Memorial

Memorial

She looked around the room and realised with a shock how separate their worlds had been. She knew no one. Apart from George of course.

“We were friends.” The words felt like dry sand, gritty in her mouth.

“Really? I thought I knew all Beck’s friends.”

Never Beck, Grace thought. Rebecca. A name with corners. Who was this thin woman, with the perfectly applied lip gloss, claiming ownership with a diminutive?

“Colleagues,” Grace said, keeping her voice flat. “Rebecca and I shared an office.”

“Oh, work.” The woman dismissed it, filing it under unimportant utilities.

She spotted George shrunk into the corner. He looked ill and fragile, barely registering the murmur of condolences swirling around him. At some point she would speak to him. Just not yet.

…

Of course it hadn't been work. It was something else entirely. It was sharing books over morning tea, tennis under the hum of evening floodlights, lunches stolen from the calendar that drifted into late-night whiskey, amber and sharp in the throat. Then a sudden, predatory passion that had caught them both off guard and off balance.

When she finally told Rebecca, the words did not come out as a speech. They came in a tumbling, breathless spill, a dam breaking, unseemly in its lack of control.

"It’s your hair, I know it sounds silly,” she’d said, her voice too loud, too naked in the quiet room. "But that long fringe, like a dark verandah over one green eye, and it’s citrusy scent, and the way you drink coffee, waiting for it to cool, stirring it slowly like, like it’s a cauldron, the way you rise up on your toes to serve a tennis ball, totally fierce, and your mind, Rebecca, and the, the amazing, terrible things you say... I love all of it. The lines of you. I’m so sorry.”

She snapped her mouth shut, horrified by the raw, unpolished shape of her confession. In the painful pause that followed, she waited, wondering if Rebecca would meet her with words of equal, terrifying value.

When Rebecca finally spoke, the words were anything but expected. “You, my love, you are Gretchen made whole…which means, I suppose I am some sort of Faust.” Rebecca’s expression shifted, softening, before she pulled Grace close and kissed her ferociously. Holding her tightly, she whispered against Grace’s ear, “You angel, fear it not!” and kissed her again, gently.

It was enough.

Rebecca possessed an expensive kind of grace. In summer, she was all sharp lines in white denim and starched shirts. In winter, she wrapped herself in a dead animal— a fur cowl inherited from a grandmother who had likely known how to handle men and money. She wore it like body armour against the cold, looking like a monochrome film star from an era when women were dangerous.

“Cheetah alone does not an identity make,” Rebecca would say. Four years of an English degree, meant Rebecca had an endless supply of aphorisms. “You need at least a dash of Dior to ground the chaos.”

She would wear the fur indoors, in the warm apartment they rented with cash, high above the city mayhem. A prop for their private theatre.

“For extra frisson,” she’d say, mangling the French on purpose, stretching it into friz-eon.

“Mais oui, ma folle, ma femme crazee,” Grace would laugh, drawing on distant memories of third form French. Then Rebecca would pull her in, enfolding themselves both in the heavy, scented fur until the laughter quieted and everything else fell away.

…

Grace sipped her wine, heedless of the conversations around her.

“Poor George. He’s beyond grief.”

The stranger’s voice dragged her back into the room, with its smell of lilies and damp coats.

“ Many of us are beyond grief, ” Grace said hoarsely, perhaps a little too quickly. Her throat felt lined with ash. “She was extraordinary. An extraordinary human being.”

The other woman gave her a long, calculating look, weighing the currency of Grace’s sorrow. “Will we ever know why she …” The sentence died, but the question remained, a lingering smoke in the air.

…

Guilt, Grace discovered, was like an old bruise—faded to an ugly yellow-green, but easily located in the dark, aching under the slightest pressure of memory.

She remembered the winter weeks when Rebecca had gone quiet, retreating into the interior of her own mind. She had looked brittle then. If you touched her, you felt the corners—edges that had grown just a little too sharp.

“Talk to me,” Grace had begged, hating the thin, pleading sound of her own voice.“Please. Let me help.” They were picnicking on the lounge floor.

“Oh, Gretchen, my love .” Rebecca plucked at the blanket. “Who can speak patience to that grief which they themselves… and so bloody on.”

Then came the laugh—derisive, like the dry rustling of autumn leaves. Rebecca’s literary cadences were an impenetrable thicket. Grace stood on the outside, scratched and bleeding, and helpless.

…

“ I don ’t know, ” Grace said aloud to the stranger, turning away quickly. She should never have come to this house of correct mourning.

She looked down at her glass, watching the dark liquid tilt against the crystal. Had she been too needy? Too insistent. Too desperate.

"How long do we stay up here?" she had asked—more than once, looking down at the city sixteen floors below. "When does this stop being a rehearsal?"

“Not yet, Gracie. George is… he’s the ground, Gracie. If… when …when I tell him, everything will start to tilt, and I know we will all lose balance. I don’t have the strength yet, my tormented Gretchen." Rebecca's excuses were always couched in a fragile necessity, which made them impossible to fight. And then she would dance across the floor, seizing Grace's hand to cocoon them both in the warm 1940s fur—always a beautiful, shifting target.

“Oh,Grace, I am giddy. Expectation whirls me round.”

Swept up in the intoxicating slipstream of Rebecca's excitement, they would spin around the room, a blur of laughter and fur, moving too fast to think—leaving Grace in the detritus of a question she no longer knew how to ask, with absolutely no idea of what she should say next.

…

“Grace. Thank you... thank you for being here.”

George was there, appearing like a small, grey ghost at her elbow. He looked diminished by her sudden absence.

“George, I …”

“Look here.” He unfurled his arms, presenting a heavy bundle of spotted fur. “I have this.”

Grace’s breath caught. “Oh God, she loved that cowl.”

George buried his face into the fur, a desperate, animal gesture that made Grace want to look away. “You can still smell her perfume.”

Dior, Grace thought. The expensive scent of secrets. Around them, the polite murmur of departing guests was a low hum, the sound of a machine winding down.

He proffered the cowl to Grace, holding it out like a trophy from a war they had both lost.

“Take it. Please. Rebecca would want you to have it — I want you to have it.”

The fur was warm from his hands, heavy and shockingly intimate.

George looked at her, his eyes blurry and bright all at once, searching the lines of her face for something he could recognise.

“Loving her, as we did.”