On The Importance of Names
‘The fact is, we have doomed names,’ said Ophelia. She looked nothing like a pre-Raphaelite painting which was something she was actually pleased about, since looking like a painting wasn’t very practical and Ophelia valued practicality. Millais had never painted a Black woman, which was, she thought, his loss. ‘Tragic names,’ she said, putting on a dramatic expression, pulling her face down with both hands flat against her cheeks.
Eurydice laughed. ‘Who calls their daughter Eurydice, though?’ If she could, she would’ve plucked at her name, like a cheap piece of fabric. Eurydice had fine, wispy pale hair that she plaited in one long thin braid down her back. It looked like a second spine.
‘The Greeks?’ suggested Ophelia.
‘I wish my parents had called me Helen instead.’
This was a game they liked to play: what they wished they’d been called and what it would have meant for their lives if they had been called it. They played it all throughout university and in the years after.
Jennifer, Anna, Lucy, Charlotte, Amy.
‘If I was called Amy,’ Ophelia would say, swinging her legs from where she was perched on a desk. ‘I would marry my childhood sweetheart and have three kids.’
‘And a mortgage,’ Eurydice put in, politely not mentioning that Ophelia did not have a childhood sweetheart.
‘And a mortgage.’
They knew that girls with names like Eurydice and Ophelia don’t get mortgages. They are destined for something else. They get three wishes, or ten gold rings, or death served to them on a silver platter engraved with fruits and flowers. They get six pomegranate seeds, crystal slippers, perfect teeth and, when they’re dead, glass coffins.
Well, that’s the way the stories go. In actuality, when Eurydice died she got a wooden coffin. And death didn’t come to her on a silver platter. It came through a mirror.
On Mirrors
Ophelia had owned a large ornate mirror that lay along one wall of her bedroom; the mirror fell and shattered one day when she and Eurydice were leaning into it and carefully applying shiny pink layers of lipstick. A shard of the mirror slipped into Eurydice’s foot. She developed sepsis.
Ophelia had never really liked her mirror. It was too big. She had inherited it from a great aunt she had never even met, who had spelled her name wrong on every birthday and Christmas card. The mirror was cumbersome and it took three people to lift it, move it, and hang it from the wall.
For six months the mirror had lain on the floor in her bedroom, propped up next to the wall, reflecting the wooden slats that always gave Ophelia splinters. Granted, it made her room look bigger than it was, but it took up valuable floor space.
Sometimes – although she would never admit to this – Ophelia would lie down next to her mirror and look at herself laid out in it. She would arrange a blue scarf around her body, behind her head and back as if it were a silk lake. Sometimes she would hold a bunch of wildflowers in her hands and squint at the reflection of her prone body.
She really looked nothing like a Millais.
More often Ophelia would stub her toes on the mirror and curse, loudly. Or she would spend half an hour dusting the gilt frame that attracted bits of skin and hair and clothing and food. After six months of cursing and dusting and snagging her tights on the thing she finally got her two brothers to help her install it on her bedroom wall. And there it sat. Eurydice often said she felt a strange aura omitting from the mirror. ‘Like it’s humming.’
Ophelia didn’t believe in humming mirrors or seven years of bad luck or saluting magpies. She had heard nothing.
◆
Everyone said that Eurydice’s funeral was beautiful.
‘What they mean,’ Ophelia said to her mother, ‘is that funerals are always so sad and so beautiful when the person who died is young. Eurydice wouldn’t have wanted a funeral like that. She would’ve wanted peonies, not lilies. And a Joanna Newsom song.’
‘Life rarely goes the way we want it to, sweetheart.’ Her mother, whose name was Mary, lived a normal, contented life with her husband and three children. Mary could be contrary, but this really had nothing to do with her name.
‘She wasn’t supposed to die.’
This was her grief talking, but she also felt it deep in the marrow of her bones: Eurydice wasn’t supposed to die. Not then, anyway. Not like that. She was supposed to grow old and still have long, fair hair that she lay on like a blanket in bed. She was supposed to live in a pale green turret of a castle and dream every day and go dancing until her shoes got holes in them every night.
Grief is not practical. This was one of the many issues Ophelia had with it.
If nothing else, Eurydice was supposed to live with Ophelia in Cambridge, the way they had for the last three years after graduating. She was supposed to help Ophelia decide what her signature perfume should be, and teach her how to make steamed dumplings, and do her impression of Columbo at least one more time. Eurydice was supposed to actually start those adult tap dancing classes she kept talking about and she was supposed to make rude jokes about the vases Ophelia attempted to make in her pottery class. And one day Ophelia was supposed to pluck up the courage to kiss Eurydice – or Eurydice was supposed to gather up all her bravery and kiss Ophelia.
Ophelia felt like she had reached out to catch something and come up holding empty air.
But Eurydice always dies. Otherwise there’s no story to tell.
◆
Eurydice had liked the mirror – that was why Ophelia had kept it.
‘Where did it come from?’
Ophelia shrugged. ‘My aunt.’
‘But where did she get it from?’
The mirror had been a family mystery – Ophelia’s mother said she didn’t think her aunt had even lived in a place big enough to house it. There was no maker’s mark on the back; no old piece of paper pasted onto it to say where it had been bought.
‘The first mirrors,’ said Eurydice thoughtfully, ‘were pools of dark, still water.’
‘Ancient Egyptians used pieces of polished copper,’ offered Ophelia, who had been obsessed with the Egyptians for a time when she was a child.
If Ophelia had believed in it she would have said that a malevolent feeling came from the mirror. It was like sharing a room with a person who sulked all day and night. The mirror seemed to take great pleasure in making Ophelia look bad (when other mirrors confirmed she looked good); it seemed to favour Eurydice. So much so, Ophelia thought, that it had leapt off the wall and burrowed into her skin.
On Doorways
Eurydice’s mother had a large fireplace in her living room. It didn’t function anymore: her father had blocked it off years ago when Eurydice and her sister were children. Her mother had a normal name, like Laura, or Victoria. She had one large vase in the fireplace that she filled with fresh flowers. There were white lilies in the vase when Ophelia visited after Eurydice died.
Victoria (or Laura) served Ophelia a slice of dry fruit cake and a cup of weak tea. Ophelia could forgive the state of the fruit cake, but the tea took some reckoning with.
Eurydice’s mother had translucent, fragile skin. Every time she moved to pour more tea or pick at her slice of cake Ophelia could see her bones moving below the surface.
‘You should visit her.’
Ophelia blinked. ‘I visited her grave yesterday. Put some peonies on it.’
Eurydice’s mother blew on her tea to cool it. ‘You should visit her,’ she said. ‘Bring her back.’
Laura/Victoria’s fireplace was a doorway, there was no doubt about that. Ophelia had been avoiding doorways her whole life; she could spot one at twenty yards. She stood kicking at it thoughtfully with one shoe just before she left. Laura/Victoria came back into the living room and gave Ophelia three bronze coins of unknown currency and a bag that, Ophelia realised with a jolt of horror, was filled with a skein of Eurydice’s hair.
‘I cut it all off,’ Laura/Victoria said. ‘Before the funeral.’ She put her fingers to her mouth. ‘Was that wrong?’
Ophelia went home, the coins in one pocket of her jeans, the bag of hair in her hand. She went straight to her bedroom and lay down, stuck her hand into the bag of hair. It felt warm and she allowed it to snake around her fingers and comfort her. The thing about stories was that you had to let them run their course.
‘This is the only time,’ she said to herself, ‘I have ever wanted to be haunted.’
She reached down and plucked a large piece of mirror from the floor. She had kept the shards, not wanting to throw them away. At certain angles it looked as though it was reflecting an entirely different reality. Ophelia hated the thought of other realities. What could be less practical? She hated the thought of adventures too, but people with names like hers had to have them. Besides, she really did have unfinished business. The trip would be worth it, if only to ask Eurydice, ‘Hey, would you have wanted to be more than friends? Moot point now, obviously, but if you were living and I’d have made a move, would that have been cool with you?’
There are lots of doorways around, if you have a keen enough eye. Puddles that look deceptively shallow, those were doorways. Hollowed out trees, perfectly flat glassy lakes, Eurydice’s mother’s fireplace, an old back bent tree whose branches reached down and formed an archway. Mirrors. Finding the right one would probably prove to be more difficult.
Ophelia clutched at the piece of mirror and whispered to it. ‘Couldn’t you just come back as a ghost,’ she said. ‘Save me the trip?’
◆
It’s surprising how easy it is to put off something you don’t want to do. Instead of finding a doorway and setting off to bring her friend back, Ophelia made a start on the chores she had put off, thought about Eurydice, and contemplated changing her name through deed poll.
Eurydice had once said, ‘Even if we change our names, officially, the universe will still know that deep down, we’re one of Those Girls.’
‘Lots of people change their names,’ Ophelia had countered, ‘all the time.’
Eurydice shrugged. ‘You are what you are. I’d know. I’d know I was still Eurydice.’
Ophelia didn’t want to admit that Eurydice was right, but it was true that as a teenager she’d tried to get everyone to call her Stephanie, and it didn’t stop her from constantly losing one shoe, or finding small silver keys on the ground, or waking up to find coins placed outside on her first storey window-sill. Besides, the name wouldn’t stick. It peeled away from her.
‘But people do change their names. It works for them.’
‘That’s because they’re becoming who they really are,’ said Eurydice.
Ophelia couldn’t argue with that.
◆
The right doorway did prove difficult to locate. Ophelia suspected that the mirror was the true doorway – after all, it had taken Eurydice to the underworld just fine. She spent all her free time with tweezers and glue, piecing the shards of glass back together. She grew paranoid about a piece entering her eye, or worming its way into her heart. It took her many long nights and early mornings, and when she had what could only generously be called an approximation of a mirror she prodded it gingerly with one finger. When nothing happened, Ophelia very nearly smashed the mirror into a thousand pieces again.
‘Do you think if you knew your fate, you could change it?’ Eurydice had asked Ophelia one night.
‘Yes,’ Ophelia responded quickly. Then, ‘I don’t believe in fate.’
Eurydice had raised her eyebrows. ‘Hmm,’ she had said, smiling.
Ophelia allowed herself to get quite drunk. She made a huge batch of macaroni and cheese and ate it mournfully. She googled Hamlet and scrolled through the images that came up: lots of white men holding skulls to their cheeks, mainly. She searched for Ophelia. Long red hair. A blonde falling into water, almost casually. The Millais came up a lot, of course. She looked quite peaceful, Ophelia thought absently. Tormented no longer. A thought, just a small one, pricked at the back of Ophelia’s mind. She sat up straight.
The bathroom was shabby. The bath, old and avocado green, but deep. Ophelia turned the taps on full blast and let the bath fill. She went into her bedroom and changed into her most comfortable jeans, a t-shirt and jumper, paused, then pulled on another jumper. Who knew how cold it would be down there? She picked up the things Eurydice’s mother had given her, left her phone.
She went back into the bathroom and stepped into the bath. Water sloshed over the rim and seeped into her jeans. She settled slightly back. The sensation of the water soaking into her clothes, making them cling to her, was unpleasant, but she hoped it wouldn’t last. She clutched the bag tightly in one hand and with the other Ophelia placed two of the coins on her eyelids and the other in her mouth, then she lay back and let the water consume her.
On Rivers
Ophelia and Eurydice’s friendship had never progressed further, but there had been hints, a certain intimacy, something not spoken but nonetheless felt within their relationship. Or so Ophelia thought. She couldn’t tell, now, if this was just wishful thinking on her part or if, like gold, a vein of romance had run through everything they had done.
◆
The underworld was cold. It was exactly like being down in the hollowed out earth. A dark dome of soil was way overhead and pale roots scraggled down through the ceiling. Every now and then, a milky pink worm would fall from the sky. Ophelia didn’t know if this meant that simply getting a spade and digging would have got her to the land of the dead or if this was an effect designed to comfort (or upset) the deceased. She suspected the latter. It wasn’t dark, as such, but the light was dim, like standing in a perpetual twilight, or as if everything was submerged in murky water.
She was dry, though. That wasn’t nothing.
Ophelia walked for some time. She didn’t know whether she was walking in the right direction but she trusted that at some point she would hit something. She usually did.
As she walked she unwound the long skein of Eurydice’s hair and let it fall to the ground. The hair was much much longer than it had been in life; Ophelia wondered if Eurydice’s mother had knotted the strands together to form a long rope, foreseeing the need for a trail. She hoped she wouldn’t run out before she found her friend.
A river snaked around from behind an earthy wall and wound its way ahead – far ahead – to a point that Ophelia couldn’t see beyond. Upturned leaves floated along in the stream like small green boats. Where had the leaves come from? Were they souls of dead trees, shedding for eternity? As she watched them bobbing in the dark water, Ophelia became aware of an approaching vessel with a small man steering it. The boat came to a stop beside her. He was very still. Ophelia made to step onto the wooden slats: the man held up one pale hand, then lowered it, palm up.
‘Seriously?’ said Ophelia. The boatsman said nothing.
Ophelia remembered that she had the three coins Eurydice’s mother had given her in her pockets. She took one and pressed it into his cold palm. One passage there. Two back.
On Stories
A King and Queen were waiting for her. They stood on the river bank, tall and proud. Much taller than humans or trees or buildings. They were like vast statues; Ophelia had to crane her neck to see their faces.
‘Well,’ said the Queen from her great height, ‘you’re not dead.’
Ophelia was relieved to hear it. ‘I’ve come for my friend. Eurydice.’
The King and Queen exchanged a look. ‘This again. How dull.’
‘But what’s your name?’ the King asked. ‘Usually it’s a boy, isn’t it? One who fancies himself a poet.’
Ophelia told them. ‘How interesting,’ The Queen smiled. ‘Have you been driven mad yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said Ophelia with gritted teeth. ‘But there’s still time.’
The Queen laughed and clapped her hands. The sound echoed loudly and reverberated through Ophelia’s body. She shook.
The Queen turned to the King. ‘Let her try. I want to see if a girl can do it.’
The King picked up her hand, turned it palm up and kissed it. He nodded.
The Queen leaned forward. ‘If you can find your friend you may take her. But you must walk in single file,’ she warned her. ‘And you must lead.’
‘And she must follow.’
‘And you mustn’t look back – ’
‘- for if you do -’
‘- she will be lost to you forever.’
Ophelia wound her hands tightly round the skein of hair. ‘I understand.’
‘Of course,’ the King bowed his solemn head. ‘It has been told many times before.’
‘We already know how it ends,’ said the Queen.
Ophelia started to walk past them; they stood like gateways to the rest of the underworld.
‘Good luck!’ the Queen called after her.
‘Beware bodies of water!’ cried the King.
‘And mad princes!’
‘And kings!’
Their laughter echoed and followed Ophelia into the land of the dead.
On Home
Their birthdays were just three days apart.
The year before they had thrown a joint birthday party at a cocktail bar. The bar gave the impression of being made entirely out of glass and wood. It had a beautiful light fitting that hung down from the ceiling like a large white jewel. It was almost absurdly expensive there. The drinks came in old, shallow champagne glasses and had flowers floating in them.
Eurydice had worn her hair loose; it spilled down her back and shone golden under the huge light like someone had poured a spoonful of honey on her head. Ophelia had put flowers in her own hair. She had worn a dress of deep blue velvet. Everything about the night had seemed ethereal; otherworldly.
Their friends had brought out a large white and pink cake that almost – Ophelia thought – looked like a wedding cake. If you squinted. Usually Ophelia didn’t allow herself those sorts of fantasies, but she indulged herself on that occasion. As a birthday treat.
They had blown out the candles at the same time, and Ophelia didn’t know what Eurydice had wished for, but she remembered her wish exactly.
The bar had a live band. Eurydice and Ophelia had danced together. Eurydice had requested Moon River which they had obligingly played three times. On the slow, drunken walk home Ophelia and Eurydice had sung it together.
◆
Some of the dead barely looked at Ophelia as she passed them. She tapped them on their shoulders or their backs to see their faces. She didn’t trust anything. She climbed a staircase that corkscrewed up into the dark sky, such as it was. It might have taken her days to reach the top: she couldn’t say. The staircase led nowhere and Ophelia almost, very nearly, sat down and wept. Instead she leaned over the cold metal bannister and viewed the Underworld below. It looked so much like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that Ophelia felt unwell. Bodies milled about, stretching out and out. Some, presumably those who had been there the longest, had lost the idea of what a human body should look like; their ears slid up and down the sides of their heads; their eyeballs floated halfway down their cheeks or perched on their foreheads. Some had lost their forms altogether and had to gather toward them the pieces of themselves that remained. That wasn’t to say it was hellish, exactly, but neither was it heavenly. It was like a storage space for souls. Who knew what would be done with them, if anything.
Ophelia had the rather romantic notion that she would be able to spot Eurydice in the crowds, but there were too many people, too far away. Everyone was small and indistinct.
◆
Eurydice always said the best stories taught you something about yourself.
‘If you’re hero material, you mean?’ Ophelia had asked.
‘Prince or pauper,’ Eurydice laughed.
‘I always leaned towards the narrator myself.’
‘That’s because it gives you the illusion of control.’ Eurydice had stolen a crisp from the packet Ophelia was eating and ate it thoughtfully. ‘Although, I understand the appeal.’
‘Control is underrated,’ said Ophelia. ‘Destiny is frightening.’
‘Well, that depends on what your destiny is.’ Eurydice’s lips quirked up to one side. Ophelia had been seized by the sudden desire to plant a kiss on Eurydice or touch, gently, the back of her neck.
Instead she had laughed a little, shook her head, and continued eating.
◆
Ophelia gathered up the hair she had strewn and carefully wound it round her hand to drop again when she covered unknown ground. The walk down the staircase seemed to take less time, but journeys were often like that.
She waded through the crowds of souls. Her legs grew heavy; her eyes became itchy from straining in the half-light. The air was thin down underground. Although, she supposed there wasn’t much use for it.
After some time, Ophelia didn’t know how much, she stumbled and dropped the bag of hair. She landed painfully on her knees, then lay down, hugging the bag of hair to her chest. A group of souls approached her and tried to take the bag off her. She tussled with it and them. She clung to the bag with both arms until, at last, they seemed to give up. Eurydice’s hair spooled out of the bag like a pale gold river.
Ophelia was so tired. She could not see where the gold river ended. She closed her eyes.
On Dreams
Ophelia was in a lake. The water was cool; it moved around her like an animal. Eurydice’s mother was there, too.
When is Eurydice coming home?
Ophelia opened her mouth and tried to answer. A white stone came out of her mouth. Eurydice’s mother picked it up and put it in Ophelia’s pocket.
When is Eurydice coming home?
Ophelia tried to speak again. Another white stone. Another weight in her pocket.
When is Eurydice coming home?
Ophelia’s clothes were so heavy. Her pockets dragged down.
Please, she tried to say. Another stone came from her mouth and hit her in the chest; she toppled backwards into the water. The lake hurried into her like a long-lost lover. She took a breath without meaning to and the water kissed its way down into her chest.
◆
Ophelia opened her eyes.
Eurydice was gazing down at her with concern in her eyes. Her hands were full of pale gold hair.
‘Eurydice!’ Ophelia got to her feet and threw herself at her friend.
Eurydice clutched her tightly. ‘Ophelia,’ she whispered, ‘what happened? Are you dead, too?’
Ophelia drew back and took Eurydice’s face in her hands. Eurydice’s dear face. ‘I came to bring you home.’
◆
The walk back was long and treacherous. Ophelia kept thinking her name was being whispered, just behind her. Just out of reach. She stretched her hand back and grasped Eurydice’s. They walked like this for a while until her arm ached too much to continue.
Eurydice had cried a little when Ophelia told her what they had to do. She was cold, colder than she had ever been alive, but Ophelia had been tempted to stay in the murky underland, with Eurydice tucked beside her.
‘You shouldn’t have come,’ Eurydice had said.
‘I couldn’t not.’
‘I know.’ Eurydice had touched, softly, Ophelia’s cheek. ‘I know you.’
Eurydice cupped her face, then leaned in and kissed her mouth with cold lips.
The walls – if they could be called walls – were damp. As if nestled between the soft, sensitive piece of skin where her ear met her neck, a voice whispered to her terrible things.
And behind that voice, like a constant thrumming, was Eurydice’s voice (or, Ophelia reminded herself, a voice that sounded like Eurydice’s) saying her name, softly, over and over.
On Darkness
If you have never travelled to the Below it will be hard for you to understand how dark it gets. To give yourself an idea, place your hands over your eyes. Now imagine the hands of every person who has ever died on top of yours. Every single one.
On Endings
Ophelia stumbled over uneven ground. Everything looked as if it had been made out of shadows. The shapes surrounding her were cut from black fabric. She knew the only bright thing was Eurydice. She longed to turn and look at her.
Now the voices were silent.
The only thing she could hear was her own breathing. Of course, Eurydice didn’t need to breathe. That was why Ophelia couldn’t hear her. That had to be why.
Ophelia carefully felt her way. The little scenery she could see looked entirely different to how she remembered it and there were no souls around. Just her. And Eurydice. If she was still there. Fear gripped Ophelia as sure as a pair of hands. Perhaps it was all a trick. Perhaps the person who had kissed her wasn’t Eurydice at all, but a shade made to fool her. She couldn’t check.
Then she saw them: her brothers.
Ophelia felt like someone had drawn a hot needle through her heart. When she reached out to them her hands passed right through them. ‘This isn’t real,’ she said to herself. ‘This isn’t real.’
Her brothers were silent.
Marcus. Liam. They smiled at her and started to walk past her, one on either side, and she came so close to following them, to turn and watch the path that they took. She clutched her face, covered her eyes, and wept. It was a trick, a sly piece of magic meant to fool her.
A steely determination came over her. Maybe knowing your fate didn’t mean you could change it, but she’d be a fool if she didn’t try. Perhaps Eurydice would disappear back into the quiet and still twilight of death. Perhaps she, Ophelia, would go mad, perhaps she already had, and was drowned in the avocado bathtub, gold coins on her eyes, gold hair in her hands. But maybe not. Maybe the story would end differently this time. She could feel the weight of a thousand Eurydices, walking the halls of the dead, a thousand lovers trying to defeat death. It had to happen, didn’t it? At least once? All Ophelia had to do was keep going. It was so simple. A new story was mapping itself out in front of her – she could almost taste it. She could almost touch it. Things would be different. She wanted, so badly, to glance behind and look at Eurydice.
But Ophelia wouldn’t look back, could never look back.
She just kept walking, one foot in front of the other; which, in the end, is all any of us can ever do.