by John Marrs
I was so detached from everything that had happened before that week, I’d wiped Dougie from my history. Even having my best friend’s blood on my hands had failed to humanise me. My actions were justified, I knew that. I had the strength to do what my father should have done to the many lovers Doreen had humiliated us with.
But dealing with Catherine was a different matter. I reckoned I’d gain more satisfaction from slowly snuffing out her flame than from any physical retribution. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it, but somehow I would eke a confession from her. Then I’d make her hang with uncertainty for weeks while I pretended to make up my mind about our future.
And once she thought she could see a glimmer of hope in my open, forgiving arms, I’d abandon her and make sure my children and all her friends knew exactly what she had done. They would hate her like I did.
But I underestimated her. While I was allowing her to believe she had got away with it, she suddenly blindsided me.
14 May
I may have terminated Dougie’s life, but he’d found a way to live on, inside my wife. Inside all of us.
It hadn’t been enough for him to decimate our marriage while he was alive. Even one mile away from my house and six feet under the ground, he still rubbed salt into my open wounds.
Catherine wore the cloak of a troubled woman the night she put the children to bed early and ushered me into the dining room.
‘We need to talk about something,’ she began nervously, ‘and I’m not sure how you’re going to react.’
She dabbed her cheeks with a paper tissue before she spoke again.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Then she leaned over the table and took my hand in her devil’s claw.
‘I’ll need your help and it’ll mean cutting back on some of your hours at work, but I think another baby could be just what we need.’
It was the last thing I’d expected to hear – another hammer blow to my fragile ego. I knew then she could never be honest with me. I’d have to rethink my plan to punish her.
‘So what do you think?’ she asked.
‘It’s great news,’ I lied, and she immediately released the rest of her crocodile tears.
It was obvious that the evil seed inside her bore no relation to me. On the few occasions we’d made love, I’d had to summon up all the powers of my imagination to become aroused. It was soulless, remorseful sex between an adulterer and the wronged, and it never resulted in me climaxing.
Yet she was willing to pass her bastard off as mine now her lover, to the best of her knowledge, had cast her adrift and returned to Scotland.
I recalled her panicked eyes when Robbie had asked when Dougie was coming to dinner again. She neither lifted her head nor questioned me when I told him he wouldn’t be. It made me wonder if she knew that I knew. But if she did, she played her cards close to her chest and said nothing. Inside it must be killing her, never understanding quite why he’d dumped her. I took some satisfaction in that.
She’d upped the ante and had been overcompensating for her wrongdoings by using every calculating trick in the book not to appear the desperate housewife. She’d wait until I arrived home from work late so we could eat together; she forced her way into every aspect of the children’s lives and redecorated our verminous bedroom by herself.
On occasions when she thought she was alone, I’d see her skulk into the garage. And as I peered through the cobwebbed windows I’d witness her kneeling on the dirty floor, crying. I hoped she’d never stop.
19 August
As the months passed and the parasite in her belly grew, I resented it as much as the vehicle carrying it. I daydreamed about watching her fall down the stairs and miscarry, or of Dr Willows confirming the baby had died in her womb.
Yet despite everything I despised about her and how ghastly she made me feel, I wasn’t able to confront her or pack up my things and leave.
All I’d ever wanted was a family of my own and I wasn’t ready to leave my children like my mother had. Living with them all, I was miserable. If I walked out, I would be Doreen. Staying, at least for the time being, was the lesser of two evils.
So I played along with her charade.
25 November
She lay fast asleep in our bed, exhausted by a labour that had ravaged and contorted her body for much of the day and night.
I sat on the tatty green armchair in the bedroom cradling her son in a white shawl she’d knitted especially for his arrival. The midwife packed up her equipment and let herself out. She’d named him William after her late grandfather, and he was deep in slumber and only an hour old. His skin was still sticky and sweet-smelling, and covered in a fine, white, downy fur.
Once he’d been placed into my arms, I tried with all my might to imagine him as one of my own brood. But I wasn’t able to press my lips to his delicate ear and whisper to him like I had the others.
I couldn’t tell that little boy that I’d always be there for him and would never let him down. Because he was not my son and never would be. Even the product of an untruth didn’t deserve a lie – I knew that better than most.
Weeks passed and I spent hours watching him, identifying traces of the father I’d killed in his smiles and frowns. He was the spitting image of Dougie, even down to his few strands of auburn hair.
He’d never experience a male role model who’d love him unconditionally, or a mother who’d be completely honest with him about his origins. So soon into his life, he was weighed down like an anchor by his conception.
However, my steely facade had begun to melt a little when I witnessed Catherine giving birth. In her vulnerability I saw pieces of the woman I’d loved, who’d already blessed me with three children of my own.
And for the first time in months, I’d even allowed myself to wonder if we could get through this. But while Billy was in our lives – a constant reminder of her transgression – I couldn’t forgive her, I couldn’t heal and we could never move forward.
His fragile existence meant nothing would ever be the same again.
Northampton, today
8.00 p.m.
He struggled to draw breath.
His bleak, lethargic pupils fluttered to life like a loose-fitting lightbulb, then collapsed back into the murkiness of his irises.
On the surface he continued to offer little reaction to what she’d told him, but inside, he was fractured. Her disclosures had forced all one hundred billion neurons scattered about his ailing brain to shoot their electrical impulses in unison, rendering him disabled.
When he finally flickered back to life, his eyes bored deeply into hers, observing her from all angles with microscopic detail. He desperately searched her face for evidence that she was lying, but all he could see was the truth. What he’d too readily believed he had heard behind the bedroom door had created a chain of events that had changed and ended lives. Now he considered whether, deep down, he’d been waiting their entire life together to catch her out, and that had been the excuse he was looking for.
She had just demolished the framework of twenty-eight years’ worth of assumptions. He could no longer blame his actions on her. It was Dougie’s fault. It was Kenneth’s fault. It was Doreen’s fault. It isn’t my fault, it isn’t my fault, he kept telling himself.
So much distress and sorrow could have been avoided if only he’d turned the door handle another forty degrees. He could have protected her like a husband was supposed to protect his wife.
She had been a victim of the unresolved issues between two best friends and the parents who’d shaped them. And it broke the charred remnants of his heart when she explained how she’d sacrificed a justice she’d deserved for his sake. She’d even been willing to love a baby sired by hate just so she wouldn’t upset him. He couldn’t understand how someone could be that selfless.
‘I – I . . .’ he began to whisper but couldn’t finish.
She remembered a time when words from this man mattered. Now they meant nothing.
> Finally, the question that had harangued her for so long had been answered. A thousand times she’d asked herself what she’d done to make him cast her aside, and now she knew.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
If the roles had been reversed, she’d have opened that door. She’d never have doubted him until she’d seen it with her own eyes. She also knew she’d have been a better person had she forgiven Dougie. And she had tried, so very, very hard. But it had been impossible, and now she knew he was dead, she felt gratitude, even if it had only happened as a result of misplaced pride.
But that gratitude was short-lived. She could never forget Paula’s murder, the life of abandon he’d lived and the children he’d left behind. They’d all been dreadful things to hear. And nothing shocked her more than the depth of his dislike for a child he’d quietly rejected as his own.
‘How could you have hated something so innocent?’ she asked, determined to gain an insight into his thinking. ‘You treated Billy like you treated your other children. I saw you with him. I watched you love him.’
‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘It was a lie because I knew he wasn’t mine. I’m so, so sorry for what happened to you, but you have to remember, I thought you were having an affair. I was crushed.’
‘Why didn’t you open the door? Why didn’t you open the bloody door?’
‘I was scared of what I’d find.’
‘You mean you thought you’d find Doreen. How dare you, Simon. How bloody dare you. That’s what you always believed, wasn’t it? That I’d turn out to be like her, because you think all women are like that. You even compared your daughter in Italy to Doreen. Your own daughter! You only see in people what you see in yourself – damaged goods.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She wasn’t interested in his apology. ‘I don’t know what’s worse: that you thought I could cheat on you, or that you pretended to love your son.’
‘That’s the point, Catherine. Billy could never, ever have been my son, no matter how much I pretended. And if I’d have known how he was conceived, I’d have hated him all the more.’
‘You and I created him!’ she stressed, increasingly exasperated. ‘He was your flesh and blood.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You know I never even completed the act with you those few times we tried. The odds are astronomically against him being mine. And he was so clearly Dougie’s! I saw Dougie in every inch of him. He looked nothing like his brothers and sister, and even less like me.’
‘No, again, you believed what your twisted mind wanted to believe. Take my word for it, Simon, you were his father.’
He dug his heels in.
‘No. I only wish I could believe it like you want me to, but you can’t promise me that. I understand why you need to think it but—’
‘Please don’t make me spell it out for you.’
‘You’re going to have to, because without a DNA test, I will never accept you’re right.’
She held her breath and closed her eyes before she responded. She was too angry and humiliated to look at him.
‘There is no possibility Billy could have been Dougie’s child because he sodomised me.’
And there it was. His last remaining excuse for any of his subsequent actions disintegrated as fast as the ground beneath him.
She struggled to understand what he muttered as he clung tightly to the arms of his chair.
All she could make out were the words ‘God’ and what sounded like ‘forgive me’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-six years earlier
3 January
My gorgeous Billy giggled in delight as he threw his favourite toy from one end of the bath to the other and chased it on his hands and knees. ‘Slow down!’ I told him.
The blue and white plastic boat and its painted smiley face had been passed down from James to Robbie and finally to their fourteen-month-old brother. And like them, Billy never grew bored of picking it up and hurling it around.
His development was coming on leaps and bounds and he was often crawling around the house and trying to stand by himself like his brothers and sister. ‘No, Billy,’ I warned as he tried to lift himself up using the sides of the bath. He sat back down and then splashed me again with his boat.
Robbie was at an age where cleanliness was so far removed from godliness that he’d rather be playing dinosaurs with the devil than take his evening bath, and Emily always demanded that her daddy gave her one. And as James demanded privacy, Billy was the only boy who’d let his mummy share these precious moments with him. I relished every one of them.
I was shampooing the ever-increasing tufts of hair finally spreading across his crown when the phone rang. I’d been expecting a call from my friend Sharon to tell me how her wedding had gone a day earlier. I was so honoured when she’d asked me to make her three bridesmaids’ dresses, as it was the biggest project I’d ever taken on. She’d invited us to the reception but Simon and I had been forced to turn it down at the last minute when our usual babysitter got chickenpox and couldn’t look after the kids.
Sharon had promised to find the time to ring me tonight, before she and her new husband flew off on their Tenerife honeymoon.
‘Simon!’ I shouted at the top of my voice when the phone went. ‘Watch Billy, please.’
Once I heard his muffled reply from another room, I dashed across the landing into our bedroom and picked up the receiver. By all accounts everything had gone like clockwork, but more importantly, my dresses hadn’t fallen apart at the seams. I was momentarily distracted by a thud coming from outside the bedroom but I’d learned from experience that if no child’s wail followed an unexpected noise, chances were all was well.
Sharon chatted for a few more minutes filling me in on her big day before we hung up. I was proud of myself and couldn’t help but smile as I went back to the bathroom to tell Simon.
‘Sharon says everyone loved them,’ I began as I reached the door. ‘It’s a shame we couldn’t . . .’
Only he wasn’t there. But Billy was, lying in the bath, his face under no more than two inches of water.
His fine baby hair floated aimlessly, his body completely devoid of the life I’d given him. His boat was close to him, anchored in the bubbles, still smiling.
I froze until the full horror of what had happened sunk in, and then I screamed for Simon and dashed those few feet from the door to my baby. I threw my arms into the water and grabbed at him, picking him up by the waist and placing his body onto the fluffy bathroom mat.
The children appeared from nowhere and stared from the doorway in confusion. Robbie yelled ‘Daddy’ and I heard his heavy feet pounding towards us.
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ I repeated as I picked Billy up again and held him in front of me. His neck flopped forwards.
Simon pushed me away and took charge. He lay him on the floor, tilted his head backwards, pinched his button nose and gave him the kiss of life. I knelt by his side, helpless, my arms as wet as my eyes, sobbing as his dad pushed down heavy on his chest to encourage his heart to beat again. I heard the crack of a rib under Simon’s pressure and it felt like it was my own.
‘Call an ambulance,’ Simon kept repeating, but I remained deadlocked and torn between hope and despair. James must have heard his pleas and ran. I listened to Simon’s warm breath as he blew hard into our son’s mouth; saw his palms sliding across his wet body; heard the crack of a second rib and the brush of his spine against the mat with every push.
I reached out to grab Billy’s still-warm hand and begged God to give him the strength to move his fingers and clasp one around mine. But God had neglected my son when Billy needed him, just like I had. Robbie and Emily were crying behind us when James returned and led them away to his room.
Simon wouldn’t give up, even when the paramedics arrived and tried to take over. They had to pull him to one side, but there was nothing they could do that he ha
dn’t tried already.
Eventually they looked at us with empathy and shook their heads apologetically.
Despair dragged my body to the floor and I clawed at my chest to take the weight off my heart. I reached for the mat, desperate to grasp something after losing so much. I tried to pull myself closer to my baby but my body was stuck to the floor. Simon scooped my head onto his thigh as I screamed so hard my eyes and throat burned.
‘It’s my fault, I’m sorry,’ I wailed. ‘It’s my fault . . .’
‘No, don’t blame yourself,’ he replied as he stroked my hair. But we both knew it was.
‘I thought you were here with him,’ I cried. ‘I shouted for you.’
‘I was downstairs.’
I begged the paramedics not to take Billy away from us, but Simon quietly explained it was time to let him go. I tenderly dried his body and put him in his Mr Men pyjamas before they carried him downstairs. I couldn’t bring myself to watch as he left our home for the last time.
Instead, I lay with my cheek pressed to the cold lino, holding on to his toy boat and wishing it could sail me back an hour in time, before I left my baby to die.
7 February
My bedroom was a tortured sanctuary. I wanted to seal off the door and windows and turn it into a coffin, like the one my little boy lay in, deep underground.
Days had passed before I could even stand up unaided by Simon. Each time I tried it alone, the ground swayed beneath me and I’d go back to my bed dizzy and defeated. The phone rang so often that he unplugged it from the wall socket so it didn’t disturb me.
I’d hear the muffled voices of friends stopping by with food parcels and offers of support, or to take the children out of our mausoleum to play with their friends. I was glad when they were out of the house because it meant they were safer than when they were with me.
But I couldn’t stop them from quietly opening my bedroom door, crawling under the quilt and curling their warm bodies around mine. I’d wrap my arms around them and hold them tight before I realised what I was doing, then I’d reject their love and send them away. They were too young to understand why their mummy didn’t want to be with them. It was for their own good: I didn’t deserve them.
