The loss of my mother is like a missing tooth: an absence I can feel at all times, but one I can hide as long as I keep my mouth shut. And so I rarely talk about her.
It’s a sad place to start my incredible little story, but please don’t misunderstand me: I love my life. I’m quite an ordinary thirtysomething woman with two daughters and a husband, Eddie, who’s training to be in the clergy. He seems to think I’ll make the perfect vicar’s wife, but I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge. Compared to my husband I’m what you might call more rational, a little more scientific. But I suppose, after what I’ve been through, I should be able to believe in anything.
Eddie says I have all the necessary qualities, and I admit I think I’m a good person. For instance, you can tell me anything and I won’t judge, and if I can’t help raising an eyebrow, it will stay on the inside, to protect your feelings. And I’ve always been completely truthful with Eddie, it’s a thing between us, not a single lie. Until now.
Now I’m a liar. Now I’m a thief.
And I can no longer say hand-on-heart that I’m even normal. I’ll let you make up your own mind. Lying to my husband makes me feel sick and I’m desperate to stop, but lies are like toes: where there’s one, there’s always more close by. My biggest confession is that I’ve been visiting my mother and lying about that, but I’ve also been scratched and scarred and lied about that too, so many things. If I told him the truth, Eddie would try to understand because he’s a good man. But logically—logically—he’s more likely to think I’m mad.
Maybe I’m being unfair to him, because as much as I love and need my husband, he loves and needs me, and over the past few months I’ve realized something important. I can’t tell Eddie what’s been happening, no matter how much I want to. Not because he won’t believe me, but because he might.
And if Eddie believes me, he’ll try to stop me.
* * *
LET ME EXPLAIN things from the beginning, although I wonder where the beginning really is. Time is not as easy to understand as I once thought.
It started with the photo and the box—but, oh, there’s me saying “started,” and that’s the same as beginning. We’ll make a deal: I could get philosophical about “the beginning” and what that really means, but I don’t want to talk about that right now and I appreciate that you’re not up to speed with the situation, so we’ll hold off on that discussion (it will come up again later, I guarantee it). Let’s just say this: the sensible starting place for my story is the photograph.
It’s the kind of photo a billion people have in their possession. You might find it tucked inside a book you haven’t opened for years, or it will fall out of an old album because it’s lost its stick. I bet you have one in a shoebox somewhere, hidden among other bits of life debris: love letters, postcards, and christening pictures of unknown babies. Mine fell out of a cookbook. A cookbook with no pictures, but with spattering on various pages indicating best-loved recipes, chocolaty fingerprints, and a few handwritten notes. My mother owned this book and had a sweet tooth; the page for chocolate brownies is particularly smeared, as is the recipe for sticky toffee pudding.
The photo is of me. On the back it says Faye, Christmas 1977. I turned it over in my fingers, and grinning up at me from thirty years ago was my six-year-old self: rosy cheeks, brown eyes, and messy curls. I’m sitting in a box in the photo, a box that had contained my Christmas gift that year: a Space Hopper. I remember sitting on it, holding on to the handles and bouncing around the garden. But in the photo, I am more interested in the box, and I look so much like a doll, I could be climbing out of my packaging on Christmas morning. I’m wearing a soft-looking pink dressing gown with a little rounded collar, and the Christmas tree behind me is heavy with colored lights and tinsel. I look so happy. Of course. I was a kid, it was Christmas morning, and my mother was taking that photo. It would have been a perfect, carefree day. My mother, whom I hardly remember, would have been soaking up this little girl’s gaze of love. My love. I peered closely, trying to see beyond the photo, trying to see more than it was capable of giving me.
I work at the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) designing products for people with partial or no sight, and a year ago I was researching cameras, all very high-tech. There’s this blind guy I work with, my friend Louis, and he was taking part in the discussions about cameras of the future and what they might be able to do. What he really wanted was to pick up a photo and feel everything in it, not just what you can see, but round the back too. He said he’d like to be able to put his arm round the shoulders of the people in the picture and felt sure one day it would be possible. He’s always been blind and I think he thinks sighted people already get more out of photos than is actually possible.
I understand what he means though, because when I look at the photo of me in the box under the tree, I want to put my hand in and touch the face of my mother. She isn’t in the picture, and yet she’s there. I’m desperate to see her and touch her. I so very much want to climb in and spend a few minutes under that Christmas tree with her.
So you know I lost my mother a long time ago, and I told you I’ve been visiting her and that, if he knew about it, Eddie would try to stop me. But I guess you also know that if I were visiting her in the cemetery, Eddie wouldn’t have a problem with that. Please don’t give up on me when I tell you what I’ve been doing. Put yourself in my shoes and imagine telling your partner, or your boss, or your best mate. I think you’d lie too, because if you kept insisting it was the truth, you’d end up in a mental unit.
I hesitate in case you scoff or smile affectionately, or back away, slowly reaching behind you for the door handle. And I really don’t want you to do that. I want you to keep a straight face, look me in the eye, and say, “Go on,” and when you do that, I’ll tell you the rest of my story.
I’ve been visiting my mother, who died when I was eight, and I’m not talking about the graveyard—I’m talking about flesh-and-blood, tea-and-cookies-on-the-table visiting.
So there you go, I’ve said it now. If you want to leave I’ll understand.
* * *
THE PEOPLE I care about most in the world are Esther and Evie. Eddie’s next, but it’s not that simple because there’s Cassie and Clem, my best friends, and they’re like sisters to me; the sisters I never had, but if I could have chosen—or created—them, then they would be it. In a conversation we once had, which probably happened after two in the morning, we girls talked about who we would throw the last life belt to if we were on a sinking ship and the rest of us, including our children, were in the water. My hesitation in answering earned me a lot of abuse, including a cushion thrown with some force. The natural reaction is to throw the life belt to one of the children, but my thinking was: Save the life of the one who’ll save the ones you love. I chose Eddie. “What about us!” Clem had wailed, and then she’d asked who I’d throw the life belt to if just she and Cassie were in the water, and—honestly?—that was the harder question. When you’re a teenager with no real family, and you meet girls like Cassie and Clem at college, well then, suddenly you do have family.