I turn back to my letter, sliding it into a purple envelope and writing Alex’s name on the front. Quietly, so that Alan won’t hear me, I cross over to the drawers under my workbench. I open the one marked, Chisels.
Inside, there’s a soft sea of purple paper. A sad treasure chest; my dark secret. The drawer’s filling up again: some of the letters at the back are in danger of falling into the drawer below, where I really do keep chisels. Carefully, I slide them towards the front. It’s stupid, really, but I hate the thought of any of them getting lost. Or bent, or crushed, or hurt in any way .
I breathe slowly, staring down at them.
I don’t write all the time – maybe once a fortnight, less if I’m really busy – but this is still the third drawer I’ve filled in the past two decades. I scoop my hand in among them now, tender and ashamed. What’s wrong with him? I imagine people saying. Still hanging on to a dead girl? He should get help.
It was a lady called Jeanne Burrows, a bereavement counsellor, who suggested I write to my dead sister. I couldn’t stand the thought of never being able to talk to her; it made me dizzy with panic. Write her a letter , Jeanne had suggested. Tell her how you’re feeling, how you miss her. Say the things you you’d have said if you’d known what was coming.
In those silent hours spent driving between the Crown Court, the psychiatric hospital and my empty childhood home, I found comfort in those letters. I had friends, of course: I even had a new girlfriend back up in Birmingham, where I’d just finished my first year as an undergraduate. Mum’s sister, Margaret, phoned daily, and Dad came down from Cumbria to help organize his daughter’s funeral. But nobody really knew what to do with me, nobody really knew what to say. My friends were well meaning but useless, and my girlfriend escaped as soon as she decently could. Dad deferred his own grief by spending most of the time on the phone to his wife.
I wrote the first letter in my empty room at halls, the day I drove up there to clear my stuff out. Mum was being treated in a secure unit at the time. There was no way I’d be going back for my second year.
But I slept, after writing that letter. I slept all night, and although I cried when I saw the purple envelope the next morning, I felt less . . . stuffed. As if I’d made a small puncture, allowed some of the pressure to escape. I wrote another letter that night, when I had unpacked back in Gloucestershire, and I never really stopped.
I’ve booked in to see Jeanne in a couple of days. She’s still practising out of her house on Rodborough Avenue. Her voice sounds exactly the same, and she didn’t just remember me, she said she was delighted to hear from me. I said I wanted to see her because my involvement with Sarah Harrington had reopened some ‘old wounds’, but I don’t know if that’s quite it. I just feel – have felt since I got back – like everything is wrong. Like I’ve arrived back in the wrong life, the wrong bed, the wrong shoes.
What’s really alarming is the sense that everything’s been this wrong, without my fully realizing it, for nearly twenty years.
I turn to look at my workshop, my safe house, my retreat. The place where I’ve hammered and sawed through fury and despair. Drunk hundreds of thousands of cups of tea, sung along to the radio, pulled out a raft of splinters, had the odd drunken bonk. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had this.
And it’s Mum I have to thank for it, really. Dad, whose fault it was that I’d become fascinated with wood in the first place, was dead against me doing this for a living. During the ten years between him running off with Victoria Shitface (this was the name Alan made up for her at the time: it’s never really lost traction) and Alex dying, Dad continued to interfere with my life and decisions as if he were still sitting at the head of our table. He went mad when I said I was considering a furniture-making foundation course instead of A levels. ‘You’ve an academic brain,’ he shouted down the phone. ‘Don’t you dare waste it! You’ll destroy your career prospects!’
In those days Mum was still capable of engaging with conflict. ‘So what if he doesn’t want to be a bloody accountant?’ she’d said, grabbing the phone from me. Her voice shook with anger. ‘Have you ever actually looked at what he makes, Neil? Probably not, given how rarely you come down here. But let me tell you, our son has an exceptional talent. So get off his back .’
She bought me my first No. 7 jointer, a fine old Stanley. I still use it today. And so it’s always her I’m grateful to, when I consider what I’ve got.
‘Bonjour ,’ Alan says, his voice a little woolly. He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing pants and one sock. ‘I need tea, and toast, and a lift, Eddie. Can you help?’
An hour later we pull up at his house, right at the top of Stroud. I keep the engine running while he runs inside to find a suitable work outfit (he flatly rejected everything I own) and gaze down at the old cemetery falling away below me, a chessboard of loss and love. There’s nobody there, save for a cat picking its way along a row of limey gravestones.
I smile. Typical cat. Why walk respectfully on the grass when you could walk disrespectfully on a human grave?
A church bell starts ringing somewhere – it must be nine o’clock – and I’m reminded suddenly of that funeral procession yesterday. The hearse, polished and quiet and disconcerting in every way. The careful set of the driver’s face, the cascades of wildflowers trailing down the coffin, that heady fear that comes with any reminder of human mortality. I cross my arms across my chest, feeling suddenly queasy.
Who died? Who was it?
But then I remember the promise I made to my sister, a mere ninety minutes ago. No more thoughts of Sarah. Not now, not ever. And I draw a screen across that part of my mind, forcing instead a plan for the working day ahead. Number one: a bacon sandwich from the roadside cafe at Aston Down.
‘Meow!’ I call to the cat, but it’s busy plotting the death of some poor shrew.
Chapter Forty-Four
SIX WEEKS LATER
Autumn is here. I can smell it in the air, rough and unprocessed and – I’ve always thought – oddly apologetic. As if it feels slightly embarrassed, dismantling the heady dreams of summer to make way for another cruel slog.
Although, personally, I’ve never minded winter. There’s something exquisitely unworldly about this valley when frost spikes the ground and the trees fling long shadows across the bare earth. I love the sight of smoke twisting out of a lone chimney, the fairy-tale pinch of light in a remote window. I love how my friends brazenly invite themselves over so they can sit in front of my fire and eat the hearty stews they seem to think I cook all the time just because I live in a rural barn.
Strangely, Mum always seems a little happier in the winter, too. I think that’s because it’s more acceptable to stay indoors once the temperatures drop. Summer is fraught with the expectation of increased socializing and outdoor activity, whereas in the winter her small existence needs little explanation or defence.
But today it’s only September and I’m still in shorts as I march up the composty hillside of Siccaridge Wood. Shorts and a jumper I still can’t bring myself to wash and de-bobble, because the last person to wear it was Sarah .
I walk a little bit faster. A mild burn spreads through my calf muscles as I stump on up the hill, too fast to let my feet sink into the layered mulch. I start singing Merry Clayton’s part from ‘Gimme Shelter’. The only people who can hear me singing about rape and murder being just a shot away are the birds, who probably thought I was mad already.
My voice reaches the final section of the song, where Clayton is basically screaming, and I start laughing. Life is not feeling all that tranquil right now, but refusing to think about – well, about unhelpful things – definitely gives me a breather.
The problem is, Jeanne Burrows is not really on board with my plan to block all thoughts of Sarah from my mind. My sessions with her make me feel so much better, so much less alone, and yet she is breaking my balls every week. I didn’t imagine you could break someone’s balls in a deeply kind, gentle, respectful way, but Jeanne seems to be doing just that.
Today’s session, however, was unprecedented.