Storm Ophelia

A story by Miranda Gold. Originally published in The London Magazine, December 2023/ January 2024.

That day when the red sun took the light out of the city and caught it in a restless sleep. Even Fran’s voice matched the drift and twitch of somnambulist Londoners, appearing and vanishing through a milky florescence usually the preserve of a seaside town out of season. She’d educated Theo and Laura in her particular grammar of signs – anything can be a sign, she reminded the children, once you know how to look at it. Laura pulled her hand out of Fran’s, let her satchel slide off her shoulder, and dragged it along the pavement.

‘No going off now, young lady,’ Fran said.

Laura skimmed the toe of her shoe off the curb and bent over a drain. She’d already spotted Phil waiting for them in the car across the road, slumped in the driver’s seat. He eased himself up, rolled down the window, and pushed his glasses back over the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand – ‘Lost something?’

His voice twinkled strangely – it was hard to tell when he was teasing. Laura shook her head.

‘Looking for treasure then. All sorts gets dropped down there. I’ll be a rich man the day I fish it out.’

Rich man, poor man, beggar man – ‘Don’t make a scene,’ Fran pulled Laura upright and marched her and Theo to the car.

Phil had offered to collect them from the gate, save Fran the trouble, but she’d eyed him, drawing in her lips, saying a moment later that there had been behaviour lately, a lot of behaviour, people would find it unsettling, a man hovering at the gates. She patted him on the shoulder and said she’d have to sew up the patches on his jacket. He always wore the same jacket – brown with the navy patches. He bent his arm to inspect the stitching at his elbow but Fran was already on to his glasses – she’d tape them up properly too, she said, turning to Laura to tuck a stray hair behind her ear and tell her to look up. Why Laura was forever disappearing even when she was right in front of her, Fran never knew, but it happened all the same. Her forensic eyes switched to Theo’s flannel washed face: it was still marked. She woke them at six every morning and plunged them into hot water, both of them blind as new-borns, baby mice made shameless by the steam.

They got wedged between cars as soon as they reached Fitzjohn’s Avenue.

Phil started singing a song about a sailor until Fran nudged him to stop.

‘I told you not to go this way,’ she said to him, taking one of her inhalations that sounded and felt to Laura like scraped skin.

The car in front spluttered ahead and Laura wriggled in towards the window. She didn’t realise she was digging her nails into her knees – not until they got back and Fran looked up from rummaging through her bag on the front step to inspect her, comb and wallet and spilled pennies at her buckled shoes. Laura dodged Fran’s eyes, locking her gaze on the car already driving away. Every time Phil left she imagined she’d never see him again, scared her terrible wish would come true. He’d vanish and it would be her fault.

‘Oh Laura, at it again, scratching yourself raw. What ever would your mother think?’ Fran glanced skyward and crossed herself. Laura crossed herself too, automatically, remembering her pact with Theo only when Fran took Laura’s hand, patted it – ‘Child of God,’ she said, ‘your mother rests in peace with him now.’

Laura wanted to pull her hand away before Theo saw but it was too late – his pale cheeks flowered pink, the toe of a trainer shifting his dropped lunchbox ahead. He must think she was a traitor. The moment Fran opened the door to the house he raced through and up the stairs to their father’s old study.

‘Don’t think you can hide away all afternoon again,’ Fran called after him, ‘and you, Miss, I suppose you’ll disappear now as well? Nosing about where you shouldn’t?’

Laura shook her head and moved towards the stairs, eyes catching on the little broken watch clipped to Fran’s nurse’s uniform as she looked back over her shoulder. Fran had finished her last shift fifteen years ago but she wore the uniform every day and still referred to herself as Nurse Fran. It’s a calling, she’d say, it’s in my blood, and Phil, with the impression of trying to keep a straight face, would indulge her with the title, applauding the exceptional care Sister took of her little patients. Fran had to agree –

‘And to think of the conditions – and the hours!’

But there weren’t hours – there was just one continuous moment, which began when Fran arrived: she kept her little patients in sight even when they were out of sight. The conditions were the damp that no amount of dedicated prayer or Googling could defeat at the bottom of the house and the dust, which Fran was forbidden from touching at the top.

The study had become home to the off-cuts of several borrowed, imagined, or potential lives their mother might have had. Stacks of portfolios, sketchbooks, magazines, catalogues, account books, and index cards filled boxes and lined walls, all coated in a thickening Dickensian fur asking for the fingers of little patients to draw stick men though them. It was both a shrine and a violation of all the selves their mother believed she might become. And she had: in corners, under shelves, between books, on postcards that had never been sent, across notes that had fallen behind the desk. There were letters left unopened and letters left half-written; drawers jammed with unfiled receipts and forgotten reminders. But it was the writing on the back of a photograph tucked inside an address book that carved a hollow just below Laura’s heart. She had found it last spring. All that time since her discovery and she hadn’t been able tell a soul. That she knew it must be kept secret deepened the hollow further. The picture had been stuck to another and both tore when she peeled them apart, white patches eating away portions of tree and sky. One only had a date on the back, the other read: The Rose Garden, May, 1998, Love always, P.

She put the first back, slipped the second into her skirt – ‘Laura, for the last time!’ – and had to sit with a corner of the picture poking into her tummy through dinner.

Under her duvet with a torch that night, it revealed a stranger’s face where her mother’s should have been. The woman in the photograph has the same features as her mother once had – but it isn’t her. It can’t be because her mother’s face was hollow and creased and papery and the woman in the picture has full cheeks – cheeks that Laura just knows would be soft and smooth and warm under her fingertips.

She stuffed the photo down the side of the mattress but it kept her awake all the same: this woman with lightly laughing brown eyes, her hand gently opening like the pink roses behind her, a woman Laura didn’t know – but P did. P knew her. P had known her in 1998 – a year locked away in a century before Laura had even been born. Whoever P was had been to the Rose Garden with her mother – Laura hadn’t and never would. She dug her nails into her knees and scratched and scratched until they were red-raw but the hollow feeling just below her heart wouldn’t go away.

She’d wanted to show Theo the photograph ever since she’d found it – but she knew that if she did she’d have to make him promise not to tell. Only Theo would see what she saw and when he did the hollow below her heart would begin to close and she wouldn’t have to scratch and scratch and the writing on the back of the photograph wouldn’t matter and she could put it back right where she’d found it –

Now, she’d show him now – quickly, before Fran came upstairs –

But, like every other afternoon, as soon as Theo reached the study he buried himself under their mother’s plastic covered clothes in the cupboard, fingers interlaced, eyes squeezed, and made the same wish: please, please let me stay right here until morning… one day his wish had almost come true but Laura dragged him out as soon as Phil came back – better Laura than Fran though, Fran would yank him and tap her buckled shoe and make him cross himself. Their father took bin liners stuffed with their mother’s shoes and dresses to the charity shops every week and still the cupboards were full.

Laura neatened the pile of unopened letters on the desk and climbed on to it to look out of the window, hands tight round the bars before sliding an arm through. All the windows had bars except for the ones in the kitchen and the sitting room. The red sun looked close enough to touch through the sunken sky, so low you might take a handful of it and bring it inside. Laura watched a car pass and imagined it was Phil but she knew that if he did come back – if her terrible wish didn’t come true – he wouldn’t be back until just before tea time to tell the story he always told, bringing the puppet he’d pretend to speak for. When Theo and Laura caught his lips moving Phil would say just testing and start again and again until their father got home and gave Phil his envelope and nod towards the front door. Their father would want words with Fran after that. Laura had seen their father counting out notes and putting them in the envelope once. She’d asked what it was for but Fran was right behind her saying never you mind.

The very first time Laura remembered seeing Phil he was hunched and had swollen red eyes and no smile. Fran had gasped as soon as he knocked and she’d told Laura to get back up the stairs. Not now not now, Laura heard Fran saying, and off you go, go on, as though she was talking to a neighbour’s cat that had slipped through the back door. Hours later Laura spotted him from the top window. He was hovering across the road, looking right up at her. She snuck out while Fran was trying to retrieve Theo from the cupboard. Laura was terrified of this swollen eyed stranger but something stronger than fear pulled her down the stairs, heart racing, magnetised. He nodded and held up a hand as soon as she opened the door, taking a step towards her. ‘Hello Laura,’ he said. Her breath caught and she rushed back inside. How did he know her name? They didn’t see him again for another year and by then his eyes had shrunk to a normal size and his back had straightened up. Fran introduced him as Uncle Phil and he did magic tricks for them and said Laura had her mother’s look and Theo had her ways. Fran said not to say ridiculous things like that and to start talking sense or say nothing at all. He answered by taking out his puppet and handkerchief.

That evening, after Phil left, Laura and Theo had stopped on the top step, Laura’s hands on the banister, Theo’s face nuzzled into her back, the two of them still and silent as new snow, listening to their father’s lowered voice and the click of Fran’s tongue. I don’t want him here again, their father was saying. Fran hissed that it was only right – only natural, she’d said, blood is blood and it’s what their dear mother would have wanted and Phil’s a changed man and other things they couldn’t quite hear. Laura leant over the banister, the muffled words sticky in her ears and her mother’s sudden breath stretching the hollow beneath her heart. Theo tugged Laura’s sleeve then and she lost her balance, tripping on to the next step, shuddering the banister as she caught herself. She managed to pull Theo on to the landing just as Fran’s buckled shoes clacked to the bottom of the stairs. It was too late, though, Fran was standing there with her arms folded, lips pursed.

‘Eavesdropping now are we?’ She asked quietly. They pressed their heads against their knees, hearing their father walking down the hall and out the door.

*

A hand waved in the window of the house opposite – that little girl was always waving. Fran said never to wave back.

‘Why not?’

‘For the same reason we don’t feed the pigeons.’

The girl went to a different school – Fran called it a special school – and a white bus came to pick her up very early in the mornings. Sometimes she’d cry and stamp her feet and smack the man trying to get her on to the bus. Theo and Laura decided that one day they’d rescue her and they’d make a boat and sail to the end of the world.

‘Don’t do that,’ Theo said, the plastic brushing over his face and head as he crawled out of the cupboard. The shock of the room was cold – too bright, too much – he glanced back at the cupboard, vowing to climb back in as soon as he was certain Laura was safe: he didn’t like it when she put her hands through the bars – her whole body might slip through, falling but never landing like she did in his dream. He had to go into her room when he woke up to check she was still there. Sometimes people disappear for no good reason.

They could hear Fran on the stairs chanting the names of animals or fruit in French for Laura, spelling out words letter by letter for Theo, each sound articulated with the force of a hole-puncher. And then she was right there, standing the doorway, catching Laura’s eye as it went back towards the window, a shake of her head as she put on her Sister smile. She stepped inside, watching them unzip their satchels and pull out their exercise books, nodding, circling her little patients, asking what would your mother have said, your poor, poor mother?

The possibility of staying in the cupboard had been ruined already. Theo heard his mother’s voice in his head – asking what she always used to ask: You’re my friend, aren’t you, Theo? Sometimes the right answer was the same as the true answer and sometimes it wasn’t, so he had to tuck his head behind his arm-wrapped knees at the end of their parents’ bed until the question went away. The TV was always on then, screen flickering an inch from his eyes every time he looked up at it, making the man with the microphone jagged and shaky. The man with the microphone always nodded a lot and took tissues out of the box for the lady on the sofa. Everything would go quiet for a moment but just when Theo was least expecting it, the shouting started. The man with the microphone never shouted and whenever he said anything the audience clapped and cheered. Not like daddy and Laura, his mother told him, they don’t love me, they’re not my friends.

Fran appraised the feigned concentration, her good, good, buckled shoes walking her backwards. Once she had gone downstairs Laura slid up and climbed back on to the table, waving to no one.

‘Can I see?’ Theo asked, standing behind Laura.

‘You’re too scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ he said.

‘Look, there’s Phil! Phil’s back!’

It was only after Phil had closed the car door that Laura realised she’d missed her chance – she could have shown Theo the photograph and now she was going to have to sit through another evening knowing what she knew alone. Phil opened the boot and pulled out the puppet and the handkerchief – he always had the handkerchief tucked into his pocket when he came back. He waved it up at the window and the little girl reappeared and waved back.

*

Laura and Theo know how the story about the disappearing lady begins. Always it begins in the Rose Garden on a beautiful day in May. But this evening Phil doesn’t pretend to speak for the puppet collapsed next to him. Instead he looks from Laura to Theo, leaning right over to make sure he has their eyes. He has never given a name or described the face Laura and Theo have transplanted from the picture of their mother on the mantle piece to the story. The face in the picture is nothing like the photograph Laura found in the study, however similar it appears. It’s the picture on the mantle piece that is their first sign; the story their first knowledge. There is no before. Then the light goes on and a woman appears at the door. Not all at once but bit by bit. The moment her feet materialise she starts to dance in the light of the yellow room, going too fast, spinning, falling, laughing. She sings of a rose garden in May. All the life of this woman, their mother, circling out into the world she was never quite a part of, circling while that neon disc of a sun hangs red in the sky.

‘Where are you going off to, Miss?’ Fran was going up the stairs after Laura. ‘Come back down now.’

But Laura wouldn’t come back down. She wouldn’t sit and listen to the singing echo. When Fran caught up with Laura she was sitting against her bed, the photograph of the woman who wasn’t her mother pressed between her palms.

*

Letters felt-tipped on bright triangles spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY had been strung across the windows of the house opposite. Balloons, ribbon-tied to the front gate, bumped softly. The little girl tugged at one and flung it back, ducking from the man coming out to fetch her. He scooped her up as though she were a puppy, ignoring her flailing arms. It was Sunday and the clocks had gone back the night before. The last time the clocks went back a woman came clattering her suitcase along the uneven pavement and stopped outside where Laura and Theo’s father was waiting. Laura had come down the stairs – no one ever came to the house. The woman put her hand to Laura’s cheek, ‘So this must be little Laura,’ the woman said. Laura flinched – the woman looked as though she’d been pulled from a terrible fairy-tale. Her father had rubbed his head, nodded without looking at Laura and said that this was Fran.

‘You don’t remember me, do you little one?’ Fran had asked. Laura shook her head. ‘Well, we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other now.’

Laura’s father stepped up past her and Fran had followed, turning back to Laura, pulling her lips in, blinking, catching up with the polished, black-laced shoes. Laura kept her eyes on the door that had just been closed. She could still hear them though. The newness of Fran’s voice, clean and precise as a vinegar-polished knife; her father’s voice weighted, tired, far away. They were saying her mother’s name, repeating it like an incantation – and then her father’s voice had faded and it was just Fran: ‘That’s it, Myra…Can you sit up for me now, Myra?’ Loud and slow but kind.

Bring Laura and Theo up, where are they?

Laura had run down the stairs as soon as she’d heard her mother speak. Out the door and on to the street, she kicked up and crunched the leaves. That felt better. She paused, watching as children gathered outside the house opposite. Herded to the birthday girl’s door by their parents, ribbon-tied presents in their hands. Suddenly shy before entering the party, they checked the stern encouragement of the grown up faces behind them. The birthday girl’s face was red from laughing or crying – Laura couldn’t tell which, only that it was screwed up. Her father pulled her back but still her hands snatched the air and her tight face cracked into the shape of a sob. But there was no sound other than the chatter of parents and the next arrivals crunching over the leaves. Someone inside was stopping and starting a recorded voice brightly explaining the rules of a party game. Laura wandered into the middle of the road. The birthday girl was trying to wrestle a shiny blue box out of the smallest guest’s arms. One of the parents caught Laura’s eye, smiled. Laura ducked her head and shuffled back inside, up passed her mother’s room and into the study that was only just beginning to house the off-cuts of all the lives and selves it seemed their mother might still live and be.

‘Theo?’

‘I’m hiding.’

‘Okay….Theo?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I hide too?’

She’d never asked before, just opened the cupboard and told him to budge up like the older kids told her on the bench in the school dining room. They could hear their mother calling their names but from the cupboard her voice lost its reality, it was a voice heard by dreamers who can’t move or respond. If they stayed in the cupboard long enough then everything would go back to being just like it was before – or just like how it was meant to have been before. But they must have come out too soon because when Laura climbed on to the desk she saw her father and Fran helping their mother into the car.

Laura, Theo…

Theo pushed the cupboard open, looking up at his sister to check she’d had the same dream. The door to their parents’ room was open, the bed empty and roughly remade, the glass of ice cubes melting, the water crackers on a saucer.

*

It was getting dark when the remains of the birthday party began shifting back the way it had come, cars pulling off, hands waving, tantrums brewing. One of the balloons bobbed up and up.

That last Sunday the clocks went back Fran took glue and glitter out of her bag and helped Laura and Theo make cards to take to the hospital but when they got there a nurse said Mr Marsh should come with her and showed Laura and Theo to a little room with no windows where another nurse was writing at a desk. Fran, in a way that would become familiar, looked skyward to consult her dear Myra. No mention was made of what had happened and Laura and Theo learnt not to ask. They sat there for an hour and before their father appeared and said it was time to go. Theo kept asking where until their father snapped that it was a surprise. Laura would have to make a card and a present. As they passed the nurses station a hunched man with red swollen eyes and no smile looked at them and opened his mouth to speak but their father shook his head, mumbling I think you’ve done enough and rushed Laura and Theo out the double doors to the lift.

*

The restaurant was empty except for two couples with toddlers in high chairs and an elderly man tucking his napkin into his shirt, tapping his knife against his side plate. Laura set to work on the colouring-in booklet the waiter had brought, looking over at Theo, his fist round a yellow crayon, and then up at their father holding his breath as Theo went over the outline of a clown again. She tried to catch her father’s eye, make sure he’d seen that she hadn’t once gone over the lines but he was putting his hand up at the waiter, raising his eyebrows, asking Laura and Theo if they’d decided what to have. The elderly man banged the knife he had been tapping and everyone except the waiter looked up.

‘Laura, come on, choose or I’ll choose for you.’

Laura shook her head and folded the picture of the balloons she’d coloured in half, writing HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the inside.