The Summer of Secrets (26 page)

The final photograph has her turning again, face towards the lens, this one set up as a conscious reconstruction of the first laughing shot. Except she isn’t laughing here. Her hair is white, the fine soft lengths resting gently on the bones of her shoulders, and there is a sharpness to the bones on her face that wasn’t there before. It is a study in the underpinning structure of beauty revealed. I am rooted to the spot, struck dumb by the speed of the passing of time.

The assistant from earlier comes along, welcoming people. She knows the couple in front of me, and they stop to chat. I ease my way past. Behind me, I imagine the three of them standing with their heads together, following me with their eyes as she tells them of our earlier meeting.

I stoop to go through a low doorway, and find myself in front of a screen. There is no sound; the jerky reel shows black-and-white footage of a little girl skipping. A distant part of my brain tries to figure out if it is original cinefilm or digital with effects added. It has a crackly, out-of-time look to it. The girl’s back is turned, and a plait bounces on each shoulder as she skips. She turns, but before I see her face the quality disintegrates into white fuzz, out of which emerge split-second flashes of other images. I think I see a boat among them. The child is there again, this time running in a field. There is a close-up of her feet, wearing sandals which I know are made of red leather. I need to sit down. The child starts to dance, a formless spinning joyful dance, with her arms outspread and her braids flying out. Then the film melts, holes forming from the heat, followed by flames. The screen is black for a second, and then numbers appear, white on grey, counting down from ten, a line like the second hand of a watch, sweeping around each one in a circle. A pause, and the sequence begins again.

My brain is running ahead of me. I don’t want to accept what it is telling me. My fingers are cold, and my legs are starting to feel insubstantial.

The reason I know the sandals are red because Pippa got them the week before the party. She jumped out of Piet’s van, ran into the garden, and pirouetted in front of us all.

I need to leave.

I see the skipping rope twirl again.

Across the room, somebody pauses in the doorway. It is a small, delicate woman with cropped dark hair. She takes up hardly any physical space: her outfit of subtly coloured layers of creased cotton adds to her insubstantiality. The crowd parts as if to give space to a delicate moth. For a second her head is turned towards me, and I am looking into Victoria’s eyes. They register nothing, and the next moment she is gone. It’s happened to me before, thinking I’ve seen her until she dissolves into a stranger’s body. This time I know it’s her. Those other forms were never more than a pale echo. She’s no bigger than I remember her and her hair, though silvered through the darkness, is caught up in the way she always had it. But it’s more. It’s Victoria herself I feel, the coiled energy and the sense of her knowing exactly who she is, and where she is going. Her imprint stays behind in the shifting air.

I stumble out of the room and on to the street, my foot coming out of my shoe as I stagger into the wall of the next building. I leave the shoe behind. I don’t want to stop and run the risk of catching the eye of anyone who saw my exit. I can’t, however, escape the feeling of her eyes as they brushed over me and carried on. I keep replaying the moment it happened, trying to decipher the message they left. I feel an accusation, but I don’t know what for. She was the one who left, after all. When I reach home I don’t consciously look for the scissors, but somehow I am standing there with a handful of my hair wrapped around my fist, wanting to tug each strand out by the roots, and with the fingers of my other hand curled around the steel of the scissors. Better the scissors than a razor.

It hurts as I pull at the hair, forcing the blades to close around the resisting mass. I pull my head sideways, panting as I grind my way through. A lament makes its way into the darkness above my head, a keening for everything that is falling with the discarded hair and piling up around my feet.

By the feeble light from the door, I look in the mirror of the window and see a floating head, shaven and pathetic; I am like
les femmes tondues
shamed in a hundred grainy post-war photographs. I finally identify the scent of cowardice. I have been running away from the knowledge for more than half of my life. It is time to find out what happened.

I have to talk to my mother.

She wasn’t sure who was laughing. Not her, because it wasn’t funny. Victoria leaned over. She said something Helen couldn’t quite catch.

‘What?’ The tree she was sitting against was handy, because it stopped her from falling down. She liked the way you could get your fingertips caught in the bark. She missed what Victoria said again.

‘Have some more.’ Victoria was holding out a bottle. ‘More hurt—’ She stopped and giggled. ‘I mean more heart medicine.’

Helen it out in front of her, trying to get the label into focus. The letters jiggled about. The glass was clear, though, and so was the liquid inside. She tilted it up. ‘There’s not much left.’ Vodka. She remembered the name as it burned down her throat. Talking and drinking at the same time made her choke, and the words came out in jolts. ‘There isn’t any left.’

She let the bottle drop to the ground and closed her eyes to try and remember who it was who was sitting under a tree. But when she closed her eyes, the world began to spin too fast, so she opened them again and she was the one sitting under a tree, which was the funniest thing she’d ever heard of. Where was Victoria? She had to tell her, she’d love it. She stood up with care, grabbing at the trunk.

‘Boo!’

The sound made Helen lose her grip and she stepped back and leant over to hold on to her knees. She must have told Victoria about the tree already, because Victoria was laughing. She was laughing so much that she fell over, so Helen let her knees bend and fell over as well and they lay there and staring up into the tree, which was in front of something orange.

‘Why is it orange?’ She heard herself say it, but she didn’t know why, so it was OK that Victoria didn’t answer. And, anyway, there was something wrong with Victoria’s head, only she couldn’t put her finger on it. ‘Where has your hair gone?’

She needn’t have worried, though, because Victoria was laughing so much. Helen tried to get up, but it was so very difficult to balance. On the third go she managed, and reached across with great care to touch the spiky bits sticking up over Victoria’s face. Her finger slid down, though, because they were so high up, and then she had her hand on Victoria’s cheek and underneath the skin she could feel the line of bone, and underneath that her jaw, and then she was touching her ear and the back of her head.

It was all so very, very sad. It was the saddest thing she had ever thought.

‘You’re going, you see.’ She took hold of Victoria’s shoulder and shook it to make her understand. ‘I love you all so much and now you’re going to go away.’ She had real, actual tears in her eyes now. ‘Because it’s only good when you’re here.’

They fell down to the ground at the same time and lay there, quite still. Helen heard the sound of their breath floating on the subdued crackle of background noise. She could feel each tiny vibration feeding through her brain, being allocated sense and dropping off into her subconscious being. Her hand was resting on Victoria’s cheek again. She let her fingers drift downwards and over to Victoria’s mouth. Her hand was moving by itself but she didn’t do anything to stop its journey. The skin of Victoria’s lips felt different, smoother than the skin of her cheek. There were tiny muscles flexing under her fingertips, and her body was nothing but a carrier for a thousand nerve endings. Even if she’d wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to stop. She would be here for the rest of her life.

‘Helen.’ Victoria was trying to sit up. Helen sympathized. It was a difficult thing to do when the world went round so much. She let her hand fall down, watched it lie motionless on the grass. The grass should be green, she thought. Victoria was leaning over, resting her forehead against the side of her head. Her voice was a breathy whisper right in Helen’s ear. ‘Helen—’

‘Yes?’

‘Helen, I don’t fancy you.’ Victoria paused for a second before letting a giggle escape. That didn’t make sense, because what she was saying wasn’t funny. ‘So that’s two of us who don’t.’ She pulled herself up to a wobbly balance and held up a hand, the fingers curled down. Using her other hand, she unpeeled the first two fingers and held them up straight. ‘One, two.’ She pointed them both at Helen. ‘I saw you snogging Seth before. Who are you going to try next?’

Helen wasn’t rooted to the spot, she was turned to stone.

She knew she was somewhere different, but she couldn’t remember how she’d got there. The ground felt damp, and was pressing into her cheek. The pounding in her head got worse when she lifted it up, so she let it stay where it was. The fire was getting bigger, with flames that shredded off and jumped into the sky. But as she lay there, the flames began to take over the sky. Alice came into her field of vision, and she must have liked the flames as well, because she was dancing with them, holding out her arms to catch them as they flew around. She was so beautiful. Helen wanted to get up and dance with her, but it was hard, because the ground was so sticky.

Seth. There was something about Seth she needed to remember. She’d done something, she was sure, something that was bad and would make Seth run away, but she couldn’t think what it was. Then the air was full of smoke. Someone must have put the wrong wood on the bonfire. The smoke bowed down, reaching out to her and wrapping her up. It was nice to be noticed, but it made her cough, and she was sure there were eyes peering out, and she’d see them if only she could turn her head. Before she could spot them, the smoke had retreated, back behind the mountain of crackling fire.

She tried her head again, and this time she managed to lift it up. Where was Victoria? Helen couldn’t see her anywhere. It wasn’t fair. Helen felt a wail rising up in her throat, expanding and growing until she couldn’t breathe. Victoria was always going off somewhere, leaving her behind. There were people running past now, but none of them had faces. They were all leaving her behind.

Screaming. Helen put her hands over her ears because she didn’t like screaming. But if her hands were over her ears, what were the hands that were pulling her up? Why was her mother here? She wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t live here any more. Her mother wouldn’t let her sit back down. It was because of the lights. They were blue, too blue, and they kept flashing on, and flashing off. Flashing on, flashing off. She wanted to stop and count them, but the hands kept pulling, pulling.

They were in the lane, and Mrs Weaver’s face was there too. Why was she there? She hadn’t been invited. Helen tried to tell her, to point out that it was rude, turning up at other people’s parties, but it was difficult because she couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. ‘Drugs, I shouldn’t wonder …’ Mrs Weaver’s mouth was talking by itself. ‘Disgraceful. A total lack of supervision.’ One minute she was there, and the next she’d turned into Helen’s mother. ‘Thank you, Officer … yes … home with me …’ And she was going to be sick, nausea sending her head into a spin, sweat enveloping every bit of her. Hands were turning her about, holding her down, and she heaved and heaved until all she wanted to do was lie down and die. Her feet were a very long way away and she tried to tell someone, but they couldn’t hear her. The hands forced her along, with her stranger’s feet, and then she was lying in a car and her mother was there, saying something she couldn’t hear.

And then she was gone.

Rain was pounding in a steady stream against the window. Helen made her eyes focus on the spot beyond the rain but before the houses opposite, so it all merged into a grey blur. She couldn’t hold it for long. Out in the street, an old lady pushed her way along behind a walker frame, and the cat from the house opposite bounded up on to the wall and made a slinking run over to the other side, hiding under a parked car. Behind her, she could hear her mother rummaging through her handbag for the car keys. She swung the cord with a final vicious force, wishing she could break the glass.

‘I don’t see why I can’t go.’

‘Because there’s nobody there and there’s nothing you can do.’ The impatient tone was back in her mother’s voice. ‘You’ve been ill and you need to rest.’ Her bag closed with a snap. ‘I have to go to work today, and you need to make a start on the book list from the sixth form.’

‘I’m not going to the sixth form.’

‘Helen.’ Her mum made her turn round. ‘We’ve been through this, and I don’t want to argue.’ She came up to Helen and put a hand on her forehead. ‘How is your head feeling today?’

‘It’s all right.’ Helen shrugged her hand away. She heard her mother sigh as she reached for her coat and crossed the room. Then came the sound of the door opening and Helen willed her mother to leave quickly, to leave her alone. But the door didn’t close.

‘Why don’t you give one of your friends a call? Find out what results they got?’

Helen clamped her mouth tight and leaned against the window. Once again, she struggled to pin down how she’d ended up here. The days she’d spent in bed, blinded by headache and nausea, were impossible to fit into the time she could see had passed on the calendar. She didn’t trust herself, was scared of the shaky episodes of unreality that swept over her when she tried to put things together in a proper chronology. The cat reappeared from underneath the car and ran across the road. Helen held her breath as a car drove past, but the cat was disappearing through its flap, one leg left outside as it eased its way in.

The flat was silent. Helen went into ‘her’ room and lay down on the bed, trying to calm the throbbing over her right eye. It was nothing like it had been, when she couldn’t get away from the pain. Those days had been awful, the walls breathing themselves in and out with the whooshing sound of a huge set of bellows and the air as dense as water, swirling faces past too fast for her to recognize them, shooting words in rapids and whirls before sucking them away and leaving her stranded.