The river is dark and inviting. It would be so easy. The worst part would be the fall, losing my body to gravity, the explosion of fear. But then, the best part would come. The obliterating cold. Everything finally stopping. Water closing over it all.
A boat speeds under the bridge, sending a series of waves through the river: a Thames Clipper. I took that last summer with Millie from Greenwich all the way here, she sat on my knee eating snacks while I pointed out castles (the Tower of London), giantboats (HMSBelfast), the monster hedgehog spike (The Shard), and she’d turned to me, crumbs all over her mouth, and said, ‘I’m happy, Mummy.’ This keeps me above the water more than any life ring, drenches me deeper than the rain. Because that’s what I want, isn’t it? To have a million more moments like that with her. Moments when I’m whole and healed.
‘Are you all right?’ It’s a woman. She is dressed in a black puffer jacket; rain is streaming down her nose but her eyes are wide on me. ‘I saw you from across the road and I thought . . .’ She doesn’t finish.
I let the railings go. Climb down from the ledge. I will not give up now. There are too many things I need to do to get back to her, to Kit. The sky growls above me. I sling on my rucksack, pull up my hood. ‘Thank you,’ I say to her. ‘I’m fine.’
From: Kit McDermott
11:38
I know they’re secrets because you’ve wrapped them in so many layers – a scarf, a plastic bag, the rucksack you bought for our honeymoon to South America. I guess you thought the rucksack was a good place to hide them. You thought they were safe.
And you know what, you’re right, your secrets are safe. Because even though I’ve found all eight of your sketchbooks, I have no idea what they mean. You’ve never once mentioned to me that you like art or that you can draw. Yet, I am staring at hundreds and hundreds of drawings – mostly plants but also butterflies, always blue.
I’m losing my mind, I’m actually going mad, I’m certain this is important, then a second later, I think it’s not. Maybe this is nothing, just a hobby you did when you were a child. But then why never tell me about it? Why were these more hidden than your pills?
32
End of theWorld
Then
The boy, whose name is Alex and who starts to meet me on the beach after he finishes school, tells me that the sea I’m swimming in is not the sea at all, it’s an estuary nestled between the western edge of Falmouth Bay and the eastern side of the Lizard Peninsula. That, if I take the coastal path from the cottage, in the opposite direction to the thyme field, I’ll come to The Ferryboat Inn, the pub where his sister is working. That, as long as I hug the coastline, I can kayak all the way from the cottage to Port Navas where he lives.
I’ve never had a friend like him before. He is sixteen to my fourteen but our schools feel the same – teachers, cliques, bullies. We spend much of our afternoons caricaturing our enemies who make us feel inconsequential and separate – their big boobs and greasy skin, their blockhead stupidity. I confess that after Mama died, no one has tried to contact me from St Matthews. He says they’re shits. I tell him about how I brought that fungus in for show and tell. He says he once took in a spider crab, whichescaped and got stamped on by Bradley Wayne. Our sides sear from laughing.
I find myself talking a lot about my father. I tell Alex that he left my mother when she was pregnant with me, that I couldn’t tell him Mama had died or that I am staying with Daniel because I do not know his address or even his name. Alex says, in his experience, it is betternotto know these things. He tells me he knows all these details about his mother but it has made absolutely no difference; since she left their family, she has never called or visited. When he talks about her, he twists his thumb and forefinger around his wrist. If I lay my hand over his, he stops.
One time, we takeForagerpast her house, Alex points it out to me, a neat, whitewashed cottage with green shutters. He lifts his chin as we go past, daring her to come out, but when the boat slips away, so does his bravado. He slumps over the side. I put my hand on his shoulder but he doesn’t get up. So, I use my St Matthews words, words Mama would never let me say. ‘Wanker.’
He chuckles sadly but that’s enough for me. I run to the end ofForager. ‘Wanker!’ I shout at his mother, give her the finger, ‘I hate your shutters!’ and then he is behind me, he is grinning and that grin is everything, we are calling everyone wankers, all the people who’ve abandoned us, the banal ways they’ve screwed us up, our rage reverberating across the water. It feels so good. To be young and rude and loud.
It is a relief to talk to Alex about Mama, I hadn’t realised how much I’d been holding in. He listens as I comb through every fight I’ve ever had with her, repeat every hurtful word. ‘I was a total bitch,’ I say over and over. His response is indefatigably the same. He looks out onto the open water and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. Sheloved you,’ and somehow, in that look, those words, I feel like her love is the sea, my twisted guilt tiny against the magnitude of it.
The one person I never speak to Alex about is Daniel. I don’t tell Alex the real reason I fought with Mama or that Daniel hasn’t spoken to me in days. If Alex asks about him, I pretend he is strict and boring, I parody him catching a butterfly, I mock his jars. But simmering under every conversation with Alex, the secrets we tell each other, the places we go, I am always thinking of Daniel, always assessing and reassessing everything in relation to him.
I am struck, for example, at how reliant I am on Daniel, how utterly incurious I’ve been about where exactly I am. In London, I walked to and from school, met Mama before her concerts, went to parks and museums; the city was as navigable to me as the estuary is to Alex. And I wonder if the intense focus on botany, which has fed me, comforted me, healed me, has robbed me of broader perspectives. I can tell the difference between the innocuous cow parsley and the poisonous hemlock water dropwort but I don’t know where the nearest supermarket is or the name of the closest train station.
I start to imagine end-of-the-world scenarios where all human life is wiped out apart from Alex, Daniel and me. Who would survive? Alex is the clear winner. He drives his father’s truck, he knows where to trig for cockles, he can cook shellfish in their own brine. Then, it would be me, I know that dandelions are complete proteins from root to tip, I can make my way round mushrooms and berries. Daniel, with his mews house and microscopic knowledge about butterflies, would be the first to go. The thought gives me a dirty rush of pleasure. Not all knowledge is equal. Some things are more worth knowing than others.
For Alex, knowledge isn’t something to pursue in and of itself, it’s a means to an end. He isn’t interested in the genetic differences between two mackerels or the Latin names for genus, species, sub-species but he knows where to fish for them and how much they sell for. I go onForagerwith him, watch him unhook the mackerels from the line, their silver tails thrashing in the blue plastic crate. Once, he catches a cuttlefish, an awful-looking thing with a swarm of tentacles under its eyes. He lets me watch it for a few minutes and then he takes it from the box and cuts it up on the deck with a pair of scissors. His practicality disgusts me and awes me. The efficient way he spears the cuttlefish right back onto the hook he caught it on as bait for something else.
For this reason, he doesn’t understand my interest in plants. ‘Wow,’ he says when I throw my arms round him after he tells me the names of the seaweed I’ve found – sea cabbage, dulse, bladderwrack. His attention drifts when I tell him my theory about how I think the different colours of seaweed are related to how close they are to the surface of the water, it doesn’t connect with him, I make a mental note to tone it down. In these moments, I feel strange and unknowable and want Daniel.
Still, he tries, he is generous in a way that boys at St Matthews never were. He invites me out with his friends, Simon and James, both fishermen’s sons. I always say no. For my sketching, he kayaks me up the creeks to muddy foreshores where ancient oaks grow, festooned with lichen. He fits me with his sister’s snorkel and fins and another layer of the world is lifted up, peeled back – clutches of cuttlefish eggs clinging to blades of eelgrass, rocks thick with the glisten of mussels. My body changes as my sketchbook blooms: my calves grow shapely; my arms muscled with swimming andkayaking. Now, every afternoon, when I pull my swimsuit on, I look at the strength of my body in the mirror and think maybe, just maybe, I could do this without Daniel.
From: Kit McDermott
12:06
I’ve broken into your greenhouse. The door was padlocked, so I punched through. It felt good. All that smashed glass.
Soon I’ll start rifling through your things – seeds, pots, plants, soil – even though it makes me feel dirty, like a thief. But now, for this moment, I’m going to sit in the greenhouse I made you, in the deckchair you love, and pretend none of this is happening. Just watch the rain.
33
SkyGarden
