The House of Lost Secrets

by Anstey Harris

I can’t understand how people who live by the sea aren’t in there every day. What a waste.

‘The average man – pretty ugly, bit chubby, dumb-AF – how many times a day do you think he thinks about his weight? Or how many calories in his coffee? Even while he’s wolf-whistling out of the window, or offering diet advice, or brushing by a colleague’s bum when he needs to get past her – do you think he’s thinking about his belly fat or his droopy arse? Is he fuck.’

It is easy to talk to an inanimate object and have the answers rumble back from deep within me as if I already knew them.

That version of me feels like someone else now. I can’t imagine being that limited, that diminished – it is a relief to know that I have grown out of it. I wish I could hug the girl I was, whisper to her that things would get better, bigger.

I don’t want to stay here, uncovering detail after detail of Rachel’s life, layer after layer of the masks she wore. Finding out more and more about the ways in which we have hurt each other.

all of these things must be unravelled – before they unravel me.

her church kept its women whippet-thin and obedient, even if their natural temperament or body type was nothing like.

My no wasn’t an apology or a confrontation. It wasn’t an excuse or a shame or a skeleton in the cupboard.

‘No,’ I said. And this was the other kind of no. The one I was used to. The one that meant nothing because no one listened to it.

How was this whole world of excess, of privilege, not enough?

Because Rachel always gets the best of everything. Me – I started with nothing, and I went downhill from there.

The doctor was everything I thought he’d be, everything I feared. Abortion had only been legal for thirteen years: it was clumsy and surgical and, hardest of all, judged brutally – especially by those who’d never need one.

The entry is brief. Rachel’s handwriting in black and white. Rachel and her darling Joanna were here from Friday to Wednesday. We didn’t swim in the sea or walk to the pub. We spent four precious days sat by the fire, together. Clachan, as ever, took care of us.

And so it’s easy to find the next black and white page. The one Rachel wrote when I drove her here. When Tim rang me to tell me the news and to say that he’d never seen her so sad. When Rachel rang me a few days after it had happened, when it was all done, and asked me to bring her here. ‘I didn’t think it would go like this,’ she said, still pale and quiet from the surgical process that had been necessary to remove the last of her longed-for foetus. ‘Usually, I set my sights on something and it happens.’ I was driving but I sensed her head turn, felt her gaze on me. ‘I’ve always got everything I’ve wanted. And that makes this feel like a bit of a punishment – for taking things for granted.’

That one miscarriage turned out to be Rachel’s only pregnancy. And the space where children might have been, where we both had imagined them in our lives, became a silence that neither of us visited. We talked about everything – or so I believed – except children. Now I realise we didn’t talk about mothers either. Rachel and her darling Joanna were here from Friday to Wednesday. We didn’t swim in the sea or walk to the pub. We spent four precious days sat by the fire, together. Clachan, as ever, took care of us.

I realised that the way I feel about death has changed. Wherever Rachel is, I will be there too eventually. She has made a path for me, just as she always did, and whether that turns out to be the road to Valhalla or a still and silent blackness, or even – how we’ll laugh – my mother’s celestial kingdom, Rachel is there and one day I will follow. We will be together again.

The connections between us are both fragile and laden.

I can’t speak about her in the past tense; however hard I try, Rachel flings herself back to the present. I cannot let her go.

I picture Rachel as if she were sitting opposite me, straddling the two worlds – his and mine – with grace, being able to bend and blend so that she fitted in anywhere. The common touch, her mother used to call it. That gift of being absolutely comfortable with anyone. ‘You can’t just stagnate,’ she’d say. ‘You only ever regret the things you don’t do. Never the things you do. And you should do one thing every day that scares you.’

The word, the idea, falls like snow in this bright summer place. The colours in the room stand out like a painting, intensified by the silence, by the cold: green apples in the fruit bowl; the turquoise lampshade hanging above the dining table; the deep red of the rug beneath my feet. It is the most silent I have ever been in this house: Rachel wasn’t built for silence, didn’t encourage it.

We will never be finished with the questions, the knotted past, but we are finished with pain.

It was a mutual adoration society – neither of you prepared to imagine, for one second, that the other had a single fault.’

‘What an absolute perfect set-up, to be the hero of someone who is your hero.

Lemon cake probably isn’t enough to make him forget.

It has been hard to understand Rachel’s need for silence, to shut me out of this, her terrible pain. But I am starting to get it – most of it – starting to know that we all have things we keep hidden.

‘Permanent happiness is not a normal human condition,’ he says. There is a pause where he lets the phrase sink in, lets the rhythm of my feet land on happiness and human. Repeated. ‘But we’re led to believe that it is.’ His voice is quiet, fits the pine needles and the light-green moss that covers the branches like fur. ‘And there are certain personality types, people, who are tied up in knots by that. For a lifetime.’

‘Firstly, you need to understand addiction. When we think of addicts, of addiction, we’re mostly thinking of people who aren’t able to access the thing they’re addicted to.’ He leaves that trademark gap for me to imagine.

‘But many people live perfectly well with addictions – even in situations you wouldn’t expect, like heroin. If you can afford your addiction – in terms of money, time, and health – the chances are that even your closest friends will never know. The problems come when we can’t access the thing we need. That’s when people find out. I’m simplifying,’ he adds. ‘Generalising. But please don’t feel like you weren’t listening to her, weren’t watching out for Rachel. Addicts, in general, learn a lot of skills to hide their problem.’

‘It can be much easier to talk to someone when you pay them to listen.’

When we ask, in addiction support, if you drink alone, we mean: “Are you so changed or challenged by alcohol that you avoid family or friends, or aren’t comfortable out in public?”’

‘The quizzes ask if your drinking has ever led to you missing work – but they don’t mean did you stay in bed one Friday because your hangover was so bad. They mean, “Did you ever take two months off to try and get your drinking back into a manageable place?” And by manageable, obviously, we mean hideable, disguisable

We have a hierarchy of addiction in this country – along with an enormous problem. We don’t see the heroin addict begging outside Tesco as suffering from the same condition as a millionaire whose drug is fine wine, vintage everything. We think of people addicted to prescription drugs as somehow cleaner, less desperate. But addiction is addiction, no matter what your drug. The same condition.’ ‘An illness.’ I say the words for him: words I want him to say about Rachel. Words that will forgive my inattention, everything I’ve missed. ‘That’s the debate. Is heroin use an illness? Or a lifestyle choice?’

‘before, I would have said lifestyle choice, but Rachel didn’t choose this. This is something that happened to her – like an illness.’

My granny talks about ‘tonics’ – anything or anyone that improves your life is a tonic: a holiday, or a friend or seeing a wee dog in the park. My granny has been a tonic for me.

The bay is a painting. The sea is as thick and grey as soup; the beach looks as if it has been dipped in lead. There are no colours except every shade of silver imaginable.

‘It controls the tide. And people used to believe we went mad with the full moon – hence lunatics.’

‘You can’t be punished for having a termination – it’s not a crime. People do it every day. It’s your right over your own body. Your body, your choice.’

Inside, I am raging against the patriarchy, against the fact that these stories never stop happening. That forty years later, friends of mine still find themselves compromised, assaulted, raped. All the words we can choose from. All perpetrated by men.

My mother is – and always was – ill. Her delusion takes all reason and twists it into an unrecognisable knot. It is not, and never was, her fault that she is ill, but – the second realisation – neither is it mine.

I will always love Rachel, warts and all – my love for her is unconditional, as I know hers was for me. Her intimacy with the mother who rejected me is a tiny bump in the road of our friendship, not enough to derail anything.

‘We’ve a saying in Scotland,’ he says. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you. That the right thing will find you at the right time.’

Dear Val Your support has been an enormous help to me over the years. You will never know what it has meant at times when I’ve almost given up, but it’s also part of my life as an addict, and that means I can’t write to you from my new life.

I was too young then to know that being silent is the same thing as being complicit. What happened to Jo was awful – what my brother did, then the termination. But the worst thing of all is that we weren’t there for her. Now I have time to put this right.

Jo has been a lighthouse for me, my whole life, the guide to home, to safety. Telling her who I am and knowing that she will still love me means the world. If it is any comfort to you, be certain that I will cherish her and her strength until the day I die.

I sketch the outline of a lighthouse on the empty page, draw stripes up its straight sides and a wide beam, searching, almost to the edge of the paper. She was my lighthouse too. She was the yellow light that warmed me, supported me, and inspired me. She was flawed and trapped, but she was mine and she was perfect. And the wonder of human beings, of our intricacy, is that all of these things can be true.

‘They just look happy for other people.

‘I’m afraid, Wilding, actually afraid of growing up like them. I don’t belong in their world.’ And I understood that, how you can live in a house your whole life but never feel like you belong. Never feel like these are your people, like you understand them.

Don’t ever let anyone make you think otherwise. It’s OK not to want the same things as everybody else.

Ben says that grief doesn’t only have to be for death, that you can grieve something you’ve never had, grieve the negative space of it. Accepting that has helped me to add my mother, my teenage years, to these ghosts I live with – as much a part of me as all my best points. Each a part of what made me. I didn’t lose my mother to death: I lost her to difference. To a difference in the way we perceived the world, to a difference in what mattered, in where we would find our happiness.

I only ever put my feet into the water. I am, at long last, a person who doesn’t have to swim if she doesn’t want to. At last, I can enjoy paddling, enjoy the shallows.