A Pale View of Hills

“I don’t enjoy deceiving people.” Perhaps I snapped a little, for Niki looked startled.

“No, I suppose not,” she said, lamely.

It rained throughout that night, and the next day — the fourth day of Nik’s stay — it was still raining steadily.

‘Do you mind if I change moms tonight?” Niki said. “I could use the spare bedroom. We were in the kitchen, - washing the dishes after breakfast.

“The spare bedroom?” I laughed a little. ‘They’re all spare bedrooms now. No, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t sleep in the spare room. Have you taken a dislike to your old mom?”

“I feel a bit odd sleeping there.’

“How unkind, Niki. I hoped you’d still feel it was your room.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, hurriedly. “Its not that I don’t like it.” She fell silent, wiping some knives with a tea-towel. Finally she said: ‘It’s that other room. Her room. It gives me an odd feeling, that room being right opposite.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at her sternly.

“Well, I can’t help it, Mother. I just feel strange thinking about that room being right opposite.”

“Take the spare room by all means,” I said, coldly. “But you’ll need to make up the bed in there.”

Although I had made a show of being upset by Niki’s request to change rooms, I had no wish to make it difficult for her to do so. For I too had experienced a disturbing feeling about room opposite. In many ways, that room is the most pleasant in the house, with a splendid view across the orchard. But it had been Keiko’s fanatically guarded domain for so long, a strange spell seemed to linger there even now, six years after she had left it — a spell that had grown all the stronger now that Keiko was dead.

For the two or three ears before she finally left us, Keiko had retreated into t bedroom, shutting us out of her life. She rarely came out, although I would sometimes hear her moving around the house after we had all gone to bed. I surmised that she spent her time reading magazines and listening to her radio. She had no friends, and the rest of us were forbidden entry into-her room. At mealtimes I would leave her plate in the kitchen and she would come down to get it, then shut herself in again. The room, I realized, was in a terrible condition. An odour of stale perfume and dirty linen came from within, and on the occasions .1 had glimpsed inside, I had seen countless glossy magazines lying on the floor amidst heaps of clothes. I had to coax her to put out her laundry, and in this at least we reached an understanding: every few weeks I would find a bag of washing outside her door, which I would wash and return. In the end, the rest of us grew used to her ways, and when by some impulse Keiko ventured down into our living room, we would all feel a great tension. Invariably, these excursions would end with her fighting, with Niki or with my husband, and then she would be back in her room.

I never saw Keiko’s room in Manchester, the room in which she died. It may seem morbid of a mother to have such thoughts, but on hearing of her suicide, the first thought that ran through my mind — before I registered even the shock — was to wonder how long she had been there like that before they had found her. She had lived amidst her own family without being seen for days on end; little hope she would be discovered quickly in a strange city where no one knew her. Later, the coroner said she had been there ”for several days”. It was the landlady who had opened the door, thinking Keiko had left without paying the rent.

I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture — of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has-long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

“I’ll probably be warmer in the spare room anyhow,” Niki said.

“If you’re cold at night, Niki, you can simply turn up the heating.”

“I suppose so.” She gave a sigh. “I haven’t slept very well lately. I think I’m getting bad dreams, but I can never remember them properly once I wake up.”

“I had a dream last night,” I said.

“I think it might be to do with the quiet. I’m not used to it being so quiet at night.”

“1 dreamt about that little girl. The one we were watching yesterday. The little girl in the park.”

“1 can sleep right through traffic, but I’ve forgotten what it’s like, sleeping in the quiet.” Niki shrugged and dropped some cutlery into the drawer. “Perhaps I’ll sleep better in the spare room.”

The fact that I mentioned my dream to Niki, that first time I had it, indicates perhaps that I had doubts even then as to its innocence. I must have suspected from the start — without fully knowing why — that the dream had to do not so much with the little girl we had watched, but with my having remembered Sachiko two days previously.

Chapter Four