The Mother's Lies

by Joanne Sefton

  Guilt needled her. She’d been absolutely ready to believe it was him. Some stunt put on to get his own way or else to pay her back for not agreeing to let him take the kids back to London when he’d first asked. But then, she could hardly be blamed for looking for reasons why he might have taken Barney – not when the alternative was the hell she was going through now. Darren had turned back to Veena, now, still with one arm wrapped tight around Helen’s shoulders. She breathed the spice of his cologne, underscored with a tang of anxiety.

  ‘There’s been no public appeal yet,’ he said. ‘We should have filmed one. We should be out there …’

  ‘There’s been a missing child alert. It’s on all the media channels.’ If anything, Veena’s tone was dismissive.

  ‘But that’s you, not us. Not his family.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Helen. ‘If anyone’s seen anything they’ll come forward either way. Barney’s not a runaway; he’s too young to respond to an appeal.’

  But Darren was shaking his head. ‘It matters because they think it’s us.’ He emphasised the last word, almost spitting it back to her. ‘That’s the read-between-the-lines. That’s why she’s got you holed up here and not in make-up at the BBC.’ He took a shaky breath, making a visible effort to keep calm. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a monkey’s if the Daily Mail thinks this is some sort of screwed-up custody battle. But while that’s the cops’ working hypothesis, whoever took our son has still got him and is getting clean away with it.’

  Helen turned to Veena, hoping she’d deny it.

  ‘We have to be open to all possibilities.’ There was an edge to her voice, a tilt of the chin that gave the truth to Darren’s accusations.

  ‘God,’ was all Helen could bring herself to say. The word was drowned, anyway, under the smack of Darren’s palm hitting the table beside him. A china candlestick on the mantelpiece jumped forward a fraction and all three of them turned to statues for a moment, watching to see if it would fall. As if it mattered.

  Darren took another step towards Veena. ‘You know it wasn’t me. You’ve wasted the best part of a day checking that to the nth degree. Hels and I may have our problems, but I’ll tell you for free she wouldn’t harm a hair on those kids’ heads. They mean more to her than anything.’ He turned his gaze to her for a moment. ‘And I should damn well know.’

  ‘Listen—’ Veena tried to interrupt.

  ‘I’ve not finished yet. There’s no side to Helen, no funny business, no shady mates or kinky sex or whatever else it is that you lot think you might be trying to sniff out. Nada. End of. You can be as open to all possibilities as you want, but if … if some fucking …’ He was shaking his head now, struggling again to hold it together.

  ‘Come on, Darren,’ Helen said, gently pulling him down to sit with her on the sofa. For a while, he sobbed and she held him. She wondered if her arms still held any comfort for him, as – in spite of every fibre of her will – his arms still did for her.

  ‘It’s late,’ said Veena, carefully neutral.

  ‘You should see Alys,’ Helen told Darren. ‘She’s asleep upstairs. Take as long as you want.’

  ‘Do you want him to stay here?’ Veena asked, quietly, once Darren had left the room.

  Helen turned to her, finding some of Darren’s acid had seeped into her tone. ‘Why? Is he allowed to leave? Or is he on lockdown too?’

  Veena shrugged. ‘Nobody’s under arrest. I’m going to make some tea. I’ll give you two a chance to talk about it.’

  Darren decided he would go to his parents. They were expecting him, he said. They were frantic. They’d gone to Clitheroe yesterday for the market and Chris was beside herself that she’d missed Helen’s calls because she’d had her phone in her jacket pocket and decided at the last moment to take a raincoat instead, forgetting to swap the phone back.

  When Darren closed the front door behind him, it was as though he’d taken the breath out of her. She hadn’t told him her mother was a murderer, she realised. It hadn’t come up in the conversation. A giddy laugh, a laugh that belonged to someone else, slipped out of Helen’s mouth.

  She was wired but exhausted, tortured with the knowledge that someone out there knew how Barney was. Whether he was asleep. Whether he was crying. Whether he was dead. All his life she’d carried the knowing of him with her. Even on odd nights away she’d get babysitters to text when the kids had gone off: what they’d been doing, what they’d eaten. Now the craving to know was like a black hole inside her, expanding with each minute she was away from him.

  In these last few weeks, she’d come to know herself in a different way – come to know how her mind and body worked and felt when pushed to the brink. This was different. This was a not-knowing, and it was quite literally driving her mad.

  February 1968

  Katy

  Katy sat perfectly still on one of the hard wooden chairs outside the governor’s office. The slats at the back of the chair pressed into her spine in two different places, but she didn’t slump. She had been sitting for so long that she was able to note the creep of the shadows from the window bars across the floor. She wasn’t bothered; she was good at sitting still.

  The clock opposite told her she’d been waiting for one hour and forty-three minutes. The countdown in her heart, on the other hand, measured in a different scale. Five years, three months and sixteen days. More than a quarter of her life. That was how long she’d been waiting. Her arse could put up with a hard chair for a while longer. Today was her release date. Today, before those clock hands reached midnight, they had to let her go.

  She let her gaze drift back down to the chequerboard of sun and shadow on the tiled floor. It must be a good omen, she decided, for it to be such a sunny day. New beginnings, she thought, imagining the sensation of the sun on her shoulders and the sight of the new growth in the hedgerows as she walked down the drive and through the gates. She savoured the image, though it was silly. This was hardly Spandau.

  Once her release date had been decided, she’d been moved to an open prison to prepare for life beyond the walls. The women could wander the grounds – still referred to as the Park, as it had been when the place was a landed estate – as much as they liked. For Katy, who had spent years in a mixed Secure Unit because there weren’t enough girls in the system, a women’s prison felt soft in a way, almost homely.

  Sunshine and freedom though, that would feel different. It would feel like roses and perfume and honey and a great big ‘fuck you’ to all the idiots still stuck here.

  The mahogany door at the end of the room swung open, and Miss Price, the governor’s secretary, stood in the doorway.

  ‘Mr Wilde will see you now, Clery,’ Miss Price announced, and stood back a fraction to allow her to come through.

  Katy jumped up smartly. The stiffness and numbness instantly dissipated.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ she said, but Miss Price had already turned on her heel and disappeared.

  Mr Wilde was a middling-sized man of about forty, with a waxed moustache and a jacket sleeve pinned neatly flat where his left arm should have been. He was leaning back in his chair, and he gestured that she should sit across from him. The chair set out at her side of the desk was a match for the ones in the hallway and her spine knuckled against the slats in the same tender spots as before. Katy gritted her teeth and pulled her back even straighter.

  ‘So, your time has come, Miss Clery?’

  His voice was oddly nasal, almost strangulated. The women speculated on whether, like the lost arm, it was a war wound of some sort, or whether it was just to do with him being a toff. Either way, Katy had to give herself a moment to tune in to him, like a radio. She nodded, carefully, noting the ‘Miss’ that no one had ever before appended to ‘Clery’ in this place. Probably not anywhere.

  ‘Our loss, I fear.’ He picked up a fountain pen and began to unscrew its barrel.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. Sure, there were bastards enough around here, but she’d
never counted the governor among them. She decided she could afford a little courtesy.

  ‘Some people leave, Clery, and I worry about what they’ll do when they get to the outside.’ He paused, scrabbling about in a desk drawer and eventually producing a bottle of ink, before looking up again. ‘In this case, I worry more about what the outside will do to you.’

  Katy didn’t say anything, and he didn’t seem to expect her to.

  ‘There’s a curious thing I’ve learnt since I came to this job, and it’s this. Very often, it’s not the worst people who do the worst things. People will try to drag you down, Clery, try to turn you into the person they already think you are.’ He drew the ink carefully into the barrel. She watched the operation closely, transfixed by the dexterity of his single hand. ‘I believe you have the character to rise above it. Eric Robertson at Ashdown certainly thought so.’ Finally, he looked her in the eye. ‘And Mr Robertson’s good opinion is not won lightly.’

  In a moment of sudden realisation, it dawned on her that the governor had prepared this speech. It shocked her, that he should consider her worth the effort.

  ‘I hope we’ve given you something? I mean, us here and at Ashdown?’ he said, looking at her in expectation of a reply. But she’d not caught the lead-up to the question.

  ‘Shorthand,’ she hazarded. ‘I’m good at shorthand now. I like it.’

  He gave a quick laugh. ‘That’s not quite what I meant, Clery, but fair enough. It’ll stand you in good stead.’

  The governor pushed back his chair to stand. It seemed the interview was over, and Katy rose to stand too. After a moment’s hesitation, she took his outstretched hand.

  ‘I understand your sister is coming to get you,’ he said. ‘She’ll have had a drive. I’ve told Miss Price to give you both tea. Make sure you get it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Off you go then.’ And with that, the governor looked down at his papers and Katy walked away from the place she’d been forced to call home. She walked to freedom.

  *

  ‘Bloody hell, Sonia, what the fuck have you got on your head?’

  ‘Katy!’

  Katy’s sister turned, her mouth a taut ‘O’ of shock. The car nearly swerved into the boggy verge, but then her driving hadn’t been particularly smooth even before Katy’s question, not least because of the amount of time she spent patting the weird structure rising up from her hairline.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road. It was only a question.’

  ‘Well, if you must know, it’s called a beehive.’ Sonia patted the back of it, gingerly.

  ‘Smells like a leak at the fucking Elnett factory.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something for free, Katy Clery, you’d better not try that effing and blinding with Mum. She’ll string you up before you know what you’ve got coming.’

  Katy allowed herself a studiedly bitter laugh.

  ‘I think I’ve learnt how to cope with worse than our Ma with her knickers in a twist, Sonia.’

  ‘It’s nothing to be proud of, you know,’ sniffed Sonia, patting her hair again and swinging the car a good three foot into the opposite carriageway in the process. ‘Just because you’ve been away for the best part of six years – and it was nothing more than you deserved – doesn’t make you better than the rest of us. Opposite, in fact.’

  ‘Never said it fucking did.’

  ‘Just stop it, Katy! I’ve got a job, and I can drive, and I’m walking out, and you’ve got flat hair and hands like a Land Girl and a criminal record. You always used to swank around like you were the cool one, but you needn’t think nothing’s changed since we were schoolkids. And that’s true, however much you try to show off with your swearing.’

  Katy shrugged, suddenly bored of winding her sister up. ‘All right, Sis.’

  ‘And I’ve driven the best part of a hundred miles – two hundred by the time we get back – to come and pick you up. The least I should get is a “thank you”.’

  Sonia turned to face her younger sister again, and Katy could see the mousy roots at her hairline and the ghosts of freckles under the panstick. She still had the deep brown eyes with long lashes that Katy had called ‘cow’s eyes’ as a child, trying to conceal her envy of them. Sonia was almost twenty-one now – the neighbours used to call them Irish twins. Katy couldn’t stop drinking in her sister with her eyes; it felt surreal, tracking the changes in the face she knew so well.

  Sonia had written to her over the years; she was the only one who had. Katy knew that she ought to show that she was grateful, perhaps even that she should be trying to make Sonia understand the truth. But just now she couldn’t cope with that. The only way she could manage was by acting as if everything was the same as when they were love-hate eleven-year-olds, ready to scratch each other’s eyes out over the biggest bit of jam pudding.

  ‘Sonia – the road!’

  ‘Shit!’

  They’d strayed over the line again and a Transit van was bearing down on them, horn blasting. Sonia hauled the Anglia across and battled with the steering whilst the Transit driver passed them making a finger-looping mental sign, which Katy answered by flicking him the Vs. The near miss was over in an instant, and both girls began to giggle, the laughter of each of them fuelling the other’s hysteria as it had done since they were kids.

  ‘Thought you didn’t swear, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?’

  ‘Aw, piss off, Katy.’ Sonia scrabbled at her feet and threw a clutch bag into her sister’s lap. ‘Get me a ciggie out, will you? And take one yourself if you want it.’

  ‘Ta, Sis, that’s more like it.’

  They wound their way through the countryside, Sonia rabbiting on endlessly about her man, who was called Johnnie Maguire, and his lovely mum and dad (who had leant her the car for the day, a fact Katy couldn’t help but be impressed by) and her job at a salon on Bold Street.

  Katy only half listened; it was hard to draw her eyes away from the scenes outside the window. After years of having only crumbling walls and dun fields to watch, week in and week out, season after season, everything she saw from the car took on a technicolour novelty. The hedgerows, at their springtime best and still laden with a heavy dew, bristled with life and energy. The villages were fascinating little worlds and the people – old and young, pretty and plain – all endlessly intriguing. Katy noted that two or three of the younger women they passed seemed to have ‘beehive’ hairdos too, although none were as exaggerated as Sonia’s.

  They’d been in the car for getting on for three hours when Katy began to recognise the names on the road signs and to have a sense that they were getting into familiar territory. The outskirts of the city looked different from how she remembered them: glossier, bigger, with adverts everywhere. She noticed new buildings and fewer of the long-standing bombsites bounded by their semi-permanent hoardings. It wasn’t that she recognised these streets as such – but she sensed she was getting closer to home.

  ‘Do you know … is Simon Gardiner still living here?’

  ‘Nah.’ Sonia shook her head vigorously. ‘The bastard moved after the trial. You don’t need to worry about bumping into him. Or his wife.’

  Sonia’s chatter died away after that. Katy wondered if it was true, or if Sonia would say it anyway to protect her – or keep her out of trouble. She’d find out soon enough, she supposed.

  The roads became smaller and more residential. A couple of times, Sonia took wrong turnings and swore gently under her breath, but she never asked Katy for help, and the Shell road atlas that had been floating around on the dashboard earlier (‘Careful with that, it belongs to Mr Maguire!’) had now been firmly relegated to the back seat.

  Eventually, Katy felt compelled to break the silence again.

  ‘Sonia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She paused, still unsure how to phrase what she needed to know.

  ‘Will they – I mean Mum and everyone – will they be pleased to see me?’

  ‘Course,’ said Sonia, a
heartbeat too late.

  Neither sister said any more for another ten minutes or so, not until they closed into the warren of terraces surrounding St James’s church. Katy felt her weight swing in the seat as they rounded each familiar corner and the rhythm of it felt like a well-known hymn or lullaby, even though, in truth, she’d rarely been in a car all the years she had lived here.

  But then there was a wrong note. Sonia took a left that should have been a right. Katy looked sharply towards her, but her eyes were fixed on the road.

  ‘Why’re we going this way?’

  ‘Our Terry lives along here. We’re going there first.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll find out. Look, we’re here now. There’s Mum at the window.’

  And so she was. Katy’s eyes met her mother’s, but the older woman turned away quickly. Even at a glance, she was instantly recognisable: the petite, erect frame, the thin mouth and big eyes, topped with her carefully curled dyed-blonde hair. Joyce Clery had the quiet air of a hand grenade or a coiled cobra – always ready.

  Five of them sat drinking tea in the kitchen. Katy, Sonia, Joyce, Terry, and his wife, Bernice. There had been a child jiggling in Bernice’s arms when they first came through the door, but it had been quickly taken into the bedroom. No one asked Katy if she would like to see her baby nephew.

  As it turned out, no one asked Katy much at all. Terry talked about her in the third person – ‘There ain’t room for her to stay here more than a night or two,’ and ‘How’s she going to get a job with her record?’ Joyce asked her questions – ‘You must be shattered from your journey, love?’ – but rarely seemed to wait for a reply. Sonia and Bernice said nothing.

  Eventually, Katy learnt there’d been some ‘nonsense’ at her mum’s house. Burning newspaper or dog shit shoved through the letter box. Once a burning newspaper and dog shit.

  ‘We’re worried you won’t be safe there,’ said Joyce, not looking at Katy.

  ‘The police are worried you won’t be safe with her there,’ Terry corrected his mother.