The Stopped Heart (22 page)

I love you, he said. It's as simple as that.

I took a breath and shut my eyes. I honestly did not know if I wanted to be loved as much as all that. But something about the feeling of him right there on my bed, my limbs warm beneath the weight of him, had begun to work its spell.

I don't know what to say, I said.

His eyes were on me, drinking me up.

Don't say anything. There's nothing to say. Just please, if you have any pity left in you, forgive me, Eliza.

Forgive you for what?

For everything. For what I have done, what I'm doing—for what I will do.

As he spoke, he laid a hand on my knee under the sheets and something jumped inside me. It ought to have been fear but it wasn't, it was pleasure. I was melting. My soft and liquid self returning.

What will you do? I whispered.

With so much care you would think I was made of glass, he touched his fingers to my lips. I smelled straw and dung and fresh air—the cold metal tang of farm machinery.

Hush, he said. That's enough. I've already said too much.

He stood up. Proud and tall and reckless and so out of place, standing there by the washstand in my little room. I felt myself shaking all over. And I couldn't help it—I didn't care anymore if it meant he had won—I reached out my hand to him.

Stay—

He looked at me for a moment and you could see his mind working. As if he was weighing something. He almost smiled at me and he seemed about to touch me but he checked himself.

No, he said. I mustn't. That's it, Eliza. I'm going now.

A
S THEY DRIVE HOME, SHE LOOKS AT HER PHONE AND SEES FOUR
missed calls from Eddie.

“Four?” says Graham, reaching for his sunglasses. “Four? Why on earth would Eddie call you four times?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I've honestly no idea. He seems to have decided that we're friends or something.”

Graham laughs.

“Well, you've no one to blame but yourself for that.”

“What? Why is it my fault?”

“You've been leading him on, haven't you? All these secret pub lunches.”

“It was only one, and it wasn't secret.”

“All these confessions about his past, then.”

Mary looks at the phone in her hand.

“It's not like that.”

“I'm only joking.”

“All right.”

“What is it like, then?” he asks her after a moment or two.

“I don't know. I honestly don't know.”

Graham slows as he comes to the roundabout. Neither of them speaking. The peaty smell of warm soil and plants and the garden center in the car.

“Well, hadn't you better call him?” he says. “Find out what he wants?”

He flicks on the indicator.

“Later,” she says. “I'll do it later.” She turns off the phone and puts it in her bag.

She gazes out at the horizon, huge sky, sun bending through the windscreen, moving over Graham's bare arms.

“I find him quite strange to deal with actually,” she says at last.

“What—Eddie? Why? What's strange about him?”

“I don't know. All he ever seems to want to do is talk.”

“To you, you mean?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Nothing wrong with talking, is there?”

Mary says nothing.

“You think he's lonely?” he asks her after a few more moments have passed.

“Lonely?” Mary feels her face heat up. “Why would he be lonely?”

“I don't know. I don't know anything about him. But men get lonely, don't they?”

She looks at him briefly, then back out of the window.

“Do they?”

“Yes, they do.”

She thinks about this.

“So do women.”

“You're right. So do women. Everyone gets lonely sometimes.”

Mary watches as he fiddles with the radio, turning the knob till he finds music.

“I do like Deborah, though,” he says. “Don't you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do.”

S
HE DOESN
'
T CALL
E
DDIE AND WHEN HE DOESN
'
T TRY HER AGAIN
, she's relieved. Briefly, she rehearses some kind of a story to herself, about her phone being out of charge or on the blink or the signal coming and going, something like that. But then in the end she forgets all about it and does nothing at all.

And the next day, wandering around the garden in the dewy cool of the morning—setting up the hose, trying with difficulty to tighten the fixing on the old metal tap so that water doesn't come spurting out from underneath, deciding where the clematis should go—she at first ignores the feeling. Or perhaps she doesn't even have to ignore it. She simply does not pick it up, lodged as it is deep within a web of sensations that she has, she supposes, learned to endure.

The lump of grief that never leaves her throat. The hot, shocked space behind her eyes. The tightness in her chest that the bereavement counselor told her was anger, but which mostly feels more like astonishment or panic or even, on those rare, optimistic days, the possibility of her own eventual death.

When it happened—all through that time when they were missing and then, in the worst possible, most unimaginable way, weren't missing anymore and it could not be changed, they could not ever be brought back—people told her how courageous she was. Him too, but especially her. As if a mother's courage was somehow harder won than that of a father's.

But she was not courageous. They both know what happened. They know that, unlike him, she let rip and succumbed, giving in to the very worst part of herself. Even though they do not discuss it now, have never discussed it, in fact, they both know that she damaged things. Biting and clawing at fabrics, objects. Making holes. Kicking. Scratching. Damaged herself too. Or wanted to, anyway. She banged her head against the bedroom wall till a vivid bruise bloomed there. She pulled her hair out. One time—a time she can barely allow herself to think of now—she struck a match and tried to set fire to her own clothes.

They offered her everything; everything was offered. There really was no shortage of offers of help. Talking. God. Flowers. Medication. Healing. A clairvoyant got in touch and offered to take her straight to them, straight to the precise place where they were. And that would have been very tempting, to be taken to her girls, whatever state they were in by then, to know that she had beaten the police to it and found them, that she could take them in her arms and hold them against her, no more searching for them, her babies.

Except that when, more than two weeks later, the chance to see them finally did come, she was unable to find whatever it took
(she would not allow herself to believe it was courage) and she refused it, that last chance to be in the same room as what was left of her own children, and say good-bye.

They'd been warned, when they were told that both bodies would be partially covered, that they would be protected from the worst, that there was in fact not much left. Not even a hand you could properly hold, the liaison officer had said, suddenly unable to look them in the eye.

Not even a hand? For a quick moment Mary saw her girls' fingers as they used to be, warm, sticky, covered in chocolate or peanut butter or poster paint. Fingers that she would grab and wipe with a warm flannel, getting the cloth down between the fingers even though they would wriggle and laugh and try to pull away. Not even a hand. They won't get me anywhere near that place, she told Graham.

They told her that whatever she decided was fine. But that she should think very carefully. It wasn't just about now. There was the future to think of too. They found that, whatever they imagined they felt at the time, people frequently changed their minds later, wishing after all that they'd done it, that they'd taken one final chance to say good-bye.

Graham said he could not decide which was the bigger nightmare, going or not going. He said that he did not want to let his daughters down. But he admitted that he was afraid. He wept. The decision woke him up at night. It made him shake and sweat. In the end he said that he would go.

He was gone for more than four hours.

When he came back he poured himself a large Scotch—a drink that Mary had never in her whole life seen him drink—then he sat very still without speaking for a long time. After that, still without speaking, he made supper. She could not eat the supper. Neither could he. She watched him not eating it, unable
to speak to him, afraid to ask him what he'd seen, afraid of what pictures he might now have in his head, loathing herself for not being able to share them with him.

And it was odd that when, however many weeks later, she saw the small, ginger-faced man sitting there in the dock, pulling down his shirt cuffs and adjusting his clothes and making himself comfortable like that, that is what she found herself thinking of. Not the terribleness of all those days of waiting. Not the loss—the small, beloved faces they would never see again, the warm hands they would never again hold. Not even the chill, raw torment of what they daily had to think, guess, imagine.

No, when she saw him in the dock that day, all she could think of was Graham's face that night. His empty face, the gulf that had widened between them—that would go on widening—and the two sad plates of food that she had scraped into the bin.

B
UT THIS FEELING.
I
T STOPS HER AT LAST, STANDING THERE IN
the middle of the half-mown lawn, trowel in hand, she is unable to ignore it any longer.

She watches a red admiral butterfly as it alights on a dying rose. The dusty black torso. The dark legs. The quivering wings, opening and closing—something about the movement sickening her.

Dropping the trowel, she sits on the broken brick wall close to the old apple shed, wrists on knees, waiting. What is it, this feeling, as if her insides are tipping up? Is she going to vomit again? She doesn't know. She feels oddly patient, alert, curious almost. She does not vomit. Holding herself very still, she continues to wait.

The butterfly flies off at last, jerking and lifting through the blue morning air. She can't watch it. Looking down, still waiting for the sick feeling to pass, she squeezes her eyes shut for a moment or two: a brief blackness and dizziness.

And then she looks up.

A sudden crowd of small children right there on the old fallen tree. Legs swinging, faces shadowy and smudged, big and small children, the smallest just a baby, odd, dull clothes, messy hair, pigtails and boots, all of them squeezed up together in a row, one of them she is certain, smoking a cigarette—

It's not possible. Feeling herself settle and still.

She looks again.

And the air thickens and warps and changes shape around her, birds and insects silenced as time passes—so much time passing all around her—wild and naughty rings of smoke blown into the air, laughter, small voices piping up and calling between the trees. And somehow here she is, she, Mary, at the very palest center of it, lulled and stilled and unmistakably herself—

Mary Coles.

Her heart jumps. She feels a hand on her shoulder and turns a bit too quickly.

“Hey.” Eddie standing there and grinning at her. “It's only me.”

Mary gasps—turning back to the children, but already the air has curved itself around them and though the sense of them remains for a few more seconds, she knows that they are somehow even now beyond her, somewhere else. Gone.

“Eddie!”

He takes his hand off her. Still smiling, but stepping back. His dimple, his glasses, sunlight on his face. She stares at him, the shock of it still pulsing in her throat.

“You OK?” he says.

She stares at him.

“Did you see them?”

“What?”

“Just now. Did you see all those children?”

“What do you mean? What children?”

“Right here—over there, just a moment ago—lots of them. Lots of little kids. On the tree.”

He blinks at her, uncomprehending, his glasses catching the light.

“On a tree?”

“Right there.” She turns back to the tree, its bark bright and blameless now in the morning sunshine. “They were all right there, sitting there. Just a second ago. A whole lot of children, sitting right there on that tree.”

He begins to laugh. Mary allowing herself at last to take a breath. She looks at him.

“I'm not joking,” she says.

“I know you're not.”

“You really didn't see it?”

He shakes his head. “I'm sorry.” Keeping his eyes on hers.

Mary turns back to the tree. Nothing. She looks at Eddie again.

“Did you say my name?”

“What?”

“Just now. Did you say it?”

“Your name?”

“Mary Coles. Did you say Mary Coles?”

He laughs.

“I don't think I said anything. I think I just said hi or something.”

“It's only me.”

“What?”

“That's what you said. ‘It's only me.'”

“OK.”

Mary looks around her again at the blue air, the green leaves, the queasy, dappled light. Her hands are still trembling.

“So—what? Am I seeing things? Is that what this is?”

He smiles at her.

“I don't know. Are you?”

Mary stares at him, a quick, chill memory creeping over her. Thinking of the photo on the wall of his bedroom. The upside-down girl. The children. The blurred baby. And the long shadow.

He folds his arms.

“What did they look like anyway, these children?”

She gazes at him, the blood still jumping in her throat.

“I don't know,” she says. “I'm not so sure I did see anything.”

He blinks.

“You were very sure a moment ago.”

“I know.”

“But not anymore?”

“No.”

He glances at the house, then back at her.