A Kind of Vanishing (16 page)

Without hanging up, Isabel hurried across the lawn, the telephone in one hand and her drink in the other.

Blinking in the glare of the sunshine, she made no sense of what she saw. The bottom of the garden was in ruins. She could only have been gone five minutes.

For a wild moment she thought a plane had fallen out of the sky. She reached the pool and later had no memory of placing her gin and the telephone down beside her book and sun tan cream.

‘Mark?’ There was no sign of him. He had gone to Lewes.

Piles of mud had come from nowhere, hundreds of splinters of wood and branches floated in the water and were strewn over the plastic furniture, which of course hadn’t moved an inch. Sheets of wet newspaper, a pair of nail scissors, a nail file and a sodden box of man-size tissues were scattered along the side of the pool. Isabel tripped over a face-down copy of the London A to Z at her feet and at the same moment recognised the scissors as her own. She had been manicuring her nails. The street atlas came from Mark’s glove box. There was something else, she bent down to read the words ‘What to do in an Accident’ on the bloated cover of a booklet with a ballpoint pen still clipped to the back cover floating at the edge of the swimming pool. She fleetingly observed that it was considerate to provide an advice manual with the mayhem. Spreading lake-like puddles on the patio reflected a cloudless blue sky. Perhaps it was this image that reminded Isabel about the lilo. She put a hand to her throat as she realised the shiny flaccid heap flopped on a platform of racing-green metal in the centre of the pool was her beloved lilo. There was a rip down its middle. Gradually, it seemed, although it must have been only a split second, Isabel took in the situation. It wasn’t a plane or the total collapse of the garage which was now in full view because the trellis was splintered to pieces at her feet. She jolted into action.

‘Mark!’

Gina heard her mother’s scream from the drive. Instantly she understood that it was all over. She went cold as if the sun had been eclipsed and stared uncomprehending as Jon dashed away up the side path of the house. As he leapt over the gate to the old tradesman’s entrance, he bellowed back to Gina over his shoulder:

‘Ambulance, police, fire brigade, get the lot!’

Gina fumbled with her new mobile phone, trying to unlock the keypad. She shook it furiously and then held it to her ear. Nothing but the sound of the sea. She glared at it. Where was the bloody asterisk key? She found it. Then flustered, she stabbed at the nought button three times. She had had nightmares like this when no matter how hard she tried, limbs moving in treacle, panic descending, she always dialled the wrong number. The person always died because her agitation woke her up in a shivering sweat before she could save them.

As Gina gave the police her parents’ address she passionately wished she had stayed at home. If she had kept indoors then nothing would have happened, because at home it never did.

Isabel skidded down the steps into the shallow end, wading out until the water was around her neck. She took a deep breath and dived down between the car and the tiled wall of the pool, knocking her knee against the bumper and grazing her bare thigh on the back door handle as she felt her way along. She couldn’t keep her eyes open for long because the high level of chlorine made them sting. Only that morning she had complained to Mark that he was pouring far too much in. Mark was cavalier about quantities of anything that wasn’t medicine.

All the windows were open and already the inside was full of water, but there was not enough room between the car and the side of the pool to allow Isabel to manoeuvre herself into the car or to open the door. She was by the passenger side and she didn’t have the breath or the time to get over the bonnet of the car to where Mark was. Besides she wouldn’t be able to open the driver’s door either. She pulled on the passenger door handle and managed to open it a little, but the gap was too narrow for her to squeeze more than her arm through. There was no way of reaching Mark. By twisting her body sideways she could just strain in through the passenger window. Isabel’s fingers were only inches from his leg, if she just could touch him, he might stir into action and help himself. She dared go no further in case she got stuck. Then she ran out of breath and explosively exhaled as she pushed up to the surface. Without waiting to recover, she took another gulp of air and ducked downwards again.

Mark’s head was tilted forward, his chin touching his chest, he might have been napping at the wheel. As usual he didn’t acknowledge her presence although his hair floated in gentle waves around his head as she flailed towards him creating undulations in the water. He had put on trousers and a blue shirt while she was in the house, and these ballooned at the sides where air bubbles were trapped making him look deformed. His eyes were shut and his cheeks trembled in and out because his mouth hung open and was full of water. How could he breathe with his mouth open? Isabel pushed against the water to slam her hand on the dashboard to get his attention. It made no sound.

There was no point.

Again Isabel screamed Mark’s name and a gush of water shot down into her windpipe. She felt strong hands grab her under the arms and suddenly she was being hauled up to the surface, away from Mark. Jon carried her up the wide steps at the end and carefully laid her on a sodden sun lounger where she curled on her side heaving and retching. Barely pausing and still in his precision ironed chinos Jon leapt straight back into the pool. Isabel winced as he overshot and fell against the car.

Action Man.

Later Isabel could only remember that she tried to follow Jon into the water. She had to speak to Mark before Jon did. She would remember that Gina had held on to her and that they had struggled violently in the shallow end as Jon kept bobbing to the surface gasping. Again and again he dived down to the car in a futile effort to pull his father-in-law free and to save his life.

Isabel had no words to explain that she had had to know that Mark had battled frantically to get himself out from the submerged car. She needed to believe he had wanted to stay with her but had got trapped behind the wheel. There was no way of saying any of this because she knew it wasn’t true.

Gina had been right; her mother’s shrill howl had signalled the end.

After the arrival of the emergency services, the violent attempts to resuscitate Mark on the slippery paving amidst a gaggle of garden furniture and sodden paraphernalia, the eventual removal of his body and the stolid arrival of Lucian from London, demanding the return of his father to life, someone had complained that a huge cardboard box had been dumped right by the front door entirely blocking the porch.

It was Isabel’s long-awaited luxury lounger.

A
lice traced the pattern on the lace curtain, as if trying to find a Braille message assuring her she wasn’t alone. She sank back into her chair, the message was prosaic: the lace was in need of a wash. In mounting despair, she looked around the room seeing other things that needed a good scrub, a thorough polish. Her despondency increased, for really the whole flat should be spring-cleaned, but spring had passed, it was a sweltering hot Monday afternoon in June, too hot to move, too hot to think.

Alice’s view through the greying curtain was much the same as James Stewart’s in
Rear Window
. Rows of windows, mostly like her own screened from prying eyes by net curtains or blinds, filled the frame. But there were still many tenants who were oblivious or unworried about creating a tableau of their lives for all to see. Their windows were flung wide and after dark were brightly lit. For these Alice was grateful. She watched the young mother, who had yesterday had her long black hair cut short, tend her window boxes or pace around the room pacifying her baby. Three windows along and one up was the woman with the iron-grey pudding bowl haircut who Chris said worked in the supermarket on the main road. When she was at home she sat motionless at her desk in the far corner of the room in a pool of angle-poise light working late into the night. Alice had to be careful not to be seen by her, as she would jump up without warning and come to the window where she would stand utterly still for a long time just staring out. Below was a wide concrete yard closed in on opposite sides by the two six-storey Victorian flats in the middle of which stood the new estate office. The other flats cut out most of the traffic noise from the Old Kent Road beyond, but also shut out the evening sunlight and curtailed her view. To her left was a twenty-foot brick wall topped with spikes upon which on her bad days Alice would impale the heads of her enemies. This wall segregated the estate from the Baptist church next door. Now, as on many days, Alice could hear the sound of a packed congregation singing.

‘…This is the day the Lord has made, that all may see his love displayed…’

To her right was The World Turned Upside Down from whose juke box Manchester United’s song ‘Lift It High’ mingled discordantly with the strains of the church choir.

Alice was forty, but today she felt eighty.

The lace curtains had soaked up London’s grime, the pattern of usually fluffy birds perched in repetition on twisty branches down its length – a design she had chosen more for company than appearance – had wind blown feathers. They too looked tired and old. Alice was an empty barn, with patches of her roof missing. Ravens flapped back and forth, wings smacking against the creaking rafters of her ribs. If she were ill, who would care? But if the ravens abandoned her, would that spell doom?

The obvious answer to the first question was Alice’s
eighteen-year
-old daughter, Chris. Nevertheless the cloud of self pity conjured up by this scenario enveloped Alice in deeper gloom.

On her bad days Alice would picture herself working through the tasks she had set herself in advance of doing them. She would sit as now, in her armchair looking out through the lace at the concrete quadrangle below, and plan her chores and activities, anticipating potential problems and contemplating how to overcome them. So detailed were Alice’s mental campaigns that when she came to do the tasks, she performed them perfectly with no extraneous elements or movement. This ruthless efficiency made her impatient when Chris made one small mistake. As a mistake could be that Chris had chosen a different way to achieve the same end, this meant Alice was frequently annoyed with her daughter. Their relationship was fraught with mutual frustration.

Sometimes Alice imagined completed tasks so vividly, she was bewildered to discover the washing basket full or, as in this case, the curtains dirty. Then her sense of control would slip and jerk through clenched fists. Alice had to breathe in and out, in and out until the panic passed, then struggle to her bedroom, brushing the walls for balance and reassurance and tapping the door frame an ever increasing number of set times before she could lie still and regain her composure. That morning she had told Chris she would have to go to the launderette after supper. Chris had been sulky, so that it was almost not worth asking. Except they both knew that Chris had no choice.

‘No one understands what it’s like not being able to nip down the shops for a pint of milk.’

‘No one believes I’m ill because I have a natural bloom to my skin.’

Everyone adored Chris. Chattering voices down the telephone, scribbled school reports and holiday postcards –
Wish you had been able to come
– told Alice how Chris was kind and always smiling. They all marvelled at how lucky Alice was to have such a clever, thoughtful daughter. Those who came into the flat, the doctor, the woman about agoraphobia, the community dentist, all of them said Chris was like her mother. Alice knew Chris was the spit image of herself so that much was true. She liked the notion that they could be sisters. The doctor had said Alice couldn’t be old enough to have such a grownup daughter. Although she had appreciated the comment, she had been anxious in case he was flirting or worse, judging. Alice wished she looked how she felt, because then people might be more sympathetic. She had no respect for the agoraphobic specialist because she had failed to spot the truth about Alice and must therefore be a fake too. Compliments about her wonderful complexion, or the lustre in her hair annoyed Alice because they meant people didn’t appreciate how it was for her.

But then Alice went to great pains to ensure they did not.

She imagined people beyond the archway of the flats leading to the Old Kent Road – the extent of her world – admiring Chris for caring for her sick mother. On good days Alice basked in the dreams where they praised her too, disbelieving that she coped with a chronic illness while running a home, being a mother and an expert at invisible mending.

Alice invented faces for the invisible people in her daughter’s life most of whom she had never met: teachers, bus conductors, friends and their parents who seldom rang now that Chris was older. There was one mother she had liked who if things had been different might even have been a friend. She was usually smoking when she called which would normally have revolted Alice, but the mellifluous speech punctuated by sucking and puffing was warm and caressing. Alice would see smoke rings rising around the woman’s head as she talked, the phone propped on her shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. When she had reluctantly to end a conversation with this woman, Alice would briefly be content, then filled with anguish at her fettered state. This was some years ago and now she couldn’t think of her name and anyway the woman didn’t telephone any more. It was the busy, fussy lady who wanted to take her daughter to France one half term who had riled Alice the most.

‘You must be proud, she is so witty, had us in stitches...’

Alice waited for the reason for her call, horrified that this stranger thought she knew her daughter better than Alice did.

‘… I know it will be hard while she is away, is there anyone who could stay with you? It will be lovely for the girls, Chrissie’s French will help us all! I can ask for things but once they start rattling back, I’m…Chrissie doesn’t know I’m calling, Rachael – my daughter, had her number. I wanted to put my pennyworth…’
Later Alice informed Chris, no, she could not go to France. How could Alice manage for a week by herself? Suppose she fell, suppose she ran out of food?

Suppose.

Chris had said she didn’t mind if she stayed at home and Alice convinced herself that Chris hadn’t wanted to go. That she had been happy to use her mother’s condition as an excuse. But still this was an uncomfortable memory.

This made Alice return to the photograph. Two years ago when she was sixteen, Chris had presented to her mother a framed picture of herself for her birthday. Alice had taken lots of photos of Chris as a little girl. She had lovingly slotted the prints between their mounting corners in a set of albums that made up a brand new history for her daughter. They supplanted the past Alice had been forced to abandon. But none of her photographs so accurately captured her daughter as this one.

Chris was doing a thumbs-up sign. Her hand was partially hiding her face so that the gesture, declaring that everything was all right, dominated the frame. It had been snapped by Emma, Chris’s best friend, while on a sailing holiday that this time Alice had agreed to. Chris had posed on the prow of a yacht like a conquering hero, and behind her there was only the sea and the sky. The photograph comforted Alice and she picked it up whenever she was upset or anxious. Chris’s laughing smile, the wisps of hair blown out from her face by the sea breeze and the way she looked through, and not directly at the lens, expressed her spirit. Chris was buoyant in the face of adversity. Alice kept her reflections to herself, although she would often tell Chris that the picture was the best present anyone had ever given her.

Late afternoon was Alice’s favourite time. She relished the anticipation of Chris’s arrival. It was like the start of school holidays. This feeling formed a link to a long lost childhood and she tried to snatch at the fading image of a little girl busily helping her Dad clean shoes on a back step, lining up each shoe to make a straight line of toes.

The little girl was always on her own. The fuzzy figure who was her Dad had gone, perhaps into the house, giving his princess time to make everything right for his inspection.

Alice carefully lifted up the black postman shoes with the metal toe-caps. She folded her rag neatly like her Dad did, and dabbed a corner into the tin of polish.

‘Don’t press too hard, you don’t need much.’

The shoe was too heavy to hold in one hand, so she wedged it between her legs as she pummelled the heel with her cloth. After a few minutes she hadn’t made much difference. She began to panic. Breathe in. Breathe out.

‘You just put me out of a job!’
He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, slurping a mug of tea her Mum had made.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough. Keep going.’
He bent and kissed the top of her head and laughed from deep inside. He smelled of aftershave. No, he smelled of apples and tobacco.

Alice couldn’t think what he smelled of. She had only a fragment from which to build her story, which was fading through lack of telling.

Chris would be moody and probably slope off to her bedroom, but still Alice counted down to the sound of her key in the door.

When Alice watched Chris march briskly across the quadrangle each morning, a young confident woman now, she wanted to open the window and call her back.

‘Don’t leave me! Take me with you.’

The words lost power before she could form them, and she let the stranger stride off under the archway to the busy street.

Alice took refuge in blurry memories of a small child skipping or spinning in ballet pumps. No matter what, the innocent schoolgirl who was always top of the class was still safe inside her.

Chris was now twenty minutes late. Alice patted her chest. Chris must have gone off with her friends without telling her. Alice wanted Chris to have friends and in one of her better states she would see her at the centre of a gaggle of girls chatting and giggling, with no responsibilities. But they had an agreement that Chris phoned if she was going to be late. Alice had spent a fortune on Chris’s mobile phone.

Alice hated that Chris was so laden down with cares and she longed to protect the little girl who even in summer was pale, her bag full of books, her head full of revision and dreams of a degree at university that would lead to a career in forensic science. Alice would have preferred that Chris wanted to be an artist and paint live creatures rather than take apart dead ones. On bad days Alice felt dissected herself as she tried to ward off the strident, deriding child who daily sucked the life out of her mother, leaving her like a discarded beetle case, turning and shifting listlessly in the draught under the door. On her bad days, Alice’s sorry images of herself were never mundane.

‘By the time I was your age…’

‘Were you ever my age? Your story changes every day. One minute you talk about horse riding, the next you say you were scared of them. Which is it today?’

‘There was a girl I knew when I was young. She could ride the way you and I walk. I get mixed up between dreams and reality, that’s all. I’m not well. It’s natural.’

Alice had hoped having a child meant always having someone who would stick up for you and love you come what may. The way Alice had loved her mother. It seemed a minute since Chris was born and she had held her, appalled by the lump of screaming flesh. Then Chris had stopped breathing and a flock of doctors and nurses snatched her away and left Alice alone. When she saw her next, under plastic like a takeaway sandwich, she was overwhelmed by the intensity of her love. This love could exhaust her with its strength and she had known then it would never release her.

Here she was now!

Alice started to tug the lace aside to wave then just in time remembered Chris would pretend not to see her. Instead she twitched the material like the fugitive she was and shrank back into her armchair.

As she watched her daughter return home in the afternoons from school, Alice would know that what she most dreaded had already become reality: Chris had moved on from her. Yet the sight of her nearly grownup daughter living a life in which she could be herself, free of a painful past, always filled Alice with joy.

She believed that this justified everything.