Ghosting (3 page)

She opens one of the diaries to find, tucked inside, a batch of a dozen or so photographs of Hannah, a visual representation of her growth, from bonny blonde baby and pretty blue-eyed child to the last picture of her ever taken. It’s a colour photo, though it could be black and white for all the colour it contains. Hannah is dressed in black, with black dyed hair all crimped and spiked; her face white panstick with black eyes and lips. It was taken during a holiday in Malta. Hannah hadn’t wanted to go and it shows. Fifteen years old and all wound up with murderous contempt for a world she didn’t understand, or which she’d measured and found wanting. By then she’d grown to hate having her picture taken, but Grace had insisted. It was almost as if she’d known that six
months later Hannah would leave home for good; a year after that, she would be dead.

She puts the photographs back in the diary and closes it. She doesn’t need or want to read these books again. Instead they read her, in memories of words scratched across some place deep inside, like graffiti on a prison wall. Without opening it, Grace knows that most of the pages in the 1978 diary are blank, representing those final months when Hannah was hardly ever at home. The last entry, on her sixteenth birthday, is the one word
Leave
. With a tightness in her chest, Grace wonders, again, for the millionth time, what made Hannah lock her out; what caused her to hide the agonies she was enduring. ‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’ she says to the girl sitting opposite her, who says nothing, of course. It breaks Grace’s heart to recall how Hannah went from the happy girl she loved to the angry, damaged teenager she grew scared of, making herself harder and harder to love with each passing day, as she burrowed further away from everyone to a place where no one could reach her. By then, she’d become uncontrollable; there was no reasoning with her. Whenever anyone spoke to her she reacted like a scalded cat. What the hell were you supposed to do?

THEY’D ALWAYS JOKED
that Hannah had nine lives, because of the many times they nearly lost her. Five months into the pregnancy Grace had started to bleed,
and at the hospital the doctor had said, ‘If you believe in God, start praying. That’s the only thing will save this baby now.’ She didn’t believe in God – never had, beyond the habits of childhood prayer – yet in that noisy ward she said, ‘Dear God, please let me keep this baby.’

It was a home birth, and when her waters broke the midwife noticed the fluid was green, a sure sign the baby wasn’t alive. But she
was
alive, and kicking. Three weeks late but perfect.

Around the age of two, Hannah started throwing tantrums, holding her breath until her face went bright red. One time she went blue and stopped breathing altogether. Passed out cold. For a moment Grace had thought she was dead, scooping her up in her arms, screaming her name, until, with a cough, her small eyes opened and she pushed Grace away. It seems she was always pushing her away, all her life, one way or another.

When Hannah was three, on the day before they left Thetford for Glamorgan, during their last trip to the beach, she disappeared. And as they searched for her, calling her name, Grace was lost to a single unthinkable thought. The flood of relief when she was found unharmed, bawling to wake the dead… She’d been spotted by an old man walking his dog, who said he’d seen a large rock fall right next to where she had been playing in pools at the foot of a high cliff.

There were two near-deaths by water, the first not long after returning from Malaysia, during a day out in
Tatton Park. Hannah had slipped and lost her footing while crossing a shallow brook, and the shock of falling into the water panicked her and she flailed around until Paul waded in and rescued her. The second time was a good few years later, when she was – what? Thirteen? And already lost to Grace by then. She’d stormed off in a mood after an argument, going out in the inflatable dinghy and drifting too far, caught in a current which carried her further and further out. That time she’d been saved by Jason, a strong swimmer even then.

But the last time, when she was nearly sixteen, just before she left home for good, was by far the worst. It was around nine pm on a Saturday night, and as usual Grace was alone in front of the television. Gordon was down at the snooker hall, Paul was out, and Jason had just gone to bed. Grace heard the back door opening and a flurry of whispered voices. When she reached the kitchen there was only Hannah, slumped in a chair, unconscious. She called her name, and shook her, pulled back eyelids to reveal bloodshattered pink. She slapped her across the cheek, but Hannah didn’t stir. Unsure whether to call 999, Grace carried the girl into the lounge and laid her down on the settee. From the kitchen she fetched a cold cloth to soothe her hot brow, all the time saying her name. After ten minutes she phoned for an ambulance; but just as she was ending the call Hannah regained consciousness, storming out before the ambulance arrived, leaving Grace the embarrassment of explaining to the paramedics what had happened.
They’d handed her a leaflet about drugs which she still doesn’t understand why she never read.

GRACE RECALLS
the first time she’d read the diaries, on the anniversary of Hannah’s death. A year in which, after the first few weeks, even mentioning Hannah’s name had drawn a disapproving silence from Gordon and her two sons. They didn’t seem to feel Hannah’s death the way Grace did; or perhaps, to be fair, they dealt with it differently. For Grace, life had lost all colour and purpose. Something had been torn from her, and all she wanted to do for the remainder of her time alive was roar like a beast at slaughter. Her firstborn was dead, and she knew, in the form of a pain that would never lessen, that nothing could ever be real again.

When she had suggested they all visit Hannah’s grave together to mark the anniversary, Gordon said, ‘It’s been a year now, Grace. We all need to forget, not keep remembering. Hannah’s gone, and we need to move on.
You
need to move on.’

‘But that’s exactly why we should remember her – because she isn’t here,’ she replied.

‘You go, if it means that much to you,’ he said, ‘but I’m not taking the day off work to visit a grave, it’s morbid; and the boys will be at school.’

So she went alone.

It was a sunny October day, the sky bright and cloudless, the light bringing out the colours of the flowers
she’d taken to put by the headstone. As she sat at the graveside, talking to her dead daughter, the loss, the terrible loss cut through her again, its dimensions so vertiginous she found herself clinging to the grass beside her for fear of falling off the planet, or else being left behind as it plummeted beneath her.

She’d fled back to the house, and, grabbing a roll of black bin bags from the drawer in the kitchen, she had gone up to Hannah’s room, pausing at the door, hand on handle. Every day for the past year she had come in here and lain on the bed, or walked around touching Hannah’s things. It had been kept just as it was when Hannah left: posters on the walls, the bed made. Now, she knew, it all had to go. She set to work emptying wardrobes and drawers, stuffing their contents into bin liners. Before long she’d unearthed the green canvas bag the police had given her. She had placed it at the top of the wardrobe immediately after they left, and then forgotten about it. She picked it up and tipped its contents on to the bed. A make-up bag, a purse… and the diaries.

As she read them that afternoon, Grace had discovered a secret account – a fragment – of her daughter’s last four years: from the childish innocence of the early entries to the uncomfortable knowledge of Hannah’s first sexual experiences; from the simplicity of
‘Top of the Pops
was complete rubbish tonight’ to the raw pain of ‘Right now I just want to die’; from sending a birthday card to John Travolta, to her first taste of heroin.

She discovered that Hannah had been bullied at school by a girl called Jackie Kirby, and this knowledge threw so much light on her behaviour that it saddened Grace to think of it again now, to recall how sullen and withdrawn Hannah became. But, whenever Grace had asked what was wrong, she’d shrugged and walked away saying, ‘Nothing. Just leave me alone.’

Hannah’s saviour from Jackie’s tyranny had been a new girl, Alicia, who had transferred from another school after being caught sniffing glue, and who’d appeared at the desk next to Hannah one day like an avenging angel, teaching her how to smoke and protecting her from the bullies. Grace recalled a well-spoken, well-mannered girl from Hale Barns, but the diaries told a different story. She was shocked to read about truancy and pot-smoking with Alicia and her older brother Mark.

The entry for New Year’s Day 1978 read:

Next to this list were blue doodles of stern angular faces and something that looked like a jellyfish or perhaps a lampshade – Grace couldn’t tell which – along with some shape resembling an iced bun with a cherry on top, or was it a volcano? It put her in mind of both. There were entries in which Hannah berated Grace: vicious attacks full of hatred and disdain, calling her stupid and pathetic.

To say it destroyed her to read all this would be an understatement. When Gordon came home from work that day he found her naked in the front garden, scraping at the dirt like a dog, digging as if wisdom, like most precious materials, must be ripped from the earth’s entrails. She was cramming soil into her mouth as if there were nothing tastier. Lost to all reality but the mulch beneath her nails and the feral grit in her mouth.

Gordon managed to get her inside the house and call an ambulance. He wrapped her in a dressing gown and asked her what on earth she’d thought she was doing. She said nothing. She had still said nothing when the men arrived. She panicked at the sight of them and tried to bolt, but they wrestled her into a straitjacket and out to the ambulance. Gordon stayed in the house and signed
the section papers. She screamed his name, screamed for release. She was driven to Parkside Hospital, its Victorian foreboding illuminated by the blue wash of a full moon, the clock tower a raised fist of masonry.

GRACE FEELS
Gordon’s arrival, rocking the boat as he steps heavily on to it; and then she hears him call hello. She quickly replaces the diaries and puts the box away.

After dinner, feeling cooped up, on the pretext of needing to buy cigarettes, she goes for a walk. ‘I won’t be long,’ she says, but he makes no response, engrossed in the television – an assessment of Gordon Brown’s first month in the office he’d always wanted, by the sound of it. She’s grateful to escape its insistent drone.

The sky is a white, pink and blue parrot’s wing. She passes some neighbours out on their deck and bids them good evening, making her way up on to the street. She walks for miles with no clear destination in mind, past pubs spilling over with people enjoying the weather; past houses filled with families. She is carrying Hannah’s dead body in her arms, and she doesn’t want to put it down but she doesn’t want to carry it any further. She blinks back a tear, pausing to feel the weight of her exhaustion.

She loses herself in imagining never having been born at all. It isn’t so much that she wants to end her life, but for the first time death presents itself to her now, in one clean moment, as such a clear solution that
it doesn’t even fill her with dread to think about it. She tries to imagine Hannah’s last minutes, slipping away in a numb fog of opiates, like a drowner submitting to the clutch of the last breath; thinks of Pete’s, wondering if she was in his final thoughts.

She watches buses pass, picturing herself jumping in front of one, wondering what force of courage or will it would take, and how it would feel in that split second of impact. Or perhaps she should fill her pockets with stones and walk into the canal? Or jump from a bridge and make a hole in the strong brown Thames? Procure some sleeping tablets and dream forever? For over an hour she walks, dazed by such thoughts. Eventually, overwhelmingly wearied, she finds a bench and sits down.

A man approaches and asks if he can sit next to her – an old man, in shabby attire with unkempt hair and a long white beard, bringing with him the scent of booze and tobacco and ancient sweat.

‘You look like you could do with some company,’ he says.

‘Be my guest,’ she says, thinking,
And you look like you could do with a bath.

‘And what brings you here, out of all star-flecked possibilities?’ he says. The sky is a deep, vivid blue now the sun has set.

‘I just don’t want to go home,’ she says.

‘And I have no home to go to. What a pair we are.’

‘What happened?’ she asks, offering him a cigarette.

‘What didn’t happen? Five years ago I lost my wife, then my job, and then, finally, the will to live. Lost the house not long after. Been sleeping rough ever since.’

‘I’m sorry. Did she die?’

‘No. Walked out. Moved in with my best friend. They’d been at it for years.’

A police siren sounds in the distance, and in the silence that follows she says, ‘I think my marriage is over, but I don’t know where else I can go.’

‘Beyond repair?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t know how to know.’

‘“Every bond is a bond to sorrow”,’ he says. ‘James Joyce.’

‘Grace Wellbeck,’ she says, and he laughs and says,

‘No, I was quoting James Joyce. He was a writer. My name’s Patrick.’ Shifting the cigarette to his left hand, he holds out his right and Grace enjoys the surprise of his skin’s rough warmth. ‘Patrick Dodgson,’ he adds, ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise,’ she says.