Listening to the Living

Swimming to the surface - there's light up there. Dazzling swirling pools of light and dark shapes above but everything's soft and blurry making me dizzy and I can't tell which way is up... A double somersault through water but not water air but not air - the soft drag on my skin like the look of fog floating above the river but not cold like the feel of it. A thrumming humming sound like Princess' purr in my ear on my pillow. I feel the curve of my backbone as I fly over the vault - turning over and over in slow motion unfolding like a sheet blown in the wind - straightening out like a pencil - arms stretched - toes pointed - the sparkle of blue sequins gliding and tumbling towards the shifting flashing light.

I have tried to get through to them really I have but so far it's been impossible. If I could, I'd shake them both! Take last week for example, when Dad arrived home Pissed-As-A-Rat on the last train from London and slept in his car at the station. If that had happened even a couple of weeks ago Mum would have been INCANDESCENT but I don't think she even noticed he didn't come home from work - just took her sleeping pills and out like a light. And when she found him in the morning drinking his coffee on deck looking grim and unshaven like someone who had spent the night in a doorway she didn't say a blessed thing. She just went into the bathroom and took the pills that help her get through the day. Looking at her reflection I was shocked at the difference ten days had made. Her eyes were huge but empty her hair tangled nails bitten and flaky with two-week old polish. She looked as if she'd survived an Earthquake or a Famine. I had never seen her like that in the WHOLE OF MY LIFE. My Mum was not the kind of mother who turned up at school in an old tracksuit, grubby trainers and hair that needed washing. This was because she didn't own any old tracksuits or grubby trainers and washed her hair every day.

My mother doesn't keep anything old. If it's a little bit old and basically still okay she gives it to someone Needy (which means someone we know who is poorer than us) or to Charity (which means someone we don't know who is poorer than us) and if it is just plain old she throws it away. Anything she wanted to keep (but didn't have room for when we moved to live on the houseboat) like mementoes and photo albums disappeared to Wiltshire to be stored in Grandma Rosa's Back Room. My Dad would say that there were whole skips dotted about Buckinghamshire stuffed with perfectly good items she'd ditched. Of course all this was before my accident.

Now it's not like they argue twenty-four hours a day or anything. It's way worse than that.

The other night on her way to bed Mum put her head round Dad's study door to say Goodnight and Dad looked up from his laptop where he was supposedly working on the Hay Fever Ad and said Goodnight back but really he was googling to see if anything new had popped up about me or my accident but there wasn't anything so he half-closed the lid of his laptop so that the words 'gymnast tragedy' underlined in blue didn't catch her eye.

After she'd gone my Dad stared at the closed door. Then he put his head in his hands. He doesn't know what to do and I'm not surprised - when it comes to my mother I wouldn't know what to do about her either. She gets a particular look on her face which I've always thought could turn some unsuspecting person to salt and she can bury emotional stuff so deep inside her digging for it would get you to Australia no problem.

Once when Dad was driving me to primary school in the dead of winter we skidded and nearly hit a bus. I said Whoah and Dad said Black Ice - Very Dangerous because it's practically Invisible - which occurs when rain freezes as it hits the road. Here's what I think. I think they want to talk to each other but the words freeze on their lips before they reach the open air.

He sighed and opened up the laptop and clicked on the Megan Armitage RIP Facebook Page that Sarah set up in the days after my death. He never comments or likes anything but he reads what my friends are doing and thinking and it makes him feel less lonely. Jessica Matthews had written that she couldn't stop thinking about me with lots of broken heart and crying face emojis. This made him feel very emotional. Of course if he knew that Jessica Matthews had basically stolen my best friend Sarah as well as my potential boyfriend he might feel differently about it but he doesn't and I can't tell him.

Two rooms away which on a boat isn't very far but may as well have been another continent Mum leaned against her door relieved that she'd got through another day without a conversation about... Well about anything. I say her door but actually it's mine - or would be mine if I hadn't had the accident and royally screwed everything up. She's moved out of their room into my room and spends the nights not sleeping under my striped duvet while my father spends the nights not sleeping in their big double bed on the other side of the wall - assuming he's not passed out in his car. My mother not sleeping is partly because she either doesn't sleep at all or can't wake up. Most nights are No-Sleep-At-All Nights.

Sometimes that's because Princess spends the whole night kneading. First the pillow. Then the duvet. Then my mother's shoulders. That's usually when my mother gets up and puts her out on deck. Princess isn't used to being outside in the middle of the night so if that happens she goes round and round my mother's flowerpots miaowing pitifully.

My mother is fond of saying that it's in a cat's nature to spend all night outside hunting but Princess is not like other cats. It's not in her nature. One because she sleeps on my pillow all night and on the roof all day and has never shown any inclination to go outside except to lie in the sun or do something in her litter tray and Two because she has soft pink paws that she would never dream of getting dirty. And keeping your paws clean is virtually impossible if you live on a boat and only have a riverbank smack up against your house.

My father not sleeping is usually because he can sense my mother awake on the other side of the wall. First he puts his hand flat on the wall between them hoping she might feel his presence and then he makes his fist into a knocking shape but doesn't knock. If he hears my mother stomp out of my room and put Princess outside, he knows for sure that my mother is awake but still he doesn't knock on the wall. Eventually he can't stand the miaowing and gets up and lets Princess in. She weaves around his ankles and jumps up onto the white armchair she's not allowed in and curls up in a neat pie shape and goes to sleep.

But this time it was different.

My mother went over to Princess curled up on what used to be my pillow and picked her up. She buried her face into Princess and all I could see was her chestnut-coloured topknot and her long pale neck.

Stupid Cat said my mother and her voice was muffled by fur. But not so muffled that I couldn't hear the quiet anger in her voice. Why have I been left with just you? Princess wriggled and planted her paws on my mother's shoulder obviously offended because she's not stupid at all. My mother didn't say anything else and I was aware of a strange noise that I hadn't heard before. An awful sound. A cross between a choke and a howl. It was a few seconds before I realised that my mother's shoulders were shaking and that the terrible sound was her.

I have to explain that my mother doesn't cry. Since I died as far as I'm aware she's only cried once and that was the morning before my funeral and it was something to do with Grandma Louise and parking the car and the 'fucking flowers' her words not mine. They kept arriving at the boat and she had nowhere to put them and it made her so angry she chucked them all overboard and they floated away over the weir and downriver. she didn't cry at the funeral.

And here we were and my mother was crying - like really crying and not only was it worse than anything I could have imagined but I could do Nothing about it ... Nada a big fat Zero. And I felt all the frustration of the past couple of weeks build in my chest - swirling and thickening like steam in a test tube. I felt the pressure mounting.

Princess didn't like this turn of events either. Not one bit. Being trapped in the arms of a weeping woman would probably rate about as enjoyable for a cat like Princess as spending a night on deck in a thunderstorm. She wriggled further up my mother's chest and her face appeared up by her shoulder. She looked straight up at me. I stared back and narrowed my eyes. Straightaway the black pupil in the very centre of her round blue eyes shrunk to a chink. I opened my eyes wide and squeezed them into slits again. Princess copied every movement. I watched her eyes growing and shrinking like water.

Chemistry: 'Distillation is a widely used method for separating mixtures based on differences in the conditions required to change the phase of components of the mixture'.

Concentrating with every fibre of my being - whatever my being is - I try to distil my feelings - frustration anger helplessness into something tangible. Something that might have a name or even just a shape. Princess' eyes glowed with an intensity that washed through me. As I concentrated the thing inside turned soft and warm like gold caramel and time slowed and melted together. Then I saw it: a thin fragile line of something travel through the air between us like a wisp of smoke moving on an invisible breeze. I felt dizzy. Sick. Like I was going to throw up.

Suddenly with an angry miaow Princess shot out of my mother's arms and leaped to the furthest corner of the bed.

My mother looked up like she had no idea where she was or why she was crying. She stared at the cat cowering in the corner glaring at her. Oh Princess I'm sorry said my mother and she sounded surprised. Like she'd just realised where she was. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry she said again and again.

I wasn't sorry though. Because I'd just discovered that I don't have to be alone.