Let Me Lie(38)

‘Come on, you.’ I unbuckle Ella from the car seat. Talking aloud to her quells the churning feeling in my stomach, as though a thousand butterflies were caught in a net.

Despite the Aga, the kitchen is icy, too. There’s a smell of fresh, cold air; a drift of jasmine I make myself ignore. Rita whines from the utility room. I open the door and go to fuss her, but she ignores me and runs into the kitchen, where she chases her nose in circles along the floor. Around and around she runs, and it makes me smile in spite of myself.

‘Silly dog!’ I say to Ella. ‘Isn’t she a silly dog?’

I find a piece of marrowbone, and reluctantly Rita leaves her imaginary rabbit chase and takes it to her bed by the Aga, where she gnaws contentedly.

Post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences. Such a clinical way to describe something so magical. So inexplicable.

‘Some people claim to have had entire conversations with their loved ones,’ Mark said at the police station. ‘It’s often part of a disordered grieving process known as pathological grief, but occasionally it can be a symptom of something more serious.’

Symptoms. Processes. Conditions.

Names for things we don’t understand, because we’re frightened of what they might mean. What they might do to us.

Entire conversations …

I’d give anything to hear my parents’ voices again. I have a few videos: birthday speeches; summer holiday antics; a film from my graduation, snippets recorded throughout the day, then stitched together. My parents are the wrong side of the camera – they kept it proudly trained on me – but the microphone picked up every whispered word as they sat in their front-row seats in the Butterworth Hall at Warwick Arts Centre.

‘Our little girl …’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Look at that one in the jeans – you’d think he’d have put a proper pair of trousers on.’

‘You can talk – you look like you’ve been gardening in those.’

‘How stupid of me – I thought today was about Anna! If I’d known it was a fashion parade for parents …’

They took me for lunch at Tailors, where Dad became prouder – and louder – with each course, and Mum wiped tears away as she shared my mediocre degree result with another stranger. By dessert I was desperate to leave, but I couldn’t steal this moment from them. I was their only child. The first Johnson to go to university. They deserved a celebration.

I’ve played the films so often I know every word by heart, but it isn’t the same. It could never be the same.

I close my eyes. Tip up my head. On impulse, I hold out my arms, palms uppermost, thinking how if anyone looks in the window right now, I will never live this down. But if I can feel Mum, if I can smell her perfume …

‘Mum? Dad?’ My voice sounds small and tinny in the empty kitchen. ‘If you can hear me …’

There’s a whistle of wind from outside, a rustle from the trees in the garden. Rita whines, a faint, high-pitched cry that fades into nothing.

When I was eleven Laura showed me how to make a Ouija board, explaining how we could summon the dead with nothing more than some strategically lit candles and a board on which we had carefully marked the letters of the alphabet. She swore me to secrecy, and we waited until the next time Laura babysat to set everything up.

Laura turned the lights low. She took a CD from her bag and played a track I didn’t recognise, by an old-fashioned singer I’d never heard of.

‘Ready?’

Our forefingers on the small piece of wood in the centre of the board, we waited. And waited. I stifled the giggles. Laura’s eyes were closed, her face screwed up in concentration. I was getting bored. I’d expected a fun night in with Laura, scaring each other with ghost stories, the way my friends and I did at sleepovers.

I pushed the marker.

Laura’s eyes snapped open. I mirrored her look of shock.

‘Did you feel that?’

I nodded furiously. She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Did you move it? Swear you didn’t move it.’

‘I swear.’

Laura closed her eyes again. ‘Is there someone there?’

Gently, I pushed the marker across the board. Yes.

And then I wished I hadn’t. Because Laura’s face crumpled like paper, and tears pushed their way from beneath her eyelids and clung to her lashes.

‘Mum?’

I wanted to cry too. I couldn’t tell Laura I’d been messing around, but I couldn’t carry on with a game she wasn’t playing. Her fingers trembled, but the marker didn’t move. It was an age before she took away her hands.

‘Shall we play something else instead?’

‘Are you okay?’ I was tentative, but Laura had already blinked away the beginnings of tears. She blew out the candles, whisked me into a game of Monopoly.

Years later I confessed. We were sharing a bottle of wine, and I had a sudden memory of crouching over our homemade Ouija board, a sudden need to clear my conscience.

‘I know,’ she said, when I’d unburdened my soul.

‘You know?’

‘Well, I guessed. You were a crap liar when you were eleven.’ She grinned and aimed a punch at my shoulder, then took in my face. ‘Don’t tell me it’s been eating you up all this time?’