My Candlelight Novel (21 page)

Lil clearly adored him. Well, he was her child, so I understand that fully now. I remember how excited she was the day he arrived home, and not long after, how grief-stricken at the news of his death. I thought that she might never come back to us at all. Even the presence of Kate could not appease her sorrow.

I remember him as tall and brown-bearded and serious. When we were small, Kate and I shared the room that was to become mine. He came in as Lil was putting us to bed one night and said cheerfully, ‘This was my room once. It's the best room in the house. Up high, with the view out the front of the river.' He stood at the doorway and looked out; it was a dark, warm night, and I can't imagine he could have seen anything much. But the expression on his face told me that he was seeing something that the rest of us couldn't.

One day, I stood at the crack of the open kitchen door and spied, as he and Lil spoke about us. ‘Who
are
these children?' he said.

‘I told you in my letter. They were left. I took them in. That's all there is to it.'

‘But who left them?'

‘Just a man. Michael O'Farrell, his name was.'

‘And what else did he leave?'

‘A few clothes. Their birth certificates. That's all.'

Lil rummaged in a drawer and drew something out. He looked at the pieces of paper and shook his head.

‘What is it? What?'

‘Nothing. You could have found him…and what about their mother?'

‘He never mentioned her. I gathered she was out of the picture. Anyway, they're better off with me…is that you, Sophie? Come in if you're coming in. No good will come of listening at doorways, madam!'

Alan gave us a pile of books he'd bought down at the local bookshop, handing them over casually. ‘Since you like stories,' he said, and not in a superior way either, as some people do, thinking them childish things. I knew that he liked stories too.

He'd even told me he wrote them.

That was the day he took us to the park where he pushed us on the swings and then lay back on his elbows, long legs crossed, as Kate played in the sand with her toy cars. I stretched out beside him, feeling very grown-up. He had a notebook with him, and had been writing in it. He closed it up when he saw that I wanted to talk. He clearly enjoyed talking with us; that was one of the things I liked about him. He treated us as real, serious people.

First, I asked him why he was going away again, because he'd told me he was only there for a few more days.

‘For adventure,' he said. ‘And to find things to write about. That's how I make my living. I'm a writer. I report back to newspapers.'

‘What sort of things? Can't you make it all up from here?'

‘I write about real things…wars. And disasters. There's always something dreadful happening somewhere. You need to be there.'

‘Isn't this real here? Can't you write about this?'

‘I used to think so,' he said.

‘I'm a writer,' I said, confidently.

‘Are you? What do you write?'

‘I can write stories! Real ones.'

He handed over his notebook. ‘Write me a story, then.'

I looked at the scribble he'd been making and said, ‘I write properly, not like you.'

I turned to the flyleaf and wrote a proper story with proper letters. There it was in the notebook I discovered after Lil died. It was a very simple story, only three sentences long. It was the story of my life.

My name is Sophie. I am seven years old. My mother is dead.

After we came back from leaving the dog with my grandfather, my mother's illness got worse. Once, she had walked about so smoothly and gracefully, her skirt swishing with life and determination. Now she navigated her way round the flat using the walls. I once found her in the middle of the night crawling down the hallway on her hands and knees. She found her way to bed and I covered up her legs and watched over her till I fell asleep beside her. She was very ill, I can see that now, and the child me knew it as well.

I used to comb her hair while she lay in bed, and learned to make cups of tea, which she could never finish. They went cold next to the bed. I amused Kate in front of the television, and spread bread with peanut butter for us both to eat. At least she was there with us. It was a kind of happiness, those days with her.

Her friend Loretta used to come and take us out while she stayed in bed, but I was filled with anxiety every moment I was away from her. One day when Loretta brought us back, I remember her saying to our mother …
weak as a kitten
, but our mother insisted that she was
just tired, that's all
.

That day the ambulance came and took her away. Later, Loretta took us to the hospital, but they didn't allow us to stay very long. I can remember holding her hand. ‘Be my big girl, and look after Kate,' she said. I put my fingers to her mouth and she kissed each one of them in turn, and then the same for Kate, who giggled with delight.

When we were leaving I looked back, and she was still watching us.

Michael O'Farrell returned. Every day he left us on our own while he went out, sometimes not arriving home till we had put ourselves to bed. I kept on asking to see our mother, but he shook his head and opened another beer. Once he found out that Loretta had taken us up to her place for the day while he was out, and he hit the roof. We were frightened to go again. I hushed Kate, and refused to answer whenever she knocked and called out.

One day he came home with a feed of fish and chips for us and told us that our mother had had to go away.

Soon after that he brought us here to Samarkand, and left us here with Lil.

At the old stuccoed block of flats, the sky was always a deep, unmoving blue. In the back yard there was only concrete underfoot, and a group of rotary clotheslines standing like a flock of queer birds. Her belly big with Kate, my mother would hang out the washing, telling stories all the while, so that for me all stories have an aura of sky-blue. In my mind they were just one big story anyway. The tales of children finding a gingerbread cottage in the woods or princesses dancing their shoes to pieces were associated with all the stories my mother told about how I'd been born.

‘I was happy the whole time I was having you…'

‘This is the dress I wore then – I love the colours; can't bear to throw it away, but look how faded it's become.'

‘There were two sisters, and one had hair as black as coal; the other's hair was as yellow as sunshine…'

‘You came into the world with your eyes wide open…'

Once, before Kate, before Michael O'Farrell, I was a naked child on an early morning beach watching my mother go out into the waves. She submerged and came up time and again, wiping the hair from her eyes. She looked back at me and moved her arm in a great celebratory arc.

I stood at the edge and watched, my toes clamped into wet sand. I roared (before I had words I had such a strong voice!) because I had been abandoned. But my mother seemed oblivious to me, and kept walking out into the terrifying unknown waves.

Finally she halted, and began to wait for each swell to come to her, diving under each one with pure pleasure, sometimes looking back at me with a reluctant expression of anxiety and longing. When I became a mother myself, I knew that look. It's the look of a woman torn between the delight of doing what she wants and the duty of returning to her child.

Finally, my mother submerged herself one last time and returned, oh so slowly, water streaming from her long hair, over her breasts and belly and thighs.

Until she was graspable, and I possessed her again.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

K
ATE AND
I
WALKED
away from the bridge, and each of us was lost in her own thoughts, and what hers were I couldn't imagine. She had been right in what she said before she ripped up that photo and threw it into the river. I didn't know her.

I looked sideways at her profile, her nose straight and fine, regal almost, her skin so pale that she appeared to have an inner light that spoke of a new certainty and self-possession. I wondered when she had stopped being my own darling Kate, when it was that I'd begun to move imperceptibly away from her. I think it must have been when we arrived at Samarkand and I could safely leave her in the care of Lil.

Though in truth, it was she who'd also been moving away from me. With her new-found friends and life in the city, her mobile phone and her new hair-style and confidence, she had grown up and away almost without me noticing.

‘I was planning to go away after Christmas,' she said, with only a faint air of embarrassment. ‘To see Alex in Europe. I've been saving all year – it won't cost much more than the fare because I'll have somewhere to stay. You don't mind, do you?'

‘Why should I mind?'

‘Well, I hadn't told Lil or anyone yet, and now that she's dead…I was planning to have Christmas with you all, you see. I still will.'

‘I wish I was as adventurous as you.'

‘Do you really? I always thought you were more adventurous. The way you just went ahead and had Hetty. I wouldn't have been so brave. I think having a child must be the biggest adventure of all.'

‘I don't know about brave…'

Then she said in a rush, as though afraid of not ever saying it, ‘She died, didn't she?'

‘Yes.'

‘I always knew that. But when your father tells you she had to go away, you kind of believe it, don't you? He seemed to have so much authority. And I was so young, I didn't really understand what anything meant at all. And then later on, you described her leaving, in her red dress and all.'

‘I made it up. Poetic licence.'

‘Then tell me what really happened.'

We had reached the horse that lived in the school's paddock, and stopped to pat it.

‘It's a long story,' I said. ‘I'll write it for you,' I said impulsively.

‘Do you promise?'

‘I promise. I'll begin this summer.'

We reached Samarkand, which stood almost in darkness, except for my room, where Becky waited for me with Hetty. It was a huge dark pile of a house, so ancient and weathered it was a wonder that anyone could ever love it.

‘Do you think that
was
her with Alan in that photo?' Kate said.

‘We'll probably never know.'

Kate bowed her head and did not speak. Then, looking up at Samarkand towering above us, she said, ‘I love this place. It's home. Let's not ever sell it.'

‘Of course not.' I reached out and straightened her collar. She smoothed the wild hair away from my face.

‘We'll do,' she said, with certainty.

She put out her hand and I took it, and we walked up the stairs that way, just as we had when we were children.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

A
ND SO HERE
I am in my red-room, galloping towards the end of my story. I can feel all the loose ends yearning to be gathered together; or more truthfully, I can feel you, my Dear Reader, wanting them gathered, because that is what novels are meant to do. But what if stories didn't end? What if they finished – ploof! – like that, simply because the writer got tired of writing, and wandered away?

Though I can feel myself
not
wanting to stop, because writing has become so much part of my life. I have burned a multitude of candles down to their stubs, a veritable host of long, white candles blazing away in your honour (though sometimes sputtering in a draft, and almost extinguished, because writing is a windy and uncertain business). Candle upon candle, blown out each night and relit the next.

Night follows night in the world of the novelist, who has only a candle and a computer screen and her own persistence to light the way. And that is why I say with confidence that the night belongs to us.

I would like to think that our lives are not mere chance. That there is a pattern and meaning to them (and isn't that what novels are about? So why not our lives?). I like to think that, before she died, our mother told Michael O'Farrell to bring us to Lil.

Before Alan went away, he drew me towards him and kissed the top of my head. ‘I'll send postcards,' he promised.

He was killed before he sent even one. But he did give me something after all because now, among Lil's things, I've discovered his notebooks written in shorthand. In one, he has recorded a conversation with a girl. It goes something like this. No – I have the notebook here. It goes exactly like this:

‘I'm not going to get dressed yet. I'm going to lie here naked, and bask. You know, what I like about sex is that it's essentially ridiculous.'

‘You think so?'

‘Don't you? God, this room is – such – an – awful – colour! It ought to be red.'

‘Why?'

‘Just because…What's that book you're writing in?'

‘It's a secret scribbled notebook.'

‘Mysterious! And?
What
are you writing?'

‘I'm putting down everything we say. Hurry up and get dressed; my mother will be home soon.'

‘What's she like?'

‘She's lovely. She has a heart of gold. And she's as mad as a hatter.'

‘I like the sound of her… Anyway, what will you do with all this stuff you're scribbling down?'

‘Don't know. I could write a story.'

‘About…?'

‘A girl too beautiful for her own good, and too restless.'

‘Are only men allowed to be restless? I could come with you, to Asia…anyway, I'm getting out of home as soon as I can. I want to go somewhere! I
hate
living on that wet old mountainside with my father. Okay! I'm getting dressed as fast as I can! What did I do with my shoes?'

And in my imagination, my mother looks over her shoulder at him as she bends down and slips a blue, embroidered Chinese slipper onto her foot. And inside her body a single sperm reaches its target, and a zygote is formed.