She sits up and pulls on her dressing gown. Might as well get up, she thinks. No point lying here. That’s not going to get any parsnips buttered.
The sound of the phrase in her head causes her a sudden wrench of sadness. It’s one of her mother’s phrases, the slightly skewed clichés that have slid into her own vocabulary without her even really noticing. Needs must when the devil dances. Where there’s muck there’s muck. Don’t listen to him; he’s the devil’s apricot. Whenever she says them, even in her own head, she hears them in her mother’s voice, and she’s right back, just for a moment, in the room with her. Her lovely mother. Her churchgoing, houseproud, lovely mother, flowered apron and steel-grey hair. She would be so ashamed of me, she thinks. So ashamed of what has happened in her home.
And then the tears come.
Collette can’t sleep. She has to go and see Janine as usual today, keep up the routine, behave, as they have all agreed, exactly as they normally would. And she hopes that one day, if she goes often enough, Janine will remember her. But today will exhaust her. She’s been awake all night, and barely slept yesterday, and she feels as though the calcium has been sucked from her bones; that the slightest jar will make her simply shatter.
I should go, she thinks. I should just pack up and go. It’s not like she even knows who I am, like it makes the slightest difference to her that I’m here. All I’m doing is turning myself into a sitting duck. But, oh, God, if I could talk to her one more time. If I could just see her eyes light up when she sees me, know that she remembers who I am. She wasn’t a bad mum, she really wasn’t. She didn’t mean to be. I’ve spent so much of my life blaming her, but there were good times, too. In between the uncles and the new dads and the ‘he took your lunch money’, there was us, and we loved each other. It’s not her fault that I got ideas above my station, decided to shortcut my way to a decent income. And now I’ve been gone three years. I abandoned her when she really needed me, and I can’t leave her to die alone.
She remembers a good time, back when she was Lisa, and smalclass="underline" when they went to Margate on holiday: one of those cut-price deals from one of the newspapers. Janine went to the library and snipped the coupon every day for three weeks, and they had a chalet in a holiday park. And it was sunburnt shoulders and Janine sitting with the other mums as she went on the slides and the roundabouts, and teaching her to swim in the great big communal pool, and she remembers watching her mum stand up and sing ‘Stand By Your Man’ at the talent competition, and she got every single note bang on, and she looked so golden and glittery and Lisa felt so proud she could have exploded. I can’t leave her, she thinks. I can’t. No one should die alone. And if I’m not going to leave, where would I go other than here? Where else would I find, where nobody wants to know who I am, where nobody’s writing me down and making a record?
But they’ll find you. You’re mad, being in London, even for a short while. If Tony doesn’t find you, DI Cheyne will, and that’s pretty much the same thing, just more circuitous. He wants me because he knows she wants me, and she wants me because she thinks I’m the way to send him down, but either way, I’m fucked. You just have to look at News International to know how leaky the Met is. And once he knows I’ve dobbed him in, no amount of witness protection will keep me safe. I need to leave. I have to. It’s the only way I’ll stay alive.
But Janine, she thinks. I can’t leave her. I can’t leave my mother till she’s gone.
Hossein lies pinned to his bed and weeps for his dead wife. It’s nearly five years since she went out to her women’s group meeting and never came home, and each day, still, he wakes and weeps when he finds she isn’t there. The basic story is no mystery to him: it will have been the Secret Police that took her and the Secret Police that never sent her back. The rest of it he will never know, and the pain of that is often more than he feels he can bear.
He speaks to her, sometimes, in his empty room, as though doing so will somehow bring her back. He says her name: ‘Roshana, Roshana, Roshana’, like a magical incantation. And when the room stays silent, when no soft voice speaks in return, he bends double with pain in his bed, grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes and sobs for the lost past.
I had rather, he says to her ghost, I had rather it had been me. I had rather we went together, that I had followed you. If I’d known how it felt without you, I would have died in your place, my love. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I loved you so much, and I couldn’t protect you. My brave, my beautiful. My Roshana.
It’s been over a year since he moved here from the asylum centre, and it’s better, it’s undoubtedly better, but the room is cheerless and he has never found the will to improve it. He thinks of their flat in Tehran, the family things, the rugs and pottery, the roses she grew on the balcony, high above the trees on Khorasan, and wonders what she would think of these sad cream walls, the dark blue bedclothes, the two pots that constitute his kitchen.
Two photos are all he has left: two photos from a life built together; all that managed to make it to the end of his journey. A formal shot of their wedding day, the two of them so young, side by side on an ornate throne, their hands entwined, as they waited to take their place at the sofreh-ye aghd and begin their feast. The other, his favourite shot of her, is wrinkled from travelling all the way here next to his heart. In it she leans, in western clothes – palazzo pants and a crisp white blouse with a frilled lace collar that stood up all the way to her earlobes – on a white balustrade by the Caspian Sea, a stiff breeze blowing her thick hair into her eyes as she turns and smiles at him. Roshana, free of the chador, is taking the risk of being observed to feel the air on her skin, her soft brown lips, her strong features, her elegant hands. The gold earrings she wears in it, her wedding ring, all gone and nothing left. He’s carefully framed the pictures, preserved them from harm, and still, four years on, he cannot look at them without a wrench in his heart.
I must live, he thinks. There is no alternative. I won’t be here, trapped in this waiting limbo, for ever. One day my application will reach the top of the pile. Day by day that day moves closer, but then what shall I do? What is there for me? No book I write, no speech I make, no plans, journeys, demonstrations will ever bring you back. If we’d had a child, Roshana… They say the pain fades with time, but time does nothing but make the ache sink deeper. I miss you. Oh, I miss you. If you were here with me…
Cher can sleep anywhere; it’s a skill she’s had to learn. She came home soon after dawn, climbed under her single sheet in the morning coolness and dropped off immediately, and the cat slunk in to join her as she slept. She sleeps, and sleep heals, but in sleep they also come back. You can escape anything, she has found, except when you’re dreaming.
She mutters in her sleep. Her frozen muscles strain to run, strain to fight. Sometimes, when she wakes in the early afternoon, she is sore and aching, as though she’s run a marathon.
A slight breeze stirs her thin curtains and cools her boiling forehead. Inside her head, she’s back in the attic. She’s found her way into the Landlord’s cupboard again, and climbed those stairs, and she’s in among the dust-motes and the shrouded furniture. Only this time, her nanna’s furniture is there. She can see the old familiar shapes, and wants to weep: the Welsh dresser with its display of mismatched china, cast-offs of dinner services that have passed out of Big House fashion, the squashy settee with the shiny flowered fabric that Nanna kept for best. The little varnished pine table that sat against the wall in the kitchen, where Cher ate every meal, the wall clock with the painted convolvulus on the face behind the hands. The Venus bird bath from her nanna’s bungalow garden, the goddess cradling a conch shell in her arms rather than stepping half naked from it, the collection of whimsical pigs that cluttered every surface.