I was about to snap back, but I looked at my mother, leaning into Laura, moaning softly. The fight left me. I was hurting, but Mum was hurting more. I crossed the room and kneeled beside her, reaching for her hand and feeling tears wet my cheeks even before I knew they’d left my eyes. My parents were together for twenty-six years. They lived together – and worked together – and despite all their ups and downs, they loved each other.
PC Pickett cleared his throat. ‘The description matched Mr Johnson. We were on scene within minutes. His car was recovered from Beachy Head car park, and on the edge of the cliff we found …’ He tailed off, indicating a clear plastic evidence bag in the centre of our kitchen table, in which I could see Dad’s mobile phone and his tan leather wallet. Out of nowhere I thought of the joke Uncle Billy always cracked, about the moths in Dad’s jacket pockets, and for a second I thought I was going to burst into laughter. Instead I cried, and I didn’t stop for three days.
My right arm, squashed beneath Ella, has gone to sleep. I slide it out and wiggle my fingers, feeling the tingle as the blood returns to the extremities. Suddenly restless, I extricate myself from beneath Ella’s sleeping body with the newly acquired mothering stealth skills of a Royal Marine, and barricade her onto the sofa with cushions. I stand up, stretching out the stiffness that comes from too much sitting down.
My father had never suffered from depression or anxiety.
‘Would he have told you, even if he did?’ Laura said. We were sitting in the kitchen – Laura, Mum and me. The police, neighbours, everyone had gone, leaving us sitting numbly in the kitchen with a bottle of wine sour on our tongues. Laura’s point was a valid one, even if I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Dad came from a long line of men who believed talking about ‘feelings’ meant you were a ‘poof’.
Whatever the reasons, his suicide came from nowhere, and plunged us all into grief.
Mark – and his replacement, once one had been found – encouraged me to work through the anger I felt in relation to my father’s death. I seized upon five words uttered by the coroner.
While not of sound mind.
They helped me separate the man from the act; helped me understand that Dad’s suicide wasn’t about hurting those he was leaving. Rather, his final text message suggested a genuinely held belief that we might be happier without him. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Harder than coming to terms with my dad’s suicide was what happened next. Trying to fathom why – after experiencing first hand the pain of bereavement by suicide; of watching me cry for my beloved father – my mother would knowingly put me through it again.
Blood hums in my ears like a wasp trapped against glass. I walk into the kitchen and drink a glass of water, fast, then press my hands onto the granite worktop and lean over the sink. I hear Mum, singing as she washes up; nagging Dad to clear up after yourself once in a blue moon. Clouds of flour as I made clumsy cakes in Mum’s heavy earthenware bowl. Her hands around mine – shaping biscuits, making pastry. And later, when I came back home to live; taking turns to lean against the Aga while the other made supper. Dad in the study, or watching TV in the sitting room. We women in the kitchen – through design, not default. Chatting as we cooked.
It’s in this room I feel most close to Mum. In this room it hurts the most.
A year ago, today.
Grieving widow plunges to her death, read the Gazette. Chaplain calls for media blackout on suicide hotspot, read the unwittingly ironic Guardian headline.
‘You knew,’ I whisper, feeling sure that talking out loud is not the action of a sane mind, yet being unable to contain it for a second more. ‘You knew how much it hurt, and you still did it.’
I should have listened to Mark, and planned something for today. A distraction. I could have called Laura. Had lunch. Gone shopping. Anything that didn’t involve moping about the house, going over old ground, obsessing over the anniversary of Mum’s death. There is no logical reason why today should be any harder than any other. My mother is no more dead than she was yesterday; no more dead than she will be tomorrow.
And yet …
I take a deep breath and try to snap out of it. Put my glass in the sink and tut loudly, as though an audible admonishment to myself will make a difference. I will take Ella to the park. We can go the long way around to kill time, and on the way back we’ll pick up something for supper, and before I know it Mark will be home and today will be almost over. This abrupt decisiveness is a familiar trick, but it works. The ache in my heart lessens, and the pressure behind my eyes fades away.
Fake it till you make it, Laura always says. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have is another favourite. She means at work (you’d have to listen very carefully to pick up on the fact that her public-school accent is learned, not inherited) but the principle is the same. Pretend you’re okay, and you’ll feel okay. Before too long you really will be okay.
I’m still working on the last bit.
I hear the squeak that means Ella is awake. I’m halfway across the hall when I see something poking through the letterbox. It’s either been delivered by hand, or it got caught in the letterbox when the postman did his rounds. Either way I didn’t see it when I collected the post from the mat this morning.
It’s a card. I received two others this morning – both from school friends more comfortable with grief when held at arm’s length – and I’m touched by the number of people who note dates in this way. On the anniversary of Dad’s suicide someone left a casserole on my doorstep with the briefest of notes.
Freeze or reheat. Thinking of you.
I still don’t know who it’s from. Many of the condolence cards that arrived after my parents’ deaths came with stories of the cars they’d sold over the years. Keys handed to over-confident teens and over-anxious parents. Two-seater sports cars traded for family-friendly estates. Cars to celebrate promotions, big birthdays, retirements. My parents played a part in many different stories.
The address is typed on a sticker, the postmark a smudge of ink in the top right-hand corner. The card is thick and expensive – I have to wiggle it out of its envelope.
I stare at the image.
Bright colours dance across the page: a border of lurid pink roses with intertwined stems and glossy green leaves. In the centre, two champagne glasses clink together. The greeting is embossed and finished with glitter.
Happy Anniversary!
I recoil as if I’ve been punched. Is this some kind of sick joke? A mistake? Some well-meaning, short-sighted acquaintance, mistaken in their choice of missive? I open the card.
The message is typed. Cut from cheap paper and glued to the inside.
This is no mistake.
My hands shake, making the words swim in front of my eyes. The wasp in my ears buzzes louder. I read it again.
Suicide? Think again.
THREE
It wasn’t the way I wanted to go. Not the way I always thought I’d go.
If I imagined my death I pictured a darkened room. Our bedroom. Pillows plumped behind my back; a glass of water touched to my lips once my own hands became too weak to hold it. Morphine to manage the pain. Visitors tiptoeing in single file to say their goodbyes; you red-eyed but stoic, absorbing their kind words.
And me; gradually more asleep than awake, until one morning I never woke up at all.
I used to joke that in my next life I wanted to come back as a dog.
Turns out you don’t get that much choice.
You take what you’re given, whether it suits you or not. A woman just like you. Older, uglier. That or nothing.
It feels strange to be without you.
Twenty-six years, we were together. Married for almost as long. For better or for worse. You in a suit, me in an empire-line dress picked to hide a five-month-old bump. A new life together.
And now it’s just me. Lonely. Scared. Out of my depth in the shadows of a life I once lived to the full.
Nothing worked out the way I thought it would.
And now this.
Suicide? Think again.
The words aren’t signed. Anna won’t know who they’re from.
But I do. I’ve spent the last year waiting for this to happen, fooling myself that silence meant safety.