Tabitha? Calling me? I hesitate to take it. I am simultaneously scared and angry. My anger wins.
‘Hello, Tabs.’ I hope my voice is as cold as my heart.
‘Hello, Jo,’ she sounds nervous. Very unlike Tabitha. ‘I’m just calling to say sorry. Oh God. I’m so terribly sorry about your mother. It’s so bloody awful.’
I want to accept her sympathy. She is, or was, my best friend. But I cannot forget or ignore that terrible lie.
‘Thank you, Tabitha.’
‘Are you OK, darling? Do you need any help? Just say the word.’
This is too much. Darling? My anger seethes. And boils over.
‘What I’d like, Tabitha, is for you to tell me the damn truth. Have you heard of the name Xander Scudamore? Because I have.’
She is quiet. I am not.
‘He was Purple Man, wasn’t he? He really did give us pills, and we really did give them to Jamie Trewin, and everything you told me at Delancey was total bollocks. You lied. You lied through your teeth. At a moment when I was significantly unstable. So I begin to wonder, Tabs, is it you and Arlo, is it you and Arlo that are deliberately ruining my life, creating that Twitter account? Why? Why the fuck would you do all that?’
Another long and agonizing pause. The normally confident Tabitha is anguishingly mute. Then she whispers.
‘Oh God. God. I’m sorry. What can I say? Yes, it was a lie. I got scared, Jo, silly and scared, it’s such a bad time for the truth to come out, for Arlo and the baby and me, and … and … And I don’t know what to say. There’s no excuse. But honestly everything else, everything else that’s happened, the Twitter thing, everything, it’s got nothing to do with me and Arlo. Please believe me. I implore you. I want to help—’
‘Well. You can help by leaving me the fuck alone. Just for now.’
‘Wait—’
‘No. Not now. Go away.’
I snap the call dead. Like breaking a stick in two. And yet, even as I do so, I wonder at what she said. She sounded, despite everything, sincere. Maybe she isn’t to blame. Maybe it is solely Arlo behind all this. Perhaps even he is innocent and there is someone beyond all of us. Or possibly this is a further lie?
The snow falls on snow. Soon we will all be buried and hushed. But I refuse to be entombed, and I will not be beaten. My mother is dead. I must fight back: for her. She would have expected it. Like Daddy, she was always proud of my feistiness, ambition, my self-confidence: Jo the Go. Yet I am also Jo the Scared. Very scared.
I need to calm myself. Opening a kitchen window, I breathe the piercing, unscented cold, breathing in, breathing out. The air does its job. I feel my heart slow. I close and lock the window – got to lock everything now – but as I do, I look at the little apple tree and think of Mummy and Daddy and me and Will all under that tree: in all the photos she took.
Mum loved taking photos.
The photos. Yes. I must see them. Mum used a camera long after everyone else had switched to camera-phones. And when she was forced to go digital she still got her digital favourites printed.
We have to keep the photos. Pacing through the house I go to the cupboard in the dining room where she kept her photograph albums. Pulling out the first album, I flick through page after page of endless baby photos, pram photos, cot photos, then Dad carrying Will as a toddler, my first day at school, then a birthday party for me (age five?) with Mum and Dad laughing and him with his arm around her, not mad then, or, at most, showing a few tiny signs. And then I pause at one photo, with a prickle of fear: it is a photo of Daddy holding me.
It is the photo that was sent to my phone, allegedly by Jamie Trewin, when I received those horrible messages by Camden Lock.
Whoever is tormenting me has access to Mum’s photos, home movies, everything?
I shake my head, puzzled by my own bewilderment. Angry at the intrusion, frightened by the power of my enemy. Repressing my fears, I turn pages, and the photos begin to darken in mood. Dad disappears. Secondary school arrives. Fewer smiles in photos. Three people on a beach, or around a table, not four. Will is now a teenager with a terrible haircut and an attempt at a moustache. I am a teenager with an even worse haircut, yet a fierce, urgent smile. There’s one distinct shot of me and Will in our late teens or early twenties, languid and finally attractive, perhaps, draped on the stairs at some cousin’s wedding. Then a graduation party …
After that: nothing. At this point, the photos essentially stop. When we left my mum’s life, she stopped showing interest in images.
Sliding this album into the cupboard, I pull out the last album she used. The last album I remember lying on her lap, as she happily gummed photos into the pages.
I am cross-legged on the cold dining room floor, absorbed, and distracted from my terror and my sadness. It seems Mum proudly scissored every single newspaper article I wrote – and pasted them all in here. And every news item about Will’s work, they’re also in here: though they are fewer.
Oh, Mum. You were so proud.
Ignoring the urge to sob, I continue my browsing. Halfway through this album, the photos gain a second life: as little Caleb is born. Mum adored her first grandson, her only grandchild, there are photos of Caleb as a baby, showing his first tooth, smiling like a loon, Caleb on a kiddy scooter in the sunshine of California, And on the next page: it’s me again. One big, page-filling photo. Mum must have got it specially printed at this size, she liked it so much.
It’s my mum’s seventieth birthday, it’s a hot July day, we’re having a barbecue under the apple tree, and to make up the numbers I have invited lots of my more interesting friends, Fitz, Anna, Marlow, Gul, Andy, Jenny. Simon is there of course. Simon’s parents too. My mum’s bridge partners. Mum. This was not long before Simon and I divorced.
There is something in this innocent photo, of a sunlit barbecue, which compels me, and I don’t know why.
I am standing in a line with Simon, Jenny, Fitz, Gul, Tabitha, in the garden, raising glasses of Pimm’s and laughing, presumably we are toasting the picture-taker. Even Arlo is there, how did I persuade Arlo to come to Thornton Heath?? It doesn’t make sense. Is that what disturbs me about this photo? Or is it something else? I scan the faces, I can sense the tension between me and Simon in this image, even as we smile, drunkenly.
I was already sexting ‘Liam’ by this time, searching for a way out of a dead marriage.
But there is something ELSE.
WHAT IS IT?
I stare and stare, I run my fingers over the photo like it is braille and I am blind, and its very texture will reveal the final truth.
Then: I see it. Hiding away – yet smack-bang in the middle of the photo.
Mummy.
She is half smiling, half squinting at the camera, perhaps a little dazzled by the sun. She is also holding a book. And I recognize its distinct plain cover. I downloaded it myself very recently.
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.
The ringing silence is a shrill klaxon in my ear.
Why would my mum be holding a book, in this photo, taken in her garden on her seventieth birthday party? Only if someone gave it to her, as a present, that day. I don’t remember this present, I don’t remember the book. Poetry isn’t really Mum’s thing, as it wasn’t mine. Yet someone who does like Plath gave her this volume. That means if I can find the book, and identify the giver, I would surely have my culprit, my nemesis, my tormentor.
Where would Mum keep a book like that? It’s a present so she wouldn’t give it away; but it is also not a book she would cherish.
Her favourite books – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, the classics she would re-read constantly, she kept in her bedroom. Cookbooks were kept in the kitchen. Less useful or important volumes were always kept here, in the dining room. The other side of the dining table.
Quickly, I cross to the bookshelves. There must be a thousand volumes here: Mum kept a lot of books, as did Dad. The shelves go high.
I scan the titles, urgently. I walk up and down like a sovereign reviewing her troops, but I am looking for the evidence of my enemy.
No joy. There is no poetry. This does not surprise me. Neither Mum nor Dad liked poetry. Yet I haven’t scanned all the titles. There is just one chance left – one shelf left, the very top, the most unread books. I am too short to reach and see: I have to fetch a dining room chair, to help. Then I step up. And crane my neck.
For the final time, I scan the titles. Old science fiction. Old science. A book about Vermeer. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.
The urgency burns, as I reach out. The present is in the top right-hand corner, and grey with dust.
Trying to stay calm, not feeling remotely calm, I pull the book. Then I step off the dining room chair, to survey my prize. This has to be the book Mum was holding in her hand, in the photo. This was the birthday present, given to her that day.
Opening the cover, I see a handwritten inscription.
Happy Birthday
xxx
‘myself the rose you achieve’
The acid rises in my throat. The writing is distinctive. That florid looping Y which my daddy taught me to do.
I wrote this. I wrote this to Mummy. I must have given her the book. Yet I don’t remember why or how or when – or anything.
What’s more, I seem to have literally predicted my own future. I saw what was coming down the line to hurt me. Plath.