The train brakes suddenly, everyone is thrown forwards then back, and though all around, there is shouting, swearing, the clutching of shopping bags, my senses are honed on one single thing – his body against mine. I feel the jut of his knee, the line of his shin, the slab of his shoulder. I am feeling him, as he is feeling me.
I take one deliberate step back. Doesn’t matter that the student behind rolls his eyes or the posh woman with her coiffured hair asks me what on earth I think I’m doing. I don’t talk to any of them, only him. ‘You’re wrong,’ I say, feeling for the shape of the ivy leaves in the back pocket of my jeans. ‘I was always strong. Sharp.’
From: Kit McDermott
09:29
The police told me to make a list of what you’d taken, so, one of the first things I did was pull open your bedside table drawer. And there they were, in plain sight: a strip of tablets. I’ve looked them up. You’re on antidepressants?
18
Colour
Then
Ido not speak in his house. When I wake up each morning, there is a moment of confusion – where am I, what’s happened, where’s Mama – before the fug descends. During the day, I’ll crave those moments, I’ll pray that tomorrow, they’ll last longer, save me, even for a few seconds, from the bludgeon of grief.
He doesn’t badger me about speaking. He is patient. Sometimes, he sees I am on the brink of it, the words are there, blooming on my tongue but I can’t get them out, my mouth is pulp, the sticky sugar of spun candy. When that happens, he waits until he is certain the moment has passed and then he pats me on my arm. ‘Don’t worry. It will come.’
He is working from home so he can look after me, he hasn’t been to the museum in weeks. The fact that it’s just him and me adds to the strangeness of what’s happened, everything feels wrong, upside down. I’ve never spent so much time alone with him, never seen him do chores or wear anything but grey shirts and blazers. But now, he is folding my laundry, chopping vegetables,wiping down surfaces, I’ve seen him in his pyjamas (a simple dark T-shirt, checked bottoms). I am knocked off course, in an alternative universe. If Mama walked in right now and said it was all a mistake, I wouldn’t even be surprised, I’m so bewildered.
When I finally speak, it is because he gives me something. He lays it at the foot of my bed, it looks like a sleek wooden briefcase but then, I see the brand emblazoned in silver and hold my breath as I push it open. It is a box of a hundred and twenty-two oil core colour pencils presented in two shelves, the top, a rainbow constellation. But it is the bottom shelf that astonishes me – twenty-two greens, thirteen browns. I put one perfectly sharp pencil to paper. The line is so fine, faithfully translating each doubt and tremor of my hand, but when I angle it to the side, press harder, the pigment is vibrant, the texture, butter.
He turns to leave. I catch hold of his sleeve, push words out, ‘Thank you.’ Not just for the gift but because, if only for this moment, he has gifted me myself.
He smiles. ‘Draw.’
Flowers help with words, colour helps with words, a new vocabulary flooding in where guilt and grief has run the ground arid. I choose light yellow glaze over ivory to capture the primrose petals,cadmium yellow for the darker heart. The pin head of the stigma, I shade may green, edge it in lime. Then, as he gifts me more botany books, as he starts taking me for walks in the park and I find flowers again, I break into other colours: delft blue; manganese violet; burnt carmine.
He talks to me constantly about butterflies – he is working on a country-by-country count of butterfly species to track population growth and decline, he’s made a new discovery about the matinghabits of nymphets, he tells me about each rare butterfly in his private collection. My mind fills with markings and wings, it is better than thinking about all the cruel things I said to Mama, her car exploding. At night, when my imagination unfurls in cinematic reel, I shove it aside with lists, reciting the rarest butterflies in the world, the biggest, the smallest.
He has been speaking to some researchers about a British butterfly, the Cornish Blue. I imagine an astonishing creature like the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing he showed me at the museum, shimmering turquoise, a wingspan the width of my waist, but it is small by comparison, the colour a gas flame cobalt. One night, over dinner, he tells me it is going extinct.
He has made steak; he is slicing through it. Daniel can cook, something I never realised until I lived with him. He makes sea bass, salmon, chicken cacciatore with simple vegetables, no carbs, no drinks apart from water or fresh fruit smoothies, he makes me take daily vitamins: cod liver oil, vitamin C, vitamin D. He is also fastidious. Maria comes every Tuesday to clean the bathrooms and hoover but between her visits, he wipes down the surfaces, empties the dishwasher. My laundry comes back in folded squares. At home, Mama just dumped the laundry on my bed. It was my job to fold it, hang it, put it away.
I make a gesture with my chin, to ask him why the Cornish Blues are going extinct. I am not speaking much, a few words, a few gestures, if I don’t he might stop talking and I don’t want him to. I like watching him, how relaying a fact can change his expression, his whole body straining with the excitement of it.
‘That’s the interesting part.’ He widens the collar of his shirt, it’s warm. ‘After the colonies dropped to four, a connection wasdiscovered between the Cornish Blue and a type of red ant.’ He chews. ‘The only way the Blues survive between caterpillar and chrysalis is by pretending to be the ants’ own larvae, they emit a chemical pheromone, almost a honey that makes the ants believe the caterpillar is theirs. The ants, sweetly deceived, carry the caterpillar back to their nest. They look after them, feed them, even sing to them.’
I raise my eyebrows.
He laughs. ‘You didn’t think humans are the only species to sing lullabies to their young?’
Mama always played me lullabies from the living room, she’d start off with a classic – ‘Silent Night’, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ – then morph it into something else, a pop song or a piece of her own invention. I dig my nails into my palm.
‘But this social parasitism is fragile. Which brings me to something I wanted to talk to you about.’ He puts down his fork. ‘They’ve asked me to lead a project to halt the extinction of the Blues. I need to take a trip.’
Lost in violin lullabies, trails of marching ants, I am not following what he is saying.
‘So, I was thinking, this might be a good time for you to think about going to Wyatt.’ After the funeral, we decided together that I should transfer to the boarding school I went to during the Easter holidays. I half listened to his reasons (he might be away on research trips, Wyatt was light-years ahead of St Matthews, one of the best schools in the country, he wanted me to have the best). My reasons were different. When I thought of St Matthews, I remembered Mama warming my uniform on the radiator in the winter so I wouldn’t be cold, how she hung two ends of a washingline over the kitchen table to clip on all my artwork, how proud she was of me when I came back with a report card full of As. There was no chance I’d go back there without her.
But the decision to transfer to Wyatt was not without consequences. The school was one of the top girls’ schools in the country; while they were sympathetic about ‘this difficult period,’ they were keen to keep up my grades. They started sending me brown envelopes, one for each subject. The first was a friendly note from my English teacher asking me to write my own version ofRomeo & Juliet’s prologue. I re-sealed the envelope and dropped it on the floor.
‘I know you haven’t taken things well.’
How does a daughter take her mother’s death well?
‘I’ve been struggling too.’