Hush (20 page)

‘Before we start, there are some things I need to make you aware of.’

Lily nodded. She felt oddly exposed, sitting across from Dr Mervyn without her usual pen and paper. He had set his notebooks to one side, and there was a clear space between them, like a pitch or a playing field. The desk was smooth mahogany, so clear that Lily could see her own face reflected back at her.

‘Firstly, I have spoken to your parents about the fact that we’re going to be doing this, so they might ask you some questions. Please bear in mind that everything we discuss in this room is confidential, so you are under no obligation to share anything,
but
if you do want to talk to them you’re very welcome to do so.’

Lily nodded again. She felt as if she was being placed under arrest and Dr Mervyn was reading her her rights.

‘Secondly, because we know exactly what it is you’re struggling to remember, I can be very specific in the triggers I present to you. This may be upsetting. You need to understand that I am not trying to upset you; I am only ever presenting you with information in the hope that I will be able to help you.’

He paused to allow her to nod again.

‘Finally: this exercise is for your benefit, and you are here voluntarily. As such, you can stop this exercise
at any time.
If you feel upset, or in any way unnerved by anything that I show you, we can stop and you are under no obligation
to start again at any point. It is absolutely essential that you understand that I’m not going to pressure you on any aspect of this, okay? If you want to stop, we stop. It’s as simple as that.’

Lily nodded again. Took a deep breath. She found she was shaking slightly, and stretched out her fingers on the desk to stop them from trembling. She looked up to find Dr Mervyn looking down at her with concern.

‘Are you really sure you want to do this?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was a whisper.

‘Absolutely? One hundred per cent?’ He smiled faintly.

‘Yes. Absolutely definitely.’

‘Okay. So. I’m going to present you with a series of objects, one at a time. You can look at as many or as few as you like today, and you can go back to previous objects at any time, but I will only put one object on the table at a time. It’s best to take things slowly with this: look at the object on the table, think about what it conjures up. You can try to connect it with what you know about what happened, or just think generally about what this object means to you. Usually I would ask you to describe for me what you see and feel, but, because speaking is not your favourite method of communication, I’m going to ask you to write it down unless you feel particularly driven to speak. Does all that make sense?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘One thing I must make clear is that I would like to be able to read everything you write down, unless you specifically choose to cross it out so I can’t see it.’

‘Why?’

‘It will help me plan future sessions,’ he said simply. ‘Now. I’m going to bring out the first object. Are you ready?’

Lily nodded. She realised she was holding her breath, and let it out in a rush. Dr Mervyn reached into a box under the desk and pulled out an object, which he placed on the desk between them. It was a photograph.

Lily leaned forward, looking at it closely. It was a photo of her and Connie in the garden, when they were very young, before the incident with Billy. Neither of them was looking at the camera; they were playing with something on the ground. Lily squinted, but she couldn’t make out what it was. Behind them, the trees loomed, casting shadows across the grass.

‘I remember,’ she murmured, barely aware that she was speaking. ‘Connie had this thing. A Bug Jug. She was catching insects in it.’

She stared at the photo. Remembered the feeling of jealousy, watching Connie playing with something that she wanted. And feeling terribly sorry for the bugs, trapped by the glass walls, running from side to side, encased by something they couldn’t see. She had tried to join in, she remembered, and Connie had refused to let her; and then, when Mama had intervened and forced her to share, Connie had decided she was no longer interested, and left Lily alone to play by herself.

She stared. Why had her mother taken this photo? Was this an example of them playing nicely together? Lily didn’t remember it as being nice, but maybe it was as good as things had got between the two of them.

Lily scribbled some words, disconnected sentences about childhood feelings. Nothing about Billy, yet. Though she could feel his presence, trapped in those trees.

‘Okay. Next object.’

Dr Mervyn took away the photograph, and replaced it with a marble. Lily realised with a jolt that it was Billy’s. ‘Where did you…?’ she began, but trailed off. It didn’t matter where he’d got it from.

The marble was distinctive: green glass, with a perfect yellow orb in the middle of it. Lily had never seen another one like it – would have known it anywhere. She remembered lying on her stomach in the grass, the sun warming the soles of her bare feet, and Billy’s face right in front of her. There
had been a gap between them, she knew, but in her memory they were nose to nose; she could feel his laughter as if it were her own. They’d been rolling the marble back and forth for hours, it seemed, watching it glide through the grass between them. Connie on the sidelines, grumbling; left out. And Billy, pleading with her: ‘She hasn’t got anyone her own age, Connie, can’t you just be nice to her?’

‘She’s got plenty of things of her own; she just always wants to steal
mine
…’

Lily scribbled down the memory. It had been, what? Six months before he died? No, because it had been summer, the sun so hot it had felt as though it was falling out of the sky, and he had died in September… So it couldn’t have been more than two months before the end.

What had they done, that summer, except lie in the grass and eat ice cream and play marbles?

And what had Connie done, except sulk and complain and shoo Lily away?

Lost in thought, she barely noticed what she was doing as she gestured for Dr Mervyn to remove the marble, replace it with something else. She looked away; stared out of the window, at the pools of afternoon light that lapped at the grass outside. She could feel exactly what it would be like to lie on that grass. The same as lying on her own lawn, back then. The slight dampness, the springiness of the grass beneath her limbs.

The smoothness of the strands between her fingers.

She looked back at the table, at the next object. And found herself staring straight at Billy.

Lily was shaking when she left Dr Mervyn’s office. Billy’s face was imprinted on the inside of her eyelids; if she closed her eyes, he was right there, in her head. She balled her fists into
her eye sockets, trying to scrub him out, but it just seemed to push him further in.

She walked without thinking where she was going; she didn’t return to class. Down the corridors with their black and white checks, which she found herself counting almost without thinking. All the doors were closed, no one was around, and the corridor felt too wide, too high, and she was just a tiny speck in a sea of tiles and fluorescent strip lights. The veins in her forehead thumped against her skin and made her dizzy.

She hadn’t said anything. She felt guilty that she hadn’t said anything. Or even written anything down. But the sight of his face… She should have been expecting it. Should have known that among a list of objects that might remind her of that night would be Billy: his face, or his name, or his belongings.

But it wasn’t that night she was remembering. It was just him.

She hadn’t even realised she’d forgotten him. You noticed when people first died. She’d never spoken about it, of course, never had any way of communicating it to anyone, but she’d thought about him every day for months. For years. During all her time at the institute he had been with her, her big sister’s best friend, her older brother, the first boy she’d ever loved. He’d been her silent companion, and she’d been silent with him, and in that way they’d been together, somehow. And she hadn’t noticed when she’d started being silent by herself; that was just the way it was.

How would you notice the absence of a thought? It was only when you thought of it again, and suddenly realised, it’d been weeks since you’d thought of him. Months. When did he become part of your past, rather than your every day?

When did he stop occupying every waking minute?

It was a shock when you realised that people were right: that time did heal all wounds. That you did move on, eventually.

And it was even more of a shock when you realised later that you never really had.

When she got to the bus stop Connie was already there, staring in the other direction. Lily sat down beside her. Connie looked down, surprised, and then shifted slightly, in acknowledgement. ‘Shouldn’t you be in class?’ she asked.

‘Shouldn’t you?’ Lily retorted. Connie smiled.

They sat quietly for a while, watching the traffic roll past. It wasn’t a busy road, most of the time, and there weren’t that many cars. There were trees on the other side, behind a fence: the back border of the private boys’ school. The trees were thick enough to obscure the building entirely.

‘Did you see Dr Mervyn today?’

Lily looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

‘Dad mentioned it. He wanted to know if I still had any of Billy’s stuff. He said you were trying something out.’ A pause. ‘He said it might upset you.’

Lily nodded. There was a trail of ants on the ground, picking their way across the concrete in an awkward line, and she watched their progress without really seeing what they were doing.

‘Did it? Upset you?’

Lily shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘Well, you left school early. You don’t usually do that, right?’ Connie looked down at her, scrutinising her. ‘Or are you secretly as bad as me?’

‘No.’

‘So it did upset you.’

‘He showed me a photograph of Billy.’

Connie’s face became strangely expressionless. Almost as if someone had momentarily immobilised all her features. ‘Oh.’

‘I’d forgotten his face.’

Connie nodded, slowly. ‘Yeah. That happens.’ She had tried to sound blasé, as if it didn’t really matter, but her voice caught and she looked away.

‘Do you still miss him?’

There was a long pause before Connie answered. Lily noticed the ants had picked up a crumb of biscuit and were carrying it between four of them like a palanquin.

‘Yeah,’ Connie said eventually. ‘Yeah, I still miss him.’

The bus turned up, and they got on, sitting at opposite ends of the back seat so they could stretch their legs out into the middle. Halfway through the journey they shifted so that they were sitting side by side, and Connie lifted her arm so that Lily could lean into her, and gripped her sister’s thin shoulder in her white-knuckled fingers all the way home.

When they got back their father was out, but Anna was in the kitchen, propping up a newspaper at the table. She looked up as they came in. ‘You girls are back early.’

‘There was a fire alarm. It wouldn’t stop going off, so they sent us home.’ Connie’s lie was so smooth Lily could almost hear the ringing of bells, the inward shrug of the teachers as they resigned themselves to the inevitable and let them all leave.

‘Oh.’ Their mother’s interest was more fleeting than a butterfly, and she disappeared back behind her newspaper. Connie and Lily made their way upstairs.

‘Have you seen any of Mama’s photos?’ Connie’s whisper trailed up the stairs after Lily.

‘No.’

‘Come with me.’

Connie grabbed her by the hand and led her into their parents’ room. It was dimly lit; the sun set on the opposite side of the house, and this side was always gloomy in the afternoons, shadows stretching out from corners and
creeping from under furniture. Connie didn’t switch on the light, though. They tiptoed across the room, instinctively imitating the silence of the house, and Connie eased open the wardrobe door, and stood on tiptoe to reach the top shelf. She pulled out a shoebox.

‘Come on. My room.’

They slipped back out of the room, into Connie’s room, and closed the door behind them. Connie flicked on the radio, and a warm chattering filled the silence. Lily felt properly calm for the first time since she’d left Dr Mervyn’s office.

‘Mama thinks I don’t know about these,’ Connie said, her voice almost a normal pitch now, knowing Anna wouldn’t hear them above the radio. ‘I found them when you were away. She hid everything, you know. Our entire childhood.’

Lily, who still had part of her childhood tucked away at their grandparents’ house, said nothing.

‘Anyway, she went out one day and she’d left them on the bed. So I went through them. There aren’t loads – well, you know, she wasn’t ever that much of a mother – but there are – well, have a look.’

Connie pulled off the lid, and revealed a stack of maybe a hundred photographs.

Resting on the top was a photo of the four of them: father, mother, two daughters. Connie a toddler, chubby and round but standing proudly upright; Lily just born, swathed in blankets, clutched in her mother’s arms. Anna looking more peaceful than Lily had ever seen her, and their father, smiling, arm slung casually around her shoulders.

It looked like someone else’s family. Lily was fascinated.

She lifted the picture, and found another, and another; year after year of them growing older, becoming different people. In different poses: at the park, at their grandparents’ house, at Christmas, on Lily’s birthday. Connie wrapping herself in tinsel, grinning with no front teeth. Lily covered
head to toe in flour, wielding a rolling pin. Snapshots of a childhood Lily could barely remember; certainly not one she would imagine had looked so happy, so varied.

And then came the shots with Billy. Connie and Billy on the swings at the park; Lily standing at the side, looking on, trying to join in. Then Lily on the swing, and both of them trying to push her. Lily sitting between Billy’s legs, going down the slide. The three of them in the paddling pool in the garden. Lily standing over them, waving her arms, directing the action. Then building the swing in the garden. Billy’s father sawing the wood for them. Their own father, tying the rope to the tree.