After my snack, I clear the plates away, and briefly stalk around the downstairs of the house to see if anything needs cleaning up. Of course it doesn’t. A lot of it needs throwing away, and I form a vague plan to hire a skip as I amble from room to room, glancing at bulky furniture and outdated ornaments and spotless but well-trodden carpets.
Nothing in this house is really mine, I think. Technically, it is – I have to see the family lawyer this week, but it will all have come to me. There will be life insurance, and savings left over even after my mum’s care bills, and the mortgage was paid off years ago. The house itself is worth a lot of money, if I sell it.
I rub my fingers on the stiff and formal anaglypta wallpaper and have no idea what I should be feeling. If I should give up on this house, let it start a new life with a family who might love it more. Or if I should stay, and make it mine with new paint and stripped floorboards and shiny things I’ve chosen for myself. I could even recreate one of those impossibly perfect living spaces they have in Ikea showrooms.
None of that seems important, and it’s not a decision I have to rush into. Either way, I am now free of any real financial worries, and I understand that makes me lucky in one way at least.
Right now, though, as I walk silently from room to room, I would swap any financial gain for a return to some certainty and purpose in life.
While my mother was ill, I knew what I had to do. I looked after her at night and weekends, and her carers came when I was at work. When I was at the school, I was busy. When I was at home, I was busy. Now, I have no mother who needs me, and I don’t have to work full-time if I’m careful. I am free, yet I still feel trapped. The trap is imaginary; perhaps I should chew off a phantom limb to liberate myself?
I have delayed enough, I know, pulling curtains and switching on unnecessary lights in empty rooms. I return to the kitchen. It’s getting later, and the day’s sunshine is fading to that peculiar half-light you get at this time of year. Birds are chattering their evening gossip, and life goes on as normal outside.
I follow my pattern, and flick on a light switch and close the curtains, creating a cosy world that is smaller and easier for me to handle.
I sit, take the box, pull it closer towards me, and remove the lid. I pause, breathe, then begin to empty it out.
It is all slightly dusty, and feels a little brittle, but the box and the tissue paper have done their job and nothing disintegrates in my fingers. My mother could have thrown all of this away, but instead she wrapped it up and kept it safe, so she must have known on some level that one day it would emerge back into the world. I’m grateful for that. At least I think I am.
She has opened the birthday cards, but the letters remain sealed, and again this is a question I will never have answered – why she looked at some and not others, what strange moral code dictated her actions. My mother: the enigma.
Once everything is unpacked, laid out on the surface in front of me, all I want to do is stroke Joe’s handwriting, to kiss it and clutch it to me, as though it will allow me to somehow be kissing and clutching him. As though fondling faded ink will open a magic portal, and I will find myself transported to Joe: wherever he is now, whoever he is now.
He could be married with eight kids, or living in a Tibetan monastery, or running a Brazilian street dance crew, or be flipping burgers in McDonald’s. I don’t care – I just want to see him again. At this stage it is ‘want’, but I realise that it may be morphing into ‘need’, which is frightening.
I regain some calm and order by sorting the contents of the box out. I am a very boring person, at least on the surface – I like lists and logic. I like alphabetising, and indexing, and correctly stored files. It helps me feel in control, which I need, as the deep, dark core of me is often secretly planning a jail break from confinement into chaos.
At first, I arrange them into small heaps according to classification – letters, cards, postcards. Then I realise that maybe that’s not right, and date order would be better. I have no real idea how long he wrote for, and what he wrote, but I do know that it was over a period of years, just from that initial glimpse of the number 5 birthday card.
I handle them all carefully, which is sensible. After all, birthday cards written to my dead daughter, from my lost lover, are dangerous bombs of emotional volatility and must be treated as such. I try and view them instead as a project, like I would at work in the primary school, organising my paperwork with colour coding and sticky tabs, except without those things. I do have them in the house, but I know that the urge to run off and find them is simple procrastination.
After a while, I am able to piece together a very rough timeline using the information I have in front of me. The communications seem to start in June 2003, which is when I was taken into hospital. They run through, in various ways, until late in 2009 – when they stop completely until one more envelope arrives, from 2013. I refuse to imagine reasons for this, and instead concentrate on what I have.
The birthday cards are kind of self-explanatory, so I can figure out when they were sent – in October of every year from 2003 when she would have been four up until 2009 when she would have been ten. Pretty, shiny cards all the way through – celebrating the birthdays that never happened for my darling girl.
I am sucked for a few seconds into imagining Grace at ten years old, a decade of life beneath her wings. Imagining that her hair would still be blonde, her smile would still be world-class, her spirit would still be fearless and warm.
She would be in year six, at my school maybe, and she would have lots of friends and be good at English and be kind but bossy and she’d have talked me into getting her a dog, probably a black Lab like the one she always loved in the park. She would be a glorious and luminescent being, just as she always had been.
I allow myself that – just that – for a few moments, luxuriating in the pictures of the might-have-been Grace, knowing that I will suffer for it later. This, of course, is not the first time I have imagined such things. It doesn’t take a birthday card to prompt me to imagine what life could have been like with my daughter still alive – that is always there, lurking beneath the surface, the ‘future losses’ the therapists warned me about.
I know I will never see her grow and change and thrive; never see her fall in love, have her heart broken, give birth to her own children. Knowing it is easy – accepting it is harder, and sometimes I can’t deny myself the brief illusion of what those things would look like.
While it lasts, it is warm and comforting and fills my heart with joy. It is so vivid I could reach out and touch her, hold her hand in mine, tell her everything will be fine. It is as real as if it were happening in front of me.
When it has passed, though – when I can no longer sustain the fantasy and stay sane – then I pay the price, and crash back into my real world so hard I plummet down, down, down, and it takes me an age to dig myself up to the light again.
I place the birthday cards in a line, standing them upright, and admire their colour and vibrancy, and think that the might-have-been Grace would have enjoyed them. Each card, inside, bears similar words: ‘For our darling angel, Gracie. Us three against the world. I love you both. Now and always, Daddy Joe Joe xxx’
Even though I know it is pretty much the same on each card, I run my finger over the ballpoint pen on every single one, reading those words out loud until I can recite them.