by K. L. Slater
Things somehow improved between Henry and me, and a few months later I fell pregnant with Ben and just sort of stopped doing it. David got better, and for a long time, everything was OK.
I sit down heavily on the kitchen chair as tears roll silently down my cheeks.
70
Judi
‘Judi. Judi!’ Amber is shaking me. ‘For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?’
She’s swimming in front of my eyes, fading in and out of focus.
‘I know your mother is alive,’ I whisper.
Her face pales. ‘My mother is dead.’
‘I saw her, Amber. I know about your family, your husband and children.’
She slaps my face and I gasp, sitting up straighter. Suddenly everything is harsh and real again. ‘Don’t say anything else. Don’t you dare.’
‘Your sister … she died, too. Everyone dies around you.’
‘Same with you,’ she sneers, pressing her face so close I can smell stale coffee on her breath. ‘David died. After he met the girl at the cottage all those years ago, that is.’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘Just tell me.’ She shrugs. ‘What happened?’
I hear myself start to speak. The words feel strange rolling over my tongue. They’ve wanted to be said for so long, and every time I’ve swallowed them down like sour clots of milk. Now, I can’t seem to stop them.
‘He was only fourteen years old and yet he became besotted with that girl. It was very odd.’ I look away from Amber’s staring eyes and I’m back there. ‘A gangly, freckly thing she was, not at all pretty, in my opinion. Unflattering red hair and a bit of a tomboy. Playing football with the boys, climbing trees and scrabbling around in the dust with David, looking for stones on the clifftop, on the beach.’
I glance back at her and see her eyes are burning with malevolence. I don’t care. There’s nothing she can do to hurt me now.
‘Think what you like, but it wasn’t what I had envisaged for my son. He started neglecting his studies, even his piano lessons. All he wanted to do was sit by the telephone talking to her each night, and then badger us senseless to go to the cottage far more frequently than we’d have ordinarily done.’
Amber is quiet.
I stop talking and think back. Back to when we were at the cottage during spring bank holiday week in May. David wasn’t interested in taking part in our family games on the beach, walks along the cliff or our shell-finding missions. His personality was changing. He began cheeking me back and making fun of me with his father. All the times I’d defended him against Henry’s brutal punishments and it counted for nothing.
The girl was hateful. She laughed openly when I demanded David be back at a certain time or take part in a family activity. She started calling me a derogatory name behind my back. I heard her once or twice and ignored it. ‘The Moaning Mother,’ she’d say, which caught on immediately with both David and Ben, and then even Henry adopted it if I was in the least bit grouchy.
But it was David who hurt me the most. He was turning against me and I had to do something. I really had no choice in the matter.
71
David
Twenty-six years earlier
As soon as he opened his eyes, David knew that something bad had happened. Something very bad.
The darkness was so thick and heavy around him that for a moment he wasn’t sure if his eyes were fully open yet, or if he had simply imagined it.
There was a strong, grazing ache in his legs and pelvis. Deep inside the bone.
An audio flashback echoed in his ears: people shouting, a girl screaming, rocks tumbling, a snapping sound, then … silence.
The ache in his legs spread, grew rapidly into a painful throbbing throughout the whole of his body. He tried to move his hand but nothing happened.
The darkness lay more heavily on his face, pressing him down into another place.
When he opened his eyes again, it was light.
The grey clouds scudded across the sky overhead, masking any trace of blue. David shivered and tried to move his head, grimacing against the shooting pains in his shoulder and neck.
He managed to turn it enough for his view to change. He gazed past the broken shape next to him, over towards Boulby Cliffs, where the Dinosaur Coast sat impassively, hard and cold and unmoved by his whimpering.
He squinted against the freezing wind that fanned hair on to his face.
And then he looked at her.
Long russet hair fanned across the slough of broken rocks, a couple of wisps caught in his own fingers. Her face was turned away from him. He knew her but he could not remember her name, nor why the two of them were here together.
She wore shorts, and her pale limbs lay splayed at unnatural angles.
He managed to make a strange noise in his throat. But she did not move.
A sound above him brought his eyes back to Cowbar Cliff, towering above. A figure stood halfway up, on a ledge. He saw slight movement and heard a sob, but he could not make out any useful details.
He put all his effort into raising a hand, but managed only a finger, lifted briefly from the fossil bed beneath him.
The figure shifted again, and a bundle of small rocks tumbled from the ledge, bouncing and rolling to a stop just a few feet away from where he lay.
David’s throat gurgled. He was struggling to take in air.
He drifted in and out of consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, the figure was standing next to him. A blurred outline. A scuffling sound near his face.
The gulls screeched above the cliff and the rush of the sea answered them.
A hand and then a dark mass hovered above his face, descended quickly towards him; a soft stroke on his cheeks.
The sensation started to fade until he was only vaguely aware of the tears that fell on him from above.
As he took his last breath, he thought about the smooth stones in his trouser pocket, and his mother’s face.
72
Judi
Present day
‘You killed them. The girl and your own son, the son you supposedly worshipped.’ Amber hesitates a second before speaking. ‘You pushed them off Cowbar Cliff. Both of them.’
I shake my head vehemently. I pushed her off the cliff. But even in death she couldn’t let him be. She grabbed him as she fell. She took my David with her.
My eyes fill up and Amber blurs in front of me. I see her move, hear a clatter and her snatching at something. I step forward and see that she is holding a knife from the block, the ones Henry keeps freshly sharpened.
‘Judi, you framed me. You need to tell them it was a mistake, what you said about me hurting Noah. You need to tell them that you planted the bottle in my handbag.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I laugh. ‘You could have made a friend of me, like dear Louise did before you. I just wanted to be part of my son and grandsons’ lives, that’s all. Why couldn’t you handle that?’
‘You still don’t get it.’ She shakes her head. ‘You’ve told me the whole story and still it hasn’t clicked, you’re so wrapped up in your own problems.’
I frown at her, trying to put the pieces together.
‘I’ll tell you my story now,’ she says. ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl called Kathryn. She lived near the coast in a static caravan with her mum and sister. Their bastard father had long gone.’
At last, too late, it seems I’m finally going to get the story of her family.
‘The girls used to roam the beach and cliffs and one day Kathryn met a boy from Nottingham called David.’
My face falls and she assumes an expression of satisfaction.
‘No,’ I whisper.
‘Yes,’ she hisses. ‘I found Kathryn’s diary. All those years it lay in a storage box of her things that my mother never looked at. I found it three years ago when she went into the care home and the house was sold.’
‘You went in David’s bedroom
. I wasn’t imagining it after all.’
‘I searched it. Trying to find something, anything he might’ve kept, notes he’d written to my sister.’
‘You took the necklace and then put it back, all to make me look like a crazy woman.’
She frowns and laughs. ‘What are you talking about? You really are crazy.’
‘Don’t bother trying to deny it, I know it was you. It could only have been you.’
She waves my words away as if she’s losing patience.
‘For three years I’ve been planning how I could make you pay. Three long years. I couldn’t go to the police because it wasn’t evidence as such, but I knew my sister. I could read between the lines that she was afraid of what you’d do.’
‘Is that why you want to destroy this family? To get back at me?’
Amber shakes her head. ‘I came here because I wanted to hurt you, to make you pay. I wanted you to feel the same loss that’s caused when someone else takes away the people you love. I don’t deny that. I came looking for you and it took me a while to find you, but when I realised the situation – that Ben was now a widower with two small boys – it was like a gift. Everything fitted together so perfectly, I knew it was fate; that I’d have my family back again.’
‘Your family died, Amber … Ben, Noah, Josh – they’re not your family to take.’
As I stare at her, trying to weigh up just how crazy she is, her eyes cloud over and she smiles, as if she is watching a movie in her head.
73
Amber
Six years earlier
The leaves are damp and cloying, like a mat of slime beneath her bare feet. The wind nips through her nightdress and it feels like a thousand screeching seagulls, each one pecking off a piece of her until she is swallowed and ceases to exist.
Still she runs, and when her ragged breaths can finally keep up no longer, she falls against the craggy tree trunk, sliding to her haunches and whimpering like a child.
‘Amber. Amber?’ The voice is kind and it rouses her from the edge of the abyss.
She opens her eyes and sees that it is Dr Stevens.
‘Let’s get you back inside.’
There are other people helping her up, but she keeps her bleary eyes on the doctor, for it is only she who truly understands.
Later, Dr Stevens comes to her room. Amber takes the small white paper cup full of tablets and swallows them down with water.
‘Why did you run?’ the doctor says gently.
‘The pictures,’ Amber whispers. ‘I was running from the pictures in my head.’
‘We talked about this. You can’t run from the pictures; they just come with you.’
‘I know.’
‘Tell me about the pictures. Describe them exactly as you see them.’
Amber closes her eyes and they flood her mind.
The twisted metal, the uniforms and bright lights. So much red. Everywhere. Like little Daisi’s finger paints; thick red on the steel-grey asphalt.
‘She was folded up like a rag doll under the front seat,’ she tells Dr Stevens, smiling. ‘She always loved rag dolls, their floppy limbs, their tangled hair.’
Tom’s shoe in the road, just sitting there neatly, as if waiting for him to slip his little foot into it.
And Robbie. Her husband Robbie’s head cracked like an egg over the steering wheel. He never wore his seat belt.
‘And you drove past the accident on your way home?’
‘I saw the registration plate. The car was unrecognisable, a twisted mess.’ Amber lies back on the white-sheeted bed in her clean white nightdress and stares at the ceiling. ‘I got out of my car and ran towards it. I broke through the cordon. I got to Robbie before they could stop me. I held him in my arms, I could smell his sandalwood aftershave mixed in with the smell of the blood.’
She raises her hands, staring in horror at the blood and brains that remain there even though she washes herself a hundred times each day.
‘One day the pictures will fade,’ Dr Stevens tells her kindly. ‘And one day your hands will be clean again. Is that what you believe?’
Amber turns her head and smiles.
‘I believe that one day I’ll have my family back again.’
74
Judi
Present day
Amber blinks and looks at me. She’s still smiling, and I find it unnerving.
‘You said your sister kept a diary.’ I glance at her handbag, wondering if she might have it with her. Evidence against me. ‘What did it say?’
‘She talked about you and how you hated her. How she heard you telling Henry you wished she’d drop dead. In the later entries she talked about running away with David.’
My face paled.
‘You knew that,’ she said bluntly.
‘I didn’t know it exactly, but I knew she was poisoning my son. I used to listen when he sat on the stairs on the phone to her. I could only hear half of the conversation but I could guess from his answers what she was saying to him.’
‘She said that the way you looked at her scared her.’
‘She used to call me vile names. She wasn’t afraid of me.’
‘Kathryn lashed out when she was afraid. That’s all it was.’ She smiles slowly and stares into space, remembering. ‘Kathryn had another boy too, you know. When David went home, there was a local boy called Archie she knocked around with.’
Another boy?
‘She would’ve grown out of the infatuation with David if only you’d given it time, instead of trying to control their lives. They were just kids, for God’s sake.’ Amber’s face twists. ‘You’ve never learned; you’re just the same now with Ben and the boys. You’re flawed.’
‘Shut up,’ I say quietly. ‘Just go. Leave my boys alone.’
‘You’re forgetting, we’re getting married. When I’m legally the boys’ stepmother, I can stop you seeing them altogether. And when Ben hears what I have to tell him, he won’t want you anywhere near them.’
‘He won’t believe you above me.’
‘Really? He thinks you’re overbearing. With him, with the boys. Even with the house furnishings, he’s hated the control you’ve exerted.’
It feels like something is lodged in my throat. A choking sensation.
‘I have rights. I’m their grandmother,’ I say, coughing.
‘You’ve no rights. Zero.’ She laughs. ‘When the chips are down, grandparents have no legal rights at all. Look it up.’
I move towards her and she waves the knife at me.
‘I’m not afraid to use it.’
I lean against the side of the worktop and squeeze my eyes shut as she speaks.
‘We had a document drawn up at the solicitor’s,’ she says slowly. ‘It was my suggestion but Ben was in full agreement. It gives me custody of both boys in the event that something happens to Ben.’
‘No!’ My eyes spring open.
‘I’m sorry to tell you it’s true,’ she says, smiling. ‘The boys will be mine. Mine! How does it feel to have your own flesh and blood taken away like you took Kathryn from us? I lost my entire family. You killed Kathryn, and a terrible accident robbed me of happiness with my husband and children.’
She looks around the kitchen, gripping the knife in one hand and reaching for her phone with the other. In the split second that she looks down, I slide the largest, sharpest knife from the block.
She springs back and we face each other.
‘Don’t,’ she warns. ‘Don’t do this, because you’ll come off worse, I can guarantee it.’
At that second her phone rings and she makes the fateful decision to glance at it. I take a stride forward and the knife slides into her torso like it’s made of butter. I pull it out and she stands stock still with a shocked expression, her mouth the perfect O shape.
She looks down at the red flower blooming on her blouse, and then she falls.
I hear the crack of her head on the floor tiles as she lands, and she lies there, very sti
ll.
75
Judi
I stand very still, holding the knife. My fingers press into the moist, sticky mess that covers the handle and thins to a trickle down my wrist.
The house is quiet and still, as if it’s holding its breath. I can hear the ticking of the wall clock and a low rumble now and then as a large vehicle passes by on the road outside.
I stare down at Amber, crumpled on the floor before me. We have despised each other for so long, and towards the end there have been times when I simply could not bear to look at her. Now, I cannot tear her eyes away. I’m transfixed by the blossoming ruby-red halo that seeps from her head.
It couldn’t continue, this silent war between us. One of us had to go.
I feel calmer inside, calmer than I have felt for a long, long time. How I have hated this woman. Hated her for so long, and yet now … now, I feel nothing.
The terrible things she forced me to do … Strips of raw chicken in Noah’s Sunday lunch, which gave the poor mite food poisoning. Using Henry’s medication and injecting him with insulin when she left him alone, sending him into a crashing hypo … contaminating his urine with glucose … I had to do all this to keep my boy safe from her.
Amber’s eyes are closed, but there is still slight movement in her chest. Every few seconds, there is a quick, desperate pulsing underneath the thin fabric of her soaked red breast. A blouse that used to be pure white.
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow.
