After Anna. Alex Lake
sixties. It happened quickly. A year from retirement he missed his first day of work from illness, then he missed another, and another, laid up in bed with a headache that left him unable to focus. He never went back. The cancer was behind his eye and worming its way into his brain.
Officially, it was just one of those things. Unofficially, Julia was convinced it was the solvents and acids he spent his days slopping around that stained his skin and fouled his lungs. Even after he had taken a bath – he took one every night, retiring to the upstairs lavatory with a cup of tea and a copy of the Daily Mirror, a ritual which infuriated Julia when she was teenager in a hurry to get ready on a Friday night, leading her to complain to her mum, who would frown and say leave him, love, he works hard – even after that long soak in the perfumed, Radoxed waters of the bath, he still gave off the hard, harsh smell of the tannery.
When she was a child, he used to lie down next to her, smelling of that smell, and tell her a story every night, a story he had made up during the long days at work. Many of them began It was the witching hour, and for years she had wondered what it would be like to be awake during the witching hour, what amazing events she would witness if she could just keep her eyes open … and then she would wake up and it would be light outside and she would have missed all the fun.
As she lay there now, the house creaked and groaned. They were just the sounds that a house made, but it was easy to believe that they were the night-time perambulations of the little people. She remembered running onto the landing as a little girl when she heard the stairs creak, and shouting downstairs to her parents.
I’m scared! What are those noises?
Her dad clumped up the stairs, bringing with him a whiff of cheap beer mingled with the acid stench of the tannery.
Don’t worry, petal. Houses are alive. They move around and they settle at night, same as you and me. It’s just our place resting its old bones. It’s saying good night to you, that’s all.
Anna was one when he died, so at least she’d met him, although she had no memory of it. He’d loved her, was great with her; couldn’t get enough of nappy changes and messy feedings and clip-clop horsey rides on his knees.
How she wished he was here now. She wouldn’t want him to suffer through this, but it would make it so much easier to have him here. She missed him. She missed him so much.
As she did her mum, but in a different way. Her mum was still alive but had suffered her own tragedy, in some ways worse. Alzheimer’s had corroded her brain, eaten her memories, dissolved who she was into a listless, confused shell. She was in a home nearby, in need of constant care. Julia visited often, but it was hard. Her mum rarely knew it was her daughter holding her hand.
They were effectively gone, her parents, as was Brian. She was going to have to do this herself.
She checked her phone. Maybe a call from DI Wynne that somehow – although she knew it was unthinkable that she would have slept through it – she had missed.
She reached out and turned on her bedside light.
There was a photo frame on the cabinet, split into uneven thirds. Anna had given it to her for Christmas, and they had spent an hour or so leafing through photos choosing which three to put in it. All of them featured Anna: as a newborn, in Edna’s arms on the couch in their old house, and with Brian and Julia outside the blue door of the nursery she had attended.
God, leaving her there for the first time had been awful. Julia had felt bereft, incomplete, as though she was missing a part of herself. She had cried all morning at work, and then made some excuse at lunchtime about feeling ill, and gone to the nursery. Being reunited with her daughter, smelling her, kissing her, made her whole again, and she vowed never to leave her daughter again.
But the next day she did. And the day after that, and the day after that. Eventually, she got used to saying goodbye, but she never stopped missing Anna.
Julia stared at the photo. It was taken on that first day, Anna a mere three-months-old. Julia looked drawn and tired, still carrying the baby weight, her face tear-stained. She was holding Anna close to her chest, holding the baby that she had barely been apart from for a minute since she was born, and who she was about to hand into the care of a stranger.
Even in a photo it was obvious she and Brian were in love. They were leaning into each other, his arm around her. He was not looking at the camera, but at his wife, his expression protective, caring, concerned. Loving, most of all. It was a photo of a man who adored his wife and the daughter they had made together.
When they’d left the nursery they’d hugged for a long time. It was funny what you remembered; Julia remembered the smell of the suit Brian was wearing. It was musty; odd but not unpleasant. He was starting his new job as a primary teacher, and he was wearing a suit that he’d bought from a charity store, and in the chaos of early parenthood he’d not managed to find time to have it dry-cleaned.
He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and, back then, she couldn’t have imagined any future in which she didn’t.
Not any more. Now he was a brooding presence, squatting in the spare bedroom.
She pulled on her dressing gown and crossed the landing to the stairs. The top two creaked and, out of habit, she trod softly on them so as not to wake up Anna, who was a light sleeper. Julia often wondered whether it was because she and Brian had fussed over her sleeping arrangements so much: at nap time and bed time they ensured that she had a dark room at the correct temperature, and then they performed an elaborate routine to get her to sleep, rocking her in a specific pattern and then, when she was nearly asleep, laying her gently in her bed and patting her back until her breathing lengthened and she could be left without fear of her waking up. They would then tiptoe around the house, terrified of waking her up.
And now she was a light sleeper: no wonder. She had only ever had to sleep in perfect conditions. All those adults who complained of insomnia would sleep like a cat on a warm flagstone if they were rocked for half an hour before bed and then given a gentle massage. She and Brian would have done things differently with a second child, Julia knew, they would have been more relaxed, both because they would have known what they were doing and because they would not have had the time to do with another child what they had done with Anna. The second child had not come, though. A miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy, which had left Julia unable to have more children, had seen to that. She was barren, as Edna had once put it.
Barren. It was a horrid, vivid word that Julia hated, and it was just the kind of word that Edna would use. She could pretend that it was just what people said when she was young and she didn’t know it would upset her daughter-in-law, but Julia didn’t believe her. Edna knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.
For a time, Julia had grieved for the loss of her fertility, but recently, as she realized she no longer loved Brian, she had come to be relieved. For one thing, divorce would be easier with one child; for another, she had always worried that she would not love the second child as much as the first. How could she? Anna and she were mother and daughter but also best friends. She knew that they wouldn’t be forever – or even much longer – but right now she loved taking her daughter to the movies or shopping or for lunch. They’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Christmas; Anna was open-mouthed. Spellbound. Julia understood the magic of theatre, the way it brought drama to life, in a way she had never done before. Anna asked frequently when Christmas was coming, so she could see it again.
Yes – her love for Anna was all-consuming, so maybe it was best that she have only one child.
One child who was now gone.
And, although she would not admit it to herself, part of Julia was sure Anna was gone. Of course, she still hoped that Anna would show up. She had to. Without that hope she would probably not have been able to carry on. But, however much she tried to ignore it, she was aware that she might never see her daughter again.
Might never meet – and disapprove of – Anna’s first boyfriend. Might never watch her fall in love, graduate, marry. Might