Stairway to Heaven

I chose to eat breakfast with Mum in her bedroom the next morning. This seemed to concern Rosaleen, who hung around Mum’s bedroom a little too long, moving furniture, setting up a table for both of us in front of the window, adjusting the curtains, opening a window, closing it a little, opening it a little more, questioning me on whether it was too breezy.

‘Rosaleen, please,’ I said gently.

‘Yes child,’ she said as she continued to make the bed, furiously thumping pillows, tucking in the blankets so tightly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d licked the undersheets before turning them over the blanket and sealing them like an envelope.

‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll make it after breakfast,’ I said. ‘You go downstairs to Arthur. I’m sure he’ll want to see you before he goes to work.’

‘His lunch is on the counter all ready to go‑he knows where it is.’ She kept plumping, smoothing, and if it wasn’t right she’d start again.

‘Rosaleen,’ I repeated, gently.

Even though I knew she didn’t want to, she quickly glanced at me. When our eyes clicked, she knew her game was up but she just stared at me and in those eyes she dared me to say it. She didn’t think I would. I swallowed.

‘If you wouldn’t mind, I’d just like to spend a little time with Mum. On our own, please.’ There I’d said it. Tamara Grown‑Up had spoken up for herself. But my request was inevitably followed by the wounded look, the slow release of the pillows falling to the bed, followed by a whispery, ‘Well.’

I didn’t feel bad.

Finally she left the room and I remained quiet for a while. Not hearing the creak of the landing, I knew she was still outside the door. Listening, guarding, protecting or locking us in‑I wasn’t sure. What was she so afraid of?

Instead of trying to drag conversation out of Mum as I’d been trying to do for the past month, I decided to stop fighting her silence and instead sit with her patiently in the silence that seemed to comfort her. Occasionally I lifted a slice of fruit to her and she took it and nibbled on it. I watched her face. She looked totally enchanted, as though she was watching a great big screen which I couldn’t see, outside in the back garden. Her eyebrows rose and fell as she reacted to something somebody said, her lips smiled coyly as she remembered a secret. Her face hid a million secrets.

Having spent enough time with her, I kissed her on the forehead and left the room. The diary I had been previously hugging proudly was now hidden under my bed. I felt as if I was running off somewhere to hide a big secret. I was also kind of embarrassed, I must admit. My friends and I didn’t keep diaries. We didn’t even write to each other. We kept in touch through Twitter and Facebook, posting up photos of ourselves whilst on holiday, of our nights out, trying on dresses in department‑store changing rooms and looking for second opinions. We texted one another continuously, we emailed gossip and forwarded generic funny emails but it was all on‑the‑surface stuff. We talked about things you can see, things you can touch, nothing deeper. Nothing emotional.

This diary is the kind of thing Fiona would do‑the girl in our class who nobody spoke to apart from Sabrina, the other dork, but she was out of school more than in because of some kind of migraine problem. But this is what she used to do: find a quiet place to go to on her own, a corner of a classroom when the teacher wasn’t in, or beneath a tree in the school grounds at lunch time and bury her nose deep in a book or furiously scribble something in a notebook. I used to laugh at her. But the joke was clearly on me. Who knew what she was writing.

There was only one place I could possibly go to write the diary. I reached for it under my bed and ran down the stairs shouting, ‘Rosaleen, I’m going out…’ My flip‑flops banged down the creaky stairs, and as I leaped off the final step and landed on the ground with all the grace of an elephant, Rosaleen appeared before me.

‘Jesus, Rosaleen!’ My hand flew to my heart.

Her eyes moved over me quickly, registered my diary, then went to my face. I wrapped my arms around it protectively, making sure one side of my cardigan covered half the book.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked quietly.

‘Just out…and about.’

Her eyes flicked down to the diary again. She just couldn’t help herself.

‘Can I fix you some food to have with you? You’ll be starving hungry.’

Starving hungry. Hot sun. Long goodbye. Very dead.

‘There’s some fresh brown bread and chicken, some potato salad and baby tomatoes…’

‘No, thanks, I’m still full from breakfast.’ I made a move to the door again.

‘Some sliced fruit maybe?’ She raised her voice slightly. ‘A ham and cheese sandwich? There’s leftover coleslaw from‑’

‘Rosaleen. No. Thank you.’

‘Okay.’ More wounded looks. ‘Well, be safe now, won’t you? Don’t go wandering too far. Stay within the grounds. Within eyeshot of the house.’

Within eyeshot of her, more like.

‘I’m not going off to war,’ I laughed. ‘Just…around.’

In the closed space of the house, where everyone always knew where everyone else was at any time, I wanted a few hours of my place, my time.

‘All right,’ she said.

‘Don’t look so worried.’

‘I’m just not sure…’ She looked down at the floor, unclasped her hands to smooth down her tea‑dress. ‘Would your mother let you go?’

‘Mum? Mum would let me go to the moon, if it kept me from whinging all day.’

I’m not sure if relief was what passed over Rosaleen’s face. Just more worry. Suddenly a few chips fell into place for me, and I relaxed a little. Rosaleen wasn’t a mother, but all of a sudden, in her quiet house, as my mum had switched to sleep mode, Rosaleen had to do the mothering of both of us.

‘Oh, I understand,’ I said softly. I reached out a hand and I touched her. Her body tensed so much that I quickly let go. ‘You don’t have to worry about me. Mum and Dad pretty much let me go wherever I wanted. I used to spend the entire day in town with my friends. I even went to London one day with my friend. We were over and back in a day. Her dad has his own jet. It was totally cool. There were only, like, six seats and it was just for me and Emily‑that’s the girl whose plane it was. Then for her seventeenth birthday her parents let us all fly to Paris. Her older sister came with us to keep an eye on us, though. She was nineteen, in college and everything.’

She listened intently; far too eagerly, too anxiously, too quickly, far too desperately.

‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ she said brightly, her green eyes hungry for all the words that came from my mouth. I could see her gobbling them up as soon as I’d said them. ‘Your birthday isn’t far off. Is that the kind of thing you’d get for your birthday?’ She looked around the hallway of the gatehouse as if she might find a plane in there somewhere. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be able for the likes of that…’

‘No, no, that’s not what I meant. That’s not why I told you the story. It was just…it doesn’t matter, Rosaleen,’ I said quickly. ‘I’d better go.’ I pushed past her to get to the door. ‘Thanks, though,’ I said. The last thing I saw before I closed the door was her concerned look, as though she’d said something wrong. Worrying about what their life could and couldn’t offer me. Turns out my old life was offering me more than it could, anyway. Like a desperate lover it was offering me the moon and stars when it knew there was no way it could ever deliver. I stupidly believed it. I used to think that it was better to have too much than too little, but now I think if the too much was never supposed to be yours, you should just take what is yours and give the rest back. I’ll take Rosaleen and Arthur’s simplicity any day. That way, you never have to give back the things you love.

As I was walking down the garden path the postman came toward me. Excited to see another person, I greeted him with a big smile.

‘Hi.’ I stopped and blocked him in his path.

‘Hello, miss.’ He tipped his hat, which I thought was very old‑fashioned and kind.

‘I’m Tamara.’ I held out my hand.

‘Nice to meet you, Tamara.’ He thought I was holding my hand out for the post and he plonked some envelopes into my palm.

Behind me I heard the door open and Rosaleen came rushing out.

‘Morning, Jack,’ she called, power‑walking down the path. ‘I’ll take those.’ She practically tore them from my grasp. ‘Thank you, Jack.’ She looked at him sternly while stuffing them into her apron pouch like a mother kangaroo.

‘Right so.’ He bent his head as though he’d just been told off. ‘And for over the road.’ He handed her more envelopes, then he turned on his heel, hopped on his bike and cycled off around the corner.

‘I wasn’t going to eat them,’ I said to Rosaleen’s back, slightly stunned.

She laughed and went inside the house. Curiouser and curiouser.

There was only one place that I could go to write this diary. Feeling the heat of the road beneath my rubber flip‑flops, I made my way toward the castle. I smiled when the trees gave away like a curtain parting for the main act.

‘Hello again,’ I said.

With great respect I wandered through its rooms. I couldn’t believe that a fire had done all of this damage. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody had lived here for at least a century. No fireplaces left on the walls, no tiles, no wallpaper. Absolutely nothing but bricks, weeds and a staircase that climbed to a second floor that didn’t exist, leading up to the skies, as though with one giant leap you could reach a cloud. A stairway to heaven.

I took my place on the bottom steps and set the diary on my lap. I twirled in my hand the heavy pen that I’d stolen from Arthur’s writing desk and stared at the closed book, trying to think of what to write. I wanted my first words to mean something, I didn’t want to make a mistake. Finally I thought of a beginning and opened the book.

My jaw dropped. The first page had already been written, each line neatly filled…in my handwriting.

I stood up, alert, rigid, and the diary fell from my lap and down the concrete steps to the floor. I looked around quickly, my heart racing, trying to see if this was somebody’s idea of a cruel joke. The crumbling walls stared back at me and suddenly there were movements and noises all around me that I hadn’t noticed before. Shrubs and weeds rustled, rocks moved, I heard footsteps from behind and inside the walls, but nothing surfaced or showed itself. It was all my imagination. Perhaps the filled pages of the diary were too.

I took a few deep breaths and retrieved the diary from the ground. The leather, scraped by the stones and rocks, was dusty, and I wiped it against my shorts. The first page had been ripped by the fall but the writing hadn’t been my mind playing tricks. It was still there‑the first page, second page‑and as I furiously flicked through, I could see my hand‑writing on the used pages.

It was impossible. I compared the date on the top to the date on my watch. It was dated tomorrow, Saturday. Today was Friday. My watch must have been wrong. I immediately thought about Rosaleen, how her eyes had run over the diary that morning. Was it she who had written it? She couldn’t have. The diary had been safely stored under my bed. Feeling dizzy, I sat back down on the staircase and read the entry. My eyes jumping over the words manically, I had to go back a few times and start again.

4 July, Saturday

Dear Diary,

Is that what I’m supposed to write? I’ve never written one of these before, and I feel like an absolute dork, beyond words. Okay so, Dear Diary, I hate my life. Here it is in a nutshell. My dad killed himself, we lost our house and absolutely everything. I lost my life, Mum lost her mind and now we’re living in hicksville with two sociopaths. A few days ago I spent the afternoon with a really cute guy called Marcus who is Vice President of Dork Central, a travelling library. Two days ago I met a nun who keeps bees and breaks locks and yesterday I spent most of the morning sitting in a ruin‑

‘Ruin’ had been crossed out and beside it was:

castle on a stairway to heaven that looked very tempting to climb and leap for a cloud that would carry me away from here. Now it’s night‑time and I’m back in my bedroom writing this dorky diary that Sister Ignatius talked me into doing. Yes, she’s a nun and not a transvestite, as I’d previously thought.

I sighed and looked up from the page. How could this be? I searched around me for answers. I thought about running back to the house to tell Mum, to tell Rosaleen, to phone Zoey and Laura. Who on earth would believe me? And even if they did, what could they do that could help me?

The castle was so still, it seemed like the clouds, so perfectly round and white like cherubs, were moving at a hundred miles an hour. There was the occasional rustle under a weed, dandelion seeds drifted through the air, taunting me to catch them, drifting close and then darting away suddenly as the breeze took them. I took a deep breath, lifted my face to the hot sun‑hot sun. Very dead‑closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. I really loved spending time in the castle. I opened my eyes and continued reading, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

I love spending time in the castle. It should be ugly but it’s not. Like Jessie Stevens with his broken nose and cauliflower ears from rugby, he should be ugly, but he’s not. I should have done this sooner, this writing lark. I was denied my rant in Zoey’s, when she and Laura just wouldn’t shut up about the no‑knickers story. Anyway.

Mum still hasn’t come out of her room. Despite feeling like I wanted to curl up and die‑I’m smothered with a cold after yesterday’s soaking‑I decided to eat breakfast in the back garden beside the tree this morning because I knew that she’d see me. I rolled out the blue cashmere blanket from my room and laid out some sliced fruit. It felt and tasted like cardboard. I wasn’t hungry, all of my energy was going into trying to will Mum to come outside. I tried to look so carefree, I lay back on my elbows and crossed my ankles and looked around as though I hadn’t a care in the world. It was my attempt to entice her outside but she didn’t join me. I just thought that if she got some air, if she took a look around this place, came to this castle, maybe she’d see what I see, that she’d snap out of the trance she’s caught in. Of course she doesn’t want life to go on while she’s sitting up there in that bedroom. It’s only when you come outside and realise life is moving on, that you just have to go with the flow.

I don’t know why Rosaleen and Arthur aren’t doing more to help her. Breakfast, lunch and dinner big enough to feed an elephant aren’t going to cure her. Nor is silence. I should bring it up again with Rosaleen. Maybe mention it to Arthur. He’s her brother, he should be helping. As far as I can see, apart from the bizarre forehead‑touching greeting they had when we arrived, he hasn’t said one word to her. How weird is that?

After the rain of yesterday…

Okay so that’s when I knew it was all ridiculous because it was the most beautiful hot day today. No rain whatsoever. I continued reading with a cocked eyebrow, armed with the knowledge that I was being punked or something, and I waited for Zoey and Ashton Kutcher to jump out from behind the crumbling pillars.

…I feel smothered with a cold. Rosaleen practically wrapped me up in cotton wool, stuck me in front of the fire and force‑fed me chicken soup. I lost half the day sweating profusely next to that ghastly fire and trying to convince her I wasn’t dying. She made me cover my head with a towel and stick my face over a bowl of boiling hot water filled with Vicks to clear my nose, and while under there snotting myself, I was almost sure I heard the doorbell ring. She assured me it didn’t. I should have taken Sister Ignatius up on her offer of drying off in her house. How scary can a house of nuns be?

Tomorrow I plan to avoid another heart attack on a plate and find a quiet place to write this. I’ll probably sunbathe in my bikini. Give the pheasants something to look at. It might not be so bad. When you close your eyes you can be just about anywhere you want to be. I can lie by the lake and imagine I’m by the pool in Marbella, that the splashing of the swans as they shake out their feathers is Mum. She always used to lie, not on a sunbed like everybody else, but along the edge of the pool, near the filters. She’d allow her hand to hover over the water, slapping the water lightly. It sounded like toddler’s barefeet walking about the place. It was either to keep cool or because she liked the sound. I used to like listening to it. Though for some reason I always told her to shut up. Something to say in the silence, something that would make her open her eyes and look at me.

Who could have known all of that? Only Mum.

Maybe I’ll sunbathe right in the path of Arthur’s lawnmower on the grass and hope he’ll run me over. If it doesn’t kill me, the least it could do is save me from a full body wax.

Arthur’s not so bad, actually. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t even make many reactions, but I get a good feeling from him. Most of the time. Rosaleen’s not so bad either. I just have to try to figure her out. She reacted so unusually at dinner today‑shepherd’s pie, yum‑when I told her I’d spent time with Sister Ignatius. She said Sister had called round to her during the morning and mentioned nothing about meeting me. That must have been when I was in the shower. Would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Then she kept interrogating me on what kinds of things Sister and I talked about. Honestly, it was constant, and even Arthur seemed uncomfortable. I mean, did she think I was lying about it? Really, it was weird. I wish I hadn’t told her what I’d learned about the castle. Now I know that whatever information I need to learn, it most certainly can’t be from her. I suppose Rosaleen and Arthur are just different. Or maybe it’s just me that’s different. I never really thought of it that way before. Perhaps it was always just me.

In case I die of dehydration and somebody finds this diary, I should mention that I cry every night. I go through the entire day, save for bluebottle and ruined‑castle breakdowns, as strong as can be and then as soon as I crawl into bed and lie in the darkness and stillness, the world only then seems to me to be spinning. Then I cry. Sometimes for such long periods of time my pillow becomes soaked. Rolling down the edges of my eyes, along my ears and tickling down my neck, sometimes down to my vest, I just let the tears go wherever. I’m so used to crying, I don’t notice it sometimes. Does that make sense? Before, if I cried it was because I’d fallen and hurt myself, or because I’d had a fight with Dad, or I was totally drunk and the slightest thing made me upset. But now, it’s like, whatever…I’m sad so I’ll cry. Sometimes I start and then stop as I convince myself that everything will be fine. Sometimes I don’t believe myself and I start again.

I have lots of dreams about Dad. Rarely is he really Dad, but instead a mixture of different people’s faces. He starts off as him, then becomes a school teacher, then becomes Zac Efron and then some random person that I saw once before in my life, like the local priest or something. I’ve heard people say that when they dream about a loved one that has died, they feel that it’s real, that the person is really there, sending them a message, giving them a hug. That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds. I used to think that people who talked like that were quacks, or fundamentalist religious freaks. But now I know that that is just one of the many things I was wrong about. It’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s got nothing to do with mental stability, but it has everything to do with the human mind’s natural instinct, which is to hope beyond all hope, unless you’re a cynical bastard. It’s got to do with love, with losing somebody you love, a part of you being torn away that you’d do almost anything or believe anything to have returned to you. It’s hope that someday you’ll see them again, that you can still feel them near you. Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn’t make you a weak person. It’s hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it’s a maybe. A ‘maybe someday things won’t always be this shit.’ And that ‘maybe’ immediately makes the shittiness better.

I thought that we were supposed to become more cynical the older we got. Me? I was born looking warily around the hospital room, from one face to another, and just immediately knowing that this new scenario was shit and that I was better off back inside. I continued life like that. Everywhere I was, was shit, and somewhere else, in the backwards direction, was better. It’s only now when the matter‑of‑factness of life has hit me‑very dead, death‑that I’m beginning to look outwards. Scientific people think they’re looking outwards but they’re not. They think that emotional people only look inwards but they don’t. I think the best scientists are the ones that look both ways.

Despite all that I’ve said, I know that Dad isn’t in my dreams. There is no secret message or secret hug. I don’t feel him with me here in Kilsaney. They are merely obscure dreams with no meaning or words of advice. Mirrored segments of my day broken up as though a jigsaw, and thrown in the air to hang in my head without order, meaning or sense. Last night I dreamed about Dad, who turned into my English teacher, and then the English teacher was a woman and we all had a free class and I had to sing for everybody, but I opened my mouth and nothing would come out and then the school ended up being in America but nobody spoke English and I couldn’t understand anything, and then I lived on a boat. Weird. I woke up when Rosaleen dropped a pot or something downstairs in the kitchen.

Maybe Sister Ignatius was right. Maybe this diary will help me. Sister Ignatius is a funny woman. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since I met her two days ago.

Yesterday. I’d only met her yesterday.

I like her. The first thing I like about being here‑okay the second thing, after the castle‑is her. It started lashing rain while I was in the castle yesterday and I could see Rosaleen coming down the road towards me with a coat in her hand, so I feel bad, but I just had to run in the opposite direction. I didn’t want her knowing that I spent time here; I didn’t want her to think that her guess was right. I didn’t want her knowing anything about me. I had no idea where I was running to. The rain came down really, really hard‑less of a sun shower and more of a power shower, and I was soaked right through to the skin, but it was like I was on autopilot, my body just switched off and I ran, and without really concentrating I ended up at the walled garden. Sister Ignatius was standing in the greenhouse, waiting for the rain to stop. She had a spare beekeeping suit for me. She said she had a feeling I’d be back.

Because I’d interrupted her the day before she hadn’t been able to get back to checking the hives. She’d other duties to attend to. Praying and stuff. So she showed me the inside of the hives yesterday. She drew on the queen bee with a marker so that I could see which one it was, she pointed out the drones, the worker bees too, and then showed me how to use the smoker. Looking at it made me feel dizzy. Something weird happened to me. She didn’t notice. I had to put my hand out and hold on to the wall so I wouldn’t crumple to the ground. While I was feeling like that, she invited me back next week to help her extract the honey, which she then puts in jars and brings to the market. I was so busy trying to breathe that I just said no. I just wanted to get away. I wish I’d just told her that I didn’t feel well. She seemed so disappointed and now I feel really bad. I also need to get to the market so I can see more people. I’m going insane here, seeing the same people every day. Also I want to know if everyone will stare at Rosaleen and Arthur like they did outside the pub. They must have done something in the town to be looked at like that. Organised swinging parties or something. Gross.

I’m sitting with my back against the bedroom door writing this because I don’t want Rosaleen to walk in. The less she knows about this diary, the better. Already she is trying to climb inside my head; I couldn’t risk her knowing my innermost thoughts are lying about my bedroom. I’ll have to hide it. There’s an interesting‑looking loose floorboard over by the corner chair that I might investigate tonight.

Once again, Mum zonked out straight after eating her dinner. She’s been sleeping so much the past two days. But this time she fell asleep in her chair. I wanted to wake her and put her in bed but Rosaleen wouldn’t let me. I’ll write this until I hear Arthur snoring and then I’ll know it’s safe to check on her.

While I’m in the safety of the house, I just want to say that I had a funny feeling while in the castle yesterday morning. I felt like somebody was there. Like somebody was watching me. It was such a sunny morning, right up until that freak cloud squeezed itself right on top of my head, and I was just sitting on the step, with this diary on my lap, and I couldn’t think of what to write and how to begin the first page and so I sunbathed instead. I don’t know how long I had my eyes closed for but I wish I’d kept them open. Someone was definitely there.

I’ll write again tomorrow.

I finished reading and looked around, my heart so loud in my ears that my breathing was rapid and sharp. That was now. I’d been writing about me now.

I suddenly felt a thousand eyes on me. As I stood up and ran down the steps, tripped on the last one and slammed into the wall. I grazed my hands and my right shoulder, dropped the book on the floor again. I felt around on the ground for it, and as I grabbed it my hand brushed against something furry and soft. I yelped and jumped away, ran into the room next door. There were no doorways out of there, all four walls were intact. I felt a few raindrops on my skin and they quickly fell faster. I went to a hole in the wall where a window used to be and tried to climb out. Once up on the ledge, I saw Rosaleen charging her way up the road with what looked like a raincoat in her hands. She was power‑walking forward, a stormy look on her face, her hand held above her head as though that alone could stop her from getting wet.

I rushed to the other window, looking out to the back of the castle and I climbed out, my knees scraping against the wall as I leaped up to catch the windowsill. I landed on concrete on the other side, feeling the sting in my feet as the lack of support in my flip‑flops sent pain shooting up my legs. I spied Rosaleen coming closer to the castle. I turned away, and ran.

I had no idea where I was going. My body felt like it was on autopilot. It was only when I reached the walled garden, completely soaked to the skin, that I made the connection to the diary and a shudder went through my entire body, summoning goose pimples from head to toe.

As I stood at the garden entrance, frozen with fear and trembling, a white shadow through the frosted glass of the greenhouse caught my attention. Then the door opened and Sister Ignatius appeared with a spare bee suit in her hand.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ she called, and her blue eyes sparkled mischievously against her pale skin.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 611