Keep This One

“Don’t blow yet,” Mum says. “Your uncle isn’t ready.”

I am seven. One of the candles has burnt almost to the icing.

Behind the camera, my uncle tells me to look at him.

We found the tape while looking for photographs for his funeral. Mum wanted something cheerful for the order of service.

The family videos were downstairs. This one was in his bedside cabinet beneath several films with naked women on their sleeves. Its plastic case had split along the hinge. He had repaired it with clear tape.

ANYA. SEVENTH BIRTHDAY. KEEP THIS ONE.

Mum’s handwriting. Three underlines.

I brought it home because it had my name on it.

“Good thing you found that,” she said. “I thought we’d lost it.”

On the television, Dad is cutting the cake. Someone has given me the icing flower. I hold it up for the camera.

A broad stripe tears through the picture. The birthday chatter cuts off halfway through Dad saying my name.

The garden disappears.

Now the camera is moving down a passage. Carpet, a slipper, the underside of someone’s wrist. A door opens.

“Can she hear us?”

“Shut the door first,” Mum says.

Her voice is different. Lower.

The camera lifts past her face. Her hair is short now, and glasses hang from a cord around her neck.

Someone has recorded over my birthday.

I pause it.

Behind Mum is the yellow wallpaper from the spare room, the little flowers with raised edges. I used to pick them off with my thumbnail.

I press play.

My uncle puts the camera on the chest of drawers.

Half the bed. The bedside table. The wardrobe mirror. In the reflection, the open doorway.

A woman is lying on the bed in a green dress.

My green dress.

I bought it with my first proper pay. Twenty-four years old and finally able to afford something that didn’t arrive in a bag from a cousin.

There was a loose thread at the sleeve. I meant to fix it.

“Have you turned it off?” Mum asks.

“Yes.”

She goes out.

My uncle’s hand comes back into the picture. He turns the camera until the pillow comes into view, then moves a bottle of hand cream out of the way.

His breathing is very close to the microphone.

He makes one smaller adjustment.

Then he leaves.

It was his birthday dinner.

I remember that much. Sixty. Mum made a cake shaped like a cricket bat, and my aunt said it looked like something she couldn’t possibly mention in front of her brother.

He filmed the cake. The speeches. Me washing up.

He had been using that camcorder long after everyone else started filming things on their phones.

“Still works,” he used to say.

On the bed, I try to lift my head.

A man appears in the doorway.

I recognise him in the ordinary, useless way you recognise someone from a supermarket you no longer use. A face that belongs somewhere.

He has a navy jumper folded over his arm.

My aunt takes it.

“Not on there. The cat sleeps on that.”

He thanks her.

Mum takes two foil packets from her cardigan pocket and puts them on the bedside table.

“Make sure you use these.”

He picks them up.

In the mirror, Mum is watching me.

“She’s had a bit much.”

I pause the tape again.

The cat died the following winter.

I remember the vet’s invoice. I remember Mum saying it cost more to put the cat to sleep than she’d paid for her first car.

I cannot remember this man entering the room.

My blackouts were a family concern.

I worked too hard. I didn’t eat before drinking. I needed to learn my limits.

Mum worried.

My aunt worried more loudly.

Sometimes I woke upstairs with a bowl beside the bed. Sometimes at home with Mum on the sofa, having stayed to make sure I was all right.

Once I found bruises on my upper arms.

“You were determined to go downstairs,” she told me. “Your uncle had to catch you.”

I apologised to him.

He said to forget it.

For Christmas, my aunt gave me a water bottle marked with hourly targets.

I had stopped telling Mum when something went well. She always found something to worry about. But those mornings, when I couldn’t account for myself, she would sit beside me for hours.

The man sits on the edge of the bed.

“Girl?”

My hand moves towards him. I seem to be trying to give him something, but there is nothing in it.

Mum bends over me. Her earrings swing forwards, the little gold leaves I bought her.

“Have a rest, sweetheart.”

He looks up at her.

“You said she’d be all right.”

“She is.”

My aunt opens her handbag. She takes out an envelope, lifts the flap with one finger and looks inside. Then she puts it away.

I watch that finger.

A plaster around the knuckle.

She had cut herself opening a tin of peaches. I remember her holding it up over dinner, accusing the tin of attempted murder.

“How old did you say?” the man asks.

“Twenty-four.”

“She looks different from the photograph.”

“Her hair,” my aunt says. “She’s had it cut.”

Mum looks towards the camera.

I stop breathing.

She reaches past it for the hand cream, squeezes some onto her wrist and rubs it in.

My aunt asks the man whether his friend is still interested.

He glances at me.

“Probably.”

“Give him my number, then.”

The women move towards the door. Mum catches my aunt’s arm.

“You’re sure she won’t remember?”

My aunt shakes her head.

Mum looks back at me.

Then she follows my aunt onto the landing and catches the door before it closes.

“Quietly.”

I get as far as the kitchen sink.

Nothing comes up.

Behind me, the television keeps playing.

A low voice. The bed moves.

I turn the tap on.

Then I turn it off because I cannot hear.

When I return, the man is standing beside the bed. His body blocks the camera’s view of me.

He says something quietly.

“No,” I answer. “I’m going to be sick.”

He looks towards the door.

There is a knock.

My whole body lifts towards that sound.

On the tape, Mum asks, “Everything all right?”

He waits.

“Yes.”

She does not open the door.

A cup rattles against a saucer on the landing. My aunt says something about taking it downstairs before it marks the wood.

They are right outside.

In the mirror I can see the light beneath the door, interrupted where someone is standing.

“Mum.”

My voice is small but clear.

The man turns back towards the bed.

“Mum.”

A floorboard sounds in the passage.

I know that board. You step over it if you don’t want to wake anyone.

The shadow stays beneath the door.

I had thought there were good evenings and bad evenings.

Good evenings were dinner, cards, taking leftovers home in containers Mum wanted back.

Bad evenings were the ones I ruined.

I remember sitting at her kitchen table one morning, unable to stop crying. There was a sore place inside my cheek. I kept touching it with my tongue.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Mum stood behind my chair and brushed my hair.

“You need to start looking after yourself.”

My aunt was doing the crossword.

“Your mother won’t always be here to pick up the pieces.”

I promised I would do better.

Mum held my hair above a knot so the brush wouldn’t pull.

The man reaches towards the pillow.

His watch catches the light.

A square face. A metal bracelet with one loose link.

My thumb finds the pause button.

He stays there, bent over me.

I look down at the cassette case. At the strip of tape repairing its hinge. The label left untouched.

All those years I thought the recording was lost, he could have reached it without getting out of bed.

I put the case on the floor.

I press play.

“Mum.”

The shadow beneath the door shifts.

Then her voice, close to the wood.

“Go to sleep, sweetheart.”

My hand stops moving.

I remember that.

Not everything. Not the whole night.

The relief.

I had heard her voice and stopped trying so hard.

The man bends lower. His watch passes beside my face.

I remember the loose link catching my hair.

I remember trying to lift my head with his wrist so it would stop pulling.

He was on top of me. Beyond his shoulder was a little brown mark on the ceiling, and I kept looking at it while I waited for Mum to open the door.

I reach for the remote and hold down fast-forward.

The counter climbs. Figures cross the room in broken strips of colour.

When I release the button, my uncle is there. The bed behind him is empty. He looks straight into the lens and reaches past it.

The picture tears.

Sunlight. The garden. My seventh birthday again.

Cake on my plate. A gap between my front teeth.

I have broken the icing flower and I am crying because nobody can put it back together.

Mum comes into the picture and kneels beside my chair.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says. “Why didn’t you call me?”

P.S. This did not happen to me. But that does not mean the story is not true. Make of that what you will.