Also, Big Rita isn’t pretty, not obviously. It probably shouldn’t matter. But it does. I’ve spent my whole life with people staring at my mother’s face, then glancing at me, observing I didn’t get her looks. Pretty people wait for you to notice them, rather than noticing you. I could tell straight away that Big Rita was a noticer. She has wide eyes, the colour of a wet beach. I loved the ordinariness of her name too: it made me think of ice-cream parlours and chips in a newspaper cone, stuff I’m not allowed. (‘Best not, until you lose the puppy fat, darling,’ says Mother, who never stops watching her figure. Or mine.) I wanted her name instead of my own. I hate having to repeat my name – ‘Hero?’ – and spell it. Also, Hera is the Greek goddess of marriage, which isn’t even funny. Mostly though I just liked Big Rita for liking me. When Daddy jokingly said I was an acquired taste, like a Brussels sprout, she whispered behind her hand, ‘My favourite vegetable.’ I’m not sure anyone’s said anything nicer to me than that. Unlike other nannies, she’d take us into the city, to museums and galleries, or mudlarking along the Thames, where we’d pocket tiny grubby treasures, our feet squelching, the metallic smell of the river on our cold pink fingertips. Until you washed the finds over the sink, you never knew quite what would be revealed.
That night was the same. We were both so excited. I couldn’t sleep. I asked her to tell me the story of her glass plant case again. Sitting on the edge of my bed, she explained in a low, soft voice how terrariums were once called Wardian Cases, and designed so that people could grow plants in the polluted London air, or transport them on long journeys overseas, and how it had changed botany for ever, and the contents of Kew Gardens, and then, when my eyelids grew heavy, my head filled with ferns, she stopped talking and tugged the sheet over my body. It was too warm for a blanket.
I woke in the stuffy dark to bloodcurdling screams coming from the floor below. Mother was dying. I clamped my pillow over my head. I wanted whatever would happen to happen so that she wouldn’t be in pain any more. Big Rita came to check on me. There would be a beautiful baby in the basket tomorrow, she said. But when she pushed the hair off my face, I felt a tremble in her fingers.
An hour later, I opened my window and knelt with my chin on the cool sill, my eyes on the rooftops, the pink sun rising. I was there when the ambulance pulled up outside the house, where the milk float usually stops with a cheery chink, and when the midwife ran down the steps, the big lantern light above the door spotlighting the bundle in her arms.
The shock of what I saw emptied my brain, then my stomach. And it hasn’t come back. I keep trying and trying but I just can’t remember: whatever I saw is scratched out, like a face from a photograph. Daddy says this is for the best. I must forget everything I might have seen that night and remember I’ve always had a ridiculously vivid imagination. And never ever mention it again.
5
Sylvie
‘Would it help to talk about what happened?’ I ask gently, edging closer to Annie on the big white sofa. I’ve still got a niggling hunch she’s not told me everything about Mum’s accident, that something’s building inside.
Annie shakes her head and chews on a rope of her long red hair, mashing it flat as a ribbon. I hug my arm around her shoulders. Under her sweat top, she feels young and frightened and shuddery. I notice that she’s gripping her phone and hope the new boyfriend’s called to offer some moral support. Maybe he can reach her.
A boat chugs past on the canal. Even this sounds different from normal. The world has shifted. Darkened. The rippling shadows on the wall look like people falling.
‘Granny’s in the very best place she could be now, Annie.’ A brilliant specialist unit in London – the local unit she needed was full. Thank God, I think, for the umpteenth time, clinging to every scrap of good news. ‘I’m going back in an hour. Come with?’
Annie nods and tries to smile. But her face is stiff with shock. Her eyes are wet green glass. She’s been crying on and off since it happened three days ago. We both have. But we’re crying for different people. Annie for Gran-Gran, as she used to call her. Me for Mum, not just the woman I call most days to chat to about nothing much, or squabble with, but the unspoken thing that exists in the space between us, deep and rippling like a sea, so gigantic and elemental and complicated I can’t put it into words.
‘Or I can drive you to Dad’s, if you’d rather be there,’ I bluster on guiltily, clumsily trying to normalize the fact that Annie’s now got two homes, two bedrooms, all that to deal with, too. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She’s been staying in this apartment for the last couple of nights, and it’s been such a comfort to have her close again. In the early hours, I’ve sat on the edge of her bed and watched her sleep, like Mum used to watch me. Or my big sister Caroline did, swinging down from the upper bunk bed, her Caramac-blonde hair dangling, hissing, ‘Sylv, you awake?’ until I was.
Caroline will be here in four days. But America feels even further away this morning, and I’m terrified Mum will have taken a turn for the worse by the time my sister flies in from Missouri.
‘Now can I get you something to eat? A nice biscuit?’ I think how Mum always says ‘a nice biscuit’ when just ‘a biscuit’ would do, and grief thunders through me again. I have to remind myself she’s in a coma. Her heart still beats. She’s not brain dead.
So where is she? I imagine her pinioned inside her own skull – incredulous and frustrated – demanding to be let out. This isn’t my time! She has a calendar full of busyness. Decades of life still waiting. Stuff to do.
‘No thanks,’ I hear Annie say, through the white-noise in my head. ‘I can’t face food. I feel kind of sick.’ She buries her face in my neck, like she used to as a little girl, her cheeks sticky with tears, eyelashes butterfly fluttering against my skin.
I hold her tight. My eyes slowly close. I haven’t slept for more than a couple of hours at a time since it happened, endlessly jolting awake, slippery with sweat, my heart scrabbling in my chest.
The accident keeps flashing in staccato bursts. I can picture it all: the spray of blood up the cliff wall; the ocean boiling under the churn of the helicopter’s propeller as Mum was lifted from the rocky ledge; Annie running along the cliff path, frantically trying to catch a signal to call me.
Then there are the photographs on Annie’s phone. Taken a moment apart, the split second that separates a casual cliff stroll from catastrophe. One shows my mother smiling for the camera in her green North Face anorak; the next, just sea and sky, my mother extracted in an instant, like someone sucked out of an aeroplane window.
‘Granny’s going to be all right, isn’t she, Mum?’ Annie mumbles, from under my unwashed curls.
‘She …’ I hesitate. Mum told white lies too. She sugarcoated the darkest of truths for me and Caroline. Rubbed the edges off them in the hope that they wouldn’t hurt so much. I can’t help myself. I do the same. ‘Granny will be just fine, hon.’
*
After Annie’s left for Steve’s – ‘home’, as she calls it, inevitably: it’ll always be the family house – I stand beside Mum’s hospital bed, adjusting to her not being at all fine. When a doctor gently suggests that, given the uncertainty, I may want to get her affairs in order, I try not to scream like someone who’s googled ‘head injury’ and ‘coma’ late at night and scared themselves witless. Also, Mum’s affairs? It’d be easier to hack into the Kremlin, frankly. ‘Okay,’ I say, trying to hold it together, like Mum would.