The Last Anniversary (18 page)

‘It will be her last midnight feast at Kingfisher,’ says Rose. ‘I can remember the first time we did it. We must have been about thirteen.’

‘All very well for you Night Owls,’ says Enigma. ‘I’d rather be asleep at midnight. I can remember you dragging me up there when
I
was about thirteen. All I wanted to do was sleep.’

‘Rubbish. You loved it,’ says Rose.

‘Well of
course
I loved it. I was thirteen,’ says Enigma. ‘But I’m too old for it now, for heaven’s sake. Are you nearly finished?’

Rose is painting a silver moon and stars on Enigma’s cheeks. She’s already done an identical design on her own face. It was Connie’s favourite. She chose it for her fiftieth birthday party and wore a midnight blue and silver dress to match. Rose gave Jimmy a colourful sunrise on his forehead. She remembers Connie sitting on Jimmy’s lap, pressing her cheek to his. ‘Opposites still attract! Even now we’re old fossils!’ In fact, they were extraordinarily young, thinks Rose with surprise, who at the time had believed that they were all astonishingly old.

‘You used to be much quicker,’ grumbles Enigma.

‘You used to be much more patient.’ Rose dips her brush into the midnight blue. She watches her hand’s tremor. Every day it distresses her afresh, the way her body doesn’t belong to her any more.

‘What does it matter if it’s not perfect just this once?’ says Enigma querulously. She is sitting opposite Rose, her face tipped forward, an unwilling canvas, with her glasses clasped in her lap. ‘No one is going to see!’

‘Enigma
Anne
!’ Rose uses the same quelling tone of voice she and Connie both used when Enigma was naughty as a child. They were imitating their own mother’s scolding tone.

Enigma subsides and pushes her lower lip out slightly. Rose turns to share a meaningful face with Connie and remembers yet again that she is not there. She will never get used to that either. Every day she will forget and remember, forget and remember.

She dabs metallic silver paint over the deep crevices in Enigma’s cheeks. When she was a little girl she had such firm, velvety, kissable skin.

‘Connie and I used to love kissing the back of your neck,’ she tells Enigma. ‘We showered you with kisses.’

‘Hmmph,’ mutters Enigma, but Rose feels her face soften beneath her brush.

When Rose is finally finished and they are ready to go, Connie’s ashes have gone missing. They get irritable and snap at each other until Enigma remembers putting the container in the fridge.

‘The fridge?’ repeats Rose. ‘Did you think they would go off?’

‘Yes, I know it sounds silly,’ says Enigma. The moon and stars on her face give her a puckish look. ‘But I was clearing the table and I couldn’t think what it was. I have a little rule: when in doubt, put it in the fridge!’

‘Imagine Connie’s face!’

‘She’d be absolutely furious!’

They look at each other and they have to sit down while they giggle, resting their heads on their hands.

Outside, it’s bracingly cold. They rug up in beanies, scarves and gloves. Connie’s ashes are safely stowed in a picnic basket together with the hot, foil-wrapped tartlets and the cold champagne.

‘Look at the stars!’ says Rose as they climb astride their bikes. ‘It looks like they’ve put extras out for us tonight.’

They drive slowly up the winding paved road towards Kingfisher Lookout. Rose has a pleasant sense of anticipation, as if this ceremony will make everything OK, as if by following Connie’s instructions to the letter they’ll get her back.

At the top they light candles and place them around the edges of the picnic rug. The moon is a big yellow coin creating a floodlit path across the river.

‘Did you see that illustration in Grace’s last Gublet book?’ says Rose with pride. ‘I said to her, “That’s midnight at Kingfisher Lookout.” She said, “You’re right, Aunt Rose.” She’s a very talented girl. I knew it from when she was five years old.’

‘It
is
very pretty up here,’ says Enigma. ‘It only seems like last week that we came up here for my fortieth birthday. I remember, Connie said, “Enigma, you’re old enough to know the truth about Alice and Jack!” My word, I thought, this is a turn-up for the books! Old enough! I thought I was ancient!’

‘I didn’t think we should have waited that long,’ says Rose. ‘But Connie had that theory about forty being the “precise age where you’re old enough and young enough to handle a revelation”. It wasn’t a scientific theory. She just made it up! But she’s so
certain
about things, isn’t she? Whereas I’m uncertain about everything.’

Enigma is looking at her with a strange expression. The moon and stars on her face scrunch up with concern.

‘Are you losing your marbles, Rose? You’re starting to worry me. Some of the things you’ve been saying to Sophie! It will be awful if you lose your marbles.’

Rose thinks of marbles pouring from a jar in a clattering torrent of coloured glass.

‘I’m not losing my marbles,’ she says. ‘I’m just shook up by Connie dying.’ And as she says the words for the first time,

‘Connie dying’, she feels a new steely sensation.

She picks up the container of ashes and stands near the little fence that Jimmy built after the war.

‘We’ll do it together,’ she says to Enigma. ‘Come on.’

‘We’ve still got another twenty minutes before midnight.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! It won’t hurt her if we’re twenty minutes early. She was always so bossy!’

But now she can’t unscrew the lid on the container.

‘Oh sugar!’ she swears.

‘Give it to me,’ says Enigma. She taps around the edges of the lid with a knife from the picnic basket. ‘This is what Margie always does with the tomato sauce.’

‘That doesn’t do anything,’ says Rose.

Enigma grunts as the lid finally comes free and holds it towards Rose. ‘Here you go!’

They hold it together, their hands overlapping.

‘Shouldn’t we say something?’ says Enigma.

‘Goodbye, Connie,’ says Rose. ‘Thank you for the cinnamon pear pies. Thank you for always being so strong and so clever. We’ll miss you.’

‘We love you!’ Enigma starts to sob. ‘We’ll make sure everything stays the same!’

Together they shake the container and watch the fine grey ash stream down into the moonlit river below.

‘Goodness!’ says Enigma through her tears. ‘Connie’s ashes look exactly like the dust when I empty the vacuum cleaner.’

But Rose’s steely feeling has vanished and she’s crying for the first time since her big sister died.

M
argie, wearing her black one-piece swimming costume, stands in front of the mirrored wardrobe in her bedroom with her eyes shut.

She has deliberately avoided actually looking at herself in a swimming costume for many years, quickly averting her eyes if she happens to pass her reflection. But now, even though it’s the middle of winter, she must, as they say, ‘face the music’.

Because tomorrow she is going to allow a man she barely knows to take a photograph of her in a swimming costume. ‘I have a proposal for you,’ the man from Weight Watchers had said to her, stirring Light and Low into his skim milk cappuccino. Margie still can’t believe she’d said yes. Immediately. Without even thinking about it. ‘Sure I will,’ she’d said. She hadn’t even sounded like herself. She’d sounded like a confident American. She might even have put on a bit of an American accent, as if she were on a TV show. It was very odd.

Margie takes a deep breath and opens her eyes. She squints. A shadowy figure squints back at her.

She sighs. Where are they this time? After a few minutes walking around the house talking through her previous movements–‘So, I came in the front door from visiting Rose and the phone was ringing and I was dying to go to the toilet’–she finally finds her glasses on top of her handbag, puts them on and once again stands in front of the mirror with her eyes shut.

Surely it won’t be
that
bad. Will it?

Whenever Ron sees her in a swimming costume he starts talking about beached whales. Oh, he doesn’t say, ‘You look like a beached whale, Margie.’ No, he just gets an innocent sly look on his face and starts telling a story related to whales. He has a whole selection of them. His favourite is about a beached whale in Oregon that the authorities tried to blow up with dynamite. Apparently they thought it would turn into convenient bite-sized pieces for the seagulls. ‘Imagine it!’ Ron always says with enthusiasm. ‘Massive chunks of smelly whale blubber raining from the sky. Only the Yanks, eh?’

‘Why are you telling me this story?’ Margie always asks. ‘I hate this story! The poor whale!’

‘No reason,’ Ron says. ‘It just came into my head.’

When Ron and Margie were first married he used to hide her nightgowns so she’d sleep naked. When she put on her red crochet bikini in the Seventies he used to embarrass her by putting two fingers in his mouth and doing a loud wolf-whistle. He didn’t know any stories about beached whales back then.

‘One, two, three,’ says Margie out loud.

She opens her eyes.

‘Oh Lordie me.’

It is worse than she thought. All that crinkly white flesh like an uncooked chicken. Saggy, baggy upper arms. Thighs like pork sausages. The tummy. Oh, dear, the tummy! Like a big watermelon.

What happened to pretty petite little Margie McNabb and her twenty-three-inch waist? Always one inch smaller than her sister’s waist! No matter how hard Laura tried she couldn’t manage it. (The sweet, secret triumph!) Before Veronika was born Margie could still just squeeze into her wedding dress.

The only consolation is that her new friend will surely not look any better in his swimming costume.

She remembers him sitting across from her in the coffee shop. He was very…
wide
, reflects Margie. His body sort of kept on going and going.

Although, of course, a fat man isn’t nearly as pathetic as a fat woman.

Her new friend’s name is Ron. This is a coincidence that Margie should have exclaimed over the moment he introduced himself. ‘Fancy! That’s my husband’s name!’ she should have said, but she didn’t for some reason. She avoided talking about her Ron at all. Instead she’d concentrated on Fat Ron and his ‘proposal’.

Not Fat Ron, she decides. That’s cruel. Rotund Ron. That’s nice. Like a jolly character in a fairytale.

‘I think it will be a laugh,’ Rotund Ron had said, ‘if nothing else.’

‘It will be a hoot,’ Margie had said in her new confident American-sounding voice. Then she’d amazed herself by reaching over to shake his hand.
Initiating
a handshake. She’d never initiated a handshake. She was becoming a women’s libber!

Well, it
will
be a hoot, thinks Margie, taking off her glasses so that the fat lady in the mirror is blurred.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll show them all.

The baby has got the hang of smiling after Sophie’s visit. Grace has taken digital photos of him grinning gummily up at his father and emailed them to friends and family. She has also printed off thirty copies of one of these photos and turned them into charming thank you cards for all the gifts they’ve received. Grace has never done such a thing before; it seems like the sort of sweet girly motherly thing someone like Sophie would do. She has written a personal message on each card.
Your rattle is Jake’s favourite toy! Jake looks so sweet in your outfit! Your teddy is Jake’s favourite toy!
She has addressed, stamped and posted the envelopes. The effort to do all this was so colossal that when she let them slide into the post-box she felt the weak-kneed relief of someone who has finished writing a thesis or running a marathon. ‘Good God, hand-made cards!’ said a friend the next day, breezily bitchy. ‘Talk about a superwoman! You don’t always have to be so perfect, you know, Grace. Give the rest of us ordinary mortals a chance.’ Grace hung up and threw the portable phone against the wall, screaming, ‘Oh fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.’ There was a mark on the wall. It took half a tub of her mother’s Gumption to scrub it away.

Today, Grace sits at the kitchen table paying bills over the phone, while Jake lies in his bouncinette that Aunt Margie gave to Grace. ‘Deborah didn’t want it for Lily,’ Margie had confided to Grace when she brought it around. ‘I didn’t want to sound like an interfering mother-in-law, so I just said, “Well, dear, your own husband used to gurgle away for hours on this very bouncinette, kicking his fat little legs.” Oh dear, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I did prefer Sophie to Deborah.’

Grace rocks the bouncinette with one foot while she pays bills, dutifully pressing numbers followed by the hash key as instructed by the robotic lady.

Jake frowns as he experiments with a new sound: a low, humming gurgle. He smiles radiantly up at her as he gurgles. ‘
Did you hear that?
’

He is adorable. She can see that. She just can’t feel it. She looks at him and it seems so evil, so
dirty
, that she feels nothing for this cooing, gurgling child. She can’t even smile back at him. Even when she makes a tremendous effort, tries to squeeze out a loving feeling, pushing as hard as when she was pushing him out of her body, she feels nothing. In fact, the harder she tries, the less she feels.

Grace thinks about the day Sophie came to visit. She stood in the doorway holding the platter, watching Callum lean over Sophie to see Jake smile for the first time. Sophie was pulling a funny face. Callum had his hand on Sophie’s shoulder. They were both so natural. Proper, real, feeling people. When she’d made herself walk in, Grace felt like she used to feel on the dance floor as a teenager, surrounded by gyrating figures, her cheek muscles hurting from her fake smile, her body like marble. She’d always known she was a bit unnatural. Now it was proven. Her emotional responses were somehow never quite right. When she met Callum she thought he’d saved her, but obviously it was only temporary.

Everyone would be better off without her. There would be a lot more laughing. The problem is that Callum wouldn’t think so. Mystifyingly, he still loves her. He genuinely seems to miss her if she goes away for one night. He might fall apart. Callum is, at heart, an old-fashioned family man. He loves saying ‘My wife’. After they got married he couldn’t stop saying it. He needs a wife; and the baby needs a mother, otherwise who would take care of him while Callum was at work? He’d have to put the baby in day-care. Callum would be stressed and he’d eat badly and the house would be a pigsty and Jake would catch colds from all the other children and, no, it wouldn’t do.

Grace needs to have a replacement woman waiting in the wings, an understudy, someone who is already like part of the family, someone who
wants
the role, someone better qualified for it in the first place.

Sophie Honeywell is such a perfect, obvious candidate, it’s like it’s meant to be.

The vague half-thought Grace had at the funeral begins to solidify into a sensible, logical plan. When she’d seen Sophie looking so longingly at Callum and Jake she’d felt an overwhelming desire to just give them both to her, to see her face light up.
Here you go. They’re yours. No, really. You can keep them. They’d look better on you.

It was quite obvious that Sophie liked Callum, and it seemed from the way that they were chatting at lunch that Callum liked her. Grace just needed to fan that spark of attraction into something more. If Sophie and Callum have begun falling in love, Grace can leave them without feeling guilty. She can erase herself.

Sophie is a sweet, kind, smart girl who would never, ever think of smashing a hairbrush against a baby’s head. She makes funny faces. She talks to Callum about music. She would fit right in with Callum’s huge circle of extroverted friends, whereas Grace still feels like the new girlfriend even after all this time. Sophie made Callum do his helpless sort of teenage-boy guffawing laugh that Grace hasn’t heard in ages and she made Jake smile for the first time ever. She even made Grace smile, for God’s sake. Jake will be much better with Sophie as his mum. After all, Grandma Enigma was brought up by Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose, and look what a happy life she’s led! Grace is just following a fine family tradition of handing over babies to more suitable people.

Tomorrow Sophie is moving into Aunt Connie’s house, which will make her much more accessible. It should be easy to make sure that Callum and Sophie spend as much time as possible together. Just as they’re about to fall in love, Grace will conveniently disappear.

One spoonful of sesame seeds and she’ll be out of everybody’s way. No need for sleeping pills or jumping off cliffs. She can already imagine how her throat will feel as it begins to swell and close up. That part will be awful but it will only last a few seconds, and the great clean void of nothingness that follows will be wonderful.