What Was Seen
Jay Merill
I start walking along the hotel corridor wondering what I’m about to find, and think of the past. There’s something embedded in there I want to re-live, something particular I need to support me through this moment. This is what I focus on:
A certain hot July. The day Marcy ran away from home was the same day Natalie set fire to the stir-fry pan. Both these twenty-year old facts are most clear to me as I stare at the blue carpeted corridor stretching out ahead. Aunt Natalie, my mother’s older sister who had asked us to come and stay when Ray and I broke up, was a lovely person. I’d always been fond of her and living at her place was such a perfect solution to my housing problems, a real chance for me to get back on my feet. She’s been dead for quite a while now, poor lady, but I find I’m able to picture her very vividly as she was on that summer day.
The conflagration burst out quickly because of the half inch or so of old fat Natalie always kept in the pan. At that moment I was on the way to the front door with my car keys in my hand. But I had to rush back into the kitchen and throw a wet towel over the rising flames. I must have felt frightened though somehow I kept calm. I’d just been doing a wash so the towel was right there hanging on the drying rack. I stretched out, caught it by the corner and brought it down heavily onto the fire. The room became an instant mass of hissing steam but we were safe. Funny that even through the worst moments my worry about Marcy dominated. Maybe that helped me confront the danger we were facing. As soon as I could, I went out to try and find the girl. All the way down the road my stress levels were increasing. There were key questions: Why was Marcy running away? Was she being bullied at school? Was she unhappy because her Dad and I had split up? Or, something else? My anxiety was so intense I’d developed a painful headache. The poor child. She was in trouble, and now, on top of that, she was in real danger on a busy stretch of road. I forgot the fire quickly as my eyes sprang frightened tears for Marcy. Only eight years old she was then.
My feet sink into the soft carpet of the hotel floor. I look through the windows on my right as I go, see fantastic laid out gardens. I’ve always loved the symmetry of a parterre and am sorry I have no eyes for it today. There’s no point even trying to appreciate the rows of flowers and colonnade of trees, I know I’m too upset. I shouldn’t really be here. It isn’t helping. I think of that old July day.
I soon saw Marcy up ahead. She hadn’t got that far. When I caught sight of her small determined figure bounding along half hampered by a back-pack the tears just poured out and everything became blurred. Then I drew the car up beside her.
‘Marcy, get in,’ I said in a steely voice. We were going to have to work on this running away thing. ‘I’m not running away from home,’ she went, before I could begin to say anything. ‘I was just playing at being an explorer. I wanted to see if I could get to the river path from the main road and then walk along it till I got home that way. You know, go round in a circle.’
By the time I made it back with Marcy, Natalie was sitting sedately on the sofa with a mug of tea in one hand. That burnt fat smokiness was everywhere. It would take some while to dissipate I’d realised. The pan was worn and tatty even before the accident, and like Natalie
herself had seen better days.
‘Is something burning?’ Marcy said and Natalie gave her enigmatic smile. It was hard to tell from the smile whether Natalie had taken on board what she’d done, but,
‘I was only trying to see if the cooker was working properly,’ Natalie promptly replied. I remember being surprised.
‘What’s burning Mum?’ Marcy had repeated, giving me a look. ‘It’s alright,’ I told her. ‘Everything’s been dealt with.’
‘The flame shouldn’t go as high as that when you turn it up. There’s something wrong with it.’ This, from Natalie.
Now I recognise I should have given more thought to this whole incident. Instead I left the room quickly as Natalie started making her teeth clicking noise, and I pushed it from my mind.
I had a little talk with Marcy later and asked what was troubling her. I said she could speak to me about anything that was on her mind but she mustn’t ever run away as it was a bad thing to do. Marcy kept on insisting she had only gone exploring.
‘Well, why did you take your back-pack full of clothes then?’ I asked her.
‘In case I got lost and the dark came down unexpectedly. In case it began snowing. You said I should start to be sensible now I’m eight. It was only my fleece anyway and a packet of chips.’
‘Ice,’ said Natalie, joining in. ‘Why is everyone talking about snow and ice?’ I’d asked. ‘It’s July.’
Natalie smiled again and went outside. ‘Iceberg,’ she murmured in a tantalising voice. I catch the nuance of her smile now, these years later, as if it just happened. Strange how easy it is to remember such a tiny detail.
What am I doing in this hotel, checking out on my partner? I can’t say I’m proud of it. I don’t know when I first began to suspect Euan was seeing someone else. Little things I’d noticed, I suppose. Signs. I had been through hell in my mind and told myself I needed to know the truth one way or the other. When he said he’d like to go away while he put the finishing touches to his book, I accepted it at first but then got suspicious. He said he needed to concentrate. Just a week would do it, he told me. He left me the hotel address quite openly, even the room number. Surely he must be alone. Or he thought I was an idiot, or he really didn’t care if I knew or not. My thoughts spiralled into angry accusations. Alright then, I’d find out for myself. And so here I am, staying furtively at the same place as Euan, and not at all enjoying the experience. I’m heading towards Room 61 but, looking at the numbers on the doors of this corridor, I realise I am on a lower floor than I should be so I walk back towards the lift.
My mind wanders off to that conversation I’d had with Marcy when she was eight years old. I hadn’t been satisfied Marcy was telling the truth when she told me she was just exploring.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this was what you were doing?’ I’d asked her straight out.
‘Well you never believe me Mom.’ ‘So why did you say to Alva next door you were running away?’ ‘That was a joke. I didn’t really mean it.’
‘You must make sure to say exactly what you mean, Marcy.’
‘Well Natalie doesn’t. Sometimes she uses different words for everything.’
I had been annoyed. ‘What a thing to say.’ Looking out of the hotel window I think of the sight of Natalie in the garden of her house as I’d seen her on that far off day. She had her watering-can in her hand and was holding it up ostentatiously by the handle, but she was watering the stone patio instead of the flowers. A very strange thing to do. In fact, whenever Marcy and I used to have a talk I seemed to see Natalie doing something strange. For example, there was an afternoon just a few days later. I had glanced through the open kitchen door and noticed Natalie in the hall with one foot on the stairs. She wasn’t moving except for her lips. They were going round and round as though she was chewing something with her mouth open. But I told myself Natalie was just upset over a fall she’d had that same morning. Marcy was starting to ask me a question then stopped. She too was looking at Natalie, I realised. Natalie was still in that fixed position with one foot on the first stair tread, and just beneath where she was standing was a dark stain on the carpet. Delayed shock, I put it down to. She’d been a bit too cool about her fall at the time. We’d been walking through the woods and talking about the recent fire in the kitchen. Natalie kept insisting the knobs on the cooker didn’t work properly and I told her they were alright as far as I knew. After pointing out that things can go wrong unexpectedly she started becoming very agitated. It was then that she fell. With a cry broken up by rasping groans. I put my arms round her and got her back onto her feet. There was blood on her right knee and a small disc shape with meshed edges, which was the hole in her tights. ‘How did that happen?’ I’d asked her, feeling uneasy, my hands squeezing her shoulders.
I looked at the ground but hadn’t seen anything obvious. Bit of uneven turf, I’d guessed, but still.
And who is it I suspect Euan of having an affair with? Well, Celia, the departmental secretary at the college where he works. She’s an attractive woman, quite a lot younger than me, divorced recently, etcetera, etcetera. Unreasonable of me perhaps but I knew she liked him from the way the side of her mouth twitched when she came into a room when he happened to be there. There was a look of sensuous longing to the twitch. Or so it seemed to me.
Just last year Marcy wanted to talk about Alva’s cat. The death of the cat was one of her worst childhood memories. ‘It wasn’t Natalie’s fault you know,’ I told her. I’d been using that same phrase in my mind ever since it happened. ‘I mean anyone could have done it.’ We’d all been fond of that cat, and had been sad when it was run over. I got a flashback of the dead cat’s profile, incongruously cartoon-like and rigid as a board, as held up by one foot it was carried from the road by the special delivery postman who’d been driving past. We were speaking on the phone and then all at once Marcy went silent and I knew she was thinking about the sight too when she suddenly said, ‘Postman Pat,’ then started to cry.
‘Wasn’t it careless of Natalie to run the cat over?’ Marcy was asking. I heard her wiping the tears from her eyes.
‘It was dark and the cat ran out into the road too fast to be seen.’ I said this realising I was glazing over what I had recently come to think.
We’d buried the cat at the bottom of Alva’s garden.
I’m aware I have this tendency to be in denial about potentially hurtful experiences. I’ve always felt threatened by the thought of going beneath the surface and finding some huge dark uncontrollable morass lurking there which turned out to be a thousand times worse than what was seen. There were plenty of things Natalie had done that I felt ashamed of not having examined more closely at the time. Like when she had wet herself on the stairs after having that fall in the woods. I had tried to lead Natalie upwards so we could go to the bathroom but she wouldn’t budge.
‘Come on,’ I said, maybe a little too irritably.
‘Wownt dont too,’ Natalie had replied in a childlike voice. I asked her what she had just said.
‘Non’t dow, Nown tow. Ownt dome,’ were the sounds that came from Natalie’s mouth.
‘What’s she saying Mom?’ asked Marcy who’d come inside. ‘Don’t talk about somebody in front of them,’ I told her quickly. ‘It’s just a kind of rhyme I expect.’
‘Well you said not to talk about anyone behind their back,’ Marcy went. I’d laughed, in spite of myself. ‘Hold onto the bannister now, please Natalie,’ I had told her crisply but she’d stared at me as if I was the one behaving oddly.
‘Why shouldn’t I talk?’ Natalie said. She looked right at me but her eyes were vacant.
‘That’s what I was telling Marcy,’ I told her, trying to be patient. Was she trying to be funny? I’d sent Marcy out to play again. ‘Baboons. They were in the picture in that café. I don’t like their pink bottoms, do you?’
Natalie continued, giggling. Then she started snorting. I managed to get her to the top of the stairs but once in the bathroom she said to me, ‘Who’s that woman?’
I looked up and saw Natalie staring at her own image in the mirror with a total lack of recognition in her face. Before I had time to feel frightened there came the scrunching sound of feet walking up the front path. It was my neighbour, Alva. I moved towards the door and went downstairs.
‘Iceberg,’ I heard Natalie calling out behind me in a remote, unreal sounding voice. But I put it out of my mind. Alva had something strange to relate and she wanted to speak to me in private, she said. She had been a little distant since Natalie had run over her cat but she was upset I said to myself and didn’t think she was blaming Natalie for what had happened.
What Alva told me was terrible. The grave where we’d buried the cat had been dug up and the cat’s remains taken away. We walked down to the bottom of Alva’s garden to have a look. She was right. Earth was in heaps and the indentation where the cat had been was empty.
‘Foxes,’ I said at once. ‘D’you think so?’ Alva sounded uncertain. ‘Definitely foxes,’ I told her. ‘What else could have done it? Or do you think, badgers?’
‘Well, I had wondered if…..’ Alva’s voice trailed away. I didn’t ask what else but instead proposed we have a drink.
Marcy and I speak on the phone two or three times a week now she’s living so far away.
As I say, she wanted to talk about the cat. I wondered whether there was anything wrong; if she was stressed about something. Was it that which made her seek out this sad and frightening past incident.
‘Marcy?’ I said. ‘Is everything alright with you? ‘Yes,’ she told me. ‘Why do you ask this? Because I wanted to talk about the cat? It was one of the worst things in my childhood¸ you know that. But I am over it now.’
‘Yes, I know you are, but your wanting to talk about it at all….. Well, I feel sure it means there’s a problem of some kind you’re having to face now that’s made you dredge this up.’
‘No, there isn’t a problem like that. I just thought of the cat because it was Natalie’s birthday yesterday I suppose. She’d have been seventy nine.’ And then after a minute Marcy said,
‘Why d’you always think there’s something else? It’s been the same story since I was a kid. I tell you there’s nothing wrong but you never listen. You go your own way, hunting for clues, getting more and more upset. It’s all in your imagination, Mom.’
So there you have it. The two aspects of myself. On the one hand I don’t take what I see at face value but go off sensing something terrible, and on the other, I can be easily taken in by surface things when I should be looking deeper. Both positions are illusions in their way. I never seem to get things right. But let me tell you what happened about Natalie and the cat.
A few days after Alva had called to tell me the cat’s grave had been broken into and the body of the cat had gone missing, Marcy came up to me in the hall and said there was a funny
smell everywhere but it was worst of all outside Natalie’s bedroom door.
‘Nonsense,’ I told her, characteristically, I suppose. But I was in a hurry to finish off several job applications, as well as see to supper and sort out tomorrow’s laundry and as it was there didn’t seem to be enough time to fit everything in. Anyway Marcy turned out to be right. There was a smell. I noticed it when I got up the next morning. It was definitely coming from Natalie’s room but she didn’t answer when I knocked. I could hear her scuffling around in there so I called out then I tried the handle. She’d pushed something up against the door from the inside and it didn’t move much when I pushed it. But through the small crack I’d made the smell came, chokingly bad. Sick making. I could no longer deny there was something awful going on but even so I avoided confronting Natalie and went downstairs wondering what to do. At last I’d decided to go and ask for Alva’s help. My inability to accurately read situations shocks me when I think of it. I do recognise more clearly than I used to how capable I am of imagining a huge mountain of trouble where nothing whatever exists. It’s true to say I’m often this way with Marcy, even now, and when she was a child it was far worse. My mirage syndrome is the way I think of it. And then, there’s the opposite. I just see what’s before my eyes and don’t picture what might be concealed in the myriad depths beneath. When Natalie said ‘Iceberg’ that day she couldn’t have drawn on a more apposite image.
I get out of the elevator one floor up and walk down a new corridor. The carpet is brown here. From the window you can see further. More rows of flowers, more trees. You can catch the tip of the wall at the far side of the parterre. As I go I’m wondering if this is one of my mirage moments and if it is, what damage I’ll be causing to my relationship with Euan any minute now. But it’s just possible I’ve been missing the dark under surface of Euan’s life for the whole time we’ve been together and when I go at last into Room 61 it will be just like when Alva forced Natalie’s bedroom door all those years ago. For it was Alva who’d had to take charge. I’d hung back, right till the last moment trying to make up some sort of tenable excuse for everything. Then, when the door swung open and we saw the gruesome things inside there was no longer any getting away from the truth. Accumulated old dusty newspaper in scrolls made Natalie’s room look like a rat’s nest. Piles of rubbish from the bins were dotted around, and faeces, that too. We could see little coils of it against the matted paper. Clearly all of this had been going on for ages. Then Alva and I saw the dark moist bundle at the foot of Natalie’s bed, which we both understood at once must have been the body of the cat. Natalie was found to be suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s of course. How could I have not realised it was something like this?
I think of the look that had been on Natalie’s face as she watered the patio that day. Distant yet intense. I had seen this yet never looked at what it might have meant. Talk about being cut off. I shake my head in disbelief at the extent of my avoidance as I re-pass the windows which overlook the laid out flower beds of the hotel gardens, dimmer now in the evening light. So what have I learned from the lessons of the past? Even now I’m not quite sure. I reach the correct door and stare at the shiny silver numbers at its centre. 61. My heart is fast beating, but my body moves in slow motion. It’s the fear, I suppose. So what is the reality I am about to face? Have I been constructing yet another mirage; a picture with no substance to it with which to torment myself? Or am I about to find the jagged underwater contours of an iceberg, the surface glimpses of which I’ve just about noticed but made sure to never explore? Which will it be?
Stretching out my hand towards the door I press the bell.
Jay Merill
I start walking along the hotel corridor wondering what I’m about to find, and think of the past. There’s something embedded in there I want to re-live, something particular I need to support me through this moment. This is what I focus on:
A certain hot July. The day Marcy ran away from home was the same day Natalie set fire to the stir-fry pan. Both these twenty-year old facts are most clear to me as I stare at the blue carpeted corridor stretching out ahead. Aunt Natalie, my mother’s older sister who had asked us to come and stay when Ray and I broke up, was a lovely person. I’d always been fond of her and living at her place was such a perfect solution to my housing problems, a real chance for me to get back on my feet. She’s been dead for quite a while now, poor lady, but I find I’m able to picture her very vividly as she was on that summer day.
The conflagration burst out quickly because of the half inch or so of old fat Natalie always kept in the pan. At that moment I was on the way to the front door with my car keys in my hand. But I had to rush back into the kitchen and throw a wet towel over the rising flames. I must have felt frightened though somehow I kept calm. I’d just been doing a wash so the towel was right there hanging on the drying rack. I stretched out, caught it by the corner and brought it down heavily onto the fire. The room became an instant mass of hissing steam but we were safe. Funny that even through the worst moments my worry about Marcy dominated. Maybe that helped me confront the danger we were facing. As soon as I could, I went out to try and find the girl. All the way down the road my stress levels were increasing. There were key questions: Why was Marcy running away? Was she being bullied at school? Was she unhappy because her Dad and I had split up? Or, something else? My anxiety was so intense I’d developed a painful headache. The poor child. She was in trouble, and now, on top of that, she was in real danger on a busy stretch of road. I forgot the fire quickly as my eyes sprang frightened tears for Marcy. Only eight years old she was then.
My feet sink into the soft carpet of the hotel floor. I look through the windows on my right as I go, see fantastic laid out gardens. I’ve always loved the symmetry of a parterre and am sorry I have no eyes for it today. There’s no point even trying to appreciate the rows of flowers and colonnade of trees, I know I’m too upset. I shouldn’t really be here. It isn’t helping. I think of that old July day.
I soon saw Marcy up ahead. She hadn’t got that far. When I caught sight of her small determined figure bounding along half hampered by a back-pack the tears just poured out and everything became blurred. Then I drew the car up beside her.
‘Marcy, get in,’ I said in a steely voice. We were going to have to work on this running away thing. ‘I’m not running away from home,’ she went, before I could begin to say anything. ‘I was just playing at being an explorer. I wanted to see if I could get to the river path from the main road and then walk along it till I got home that way. You know, go round in a circle.’
By the time I made it back with Marcy, Natalie was sitting sedately on the sofa with a mug of tea in one hand. That burnt fat smokiness was everywhere. It would take some while to dissipate I’d realised. The pan was worn and tatty even before the accident, and like Natalie
herself had seen better days.
‘Is something burning?’ Marcy said and Natalie gave her enigmatic smile. It was hard to tell from the smile whether Natalie had taken on board what she’d done, but,
‘I was only trying to see if the cooker was working properly,’ Natalie promptly replied. I remember being surprised.
‘What’s burning Mum?’ Marcy had repeated, giving me a look. ‘It’s alright,’ I told her. ‘Everything’s been dealt with.’
‘The flame shouldn’t go as high as that when you turn it up. There’s something wrong with it.’ This, from Natalie.
Now I recognise I should have given more thought to this whole incident. Instead I left the room quickly as Natalie started making her teeth clicking noise, and I pushed it from my mind.
I had a little talk with Marcy later and asked what was troubling her. I said she could speak to me about anything that was on her mind but she mustn’t ever run away as it was a bad thing to do. Marcy kept on insisting she had only gone exploring.
‘Well, why did you take your back-pack full of clothes then?’ I asked her.
‘In case I got lost and the dark came down unexpectedly. In case it began snowing. You said I should start to be sensible now I’m eight. It was only my fleece anyway and a packet of chips.’
‘Ice,’ said Natalie, joining in. ‘Why is everyone talking about snow and ice?’ I’d asked. ‘It’s July.’
Natalie smiled again and went outside. ‘Iceberg,’ she murmured in a tantalising voice. I catch the nuance of her smile now, these years later, as if it just happened. Strange how easy it is to remember such a tiny detail.
What am I doing in this hotel, checking out on my partner? I can’t say I’m proud of it. I don’t know when I first began to suspect Euan was seeing someone else. Little things I’d noticed, I suppose. Signs. I had been through hell in my mind and told myself I needed to know the truth one way or the other. When he said he’d like to go away while he put the finishing touches to his book, I accepted it at first but then got suspicious. He said he needed to concentrate. Just a week would do it, he told me. He left me the hotel address quite openly, even the room number. Surely he must be alone. Or he thought I was an idiot, or he really didn’t care if I knew or not. My thoughts spiralled into angry accusations. Alright then, I’d find out for myself. And so here I am, staying furtively at the same place as Euan, and not at all enjoying the experience. I’m heading towards Room 61 but, looking at the numbers on the doors of this corridor, I realise I am on a lower floor than I should be so I walk back towards the lift.
My mind wanders off to that conversation I’d had with Marcy when she was eight years old. I hadn’t been satisfied Marcy was telling the truth when she told me she was just exploring.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this was what you were doing?’ I’d asked her straight out.
‘Well you never believe me Mom.’ ‘So why did you say to Alva next door you were running away?’ ‘That was a joke. I didn’t really mean it.’
‘You must make sure to say exactly what you mean, Marcy.’
‘Well Natalie doesn’t. Sometimes she uses different words for everything.’
I had been annoyed. ‘What a thing to say.’ Looking out of the hotel window I think of the sight of Natalie in the garden of her house as I’d seen her on that far off day. She had her watering-can in her hand and was holding it up ostentatiously by the handle, but she was watering the stone patio instead of the flowers. A very strange thing to do. In fact, whenever Marcy and I used to have a talk I seemed to see Natalie doing something strange. For example, there was an afternoon just a few days later. I had glanced through the open kitchen door and noticed Natalie in the hall with one foot on the stairs. She wasn’t moving except for her lips. They were going round and round as though she was chewing something with her mouth open. But I told myself Natalie was just upset over a fall she’d had that same morning. Marcy was starting to ask me a question then stopped. She too was looking at Natalie, I realised. Natalie was still in that fixed position with one foot on the first stair tread, and just beneath where she was standing was a dark stain on the carpet. Delayed shock, I put it down to. She’d been a bit too cool about her fall at the time. We’d been walking through the woods and talking about the recent fire in the kitchen. Natalie kept insisting the knobs on the cooker didn’t work properly and I told her they were alright as far as I knew. After pointing out that things can go wrong unexpectedly she started becoming very agitated. It was then that she fell. With a cry broken up by rasping groans. I put my arms round her and got her back onto her feet. There was blood on her right knee and a small disc shape with meshed edges, which was the hole in her tights. ‘How did that happen?’ I’d asked her, feeling uneasy, my hands squeezing her shoulders.
I looked at the ground but hadn’t seen anything obvious. Bit of uneven turf, I’d guessed, but still.
And who is it I suspect Euan of having an affair with? Well, Celia, the departmental secretary at the college where he works. She’s an attractive woman, quite a lot younger than me, divorced recently, etcetera, etcetera. Unreasonable of me perhaps but I knew she liked him from the way the side of her mouth twitched when she came into a room when he happened to be there. There was a look of sensuous longing to the twitch. Or so it seemed to me.
Just last year Marcy wanted to talk about Alva’s cat. The death of the cat was one of her worst childhood memories. ‘It wasn’t Natalie’s fault you know,’ I told her. I’d been using that same phrase in my mind ever since it happened. ‘I mean anyone could have done it.’ We’d all been fond of that cat, and had been sad when it was run over. I got a flashback of the dead cat’s profile, incongruously cartoon-like and rigid as a board, as held up by one foot it was carried from the road by the special delivery postman who’d been driving past. We were speaking on the phone and then all at once Marcy went silent and I knew she was thinking about the sight too when she suddenly said, ‘Postman Pat,’ then started to cry.
‘Wasn’t it careless of Natalie to run the cat over?’ Marcy was asking. I heard her wiping the tears from her eyes.
‘It was dark and the cat ran out into the road too fast to be seen.’ I said this realising I was glazing over what I had recently come to think.
We’d buried the cat at the bottom of Alva’s garden.
I’m aware I have this tendency to be in denial about potentially hurtful experiences. I’ve always felt threatened by the thought of going beneath the surface and finding some huge dark uncontrollable morass lurking there which turned out to be a thousand times worse than what was seen. There were plenty of things Natalie had done that I felt ashamed of not having examined more closely at the time. Like when she had wet herself on the stairs after having that fall in the woods. I had tried to lead Natalie upwards so we could go to the bathroom but she wouldn’t budge.
‘Come on,’ I said, maybe a little too irritably.
‘Wownt dont too,’ Natalie had replied in a childlike voice. I asked her what she had just said.
‘Non’t dow, Nown tow. Ownt dome,’ were the sounds that came from Natalie’s mouth.
‘What’s she saying Mom?’ asked Marcy who’d come inside. ‘Don’t talk about somebody in front of them,’ I told her quickly. ‘It’s just a kind of rhyme I expect.’
‘Well you said not to talk about anyone behind their back,’ Marcy went. I’d laughed, in spite of myself. ‘Hold onto the bannister now, please Natalie,’ I had told her crisply but she’d stared at me as if I was the one behaving oddly.
‘Why shouldn’t I talk?’ Natalie said. She looked right at me but her eyes were vacant.
‘That’s what I was telling Marcy,’ I told her, trying to be patient. Was she trying to be funny? I’d sent Marcy out to play again. ‘Baboons. They were in the picture in that café. I don’t like their pink bottoms, do you?’
Natalie continued, giggling. Then she started snorting. I managed to get her to the top of the stairs but once in the bathroom she said to me, ‘Who’s that woman?’
I looked up and saw Natalie staring at her own image in the mirror with a total lack of recognition in her face. Before I had time to feel frightened there came the scrunching sound of feet walking up the front path. It was my neighbour, Alva. I moved towards the door and went downstairs.
‘Iceberg,’ I heard Natalie calling out behind me in a remote, unreal sounding voice. But I put it out of my mind. Alva had something strange to relate and she wanted to speak to me in private, she said. She had been a little distant since Natalie had run over her cat but she was upset I said to myself and didn’t think she was blaming Natalie for what had happened.
What Alva told me was terrible. The grave where we’d buried the cat had been dug up and the cat’s remains taken away. We walked down to the bottom of Alva’s garden to have a look. She was right. Earth was in heaps and the indentation where the cat had been was empty.
‘Foxes,’ I said at once. ‘D’you think so?’ Alva sounded uncertain. ‘Definitely foxes,’ I told her. ‘What else could have done it? Or do you think, badgers?’
‘Well, I had wondered if…..’ Alva’s voice trailed away. I didn’t ask what else but instead proposed we have a drink.
Marcy and I speak on the phone two or three times a week now she’s living so far away.
As I say, she wanted to talk about the cat. I wondered whether there was anything wrong; if she was stressed about something. Was it that which made her seek out this sad and frightening past incident.
‘Marcy?’ I said. ‘Is everything alright with you? ‘Yes,’ she told me. ‘Why do you ask this? Because I wanted to talk about the cat? It was one of the worst things in my childhood¸ you know that. But I am over it now.’
‘Yes, I know you are, but your wanting to talk about it at all….. Well, I feel sure it means there’s a problem of some kind you’re having to face now that’s made you dredge this up.’
‘No, there isn’t a problem like that. I just thought of the cat because it was Natalie’s birthday yesterday I suppose. She’d have been seventy nine.’ And then after a minute Marcy said,
‘Why d’you always think there’s something else? It’s been the same story since I was a kid. I tell you there’s nothing wrong but you never listen. You go your own way, hunting for clues, getting more and more upset. It’s all in your imagination, Mom.’
So there you have it. The two aspects of myself. On the one hand I don’t take what I see at face value but go off sensing something terrible, and on the other, I can be easily taken in by surface things when I should be looking deeper. Both positions are illusions in their way. I never seem to get things right. But let me tell you what happened about Natalie and the cat.
A few days after Alva had called to tell me the cat’s grave had been broken into and the body of the cat had gone missing, Marcy came up to me in the hall and said there was a funny
smell everywhere but it was worst of all outside Natalie’s bedroom door.
‘Nonsense,’ I told her, characteristically, I suppose. But I was in a hurry to finish off several job applications, as well as see to supper and sort out tomorrow’s laundry and as it was there didn’t seem to be enough time to fit everything in. Anyway Marcy turned out to be right. There was a smell. I noticed it when I got up the next morning. It was definitely coming from Natalie’s room but she didn’t answer when I knocked. I could hear her scuffling around in there so I called out then I tried the handle. She’d pushed something up against the door from the inside and it didn’t move much when I pushed it. But through the small crack I’d made the smell came, chokingly bad. Sick making. I could no longer deny there was something awful going on but even so I avoided confronting Natalie and went downstairs wondering what to do. At last I’d decided to go and ask for Alva’s help. My inability to accurately read situations shocks me when I think of it. I do recognise more clearly than I used to how capable I am of imagining a huge mountain of trouble where nothing whatever exists. It’s true to say I’m often this way with Marcy, even now, and when she was a child it was far worse. My mirage syndrome is the way I think of it. And then, there’s the opposite. I just see what’s before my eyes and don’t picture what might be concealed in the myriad depths beneath. When Natalie said ‘Iceberg’ that day she couldn’t have drawn on a more apposite image.
I get out of the elevator one floor up and walk down a new corridor. The carpet is brown here. From the window you can see further. More rows of flowers, more trees. You can catch the tip of the wall at the far side of the parterre. As I go I’m wondering if this is one of my mirage moments and if it is, what damage I’ll be causing to my relationship with Euan any minute now. But it’s just possible I’ve been missing the dark under surface of Euan’s life for the whole time we’ve been together and when I go at last into Room 61 it will be just like when Alva forced Natalie’s bedroom door all those years ago. For it was Alva who’d had to take charge. I’d hung back, right till the last moment trying to make up some sort of tenable excuse for everything. Then, when the door swung open and we saw the gruesome things inside there was no longer any getting away from the truth. Accumulated old dusty newspaper in scrolls made Natalie’s room look like a rat’s nest. Piles of rubbish from the bins were dotted around, and faeces, that too. We could see little coils of it against the matted paper. Clearly all of this had been going on for ages. Then Alva and I saw the dark moist bundle at the foot of Natalie’s bed, which we both understood at once must have been the body of the cat. Natalie was found to be suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s of course. How could I have not realised it was something like this?
I think of the look that had been on Natalie’s face as she watered the patio that day. Distant yet intense. I had seen this yet never looked at what it might have meant. Talk about being cut off. I shake my head in disbelief at the extent of my avoidance as I re-pass the windows which overlook the laid out flower beds of the hotel gardens, dimmer now in the evening light. So what have I learned from the lessons of the past? Even now I’m not quite sure. I reach the correct door and stare at the shiny silver numbers at its centre. 61. My heart is fast beating, but my body moves in slow motion. It’s the fear, I suppose. So what is the reality I am about to face? Have I been constructing yet another mirage; a picture with no substance to it with which to torment myself? Or am I about to find the jagged underwater contours of an iceberg, the surface glimpses of which I’ve just about noticed but made sure to never explore? Which will it be?
Stretching out my hand towards the door I press the bell.
