The House of Memories

The House of Memories by Monica McInerney Page A

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Authors: Monica McInerney
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women
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the fourth time.
    Her phone rang. It was her on-again, off-again boyfriend. They spoke. Beside her, Felix tugged at her skirt and tried to climb up the fence again. Still on the phone, Jess lifted Felix up, balanced his feet on the top of the fence and started walking. Felix laughed. She kept talking.
    They were nearly at the end of the fence, two feet away at the most, when an insect flew at Jess’s face. A bee, a wasp, she couldn’t remember. She reacted, jumping back. She let go of Felix. Not her phone, but Felix. Felix fell. Not toward Jess. Not toward the playground. To the other side, the nature reserve, where there were tree roots, clods of earth and a large rock, hidden by leaves.
    His head hit the rock at full impact.
    He didn’t suffer, Aidan told me, again and again. “It was instant, Ella. He died instantly.”
    He was falling while I was lying on a massage table, drifting to sounds of ocean music, inhaling lavender oil and thinking to myself that this was perhaps the closest I’d been to heaven. I was wrong. It was the closest I had ever been to hell.
    Jess climbed over the fence, held Felix, tried to resuscitate him, phoned for an ambulance, shouted until passersby and other parents came to her. I know the details but I can’t repeat them again, because all I see are strangers, dozens of strangers, leaning over my son’s body, and it is too late, they are too late, and I am not there.
    I wasn’t there when Jess called my mobile number, three times, hysterical.
    I wasn’t there when she rang Aidan’s mobile, interrupted his meeting and told him what had happened.
    I wasn’t there when Aidan arrived at the playground at the same time as the ambulance.
    I wasn’t in the back of the ambulance when they screamed through the city streets, the paramedics still working on my son’s body.
    I wasn’t there until my son had been dead for nearly an hour.
    I can’t say what Felix looked like when I finally saw him. I don’t remember what he looked like. All I remember is holding him. Holding him, tight, tightly. Aidan held me, holding Felix. The three of us. But it was now just the two of us.
    I didn’t see Jess. She was there at the hospital with Mum and Walter but I didn’t see her or talk to her. I didn’t blame her. Not then. I hadn’t heard the whole story by then.
    I heard it the next day.
    That’s when I started blaming her.
    I haven’t stopped.

SEVEN
    L ucas’s house suddenly felt too quiet.
    Keep busy.
    I’d already tidied the kitchen. I knew from experience not to dare tidy Lucas’s withdrawing room too much, or any of the tutors’ rooms at all. I’d already unpacked. Already tidied my own room.
    Think of something else. Observe. Distract.
    I was in London. Staying with Lucas. Lucas had offered me a job.
    Think about that.
    When Lucas had said that he needed my help, I’d assumed he meant as a housekeeper. He knew I’d enjoyed doing the job in the past. I think he also knew I wanted to be as physically busy as possible. That I needed to be as busy as possible.
    “Let me give you a bit of background first, Ella,” he’d said the night before. He had four students living with him and working as his tutors at the moment, he told me. One woman, three men.
    “And there the problem lies,” he said. “I don’t know which one it is.”
    I was confused. “Which one?”
    He turned and checked the door was shut. It was. “You know, Ella, that my client list has changed? Gone up a gear, in modern terms?”
    I nodded. It had started to happen when I was staying with him three years earlier. Originally, his tutors had spent ninety percent of their time coaching “normal” kids—the children of eager, middle-class parents who needed private tuition on top of the generally good education they got at school. The other ten percent had been anything but normal: the children of London’s super-rich—the millionaire executives, rock stars, film actors, Russian oligarchs. . . . Lucas had

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