11
Anna Dupree
Rage. Oh, such rage. Like a blazing column in her chest. How dare Queenie? How dare she? Maureen had not felt this way since the book group. The moon was a silver-white fragment, flooding the land in cold light. She followed the path of her own shadow, her driving shoes stumbling over the sand. Ahead, the skin of the sea heaved and waves rolled out of the dark. A salt smell pricked her nose and the wind came at her face. The noise was terrible. She crossed to the end of the bay and made her way up the steep wood steps, grasping at marram grass, but it burned her hands and that hurt too. She moved past the closed-up chalets toward the garden. Her car was parked at the golf course, ready to go, with her suitcase and handbag. Queenie could do whatever she liked for other people, she could even take Harold if she must, but she could not have Maureen’s son. She could not have David.
In the dark, the garden was transformed. Things generally became smaller once you knew them but moonlight shone among the driftwood figures, magnifying each one. The wind made sounds she did not know, hissing and seething, followed briefly by silence. Maureen felt her way between the sculptures. A flutter of something caught her hand and she flinched. All around her rose the statues and pieces of driftwood and she was frightened, as if they were watching. She needed to get this over and done with. She needed to hurry.
Maureen moved toward the figure that she knew now to be her son. She placed her hands firmly on either side of the V-shape, as though grasping a pair of horns, and she pulled. Nothing happened. The wood slipped through her fingers, grazing them. She tried again. Same thing. If only she had gloves.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, if that’s what you want.”
This time she stooped right over, cradling him beneath her so that the V-shape was either side of her body and she was at the very middle, and she wrenched yet again, really hard, but her balance wasn’t right. Instead of freeing him, she lost her grip again and this time she stumbled backward. The ground seemed to shoot away from beneath her, sending her down. She heard a sharp crack and experienced an unforgiving pain. Oh, God, she thought. Please let it not be my son.
It took moments to work out what had happened. Moments that didn’t flow from one another but happened in a more staccato way like a series of full stops. Everything was in the wrong place. She was on her back. Sky. She was looking up at the night sky. Stars, tiny and flickering. Something had slammed against the back of her neck. The vertebrae of her spine felt numb. She tried to breathe. It hurt. She stopped. She moved what might be her leg. It was her leg. That hurt, too. She couldn’t be sure she still had toes. She tried to move and heard a noise like an animal stuck underground and realized it was coming from herself. She stopped trying to sit. She stayed lying still. She took one breath. She took another. She was beginning to feel cold.
“Maureen,” she said. “Move.”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t move her arms or her feet or her head because the moment she tried, there it was, astonishing pain in her neck. Suddenly all she wanted was to close her eyes and sleep.
“Maureen,” she said again, louder this time. “Move, you fool. Move.”
It was no good. She could be as impatient with herself as she liked, but it made no difference. She couldn’t do this. She was in too much pain.
“Help!” she called. “Help!” Nothing answered or arrived.
The driftwood figure that was Harold was only a few feet away. Maureen shuffled toward it, bit by bit, still on her back. Her body seemed to be made of fragile pieces that were badly put together. Keeping her neck rigid, she tried to reach for the wooden structure, but sparks of pain stopped her. If she didn’t move her neck, she could do it. She rolled over. She clung on with one arm, then the other, dragging herself to her knees, all the while not moving her neck, holding it as if it were welded to her shoulder blades, then crawling herself upward, until she managed to stand. She leaned her body against the driftwood piece. If she as much as twitched a muscle in her neck, the pain flashed.
There was nothing to do but wait for daylight. She stayed with her spine pressed against Harold because without him she knew she would fall apart, like a pile of stones, and she tried to imagine him behind her as she washed the dishes at the kitchen sink, but it was no good. She was caught in the very middle of Queenie’s Garden, like a living relic, while the figures and statues watched her and whispered. All she could think of was the night in the bookshop.
Had she known? Did some part of her head know what was going to happen even when she bought her ticket for the event? “Oh. Don’t you just love that book?” the bookshop owner said, and she pressed it to her chest as if it were attached to her vital organs. No. Maureen did not love that book. Reading it for her new book group, she had felt so wounded—she had no idea where to place herself. It was a story about a woman whose twenty-year-old son hanged himself. The only reason she finished the damn thing was because she wanted to be part of a book group. Otherwise she would have flung it out of the window. It was a vile book.
On the night, the shop was packed. Maureen chose a place at the end of a row, wanting to be alone, but an assistant asked last minute if she wouldn’t mind moving in case there were latecomers. She had squeezed past other people to a seat in the very middle, and her new acquaintances from the book group—Deborah, Alice, and so on—were smiling at her in a polite way from their rows. Maureen’s heart felt tight, as if someone had wound it in plastic bands. She was finding it hard to breathe.
To her surprise, the writer was even younger than she expected. She might only have been in her late twenties, wearing a leopard-print dress, a pair of cowboy boots and a wide belt that accentuated how neat and small she was. She turned to the audience and the first thing she did was bow her head with her hands clasped in prayer. Oh, Maureen hated this safari/cowgirl writer.
Throughout the evening, she had a strange feeling of not being there, as if she were dreaming, or as if she was remembering a bookshop from a dream. Her heart still felt compressed, while strangely the rest of her body felt emptied. Almost without any bones at all. The writer spoke about the book and her life, and gave some observations about grief that made the room go silent. The bookshop owner said this had been the most important and moving interview of her life, and after that there were questions from the audience. Someone asked whether the writer believed in God, and the writer said she believed in what we could not see, and the audience nodded and a few wept. All the while Maureen remained absolutely still, both present and somehow not there at all. Then a woman in the audience put up her hand and said, “What I want to ask…”
A shuffling of chairs. Rows of faces turning, wary, confused. The owner saying she was sorry, but no one could hear, and a young man with a mic now wriggling past knees to get to Maureen. Because she was the woman in the audience with her hand in the air. She was the one whose legs were shaking as she took to her feet and whose voice was too shrill—but at the same time it did not seem to be her.
“What I want to ask, Anna Dupree, is how dare you?”
Maureen could no longer recall her exact words. The memory was a series of stains on her mind, as if a shutter had come down between the place in her brain where words formed and the other where they took on meaning. She was rigid, on the edge of a void. She knew she had asked if Anna Dupree had ever lost a child, if she really thought she knew what that was like, when look at her, she was barely old enough to have a baby, let alone a full-grown adult son. She asked exactly what right she had to write about something she did not know and sell millions of copies all over the world to other people who did not know either. Had she called Anna Dupree a tourist? Probably. Had she accused everyone else in the bookshop of being a tourist? Chances were, yes, she’d done that too. Now she had started speaking she didn’t feel able to stop, though stop she must, but to stop would mean there would be consequences, there would be the terrible thing that must happen next after a woman says something like this, so she kept plowing on, closer and closer to the void. A member of the book group with pretty hoop earrings had shaken her head, as if to say, No, no, Maureen, please don’t do this to yourself.
Meanwhile Anna Dupree listened with her hand to her mouth. Her face looked stretched.
Maureen wanted to leave. More specifically, she wanted not to have come in the first place. She wanted none of this to have happened but she was stuck in the middle of the shop, in a jungle of fold-up chairs and kind people who were doing their best to look elsewhere, with her face so red she could feel it burning, and she wanted to say, I am sorry, I did not mean this, but she had already said it. It was too late. Besides. She did mean it. That was the trouble. She really did. Every terrible word.
A difficult child.
She made her way to the door, crushing her knees into the backs of chairs, pushing past people’s elbows and shoulders and, as she hit the warm air of the summer evening, she overheard someone murmur, “Yes, that’s his wife,” and she knew they were talking about her and Harold. She knew she would never come back to the bookshop. She knew that when emails came about the book group, she would feel so conflicted that she would delete them without a first glance. She didn’t want to pick up another damn book, not ever. She knew, too, that people would move away from her in the supermarket—even though Harold would say she was only imagining that, which irritated her because it made her sound paranoid. She would shop online instead.
A few months later, Maureen read an interview in a Sunday magazine where Anna Dupree talked about her worldwide bestselling book and how she was going to stop writing fiction because of something a reader had said to her. I realized I could not make it up any more. Maureen buried the magazine in the recycling bin. “Serves you right,” she said. But she no longer knew if she was talking to herself or Anna Dupree.
It was not the worst thing, what she had done that night, just as the unnamed figure in Queenie’s Garden was not the saddest. But it was worse than a leaking bladder, worse even than falling as you tried to steal something from a garden, because Maureen had laid her deepest loss at the feet of the world and experienced nothing but an affirmation of her left-outness and her shame. David’s loss was her secret. It was the rock against which she was forever shattered. And Maureen was a loose cannon, firing herself in all directions. She was sundered from life, irrevocably and completely. She would never be free.
At first light, Maureen shuffled her way through the garden. The figures and sculptures were barely shadows. She could just about walk if she didn’t move her neck but any slight turn of her head sent pain shooting down her arms. The rising sun gave orange and pink flashes and the sea held its light and so did an inlet of water winding its passage through the sand. The beach was littered with kelp, their roots like knuckles, and driftwood, and plastic bottles. She felt weak. She couldn’t remember when she had last eaten. In the distance, sunlight struck the windows of the line of houses of Embleton, and briefly they flamed. She longed to speak to Harold but he would be asleep and, anyway, she had no idea how to explain what she had been trying to do. She didn’t even know how to get into the car.
In the end Maureen lowered herself, piece by piece. She started the engine, and inched the car at a snail’s pace away from the bay. She could manage if she didn’t look down at the pedals or the gear stick, though she couldn’t move her neck either to check her rearview mirror. All those years of holding her head high and now it was doing it all by itself. She concentrated on the road ahead, forcing herself to stay awake, but the pain was coming in wheeling patterns that made her drowsy. She knew she should turn round and drive back but she could not bear another night in that guesthouse. She heard the roar of a van behind, too close. As he overtook, the driver swore and shouted at her to get off the road.
It was too much. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know where she was going. The truth was, she could go where she liked, but she would never get away from herself. Because it wasn’t Anna Dupree she hated. Not really. It wasn’t even her damn book, or the many people who loved it. It was the fact that this young woman had been able to conjure something beautiful out of grief, while Maureen, who lived and breathed it like a full-time professional, could not. And now she knew Queenie had found a way to do the same with her garden.
Maureen pulled over at the next garage and rang the only person she could think of.