‘I think it just made us more aware of what we actually have. What we… are. Losing her tore off a mask we didn’t even know was there.’
She smiled and laid a hand on my forearm. ‘I thought we were losing you too, Cliff. Truly. But for a while now… ever since Mabel, it feels like you’re coming back to us a little.’
What she said was so true it ached, in a way that made me dig my fingernails into my palms until it hurt. Physical pain was more bearable.Anythingwas more bearable. ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter,’ I snarled bitterly. ‘We all know how this is going to end.’
‘Still, I’m happy for you. It’s good to be reminded every now and then why we’re all doing this, isn’t it? It’s no less precious just because it can’t last. There’s no point living a life like this if you’re dead inside.’
At least if you’re already dead inside, you don’t feel like you’re still dying, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. It wouldn’t help. Besides, I’d known from the start what I was getting into. I had seen the light, and knew what it would cost me to reach my fingers towards it. Getting them burnt was just part of the deal, one I was willing to accept because I’d been so cold so long, and because Mabel and her radiance were the first in many years to hold such allure. Perhaps the first of all. I’d never felt anything like it, which was fascinating and soothing and beautiful and…deadly. For the both of us.
‘The pain will fade. It always does, you know that.’ Norah leant her head against me, her hair tickling my chin, her words in her eyes. ‘In the end, all we have is each other.’
I didn’t answer, only stood, breathing, trying merely to exist and not to be. I’d been doing it more and more these days. Yet I couldn’t ignore what, deep down, I had already realised: I didn’t need to have Mabel to know I was going to lose her. To know that she was already losing something herself. Much more than she could possibly know. If I’d been stronger, if I’d been better, I would have protected her. I would have kept my distance. But Iwasn’t strong or good, I was exhausted, and at the same time strangely elated. As if being near Mabel had dug a hole at the very core of me. It had been so hardened for so long I’d thought that was impossible, yet there it was: a chamber softly scratched out at my centre, and I felt her in it. Suddenly, somehow, I felt many things. It hurt, but the hurt was what made it good. After all, what was a wound, if not a sign you were alive?
I knew that every second I allowed myself to feel this way would only make the end feel even worse. But in that moment, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to let it go yet. I didn’t want to lethergo yet.
What did that make me? A fool, a monster, or a human being? Perhaps it didn’t matter much, because in the end, it all came to the same thing. For someone like me, living always tasted like dying. And finding something always tasted like losing it again, in the cruellest possible way.
Chapter18
Mabel
Christmas came, and the people around me went. The colleges were emptier each day, the snow falling more thickly. When I left my staircase in the morning, my footprints were the first to break through thewhite. When I returned from the library in the evening, they had been swept away as if they were never there. As if I were never there.
That wasn’t the only thing that made me feel like a ghost. I was only sporadically in touch with other people: Clara called a few times, Davie sent me snaps of the family dogs wearing reindeer antlers, Zoe ignored my texts, and Blake… Blake didn’t communicate at all.
I didn’t text him either, just stared again and again at the open chat, wondering what it was that held him back. The kiss, or everything else. Me, or all the stuff about the professor, Ashton, his friends, his… society. What was the mistake, the big, glaring error always stirring at the back of my mind when I thought about that night?
I should have been relieved that he made no attempt to pick up what Norah had interrupted. Yet I felt a pang of disappointment every time I took out my phone to find no new messages from him. Like on Christmas Eve, when I got back to my room around six. Flecks of snow were melting on my coat, my hair was damp, and the tip of my nose began to tingle unpleasantly as soon as the heated air began to gnaw at its chilly armour.
I rubbed it with the ball of my hand as I checked my phone again, so that I didn’t notice the box ouside my door until I nearly tripped over it–even though it was wider than me and as tall as my chest. I looked for the sender’s name, confused, but all I could see on the lid was my own name. That and the outline of a… bird. For a moment I thought it was a starling, but then I realised there wasn’t a twig held in its beak but a beaded necklace. So, a magpie. Suddenly I knew who’d left me the box.
I glanced around, but saw no one. Everyone else on my staircase had gone home. I was alone with a box so large it was a struggle to manoeuvre it over my doorstep. Something inside it rustled as I put it next to my bed. I stared at it uncertaintly, taking out my phone again and opening the chat with Blake.
Pica
Have you ever seen the movie Seven with Brad Pitt?
As soon as I’d sent the message, he came online. Immediately, he started typing.
Heathcliff
I promise you, I didn’t leave a severed head on your doorstep.
Pica
If the size of the box is anything to go by, it’s not severed.
Heathcliff
Just open it, Pica.
I bit my lower lip to hold back a smile. I put the phone down without answering, slung my damp coat onto the bed and picked up some scissors from my desk. Even before I’d opened the lid, I could smell what it was. I caught a tart waft of pine needles and resin, and moments later, the first prickly branch came poking out. A tree, its spreading branches alreadydecorated. Stars made of gold and silver-laquered glass, hand-painted baubles, ornaments made of crystal and straw.
My heart grew heavy and warm. My knees felt weak, and I sat down on the edge of the bed. Mum and I had always chosen our tree together, decorated it, drank our mugs of caramel hotchocolate beside it. After she was gone, somehow I’d associated Christmas trees with everything I’d lost. But to be gifted one– by someone who didn’t even know what it meant to me–made me feel for the first time in six years like I could begin to think about what I’d had. What I’d always been grateful for at Christmas.
Giving in to a sudden impulse, I called Blake. He picked up in seconds. ‘You got me a Christmas tree?’
‘Mmm.’ I heard him take a few steps, then a door swung shut. ‘You like it or you don’t like it?’
