The Rumour

by Lesley Kara

  It’s Michael. ‘I’m outside. I didn’t want to ring the bell in case it woke Alfie.’

  The sight of him on the doorstep with his big leather holdall and an archipelago of assorted bags and boxes on the path behind him is balm to my frayed nerves. His arms enfold me in a long, close hug. He must have woken early and seen my messages, driven here as soon as he could.

  I tell him about the photo on the school noticeboard first, and I can see from the sceptical expression on his face that he thinks I’m overreacting.

  ‘You say some of the other kids were made to look like zombies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how did you know they were zombies?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Michael! I know what a zombie looks like! Their faces were grey and their eyes all weird and bloodshot. And they had oozing wounds. You know, the usual zombie stuff.’

  ‘So I don’t see how Alfie having a knife sticking out of him is any worse than that. It’s a classic Halloween image, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, Mr Matthews thought it was inappropriate. He agreed it was odd that Alfie had been singled out in that way.’

  Michael raises his eyebrows. ‘He was probably just saying that to defuse the situation. Come on, Joey. You can’t really think there’s anything more to it than that, can you?’

  I reach for my phone and go on to Twitter. ‘Wait till you see this, then.’

  But when I click on to my followers the Sally Mac account has disappeared. She’s not following me any more. I search for her username, but there’s no trace of her.

  ‘That’s weird. She’s gone.’

  ‘Who’s gone?’

  I tell him about Sally Mac @rumourmill7 and the tweets she’s posted. His eyes narrow. Then I tell him about the Watching Alfie hashtag and they narrow further still.

  ‘That’s nasty,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t think it’s her, do you? That she’s somehow got wind of the fact I’ve been spreading this rumour?’

  Too late, I realize what I’ve said.

  Michael stares at me. ‘What do you mean, you’ve been spreading the rumour?’

  My cheeks burn with embarrassment. Embarrassment and shame. ‘When I first heard it, before I even mentioned it to you, I talked about it at book club.’

  Michael rolls his eyes.

  ‘I was trying to deflect attention away from Jenny, one of the other members, because Karen was quizzing her on her love life and she looked really uncomfortable. It was the first thing that came into my head. I’ve regretted it ever since.’

  ‘But you haven’t told anyone what I found out, have you? Nobody knows I’m planning a book about her?’

  ‘Nobody knows about the book, but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘The week after book club, one of the women – Maddie – told me she’d been talking to a friend of hers from Pilates who used to be a probation officer and who came out with all this stuff about witness protection. Maddie put two and two together and came up with five. She convinced herself that Sonia Martins from Stones and Crones was Sally McGowan.’

  Michael shakes his head in disbelief. ‘So all that’s down to you too.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m responsible for Maddie blabbing to her friend, am I?’

  He sighs. ‘No, of course not. But that’s how these things get out of hand. They spread like wildfire.’

  ‘Anyway, she doesn’t think it’s her any more. Apparently, the husband of another one of her friends at Pilates went off with Sonia Martins, so now Maddie thinks her friend has started this false rumour about her out of revenge.’ I clench my toes. ‘Someone put a brick through the shop window the other night.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Michael says under his breath.

  ‘I know. The whole thing’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Anything else you want to get off your chest?’ He’s looking into my eyes. He knows there’s something I’m not telling him.

  I take a deep breath. This isn’t something I want to admit, but if we’re really going to make our relationship work I have to be honest with him.

  ‘I might have mentioned what you said about her being moved to a dry town.’

  He sighs deeply and looks away.

  ‘Why?’ he says at last. ‘Why would you do that? I didn’t have you down as a gossip.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s just that … Alfie’s been having problems making friends. Nobody was sitting next to him at lunchtimes. I didn’t want him to be miserable. I didn’t want him to be the victim again, not after what he went through before. All that horrible name-calling he had to put up with. And I’ve been finding it hard too. The other mums already know each other. I feel like the new girl at school.’

  ‘So you thought gossiping to them would help.’

  ‘It did help. They asked me to join the babysitting circle. And Alfie got invited to Liam’s birthday party. I’ve been trying to pour cold water on the story ever since.’

  I’ve been looking at my hands while I’ve been telling him all this, but now I lift my head and force myself to meet his eyes.

  ‘You don’t think it’s Sally McGowan, do you? This Sally Mac person on Twitter?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he says. ‘I should think having a Twitter account is the very last thing she’d want to do. It’s probably another one of the mad-mummy brigade.’

  He wipes a stray tear from my cheek with his thumb. It’s a tender gesture that makes me cry even more.

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence that the account’s been deleted the day after Halloween,’ he says. ‘It was a malicious prank, that’s all.’

  ‘I hope so. I really do.’

  He enfolds me in his arms. I’m glad I’ve finally told him. It feels like a weight has been lifted.

  ‘Twitter is full of twits,’ he says. ‘Twits and trolls and people with something to sell.’

  ‘So I guess I fall into the Twit category.’

  He laughs. ‘You said it.’

  29

  That evening, after Michael’s put Alfie to bed, we search online for the documentary I read about a while back – In Identity Limbo, written and presented by Martin Knight – but we’re only able to find short clips of it on YouTube. Excerpts from interviews with protected persons, shot so you can only see the silhouettes of their profiles talking, or where their faces are deliberately blurred, their voices distorted.

  While some are grateful for their new identities, others wish they’d never agreed to leaving their old lives behind. The strain of living a lie, of continually having to be on guard, has exacted a terrible toll on their mental health. One of the interviewees, Peter – not his real name, of course – explains how hard it is not to slip up when you first take on a new identity. What worked for him, he says, is including a small element of truth somewhere in each of his lies, something to lend them authenticity.

  Then a psychologist cites the ‘illusion of truth’ effect, whereby the more times something is repeated, the more it is believed. Like rumours, I think. So what happens in the end is that people in witness protection start believing their own fictions and their old lives become less and less real to them.

  It makes sense when you think about it. I told a lie once, when I was a teenager. Made out I’d lost my virginity to one of the boys who whizzed the waltzers round on Mistden Pier, when all we’d really done is have a snog and touch each other up. It gave me the kudos I needed to fit in with the right group of friends. Or rather, the wrong group of friends, but I couldn’t see that at the time. We talked about it so often, dissected all the details, I honestly felt like it had really happened. The fantasy seemed far more real than the awkward fumbling that actually took place.

  All the people interviewed in these clips are those whose testimony has put gang members operating in organized crime behind bars. Either victims of violent crime or ex-criminals turned informers. None of them is themselves a killer. So we end up watching an old documentary about Sally McGowan instead. It was made in the late 1970s and may
well have been ground-breaking in its day, but now looks and sounds decidedly dated.

  We sit close to each other on the sofa, Michael’s laptop resting across our knees, and watch as black-and-white footage of Salford in the 1960s is interspersed with interviews of people who knew Sally as a child. Pupils and teachers at the school she attended. Neighbours and key figures involved in the original investigation into her case and the trial itself. The general consensus is that she was a headstrong child, intelligent beyond her years. A leader, not a follower. According to some of them, she had a tendency to be a bit of a bully. Hardly surprising, considering her background.

  The music alternates between mournful and menacing and the sonorous male voiceover is laden with doom. I’m sure I’ve seen some of these shots before, probably in those historical documentaries I sometimes watch. The ones that focus on a particular street or house and show the changes through time. Endless rows of back-to-back terraces. Grubby children playing unsupervised in the street. Housewives scrubbing their front steps on their hands and knees, or leaning on broom handles, gossiping. Boarded-up shops and derelict houses. The standard ‘it were grim up north’ footage.

  And then, of course, there are the lingering close-ups of Sally McGowan’s young face.

  ‘What do you see when you look into those eyes?’ Michael says, pausing the film for a moment.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I say. ‘I mean, I know what I think I see.’

  ‘Which is?’

  I put my head on one side and consider his question. ‘At first I thought she looked defiant. Fearless, almost. There’s an incredible self-assurance about her, don’t you think? A knowingness. My mother would say she looks like she’s been here before. An old soul in the body of a child.’

  Michael screws his nose up. ‘I think she looks scared and is trying to hide it. Mind you, I’m not sure what you can tell from a photograph. A millisecond after the camera shutter opened and closed, her face might have changed.’

  ‘You’re right. We’re just projecting what we know about her on to that one frozen image.’

  ‘I was looking at photos of myself as a child the other day,’ Michael says. ‘Wondering whether someone would be able to pick my adult face out, having only seen me as a little boy.’ He laughs. ‘I don’t think I’ve changed that much, to be honest.’

  ‘Are we talking physically here?’

  He pinches my thigh in response.

  ‘Apparently, for women, the most changes occur between when you’re young and when you’re middle-aged, whereas in men it’s between middle and old age,’ he says.

  He sits up and takes my face in his hands, runs his fingertips along my cheekbones and temples as if he’s a cosmetic surgeon, sizing me up for his next procedure.

  ‘We’re not just talking skin here, it’s the facial bones that change shape. The eye sockets enlarge, the angle of the lower jaw drops and the tip of the nose dips downwards.’

  ‘Such a lot to look forward to,’ I say.

  ‘You lose the deep fat pads in your cheeks too, and your eyelids start to droop, which makes the eyes look smaller.’ He grins. ‘I reckon you’ve got another ten years.’

  ‘Bloody cheek!’ I take hold of his wrists and make him slap his own face with his hands. The laptop nearly slides on to the floor and we catch it just in time, laughing.

  ‘You’ve really looked into this, haven’t you?’

  ‘Just idle googling, that’s all.’

  ‘And all this happens earlier in women than men? Typical. We always get the rough end of the stick.’

  We contemplate the face on the screen before us. The face I’ve come to know so well in the past few weeks. And the more I study it, the more it becomes what it actually is: just the face of a ten-year-old girl looking into the lens of a camera, as she was no doubt instructed to do. A child being processed through the police system.

  But this was no ordinary child. This was a child who’d committed a monstrous crime.

  Would Sally McGowan have turned out differently if she’d been nurtured by a loving family, if she hadn’t been abused by her father and traumatized by her upbringing? If you can call it that – by the sounds of it, it was more like a downbringing. I guess we’ll never know the answer to that question. And yet, she has never reoffended. Despite her dreadful past and her unthinkable crime, people believed in her ability to change and grow, to move beyond the horrors of her past.

  And now, somewhere out there, possibly in this very town, if Michael’s sources are correct, her anonymity may finally be drawing to a close. Because of people like me. And people like Michael, who, for all his faux outrage at my gossiping, has been guilty of fuelling all sorts of false or unsubstantiated stories in his time. It’s how he makes his living.

  He presses Play and the video resumes. Now we’re looking at photos of her parents, Jean and Kenny McGowan, the details of their faces slightly blurred. But there’s no mistaking the look of fear in Jean’s eyes and the belligerent swagger of Kenny as he strides towards the cameraman. I wouldn’t mind betting there was a nasty confrontation after that picture was taken. Kenny’s hands look enormous. One of them is clenched into a fist. A fist that looks ready to swing.

  ‘Surely he should have faced prosecution too,’ I say. ‘He might not have murdered Robbie Harris, but he abused and tortured Sally for most of her young life. Everything I’ve read points to him being violent with the mother as well. Why did they believe him when he said it was Sally who inflicted the cuts and burns on her skin? Everyone knew he was a violent drunk and a bully.’

  ‘It was a different world back then,’ Michael says. ‘People didn’t talk so openly about stuff like that. Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to admit such things could happen.’

  I think of what Susan Marchant told me about her father, and shudder. Even when abuse like that stops, its effects last a lifetime. The memories never fade. I see her face on the beach, the pain behind her eyes. Something niggles at the back of my mind, then elbows its way to the front. What if she’s doing what ‘Peter’ did and embedding a germ of truth in a lie? McGowan was horribly abused by her father, after all. As Maddie would say, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

  The documentary is over now. Michael closes his laptop and stands up. He’s doing that thing he always does when he’s thinking hard about something: pushing his tongue into the flesh of his lower lip. It makes him look gormless, but I’ll never tell him that because I’ve grown quite fond of it over the years.

  ‘I could murder a drink,’ he says. ‘I think I’ll nip out and buy something.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ve got a bottle of red wine in the cupboard. And I’m sure there’s some brandy in there too.’

  ‘But I really fancy a whisky,’ he says. ‘The Co-op’s open till ten, isn’t it? I’ll only be a few minutes.’

  As the front door closes behind him I run upstairs to the bedroom window without turning the light on and peer behind the curtain. Michael isn’t a great drinker. And since when has he drunk whisky? I’m sure he only said that because he knows I haven’t got any and it’s given him the excuse to leave the house.

  I watch him saunter off towards the shop. As he crosses the road by the lamp post, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. By the time he reaches the other side, he’s already talking to somebody. One of his sources, perhaps? He doesn’t want me to listen in on the conversation because now he knows I’ve told people about his ‘dry town’ theory, he doesn’t trust me any more.

  I let the curtain fall back. I suppose I can hardly blame him for keeping things close to his chest.

  I go downstairs again and dial Liz’s number. She must be home by now. She’s always telling us how she’s a homebody at heart and how she hates going out in the evenings. If I can just persuade her to speak to Sonia Martins, maybe, just maybe, Sonia will grant Michael an interview. I need to undo some of the damage I’ve done.

  30

  I feel her before I see her. A pres
ence at the foot of the bed. An irresistible force that draws my eyes towards her like a magnet. At first her face is blurry, ethereal, like an impressionist portrait. Then she comes into focus and my heart stops. It’s her. It’s Sally McGowan!

  She throws her head back and her face splits open in a scream of manic laughter. I’m hypnotized by the back of her throat and the small, soft piece of flesh that hangs there, quivering. As her arms stretch towards me, they’re pale as bone, apart from her hands. Nausea surges through me like a monstrous wave that refuses to break. Her hands are smeared with blood and I know, with terrifying clarity, that it’s Alfie’s blood.

  She’s killed my baby.

  When I wake, I’m sitting bolt upright and Michael is shaking me by the shoulders. ‘It’s just a dream, Joey. A nightmare. It’s all right. You’re safe now. You’re safe. I’ve got you.’

  I scrabble to free myself from the duvet. My skin is cold and clammy and my limbs don’t seem to work properly. ‘Alfie! Where’s Alfie?’

  ‘Shh. Alfie’s fine. He’s asleep in his bed.’

  ‘Have you looked?’

  ‘No, but where else would he be?’

  I’m fully awake now, and though I know it was a nightmare – of course it was a nightmare – the horror still clings to me like a shroud. I have to go and see him for myself.

  I push open his bedroom door and there he is, curled on his side in his Star Wars pyjamas, his lips stuck together in sleep, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling. I lean over him and inhale the familiar baby scent of his skin. His hair curls damply against the curve of his cheek. I smooth it back with my fingers, hook it round his little pink ear. He wrinkles his nose and chews air, but only for a second. I haven’t woken him. I crouch beside the bed, not yet ready to leave his side. Unwilling to tear myself away. No, not unwilling. Unable. I’m physically unable to remove myself from this room. As if he’s a newborn baby all over again and, if I’m not here to see him breathe, then maybe he won’t.