Let Me Lie(51)

‘You’re—’ I drag each word out into the world as if using them for the first time. ‘Actually here?’

She straightens. Takes a breath. Her tears have stopped, but there’s such anxiety in her eyes it’s as though she’s the one mourning me. Life is moving like sand beneath my feet and I don’t know what’s real and what’s not any more. I’m seized by paranoia. Has the last year been a nightmare? Could it have been me who died? It feels that way. My head spins with a light-headedness that makes me sway, and my mother steps forward, one hand outstretched in concern.

I step back, confusion making me frightened, and she takes her hand away, hurt in her eyes. I’ve started to cry noisily, and she glances over her shoulder towards the road. Every movement she makes is achingly familiar. Every movement makes this harder to understand because it means this isn’t my imagination. I haven’t conjured a vision of my mother; I haven’t gone mad. She isn’t a ghost. She’s actually here. Living. Breathing.

‘What’s happening? I don’t understand.’

‘Can I come in?’ My mother’s voice, low and calm, is the voice of my childhood. Of bedtime stories and post-night-terror reassurance. She calls the dog, who has tired of running circles around her, and is sniffing the gravel at the bottom of the steps. Rita obeys instantly, trotting inside. My mother takes another cautious glance around. Hesitates on the threshold; waiting to be asked.

I have imagined this moment every day for the last year.

I have dreamed about it. Fantasised about it. Coming home and finding my parents going about their business as though nothing had happened. As though the whole thing had been a terrible dream.

I’ve imagined getting a call from the police to tell me my father was swept out to sea. That he was rescued by a fishing boat; lost his memory. That my mother survived her fall. That they were coming back to me.

In my dreams, I throw myself at my parents. We cling to each other fiercely; hugging, touching. Making sure. And then we talk, words tumbling over each other. Interrupting, crying, apologising, promising. In my dreams there is noise and happiness and sheer joy.

My mother and I stand silently in the doorway.

The grandfather clock whirrs in the prelude to the hour. Rita, who has never liked the sound, disappears to the kitchen, having presumably satisfied herself that her mistress is here. Is real.

The chimes ring out. When my father brought home this clock, bought at auction the year I started secondary school, the three of us looked at each other as it rang the hour.

‘We’ll never sleep through that!’ my mother said, half laughing, half appalled. Even the ticking was intrusive, echoing each passing second in the empty hall. But sleep we did, and before too long I only noticed the clock when the mechanism had stopped, and the absence of tick-tock, tick-tock made the house feel empty.

Now we look at each other, my mother and I, as each hour echoes into the space between us. Only when it has stopped, and the final peal has faded, does she speak.

‘I know this is a shock.’

Was there ever more of an understatement?

‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

I find my voice. ‘You didn’t die.’ There are so many questions, but this one – the fundamental truth – is the one with which I am struggling the most. She didn’t die. She isn’t a ghost.

She shakes her head. ‘We didn’t die.’

We. I hold my breath. ‘Dad?’

A beat. ‘Darling, there’s a lot you have to know.’

Slowly, I make my brain compute what I’m hearing. My father is alive. My parents didn’t die at Beachy Head.

‘So, it was an accident?’

I knew it. Was certain of it. My parents would never try to kill themselves.

But … an accident. Not murder; an accident.

Two accidents?

A ticker tape runs through my head as I apply this new narrative to the scenes I never have understood. Two accidents. Eyewitnesses mistaken. Falls, not jumps.

Identical falls?

The tape stops.

A sigh from my mother. Resigned. Tired. She fidgets, pushing one black strand of hair behind her ears in a gesture futile now that it is so short. She nods towards the kitchen.

‘Can I come in?’

But the ticker tape has jammed. It twists into knots in my head because what I’m imagining doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up.

‘Dad sent you a text.’

The longest of pauses.

‘Yes.’ She holds my gaze. ‘Please – can we sit down inside? It’s complicated.’

But suddenly it seems simple. And the shifting sands beneath my feet grow still, and the tilted world starts to spin again. There’s only one explanation.

‘You faked your deaths.’

I observe my calmness as though standing in the wings; congratulate myself on my presence of mind. Yet even as I say it – even as I know without any shred of doubt that I’m right – I pray that I’m wrong. Because it’s preposterous. Because it’s illegal. Immoral. But more than that, because it’s cruel. Because their leaving me broke my heart, and has continued to chip away at it every day since, and to know that my parents did that deliberately will shatter it completely.

My mother’s face screws up like paper. Tears splash onto the stone step.