by Thorne Moore
So why was this upsetting her? Because Gillian, who had failed her so unforgivably, was all she had, and it was so hard, so cold, to be alone.
As hard and cold as the wind on Brewer’s Down.
Gillian, alone in the house, busied herself with housework. Time to vacuum, do the stairs, get the cigarette ash out of the carpet. Try to keep the dread at bay.
What had Vicky heard?
Of course she should have told her years ago. Why hadn’t she done as everyone had advised and been honest from day one?
She had been put off by her mother, that was the truth of it. By Joan’s comments, her constant belittling. Whatever Gillian had said to Vicky, Joan would have spoiled it. With the cat officially out of the bag, there would have been no stopping her. As if her heavy-handed hints all these years hadn’t been enough. It was a miracle this hadn’t happened sooner.
Landing done, Gillian reverently pushed open the door of Vicky’s room. Nothing to do. Everything neat and tidy, in its place. It had to be; the room was so small. Years ago, when Vicky was doing so well at school, accumulating so many textbooks, needing quiet space to do her homework, Gillian had suggested that Joan, who had the big room at the front, should swap rooms with her. Joan was having none of it. The house was hers, wasn’t it? Damned if she was going to be turfed out of her own bedroom for a brat who should be outside playing with the other kids, not burying her head in books. No matter that widowed Joan spent five nights out of seven away from home, with her succession of ‘fancy men’. Even now she was eighty and her latest, Bill Bowyer, was seventy-seven, she wasn’t a woman for a cosy cup of cocoa before bed.
Night after night the big front room stood empty, while Gillian and Terry shared the smaller back room and Vicky made do with the little one over the hall. A narrow bed, a tiny dressing table that passed for a desk, a chair tucked under it so that there was room to move. Shelves on the walls, bending under the weight of books. She needed more. She deserved more. But there was no point letting her use the big bedroom in her grandmother’s absence. Joan’s room stank of tobacco smoke, scent and used underwear. Vicky refused point blank even to enter it.
Gillian laid a hand on the books by the closed laptop on the desk, as if to draw strength from them. Medical books. Utterly incomprehensible to her. With all her might, she had catapulted her daughter into a future beyond her own. Only now she realised that she would be left standing, watching Vicky disappear from view.
Not yet. Please God, not yet.
She put the vacuum cleaner away, wiped down the bathroom, put her apron on to start on lunch. Something healthy. Ham rolls with salad. Would that be all right? She always managed to get something wrong.
She heard the front door open; she was listening for it. Footsteps on the stairs. Gillian peeled back the wrapper from a fresh block of butter, her chest so tight she was barely breathing. If she heard Vicky’s bedroom door close, what should she do? Go up to her? Or leave her to get on with her work?
She didn’t have to decide. She could hear her daughter coming back downstairs. The kitchen door opened.
‘Ah, there you are.’ Gillian buttered furiously. ‘Did you get your medicine? I’m making some rolls for lunch. Is that all right?’ The knife hovered. ‘Should I be using low fat spread?’
‘Is Joan out?’
‘Gran? Yes, gone to Bill’s. Don’t suppose she’ll be back today. Salad cream? I never know…’ She felt compelled at last to face her daughter.
Vicky stood in the doorway. A blank mask. ‘Can we talk, please?’
Gillian felt her insides shrivel. ‘Yes, of course.’ The floor was buckling under her feet as she followed her daughter into the living room.
She sank onto the brown velour sofa, looking up at her daughter. Tall and angular. Beautiful to her mother, even if other people didn’t think so. Standing there, arms folded tightly. Gillian felt a twinge of pain merely looking at her. For all her academic success, there was something about Vicky that screamed distress. Some deep anger boiling within. Was it Gillian’s fault? Was it all because of this, because she had been too cowardly to tell the truth?
‘Could you explain, please? I would like to know. I know you had fertility treatment. I thought it was the sperm, but it must have been the egg, if Joan thinks I’m not her real granddaughter. Is that right?’ The girl’s careful politeness acidified. ‘I’m not her granddaughter? Thank God for that at least!’
‘Oh Vicky, don’t be like that. Your gran means well.’ What was she doing? Defending her mother, for God’s sake, just so that she could postpone talking about anything else. She met Vicky’s eyes, blank behind her glasses.
‘Actually…’ Gillian stood up, walked to the glass cabinet, opened a drawer. Why? Was she expecting to find the Answer within, tied up with a bow? She pulled out a tissue and wiped her sweating hands.
She turned, bracing herself against the cabinet. ‘None of the fertility treatment worked. Terry and I couldn’t have children. We adopted you, Vicky. Please, darling, don’t think—’
‘Adopted?’ Vicky’s voice was sharp with surprise.
‘You mustn’t think for one moment that you’ve ever meant any less to us. You’re every bit as precious to us as if—’
‘Precious.’ She repeated the word as if it were too bizarre to have any meaning. ‘You adopted me. Some other woman didn’t want me, so you took me in.’
‘Yes. You see—’
‘To this family. I didn’t belong, but you brought me here.’
Vicky’s voice was so even that Gillian mistook her words at first for understanding. Then she saw the tremors in Vicky’s hand, the tick under her left eye, and she realised that some seething molten emotion was about to erupt.
‘We wanted to give you a loving home, darling.’
‘A loving home. You spent every last penny trying to conceive, and when that was exhausted, you selected me, something another woman had discarded, and put me in this loving home.’ Vicky’s voice was rising, her fists clenching.
‘No, Vicky, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t think of adoption at first because the doctors talked about other things, about trying this, and then that. If I’d known I would get you, I would have gone straight for adoption from the start. You’re my daughter, Vicky, my darling, all I ever wanted.’
‘I’m what you wanted?’ Vicky opened her arms and looked down at herself, her face twisted with challenge.
She’d taken to doing this, selling herself as an unattractive, ungainly shrew. Why? Vicky might not have a face from the cover of Vogue, but she would look wonderful if she made the right effort. If she bought herself some nice clothes, had her hair done, put on a bit of make-up. It wouldn’t take much. It was almost as if she took satisfaction from the snide comments Joan slipped in every day. ‘Never going to get yourself a man, looking like that. What’s this, you off to the frump’s ball? What do you want to be wearing those specs for? Men don’t need women to see. You’ve had your hair cut. Look like a boy. But you might as well. That long straggly stuff wasn’t doing you no favours. Not that long or short is going to turn you into a fairy princess.’
Gillian had spent twenty-two years trying to shield Vicky from comments like that. All Joan’s granddaughters had received the same, her daughters too. The others knew how to respond. But despite Gillian’s attempts to protect her, Vicky had reacted with hurt and later with contempt.
Now that same contempt was being turned full force on Gillian. Perhaps it had always been there. Contempt for a mother who allowed Joan to victimise her. A hopeless and inadequate mother, despite all her efforts.
‘Vicky, you are exactly what I wanted. You are the daughter I love. I will always love. I just want you to do well and be happy.’
‘Happy! You brought me here to be happy? That’s a new one. I remember you wanting me to do well. Nose to the grindstone. Someone for you to push into doing all the things you weren’t allowed to do. Someone to live your life for you.’
‘No, t
hat’s not what I wanted!’ There was a flicker of anger in Gillian too now. It helped to quell the nausea of distress. ‘I wanted you to live your life.’
‘But you decided what that life was to be.’
‘You mean you don’t want to be a doctor?’
‘A bit late to ask me that now, isn’t it? You were the one desperate for the top grades, the posh career. “My daughter is not going to be a hairdresser.” That’s what you said to Amy’s mum. You never asked me if I wanted to be a hairdresser.’
‘Did you?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Yes it is! You had the brains, you could do anything and I didn’t want you to throw it all away, like everyone else round here. I pushed because I loved you, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t enough for you! I love you because you’re my daughter, whether I gave birth to you or not.’
Her heated response took a little of the wind out of Vicky’s sails. They stood for a moment staring at each other.
‘Are you going to tell me who my real mother is, then?’ Words deliberately calculated to hurt. Lashing out.
Gillian took a deep breath. ‘Your biological mother? I don’t know.’
‘You mean you won’t tell me. Stupid of me to ask. For twenty-two years you haven’t even bothered telling me she existed. That I was just bought over the counter.’
‘You weren’t bought! You were found. Aban—’ Gillian stopped, biting on the word.
‘Abandoned? Oh great! Chucked away!’
Vicky put her knuckles to her mouth. Gillian reached out but she flinched.
‘No! Don’t – I need to think. Just – leave me alone.’
She ran, blundering up the stairs blindly, slamming the door of her room.
Gillian slumped onto the sofa, acid in her stomach, an iron band tightening round her head. For years she had shied away from this moment, dreading how badly it might go. Now she knew. This badly. Worse than her worst nightmares.
Her palms were sticky with sweat. She forced herself up, back to the kitchen, and held her hands under the taps, numb, not even sure if the water was freezing cold or scalding hot.
Instinctively, hopelessly, she finished making up the rolls.
Vicky’s room was a prison, the walls edging in to crush her. But when, on the point of exploding, she rushed out, gulping the damp air, heading wildly down the road, she realised that there was nothing to do but keep walking. She had nowhere to go.
The Downs had offered her no answers in the morning, so she walked the other way, into town. It really didn’t matter.
She found herself, briefly, at the gates of her old school, gripping the bars. Why had she come here? Because it had been a place where she used to learn, to feel in control. But it had no answers to offer this time.
She finished up in the town centre, marching through the shopping centre, up the High Street, round the town hall, down the High Street, through the shopping centre. She couldn’t keep this up for ever. It wasn’t helping, any more than the school gates had done. She emerged from the centre, into daylight, looking across the square with its patches of worn grass and its concrete tubs of bulbs, into the glass wall of the library. Her natural home, the place where she always sought answers.
The library.
It stared her in the face, the newspaper for the year of her birth, a great volume like the book of judgement, opened up to pronounce her fate. She’d hoped she might find some small snippet, some tiny clue, but there was nothing tiny about it. The big story of 1990, it seemed. So obvious. The woman who claimed her baby was snatched.
She read, devouring every word, absorbed and yet detached, because it was too unreal.
The story unfolded. The woman claimed… The police suspected… The public thought…
It was true. Behind all the claims and suspicions, Vicky held the truth within her, like a hard, sharp jewel. She was the missing child. Snatched. That’s what Gillian had done. Snatched her. Taken her home to Joan.
The library swam around her. Vicky shut her eyes, forcing her breathing to steady. The woman, her real mother – where was she now? In the hefty volume of the collected Lyford Herald, the story ran for a few weeks, then petered out. Was that all there was?
She enquired about the story and was directed to the clippings section of the local history library, with folders on every possible subject – factory closures, royal visits, council rebellions, accidents at sewage works. Pamphlets, articles, postcards even, collected, collated, indexed and cross-referenced. It was easy to find her story: it had a folder of its own. The same articles she’d just found in the Herald and other papers, with updates from later years. The latest clipping was less than a month old.
Vicky stood staring at it. It gave a name, a place. It was enough.
iii
Mrs Parish
‘Mrs Parish.’ The tone was hostile, struggling to be polite, as if the speaker would much rather have spat.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs and turned. Mrs Bone was peering round her front door, lips pursed. ‘Mrs Parish. The graffiti. It’s there again.’
‘I didn’t put it there.’
‘No, well, I never said you did, but we all know why it’s there, don’t we. And it’s not nice! None of it’s nice.’
‘It’s not nice for me either.’
‘Whose fault’s that?’ Mrs Bone slammed her door shut.
Mrs Parish continued up the stairs. Fifth floor flat. She could have taken the lift, but she’d made that mistake a month ago. She’d found herself trapped with a burly resident who felt obliged to make his feeling clear with his fists. When she escaped, someone called the police. Not an ambulance, just the police.
The latest incident in the park had set off the usual ritual – the tip-off to the local papers, the carefully legal tabloid sniping, then the abusive letters, the graffiti, the vigilante rage. Every few years it flared up, usually ending in an assault, a trip to the hospital. She knew by now how to handle it: wait for things to die down, then she’d quietly move on, find a new flat where her neighbours didn’t know her.
The solution was simple. She knew it. Everyone knew it. She should move out of the area. But she wouldn’t. Not till she had her answer.
She was out of breath when she reached her own front door. A red spray can had been used. Lots of it, randomly, like blood splatter. The words ‘Baby Killer’ were scrawled across the door and onto the adjoining wall. Probably a dog turd shoved through the letterbox too. There usually was.
Then she noticed the figure.
Hunched, at the end of the corridor, hood up, rising from the ground now like an evil imp.
Her fingers fumbled with her key. She could feel the month-old bruises on her cheek flare up in anticipation, as the figure strode forward.
Then the hood went back. Not a hoodie but a cagoule, not a boy but a girl. A young woman, lank hair, long face white and desperate. No evident hatred, but the girl was strangely rigid.
‘You’re the one, aren’t you?’ the girl demanded. ‘The woman everyone said killed her baby.’
She stood, equally rigid. ‘I did not.’
‘1990. It was you? The papers—’
‘The papers got it wrong.’
‘I know!’
It wasn’t what she was expecting. Mostly, when she was recognised, her accosters said, ‘Liar! You murdered her. We know the truth.’
She waited, her fingers twisting the key back and forth, something to concentrate on.
The girl lifted her arms, not to strike, but to reach out. ‘I’m her! I’m your daughter. I was the stolen baby.’
Such insane eagerness. Of course, now it made sense. It was another of those deranged fantasists, or the heartless con artists. Every so often they popped up. She had given up trying to fathom why. Mad fixation, or some idea of wringing money out of her, or maybe just a hope of notoriety. Once, years ago, she’d have felt a wild lurch of hope, a racing pulse and a catch in her throat as she stupidly dared to be
lieve. Now she knew better.
‘No.’ She spoke coldly, tired of the situation already. ‘You are not my daughter.’
‘But I am!’
The girl came forward, crowding in on her, as she fumbled and finally succeeded in opening the door. ‘Get away from me. I know you’re not my daughter, you understand? I know. I don’t know what sort of freak you are and I don’t care. Just go away.’
Mrs Parish shut the door in the girl’s face. Through the panels, she could hear her, voice raised almost to a scream.
‘Why? How can you know? Because you lied? Was that it? I wasn’t snatched, you really tried to kill me.’ She was thumping on the door. Would the lock hold? ‘It didn’t work! I didn’t die!’
The hammering slowed, like a failing heartbeat. ‘I didn’t die.’
Mrs Parish waited for the silence to settle. It would pass, this episode of insane misery. She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out cleaner and a scrubbing brush, then put the kettle on. When she was sure the mad girl had gone, she’d deal with the graffiti.
iv
Kelly
‘Just leave that for a moment,’ said Kelly.
Roz laid the knife on the chopping board.
‘Doc wants us to try this,’ said Kelly, holding the cotton bud ready. ‘A new way of testing blood sugar levels they want to check out. Might as well give it a go.’
‘If you think so,’ said Roz with comfortable unconcern, opening her mouth to let Kelly swab the inside of her cheek. ‘It’s all voodoo if you ask me.’
‘Quack experiments,’ Kelly agreed, with a shrug. ‘But what the hell, if it keeps them happy.’
Keep everyone happy. Especially Roz, who trusted her implicitly. It was fine with her that her daughter was in charge. Control was something Roz had never been comfortable with.
Prompted by guilt, perhaps, Kelly’s mind pictured her mother’s face, thirteen years ago. A face so rigid with purpose that it had seemed to belong to a different person. Eight-year-old Kelly had been more disturbed by that look on her mother’s face than by the cause of it. She could recall her mother treating the bruises on her cheek, but she could only vaguely recollect being hit.
