The weight of loss, p.11
The Weight of Loss, page 11
‘The doctor mentioned she might have some memory loss,’ Heather told Marianne. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. She’s still in shock.’
Their parents had been invited to a party for New Year’s Eve. They had been friends with Jon and Mary Taylor for many years and David knew Jon originally through his former job at Bowland Tree Services. Marianne had always liked Mary because she was very attentive to everybody and always brought out a side of her mother that nobody else knew to look for. They had a large house, which Marianne and Marie used to visit when they were younger.
Marianne remembered the enormous oak tree in the garden that she’d climb with Mary and Jon’s son, Dylan. They used to hear the low murmur of adults talking through the open window as they curled their legs around the branches. This house excelled where Marianne’s failed because it felt as though it was lived in without tension or subterfuge. It was a calm space, but not so carefully organised that it couldn’t contain distress. Heather had often felt at liberty to cry in that house when she couldn’t find the nerve, or perhaps the momentum of feeling, to do so in her own.
‘We won’t go. They’ll understand,’ Heather said. She was staring into her wardrobe and biting her lip. Most of her dresses were green or grey or charcoal – never quite black – and she suddenly seemed very tired of the image of herself she’d always crafted. ‘We shouldn’t leave Marie.’
‘I’ll look after her. I know what to look out for. I know what pills she needs to take,’ said Marianne.
Heather said nothing and tugged at the sleeve of a white blouse with a high Victorian collar.
‘Mum, please. You should go. You and Dad haven’t done anything for ages.’
Her mother eyed her coldly.
‘I don’t know if I want to.’
‘Please. I promise Marie will be alright with me.’
At about eight that evening Heather finally relented, though they were already an hour late. She wore a very dull outfit in the end, a coffee-brown dress that was creased at the back and a pair of suede boots that were scuffed at the toes. She wore no make-up, though her face was shadowed and her skin still grey. Marianne didn’t know whether this was something to admire – that she was not a slave to artifice and wished others to see her naked face as it was – or something to be concerned about, for surely she knew she looked very unwell. Perhaps she wanted to flaunt her sadness to legitimise it. Mary would see her and know at once that she was suffering. It was a shorthand way to reveal her sadness without having to assemble the words, because that took time and consumed a great deal of energy, which needed to be conserved for other things. For choosing what to wear, for example. Marianne wished her energy had not been so misplaced in that instance.
‘Have a great time,’ Marianne said to them as they were on their way out. ‘Happy new year.’
David was putting his coat on when he looked in on them both, Marianne eating a bag of popcorn on a beanbag by the tree and Marie lying under a blanket on the sofa.
‘What are you guys up to tonight then?’ he said. ‘Are you going to watch all the Lord of the Rings films back to back?’
‘No. Those days are over, Dad,’ Marianne said.
‘Shame.’ He smiled. He looked at Marie. ‘You’ll be alright, love?’
She looked at him blankly.
‘Yes,’ Marianne answered.
He looked downcast when he left them. All it took was a second of silence from Marie. Heather was similarly strained when she stooped to hug them both. She asked Marie if she was still in any pain and Marie shook her head.
‘Ring me if anything happens,’ she said to Marianne quietly before leaving.
When they were gone, Marie admitted she was, in fact, in pain.
‘Where? Your wound?’
‘Everywhere. Just lots of dull throbbing.’
She wouldn’t turn her head to look at Marianne, perhaps because the effort was too much, so Marianne came and knelt by the sofa. She could see a line of sweat across Marie’s forehead and her upper lip.
‘You’re too hot? Shall I turn the heating down?’
‘No. I’m hot then cold again.’
For the next couple of hours, Marianne sat beneath Marie on the floor and flicked through the channels on the TV. She settled on a documentary on Britain’s coastlines and thought vaguely about how much she wanted to be at sea. It was a bland, romantic impulse that lacked conviction. Her imagination seemed to have lost its forcefulness. Now and again she glanced at Marie, who was drifting in and out of sleep. Her face was growing slack again, like when she was sedated in the hospital.
There was, Marianne knew now, a very marked distinction between a face that is animated by the content of a dream and a face that empties entirely so that you instinctively feel there is nothing happening within. As though all movements grind to a halt, stunted by something a little deeper that dispossesses the brain of its timeline. Marianne recalled those times she herself woke from a heavy sleep. It was a kind of paralysis she strove very hard to recover from. For a time, she thought it was brought on by the sameness of her days, the monotony of her routine, the details of which were scattered through her dreams, maddening repetitions that filtered through and found her again: an odd phrase she’d heard recently, the fading pattern of her grandmother’s carpet, a lurid headline from the news. But Marie’s rest was different. It might have been entirely blank, uninfluenced by any memory. Her features hadn’t softened; instead, they were frozen in a position of cold neutrality. Marianne watched her and tried to imagine whether consciousness was flowing through a dark channel, or whether it was a stagnant pool of tension, the current circling the same spot. Marie would often wake up and still seem stultified, never recharged. Whatever the brain did to flush itself out during this time, it might not have happened for Marie. The shadows beneath her eyes became more pronounced with every passing day.
It was eleven o’clock when Marianne got up from the floor, feeling stiff. She needed to be diverted by something and she craved nostalgia. Sitting in the same position and poking her sister every ten minutes to see if she would respond had depressed her. She realised she had been keeping great reserves of pity on hold that she’d been waiting to use on herself when the time came for it. She recognised her tendency to squander feelings on someone else, but tonight she would rescue what last good thoughts she had of herself before they passed on and were finally irretrievable. It brought on a maudlin impulse for her childhood.
She left the room momentarily and headed up to the attic, where all the family albums were kept. She studied the photographs in their shiny sleeves, alone, sitting on the upstairs landing with the leather book in her lap.
One photograph gave her pause. It was taken about ten years ago according to the pencilled date on the back. ‘Aberystwyth, North Beach’, her father had written in neat letters beneath. It wasn’t a scene she remembered. Her mother was sitting on a jetty with her feet hanging very close to the water, the arches extended so her toes were pointing straight down. She looked as though she was poised to disappear. Though she was in the slightly blurred recesses of the photo, her head was clearly turned towards the two children frolicking on the beach in the foreground.
Marie was posing in a manner that Marianne had completely forgotten about. Her hands were behind her back, legs parted as far as they could go, chest thrown out, head cocked downwards and to the side. Her eyes were demented and forced open very wide, her mouth in a rictus grin. The pose was vaguely suggestive of irony or at least self-awareness, a brash imitation of an excitable child. It was just clever enough without being mocking, so closely aligned with her ecstatic, preposterous mood as to be real. She was both within and without, posing and projecting what was already there. She’d dialled it up a notch because she knew it would please her father, whose finger occupied the corner of the frame as a hot pink blur. The slightly dazed, inebriated expression in their mother’s face confirmed the silliness of everything, as well as the ease with which they’d behaved with one another on that trip.
It was only ever on holiday that Heather had been susceptible to those emotions, namely those in which she found her family an essential component of herself. There was a rarefied quality about these excursions to the sea, a way in which common grievances dissolved. As though the salty air ground everyone down to their native instincts, which were fundamentally peaceful. Marianne was not one to sentimentalise the past – there was a meanness in the way she sometimes viewed it, guarding herself against harmful fabrications – but she still sensed those people in her blood, the silly child on the left and the wistful girl on the right. Her own face, a little more defined with the onset of puberty, was not as wildly contorted as Marie’s, but there was a relaxed quality about it. Her eyes were closed, and she was laughing easily like she knew the day would be safe. There would be no unexpected twists, no abrupt changes of atmosphere. The climate of that photograph was perfectly hospitable, conducive to hours, perhaps days, of happiness while its warmth remained. That this was a foreign feeling for their mother was difficult to read in that picture. Heather’s face seemed right in softer focus, like this was her basic setting, her natural state. Yet how swift was her reversion to harmful habits of thought. How quickly that false temperament, the one that automatically resumed itself once they returned, how quickly that then seemed the natural order of things. The holiday had tricked them, and they would continue to fall for the trick every time.
Marianne slipped the photo back into its sleeve. She was being cruel in her thoughts. Perhaps it was not the quantity of those moments that counted but their exhilarating quality. Still, the suddenness, the strangeness of happiness could also be its downfall. The rare intensity of a moment could cause everyone to fumble, to launch themselves at it with too much vehemence, too much anxiety, until pleasure itself was lost in the effort of maintaining it.
A selfish impulse prevented Marianne from wanting to share these photos with Marie. But she felt it was a burden to look on the past alone. Reflecting on shared experiences in isolation only compounded the fact that it was over and couldn’t be revived. When she came upon a photo of Marie as a smiling, white-haired two-year-old with pink cheeks, she carried the album downstairs to the living room.
‘Marie, look at this,’ she said loudly.
Marie was awake this time and she was frowning at the door before Marianne had appeared there. Marianne thrust the open book in her face.
‘Look. Baby you.’
Marie smiled but she didn’t sit up, so Marianne perched on the edge of the sofa and proceeded to turn the pages.
‘Oh my god, we’re in the bath. With our pecks out.’
Side by side, Marianne’s skin was so much more solid in that photograph. Marie’s small body possessed that old blue transparency, a reluctance to materialise. She was three according to their father’s handwriting, and Marianne was eight. It annoyed her slightly that she’d been photographed in the bath at this age. Sometimes their father might have gone too far in his quest to document everything they did together.
She fast-forwarded to the years Marie was in primary school. Marie’s face had settled into its heart-shaped mould and her eyes were so light in the morning sunshine, standing with her head slightly bowed on the front doorstep, that the camera had failed to trap the pigment. The resulting image felt undernourished, not quite as vital as it should have been. Her hair, however, looked like it was blissful to touch, soft and feathery and full around her shoulders.
‘God, your hair was so light then,’ said Marianne.
‘And it’s always long,’ Marie said. She sat up a little. ‘Same boring long hair.’
Marianne stared at her, dumbfounded. She had never heard Marie complain about her hair and had always assumed she was as in love with it as everybody else.
‘I want to cut it.’ Marie looked at Marianne urgently. ‘I’m sick of it. It makes my head itch.’
‘You haven’t washed it for a few days, that’s why.’
‘No, I want to cut it.’
‘Dad said he’d book an appointment—’
‘Don’t need to wait for that. Let’s do it now.’
There was that same angry compulsiveness in her voice that Marianne had witnessed in her eating habits recently. Her hair was certainly lank and stringy because she hadn’t washed very often, finding it painful to do so without help. And it was darker too, almost mousy now with age and recent oiliness. But it was so much a part of Marie’s image that Marianne was afraid to give her consent.
‘I think you’ll regret it,’ she said.
‘I’ll do it myself – or you can do it. Bear in mind you will do a better job from the back.’
‘But how short?’
‘Let’s see.’
Marie picked up the remote control and flicked through the channels. She paused when she came to the BBC footage of the New Year’s Eve celebrations in London. A female presenter was shouting at the camera and kept pushing strands of her hair out of her face with the wind.
‘Her hair’s awful,’ Marianne said.
‘Not her. The woman on the right.’
The woman she was referring to was standing at the front of a crowd of people in Trafalgar Square. Her hair was closely cropped and her ears were quite large.
‘Jesus – no.’
‘Why not? It really is just hair.’
‘Then why cut it at all?’
Marie twisted the dry ends of her hair in her fingers and stared at it dispassionately.
‘Because I don’t want it. I can’t sleep and it’s there around my neck and face.’
She was bored of talking about it and heaved herself off the sofa. She hadn’t changed her clothes for the last few days either, and Marianne didn’t like to say that she was starting to smell of dried sweat. She silently followed Marie out of the room and upstairs to the bathroom. Marie opened the cupboard beside the sink and found a pair of scissors. She handed them to Marianne and then turned resolutely to the mirror to watch herself.
‘Marie, I can’t. Why can’t we just wait for the hairdresser to do a better job?’
‘Because I’m bored of waiting for everything.’
‘At least wash it first.’
Marie sighed and turned the tap on. Marianne stared as she put her head under the cold water without waiting for it to warm up and scrunched her hair in her fist until it was all wet. She looked up and Marianne passed her the shampoo bottle. Then she spurted it into her hand and scratched it into her scalp. It was quick, frenzied, careless. She didn’t bother cleaning the ends. By the time she had washed it out, she was fully engaged in the task at hand. Her face had flushed slightly. She towelled her hair dry and threw it aside.
Marianne began slowly. She trimmed about five inches of hair from the bottom, which had grown to Marie’s waist. She flattened the ends between her fingers to see if the line was straight.
‘Come on. Just hack it off.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Right, then.’
Marie snatched the scissors and flicked her hair over both shoulders so she could see it in the mirror. To Marianne’s horror, she really did hack it off. She bunched one part and snipped it at the level of her chin. Then she did the same on the other side, only snipping it higher. The hair fell in dark wet waves over the sink.
Marianne could see that Marie hadn’t the will to stop herself. She was convinced Marie’s dismay at what she was doing was linked with a morbid impulse to carry on with it. She kept pulling strands in her fingers and cutting at random points. Her scalp rose beneath the roots.
‘Marie! Stop it.’
Marianne made a swipe for the scissors, but Marie held on to them. She was almost smiling again but Marianne didn’t understand the humour in it. She fastened her hand on to Marie’s wrist in a pincer grip and they both watched the scissors fall into the sink. The hair cushioned the fall so it made no sound.
Marianne had a very real dread of Marie and what she would do next. Her face, with that wildly uneven body of hair around it, had stopped moving, but the tension inside of her was building. She was ranging in and out of some dark centre, launching herself at the physical world with haste and then reeling her energy back in again to prosper from the inside. Marianne sensed in her an unwillingness to be consoled ever again, a desire also to bring things violently to a head.
Marianne was glad the scissors were down. She silently picked them out of the sink.
‘Well, you’ve just made yourself look awful,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad will kill me when they come back.’
Marie shook her head jauntily and continued to stare at her head from different angles.
‘I like it,’ she said. ‘My head feels lighter now.’
She turned to Marianne and smiled. Something of her babyish nature came back in the smile.
‘I’ll tell them I did it when you were in the other room. They can only blame me.’
‘It’s not even straight. Anywhere.’ Marianne pulled at some of the ends, which were beginning to dry around Marie’s chin. ‘The right side is totally shorter.’
