I knew the fish was dead and I couldn’t decide how I felt about that. I had a goldfish that died when I was little. Nana flushed it down the toilet and I was sad. But that was mine, it had belonged to me. This fish wasn’t mine but, while I tried to find the right feelings to feel about it, my hands did their own thing and opened the lid of the tank. I don’t know why I wanted to hold it. It was wet and slippery and cold. Taylor came into the classroom then. She looked at the dead fish, then she looked at me. She took the fish from my hands, put it back in the tank and closed the lid. She took a tissue out of her sleeve, like a magician takes a rabbit out of a hat, then she dried my hands before drying her own. I was glad that she was all right.
Last year, I had two Easter eggs. One from Mum and Dad and one from Nana. Nana’s was better because it had sweets inside the chocolate egg. I counted them and there were thirteen sweets, which I remember because it was lucky and unlucky all at the same time. This year, I’ve only got one Easter egg, but that’s OK because it’s from Taylor. I didn’t get her anything, but I will. I might give her some of the KitKats, we’ve got loads.
Now
Thursday, 29th December 2016
My parents are dead. I don’t know how you forget a thing like that, but I did. They were here in my hospital room, as real as anyone else, and yet they weren’t here at all. They can’t have been; they’ve been gone for over a year now. The mind is a powerful tool – it can create entire worlds and it’s certainly more than capable of playing a few tricks in order to aid self-preservation. We weren’t even on speaking terms when they died. I remember the last words my dad said to me – I can still hear him speaking them, a cruel stuck record of a memory: ‘Listen to me, Amber. Any distance that exists in our relationship was created by you. Ever since you were a teenager you withdrew into your own little world. You didn’t want us there and we wouldn’t have been able to find you even if we tried. I know because we did try. For years. The world does not revolve around you; if you’d had children of your own you would have learned that by now.’
They didn’t call again after that and neither did I.
Claire was the one who called to tell me that they were gone. It was a coach crash in Italy. I’d seen it on the news but even when the presenter talked about the British tourists feared dead, I had no idea that the voice from the TV was speaking directly to me. We never knew what happened, not really. There was speculation that the driver of the coach had fallen asleep at the wheel. It was on the news for a day or so and then our parents were forgotten again by everyone who wasn’t us. Something bad happened to someone somewhere else and that became the new news while we carried on watching our story alone. They’d written Claire’s name as their next of kin in their passports, not mine. Even in death, they chose her over me.
Claire did everything: arranged to bring them home, organised their funeral, dealt with the solicitor. I cleared out their home, disposed of their things, distributed parts of their lives to other people in other places. Claire said she couldn’t bear to do that.
I’m still shocked by how very real they seemed to me in this hospital room. I must have wanted to share my solitude with someone so badly that my mind obliged by returning my parents to me as living memories. The dead are not so very far away when you really need them; they’re just on the other side of an invisible wall. Grief is only ever yours and so is guilt. It’s not something you can share. Claire was genuinely heartbroken when they died. She cried on the outside for weeks, I cried on the inside for ever. I’m starting to question everything my mind presents to me now, trying to sift through what is real and what might be a dream.
The door opens and someone pulls up a chair. He takes my hand and I know it’s Paul just from the way he holds it. His hands are mostly soft, except for a lump of hard skin on his middle finger where he grips his pen too hard when writing. He’s back. The police must have let him go. We sit in silence for a long time. I can feel him staring at me, he doesn’t say a word, just holds my hand. When the nurses come to turn and change me, he waits outside as requested. When they leave me, he is there again. I want to know what happened to him, I want to know what the police said, what it was they thought he had done.
A nurse comes in to tell him that visiting hours are over. He doesn’t reply but his face must have said something to her, because she says it’s fine for him to stay as long as he wants. Whatever the police thought he did, the nurses clearly think he’s a good husband. We sit in silence for a while longer, he can’t find the right words and mine have been taken away.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
Just as I’m wondering what for, I feel him lean over me and the routine panic sets in. I don’t know why I am afraid and then there is that flash of memory again, a man’s hands around my throat, it feels like I can’t breathe despite the machine forcing oxygen into my lungs. Paul’s hands are on my face, not my throat, but I don’t know what he is doing. I want to cry out as he pushes something into both of my ears. The soundtrack of my world deflates a little and I don’t like it at all; hearing is all I have left.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Claire and I am shocked to hear her voice. I don’t know how long she has been here; I didn’t know that she was.
‘The doctor said it might help,’ says Paul, taking my hand in his again.
‘The police let you go?’
‘It would appear so.’
‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you look like crap and smell like you need a shower.’
‘Thanks. I came straight here.’
‘Well, it’s over now.’
‘It’s not over, they still think that I . . .’
But it’s over for me because I can no longer hear them. My ears are filled with music, which pulses and bleeds down into my body, diminishing all other sensation until it is all that I know. Everything else, everyone else is gone and I am taken away from this place by a series of notes culminating in a memory; this is the song I walked down the aisle to when Paul and I got married. The lyrics about trying to fix someone you love pull me back in time. Even back then he wanted to fix me, when I didn’t know I was broken. He’s still trying.
The memory is a little torn around the edges, but it’s something real, so I slow it right down and hold on to it. I can see Paul in the corner of the memory, sliding a ring onto my finger, he is smiling at me and we are happy. We were happy then, I remember now just how much. I wish we could be that version of us again. Too late now.