The Weight of Loss Read online

  ‘Calm down. It’s a tree,’ Marianne said with her arms folded.

  That same month, Marianne noticed that Marie’s calves were covered in large bruises, some of them already turning yellow. And she was noticeably paler. Her eyelids were traced with tiny blue veins that seemed to bleed into her line of vision.

  ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ Marianne asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I bruise easily.’

  The way her skin changed its colour so readily disturbed Marianne. She also spotted a small purple mark behind Marie’s ear, shaped like a comma. She fancied her sister’s body was communicating something to her without Marie’s consent.

  She was not the only one troubled by what was appearing. Marie’s form tutor, Miss Grady, rang the house one afternoon when Marianne happened to be at home, having finished early at the shop.

  ‘Could I speak to Mrs Turner?’

  ‘She’s not in. Sorry.’

  ‘Ah, are you Marie’s sister? Is it – Marianne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m her form tutor, Jo Grady. I was just calling to discuss – to talk about a delicate matter but one that is quite serious.’

  Marianne said nothing, so Mrs Grady continued.

  ‘I’m worried about Marie. You must have noticed she has a rather large number of bruises, and she is looking – unwell. Very thin. She doesn’t appear to me to be in a fit state for study and other teachers have noticed that she seems very tired in her lessons.’

  ‘I—’ Marianne was struggling to find anything useful to say. ‘I have noticed the bruises but she says she doesn’t know what’s caused them.’

  ‘Has she seen a doctor?’

  ‘No. She rarely does.’

  ‘I wonder – how are her eating habits?’

  ‘Fine. She eats,’ Marianne said sharply.

  ‘She doesn’t limit her food intake in any way?’

  ‘She’s not anorexic.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to seem like I’m prying but – as I said – I am concerned for her. She’s clearly not well.’

  Marianne looked out of the kitchen window. Their small garden was prickly and cruel without flowers and, unlike the other gardens on their lane, which bore fairy lights and flashing LED reindeers, this one held a compact darkness. The gloom immediately below their window made her push the phone deeper into her skin.

  ‘We can take her to a doctor if you think someone should—’

  ‘Oh yes, I do. She should be examined. I also think she should spend the rest of the week at home. I know this is the last week before term ends but I look at her and – I think she’s struggling. She needs to get her strength back over the Christmas break.’

  ‘Okay. Is she in a lesson right now?’

  ‘No. She’s actually just sitting in reception. I left her there to call you. Do you want to speak to her?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Marianne waited. She refused to look out of the window.

  ‘Hello,’ Marie’s voice materialised.

  ‘Hey, is this true then? You’re falling asleep in class?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re knackered. And the bruises – people are starting to notice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you coming home now?’

  ‘I think so. Can you pick me up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Are you – how come you haven’t said anything?’ Marianne said.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to go to the doctor.’

  ‘You have to. I’m going to take you there today.’

  ‘No – there won’t be any appointments available.’

  ‘I’ll book an emergency one.’

  Marie groaned.

  ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  The surgery was full but Marie was admitted to see someone straight away – a dark-haired woman with very small eyes who watched Marie carefully as she escorted her from the waiting room. It occurred to Marianne that perhaps she should have gone with Marie. But she’s old enough to go on her own. Then she descended into bitter thoughts. The fact of the matter was that she was losing patience with Marie and her complacency. Perhaps an illness of some sort was necessary to force her out of it. She watched the double doors and hoped that Marie would emerge at a loss for words.

  Was it complacency? Marianne wasn’t always sure. She recalled a dream Marie had once told her about, only because she’d been asked to write about one for a homework assignment. It was about a year ago now, though Marianne had often thought of it since.

  Marie had described how she wandered into a doctor’s surgery, seemingly by accident – though surely everything in a dream is some sort of casualty of logic. She had instinctively known that she needed to be operated on, without knowing why. The surgeon welcomed her with an elongated smile, almost too large for his face. The reason for her operation then dawned on her. There was a hole in her brain. It needed stitching back up immediately, otherwise she’d lose her mind. The surgeon told her that there would be no anaesthetic as it was dangerous to put her to sleep at this point, that she had to hold on to her thoughts while they operated. ‘I could see what he was doing as he was doing it. My eyes had gone – inward.’ She felt the shadow of his scalpel before it plunged through the membrane. The hole was immediately conscious of an intruder and began to glide away from the point of incision, resisting all attempts to pin it down. The surgeon then took a saltshaker and began to sprinkle great crystal shards on the wound where he’d sliced Marie’s head open.

  It was a bizarre dream and they’d both laughed about it. Marianne was once convinced Marie had invented it, just so she would be able to produce something macabre, the sinister Freudian tale her teacher obviously wanted from such an exercise. But she also felt, in hindsight, that it was too weird to be the product of design. She didn’t think it was fabricated – or rather, it was a fabrication of unconscious origin. And she didn’t know which one was worse.

  When she came through the waiting room doors, Marie was clutching her arm. Marianne knew at once that the nurse had taken blood.

  ‘It’s likely a deficiency of something – iron maybe,’ she said on the way home.

  ‘When do you get the results?’

  ‘Don’t know. I can’t remember what she said.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Marie.’

  Marie flinched as she always did when Marianne swore.

  They didn’t say anything to their parents. But when they were eating at the kitchen table, Marianne had the compulsion to say something even if it wasn’t kind. She noticed how different Marie looked under the overhead light, while the muscles in her face were in motion as she ate. And she also realised that she wasn’t alone in noticing the difference. Heather also stared, deep in concentration, at the blue hollows of Marie’s face, turning the meat over in her mouth in a rigid manner, her jaw shooting quickly from one side to the other.

  David spoke about his mother, telling everyone that she was beginning to forget what day it was, that she presumed Christmas was already over. Lately, whenever her social worker came to visit, she found the old woman packing the tinsel and baubles away. Every time, the social worker put everything back again and laughed it off, but after the fifth time, she gave in to the woman’s furious conviction – that the new year had begun and she was tired of God and Jesus taking up space in her house. Marie gazed at him for long periods at a time, her knife and fork perfectly crossed in the centre of her plate.

  ‘You’re not hungry?’ Marianne said to her.

  ‘No. I’m not feeling well.’

  She had never said anything like this in her life.

  Later, when they were sitting in Marie’s bedroom, she confided to Marianne of a tight swelling in her chest.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ Marianne asked.

  Marie lifted her jumper, which was large and lumpy. Her ribcage heaved through the skin like the shadows of splayed fingers. And there it was – the thing that had been oppressing her all this time. A lump beneath her left rib cage, hard as a stone.

  ‘Shit.’ Marianne pressed it lightly with her fingertip.

  Marie squirmed under her touch.

  ‘Did you show that to the doctor?’

  She had the decency to look ashamed. ‘No.’

  ‘You’re an idiot! Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Marie lay back on her pillow and watched Marianne with a quietness that chilled them both.

  ‘I wish you’d take things more seriously,’ Marianne said finally.

  She returned to her room and tried not to think about Marie, but it was impossible not to. There were countless thoughts she wished she could erase but they only seemed to grow in significance and threatened to repeat themselves. The panic that had once informed them was suspended for a time but now she knew it was hovering below the surface, waiting to insert itself again.

  She recalled the years when she used to cross the landing to Marie’s bedroom, enter without knocking and sit on her bed. Marie always woke very quickly. Marianne asked her questions that were frank and fearful, as though she was convinced her younger sister was closer to the truth than she was because she seemed to exist instinctively and without effort. ‘I wish I knew when I was going to die,’ Marianne once said to that dazed expression against the headboard, ‘then I could be ready for it. Not knowing is worse. I hate not knowing when I’ll be over. Do you think we’ll end up somewhere else?’ Marie barely ever gave a coherent answer, but she held on to Marianne’s knee. It took Marianne years to realise there was nothing conciliatory in the gesture. While Marie had a vaguely theoretical interest in what Marianne said in her moments of darkness, she didn’t re
spond as one who had ever shared it. The concept of the afterlife was lost on her because she didn’t really believe in death. The hand on Marianne’s knee was an attempt to mute her, to keep her thoughts still. Marie didn’t want to be embroiled in them.

  Throughout Marianne’s teenage years, she lost herself to that peculiar panic. She could never absolutely guarantee that she would be alive in the next second. She could only positively assure herself that she had happened, not that she would continue to happen. The idea of becoming lost forever would create an immediate tension in her head, as though she was bound to prepare for it now while she could, her consciousness pooling at the limit, gathering speed for a route it would never enter. She wondered whether the fact that she thought about it so often held her in good stead. She was also convinced that there were secret methods to prolong herself, that certain practices, like moving symmetrically through the world, with both sets of limbs matching one another, would lengthen her existence, while others, like losing sleep, would bring death a second closer at a time. She was locked in herself without really wanting to be released, knowing that light-heartedness was something she would simply never grasp, for grasping types never fare well and remain trapped in their fixations.

  Marianne did not attract the kind of disciples that her sister did, those who gravitated towards calm energy, a prevailing lightness of temper. Marianne drove everyone away with her rigid silences. Her sister was silent most of the time too, but she negated herself without tension. Marianne dropped out of company like a stone. In fact, she often felt the vertigo of one who slips and loses their balance yet never gets used to it. I live in panic, she thought. I live in dread of every day.

  But Marianne had lived through adolescence without pricking herself to death. Once she left home for university, her raggedness disappeared, her edges softened. The library was a genuine haven for critically minded people with a quiet resolve to learn and her thoughts no longer spiralled discursively into darkness, rather they moved at a steady pace. Her essays were methodical and concise. She made plausible friendships for the first time. Spoke with an authority that arrived from nowhere.

  She began to write freely, unprompted by any assignment, recording her thoughts so they would be stored for posterity. Posterity, to Marianne’s mind, meant the offspring of her ever-evolving consciousness, this mysterious code that adapted to different contexts and produced myriad editions of herself, all of them flickering into being at different stages of her life. She tried to pin down something of her essence even while it was still so tenuous, so that she would commune with that version of Marianne at a later date.

  At university, she filled herself from the bottom up, growing into what she once thought was a dead end – though she kept this growth to herself, preferring to exist three quarters below the surface. Writing was a mechanism for relief, a stable method of attending to the dark part of herself, keeping it in check by assembling the right words. And sometimes it was enough – the relief of translating something of herself in as precise a fashion as she could manage was enough to satisfy it, without even finding an answer. She was her sole audience. Whereas before, she had craved company, now she resisted it, skipping nights out for time spent alone. It was worth the quiet growth of her inner life, and she knew it wasn’t the only condition available to her but, significantly, one she had chosen. She had only been frightened of being alone when she’d had no other option.

  Growing up with Marie had taught her not to share that secret store of feeling and expect much in return. Sometimes at university, lying awake in her bedroom, she granted herself a private audience and strained to make sense of the raw part of her psyche. It was fruitless but far less agonising than what had occurred previously. At least she was no longer in danger of misappropriating someone, fastening her fears on to another’s consciousness and trying to reel it in towards her. She hadn’t been able to do it with Marie, and the effort had cost her.

  ONCE RICHARD LEFT FOR WORK on Monday, Marianne was due a Skype call with the editor of Empowered, Anna Mason. She carried her laptop downstairs and placed it on the kitchen counter, though she wasn’t sure why it seemed the right place. Perhaps it was that the kitchen offered an impression of industry with its glossy surfaces and appliances – most of which Richard had bought, including the coffee machine from Harrods – and any other room bore little resemblance to a professional environment. Marianne angled the screen towards different parts of the room before settling on the coffee machine as a backdrop. She’d decided to wear a black and white polka dot shirt and, for the first time in weeks, she was wearing mascara and had applied a generous amount of concealer to the areas of her face that had become slightly grey, especially under her eyes, where the skin was turning blue then yellow like a bruise. She heard the chirpy dial tone and waited for Anna’s face to emerge.

  Anna wasn’t looking at the screen when she appeared on it. Typically, Marianne thought, she was keeping her at a carefully considered distance, even in the short time she’d allotted her for a one-to-one. She had a vertiginous head, inverted towards the chin, with a large, shadowy temple.

  ‘Marianne, hi. Just bear with me for a sec.’ She turned again to talk to somebody just out of view of the webcam. ‘Please don’t presume you have the authority to make that kind of decision. You pass it by me. The interview is too long and I asked you to remove the part about her mindfulness campaign on Instagram because it’s all cliché. Besides, we covered all that last issue. You know which bit to focus on.’

  A woman’s voice mumbled something in reply but Marianne could only catch the words ‘off the record’.

  ‘There’s no such thing. Please do as I ask. I’m relieving you of your conscience, alright?’ Anna laughed towards Marianne as though she was colluding with her. ‘I’m in a call, Michelle. Send me the piece once you’ve made the edits.’

  The door closed and Anna faced Marianne directly.

  ‘Right. I read the interview,’ Anna said. ‘We’re not running it for this issue.’

  ‘Really? I thought you said—’

  ‘The tone is all wrong. This issue is supposed to be about new beginnings.’

  Marianne said nothing. Anna waited before carrying on.

  ‘The woman in your interview doesn’t seem invested in anything other than finding the right man to raise a child with. Has she seriously considered other options? Adoption? Sperm donors? And she hasn’t stopped to consider the benefits of childlessness. Embarking on new adventures, travelling the world, sleeping in with a hangover at the weekend. She has a wide network of friends and a big family but she acts like none of this means anything until she’s found her soul mate. Everything begins once the child begins. Why would our readers want to hear this? What good does it do to know about a woman who refuses to live for herself? There is no angle here that feeds into the hopeful spirit of the issue.’

  ‘But it’s honest. She admits she’s not hopeful about her prospects but won’t disguise it with any bullshit.’

  ‘Nobody wants to read that.’

  ‘I do.’

  Anna paused and Marianne wished they were speaking on the phone. Her shirt was tight under her armpits, causing them to sweat.

  ‘How are you doing at the moment?’ Anna said. It was hardly a question, delivered in a flat tone.

  ‘I’m better.’

  ‘Are you in therapy?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it’s something I’m interested in.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Anna probably genuinely meant it. Marianne couldn’t imagine her advising anyone to see a therapist.

  ‘We’re considering doing an issue on trauma and PTSD down the line,’ Anna continued. Marianne knew where she was going. ‘And it might be fruitful, or in some way cathartic, for you to write a piece. We’d use it as one of our main features. Include a by-line on the cover.’

  She paused and waited for Marianne to insert a reply. There was none. So she continued.

  ‘If you were to write about your experience—’

  ‘And say what? What do I say?’ Marianne interjected. She was feeling sick.