Diana
2016
It doesn’t look like a scene of death. It looks like paradise. Wooden cabins dream in autumn sunshine, goats graze by the lapping waters of a lake. Even the hills seem placid, luxuriating in their pelt of native bush. She can’t hear a man-made sound: only the distant chuckle of a stream, the fluting and whistling of birds. The valley is submerged in a blue haze of peace.
Paradise.
Or not. Gaudy plastic stirs among the flax bushes. Police tape: a jaunty, jarring souvenir of tragedy. There are other signs too, if you look for them. Empty buildings, marker pegs on the beach. The authorities set up camp here, she knows, and stayed for weeks. Squads of divers plunged into the lake; dog handlers combed the shadowy folds of bush. They even used a drone to take aerial footage. She imagines them tramping around in heavy-booted incongruity, coaxing and bullying statements from people who desperately want to forget.
Until a few years ago, Diana had never heard of Justin Calvin. She’d never dreamed that events in a valley on the other side of the world could decimate her family. She and Mike were pretty bog-standard people in those days. They’d been married longer than the national average, got through his army years and come out the other side. Not rolling in money, not struggling. A redbrick- and-stucco semi in South London. Most of their worry, their focus and hope were centred on their two daughters. Nobody had gone off the rails. Not unless you counted Tara’s suspension for smoking behind the gym.
No sign; no sign at all of what was to come.
There’s a new sound among the cabins. It’s strong and clear and utterly unexpected. Someone is playing a piano: rippling, complex triplets with a haunting melody woven through them. A pair of fantails swoop and dive around Diana’s head as though riding on the currents of the song. In this strange and beautiful place, after so much loss, the music seems to speak of appalling sadness. It makes her want to cry.
She has a photo of Cassy, taken as they waved her off from Heathrow. One final picture. One final smile. A butterfly in a glass case. Have fun, they were yelling, in the moment it was taken. Watch out for man-eating kiwis! Diana has used it as her desktop background ever since. She greets her elder daughter in the morning, and last thing at night, and a hundred times a day.
The girl smiling out of the screen is dear and familiar and . . . well, she’s just Cassy. Voluptuous, long-legged, quick to blush. A thick plait hangs over one shoulder, an in-flight bag over the other. Her nose isn’t quite straight, never has been since it was broken by a rogue hockey ball, but there’s something arresting about the dark blue eyes and flicked-up lashes. She’s always had that wistful expression: a downturn at the corners of her eyes, as though she knows something that others don’t.
My God. Did we really make jokes about killer kiwis? If I’d seen what was around the corner, I’d have begged her not to get on that plane.
Across the lake, the volcano is a sleeping giant. The peace has a hypnotic quality. It stills your soul. It slows your breath. No wonder the media has become obsessed with this glorious wilderness. No wonder the police struggled to understand what happened here. No wonder the nation is still searching its soul, wondering who to blame.
She’s often wondered the same thing herself. There have been moments over the years when she’s found she has stopped. Just stopped dead. She was meant to be walking to work or feeding the cat. Instead she is far away, arms limp by her sides, gazing at the past.
It’s like watching a milk bottle falling off a table. It rolls and falls in nightmarish slow motion and yet it seems unstoppable. There was a time when the family was whole, and a time when it hit the ground, milk and shattered glass spraying across the tiles. In between is the moment when she should have caught it.