There is a staircase to our attic, steep and narrow and lined with towers of books and heaps of starched, folded bed linen that hasn’t touched a bed for a decade. There is barely room to put one foot in front of another, and each step feels like it could be the one that sends you toppling.
I suppose, long ago, the attic might have been used as an extra bedroom, or even, when the house was first built, for a nanny or maid.
In my lifetime, though, it’s been a mysterious but uninteresting domain used primarily as a dumping ground by my mother. A place to abandon shameful clutter, safe where nobody could see it. Coming up here was discouraged—and the few times I did, it was so boring that the whole concept soon lost any sense of intrigue.
This was my mother’s realm, and one she protected fiercely. My father, a tax accountant for a long-gone company that manufactured fishing rods, was only ever allowed in to store his old files—and that hardly sounds like something enticing and magical, even to a curious child. Mum rarely disagreed with my dad, but she would stare him into the ground if he ever suggested using her top-of-the-house empire for anything else.
Mainly, she used it as an extra space for her sewing and crafting materials, back in the days when she had the dexterity and the energy to engage in such things. Before the strokes. She’d climb up here, bundles of fabric clutched to her chest, trailing cotton behind her.
Today is the first time I’ve ventured up these steps in years. I have never felt the need—the house was big enough without adding an extra layer to feel lonely in.
Michael follows behind me, and we are both carefully placing our feet, both silent as we cling to the wooden handrail and try not to displace any of the random items stacked at the sides of each step.
“Why do I feel like we’re doing something super naughty?” he whispers. “And why am I whispering?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper back as I narrowly avoid slipping on a pile of back copies of Homes & Gardens that are at least twenty years old, “but I am too!”
“It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?” he says, stopping behind me at the top of the stairs, so close I can hear his breathing. “Like there might be some kind of Miss Havisham thing going on up here? Or we might find the desiccated corpse of Juan, the handsome Guatemalan gardener who went missing in the summer of seventy-nine . . .”
I pause, hand on the doorknob, and look back at him.
“What?” he splutters, looking outraged.
“You—you’re wasted on the law, Michael. You should give it up and become a writer.”
“That’s the plan,” he replies, “eventually. I just need to get a year behind me, so I can become the new gay John Grisham, and be able to put ‘former lawyer’ at the start of each book so people take me seriously . . . Anyway, I rarely say this, but enough of me—are you going to open that door or what? I love you dearly, Jess, but I don’t want my face to be this close to your arse ever again.”
I laugh, and push open the door. It’s dark inside the attic, and although I’d never admit it, I am feeling a tiny bit spooked, and also a tiny bit inebriated.
My hand flails around inside the space behind the door, clutching for the pull string, and soon the room is flooded with the tinny light of a single dangling bulb, hanging shadeless from the roof.
I climb up the final step, and emerge into the tallest part of the room, where you can just about stand upright without banging your head on one of the wooden roof beams. I can, at least—Michael is well over six feet, though, so he hunches his shoulders and shuffles forward. He was a weirdly tall child, always slightly stooped in the way of the self-conscious adolescent, and the hunched shuffle looks familiar on him.
The air here is musty and dense with dust; every object is layered with it, draped with crumbling cobwebs. Every surface we touch displaces clumps of gray that float through the unnatural lighting.
My nostrils twitch as they try to defend themselves against the onslaught, every breath lining my throat with an oddly tangible sensation of being coated in grit. There’s an old run of carpet on the floorboards, which looks like an offcut from the one on the stairs, and each footstep I take sends up another small puff of grime.
I glance at Michael, see his face contorted in distaste. He doesn’t like getting dirty, and he’s wearing his funeral clothes. I can imagine him running through a mental checklist of ways he’s going to scrub himself clean later, as he scans the room searching for signs of asbestos or killer mold.
I look around, see the hazily familiar shapes of the filing cabinets my dad kept his records in. I run my finger over the dull metal, wondering why my mother kept them after he died. It seems unlikely that the tax accounts of a now-defunct firm will ever be needed again. Maybe it was too much trouble to move them—maybe it was a reminder of him. Another thing I’ll never know.
Michael pulls one of the cabinets open, then sneezes repeatedly as a dust grenade explodes in his face, snorting with each rapid-fire “ah-choo!”
“Bless you, times a million,” I say, reaching out to poke one finger into the now-opened drawer. The paper piled inside is yellow and rotting, ragged at the edges, garnished with a long-dead spider curled up into a brittle ball. I snatch my hand away, and Michael quickly slams the cabinet shut, as though it contains a filthy secret he’d rather not face.
“Well, this is quite a treat . . .” he mutters under his breath. “I’m going to need a very long shower after this adventure. Both physical and mental. Possibly some kind of spiritual spa day.”
I nod. He’s right, and I know exactly what he means. It’s not just the dust seeping inside us, soaking through our clothes and our skin; it’s the smell. The smell of mildew and damp dark corners and past lives, now forgotten. The smell of deaths large and small, and abandoned things clustered together in communal sorrow.
I see my mother’s old sewing machine in one corner, down where the roof slopes, and am instantly struck by a memory so vivid it feels like yesterday: a sunny morning, the sewing machine set up on her table in her room at the back of the house. I was in the garden, playing in the imaginative and overly cerebral way of the only child, having conversations with worms and making friends with the wood lice that lived beneath the tree stump.
I must have been very young, maybe four or five. I remember looking up, at the big bay window into the house, and seeing my mother there, at her sewing machine. She’d stopped whatever it was she was doing, and was just sitting still, watching me. For a split second, I felt like the most loved and adored creature on the whole planet. I broke the spell when I waved, and she immediately went back to her work, as though she was embarrassed by the fact that I’d caught her out in an unguarded moment.
Now, the sewing machine sits in its own dark pool of dim light, the once-gleaming black and gold dull and tarnished. It’s surrounded by piles of material, scraps and lengths, different colors, different textures, half-finished clothes and curtains and projects. A feast for moths.
She stopped sewing long before she had her stroke. Truth be told, she stopped doing most things—it was as though she simply had no capacity for living left in her. As though all the traumas I’d brought to her existence, along with the early death of my father, emptied her out. The strokes were just a sequel to the fact that she’d already died in any way that mattered.
I feel the sting of tears, for myself, for her, for everything that could have been that never was and never will be. I squeeze them away—there will be time for them later. When I am alone in the bedroom of the house that is now mine, beginning a life I have no idea how to live.
Michael is delicately rummaging in a pile of photo albums, his curiosity outweighing his disgust at having to touch such determinedly grubby objects. He pulls one open, and I hear the creak of a spine fracturing as he pulls a “sorry” face.
“Jackpot!” he exclaims, looking up at me with a grin. “Jess in the buff! Looking pretty damn hot in that swimsuit, babe!”
I laugh, and glance at the picture. It’s in one of those albums with the sticky-backed pages and cellophane. The kind that members of Michael’s digital-first generation probably never use.
The pages are yellow, the plastic crinkled. It is indeed a photo of me, sitting in a blow-up paddling pool in the garden, wearing one of those old-fashioned swimming costumes that has a little frilly skirt around it.
I look slightly worried, which tended to be my default setting as a child. The eighties was an era of “proper” cameras, and getting your picture taken was more of a big deal—my father was a stickler for not wasting film, and spent about ten minutes preparing me for each shot. No candids in this family—just a stressed-looking toddler.
I feel sad for baby me, frowning away in her frilly swimsuit, as though she has a vague premonition of all that is to come. I move on, flipping through pages of photos: my mother, my father—never together, as one of them was always behind the camera. Me on my first day at school, still with that same borderline tearful expression.
Michael produces other albums from the same cardboard box, shaking each one off and whipping up a whirlwind of dust. He provides an amusing commentary as he proceeds to take a secondhand journey through my childhood, delighted by my disastrous teeth and gawky build and continuously strained expression.
“You look like you need a really big poo in every single one of these photos,” he says, as he turns the pages. “Were you a constipated infant?”
“Yep,” I reply, “pretty much a poster child for laxatives. It was . . . well, they were different times. We didn’t live our whole lives on social media back then. Nobody took pictures of their dinner and showed it to their friends. Nobody did selfies. These are snapshots, not a twenty-four-hour monitoring device like your phone.”
“Thank God!” he exclaims, placing a hand on his heart in mock horror. “This stuff would single-handedly close down Instagram!”
He begins a new album, and I see the teenage me: nineties combat pants that looked really cool on TLC but less so on my skinny legs, a khaki vest top, red-and-black flannel shirt hanging over it. As soon as I was out of the house and away from my parents’ watchful gaze, I completed the ensemble with big hoop earrings and badly applied makeup.
I was trying to look fashionably edgy, but only looked confused—hoping people would think I was into grunge because the Seattle scene seemed cooler, but knowing my secret love was the Spice Girls. I was the kind of kid who yearned to have adventures like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but was actually a bit scared of getting on the bus.
At least I’m actually smiling in this one, though—a genuine smile, not the mouth-twisted semi-grimaces I’d tried to force for previous pictures.
I remember that photo being taken—my first day at sixth form college. My first day away from the girls’ grammar school I’d attended for too many years, my first day out of the hideous green uniform and pleated skirts. The first day I decided to re-create myself as someone funkier, hipper, generally more awesome.
The day I decided I would be Jess, not Jessica, and that I would have a secret life that was rich in wonder. The world was mine for the taking, and this was the first step along a road that would undoubtedly be paved with amazements and magic. No surprise I was smiling.
I had to fight long and hard to escape that grammar school and those pleated skirts. My parents were horror-struck at the idea of me going to the college—a big brick-and-concrete building almost an hour away on the bus, on a circuitous route that snaked its way through our village and two other small towns before arriving in the outskirts of Manchester.
It wasn’t even in Manchester itself—but close enough for my parents to see it as a den of iniquity, where I could potentially meet drummers from bands, or men with tattoos, or girls who wore choker chains, or many other Satanic forces that might pollute their baby girl. Looking back, I have more sympathy with them—I’d led a sheltered life, and what I saw as stifling and controlling, they saw as protective.
Fighting wasn’t something that I did often, but that summer I was ferocious and determined and stubborn in a way that I’d never been before. Either they let me do my A-levels at the college, or I wouldn’t do them. They eventually relented, a decision I immediately gave them cause to regret—the “we told you so” to end them all.
A lot of things happened to me after that first day. After that photo being taken. Everything changed, and nothing was ever the same. My whole world spun out of control, into the best and then the worst of times.
I take the album from Michael’s hands and gently close it, whooshing dust up toward the dangling lightbulb, where it does a polka in the pale yellow gleam.
I’m not ready to revisit that part of my life. I might never be—but most definitely not on the day of my mother’s funeral.
He looks at me, frowning as he tries to figure out why I’ve drawn a halt to the nostalgia trip.
“Long story,” I say simply. “For another time. Plus I don’t want you to see me when I went through my fake hip-hop phase.”
Michael nods, but I can tell he understands that there is more to my decision than bad fashion choices. I bite my lip and look at him pleadingly, willing him to let it go, to skip ahead, to let me wriggle off the hook of my own past.
“OK,” he says, putting the album back in the box. “We can laugh at that another day, Queen Latifah.”
He closes the box again, and I reach out to touch his hand in gratitude.
We both pause, awkward and almost embarrassed—we’ve been raised in the same way, and casual tactility is not included on the list of socially acceptable behaviors. It’s like we’re teetering on the edge of a deep, dark well, and neither of us quite knows how to react.
Michael responds by moving on, coming up with various treasures, which he displays and we examine together.
There’s a framed picture of my parents’ wedding in the seventies, both of them stiff and subdued, Michael’s mum, Rosemary, surprisingly young and pretty in her bridesmaid’s dress.
My dad’s hiking boots, still coated in dried mud so old it could bear fossils.
A collection of cookery books, dog-eared, and notes scribbled on various recipes in my mother’s neat handwriting, stains and splodges on the paper testifying to long kitchen use.
A small wooden chest, crammed with costume jewelry that I never saw her wear. A container full of candles, some intact, some half burned, the once-dripping wax frozen in hardened globules. Old Christmas decorations stored in an age-tattered bin bag, their glitter faded.
“It’s all been very tame so far,” Michael says, “and frankly so sad I feel like watching Les Misérables to cheer me up.”
He reaches out to lift a heavy burgundy velvet curtain with gold tassels that seems to be being used as a drape to hide another pile of clutter.
“Though I suppose if there’s anything good in here, it’s bound to be behind the red velvet and the gold rope . . . This must be the VIP section!”
He throws the fabric to one side with a dramatic “ta-da!,” and we stare through the ensuing dust cloud together, waiting for it to clear. Behind it, we are rewarded with a profoundly disappointing display of two broken lawn chairs with mangled metal legs folded up on themselves, a mismatched set of dinner plates, and one old shoebox.
The shoebox is one of my dad’s—I recognize the brand; he wore the same formal brogues for work every day of his adult life. Always black, never anything as outrageous as tan or brown, always from the same expensive shop in London. He hardly lived the life of Oscar Wilde, but he did like to buy nice shoes.
Michael scoops up the box, and opens the lid. Inside, we both see something wrapped in faded pink tissue paper. I can’t tell what it is, but it’s definitely not brogues.
He raises his eyebrows, purses his lips, and makes an excited “ooooh!” sound at our discovery.
“This is it,” he says mock seriously. “I can feel it in my bones. It’s a diamond tiara. Or a voodoo doll. Or a collection of fake passports and a bundle of foreign currency because your dad was a secret CIA assassin. Something life-changing, anyway.”
I roll my eyes, and take the box from his hands, feeling its surprising weight. I pull away the crinkling tissue paper, and look at what lies beneath.
I see a pile of items, of different shapes and sizes, heaped over one another. It all looks like correspondence or paperwork of some kind, with crooked edges and colored corners and tiny glimpses of writing.
Faceup on the very top is a birthday card. A birthday card for a little girl, with a cartoon teddy bear with a blue nose on the front. The bear looks a bit sad, even though he’s holding a bunch of red balloons. Written across the card, in bumpy 3-D foil, are the words “For my daughter,” and a big number 5.
This is not the kind of card my parents ever bought for me. This was not their style at all. I stare at it, this brightly shaded thing, stacked on the top of more cards and letters and postcards, all poking out at strangely pointed angles, jostling for attention: Look at me, look at me, look at me . . . Don’t you want to know what I am? Don’t you want to gouge out my secrets?
The card starts to tremble, which I eventually realize is because my hands are shaking.
Part of me wants to put it back in the box, buried beneath a layer of tissue paper and cowardice; to close the lid and hide it away beneath a broken deck chair and pretend I never saw it.
Part of me knows I’m being silly—it’s just an old birthday card, surely? I don’t remember it, but that’s not surprising if I was only five. It must have been for me. It must be mine—because the only alternative I can think of feels like a phosphorous grenade igniting inside my skull.
My shaking fingers are moving in front of my eyes, the sad-faced bear blurring. Everything blurring, even sound. I can hear Michael talking, but can’t differentiate between his words and white noise. My brain is buzzing, and my eyelids are blinking fast, and I feel distinctly separate from the world around me.
I open the card. I see the handwriting, all scrawls and loops and passion. I read the message.
“For our darling angel, Gracie. Us three against the world. I love you both. Now and always, Daddy Joe Joe xxx.”
I tell myself I must be wrong. That it can’t be from him. That he was long gone by the time Grace would have been five. That he’d left me—left us—swimming away from the wreckage of our lives and moving on to new harbors.
I prod the contents of the package, jumbling things from side to side. I see that everything in here, in this volatile box-of-not-brogues, is either a birthday card, or something else that bears the same looping handwriting. That all of this—every single thing in this box—is from him.
The meaning of this registers both instantaneously and slowly. One end of my brain intuits it in a nanosecond; the other end trundles slowly toward it. Eventually, they meet each other, and spell out a few inescapable facts in flashing neon light.
They spell out the fact that he hadn’t swum away. That he hadn’t abandoned us.
And that, ipso facto, means that my parents had lied. It means that everything that I’ve believed to be true for so long is based on that lie. My whole life has been lived under the shadow of that lie, starved of light, quietly surviving, never thriving.
It means that the people I thought loved me the most, my mother and father, deceived me on the most sacred of subjects.
I feel the strength drain suddenly and completely from my legs, as though someone has chopped off my feet and all the muscles and tendons and every essential thing that holds me together have poured out of my body. My throat clamps against my own saliva. The skin on my face burns suddenly, and I know that I need to sit down before I fall.
Michael, by my side, takes the card from my passive marshmallow grip and reads it.
“Who on earth is Joe Joe?” he asks.