True Love, page 23
She makes Anna her tea: mashed potato, fish fingers and a few scoops of baked beans. She sits opposite her at the table and asks her questions about her day. It still seems remarkable to her that this little person understands her, that she has thoughts of her own, that she can articulate her pleasures and displeasures so clearly, and often so amusingly. It seems utterly unfathomable now that Keely had come so close to vanquishing this life that she’s created, that’s been added to the world and makes her own so much brighter and happier.
Anna tells her about a painting that she did. She has a friend, a little boy named Sebastian, that she spends most of her time with. Keely has taken Anna over to their home in a little village a few miles away. It’s a large white house with its own drive and garage, and it has a garden so big that the lawns have to be mowed by a sit-on machine.
Keely will often have a cup of tea in the kitchen while Anna plays for a bit longer, and she’ll sit at a large wooden table and stare at the dark gloss of the granite surfaces, at the pleasingly distressed tiles of the floor. This is the first house she’s been in that belongs to people who have money.
Sebastian’s parents are called Louise and Jonathan. Louise grew up in the town but she met Jonathan when she went to university. Keely assumes that’s how she lost her accent, though sometimes the occasional word slips out of her mouth that has the same musical lilt to it as her own. Jonathan, a tall, fair-haired man with bright teeth and spectacles, is from somewhere down South and does a job that Keely doesn’t understand but must earn him a hefty salary. He doesn’t say much, and often seems a little wary around her, as if she might be considering attacking him.
Anna sometimes asks if Sebastian can come over to their house to play, but she always comes up with an excuse why this isn’t possible. She would love to have Sebastian round, to hear him and Anna playing upstairs in her room, but she’s simply too ashamed to have Louise or Jonathan see how small and grubby her house is compared to their own. She’d love to have a great big kitchen with a tiled floor and cupboards that go up to the ceiling, but she has only enough room to fit in a small plastic table that she knows is actually patio furniture. It was all she could afford at the time, but she’s promised Anna that they’ll have a big wooden one like Sebastian’s one day.
Anna leaves some of her tea – half a fish finger and a dollop of beans – which Keely finishes off while stood over the sink. The windows are all dark now, though when she’s rinsing the plate under the sink, she can still see the snow landing on the glass and then disappearing.
Finn recently bought Anna a video player and some videos. She has no idea how he scraped the money together, but Anna loves them. She wants to watch one now, one they must both have watched a hundred times. Like some of the books she’s read, Keely can remember nearly all of the dialogue, and she can time some of the lines perfectly with the characters on the screen to make Anna laugh.
She switches on the old, ugly electric fire that she’d like to remove at some point, but which now warms them, the bars glowing red after a few minutes. The sofa is lumpy but comfortable enough. Anna fetches her blanket from upstairs and then comes back down with it trailing after her, still in her nursery uniform but with her pink dressing gown over the top.
They nestle up together in the corner of the sofa. Keely loves to feel her daughter’s body pressed against her own, the solid weight of her. When Anna sleeps at night, Keely never goes to bed without tiptoeing into her room. She’ll watch her daughter’s chest rise and fall, but still she’ll lower her hand to hover over her mouth just so she can feel the soft warmth of her breath against the tips of her fingers.
Sometimes, if she’s not too fearful of waking her up, she’ll rest her hand on her chest and feel the steady drum of her heart. It can send a shiver of worry through her, all of this precious life supported by something she can’t see, can’t touch, can’t protect. She’d like to keep that heart locked away from harm, for it to be always with her, never not within her reach, and it’s only recently that she’s felt a little more comfortable handing Anna over to be looked after by someone else.
They watch the video. The bright colours splash across Anna’s face. She laughs at all the same parts, sings along with the songs, sometimes getting the words mixed up in ways that make Keely smile. There’s the occasional suggestion – the way she brings her small fists up to rub at her eyes, or starts sucking on the tip of her thumb – that lets Keely know Anna’s tired, and she hopes that she’ll at least sleep through the first part of the night before climbing into her bed, where Keely herself is often still awake, swarmed by thoughts of Finn, reliving the terrible conversation that led to him leaving.
The video ends and then they go upstairs, Anna placing her hands on each tread and counting them, her bum raised up in the air. Keely runs a bath and watches the mirror steam up, then she lifts Anna up so that she can draw on it with her finger. She draws squiggles and claims them to be clouds. Then she draws both the sun and the moon, two uneven circles on opposite sides of the glass.
You can’t have the sun and the moon out at the same time, Keely tells her. Or you can, she corrects herself, but only one of them can really shine its light.
But Anna shakes her head. She’s stripped down to just her white vest and her knickers with the frilly trim. Her legs are thin and lean like Keely’s were at that age, but there’s also a suggestion of Finn, in the knobbly awkwardness of knees and ankles.
Some people are in the light, Anna says, and some people are in the dark.
It’s not uncommon for Anna to say such things. She has an uncanny knack for aphorism, like a miniature sage. These moments can be funny, or they can unnerve Keely, and she can convince herself that Anna has been gifted with some prophetic foresight, as if she might one day reveal her destiny as she’s pawing yoghurt into her mouth with her fingers.
Sometimes Keely will get in the bath with her, but now she just kneels down next to it, still wearing her work skirt, so that it’s stretched tight across her thighs. Her left sleeve is rolled up, so she can dangle her fingers in the water and help fish out some of the toys that sink to the bottom. The duck with the red beak is in there, bobbing on the surface, but what Anna seems to enjoy the most is an ordinary plastic measuring jug, which she fills up and pours out over her own head, and sometimes drinks from when she believes Keely isn’t looking. Whenever Keely catches her, Anna claims to like the taste of it more than normal water.
She tells Anna that she didn’t have a bath when she was her age.
Then what did you get clean in? Anna asks her.
We had a little shower in the caravan.
Keely does her best to explain what a caravan is. She wants to take Anna to the camp someday soon. She went recently, the last time Finn was looking after Anna, and she walked up into the dunes and down on to the beach. No one was there, and it seemed like no one ever had been, and she’d left not knowing whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
Keely looks at her daughter, with her hair dark and flat, her skin glistening. Her green eyes always seem to look bigger in the bath, at a glance taking up half of her face. When Keely drops her off at Finn’s and Finn lifts her into his arms so that their faces are level, it can still shock her to see how similar they look; and she can’t help but feel a small part of herself resent this. She doesn’t want to be reminded of him or what he did for the rest of her life, and this is going to be the case.
Anna is asking to get out of the bath because she’s feeling cold. Keely lifts her out, wraps her in a towel so that only her face is showing, her eyes peering up at her. She picks her up and carries her into her small bedroom. The walls are painted a shade of light blue, because Anna had said that she wanted it to feel like she was surrounded by the sky. Keely hadn’t been able to afford to get a decorator in, so she’d painted it herself. But even with a stepladder, she hadn’t been able to reach certain corners, and so one afternoon when Finn was dropping Anna back off, she’d asked him if he could do the last touches.
This was the first time they’d been in the same room together for longer than thirty seconds since they’d split, except for when she had gone round to his flat to check it was suitable for Anna. He looked paler and thinner, and when he’d climbed the ladder and reached up, she saw the hard bones of his hips poke out over his jeans.
They’d talked, but not about anything other than what he’d done with Anna that day. Still, the exchange had been calm and without incident. It’s only ever her that gets angry. It always has been.
Finn hadn’t been able to finish it all that night, so he’d come back the following week, and it was only a few nights after that that Keely had seen that he’d painted a little yellow sun in one corner of the room, with a face – two eyes and a nose and a gentle, beatific smile – that was looking down on Anna’s bed. He must have snuck a small tin of paint in with him, just a sample maybe, in his coat pocket. She’d pointed it out to Anna, and now Anna looks up every night and says goodnight to it. Keely likes to look at it at night too, though she’s never mentioned it to him, and he’s not mentioned it to her.
She tucks Anna in bed. She’s wearing her pyjamas, the ones with the little red truck motif, because she likes anything red and things that go fast. Her hair is still damp to the touch behind her ears, so Keely lays a small hand towel on the pillow that she keeps warming on the radiator.
She asks for a story, and picks up the one about a boy who helps a bear build a den in return for being taught to ride a unicycle. The story always prompts Anna to say that she’d like to have a garden big enough for a bear to build a den in, and Keely tells her that one day they will, but she can’t promise the bear.
Anna falls asleep before Keely’s even halfway through the story. She must have been tired. She lifts up the duvet so that it’s snug beneath her chin, and then she just sits for a few minutes and looks at her. She hovers her fingers over her mouth to feel her breath. The fact that she’s a part of her is yet to lose its potency, and she hopes it never will.
Downstairs it’s cold and empty now that Anna’s in bed. These are the hours, the empty hours of her day in which she’s alone with her thoughts. This is when they can pick at her, when they know she’s vulnerable, swarming her like ants on a dropped cone of ice cream.
The only thing that soothes them is the few mugs of whiskey – never more than three – that she pours now, sitting herself at the table and watching the clock on the wall until it’s time for her to go to bed.
HE’S STILL AT THE butcher’s in the day, though at night he’s studying. It’s not a course that he’s a part of or paying to do, but something that he’s taken on himself, that he’s entirely responsible for. He has stacks and stacks of books, most of them borrowed, some of them bought, but they’ve come to feel like the only things that are keeping him going, that are saving him from despair.
He can see snow starting to fall from the darkling sky outside. He serves the last customer of the day and then begins clearing away, wiping down the surfaces and mopping the floor, spreading out the little fistfuls of sawdust where necessary.
For the first few weeks after he’d split from Keely, Harry had offered him the spare room in his and his wife’s house. Every night, they’d walked back together and sat down at the table as Linda, Harry’s wife, would serve them up a meal, and then Harry would do his best to ask Finn about everything that had happened between him and Keely, which he described almost every night in the same way, as being like pulling teeth.
Finn knows that Harry worries about him. When he’d found a place to live and move his stuff to, Harry had tried to convince him to stay a little longer. It was Linda who’d had to convince Harry that Finn was ready to be on his own again, and only then had he let Finn out the door.
Around a year ago, Finn went into the charity shop that Keely used to go into all the time on the high street. Since he saw so little of her now, it was somewhere that he could go to sense her presence, to feel near her and all the small moments they’d shared together there.
He’d been looking at nothing in particular when he’d seen a spine on the shelf that his eye had been immediately drawn to. When he’d pulled it out and turned it in his hands, he found that it was the same book he’d been obsessed with as a boy, the one he’d found in the library at school about the Bog People.
He hadn’t seen the pictures in so long that when he opened the pages, he’d had to fight to hold back the tears. They brought with them a such a vivid rush of memories, and almost every thought that had ever skimmed through his mind at that age seemed to flow through him again, as if his entire life was somehow contained within this book, as if it was a portal into a past version of himself.
Just as when he was a boy, he started to spend whole days thinking about the book. It became his primary means of distraction. Whenever he was thinking about how he’d betrayed Keely, or about how Anna was now living most of her life without him there to be with her, he’d force himself to think about the book, using it as a beacon, like a lighthouse to guide him safely around the spearing rocks and safely on to shore.
For weeks, maybe over a month, the distraction worked; but then times started to creep in when it didn’t work, when no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t control what his mind wished to summon forth. He’d wake and the first thing that he’d see would be the faces of Keely and Anna. It always felt to him as if they’d been waiting there for him; he never had any memory of dreaming of them, but there they’d be, staring at him, their faces always expressionless, seeming to expect both something from him and nothing at all.
On these days, he could barely bring himself to get out of bed. The knot in his stomach would be as tight as it was when he was a boy. He’d try to calm himself by imagining the river that he’d used to wade through, but it never worked. He remembered back then that he used to feel a kind of emptiness, but the feeling that took over him now would more often than not strike him as the opposite, as a fullness, a fullness that was stretching his muscles and his skin, as if something was growing inside him, a malignant life force seeking its freedom.
It altered the way he moved around. His gait became slower, clumsier. His head was permanently foggy. He felt as if his body was shutting down, as if it was no longer truly his own. To try and counter it, he started to run more than ever, sometimes doing five miles on a morning before work, and then heading back out for another five after. It’s not as if he’d had much fat to lose, but he became dangerously thin. His eyes bulged. His teeth pressed against his lips. The strings of his apron could be fastened twice over around his waist.
There were many nights when he’d go without eating. He barely recognized the sensations of hunger. Everything he ate came out of a tin: baked beans, carrots, potatoes. Sometimes, if he couldn’t face the very simple task of standing and stirring the beans, he’d warm the tin on the radiator and then dig in with a spoon. By the end of the week, he’d have a stack of tins and lids that he’d then have to clear away before Anna arrived on the Sunday.
It was always at night that he was at his worst. The darkness invited every spectre his mind could conjure up. He desperately struggled to make sense of what he’d done, how he’d so thoroughly ruined his life. The fault was all his own, and it made him feel so wretched that he wanted to tear at himself, and often he would, dragging his nails down his forearms until the skin broke open, so that the next day he’d have to make sure to wear a long-sleeved top to keep Harry from seeing.
How? Why? These were the questions that haunted him. He’d had no desire to do it, no secret motive propelling him forward. It wasn’t that he hadn’t loved Keely; it wasn’t that he’d thought of Anna in any way other than that she was the most beautiful, astonishing creature that he’d ever set eyes on. These were the things that life had presented to him without his having to make a decision, without his having to really work for them. They’d appeared purely out of luck and chance and good fortune. And yet he’d spat them back and now here he was, alone, in a room with walls black with mould, and a toilet down the hall that he had to share with other tenants, some of whom didn’t seem to sleep for days on end.
I NEED TO TAKE three days off work next week, he’d said to Harry, who’d looked up at him surprised before nodding lightly and saying that he’d cover the time himself if he had to.
It was the beginning of November, and Finn had read about a local dig that was happening a few miles away. A team of archaeologists were expecting to discover something of great importance. From the air, they’d managed to discern patterns on the ground below that suggested an ancient town, shapes of walls and pathways pressing up beneath the grass. He cut out the pictures and studied them by lamplight.
The article – which he had stumbled across in the local paper – gripped him in a way that was physical. His body was tense, and when he’d got to the end, he realized that his heart was hammering and that his fists were bunched together so hard that his knuckles shone white, like hard, pale fruit.
Finn didn’t quite know what he was going to do when he got to the site. He just knew that he needed to be there. It was a feeling like the one he used to get as a boy when he’d run his hands through the treasure in the box under his bed, a feeling which remained inside him long after he’d put the paper to one side, humming like the final note struck on a piano.
Keely now had the car that they’d shared, so he decided that he’d run there, packing a backpack with a map, some water and a small amount of food – a banana sandwich and an apple – then setting off early in the morning when it was still dark and the air cold enough for his breath to mist from his nose and mouth.
As he ran and the sky got brighter, his lungs seemed to expand. He’d not felt so light on his feet for a long time. The sun rose up and washed him in light. The wind tore at him, reddening his thighs. His fingers ached with the cold, but he was alive, and for the first time in many months, years, he felt glad of it.
