The House of Lost Secrets

by Anstey Harris

I imagine the relatives already know that this isn’t grief – this bleak catastrophe unfolding. Grief is longer and heavier than this. Grief likes Wednesdays and bus queues, a hijack in the most unlikely of situations. Grief likes to be close, and friends for years. I anticipate that grief will entirely fill the space Rachel took up in my life.

The Willoughbys knew that money talks, but wealth whispers, and nothing fazed them.

When I was young, I thought we were equals. All credit to the Willoughbys that they hid how much we weren’t.

Rachel is in all the conversations, but not necessarily in the words.

‘Not real, is it?’ he asks me, getting the bottle back out again. I want to tell him that it is, that it feels so real my heart is on fire, that my insides have disappeared and I can’t feel anything from the lungs down except a vast empty pressure. It’s far too real to me. ‘

‘It’s yours,’ he says, ‘so you have to go back. That’s what I’m trying to say.’ His voice cracks at the end of the sentence. I hear him, but I can’t grasp the meaning. It must show on my face. ‘She left you Clachan in her will.’

There is a magic to the oldest of relationships, a deep peace that comes from a lifetime of shared experience, of understanding the things that made us.

‘My life is almost all in the past now, and there are fewer and fewer people who remember the cast of it, let alone the plot.’

‘Has anyone ever told you you’re fucking insensitive, Terry? Oh, hang on, yes – me, I have. Loads of times.’

Food no longer fills the hole in my belly – that is where my grief lives now, a little burrow it has hollowed out for itself.

I loved that cat. We’d had him all my life and it was so hard to be without him when I first left home. I used to feel guilty that I missed him more than I missed my mother, but as an adult I know that it’s hard to have a fundamental disagreement with a pet.

My dad likes to reserve his swearing for special occasions. Big guns, he likes to say: use them as ammunition, not punctuation. If you overuse them, they lose their meaning. So he says things like ‘What the heck?’ when he really means ‘What kind of unholy clusterfuck is this?’

I search around inside myself to see if I am sad, but I don’t have access to my feelings about my mother. I walled them up years ago.

He’s patronising to his core, but he doesn’t deserve this, and I hope he doesn’t know. There can’t be much worse than losing your wife twice.

If I am to stay here, to use Rachel’s gift in the way she intended, all of these things must be unravelled – before they unravel me.

Maybe this is generational. Maybe women her age accepted the whole boys will be boys thing, maybe the voices of the straight white men around them were so loud they drowned out anything else. I’m losing control of my words: I want to explain male privilege, consent, but it’s all strangled – tied up inside the hundreds of things I want to tell her.

Because here I was, full of alien, growing a baby I couldn’t want, growing a baby made of Rachel’s brother.

I had known this visitors’ book entry was similar: I hadn’t realised it was the same – that Rachel reproduced her words exactly. That she had always known what my operation was but, at the same time, had known I didn’t want her to ask, had trusted me to be too smart to sleep with her brother.

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.

‘Tim.’ He looks at me. ‘Was Rachel an alcoholic?’

‘Ben isn’t her boyfriend, Jo. He’s her therapist.’

And all the time she was killing herself, a slow suicide while she wished for someone to notice, for someone to stop her.

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

‘Permanent happiness is not a normal human condition,’ he says.

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.

And then it is in front of us. Just there, as if it has been waiting all these years. Patient and solid. Our prayer tree. The crazy dream that Rachel and I found so long ago.

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.

‘It matters so little, Meg,’ he says. ‘I know it seems huge now, but it matters so very little in the great scheme of things.

‘It never fails to give you whatever it is you need at that moment.’

I want her to know that I love her, even though I wasn’t always right in what I said and did. I hope you have reached peace with your brother and found room in your heart to forgive him: just as I hope Joanna finds room to forgive me.

There were moments where we were happy. It is undeniable.

I cannot begin to think about forgiveness: despite tonight’s warmth, its hopefulness. It does not extend as far as my mother, her sudden need to make peace while death breathes down her collar.

I couldn’t tell her anything without telling her everything.

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.

There is no need to be unkind to my mother: time has already done that.

‘Why do you think she told you?’ I ask. ‘When she couldn’t tell me.’ My mum deliberately keeps her gaze from mine. ‘Because it’s very hard, when you’ve made mistakes. Rachel knew I wasn’t perfect, and everyone else around her was, she thought. Even you.’

Try as I might, I can’t love her.

‘They were all drunk? All on drugs?’ ‘Four rotten apples, in it together.’ I think of Rachel, of her story going round and round on repeat when she’d had too much to drink. ‘It wasn’t the brakes. It never was,’

‘This has put a lot in perspective – about my mum and my dad and me,’ Meg says. ‘I’ve been such a dick: things could be so much worse.’ It is not the first time my mother has fulfilled that function, has been the So Much Worse in life.

I didn’t sink. I never have, not even in my darkest hours.

When he kisses me, it is picture perfect. The geese have stilled and silenced, the sea is just in the right place – far enough in, far enough out – to provide a soundtrack of the gentlest of waves. His first kiss is gentle, soft as seawater on my lips and seeking permission. The second is the kind of kiss I have missed. A long, exploring first kiss, between people who will or won’t stay strangers.

‘Jo.’ His voice is a whisper. ‘I didn’t expect to find you here. To find you at the end of all this sadness, this’ – he looks for the word – ‘complication.’

‘What’s for you won’t go by you. That the right thing will find you at the right time.’

I was too young then to know that being silent is the same thing as being complicit.

One thing will never change, my mutually respectful relationship with the best friend anyone could ever have. I am proud of her every day.

It is almost daylight under this moon that belongs just to me, daylight but with shadows, as if the secrets of the past walk like misty friends beside me.

‘But I didn’t expect you to be so—’ He paused, chose his words. ‘I didn’t expect you to love me. I didn’t expect to be so moved by that.’

‘Most of all,’ Poll says, ‘I love how much of my family are still here. I sat in the sitting room in the evening and I could almost see Duncan raise his glass to me. I could swear that when I looked out of my bedroom window, I saw you children running up the beach.’ She lowers her voice, a secret. ‘I waved at you all, you dear little ghosts.’

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.