Two Years

London, 2017

The email looked ominous the moment it dropped into my inbox. It stood, starkly bold, at the top of the list. From: Jade Morris. Subject: An update. It was the middle of the night over in New Zealand and there was no reason for Jade to email me now unless she had bad news.

I stared out the window. I had a good view from where I was up on the fourth floor. A wintery sky hung over London. My eyes flitted over the innumerable roofs and chimneys, the brick walls and windows, the canal running below. It was a Sunday afternoon and crowds of people were out walking or jogging along the towpath.

I turned back to my laptop and opened the email.

Hi Amy,

It’s happened. Liz passed away a few hours ago. I was there at the hospice, luckily. I’ve practically been living there.

I’m all over the place at the moment, so sorry this is going to be a short message. I did want to say, though, thank you so much for all your support over the past year. It’s meant a lot to me and I know a lot to Liz as well. She really appreciated talking to you on Skype.

I’ll send you a longer email in the next few days.

Jade x

I sat back in my seat. Liz was gone. I wasn’t sure what I felt. I knew I must be sad on some level, but sometimes I had a delayed reaction to things. It could take hours or even days before an emotion hit me.

Mainly I was worried about Jade. Liz’s death wasn’t unexpected – she’d been ill with cancer for the past year. But it was still going to be hard on Jade. She’d lost her sister years ago. Now she’d lost her mother.

I wrote a reply to her, then read through it, deleted it and wrote it again from scratch. Then I edited it some more. It was so hard to know what to say in these situations. Finally I pressed ‘send’.

Hi Jade,

I’m so very sorry to hear this news. How are you coping? I wish I was over there in Christchurch to give you a big hug. As I can’t be there, I’m sending as much love as I can from afar.

Liz was an amazing woman. She meant a lot to me too. I’ll always remember her kindness to me, especially back in the 80s when I pretty much moved into your house.

Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Anything at all. We could catch up on Skype soon, if you like. Just let me know.

Love,

Amy

I read through my email again and immediately disliked it. My words were bland and trite. I seemed to be following a formula rather than saying anything genuine. But I’d sent the email now and there was no point analysing it any further.

I walked over to the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea, then returned to the laptop and stared at the screen. I had to work. I had to finish a piece of consumer research by tomorrow. But I was hardly in the mood. Some people liked brand x. Other people preferred brand y. It all seemed so trivial when someone had died.

I opened the document I’d been working on and gazed at the black characters on the white page. The page gazed back at me. I peered out the window, then looked back at the screen. I pressed the space bar a few times.

On a whim, I opened Google Maps and searched for Christchurch, New Zealand. I zoomed deeper into the map and eventually switched to Street View. I began navigating the streets of Avonhead, the suburb where I’d grown up. I could see the bungalows, gardens, driveways, grass verges and the vast sky that always arcs over the city. A few things seemed to have changed, but most of it looked the same. The experience was slightly eerie. I hadn’t been back to Christchurch for decades, and yet here I was traversing the old streets. I wondered why I hadn’t thought to do this before.

Eventually I turned into Longfield Street. And finally I stopped outside my old home, the place where I’d lived until the age of sixteen. The house looked the same as I remembered it – red brick, with a white front door. The garden was largely the same as well, although the trees were taller and the bushes had been allowed to grow out. I felt uneasy. Traces of old teenage emotions bubbled inside me. The feelings were still there…

I got up from the table, wandered into the kitchen and took a half-empty bottle of wine from the fridge. I went to open it, then paused and glanced at the clock on the cooker. It was nearly three – not too early, surely. I poured myself a glass and headed back to the laptop. Now I opened a new browser tab and started googling kids I’d known at high school and even primary school. I’d tried this before occasionally, but I made a more concerted effort this time. I managed to track down a few people. Claire Barnet was a lawyer who still lived in Christchurch. Todd Carter was a TV presenter in Sydney. Joanne Price was now Joanne Kingly, and owned a cafe in Auckland.

I felt a little guilty viewing all this information about people I hadn’t seen in years. It was like I was spying on them, even though all the data was publicly available anyway.

After a while I searched for Jade Morris. There was no reason for me to do this as I already knew all about Jade’s life. I knew she lived in Christchurch, was married with kids, and was a jewellery designer. But I scanned through the search results anyway and clicked the link to her website. The site opened up and a large photo of Jade smiled back at me. I browsed through her jewellery catalogue, even though I’d seen it before. I liked her work. Many of the pieces included something typical of New Zealand, like a kōwhai flower motif or a fragment of pāua shell.

Eventually I googled Liz Morris. There weren’t any relevant results, but when I tried ‘Elizabeth Morris’ several links appeared. I clicked to view a few of her paintings, which were landscapes, but very abstract. At first they looked like nothing but random brushstrokes, but after a while you could make out hills, bays, rivers, mountains. There was an old review of one of Liz’s shows at an art gallery in Christchurch. And she cropped up in a few other articles. She was a respected, if minor, New Zealand painter and there was even a brief page about her in Wikipedia.

I’d finished my glass of wine now, so I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another. Next I searched on ‘skye morris christchurch new zealand’. When that returned nothing relevant, I tried ‘skye morris new zealand’. This still found nothing. But of course, I’d known that would happen. Skye had died before the World Wide Web had even been invented. There was nothing of her to be found on the internet. She didn’t have a Wikipedia page, and she never would. She hadn’t had a chance to do anything notable during her short stay on the planet. She’d been forgotten by most people.

I took a large gulp of wine, stood up and noticed the first faint trace of the alcohol in my system. I was warm and slightly light-headed. I couldn’t help remembering that the first time I’d ever got drunk had been with Skye. Not only with her but at her insistence.

I went to the window. The sun was already low. There were fewer people walking beside the canal now.

I shivered a little. I wished that my husband, Rob, and our boys were around. But they’d all gone to Rob’s parents in Shropshire and wouldn’t be back for a few days. I’d been intending to go with them, but then, frustratingly, I’d been swamped with work – yet again.

I took another swig of wine. The glass was empty now, so I refilled it. I drifted through the flat, first visiting Owen’s room and then Theo’s. I liked seeing all their toys, games and Lego stuffed onto their shelves. It reassured me. A sock lay on the floor in Theo’s room, so I picked it up and tidied it away.

I walked down the hallway, sipping wine. The flat was large by London standards. Rob and I were lucky we’d been able to buy it when we did. Prices in the area had doubled over the past ten years and there was no way we could have afforded it now.

I arrived at my and Rob’s bedroom and switched on the light. I lay on top of the bed, drank some more wine, then shut my eyes for a moment. I felt as though I was floating. So many memories flickered in my head. I kept thinking about Jade and Liz and Oberon and, most of all, Skye.

Once again, I recalled the last time I’d seen Skye. I’d replayed this scene in my mind so many times. It was night-time and we were in town, in the Square. She was walking away from me, escorted as always by that lanky figure. She looked back over her shoulder at me once, then turned away and continued walking off into the shadows.

I wanted to join her. I wanted to go with her. I still felt the pull, even now thirty years later. It was silly of me, ridiculous, but I still longed to follow her down, down into a dark world…