When at last I saw her fall, it was exactly as I had imagined it would be. Her face was a white flash of shock, eyes wide open and full of surprise. I watched her hair riding up in tumultuous curls behind her, the light filtering through every strand, all in slow motion like some scene from a film where they slow everything down to savour every last agonising detail.
All the while that she fell I had the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the knowing that, oh god, I did that. It’s my fault. I should never have let her go. I could have saved her but I didn’t. I can’t believe that I didn’t. And the shocked, horrified part of me that had let her go turned on the bit of me that had wanted her to fall all along.
You needed to be free of all this. How many times have you thought that? You needed her to fall so that you could be free, didn’t you, Rachel? So you just let it happen. By the sins of our commission and omission…
You were responsible for her safety and her wellbeing and you knew this was going to happen and you just let it.
And I could not deny it.
How many nights had I lain awake fantasising about just such a scenario, my escape route from the prison that my life had so long ago become? Would it have made any difference if I had not succumbed to temptation and looked inside Pandora’s box? I really cannot say. I’m feeling too numb now. My world has crumbled, everything has gone. I don’t know anything at all any more.
And so she fell and I did nothing. And why? Because although I loved her, as long as we were yoked together I could never be free.
Pandora’s box arrives on a grey Saturday in March, wet on its cardboard bottom where the postwoman has laid it down in a puddle outside our front door. My first thought is: I told my mother not to send it. I know what’s in it and I don’t want it.
I’m not even going to open it.
The box has ‘This will cheer you up’ scrawled in my mother’s handwriting along the top. But I know that it won’t. My mother, Pandora—who is emigrating to Sydney with her new ‘boyfriend’—has already told me exactly what she is sending:
‘Just some of your childhood things I’ve been holding on to. All your stuff, you know. Your school certificates and your medals and some old letters I kept. Photos of you and Liliana doing your dancing. God, what promise you two girls once showed!’ she had sniffed, remembering. She didn’t have to spell it out to me that we’d never lived up to that promise. ‘But there’s nothing I can really take with me all that way.’
Of course she can’t and, fair enough, I thought, I am forty-two after all. I can’t expect Mum to hang on to all my childhood paraphernalia forever.
I just wish she’d chucked it out herself instead of sending it on to me. There is something disquieting about having this stuff turn up at my door this morning; something I can’t put my finger on. I look at the box. It’s 7.45 a.m. and the children aren’t even up yet. The hallway is still dark when I pad through to the kitchen with the box, hoping for a tiny bit more light. The fact that she’s sent this to me…it’s as if I’ve been left holding the past in some way. My stomach catches tight at the thought. I feel as if I’ve just filled it with a bowlful of cold porridge.
What I want to do is just chuck the whole lot out without even looking at it—after all, why waste the time? Time is precious. Time is something I never have enough of, these days. The lino on the kitchen floor is freezing my feet and the scissors aren’t in the drawer where they’re supposed to be. My little kitchen faces north but when the sun shines I can see the blue sky in the distance over the tops of the houses and trees. When the sun shines all the pansies and daffodils struggling through in the garden don’t look so battered and lifeless. It isn’t shining today.
It’s all very well for Pandora, I think suddenly. She gets to jet off to sunnier climes with a new life and a new man. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Bernie asked me to join him out there.’ The memory of her voice fills my head again. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to emigrate but the time never seemed right till now. Bernie said he couldn’t possibly set up his new PR venture without me. Just think, at my age!’ The cold feeling in my stomach resolves itself into an uncomfortable patch of envy.
I’ve got the wintertime blues, that is all.
The cardboard box—underneath all the masking tape—looks vaguely familiar. Surely it’s got to be the same one that my mother has kept, tucked away in the back of her wardrobe for the last, oh, century or so?
It must be at least that long because that’s how old I feel. I set about one corner of the box with my little vegetable knife. It must have been at least a hundred years ago that I was young enough to have won certificates at school and drawn pictures that anybody judged worth keeping and…had Mum said medals?
I hadn’t won any medals. I pull a face as the brown tape sticks onto my hands, winding itself around my fingers as if it wants to tie me up. Liliana had won all the medals. All those championship rosettes for the under-fourteens’ ballroom dancing events. Yuck. I had hated those events. I was the taller one so I always had to be the ‘boy’. I didn’t remember anything much about them except that I hated them.
‘You will come out and visit us, won’t you? Just as soon as we’re settled.’ Pandora’s voice over the phone had been breathless, just the slightest edge of anxiety to it had warned me: just say yes, say you’ll come. Don’t bring up Shelley and the fact that she can’t fly so you won’t ever come, even assuming you could get the money together in order to do so…
We are trapped, basically: Shelley and me and her brother Daniel. I pull vengefully at one long piece of sticky tape that has been wound interminably around the top of the box.
My mother can’t—or won’t—see that.
Hell, she doesn’t even really accept the fact that Shelley is dying.
‘Hope springs eternal’, as she likes to tell me gaily every time she calls. Well, she is Pandora, so maybe in her world it does. I just wish I could tap into that eternal spring when I get faced with things like Shelley refusing to go to school because it is ‘a waste of the precious little time she has left’. And maybe Shelley is right. What does school matter, for her? She won’t need the exams. She won’t ever be going to university. She won’t live long enough to ever get herself a job.
It is an unfathomable thought, but it is the stark reality, a truth that winds itself like a steel cord around my heart every time I think about it, threatening to cut me in two.
I cut the masking tape away from my fingers with the knife and flick open the door under the sink to throw it in the bin. Damn it. Why did things have to work out this way? Nothing matters any more. Things only ever matter when you’ve got hope, and today I don’t have any.
My daughter might seem fine, but I know she isn’t. Recently her consultant has been keeping an even