by Sam Hayes
‘Then get Alex in here immediately,’ Ed demands, and instantly Murray is telephoning his sister.
Alex has mushroom-coloured rings beneath his usually sparkling eyes. This is way more than make-believe games and he knows it.
‘Mum?’ he says nervously.
I cradle him on my knee as if he is five years old again. He doesn’t struggle or pull away like he would normally if I showed too much affection in front of other people.
‘Uncle Ed just wants to talk to you about the time when you were alone on the boat with Flora.’
Alex nods. ‘OK.’
‘Alex, you told your mum and dad that Flora was leaving a trail. In your games, where did you and Flora pretend to go?’ Ed is standing somewhere between detective and uncle.
‘Anywhere. Sometimes it was the seaside. Sometimes the moon.’ He reddens. ‘I only played those babyish games because Flora made me.’ He shifts uncomfortably on my knee. ‘She wanted to play a different game on the boat, though. But it was boring and so that’s why I went out to get wood for the fire.’
‘That’s good, Alex.’ Ed crouches in front of us. He’s pure uncle now, his eyes probing his nephew. ‘And what was the game that Flora wanted to play on the boat with you?’
Alex sighs, as if we should all know. ‘It’s because of those silly pictures she was drawing. Grandma told her to do them.’
‘Mum told her? But you know Grandma’s not speaking, Alex. How could she tell Flora?’ I glance at Murray, then Ed, hoping my questions will tease out the reply.
‘That’s not a game, though, drawing, is it?’ Ed remains patient. ‘Where did Flora go in the game she wanted to play on the boat?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Alex says. ‘She was off to find her grandad.’
‘Grandad?’ Murray says. The kids’ only grandfather died before Flora was born.
‘No-oo,’ Alex says as if we are all stupid. ‘Her new grandad. The one Grandma told her to draw. She didn’t talk, of course,’ Alex continues, anticipating the next question. ‘They were signing together. In the hospital when you were busy with the nurses. She said that Grandma told her a secret.’
‘She did?’ I edge forward on my seat with the weight of my son bearing down on my legs. ‘Alex, it’s so important that you tell us exactly what those secrets are. They might help us find Flora.’
There is a pause, and it feels almost as long as the time Flora has been missing all over again. Finally, looking worried and pained as if it’s all his fault, Alex speaks. ‘I don’t know. Flora wouldn’t tell me because I wouldn’t play her silly game.’
The breath I’ve been holding escapes and my shoulders flatten. The three of us converge our thoughts and Ed drives us in a police car back to Northmire. My mother, the woman who has not uttered a word for weeks, is the only one who can help us. Whatever it takes, she is going to have to speak.
MARY
The week after it happened, a few papers and a couple of society magazines ran the story. A socialite wedding with rape and assault thrown in for good measure filled a couple of columns – and, given the recent anonymity laws for complainants of sexual offences, I was protected from being named in their sensationalist articles. No one would ever know who David Carlyle had allegedly raped.
Months later, when the case came to court and a verdict was reached, my story hit the papers again. David’s photograph – his face surprised, slashed by relief, creased with unbelievable luck, good fortune, perhaps even remorse – made it into every newspaper in the country. That was the day on which he was acquitted.
‘How do you feel about the jury’s decision, Mr Carlyle?’ The reporter pushed a microphone at David’s mouth. I sat alone at Northmire watching the morning’s events on the evening news.
‘Relieved,’ David replied solemnly. ‘Thankful it’s all over and I can get on with my life.’ His voice sent shivers through me – the same shivers of anticipation that I used to get when he strode into the café, or when he grabbed my wrist and pulled me close. The passion, the intensity, it was all still there. All still David.
‘Did you expect a not guilty verdict on all the charges?’ The microphone was under David’s nose again. While all this was going on, I had been escaping from the back door of the courthouse. A police officer draped a blanket over my head and I was driven back home by my parents. Blanket or not, I was guaranteed a lifetime of anonymity. No one would ever be able to find out the name of the woman who had cried rape; cried wolf. I was destined to a lifetime of silence.
‘Yes,’ David said easily. ‘I trusted the jury to find me not guilty.’ Every nervous, overstated blink he made represented a minute of the torture I had been through. How could they have let him off? Why was I still the victim, the nuisance, the silly girl who had caused all this trouble? He raped me, and afterwards he attacked me with his knife.
In court, the rape charge had been dismissed. The defence barrister convinced the jury that I had been on the lookout for sex; a predator. I was flaunting my body and willingly indulging in mind-altering substances. In short, they believed that I had asked for it.
As for the slashes to my tongue and feet, the jury ruled that there was no evidence to uphold this charge either, especially in the light of my unreliable claim of rape. ‘It’s equally as likely that Mr Felosie or the groundsman or anyone else at the wedding party harmed Miss Marshall,’ the defence stated in the closing argument. ‘That’s not to say the attack wasn’t brutal and the perpetrator shouldn’t be brought to justice. But fingerprints on a hunting knife owned by my client are hardly grounds for conviction.’
‘What about the drugs, Mr Carlyle? As a trainee medical student, what are your views on the use of the sedative methaqualone for recreational purposes?’ A microphone was pushed at David’s mouth.
‘No comment.’
‘The jury found you had consensual sex. Is it true that the woman concerned is now pregnant? Will you be supporting mother and baby?’
As I watched the news that evening – the way David’s expression changed, stopping his life for just long enough to realise the implications of this revelation – I could tell that he didn’t know, or perhaps hadn’t even considered that I was pregnant. Indeed, I had told only a few people about the baby and I was too ashamed to confide in my barrister, even if it would have helped my case. I had no idea how the journalist found out.
‘No . . . no comment,’ he said and walked off into the crowd.
I flicked the television off, wiping David Carlyle from my life. For thirty years, I lived without him.
I didn’t take the bus immediately. I stood at the stop – as still and cold as the metal post itself – and stared blankly at the road while the different-coloured cars blurred through my field of vision. When the bus arrived, I let it pass. Other passengers filed past me and I watched the number fifty-eight disappear down the road. My infected finger throbbed. I squeezed the tip of it as hard as I could stand. A yellow globe of pus burst from the side of my nail.
Without another thought, I walked back to the surgery and waited in the car park behind a thicket of bushes.
I was infected, certainly, but the pus wasn’t limited to my finger. I knew I had to see David again. I wanted information. I wanted to know that he’d had a miserable life; that he’d suffered for what he had done to me. I didn’t think I could live if I knew he would be going home to a happy house, a wife and two kids after work. Despite my tough exterior, the years of bringing up Julia, the foster kids, the farm, and finally, my grandchildren – despite all this, I had never recovered from what happened. Perhaps harder to understand was that he’d got away with it. David had walked free while I was imprisoned for ever.
Two and a half hours later, David Carlyle emerged from the medical practice wearing a green waxed jacket over his suit. His mobile phone was pressed to his ear. My heart stuttered with fear and intrigue. He gestured as he spoke, and even from a distance I saw that he looked angry . . . then appeased . . . then perplexed
– a rainbow of emotions on a face that I remembered thirty years younger.
After ending the call, David unlocked his car, placed his doctor’s bag in the boot, and locked the car again. He walked off down the road towards the centre of town. In a snap decision, I followed him, holding back just enough so that he couldn’t hear the beat of my footsteps, but close enough to catch his scent on the breeze. My heart was pumping revenge.
David went into a café, a little place with gingham curtains and the smell of scones baked into the bricks. I waited outside in the cold. Several times I walked past the window and caught a glimpse of him sitting alone, sipping tea, glancing at his watch, sliding out of his jacket. And suddenly I was back there, at Café Delicio, so firmly planted in the past that it took all my strength not to go inside and take his order.
I would have watched him, hunched over his books, demanding eggs and coffee, while he told me jokes, held my wrist as I wiped his table, breathed warm words into my ear as I delivered his food.
‘Mary,’ he would say, ‘I’m learning about lovesickness. Can you recommend a cure?’
I would stare fondly, using the tea towel as a buffer between us, wiping my hands over and over while he tormented me with his eyes and a grin that showed a trace of his crooked tooth, before flicking him on the shoulder and walking away, my own smile widening once my back was turned.
I bumped into a young girl, a pretty teenager obviously in a hurry.
‘Sorry,’ I said, spinning a half-circle from the collision, but she didn’t reply. Her hair spread as she tossed it back, just like mine would have done. She stepped inside the café, breathless, beautiful, hopeful. I watched through the window as she wove a seductive dance through the tables. She arrived at David’s side, her face lighting up as she sat beside him. She left a kiss on his unanimated lips. David stared blankly ahead in just the same way he would often ignore me, hoping I would tease out the reason for his bad mood.
That was the first time I saw them together. I wondered if the girl might be his daughter, but the passion stitched into her expression showed me she was run aground with love for him – a love that no girl should have for her father. David continued to be cautious, nervous, as if someone was watching him. Perhaps, deep down, he knew.
My mother was content. Finally there was going to be a baby in the house. I’d strayed so far from my parents’ plan of marrying a local boy, becoming a farmer’s wife, rearing dozens of happy children alongside a prize-winning herd of dairy cows or acres of wheat, that being raped and getting pregnant, shaming the family and bringing the child up alone, was by then a perfectly acceptable alternative.
‘No matter.’ Mother said this about pretty much everything, from a broken cup to my shattered life. ‘You can live here with us.’
And so that’s what I did. My life in Cambridge, my foray into the world of academia, my attempt at snatching a slice of it for myself, became a rancid memory consigned to the back of my mind. No one ever spoke of it, and my plight was protected from discovery by the anonymity law. My name hadn’t been in a single newspaper. Plus, my mother made it her life’s work to shield the world from my disgrace. She became adept at fabricating stories about my condition. Each time someone asked, she told a different version so that no one ever really knew the truth.
‘Mary’s poor husband was the victim of a hit-and-run accident.’ This usually shocked those interested into silence.
‘The baby’s father was killed in action.’ No one ever asked where, for fear of not knowing about a far-off war.
‘Mary’s an agoraphobic, don’t you know?’ Most people didn’t.
‘He left her for another woman. And with a baby, too.’ Instantly, my absent husband was dirty scum.
‘She has to cope with a new baby and a terminally ill husband in a hospice.’ This was reserved for the local shopkeeper and spread, in various forms, within hours of its release.
But with the help of the vicar and the circle of women that my mother set up around me as a steely barrier of maternal strength, a more realistic back-story was used to explain my sorry situation. ‘Mary fell in love with a man who betrayed her.’ It kept their questions at bay; it matched and explained my demeanour; it allowed me to grieve while taking the support of other women – in particular the mother of a pair of children named Murray and Nadine. Without her help, I don’t think I’d have got through my pregnancy.
‘Breathe like we practised,’ Shauna said through the cotton of her mask. Her eyes were wide above it. She had rushed to Northmire when my mother called to tell her the time had come.
Shauna pulled the mask off her face and showed me how to breathe, patiently timing each inhalation to coincide with a contraction. I followed her instructions as best I could. For hours and hours she bathed my face with rosewater. She allowed me to squeeze her hand until it nearly burst and took nothing personal from the insults and screams of hate and pain I threw her way.
‘It’s a baby girl,’ Shauna exhaled as the final contraction spewed out my daughter into the midwife’s hands a full day and a half after I had gone into labour. The baby was placed on my deflating belly but I couldn’t stand to look at her. As a reminder of that dreadful night, as a permanent receipt of my relationship with David, how would I ever be able to hold or love or care for my baby?
But, I later thought, being a girl, being so innocent, perhaps she wouldn’t look too much like her father. If I’d delivered a son, I doubt I could have taken him as my own. As the minutes rolled into hours and the pain of childbirth, indeed the pain of the last nine months, diminished with every wail of my poor neglected baby, I mustered the courage to sit up and peek into the crib. The midwife pottered around, unwilling to leave until I showed some maternal instinct.
‘Go on. She’s beautiful,’ Shauna said, encouraging me to take a look. She’d cleaned me up, made a tray of tea, washed and dressed the baby while telling me about every tiny feature, every finger and toe, every hair on her head and lick of the air as her perfect mouth searched for my milk. I lay there with my eyes closed until finally intrigue and instinct won over anger and bitterness.
‘She is beautiful,’ I whispered. My daughter had the palest skin gilded on to a squirming body. Her tiny fingers haphazardly scrutinised the soft blanket wrapped around her, while her feet, balled up in wool, kicked against cloth instead of my womb. ‘Truly the most beautiful baby alive.’
At the sound of my voice, her huge eyes lolled up at me. For the briefest moment, we fell into each other’s minds. Mother and daughter locked up for ever, just like that. ‘I will call her Julia,’ I said, and reached into the cot. I gently picked up my baby. ‘Shhh, be quiet, hush now,’ I whispered in her ear, and later, when we were quite alone, I told her who her father was, and promised I would never let him hurt her.
Julia and Murray and Alex blow into the kitchen like litter on a squall. They are exhausted, bereft, frustrated and angry. Flora is still missing. I am desperate with worry yet unable to help. What must Julia think of me, sitting here doing nothing?
‘Mum, are you OK?’ Julia says in a breathy way that tells me she has forgotten all about me. My heart aches for her. A moment later and Ed lets himself into the kitchen, and by now we are quite a crowd because Brenna and Gradin have come to see who’s here. ‘Ed wants to talk to you, Mum. I do as well. We all do.’
Julia’s words are brittle. Her eyelids fold down over her pupils and I imagine for a moment what it would have been like to lose her when she was a child. They don’t notice, but the skin on my arms dapples with goose bumps. Losing my daughter would have been a waste of all my pain. What I went through is only justified by her existence.
‘Mrs Marshall, I need to take a statement from you regarding your granddaughter. I know you’re not well, but we would greatly appreciate your help.’ Ed has always been formal with me when we’ve met at family gatherings. Once, maybe twice a year at most – Easter or a birthday. He pulls up a chair. ‘As you know, Flora is still missing�
�’
And it’s just then, just at that point where everyone is holding their breath, waiting for me to provide all the answers, that Gradin rips the kitchen apart.
‘Nooo-ooo! ’ he yells over and over, tearing down the generations of family life that make up the room. The patchwork of memories is snatched from the walls or smashed on the floor or toppled from a height. Gradin whips round the kitchen like a tornado without a weather warning, kicking and ripping and breaking up everything in his path. In a moment his hands and face are bleeding, but this doesn’t stop him hurling a wooden chair through the old paned window above the sink. Everything he can lay his hands on gets thrown into the courtyard, and it takes Murray and Ed several minutes to catch, restrain and calm the boy. Alex huddles terrified beside me.
‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .’ Julia wails as she crunches through the wreckage. Gradin has pulled down the dresser and with it at least twenty place settings of crockery. ‘I can’t stand any more of this, no, no, no . . .’ And my daughter is on the floor, crying with the same needy emotion as when she slithered from my womb.
As Ed and Murray deal with the boy, I recall the day when Brenna and her brother first came to stay at Northmire. I accused them of stealing thirty pounds. If tipping up the table was his reaction to a false accusation before, then I wonder what he has done to warrant this extreme explosion.
‘That’s it, young man. You’re under arrest.’ Ed straightens from the kick he received in the leg, and he doesn’t know it but there is a cut beneath his left eye. ‘I am arresting you for criminal damage and assaulting a police officer. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence.’
‘Baby?’ Gradin is shivering, quiet now, and his doleful eyes – as calm as they have ever been – hang heavy in his face. ‘Help me, Baby. Don’t let them put me in prison.’ His words are laboured and without any trace of comprehension. Ed snaps handcuffs closed behind Gradin’s back.
