The Unheard

by Nicci French

‘Available,’ I repeated.

  I felt dangerous, as if the self I had carefully kept under control was coming loose and unravelling. I sought Aidan out and wound my arms around his neck and he kissed me on my jawline.

  ‘Beautiful woman,’ he said softly.

  ‘Nice man,’ I said.

  ‘What I said was nicer.’

  ‘No. That’s the sexiest thing you can be. Nice, nice man.’ I kissed him hard on the lips. ‘If you ever cheat on me, we’re over. No second chances.’

  * * *

  At half past four in the morning, I woke with a dry mouth. Aidan was lying on his back beside me, straight as a log and with his hands gathered on his chest, which rose and fell peacefully. He looked younger in his sleep, more vulnerable.

  I quietly climbed out of bed and went into the main room, which was washed with moonlight, though day was already coming. I made myself a mug of tea and sat by the French windows looking out into the garden. Miles away across the city, Poppy was sleeping. I could picture her, her hands pressed together under her cheek as if in prayer and her mouth very slightly open, all the heat and fret of the day gone from her.

  But was she safe? The question made my heart hammer faster. I cradled my tea in my hand and tried to turn my mind onto other things. But the fear that, far from me, Poppy might be in danger, had rushed back and was filling me with a churning dread.

  At last, I tiptoed into my bedroom and in the dim light put on a pair of jeans, a shirt and plimsolls. I left a note on the kitchen table for Aidan – Couldn’t sleep so gone for a walk; back before long xxxx – took my light jacket from the hook in the hall and left the flat, shutting the front door with a quiet click as I went.

  * * *

  The curtains were all closed in the house in Brixton, but there was a light on downstairs. At twenty to eight, the front door opened and Emily appeared in her dressing gown. She put out a bag of recycling, then went back inside.

  At ten to eight, the curtains were opened in Poppy’s room, which looked out onto the street. Standing on the other side of the road against a lamp post, I waited to see Poppy herself, but only made out a larger figure move briefly across the space. Jason? My tummy rumbled. I needed breakfast. I could be sitting in my flat right now with a pot of coffee in front of me, while Aidan made scrambled eggs for us and the goldfinch came to the bird feeder.

  Half an hour later, the front door opened once more and Emily’s brother Ben came out, Roxie at his heels. He was moving slowly, as if carrying a heavy weight, and dragging his feet on the ground. His hands were deep in his pockets and his head was lowered.

  Ten minutes later he was back, carrying a bundle of newspapers. Jason had always liked to get the Saturday papers.

  Another half an hour went by and then the door was flung wide and out came Jason, Emily and Poppy. I knew where they were going: they were going where Jason and Poppy and I used to go on a Saturday morning – the little café on the edge of the park. Jason would have granola with blueberries and two mugs of coffee, milk on the side. Poppy would probably have the pancakes with maple syrup. It was the same tradition, just a different cast of characters inhabiting it.

  I followed them at a safe distance. Poppy held Jason and Emily’s hands. Sometimes she would drag down on their arms and I knew she was asking to be swung. Twice they gave in and I saw Poppy lifted high in the air and heard her whoop in delight.

  Now Poppy was refusing to walk. She tried to sit down on the road and Jason held her up by one arm so she dangled like a rag doll. He was dragging her along. I groaned out loud. I watched as they went into the café. I dithered uselessly on the pavement, then edged a bit further towards the entrance.

  ‘Tess? It is Tess, isn’t it?’

  I spun round. Ben was standing there, holding Roxie on a lead and looking confused.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I thought you weren’t collecting Poppy until later.’

  ‘I was in the area. And I remembered there was something I forgot to give Jason.’

  ‘He’s in there.’ Ben jerked his head towards the café.

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Give it to me then.’ He held out his large soft hand, palm upwards. ‘Whatever it is.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ I stepped back.

  ‘Give it to me,’ he repeated.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Got to go.’

  ‘You don’t like me, do you?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m just sorry I bothered you.’

  I half-turned, but as I did so the door of the café swung open and there was Jason and he was striding towards me.

  ‘Tess,’ he said. Ominous voice.

  ‘I’m just going. Passing. You know. There was something I was going to—But it’s OK. Poppy can wait till this evening. Silly. No worries.’ I lifted a hand in histrionic farewell and began walking away so fast I was practically running. My breath was ragged. Where was the hole I could hide in? Where was the ground that would open up and swallow me?

  Jason easily caught up with me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re spying on me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yesterday Emily said she saw you at the school when she went to collect Poppy.’

  ‘I needed to speak to the teacher.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘I’m going now,’ I said.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and I jerked and pushed it off.

  ‘Careful,’ said Jason. ‘Poppy might see you behaving like this. Is that what you want?’

  ‘What do you have to say then?’

  He leaned in closer. Stubble. The smell of coffee on his breath. ‘You’re this close…’ He held up a thumb and forefinger, almost touching. ‘This close to me getting lawyers involved.’

  I made a scoffing sound that sounded more like a squawk.

  ‘I’m serious. This is serious. You tried to stop me seeing Poppy. You lied about arrangements. You spied on my wife.’ The phrase ‘my wife’, spoken so pompously, made me smile nastily. ‘You’re here now, spying on our family. Stalking us. You need to get a grip on yourself, Tess, and quickly.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Right. I’ll leave you to your wife, your family.’

  ‘Make sure you do that.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ asked Aidan.

  He was preparing pizza for when Poppy got back, his shirtsleeves rolled up and a striped apron tied round his waist. I was sitting at the kitchen table, ragged with exhausted emotions, but I liked seeing him at work. It soothed me. He had already made the dough and it was rising soft and spongy in the bowl; now he was making the sauce, chopping onions and lifting them into the pan where they sizzled, squeezing garlic, adding a tin of tomatoes.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Or actually, yes, but I think I’ll wait till after Jason’s brought Poppy back.’

  He glanced across at me. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I’ll have herbal tea, I think.’

  ‘The excitements of Saturday night,’ he said, but agreeably.

  It took some rummaging around in the cupboard before I found a carton at the back with two remaining bags of peppermint tea. Making it was the sane thing to do and I needed to do something sane.

  When it was ready – it smelled disagreeably like toothpaste – I sat back at the kitchen table and tried to calm myself before Jason arrived. When you feel stressed, you should breathe slowly and look around your environment and take a note of every object and… then what? I couldn’t quite remember. It was something about looking at it as it is, in itself. Not judging it. Not making plans about it. I looked at the carpet that was badly worn (really it needed either replacing or removing altogether and just having the floorboards, which would probably need sanding and polishing, but that was the kind of job I liked doing). I looked
at the green vase on the mantelpiece, with tulips in it that were starting to splay and collapse.

  Aidan was tearing a ball of mozzarella into pieces, then grating Parmesan. He was very serious about it all, almost comically so. There was a rich smell of tomatoes and garlic in the kitchen.

  ‘Shall I put some music on?’ I asked.

  ‘Good idea.’

  Soon a deep female voice, a glorious smoker’s voice that made you think of whisky and sex and heartbreak, was singing about being half crazy. I had become half crazy myself. Or at least, I had done the sorts of things that mad women did. Jason would be here soon and I knew that I must be careful not to give him any more ammunition. He had a way of twisting things so that even when he was in the wrong, he appeared to be in the right.

  In one of our counselling sessions, Toni, a middle-aged woman with a strange taste in cardigans, had told us that we both needed to take responsibility. I could have wept as I remembered how I had opened up to Toni and to Jason about my own failings, my own bad thoughts, about how I had been changed by motherhood and maybe I hadn’t paid enough attention to the relationship and that I could understand how hard this must be for Jason – and Jason had nodded with a sad smile and all the time, all the fucking time, he had known that he was still sleeping with someone else, that all this was a grim charade. You could unhinge someone like that. You could make them think everything was their fault, their weakness, their failure.

  I took another sip of the hateful tea. Aidan was stretching the dough in his hands like a piece of elastic that sprang back on itself as soon as he loosened his grip. He laid it out on the baking tray, ladled on the rich sauce and scattered the cheese over. He sensed me looking at him and crossed to the table. His glasses were steamed up so I couldn’t see his eyes, but he took them off and bent down and kissed me.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be OK,’ he said.

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He tucked my hair behind my ears, put his glasses back on and returned to the stove.

  ‘Aidan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I felt a new fragile calm which hadn’t dispersed when, shortly before seven o’clock, the doorbell rang and I went upstairs and opened the front door to find Jason and Poppy standing on the step. Poppy was wearing her little backpack and her hair was in unravelling plaits. Jason’s expression was entirely impassive, as if he was looking at a stranger.

  I resisted the impulse to lift Poppy up and hug her close.

  ‘Did you have a lovely time, darling?’

  Poppy only yawned, so widely I could see the clean pink of her throat.

  ‘She’s tired,’ said Jason. ‘She needs her sleep.’

  ‘Do you want to come in?’

  ‘I’d better get back.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to come all the way,’ I said formally. ‘I know it’s a big journey. I could have met you halfway like we usually do.’

  ‘I thought it best.’ Jason’s tone was clipped, as if he were rebuking me.

  There was a pause. I was aware that it was a silence I was supposed to fill, probably with an apology. I had to make a physical effort not to do that, biting down on the words jammed up in me – sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean, I’m a bit stressed…

  ‘Was everything all right?’ I asked instead.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You know.’ I gestured towards Poppy, who was clutching Jason’s hand and yawning.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t the time,’ he said.

  I lifted Poppy into my arms.

  ‘Say goodbye to Daddy, sweetie.’

  She only buried her face in my neck.

  Jason was still holding Poppy’s overnight bag and also a bulging black bin bag. He leaned forward and deposited them just inside the door.

  ‘Emily put out some old clothes she thought Poppy’s school could use for their dressing-up box,’ he said.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  He turned and walked away, his hands in his pockets.

  I closed the door and carried Poppy downstairs and into the kitchen, where Aidan stroked her head and told her that the pizza would be ready in a jiffy. But Poppy’s face was still deep in my neck.

  I mouthed a few words at Aidan about how she was always in a strange mood when she got back from Jason’s. I unhooked her miniature backpack, slung it on the ground beside us and carried her into the garden to find Sunny. She still didn’t want to let go of me. She wrapped her arms fiercely around my neck and her legs around my waist like a scared koala. Her body felt squashy and soft and it smelled slightly sour. Her hair needed washing but I would do that tomorrow.

  We ate outside, sitting at the rickety little table that I had found in a junk shop shortly after we’d moved in. Poppy insisted on staying on my lap. She barely touched the pizza that Aidan had spent so long making and she didn’t want any of the strawberries he’d bought.

  ‘No bath tonight,’ I said. ‘Bed.’

  ‘Story,’ said Poppy.

  I picked up the backpack and the bag that Jason had left by the door and carried Poppy to her bedroom. I dressed her in her clown pyjamas and selected the happiest stories I could find. I noticed that her eyes were starting to close.

  ‘Shall I turn the light off?’

  ‘I want another story,’ Poppy’s eyes clicked open and she stared at me. ‘Then another and then another.’

  ‘Tell you what. I’ll unpack your things and put them away and I’ll find Teddy and when I’ve done all that, I’ll read you a story.’

  I unzipped the bag. The sight of the little dungarees, the tee shirts, the miniature knickers and socks made me feel sad. I suddenly had a vision of my daughter as a vagabond moving from place to place, still too young to realise what had happened to her. She could only express it in behaviour, in pictures. She didn’t yet have the words.

  I put things in their various drawers. I found Teddy and tucked it into the bed next to Poppy, now almost asleep. The small backpack had a few items in it that must be for the school’s dressing-up box – a couple of chunky necklaces, a few bangles, a corduroy cap, Emily’s cast-offs. I tossed them into the corner of the room, to sort out later. The backpack felt empty now, but I put my hand in to make sure. It touched a soft object and I pulled it out, then felt a jolt that was so severe that I fell backwards and sat on the floor of the bedroom, holding it in front of my face, staring in disbelief.

  I was holding Milly. Milly the doll. Milly the rag doll that Poppy had ripped into pieces and that I had taken outside and thrown into the bin because I couldn’t bear it being in the house.

  I could hardly bring myself to look. The doll had been crudely repaired with thick black thread, and the whole point was to clearly show that it had been stitched together. Its head was sewn on back to front. Its arm had been attached too low down, so it dangled like a mutant limb. The foot on the mended leg was pointing outwards. Bits of its stuffing pushed through the large, clumsy stitching, like the fluff inside a ripped jiffy bag.

  I stared at it with horror. In my distress, had I suffered a form of amnesia? Was it possible that I hadn’t actually thrown the doll in the bin? I tried to imagine a scenario where I had repaired the doll and forgotten about it. It was inconceivable. In all the murk and mess, one thing was clear. Someone had retrieved the doll from the bin and they had repaired it horribly and given it back to Poppy.

  I was still sitting on the ground and now I edged over to the bed.

  ‘Poppy?’ I said.

  But Poppy was asleep, her right arm thrown back above her head.

  * * *

  ‘Look,’ I said to Aidan, sitting in the garden in the dusk. ‘Look!’

  Aidan took the mutilated doll. He stared at it, an expression of distaste of his face. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What happened to it?’

  I realised how much I hadn’t told him.

  ‘Poppy tore it up.’

  ‘
Why on earth—?’

  ‘No. Wait. That’s not the point. I found it in her room a couple of days ago, all dismembered, and threw it away. In the outside bin.’ I could hear my voice rising and stopped for a few seconds to calm down. ‘And now it’s reappeared. Like that. In her overnight bag. What’s going on?’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Aidan slowly. He was still holding the doll. ‘You’re telling me that someone got it from the outside bin, mended it – if you can call this mending – then gave it back to Poppy?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. Who would do that? Why?’

  ‘That’s hideous,’ said Aidan. I felt a new terror rising in me. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘What shall I do?’ I wasn’t really talking to him.

  ‘It was in her overnight bag?’

  ‘Her backpack.’

  ‘And you’re sure it wasn’t in there before she went to Jason’s?’

  ‘How could it have been? I threw it away.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘When? Wednesday? No. Thursday. Thursday evening. It was when Gina came round.’

  ‘Who did you tell about it?’ He lifted his eyes from the doll. ‘Not me, anyway.’

  ‘Who? Nobody. I didn’t want to think about it.’

  ‘What about Gina?’

  ‘No. I’m sure I didn’t. We had other things to talk about,’ I added grimly.

  ‘You didn’t tell Jason?’

  ‘No. I probably should have done but I can’t really talk about things with him just now.’

  ‘Poppy couldn’t have got it back herself?’

  ‘Poppy? No. Surely not. And even if she did, what then? She definitely didn’t sew it back together.’

  ‘And you’re quite sure you threw it away?’

  ‘Yes. In the outside bin.’

  ‘It’s easy to get memories wrong.’

  ‘So people keep telling me!’ I sounded waspish. ‘Sorry. I’m rattled. I remember doing it. I’m sure I remember. I didn’t want it in the house. It gave me the creeps. Now look at it! I feel like I’m going out of my mind.’

  Aidan nodded. He was staring at the rag doll.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked at last.