The Rabbit Girls(21)

Three wooden sleepers lie across each other, haphazard, with a bronze plaque screwed in to the top commemorating the deportations that happened here. Years ago. A lifetime ago, she thinks. Her hands grow cold, her feet numb and she stands. Waiting.

Stems of roses are played with by the wind. Once laid in memory, their petals join the leaves and big grey stones underfoot. A rose petal floats across her feet, once red, now crumpled black. She bends and picks up a stone and runs her finger over its jagged edges, its heaviness comforting.

Millions were deported, killed. The bringers of the roses come to remember, but her parents chose to forget. Why?

She places a stone on the sleepers.

‘For Mum,’ she says, then chooses another stone to lay beside the first, so they touch. ‘For Dad.’

They survived. When most died. They chose to have a life free of the past, but she cannot understand why Mum would keep the uniform. The clouds gather overhead and the wind swirls.

‘But if you chose to forget,’ she whispers, squatting low so that she is level with the stones sitting together on the sleeper, ‘why did you keep the dress?’

She presses her lips together hard. ‘And the letter.’ She didn’t know a Eugenia. Why would she keep a letter that didn’t really ‘belong’ to her?

Her memories shift like smoke, changed by the current, and suddenly dissolve at the crunch of footsteps on stones behind her. She struggles to stand on cold legs. A couple, both in long, dark coats and fur hats, have come with flowers and Miriam nods to them, before noticing the stones. So many stones, so many people. Why would her mother keep a dress with just one single letter?

There must be something more.

Something else, maybe.

And just as she stamps life into her feet, she feels momentum. To leave a place stuck in the amber of memory and return home, to the present, to Dad and to the dress. To find out what happened to them. Her breath steams ahead as rain falls.

Through the station and out, the sky rains grey and she is soaked before she has walked to the end of the car park, her hood drips water on to her face. She finds a solitary taxi about to pull away and hails it.

The jingle of tinsel cheer that rings both from the radio and the driver stun Miriam into silence. It is an assault on the senses after the clear, crisp quiet of the platform. The peaceful respect of the past scratched away by cheap music.

‘Where to, love?’ the driver asks, turning the rear-view mirror so he can see her. She tells him and sees the smear of fingerprint left on the mirror. It fragments the light into a unique pattern that keeps catching her eye as they wash through empty streets. The screech of windscreen wipers creates shooting stars from raindrops across the screen. Closer to home, she wonders where Axel is and feels nauseous without any warning, just thinking of him.

‘Don’t mind if I turn up the radio, do you?’

The false cheer pulses out at her from the warbling driver.

She pays the driver. He wishes her a Merry Christmas and pulls away, leaving her on the step of the large five-storey apartment block, shadowed by oak trees on either side, their leaves littered on the cobbled ground. The front door a white light guiding the ship lost at sea home.

Unlocking the main door, she continues up the stairs, the fur of the hood tickles her damp skin. She moves as fast as she can, but her feet hold her back, each step weighted, like walking through water.

She finds the key in her bag, turns it in the lock and pushes her way into the apartment.

Time moves through frames like snap shots. Blink. Snap. Move. Her thoughts circle around and around. She hears the mattress and the radio in the background.

His door glides open and he looks dead.

She takes a step in, unsure yet eager, but stops as the smell of over-ripe fruit, more pronounced by leaving, hits her like a wall.

His chest rises then falls.

She smiles at Hilda in the chair. The radio is playing a quiet violin solo and Miriam can hear the haunting, sharp notes as they cascade, reminding her of journeys and of goodbyes.

‘The weather turned, eh?’

She nods.

‘I had a thought,’ Hilda says, getting up. ‘Now that you are here to stay, perhaps you would like to see a doctor?’

Miriam takes off her coat and kisses her father’s papery skin.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ Miriam’s voice rises, then falls fast, as she somehow loses her centre. Unravelled somewhere between the purpose she felt at the platform looking at the stones and now, back in the apartment.

Hilda packs her glasses into her bag. ‘I think you are doing an amazing job. But it would be wrong of me not to offer you some support, medical or otherwise.’ She closes her bag and puts it on her shoulder. ‘Think on it, okay?’

Miriam looks at her father, a sheen across his forehead and his cheeks pink. She touches the back of his hand with her fingertips.

‘If this is what you want to do?’ Hilda continues.

A fireball of frustration rises so fast she feels she may launch herself at Hilda and tear into her.

‘There are other places, hospice perhaps, if you are finding this too tough. And it wouldn’t be a reflection on you, just . . .’

The internal fire is extinguished with a hiss.

‘No. I have to. I want to,’ she implores Hilda.

‘Then we need to look after you too, so you can look after your father. I can make you an appointment.’ Hilda gives Miriam a kiss on both cheeks as though to seal the conversation, then sees herself out.