The vague fear
I have posted this before and then deleted it. I regret that now. Apologies to early readers who may have already read it in an earlier version. But the last line has been something I have been repeating to myself in the last few weeks and is becoming a bit of a mantra.
I don’t know where to start. There is no Feely archive. The only things I have in my possession are these: a small envelope of photographs and a papier mâché ‘Chinaman’ with a wobbling (badly chipped) head. And three of your notebooks.
I will start here, then. Where did you get that handwriting from? You can’t have been taught to write like that. It must have been – like your accent – carefully crafted. Always fountain pen. After you died, Mark took your Parker, knowing that in life that was the worst thing he could do to you.
You always wanted to be a writer. The novel, oh God, the novel. We used to mock it mercilessly with its barely disguised, potentially libelous names. We were all in it, of course, and none one came out well, except Rebel – sorry, Revel – the dog, but you even had him fart to pollute the air you breathed.
But that was what you promoted. These books are something else. You would have hated to hear me say that they were much better written than anything that you tried to write. Anxiety, pure and utter anxiety: your fears, your loves, your (literal) dreams. They were never exactly hidden. They were always on the shelf, in plain view of all us.
One of the dreams has footnotes. Footnotes! The main text is a long and involved scenario about being on a free cruise on the QEII with me and Mum and somehow ending up back on the dock as we sailed away. But in the footnotes, a detailed picture of the cabin:
3. Catherine’s bunk is with mine in a corner of this ship’s lounge in what appears to be an alcove – the shape and size of the alcove reminds me say of an alcove at home at the side of a chimney breast. Catherine hasn’t really got a bunk it now seems. Her bed is made up already on a mattress which now appears to be sitting directly on the floor of this alcove. The mattress is pitifully thin.
4. My bunk is half-way up the wall of this alcove above Catherine. I have a vague fear that if I lever myself up into it, it will fall on Catherine and crush her.
Rest easy in your sleep now: your Catherine will not be crushed.