Let Me Lie(19)

The aftermath of a death is an unwanted gift to our loved ones. It is our children, our spouses, our friends who must tie up the loose ends and clear away the remnants of a sudden departure. I did it for my parents, at their house in Essex; you did the same for yours, here in Eastbourne. Now Anna’s doing it for me. For the two of us.

I watch Laura pick up a ceramic pot that once held a succulent – dried earth clinging to the inside – and discard it. Two distinct piles are emerging on either side of the desk, and I wonder who is driving this efficiency. Anna? Or Laura? Did she make Anna sort through our belongings today? Is Laura pushing her unwittingly towards danger?

They’re talking. Too distant for me to make out the words. My glimpse into this scene is narrow, obscured. It frustrates me because unless I know what’s happening now, how can I influence what happens next?

Our granddaughter lies on a padded mat, beneath an arch from which hang brightly coloured animals. She kicks her legs and Anna smiles at her, and my breath catches for a second as I imagine being a mother who could walk through the door as though she’d never been away. A mother who hadn’t missed a year of one life; the birth of a whole new one.

There are no decorations up, no twinkling lights on the bannister or wreath on the door. It is four days until Christmas, and I wonder if they are waiting until Christmas Eve – forming new traditions as a family – or whether the absence of festive cheer is intentional. Whether Anna can’t face the sight of tinsel and tawdry baubles.

Laura is looking through my diary. I see Anna glance at her; bite her bottom lip as if to stop herself from commenting. I know what she’s thinking.

We’d been at Oak View for a year when the burglary happened. They didn’t take a lot – there wasn’t a lot to take – but they rifled through the whole house, leaving destruction in their wake. A messy search, the police called it. It was weeks before the house was back to normal, and months before I felt at ease again. There was nothing secret about our lives – not back then – but still I felt angry that someone knew so much about me, when I knew nothing about them.

That same feeling of anger returns as I watch Laura flick through the pages of my appointment diary. There’s nothing of consequence in there, but the intrusion is unbearable. Stop it, I want to shout. Stop looking through my things, get out of my house!

Only it isn’t my house any more. It’s Anna’s. And she laughs at something Laura says, and smiles a sad smile when Laura points something out that I’m not permitted to see. I am excluded. But Anna’s laugh is short. Polite. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She doesn’t want to be doing this.

Laura looks like her mother. I was at school with Alicia; the only person she told when, a week before her sixteenth birthday, she discovered she was pregnant. Skinny as a rake, she was showing before she was eight weeks gone, and out on her ear not long after, when the baggy jumpers she’d adopted did nothing to fool her mum.

When I left school two years later, my PA job just about covering an apartment with a lift and communal laundry, with enough left over for weekend chips and wine, Alicia was living on benefits in a high-rise in Battersea.

I took them on holiday. We spent three nights in a B&B in Derbyshire, sharing a double bed, with Laura in between.

‘We should get a place together,’ Alicia said, on the last day. ‘We’d have the best time.’

How could I tell her that wasn’t what I wanted from my life? That I’d been careful not to fall pregnant; that I loved my single life and my friends and my job? How could I tell her that I didn’t want to live in a damp flat, and that – however much I liked spending time with her and Laura – I didn’t want to live with someone else’s baby?

‘The best,’ I agreed, and then I changed the subject.

I should have helped more.

Anna kneels on the carpet and pulls open the bottom drawer of the desk. It comes out with more force than she expects and she falls back, the drawer on her lap. I see Laura look up to check she’s okay; watch Anna laugh at her own clumsiness. Laura goes back to the pile of my diaries, and Anna lifts the drawer to slot it back into the desk, but something stops her. She’s seen something.

Anna sets the drawer to one side and reaches a hand into the base of the pedestal. I see her glance at Laura to check she isn’t watching, and as Anna’s eyes widen I know, as clearly as if I could see it, that her hand has closed around the smooth glass of a vodka bottle.

There’s disappointment on her face.

I know that feeling, too.

She pulls out her hand, empty. Pushes the drawer back into the desk and leaves the bottle in its hiding place. She says nothing to Laura, and the feeling of exclusion disappears, thanks to this small complicity Anna isn’t even aware of. Some secrets shouldn’t be shared outside the family.

Others shouldn’t be shared at all.





TEN


ANNA


I catch Laura looking at her watch. She’s working her way through a stack of papers, heaping half of them onto a pile for the shredder. It’s making me itch. Anything relating to work should be in the showroom, but what if she accidentally destroys something important? I’m a director of the business – albeit a somewhat passive one. I can’t just throw paperwork away without checking what it’s for.

The weight of my gaze makes Laura look up. ‘All right?’