“I remember breaking my arm. And also eating cake.”
“Cake?” Jamie asks, smiling broadly. “Was it a special cake?”
“Yes,” she says, “a birthday cake, and it was covered in thousands of tiny sugar flowers. And I was putting each tiny flower on the tip of my tongue—just like so—and I remember oh, the taste was magical, so sweet. Outside, it was very hot, but I was inside, somewhere dark and cool, a small room, with long shelves full of food—”
“A pantry?” Cat says. “Or you can say larder.”
“Yes, thank you. I was inside a pantry. And the big cake was on a cool marble shelf, and I was sitting under that shelf. And I remember looking up and seeing the slab of marble had blue lines running through it, like those little veins you see here—”
“Wrist,” Nate says.
“Yes, under the skin of your wrist. And I had a little handful of tiny sugar flowers, and I was eating them, on the cold pantry floor, underneath that shelf.”
There’s a pause, all of us momentarily held inside the tale by the lilt of Claudette’s accent and the softness of her voice, her dreamlike storytelling. Cat rests her chin on her palm, watching. Jamie shifts in his seat. I think I am holding my breath.
“Was it your own birthday cake?” Willa asks.
“Non,” Claudette says, breaking the spell, “it wasn’t mine. For me, I have a winter birthday, in March.”
“And about how old were you?” Liv asks.
“I was six.”
“Six,” Liv says. “Well, that would work as an explicit memory. We can divide early memories into two types: explicit and implicit. An explicit memory is one that involves recall of specific times, places, events. Yours too, Michael. The details are very defined and, to be fair, what you’ve described is the sort of major, one-off event that would stay in a child’s mind. Robyn, Jamie, Willa, you’re describing implicit memories: unconscious, emotional recollections. These are more like an amalgamation of your total early childhood sensations than memories of specific events—”
“Not a chance,” Jamie says. “The memory I described had exactly the sort of specific details you’ve just mentioned—right down to the color of my shorts.”
“Sure,” Liv says, “but you also said you were two. If that’s correct, it’s far more likely to be an implicit memory or, even more likely, not a memory at all but a description of something you’ve been told about, or a photograph you’ve seen. There are exceptions, of course, but, generally speaking, explicit memories start later.”
“I remember it exactly,” Jamie says. “It’s an explicit memory.”
Liv says, “It’s possible. But, to be honest, it sounds far more like a generalized, happy, childhood sensation.”
“Explicit,” he says. “The entire thing is guesswork anyway. Supposition and conjecture.” He throws back the last of the red, then crosses his arms, the picture of a sulky adolescent, spots of high color on his cheeks.
“Coffee anyone?” Cat says, meeting my eye and widening hers. “Jamie?” It’s abundantly clear to the entire party that he’s as pissed as a fart. He’s been through both the bottles they arrived with, and then some. Nate and Michael exchange a look: tolerant but unimpressed. Liv looks concerned, Claudette a little repulsed. “Weela,” she says, moving her eyes away from Jamie, “how do you two know Robyn and Cat?” Her voice is lemony-sour.
“I met Robyn at boarding school,” Willa says quietly. “They gave me to her to look after.”
I grab the chance to lighten the mood. “You make it sound like you were some sort of exotic pet,” I say, smiling. “They used to assign everyone an official buddy when they first arrived. I was meant to show her around, get her used to the routines. But I’ve always maintained their real intention was for Willa to be a good influence on me.”
“And was she?” Cat says, throwing me the evils.
“God, no,” I say grinning. “She corrupted me completely.”
Jamie leans back in his chair and laughs so loudly at this we all look at him. He hasn’t got a clue, I think. At least it’s cheered him up. One good laugh and he’s back in the room, starting a conversation about his and Willa’s renovation project, and—God help us—his commute. Cat widens her eyes and mouths—Kill me now—and I almost start to laugh. I don’t: a single glance at Willa stops me in my tracks. Her face has grown as gray as a February cloud.
The light from the candle flickers. I look round the table: Jamie, boorish, holding court, his voice growing increasingly strident and loud. Our poor other guests have grown as quiet as the spectators in the background of an Old Master’s painting: impartial witnesses, faces half hidden in the dark. Claudette frowns as she listens, leaning toward Jamie with a look of confusion, but Liv keeps her eyes on Willa, her expression, I suspect, almost purposefully blank. Willa herself is silent, pensive, lost in thought.
My beautiful, brave friend, I think, how did you end up like this?
6 Small Bones Willa
What people don’t always understand about the British press is this: they are vile. When Laika disappeared, it took only hours for them to locate our family home and less than twenty-four before the first of them turned up at my school. After that, everything changed. Rabid packs of them gathered by the school gates, shouting my name, shoving microphones and cameras into the faces of my teachers and friends. They wouldn’t leave. By the time a few of them got inside, masquerading as cleaners, the school had had enough. It would, perhaps, be in my own best interests, the head told my parents, if I were to move.
I’d been at that school since I was seven, and I’d loved everything about it. The last thing I wanted was to go somewhere new. But there wasn’t really a choice.
***
That’s how I met Robyn.
***
She was waiting for me in the headmistress’s office and my first thought was that she didn’t look like a sixth former at all. I thought she looked about fourteen, at most. Then I realized that, at that moment, I probably didn’t look any older myself, because at that school you had to wear a uniform all the way through, even in the sixth form. At my old school we were allowed to wear our own clothes in the sixth form, as a mark of our seniority. I’d worked for that privilege, earned it, with a full set of A grades at GCSE. Being forced back into uniform was the final indignity. I already felt hollowed out.
And here was Robyn, wearing a faded gray skirt that stopped somewhere mid thigh, far above the stated regulation length. Mine was on the knee.
Robyn was my assigned buddy. I hated the word instantly, sitcom slang, I thought, picturing American Girl Scouts marching cheerily off to camp, grown men slapping each other’s backs, smiling dogs with wet, lolling tongues. Worse still, we were going to share a study-bedroom in the boardinghouse. Up to that moment, not one person had mentioned I’d be expected to share a room. It occurred to me that the showers were bound to be communal, all of us girls washing together in a steam-filled room like in some film from the seventies, horror-slash-porn. Jesus, I thought, I will literally kill myself.
I didn’t need a buddy anyway. What I needed was a ghost-rider, someone to sit inside my brain and work my limbs, to answer questions when they were directed at me, to navigate my life. When people spoke to me, their voices were too quiet. I could see their lips moving, but their voices seemed to come from other rooms. Nothing made any sense.
Robyn had dark, shortish hair which she sometimes plaited into two stubby pigtails which stuck out from the back of her head at odd angles. She was shorter than me, with strong-looking limbs. On our first tour through the school she’d asked if I’d like to play tennis. I said maybe, but that I wasn’t very good. She asked me what sports I liked and I told her that I’d taken ballet as a child, then she grinned and spun round in a pirouette. “Like this?” she said. She jumped into the air, kicking her legs into a split. “Like this?” Then she told me she was the captain of the senior girls’ hockey team.
Our tour ended in the boardinghouse. Robyn had one half of our study-bedroom, I had the other. The room was small, with clean, functional furniture. We each had a single bed, a cupboard with an integral chest of drawers, and a desk with a pinboard attached to the wall. Robyn’s board was covered in stuff: photos of her parents and brother, a drawing she’d made of her dogs, a black-and-white postcard of Virginia Woolf, and an old ticket stub to some minor West Country music festival, where the headline act had been Joan Armatrading.
I didn’t put anything on mine. There was no way I was going to put up pictures of Laika for the cleaners to gawp at or, worse, sell, and I didn’t have any pets. I didn’t want to put up pictures of my parents either, especially since they were still being featured on the news. No one at that school paid the slightest attention to the TV, but it was always on in the communal sitting room, as background noise. Groups of girls sat around on baggy sofas, laughing, eating toast smeared thick with Nutella, and there, two nights after I arrived, I saw my parents on the screen at a press conference, in front of a poster-sized image of my sister, a photograph that showed her with long dark hair and the serious eyes of a deepwater fish. My father had a thick arm angled round my mother’s shoulders, and my mother herself sat stock-still, a gray cashmere wrap folded around her shoulders, staring ahead, in the manner of the sole survivor pulled from a wreck. An unseen voice asked if they had a message for their daughter, and my father, looking straight into the camera, said, “To whosoever has my child I say this: Bring. Her. Back.” A discharge of camera shutters, flashing bulbs. My mother’s bloodless face.
Of course, that was while the press still thought the story had legs. In time there were no fresh developments to report, no new arrests, and after that I didn’t see them anymore.
