And it will happen, over the years, Kay dreams, the photographs of her will put themselves away. Gone from the mantle, gone from even Tom’s room. And Freya’s boyfriend, Sven, will be looking for a pen that actually works but instead he finds a photograph stuffed in the far back of her desk. A woman in her late 30s, she’s on a rooftop, possibly of an African city—something about the light, the dusty air; she looks happy, but who’s to say? We all smile for photographs. He asks Freya: “Who’s this?”
Freya is on the bed reading The Importance of Being Earnest. She has a paper due tomorrow; she’s just begun the book. Typical. She scratches a mosquito bite on her ankle. Her toe-nail polish is chipped and she should really shave her legs. She glances at the photo. “My mother.”
Sven looks at her, he looks at the photo. There’s a strong resemblance, same eyes, same hands, same slim build. “But I met your mother.”
“You met Barbara, my step-mother. She’s basically my mother.”
Sven is well brought up. He has sensitive and intelligent parents. He tries to have some instinct about where to go next with this conversation. He loves Freya—what’s not to love? She’s smart and pretty and funny. She loves to fuck. But there are these blind corners in her—she’ll be looking out the window and he can’t reach her, can’t follow her. She’s a happy person, but remote. It’s because he wants to know her better that he persists. “What happened to her? This mother?”
Freya doesn’t look up; nothing in her voice changes. “She died.”
“I’m sorry.”
Freya shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”
Sven looks again at the pretty woman in the photo. Death is so weird, he thinks. You keep thinking they’ll come back or they’ve just gone on vacation. His dog was hit by a car a few years ago, when he was 15, and even though he knew that Sparky was dead—he’d seen the body, and they’d buried him in the back yard—he went out in the evenings calling for Sparky. Spark, Sparky, Spaaarrrrkkky, until he mother told him to stop it.
He sits on the bed, he puts his hand on Freya’s impossibly soft thigh. “How?”
Freya shrugs. “We don’t really know. We just assume.”
“What do you mean?”
“She disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“One summer. In America.”
“So you don’t know if she’s dead or what?”
Freya puts the book down. “Look, I’m trying to read this, okay?”
Then Kay woke and she was buried alive and she hit out with her hands, her feet, screaming, floundering, attacking, her limbs on fire with cramp. She howled and raged at the blackness of her tiny coffin, unsure even of gravity.
At last she remembered where she was. The cupboard. Her breathing deepened, she began to calm. Her chin was damp. Christ, she’d dribbled in her sleep. The bandage on her hand had come unraveled, bits of plastic wrap slipping off, but she couldn’t find them. It hurt, raw, pink fleshed pain. She grubbed along the walls, searching for the latch. In her panic she’d completely turned herself around. Finding it, she clicked it open. Cool air hit her face. She inhaled deep, and dragged herself out onto the linoleum. The bathroom was awash in moonlight.
She lay, face up, her arms and legs stretched out, wriggling her fingers and toes, the blood moving freely into her veins, gushing into the capillaries. Somewhere they’d kept prisoners in boxes, for years and years. A North African country? Or was it slaves in the Caribbean? Her mind always came to these horrors, a butterfly alighting on an oozing, dark flower.
Putting her injured hand on her chest, she felt her heart, insistent and indifferent to whether she was good or bad, mother or un-mother, indifferent as the stars to what she thought and felt and did. It would beat on if she never saw her children again, if Michael left her for Barbara, if school girls were raped, if boys were made to kill.
Now she got to her knees, stood, shook herself out like a dog. The house around her was still, moon-filled. How alone she was, a condition neither peaceful nor alarming; but particular. She hadn’t been alone at night for a very long time. She saw her phone on top of the toilet’s tank, the message light blinking.