Into the Water(35)

‘Mum?’ He was white as a ghost, his voice caught in his throat. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing, darling, I’m just …’ She took a step towards him, but he stepped back.

‘Are you … are you going to clear her room now?’

Louise nodded. ‘I’m going to make a start,’ she said.

‘What will you do with her things?’ he asked, his voice rising even higher. He sounded strangled. ‘Will you give them away?’

‘No, darling.’ She went to him and reached out to smooth his soft hair from his forehead. ‘We’ll keep everything. We won’t give anything away.’

He looked worried. ‘But shouldn’t you wait for Dad? Shouldn’t he be here? You shouldn’t be doing this by yourself.’

Louise smiled at him. ‘I’m just going to make a start,’ she said, as brightly as she could. ‘I actually thought you’d gone round to Hugo’s this morning, so …’ Hugo was Josh’s friend, possibly his only true friend. (Every day Louise thanked the Lord for the existence of Hugo and Hugo’s family, who took Josh in whenever he needed an escape.)

‘I did, but I forgot my phone, so I came back for it.’ He held it up for her to see.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Good boy. Are you staying there for lunch?’

He nodded, and he tried to smile, and then he was gone. She waited until she heard the front door slam before she sat down on the bed and allowed herself to cry properly.

On the bedside table there was an old hair tie, stretched and worn down almost to a thread, long strands of Katie’s glorious dark hair still entwined in it. Louise picked it up and turned it over in her hands, lacing it between her fingers. She held it against her face. She got to her feet and walked over to the dressing table, opened the heart-shaped pewter jewellery box and placed the hair tie inside. It would remain there along with her bracelets and earrings – nothing would be thrown away, everything would remain. Not here, but somewhere; it would travel with them. No part of Katie, nothing she had touched, would languish on a dusty charity-shop shelf.

Around Louise’s neck hung the necklace which Katie had been wearing when she died, a silver chain with a little bluebird. It bothered Louise that she’d chosen that particular piece of jewellery. Louise hadn’t thought it a favourite. Not like the white-gold earrings which Louise and Alec had given her on her thirteenth birthday, which she’d adored, not like the woven friendship bracelet (‘brotherhood bracelet’) which Josh bought for her (with his own money!) on their last holiday to Greece. Louise couldn’t fathom why Katie had chosen that – a present from Lena, to whom she’d no longer seemed particularly close, the bird engraved (most un-Lena like) with love.

She’d worn no other jewellery. Jeans, a jacket, far too warm for the summer evening, its pockets filled with stones. Her backpack similarly laden. When they found her, she was surrounded by flowers, some of them still clutched in her fist. Like Ophelia. Like the picture on Nel Abbott’s wall.

People said it was tenuous at best, ridiculous and cruel at worst, to lay the blame at Nel Abbott’s door for what happened to Katie. Just because Nel wrote about the pool, talked about the pool, took pictures there, conducted interviews, published articles in the local press, spoke once to a BBC radio programme about it, just because she said the words ‘suicide spot’, just because she talked about her beloved ‘swimmers’ as glorious, romantic heroines, as women of courage meeting easeful death in their chosen place of beauty, she could not be held responsible.

But Katie didn’t hang herself from the back of her bedroom door, she didn’t cut her wrists or take a handful of pills. She chose the pool. What was truly ridiculous was to ignore that, to ignore the context, to ignore how suggestible some people can be – sensitive people, young people. Teenagers – good, intelligent, kind children – become intoxicated with ideas. Louise didn’t understand why Katie did what she did, she never would, but she knew that her act hadn’t happened in isolation.

The grief counsellor she had seen for just two sessions told her that she shouldn’t seek to know why. That she wouldn’t ever be able to answer that question, that no one could; that in many cases where someone takes their own life, there isn’t one reason why, life just isn’t that simple. Louise, despairing, had pointed out that Katie had no history of depression, she wasn’t being bullied (they talked to the school, they went through her email, her Facebook, they found nothing but love). She was pretty, she was doing well in school, she had ambition, drive. She wasn’t unhappy. Wild-eyed sometimes, excitable often. Moody. Fifteen. Most of all, she wasn’t secretive. If she had been in trouble, she would have told her mother. She told her mother everything, she always had. ‘She didn’t keep things from me,’ Louise said to the counsellor, and she watched his eyes slide from her face.

‘That’s what all parents think,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’m afraid all parents are wrong.’

Louise didn’t see the counsellor again after that, but the damage had been done. A fissure had opened and guilt seeped through, a trickle at first and then a flood. She didn’t know her daughter. That was why the necklace bothered her so much, not just because it came from Lena, but because it became a symbol for everything she didn’t know about her daughter’s life. The more she thought about that, the more she blamed herself: for being too busy, for focusing too much on Josh, for failing so completely to protect her child.