第7章 Thirty Years of Not Asking

## Marlie There is a year, and I know which year it is, and it is not the year anybody would expect. It is 2006. Rissy had been gone eight years. My father died in 2004. My mother died in October 2006, and the year before that she had had a stroke, and the year before that she had started to say things that were not there. Here is what I mean and I have never told this to a journalist and I am telling it now because a woman sat in my kitchen in April who is a solicitor and who is the first person in twenty-eight years who did not ask me a single question about the case. In 2006 I stopped saying her name. I did not decide to. There was no afternoon. I noticed it the way you notice that you have stopped doing something you used to do all the time, which is by finding out that you have been doing it. What happened is that my mother had lost about two-thirds of her, and she was at home, and I was at home, and I was the one who sat with her, and the two of us got into the habit — and it is a habit, I have been in it, I do not know how else to do it — of working out what to say. Because that is the actual work of being with a person who is going. It is not grief. Everybody thinks it is grief. It is a constant low-level editing. You are running a small committee and you are deciding, in real time, whether to tell the person in front of you the thing they have asked about. And my mother asked about Rissy twice a day in that year, from about March, and there were two answers available. There was the true one, which was that Rissy walked out of this house on the fourteenth of January 1998 and got into a river and the police are the police and there was nothing anybody could do. And I could not say that to a woman who had lost the thread, because she had not lost the thread. She had lost about a third of the hardware and the other two-thirds was working perfectly well and it was holding the specific detail that her daughter was at the works and would be home at six, and the specific detail was the only thing keeping her out of a completely different decade. And there was the one I used. I'd say, "Rissy's fine, she's just over in Ardwick with the Aitkens." For about seven months I said that. Ardwick is eleven miles away. There is an Aitkens family. My mother knew them, and had a photograph of them in a drawer, and would nod, and would accept it, and the accepting was a relief to her, and the cost of it was mine. And here is the thing I actually want to write down, and it is not about my mother. I got so good at it that I began to do it to other people. That's what happened. In 2006 I found out what it is to keep a version of a thing going, and the version was a false one, and I kept it up for seven months with a woman with a stroke, and then she died in October, and then in 2007 I sat at a table at my father's and mother's anniversary and somebody raised her, and I opened my mouth and what came out was, "Rissy's fine, she's over in Ardwick with the Aitkens." To a room. In a pub. About nine people. And one of them said, "Your sister, we never met her, did we?" And I said, "No. She moved away." I have never in my life said anything so bad. I want to set two things against that, because I have had twenty years to think about it and I have not made myself do either of them. The first is that it is not unusual. It is not unusual at all. It is what people do. Every town in this country is full of women my age who went a bit odd in 2006 and who have never once said a real sentence about a person who died. That is the human condition and I am not going to sit here at fifty-one in a book and be a special case. The second is that I could have said it. I want to write that clearly and I want it to stand there. In a pub in Carbide Creek, on an evening in 2007, with nine people, I could have said: no, we never met her, because I am her sister, and she went out of our house at half past seven on the fourteenth of January 1998 and she asked me if I was all right, and I said no, what, and she said nothing, move the milk, and she did not come back. It would have taken about forty seconds. It is the single most available sentence in the English language and I did not say it, because the third person to the right of me at that table was a man called Prentice whose son worked at the works and who would have told everybody by the Tuesday, and because Rissy's name had by then been a thing that could not be said in a room, and I would rather she was a person who had gone a bit odd than a person who was dead, because a person who is dead is a person who has been asked about. So the year 2006 was the year I learned it, and I have been a person who does not say that name in rooms for nineteen years, and I do not believe I will change, and the people who have been hurt by that are not Rissy. They are the people in rooms. I have never said that anywhere except here, and I am aware that I said it, and I am aware of the extraordinary position I am in, which is that I have been the keeper of this for twenty-eight years and nobody has ever actually asked me anything except a policeman in 1998 and a woman from a newspaper in 2026, and both of them asked about a coat.