Into the Water(16)

I didn’t understand you, but if you were strange to me then, you are utterly alien now. Now I’m sitting 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 on to 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 which gave me purpose; a job which 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 river bank and creep around the house, up to your ankles in mud. You’d scramble up the bank and on to 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.