Authors: Julie Cohen
The doctor said I would be tired, but this is
not any normal form of being tired. Everything is grey. Naomi and Yvonne and some of my other friends bring me books and flowers, chocolates and conversation that I can’t seem to engage in. Words come slowly when I speak, and my body struggles to rouse itself. The heatwave has broken and Lauren keeps on making cheerful comments about the cool weather outside, but I feel as if I haven’t breathed fresh
air since that night in the roof garden under the moon. Emotion has been wrung out of me, coiled and squeezed away.
‘I’ve been pithed,’ I say to Lauren one evening when she comes home from work, bringing a fresh pineapple. I hold the fruit in my hands. Once I would have smiled at its spikiness, its outrageous armour, useless against the temptation of its scent. I turn it over and put it back
on the coffee table. ‘Like when they take the brains out of frogs.’
‘It’s because you’re recovering,’ she says, putting her hand on my arm. ‘You’ve been through a lot. Your body needs to conserve its energy to heal. It doesn’t have any extra to cope with what you’re going through emotionally.’
‘I’m not going through
anything
emotionally,’ I say. ‘Maybe if I could see Quinn …’
‘I don’t think
that’s a good idea. You both need some time to come to terms with what’s happened.’
‘Or Ewan. I should call him. I know you don’t like him, Lauren, but he’s been through a difficult time too. He doesn’t have anyone else.’
‘Again, not a good idea. Everything’s too complicated right now. Let it settle for a little while.’ I’ve told her what’s happened, of course; she may have heard more about
it from Quinn. Knowing how she feels about Ewan, she’s being remarkably restrained about it all. ‘You’re healing. Take time to heal. One step at a time. This time next week, you’ll feel much better.’
‘I think it’s gone, Lauren. What they did to me has damaged me in some way. I can remember that I used to feel, but I can’t actually do it any more. Something has gone wrong in wherever my brain
makes emotion.’
‘Sweetheart,’ she says gently, ‘if your brain couldn’t produce emotions any more, you wouldn’t be crying every night in your sleep.’
This is true. I have been doing this. I wake up with my pillow soaked with tears. I wake up filled with an overwhelming sense of loss.
‘You’ll work it out,’ she says to me. ‘It will become clear to you what you should do. Meanwhile, I am going
to make you some fruit skewers. Pineapple stimulates dopamine production. You know, the happiness hormone?’
‘How do you know all of this about food, suddenly?’ I ask her.
She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek. She’s a good friend, but I can’t work out whether I know this logically or through feeling.
In between materialistic television shows, I try examining the facts of my life: I am separated
from my husband because I cheated on him with a man whom I believed I loved. At least, sometimes I believed I loved him. I have made enemies of my in-laws and roused the concerns of my friends. I have entered into a relationship with a near-stranger and made him care about me far more than I deserve, probably far more than is good for him. I’ve done all of this because of a malfunction of my
brain. Or perhaps I haven’t. Perhaps it was something I would have done anyway, given the right circumstances. Perhaps I am naturally faithless, naturally immoral. All I know is that the world before was made of colour, and now it is made out of grey.
I poke at these facts and these possibilities, as one would a rotten tooth, and try to make them ache. Even feeling pain would be better than this.
I felt pain in the hospital, after the surgery, I know I did. When I reached for the newspaper and it was two days old. When I dreamed about the
Igor the Owl
book I’ll never write in reality.
I poke and poke at the tangle of facts, but I can only cry in my sleep.
During the second week of September, two things gradually make their way into my attention. One is that Lauren is spending quite a
bit of time sending and receiving messages on her phone that make her laugh. The second is that 12 September is rapidly approaching, the day when Ewan arranged to meet me. I understand why he asked me to meet him in Greenwich, at the same time as before. It’s a message to me that if I don’t turn up, he’ll do what he asked me to do originally: carry on, forget about the whole thing.
But can he
forget? Can I?
On the other hand, if I do meet him, will I be doing the right thing? Should I be jumping into another relationship, and such an intense one, so quickly, when I don’t know what to feel? When I’m not certain that I even
can
feel any more?
On Friday night, I walk around and around the living room. Lauren is curled up on the sofa tapping into her phone. She should be out having fun,
but she’s brought us a film to watch later. It’s dark outside; autumn is shortening the days.
‘Stop prowling,’ she says to me. ‘You’re making me dizzy.’
I perch on the other sofa, then get up again. I want something to do, something mindless like tidying or ironing, but the flat is spotless and Lauren sends all her laundry out, and I can’t stop moving around and around, like the thoughts in
my head. I brush against a side table and an envelope slides off the pile stacked there, of all the post I’ve received and haven’t bothered to open yet.
That’s something I can do. I bring the stack over to the sofa and begin to open envelopes. It’s mostly get well cards, from my editor Madelyne (
Don’t worry about work, sweetie, just get better!
) and my agent, and friends who don’t live in London.
A box of expensive chocolates from Andrew and Tom. I open it and offer some to Lauren.
‘How do all these people even know that I’ve been ill? And that I’m staying here?’
‘Word travels. Lots of people love you.’
‘I threw away all the cards people sent me after my mother died,’ I tell her. ‘I didn’t even read them. I sort of think that was a mistake.’
Right at the bottom of the pile is a yellow
envelope. The card is of a fuzzy yellow duckling wearing a hat. It’s holding on to a rope, the other end of which has been tied around a quaint wishing well. GET WELL it says. As in, the duck has got a well. I open it, expecting an ironic message from one of my friends.
Dear Felicity
,
I told you once that you should consider me your mother. I would be a poor mother if I took away my love because
of something you had done. I’m sorry for my behaviour the last time we met. I hope you are feeling much better
.
Love, Molly and Derek
I read the card and reread it, and then look at the front again. It’s still a duck with a wishing well. I don’t know how I could have possibly thought it was from anyone but Molly Wickham.
All at once I miss Molly: her lily-of-the-valley-scented hugs, her flowered
teacups, the proud look she gets on her face every time all of her family are gathered together. I remember how magnificent I’d thought her in the garden, defending her son. How much strength there is in niceness, in softness, in love.
‘I need to go somewhere,’ I say.
‘Okay,’ replies Lauren. ‘I keep on saying you should get out of this flat. Where do you want to go? To the pub for a swift one?’
‘No. I need to go to St Ives.’ I walk into my bedroom to look for my shoes. Lauren follows me.
‘St Ives? Cornwall? Right now?’
‘Yes.’ I pull on my trainers, and find a cardigan.
Lauren is smiling. ‘Now this is the Felicity I know.
Finally
. How are you planning to get there?’
‘I don’t know. The train?’
She checks something rapidly on her phone. ‘Darling, this time of night, you wouldn’t even
get there until tomorrow. It’ll have to be by car. And you’re not allowed to drive, so I’ll have to come with you.’
‘You haven’t got a car.’
Her smile gets broader. ‘I’ve got an idea. Just a minute.’
While she disappears to have a conversation on her phone, I pack a few clothes into a rucksack: warm things, a waterproof. The bundle, wrapped in a plastic bag, has been in the drawer with my socks
since I came to Lauren’s flat. It fits easily into the rucksack. Although I’ve assumed that Lauren is ringing a car rental agency, when I join her in the living room, she’s giggling. ‘See you in five,’ she says into her phone, and slips it into her pocket. ‘Right. You pack the chocolates whilst I make a flask of coffee.’
‘You own a flask?’
‘Full of surprises, me,’ she says, tapping her nose.
Fifteen minutes later, her phone chirps and we’re running down the stairs and out of the lobby, Lauren pulling on her cashmere jacket. ‘Remember getting kicked out of that hostel in Bangkok?’ she asks me, but I’ve stopped dead at the sight of the vehicle which is idling in front of the building. It’s a green van with the words
TWO SLICES CATERING
on the side.
‘Who’s this?’ I ask. The driver’s
door opens and a man gets out.
‘This is Bill,’ says Lauren. She’s actually blushing. Bill, tall and with curly hair in need of cutting, offers me his hand to shake.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ I tell him. ‘Thanks for this.’
‘Hey, thank
you
. I didn’t have any plans, and I love the beach.’
Lauren gets into the passenger seat, breathless, and I curl up in the back next to several empty plastic mayonnaise
containers. As Bill drives us through London, I send her a text from the back seat to the front:
Is this one independently wealthy, too?
She turns around. ‘After careful consideration, and after watching you nearly die, I’ve decided with all due respect that the checklist can go to hell.’
‘Here’s to that,’ agrees Bill, turning onto the A4.
I leave my shoes at the top of Porthmeor Beach and
roll up my trousers. Lauren and Bill lag behind me, maybe because they know I want to be alone, maybe because they want to be alone too. I walk down the sand to the edge of the sea, listening to its large dark sound.
My mother isn’t here. I know that she doesn’t live anywhere but inside my memories. Still, I breathe in deeply, trying to catch the scent of her, trying to find a sign.
There’s
nothing. Nothing but the hiss of water on sand, the foaming surf. No stars tonight, no moon, only the smell of seaweed and salt. And there was never any sign anyway; that was just a bubble in my brain.
I unwrap the urn from the plastic bag and I unscrew the top. ‘Goodbye, Mum,’ I say, and I tip the contents out into the sea. So she can join the water cycle, swim in the ocean, fall with the rain.
I imagine particles of her body dancing in the surf under the shimmer of the moon.
All she wanted was for me to be ready to say goodbye to her.
I let the water roll over my feet and ankles, here at the edge of land, where the country stops, and I know, finally, what it means to walk lightly. It’s not giving things away. It’s not the opposite of holding on.
It means to forgive and be forgiven.
It means to hold on to love, and to nothing else.
It’s taken five hours to drive here, and maybe all of my life of wandering beforehand. But fifteen minutes on the beach is all it takes for me to know exactly what I need to do next. For me to know what love is.
Whether it will work out, I have no idea.
THE RAIN SENT
the tourists running for shelter, but Ewan pulled his leather jacket up over his head and kept looking. It was quarter to twelve, and he’d been here for half an hour already, standing outside the gates to the courtyard where he could see her if she came up the hill.
For the past few days, he’d been nervous as a cat. He’d taken a Gibson out of storage and started playing again,
which felt good, but he couldn’t settle to it. He was too aware of the days passing, the date he’d chosen pretty much at random approaching. With every day he got more restless.
He was ready for a change. Definitely ready. But it felt like ages ago since he’d sent that message, asking Felicity to meet him here again. So much had happened since: his trip to Leicester, meeting with Ginge again,
the first couple of sessions with Ali, his new counsellor. It was getting to be that he didn’t have the impulse to ring Flick every time he saw something he thought she’d like.
But that would change.
He rocked back and forward on his feet, looking around, seeing her everywhere. People wore anoraks and hats, huddled under umbrellas, coming out of the Royal Observatory Museum to stand astride
the Meridian Line. It was supposedly where the world ended. Or began.
He wanted to begin again, to wash himself clean with love.
A black golf umbrella approached him, only a pair of jeans and wellies visible below. The wellies had orange spots on them. ‘Flick?’ he said, ducking his head to look underneath.
It wasn’t Flick. But she was so familiar that it took a moment before he could process
who she was.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here,’ said Alana.
He could only stare. ‘What?’
‘It’s a long way to come. So I’m glad you bothered to turn up, though you could have picked a place with a roof. Where is she?’
‘Who?’
‘Felicity.’
Though he couldn’t process this, he glanced around, trying to spot Felicity. Greenwich park was nearly empty. All he saw was a busker, under a tree down the hill.
A single person hidden under a pink umbrella watched him play guitar.
‘I … don’t know where Felicity is,’ he said. ‘She’s supposed to be here.’
Alana shrugged. ‘Okay. It doesn’t matter.’ Her eyes slipped past him to the busker, and then back. ‘I need to know that you really want to do this. It’s been hard enough already, without you mucking her about.’
‘Mucking who about?’
Alana glared at
him. ‘You need to ask?’ She looked down the hill again at the busker, who was playing that Katrina and the Waves song, and the small figure watching him play, under a pink umbrella, with pink wellies, who turned so the side of her face was visible, and her red hair.
Ewan’s heart beat painfully once, and then harder.
‘Two years without a word, and suddenly this. It’s fine, she wanted to come,
but you can’t leave it for so long this time, Ewan. You need to be in her life, or out of it. And we can’t come traipsing down here every time you wave your hand.
You
have to make the effort. You, yourself.’