Commencing Our Descent. Suzannah Dunn
or keen, but because she is organised. She lives to a schedule, and so she rises to the challenge, allocates me a slot. Sitting there in that train carriage, my journey suspended, I became aware of how I was braced, dreading her. During the past couple of years, she has changed. Hers is that state of mind into which most of my friends disappeared for a while during their twenties. They had time on their side, and eventually eased up, stopped trying to prove themselves and distance themselves from the past. In time, they relaxed; they came round. For Fern, late developer, the new identity could be permanent.
Lately, I have been wondering why I like her. The same, perhaps, as wondering if I like her. The same as wondering why I ever liked her. Originally, when we were sixth-formers, I liked her because she was likeable. The words that come to mind – funny and warm – say no more than that: she was likeable; I liked her. In recent years, she seems to have gone through a sense of humour menopause. The world is simply something with which she deals, and there is no give in her. I make rare appearances in her diary, but otherwise there is no place for me in that dealt-with life, not even as a memory. Perhaps especially not as a memory. In latter years, she has made a series of advantageous moves to become who she is now: wife of a BBC producer; mother of a year-old son; homeowner in Crouch End; sub on a Sunday paper; and Tavistock-trainee. Having taken the steps as they became available to her, she has kicked over the traces. I am an unwelcome reminder of how far she has come.
The doors continued to fail, and the train was delayed for an hour. We weathered the heatwave in a block of conditioned, manufactured air. Outside, on the station platform, the kiosk’s newspapers detailed disasters that had happened elsewhere on the tracks in a week of jinxed journeys: a ninehour delay on one train, a fire and fatality on another, and the driver who had turned by mistake into the grounds of a nuclear power station.
When there had been no more from the disembodied voice for ten minutes, one of our fellow passengers stood up and announced to the carriage that he was going to find the guard.
‘I’d hate to have that guard’s job,’ I said to Edwin.
He said, ‘I’d hate to have any job other than mine,’ and asked, ‘what about you? What do you do?’ Properly cautious, he revised: ‘Or what did you do? or would you like to do?’
So, I told him about Jacqueline: for five years before her death from pneumonia a year and a half ago, she lived with me; we were best friends when students, and then, just after graduation, she was injured in a car accident.
‘Head injuries,’ I said.
Those who never knew us before the accident assumed that we were sisters and that was why she lived with me. In fact, I explained to Edwin, there was nowhere for her to go: her father was dead; her mother, ill for years with depression; her brother and sister-in-law busy with a toddler and new baby. The only solution, in Jacque’s case, was a rehabilitation centre, nearly a hundred miles away, where she was the youngest resident by more than thirty years.
‘The staff were nice, but they were staff, if you know what I mean.’
And there were so many of them. So many hands. Timetables, job titles, Key Worker.
‘She needed a home. I couldn’t leave her there. And I wasn’t working, at the time; I wasn’t doing anything else.’ I shrugged – no big deal – but below these words, the whole truth slid like a fish, barely detectable and faintly repulsive.
‘I had the help of Philip, my husband.’
Not that he was my husband, then. But we were living together, because I had taken him up on his offer: if I wanted to provide a home for Jacqueline, I should live with him. She is part of our past, was part of our start. Caring for Jacque was possible because we had compensation money, we had equipment, help, and because we had each other. I had muscles, too, in time.
‘She was very small,’ I reassured Edwin.
She had-always been small, but was smaller when she came home from the residential centre, her muscles wasted from lack of use. Smaller still when she died: barely able to move a muscle, she had barely a muscle to move. She shrank, over the years, and I grew. I am small again now. We both wore clothes labelled eight or ten: in my case, size; in hers, years. Did she ever glimpse and comprehend her labels, those graphic illustrations of her diminution? It occurs to me, now: why did I never think to remove them?
More than a year ago, she was already dead; a year ago, she had been dead for months. During that whole first year, my grief was undiminished. Almost as shocking to me as her death was how that gaping loss remained unmitigated, month by month. Her absence was raw; her death, a fundamental and disabling severance. But the slow passage of that time had an odd effect: when I was still near to her death, I was very near; and then suddenly I was worlds away. And that is where I am, nowadays: worlds away, with no prospect of return; remembering surprisingly little, and vaguely resentful that even her loss has moved away from me.
How strange, on that train, with Edwin, to be saying and hearing Jacque’s name. She rarely, if ever, surfaces in conversation, nowadays. Not even with Philip. Perhaps especially not with Philip. I remember how, a couple of days after her funeral, I mentioned beginning to look for work, because I felt that I should, because I was clueless as to what else I should do; and, gently, kindly, Philip admonished me with, ‘After this, you’ll need time to find your feet.’ That was the moment when I wanted to scream, And what about you? Why didn’t I? He has always been careful of me, but more so since Jacqueline died. I feel that I am forever protecting him from me.
I never doubted that Jacqueline understood me, on some level: that she caught the drift, detected the undercurrent. She was incapable of more than indicating the most basic of preferences – her speech badly affected, practically obliterated – but I am certain that what was happening inside her head was nothing like that which happens inside the head of a small child. She was nothing like a child; she was Jacqueline, changed, but not into a child. No one ever changes back into a child. Nothing so uncomplicated. I talked a lot to her, told her a lot. We were together almost all the time. We passed the days listening to music, to the radio, watching television, going shopping and to the Day Centre, and to her various medical and therapeutic appointments, of which there were many. Everyone seems so sure that I gave up on something for her. But what? What else – what more – would I have had? People think that I lost the world, that I was lost to the world. And, yes, that is what accidents do: they befall you and you keep on falling; they take you from the world, either for a while or forever. But what was the world, to me? Only now that I am having to return to the world, am I lost. I have never been as lost as I am now.
Glancing over, I saw that he was watching me; he was watching more than listening. Or listening to more than the words. And he was opened up for more. All of him was in that wide-open gaze, and I was on the brink, hushed, buoyed by my unspoken words. Then, a pulse of eyelashes before once again he was self-contained, self-conscious, that gaze folded away.
After my day in London, I travelled home quite late, the land dipped into shadow, the sky a blue like the white of an eye. Darkness hardened around the train; but above, delicate plane trails were splashed by the sinking sun and tinted peachcoloured. For a while, several of them ran parallel, as if in a race; a slow race, the speed shrunk within the expanse of sky. For the first time ever, I wondered how many more summers I would see. Probably no more than could be counted on my fingers and toes, twice over. A finite number of summers.
This morning the sky is cloudless again, but looks breathed upon. Hal and I have come a little later than usual to the park because a man came to advise me on the polishing of the floorboards in the front room.
Yesterday, when he had heard the story of Jacqueline, Edwin had asked, tentatively, ‘And now?’
‘Oh, now. Well, for now, I’m doing the house.’
‘Doing what to the house?’
‘Everything. Everything needs doing, nothing was done for years.’
Nothing, during the years when I was busy with