Whispers Through a Megaphone Read online

  WHISPERS THROUGH A MEGAPHONE

  Rachel Elliott

  To my family, shore to my sea

  “When you decide to live, to finally live, a world of possibility opens, maddening and vast, but where is the bridge across to that world, can anyone see a bridge?”

  MIRIAM DELANEY

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 THE SUPERABUNDANT OUTSIDE WORLD

  2 MOVE OVER DARLING

  3 BUTTONS AND BUTTONS, MOON-HIGH

  4 WHAT A LEAKAGE, WHAT A SPILL

  5 THE MADNESS THAT LOOKS LIKE SANITY

  6 PAIN THAT FELT LIKE LOVE

  7 THE BRIDGE

  8 IT WAS FINE AND IT WAS NOT FINE

  9 A SUPERHERO, A COW, A BISCUIT

  10 GET WITH THE PROGRAMME

  11 END OF

  12 DO I KNOW YOU?

  13 THE AWAKENING

  14 IT WAS ALL GOING ON, WORDLESSLY

  15 THE LULL, THE PAUSE, BEFORE THE COMMOTION

  16 PSYCHOANALYTIC ANARCHY

  17 YOU CAN CALL THE POLICE OR JUST STAB ME

  18 REGRET

  19 A STRANGE KIND OF MINI-BREAK

  20 ACQUIESCENCE

  21 WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE

  22 PLASTIC FRUIT

  23 THINGS YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY

  24 IT DIDN’T, IT COULDN’T, IT MUST

  25 FAST AND DEEP

  26 DANCING

  27 THOUGHTS OF MURDERING ONE’S MOTHER DO NOT MAKE A PERSON INSANE

  28 THE ALLURE, THE MAGNETISM

  29 WHOSE LIFE IS THIS?

  30 MONKEY SPINS

  31 THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU JUST KNOW

  32 GAMES

  33 GIVE THE GIRL A ROUND OF APPLAUSE

  34 A BICYCLE BUILT FOR TWO

  35 I PREFER MOOMINS TO PEOPLE

  36 WE ARE NEVER COMING DOWN

  37 A SURPRISING ANNOUNCEMENT

  38 AWESTRUCK

  39 I’D LIKE TO LAMINATE SOMETHING FOR YOU

  40 #MYEVERYTHING

  41 GO FORWARD BY GOING BACK

  42 PITY

  43 IT JUST IS

  44 TESTING

  45 CONTRACTION

  46 A COIN, A COUNTRY SONG, A VIENNESE WHIRL

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  THE SUPERABUNDANT OUTSIDE WORLD

  Miriam Delaney sits at her kitchen table and watches the radio. She is mesmerized, transfixed.

  Inside a studio somewhere—somewhere in the outside world—a woman is speaking in the fullest of voices about her extraordinary life: the adventures, the flings, the lessons she mined from her mistakes. Her stories are punctuated by music, carefully chosen to reveal even more life.

  Miriam takes a deep breath in, because maybe what’s on the air is also in the air, maybe something of this woman’s superabundant presence will transmit through the broadcast.

  Fancy being able to speak like that.

  Fancy being able to speak properly.

  It’s three years today since Miriam last stepped out of this house.

  No, that’s not quite true. She has stepped into the back garden to feed the koi carp, stepped into the porch to collect the milk and leave a bin bag for her neighbour to place at the end of the drive. But step out into the street? No chance. Risk collision and a potentially catastrophic exchange with a stranger? You must be joking. Not after what happened. Not after what she did. Inside the cutesy slipper-heads of two West Highland terriers, her feet have paced the rooms of 7 Beckford Gardens, a three-bed semi with a white cuckoo clock, brown and orange carpets, a life-size cut-out of Neil Armstrong.

  Miriam’s hibernation is three years old today, but numbers can be deceptive, three years can feel like three decades. Hibernation ages like a dog, so three is about twenty-eight, depending on the breed, and this one is kind, protective, it keeps the world at bay.

  The world—now there’s an interesting concept. Miriam rests her chin on her hands. Where is the world exactly? Is it inside or outside? Where is the dividing line? Am I in or am I out?

  She tosses a coin. Heads I could be part of the world, tails I’ll always be outside it.

  The ten-pence piece, flat on her palm, says heads. Best out of three?

  Three hopeful heads, one after the other.

  Miriam smiles. It’s time. She knows it and the coin knows it. Show me the money. Money talks. It’s time to get a life.

  The main problem? Other people. They have always been the problem. Other people seem to know things. They know what a life should contain, all the simple and complicated things like shopping and Zumba and being physically intimate with another body. They know the rules, the way it’s supposed to go. Miriam is thirty-five and when she looks out of the window all she sees is a world full of people who know things she will never know.

  The world again. After years of not looking it’s all she can see. She would like to be part of it, to somehow join in.

  She writes a plan on a Post-it and sticks it to the radio:

  Do something I am afraid of. Apparently this builds confidence (have yet to see evidence of this—will be an interesting experiment)

  Spend next few days clearing out house—get rid of mother’s things

  Leave house next week

  The trouble with number one is what to pick from the enormous list? The task of actually making the list of things she is afraid of could take another month, and four more weeks inside this house? Four weeks that will feel like ten months? That thought is unbearable, it makes Miriam shiver and run upstairs to fetch one of her many cardigans.

  But lists are good, remember? You can add things and take them away. Adding makes you feel like a person with clear intentions, subtracting feels like a small victory. What else? Well, a list is a personal map. It’s a ladder that you can move up and down at your leisure. When you cross things off it feels like you’re moving, you’re getting somewhere, there is some purpose to all this—something is finally happening.

  Back in the front room, she begins the list.

  Write fast, Miriam. You can do this. Lists are good. Write until you land on something you could tackle tonight. No, not tomorrow. Tonight.

  THINGS I AM AFRAID OF

  Idea that my mother is still alive somewhere and I am not alone

  Idea that my mother is definitely dead and I am alone

  Going back to where it happened

  Love

  No love

  Clothes shopping

  Thought that I might do it again if I go back outside

  Being stuck in a lift with a group of talkative people

  Never being able to write a list or letter due to major accident involving hands

  Turning into my mother

  Having no capacity to know that I’m already just like my mother

  Fingerless gloves

  Naked cleaning

  There it is, number thirteen on the list (unlucky for some). Naked cleaning—all it actually requires is removing this cardigan, this T-shirt, these jeans, pulling Henry the hoover from the cupboard and plugging it in. How scary can it be?

  Answer: that depends on your childhood.

  It depends on whether, at the age of eight, you found your mother sweeping the floor of the school corridor wearing nothing but a pair of trainer socks. (Had she planned to go for a run and slipped into insanity seconds after putting on her socks? Can madness descend that quickly, like thunder, like a storm?) There she was, Mrs Frances Delaney, quietly sweeping her way through a turbulent sea of hysterical children, the waves of laughter rising up and up and—

  Miriam was drenc
hed. She had wet feet, wet hands, wet eyes.

  Mother here at school. Mother naked. Other children cackling, jeering. Poor mother. I love mother and hate mother.

  The headmaster appeared. He walked on water. He took off his suit jacket and smothered Mrs Delaney’s nakedness. He was gallant, unfazed. Perhaps he had seen it all before. (Miriam hoped not.) Frances carried on sweeping—she was thorough, if nothing else. She had always valued cleanliness and order. Perhaps the headmaster understood this, hence his sensitivity. Perhaps he respected it.

  What made the situation worse, even harder for Miriam to comprehend, was the fact that her mother didn’t even work as a cleaner. Turning up at your own workplace without any clothes on is a rupture of social etiquette, a glitch in mental health, forgetfulness at its most perverse, but at least it contains a thread of continuity: I have done what I normally do, I have come to the right place, but something is amiss. I wonder what it could be? Turning up at someone else’s workplace—your daughter’s school—in the nude, in the buff, apart from tiny socks, is unbearably nonsensical.

  Miriam’s mother was mad as a spoon.

  Was it catching?

  (Miriam hoped not.)

  Fast-forward twenty-seven years and what do we see? We see a woman, carefully folding her clothes and placing them on the sofa. She walks to the cupboard in the hallway and pulls Henry the hoover out into the light, plugs it in, switches it on. Now she is vacuuming the brown and orange carpet in her front room wearing nothing but knickers and Westie slippers. A cuckoo springs from its house, making her jump. It’s ten o’clock. Only two hours left until Wednesday becomes Thursday, until the first day of August is over, and then it will be three years and a day since she ran all the way home, whispering oh my God, oh my God. Anniversaries come and go. Important dates get sucked into the vortex and life rolls on, taking us with it, perpetual tourists who pretend to be at home.

  Steady on, Miriam. There’s no need to start brooding over the nature of existence. You’ve got to stay focused, just for once, otherwise you’ll never leave this house. Self-soothe, remember? Remember what the book said, the one Fenella lent you, the one about staying sane in a mad world.

  Fenella Price. Chief supplier of objects from the outside world: food, pens, knickers, etc. Fenella is no ordinary friend. She is a Beacon of Sanity, forever glowing, her equanimity unshakeable. She is proof that people can be sensible, rational, consistent. But more importantly, she is proof that Miriam isn’t contagious. Her mother’s madness is in her blood and her bones—it has to be, doesn’t it? But Fenella has been there and seen it all, the highs and lows, the dramas and trips, ever since they were at primary school, and still she is sane. She wears smart clothes, works as a cashier in the local branch of Barclays, goes to evening classes three times a week: Pilates, Tango, How to Make Your Own Lampshades. As sane as they come, surely?

  “Stay sane in this mad world,” Fenella said. “When your thoughts race off into historical territories, talk softly to yourself. That’s what I do. I don’t care where I am. I say just you settle down, Fenella Price. Everything is fine.”

  Miriam sighs. Thank goodness for Fenella. If only she could tell her the truth about the thing that happened, the thing she did, three years ago today.

  It happened like this.

  Oblivious footsteps along the woodland path.

  Oblivious footsteps across the field and all the way to the pub.

  Lunch with Fenella (a cheddar and onion-marmalade sandwich, a few French fries, half a cider).

  A hug and a goodbye, nice to see you, give me a ring soon.

  Now we travel in reverse.

  Oblivious footsteps across the field.

  Oblivious footsteps along the woodland path. Disgustingly ignorant, outrageously unaware, until—

  The world is a safe place until it isn’t.

  People are good until they’re not.

  Miriam wishes she had taken a final look at the buildings, the trees, the dogs playing in the field, but you never know what’s coming, you walk small and blind, the world simply an echo of your own concerns.

  2

  MOVE OVER DARLING

  Ralph has Treacle all over his legs, his arms, his stomach. Treacle the ginger cat, bored with Ralph’s inactivity, hungry for breakfast. She pads up and down the sleeping bag, treads over the lumps and bumps of her new owner, searching for signs of life.

  Treacle had been lost and alone, a stray cat in the woods, patchy and thin. Then she met Ralph Swoon, who was also lost and alone. Now they had each other, and a rickety old shed in the middle of the woods, full of slatted light.

  He bought her a can of pilchards.

  It was a fishy kind of love, but it was real.

  Still wearing yesterday’s clothes, Ralph steps out of his sleeping bag. He runs his fingers through his hair and opens the door, heading for the pile of leaves that has become his outside toilet. Treacle sits in the doorway, waiting. She is already used to this part of their daily routine. She knows that Ralph will stumble back in, tip some food onto that cracked blue plate on the floor, then return to his sleeping bag and invite her inside it. Yesterday they fell asleep like that for three hours, with Treacle opening her eyes every now and then to make sure Ralph was still breathing.

  Feline logic told her that he had dragged himself here to die. Why else would he have turned up in the woods at 11.30 p.m. on 4th August with no bag, no possessions, just a wallet, a phone and a guitar?

  But the cat was wrong.

  He hadn’t come here to die.

  Last week, Ralph was sitting at the breakfast bar in his kitchen, listening to his wife and their two teenage sons out in the garden. Sadie and Arthur were hosing the legs of their new puppy while Stanley watched.

  “This dog stinks,” said Arthur.

  “It’s just mud. Help me hose it off,” said Sadie.

  “He’s your dog, Mum.”

  “Don’t start this again.”

  “Who went and got him?”

  “I bought him for you and Stan. You always wanted a dog.”

  “I wanted a dog when I was six. You’re ten years late.”

  “Oh fuck off.”

  Arthur smirked. The puppy wriggled about, trying to escape the cold water, trying to play.

  Ralph had been against the idea of a dog. Didn’t they have enough problems, without attending to the needs of what was effectively a furry baby? As usual, Sadie won. She said it would be good for Arthur, who was showing signs of excessive boredom. It would relax him, teach him responsibility, get him outdoors. A teenager needs a reason to climb out of bed in the morning, she said, otherwise he will sleep all day and all night and life will pass him by like an unremarkable dream. Sounds familiar, thought Ralph.

  “Don’t get water in his ears,” said Sadie. “Dogs hate water in their ears.”

  “So why does he keep jumping in the river?”

  “Spaniels like to swim. They don’t swim underwater.”

  Arthur dropped the hose on the floor. “He’s clean now, I’m going in.”

  “He’s not clean. Look at him, he’s filthy.”

  While the puppy shivered between them, Arthur and Sadie glared at each other. Stanley was an absent bystander, his thoughts elsewhere. These departures had been happening since last Friday, when Joe Schwartz kissed him hard, led him upstairs, sat beside him on the bed, kicked off his Converse trainers, flicked the hair out of his eyes and said you’re wonderful, Stan, I really think you’re wonderful.

  Canadian Joe. An Adonis. He was a magician too—he had turned down the bickering voices of Arthur and his mother so that Stanley could barely hear them. Something about a filthy dog. Something about his brother having a problem.

  “I’m not impressed with you right now,” said Sadie.

  “Oh really,” said Arthur.

  “You talk to me like I’m a piece of shit. What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  “Just go and make
me a coffee, Stan can help me finish. Stan, are you with us?”

  Arthur marched through the kitchen in muddy boots, tapping on his iPhone.

  Arthur Swoon @artswoon

  Mum drowning new dog in garden call RSPCA

  Mark Williams @markwills249

  @artswoon Really? Not the LOVELY Sadie? Don’t believe you

  Arthur Swoon @artswoon

  @markwills249 Enough SICKO BOY thats my mother!

  My dad wearing hoodie not cool at his age

  Mark Williams @markwills249

  @artswoon Maybe he’s in midlife crisis? One word for you: MILF

  When the twins were born, Ralph was still an undergraduate. He was twenty years old, passive and unworldly. He hadn’t wanted to call his sons Arthur and Stanley. He preferred Mark, Michael or Christopher, but he would never have risked arguing with Sadie about such crucial matters. They were fine, they were happy, he could lose her at any moment. This was the wordless core of their relationship, known and unknown. Sixteen years later they argued all the time and the sight of her Mini pulling into the driveway, its back seat covered with newspapers and unopened poetry anthologies, had begun to make him queasy.

  Should your own wife make you feel queasy? Perhaps at the beginning, with the anticipatory fizzing, the urgent desire. But after sixteen years? What would she say if she knew?

  “You make me feel queasy, dear.”

  “You make me feel queasy too.”

  “What now? A dry biscuit, a cracker, Alka-Seltzer?”

  He took a digestive biscuit from the packet and put the kettle on. He listened to Sadie telling Stanley about an exhibition she wanted him to see—maybe they could go this afternoon, she said. There was a pause before the inevitable rejection: I’m sorry, Mum, but no can do.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m taking someone to the cinema this afternoon.”

  “Can’t you go to the cinema another time?”

  “Maybe you could see the exhibition with Kristin.”