Sometimes the fall is more frightening than the impact. That’s what I keep telling myself. Ten months of therapy and a wedding and a funeral and all it took was the phone call I received yesterday morning to shake me to my bones. There is only one person I want to see to share this news with and I have come a long way to see her. The sky in London is flat grey chrome. I am wearing a plain blue dress and I have lost my brittle, fragile shell, cutting my hair short, allowing it to lighten in the summer sun. I have been married a little over a month and the wedding ring still shocks me when I see it on my finger.
Frankie and I were wed in a church in the far south of Cornwall, a long way from Tyrlaze, and even further from Chy an Mor. It was a bright spring morning, bitterly cold with the first few flurries of snow falling amongst the yellow daffodils growing in the churchyard. It was a small ceremony, very informal. I wore yellow and carried primroses in my posy. Aunt Jackie wept in the front pew, her face shiny with happiness. She’d come to see me in the days after Marco’s disappearance, hugging me tightly to her with a jangle of charm bracelets and rosaries.
‘He told me you weren’t coming back,’ she said.
‘I know.’
Martha and James had also sat in the front pew, in the space my parents would have occupied. Baby Oskar had been cradled in Martha’s arms, his skin downy-soft and peach-coloured. Earlier that morning Martha had helped me get ready, smoothing my skin with her beautiful, expensive face serums and dusting me with soft perfume. She had reached into her bag and pulled out a liquid eyeliner – a bright, vibrant blue colour – that I recognised immediately as the one Carmel used to wear.
‘Your “something blue”,’ she had said, her hand only slightly trembling as she’d applied it to the line of my lashes.
I take a right and then another right down a long street of houses stacked like crooked teeth. Deep breath. The London air curdles my lungs. A cat lies on a windowsill watching me, tail switching, half asleep.
I’d taken flowers to the spot on the cliff where she jumped. Ellie. I wonder how it would feel to plummet that far; would there be a lightness, a liberation? Would the air rushing past your ears sound like voices in the dark? I’d closed my eyes and seen the rain dimpling the surface of the water, and Ellie jack-knifing into it like a blade, over and over on a loop. A descending horror, down where the thoughts bury themselves like reclusive creatures of the deep. I had stood until the wind had made my eyes stream and then I walked back the way I had come, up from Tyrlaze, around the coastal path. I did not look over my shoulder. I did not look at Chy an Mor.
I don’t take flowers to Carmel’s tree. I take wine and cigarettes and something bright to hang in it. Neon-pink fishnet, a vivid green taffeta, ribbons in electric blue. In the winter I string fairy lights through the branches. Last year a robin nested in the Y-shaped bough. Her mother had been pleased. They’re said to be good omens, she’d told me. A symbol of dead loved ones. Then she’d hooked her arm through mine and said she would buy me tea in the café in the park. That was then, last time. I’m here alone now. Some nights I wake and think I see someone standing in the corner of our bedroom where the eaves dip the lowest. A shape, slightly blurred. Like moving smoke. I think it may be Carmel, come back to me in the still hours of the night. I jerk awake as though she is standing over me and I can never tell if my heart is beating too fast because I am hopeful or because I am frightened. And so I come here, and I bring her things, and I tell her I am sorry.
I still have her gift, the inscribed bracelet, but I have not been able to bring myself to wear it. I haven’t felt worthy. Not till yesterday. Not till I got the call.
They found his body. After all this time. The phone had rung yesterday morning, startling me from a dreamless sleep. The skeletal remains of Marco Nilsen – a man also known as ‘Uncle’ – had been washed ashore at high tide in a bay thirteen miles away. He was still wearing the remaining shoe. He had been missing his lower jaw and his right hand. I like to think of crabs nesting behind his ribs, barnacles clotting his spine.
I am nearly at Carmel’s tree now. I’ll sit there awhile. The crocuses are bursting through the earth and my silver bracelet winks as it catches the sunlight. It is a good day. A warm day.
I will enjoy this day and all the ones after it.
And I will make scar tissue of my memories.
And I will heal.
I will heal.