by Helen Walsh
Her panic mushrooms out into the cold damp air. She leans further into the intercom so her lips fizz against its crackling mesh. ‘This is Sara Cartwright’s house?’
‘Yeh-es. You’re speaking with Mrs Cartwright. But Sara has no friends staying over tonight. Who is this again?’
‘Please. This is urgent. I need to speak to Sara.’
Through the muffled perforations, Sheila can hear her conferring with her husband and then the intercom clicks dead and the gates pull back. Sheila races up the gravel, smoothing down the kink in her hair, straightening out her jacket. Even in the demented scourge of her ordeal she is acutely aware of how this must look to a family like Sara’s. She knows that the fact of her being alone, without a husband, and that orange jalopy parked up outside the gates have already conspired against her. A man with an elegant mane of silver-grey hair comes to the door. Behind him his wife hauls their teenage daughter down the stairs. She’s heart-stoppingly pretty, a mass of golden hair and big, brown eyes. Mr Cartwright steps forward. ‘Can you be quick, please. I’m only letting you in because …’ He casts a disapproving look at his wife, then steps back into the house. Mrs Cartwright is austere, yet not unkind.
‘So. What is this?’
‘I dropped my daughter off here. Ellie Fitzgerald.’
A look of slight fear passes over Sara. Her mother goes to stand behind her daughter, drapes two protective arms around her. ‘Sara hasn’t had a sleepover this week – have you, darling?’
She shakes her head.
‘And I don’t think … Ella, is it?’
‘Ellie’s never been here. We don’t really socialise.’
A whole, rapid-fire flashback speeds in front of Sheila’s eyes. Her helping Ellie pack her overnight bag. Ellie giggling with her about Mr Cartwright’s roving eye. How they lace all their food with garlic – even the cheese on toast. Ellie could not make these things up. She feels like she’s choking here. She’s going under. For Vincent’s sake, she drags herself back up. She fortifies her voice, fighting to override another tearful breakdown. She places a hand on Sara’s shoulder, looks into her eyes. ‘Sara? Do you have any idea where my daughter might be?’
The girl shoots an anxious sidelong glance at her mother. Sheila turns her gaze on Mrs Cartwright, a desperate, beseeching look that only a mother can understand. She softens her voice and turns to her daughter. ‘Sara, darling – if you do know anything …’
Sara looks torn for an instant, then hides her head in her mother’s dressing gown. Mrs Cartwright holds Sara’s head, makes her look up at her. ‘You’re not in any trouble, darling! Anything you know, anything that might help this poor lady …’
Sara peers at Sheila, still clinging to her mummy’s warm body. ‘I think she might be at Legends.’
Sheila gives a nervous, spluttered giggle. ‘Right, Legend – do you happen to have his number? Or do you know where he lives?’
A beat, and then, ‘It’s a night club.’ She fires another troubled glance at her mother. ‘I only know that because Katie’s sister goes.’
Sheila’s reprieve lasts all of half a minute. Bile cloys in her throat. ‘Is it … is it in Warrington?’
Sara shrugs, and Sheila knows she’s telling the truth.
‘Well. Thank you. I’m so sorry to have disturbed you like this. My son …’ She chews down on her lip, fights the tears back.
Sara steps forward. ‘I thinks it’s somewhere near a garage. That’s all I know. Someone told me they dance on a wall.’
Sheila drives round and round the centre of town in panicked loops, her world spinning out of control. She should go to Vincent – but Ellie is out there, too, and her maternal tug is dragging her in circles. All she can do is respond to each instinct as it comes to her. She pulls into three different garages, asks the attendants if there is a club called Legends nearby. None of them have heard of it. She heads up to the taxi rank at Warrington Central. Someone there has got to know. A group of Asian cabbies is clustered around their cars, elbows splayed across the roofs, drinking tea from polystyrene cups as they wait for the last train in from Liverpool. She knows exactly how this will go. She can’t bring herself to approach the bastards. But she has no choice.
‘Legends?’ one of them spits. ‘In’t that the druggies’ club?’
It’s humiliating. The man has a broader Warrington accent than Sheila but once he’s clocked her Western clothes, sussed her naked fingers and the awful shine of panic in her eyes he’s already drawn his own conclusions. He and his workmates are luxuriating in her anguish. She refuses to give them the satisfaction of a lecture. She thrusts a fiver at him. ‘Drive. I’ll follow.’
He leads her to the bottom of Priory Street. She looks him up and down as he gets out of his cab and delves for change. She’s seldom known such fire, such anger in her soul.
‘Keep it!’ she spits, and marches towards the garage.
Pale-faced revellers are already spilling out into the night. They look like some alien species, the boys stripped down to their waists utterly oblivious to the lacerating air. Sara must have made some kind of mistake. Sheila would know if this place, these people were a part of Ellie’s world. And yet, even as she thinks it, her conviction is eclipsed by a full and sickening realisation that this is, absolutely, Ellie’s world. She recalls her own horror at the works’ night out, and her sickness goes deeper.
A huddle of them are gyrating on the pavement in solipsistic abstraction, dancing to imaginary beats. Sheila approaches the girl who seems the least out of it.
‘Excuse me, dear …’ She tries to sound bright and upbeat as she takes Ellie’s photo from her purse. ‘Please – have you seen this girl?’
The girl grins massively, baring both tiers of teeth. She steps from side to side then peers right into the photo of the schoolgirl. Beyond the black wells of her eyes, light bulbs are going off. Sheila’s heart starts to sink. ‘Ohhhh, yeah – that’s Elleh, in’t it? The scooleh. Good robber …’
Sheila shuts her eyes, reclaims her balance, focuses, hard. ‘Is she still in there?’
The girl shrugs her shoulders. ‘Done one, I fink.’
More instantaneous terror strangling her guts. ‘OK. Thank you.’
She puts the photo back, hoping against hope she won’t be needing it for the police again later that evening. She swears to herself, here and now, that all she’s asking for is the safe return of her girl. She won’t shout at her. She won’t question her about Sara, or Legends or school, or anything at all. Just bring her back, and she’ll make it all OK. She walks away from the syncopating ravers, back towards the Lada. The girl runs after her. ‘Hey! Missus! Your Elleh might be at Knutsford, yeah? Giz a lift to the services an’ al find her for yoh.’
Sheila ignores her, gets back into her car, fires up the engine and sits there trembling. She’s torn between her babies. Somehow, she has an inclination that ballsy, bolshy little Ellie can take care of herself. Wherever she goes, she seems to have an override, a safe mode that always sees her right. The time she ran away to Blackpool to find her dad, she made it as far as the Haydock roundabout. Juggernauts and lorry drivers and camper vans everywhere, but Ellie persuaded the motorway police to bring her home. She peels off towards the M62. Right now, Vinnie needs her more.
Dawn is breaking the city skyline when the registrar wakes Sheila. Faint smudges of lilac clouds dapple the walls. He hands her a cup of tea, then sets about talking her through the work they’ve had to do on Vincent. The damage he’s sustained is extensive: fractured maxilla, fractured mandible, fractured nose. The CT scan has shown up a temporal lobe bleed. It’s too early on to assess how this might affect his speech cortex, let alone his general psychological make-up. There’s a possibility he may develop epilepsy. He waits for her to take this all in before continuing. ‘We had to do a free-flap reconstruction.’
Sheila knows precisely what this means. They’ve had to rebuild his face, or sections of it. In her experience, it’s only victims o
f the very worst car crashes or infernos who need such treatment. She reaches for the registrar’s wrist, eyes pleading. ‘Oh no, please. Not his little face. Tell me it isn’t bad …’
‘We’ve had to take some skin and bone from his arm to reconstruct his chin. We’ve tried to find as close a match as possible but the skin on his arms is slightly darker than his face …’
Sheila drifts out. Up until this point she’s been stoically absorbing the detail, each new revelation pushing her resolve closer and closer to breaking point. But this is just too much for her to bear. She can feel herself starting to split and tear under the weight of her own fear – and her fears for Vincent. She knows it, knows it well. Vincent will never recover from this. But her ordeal is not quite through.
‘The ambulance crew that picked him up …’ He hesitates, looks down at his feet. ‘They found track marks on his arms.’
It takes a moment for it to register. Sheila can’t speak, can’t think. Not Vinnie. Not her Vinnie. She opens her mouth to defend him, but no words come.
The registrar continues. ‘The ambulance men were amazed his body was able to survive that level of pain without suffering a heart attack. So at least some good came of it. The heroin saved his life.’
Sheila collapses back onto the bed with a groan.
‘We’ve screened him for HIV and hepatitis B.’ He places his hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently, then he’s gone.
A slow tide of teal blue is rinsing out the pale dawn sky. The light is still feeble, the early morning sun blotted by the low wash of soapy pollution drifting in from Crossfields. Ellie is cold and low as she trudges the lanes back to Thelwall, her mission exposed as a foolish pipe dream, the lighter it gets. She craves nothing more than the fleecy lair of her bed now, but there’s hardly a car in sight. She takes out her last crumpled cigarette, weighed down by a hopeless pall of despair and nothingness. Other kids speak often of their comedowns, but this is new for Ellie. This is a desperate, debilitating low, and she needs to get home, shut out the world, curl up in the safety of her own hollow place.
She sparks the cigarette. Way, way on the horizon below and beyond lie the belching smoke stacks where her dad once worked. She cuts off across the fields and, choking back all feeling as she realises where this will bring her out, she passes the copse and keeps her eyes straight ahead, ignoring the whinny of the horses in their paddock. She hops down to the canal bank and follows its lugubrious trawl back home. Oh Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. How did it come to this? On the swing bridge above, a couple of cars blare past, then another and another, sub-bass thumping, each crammed tight with the fading fauna of the night – queasy faces and grinding jaws, living for nothing now but the beat. She knows exactly where they’ll be heading. Wallie Res. Another time and she’d be with them in that convoy, chasing the same false dawn, trying to stretch out the night for ever. She passes under the bridge.
Ellie’s legs are so heavy now she can barely stagger in a straight line. She trudges back over the wasteland, that mythical, muddy badlands where Vincent had been too scared to tread when they were kids – these final few yards strung out like a throbbing eternity. She sticks her head over the back fence. Mum’s car is not there in the drive. She’s left for work. It’s safe to go in. Numb with fatigue, she heaves herself over the garden fence. The weak sun finally declares itself, edging out from behind the cloud cover, warming her face. She slumps down on the garden bench. She’ll just lie down for a moment, get herself together. That sun feels nice. She’ll be better in a minute.
Eighteen
‘Ellie. Darling …’
Even in her comedown trance, Ellie can feel the emotion, the affection in her mother’s voice. So careful not to startle her.
‘Baby. It’s Mum.’
The warm spool of sound dangles across the hazy flannels of her subconscious, briefly lulling her from the dark paranoia of her thoughts. The voice calls again, and this time it’s closer. She forces a stubborn, sticky eye open. Her mum’s harrowed face looks down on her, and her heart bangs wildly with fear, with pity, with crushing remorse. She sits up, and smoothes her matted hair down onto her skull. She is utterly unprepared for any kind of showdown.
Sheila peers into the bitumen craters of her daughter’s eyes, fighting back tears. There is a crease on one side of her face and her hair looks like something washed up from the canal. She can smell the pungent heave of chemicals wafting up off her skin and clothes. There’s a mechanical tick to her jaw as it pulverises an imaginary stub of gum. How could she not have seen? Both her babies junkies and not once, ever, did she suspect. The school trips. The piano lessons. Rome. All those extra-curricular activities and items Sheila had grafted so hard to pay for. She feels spent – hollowed out.
Ellie is bracing herself for some kind of rebuke. Little quivers of indignation are jabbing her top lip, teasing it up into her gums. She leans over, buying herself a few seconds with a fake coughing fit so that she can drum up and perfect her defence. A rim of wild green fixes around her black bulging pupils. Her eyes, her father’s eyes are ready for combat.
Sheila pushes back the hurt, the anger stinging up her throat. She has to focus on now, on Vinnie. But this is almost too much. As she looks into those defiant eyes, she’s dragged through the mincer of all the warring emotions. There’s betrayal. The design and detail that’s gone into her weekly chicanery is frightening. All those elaborate lies about her imaginary sleepovers and the sideshow of Sara’s dysfunctional parents – she’s swallowed it all, and savoured it, too. Above all that, above the hurt and the sense of her own wide-eyed gullibility, revelling in her daughter’s high society, there’s a crushing throb of love and affection, relief that Ellie is here and safe, even a slight sense of awe that this little thing, her own offspring, has been capable of such intricate duplicity.
Sheila takes Ellie’s hands in her own. Their cold, bitten daintiness slays her and any residual anger fades to nothing. She still has tiny, dimpled knuckles. No matter what she’s been up to, she’s still a kid. She smiles into the strange, alien satellite of her daughter’s face. Somehow, they will all get through this.
Once she’s got Ellie tucked up in bed she steels herself to call Robbie. God knows what she’ll tell him. The truth. Why spare him? Yet she’s shaking as she dials his number. No answer. She checks the digits, dials again, carefully, but the phone rings out.
Nineteen
Ellie shrinks into her mother’s flank when she sees her brother. She takes it all in – the fluid dripping into his veins, the weirdly human machine that’s monitoring his vital signs. She stalls the inevitable for as long as she can. When there is nowhere left to look, she tightens her grip on her mother’s hand and slides her eyes along the bed covers, up to his face. His head is fixed in a brace, his cheeks speared with a pair of metal rods. His swollen, blood-cracked mouth is wrapped around a plastic tube that plunges rudely into his throat. There’s no disguise, no attempt at softening the blow here. They’ve put Vincent back together. His eyes are swollen to a pair of bulbous purple-black peaches, just a tiny gash in his right eye for him to peer out through. She nearly cries as she catches a whiff of the acid stink coming off him. The boy who lives in the bath would hate this – an obscene violation of all he holds dear.
Ellie remembers what Mum has said about bravery in his presence, how important it is to stay calm for Vinnie – but it’s too much, seeing him like this. Suffering, begging, barely alive. Who would do such a thing to her shy, bookish brother? It would be like hitting a baby. He couldn’t even block a punch, Vinnie, let alone throw one. She scans the butchered mire of his face, desperately seeking a glimpse of him. But he’s nowhere to be found. That’s not her brother lying there. It looks nothing like him, and for one blind moment she wishes that they’d finished him off. She fights back the tears welling from her soul and mouths ‘sorry’ to him, then to Mum.
She turns and leaves the room.
*
Ellie’s tear
ful exit gives Vincent his first sense of the horrific extent of his deformity. There’s been no room in his banging, slicing head for vanity up until now. A shrill and scintillating pain courses his body, driving him to the point of nausea – yet he holds off on the morphine. Around his wrist is a button-push device that will mainline a balmy, soothing opiate right through him at his will. But something compels him to own the pain. If he can take the worst, he thinks, what follows can only be better. And he needs to know exactly what that worst consists of. What remains of him, outside the throbbing trauma of his shell?
He tries to read the answers in his mother’s dissembling face. She makes a big thing of looking directly at him like there’s nothing wrong, but he can see the hurt in her tired eyes. Poor Mum. How he wishes he could make this better for her. She rolls her eyes at him.
Now his mother is just staring at him. She can’t do this. The monster staring back at her is not her young, beautiful son. And Vinnie sees that. He’s starting to understand. He closes his eyes and feigns sleep. He needs to be alone now, left to surrender to the black depression that laps at his subconscious. He pushes the button and the morphine takes him away.
Twenty
Vinnie is asleep when the police arrive two days later. On the empty bed beside him, his sister is snoring. Sheila keeps vigil over both of them, listening to the soft rattle of air circulating through their nostrils, watching their faces wrapped around their dreams. The policeman sees the intimate family vignette, holds up a hand and backs off, gestures that he’ll come back later. But Sheila is up and out of her chair, summoning them back with a wild flapping hand. This is the third time in two days they’ve turned up, seen her son sleeping and left.
