80.
Rachel
September 2030
The moment I know – I mean,reallyknow – comes on an innocuous Tuesday in September.
It started almost as imperceptibly as the drip from a tap – so soft and sporadic, I neglected to pay attention at first. It just didn’t seem like something that needed fixing. Words and places falling, very occasionally, out of my head. Emails unintentionally not responded to. Insurances lapsing. Getting lost on the way into town. Struggling to plant my feet on the stairs. Failing for a minute or so to place my godchild – Lo’s daughter – when she messaged me last month. Forgetting Ingrid’s birthday, which I have never done before in my life. And then trying to blame it on the time difference, which – as Polly gently pointed out – made absolutely no sense at all.
And now, after searching for nearly a full morning, I open the bathroom cabinet to find my wallet on the second shelf.
I stare at it in shock, like I have stumbled upon a wasp’s nest.When, and why?I have no recollection at all of putting it in here.
I feel my cheeks flush red. Because, even though I am alone and unobserved, the humiliation roars.
I have recently turned sixty, which is hardly old, of course. But I feel there is a ghoulishness to the world’s preoccupation with the ageing body. There are certainly enough adverts and doctors and newspaper headlines and segments on daytime television that seem, to me, absurdly sensationalist. I find the narrative petty and dull, so I generally ignore it. Life has been kind to me, and I am lucky. And, as my friends and I so often say, it makesabsolutely no sense that we should pay attention to the people who try to sell us fear.
Ingrid has mentioned a couple of times lately that she thinks I’ve lost my spark. She’s asked if it’s because I don’t like getting older. But ageing doesn’t trouble me – it is normal and expected that I should experience the occasional twinge in my back, and that it takes me longer than it once did to recover from a jog. Admittedly I am more precautionary, these days: I’ve cut down on alcohol, and have started lifting light weights, on the advice of Josh, ever since Lo slipped a disc shaving her legs. I never did get the hang of yoga, much as I tried.
But I do not resent these things. To do so would be like begrudging sunrise, or the turn of the seasons, the twist of a tide.
That said, I have been keeping a kind of diary recently. On the first page, I headed itThings of Mild Concern. And much of what I have recorded so far, I’ve begun to realise, has been a series of little memory lapses – circuit-breaks and gaps in my thinking, like bricks missing in a building. My mind sometimes resembles one of those computer games where the floor opens up without warning, cleaving maliciously apart. And I need to concentrate, hard, so I don’t fall into the darkness that is waiting.
After retrieving my wallet, I make a coffee and take a biscuit from the tin, and then another. I force myself to go through the rigmarole of my weekly online shop, then exchange some messages with Emma, and one with Lawrence. He’s back in Bedford next week on a flying visit from the Cotswolds, where he lives now with his girlfriend. He is keen for us all to go out for dinner, but I decide I don’t want to see him. I couldn’t bear it if something embarrassing were to happen in front of him.
By the time I can bring myself to jot down the wallet incident in my notebook, it is almost dark.
Once I’m finished, I get out my phone. I know Josh is busy right now, writing his next book, and with a TV series in pre-production. But I would like, I think, to feel reassured by him.
Or perhaps it is not reassurance I want. Perhaps, in fact, it is honesty.
I have been telling myself – over and over – that I am too young for this to be happening. If my mother ever enters my mind, I push her swiftly away, as I have been used to doing for much of the past fifty years.
But ignoring the truth is never more than a temporary fix. Reality is guaranteed to return, the way a dead body will always rise to the surface of a lake.
I scroll down to Josh’s name, double-checking I’ve remembered it right, since I seem to be in the habit of misdialling people lately.
But, as my fingers hover over his name, I feel a chill of fear seep slowly through me, pooling in voids I didn’t know existed.
In my hand, I let the screen fade to black.
81.
Rachel
August 2031
Thirteen years afterGraveyard Heartwas first published, the film is finally released.
Josh invites me to the premiere in London. For weeks he tag-teams with Emma on trying to persuade me. But I am resolute. I know there’s no way I could walk a red carpet with him now, no matter how meaningful the occasion. I have to do things at my own pace these days, in private, well away from the glare of observation. I haven’t told him I’ve been struggling for balance recently, reluctant to leave the house in case I topple and hit my head. The thought of doing so at an event in front of cameras is almost unbearable. Most of the time, I’m worried people might assume I’m drunk.
In the end, we agree to go together to see it at the cinema.
I am late, of course, as I so often am now. I end up doing two laps of the block before I see that Josh has come outside the cinema to wait for me and I remember what it is I am meant to be doing. But I brazen it out – just apologise, and pretend the bus was delayed.
Before the film starts, as the cinema plays a needlessly explosive advert for a new streaming service, I lean over and say to Josh, ‘I need to ask you something. It’s to do with Emma.’
‘Sure,’ he says, through a mouthful of popcorn. He extends the carton to me, but I shake my head. The last time I ate popcorn, I cracked a tooth on a rogue kernel and had to pay an extortionate amount of money for emergency dental work.
