‘Yes, you used to talk about the bird too. Not much to me. I wasn’t here. You know that.’ Her eyes, overly bright in her cold face, strain with guilt. It’s not the first time she’s looked at me like this. I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive herself for leaving me as much as she did back then, no matter how many times I tell her she needs to.
I try to do it again now.
‘Mum, stop. You’re too hard on yourself … ’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘You needed me. You really needed me, and I was no use to you. I was young, heartbroken, afraid of everything, letting you down most of all, and you weren’t … Well … ’ Her brow pinches. ‘…straightforward.’
‘Oh.’ I grimace.
‘No, don’t look like that.’ She reaches for my hand. ‘You were gorgeous, and sweet, and precious. But you weren’t like other children. You saw the world differently to the rest of us. Youheardit differently. That bird you used to talk about, it was alive to you. Nan thought, the way you described it, that it might have been a hawk, they used to have them here when she was a child, but she could never hear it. No one could.’ She places her other hand around mine. ‘I remember, on your fourth birthday, I took you out for a walk, and you kept pointing atthe sky, asking where the bird was, but I couldn’t tell you, and you just started …wailing.’ She widens her eyes, remembering.‘I realise now how frightened you must have been, but then, I didn’t know what to do. I thought you were going to make yourself ill, so I lied to you, said I’d seen it flying away, but you didn’t believe me. You just kept crying.’ She pauses, studying me. ‘Do you remember?’
‘No.’ I try to, delving into the depths of my mind, but I can’t find anything there. ‘I don’t.’
‘And what about here?’ She nods in at the cemetery.
I turn to look, my eyes moving over the slumbering space, taking in the trees, the patches of green where their branches have protected the earth from the frost, and all the graves, disordered and unplanned, squeezed together over the centuries. ‘Yes,’ I say, feeling a stirring of recollection. ‘Yes.’
Then, ‘Where are Nan and Grandad?’
‘They’re not here,’ Mum says. ‘They never have been.’
Slowly, barely aware of my own movement, I turn back to face her.
She stares at me, her face taut with emotion, her breath, seemingly, held.
‘What?’ I say, numbly.
‘They were cremated. I scattered their ashes up on the peaks.’
‘But … ’ I frown. ‘What?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I remember us burying them … ’
‘You don’t, my darling. You just don’t.’ She forces the words out in a strangled rush. ‘I know you’ve always thought you do, and I tried when you were little to convince you that you didn’t, but you got so upset. Hysterical.’ She gives me a helpless look. ‘In the end it just felt kinder to leave it. Then, the lie …grew… ’
‘They really weren’t buried?’
‘No.’
‘What about the funeral?’
‘I didn’t take you. You were too little, had been through too much … ’
‘Mum –’ I place my hand to my head, fighting the absurdness of what she’s telling me – ‘this can’t be right.’
‘It is, Claude.’
‘Then why are we here?’
‘Because you ran away here, the day before the accident. Grandad found you curled up among the graves, fast asleep, your face all swollen with tears.’
I stare, appalled.
‘I know,’ says Mum. ‘I know.’
‘Why have you never told me?’
