BEING HOME WAS weird. She felt like she’d been away for much longer than a few hours. She kept on walking around touching things: OscanIrie’s toys, the vase of flowers on the kitchen island, the soft face of her childhood teddy bear. Thinking that she might not have been able to touch any of this again. She might have been gone, nothing more than an absence.
OscanIrie were at their dad’s for a few days, but it felt as if they were going to be back any minute. Oscar’s wellies had toppled over by the front door, and Iris’s beaker sat on the draining board. Lydia ran her finger over the marks Iris had made in indelible marker on the tablecloth. If she’d jumped, would it have felt this way for the people she left behind? As if she were about to come back? She remembered it feeling that way when Dad had died. It was the reason she’d waited for the post and spirited away the letters. She’d been angry, as a child, at Jo for clearing Dad’s stuff away: getting rid of his clothes, his books, his shoes by the door. But picturing herself in her father’s place, she started to understand the reason for it. That brief moment of hope when you saw something that belonged to your dead loved one, that split second of believing they were still there, must be the worst torture in the world.
She wore pyjamas and slippers, as if she were ill. She kept on hugging her mum, all the time, even when her mum was in the middle of something – making tea or whatever. She was taller than her mother – she’d never even noticed it happening, growing taller than her mother – but she ducked her head under Jo’s chin as if she were still a little girl and inhaled her scent of rose perfume. She kept curling up on the sofa with Honor as well. Honor was bony and you had to be careful of her broken wrist, but she touched Lydia’s face and hair and hands in a way that made Lydia feel understood. It was Honor’s way of seeing.
‘Why didn’t you tell us you were blind?’ she asked her grandmother.
Her fingers trailed over Lydia’s mouth and chin. ‘I was afraid that admitting it would change everything. I would no longer be allowed to remain in my home; I would be seen as useless and vulnerable. And I was ashamed.’
She tilted Lydia’s face towards hers. Lydia could see now, that Granny H’s eyes moved too much; that she was looking out of the sides rather than the centre, looking at parts of things instead of wholes. She’d thought it was diffidence, before. It was sort of amazing how knowing one simple fact about a person could change your entire perspective of what they were like.
‘Did you feel that way,’ Granny H asked her, ‘about how you are? Ashamed? Afraid?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But now it’s the truth that’s important.’ Honor lowered her voice. ‘Except about those flapjacks your mother made this morning. I had to hide mine under a cushion before it broke all my teeth.’
‘Mostly I felt alone,’ confessed Lydia. ‘All alone, even when I was with other people.’
‘Yes. Loneliness is powerful and terrible.’
She nodded against her grandmother’s meagre shoulder, feeling her fingers seeing her. Said, ‘I’ll read to you. You must miss reading.’
‘We shall have to teach you Russian.’
Now that she was without the mask she’d worn for so many years, she felt raw and delicate, like newly formed skin. But clean, in a way. She thought of the things that had been said to her and they still hurt, but it was at a distance almost. It was like the idea of exams going on without her: something that belonged to a different girl, a different life, somewhere far away from this house with her mother and her grandmother and her. Those moments on the bridge had been more real.
She would have to go out into the world without her mask soon. Not yet. But soon. She’d stand up straight, like Granny Honor did. She’d believe that things would get better, like Mum did.
And yet the ache for Avril didn’t go away. It stayed with her all the time. Sometimes it melted into the background, but mostly it was a sharp knife in her middle. The person she had lost; the person she was never getting back.