Watch Over Me (4 page)

I’ve been dead three years now, to measure time the way you do.

Time feels very different when you are dead, an eternity is condensed into a second, nights and days pass in eternal twilight.

It was such a wrench to have to go, to leave Shona and Jamie behind.

I was sixty-five, not that old really, but not that young either. I had a happy life, I did all I wanted to do, but what hurt me so much, so much, is that I had to leave my children to fend for themselves.

I know, they are adults, but are our own children ever really adults? Are mothers ever ready to leave them? So much of our world is defined by our parents being alive, a barrier between ourselves and our turn to die. When our parents go, there’s no more protection. We are on our own, exposed.

And Maisie. I didn’t want to leave Maisie, poor wee mite, motherless. Well, she has a mother of course, but a mother not overly concerned about her. Or not concerned at all, really.

I suppose I should hate Janet but I don’t. It’s difficult to have these sort of feelings, anyway, when you are dead and you feel peaceful, at one with everything, safe.

But to be fair, I didn’t even hate her or resent her before, when I was alive. I’d been incredibly relieved when she left without Maisie. I’d spent night after night awake, fearing she’d take Maisie away, and we couldn’t have said no; it was her daughter and clearly Janet wasn’t happy up here, with Jamie. But how could he have moved down to London? It would have been like trying to take one of our trees, the lovely mountain pines that grow all around us, and replant it in some suburban garden. Jamie would have been miserable. But still, he would have gone. She spared him this painful choice; she went and left Maisie to us. She hadn’t been that interested in her anyway, since the day that little life started inside her.

Maybe I should say she’s some sort of monster, that she’s unnatural, without motherly instinct. But life taught me compassion. Who says all women should be mothers? Who says all women know how to be a mother, or want to be one?

One night – one night was all it took for Janet, and I remember how it feels to be young and reckless and have life flowing through you so strongly that you have to live it, live it deeply and fully. One night of love at first sight, and whisky, and the beauty of the Highlands all around her, and her life was turned upside down.

Who are we to dictate she had to be happy, that she had to take to motherhood like a duck to water, like I did with my children and Shona did with hers? People pointed their finger and despised her, as if they didn’t know how many women
pretend
. They pretend to be happy, they pretend to want this life, of wife and mother, because that’s what’s expected of them. They bend and break themselves to fit the mould they were handed down from their mothers. Misery handed down from mothers to daughters, a life of self-denial.

Janet couldn’t do that. She’s an artist. Like you would say, ‘She’s a human being,’ or, ‘She’s a woman,’ – the very basic qualities that define her essence – you would also say of Janet, ‘She’s an artist.’

I knew someone like her before. A boy I went to school with, who used to think of nothing else but playing the violin. His dad played too, his mum was a beautiful singer, and they loved music. But with him, it was different. He was consumed – I’m sure that had they taken his violin away, he would have withered and died. He went on to be a famous musician and composer, he lives in Glasgow now. He has three children. Because you see, he could keep playing the violin ten hours a day and travel the world and live his music as deeply as he wanted, while his wife raised the family. He could have both, because he’s a man. But a woman artist, if she wants children, she has to stop, she can’t be consumed by it, she has to put her art in a slot to fit in with the biggest slot, the most important one – her babies. Some are willing to do it; some, like Janet, are not.

I don’t know what that feels like, to feel forced to give up your passion, your very reason for being. I can only imagine it is like some sort of death of the soul. I saw it happening to Janet. How can I judge her? The only passion I’ve ever known is my family, James and the children, and my home, this little-known corner of the world, and all its beauty. I don’t know what it feels like to have to give up your own soul.

Since I died, I am at one with my home. I am the loch and the silver fish that swim in it. I am the wind and the leaves and the mountains. I am the particles of dust twirling around in the rays of sunshine, seeping through the windows of my son’s workshop. I am the moon that shines in a pool of silver light on Maisie’s floor, as she lies asleep. I am the wind that caresses Shona’s face, and her girls’, whenever they come home.

When we die, we can choose to go and be reborn. Or if we still have things to do, things to be seen to, we can stay, although not forever.

At first, I didn’t want to go. But now I do. I feel myself dissolving, I feel myself drifting more and more, every day another bit of consciousness leaves me and I am less and less myself. If I don’t go, if I don’t walk into the new life that has been chosen for me, I’ll just disappear. It will be painful to go into the new life, because I’ll have to forget all about them. James and my children and grandchildren, and all my friends, and everything I knew in this life. But I must go.

The one thing that really keeps me here is Jamie.

He’s lost. I watch him and fear seeps even into this peace I feel in death. I suppose not even eternity can stop a mother from worrying. I’m worried sick that he’ll keep freezing up until it’s too late and he can never come back. Maisie keeps him going but not much else. He speaks to people but he doesn’t say anything. He smiles and functions through his days and ends them with a glass in his hand, and another, and another. He seems to thaw a little when he’s with Maisie, but she’ll grow and build a family of her own, and Jamie will be one of those men you see in pubs up here, a whisky in their hand, not wanting to go home to a cold, empty house.

He has shut the world out.

My lovely son, who has so much to give. I am determined I will not go until I’ve helped him.

One night I was sitting on the rocks, listening to the water lapping at the shore, when something startled me. A wave of sadness washed over me, like a shiver, from my forehead to my spine. It was as if I’d been looking out to sea and suddenly saw a distress signal, cutting the sky in a burning arc.

As a ghost, there are a million souls floating in mine, a million voices whispering their thoughts, their memories. That voice, I knew.

It was Eilidh, the granddaughter of my childhood friend Flora McCrimmon, crying out her sorrow in her sleep. But she wasn’t calling me, she was calling Flora.

Flora couldn’t hear her – she had rejoined the sea of souls and she’s not Flora anymore. But I could hear her, and I would
listen
.

I closed my eyes and called her.

I called and called, picturing the child that Eilidh used to be, the sweet girl with thoughtful eyes, so different from her brazen sister Katrina. Kind Eilidh …

Walking home from school in her blue uniform …

Dancing at the village ceilidhs, her brown hair flowing …

Eilidh on the swings …

Eilidh helping in Flora’s shop, in her little maroon apron …

Sitting on the stone wall at the edge of the play park, daydreaming …

Sitting in our kitchen, chatting to me as I baked, Jamie coming in from fishing and them exchanging a few awkward words, the way children do when they are nearly teenagers and don’t see each other with the same eyes anymore.

Memories of Eilidh kept flooding back as I called her, trying to seep into her dreams. I finally found her consciousness amid the million minds that floated in mine and stepped into it.

I recoiled. Such pain and sadness, it broke my heart.

‘Come home, Eilidh, come home child … Come to Glen Avich …’ I repeated over and over and over again.

I’m not sure she heard me. I hope so because she needs to come home.

And maybe, just maybe, she could be the answer to my prayers.

I’d never been much of a matchmaker when I was alive, I never meddled in other people’s business, I was always too reserved, too quiet for that. Flora and Peggy, out of all the women of my generation, were the born matchmakers.

However, here I am now, trying to set my son up. Life can be surprising. And as I’m finding out, death can be quite surprising too.

The next morning, I woke up to a silent house, as the muted, milky light of autumn seeped through the curtains.

For a few seconds I didn’t know where I was. I looked up at the low ceiling and around me. The wooden wardrobe, the old-fashioned dressing table, the paintings of fields and whitewashed cottages on the walls and, finally, the patterned carpet.

My gran and my aunt’s house, still unchanged since I was a wee girl.

I waited for the usual pang of grief and sadness, the one I got every single time I opened my eyes, after a fitful sleep, since I lost my baby.

It came, but it was somehow less sharp, less cruel. As if something, or someone, was standing between me and the terrible pain I felt. Like it was being cushioned off, softened.

When you are a child, no pain is so harsh that the ones you love, the ones that look after you, can’t ease it. Even the worst of days look up when someone tucks you in, brings you a cup of warm milk and a biscuit, and sits at the edge of your bed to read you a story. You look at their well-known faces, breathe in their familiar scent, listen to the voice that you have heard since you can remember, and something inside you just unknots. For some of us, the person to do this was their mum. For me, it was my gran.

And that deep comfort and peace, the sense of safety, the childhood illusion that they’ll always be with you … all that I had felt again since I had stepped into the house.

I felt Flora was still there.

And of course there was Peggy, my dear aunt who had been widowed a few years before, just after Flora’s death. Peggy’s daughters live in Canada and in the space of a few months, Peggy had lost both her husband and her sister and had been left to live alone. Strange, I had never before thought how lonely she must have felt – all this had happened while I was undergoing the first IVF treatments, and after a few years of trying and trying to get pregnant. I was so worn out that I could only see my own predicament, my own quest, and had no energy or time for anybody else.

I must have been so blind, blinded with the intensity of my desire, with the endless frustration of it never being satisfied.

I looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table, beside the untouched cup of tea and Tunnock’s wafer that Peggy had left the night before. The biscuit made me smile – Flora was so fond of those wafers, she always put one in my lunchbox and produced them whenever she had visitors. Tunnock’s wafers, custard creams and teacakes were her staples.

I blinked as I saw the time. And again. I couldn’t believe it. Half-past nine.

I had slept twelve hours. Non-stop. Without Diazepam and all that anxiety and depression medication I had been prescribed and that wasn’t helping me at all. I had put the lot into a plastic bag before I left, sealed it and dropped it in the bin, banging the lid for good measure, because what good was numbing the pain, numbing my brain, ignoring the storm instead of facing it?

My struggle’s finished anyway. There’s no hope left.

When you let go of hope, you have nothing.

And that’s when there’s a choice to be made.

You end it all.

Or you keep going, somehow. You try and try to fill the emptiness with something else and, through trial and error and sheer stubbornness, sooner or later you find the way out of darkness.

What I know now is that hope doesn’t always spring eternal but there
is
life after hope.

That morning, I was going to face the emptiness and see what to do next. I wasn’t scared. It couldn’t possibly get any worse. No babies, no house, no husband, no job, hardly any money – the only way was up.

I got up to open the curtains and the view took my breath away. The grey, dramatic sky; the drifting clouds galloping like wild horses; the misty hills below, brown and orange and dark green, soft and velvety and moist; the pinewoods, still and silent and solemn.

I opened the window and let the cold air embrace me, laden with that mixture of damp earth and leaves dissolving on the ground that is the scent of autumn.

To me, autumn smells of sleep. It was the perfect season because all I knew had gone and died, just like the leaves. It was a good time to be grieving, waiting for spring to bring life back.

I shivered and put on my dressing gown. The house was freezing. It does have central heating but it’s terribly expensive. Most of the heating is provided by the stove in the kitchen and the fire in the living room.

I went downstairs and found that Peggy wasn’t there. There was a tray on the table with a teapot, a cup, some bread, a butter dish, a jar of her home-made blackberry jam and a note: ‘I’m at the shop. Help yourself to breakfast and get settled, then you can come up to the shop and we can have a chat.’