Now
I’m walking but I don’t know where to go. I can’t go back to the hotel, I’m afraid of rectangles – that cold, clean square of room, of waiting for a glimpse of Millie and Kit on the screen of my phone. On the bridge, there are life rings, one every few metres, and then, the orange buoy onForagerflashes through my mind, what I’d give to be on a boat with Alex right now, the hum of the engine, the horizon of estuary. A gull flies overhead, swooping low over the Thames and then rearing up against the skyline, and I see the skyscraper, half shrouded in clouds: The Walkie Talkie. It is everything they say it is, a swollen pint glass bulging comically at the top and narrowing at the bottom. The only reason the council granted planning permission is for the precise reason my heart is lifting at the sight of it. It has the highest public roof garden in London – Sky Garden.
I’ve never visited before; I don’t let myself go to gardens. I live within strict rules: no collecting outside The Wedge, no looking things up, I’ve contained that part of myself, in the soil beyondthe brambles, in my greenhouse. But I’m not home anymore and I need this. Open the cage. Let out the beast that’s lain drugged and dormant for so long.
There’s almost no queue, it’s still raining, the worst day for viewing London. But I’m not here for the views. Heat streams over me as I enter the lift lobby; until I feel it on my skin, I don’t realise I’m shivering. I stay there for a few minutes, squeezing out my hair, wiping rain from my face. Then, I take the lift up thirty-five floors.
The doors open out onto what could easily be the lobby of a bank, a spotless stone floor, sofas and bistro tables, except that directly ahead is pure window. There are so few people here, a mistake, because seeing London in a storm is breathtaking, the gathered fists of shadow, the highest buildings covered in banks of clouds. Rumour had it that The Walkie Talkie was put forward as a potential new office for Dulwich & Sullivan. The partners voted it down. ‘If something happens that far up,’ Bruce told me with the kind of appetite for risk that makes him a lawyer and not a banker, ‘you’d never get out.’ Surely, that’s the thrill of it, though. The insanity of working thirty-five floors up. The absurdity of a garden in the sky.
But, despite London laid out before me, the thunderous sky, the flashes of lightning, my eyes are drawn to a mother and her son. He looks about four, a little older than Millie. He holds out his arms. His mother swings him up onto her shoulders as she points to The Shard.
I fist back tears. She is the mother I can never be. I don’t like to put Millie on my shoulders, throw her, catch her, when she was a baby, I refused to carry her round the house, I’d only everhold her sitting down. ‘You know you’re not going to drop her, right?’ Kit would say, but how would I know that? I don’t trust my body – gullible, treacherous – I am unsafe inside it. Why would I trust it with my child?
The garden is a set of raised terraces on either side of the central restaurant; I take the stairs slowly to the top. Beyond the glass, a different side of London is visible, the swirl of the Gherkin, the white dome of St Paul’s, but I’m more interested in what’s in the soil. I reach out, examine the plants. They’re mostly New Zealand black tree ferns with their ink-ribbed fronds – tough but edible. Not what I’m looking for. No matter. Almost every plant defends themselves. If you know what you’re looking for, there are weapons everywhere.
The slope falls away to cycads; with their stout, woody trunks, their sprays of leaves, they look like small palms. I unsling my backpack, roll on a plastic glove. My heart races. I reach over the bed and grab a handful of seeds. No one stops me. No one is policing the plants.
I’m bold by the time I get to the foot of the slope; it’s filled with seasonal crowd-pleasers – succulents, irises, blue lilies, silver lamb’s ear spikes – so many saps and spines and bristles. I crouch down slowly, trying not to hurt my stomach, then gather as much as possible as I pretend to admire a leaf, tie my laces, take a photograph. Daniel’s words circle in my head.How can he love you when he has no idea who you are?
‘You love me,’ I whisper. ‘And you have no idea who I am. No idea at all.’
My backpack is heavy with what I’ve collected. I peer inside. It’s beautiful, full of foliage, flowers, stems, if someone foundit, they’d think I was one of those women who makes floral wreaths, who hang them up on their front doors with a length of silk ribbon, so creative, such a lovely hobby. Kit thinks that about my gardening. ‘You grow such beautiful flowers,’ he says if he finds me in the greenhouse, surrounded by Brugmansia, foxglove, laurel. In this, Kit and Daniel are alike, united in their profound misunderstanding.My loves, don’t you know? Beauty is the best cover for deadly.
From: Kit McDermott
12:15
When I found out the greenhouse was locked, I was actually excited, I was convinced there was something up here, why else was there a padlock I’d never seen before? But I haven’t found anything. I think you might have taken that trumpet flower with you, although I can’t be sure. Do you remember dragging it out from the greenhouse and setting it outside in the summer? We’d sit on deckchairs, holding hands, watching the sun set, the intense scent of those flowers washing over us. Is that why you brought it with you? A reminder of this? I want those back too.
34
KillingJars
Then
Iam in the field with Daniel. The setting sun flushes through the thyme, the scent of it penetrating my lungs, and there are butterflies, so many of them all around me, rising up from the purple haze. I shut my eyes, hold out my arms, feel their wings brush my skin, hear them flapping but there is something wrong, a stinging smell like alcohol. I open my eyes. The orange glow of the afternoon instantly disappears because I am not in the field, it is night. I am in my narrow room in the cottage. But still, that smell.
I know what it is. It is the fluid in the study, in that unlabelled bottle. I get out of bed, walk down the corridor. A bar of light shines from under the door. I push it open.
He’s there, sitting at the trestle table, his laptop open. After living with only my thoughts of him and the traces he leaves in the cottage, that he is really here, in front of me, is almost too much. I am scared my presence will send him away, I want to stay like this, watching him from the doorway. But he hears me, turns.
‘I smelt something,’ I say stupidly. ‘It woke me up.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He hasn’t changed from the field; he wears a dove-grey shirt, cargo trousers. Behind him, the trestle table is not empty like it was when I checked it this afternoon. Instead, it has ten jars on it and a mesh cage filled with Blues.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Research,’ he says. A few weeks ago, he would have volunteered what that research is, the complex, fascinating reasons he’s selected each of the butterflies from the hundreds he has identified and released. Now, he does not.
‘What’s the smell?’
He hesitates, reluctant to enter into our old dynamic again, but the prospect of enforcing this now, in the middle of the night, seems to overwhelm him. He rubs his eyes. ‘Ethyl acetate.’
‘What does it do?’
‘It’s for the killing jars.’
‘Killing jars?’