The Museum of You Page 26

  They drove until they reached the bridge. The police officer blocking it waved them through. They edged past a Land Rover sitting sideways across the road, fixed in the aftermath of a brake and swerve and crept to the end of The Grove. Mrs Mackerel came straight out, holding Clover. She followed Darren and the officers into the house.

  ‘SIT DOWN,’ she said, like she owned the place. ‘I’ll make him SOME TEA, God love him.’

  ‘Would you like us to call someone?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  But they did. And over the course of the afternoon and evening they arrived. All of them: Dad, Jim, Colin and Maureen. Like the animals in The Little Red Hen. He’d asked for help and they’d refused, appearing only when there was nothing to be done. They were too late. He hated them.

  In the days that followed one or other of them was constantly there.

  ‘It’s a good job Clover wasn’t breastfed,’ someone said as they scooped formula into a waiting bottle.

  ‘You’ve got to stay strong for the baby.’

  ‘You’ll always have part of Becky with you.’

  He was stunned by their stupidity, their need to fill the air with empty words. He could barely speak for fear of shouting. They talked as if Clover’s presence was a consolation, but she was not the part of Becky he wanted.

  He wandered around the house, abstracted and surrounded by mysteries. He couldn’t fathom how Becky’s toothbrush existed when she did not. How the date on the tins in the cupboard extended past the end of her life. How letters addressed to her landed on the doormat. How her side of the bed could be empty. How the baby that woke him in the night was his responsibility for at least the next eighteen years – people spent less time in prison for murder.

  They spoiled Clover. Held her all day. Showered her with all the love and sympathy they’d have given him if he’d let them. At night they left him on his own with her and she cried. When they returned in the mornings she seduced them with her newly acquired trick: the throwing of gummy smiles every which way – feed me, change me, play with me. He hated her, too.

  Jim couldn’t remember why he’d phoned. When asked, he said he thought he’d been calling to see how Becky was. Or to tell her about the new pet shop that had opened in town. Or to find out whether the number 60 on the washing machine was the wash cycle in minutes or something else. Or to say he’d lost the remote for the telly in his room and did she know where he might be able to get another one. Eventually, Darren stopped asking. What difference did it make, anyway?

  The nights were the worst. His brain manufactured ‘finding’ dreams. He looked for Becky, searching in far-flung places: up mountains, across grassy planes, in crowded city streets, constantly seeking, always on the cusp of finding . . . and then Clover would cry. Sometimes he listened with disinterest as she howled so forcefully it seemed she might burst with rage. Sometimes he cried, too; matched her sob for sob in a peculiar anguish contest, and she would stop for a moment and listen, curious about the source of the other noise, the agony and anger pouring into the dark.

  People tied flowers to the lamp post at the bottom of the bridge. What had the lamp post got to do with Becky? he wondered. Someone discovered that he lived right there, down The Grove, his house facing the bank of the bridge. Flowers appeared on the railings along the top of the bank, and then in front of the house. They were accompanied by cards addressed to ‘The Baby’s Dad’ along with teddies and helium balloons for Clover. A pair of photographers stood in the driveway, cameras noosing their necks. ‘Tragic Dad, Darren’ – that’s what they called him in the paper.

  It rained, and the cards turned to papier mâché. Colin came with a pair of secateurs and a roll of bin bags. He started at the lamp post: cut everything off and stuffed it in a bag. Next, the railings. And finally the front wall and driveway. Pulped cards, soggy teddies, rotting flowers – he binned the lot.

  It was better.

  People stopped slowing down on the bridge to peep past the railings and trees to the house at the bottom of the bank. And the driveway no longer felt like a cemetery.

  There were more flowers, after the inquest.

  ‘Fucking idiots,’ Colin said, bin bag and secateurs at the ready. ‘Making a mess. Fly-tipping their crap everywhere. How’d they like it if I shat on their doorsteps?’

  Darren felt he was pantomiming fury in an effort to sound him out, hoping to discover how he felt about the uncanny display of collective grief. He was angry, course he was. All those people who didn’t even know Becky, co-opting his sadness. But the anger was dark and strong and he was already learning to spread it thinly like Marmite.

  At twenty-four he was newly aware of the stretch of the years. He had no appetite for life, he was beholden to it – obligated, like a perennial, to keep on living because of Clover. And he was alone because of her, too – he allowed himself the thought, even though it was dangerous, a tightrope to be tested with the tip of one toe. Afterwards, he retreated to the edge of the precipice, where he waited, imperilled and unsteady.

  He shopped late at night when the supermarkets were full of gruff blokes with pallet trucks, restocking the shelves. No one tried to talk to Clover, no one stopped to congratulate him for babysitting his own child.

  He drove down to the allotment, lulling her to sleep with the drum of the engine, and placed her car seat on the old carpet while he planted rows of potatoes: red Desiree, Maris Piper and Charlotte; hard as pebbles, the life tucked inside them.

  Clover’s smiles were followed by sounds. Sometimes when she woke in the night she soothed herself with wordless babble and returned to sleep. She started to turn when he entered a room, extending her arms in anticipation of his embrace, sanding the worst roughness of his feelings.

  He remembered that being loved keeps babies alive. And he loved her. Of course he did. She wasn’t a consolation prize or an ‘at least’. She was his daughter.

  Edna took Clover while he worked. When he was on lates, Colin or Kelly would collect her from Edna’s at six o’clock and entertain her at home until he got back. After Dad retired he sometimes helped, coming to the house with his B&B book, tying a hanky over his nose and mouth if he had to change her, recording her input and output alongside his own.

  He and Dad might have been a comfort to each other. But Darren noted the slope of Dad’s shoulders and the drag of his feet and it wound him up, made him want to shout, ‘I feel worse! I am the winner of this competition!’ He made no concessions and allowed no comparisons between their griefs. By the time he realised how ridiculous he was being, the damage was done; the distance drawn, and delimited.

  Every day he drove his bus over the bridge, past the house and the spot where the Land Rover hit Becky. It might help, he thought, to live out the middle of his life away from the places where his happiness began and ended.

  He put the house up for sale.

  It might help, the estate agent advised, months later, to have a bit of a sort out or, if he didn’t mind her saying, to invest in some storage solutions.

  He took the house off the market.

  Clover was eighteen months old when the health visitor asked how many words she knew. He wasn’t sure. Did he talk to her? she asked. Yes, he thought so. Was he saying things out loud or merely thinking them? she wondered. He didn’t know, couldn’t say. He should try a running commentary, like the football on the radio, she explained, in case he hadn’t got it. Tell her what you’re doing, as you do it; she’ll like that. So he did: Daddy’s making you some lunch; Daddy’s putting the washing in the machine so your clothes will be clean; Daddy’s taking you next door to play so he can go to work; Daddy’s singing you to sleep so you’re not afraid. The health visitor was right, she loved it. And the next time she came he had a list of words to tell her. But he felt guilty for his silence, if that’s what it had been; he didn’t know, he couldn’t remember – doesn’t know and can’t remember those early years.

  Colin appeared one day with a ukulele.<
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  ‘Remember Mad Scouse? I did a house clearance and I found this baby guitar. Thought you could teach Clo. Maybe she could be in a band one day.’

  ‘It’s not a baby guitar.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s a ukulele.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Nothing like a guitar.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Totally different things.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And she’s way too young to learn an instrument.’

  ‘You can be a right twat sometimes,’ Colin said as he went. But he left the ukulele on the table.

  Clover played in the soil of the allotment with a bucket and spade while he planted and weeded. She watered the seeds and the resultant plants with her own little can. Time felt different there. More measured, less prone to speeding up and slowing down – the good moments felt longer, the bad, shorter.

  It would be great if girls came in packets like seeds, he thought, watching her stomp through the dirt in her Peppa Pig wellies. If girls had instructions – grow indoors with plenty of books, or likes sunlight and climbing frames – he could buy the right equipment, create the correct conditions for optimum growth.

  Around the time Clover started nursery, Colin came round and told him to pull himself together.

  ‘It’s time to think about getting back to normal,’ he said. ‘It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault. If Becky hadn’t been so self—’

  Before Darren knew it, he was on his feet, shoulder-barging Colin from one end of the lounge to the other, as if they were on opposing teams in a penalty dispute. Colin raised his arms, indicating surrender. But the instant Darren gave up, Colin clocked him in the stomach. Hard.

  ‘That’s for Kelly, you shit.’

  They were on the way to the corner shop to buy a tin of custard to go with some stewed apples, windfalls from the allotment next door. He had taught her how to cross the road in The Grove. It was safe there. Stop, look, listen – she knew exactly what to do. But she saw the shop from the other side of the road and dashed out. He grabbed her arm and hauled her back, lifting her off her feet. She swung like a monkey, light, elastic, and when she landed he smacked her, hard.

  She sobbed all the way home. That evening, she wouldn’t look at him. The flat of his hand stung, but it was nothing to the ache in his stomach when, at bedtime, he checked her leg and saw his fingerprints ranging across her thigh like tributaries.

  For the next week he lived in fear of someone at nursery seeing what he had done. Clover forgot long before the bruise faded. But he remembered.

  He studied her like a seismologist, on the lookout for waves, trying to map her interior in order to forecast the magnitude and timing of any future quakes. ‘Is there anything you need?’ he’d ask. And then he’d get her something anyway. Just in case. Often mistaking impulse for instinct. But it was better to be safe than sorry, he thought.

  They marked her first day at school. Half past eight in the morning and the driveway was jammed with them: Edna, Dad, Colin, Jim and him. Clover stood on the doorstep, gripping a tiny PE bag and a Barbie lunch box; uniform stiff with newness, square knees peeping out from under her pleated skirt. They pointed their cameras at her, and Darren remembered other cameras focusing on the front of the house.

  They were waiting for him outside Edna’s when he got back from taking Clover. An intervention, that’s what Colin called it. He hadn’t been successful by himself, so he’d enlisted the rest of them. Dad appeared to have been press-ganged, while Jim looked like he’d won front-row tickets to a concert. Items on the agenda included the clutter in the house, the state of the garden, and his failure to move on. He gently told them to mind their own business.

  Colin tried one more time, not long after he’d got together with Mark and Kelly had married Pete. Mark knew someone, a fellow nurse. She was pretty, dead nice. Just a date, he said. Just one measly frigging date.

  Darren refused. One date would be pointless – an exercise in box-ticking.

  Cock-sticking – it could be an exercise in that too, Colin joked, before clearing his throat and delivering a short speech about the importance of getting over things. The speech had a rushed, rehearsed quality. Darren listened. And then he saw him out.

  People aren’t speed bumps, you don’t get over them. It wasn’t that he was averse to another relationship. He could picture it, one day. It was the idea of beginning again that put him off. The prospect of getting it wrong. The possibility of not being enough. The knowledge that he had once started out with the intention of being the best thing to happen to someone and had ended up being the worst.

  *

  He opened Clover’s notebook and read. Although she hadn’t succeeded in conjuring Becky in the display, there were fragments of her on the pages, in the comments people had made and the stories they had told.

  He thumbed the pages. Jim, Edna, Colin, Maureen, even Kelly – all there. Only his voice was missing. He had imagined he would find the words to talk about Becky often, that it would be natural and she would always be present, thanks to his inclusion of her in their daily lives. But why would he bring her up when it made him feel like shit? And what to say? He wasn’t sure what to tell himself, never mind a kid. Once Clover was finally old enough for it to come up in conversation, there was nothing natural about it. He struggled for the right words and watched as her mouth clenched and her little face froze around it.

  He likes to think that if Jim wasn’t Jim and was, instead, a reliable witness to his own life, they’d have been able to talk about his childhood, and together they might have formulated it into some sort of story that made sense: this happened, and then this happened, followed by this – an easy-to-understand, cause-and-effect sort of story, the kind you can share with children. Instead, it was all a jumble. And the confusion continued: Would Becky have coped better if she’d known she was pregnant? Was she already unhappy before she had Clover? Could he have done something, anything, different? Could he? Could he?

  When someone dies you feel an urge to collect all the pieces of them and put them in one place, to hear every story from the people who knew them when you weren’t there. By the time he felt the need to talk, he’d scared everyone off. But the urge to collect all the pieces of her and put them in one place remained. The wrong pieces, he realised, sitting in the bedroom. The wrong place. And he was struck by the impossibility of reconstructing someone via their possessions. Imagine if it was him: the motorbike helmets and tins of paint on the stairs, the ukulele parts and the boxed clocks, the saved newspapers and the boat engine – what would it all mean? It was the same here. All the things he had saved and stowed, all the stuff that sat suspended in the bedroom – it had no significance.

  He unfastened the knotted tops of bin bags and was lifting out piles of Becky’s clothes as Clover knocked on the door.

  ‘Tea’s ready,’ she called.

  ‘Down in a minute,’ he said.

  He started to hurry, but changed his mind, deciding instead to take his time. He straightened and folded; touched everything one last time. He’s learned something during the past decade: grief never goes away. And that’s no bad thing – it’s only the other side of love, after all.

  Thursday, and the lock of his neck and shoulders is somewhat looser. He can turn his head slightly from side to side and raise his arms without wincing. He eases himself out of bed and steps into the bathroom. There is condensation on the windowpane; he grabs a scrunch of toilet paper to wipe it off. When he goes to chuck the paper away, the bin seems unusually full and, on closer inspection, he notices the sanitary towels, rolled up in their bright, sweet-like wrappers. Shit.

  He sits on the toilet, elbows resting on his knees, head supported by his hands. Beside the bath, opposite, the reduced-price Christmas tree rests on its side, still waiting to be lifted into the loft. If he looks hard enough, he can see the truth of things. Like the picture of the woman who is both old and young at once, the house is both
a home and a mess.

  He will have to speak to Clover. If it comes down to a choice between talking to him and talking to no one, she will prefer the former, won’t she? He can’t leave her like the chubby girl in the book about being a woman, bleeding and with no one to speak to. He won’t send her anywhere today. She can lie on the sofa and watch telly or cycle down to the allotment or knit her secret scarf – whatever she wants.

  Back in the room, he bags the remaining unneeded objects. He makes a small pile of things that should be kept, aware that they, along with her curly hair and sunny nature, are Clover’s inheritance, and she should have some say in what happens to them. He removes the Blu-Tacked colouring pages from the wall, unsure about what they are meant to represent. Saints, that’s what they are. Is it easier, he wonders, to turn a dead person into a saint than to remember them exactly as they were? When he is almost finished he sits on the floor, back propped against the closed door, and reopens Clover’s notebook, wishing the past was the beautiful place other people seem to think it.

  There is, he decides, a difference between what is true and what is necessary; between what is correct and what is kind. He picks up the pen he has brought with him.

  ‘I met Becky on the 43 bus,’ he begins.

  Friday, and all the bin bags are piled on the far side of the bed, which has been stripped and is now a resting place for the stack of collapsed boxes. There is so much stuff here. It’ll take him ages to get rid of it. He attempts to roll his shoulders up to his ears. A pain steers along his jaw and his collarbone and the knobbly bump of bone behind each ear, which must have a name but he doesn’t know it.