Oh Marina Girl Read online

  Another motivation for my writing was my jealousy of the authors who had so captivated Lisa. I needed to possess her totally and conceived the notion that this was possible only if it was my writing in which she was immersed. I needed to enrapture her through my words. I needed to possess her imagination as much as her flesh. I needed her to need me for the words I’d written as much as for who she knew me to be.

  I’d also intended that writing would help preserve precious memories but, in fact, I realised, too late, that, instead of preserving memory, writing distorted it so that, when I reread something I’d written some time previously, the boundary between fact and fiction had become blurred to a degree where I became uncertain of my memory. The memories I’d used as a starting point for my writing had been deliberately distorted — biographical facts fabricated, exaggerated and dramatised — and these fictionalised memories had, through the process of writing about them, superseded the real memories so that, in retrospect, I was left floundering in an indistinct factional world.

  As Lisa spent each evening slumped before a stream of soaps and repeated, canned-laughtered 1970s sitcoms which she’d first watched in her early teens, I’d tuck in Will and kiss him goodnight, then retire to the kitchen to wash and dry the dishes before sitting at the unsteady table to write.

  I wrote aimlessly at first. I had no deadline and so I took my time. I took my time because another motive for writing was to fill time.

  And I watched in wonder as Will grew from a chubby baby into a toddler, stretching into a cherubic wee boy with a cowlick, missing front teeth and a dimpled grin that placed all the anxieties of my stalled career into perspective. My parents and Lisa’s mum all agreed that Will was a miniature version of Lisa.

  Why is the sky blue? What’s love? What’s death? Why do people kill other people? Where was I before I was born? What’s God? My inadequate replies to his infinite supply of questions only prompted further questions and revealed to me the extent of my own ignorance.

  When Will was seven he still looked like a mini version of his mum but, sometimes, I recognised my own voice spilling from his lips, my own slant on things revealed through incidental comments suggesting that, inside, he was more a mini version of me. Whilst I’d purposely taught him the necessary skills required for socialisation, he’d incidentally been imbued with many of my perspectives. This paternal influence did not pass unnoticed by Lisa, who contradicted any exceptionable opinion she felt Will had inherited from me.

  Most notably, the matter of his faith became one of the last major battles in our internecine warfare for control over Will before, like all the previous battles, it was consigned to the burgeoning list of taboos that plunged any conversation surviving between us into the necessary trivialities. Hostilities were settled by a compromise package thrashed out over a series of summit meetings between Will’s grannies — who despised each other and struggled to hide their mutual loathing whenever they were in his presence — which involved Will attending a non-denominational school provided that he would accompany Lisa to Mass on Sundays.

  I agreed to this concession for two reasons. Firstly, despite my atheism, I was willing to accept (though I would never admit as much to Lisa) that, theoretically, faith could provide a degree of comfort when encountering death; it could act as a crutch which Will could lean on until such time as he recognised religion for the superstitious mumbo jumbo that it was, when he could discard it and join me in faithlessness.

  Secondly, I suspected, accurately in retrospect, that Lisa’s lethargy would lead to a steady decline in her attendance at Mass.

  One of the paternal influences that Lisa had either been unwilling or unable to unravel was that Will had inherited my love for writing. At my suggestion, at the age of seven, he’d embarked on a regular correspondence with a pen-pal, sourced through an international reading club, just as I had done before him. Where we differed, though, was that my pen-pal was a boy whilst Will’s was a girl. You were the same age as him and you lived in Vancouver. That was all he would tell me about you. He was secretive in his correspondence and I respected his privacy. I remembered how precious my privacy was to me at his age and so, whilst I had ample opportunity to rifle through the not-very-well-hidden ‘secret’ box where he stored his correspondence, I was never tempted to do so.

  We took Will on his first foreign holiday that same year, to Majorca, Port de Soller, where Lisa and I had visited some years earlier. I made all the arrangements as Lisa’s chronic fatigue had reduced her existence to one long, interminable yawn. I viewed the holiday as a last-ditch attempt to reawaken memories of happier times. I thought that perhaps memories and sunshine and sea air might reinvigorate her. In retrospect I realise how naive a notion that had been. But I was desperate. Needless to say, the holiday didn’t transpire quite as I had envisaged it.

  Although I booked the exact same apartment with the exact same veranda, and although the sight of the cluster of cypress trees and bougainvillaea after all this time did rekindle a long-extinguished fire within me, it was but a flickering flame instantly snuffed out by Lisa’s habitual heaved sigh of despondency.

  We lounged out on the veranda, but not in the state of post-coital bliss of my treasured memory — coitus and bliss had long been conspicuous by their absence. It was Will who now lounged naked on a dinghy, gobbling peaches and penning postcards whilst Lisa, miserable without her daily diet of soaps and quiz shows, moped in the shade and refused to come down to the beach because she’d developed an aversion to sand, and so I resigned myself to the futility of my hopes of resurrection of happier times.

  At seven o’clock on the seventh morning, the first day of our second week, I was woken by a knock at the door. Startled, I verified that Will was still asleep and, since Lisa hadn’t rushed to answer the door, surmised that she must be behind it, no doubt returning from one of her irregular but not infrequent insomnia-inspired dawn jaunts. Instead, I opened the door to find an officious policeman with military bearing dressed in an immaculate uniform. He bowed curtly, removed his helmet and offered me an item of jewellery. I lifted it from his palm and examined it. It was a crucifix. I shrugged and waited for an explanation.

  ‘You recognise it — yes?’ he prompted, in stilted English.

  ‘My wife has one similar,’ I commented, still not understanding the connection. He waited until I did.

  Despite a prolonged, wandering circumnavigation, frequently interrupted by profuse and quite unnecessary apologies for his faltering English, the policeman eventually arrived at the purpose of his early morning visitation and informed me that Lisa’s body had been discovered by a couple of fishermen at the harbour earlier that morning. After expressing his condolences, he crossed himself, whispered a blessing in Catalan and told me that procedure required that I formally identify her body. He also suggested that, should I feel up to it, I could help him in his enquiry into the events leading up to her death. Although there was no trace of suspicion in his tone, I was engulfed by guilt and, imagining myself as the prime suspect in a murder investigation, I explained that my son was still sound asleep — and I found myself moving aside to show him Will sleeping on the fold-down settee for fear that he should think I was lying and seeking instead to buy myself some time to devise a desperate getaway — and so he arranged to return later that morning.

  As he turned to leave, I heard myself wondering aloud how he’d known to come to this apartment and he told me that the key to the apartment had been found ‘on the body’. I felt foolish for thinking about, but not thinking through, such a triviality, but the finality of the phrase ‘on the body’ forced me to visualise Lisa’s drowned corpse.

  Realising that I still held Lisa’s crucifix in my scrunched-up fist, I hung it around my neck. Wondering how I felt about the policeman’s news, I searched the bathroom cabinet for the box of paracetamol I’d bought at the airport in anticipation of a holiday hangover and, when I couldn�
��t find it, ransacked the apartment for the still-unopened bottle of duty-free Macallan to pour myself a stiff measure. I never found it. The next day the post-mortem would reveal that, at the time of her death, Lisa had had enough paracetamol and alcohol in her bloodstream to intoxicate her. The cause of death was confirmed as drowning and it was postulated that, in a drunken stupor, she’d stumbled off the pier and into the sea.

  My ransacking of the apartment might have failed to unearth the whisky, but I did discover an unfolded letter on the bedside table. Addressed to Will and myself, dated the day before, and written with what looked like a blunt eyeliner pencil, I didn’t recognise the cramped handwriting but I did recognise Lisa’s signature. I’ll reproduce it for you verbatim. I wouldn’t know how else to relate its contents to you.

  I betrayed your faith. I took your love and never returned it. I am faithless. You’re better off without me. Forget about me. Nothing matters to me. Not even you. Nothing.

  Lisa

  Following the realisation that I’d discovered Lisa’s suicide note; I was intrigued then perplexed by its content. Though terse, it seemed to me to be open to misinterpretation. What did she mean, for example, by ‘I betrayed your faith’? Did she simply mean, as suggested by the following sentence, that she betrayed us (the letter was clearly directed to both me and Will) through her inability to reciprocate our love, or was she, perhaps, referring to something more specific and, if so, what exactly? And what of ‘I am faithless’? Did this mean that, ultimately, she had traversed the polluted river that separated us and had accepted the absurdity of her faith and, if so, was it possible that the stark perspective she perceived from my side of the riverbank had led her to take her own life? Such a notion led me to accuse myself of culpability and shoot a quiver of guilt-tipped arrows into my own heart. And how could she possibly write ‘Nothing matters to me. Not even you’ to her son? She could write that to me, if that was a true reflection of how she felt, which I didn’t believe, but how could she write that to Will? Could she really have intended the last message to her son to be an unequivocal denial of her love for him? Perhaps the letter wasn’t a suicide note after all … perhaps it was only a discarded draft of passing thoughts that she’d intended to destroy and was never meant to have been read. She loved me and she loved Will — whatever she’d written. How could she write ‘Nothing matters’ when everything matters? Everything! Was I reading too much into something that had been scribbled by someone who’d just decided to kill herself? Had her words been carefully chosen or were they a spontaneous outburst? Why did that matter? Because it determined how to interpret the letter. If the letter was a genuine suicide note, then perhaps its last sentences were a reverse expression of her true feelings, which she was seeking to deny in the hope that we, Will and myself, would accept them at face value and, beyond our immediate distress, find it easier to continue without her — so that when she wrote ‘Nothing matters to me. Not even you’, what she really meant was ‘Everything matters to me. Especially you.’ Or was my failure to accept her at her word merely evidence of my inability to comprehend her?

  I reread the letter one last time, committed it to memory, then lit it and watched it burn.

  I chose to burn it, firstly, and most importantly, because I wanted to shield Will from ever discovering that his mother had been a suicide — I could only envisage such knowledge having a damaging effect — and, secondly, because I had a notion that, if it were to discover that Lisa had taken her own life, her Church might prove reticent to perform a full funeral and, inexplicable even to myself, I’d decided that, although, or maybe because, I saw it as the source of all our enmity, I wanted to make a reconciliatory gesture — albeit posthumous and, therefore, of symbolic value only — towards her faith.

  I became conscious of Will snoring, curled like a foetus, drool dribbling from his slack mouth, sound in the unquestioning trust in the love and infallibility of his parents and certainty of his security; a certainty which a truth, however whispered, would bludgeon; and, for the first time, I realised that there was a time and a place for well-intentioned lies; that fiction held a valid function; that innocence must be prolonged for as long as possible and that I had to enact a delicate damage-limitation exercise by couching the truth in the language of faith.

  Later, when he’d woken, I waited for him to ask me the inevitable question. Mercifully, I didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ he asked, still yawning, no trace of concern in his voice.

  I told him that she’d gone away and wouldn’t be coming back. I told him that God had come for her during the night and taken her with Him to heaven while he was asleep. I told him that she was very sad to have had to leave him without saying goodbye. I told him that she had become an angel in heaven and would be looking down on him at this very moment. I told him that she had told me to tell him not to be sad because she was happy. I told him that she had given me her crucifix to give to him and I took it from my neck and I put it over his and, as I did so, I told him that she’d told me to tell him that she loved him.

  ‘Will I see Mummy when it’s time for me to go to heaven?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘perhaps. But that won’t be for a long, long time.’

  Then, to distract him, I took him shopping for a present. He chose a fishing net and we wandered down to the harbour. He showed no signs of grief. I treated him to his favourite strawberry ice-lolly on the way. It soon occurred to me that we were fishing in the vicinity where Lisa’s body had been found. Unable to conjure a valid reason for delaying further my appointment at the police station, I resigned myself to confronting my dread.

  A policewoman distracted Will with a colouring book and crayons while the policeman who’d woken me that morning led me to the nearby morgue.

  I’d never seen a dead body before but I’d seen the scene on television on several occasions, which must account for the fact that, as I entered the mortuary, I felt disembodied, unsure of how to act or react, as if I was watching myself on television.

  On a stainless steel trolley, beneath a starched white creased sheet, lay the outline of a body. Its splayed feet made a long, thin, triangular valley of shadow where a depression descended into the hollow between its legs, coming to a point at its crotch. I recognised the shape. I had lain beside it for many years. The mortician, a girl much too young to possibly be a mortician (clearly miscast), folded back the sheet to reveal Lisa’s face. I glanced at it and, after a moment’s hesitation (she did not look herself — there was a huge discoloured bruise that had mushroomed over her forehead which, the mortician explained, had most likely been caused when she’d fallen into the sea and bashed it against a rock), confirmed its identity and strode from the room. After formal identification, I signed a form and was told that a post-mortem examination would now be performed to establish the exact cause of death.

  My next task was to inform Lisa’s mum of her death. Fairy tales weren’t going to work this time. There was nothing to do but tell her the truth. I dreaded her reaction to the news — and the inevitable waves of sympathy and grief which, although I’d only started to anticipate, were already threatening to swamp me. When it occurred to me that I would have to discuss funeral arrangements with her mum, I cursed Lisa for subjecting me to this ordeal and, momentarily, and for the first time, found myself wondering whether she hadn’t loved us after all.

  I sleepwalked through the remainder of the day, my sensibility bound in layers of bandages and barely discernible. I found myself caught between the desires to gush out my grief — a need to be practical and make arrangements to meet Lisa’s mum at the airport early the following morning — and an ardent attempt to affect normality for Will. Evidently I was less than entirely successful in this latter regard for, in the midst of moulding a moat around his elaborate sandcastle, Will stopped, stabbed his spade into a turret and asked, ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ He’d caught me un
awares. I’d been thinking about Lisa, trying to remember our last conversation. ‘Are you sad about Mum?’

  ‘A bit,’ I confessed. ‘You?’

  ‘I’ll miss her,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad she’s happy where she is. She wouldn’t want us to be sad, would she?’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ I admitted, offering to buy him another ice-lolly as a means of changing the subject.

  This curious case of role-reversal, whereby Will consoled me rather than me consoling him, was repeated that night as I tucked him into bed. But while it touched me, his ready acceptance of his mother’s death disconcerted me. He seemed to have swallowed whole my fairy tale about God and angels and heaven without question. I suppose that was to be expected. I had never lied to him before, so why should he suspect me of having lied to him then?

  Alone that night, I reflected on the day. I sat out on the veranda to contemplate the stars and wallow in self-pity, postponing my appointment with an empty bed. When I did eventually retire for the night, my gradual shift into slumber was interrupted by that first involuntary jerk and, wide-awake, I got up to cuddle into Will.

  The following morning I was woken by a knock at the door. I jumped out of bed and yanked it open to discover the same policeman who’d stood there the morning before. Once again, he bowed, removed his helmet and offered me an item of jewellery. For a moment I didn’t understand, and then I noticed his expression, imploring me to comprehend in order to spare him the ordeal of attempting an explanation, and I took the crucifix from his hand, dangled it before my eyes, and realised what it meant.