To start with, when I was first dead, I was confused, caught between memory and experience, between memories from before and those since. I had pictures and knew faces, but I did not know if I had seen them through my living or my dead eyes. Because I see them still, those I loved, but they don’t see me, I don’t think. Sometimes I feel something, a tremor, and wonder if they do feel my presence, or think of me. But these visits, they became part of the kaleidoscope jangle of what I drag with me. I don’t always know where the pictures belong – sight or memory, living or dead eyes. I hang onto each one, to sort and join together, to find its place and knit my story stronger for the telling.
Chapter 1
A winter dream. She drifts across the field towards the woods. She feels sharpness underfoot and the bite of cold air in her lungs. She watches herself move clumsily across the stubbly field. She is naked, cold, her hair fallen out, her skull fragile, exposed. She recognises her body – the dry of winter sits on her; her tall shape clings forlornly to long bones. She is mad, a scream frozen, sharpening the air around her as the frost has sharpened the ground under her feet. She is bone-pale, brittle; cold, screaming frost. If she were to die naked in these woods she would lie unseen by dog walkers and children for months, hidden perfectly in the frost-hollowed waste of winter on the forest floor. Sticks and lichen. She experiments with the idea of death in the cold leaves of winter. Cold for her, cold for her dead body, but warm and sheltering for the tiny lives of hibernating insects scurrying through pockets below the surface of the Earth. They would eventually find a home below the surface of her too, making pockets in her, making loops and channels, making her hiding place ever more complete. Though in life, this would be no hiding place; her breath would give her away. In life, she is clothed in enough of autumn’s quiet pulse to be seen by others – a naked woman, bony, pale, lying stupidly on the ground in the woods. Pitifully reduced but not yet part of eternal winter. In life, she is not yet brittle enough to disappear so easily. There is a slow thrum behind her skin, the stately movement of cinnabar liquid through a time-worn muslin bag, a steady flow that will set to make jewel jars of sharp jam. Autumnal, slow, but definitely living. She turns in her bed, casts out dreams until the morning, a heavy fall into the pictureless, wordless depths of deep sleep.
Anna wakes cold, sick-feeling. Dread has leaked from her thoughts into the soft folds of her pillow. She pulls back into herself, waiting for a different voice, the trained voice of her waking mind, to assert itself. Neutralising is the first act of every dull and waking morning. And so day turns over, the usual kind of day. There is much to do, nothing to remember. Most days will not be remembered, a tick and tock of time. She complies; she holds herself steady, flattened into lustreless, manageable boredom.
She gets up from the tangled bed and goes to shower. The water streams down her body and the shower tiles, gently bashing sound into her ears, a pleasant, blocking roar. She scrapes hands down her skin, paring down, containing, shriving in the hot water. The escaped remnants of dread that cling, whimpering, in the crooks of her elbows are washed down the plughole before she has a chance to notice. But dread is not a finite resource; she has not lessened the load, rather removed it from sight. Capped off within, hosed off without.
After showering, wrapped in thick towels she sits at her dressing table, looks for the thing that will drag her from indolent torpor and, though she tries to keep it from herself, knows that there is nothing. She could sit there for days if she wished.
She turns to the window and the view across the field leading to the woods, the distant end of the nearest row of houses in the village. She has sat here so many times, noted seasons, watched small birds, caught glimpses of red jumpers and green coats in distant gardens, heard children play. She has watched each year as the hedge at the field’s boundary grows and recedes, is cut, and grows once more. It is a beautiful thing, a hedge, but a thing confined, restricted, pressed into service against its natural habits. Made to contain, made by forced containment.
Content and languid becomes chilled and restless. A cape of cold drapes her shoulders between the towel wrapping her body and the one wrapping her hair. Her bones creak silently as she stands to dress. She pulls on warm clothes, runs fingers through her short hair, then goes down to the kitchen.
She lives on the edge of a village, in a large, well-appointed house on a lane that pulls away like a loose thread and trails through the woods, eventually looping back onto a busier road. Though she has not always been the only occupant, and in spite of bouts of loneliness, she has developed a protective care for her privacy and cherishes the isolation. People don’t drop in.
She lives on a generous pension since retiring sooner than the university wanted her to from a successful career as an art history lecturer and specialist in mediaeval female artists. But a busy working life did more for her than secure the pension. She should not have retired, she has recently realised, whilst still relatively young, whilst her position in the university was so secure and her status there was in the ascendency, but she had known for many years that she was performing her role out of habit. She had lost the feeling that she cared whether her students did well in life and whether they understood the world they had chosen to make their own. She thought an end to the professional performance would bring relief, but the removal of the distraction of a demanding career gave her too much time for other thoughts. Cracks began to appear in the walls she had built within herself, the internal prison cell that held her grief.
Her daughter, Caitlin, has been dead for nearly ten years. Killed, apparently manslaughter – so slaughtered, then – aged nineteen years old, by her boyfriend, Ryan.
Caitlin’s death caused a split, a warp that skewed Anna so she no longer fit the smooth planes of her life. She was changed by her loss. But so was everything. Grief shone a different spectrum of light; it revealed the well-formed, polished facets of normality as flawed, treacherous, deceitful. The world did not respond in a way that made sense. Her daughter had been killed, and no one beyond a small circle of family and close friends seemed to care. Where once life had run on guidelines of tolerance, understanding and certainty, now misery and hatred set the rules. She had never known such hate before. For Ryan, for the parents that raised him and stood by him, for the jury who believed his explanation of an accident. For a world that didn’t find it a tale that was worth telling. Hate reshaped her.
In the long-ago months immediately after Caitlin’s death and the court case that followed, Anna blasted out her sorrow with an exhausting frenzy that was at least a partial distraction from the greater pain of loss.
This early rage was further fuelled by the response of the criminal justice system. She had not been able to accept the conclusion of the court and the men and women of the jury, whom she had particularly relied upon to understand the terrible loss of her girl. They decided that Caitlin was dead by accident, that a man who violated her body with kicks and punches, demonstrably over time, hadn’t meant it. This bewildering blunting of his crime almost killed Anna. Those men and women had decided that Caitlin wasn’t supposed to die. She was just supposed to be cowed, controlled by the pain Ryan caused, frightened enough to do his bidding. And this somehow lessened the gravity of the offence.
Slowly, time passed and the abstract, animal efficiency of the will to survive overcame and then subdued Anna’s flailing strategies. Memories of her daughter became distant, fleeting, irregular. She gradually twisted grief away. The only direction for such a motion to take was inwards. Burning anger and the parched, agonising cold of sorrow were bound together and banished to the deep dark space inside, the emptiness created by her loss. All that she felt was screwed up tight, a dense pebble of cold and heat lodged at her core, baulked and buttressed with the betraying forms of normality. For long stretches of time she felt only the pernicious and pallid warmth of the blended extremes.
Worthwhile distraction, a successful career a vital component of the mortar in these walls, allowed them to stand almost always unregarded, for many years. But now the gaps are beginning to show, and the effort of managing the constant mending, though unconscious, weighs heavy on her.
In