It’s been a long time since I flexed my creative writing muscles, so forgive any indecorousness in the below. Whether I’ve ever been any good at fiction writing is another question entirely, of course: those muscles may have atrophied or never been very big in the first place.
For some reason, I feel much more trepidation at putting out a story than an essay. Perhaps disagreement with, even abuse for, one’s opinions is somehow not as personally galling as being told that your foray into the literary is rubbish (or, worse, embarrassingly bad).
Anyway, I keep saying I want to try my hand at fiction again, so enough apologising and hand-wringing. Here goes.
On the day that little Anna fell and cracked her head and died, everyone was having a lovely time.
It was her younger brother’s birthday party. Lennie was turning one year old. Anna, aged 10 and the oldest of five siblings, felt it was her duty to be the adult and keep the other children in line. In the garden of their home on the day of her death—the sunny, green garden of their home in the country, the scene of a great many happy memories for the whole family—she was bossing her younger siblings around, acting the part as only children can of the put-upon and exasperated grown-up.
“NO! That pop is NOT for you, Henry!”
“Elizabeth, tie your hair back up this instant!”
“Charlie, put that rock down right about now!”
The younger children did what they were told—until she turned away, of course.
Lennie, meanwhile, was in their father’s arms at the centre of the garden being cooed at by uncles and aunts and grandparents and sundry other friends and relatives.
Younger cousins, unbeholden to even the tenuous authority of Anna, chased and screamed and otherwise tore up the garden. The adults paid little attention to these antics, too busy catching up and wishing happy birthday to the oblivious baby.
As Anna was about to stomp over to Charlie, who was preparing to lob a rock across the garden fence, her mother called from indoors.
“Anna, I need your help, darling!”
And dutiful Anna ran straight away up the steps and across the patio to her mother’s side in the kitchen, keen as a pup. Her mother kissed her on the head and fussed about for a little while before handing Anna a couple of plates holding slices of cake. “I’ll take the rest, it’s time to sing Happy Birthday.”
Emma, the matriarch of the family, did not in fact need any help at all. She was carrying the (mostly-uncut) cake on a large platter and was planning to cut it in the garden. But she delighted in Anna’s sweet, silly attempts to be a grown-up and wanted to give her some responsibility. So out they went, mother and daughter, and Charlie senior, with Lennie in his arms, called out, “Time to sing!”
The partiers all turned to face the bringers of cake. As the sun shone and everyone sang and Anna and Emma approached the steps leading down into the garden from the patio, it all seemed such a perfect moment. A typical summer’s day, a typical middle-class English family, a typical birthday party, the sort of everyday occurrence replicated all across the country at this time of year.
And then Emma gasped and dropped the platter in her hands and tried to catch her daughter as Anna tripped over the final step. Anna’s head hit the ground at the same time as the cake. The singing ceased and Emma leapt to Anna’s side, her mouth wide open but emitting no sound, showing only the darkness within. On any other day, this would have been merely a minor drama. A child knocks her head on the stone ground and begins to bawl. She is taken care of by her mother. She recovers quickly enough.
But today, there was no bawling. There was, simply, silence. Almost immediately, Emma had intuited that Anna was dead. There was nothing to be done. As tears began to fall and screams began to emanate, Charlie senior, still holding Lennie and feeling utterly numb, somehow managed to phone for an ambulance.
The paramedics declared Anna dead at the scene. And that was that. The rest is as you would imagine: the inconsolable children, the crying relatives, the very small body bag, and, later, the awful funeral at which the parents sat empty and still as stars in the night sky and spoke not a single word.
In the weeks and months that followed, Emma and Charlie senior were able to begin their life again. As they went back to work and took care of the (remaining) children and washed dishes and cleaned the bathroom, one would almost think they were perfectly fine. Perhaps Anna had only gone on a long school trip.
But it was an artifice. Not even a delusion or a refusal to face the truth, but an artifice. They knew full well that their daughter was dead. They had no illusions. They had absorbed this fact almost the moment Anna’s head had hit the ground. But for the sake of their (remaining) children and for their wider world of friends and relatives, a world which had moved on surprisingly quickly, they erected a lie. They saw unhelpful therapists and pretended that, though they were still grieving, they were moving towards the light.
But they had had no such breakthroughs and they both knew they never would. Their only reason for living was the (remaining) children, who they loved even more fiercely now that their number had been depleted by one.
Charlie junior, Elizabeth, and Henry (and perhaps even Lennie, too) knew somewhere within themselves that their parents were, love for them aside, closer to living deaths than lives.
Emma’s deathly life turned her into a black box, or rather a black hole, everything pulled in so strongly that there was little left of her. The only thing that escaped, the Hawking radiation of her grief, was her love for her still-living children. Otherwise, she became impenetrable, an automaton, a performer of normality in the dumbshow of her life.
Even her husband had no idea what went through her head.
Perhaps the answer was nothing at all.
Charlie himself, who had cradled Lennie’s head as Anna’s smacked on the stone, sought answers externally. As he, too, put on a pretence of normality, he began a secret life. When he could, he read books on philosophy and religion, seeking to understand what had happened. He had never been particularly religious but now he sought out priests and imams and rabbis and gurus to ask them a single question.
“Why?”
In the days after Anna’s death, he had asked family members this question, too. Most of them had simply averted their gaze and spoken some pablum about time healing all wounds. So he had sought answers elsewhere, sneaking off to speak with holy men and to read holy books in the hope that something, anything, would explain the terrible events that had befallen his family on the day of Lennie’s birthday party.
“Why?”
Asked over and over and over again, but no response ever satisfied him. The religious men had their unconvincing answers about God’s mysterious ways. Philosophy books preached stoicism and other useless ideas. He even attended a talk by a famous Canadian psychologist, but came away merely baffled by the man’s weird, empty babblings.
Yet still he read, still he asked, still his strange extramarital affair went on. Just one priest, just one book, will hold the answer, he thought. He just had to find the right priest, the right book, and all would be explained. Maybe then he really could move on. Maybe then he could share the answer with his black hole of a wife and she too would return to the land of the living.
The alternative was just too horrific to consider. So he pushed it out of his mind, refused it space in his quest for understanding. Whether he knew within himself that this alternative was the unalterable truth or not, he spent years avoiding it.
Sometimes he even wondered if Anna had been murdered. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? He had always disliked one of her cousins, and he had turned into a thuggish teenager. Maybe he was a psychopath? Maybe he had pushed her? But then he remembered that the entire garden had witnessed her death, and that she had simply misplaced her foot while focusing on the plates she carried.
Ah, but perhaps that cousin had smeared something slippery on the step? Except that he couldn’t have anticipated Anna would be called in by her mother to help with the cake. Ah, but what if the target wasn’t Anna but Emma? But then he recalled the scene, which he had burned into his mind forever, and he knew that there was nothing at all on the steps, no grease laid by an evil cousin, nothing at all.
It was just a step.
He was occasionally tempted to blame Emma for putting Anna in the fatal situation in the first place, but he could never really muster the feeling to do so. It would be absurd to blame Emma for something so unforeseeable.
And it still wouldn’t be an explanation.
And so Charlie’s quest continued as his other children grew. What effects their sister’s death and their parents’ transformations had on Henry, Elizabeth, Charlie junior, and Lennie can only be guessed at (and how Lennie felt about his birthday also being his sister’s deathday is impossible to know). Charlie and Emma hoped that they had breathed life back into them, that they weren’t too damaged, that they would be capable of living full lives themselves. But they could never know for sure.
It was ten years almost to the day of Anna’s death when Charlie finally grasped the truth—or accepted what he had already known.
It was a Saturday and the children were out with friends doing whatever kids do when they are free from the constraints of school and home. He and Emma pretended to enjoy their relaxing afternoon in the garden as if the anniversary of Anna’s death wasn’t approaching. The only clue was a table at the back of the garden piled up with plastic plates and cups in preparation for Lennie’s birthday celebration next week. They read the newspaper, exchanged the odd word, sipped some tea, even sunbathed a little.
To an outside observer, they would appear a normal, quiet, middle-aged couple. The truth of them—the black hole and the agonized quester, the two wrecked human beings—was invisible. And you would never be able to discern that this garden was the scene of the very worst thing that had ever happened in the history of the universe, that mere feet away from the couple lay the step, that terrible final step, and the brain-battering stone which had killed their daughter.
Charlie decided on a walk. Emma preferred to stay in the garden, so he went alone. Up the garden steps he went (invisibly dying as he climbed the first one), then through the house and out into the street. He mindlessly strolled into the town centre, smiling and nodding to acquaintances, just one among many ordinary people doing ordinary things in an ordinary town on an ordinary summer afternoon.
He bought some coffee and perused some shops. And, before he went home, he decided on one last stop. He needed to write a letter to some newfound guru to ask his eternal question, so he made his way up the steps into the post office and bought some pen and paper. He wrote the letter there and sent it on its way, first class, and headed outside.
As he reached the final step down to the pavement, he slipped, stumbled, caught himself, and moved on. As he reached his house, he noticed four bikes by the front wall. The children were back.
It was only once he reached the front door that the truth exploded in his brain.
It was just a slip. A meaningless accident. There was no agent involved. There was no grand metaphysical reason behind Anna’s death.
It just…was.
He opened the door and went upstairs to lie down. Had he known this all along? Had he known that no philosophy or value system, religious or secular, held the answer?
And what was he to do with this knowledge, this terrible knowledge? He couldn’t talk to Emma. Emma was essentially gone. Perhaps she had understood the truth long before him and had found that becoming a black hole rather than a person was the only acceptable solution.
Had he simply delayed his collapse into the same?
What did one do with such knowledge? How did one recover from it?
A whisper: “It just is.”
From him? He didn’t know. He turned to the door and thought he saw one of his children moving quickly away. His dazed mind, bleary eyes, and the upstairs gloom made it impossible to know, let alone which one it could have been. Or had it been Emma? No, he thought he would have recognized her form instantly. There was no clue in the voice, either: it could have belonged to anyone.
Had someone just been upstairs to use the bathroom? Had he said the words or had they? And if they were another’s words, what did they mean? Were these words a curse or were they wisdom?
“It just is,” he repeated (himself?).
As a curse, they were sinking him. He could feel the denseness at his core, the collapsing in of himself.
It’s all meaningless, all irrelevant, all just matter and accident, it meant nothing, she meant nothing…
But what about as wisdom?
As wisdom: yes, it is all matter and accident, but she meant everything, as I bloody well feel and know, and perhaps that’s all that matters—the human. Our feelings, our love, our horror. And terrible things happen all the time and every day but still there are things worth living for, even if there is no ultimate purpose, just us, just us. There is only the human. It just is.
It just is. But is that enough? Does it free me from my quest, does it mean I can move on, hold her in my heart forever but not forget to live and to be, because there is nothing more and nothing less than nothing, which is everything?
A curse or wisdom?
Wisdom or a curse?
The emptiness of space, the void, the black hole—or the human?
Outside, he heard four children laughing and then the voice of their mother telling them off.
Curse or wisdom?
I seldom read fiction these days, but I enjoyed it. If I could write nearly as well, I would do it for a living. It was interesting and clever. I liked the "Hawking radiation" reference and the the "famous Canadian psychologist" dig. Hint to those who don't get it: not Steven Pinker.