I pressed 1 to repeat the message, again and again. I listened to your voice, not just the huskiness, the faint but irritating mid-Atlanticism of the pronunciation, I listened to you. What were you trying to tell me?
You left the message in the middle of the night and I picked it up in the early hours of the morning, rolling over in bed to see the telltale white flash on my phone. I listened to your first three words—Julia, it’s me—and hung up. I was tired and I was feeling low and I didn’t want to hear your voice. I listened to the rest of it later. I didn’t find it strange and I didn’t find it particularly intriguing. It’s the sort of thing you do: leave cryptic messages in order to pique my interest. You’ve been doing it for years, and then when you call again, a month or two later, I realize that there was no crisis, no mystery, no big event. You were just trying to get my attention. It was a game.
Wasn’t it?
I listened to the message, over and over, and now that I was hearing it properly, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed before the slight breathlessness of your delivery, the uncharacteristic softness of your speech, hesitant, faltering.
You were afraid.
What were you afraid of? Who were you afraid of? The people in this village, the ones who stop and stare but offer no condolences, the ones who bring no food, send no flowers? It doesn’t seem, Nel, that you are much missed. Or maybe you were afraid of your strange, cold, angry daughter, who doesn’t weep for you, who insists that you killed yourself, without evidence, without reason?
I got out of bed and crept next door to your bedroom. I felt suddenly childlike. I used to do this—creep next door—when my parents slept here, when I was afraid at night, when I’d had nightmares after listening to one of your stories. I pushed the door open and slipped inside.
The room felt stuffy, warm, and the sight of your unmade bed brought me suddenly to tears.
I perched on the edge of it, picked up your pillow, crisp slate-grey linen with blood-red edging, and held it against me. I had the clearest memory of the two of us coming in here on Mum’s birthday. We’d made breakfast for her; she was ill then and we were making an effort, trying to get along. Those truces never lasted long: you tired of having me around, I never failed to lose your attention. I’d drift back to Mum’s side and you would watch through narrowed eyes, contemptuous and hurt at the same time.
I didn’t understand you, but if you were strange to me then, you are utterly alien now. Now I’m sitt
ing here in your home, amongst your things, and it is the house that is familiar, not you. I haven’t known you since we were teenagers, since you were seventeen and I thirteen. Since that night when, like an axe swung down onto a piece of wood, circumstance cleaved us, leaving a fissure wide and deep.
But it wasn’t until six years later that you lowered that axe again and split us for good. It was at the wake. Our mother just buried, you and me smoking in the garden on a freezing November night. I was struck dumb with grief, but you’d been self-medicating since breakfast and you wanted to talk. You were telling me about a trip you were going to take, to Norway, to the Pulpit Rock, a six-hundred-metre cliff above a fjord. I was trying not to listen, because I knew what it was and I didn’t want to hear about it. Someone—a friend of our father’s—called out to us, “You girls all right out there?” His words were slightly slurred. “Drowning your sorrows?”
“Drowning, drowning, drowning . . .” you repeated. You were drunk, too. You looked at me from under hooded eyelids, a strange light in your eyes. “Ju-ulia,” you said, slowly dragging out my name, “do you ever think about it?”
You put your hand on my arm and I pulled it away. “Think about what?” I was getting to my feet, I didn’t want to be with you any longer, I wanted to be alone.
“That night. Do you . . . have you ever talked to anyone about it?”
I took a step away from you, but you grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. “Come on, Julia . . . Tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?”
After that, I stopped speaking to you. That, according to your daughter, was me being horrible to you. We tell our stories differently, don’t we, you and I?
I stopped talking to you, but that didn’t stop you from calling. You left strange little messages, telling me about your work or your daughter, an award you had won, an accolade received. You never said where you were or who you were with, although sometimes I heard noises in the background, music or traffic, sometimes voices. Sometimes I deleted the messages and sometimes I saved them. Sometimes I listened to them over and over, so many times that even years later I could remember your exact words.
Sometimes you were cryptic, other times angry; you repeated old insults, you dredged up long-submerged disagreements, railed against old slurs. The death wish! Once, in the heat of the moment, tired of your morbid obsessions, I’d accused you of having a death wish, and oh, how you harped on about that!
Sometimes you were maudlin, talking about our mother, our childhood, happiness had and lost. Other times you were up, happy, hyper. Come to the Mill House! you entreated me. Please come! You’ll love it. Please, Julia, it’s time we put all that stuff behind us. Don’t be stubborn. It’s time. And then I’d be furious—It’s time! Why should you get to choose when to call time on the trouble between us?
All I wanted was to be left alone, to forget Beckford, to forget you. I built a life for myself—smaller than yours, of course, how could it not be? But mine. Good friends, relationships, a tiny flat in a lovely suburb of north London. A job in social work that gave me purpose, a job that consumed me and fulfilled me, despite its low pay and long hours.
I wanted to be left alone, but you wouldn’t have it. Sometimes twice a year and sometimes twice a month, you called: disrupting, destabilizing, unsettling me. Just like you’d always done—it was a grown-up version of all the games you used to play. And all the time I waited, I waited for the one call I might actually respond to, the one where you would explain how it was that you behaved the way you did when we were young, how you could have hurt me, stood by while I was being hurt. Part of me wanted to have a conversation with you, but not before you told me that you were sorry, not before you begged for my forgiveness. But your apology never came, and I’m still waiting.
I pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table. There were postcards, blank ones—pictures of places you’d been, perhaps—condoms, lubricant, an old-fashioned silver cigarette lighter with the initials LS engraved on the side. LS. A lover? I looked around the room again and it struck me that there were no pictures of men in this house. Not up here, not downstairs. Even the paintings are almost all of women. And when you left your messages you talked of your work and the house and Lena, but you never mentioned a man. Men never seemed that important to you.
There was one, though, wasn’t there? A long time ago, there was a boy who was important to you. When you were a teenager, you used to sneak out of the house at night: you’d climb out of the laundry window, drop down on to the riverbank and creep around the house, up to your ankles in mud. You’d scramble up the bank and onto the lane, and he’d be waiting for you. Robbie.
Thinking of Robbie, of you and Robbie, was like going over the humpback bridge at speed: dizzying. Robbie was tall, broad and blond, his lip curled into a perpetual sneer. He had a way of looking at a girl that turned her inside out. Robbie Cannon. The alpha, the top dog, always smelling of Lynx and sex, brutish and mean. You loved him, you said, although it never looked much like love to me. You and he were either all over each other or throwing insults at each other, never anything in between. There was never any peace. I don’t remember a lot of laughter. But I did have the clearest memory of you both lying on the bank at the pool, limbs entangled, feet in the water, him rolling over you, pushing your shoulders down into the sand.
Something about that image jarred, made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a while. Shame. The dirty, secret shame of the voyeur, tinged with something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on and didn’t want to. I tried to turn away from it, but I remembered: that wasn’t the only time I’d watched him with you.
I felt suddenly uncomfortable, so I got up from your bed and paced around the room, looking at the photos. Pictures everywhere. Of course. Framed pictures of you on the chest of drawers, tanned and smiling, in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, on skiing holidays and on beaches, with your daughter in your arms. On the walls, framed prints of magazine covers you shot, a story on the front page of the New York Times, the awards you received. Here it is: all the evidence of your success, the proof that you outdid me in everything. Work, beauty, children, life. And now you’ve outdone me again. Even in this, you win.
One picture stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of you and Lena—not a baby any longer, a little girl, maybe five or six, or maybe older, I can never tell children’s ages. She’s smiling, showing tiny white teeth, and there’s something strange about it, something that made my hair stand up on end; something about her eyes, the set of her face, gives her the look of a predator.
I could feel a pulse in my neck, an old fear rising. I lay back down on the bed and tried not to listen to the water, but even with the windows shut, at the top of the house, the sound was inescapable. I could feel it pushing against the walls, seeping into the cracks of the brickwork, rising. I could taste it, muddy and dirty in my mouth, and my skin felt damp.
Somewhere in the house, I could hear someone laughing, and it sounded just like you.