three threeI was dizzy in that room. I felt faint with disbelief. I held on to the seat of my chair to stay upright. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t absorb any of it. This is London, I kept telling myself. Pall Mall. A room at the Royal Society. That’s where I am. During the two hours I sat in that room, my eyes tried to dodge the screen in front of me. “Stephen Lissenburgh Memorial Lecture,” it said. Steve?
It’s over now, the lecture that Steve’s research institute organized. I could only gaze vacantly at the speaker on the podium. I didn’t hear many words. I was calm while chatting with that crowd at the reception after, though, had a glass of white wine, a quail egg. Maybe I didn’t look stunned.
Now I am with friends at a bar near the Royal Society, the ICA bar. It was my idea to come here. I suggested it, not stopping to think that this is somewhere Steve and I often came.
I am in England? I can’t grasp the truth of this. This is the first time I’ve come back to England, and it is now almost two years since the wave. But the reality of being here eludes me, I can’t focus, I am dazed. And I want to stay this way. If I have too much clarity, I will be undone, I fear. I was in a panic when I walked up Piccadilly on the way to the lecture this evening. I didn’t look around, wanting to somehow disregard my familiar surroundings. I am only staying a couple of nights, I reassure myself, I won’t even notice I’ve been back. And our home in North London, even the thought horrifies me, I won’t be going anywhere near it.
But I am at the ICA bar? I don’t want to know this. Steve and I would come here before going to a movie at the Curzon Soho. We’d have a drink here first and stroll up Regent Street. At the cinema, Steve always had a black coffee, I had a ginger and honey ice cream. Now I stop these thoughts. Because I am about to say, no we don’t have time for another drink. The film starts at seven. Let’s get a move on, Steve.
It was the light that did it. It was the angle of the sun at five o’clock on a Sunday evening in early March on a country road somewhere in Shropshire. It was those sinking rays slanting against a yew tree and glinting on the wing mirror on my side of the car, dazzling my eyes. The hawthorn hedgerows on either side of the road throw long shadows in this light. This light that is so very familiar unexpectedly makes me forget. It makes me forget that I am driving back from Wales with my friends David and Carole. It sends me into our car, Steve at the wheel, the boys at the back. The four of us drive the gentle curves of an English country road as we have done innumerable times before.
For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive. Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely. But now I am unmoored simply by the familiar light. This is different from remembering them, warily, as I usually do. This is tumbling into them, into our life, into our car. This is slipping up. I can see the tiny star-like crack on the windscreen made by the pebble that shot out of the road and smashed into the glass no sooner than we’d bought the car. The AA road atlas by my feet is trodden and creased. Vik sits behind me, Malli behind Steve. There are two Ribena cartons between them, drained empty so their sides are curved in, the last drops of blackcurrant juice leaking out the straws and staining the seat. Also, a spit-covered core of an apple that one of them could easily have thrown out the window instead of leaving there to roll off and rot under the accelerator pedal. We have to get home and fix their dinner. The rush of Sunday evenings.
Was that a dead pheasant on the side of the road? They are not here, they would have noticed it if they were. They would have said something. Yuk. Cool. When do you think it got killed, Dad? They are not here. But I don’t want to emerge out of them. I want to hover inside our metallic blue Renault Mégane Scénic. Why am I allowing this? I will have to crawl back into reality soon, and that will be agony. Maybe it is the somnolent warmth of Dave’s car that entices me to forget in this way. Now I slip up again, this time voluntarily.
They are sitting quietly at the back, not kicking each other’s shins for a change, no burping contests. Vik sees a gush of starlings wing the air, his eyes trail the whirr of grey filling the sky. But what he really wants to see is a sparrow hawk. Or, better still, a sparrow hawk sparring with a crow. Malli’s nodding off, he always does this in the car, but it’s too late to nap now. “Vik, talk to Malli and keep him awake, sweetheart. He won’t sleep tonight if he dozes off now.” They will run up the stairs to our front door and keep ringing the doorbell even though they know there is no one in. They will fight about whose turn it is to pee first. Steve will suggest that all three of them pee together, and they will do so gleefully. I will ask why one of them can’t use the other toilet upstairs. And I will tell them not to spray the whole bloody place. When they are done, they will use the blue and white hand towel to mop up the floor a little and then hang the towel back on the rail. I will hear their giggles over the gulping and gurgling of the flush. But that’s when we get home. We are still in the car, and the boys are both sitting in their socks because Steve has flung their muddy shoes into the boot.
Malli is proud of his new hiking shoes, brown Timberlands with thick soles, just like Daddy’s shoes. He didn’t complain and ask to be carried when we walked in the woods today. You have the best shoes, Mal, you lead the way, we told him. He said the small red tags on the back of his shoes glowed like lights and that would stop us getting lost, even on the darkest paths. He set off in front with a purposeful tread, stopping only to test the grip of his soles on an uneven slope or to pick blackberries. The berries were scarce today, the bushes on our path offered only dried-up brown clusters speckled with a few tiny purple beads, which the boys painstakingly picked out and then winced at their sourness when they crushed them between their teeth. Vik stepped on some nettles, and Steve showed him how to rub a dock leaf on his leg to stop the stinging. You always find dock leaves near nettles, he told Vik. We walked a long way today, and Malli didn’t want to turn back once, simply because of his new shoes.
And then I remember. Shoes. Those shoes. I remember those shoes, and my heart shivers. The police took away one of those shoes from my parents’ house when they were trying to identify bodies. They took it for DNA testing. They returned it in a sealed polythene bag, like a large sandwich bag. I am beaten. The one time I allow my family to come alive, and that shoe trounces me. But I want to linger with them. I want to stay in our car forever. Let’s put the boys to bed early and watch The Catherine Tate Show, I say to Steve. I have to plan my lecture for tomorrow morning, but that can wait. What am I on about? The Catherine Tate Show? It wasn’t even on then. That was after our time, we missed all that. Now I have to surrender, I have to squirm back into reality. But daylight is collapsing fast, and the air outside is sharpening, as it always does in early spring. And I can hear a voice from the back of the car say, Is it a school day tomorrow, Mum? And if I turn around …