I bring things up here now to bury them, but not discard them. More dissociation, I think.
I sit down beneath the tree, tucking the folds of my skirt around me. I am all alone, the sound of rustling leaves like whispering voices, the sky a soaring, polished blue. On what would have been Edie’s eighteenth birthday I carried a bottle of wine up here, drinking it too fast and getting woozy and disoriented. Last year she would have been thirty-two, and I buried a beautiful hair clip decorated with pearls. I wasn’t able to decide if it was the kind of thing a woman in her thirties would wear, but had bought it at the last minute anyway. This is my grief, lying beneath the earth. Long years of mourning unspooling like a bright red thread, running through the ground to meet the roots of trees.
But I’m wary of being maudlin. I have to measure it – ration it almost. Edie was a beautiful toddler but a difficult child. Obstinate, wilful, impossible to please. I caught her stealing money from my purse at age ten. When I asked her why, she answered simply, ‘Because I want it.’ In the months before her disappearance she was suspended from school for a week for getting into a fight and biting another girl’s ear.
No, wait. That sounds worse than it was, makes her sound like Mike Tyson. It’s true that there was a fight and it’s true that Edie, quick to provoke, got this girl into a headlock. At some point a small chunk of flesh was taken from the top of the girl’s ear, the part where it curves sweetly like an oyster shell – a tiny crescent, the slightest disruption of the curve. Edie didn’t know what happened to it, thought she may have swallowed it. Apparently, the sight of her blood-smeared mouth cleared the classroom and the headmistress found all thirty-odd children standing silently in the corridor as she raced towards them. Then I got a phone call. There had been an incident, they said. She was becoming feral, they said. Impossible to manage. They told me I was lucky the other parents weren’t pressing charges. Edie was there in the office, stony-faced in the hard-backed chair, her jaw rigid. There were scratches on her neck where the other girl had clawed at her. She’d cleaned the blood off her teeth but there was still more on the collar of her shirt, her cardigan.
Afterwards, the newspapers had asked me if I’d given up on her. Given up on her? What the fuck do you think?
I’ve read that there are creatures below the surface of the sea in the dark, uncharted parts of the ocean that have evolved to survive the crushing pressure the water exerts on them. I envy them. Some mornings I wake to a weight of such intensity pinning me to the bed that I feel like my bones will liquefy. It’s a sickness, a blight, a thorny plant crawling towards sunlight through my guts. It’s her. I miss her. She is my trigger.
I talk about triggers a lot. I’ve been in a lot of behavioural therapy where the search to find your trigger is as inexorable and precise as conception. My trigger is Edie, always and always, but sometimes I find myself wondering what her trigger was. I think I know, and like all important things it began very small, and grew like a seedling.
We were slipping into the summer of 1997 and his name was Dylan. Such a waifish, dreamy name. I was expecting a golden-haired hippy who carried a guitar painted with flowers, so I was surprised when Edie brought home a tall stocky boy who could easily have passed for nineteen. He was a rugby player and had been on family holidays to places that Edie could only dream about: Florida, the Gold Coast, San Tropez. She was fifteen and absolutely in awe of him. Dylan smiled easily and referred to me as ‘Sammy’. He wore his school tie to one side and had a rangy, hungry look in his eyes. Fuck the pleasantries, it said, and show me your tits.
I tried to give them room. I tried to show Edie that I trusted her. I was told that this was important. Personal space, you see.
The problem was that Edie, while funny and bright and often deep-thinking, had her father’s narrow, suspicious gaze, thin lips and ruddy cheeks like fillets of meat. She’d inherited my wild hair and short, rounded torso. Added to that, the previous winter she’d started hanging round with a group of girls who dressed all in black; thick, heavy eyeliner, lace and velvet and silks, chipped nail varnish on bitten nails. They called themselves the Rattlesnakes and drew tattoos on to each other’s arms in thick felt-tip. That winter I’d watched her morph into something vampiric, all funeral pallor and choking, Victorian clothes. In the evenings she would leave the house to meet her friends, trailing black scarves like kite ribbons, her perfume a suffocating mixture of patchouli and nag champa, and I would watch her from the upstairs window, arms folded over her chest, her back stooped as though trying to diminish herself, to turn to smoke and fade away.
One muggy July night, just before the summer storms had come, Edie and I sat outside in the yard, chairs pushed close together, her bare feet hanging in my lap. Some days we barely spoke, such were her moods. But today was not one of those days.
‘It’s too hot,’ she moaned, peeling her T-shirt (black, full of holes) away from her chest and fanning herself with it.
‘The weather’s about to break,’ I told her. ‘They’re forecasting big storms all the way up to the weekend.’
‘Oh, great. I’m meant to be meeting everyone tomorrow.’
‘In town?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘In the park?’
She shrugged.
I let a moment or two pass. In the distance, thunder.
‘Will Dylan be there?’
‘Yeah. He plays football in the mornings but he’ll be finished by lunchtime. He’s making something for me.’
‘Is he?’
‘Yeah. Nancy reckons it’s a mixtape, but he gave me one of those last week, so I don’t know, maybe a painting or something. It’ll be cool, whatever it is.’
‘Because he’s cool, right?’
‘Right. Only don’t say it like that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you sound like Nonno.’ Nonno was her grandfather – my father – in Italy. She poked me with her long toes to indicate that she was teasing. ‘Dylan speaks Italian. French too.’
‘Does he?’
‘Oui. Il est bon à French.’ She laughed again. I always remember her laughter, slow-moving and heavy as honey.
‘I used to speak French. Un petite.’
‘It’s un peu.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Please don’t do this around him.’
‘You wouldn’t give me the chance. I’ve barely said more than two words to him.’
I waited. The air was cooling noticeably now, and I wanted to say something else before the moment was washed away.
‘What else does he do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, football, mixtapes, French. Anything else?’
‘He’s into everything.’
I bet he is.
‘I mean,’ she added, ‘he’s not, like, totally into music but he listens to it. He doesn’t really like science, but he knows about stuff, you know?’
‘Ah. He dabbles, you mean?’
‘I guess.’
‘Are you two serious?’
A pause. It was a question designed to trick her, to elicit the answer I wanted. No, I wanted her to say – it’s only been two weeks, Mum, don’t be crazy! But I could never catch her out. She shrugged to show her indifference, but I was her mother. I knew she wanted it to be serious. That was the danger.