We’ll make other songs. We’ll learn other ways of singing. Thomas’s eyes bored into her, but Grace’s were the only songs she had known so far. Rachel hollered, there on the wall. She wept until her mother’s face crumpled in exhausted exasperation, but it was only when her brother’s eyes said to her If you don’t move from there you will never sing again that she dug her heels between the bricks and slid her bottom towards the ground.
Now her feet are bare on the green carpet, tapping a muffled beat, a counterpoint to her own child’s cries and the insects that wait between the cracks until nightfall. She closes her eyes and feels the weight of her skin. She breathes a lifetime back to the moment when there was no child, no green carpet, no heavy air pressing down on her. She can barely remember a time when she was somebody else, someone other than this. She catches a glimpse of another life like a shadow or a wayward ghost, a fleeting shade across the space. And then it is gone.
A sound floats from inside the house, music that isn’t hers but someone else’s sense of a life gone, another place and another time into which she doesn’t fit. A lilting female voice sings as a guitar stumbles beside the melody. She stands, crosses the room, fighting the air to breathe. She closes the door against the child, against the music. She leans her head against the painted wooden doorframe. The sounds have faded but they are not gone – the music, the child, the feet of insects. Only the heat stays with her completely, while she continues to breathe.
The knock comes like a bolt through her memory. Kamal enters the room as though afraid of what he might find on the other side of the door. When he sees her his shoulders soften, but he ventures no closer, and now she won’t go to him. The child’s voice flows into the room and he stands between them in that small ocean of sound. His eyes travel to her across the room but they speak of other worlds, and she can find nothing there that she recognises.
This morning when he reached for her she moved across the sheets, away from him, and left only ripples where her weight had been. Then she felt their differences, encased in separate skins. The weight of experience, of history, of family, the knowledge that she and Kamal are not the same. Since then he’s kept away from her. Now he’s in the doorway, telling her that the child is crying. She looks up and replies that she really doesn’t care.
To add to the sound of the child and the music there’s the shrill cricket-cry of the telephone in the hallway. It startles them both and she looks at him, tells him that he’s closer. He retreats from the room and the ringing ceases. The child stops crying but the music continues.
She wants to close the door again, to shut herself off from them, but before she can move he’s there, his eyes on her as he says that it is Maya, it is her brother’s wife, on the telephone.
She picks up the receiver and hears Maya say, ‘Hello? Hello? Rachel, are you there?’
The child begins to cry again. Kamal curses in an ancient accent. He goes through to the bedroom with their son in his arms and Rachel shifts the receiver to the other ear. ‘Yes, I’m here,’ she says. ‘Sorry. It’s Jack, he’s impossible at the moment.’
‘The funeral’s on Saturday,’ Maya says. ‘Simple, in the Gardens. No church.’
‘Okay,’ Rachel pauses, unsure of what she wants to do, unsure of what is expected of the sister of a dead man. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really ready?’
‘I know people will think it’s about the money.’
‘I don’t think that.’
‘The money means nothing. The court might not even grant it. I need to close the chapter, Rachel. I can’t keep wondering if my husband is suddenly going to walk through the door.’
‘It’s only been six months.’
‘Six months of hell. Nobody says it, but I think even the police suspect the worst.’
‘There might at least be some insurance.’
‘I don’t want anything, Rachel. I have two hands and a working body. I can make my own money. Forget money. All I want now is my peace of mind. I want my life back.’
‘And some memorial in the garden will give you your life back?’
‘Don’t start – you, of all people.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’
‘He was your brother! Don’t you want closure too?’
‘Of course. I just … I just don’t want to call him dead when …’
There is a softness in Maya’s sigh. It remains between them, suspended.
‘I’ll book a flight,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘When do you want me to come?’
‘As soon as you like.’
‘You don’t want to be alone right now?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Maya says. ‘The house feels so empty.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘If you can bear to be here, Rach.’
I can’t bear to be anywhere, Rachel thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.
All day she moves around the house, touching objects to make herself remember, holding things in her hands as though such random acts can bring back time. ‘She wants to make him officially dead,’ she tells Kamal when they pass each other in the passageway.
‘It’s been a long time, Rach,’ he says in return.
‘She wants to have a … a wake, or memorial, or whatever …’ her voice fades out to nothing.
‘I think we all need that,’ Kamal says. ‘Maya can’t go on with no end point. You need some kind of full stop.’
‘What I need is to know is if he suffered.’
‘What will that help? If he’s …’ Kamal stops, mid-sentence.
‘Say it.’
‘Dead. If he’s dead, he’s dead.’
‘Do you think he is?’
‘I can’t imagine that he’s not.’
Later Kamal takes the child to the shopping centre for milk and bread and afterwards to the park where he sits alone on an empty bench. Jack toddles on the grass at his feet and scrunches crisp leaves in his small fists. Rachel stays in the house all day, and she doesn’t think of them at all.
Kamal lies beside her, stealing the air from the night. She’s awake, her body stuck in a heavy mattress, longing to dream. Kamal’s neck has thickened since their marriage; now it blocks the passage of air in his sleep, night after night. Her eyes feel the grit of the morning not yet come to light, a saltiness at the back of her throat that is the taste, the bitter spice, of stolen rest. He breathes and she waits. She waits for sleep, for morning, for the will of her muscles to rise. She waits for the child to cry in the next room or for something to call her. She can count the seconds according to the steady metronome of his breath. It renders her immobile.
She wants him to place the weight of his arm on top of her, to root her to the bed so that she can’t move, so that she knows her place beside him. Instead he breathes and dreams without her in an intensity of colour with which she can’t compete. She turns to face his back. She watches the summit of him and wonders about men and mountains, and what it takes to move them.
She shifts to the edge of the bed, and makes the move to the floor. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she shudders at the squeak of the door handle, but his snoring continues, uninterrupted. She closes the door behind her; she’s out, and she’s free.
Jack’s room at the end of the passage looks over the garden. Rachel keeps the blue-and-white train-print curtains open at night. She wants her son exposed to as much natural light as possible. She read