The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘I loved Geraldine and Lucy with all my heart,’ says the younger of the two men, ‘and I will always love them, even now they’re gone.’

  Why didn’t Mark tell me his wife was the image of me? Did he think it would make me angry? Make me feel used?

  ‘Poor sod,’ says Nick.

  The man at the microphone is sobbing now. The older man and woman are holding him up. ‘Who is he?’ I ask. ‘What’s his name?’

  Nick looks at me strangely. ‘That’s the madwoman’s husband, ’ he says.

  I am about to tell him he’s wrong-this man is not Mark Bretherick, looks nothing like him-when I remember that I am not supposed to know this. The official story, the one Mark and I drafted together, is that we never met. I remember us laughing about this, Mark saying, ‘Although obviously I won’t go round saying I’ve never met or heard of a woman called Sally Thorning, because that’d be a bit of a giveaway!’

  The madwoman’s husband. Nick is laid-back about day-to-day life, but I’ve never met anyone more black and white about anything that qualifies as an important issue. He wouldn’t understand at all if I told him, and who could blame him?

  I say quietly, ‘I don’t think that’s the husband, is it?’ Impartial, uninvolved.

  ‘Of course it’s the husband. Who do you think he is, the milkman?’

  As Nick speaks, another caption appears, black letters on a strip of blue that cuts the weeping man with the long nose and heavy-lidded eyes in half. My mouth opens as I read the words: ‘Mark Bretherick, husband of Geraldine and father of Lucy’.

  Except that he isn’t. He can’t be. I know, because I spent a week with Mark Bretherick last year. How many can there be in Spilling, with wives called Geraldine and daughters called Lucy?

  ‘Where do they live?’ I ask Nick in a stretched voice. ‘You said you knew the house.’

  ‘Corn Mill House-you know, that massive dobber mansion near Spilling Velvets. I cycle past it all the time.’

  I feel faint, as if every drop of blood in my body has rushed to my head and filled it, pushed out all the air.

  I remember the story, almost word for word. I have a good memory for words, and names. It didn’t even used to be a corn mill. There was a corn mill nearby, and the people who owned it before us were pretentious gits, basically. And Geraldine loves the name. She won’t let me get rid of it, and believe me, I’ve tried.

  Who said that to me?

  I spent a week with Mark Bretherick last year, and the man I’m looking at is not him.

  Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

  Case Ref: VN87

  OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

  GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 1 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

  18 April 2006, 10.45 p.m.

  I don’t know whose fault it is, but my daughter now believes in monsters. They are never mentioned in our house, so she must have picked it up at school, like God (about whom she’d heard so little at home that for the first few months she called him Gart-Mark found this hilarious) and her obsession with the colour pink. Education, even the fraudulent (sorry, creative) Montessori variety that we pay through the nose for, is no more than a process of brainwashing-it does the opposite of train children to think for themselves. Anyway, Lucy’s terrified of monsters now, and insists on sleeping with a night light on and her bedroom door open.

  The first I knew of it was when I put her to bed yesterday at eight thirty, turned the light out as I always do and closed the door. I felt the usual sweeping relief all through my body (I don’t think I could explain to anyone how important it is to me to be able to close that door) and I punched the air in triumph as I often do, though never if Mark is watching. I don’t mean to do it, but my arm moves before my brain has time to stop it. I feel as if I’ve escaped from prison-all my dread disappears; even the certainty that it will return tomorrow can’t stifle my joy. When Lucy goes to bed, my life and home are my own again and I can be myself, free, doing whatever I want to do without fear, thinking about whatever I want to think about for a few precious hours.

  Until yesterday, that is. I closed the door, punched the air, but before I was able to take more than a couple of steps towards freedom, I heard a loud wailing noise. Her. I froze, trying to close my ears from the inside. But I wasn’t mistaken, it wasn’t a cat outside or a car coming up the lane, or bell-ringers at the church across the fields (though it’s bliss when this happens the other way round: you hear a faint whine or some other high-pitched noise that you’re certain is your child wanting attention, more attention, and then-oh, thank you, Gart!-it turns out to be only a car alarm, and you’re saved). But I wasn’t, because the source of the awful whining noises was my daughter.

  I have a rule that I’ve made for myself, and that I stick to come what may: whatever I feel inside, however I feel like behaving towards Lucy, I do the opposite. So when she cried after I’d closed her door, I went back into her room, stroked her hair and said, ‘What’s the matter, love?’ because what I really wanted to do was drag her out of her bed and shake her until her teeth fell out.

  There must be parents who are so strict and terrifying that their children make sure never to annoy or inconvenience them. Those are the people I both envy and loathe. They must be cruel, vicious, intimidating ogres, and yet-lucky them-their children tiptoe round them trying not to be noticed. Whereas my daughter’s not at all frightened of me, which is why she screamed after I closed her door, even though she was absolutely fine: bathed, fed, kissed, hugged, the blessed recipient of at least three bedtime stories.

  I need her not to be around in the evenings. Evenings! Anyone would think I meant from six until midnight or something extravagant like that. But no, I settle for a mere two and a half hours between eight thirty and eleven. I am physically unable to stay up any later than that, because every minute of my day is so exhausting. I run around like a slave on speed, a fake smile plastered to my face, saying things I don’t mean, never getting to eat, enthusing wildly over works of art that deserve to be chopped up and chucked in the bin. That’s my typical day-lucky me. That’s why the hours between half past eight and eleven must be inviolable, otherwise I will lose my sanity.

  When Lucy told me she was scared of monsters getting her in the dark, I explained as reasonably and kindly as I could that there was no such thing as a monster. I kissed her again, closed the door again, and waited on the landing. The screams got louder. I did nothing, just listened for ten minutes or so. I did this partly for Lucy’s sake-I knew there was a danger (never underestimate the danger or something awful might happen) of my smashing her head against the wall because I was so furious with her for taking up ten extra minutes, minutes that were mine, not hers. I cannot spare her any time apart from what I already give her, not even a second. I don’t care if that sounds bad-it’s the truth. It’s important to tell the truth, isn’t it, if only to yourself?

  When I was certain I had my rage under control, I went back into her room and reassured her, again, that monsters weren’t real. But, I said-ever the understanding, reasonable mummy-I would leave the landing light on. I closed the door, and this time I got halfway downstairs before she started screaming again. I went back up and asked her what was wrong. The room was still too dark, she said. She insisted that I leave the landing light on and her door open.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said in my best authoritative-but-kind voice, ‘you sleep with your door closed. Okay, love? You always have. If you want, I’ll open the curtains a bit so that some light comes in from outside.’

  ‘But it’ll get dark outside soon!’ she screamed. By this point she had worked herself up into hysterics. Her face was snot-streaked and red. My palms and the skin between my fingers started to itch, and I had to press my hands together to stop myself from punching her.

  ‘Even when it’s dark, some light will come in, I promise. Your eyes’ll adjust, and then the sky won’t look quite so b
lack.’ How do you explain to a child the grey illumination of the night sky? Mark’s the intellectual in our family, the one worth listening to. (What does Mummy know about anything of any importance? Mummy has sold her soul. She contributes nothing worthwhile to society. That’s what Daddy thinks.)

  ‘I want my door open!’ Lucy howled. ‘Open! Open!’

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ I said. ‘I know you’re scared, but there’s really no need to be. Goodnight. See you in the morning.’ I walked over, pulled her curtains half open, left the room and closed the door.

  Her screams intensified. Screams for which there was no cause; her room was no longer dark in any way. I sat cross-legged on the landing, fury ripping through my body. I couldn’t comfort Lucy any more because I couldn’t think of her as a scared child-the screams were too much like a weapon. I was her victim now and she was my torturer. She could ruin my evening, and she knew it. She can ruin my whole life if she wants to, whereas I can’t ruin hers because a) Mark would stop me, and b) I love her. I don’t want her to be unhappy. I don’t want her to have a horrible mother, or to be abandoned, or to be beaten, so I’m trapped: she can make me suffer as much as she wants and I can’t retaliate in kind. I have no control-that’s what I hate more than anything.

  The shrieks showed no sign of stopping. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought Lucy was being burned alive in her bedroom, from the noise she was making. After a while she got out of bed and tried to open the door herself. I held on to the handle from the outside to keep it shut. Then she really started to panic. She isn’t used to doors that won’t open. I still couldn’t feel anything but rage, though, and I knew I had to wait, so I sat there until Lucy’s voice grew hoarse, until she was begging me to come back in, not to leave her alone. I don’t know how long it was-maybe half an hour-before I started to feel sorrier for her than I felt for myself. I stood up, opened her door and went back into the room. She was in a heap on the floor and when she saw me she grabbed my ankles and started babbling, ‘Thank you, Mummy, thank you, oh, thank you!’

  I picked her up and sat her on my lap in the chair by her window. Sweat dripped from her forehead. I calmed her down and cuddled her, stroking her hair. Once she has made me angry, I can only be kind like this when she’s reached the point of total despair and all the fight has gone out of her. Anything less and it’s hard for me to see her as deserving of sympathy, this well-fed, beloved child who has everything a girl of her age could want-a secure home, an expensive education, nice clothes, every sort of toy, book and DVD, friends, foreign holidays-and who is still, in spite of it all, complaining and crying.

  When Lucy is desperate, grateful and limp with the relief of having been forgiven, I find it easy to feel the way a mother should. I wish I could awaken this protective feeling in myself more easily. Once she was sick before I could bring myself to comfort her, and I vowed I’d never let it go that far again.

  I patted her back and she soon fell asleep on my knee. I carried her over to her bed, laid her down and covered her with her quilt. Then I left the room and closed the door. I had won, though it had taken a while.

  I didn’t say anything to Mark about what had happened, and I was sure Lucy wouldn’t either, but she did. ‘Daddy,’ she said at breakfast this morning, ‘I’m scared of monsters, but Mummy wouldn’t let me have the door open last night and I was frightened.’ Her lip trembled. She stared at me, wide-eyed with resentment, and I realised that my tormentor, my torturer, is only a child, a naïve little girl. She is not as scared of me as I often fear she is, or as I am of myself, or as she should be. It’s not her fault-she’s only five.

  Daddy sided with his precious daughter, of course, and now there is a new system: door open, suitable night light in place (not too bright but bright enough). I can’t object without revealing my own irrationality. ‘It makes no difference to us whether her door’s open or closed,’ Mark said when I tried to persuade him to change his mind. ‘What does it matter?’

  I said nothing. It matters because I need to close that door. This evening, instead of feeling that I had successfully shut Lucy away at half past eight, I tiptoed round the house imagining I could hear her breathing and snoring and turning over, rustling her covers. I felt her presence with every molecule of my body, invading territory that was rightfully mine.

  Still, it’s not that bad. As my terminally cheerful mother insists on telling me whenever I dare to complain, I’m luckier than most women: Lucy is a good girl most of the time, I have Michelle to help me, I don’t know how lucky I am, it’s hard work but it’s all worth it, and everything is basically ‘hunky-dory’. So why do I wake up every Saturday morning feeling as if I’m about to be suffocated for forty-eight hours, wondering if I’ll survive until Monday?

  Spoke to Cordy on the phone today and she told me Oonagh is also preoccupied with monsters. Cordy blames the children in Lucy and Oonagh’s class who are from ‘the other side of the tracks’ (her expression, not mine). She said, ‘I bet their thick parents have been stuffing their heads full of nonsense about fairies and devils, and they’ve passed it on to our kids.’ She sounded quite cross about it. She says you pay through the nose to send your daughter to a private school where you trust she won’t encounter any ‘white trash’, but then she does because some white trash types have lots of money. ‘From setting up chains of tanning studios and pube-waxing emporia,’ she said bitterly. I didn’t ask what ‘emporia’ were.

  What else? Oh, yes, a man called William Markes is very probably going to ruin my life. But he hasn’t yet, and I admit I’m not in the most positive state of mind at the moment. Let’s wait and see.

  2

  8/7/07

  It struck DC Simon Waterhouse that, as usual, everything was wrong. He was feeling this more and more lately. The lane was wrong, and the house was wrong-even its name was wrong-and the garden, and what Mark Bretherick did for a living, and the fact that Simon was here with Sam Kombothekra in Kombothekra’s silent, fragrant car.

  Simon had always objected to more things than would offend most people, but recently he had noticed he’d started to baulk at almost everything he came into contact with-his physical surroundings, friends, colleagues, family. These days what he felt most often was disgust; he was full of it. When he had first seen Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s dead bodies, his mouth had filled with the undigested remnants of his last meal, but even so, their deaths didn’t stand out in his mind in the way he knew they ought to. Each day he worked on this case he felt sickened by his own numbness in the face of such horror.

  ‘Simon? You okay?’ Kombothekra asked him as the car lurched over the deep potholes in the lane that led to Corn Mill House. Kombothekra was Simon’s new skipper, so ignoring him wasn’t an option and neither was telling him to fuck off. Wanting to tell him to fuck off was wrong, too, because Kombothekra was a fair and decent bloke.

  He had transferred from West Yorkshire CID a year ago, when Charlie had deserted. Selfishly, she didn’t leave altogether-she still worked in the same nick, so Simon had to see her around the building and suffer her stilted, polite greetings and enquiries about his well-being. He’d rather never see her again, if things couldn’t be how they were.

  Charlie’s new job was a travesty. She must know that as well as I do, thought Simon. She was head of a team of police officers who worked with social services to provide an encouraging and positive environment for the local scum, to discourage them from re-offending. Simon read about her activities in the nick’s newsletter: she and her underlings bought kettles and microwaves for skag-heads, found mind-expanding employment for coke-dealers. Superintendent Barrow was quoted in the local press talking about caring policing, and Charlie-with her new, fake, photo-opportunity smile-was head of the care assistants, arranging for all the scrotes to have their arses wiped with extra-soft toilet tissue in the hope that it’d turn them into better people. It was bullshit. She ought to have been working with Simon. That was the way things were meant to be:
the way they used to be. Not the way they were now.

  Simon hated Kombothekra calling him by his Christian name. Everyone else called him Waterhouse: Sellers, Gibbs, Inspector Proust. Only Charlie called him Simon. And he didn’t want to call Kombothekra ‘Sam’ either. Or even ‘Sarge’.

  ‘If you’re unhappy about something, I’d rather you told me,’ Kombothekra tried again. They were coming to the point where the pitted lane divided in two. The right-hand branch led to the cluster of squat, grey industrial buildings that was Spilling Velvets, and was smooth, concreted over. The track on the left was too narrow and contained even more craters than the wider lane. Twice before on his way to Corn Mill House, Simon had met a car coming in the opposite direction and had to reverse all the way back to the Rawndesley road; it had felt like driving backwards over a rough stone roller-coaster.

  Mainly, Simon was unhappy about Charlie. Without her he felt increasingly cut off, unreachable by other human beings. She was the only person he’d ever been close to, and, worst of all, he didn’t understand why he’d lost her. She’d left CID because of him-of that Simon was certain-and he had no idea what he’d done wrong. He’d risked his job to protect her, for fuck’s sake, so what was her problem?

  None of this was Kombothekra’s business or what he’d meant. Simon forced his mind back to work. Plenty of negative feeling there too. He didn’t think Geraldine Bretherick had killed her daughter or herself; he was staggered that most of the team seemed to favour this hypothesis. But he’d been wrong in the past-spectacularly so-and the Brethericks’ minds and lives felt utterly foreign to him.

  Mark Bretherick-and Geraldine, Simon assumed-had chosen to live in a house at the bottom of a long lane that was almost impossible to drive down. Simon would never buy a house with such an approach. And he’d be embarrassed to live in one that was known by a name instead of a number; he would feel as if he was pretending to be an aristocrat, inviting trouble. His own home was a neat rectangular two-up two-down cottage in a row of similar neat rectangles, opposite an identical row across the street. His garden was a small square of lawn bordered by thin strips of earth and a tiny paved patio area, also square.