When Emily woke, she was thirsty and her clothes were drenched in a cold sweat. Vaguely she remembered someone banging at her door but by the time she had dragged herself into full consciousness, and to the door, the corridor outside it was empty. Perhaps it was Omar. Standing in a pair of threadbare socks she considered venturing across the few feet that separated their flats and knocking, but even if he was there, what would she say? The iciness was still with her, un-melted by sleep. If he needed emotion, she did not have it. If he did not, then what was the point?
Emily closed the door and sat on the cushion in front of the television. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a red light blinking: her answering machine. It flashed on and off, on and off, on and off. Outside, the sun must have been fading because the small light that crept through the window into her room was growing paler and less insistent. Day to night. On and off. On and off.
At some point, Emily rose from the cushion and without a glass drank water from the tap at the sink, then without a coat or shoes, she left her flat. She wasn’t cold, or rather she was unable to separate the effect of the weather from the iciness inside her, and so she didn’t notice the hairs on her arms prickling or her toes turning numb. Occasionally the people she passed in the street regarded her from beneath their hats and scarves with curiosity.
Hours later she found herself outside Auntie’s house. A light was on in the kitchen and Emily imagined Auntie peeling sweet potatoes, boiling rice, drying fish, preparing the foods of the place she’d decided to leave as though this mitigated her abandonment. For a time, Emily had felt angry with Auntie for not having had the courage to stay and face the dangers she herself had suffered. But later, she had turned this animosity against her own dead parents who had not been foresighted enough to take her and her brothers out of Rwanda too. The problem with the dead is that they are not around to answer indictments, and so Emily’s rage had had nowhere to flow and she was always so close to snapping. Or had been. If Auntie appeared at the door now, Emily wouldn’t snap at her, or blame her, or plead with her.
The curtain in the kitchen moved. Then the hall lamp lit up the space behind the door revealing a small group of silhouettes. Perhaps Auntie had seen her. Perhaps she regretted turfing her out. Perhaps she didn’t. The light went off. On again. Off again.
Emily moved on. After hours she hadn’t bothered to count, she lost track of where she was going or how long she’d been going for, but the sun rose while she was still in the graveyard. At this time of day the quiet of the place was liberating, and the thud of it made Emily pause. She sat on top of a stone monument undisturbed and thought about nothing. Gradually, early morning rabbits crept towards patches of grass, birds sang brazenly in nearby trees without summer foliage to hide them, and a London rat flitted deviously between graves. Beneath the soil, there were probably chrysalises waiting to hatch into caterpillars.
Emily noticed that she was hungry, but she lacked the necessary precision of thought to do anything about it. Hunger was only another empty hole to add to the dark mass inside her. In a distant part of her soul there murmured a suggestion that she had missed or forgotten something important, but this conviction was barely formed and slipped in and out of the pervading emptiness.
One by one and then in loose bunches, people began to appear on the path: People bent against the cold and scuttling to work, mothers with prams and red-faced babies in them, children padded in gloves and marshmallow coats that might tear if they climbed trees. For a while longer, Emily watched them, unmoved, but at some point she lowered her sock-clad feet back onto the frosty ground and slipped into the march of pedestrians. Walking on, she noticed with a marked detachment that she was passing all the places she had once known intimately: her school, the grocer owned by Uncle’s friend Franco, the newsagent where Auntie let her buy sweets, a string of bus stops. It was as if her legs were taking her on a tour of her life in England, recapping it, or bidding it farewell, but even this she did with indifference, uninterested in whether she paused or persisted.
It grew dark again and she was somewhere unfamiliar. She sat on the steps of a building she didn’t recognise and rested her head against the stone wall, though she wasn’t specifically tired. Perhaps night turned to day. Darkness. Light. Noise. Silence. On again. Off again. When she closed her eyes a red light blinked, and at the back of her mind that nagging suggestion itched uncomfortably.
Emily stood up. It was daylight and nearby a bus was pulling up to the pavement. She got on it, fishing her Oyster card out of her jeans pocket. She stared out of the window and wondered what it was that should be on her mind. Was it Omar? What was her soul suggesting? It was a great effort to force herself to think, almost as though she had to climb out from underneath a pile of dead weight to do so.
The bus stopped at a red light and Emily stared at it until it finally turned green. The colour that the Hutu Power men had waved in the street, the colour of the bandana worn by the man who’d once slapped Cassien, the colour Jean had worn, the colour of grass. She thought of these disparate things without emotion and returned her gaze to the city that trundled by.
Some indefinable time later, she found herself back in her flat, sitting again on the cushion in front of the inactive TV. A tin of corn had made its way into a bowl, topped with chickpeas and a few cherry tomatoes that she should really have thrown out days earlier. She ate the concoction slowly, taking at least a small grain of satisfaction from the feeling of fullness that began to engulf her. She supposed that it was important to eat. In fact, perhaps that was what her mind should be concentrating on: determining which aspects of her existence were truly necessary. So far, eating was the only thing that seemed obvious. If she didn’t eat, she would die. If she didn’t drink, this too would kill her and quicker. And she should probably not sleep on the street again, at least not during the winter. She poured herself a glass of water and pulled on a jumper. What else? Was anything else important to her survival?
It didn’t matter where Emily slept, only that she did, and so she remained on the cushion and drifted again into unconsciousness.
When she woke next, the phone was ringing. The red light was still blinking and Emily moved slowly towards it, letting her body and not her mind decide whether or not to pick it up, since it was of little consequence. Her body hesitated. The answering machine kicked in. Suddenly, the urgent voice of Lynn’s youngest son invaded the room.
“Angel? Are you there? Emily?” He paused. “Emily I hope you’re alright, I’ve been leaving you messages for days, I’m sorry to keep calling, only my mother was expecting you, well, for the last five days actually. She’s not doing too well so - anyway we could do with your help if you can. And of course today is Christmas Eve and I’m no good with a turkey you see and Luke, well, anyway, I hope you’re alright, I’m not really sure where you’ve been, the agency said they’ve called you already so - look, if you can come, my mother would like to see you. Oh, it’s John Hunter by the way.”
Emily’s body took her into the shower and stood letting the hot water beat down onto its chapped skin. Then it planted itself in front of the small wooden wardrobe and dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a heavy jumper, before packing an old canvas bag with a few extra items including her toothbrush. For a moment, her body paused and glanced at the still-flashing red light on the answering machine, but then it turned and made for the door, traversing the stench-filled stairwell and walking directly to the flower shop a few roads away where it bought a bunch of yellow tulips, because they didn’t have daffodils. Emily’s body then made its way onto a bus, packed with last-minute Christmas shoppers, and it hung onto the handrail until it reached the stop close to Lynn’s house. It walked without diversion down the three roads that separated it from Lynn’s door and suddenly, Emily found herself on Lynn’s doorstep, aware that her body had just rung the bell. It didn’t matter, she told herself. It was inconsequential, whether Lynn was well or not. Whether Emily went in or didn’t.
John’s face flooded with relief when he saw her.
“Oh thank goodness.” He lurched forward as though he wanted to hug her but then only took her bag. “Luke’s with her now.” Her stomach tightened. “She’s not talking much. I think she might need help getting changed but I didn’t know how to, or she might need to go to the bathroom I think but she’s too - I didn’t know if I should… ” His voice trembled and cracked. His usually debonair demeanour seemed crumpled, like a slept-in shirt. His head dropped. “Luke’s been handling things.”
Emily put her hand gently on his arm. “I’ll see what she needs,” she said simply and turned towards the stairs.
Perhaps the flowers were heavier than she’d realised because Emily found herself climbing the steps slowly. Although Lynn’s state didn’t really matter, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being weighed down. And although she’d prepared herself for it, and it was irrelevant, when she finally reached the woman’s room, Luke’s face shook her. The unmistakable eyes. Not one thing or another. Or two things at once.
He stood up when she entered. Grey and Green.
Emily dug her nails into the palms of her hands, clinging to ice.
Both of them hovered uncomfortably on either side of the bed.
Somewhere beneath the folds of the duvet lay Lynn. Her thin, white hair was sprawled across the vast pillow and the tip of a pale pink nightgown escaped the blanket that had carefully been tucked in around her, but it took Emily a long time to locate her face. Turned to the side, it could easily have been mistaken for just another fold in the ageing bedclothes, yellowed slightly, the lines that had once indicated a lifetime of smiles hanging downward now, uncertainly, like a sheet that had been accidentally made up inside out. Lynn’s eyes were closed but beneath the thin lids they darted this way and that. Her lips were dry. Her arms were wrapped up in a brown, threadbare dressing gown. Her breath was shallow.
Emily looked around the room and found an empty vase that she took to the bathroom and filled with water, before arranging the yellow tulips and returning with them to Lynn’s bed. Luke had sat down again and placed his hand onto the covers near where his mother lay, though remaining always just beyond the space where their bodies might touch.
“Has she been eating?” Emily asked.
Luke sat up straighter, his shoulders taut, and shook his head. “Not for two days. Occasionally she manages a sip of water.” He pointed to the glass with a straw sticking out of it on her nightstand. It made a ring on the pad that Lynn had used to write the address of GENSUR so carefully. “Where have you been?”
“Has she been to the toilet?”
“She’s needed help.”
“Did you help her?”
“The bed smells a little.”
Emily lifted the top blanket and a putrid smell wafted out.
Luke wrinkled his nose. “You were meant to be here,” he stated, with a sudden violence, slicing the air like a knife. “As it’s Christmas the agency had nobody else to send. And she refused to let anybody else come anyway. And she said she needed you, she needed to - I couldn’t help her.”
“I’ll see to the bed.”
“It could have made a difference.”
Emily began to collect the empty glasses that had accumulated in the room.
“It wasn’t meant to happen so fast,” Luke kept on.
Emily put the glasses back down. She wished that he wouldn’t talk with such volume and venom. She wished his eyes would close. Or would not exist at all.
“Emily,” Luke said again as though she had an answer for his anguish.
She brought her finger to her lips and shushed him firmly. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said decisively. “I didn’t do anything.”
“It’s what you didn’t do.” His words came in angry whispers. “It’s what you didn’t do and could have.”
“I couldn’t have stopped it,” Emily protested.
“But you could have helped. Her. And us. We trusted you.”
“Well you shouldn’t have.” Emily noticed that her voice had suddenly risen. “You shouldn’t trust anyone.”
Luke stared at her, his two-toned eyes darkening into similarity but intense and as penetrating as ever, his strong jaw angled upwards, his hands twitching. As anger infused him he seemed to grow in front of her, and when he raised his arm Emily was certain he was going to bring it down against her head. She flinched. But then all at once, his great frame crumpled backwards into the small, unsupportive chair, and everything inside him shrank, like a hot-air balloon deflated. The escaped air whistled around the room and silenced them both.
“I - I’m sorry for you,” Emily offered after many awkward minutes had passed.
Luke looked up. “You’re sorry?” Through his desolation he grasped her apology like a piece of evidence, proof of her culpability or at least his lack of it, and it seemed to replenish him. “Sorry? Sorry’s no good. What am I supposed to do with sorry? What’s John supposed to do with sorry? Sorry won’t bring her back.”
“She’s not gone yet,” Emily reminded him.
As though she’d been listening all along, Lynn opened her eyes. At once, both Luke and Emily flew to the bed. Lynn’s breath remained laboured but with her eyes open, much of her old poise seemed to return. Her no-nonsense gaze darted between them.
“Mother, I’m here. Are you alright? I’m here.” Luke gushed urgently.
Lynn focused on him and took another series of breaths, with each intake looking as though she might speak but never quite harnessing the puff for it.
“You’re doing well,” Emily told her. “You’re looking better.”
Weakly, Lynn smiled, and Emily gulped suddenly, surprising herself. When she looked at Lynn, she saw both the old woman and her own mother, and could feel her ambivalence slipping away. She hurriedly returned to tidying the room - glasses and blankets and things that didn’t matter, and Lynn shifted her eyes back towards her son. Taking a breath she opened her mouth, but again nothing came out of it.
“What is it Mother? What do you need?”
Lynn’s eyes closed. Consciousness and unconsciousness danced across her face. A slow waltz that for all the death she’d witnessed, Emily had never seen. For many minutes she and Luke hovered over her not daring to move, but then all at once Lynn took a deep breath that seemed to pull on every scrap of oxygen in her body, opened her eyes again, and with barely a tremor in her voice, she spoke.
“I’m sorry I won’t be at your wedding, Luke.” He shook his head and began to protest but she continued over him. “You must look after John though, won’t you? You must tell him, tell him it’s okay. When he comes to you, you’ll do that, won’t you? And tell Vera she should use the china, all of it. Don’t be precious about it. Don’t lock it away. What you don’t use, smash.”
“Mother, don’t talk like that,” Luke interrupted, unable now to take any more and grasping her hand tight before realising how fragile it was and weakening his grip. “John’s only downstairs, you can talk to him yourself. And Vera, I’ll ask her to come. Maybe for lunch tomorrow?”
“I should have used the teapot with the crocuses.”
Luke looked to Emily for explanation, who nodded, but did not explain. With a gigantic effort Lynn raised her free arm and patted Luke’s hand. Her skin was soft, almost translucent next to her son’s harder palms. “Don’t stick to all the rules Luke,” she murmured. “Some you can break. Don’t be afraid to.”
A thin coat of pain flew across Luke’s strong face. He tried to hide it by painting on an even broader smile, but when Lynn asked him to leave the room so she could talk to Emily, he couldn’t hide his distress any longer.
“To Emily, Mother? Not to me?” But even as she lay sinking deeper into the folds, a single glance from Lynn was enough to move him. Obediently he closed the door.
On the other side of the room, Emily continued to tidy, furiously engaged with the unimportant. But the silence-sodden seconds were heavy. She turned.
“You went?” Lynn asked her. “To GENSUR?”
Emily nodded and without speaking began to help Lynn out of her stained nightgown and into a fresh one. She rolled her carefully onto her side and manoeuvred the bed sheet out from underneath her pale, shaking body. Then she replaced it with a clean white sheet that she found in a disordered cupboard whose jumble revealed Lynn’s final attempts to care for herself in the days in which Emily had been missing. Lynn looked relieved.
“You managed to forgive?” she inquired hopefully, sinking again into the pillow that Emily had plumped behind her and trying not to wince as her failing body settled thankfully back into stillness. Emily noticed that there was a dark bruise on Lynn’s arm where she must have banged it or fallen.
“I told you my story,” Emily answered. “I laid it out. I gave it to you.”
“But that was only the beginning. You must accept it Emily. You must forgive.”
“I told you that I couldn’t.”
Lynn nodded as though she understood, but her weary brow crinkled, troubled.
“I brought you flowers,” Emily said to distract her, pointing to the vase on her nightstand. “Tulips. I looked for daffodils but it’s not the season. Still, they’re yellow.”
“Like on your hills in Rwanda.”
“Yes.”
“Put them on the windowsill then so they get some sun. They won’t last long in the darkness.”
Emily did as she was asked, carefully rearranging the stems over and over.
“Forgiveness breaks every moral code of the universe,” Lynn whispered as if reading her thoughts while Emily was still facing the window. Her voice had suddenly grown raspier. “It’s hard. But without it, you will miss grace.”
“Grace?” Emily turned around.
“If you forgive, the wrong loses its grip on you, because you’ve put it into God’s hands.”
“You don’t believe in God anymore,” Emily reminded her.
“I have forgiven Life, Emily. I have done it.” She said this with a proud, overwhelming smile that shot light through her creases. “It is okay now.” She stopped. Her breath had run out. It was many minutes before she could speak again. “Only John - ” she mused slowly. Then paused. “Promise to try Emily,” she whispered.
Instinctively Emily shook her head, but then, she realised that it didn’t matter whether she promised or not. It was not a necessity. “I promise,” she relented.
Lynn’s eyes closed. “Okay,” she murmured. “Okay. Okay.”
Motionless, Emily watched her. Next to the bed the empty glasses still waited to be taken downstairs, on the floor the stained linen lay crumpled needing to be laundered or at least removed from sight, and it occurred to Emily that perhaps she ought to run Lynn a bath or make her some soup; but she did none of these things. There seemed no point. And so she merely watched.
Until, inexplicably, the rosary began to circle around her head. He shall come to judge the living and the dead. Emily shook herself.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered to the almost empty room, pushing the familiar words back again. “It doesn’t matter. She is just one more person. Why should I care?” But now the words of the rosary crept from her mind onto her lips and she lowered herself onto the bed where, careful to avoid Lynn’s frail, fragile legs she found a space that felt like a grass-woven rug and leant up onto her knees. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” She reached for Lynn’s hand. “You shouldn’t have given up,” she told her. “You should have tried. You should have kept trying. You should have come back the next day. You shouldn’t have left me with nobody and nothing.” A hot tear rolled down Emily’s cheek. Melting her. Melting her. She bent her head low and placed Lynn’s soft, spindly hand onto the rough edge of her scar.
Over an hour later, Emily was still in this position when John pushed open the door.
“I have to talk to my mother,” he whispered urgently.
Though much older than she, John struck her suddenly as young, or at least in every way the younger brother.
Without a word, she stood up from the bed, and straightened her fringe.
Emily just about remembered what a full house sounded like, a place with sounds you could identify without having to see, with family and familiarity. Downstairs, Luke was clattering about in the kitchen. Emily followed the noise.
“Bloody fridge,” Luke muttered when he saw her standing, watching him attempt to rearrange the shelves so that the turkey, which Lynn had organised delivery of weeks earlier, would fit inside. “I can’t find the recipe Mother uses for the stuffing, but I know that’s her favourite part. And John likes cranberry sauce but I don’t think we’ve got any cranberries. Usually I carve. Since Father died. I’ve got the knife.” He picked it up. “Mother always keeps it in this drawer, but the - I don’t know, do I have to put the bird in now? I don’t want her to be without her turkey. I don’t want to - ”
He stopped. Emily had moved forward, taken the long carving knife from his hand, and in grateful surrender Luke had let her. His jaw remained fixed in a slightly raised profile but the corners of it trembled. His eyes meandered away from her but were bursting with colour. He looked so much like Jean.
Emily raised the knife to his face.
Neither of them spoke. Flashes of grass and dirt and her mother flickered before her. She could feel her heart beating fast, adrenalin shooting through her arm and fingers into the metal instrument. Her scar pulsated. Green and grey and blood red danced before her eyes.
Then Luke started to shake.
Emily paused. But she had shaken too.
Luke’s hands gripped the sideboard, and the pots on top of it rattled to announce his desolation. He laughed loudly, obscenely, because there was nothing else to do, but he could not control his spasms. It was a total physical collapse, and it was mesmerising.
“Sorry. I’m being pathetic,” he mumbled apologetically, waving her away in embarrassment, and only then did Emily realise that his shuddering was not from fear, at least not of her or her sharp-edged blade. Violence was a concept that never even occurred to him. Yet he shook.
And she had shook. And was all at once shaking again. The knife waved from side to side in front of her.
“I’m sorry Emily,” Luke said suddenly, through his own trembling turmoil. “For before. It was unfair of me. None of it’s your fault at all. It’s my fault.”
Emily said nothing but gripped the knife more tightly, and finally Luke noticed. He let go of the side and slowly refocused his two-toned eyes towards her, observing as he did the way her body quivered, the way her own eyes flashed, the way her nails had turned white from the force of her clasp on the sharp, deadly blade. And now, understanding crept dangerously across his brow. It seemed to compose him. He stopped shaking, his jaw clenched and he looked strong again, he widened his stance and he looked powerful. He ran a weary hand through his hair and disordered it. She’d seen him do that before. Somewhere. Her head began to throb. Her two worlds scrambled. I didn’t have a choice. “You did,” she said. I tried to save you. You are still alive. “Not really,” she answered.
Now Luke was scrutinising her closely.
“What are you talking about?”
Her head continued to pound. Clutching the knife harder, she put her free hand to her temple and rubbed it.
Luke moved a step closer.
“None of it was your fault Emily,” he stated again, eyeing the knife. “My mother cares for you, you know.”
“I watched her die. I watched them all die.”
“What? Who?” She shook her head but abruptly Luke reached for the hand still working on her temple. He encased her palm within his own and held it still. “Stop Emily. I’m sorry,” he repeated. Stunned by his touch, her head beat harder. Her scar throbbed. She needed it to stop. She needed to touch it, to calm it. She needed her hands. Weakening her grip on the knife, Emily tentatively lowered it, then finally she put it down, raising her now free hand to find her scar, but Luke was too quick. He caught her wrist and held it aloft with the other one. “I’m sorry,” he said again, holding her still, forcing her to focus on him. “I’m sorry.” Without speaking, the two of them held each other’s gaze, remaining this way for many long seconds until finally, trapped in his grasp, unable to escape, unable to avoid him or hurt him or pretend he wasn’t there, Emily let out a deep, haunting sob. “I’m sorry,” Luke said once more and now Emily stared up into his green-grey eyes. Not one thing or another. Or two things at once. Aggression and fear. Power and regret. Love and loss. Just like Jean’s, though through the film of her tears they looked almost ghostly, almost gone. She held them in her sight until they disappeared.
“I forgive you,” she sobbed finally.
And then they kissed.
Afterwards, Emily sat alone on the orange-tiled floor of the kitchen and tried to work out how it had happened.
To start with, all they had done was hold each other and let their salty tears mingle with the other tastes of their mouths. He had clung to her as if in need of comfort, and she to him, each tenderly letting their tongues explore the other’s as though this was a sweet first kiss and she again an untouched child. Gently they had inhaled each other’s alien smells, leaning in close, steadying their breath, considerate, anxious not to expel too much force and blow the moment away. It had seemed, almost, like a natural extension of his apology. Sorry. But there were no more words. Silence had surrounded them and it was insistent. There was no TV blaring from the lounge, none of the old music chugging out of the gramophone, and now that Luke had stopped fumbling with the turkey and she had put down the knife, there was no clattering about of cupboard doors, or friendly, familiar sounds to remind them of the ground they were leaving behind. Upstairs, John may have dragged his chair a little closer to Lynn’s bed, and Lynn might have been murmuring; but they had not heard these earthly sounds or chose not to.
Instead, Luke had touched his hands to Emily’s face and held her a little away from him. She may have flinched slightly, but otherwise she did not move or try to move, standing instead wilfully paralysed by him. Luke had relished her paralysis as though she was some ethereal being. He examined her closely as he went, caressed the smooth dark skin of her cheek and pushed her fringe behind her ear so that with his thumb he could trace her long, lumpy scar. He let his fingers slide into her thick hair and felt the texture so much rougher than his own. He explored her small ears, traced a curve around her earlobes, cupped her dark, bony chin in his pale hands, and with his mouth tasted her skin. He paused. He looked. And then all at once he tugged roughly at her heavy jumper, lifting it in one motion over her head so that she stood in Lynn’s kitchen in just her bra and jeans, which he quickly began to unbuckle, and with that movement, their early caution was over and there was no turning back. Now they were both overcome with a powerful momentum. Emily reached for the shiny black belt of Luke’s trousers and the zip beneath it. Luke’s shirt was already untucked but she scrambled with urgency to unfasten the buttons, one, then another, and then ripping off those that remained. He looked up as the white circles bounced across the floor, and for a moment she thought he was going to stop. But instead, he grabbed her wrists and threw her hard against the fridge, inside which the turkey was nestled, tearing her bra from her chest with an intensity that equalled her own. She fought back. Slapping him across the face and scratching at his shoulders she pushed hard until he backed away slightly, and then she pounced on him once more, trapping his face with her hands against the cupboard and sucking hard on his lip as they kissed again.
After that, it was hard to say who had taken the lead, or followed it. Together they had descended somehow onto the floor and brawled naked, tugging, biting, craving each other’s raw flesh. His lip bled. Her breasts throbbed under the strength of his fingers, and she cried out in pain. But Emily felt empowered as they battled, high on the excitement of returning his roughness, of demanding it, of controlling it. She held onto his hair. A few strands of blond came loose in her hands, his pale, stubbled face rubbing coarsely against her thighs, that angular jaw and penetrating eyes beneath her, compliant. And then, as her fingers began to unfold and she writhed against the cold floor she’d mopped so often, he yanked her over and thrust his way inside. Deep. Intense. Within her.
Strangely, this was the moment that she felt her mind floating away. Flesh collided and took time and space with it. And from nowhere, Emily thought of Omar. Luke puffed on above her and her own body continued to contract and contort in a peculiar, detached pleasure, but she was no longer there. Instead, she was in Omar’s box-filled shantytown, then watching him from across the road, then noticing how enchanting his smile seemed up close, how beautiful he was. How his eyes had continued to bore into her own even once he’d learned she was not a ‘sister’. Luke grunted in satisfaction, but Emily was lying on a bed while her father read to her, she was looking at yellow flowers swaying in a cool breeze from between the gaps of her mother’s fingers, she was laughing as Cassien chased her through the bushes, she was waving a greeting to Gahiji whose head tilted as he opened his arms for her to dash into, she was home. A current of warmth rushed through her body. The cell had been so cold, so hard, so numbing. But she was warm now. She was balancing on the branch of a tree, and she was warm. She was in a cage where her mother refused to move, and she was warm. She was looking straight up into Jean’s face.
Her eyes locked with his. Green and grey, and the brown of her own. Still she was calm. He pushed once more, then with a final spasm collapsed on top of her, his face nestled between the curves of her bare chest, her arms around him. He exhaled. Her breath matched his. There was peace.
Fleetingly.
A moment later, Luke had released her and immediately they’d moved in simultaneous haste to opposite sides of the kitchen where they scrambled to collect the various layers they’d shed without premeditation, and stole glances at each other, in need of confirmation of their equal nakedness and equal compliance and equal sin. Emily didn’t feel sorry. She didn’t know what she felt, only that she felt, she was indifferent no longer. She pulled on her jeans and watched him, a new sensation brushing delicately across her face, one that she didn’t recognise but made her smile. And lifted her up. By the hairs on her arms. By the spine in her back. By the joints of her legs and the soles of her feet until she would have sworn that only air was beneath them. Outside her body, the room glowed.
Now Emily considered the sin they had committed together. It was certainly a sin. At least it was something that her brothers and the priests and her mother would have disapproved of. She had slept with a man she hardly knew, who was engaged to an unsuspecting girl she’d never met but knew about and Lynn said he loved, a man who was clearly in mourning because his mother was sick upstairs and dying. Emily considered it all. Still, she felt no guilt. She was, she supposed, still more sinned against than sinning. Shakespeare. Her father had read it to her once. It was a story about a king. About madness. Or freedom maybe. Suddenly she felt freedom bestowed upon her, without qualification and without her asking. She felt renewed. And all at once, bruised and half-dressed, she realised that she had survived.
And Emily laughed.
With her head thrown back.
Like the girls from the café by her flat who sat outside on their cigarette breaks.
Luke tucked his shirt back into his trousers and dabbed at his lip with a piece of kitchen tissue. He stared at Emily as she giggled against the cupboards, as though viewing her for the first time, and he shook his head, mumbling to himself over and over, “Like Bathsheba.”
Luke looked away. He seemed not to want Emily to speak, for her to remain only a body. She didn’t press him. Lowering herself back down to the floor, she noticed that one of his shirt buttons had rolled underneath the fridge and she picked it up, offering it to him.
Luke took it quickly. The noise of a door opening above them had wafted down the stairs, then John’s footsteps creaked on the landing.
“I don’t know why - I’ve never - I’m engaged,” Luke rushed suddenly, his angular jaw offset and awkward. “I love her. She’ll never forgive me.” He was crying now, urgently swiping the revealing tears.
“I forgive you,” Emily said calmly, repeating the words that seemed to have started everything, and as the syllables slipped smoothly out of her mouth, the room glowed a little brighter, more like the colour of a rising Rwandan sun.
Emily slept at the foot of Lynn’s bed. There no longer seemed to be a need to hide her feelings from the boys, or from herself. They were simple: she did not want Lynn to die. Her whole body was brimming with the revelation that it was after all possible for her to care and love and feel again, and she would cling to Lynn for as long as she was able. Luke couldn’t look at her, but did not ask her to leave, and John seemed grateful for her presence in the room, as though her being there somehow tempered the reality, made different the memories that must have been flooding them. John was wearing the velvet waistcoat, Emily noticed. The older woman sighed through shallow breaths.
*************
Lynn felt peaceful. She didn’t open her eyes but sensed Emily at her feet, her sons at her side. Somehow, without looking, she could see them all. The yellow tulips on the windowsill stood proud, her favourite colour, their petals pushing further open with every hour that passed, opening, blossoming, dying. Unfulfilled stems. Unless of course, being there for her had always been their destiny.
****************
Okay, Okay, Okay.
Who was Lynn talking to? Did she know that Emily was there? Was she trying to reassure her? Or was she talking to God? Letting Him know that she was ready now, that she understood? Or maybe to her husband, whose picture, Emily noticed, Lynn had removed from the frame where it had always stood and was now lying upside down on the mattress where it had fallen from her weak hand.
Okay, Okay.
The words came less frequently and in raspier tones. Lynn’s eyes didn’t open. The skin around them looked bruised and tired. Her hands that had once been poised enough to paint sweeping, delicate strokes, were lifeless now, contorted strangely towards her chest. Emily reached for them and felt the iciness that had invaded Lynn’s bones. Gently, she rubbed the thin skin and squeezed the fragile palms between her own. Hot now. From the far corner of the room, John wept. Luke sat stoically on the other side of the bed. She noticed the buttons missing on his shirt. His hands twitched again and again and he moved forward and back, forward and back, in and out of the sphere of his mother, though still not touching her. Perhaps it was enough for him to feel her breath, to sense the rising and falling of her chest, to imagine her arms around him.
***********
It was almost Christmas morning. The boys would be up wanting their stockings soon. Philip would be exhausted from spending too long wrapping presents until late, but he would sit up in bed when the boys came running in with their load, and read the letter that Santa had left them written on paper he’d bought especially from an Indian shop so that it looked as though it could have come from the North Pole. A lie they told them, to make things prettier. Full of possibilities. She should get the turkey in the oven. It needed to go in before they left for church and she should peel the potatoes before she put on her good clothes. Perhaps though, she would sleep for just a few minutes more. Something was rustling at the bottom of her bed and the gentle fluttering lulled her into a state of unusual lethargy. The boys would be in soon anyway, bounding onto the bed, and they would wake her. There would still be time for the turkey, there would be time. She would sleep for just a few minutes more, another few minutes. Philip was next to her, his body was warm, it felt good to snuggle up against him. She lay her face onto his bare shoulder and wrapped her arms around his waist, breathing in his familiar scent.
************
Night fell. John and Luke took turns sleeping on the couch in the living room while the other maintained a vigil at their mother’s side. Neither one would go to their childhood beds. Emily rested her forehead gently on the duvet and held on.
At 5.30am, the doorbell woke her. Both boys were camped out again in their mother’s room, but didn’t stir. The tulips had turned slightly away from the window that was now swathed in darkness. Lynn was no longer breathing.
Emily stopped breathing. For a full minute, through the dark, she watched, and waited, then finally she opened her hands and let Lynn’s cold fingers slip from between them.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang again. Dreamlike, rising slowly and stretching her neck from where it had been hunched too long, Emily made her way down the staircase and acknowledged the swelling pain in her throat. Somehow, the sensation of it comforted her. She reached the hard, wood floor and padded across it quietly. On the edge of the doormat at the front of the house, Emily noticed another one of Luke’s shirt buttons. She stooped to pick it up before opening the door. Later, she would give it to Luke to repair. Such little things would go on, they always did. The world that morning was unbearably sad, but at least it finally felt like a reality, the pain was at least fresh, and the universe was rational again.
Then, there on the step in front of her, was a young, blonde-haired woman she realised immediately that she had seen before. Emily struggled to place her. Her blue eyes were still, but nervous, her skin was pale but for a spattering of freckles. Her wispy hair flew about behind her. And then she knew. Emily had seen this woman not in the flesh, but on a canvas. The effect had been luminous. And the luminous woman said her name was Vera.