Secret Smile Page 18

  'Oh, Miranda, Miranda, Miranda,' he murmured in my ear. 'What a terrible thing. It's so good of you to come. It means a lot to me. It would have meant a lot to Laura.' He looked over at Rob Pryor. 'Rob has been a good friend to me, ever since the business with Troy.' He looked back at me. 'I'm sorry, Mirrie. I'm so sorry. I seem to bring bad luck wherever I go.' I didn't reply. I couldn't. 'I needed to talk to you, Mirrie.' He smiled at me, looking me in the eyes. I always felt he was just a bit too close, his breath warm on my cheeks. 'You're the one who understands me. Better than anyone else. There's something strange. Has Rob told you?' He looked over at Rob, who shook his head. 'Almost at the moment when it – you know, the thing with Laura, I can't bear to say it – do you know what I was doing?'

  'Of course I don't,' I said.

  'You do,' he said. 'I was talking to you.'

  Dearest Troy,

  There's this memory that keeps coming back to me. When you were about nine you insisted on waking me up at four in the morning to listen to the dawn chorus. I staggered blearily out into the garden in my dressing gown even though it was freezing cold and the grass was soaking wet. I thought I'd just stay out there for a few minutes to humour you and then race back to my warm bed. But you were all dressed up in jeans and Wellington boots and a big jacket, and you had Dad's binoculars hanging round your neck. We stood at the end of the garden in the dawn and all of a sudden – as if a switch had been thrown – the birds started to sing. A great wall of sound all round us. I looked at your face and it was so incredibly joyful that I forgot to feel cold. You showed me the birds in the branches and then I could match the sounds with the open beaks and pulsing throats. We stayed out there for ages and then we went into the kitchen and I made us hot chocolate and scrambled eggs. You said, with your mouth full: 'I wish it could be like this all the time.'

  Of course you can't read this, but I'm writing to you anyway because you're the only person I really want to talk to. I talk to you all the time. I'm terrified that one day I'll find that I've stopped talking to you, because that will mean you're dead.

  CHAPTER 28

  'I don't really know why I'm here,' I said.

  The woman opposite me didn't answer, just looked at me until I glanced away, down at my hands screwed together in my lap; at the low table between us where a box of tissues stood ready. Out of the window I could see daffodils in the sunshine. The yellow colour looked garish and excessive. I felt blank and dull and stiffly self-conscious. At least I wasn't lying on a couch.

  'Where should I begin?'

  At least she didn't say, 'Begin at the beginning.' Katherine Dowling must have been in her late forties or early fifties; her lined, handsome face was without make-up; she had steady brown eyes, strong cheekbones, a firm jaw. Her hair was flecked with grey and she wore quiet clothes – a skirt down past her knees, old and wrinkled suede boots, a baggy, soft-grey cardigan. She was focused on me, or trying to see into me, and I didn't know if I liked it. I shifted in my chair, unfolded my hands, scratched my cheek, gave a polite, irrelevant cough. I glanced at my watch – Troy 's watch – on my wrist. I had forty-three minutes left.

  'Tell me what brought you here.'

  'I've got no one else to talk to,' I said and noticed the unsteadiness in my voice. I welcomed it – I wanted grief to overwhelm me, to pour uncontrollably out of me, the way it did sometimes at night when I would wake in the small hours and feel my pillow was wet with weeping. 'The people I want to talk to are gone.'

  'Gone?'

  'Dead.' I felt my throat begin to ache and my sinuses thicken. 'My little brother and my best friend.' I made myself say their names aloud. ' Troy and Laura. He killed himself, or that's what everyone says, though I think, I think – well, never mind that… I found him, in my flat. He hanged himself. He was just a boy, really. He still hadn't stopped growing. If I close my eyes I can see his face. Except sometimes when I try to remember him, I can't. Laura died just a few weeks ago. She died in her bath. She was drunk and she knocked her head and drowned. Isn't that a stupid way to die? She was only my age. The last time I saw her we didn't speak. I keep thinking if I'd said something to her, if I'd done things differently, this wouldn't have happened. I know that probably sounds stupid to you, but it's what keeps coming back to me.'

  Katherine Dowling leaned towards me very slightly in her chair. A lock of hair fell forwards and she pushed it behind her ear without taking her eyes off me.

  'I can't believe that I'll never be with them again,' I said. I took the first tissue out of the box. 'Of course I know I won't, but I can't believe it. I can't,' I repeated hopelessly. 'It seems impossible.'

  I took another tissue and wiped my eyes.

  'Bereavement,' began Katherine Dowling, 'is something that everyone experiences in…'

  'This is his watch,' I said, holding up my wrist. 'He left it by my bed and now I wear it and every time I look at it I think, this is the time he doesn't have any more. All those seconds and minutes and hours, ticking away. I always thought we'd grow old together. I thought I could help him. I should have helped him, my lovely little brother.'

  I was weeping in earnest now and my voice was coming out in hiccups.

  'Sorry,' I said. 'Sorry, but it seems so unfair.'

  'Unfair on you?'

  'No. No! I'm not dead, am I? I'm one of the lucky ones. Unfair on them, I mean.'

  I talked and my words came out in a jumble of memories and feelings, everything mixed up together. Troy, Brendan, Laura, Kerry, my parents, Nick; a body dangling from a beam, phone calls in the night, words whispered into my ear like poison trickling into me, weddings called off, funerals, first his and then hers… Every so often I stopped and cried into the damp wodge of tissues I clutched in my hand. My cheeks stung; my nose was snotty and my eyes were sore.

  'I'm like Typhoid Mary,' I said at one point. 'I'm like one of those Spanish soldiers bringing plagues to the American Indians, poisoning their world. I'm like

  'What do you mean, Miranda?' Katherine Dowling's calm voice broke into my tirade.

  'I'm the carrier,' I cried out, blotting my face. 'Don't you see? They were all right, more or less. I brought him into my world, and that's my problem and I had to deal with that. But it was their world as well and he's infected them, destroyed them, wrecked their lives. I'm all right. Look. Here I am, sitting with a therapist, working out ways to feel better about everything. You see, that's the problem.'

  'Listen,' she said. 'Listen to me now, Miranda.'

  'No,' I said. 'Wait. I've got to get this straight, for myself as much as anybody. It's like this: there are awful things in the world, right? I feel terrible about them. Your job as a therapist is to stop me feeling bad about it. But maybe what I should really do is deal with the awful things in the world.'

  'No,' she said.

  'There's something narcissistic about this, if that's the right word. I mean, if people came to you and were suffering from depression because of the poverty and suffering and injustice in the world and you had a pill to make them stop worrying about it, would you give it to them? Would you dole out this pill that would make people indifferent to what is wrong in the world rather than go out and make it better?'

  There was quite a long pause. Katherine Dowling was probably starting to regret what she'd let herself in for. I blew my nose and sat up straighter in my chair. Outside the window, the sky was a lovely pale blue.

  'This,' she pointed at me. 'This is called grief. Do you hear me?'

  'He even made me into his fucking alibi,' I muttered. 'God, he must have laughed!'

  'Listen!' she said and I subsided again. 'People come to me and often what I do is help them find patterns, make shapes out of chaos, make stories of their lives so that they can understand them. But here I am going to say something quite the opposite to you. You are making a pattern that isn't there. You are trying to find a meaning, an explanation, tie everything up neatly, take responsibility, place blame. In the past few months, you have lost two
people whom you loved a great deal. And you have been through a painful and disturbing episode with a man. This Brendan. Because these things have happened together, you connect them, like cause and effect. Do you understand?'

  'I do connect them,' I said.

  'Now: we can talk about what happened with Brendan; in fact, I think that might be helpful. We can talk about your bereavement, and why you feel such guilt. But we will be looking at you - at what is going on inside you after these traumas. We will not be looking at why these two young people had to die one after the other. They died. Now you must mourn.' Her voice grew gentler. 'You must let yourself mourn. Not cast around for explanations.'

  'But if…'

  'It takes time,' she said. 'There's no easy way.'

  I made myself consider what she had said.

  'Sometimes I have felt that I was going mad,' I said at last. I felt like a rag doll lolling on the chair. 'I used to have this life that I understood. Things made sense. I could work out what was going to happen next and make plans. I feel I've lost control. Anything could happen. Everything seems hostile and out of kilter. It's like a nightmare, but I can't wake up out of it. It just goes on and on.'

  'Well, we can talk about that too,' she said. 'We should. Would you like to come again, Miranda?'

  I nodded. 'Yes,' I said. 'I think I would.'

  'Good. This time next week would suit me if that's all right with you. Now, as your brother's watch will show you, it's time for you to go.'

  Before I had time to find excuses, I changed into my running clothes and stepped out into the spring afternoon once more. I ran to the Heath. I ran up the hill where I had last glimpsed Laura, but I didn't stop. I ran until my legs ached and my lungs hurt and I had a stitch in my side.

  When I got home I had a shower and made myself a bowl of pasta with olive oil, chopped spring onions and Parmesan cheese over the top. I ate it and stared around me. Everything was drab and neglected. I'd been stumbling through my life, coming back here just to sit staring out of the window, then crawl into bed at nine o'clock and sleep for hours and hours. I'd been sleeping for ten or eleven hours every night, sometimes even more, and still woken in a fog of dreary, heavy-eyed, leaden-limbed fatigue.

  I thought of Katherine Dowling pointing her finger at me. 'This is grief,' I'd let myself become clogged up by grief, sodden and hopeless with it.

  I stood up and put my bowl in the sink. Then I filled a bucket with hot, sudsy water and started to wash the windows, to let in the light.

  CHAPTER 29

  The next morning I woke early and knew before I even opened my eyes that it was a warm and lovely day outside. The strip of day between the curtains was blue. There was a warmth in the room. And, for the first time in a long while, I didn't feel clogged with tiredness, but alert, as if there were something that I had to do. Although it was a Saturday and I didn't have to go to work, I got up at once.

  I stripped my bed and put the sheets in the washing machine, then put on my running clothes. I went to the Heath again, but this time ran to the wilder part, where the trees are thick and you can even fool yourself that you're not in the city with millions of people around you in every direction. The sun, still low and pale, shone steadily. There were primroses and tulips among the tangle of bushes, fresh, unfurling leaves on the branches above me. I ran as hard as I could, until my legs ached and, as soon as I stopped, sweat trickled down my forehead. I felt as though I were cleaning out the inside of my body, making the blood run faster, the heart pump stronger, opening up my pores.

  Nearing home, I stopped at the baker's and bought a loaf of wholemeal bread that was still warm. I had a quick, hot shower, washed my hair vigorously and pulled on a denim skirt and a shirt. I put on Troy 's watch, but for once the sight of it didn't make my eyes well up with tears. I made a cup of peppermint tea and tore a hunk of bread from the loaf, eating it just as it was, chewing slowly and letting the doughy texture comfort me. I vacuumed the carpets, plumped up the pillows on the sofa, piled old newspapers and magazines into a box and opened the windows to let in the bright day.

  Before I could change my mind, I pulled on a jacket and walked to the underground.

  Kerry was already behind her desk when I walked in. Someone was sitting across from her, leafing through brochures and pointing things out, so she didn't see me immediately, and when she did her face flickered through various emotions: surprise, discomfort, pain, welcome. It smoothed out again into politeness as she turned back to the woman.

  I watched her as she leaned across the desk, pointing at pictures with a finger whose nail was a delicate pink. She looked much better than I'd been expecting. I'd grown used to seeing her pinched and blotchy. Now she looked rosy and plumper. She was growing her hair again, and it fell in blonde waves round her smooth, pale face.

  'Fancy a cup of coffee?' I said, when the woman left, clutching a pile of brochures, and I eased myself into her seat. I smelt Kerry's perfume, something subtle and sweet. Her skin was satiny, her lips glossy, and she had tiny gold studs in her ears. Everything about her seemed considered, delicate, well cared for. I looked down at my hands on the desk, with their dirty, bitten nails. I saw the cuffs of my shirt were slightly frayed.

  Kerry hesitated, looked at her watch. 'I don't know if I can.'

  'Go on,' called a woman at the next desk. 'We'll be busy soon and then you won't have the time.'

  She looked at me and gave a nod.

  'I'll get my coat.'

  We didn't talk until we got to the cafe down the road. We took our coffee downstairs, where they had a sofa and armchairs, and looked uncertainly at each other over the rims of our steaming mugs. I said something about the new flat she was renting, and she said something about being frantic at work. We lapsed into an awkward silence.

  'Sorry I haven't been in touch,' I said eventually.

  'You've been busy.'

  I waved away the polite words.

  'That's not the reason.'

  'No, I suppose not.'

  'I didn't know where to begin.'

  'Miranda

  'You said something to me – just after he, you know… just after Brendan walked out. You said everything was ruined and he'd just kicked over the last standing stones. Something like that.'

  'I don't remember.' She put her mug down on the table. There was the faint red semicircle from her lips on its edge.

  'Of course not. Why would you? I don't know why it stuck in my mind, but it did, maybe because of my job – that image of him razing everything to the ground until we were all just standing in the rubble of our lives. That's what he did to us.'

  'You shouldn't think about him so much, Miranda,' she said. 'You should let him go.'

  'What?' I stared at her.

  'I have,' she said. 'He's out of my life. I never want to think about him again.'

  I was startled by what she had said.

  'But everything that happened…' I said, stammering. 'With you and me. The whole family. With Troy.'

  'That's got nothing to do with it.'

  'And Laura.'

  'Do you think I didn't care about Laura?'

  'Of course not.'

  'Do you think I felt a little stab of pleasure when I heard? That some sort of revenge had been taken?'

  'No,' I said. 'Of course not.'

  'Well, I did. Just for a moment. I hated Laura so much and I'd wanted something bad to happen to her and then the worst possible thing did happen and I felt some kind of triumph for a second and then I felt terrible, as if I were responsible for it in some way.' She had looked fierce for a moment, but then her expression turned sad again. 'In the end I just felt, well, what has any of it got to do with me? I decided we've just got to put it behind us.'

  'Don't you want to talk about it at all?' I asked.

  'I want to get on with my life.'

  'Don't you want to think about it? To understand what happened?'

  'To understand?' She blinked at me. 'Our brother killed himse
lf. My fiancé left me.'

  'But…'

  'I'm not saying it wasn't terrible. I'm saying that it was quite simple. I don't know what there is to talk about.'

  I sat for a few moments. All the turbulence, the waves of emotions and hatred and despair that had battered our family, was now a calm, dark pool.

  'What about us?' I asked at last.

  'Us?'

  'Us, you and me, the two sisters.'

  'What about us?'

  'You hated me.'

  'I didn't,' she said.

  'You blamed me.'

  'A bit, maybe.' She picked up her mug and drained the last of the coffee. 'That's in the past. Are you all right? You look a bit…' She left the sentence dangling.

  'I've been a bit down.'

  'Of course.'

  I couldn't just leave our conversation there.

  'Oh, Kerry – I wanted to make it all right between us,' I said, then, realizing I sounded like a two-year-old asking to be kissed better, I added, 'I thought there were some things that ought to be said. Made clear.'

  'I'm quite clear about everything.'

  'I hope you know now that I was never in love with Brendan. Never. I left him and

  'Please, Miranda,' she said in a disgusted tone. 'Let's leave that.'

  'No, listen, I just want you to understand that I was never trying to wreck things between you two, never; I wanted you to be happy; really I did; he was the one who was…' I let my words trail away, realizing what I sounded like. 'Like you said, it doesn't matter any more. That's all finished with. He's out of both of our lives. I wanted to know if you're all right, that's all, really. And that we were all right. It would be terrible if we allowed him to alienate us from each other.'

  'I know,' she said in a small voice. Then she leaned forwards and for the first time her face lost its smoothness. 'I should tell you something.'