Mim passes Simon the spoon to dish up.
‘Hold up your plate, Helen,’ he says.
I lift the plate so he can fill it. ‘Stop. That’s enough.’
He’s not looking at me but telling Mim about his day at work. I put my plate down. The serving spoon falls against the rim of the pot as she tells him something about her day too. There is nothing to be said about my day. I fill up my fork and blow on the steaming meat and potato to cool it.
I force myself to eat four mouthfuls, then set the knife and fork to rest on the edge of the plate and push the plate away by a couple of centimetres. ‘I’m not hungry tonight. I think I’m going to go to bed.’
Simon looks from Mim to me. ‘Did you do too much today? It was—’
‘I’m fine. I promise. Just tired. Everyone gets tired occasionally.’
A slight frown creases his forehead, making several rows of long thin lines. He looks about ten years younger than he is until the moment he frowns and those wrinkles show.
I take my plate away and scrape the leftovers into the bin. It’s a waste. The lid of the pedal bin falls with a sharp ring. When I turn around Simon is looking at me. I smile, widely, probably overdoing the happy show, walk over, bend down and wrap my arms around his neck. The movement makes the scar on my chest pull but it doesn’t hurt much. ‘I love you,’ I say quietly against his ear; they are words that are just for his ears. He pats my shoulder as I pull away.
‘Goodnight,’ I say to Mim.
I walk around the table and kiss Liam on the top of his head, then Kevin on the top of his head.
My laptop is in the living room. I stop to pick it up so I can take it upstairs. I’m going to bed to look up Robert Dowling’s interview. It will be on the iPlayer Radio.
‘Simon …’ Mim’s voice reaches from the kitchen behind me, with a tone of warning; the tone that comes before the boys get a ‘ten seconds to do something’ countdown.
‘Don’t,’ is his answer; a full stop that ends a conversation that never began, and then there is no sound except the scraping of cutlery on plates.
I listen to the interview in the dark, in bed, with an earphone in my left ear, my head sinking into the pillow. The cotton releases the smell of Mim’s lavender-scented washing conditioner. It is a smell of safety. My whole body calls this bed mine but it is Simon’s and Mim’s spare bed, for guests, not a permanent place for me.
I have no home.
Nowhere that I can call mine. I think it makes it worse that the only place I have ever thought of as mine is now Dan’s and his new woman’s. But I couldn’t be the one who kept the flat because I was too ill to live in it alone.
If I’d had parents, I would have had a home to always go back to. A home like Louise’s, with a flower bed full of scented roses, and parents who loved her. There’s that vacuum again.
The emotion in me is envy. It is my emotion. Louise had what I always wanted.
When the vacuum sucks everything away this is what’s left: darkness. Envy. Anger. Pain. These are the emotions that can take over when bipolar slips into what people call manic depression.
The Dowlings’ radio interview is eleven minutes long. They talk for four minutes then there is a break for a song and another seven minutes.
I want to help. I wish I had something I could say that would help. Their love for Louise flows in the cadence of their voices. There is a moment when Robert says something to his wife, Patricia. ‘I know, Pat, I feel that way too.’ I imagine him holding her hand as she makes a sound, a slight acknowledgement that says she is reassured.
An ache presses through my heart, as it makes itself heard, in a gentle rhythm as I listen to the Dowlings again.
Louise’s sadness becomes a lead weight in my chest and there’s a tension in my throat; she wants to cry.
If I were her, I would be crying.
I want to know love like that.
In Louise’s body, while she was alive, I think this heart would have clasped tight with love when she heard these voices.
The Dowlings mean everything to one another and Louise must have been enveloped in that love too.
When I was young, I imagined myself in a happy sitcom family. But Louise’s family are painting a new mental picture of what life would have been like with parents. What her life was like. What mine could have been like – still might be like.
I look up the one image of Louise that I have access to and play the recording from the beginning, listening for her voice inside me. I can’t hear the words but I hear her: a whisper that’s out of reach.
I want to hear her. I want to understand what she’s saying. I want to understand what she wants me to do.
6 weeks and 1 day after the fall.
When I leave the railway station, a strong breeze sweeps at me like a broom trying to push me back through the sliding doors.
An answering shiver rattles through my body, up my spine and into my shoulders.
When I dressed this morning, I chose a thin jumper, not thick enough to keep out the cold. I haven’t mastered the forecasting skills required for being outside in the British weather, and the chill in the air is a reminder that in just over two weeks it will officially be autumn.
But perhaps the shiver came from the sense I have that Louise is watching me walking the streets of Swindon – a someone-has-just-walked-over-my-grave sort of shiver.
Her spirit feels more active today. Louder. My heart is pulsing hard and there is a hum of energy in my blood that is making her undeterminable whispers stronger. It is like having someone fidgeting impatiently in my body.
The crossing that is in front of me will take me to the shopping area.
There are tall buildings all around the station but the multi-storey car park is farther away.
Other people who disembarked from the 11.27 train cross the road beside me while the green walking man counts down. The knowing pace of the man in front of me leads me in the right direction, across paved pedestrian areas.
The shopping area is busier than I expected. It will be even busier in fifteen minutes when the office-workers spill out of the high buildings, like ants from an aggravated nest, to buy lunch.
A young boy who is close by complains to his mother. ‘Get in the pushchair!’ she yells, provoking a tirade of screams.
Blustery breezes stir up children. They want to run. Children in a playground are like birds when they play on a strong breeze. There is excitement and expectation in the air of a good breeze.
A young woman sweeps past on a skateboard, putting one foot down to push the skateboard on as she cuts in front of me. She weaves quickly through the people ahead. My gaze follows her until she disappears into the crowd. Then I see it.
The car park is a looming shadow stealing the sunlight from the street farther on; a concrete mass that peers over the top of the shops in the structure of a layer cake.
This is the street that Louise fell into.
At the top of the car park there is a wall. Somehow Louise fell over the top of that wall.
The sky is an innocent, denying blue today. Nothing happened up here, it tries to say.
But something did.
Picture after picture of this street and that car