The Weight of Loss Page 4

  ‘Marie,’ she whispered.

  ‘Ssh. Don’t.’

  He seemed to know, by gripping her body, how large her grief was inside of it. His arms came up around her neck.

  ‘Don’t, Marianne. I’ve got you.’

  She breathed her way into a hoarse silence, gasping every few minutes. Those gasps became less frequent as the night progressed, until she was finally still. He sat next to her with his arm curled around her neck and they watched the bed from the floor.

  She didn’t feel as though he had her. Everything had lost its grip; the world was slack-handed. Convulsive despair has a quick trajectory and she was released without progressing from it. There was not any less of it to feel from this night onwards, nor was there anything more to be gained from it. So she waited, with Richard beside her, who she knew was also still awake, for the sake of waiting.

  MARIE WAS A BLUE CHILD. For the first few months, her head had tiny blue veins that congregated at certain points where Marianne believed the pressure of being conscious was perhaps too much. Her skin was tinged blue. She had blue eyes and continued to have blue eyes. As if she were composed of water, not blood and muscle and bone. Marianne didn’t want to hold her so she watched her in the cot and tried to make sense of her. She herself was only five years old, but she felt unusually responsible for this fragile new life.

  Their mother, Heather, was more concerned that Marie was generally very quiet. She was too silent for peace of mind. Heather would pick Marie up and cradle her, waiting for her to make a sound that would finally convince everyone she was thriving. She appealed to their father, ‘Why is she still sleeping? Why isn’t she ready for feeding?’ David shook his head and told her to get some sleep herself. But when Heather disappeared, Marianne felt uneasy watching the child with her father. She detected nothing at the heart of his vigilance, no authentic desire for the task at hand. He watched the television set with the volume down and she watched him. His eyes wandered across the striped wallpaper and always settled on the kind of blank space that seemed to relieve him of the continual pressure of thought, one after another, always inserting itself rudely into his head without permission. At least that is what Marianne imagined when his eyes refused to be filled.

  She took it upon herself to watch the baby, kneeling at the bars of the cot. It struck her how very wrinkled the child was. The corners of her eyes were slightly puckered and her body had so many lines and folds, as if there were too much skin to start with. As if the body was retreating back to where it came from. Marie did not yet possess the frightening, volcanic energy of a life that must command itself at once; instead, she was passively inclined and sought nothing of the world. She never cried or threw out her little fleshy arms; she was silent and somnolent, existing because she had no choice. This was what pained her mother, though Marianne did not understand at the time.

  Heather suffered from the ‘baby blues’, something Marianne was told did not happen when she was born but did when Marie came into the picture. She thought it was an apt description, considering the strange hue of Marie’s skin. And forever afterwards, she associated Marie’s shadowy body with that unconquerable grief that leaves an imprint in the blood. Heather was given anti-depressants, and for a while she was drawn into a stupor not dissimilar from the one Marie was trapped in. She stopped checking on the child every hour in the night to reassure herself that it had not died. She stopped rearranging everything in the bathroom cupboard behind the mirror. She stopped ringing her mother and then hanging up just in time so as to escape the sound of her voice. The insidious panic about whatever it was she dreaded happening died down.

  In its place, she became extraordinarily placid, though nobody confused it with relief. On the contrary, David knew his wife was still living out her private fears under the influence of medication. What nobody would ever know was the way in which she watched her terrors expand and conflate in that cold room of thought without possessing the energy to attend to any of them. Instead, she quivered at night, pressed upon the mattress of these insane realities, all of them hypothetical, feeling them with her body along the seconds, until something in her bloodstream stole her from her crisis. That was the only way she knew the drug was playing its part. It froze her nightmarish progress from the moment of conception, seizing the panic that arose from a single thought, right before it peaked. The problem was that she would rather peak than submit to this dull tension, this inability to evacuate anything from her brain in one glorious second.

  Marianne wondered whether her own black line of thought began with their mother, whether it was hereditary. She never thought anything of it until the end of Marie’s life. In fact, it had been very easy to pay little to no attention to her mother at all while she was a child because Heather disappeared to her bedroom, the only place the children could never enter in the house, when she was sick. ‘Sick’, Marianne knew now, was a term for something her father wouldn’t divulge, and which must necessarily be voided from the girls’ memories. Marianne never found it strange that her parents had two separate bedrooms until she began to visit the homes of her friends at school. When she told their parents that her own did not share the one room, she was always surprised by the rueful expressions she got.

  She only understood intimacy insofar as Marie was concerned. She did not simply love her sister, she craved her. As a toddler, Marie was golden-haired. She had lost the sleepy blue tinge to her skin. Her eyes widened and the irises were a very pale, icy blue that gave the impression she saw everything with forensic detail. Her eyelashes were long and thick and balanced neatly on her cheeks and eyelids. Her face had the plaintive aspect of one who doesn’t know how to process any dark element of life.

  When Marie was ten, their father witnessed her running out into the road in front of their house to collect a tennis ball. She seemed to glide weightlessly across the road as if the air carried her like a leaf stolen by gravity. A car swerved to a halt. Marie blinked at the driver when he opened the door, stepped out and cursed at her, his hands shaking. David had watched the incident from the window and ran outside to intervene. Marie’s imperturbable demeanour, her refusal to respond to the driver’s rage, was evidently taken as an insult. Marianne also suspected that he was disturbed by her in a way he might not have been able to explain.

  Afterwards David spoke to Marie about her carelessness. Marianne sat on the stairs and eavesdropped. Their mother was absent – in her room, out of bounds. Marianne plucked the fibres of the carpet, wrenching them free, while she listened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marie.

  ‘But what good is that once you’re dead?’ he said.

  ‘I would still be sorry. More sorry.’

  Marianne frowned at the banister.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Once you’re dead, you’re dead.’

  He always seemed to be spouting these truisms. They had seemed ludicrous at the time but Marianne would remember them sombrely. Sometimes, the truth had more potency when it was trapped in itself.

  ‘I would still be sorry.’

  ‘Hey. Stop being smart with me.’

  ‘I’m not. I don’t mean to be. I’m sorry!’

  There was a pause, and then their father’s muffled voice came as though through the wall of Marie’s body.

  ‘I want you to be less stupid. You’ll give me a heart attack one day.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I won’t.’

  He laughed while he was buried in her chest. He must have been sitting on the futon and Marie had stood to embrace him. Marianne could imagine his balding head from above, where the view of him was the saddest. She was anxious to join them but something about their voices suggested a privacy she couldn’t stake any claim on.

  Marianne wished she could release herself from the burden of loving Marie. She was accepted as a permanent feature of Marie’s world, as consistent as the bed that she slept in and the cereal she had for breakfast. But she was not essential. She was never really sought out or summoned from her bedroom to help Marie pass the time; it was usually the other way around. Marie knew how to be alone, to subsist from some private centre that she alone knew about, abstracting herself without warning. Marianne would wonder where Marie pooled her thoughts, for she never really shared them with anyone unprompted. How was it possible to exist in such secrecy? She was certainly capable of passion but she never verbalised it, never felt the compulsion that Marianne had to divulge her occasionally dark impulses. Perhaps she had none.

  As Marie approached adulthood, this quiet insularity seemed deliberate as opposed to unconscious. She was also beginning to recognise the rarity of her condition – that very few people can be truly independent. Marianne suspected a single note rang through her sister’s blood and vibrated with silent urgency, humming like a forest with roots that operated predominantly beneath the surface. That earthy silence – where she sought her pleasure without assistance – was her black secret. Marianne envied her that way of existing purely from the inside.

  When they went to Williamson Park with their father, Marie would find ways to bury herself. In the autumn months, she would lie on the ground and ask Marianne to heap piles of flaming leaves on her prostrate form. Then she’d slowly extend her arms and legs so that the leaves would fall away again – it was a game and Marianne had to hide Marie’s wriggling body. The ‘grave game’, Marie would call it. There was also a large oak tree that had a hole in the base of the trunk, and she would crawl inside that hollow centre and sit there for hours while Marianne walked through the woods with her father. He used to be a tree surgeon, and he would point out all the species of tree they saw and tell her the Greek myths and legends surrounding each one. They could see Marie’s scarlet Converse trainers poking through the tree from afar, signalling
to them that she was still there.

  And yet she was not really anywhere. She had crammed herself into a space that seemed to have whittled down her thoughts to the bare minimum required to exist. She was quietly satiated by this spot where the walls seemed to pulse. ‘It’s alive,’ she would tell Marianne. She sat inside it like a foetus. The older she got, the harder it was to cram herself inside until she finally gave up and stroked the heavy opening with her hands, bidding goodbye to her darkness.

  Once they left the woods, Marie would glide from one activity to another, casting off the last impression – one that barely made an imprint before its erasure – and cleanly inhabiting the present, never quite clutching it or mourning its end in advance. There was no sudden dent in her mood, where the weight of expectation sank in on itself – at least, Marianne couldn’t see any evidence of it. Marie didn’t seem to accumulate layers of experience like everyone else, like so many woollen garments to be shrugged off at the end of the day, the pockets weighed down with paraphernalia; rather, she swanned through the seconds like they were made of silk, slipping them off as easily as they fell into place, unwrinkled and unblemished.

  She would hurl herself on the tyre swing, then lean her head so far back that her hair brushed the leaves on the ground and the blood sank into her face. She’d sit up and stare, mesmerised, if a dog pranced by, always honoured by its reciprocal interest in her. While Marianne and David chatted at the cafe, she would be wholly absorbed in eating, her eyes glazed over, not glancing up until every crumb was gone. Afterwards, they’d visit the butterfly house, where Marie considered every specimen with solemn interest. If an insect landed on her head, she’d remain stock-still so it could find its footing in the strands of her hair. Her concentration, her pleasure too, was absolute. Nothing existed but what was immediately at hand, though she adapted, always, to the loss of it.

  She’d sometimes hum to herself, a monotone sound – which was when Marianne could tell she had reached a point of consciousness from which there was no calling her back. There was a chance she didn’t realise she was doing it; it was extremely quiet, barely audible in a crowded place. Often Marie would take a breath and the pitch would bounce up slightly, as though her thoughts had moved higher up where the air was strange. Then she’d continue to build on the original sound, recovering neutral ground. Marianne and her parents would joke about it, but it never truly irritated them because it was one of Marie’s harmless quirks. That was not to say that it didn’t occasionally grow tiresome. Sometimes Marianne would prod her sharply in the back and Marie would then pretend to break her finger off. She was surprisingly strong when she wanted to be.

  David’s mother lived quite close to them in Lancaster and he would take Marianne and Marie to visit her. She had an enormous garden with a wall of trees at the bottom, and she asked her granddaughters to take care of it for her. She would not think of hiring a gardener to tend to her plants; instead she tasked the girls with watering and fertilising her flowers. They were taught how to prune damaged limbs and how to add mulch to the soil to stop the weeds from growing. She would show them how to do all of this with her trembling hands, lined with veins that criss-crossed the knuckles. Her thumbs were thick and strong like her son’s, the nails slightly brittle because she liked to use her hands as much as she could before they finally became too convulsive. Her oak trees were looked after by David and it was something of a religious exercise for her to watch him out there with the girls, preserving that fertile peace. ‘I have one Adam and two little Eves,’ she said.

  Marie spotted the blood first. She called it blood because it certainly looked like it, a dark oozing trail from a split in the bark. The tree was leaking through the skin, secreting its secrets, which dried like honeyed bruises. Marie asked her father whether the tree was poorly.

  ‘It’s infected,’ he said. ‘There must be bacteria in the tree. It might spread to the others.’

  He would have to fell the tree to save the others. Something about this course of action frightened Marie.

  ‘It’s alright,’ her grandmother said, placing her blue-veined hand on Marie’s shoulder. ‘We’ll have a nice fire and burn it.’

  They watched David slice into the trunk with a chainsaw, creating two notches from either side so that he could force his way through the centre. Marianne enjoyed the suspense before it eventually gave way. Marie was forlorn, shouting through the noise. As the chainsaw buzzed, she called to Marianne, ‘When is it dead?’ For a while, Marianne could hardly respond because she couldn’t ascertain anything. All she knew was that her father was delivering something from an eventual fatality, a slow-moving demise. That the tree did not complain, did not move or echo its malaise, but stood as silent as ever while the rot ate through its body, made her slightly sick. If the tree had a heart, it was arrested from beating. An intervention was necessary for the others to remain pure.

  When the trunk was flat along the ground, its body was a horrible thing. It was not over. Their father stripped the outer bark and sapwood; then he set fire to its long, thwarted limb. The flames licked the body finally to nothing. ‘It’s for the best,’ said their grandmother when Marie began to cry. Marianne was annoyed that she was so sentimental about a tree.

  For her eighteenth Christmas, Marie asked their mother if they could have a real fir tree installed in the living room.

  ‘Why?’ Heather said.

  She was flossing her teeth in the bathroom mirror, gurning at Marie, who stood behind her in the doorway and was visible in the glass. Marianne noticed that Marie’s eyes were never drawn to her own reflection. Even when she washed her face. She never caught her own eye.

  ‘Because it will smell of the forest,’ she said.

  Heather ran her tongue over her gums and watched herself.

  ‘It’ll shed all over the carpet. You knock it even slightly, those firs will shed.’ She turned and looked at Marie. ‘Bit like you with your hair.’

  ‘My hair is tidy,’ Marie said.

  ‘It’s everywhere. It’s in the carpet, the bottom of the bath, the washing machine.’

  ‘What’s she supposed to do? Shave it off?’ Marianne said.

  Heather turned around and spotted Marianne sitting on the stairs, watching them.

  ‘Who asked you?’

  ‘I’m just saying. I wouldn’t mind one too. I’ll pay for it.’

  Heather closed the bathroom door and locked it. Marie looked at Marianne with a smile.

  ‘You’re pushy.’

  ‘Someone’s got to be,’ Marianne said.

  A week later, Marianne found a small fir tree at the garden centre and brought it home once she’d finished work at the stationery shop in town. She’d taken a black velvet ribbon from the shop – for some reason, she wasn’t inclined to go for the usual festive colours – and tied it round the trunk before Marie came home from school. She put it in Marie’s bedroom.

  When Marie arrived, she ran up the stairs lightly as though her feet barely touched the floor. Her face was patchy from the cold; one cheek was much pinker than the other and, Marianne thought, there was something blue beneath the skin when the colour died down. In the past year, she’d begun to turn blue again, and it was only then that Marianne recalled the strange hue of her skin in the early years. It was not like a bruise, more like the ghost of a violent sensation, felt internally, where the blood had left an imprint when it gathered behind the face, peering through the skin as one might press oneself against a window. Marianne didn’t know whether she’d imagined it, twisting her memory of things to persuade herself that life has a way of revealing the truth to you before it occurs.

  When Marie saw the tree, fat and full, in the corner of her bedroom, she sank to her knees, then brushed the back of her hand along the branches in a gentle manner, like she was stroking a cat. There was a sudden earthy smell, which she had activated, like the tree was emitting pheromones. For the first time, Marianne found Marie’s joy vaguely irritating. It was just too much. It defied any mature and reasonable distance from the thing. Instead, she plunged herself towards the absolute physical limit of it, touching every branch and brushing them against her face.