by Martina Cole
She felt the anguished tears of motherhood blur her vision and blinked them away. She was done with crying. Patrick was right, she must build bridges now with Lizzy. Try and make some good come out of all this badness.
Patrick turned over and his arm settled across her stomach. It felt good, it felt right. She felt safe.
Kissing the dark head beside her, she settled down. Not to sleep, that was a long way away, but to think and plan. The initial shock and fury were gradually disappearing; now she needed a plan of action and would concentrate her energies on that.
Somewhere, at some time, she had missed some vital step with Lizzy. It was up to her to rectify that as best she could. And rectify it she would.
Snuggling into Patrick, she closed her eyes and let the memories drift in front of her closed lids.
The only thing she forgot to wonder was how Lizzy was going to feel about everything.
It was a mistake she would soon regret.
Kate felt the eyes of the desk sergeant boring into the back of her head as she signed the papers for her daughter’s release. She made her way to the cells with a heavy heart. The fact that Lizzy had been nicked was the talk of the station, she knew that. She passed Amanda Dawkins who smiled at her sympathetically. Kate looked away. As the cell was unlocked she held her breath. Lizzy was sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor. Her make-up was smeared over her face and her hair was a mass of tangles. She looked defiantly into her mother’s face as the door opened.
‘So you’ve come then?’
Kate swallowed deeply. ‘Get up, Lizzy.’
The girl pulled herself from the mattress and stood with one hand on her hip, in an aggressive pose. The duty officer shook his head in wonder. If she was his daughter he’d give her a smack she wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
‘Come on, get your things, we’re going home.’ Kate’s voice was low. She turned to the duty officer, a man called Higgins. He was nearly fifty and Kate could see the pity in his eyes.
‘Has she eaten?’
‘Not a thing, love, but we made her drink the orange juice. It brings them down you know, the Vitamin C.’
‘Yeah, I know. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘I want Dad to come and get me.’ This was said through gritted teeth.
‘He can’t come so you’ll have to make do with me. Now come on, Liz, I’m not in the mood for games.’
Lizzy sneered, then sat back down again. ‘I’ll just have to wait for Dad then, won’t I?’
‘You’re coming home with me now, Lizzy.’
She grinned annoyingly. ‘I’m going to do whatever I want, Mum. I’m through with you and Gran always telling me what you want, what you expect me to be . . .’
Kate felt herself reddening. She tried desperately to control her voice.
‘We can talk about this at home, Lizzy. This is neither the time nor the place.’
‘Really? Funny that, because you seem to spend enough time here. I’d have thought this was the place for you, Mum, more than anywhere else.’
‘I’m telling you for the last time, Liz, get up and let’s go home. We can talk this through, make some sense out of it.’
Lizzy laughed out loud, her mouth wide with mirth. ‘That’s about right for you, isn’t it? Let’s analyse everything. Let’s find the hidden meaning in everything. Oh, fuck off, Mum. You sound like a bad play!’
Kate spoke between clenched teeth to the duty officer. ‘Would you leave us alone, please?’
The man had been so embarrassed he had been pretending to study the graffiti on the cell walls. He rushed from the cell, shutting the door behind him. He liked Kate Burrows a lot. She was a nice woman, a good DI; to see her shamed like that was terrible.
Mother and daughter stared at one another and Kate was aware that it was now a battle of nerves between them. For some reason Lizzy was enjoying this. She was not contrite or sorry or any of the things she should have been. In fact, it seemed as if she was actually enjoying it. Where, oh where, was the daughter of two days ago? Where was the girl with the ready smile and the laughing face? It was as if she was seeing a stranger, a stranger with her daughter’s face and body. A body that had been well used, judging by the diary she had found.
‘What’s all this really about, Lizzy? Come on, tell me.’ She stood up and walked to the back of the cell. Her hair was in her eyes and she brushed it away impatiently.
‘I want Dad.’
‘Well, your dad isn’t here, I am. And if necessary, Lizzy, I am going to take you out of here by force.’
She laughed again.
‘I’d like to see you try!’
It was said in a tone of such contempt that Kate felt something inside her break. She walked across the room and, grabbing her daughter’s long hair, yanked her towards the cell door. It took every bit of strength that she possessed.
Lizzy, though, was not having any of it. She brought her fist round and punched her mother in the shoulder. Kate felt the blow, and swinging Lizzy round to face her, slapped her hard across the face, sending the girl flying to the corner of the cell.
Both were breathing heavily.
‘Get up, Lizzy, now, before I really lose my rag! Get up, I said!’ The last sentence echoed around the small cell.
Kate walked towards her daughter and Lizzy scrambled to her feet.
‘You are coming home with me now, and if you so much as open that foul mouth of yours, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life.’
Something in her mother’s voice told Lizzy that she meant it. Kate grabbed the shoulder of her daughter’s tee-shirt and dragged her to the cell door. She banged on it with her free hand and it was opened by Higgins. Kate then marched the girl along the cell row, through the desk sergeant’s office and out of the building to the car park. She threw Lizzy in the car. Getting into the driver’s seat, she started the engine.
‘You’d better have a good reason for all this, Lizzy, because I want to know exactly what’s going on with you.’
With that she drove out of the station and home. Neither of them said a word more.
Evelyn desperately wanted to clean up Lizzy’s room for her but Kate had forbidden her to touch it. She sat on the bed looking at the utter chaos around her. Pictures of Lizzy as a child were everywhere. She shook her head. If anyone had told her that her granddaughter was on drugs she would have laughed in their face.
‘Not my Lizzy,’ she would have said. But now the truth was facing her and it was like gall. That beautiful girl was ruining her life, was breaking her family apart - for drugs.
From what Kate had told her Lizzy had been on amphetamines for a couple of years. She shook her head. Standing up, she looked around the familiar room. How many times had she come to tuck Lizzy in when she had been small? Kissed the soft skin of her face? Brushed the long hair till it gleamed?
She walked to the window and looked out into the dull afternoon light. That was when she saw the diary. It was a girl’s diary, with birds and flowers painted on a pale green silk background. Evelyn opened it up idly and began to read.
She was still reading when Kate and Lizzy arrived. Kate had to pull the girl from the car and practically drag her up the garden path to the house. Opening the door, she pushed her daughter inside.
Lizzy walked into the front room and through to the kitchen where she began to make herself a cup of coffee as if nothing had happened. Kate pulled her coat off and put it on the banisters. She followed her daughter through to the kitchen.
‘Right then, I want to know everything that’s been happening. I want to know where you got the drugs, who from, and who you took them with.’
Lizzy poured milk into her cup.
‘That, Mother, is none of your business.’
Kate pushed her hands through her hair.
‘I’m not going to argue all day, Lizzy, I mean it. I want some answers and I want them now.’
Lizzy faced her mother and crossed her arms over her breasts. �
�That’s you all over that is. “I want some answers and I want them now.” Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’m your daughter not a bloody suspect.’
‘That, madam, is just where you’re wrong. As far as I’m concerned at this particular moment in time you’re both those things. You are suspected of dealing in drugs, Lizzy. You were at a known dealer’s house, so where exactly does that leave you? I found drugs in your bedroom. I also found your diary. So I know I’m not dealing with Snow White here.’
Lizzy turned to the kettle and poured boiling water into the mug.
‘I don’t need this at the moment, Mum, I’ve had a terrible night. Maybe later I might feel like discussing it.’
Kate watched in amazement as Lizzy stirred her coffee. Her long fingers gripped the spoon so tightly her knuckles were white. Kate looked at the womanly figure in the jeans and T-shirt. She wasn’t even wearing a bra. The T-shirt was stained and crumpled. Her hair was like rats tails and she just stood there making herself a cup of coffee. Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours Kate wondered what on earth had happened to her child.
Evelyn had been in the front room listening to the exchange. Now she walked into the kitchen as Lizzy sat at the breakfast bar and threw the diary in front of her.
‘I have seen a lot of things in my life, Elizabeth Burrows, but I never thought to see this. I felt sick to my stomach reading that filth.’ Evelyn’s voice was hard and cold.
Lizzy picked up the diary and looked at her grandmother.
‘You shouldn’t have read it, Gran.’ Her voice was small. Her grandmother was important to her.
‘Don’t you call me Gran! Don’t you ever call me that again. That you could do those things with boys and then write about them . . . It’s disgusting!’
‘It’s real life, remember that? You must have been young once.’ Lizzy felt her voice rising and tried desperately to control it. ‘My life is my own now, I’m nearly seventeen years old. If I want to sleep with boys I like, then that’s my business. Mine. Not yours or Mum’s or anyone’s. Mine!’
Evelyn gave her a look of contempt. ‘That’s all you’re interested in, isn’t it? You know, it’s funny but over the years I can always remember you saying: me, my, mine. I want, I think, I, I, I. Never a real thought for anyone else. We all fell in with what you wanted, we all bent over backwards to do what you wanted. Never a thought for ourselves. You’re nothing but a conniving, scheming, little bitch!’
‘Mum!’
‘Oh, don’t “Mum” me, Kate. That diary says it all. I make you feel suffocated, do I, with my loving? My cuddling annoys you. Well, don’t worry, Lizzy, because I never want to touch you again as long as I live.’
With that Evelyn walked from the room, her shoulders stooped.
Lizzy put her head in her hands.
‘Why did this have to happen? Why did you have to let her read that?’ She threw the diary on to the breakfast bar and Kate could hear the tears in her voice.
‘I think you should ask yourself why you wrote it, Lizzy, and why you did those things? That’s the important issue here now, not what we think.’
Tears were pouring down the girl’s face and every maternal instinct in Kate’s body told her to comfort her child. But the descriptions in the diary were there in the forefront of her mind and they stopped her. To picture your daughter with two boys in the back of a transit van is not exactly conducive to maternal solicitude. It caused a wide gap, a void that Kate was sure would always be between them.
‘Why can’t you just let me live my life how I want to?’
‘Because you’re set on a course of self-destruction, that’s why, Lizzy.’
‘I didn’t mean the things I said about you and Gran in the diary. I was just a bit stoned at the time and it all poured out . . . I love Gran, I always have.’
Kate sat opposite her and sighed.
‘It’s not just what you wrote that hurts us, Lizzy, it’s the way you’ve been living a lie all this time.’
‘I had to live a lie! If you knew what I was doing you’d have moved heaven and earth to stop me. It’s my life, Mum, my life.’
Kate lit a cigarette. Lizzy leant across the table and took one from her packet.
‘Yes, I smoke as well. You know everything else, you might as well know that.’
Kate shook out her match and Lizzy took the box from her hand. The touch of her daughter’s warm skin on her own was like an electric shock.
She watched Lizzy light her cigarette. Her fingers were stained with dirt, her nail varnish chipped. Her lips were cracked and dry. She looked like a girl who had been tripping all night. She also looked very young and unsure of herself, but Kate knew that was just an illusion. How many times had she pulled in young girls over the years? ‘Tarts’ was how she had described them in her own mind. Little tarts with too much make-up and too much to say for themselves. Now, here was the truth of her life in front of her. Her daughter had been sleeping with boys, and men since she was fourteen. Kate couldn’t even justify it by saying it was a boy Lizzy loved, whom her daughter had been with for a long time and so sex was a natural progression. From what she had read in the diary, it seemed any boy with a pleasing face and the latest clothes was in for a good time. Kate closed her eyes tightly.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s gone, Lizzy. I don’t know where.’
‘Figures. You never cared about him anyway.’
‘Listen, you! I let him stay here because of you. If it had been left to me I would have put him out on the street long ago. Turning up here as and when it suited him. I thought you needed a father, even a lousy father. A father who loved you was better than no father at all.’
Lizzy laughed softly.
‘I never had a father. I never really had a mother either, did I?’
Kate took a long pull on her cigarette and sighed.
What the hell had happened to her life?
Evelyn lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. The shock of what she had read was just wearing off. In place of her anger was sorrow. Sorrow for her daughter. Not for her granddaughter, but for Kate. She had battled against all the odds to give that girl everything she could possibly want. Evelyn had watched Kate over the years putting her own life on hold for Lizzy, and for what? What?
She admitted to herself that she had been partly to blame. She had spoiled the child rotten. But what else could she have done? Who would have thought that that bright articulate girl would turn out like this? That the little girl who had sat on her granny’s knee and smiled and laughed, would grow up to give herself to anyone and everyone who asked her? Hadn’t she tried to instil morals into the girl? Not for the first time she missed her husband dreadfully. He would have known what to do. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Lizzy had never known the love of a father, a real father. Kate used to wait in the hallway, sitting patiently on the stairs, listening for her father’s boots to clump up the tiny pathway. Then, as he opened the door, she’d be picked up in a big hug. Kate had known the security of love, as a child and as an adult. It was the advent of Dan that had changed her. When he had left her with a tiny baby, she had hardened her heart somehow. Oh, she loved Lizzy with all her being, Evelyn knew that, but she had also channelled her energy into her work. On reflection, Evelyn wondered now if this was such a good thing. If Kate had maybe married again and given Lizzy a father figure . . .
She shook herself mentally. ‘What’s bred in the bone comes out in the blood.’ How many times had she said that to people? Lizzy was like her father. She used people for her own ends. Dan had been the same. He was still the same. He had packed his bags and disappeared, as he always had, at the first sign of trouble. He said he couldn’t cope with aggravation. Those were his exact words. Well, he generally caused any aggravation that was floating around, but he would never admit it.
She heard the bedroom door open and put her hands over her eyes to shield the glare from the lan
ding light.
‘I’ve brought you a cup of coffee, Mum.’
Kate set the cup down on the dresser by the bed.
‘How are you feeling?’
Evelyn had closed her eyes. She felt the springs in the bed shift as Kate sat beside her. They clasped hands.
‘I don’t know how I feel, to tell you the truth. Now the shock’s wearing off, I keep trying to make excuses for her.’
She heard Kate sigh.
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Oh, Katie, that we would ever see the day . . .’ Her voice broke.
‘I know. Believe me, I know what you’re feeling. The worst of it all to me is that I never guessed anything. Me a policewoman, a DI, never saw what was in front of my face.’
‘That’s because you trusted her.’ Evelyn’s voice was so filled with despair that Kate felt rage again. Rage at her daughter, not just for what she had done but for all the unhappiness she had caused her grandmother. Evelyn was of a different era, a different breed. She had been a virgin when she married, had stayed faithful all her married life. Even when she had been widowed young, she had never wanted another man. Kate had envied her mother her nice clean life. Now Lizzy had taken all that her grandmother held dear and dragged it through the dirt.
For that Kate would find it hard to forgive her.
The two women sat together in silent despair. Then the phone rang.
Kate answered it and went back in to her mother.
‘Frederick Flowers wants to see me. No prizes for guessing why.’ Her voice was trembling now.
The Chief Constable had been quite nice, Kate conceded. He had asked her what was happening and she told him as truthfully as possible. The possession charge had been dropped because her daughter had only had a small amount on her. Not enough to be a dealer, only enough for what the police termed ‘personal use’.
Kate drove home in a stupor. She knew that this would be a black cloud hanging over her for the rest of her working life. But that wasn’t the issue here. The real crux of the matter was finding out why her daughter felt the need to take drugs. Why she lied and cheated. What the hell was going on in the child’s mind.
