While My Eyes Were Closed (33 page)

Hebden Bridge is busy with tourists, the type who think mooching about from one tea shop to the next is a good way to spend one’s morning. There is no shortage of them, it seems. People with nothing better to do.

I wait to turn left at the traffic lights. The white noise breaks up and becomes words again.

‘Where are we? Why aren’t you taking me home? Is Daddy going to collect me?’

I drive up the hill and bear right, out into open countryside. The trees of Hardcastle Crags shield the sun. I still remember where the car park is although it is a long time since I was here. Matthew used to know the landmarks to look out for. He was always very good at that sort of thing. I turn in, pull into a space in the far corner and pull on the handbrake.

‘Are we here?’ asks the child.

‘Yes, we are.’

She cranes her neck again. ‘Where is it? Where’s Daddy’s car?’

I get out and walk round to open the passenger door and unclip her. She scrambles out in a tangle of hot nylon and flailing limbs and starts to undo the zip on the waterproof.

‘Keep it on, please.’

‘Why?’

‘You might need it later.’

‘How long are we staying? Have you got a picnic? Mummy always has a picnic. I like strawberries best.’

I take her hand and lead her towards the footpath, worried already that the steps further down will be too steep for her to manage.

‘Mind your legs with the nettles,’ I say.

‘Are they stinging ones?’

‘Well, I don’t know of any other kind.’

‘Daddy says you need to find a duck leaf if they sting you.’

‘Dock leaf,’ I correct.

‘Do they make it better too?’

We walk on. It is further than I remember and she is a slower walker than Matthew used to be. We have to keep stopping when she gets stones in her Crocs. At last I see the ridge. A huge chasm opens up in front of us, a river snaking through far below. On the other side a massive bank of trees stretches into the distance. I stand near the edge of the ridge. I have the child’s hand in mine. I think, if he could have, Matthew would have chosen to come here. It was simply that he didn’t have the transport.

‘I don’t like it,’ says the child. ‘I don’t like looking down.’

‘Then close your eyes,’ I reply.

I come round suddenly, thinking I heard a noise but unsure what it was. I seem to have discovered a mode, like the standby button on the TV, where I’m not awake but not truly sleeping either, just able to switch on instantly. I check the alarm clock. It’s half past seven. I look at Alex still fast asleep and feel a little like you do as a new mum when you wake up to find it’s morning and your baby has unexpectedly slept through the night. Although I also remember as a new mum being mad as hell at Alex for being able to sleep through Otis and then Ella waking at night. He was always apologetic in the morning, always said I should have dug him in the ribs to wake him up, but I was never quite enough of a cow to do it.

I get up straight away, pull my dressing gown on and
leave the room, closing the bedroom door behind me. The house is quiet, too quiet somehow, even allowing for Ella’s absence. I go to Ella’s room first. It has become a ritual, checking in on her like this while the rest of the house is sleeping. I don’t know whether there is a deluded part of me which actually expects to find her in there one morning or whether it is simply that it makes me feel close to her, but I can no longer imagine starting the day without doing this. I lie on her bed as usual, breathe her in, stroke her pillow, see her in my head smiling back at me. And then, as usual, reality kicks me in the teeth and all I hear is the silence of the room, all I see is the empty bed and all I smell is my own grief.

I get up again, tired of the relentlessness of it all, and go back to the landing. My next stop is Otis’s room. Even in a week I have learned how to feel my way around his bed in the dark more expertly. I find his foot – for some reason I always seem to find his right one first – and follow his body upwards, as if making sure he is all there. Satisfied, I leave the room.

I pause outside Chloe’s room and think for a second about going in to check on her but decide against it, knowing I would get my head bitten off if she did happen to be awake. I go to the toilet then head downstairs. I don’t know why I look at the front door as I reach the bottom but I do. Something is making me uncomfortable; something is different. And then I see it – the top
and bottom bolts are undone. Alex fitted them a couple of days ago. Said he thought they may help me sleep. I opened my mouth to say something about shutting the stable door but thought better of it. He was trying his best. I understood that. I know he slid them across last night. I watched him do it. Did he go outside in the night and forget to shoot them across again? Or has somebody come in? Could they be in the house now? I freeze and listen for any sounds but all is silent. I go to each room downstairs and check the windows but nothing is broken or forced. I would have heard it anyway if someone had smashed something. What I heard when I woke didn’t sound like glass breaking, it was more like a door shutting. I hurry back to the hall and look at the shoe rack. Chloe’s Converses have gone. She has other shoes but she never wears them. Her jacket has gone from the peg too. I run upstairs and into her room. The bed is empty. She has put the duvet back as if she has never slept in it. She has gone. I am losing all my fucking children one by one. I check on the chest of drawers. Her mobile isn’t there so she does at least have that with her. I creep back into our bedroom, grab my phone, take it back to Chloe’s room and call her. It goes straight to voicemail.

‘Chloe, it’s Mum. Ring me. Or text me. Please let me know where you are and that you’re OK.’

Perhaps she’s gone to Robyn’s. I’d ring her but I don’t have her mobile. I sit down on the bed, trying to calm
myself. She’s nineteen years old. She’s entitled to go off on her own, she’s just been to bloody France. But that was different, that was a holiday, I knew where she was going. I drove her to the fucking station. This is different. She doesn’t just take off like this. Maybe it’s the reconstruction this afternoon; maybe she’s worried about it. Perhaps she’s changed her mind and doesn’t want to go.

I stare at the calendar on the wall opposite. Seven days since I saw Ella. The seven longest days of my life. I count off the days, my mind replaying the events of each in my head on fast forward until I get to today. Friday, 5 September. There is an uneasy feeling in my stomach. And something is agitating inside my head. Knocking softly at first but, when I fail to listen, soon hammering at my skull. I see the scrunched-up tissues on Chloe’s bedside cabinet and look, for the first time in ages, at the small photograph in a frame she keeps on it.

‘Fuck,’ I say out loud. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

I run through to our bedroom and wake Alex up. ‘Chloe’s gone,’ I say, watching as his eyes struggle to focus. ‘It’s Matthew’s anniversary. I completely forgot.’

‘Oh shit,’ he says, sitting up.

‘I’m going to go after her; you hold the fort here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To his grave,’ I say. ‘She’ll have gone to his grave.’

*

I work it all out as I drive into town. It was the front door I heard when I woke. There’s a bus at half past
seven. She’ll have been on it. I should have remembered. Even with everything that has gone on this past week I should have fucking remembered. She’s my firstborn, possibly the only daughter I have left, and I’ve let her down. Again.

I shake my head. I don’t blame her for hating me. I don’t blame her one little bit. It’s hard to imagine any mother screwing up quite so spectacularly as I did. But it’s also hard to work out how you can unintentionally hurt someone so badly when you love them so much.

The roads are starting to get busy. I tap my fingers on the steering wheel as I wait at the traffic lights on the main road. When they finally go green, I turn right and take the first left. I only realise as I do so that I will be driving past the park. A coldness runs through me. I haven’t been back since. It is too painful, even watching the video on Alex’s phone last night felt too close. My hands start to shake on the steering wheel. I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead but even so I can see it out of the corner of my eye. The wall, the trees, the roof of the butterfly house. The sights and sounds and smells of the day rush back to me. I drive on, gripping the wheel tightly. I still see the green in my rear-view mirror, the big lush tops of the trees. I want to stop the car and go and shake them, demand that they reveal their secrets, tell me what they witnessed. Because nobody else seems to fucking know.

It is half past eight by the time I pull up in the
cemetery car park. There are only two other cars there. According to the sign it only opened at eight. I wonder if Chloe got here earlier than that, if she was waiting outside when the gates opened.

I only realise when I walk through the gates that I do not know where Matthew’s grave is. I didn’t go to the funeral, which was fair enough as I didn’t know the boy. But Chloe didn’t go either. She wanted to but the funeral was private, strictly family only. It was like a second bereavement to Chloe, not being able to say goodbye to him. I told her to go, that she had every right to be there. She didn’t though. Said she didn’t want to cause any more upset than she already had.

She’s come since, of course. With Robyn the first time and after that on her own. She even allowed me to drop her off once and wait because it was cold and wet and she didn’t have enough money for the bus fare. I asked if she wanted me to go in with her but she just gave me one of her looks. When she got back to the car she didn’t say a word, just nodded and we drove home in silence.

I know I should have tried harder, taken all the knock-backs and kept trying, but I think I was scared, scared that I was pushing her further and further away and maybe what she needed was space to try to come to terms with this in her own way. Turned out to be a load of bollocks, but that’s what I thought.

I look around me. The trees are still in full leaf and it’s hard to see past them to the far side of the cemetery.
I look at the gravestones at the end of each line as I walk. Most of them are old, very old, from a time when it seemed you were lucky if one of your children made it into adulthood. But then I get to an area where there are some newer graves, children’s ones. One has a photo of a baby in the headstone, another has a collection of soft toys around it. The carving in the stone is new and easy to read as I pass. The boy was four years old when he died.

I hurry on, trying not to think, trying to block it all out. I am here for Chloe. She is the one I am looking for today. And then I turn a corner and see her, standing by a headstone underneath a huge tree fifty yards in front of me. She has her head bowed and her back to me. I wonder if I should say something as I approach but the truth is I am scared to do so in case she runs away. I have had enough of seeking and I do not want to give her the opportunity to hide.

I walk up to her and take hold of her left hand. She turns to face me, her eyes red and puffy, a frown on her face. It seems to take her a second or two to realise that I should not be here. I wonder if she is going to pull her hand away and run but she doesn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

She screws up her eyes and collapses into my arms, crying like a little girl again. I pull her in tight to me like I used to do. I stroke her hair, pull a soggy strand of it back from her face and stroke her cheek.

‘I miss him so much,’ she says.

‘I know. I know you do. And I’ve been so crap because I should have been there for you, but I knew it was all my fault and I knew you blamed me and I think I was scared that if I kept trying to reach you you’d push me further away.’

‘I don’t blame you.’

‘Well you should,’ I say, wiping another of her tears away. ‘Telling you to dump him when I didn’t know him from Adam. I thought all teenage lads were like your father, that they just needed a kick up the arse sometimes to show some commitment. I didn’t know he was such a sensitive lad.’

‘Yeah, but I did. I should have realised how he’d react. I shouldn’t have pushed him that far.’

‘Yeah, but he was messing you about – all that crap about keeping things secret. I knew it was doing you in, that’s why I said summat. I didn’t want you to let him walk all over you.’

I look up at the sky, wipe the tears from my own eyes.

‘I didn’t even want to break up with him,’ says Chloe. ‘I just wanted him to stand up to his mum It was like she owned him, like she didn’t want anyone else to have a piece of him. She was such a fucking control freak.’

‘She was probably just being overprotective,’ I say. ‘It’s hard letting go, you know, when your little girl or boy grows up.’

She looks at me and I wish so much that I could reach
inside and remove the ache in her heart, take all the hurt away with a cuddle and a kiss and the promise of an ice cream later. I can’t though because this is proper, grown-up hurt. Love and death and grief and loss, and it all came to her so, so early.

‘The thing is, Chloe, I know it hurts and I know it always will, but what I’m so scared of is that you’re going to beat yourself up over this for rest of your life.’

‘But I can’t stop thinking about him.’

‘I know, but at some point in the future I want you to give someone else the chance to find out what an amazing person you are. I want you to give yourself permission to be happy again.’

She shrugs and turns back to his gravestone.

‘They’re beautiful,’ I say, looking at the red roses she has left there. ‘May I?’ She nods. I crouch down and read the card attached to them.

‘I’m so sorry. Love you and miss you for ever. Sparrow x’

I stand up and wipe my eyes.

‘It’s what he always called me,’ she says. ‘I told him about the Chloe bird thing. He said it made him smile, said he wished we lived in a world where everyone had a bird named after them.’

I smile and take hold of her hand.