Let Me Lie(13)

I call Rita, who is standing on the driveway, barking at nothing.

‘What’s up with her?’

‘Invisible squirrels. She’s been like this all day. Rita!’ Reluctantly the dog comes inside, and I can shut the door. I realise Laura’s in jeans, instead of the awful brown and orange uniform of the bank she started at a month ago. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘It didn’t pan out.’ She shrugs off my concern. ‘It’s fine, honestly. I wasn’t enjoying it. Shall I put the kettle on?’

When the tea’s made we sit at the island and I show Laura the photographs of the anonymous card. I took them at the police station, not having thought to do so sooner, and the light reflects off the evidence bags, making the contents hard to read.

‘And that’s all it said?’

‘Just that one line.’

‘Did the police take it seriously?’

‘I think so.’ I catch a look in her eyes. ‘You don’t think they should?’

‘Of course they should! Look at it. Look at you – it must have been really upsetting.’ She pauses. ‘Didn’t you get something like this when your dad died?’

‘That was different. Those people were crazy.’

She raises an eyebrow. ‘You think this is sane?’

I look out of the window for the longest while. I think about the searches Dad made on his phone, checking for high tide, for the best place to jump to his death. I think about the chaplain who listened to Mum cry over her husband’s suicide. I think about my parents falling five hundred feet into ice-cold sea. And I wonder if someone pushed them. ‘I just want answers, Laura.’

She stares into her tea for a long while before speaking. ‘Sometimes they’re not the ones we want.’

I was ten when Laura’s mum died. I ran to answer the phone, knee-high socks slipping on the hall floor.

‘Can I speak to your mum?’

‘Laura! When are you coming to see us again?’ As Mum’s goddaughter, Laura was the big sister I never had. Seven years older, and everything I aspired to be, back when I thought it was important. Cool, fashionable, independent. ‘I got Star of the Week today, and—’

‘I need your mum, Anna.’

I’d never heard Laura like that. Serious. Sort of cross, I thought, although I realised afterwards she’d simply been trying to hold it all together. I took the phone to Mum.

My mother’s crying jags were punctuated with bursts of anger. I heard her rail at my dad, when I was in bed – supposedly asleep.

‘That bloody flat. Damp in every room. Alicia must have told the council about it a hundred times. She found mushrooms in the bathroom. Mushrooms! Her asthma was bad at school, but … Mushrooms, for God’s sake. No wonder it got worse.’

My dad. Soothing. Too low to hear.

‘I mean, they’ve already said they’ll move Laura into a new-build. If that’s not an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.’

Only it wasn’t. The housing association strenuously denied any liability. The coroner ruled death by natural causes; Alicia’s asthma an unfortunate contributory factor.

‘You still miss her?’ I ask now. It isn’t really a question.

‘Every day.’ Laura meets my eyes. ‘I want to tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t.’

I wonder how I’ll feel, sixteen years from now. Surely this jagged, raw pain in my chest won’t still be choking me, all that time later? It has to ease. It has to. The nightmares will fade, along with the fresh sense of loss when I walk into a room and realise my father’s chair is empty. It will get easier. Won’t it?

I stand up and crouch beside Ella’s bouncy chair. She’s sleeping, but I need to distract myself from the surge of emotion. That’s the key. Distraction. When Alicia died Laura had no one. I have Ella, and I have Mark. Mark who always knows what to say; always knows how to make me feel better.

My parents sent Mark for me. I know that sounds absurd, but I believe people walk into your life at precisely the right moment for you, and Mark is everything I never knew I needed.

A few days after Mum died I drove to Beachy Head. I had refused to go after Dad’s death, even though my mother spent hours up there, walking the cliff tops, standing at the spot from where he was seen to have jumped.

When Mum died as well I wanted to see what my parents had seen – wanted to try and understand what had gone through their heads. I parked my car and walked to the edge; looked at the sea as it crashed against the rocks. I felt a dizzying rush of vertigo, coupled with a terrifying, irrational urge to jump. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but right then I felt close to my parents for the first time since their deaths, and I wished I knew unequivocally I would be reunited with my loved ones in heaven. If I knew that, I thought, I wouldn’t hesitate.

The coroner said my mother’s suicide was understandable – in so far as any death can be understood. She missed my father.

Dad’s death sent Mum mad. She became nervous and paranoid, jumping at noises and refusing to answer the phone. I’d go downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water and find the house empty, my mother out for a walk in the early hours.

‘I went to see your father.’ A memorial stone lay in the churchyard, among the other marks of lost lives. I wept to think of her standing alone by his grave.