The Rose Petal Beach

  Beatrix

  It’s not as big as I thought it would be. How it felt under the dressing was like they had taken away half my breast. Even though I could see they hadn’t, it felt like that.

  I hadn’t been able to look when the district nurse had come out to change the dressing and remove the drain. I’d been too scared of what I might see, and too terrified of not being able to handle it. The area around the dressing is calming down now, it was bruised, such a deep purple it almost looked black, with tinges of blue and yellow and red. Under the dressing seemed a vicious, dangerous place and I did not want to see. I had enough reality drip, dripping itself into my life, I did not need to see that before I was ready.

  Today, I am seeing. I am ready. I have taken the requisite deep breaths. I have a full-length mirror in the corner of the room and I have Tami standing in the other corner of the room, by the door, as if she wants to escape. She’s been pretty inscrutable this past week. We haven’t had any big chats, it’s all been neutral where she helps me to the shower, brings me food, lets the girls come in to say goodnight, and reminds me to do my arm exercises.

  You would not think that I had betrayed her. She is still wasting away, though. Something is eating her up. I do not know what, but I know deep, unrelenting guilt when I see it. What she has to feel guilty about I don’t know.

  You can see what I’m doing, can’t you? I’m thinking about other things so I do not have to open my eyes and look down. I do not have to see what has been exposed to the air. I can feel air on it, cool after the wound has been protected all this time by the dressing.

  In goes another breath, another moment of steeling myself, and I look down. It is a thin, slightly jagged line that runs about 5cms across the left part of my cleavage. It’s nothing, really. Not when I was expecting a crater.

  I resist the urge to touch it, fascinated at the marked skin and the bruising that has not completely disappeared. I am fascinated because you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t tell that something that came out of a space that small could have brought about the end.

  ‘It’s not as bad as I thought,’ I say to the nurse. She nods. My eyes move to Tami. ‘It’s not as bad as I thought,’ I say to her.

  She is pressed up against the wall, her lips curled tightly inwards, her face an ocean of tears. Is it the scar? Is it how close I came? Or is it that I am naked to my waist, making the pictures of what I did with her husband more vivid and real?

  I turn away from her. As I walk the few steps to the mirror, I hear and feel rather than see her slip out of the room.

  Beatrix

  This is what I found out today:

  It is a stage one cancer because it smaller (just about) than 2 cms and it hasn’t spread to the lymph nodes.

  It is a grade two cancer because the cells are growing at a moderately fast rate.

  It is oestrogen-receptor positive.

  I will need to have radiotherapy as well as chemotherapy.

  I will also need to be on a hormone therapy probably for five years.

  I will need regular visits and check-ups probably for the rest of my life.

  I will have to revisit the whole baby thing because oestrogen-receptor positive cancers make pregnancy ‘complicated’.

  I have to be told things several times before they sink in.

  I can hurt someone so badly she looks like she is being eaten alive from the inside out and she will still hold my hand while I listen to the hard bits.

  17

  Fleur

  The inside is completely different to the outside. From the outside, the house is old and stuffy, but from the moment you open the door, it hits you, this place is modern; everything new and expensive.

  One time I said to her that I felt bad about her spending all that money on a car for me when I couldn’t drive it and she said, ‘Who else am I going to spend my money on?’

  She obviously had a lot of money. I knew that, there’s a lot of it in her will, but this shows that she must have earned a bomb because her house is mint.

  It’s taken a while for us to make it here because I’ve been waiting to hear if they had anything new in the investigation. But nothing has changed: they have a suspect and are still gathering evidence. After a few days of pretending that situation might change, I knew I couldn’t delay any longer and I had to come to her house.

  I was sort of expecting to feel something, like maybe her spirit or something would be hanging around or I’d feel her when I opened the door to walk in. I’d taken Noah’s hand the moment I pushed the door open, needing him to be with me, not to let me go.

  He was nervous, too, although he tried to hide it. Neither of us knew what to expect, or what would happen or how I would feel. I’d wanted so desperately to come here over the years, but I didn’t dare ask. She never offered, either. But now I know my father, Dad, has been lying to me, I wonder how many times she asked over the years if I could come and stay for the weekend. For half term. For the summer holidays. How many times did he turn her down before she gave up?

  We hold hands as we walk down the tiled hall, black and white tiles that look antique but are new. We instinctively go down the corridor instead of going upstairs. That’s something we’ll tackle soon.

  There’s an odd quiet in the house. It’s more quiet than you get with empty houses. Maybe that’s what I thought would happen, instead of feeling something there, it’s knowing there is something missing. The heart of the home has stopped beating and you can sense it in the air.

  The first room we come to is a large living room. I gently push the door open, almost expecting to see her on the sofa, sitting there, with a book or maybe a cup of tea or even a glass of wine, although she never drank around me. There are two leather sofas, a large rug, a couple of side tables. And that picture. I’ve never seen it before, I’ve never known it existed, but it feels like it should be here. Her house wouldn’t be complete or hers without it. We don’t dare go into the room, that’d be like walking into the deepest recesses of her heart or something. We both stand on the threshold and look. We do that for every downstairs room. The other room down there is a study, it has a wall of books, the shorter wall has shelves that are lined with work files. There is a computer on a glass-topped desk, and a printer on the corner of the desk. We move on to the kitchen. It is longer than it is wide, but it is a big space with all chrome and shiny appliances and gadgets. When we have looked at everything from the threshold, we both return to the staircase.

  ‘You don’t have to do this now,’ Noah says to me.

  ‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’ I say.

  I feel sick. Properly, properly sick as I put my foot on the bottom step. I don’t know where the bathroom is. I don’t know if it’s the first room we’ll come to or if it’s the last. I’m crushing Noah’s hand, I know it, but I’m feeling sick and if I don’t squeeze tightly I might actually throw up. My feet are like giant’s feet and make a very loud sound on the stairs even though there’s carpet.

  At the top of the stairs we stop. There are five doors all leading off from the oblong corridor. I have to do this bit alone, I realise. It’s good having him here, I’ve needed him, but I need to see where she died on my own so I can assimilate it. It won’t be real if I don’t go in and see it. And it won’t mean anything if I let someone else share that burden. He didn’t know her, he didn’t have that messed-up relationship I had with her.

  ‘Can you … Can you wait here while I find it?’ I ask him.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he replies.

  I’m sure. I’m not sure, I’m sure, but I don’t want to do this wrong. I don’t want to bring a stranger into the place where she spent her final moments. They were minutes of terror and horror, I guess, and that is private, that is not something to share with someone who didn’t know her. I want to think: with someone who didn’t love her, but I’m still struggling to feel I did love her. I’m still trying to convince myself that I do feel it, that it’s all
stuck behind this grief and anger. I have anger that I have been robbed three times: first by Mirabelle, then by my dad and now by whoever has done this. I have been robbed three times of the same thing, the same person. And with this last robbery, this crime committed against me as well as her, I’m never going to know the full her.

  At the first door, the door to my left, a short way down the corridor, I close my hands around the brass handle and hold my breath as I turn it and push. Nothing. It is stuck. I try again. No, it is locked. I exhale all at once. I don’t think anyone would have locked it after the police had gone, but that policewoman in charge of the case said on the phone that I could go into the house and they’d left it as they found it. So maybe they did. Maybe this door was always locked, but I do not see a key anywhere. Would they really have gone to the trouble of locating the key and then locking it and putting it back where they found it?

  That’s thrown me. We’re going to have to go through the house looking for the key now. We’ll have to move stuff and destroy the house that she created, the home that she had made.

  I walk to the next door and turn the handle, not expecting it to open. It does, though, and behind it is a bedroom. The way it is set up, the formal way the bed is made, the chair sitting in the bay window with guest towels folded upon it, says it is not a room that is used very often. Again, did the police check in here? Did they examine every inch of the place to find clues, because it doesn’t seem like it. It seems as if they’ve tidied up to a professional standard.

  ‘We weren’t sure but didn’t think you would want to come in after the investigation so we told the cleaner she could come in after we’d gone.’ The policewoman said that, didn’t she? I wasn’t really listening, I was too busy freaking out that I was finally going to go into the house.

  ‘The cleaner’s been,’ I say to Noah.

  ‘That explains why it’s so tidy, then,’ he says.

  The next one is the one I’m dreading. I know what will be behind it when I open it, I know that it’s going to be the one. Inhaling deeply, my fingers close around the brass handle and I turn. The door doesn’t creak or nothing freaky like that, it swings back smoothly on its hinges and the white rushes out to fill my line of vision. The walls are tiled in white, the floor is tiled in black and white. Against one wall is a huge glass shower cubicle with a wall-hung sink beside it. Directly in front of me is a large old-fashioned window, and then on the other side of room, against the wall is a large roll-top bath. It is white with large chrome taps.

  I take a few steps into the room, my heart is running in my chest. It’s trying to escape. I think I’m shaking but I can’t be sure because I’m not sure if I feel anything any more. I take a few more steps … stepping … stepping … and I am in front of the bath.

  I used to talk to her in the bath. When it was only her and me in the house and she wanted to take a bath, I would bring my story-book and sit next to the bath and talk to her. Sometimes I would read to her, making up the story as I went along, and she would help me and laugh with me when the most implausible things would happen. She’d sometimes splash me and I’d laugh as the droplets of water rained down on my face and shoulders and hair.

  I drop to my knees beside the bath. I close my eyes as I touch the smooth, cold side of it.

  I remember … I remember the sound of the water splashing as she used a red flannel to clean herself … the radio as it played soul music outside on the landing … the smell of her rose water soap filling the air … the heat from the steam because she liked her baths hot … the sound of her laughter as I told her the dog had flown to the moon … her long fingers as they curled around the edges of the bath right before she stood up … her voice as she’d say, ‘Hand me my towel, please, Fleury-Boo’ … the happiness of being allowed to help and saying, ‘Here you go, Mum’ … the feel of the scratchy towel as I took it off my lap and handed it to her … her becoming a giant when she stood up to wrap the towel around her body.

  I remember. I remember every second of it.

  ‘Hand me my towel, please, Fleury-Boo,’ she says to me. I open my eyes, looking for her, looking for my mum. Her voice was here, surely she should be too.

  She’s not. It was an echo from my memory.

  I take in the bath again. My fingers stroke slowly along it.

  My throat is too full, my heart is caving in, my eyes are too heavy.

  ‘Here you go, Mum,’ I murmur.

  ‘Thank you, Fleury-Boo. Thank you.’

  Tami

  Fleur’s boyfriend, Noah, rests the picture against the wall in the hallway, then immediately flexes his fingers at the strain that carrying it put on him.

  ‘I really can’t accept this,’ I tell Fleur. ‘It’s too much. It should be yours.’

  ‘It is mine. I want you to have it, though.’

  ‘But Fleur—’

  ‘The thing is, Mrs C, I hate that story. Yeah, yeah, I know hate isn’t the opposite of love and it suggests an on-going emotional attachment,’ she glances at Noah when she says this, he must have tried to reason with her, too, ‘but I hate it. I hate that story and I hate that picture. It reminds me that my mother left me. That she’d rather be there, in the picture, on some fantasy quest, than to stay with me.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not that simple, Fleur. Life’s not that simple.’

  ‘Sometimes, it really is.’

  ‘She loved you.’

  ‘So? She loved me but she still left me. She had no part in my life until I was grown up. I’m starting to, you know, be cool with that. We all do what we gotta do. But I still hate that picture and that story. Yeah, she probably changed her mind and tried to come back, but some mistakes are too big.’

  Yeah, they are, I think. ‘Look, I’ll keep it for you. I wouldn’t feel right, accepting it, so I’ll keep it for you. Wherever I am, the picture will be too until you want it back.’

  ‘You sound like you’re going somewhere,’ she says.

  ‘Get off me! Don’t touch me!’ Chocolate-brown silk. Raised voices. Flailing, fighting arms, kicking legs. Mirabelle’s face. My body burning with an incandescent rage.

  ‘You just never know what’s around the corner.’

  ‘True.’ Another look at Noah. I’m glad she has him. I’m glad she has someone. ‘But if I could give you one bit of advice from, like, someone who knows – don’t leave your kids. I know you wouldn’t but, you know, just don’t.’

  I smile at her.

  ‘Get off me! Don’t touch me!’

  I’m not sure how it was for Mirabelle in the actual moment when she left her child all those years ago, but I know that for me, I may not have any choice in the matter.

  Beatrix

  ‘Hello, TB.’ He is so calm, so quiet, relaxed.

  I shouldn’t have answered the phone, it’s not my house after all, but it was automatic: a phone rings, you pick it up, don’t you? Well, I do.

  And it was him. Him.

  He sounds … Normal. His voice, his tone, causes me to catch my breath, then to drop the phone.

  ‘Tami?’ his tiny, tinny voice squawks from the receiver on the carpet. ‘Tami? Are you there?’

  Bending slowly, my trembling fingers reach for the silvery-grey handset and place it near my ear. Not actually to my ear because I don’t think I could stand to have his words reverberating directly through my body.

  ‘I know you don’t want to talk to me right now, but I need … sorry, what I need isn’t important. But I’d like to speak to you. I miss—’ I click the red telephone hang-up button. I can’t listen any longer. With a shaking hand, I return the handset to its cradle, staring at it, seeing his face. The lines that make up his manly, powerful features: his straight nose, his set lips, his brow above those chocolate-maple eyes, his hair styled carefully off his face.

  He did not sound like a man in pain; so mired in his own private version of hell he has not been able to reply to my texts, answer my calls (not even when I have sneakily withheld my
number). He will not speak to anyone at work who does not give their name and reason for calling.

  Scott sounded like a man who missed his wife. A man in love with his wife. ‘Never mind his wife, he can’t love her, she can’t love him.’ Isn’t that what Tami said? Never mind that he was married, I lied to myself that it was OK what I was doing because I loved him. I defended myself, I defended him, I defended what we did by saying it was love, we couldn’t help ourselves, Tami was deluded because she couldn’t accept that.

  I’m the one who’s deluded. My hand goes to my chest, to the site of my scar, to where the weight of the world seems to rest. I’m the one who’s been in denial about what I did, who I really am.

  The door opens and she sticks her head around. Her gaze rests momentarily on my hand, on the way I am holding myself together.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ she asks. ‘Do you need me to call the doctor?’

  I shake my head. It’s here now, dispersing through me like dye dropped into water, spreading out through me, staining every part of me as it moves. Guilt. Guilt at what I’ve seconds ago done and what I’ve done in the past.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks, stepping into the room. She avoids coming into this room as much as possible. It’s sort of become my living room because the children either play in the kitchen or in their bedrooms or in the garden. I wonder what happened in this room that has made her consign it to a never-visited zone. I used to avoid this room before I started to stay here because of the pictures of family life it held on its walls. Now I sit here and drink in those pictures, trying to believe I will be seeing them for years to come, that things will work out for me.

  I am in that stage between appointments when I am recovering from surgery and waiting for chemotherapy. I am euphoric and exhausted often in the same spaces in time. I am here. I keep reminding myself of that. I am here. And now, my guilt is here, too.