crackers held out in their hands, Will’s pointing like a gun at the lens. It is only the second picture I have seen of him; the first, a cracked, faded thing in a drawer at home, his name and a date in blue-black ink on the back. A school photograph, his teenage years belied by spots, his tie loosened just enough to know that the sneer isn’t an accident. A single memory, the others too painful, or too much to carry from here to London. Here he is a boy, seven or eight. Still playing cowboys and Indians, I guess. Or gangs, like Finn and his mates back in London, whooping round the street with lightsabres, until they see the real thing, or something like it.

There is one of Will and another boy, the same blond hair and ruddy cheeks as him, flushed with cold and flanking a snowman. It actually has a carrot for a nose, and a pipe. At home they wore bandanas, before the snow melted in the city fug and turned to dirty slush.

There is Mum. Aged five, aged fifteen, the same haunted look on her face. Not smiling; sullen.

And this must be Eleanor. Her mother. My grandmother. She is beautiful, like Mum. But different too. Her hair straighter, swept back in a tight chignon, her face tighter. But her smile is as absent as Mum’s. I see the lips move in my head, form the words I heard on the answerphone: the clipped accent, the crisp consonants. And I wonder what she said to Mum. To make her scowl. To make her leave. Or was it him?

There are just four photographs of the man I take to be her father; my grandfather. Two of him stiffly holding newborns; Will and Het. Then one of him in a surgical coat shaking hands with a man in a suit, both looking into the lens. A local newspaper kind of shot. I wonder if he’d won an award. Or retired. Yet he looks young still. His hair dark, his face unlined, yet severe.

I turn to the last page, to a family shot, all of them posed together, lined up on the lawn. Eleanor smiling, her husband’s arm around her shoulder. Yet still she looks uncomfortable, strained. Next to her Will is pulling a face again, the collar of his rugby shirt turned up. Then Mum. Lost. Her face turned away, looking blankly at something in the distance, to the left of whoever was calling out “say cheese”.

I look at the date underneath. It was taken the summer before I was born. I look hard at Mum’s stomach but I can’t see the trace of me yet. I wonder if she knows, if they know. If this is the last time they were all together. Before I came and put some unbreachable wall between them.

This isn’t ephemera, I think. Not fleeting. Even though the bodies are gone, the bones buried or burned, the people are preserved. Captured in a single Kodak moment.

I close the album, its heavy binding snapping and sending motes of dust whirling in the beams of light. But then something bigger flutters down, a paper square, a Polaroid, twisting to the floor like a sycamore seed. It lands face up, and I start. Because this isn’t a stranger. This is almost identical to a picture that was stuck to our fridge door with a magnet shaped like a cob of corn. Taken a second before, or a second after, its subject is the same. A fat-faced baby, mouth open, eyes tight shut, held in its mother’s arms, her face chopped off by white edging.

This is a picture of me.

ELEANOR

“SMILE,” SAYS
Martha
.

And Het does. Motherhood becomes her, she knows that. Even with the cracked sleep, the endless washing and drying and feeding, she shines somehow. The weight she felt before, the torpor, a ceaseless dragging at her chest, her legs, have gone. The midwife warned her about baby blues. Fussed about having family around to help, what with the father gone. Het shook her head. Said she didn’t need them. That she had everyone she needed. Martha, and now Billie
.

Billie chooses that moment to yawn. Martha laughs as she clicks the Polaroid shutter, jolts the camera, and the image spat out is missing part of its subject
.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Het
.

She holds the photograph between two fingers, fanning it back and forth to dry the ink. “No one wants to see me anyway.”

Martha drops her head to one side, beseeching. “Come on, I’ll take another.”

Het groans. “She needs feeding.”

Martha ignores her, holds the camera up anyway. “Say cheese,” she says
.

Het rolls her eyes, but obliges
.

This time the photo is complete
.

But this isn’t the image that Het chooses. It is the cut-off photo that she will send. On the wide white strip underneath she writes her daughter’s name and weight. No birth date. Because that would mean birthday cards and a knot in her stomach every year. So she picks her words carefully. Just enough so that they know she is real. And she is beautiful
.

Eleanor recognizes the handwriting on the envelope. Has seen it morph from meticulously copied
a
s and fat, open
b
s to the close, sloped script it is today. Her delicate fingers tremble as she slides the knife under the flap, pulls it sharply away. She hears the rip of paper, the clatter of the knife as she drops it onto the table, leaving a dent that cannot be polished out, that he will poke at later, worry over. But it is the
thud thud
of her heart that resonates loudest, and she is glad he is already out, worries the sound would betray her
.

She slips her still-shaking fingers inside the brown paper and takes out a single glossy rectangle. A burst of colour, of life, it hits her full square, knocks the breath out of her. Because now she knows she has lost not just a son and a daughter, but a granddaughter too
.