Chapter Seventeen
What does it feel like when someone you love dies? It's different for everyone, but if you could ask Jay, she certainly couldn't tell you. She remembered very little of the next six months. True to his word, Gramps had insisted that Jay be allowed to visit Grace as she lay in state in the funeral parlour. She looked thin and somehow different, but it was difficult to say that she wasn't just asleep. Jay tucked a favourite toy under Grace's crossed hands, and wondered why she couldn't have been allowed to sleep for the last time in her usual curled up position. Shakily, reluctant to leave her sister alone, Jay walked out of the flower-packed parlour, Gramps following her. She turned, when they got outside, and stood trembling in his arms, unable even to cry.
Something changed in her after that. Anger filled her, not grief. She hated everyone for not being Grace. She hated herself for not being there when Grace died, and felt somehow that it had all been her own fault. If she had done this, or that, maybe Grace would still be alive now. More than anything, she hated roses. Grace couldn't smell them any longer, it was just unfair and somehow horrible that they were still so sweet and beautiful.
Immediately after the funeral, when all the well-meaning relatives had left the house, Jay went to her room and looked with loathing at the big photo of the two of them smiling into the camera. She had hung it on the wall during Grace's illness, almost as a magic charm to help Grace get better, together with the special stone she had found in the woods just before she had learned of Grace's death. She took the picture down and dropped it on the floor; the glass splintered in its frame but did not fall out. She took the special stone from her table and looked at it scornfully and with some disgust. It hadn't been magic after all. Not only had it not helped Grace get better, it wasn't helping her now, never mind what that stupid old woman had told her.
“Take care of this, Jay, it will help you in your trouble,” she had said when Jay, holding the stone, had looked round and seen her: a smartly dressed woman in a fur coat with a strange look in her eye, as Jay thought she remembered. Jay had not questioned how the woman had known her name, or how she had known that Jay had worries.
Now it was just a silly stone. She threw it with all her force at the wall, where the dent remains to this day.
Over the next few weeks she slept a lot and became contemptuous, rude and hurtful, while internally she was either sullen and resentful or felt only a vast emptiness. She spent a lot of time sitting staring at nothing, or at patterns in the carpet; and slammed the door whenever she left a room.
The photo and the stone lay where they had fallen for a while, gradually getting absorbed into the great untidiness that Jay found she had no wish to control, although she did make a concession to comfort and picked up the glass from the broken photograph. Piles of washed and unwashed clothes, paper, read and unread books and assorted rubbish took over the floor of her previously tidy room and were occasionally kicked, rummaged through, or spread into other piles. Once in a while she found herself seeing it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. She lived in a world without meaning. She took to wearing black.
As Grace had always been her first friend and companion, she had never bothered to make many friends at school, and had been a bit of a loner when Grace was not available. Grace had been the sociable one, who had found it so easy to make friends. There had often been a noisy crowd of girls around, or she was out visiting one or another of them, or off playing in the park, or doing some sporty thing or another which didn't interest Jay at all; whatever her sister did seemed to leave Jay very much to her own devices.
When the summer term began she had gone unwillingly back to school, but soon found that those of the children she did know were diffident and awkward around her. One or two of them tried to be kind, especially Sumira; but their sympathy reminded her too painfully of Grace's absence, so that she in turn didn't know how to talk to them. Soon she was spending almost all her time alone, bunking off school to wander aimlessly, sometimes taking buses to the end of their routes and walking for miles. She became almost unconsciously familiar with her city and the surrounding countryside, from the busy centre and the waterfront to the almost endless suburbs and right out into the cultivated greenness or the hills which sheltered the city to the north. Once or twice she caught a bus which took her right out into the Valleys, with their long terraced towns and the sense of wildness beyond. Mostly she gave her attention to detail, so that a leaf on the ground could hold her attention for longer than any person or place; she kept little memory of where she had been or what she had done. She didn't notice the long summer holiday come and go, having been so seldom at school during the summer term; and her birthday passed her by completely, though her mother tried to mark it with cake and kindness.
Other people irked her, especially her mother. She could hardly bear to be in the same room with her. Occasionally, when she made a particularly hateful comment to her mother, she might become aware of a voice inside saying, “Jay, dear, this isn't worthy of you,” but she always brushed it aside irritably and ignored it.
One dull November day, a bit more than six months after Grace's death, Jay was kicking through the piles of clothes and debris in her room when her boot connected with something unexpectedly hard. She groped around until she could close her hand on it, and pulled it out. It was the first time she had felt the stirring of curiosity for many months, and she stared at it, scarcely understanding what she was seeing. Then it came into proper focus, and she saw it was the talisman. A ripple of unaccustomed feeling tickled her, which she suppressed as quickly as she could. She did not want to remember, she did not want to feel. She encouraged her now-familiar bad mood to return and take over again, threw the stone back onto the floor, kicked clothes over it to hide it, and stomped into the kitchen where her mother was peeling potatoes.
“Please will you give me a hand with these? I'm running a bit late and...”
Enraged by her as usual, Jay stormed at her.
“Potatoes! Is that all you can think about? You just act all the time as though the world's a nice place and everything's just fine. You heartless cow, you don't care about anything at all, do you?” She used an unprintable word for the potatoes, and added, “Do them yourself!”
Somewhere inside, Jay was listening and watching herself with surprise, unable to stop the hurtful words pouring out. She hadn't realised until this moment that this had become her usual way of addressing her mother, whom she had loved dearly right up until after... after... Grace died. Grace was dead! She was horrified as it dawned on her that she had resolutely forgotten her sister, the long illness and the terrible shock of her death. The impact of this nearly stopped her hearing her mother as she turned to Jay and said in a tight, shaky voice:
“You really do think I don't feel anything, don't you. Would you feel any better if I went around being as horrible as you? Or would you rather I cried all the time? I daren't show my feelings to you, Jay. You'd rip me apart, and then where would we both be? It's all I can do to hold myself together as it is.”
Jay's mouth opened, then closed as, with a jolt, the two parts of Jay came together: the inside, real, aware and listening Jay and the part of her which lived in the outside world and was coping so very badly. On the verge of a stinging retort, her hands flew to her mouth. Time stopped. She saw her mother clearly, turned half away from her, a half-peeled potato in her hand.
In the distance, a dog barked.
With a sudden pain in her heart, she observed her mother's tenseness, how thin she'd become, the tears in her eyes. And how, without her having noticed the change, Jay was now the taller of the two.
When time started again, Jay went towards her mother with tears starting in her own eyes. She touched her gently on the shoulder and was appalled that her mother flinched away from her hand.
“Mum... Mum, I'm sorry,” she said slowly. “I'm not doing this any more. Leave the potatoes, I'll do them. Just, please, give me a few minutes.”
Jay turned and left the kitchen, not noticing her mother's look of utter astonishment. She leapt up the stairs two at a time, with more energy than she had felt for months, and went to her room. She was amazed to find, after such a long time living with either rage or a huge emptiness, that she was feeling a great range of emotions, from sadness and shame to compassion and a rediscovered love for her mother. Tears poured down her face for the first time since the funeral. She noticed them but didn't wipe them away, for the torrent seemed endless and she had more important things to do. Great gasps rather than sobs shook her as she tore off every stitch of her grubby black clothing and her black clumpy boots. She took out the line of studs in her ears, which she had regretted the moment they were done. A lot of pocket money, that impulse had cost. She would decide later which ones to keep, if any.
Then she tied her hair back untidily. It had been great to hide behind; but it was now very dirty and tangled, and there was nothing to be found to hold it but a long bootlace from one of the boots she'd just taken off. She grimaced, resolving to get clean later.
Rummaging through the mess of her clothes for something less grubbily black to wear, her hand brushed against the talisman stone. Suddenly the whole of the wonderful journey came back into her memory, and she remembered that it hadn't been an old woman in the woods who had spoken to her about the stone, but a terrifying dragon in an unbelievably beautiful cavern. At the time, she had stubbornly made herself believe, in spite of what she had been told, that the stone had been given to her to help Grace magically recover; now she remembered that hadn't been its purpose at all. She thought about it for a moment, tears still hotly scouring her cheeks.
Coming back to present time, she put the talisman on a corner of her table, brushing its unstable accumulation of rubbish onto the floor to make space. Storing in her mind's eye the shape and feel of the stone so that she wouldn't forget again, she found a cleanish pair of old blue jeans and a sweatshirt without words or pictures on; the jeans were a size too small but she squeezed into them anyway, lying on the bed to do up the zip. In the pocket was a phone number: Sumira's. She would definitely, definitely ring her later: I could do with a friend, she thought. As she stood up she gazed with astonishmentt at the awesome mess and chaos in her room. How had it got like that? She had no idea at all, but determined it wasn't going to stay that way. She decided to show the talisman to her mum and tell her the whole story.
First things first. She blew her nose, wiped her face, stuffed a tissue in one back pocket and the stone in the other, and with some trepidation went down to the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table still holding the half-peeled potato loosely in her hand, gazing out of the window at the dreary November twilight. Jay sat down opposite her. It was obvious that she had also been crying. Tears welled up again in her own eyes.
“Mum, I'm so sorry.”
There was a long damp silence, punctuated by the occasional surreptitious sniff.
“You didn't just lose Grace, did you? You lost me as well. I lost me. But you lost both of us.”
Her mum turned to her with an expression of amazement, opening her mouth to say something, but Jay spoke first.
“No, please, don't say anything. I want to think.”
The clock ticked. A dog barked once again. The world turned a little further and the November day darkened.
“I think I'm back now, mum. Let's get a takeaway tonight, forget the potatoes. Would it be all right if I took a week at Gran and Gramps's? A week away would be a break for both of us. I'm not running away, well, not really, I just thought... No, I'll stay. I've got a heap to catch up on, and there's my room...”
She got up. “I love you, mum. Difficult to believe after the way I've been, but I do. Now there's something I want to show you, something I want to tell you about.”
Her mother's mouth was still open as Jay left the room to get the stone talisman.
What does it feel like when someone you love dies? It's different for everyone, but if you could ask Jay, she certainly couldn't tell you. She remembered very little of the next six months. True to his word, Gramps had insisted that Jay be allowed to visit Grace as she lay in state in the funeral parlour. She looked thin and somehow different, but it was difficult to say that she wasn't just asleep. Jay tucked a favourite toy under Grace's crossed hands, and wondered why she couldn't have been allowed to sleep for the last time in her usual curled up position. Shakily, reluctant to leave her sister alone, Jay walked out of the flower-packed parlour, Gramps following her. She turned, when they got outside, and stood trembling in his arms, unable even to cry.
Something changed in her after that. Anger filled her, not grief. She hated everyone for not being Grace. She hated herself for not being there when Grace died, and felt somehow that it had all been her own fault. If she had done this, or that, maybe Grace would still be alive now. More than anything, she hated roses. Grace couldn't smell them any longer, it was just unfair and somehow horrible that they were still so sweet and beautiful.
Immediately after the funeral, when all the well-meaning relatives had left the house, Jay went to her room and looked with loathing at the big photo of the two of them smiling into the camera. She had hung it on the wall during Grace's illness, almost as a magic charm to help Grace get better, together with the special stone she had found in the woods just before she had learned of Grace's death. She took the picture down and dropped it on the floor; the glass splintered in its frame but did not fall out. She took the special stone from her table and looked at it scornfully and with some disgust. It hadn't been magic after all. Not only had it not helped Grace get better, it wasn't helping her now, never mind what that stupid old woman had told her.
“Take care of this, Jay, it will help you in your trouble,” she had said when Jay, holding the stone, had looked round and seen her: a smartly dressed woman in a fur coat with a strange look in her eye, as Jay thought she remembered. Jay had not questioned how the woman had known her name, or how she had known that Jay had worries.
Now it was just a silly stone. She threw it with all her force at the wall, where the dent remains to this day.
Over the next few weeks she slept a lot and became contemptuous, rude and hurtful, while internally she was either sullen and resentful or felt only a vast emptiness. She spent a lot of time sitting staring at nothing, or at patterns in the carpet; and slammed the door whenever she left a room.
The photo and the stone lay where they had fallen for a while, gradually getting absorbed into the great untidiness that Jay found she had no wish to control, although she did make a concession to comfort and picked up the glass from the broken photograph. Piles of washed and unwashed clothes, paper, read and unread books and assorted rubbish took over the floor of her previously tidy room and were occasionally kicked, rummaged through, or spread into other piles. Once in a while she found herself seeing it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. She lived in a world without meaning. She took to wearing black.
As Grace had always been her first friend and companion, she had never bothered to make many friends at school, and had been a bit of a loner when Grace was not available. Grace had been the sociable one, who had found it so easy to make friends. There had often been a noisy crowd of girls around, or she was out visiting one or another of them, or off playing in the park, or doing some sporty thing or another which didn't interest Jay at all; whatever her sister did seemed to leave Jay very much to her own devices.
When the summer term began she had gone unwillingly back to school, but soon found that those of the children she did know were diffident and awkward around her. One or two of them tried to be kind, especially Sumira; but their sympathy reminded her too painfully of Grace's absence, so that she in turn didn't know how to talk to them. Soon she was spending almost all her time alone, bunking off school to wander aimlessly, sometimes taking buses to the end of their routes and walking for miles. She became almost unconsciously familiar with her city and the surrounding countryside, from the busy centre and the waterfront to the almost endless suburbs and right out into the cultivated greenness or the hills which sheltered the city to the north. Once or twice she caught a bus which took her right out into the Valleys, with their long terraced towns and the sense of wildness beyond. Mostly she gave her attention to detail, so that a leaf on the ground could hold her attention for longer than any person or place; she kept little memory of where she had been or what she had done. She didn't notice the long summer holiday come and go, having been so seldom at school during the summer term; and her birthday passed her by completely, though her mother tried to mark it with cake and kindness.
Other people irked her, especially her mother. She could hardly bear to be in the same room with her. Occasionally, when she made a particularly hateful comment to her mother, she might become aware of a voice inside saying, “Jay, dear, this isn't worthy of you,” but she always brushed it aside irritably and ignored it.
One dull November day, a bit more than six months after Grace's death, Jay was kicking through the piles of clothes and debris in her room when her boot connected with something unexpectedly hard. She groped around until she could close her hand on it, and pulled it out. It was the first time she had felt the stirring of curiosity for many months, and she stared at it, scarcely understanding what she was seeing. Then it came into proper focus, and she saw it was the talisman. A ripple of unaccustomed feeling tickled her, which she suppressed as quickly as she could. She did not want to remember, she did not want to feel. She encouraged her now-familiar bad mood to return and take over again, threw the stone back onto the floor, kicked clothes over it to hide it, and stomped into the kitchen where her mother was peeling potatoes.
“Please will you give me a hand with these? I'm running a bit late and...”
Enraged by her as usual, Jay stormed at her.
“Potatoes! Is that all you can think about? You just act all the time as though the world's a nice place and everything's just fine. You heartless cow, you don't care about anything at all, do you?” She used an unprintable word for the potatoes, and added, “Do them yourself!”
Somewhere inside, Jay was listening and watching herself with surprise, unable to stop the hurtful words pouring out. She hadn't realised until this moment that this had become her usual way of addressing her mother, whom she had loved dearly right up until after... after... Grace died. Grace was dead! She was horrified as it dawned on her that she had resolutely forgotten her sister, the long illness and the terrible shock of her death. The impact of this nearly stopped her hearing her mother as she turned to Jay and said in a tight, shaky voice:
“You really do think I don't feel anything, don't you. Would you feel any better if I went around being as horrible as you? Or would you rather I cried all the time? I daren't show my feelings to you, Jay. You'd rip me apart, and then where would we both be? It's all I can do to hold myself together as it is.”
Jay's mouth opened, then closed as, with a jolt, the two parts of Jay came together: the inside, real, aware and listening Jay and the part of her which lived in the outside world and was coping so very badly. On the verge of a stinging retort, her hands flew to her mouth. Time stopped. She saw her mother clearly, turned half away from her, a half-peeled potato in her hand.
In the distance, a dog barked.
With a sudden pain in her heart, she observed her mother's tenseness, how thin she'd become, the tears in her eyes. And how, without her having noticed the change, Jay was now the taller of the two.
When time started again, Jay went towards her mother with tears starting in her own eyes. She touched her gently on the shoulder and was appalled that her mother flinched away from her hand.
“Mum... Mum, I'm sorry,” she said slowly. “I'm not doing this any more. Leave the potatoes, I'll do them. Just, please, give me a few minutes.”
Jay turned and left the kitchen, not noticing her mother's look of utter astonishment. She leapt up the stairs two at a time, with more energy than she had felt for months, and went to her room. She was amazed to find, after such a long time living with either rage or a huge emptiness, that she was feeling a great range of emotions, from sadness and shame to compassion and a rediscovered love for her mother. Tears poured down her face for the first time since the funeral. She noticed them but didn't wipe them away, for the torrent seemed endless and she had more important things to do. Great gasps rather than sobs shook her as she tore off every stitch of her grubby black clothing and her black clumpy boots. She took out the line of studs in her ears, which she had regretted the moment they were done. A lot of pocket money, that impulse had cost. She would decide later which ones to keep, if any.
Then she tied her hair back untidily. It had been great to hide behind; but it was now very dirty and tangled, and there was nothing to be found to hold it but a long bootlace from one of the boots she'd just taken off. She grimaced, resolving to get clean later.
Rummaging through the mess of her clothes for something less grubbily black to wear, her hand brushed against the talisman stone. Suddenly the whole of the wonderful journey came back into her memory, and she remembered that it hadn't been an old woman in the woods who had spoken to her about the stone, but a terrifying dragon in an unbelievably beautiful cavern. At the time, she had stubbornly made herself believe, in spite of what she had been told, that the stone had been given to her to help Grace magically recover; now she remembered that hadn't been its purpose at all. She thought about it for a moment, tears still hotly scouring her cheeks.
Coming back to present time, she put the talisman on a corner of her table, brushing its unstable accumulation of rubbish onto the floor to make space. Storing in her mind's eye the shape and feel of the stone so that she wouldn't forget again, she found a cleanish pair of old blue jeans and a sweatshirt without words or pictures on; the jeans were a size too small but she squeezed into them anyway, lying on the bed to do up the zip. In the pocket was a phone number: Sumira's. She would definitely, definitely ring her later: I could do with a friend, she thought. As she stood up she gazed with astonishmentt at the awesome mess and chaos in her room. How had it got like that? She had no idea at all, but determined it wasn't going to stay that way. She decided to show the talisman to her mum and tell her the whole story.
First things first. She blew her nose, wiped her face, stuffed a tissue in one back pocket and the stone in the other, and with some trepidation went down to the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table still holding the half-peeled potato loosely in her hand, gazing out of the window at the dreary November twilight. Jay sat down opposite her. It was obvious that she had also been crying. Tears welled up again in her own eyes.
“Mum, I'm so sorry.”
There was a long damp silence, punctuated by the occasional surreptitious sniff.
“You didn't just lose Grace, did you? You lost me as well. I lost me. But you lost both of us.”
Her mum turned to her with an expression of amazement, opening her mouth to say something, but Jay spoke first.
“No, please, don't say anything. I want to think.”
The clock ticked. A dog barked once again. The world turned a little further and the November day darkened.
“I think I'm back now, mum. Let's get a takeaway tonight, forget the potatoes. Would it be all right if I took a week at Gran and Gramps's? A week away would be a break for both of us. I'm not running away, well, not really, I just thought... No, I'll stay. I've got a heap to catch up on, and there's my room...”
She got up. “I love you, mum. Difficult to believe after the way I've been, but I do. Now there's something I want to show you, something I want to tell you about.”
Her mother's mouth was still open as Jay left the room to get the stone talisman.