Hide and Seek

by Amy Bird

  “That did help. It helped loads.”

  “Of course it did, Ellie.”

  “Mum always knows best,” and she pats her stomach. That is the exact opposite of the truth. No mother knows best. Not Gillian. Not Sophie. Not her.

  “Of course, darling,” I reassure her. “It’s not because I’m mourning him. I just wanted some facts for the lecture – thought it would be a nice touch to weave Max into it. And I didn’t want to tell you about her trying to kiss me because I didn’t want to upset you. Upset little Leo. I didn’t think she’d go and do anything nutty like this.” I gesture to the Facebook post.

  “What’s everyone else going to think?” Ellie asks me. She gestures to the page. Someone else has already ‘liked’ the post.

  “Sod everyone else. Everyone else isn’t our family. It’s so obviously a fake post – nobody who was really having an affair would write a post like that.”

  “OK,” Ellie says.

  “I got it wrong,” I say. “No more secrets. For either of us.”

  Ellie nods. Good. Maybe now we can start talking about Sophie. I look at Ellie. She has stopped breathing so heavily now and her face is less flushed. I sit her down on the nursery chair, and kneel in front of her.

  “But what about you, my love? It sounds like you’ve been doing some super-sleuthing about my mother? You found her?”

  Ellie nods proudly. “Yup.”

  “All under your own steam? At the same time as the job-hunting?”

  Her eyes dart away from mine for a moment and then dart back.

  “Yup.”

  “Wow, that’s just amazing. Am I going to get to meet her?” The woman who killed my father and robbed me of a life of music, I add in my head.

  “Well, it’s early days yet. There was a problem with the line when I phoned her. But I’ll try again.”

  “Can’t I just speak to her?” Tell her what I think of her. That I’ll be coming to get her. Her and the truth.

  “Oh, let me set it up, Will! Please. I’ve got it all planned out. Besides, it might be better for me to act as a go-between, at first. So you don’t need to get into any emotional stuff before you’ve even met.”

  She looks down at me earnestly. Why not agree, if it makes her happy? So easy just to say yes.

  “Of course, darling. You know best, after all. And it’s only through you we found her, so have it your way.”

  “You’re happy, then?”

  “I’m delighted.”

  And I am. Because now the zebra-pianos don’t mock me. They can’t tell me that I know nothing. Because I know everything now. Everything that I need to know. About where to find Sophie. And I think I’ve always known what I will do when I find her. Ever since my dreams started telling what she’s done. And they told me very accurately, I see, when Ellie shows me the pictures she took of my old home. Because there are the black and white tiles. The tiles of my memory. The tiles of the kitchen where my mother murdered my father.

  I’m just about to lean down and kiss Ellie when the picture of the baby pandas that I’d hung on the wall falls down.

  “Not a bad omen, I hope!” says Ellie.

  “Of what?” I ask. The picture cannot sympathise with Sophie. That wouldn’t be right.

  “Little Leo.” She rubs her stomach. Oh. Of course. I rub it too. And for a moment, I do feel the anxious delinquency that I’ve read goes with new fatherhood. I lean down and blow a raspberry on her belly. I’m rewarded with a little kick.

  “Of course it’s not a bad omen. It’s just a bad nail.” The nail has fallen out of the wall. I pick it up and show it to her.

  “OK. I’ll hammer it back in. I know you and hammers!”

  I smile because her tone seems to demand it. And in fact, why not smile, why not grin? Now is the time. The revenge on the old mother. The birth, through Leo, of a new mother. And a new father.

  Ellie rises from the chair.

  “Now you,” she says. “Hadn’t you better do a bit of practice on your lecture? It’s the big day tomorrow!”

  Indeed. It will be a very big day tomorrow, thanks to Ellie’s sleuthing. The ultimate day, even. But not for me.

  Chapter Twenty

  -Ellie-

  Now, where’s that hammer? There’s just time to nail the pandas back into the wall, so to speak, before I have to set off to Will’s lecture. Appropriate, pandas, seeing as we mate as rarely as they do. I thought we might have a chance for a lazy i.e. sexy get-up this morning – a little adult bonding after I shared the news about Sophie, and to rejoice in the fact we know the whole Felicity Stephens thing is nonsense. But Will left early, said he had to check over some points in his office. Good job I believed him over Flick (stupid nickname – just makes you want to flick her right in the forehead, although actually it’s likely that’s more to do with the fact she’s a bitch than with her name). A less secure woman might think that Will had sneaked off now to spend more time with his lover. Or that the reason we haven’t been having sex is because he’s been getting enough of it in another bed. That someone else has been enjoying that naked torso, those firm thighs, that glancing collar-bone, that I so much miss being pressed against me. But no. Not me. I know when my boy is telling the truth. It’s like he said: no more secrets.

  Seriously, where can it be, the hammer? It’s not in the toolbox, it’s not in the garden, and it’s not lying around in any of the rooms, so far as I can tell. Will must have hidden it somewhere. I pick up my phone to ask him but then put it down again. He won’t want to be interrupted in the final preparations. I’ll try Sophie again instead, to fill in the time. I can ask Will about the hammer and sort out the pandas later. I wish in a way I hadn’t had to tell him about my mother-finding. But I was so furious, you know? That he’d apparently been hooking up with old whoreface while I was tracing his roots. Obvious, now, that he hadn’t been. But when you see something like that on Facebook, you don’t think logically, do you? Anyway, I do kind of wish I’d been able to keep it a surprise like I’d planned. Much more fun that way. But he’s obviously totally delighted that I’ve tracked her down. You could see this extra sparkle in his eyes, like the sparkle in Sophie’s ring. Maybe he could even be best man! He could give her away like she gave him away. Even things out, in a jolly, ironic, sort of way. I can hear the jokey wedding speeches now. I dial Sophie’s number. Nothing. The aggressive French ring tone just burrs coldly on.

  So I guess I’ll just have to head off to Will’s lecture! When I say ‘just’, I don’t mean it like that. It’s a big deal, this, his first public lecture. Geared to the students, of course. And I might be the only public that’s there. But still. A big deal. And he seems to have been working on it for ages – almost as long as I’ve been pregnant. He’ll be giving birth to it only a matter of weeks before I give birth to Leo! Although he keeps postponing it, to get it just right. You can’t postpone a birth.

  Just grab my coat, the mustard yellow one I think and – ow! One of those pains, again. Like contractions. But they can’t actually be contractions. I’m not due for another two months. Just little Leo wriggling around, giving Mummy’s pelvis a good kick. I give him a little pat, in utero. Naughty Leo, giving Mummy pain like that. Won’t hit him after he’s born, of course. What sort of mother does that?

  And I open the door to that sort of mother. OK, maybe she didn’t hit him, but it’s all part of bad mothering. Gillian. Gillian and her bloody Audi. Just sitting there, outside the house, engine running, window half down. What can she possibly want now?

  “Going to the lecture?” she calls out to me.

  “Obviously,” I say. Damn. Of course, open to the public includes open to ex-mothers.

  “Let me give you a lift,” she says.

  “I’d sooner die,” I say. I’d only meant to think it, but what the hell. Then I get another one of those pains, down below, and it stops me short. Gillian stops the engine on her Audi.

  “You OK?” she asks.

  “It’s nothi
ng,” I say. But the Audi starts to look more tempting. A walk then a train then a tube less so.

  “Come on,” she says. “Get in.”

  I walk along the pavement, as if I’m not interested. She keeps pace with me in the car. I keep walking, as quickly as I can. Which is not very fast.

  “I’ll tell you why I was in Dartington.”

  “I think it’s kind of obvious why you were in Dartington.”

  “I really hope it’s not,” she says, pushing open the passenger side door.

  I look at it. Inside, there are nice plush comfy seats. Cream seats. At least if I am going to go into labour early, or the worse thing, the m-word, I will get the satisfaction of doing it on those seats. Maybe even manage to get some fluids on that sodding green jacket of hers, which I see has come out for the occasion.

  “I reserve the right to get out at any time,” I say, as I climb in.

  “Of course,” she says.

  I place the seat belt carefully under my bump, like the NHS Choices website says I should, and Gillian starts the car.

  “So,” I say. “Dartington.”

  There’s a pause. So, she’s reneging on her promise already. What a surprise.

  “Let’s take a step back,” she says. Oh, great. Corporate speak. As if I need another reminder why I don’t want to start hanging round in offices, whatever Will says. Bet phrases like that were popular with Gillian’s fellow interior designers, as they survey walls ripe for fresh creations, but they won’t wash with me.

  “Comes a bit late from you, doesn’t it? Where was all your stepping back when Will turned eighteen and you should have been telling him he was adopted? Have you any idea what these last few months have been – ”

  But she cuts me off, the bitch. “Motherhood is all about protection. Protecting the ones you love. Would you agree?”

  I shrug. “It’s an element, I suppose. Along with nurturing and supporting and encouraging honesty at all times.” She’s not going to out-mother me, this non-mother.

  “Sure. But the thing is, Ellie, that if you know something about your child, something that will traumatise them throughout their life, you don’t let anyone know about it. More than that. If anyone does know, you make damn sure they don’t tell anyone else.”

  “What, you’ve spent your whole life putting the frighteners on everyone who wanted to tell Will he was adopted? Bit late for that in Dartington, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m not talking about Will being adopted. I’m talking about something else.”

  I notice she doesn’t deny putting the frighteners on people though.

  “So come on, Dartington. What was that all about?” Hiding your sordid love match with Max Reigate? I ask in my head. Then I think what the heck, why not, I’m pregnant, I can get away with anything, and I owe this woman nothing. I ask it out loud too.

  “Yes, I was close to Max Reigate.”

  Ha! Thought so.

  “But I was close to Sophie too. We were next but one neighbours and great friends. Both thought we were bigger than Dartington, and told each other we were. I was Will’s godmother. You know what that means, being a godmother? If the child’s parents die, you have to…”

  “Yes, yes, you have to look after them,” I mutter, irritated. I’m all over this stuff. We’ve been deliberating Leo’s prospective godparents since forever.

  “But they never tell you what’s to happen if the child kills the parents,” Gillian says.

  What? If the child kills…

  I shake my head. I can’t have heard her right.

  “I’m sorry?” I ask.

  “They don’t tell you what the responsibilities are if your godchild kills one of his parents. His father.”

  I can’t stop staring at her. What does she possibly mean? Does she mean Will –? But no. That would be ridiculous. He was only four when Max died.

  “Gillian, if you’re trying to tell me Will killed his father, that’s mad.”

  Gillian shakes her head. “I wish it was.” There are tears in her voice.

  I pause for a moment, trying to work out how to respond. But that’s obvious, isn’t it? Incredulity. She is trying to tell me my husband murdered his father!

  “It’s another of your crazy stories, another way to try to keep Will in some made-up world. What next – you’re going to say his mother put him up to it? Which is why he shouldn’t go looking for her?”

  “The reason he shouldn’t go looking for her is that she won’t be able to bear to see him. Would you be able to look at your son if he’d murdered your husband? Wouldn’t you give him away?”

  My brain is whirling and my pelvis is cramping, but somewhere in the swirl and the pain, what she says makes a horrible kind of sense. Sophie Travers had made the family friends look after her child, because the child had killed the father. And she could no longer look upon his face. But, come on, no, he was four. Max was thirty. How could that happen?

  “If, if, what you’re saying is true, how does a four-year-old boy kill a thirty-year-old man?”

  “With a hammer,” Gillian says. “With a hammer, in a tantrum. While daddy is fixing the sink.”

  I gag. It sounds horribly plausible. I stroke Leo, despite the pain he is giving me.

  “Gillian, I – Look, how can I believe this is true? And why the hell are you telling me? You hate me!”

  “I’m telling you because you need to understand why Will shouldn’t try to find his mother. Which I believe is what you were helping him do in Dartington. I don’t want to imagine how she will react when she sees him. What if she tells him? It will destroy him.”

  It would make sense, Sophie hanging up as soon as I called, as she had done. Sophie not wanting to be found.

  “And as for whether what I say is true, it’s all in there.” Gillian gestures at the glove compartment. I stare at it. What could possibly be in there? A bloodied hammer, with Will’s infant fingerprints on it?

  “The transcript of the inquest. Never released publicly. To protect Will.”

  I fumble to open the glove compartment. My fingers don’t seem to be working properly. The catch keeps slipping beneath my grasp. Finally, I get in there. I see a sheaf of paper in a plastic covering. With shivering hands I take it out.

  Gillian drives silently as I read. As I take it all in. Because it’s all there. How Will murdered his father.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  -Ellie-

  By the time I’ve finished reading, two things have happened. First, we have arrived at the university. Second, my heart is broken.

  “See?” says Gillian, turning towards me as she puts on the handbrake.

  I nod. “I see.” I see how a little boy can, with three swings of a hammer, give pain that seems like no more than an annoyance. I see how that annoyance can, hours later, become a fatal build-up of blood on the brain. I see how a mother must spend her life in horror and in grief. I see that my husband remembers nothing of this at all. I see that I’m going to have to sit through a whole lecture with him opining on ‘talk and die’ while I keep quiet about him causing just that effect in his father. I see that I am going to have to lie to him forever.

  “We’d better go in,” I say.

  But when we get to the auditorium, it is dark. There is a note on the door saying that the lecture is postponed.

  “I don’t understand,” I tell Gillian. “He left for the lecture this morning. He can’t have postponed it again, at such short notice?” Part of me is relieved, relieved I won’t have to sit through the horror of his specialist subject being – unbeknownst to him – about what killed his father. Or at least, he may suspect the ‘talk and die’ nature of his father’s death, if his sleep mutterings are any clue. But he doesn’t know it is him who did it. He’s probably got some mad theory somewhere in his brain. Like that one he first dreamt up, that Sophie killed Max. I shiver. A mad theory. One he’s over now. Otherwise why would he be so pleased to know that I’d found her? I shiver again, and rub my hands
against my arms to keep warm. There’s another pain in my pelvis. I’m going to have to start paying attention to them soon.

  Only part of me is relieved the lecture isn’t on. The other part of me is concerned that I’m now going to have to face Will and lie, lie like I’ll be lying to him for the rest of my life.

  “He must have gone to his office,” I tell Gillian. “We’d better look for him.”

  So we go to the information desk, and explain who we are. No one is going to argue with a seven-month pregnant woman. We’re pointed in the right direction and walk along the tiled corridor and up the stairs towards Will’s office. Or at least, I assume it’s Will’s. Because I see he has put a post-it over the doorplate, replacing the name with ‘Dr Reigate’.

  “You’d better wait outside,” I tell Gillian. “I’ll have to explain why you’re here. That you gave me a lift. That it’s OK, with you.”

  “But you can’t – ” she says.

  I shake my head. “I won’t tell him,” I say. “I promise.”

  I go into his room. It’s empty. Or rather, it doesn’t contain him. It does contain a piano. He’s actually got himself a piano. He must be the only medical academic with a piano in his room. But then, he’s probably the only one fixated on a dead piano-genius father. A dead father that he killed. And there are piles and piles of manuscript notes, littering the floor. No sign of order. This is not the office a healthy man. It is not the office of the Will that I know, the Will that I married, the Will with whom I conceived my child. My insides feel like they are sliding. The zebras in the nursery are nothing to do with zebras. They are pianos. My husband is obsessed with pianos. With his father. With the father he killed. I still can’t quite get my mind around it; it keeps repeating in my head, like my subconscious is trying to make sense of it. But how can it? It is too odd, too other-worldly. Yet real.

  I move to the piano. There’s a sheaf of handwritten notes on that too, held together with treasury tags. ‘Talk and die lecture’ he’s written on it. Not in his usual handwriting though. These are scrawled capitals. Another shiver. Another pain. Hand on my pelvis, I move round to the other side of the piano to sit at the stool. On the music rack I see sheet music. And Will’s childhood crayon drawing of ‘Daddy’ that I saved from the funeral pyre. Will has been savouring his legacy, then. I sit down on the stool and flick through the lecture. Then I stop flicking and start reading. In horror.