Louise
THERE WAS A man sitting on the bank. She thought at first that he was naked, but when he stood she could see that he was wearing swimming trunks, short and tight and fitted. She felt herself noticing him, noticing his flesh, and she blushed. It was Mr Henderson.
By the time she reached him, he had wrapped a towel around his waist and pulled a T-shirt over his head. He walked towards her with his hand outstretched.
‘Mrs Whittaker, how are you?’
‘Louise,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He ducked his head, half smiled. ‘Louise. How are you?’
She tried to smile back. ‘You know.’ He didn’t know. No one knew. ‘They tell you – they, listen to me! The grief counsellors tell you that you will have good days and bad, and you just have to deal with it.’
Mark nodded, but his eyes slid from hers and she saw colour rise to his cheeks. He was embarrassed.
Everyone was embarrassed. She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first, it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way – of conversation, of laughter, of normal life. Everyone wanted to put it behind them, to get on with things, and there you were, in the way, blocking the path, dragging the body of your dead child behind you.
‘How’s the water?’ she asked, and his colour deepened. The water, the water, the water – no way to get away from it in this town. ‘Cold,’ she said, ‘I imagine.’
He shook his head like a wet dog. ‘Brrr!’ he said and laughed self-consciously.
In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.
‘You heard about Lena’s mother?’ As if he wouldn’t have. As if anyone could live in this town and not know.
‘Yes. Terrible. God, it’s terrible. Such a shock.’ He fell silent, and when Louise did not respond, he kept talking. ‘Um … I mean, I know you and she …’ He tailed off, looking over his shoulder at his car. He was desperate to get away, poor thing.
‘Didn’t exactly see eye to eye?’ Louise offered. She toyed with the chain around her neck, pulling the charm, a bluebird, back and forth. ‘No, we didn’t. Even so …’
Even so was the best she could do. Didn’t see eye to eye was a ludicrous understatement, but there was no need to spell it out. Mr Henderson knew about the bad blood, and she was damned if she was going to stand by the river and pretend she was unhappy that Nel Abbott had met her end in it. She couldn’t, she didn’t want to.
She knew when she listened to the grief counsellors that they were talking nonsense and she would never, ever have another good day for the rest of her life, and yet there had been times over the past twenty-four hours or so when she had found it hard to keep the triumph from her face.
‘I suppose, in a horrible way,’ Mr Henderson was saying, ‘it’s oddly fitting, isn’t it? The way she went …’
Louise nodded grimly. ‘Perhaps it’s what she would have wanted. Perhaps it’s what she did want.’
Mark frowned. ‘You think she … You think it was deliberate?’
Louise shook her head. ‘I’ve really no idea.’
‘No. No. Of course not.’ He paused. ‘At least … at least now, what she was writing won’t be published, will it? The book she was working on about the pool – it wasn’t finished, was it? So it can’t be published …’
Louise skewered him with a look. ‘You think so? I would have thought the manner of her death would make it all the more publishable. A woman writing a book about the people who died in the Drowning Pool becomes one of the drowned herself? I’d say someone would want to publish it.’
Mark looked horrified. ‘But Lena … surely Lena … she wouldn’t want that …’
Louise shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘I assume she’ll be the one receiving the royalties.’ She sighed. ‘I need to be getting back, Mr Henderson.’ She patted him on the arm and he covered her hand with his own.
‘I’m so very sorry, Mrs Whittaker,’ he said, and she was touched to see that there were tears in the poor man’s eyes.
‘Louise,’ she said. ‘Call me Louise. And I know. I know you are.’
Louise started on her way home. It took her hours, this walk up and down the river path – even longer in this heat – but she could find no other way to fill her days. Not that there weren’t things to do. There were estate agents to contact, schools to research. A bed that needed stripping and a wardrobe full of clothes that needed to be packed away. A child that needed parenting. Tomorrow, perhaps. Tomorrow she would do those things, but today she walked by the river and thought of her daughter.
Today she did as she did every day, she searched her useless memory for signs she must have missed, red flags she must have breezed blithely past. She searched for scraps, for hints of misery in her child’s happy life. Because the truth is, they never worried about Katie. Katie was bright, capable, poised, with a will of steel. She swanned into adolescence as if it were a trifle, she took it in her stride: if anything, Louise felt sad sometimes that Katie hardly seemed to need her parents at all. Nothing fazed her – not her schoolwork, not the cloying attention of her needy best friend, not even her swift, almost shocking blossoming into adult beauty. Louise could remember acutely the sharp, affronted shame she had felt when she noticed men looking at her body when she was a teenager, but Katie showed none of that. Different times, Louise told herself, girls are different now.
Louise and her husband, Alec, didn’t worry about Katie, they worried about Josh. Always sensitive, always an anxious child, something had changed this year, something was bothering him; he’d become more withdrawn, more introverted, seemingly by the day. They worried about bullying, about his slipping grades, about the dark shadows under his eyes in the morning.
The truth is – the truth must be – that while they were watching their son, waiting for him to fall, their daughter tripped instead, and they didn’t notice, they weren’t there to catch her. The guilt felt like a stone in Louise’s throat, she kept expecting it to choke her, but it didn’t, it wouldn’t, and so she had to go on breathing; breathing and remembering.
The night before, Katie was quiet. It was just the three of them for dinner because Josh was staying over at his friend Hugo’s house. It wasn’t usually allowed on school nights, but they’d made an exception because they were worried about him. They took the opportunity to talk to Katie about it. Had she noticed, they asked, how anxious Josh seemed of late?
‘He’s probably worrying about going to the big school next year,’ she said, but she didn’t look at her parents when she spoke, she kept her eyes on her plate, and her voice wavered ever so slightly.
‘He’ll be all right though,’ Alec was saying. ‘Half his class will be there. And you’ll be there.’
Louise remembered her daughter’s hand clenching a little tighter around her glass of water when Alec said this. She remembered her swallowing hard, closing her eyes for just a second.
They did the washing-up together, Louise washing and Katie drying, because the dishwasher was broken. Louise remembered saying that it was all right, that she could do it herself if Katie had homework, and that Katie had said, ‘It’s all done.’ Louise remembered that every time Katie took a dish from her to dry, she let her fingers brush against her mother’s for just a moment longer than she needed to.
Except now Louise couldn’t be sure whether she remembered those things at all. Did Katie lower her eyes, look down at her plate? Did she really grip her glass more tightly, or let her touch linger? It was impossible to tell now, all her recollections seemed open to doubt, to misinterpretation. She wasn’t sure if this was down to the shock of realizing that all she had known was certain was not so sure at all, or whether her mind had been permanently fogged by the drugs she’d swallowed in the days and weeks after Katie died. Louise had gobbled pills upon pills, each handful offering hours of blank relief, only to be plunged freshly back into her nightmare on waking. After a while she came to grasp that the horror of rediscovering her daughter’s absence, over and over again, was not worth the hours of oblivion.
Of this, she felt she could be sure: when Katie said goodnight, she smiled and kissed her mother the way she always did. She hugged her, no closer or longer than usual, and said, ‘Sleep tight.’
And how could she have done that, knowing what she was going to do?
In front of Louise, the path blurred, her tears obscuring her vision, so she didn’t notice the tape until she was upon it. Police Line. Do Not Cross. She was already halfway up the hill and was approaching the ridge; she had to take a sharp detour to the left so as not to disturb the last ground that Nel Abbott ever stood on.
She lumbered over the crest and down the side of the hill, her feet aching and her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, down to the welcome shade where the path passed through a thicket of trees at the edge of the pool. A mile or so further along the path, she reached the bridge and climbed the steps to the road. A group of young girls was approaching from her left and she looked, as she always did, for her daughter amongst them, searching for her bright-chestnut head, listening for the rumble of her laugh. Louise’s heart broke again.
She watched the girls, their arms draped around one another’s shoulders as they clung to each other, an entwined mass of downy flesh, and at their centre, Louise realized, was Lena Abbott. Lena, so solitary these past few months, was having her moment of celebrity. She too would be gawped at and pitied and, before too long, shunned.
Louise turned away from the girls and started up the hill towards home. She hunched her shoulders and dropped her chin and hoped that she could shuffle off unnoticed, because looking at Lena Abbott was a terrible thing, it conjured terrible images in Louise’s mind. But the girl had spotted her and cried out, ‘Louise! Mrs Whittaker! Please wait.’
Louise tried to walk faster, but her legs were heavy and her heart was as deflated as an old balloon, and Lena was young and strong.
‘Mrs Whittaker, I want to talk to you.’
‘Not now, Lena. I’m sorry.’
Lena put her hand on Louise’s arm, but Louise pulled away, she couldn’t look at her. ‘I’m very sorry. I can’t talk to you now.’
Louise had become a monster, an empty creature who would not comfort a motherless child, who – worse, so much worse – could not look at that child without thinking, Why not you? Why weren’t you in the water, Lena? Why wasn’t it you? Why my Katie? Kind and gentle and generous and hard-working and driven – better than you in every possible way. She should never have gone in. It should have been you.