by Karen Swan
He smiled, physically rallying at the sight of her and doing what he always did – soldiering on. ‘Breakfast?’
‘Let me do it, Dad.’
‘Nonsense. I’ve already started collating a Christmas Eve extravaganza. How does duck eggs, salami and chestnut mushrooms sound to you?’
‘Uh . . .’ she said dubiously. ‘All right, I guess.’
‘Good. Because it’s all we’ve got.’
She watched as he fussed at the fridge, piling food high into his cradled arms, closing the door with his foot and staggering over to the worktop.
‘So how was it here, last night?’
‘Oh, fine, fine.’ He shot her a guilty look. ‘I took them all a cup of tea at about ten o’clock.’
‘Oh, Dad, you didn’t! What did you do that for?’
‘They’d been out there for hours. It was perishing out there.’
‘Good!’ she cried. ‘All the better for getting them to clear off.’
He tutted. ‘I couldn’t leave them without any refreshments. Besides, I thought it might reassure the neighbours to see that we’re not . . . holed away in here, that we’re not frightened by all this. There’s a difference between not wanting to talk and having something to hide. Besides, it doesn’t hurt to be friendly. You know what your mother always says – there’s nothing so bad a good cup of tea can’t remedy it. I must say they were terribly grateful.’
She sighed, running a hand through her hair. ‘I still can’t believe this is happening. If it’s any reassurance, I doubt they’ll bother staying here past tonight. Who’s going to want to do a stake-out on Christmas Day of some random girl who’s raised money in a fancy-dress costume?’
Her father opened his arms wide. ‘Come here.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do as you’re told.’
She walked into him, his chest and beard soft as he closed his arms around her. ‘I am so proud of my little girl. Raising all that money.’ He pulled back, a concerned frown on his face. ‘I’ve seen some of the videos, you know.’
‘I know, I know, you’re worried about the Ice Crush one.’
‘You could have been so badly hurt.’
‘I know. But it was over before I even really knew about it.’ Not true. ‘Trust me, I didn’t do it on purpose.’
He sighed. ‘Honestly, those crazy ears . . . flying about,’ he chuckled, going back to cracking the eggs. ‘Your mum’s going to be so proud when she hears.’ He snuck a glance at her as he whisked the eggs with a fork, and they were silent for a few moments.
Nettie felt paralysed by his relentless optimism. Even in the face of all this – house arrest, national scrutiny – he still clung on to the hope that there was going to be a happy ending. How could she tell him what she’d done? How was she supposed to say the words?
‘You know, I’ve been thinking – what if she sees it, all this hoo-ha, I mean? I know you feel it’s private, no one else’s business but ours, but what if we could turn this to our advantage, Button? What if it’s actually a blessing in disguise?’
‘Dad—’
‘We could use it to reach out to her, give them an interview maybe? It could be our opportunity to show her how much we miss her, let her know that it’s OK to just . . . come back.’ His eyes shone.
‘But—’
‘She’s so close, isn’t she? She’s already trying. This could be the final little push to help over the hump of it all. And it’s Christmas! How can she not get home for—’
‘Dad!’
He looked at her in surprise, his hand stopping whisking.
She swallowed. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
He came and sat at the table, as she asked. She thought he should be sitting down when he heard what she’d done.
‘Yesterday, before all . . . this broke . . .’ She gestured vaguely towards the windows. She raised her eyes to meet his. ‘I saw Mum.’
‘You . . . ?’ His voice cracked like a walnut to a sledgehammer, his hand covering his mouth, and she felt the air dissipate in her lungs, the words fall like bricks into her stomach as his dark eyes shone like a teddy bear’s beads. It was an age before he could speak. ‘Where? What did she say?’
‘I don’t know . . . I ran away.’ She watched him stare at her, the words bouncing off him like rubber bullets, unable to penetrate. ‘I panicked,’ she said, desperation colouring her voice, thinning it and stripping it down as she saw the disbelief rise in his eyes like a moon. ‘She looked so different. Not like Mum.’
He was examining her face, looking for signs that this was a trick, a cruel joke, a nightmare. His breath was beginning to come in chunks, like solid coals, his cheeks growing florid and hot. He pushed himself away from the table, staggering to the sink again, his back to her.
‘Dad?’ she asked, her voice quavering as she watched. ‘Say something.’
Slowly he turned. ‘You ran from her? You ran from your mother?’ Disbelief hung from his words.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry? She’s been alone for four years and the first thing you do is you run from her?’ His hands were gripping his hair, a frantic look on his face.
‘Dad, she’s changed.’ Panic ricocheted through her like a pin ball as she sensed the battle line being drawn between them.
He blinked, stultified by the comment. ‘Of course she has! We all have! Do you think we’re any less broken than her just because we have soft beds to sleep in and hot showers every day?’ His voice was like a thunder, shifting her world off its axis.
‘I didn’t plan it,’ Nettie cried, hot tears jumping from her lashes. ‘I didn’t know I was going to see her. It was a shock, all right? I just . . . I just wanted everything to be like it used to be.’
‘But if everything was like it used to be, why would she come back? How it used to be is why she left!’
Nettie stared at him, her shoulders heaving as the truth of his words scalded her. ‘But we were happy then!’ she yelled suddenly, so suddenly her father stumbled backwards, his hands grasping for the counter. ‘I was happy! I don’t know why she left!’
They stared at each other, sheets of tears skinning down her cheeks, both of them shaking.
Her father dropped his gaze to the floor, the life force spinning out of him and leaving just a sagged jumble of muscles and bones. He aged twenty years before her eyes.
‘Dad, sit down,’ she urged, jumping up and bringing him back to the table, her arm around his. He put his hand out, leaning on the table as he lowered himself down carefully.
She reached for his hand, covering it with hers as he sat in silence, watching the war that was raging behind his eyes. ‘Dad, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to shout at you. It’s myself I’m angry at, not you. I hate myself for what I’ve done.’
‘No.’ He looked up at her, his voice flat and toneless. ‘It’s my fault. It’s because of me that your mother left.’
Nettie felt her sinews tighten at the asserted fact, her hand automatically slipping away from his; she dried her tears with the back of her hand, feeling the tension beginning to set in her muscles. What did he know that she didn’t? What was he going to tell her – that he’d had an affair?
‘When you were not even a year old, we . . .’ He blew out through his cheeks, as though this was an endurance test, not a conversation.
She waited.
‘We had another baby. He died.’
Nettie blinked. ‘What?’ Her voice was a ghost of itself. Baby? Died? He?
‘He was breech. The hospital advised Caesarean, but your mother was still fragile from delivering you, love. It had been a long and gruelling labour, and she had found being taken into the operating theatre like that very frightening. I couldn’t be in there with her – they wouldn’t allow it, so . . . it was a bad experience.’ He patted her hand. ‘Although, it brought you to us and we were so grateful for that. So grateful.’ He shook his head. ‘But when we discovered she was pregnant again
so soon, we vowed to take ownership of the situation second time round.’ He nodded, his eyes lost in the swirls of the pine table. ‘She just wanted a natural birth at home; she had prepared for it. We had a special birthing pool and that . . . that whale music. Smelly candles everywhere. She wanted it to be peaceful, that was all.’ His eyes met hers, red-rimmed and watery. ‘By the time the midwife realized things were going wrong, it was too late. They couldn’t get her to the hospital in time and she delivered in the ambulance.’ He shook his head. ‘There was nothing they could do. The cord had been compressed.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ Nettie sobbed, her hand clamped over her mouth.
‘Your mother – she never forgave herself. Over and over she kept reliving it – if we’d just gone to the hospital, just had the C-section . . . There was no reasoning with her. She wouldn’t accept that it was a tragic accident. She had acted with the very best of intentions.’
Nettie stared at him. All these years and she’d never known, never suspected such a thing. They hadn’t slipped up once. ‘But you never said anything about it to me. Not a word.’
‘No. Your mother was adamant. You were too young to understand and by the time you were big enough to be told, she said it would only upset you to know about your brother.’ He stared into space. ‘She threw herself into being the best mother she could be for you, but looking back . . . she never recovered; she couldn’t even bear to hear his name. If it was in a book, she’d stop reading it; on TV and she’d leave the room.’
Nettie felt like she was carved from oak – dense, immovable and ancient. ‘What was his name?’
‘Benjamin. Benjamin George Thomas.’
She looked away. A brother. She would have had a brother. All those games of make-believe on her own upstairs, all those hours on the slide, waiting for the other kids to finish tea and come and play.
‘But you never had another baby?’
Her father looked down again, giving a quick shake of his head. ‘I wanted to, but it was too much for your mum. She wouldn’t consider it. I don’t know whether it was the thought of giving birth again or just loving another child, but she refused to discuss it. She gave everything she had to you instead.’
Nettie was quiet. She couldn’t stop imagining how different her childhood would have been, how different she might have been. ‘But this can’t be why she left, surely? I’m not saying she got over it, but why would it drive her to leave us, over twenty years later?’
‘When you came back from university and started looking at moving out, she told me she wanted to try for another baby.’
Nettie’s jaw dropped. ‘What?’ She did the maths in her head. Her mother would have been forty-nine, four years ago.
‘I said no. I thought that it was too late. We were too old to be going back to dirty nappies and sleepless nights. Plus, there would be greater health risks to both her and the baby to consider. After everything we’d already been through, I didn’t want to risk it – for either one of us. I couldn’t go through it again.’
‘And that’s when she went?’
He hesitated. ‘It was several months later, but . . . effectively, yes. She became very depressed. She disappeared on the day Benjamin died.’ He dropped his head in his hands, his hands covering his ears. ‘If I’d had any inkling she was so desperate, of course I would have gone along with it . . . I hadn’t realized how—’
The sob swallowed his words and she took his hand in hers again, trying to warm it up. ‘You couldn’t have known, Dad. She hid it so well, always losing herself in us.’
The words had been unthinking, automatic, but they hit Nettie with a jolt. That was exactly it – her mother had lost herself in her family, and with Nettie moving out and moving on, it must have seemed to her that that journey was coming to an end.
She fell silent, processing this new information. After four years of knowing nothing about what had happened and why, she now had a location and a reason. The blanks were being filled in, the puzzle forming a picture at last.
She rubbed her temples, trying to press back the emotions that were throbbing to be let out. Would knowing this yesterday have changed anything? Would she have seen the vulnerability her mother had hidden so well? She might have been protective and not defensive, compassionate, not critical.
Maybe Dan had been right about her being angry; she had spent so long trying to fix it – walking, searching, distributing posters – but she’d never had an opportunity to understand it. And without understanding, how can there be forgiveness?
‘Where were you?’ Her father’s voice intruded on her thoughts.
She looked back at him. ‘What?’
‘Yesterday? Where did you see her?’
‘Dad, it’s no good. She won’t be there. It’s the last place she’ll go to now.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do,’ she said, fresh tears budding as her own cruelty shone back at her in the cold light of day. ‘I found her and I . . .’ Her bottom lip trembled. She could barely say the words; she could scarcely believe she had done it, that this had been her reaction. How often had she dreamed of seeing her mother again, of feeling her arms around her and the gaping hole in her world sealing up? Not once, ever, had it crossed her mind that this would happen. ‘I left her,’ she cried, pushing the heels of her hands to her eyes. ‘Why would she hang around for me to do it again? She’ll know I’ve told you. She’ll know you’ll come looking. She’ll be long gone, Dad. She’s more lost to us now than she’s ever been.’
What had she done?
She sobbed, her heart feeling small and hot and tight. Her mother knew how to disappear. She would slip below the radar again, surfacing in some other random pocket of the city – or maybe not; maybe she’d travel farther afield to York or Warwick, Bath or Plymouth. Quite literally, anywhere.
Her father sank into the chair again, his hand grabbing hers now. ‘We have to try,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s Christmas Eve and we have a location for her – someone might know where she’s staying. We can’t give up now, not when we’re so close.’
‘Dad, I turned my back on her. Don’t you get it?’
‘No, Button, don’t you? She is your mother. She loves you above all else; she’ll understand. Of course she’ll forgive you.’ He smiled.
Nettie stared back at him. How could he have such faith after all this time?
He shook her hand lightly. ‘Tell me where she was.’
She sighed, her breath shaky. ‘It was at Clifton Nurseries, Maida Vale,’ she sighed eventually. ‘But it’s easy to miss. You have to look for a—’
‘You can show me yourself.’
‘I’m not coming!’ she said urgently, recoiling as her father stood and held out his hand. ‘Dad! I’d do way more harm than good.’
‘We are a family, Nettie. That didn’t stop just because your mother changed address. Now, upstairs and get changed.’
‘But—’
‘Now.’
Nettie exhaled heavily, pulling her tears off her cheeks with the flats of her hands. ‘I can’t go past all those reporters,’ she said quietly.
‘I quite agree.’
She frowned. ‘So then . . . ?’
Her father winked, jerking his head towards the back garden beyond the kitchen window.
‘You’re mad,’ she gasped.
‘I’ve begun to think so recently, yes.’
Nettie laughed. It was futile, this, but her father was right – they had to try.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘She didn’t turn up today.’ The woman scowled, her gloved hands holding a potted gardenia. ‘God knows she picked her day for it. Christmas Eve, I ask you? We’ve been run ragged all morning.’
Nettie looked around the nursery. Yesterday’s snow had thawed to a lace, but it wasn’t the white-webbed plants and pin-lit trees her eyes found. She was searching the crowds again – her expert gaze looking for familiar gait and pose, hands or clothes. She would recognize h
er again in an instant now, having committed to memory from that one agonizing moment the 1970s shag-cropped hair, wary eyes, hunger-hollowed cheeks.
‘Well, do you have an address for her?’ her father asked in a polite, gentle voice, his entire world resting on this stranger’s kindness. ‘It’s very important that we speak to her.’
Nettie glanced at him, before looking back at the woman who had no idea of the gravity of her words – the fact that lives would be changed by her answer.
The woman looked at them both suspiciously for a moment, clearly wondering who they were – police? Social workers? Debt collectors? ‘That’s confidential. I can’t give out that kind of information,’ she replied disinterestedly. She turned to carry the potted plant to . . . somewhere.
Nettie put a hand on her arm to stop her, feeling a rush of anger at her diffidence. ‘Please.’ Her voice was firm, her eyes flinty. ‘She’s my mother. She’s been missing for four years.’
The words had their intended effect – there was no way to dilute them – and the woman stalled like a car thrown into the wrong gear. ‘How do I know that’s true? You could be anyone.’
Nettie flipped open her purse and pulled out a photo of their little family, taken at a fairground when she’d been ten – her father, mother and herself all sitting on brown hessian mats at the bottom of a helter-skelter, mouths wide with laughter, eyes bright. She watched the woman scan it, her eyes flicking over them both. It had been taken a long time ago – but her father still had his beard; his hair wasn’t entirely grey yet. And she wasn’t so different, was she? But then again, maybe they had all changed more than they realized?
She handed over the laminate of the ‘missing’ poster she kept in the purse too – safely impervious to time, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice on her weekly walks, to show anyone who might know, anyone who might be interested.
The woman considered, her jaw sliding to the right as she looked them over. Something must have come across in their eyes – desperation? Despair? Hope? – because eventually she nodded. ‘You’d better follow me, then,’ she said with a tiny nod of her head.
Nettie inhaled deeply, smiling at her father as the woman led them towards an office based in the back of one of the buildings, a clematis trailing up one of the walls outside, the bare arms of a summer bower overhead.
