I knew Dad was mistaken. Of course she was going to come. She said she would come and be in time to see me blow out my candles. I was nearly a teenager, I had grown up so much, which was why I could invite her to my birthday party. Dad had asked if I was sure that was what I wanted, and I almost told him that’s what I’d wished on last year’s birthday candles, and every time I got a wish bone from a chicken dinner. I wanted my mum to see me do something special like blow out my birthday candles or dance at the front in ballet or win a medal on sports day. I wanted her to see me do all those things because I did them for her. I did them to make her proud enough to want to come home to us.
‘OK, Little Flower, we can wait until four o’clock, but then we have to blow out the candles so everyone can go home.’
I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him. She was going to be there. She said she would so she would.
I look back at Mrs C who has respectfully chosen to sit in the pew behind me, because she, her husband, her daughters and her friend take up a whole row. I thought I minded being alone until Noah turned up. Mrs C is crying. She keeps clasping her hands together as if she’s going to pray really hard, then she pushes her linked hands against her lips and then she lets her hands fall into her lap. All the while tears are drizzling out of her eyes as if she doesn’t even know she’s crying. Her two daughters are next to her, her husband on the other side of their oldest daughter.
Beside him is her best friend. Her other best friend. I keep watching Mrs C and her man, noticing with every passing moment how separated they are. She barely looks at him, and when he looks at her he doesn’t seem to see her. It’s like he’s looking at a stranger suddenly. I’m seriously creeped out by him.
He reaches an arm out, snakes it along the back of the pew to Mrs C’s shoulder and gives it a comforting squeeze. She lets his hand rest there for a second then she leans away enough to force his hand to leave her shoulder, to stop touching her. Her other best friend has seen this too, and we make eye contact.
It’s over for these two, we’re both thinking. Their marriage is dead in the water.
It’s a stupid phrase I’ve used a million times before. This time, though, I crumble at the thought of her like that. Dead. In the water. Not alive. Not around. Not sixty miles down the motorway living a life I can’t see, but still living.
His arm is around me seconds after I start to fall apart. He draws me carefully to him, and holds me so gently but firmly I feel safe to do this. I feel safe to cry again for the mother I didn’t know, in the arms of a virtual stranger.
Ten years ago
‘You can’t keep doing this to me, Donald, it’s not fair.’
She didn’t come. I had to do the candles without her and she didn’t come. She didn’t ring or anything. Dad had rubbed my back as I cried myself to sleep that night. None of the presents seemed as important as having her there and she hadn’t made it. I really thought she would sweep in, a big cloud of perfume around her, looking like a movie star in an expensive dress and a big hat. ‘I’m going through a bit of a hat phase,’ she’d told me.
I’d wanted to show her off to all my friends and tell them I had a glamorous mother. That, yes, she didn’t live with me, but she was still around when it mattered.
‘You leaving a six-year-old is what’s not fair, Mirabelle,’ Dad said.
‘You made me choose then took away my choices.’
‘You should have chosen better.’
Their voices carried up to my bedroom. I wondered if they had any clue I could hear them. I’d heard similar arguments over the years, whenever she got brave enough to turn up. It was the day after my party and here she was. When it didn’t matter, didn’t count, she’d shown up.
‘Does she know that you told me the wrong time, wrong day?’ she asked.
‘All she knows, all she needs to know, is that you weren’t here when you said you would be – that you left and you keep letting her down.’
‘I should have known something was suspicious when you were so pleasant to me on the phone, talking about a change of plan. I should have known it was all a ploy to do this again. Do you realise the only person you’re hurting here is Fleur?’
‘I love my daughter – enough to stick around.’
‘She’s my daughter, too. And if you carry on like this, I’m going to go through official channels to get things formalised so I can see her regularly.’
‘You do that, Mirabelle. I can’t wait to tell the world how you left your child for your lover, and I really can’t wait to drag up every sick, perverted thing you’ve ever done. By the time we’re finished, Fleur will never speak to you again and the court will ban you from ever seeing her again.’
‘You’d really do that, wouldn’t you? Despite how much it’d devastate Fleur, you’d do that to hurt me.’
‘No, I’d do it to keep you away from her because she doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near a pervert like you.’
‘I did a really bad thing in letting her grow up with a bigot like you,’ she said. ‘I thought you were a good man, even though I couldn’t love you the way you wanted me to, I did love you. I would have stayed if—’
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Just go.’
‘At least let me see her. I’ll tell her I got the dates and times mixed up, I won’t tell her it was you,’ she said. ‘Please. I don’t want her thinking I completely forgot about her.’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘Please, Donald, please.’
‘No. She’s asleep, I don’t want her any more upset than she already is.’
‘At least take her present.’
‘Send it yourself.’
‘So that it can get lost in the post like all the other letters and presents I’ve sent over the years?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. It’s not my fault if you’ve had bad luck with the postal system. Maybe somebody up there doesn’t like you.’
‘Fleur’s not going to stay a child forever. One day I’m going to have that conversation with her and I’m going to tell her everything about who I am, why I left and everything you’ve done to keep me away. And you won’t be able to stop me.’
‘Dream on, Mirabelle. I’d see you dead before I let you fill her head with lies.’
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘When she’s twenty-one and finished with college and finally free of you, we’ll see how things pan out then.’
I wanted to be twenty-one so I could hear the truth. Instead, I had to pretend to be fast asleep when Dad came in to check on me. I was good at pretending to be asleep, I’d done it for years and years because when I was asleep, I found out things. When I was ‘asleep’ Dad didn’t keep his voice down as much as he should, he didn’t speak in adult codes to people on the phone.
I didn’t like pretending with Dad, but sometimes I knew that pretending was the only way to get to the truth.
‘I don’t want to go to the thing back at the house,’ I tell Noah as we leave the graveside. I don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of people I don’t really know. And it was at the Challeys’ house.
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ he says.
‘Can you take me for a drive?’ I ask him.
‘Course.’
‘Can I drive your car?’
He looks a little unsure, stares warily at me before asking, ‘Do you have a licence?’
‘Yes. I never told her, Mirabelle, that though. She was teaching me to drive and she did a good job, I passed first time. But I liked spending time with her doing that, so I pretended to fail two tests so she would still teach me. Is that bad of me?’
‘Yes, and no. I don’t think pretending like that is good, but if you didn’t think you could tell her outright you wanted to spend time with her, given the facts of your relationship, I can’t say it’s a hundred per cent wrong, either.’
‘I really just wanted to spend time with her.’
‘I know,’ he says, and holds
me close. ‘Come on, you can drive my car. If you knew how big a moment that was, you’d … No one drives The Beast but me, usually.’
Mrs C is still at the graveside and I realise I need to tell her now. Seeing her with her husband I know she needs to know the truth. ‘Hang on,’ I say to Noah, who dutifully puts his hands in his pockets and waits for me to be finished. I make my way over to Mrs C, who seems lost in a trance.
‘Mrs C,’ I say and she turns away from the graveside to me.
‘It was a beautiful service, Fleur. You did a brilliant job.’
‘Thanks, but you did most of it.’
‘I didn’t, I really didn’t.’
‘Mrs C, there’s something I don’t get, which I didn’t want to tell you before, but seeing you today … You said your husband had an affair with her, Mirabelle.’
She looks around to see who is listening, and when she sees no one is close enough, she steps forwards, lowers her voice: ‘Yes.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ I say, as quietly as her. ‘If it was you, yes, but not your husband.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘She,’ I’m waving my hands around, trying to get them to say what I can’t. It’s proper embarrassing talking about this stuff. She might not have felt like it most of the time, but she was still technically my mother and that meant technically I was talking about – agaralggh – ‘sex’ in relation to her. You don’t think about your parents like that, let alone talk about it. Not unless you’ve got some serious BIG ISSUES. ‘She liked women. Loved women.’
‘Pardon?’ Mrs Challey says.
‘That’s why she left, you see. She came to Brighton to try to find her first girlfriend. She met her at school and they broke up because she and Mirabelle were caught by Mirabelle’s mum. My grandmother. My grandmother nearly had a nervous breakdown. So Mirabelle got with my dad to escape from home. And then her first love disappeared in Brighton, so she came here to look for her. Just like in the story, Mirabelle came to find her lost love. She liked men, but not in that way.’
‘Are you telling me Mirabelle was gay?’ Mrs Challey says.
I nod. ‘Yes, yes I am.’
Tami
It’s just me here at Mirabelle’s graveside.
Everyone has drifted away, either to go home, back to work, or back to our house for the wake. Everything is so surreal. We’ve just buried Mirabelle. She was so there, all the time. Vital is the word, I suppose. It doesn’t seem possible that this has happened to her.
And she was gay. She was gay and she never told me.
Fleur is gone, too, having delivered the news that has rocked me at a time when I didn’t think it was possible to be any more shocked and rocked. I hope she’s gone off with that man, I hope he’ll take care of her. I can’t remember what she called him but she’d mentioned she was seeing someone and it wasn’t serious. But I could tell from the way she spoke, the way she lit up, that she was serious about him no matter how he felt. The memory of feeling like that never goes away, it stays there in your heart to help you through the bad times; to see you through to the other side. Although, is there enough left for us? With everything that has happened between Scott and me, I don’t think there is enough to see us to the other side. Especially now I know they weren’t having an affair.
She was gay.
She was gay; she did not have an affair with my husband. My mind stops me there, stops me from going to that place, that place where I have to accept what he has done.
Beside the head of the grave there is a gold box of red rose petals, passed around for those in attendance to throw in instead of earth. Crammed in the hands of those who came, then released in sombre, respectful movements, some of the petals danced away on the breeze, tokens of who she was, what she loved. Most of the petals have fallen on top of the brown, maple-wood box with the brass plaque declaring her name, and they’re going to stay with her forever.
I scoop up as many of the remaining petals as I can from the box, they’re satiny and almost weightless against my skin, and drop them in, covering more of the box with red. I want it to be like the story of her beach. I want there to be a velvety, fragrant blanket of rose petals that will cover her while she sleeps. I gather up more of the petals, drop them in. I want her to be always surrounded by roses, to be comforted by them as she begins her journey into eternity. I want Mirabelle to never be on her own.
‘That’s a lot of rose petals,’ someone says to me as I release another armful of petals.
Rubbing at my eyes, wicking away the tears that are falling, I turn to the speaker and it’s the policewoman. Detective Sergeant Harvan. Her sidekick is nowhere in sight, but he’ll be there somewhere. They seem to travel in pairs, unable to work without each other.
‘She liked them,’ I say.
‘Really? That’s interesting. And what about you, Mrs Challey, do you like them?’
I study her for a moment. I know that anything I say will be noted down somewhere. ‘They’re all right. But today’s not about me, it’s about saying goodbye to Mirabelle.’
DS Harvan puts her head to one side and studies me for a few seconds. With her hair pulled back, she seems to be made up of odd, angular lines that come together to create an unusual beauty when she doesn’t have a scowl on her face. ‘I suppose that’s true,’ she eventually says.
‘I didn’t realise the police came to funerals,’ I say because it seems expected that I will speak next.
‘We go to a lot of funerals when a person has died in suspicious circumstances,’ she says, her brown eyes drilling into me. ‘You’d be surprised how often the killer will show up at the funeral. It’s good to study everyone there when they don’t realise they’re being watched, then follow that up with a chat with anybody we’re interested in.’
‘You think Mirabelle’s killer was here?’ I sound naïve but I’m not, not really. It makes sense, what she’s saying, if you think about it.
‘Almost certainly,’ she says, with a look that would be probing if it wasn’t outright accusatory.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I ask.
‘You asked, Mrs Challey,’ she says.
It doesn’t feel like I asked. I know I did, but it still feels like she’s telling me as a subtle means of accusing me of something.
‘I’m glad I bumped into you, actually, Mrs Challey,’ Harvan says as if we were walking down the road and happened to run into each other. ‘I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind popping down to the station for a chat in the next couple of days?’
‘A chat about what?’
‘Just a general chat.’
‘Do I need a solicitor?’
She blinks and pulls her face in faux surprise. ‘You’re not under arrest, Mrs Challey, we just want to clear up a few things. It’s a routine, informal chat. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.’
The kind of chat she invites someone of ‘interest’ to, I’m guessing. ‘Right,’ I say.
‘Monday, then?’
‘I think I might be bus—’
‘Monday. Then.’
‘OK, Monday.’
‘Excellent. See you then.’
I wait until she is out of earshot before I take a final handful of rose petals. ‘I’m sorry, Mirabelle,’ I say to her. ‘I’m sorry, for everything. Sleep in peace.’
There’s a hush in the house. People drift from room to room, talking quietly, careful not to break the reverential atmosphere. Did none of these people know about Mirabelle? Did she really keep herself that hidden from everyone? They are all here, though, to remember her, and yet how many of them knew her at all?
I have been avoiding Scott, he has been avoiding me. Our whole life seems to be based on avoiding each other since I told him that I was helping Fleur and we were paying for the funeral. ‘Are you insane?’ he’d asked me. ‘The woman almost broke us up.’ I noted the ‘almost’ in his words, the way he assumed things had healed between us.
‘How’s the porn hab
it going, Scott?’ I’d replied. ‘Oh, and have you chased up about our counselling sessions, yet?’
He’d clamped his teeth together so hard the veins in his jaw stood out. ‘Suit yourself,’ he’d said, then marched away so didn’t hear me say: ‘I will.’
My eyes sweep the living room again, examining the faces of those who were there. Did they know about the animosity between Scott and Mirabelle, or did they just put it down to a personality clash? Did any of them know that Scott was arrested? Did any of them know that he and I are practically split up?
I used to work among most of these people, I was their boss at one time, but the ones I still know are distant colleagues, they work for Scott, they would turn a blind eye to whatever was going on because that’s what you do, isn’t it, when you want to keep your job, or you want to do well, or you don’t want to be next on the hit list.
I look at Scott, and he’s in the corner of the room by the bay window, talking to Terry Cranson, who is now chairman of the board of directors and did away with the role of President when he vacated the position. I secretly think he did that to stop Scott getting the role, but we haven’t spoken in years so he wouldn’t tell me now if he had.
He’s made polite conversation, but I knew he was uncomfortable around me. I wasn’t sure if it was because I resisted his attempts to get me to go back to work when Anansy was a year old, or if he still had a festering dislike and distrust of Scott and he knew I’d be loyal to my husband no matter what.
I’d never told Scott Terry had been at me to go back for ages after I left. Not even when Scott was crowing about his latest success while subtly making digs about whether I could have pulled it off had I ‘stuck around’, as he put it. Another part of our history he had rewritten that I didn’t bother to correct. It didn’t matter, I often thought. It wasn’t important, I knew the truth and he did too.
As he stands talking to the man whose job he has his eye on, Scott’s gaze is constantly drawn across the room. To the fireplace. Where Beatrix is standing, talking to one of Scott’s subordinates. Trust Beatrix to go for the best-looking man in the room. She never misses an opportunity to—