North
Summary: "Reading it seems strangely like an intrusion on her own grief. Like Kate might be here, might be trying to speak to her, but it's like she's underwater, it's distorted. She can't hear her, doesn't want to hear her, tempting as it is. She's too angry." After Kate's death, Caroline finds a collection of poetry, annotated in Kate's hand. The discovery leads her to contemplate the past and consider the future.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just borrowing them. All the poems referenced in this series are from Seamus Heaney's North (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) unless otherwise stated. No copyright infringement intended. I'm just riffing on some of its themes.
A/N I don't usually write long author's notes, I know they're annoying and self-important, bear with me or, feel free to skip it entirely, but I feel the need to explain where this is coming from.
So Kate is dead, and like many of you, I'm not happy about that. I don't think the wider implications of her death were at all thought through. However, I love Sally Wainwright from the bottom of my dark and twisty heart and I do think that she genuinely wanted to explore something quite important about the nature of grief in series 3. So this is my attempt at honouring and continuing with that theme, (mostly) staying with canon, while exploring the Caroline/Kate relationship and addressing some of the issues of the representation of gay women on television and film that I, as a gay woman, find more than a bit troubling.
I intend on this being quite a long series, but I'll see how it goes. Reviews are greatly appreciated,
Penny.
Chapter 1: Bone Dreams
Reading it seems strangely like an intrusion on her own grief. Like Kate might be here, might be trying to speak to her, but it's like she's underwater, it's distorted. She can't hear her, doesn't want to hear her, tempting as it is. She's too angry. And she's not so far gone as to think it's healthy to spend half the night talking to your dead wife. Still, she can't put it down, reads every poem, every one of Kate's annotations and notes on rhyme scheme as if she might read her back to life. It's complicated. Hieroglyphic in nature. Caroline doesn't pretend to understand it. Not a word of it. Still she keeps it close to her, always open to a dense page, full of Kate's close annotated script, laid open on their bed, next to the head of their finally, finally sleeping baby girl.
She runs her fingertips over the muted grey-green cover, traces the lettering. Seamus Heaney, North. She knows of the poet but not the poems:
Bone Dreams, Come to the Bower, Sunlight, Funeral Rites
She can't bear to even look at the last one.
She had found it two days after the accident. It was just lying there, abandoned, just poking out from under the bed. In the first moments of waking – before her brain caught up with her body, before it had time to register the cleaving emptiness of her chest, the watery nausea not quite settling in her stomach, just before she remembered that it should be hard to breathe – Caroline's first emotion had been a mild annoyance tinged with a kind of endeared exasperation. Kate could be messy and the best of times, and in the late stages of her pregnancy, she was finding it almost impossible to get comfortable or relaxed enough to sleep and had developed the habit of reading herself into unconsciousness. The books often ending up tangled at the bottom of the duvet, or on the floor.
She had called out to Kate. This early in the morning, the first rays of sunlight barely scratching at the window, she could only be in the en-suite. She had waited for her to appear in the doorway, got out of bed, groggily picked up the offending book, swore at the cold floor, even started to formulate a joke as she picked her way across the room to find her
Darling, it's one thing to share our bed with Proust in the original, but I really do draw the line at dead Irish writers...
Before she remembered. Before the sunlit absence of Kate crashed down around her. She was unhinged, unravelling, all over again. Unable to bear the weight of it. Falling. She still doesn't remember what happened next, where she went in her mind...only that William found her three hours later, still on her bathroom floor, still clinging desperately to a book she had never read.
It reminds her of some ancient palimpsest. Different coloured inks: reds, blues, black biro and pencil, overlaid in garish neon pink. Religious in nature. The Kate Codex. Years and years of notes, things she had no idea of. Things she could never have known, would never have thought to ask. Some faded from age, almost subsumed back into the thick satisfying paper. Others freshly imprinted, newly engraved. Evidence of learning, then teaching, then, finally, a sense of becoming, of a personal investment in its broad Irish rhythms. And here... perhaps that last morning...Perhaps the very last thing she wrote...
Underlined. Marked:
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal
and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant
carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move towards the passes.
And beside it, in elegant, florid parenthesis. One word. One name...
Caroline
She thinks she can hear her whispering it, near inaudible:
"Caroline"
Pleading. "Caroline..."
"Caroline. Please...talk to me..." tears in her voice. And Caroline, flashing with anger, thinks how can a dead woman cry?
She ignores it. Knows she can't be real. Not really. Checks on their sleeping child. Returns to Bone Dreams. Studies her name beside the poem. She can't decipher it. Can't fathom its meaning.
"Oh Caroline. I'm sorry...I'm so sorry..."
Kate's hands on her shoulders, stroking, offering comfort. The weight of her body pressed against her back. Her lips on her neck. And my God, it is so real. It feels so real. And she wants it. Wants her to be here so badly that she will deny everything she is, the scientist she has always been, just to live here, in this moment. Just one second. Just a second more...she bargains with herself. Leans into the phantom cocooning her. Breathes deeply. Shudders. Angrily wipes the tears from her face. Sighs. She might have been standing here in a dead woman's arms, for minutes, or hours. She can't bring herself to care. She reaches for Kate's arms. Pulls them around her. Buries her nose in her neck. God she can smell her. She breathes of it deeply.
"Please, tell me Kate. I don't understand. Tell me what it means."
She imagines Kate is smiling at her in that almost indulgent, almost unkind, almost exasperated way that she has. Had. Caroline can't even begin to get her tenses straight.
She feels Kate shrug, and tighten her arms around her. "It doesn't really mean anything. It's not a codex, Caroline. Not a problem or a puzzle to be solved...It just...the poem I mean...it just reminded me of you. Of us...together."
She almost understands. It is beyond words. Beyond language or understanding. The feeling of teasing kisses, breathtaking seductions, touching that precise, exact spot on her neck. A moan escapes her lips " A love nest?...in the grass? Really?"
"Yes...well...something like that..." Of course that's not what it means at all. And Kate, Kate is nothing but the memory of a chagrin smile against her neck.
It's not real. Just a memory. That's all. It's not real.
Caroline pulls away from the visitation. Intends on returning to her studies. Reaches for the book. Suddenly Kate is grabbing her wrists. Her grasp is painful, stronger than it ever was in life. Her voice is cold:
"Stop it. Stop it Caroline. I'm not there. They're just teaching notes. Thoughts. Scribbles. You won't find me there."
Caroline feels trapped. Pulls away. Tears at the invisible bonds of Kate's fingers at her wrists. She yells, her eyes raised to the ceiling of an empty room. She is losing her fucking mind:
" I know that! Don't you think I know that!"
At night, she tucks the book under her pillow. Kate's pillow really. She hasn't slept on her side of the bed since their wedding night. Caroline lays down. Closes her eyes. She thinks that she must have read it in one of John's novels, or seen it in some poxy Hollywood fabrication of what loss feels like: She'd thought that Kate's pillow, this side of the sheets, this side of the duvet, would smell of her. It doesn't. It smells clean. Maybe – if she's not imagining it – there might be a hint of her conditioner, an undercurrent of...something. But it isn't her. She isn't here. She's just gone. In this moment it utterly eludes her. A painful sob forces itself from her unwilling body, "How can you just be gone?" Caroline tries to control her grief, wraps her arms around her shuddering body, rocks forward, clasps her hands to her mouth, tries to bury it, or at least muffle the sound of her tearing herself apart. She doesn't want the boys to hear her. Doesn't want to wake the baby.
She's here again. A comforting hand caressing her ankle, moving up her leg to rest on her thigh.
"Caroline. I want you to name the baby...it's..it's been a week, our little girl, don't you think she needs a name?"
She does. She does. She has been thinking exactly that. Which is why this Kate thinks it too. She is Hallucinating. That has to be it. She doesn't believe in ghosts, and she's not imagining it ... not exactly.
But she is filled with rage. Rage that Kate left her, that she didn't fight harder, rage that she has to do this alone. None of this is fair. None of this is what she wanted. None of this is how it was supposed to be. She kicks away Kate's hand. Sits up, screams at an empty room:
"You have to be here! You have to be here to want things, Kate! And you aren't, so leave me alone! I can't. I can't DO this. Get OUT! Leave us ALONE!"
The baby is screaming. Really screaming. It's not a cry for food, or a nappy change, or wind, it's not even a cry for comfort and attention. She is scared. Caroline has terrified her new born daughter and in that moment she is terrified for her. Terrified for herself. She has to get out of this room. This has to stop. This has to end.
She picks up the baby, holds her close, rocks her, reels through every calming baby sound she knows. Promises herself that she will never let her daughter feel her fear, her anger like that again, not as long as she lives.
Kate is still there. Standing in the corner of their bedroom, smiling serenely. She can't look at her anymore. She turns away, reaches for the door handle. Turns it. Swings open the door, only to find William there, standing guard at the threshold.
"Mum." He almost looks, almost sounds relieved. "How are you...I mean...stupid question. Are you ok? I heard you. I could hear you...you know, shouting..."
William is staring at her, a concerned, sympathetic, deer in the headlights. Shit. Shit. Shit. He Knows. He Knows; standing there all this time, he must of heard her. She won't have it. Won't put this nonsense, this heartbreak on her children. The baby is still screaming.
"Sorry. It's umm... it's just...it's fine. I'm going to be fine."
What can she tell him? That he has thwarted her escape from her own confrontational hallucination? That she is almost sure that Kate is haunting their bedroom?
"Mum..." He reaches out to her, then hesitates. He doesn't know if he should touch her. Hug her, offer to take the baby. "Tell me. Tell me what I can do." He is almost pleading with her. She can't bear it.
She doesn't know. She sees her son's grief and isn't sure that she can take it. Support him. Keep his head above water when she is drowning herself.
"Nothing. You can't do anything"
She tries to say it kindly, but she knows that it came out sharply when William flinches, almost imperceptibly drawing away from her. "It's fine. Really. I'm fine. I'm...I'm going to..." She turns and points, indicates that she is going back inside the bedroom. For what she doesn't know. She shuts the door on William. She slides her back down the door. Finds herself sitting on the floor again. Rocking their baby. Their baby girl who doesn't have a name. Tears streaming down her face. She's quieting now, she thinks she might be settling "Shh...shhh." She whispers "It's ok. It's going to be ok. I'm sorry...God, I'm so sorry..." Sorry for Kate or the baby, or herself, or all of it. She isn't sure.
Kate stares at her. Silently, longingly, from the corner of the room. Caroline stares back. Holding the gaze of an illusion. A trick of the light. She thinks back to when her grandmother died, they had been close, hadn't they? She had been upset. Terribly upset, but it had passed quickly. She still thought of her often and fondly, with some misplaced nostalgia, some attempt at constructing a happy childhood. Then she thinks back to the death of her father: that was different, almost a relief, that it had ended. That he wasn't suffering anymore. That he would never hurt her mother again with the spite and anger of his senility. The realisation that she had grieved his passing years before his actual death. She tries to remember what it felt like. Not like this. Never like this.
She almost smiles. It is sad, and bittersweet. "I shouldn't have expected anything else really, should I?"
Kate returns her smile knowingly.
"It was always like this. Between us...always the part I could never quite get my head 'round. From the start, from the very beginning it confused me, because I used to think that I knew what love was. That it wasn't about chemistry or romance...or lusting after someone or feeling incomplete without them. That was a fairytale. To me, it was about choosing to stay. Providing stability. Loyalty. Being there. But I never knew. Not at all. Until I met you, I never understood that it was possible to feel this much, this strongly, about another person."
Kate sits beside her. Takes her hand, laces their fingers together. Her thumb tracing absent patterns on Caroline's skin, the fingers of her other hand tracing the contours of her daughter's cheek. The child now sleeping fitfully in the crook of her mother's arm.
"You always said it was my hands."
"Your hands?" Caroline asks, confused for a moment, before she remembers. "Ah..yes. Your hands."
" You always said that you first fell in love with my hands, and the rest of me followed about 12 hours later."
Caroline shrugged. Wiped at her eyes. "Yes well, I can be a bit slow."
"It's ok to remember you know. It's good. It's important. Talk about it too. To the boys, to the baby, to Gillian, to whoever will listen. Don't let us be written off as some hetronormative bullshit, tragic lesbian love affair." Caroline burst out laughing.
"What? What's so funny?"
"You. You're dead and you're still managing to drop words like 'hetronormative' into casual conversation."
For some reason, Kate's ghost, hallucination, symptom of a nervous breakdown, whatever she is, finds this hysterically funny too, and soon they are laughing together, like the day that Gillian had interrupted what was sure to have been an extremely steamy kiss with news of her mother's great underwear crisis.
It's not real. Just a memory. That's all. It's not real. Caroline reminds herself. I know, she tells herself, but right now I don't care...
"Seriously though" Kate interrupts her thoughts. "We were really, really happy. More often than we were sad, more often than we were awful to each other. Remember that."
Caroline tries to return the slight pressure of Kate's hand in her own but finds herself grasping for thin air. She sighs. Rearranges the baby in her arms.
"I do. I will." She promises to the empty room.
Kate was right about them. About the poem. Yes. How perfect. How exactly like them. This too, is a kind of bone dream: It is beyond words. Beyond language or understanding, but Caroline is nothing if not persistent. She will find a way to articulate the impossible.
A/N: So if this was just way too much angst and maudlin poetry for you to deal with, please stay with me. It's not all going to be like this! Next chapter will be a much happier piece. A flashback to the beginnings of Caroline and Kate.