by Linda Green
The woman picks up the child and stares across at me, tears streaming down her face. I do not know exactly what she is feeling because it is something I have not experienced and never will now, of course. Nothing is going to bring Matthew back to me. But I am pleased for her, I know that much. Pleased that for her, at least, the suffering is over.
Your body realises you have lost your child before your brain does. Every morning it registers the emptiness, the hopelessness, the ache, and sends a signal to your brain before you are even awake. You never recover from losing a child, you see. It is the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about before you go to sleep. If you sleep, that is. Many of us do not manage anything approaching real sleep. Even shutting your eyes is hard. Because you lose control when you do so. You lose the right to say, ‘I had my eye on them.’ You didn’t, you see. You weren’t watching, you weren’t paying attention. And whether that was the case for a matter of seconds or for a lifetime, it doesn’t really matter. You can never shut your eyes again. Because the insides of your eyelids will constantly replay what happened, the images projected large, the sound turned up loud. And if you do somehow manage to drop off, even with your eyes open, when you wake suddenly in the night there is a flickering white screen in front of you as if you have lost the signal, and a sea of white noise crashes down across your head.
That is why we have a haunted look about us. We are haunted by our lost children – and deservedly so. We cling to the past because that is all we have to hold on to. There is no present and no future. Not for the mothers of the dead.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the following people: My editor Kathryn Taussig for believing in this book and letting me write something a bit different; the whole team at Quercus for getting behind it; my agent Anthony Goff for his ongoing wisdom and support, and being one of those lovely, and all too rare, people who still make proper phone calls on the landline; everyone at David Higham Associates for all the important bits; David Earl, for invaluable police research (all mistakes are my own – or artistic licence); Mary Cuthbert, Clare Townley and Millie for braving the camera for the book trailer; Rob Madill for donating to the CLIC Sargent charity and Claire Madill for donating her name; Clive Wilson for supporting Authors for Nepal and Charlie Wilson for lending his name; Lance Little for the fantastic website (www.linda-green.com); Samir Mehanovic, whose powerful documentary provided the quote at the beginning of this book (please go to srebrenicia.org.uk to help); all the authors whose quotes are on the cover and all those authors, book bloggers, readers and reviewers who have helped to spread the word (and kept me entertained on Twitter); brilliant libraries everywhere for stocking it; wonderful independent book shops for still being there to do the same; all the places I have sat in to write this book such as the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester, Roald Dahl’s former holiday cottage in Tenby and, rather less comfortably, the toilet seat (lid-down) of the Travelodge in Newport while my son slept; my family and friends for their ongoing support; my amazing son Rohan for all his ideas, quotes and enthusiasm (and always offering to turn my books into shows when he’s a director!); my husband Ian, without whom I’d have to get a proper job, for his unstinting support and belief; and you, my readers, for being there at the end of it to make the whole thing so special! Please do get in touch via Twitter @lindagreenisms or Facebook Fans of Author Linda Green. It’s always so lovely to hear from you.
And finally, apologies to readers in Yorkshire (which makes this sound like a Victoria Wood sketch). As an adopted Yorkshirewoman, I do know that people in Halifax say ‘were’ instead of ‘was’ and drop ‘the’ rather a lot etc, but out of consideration for the rest of the country – and as compensation for not living anywhere half as nice – an editorial decision was taken to write it without the dialect so they can understand what my characters are saying. Please forgive me and feel free to re-Yorkshirefy it in your heads. Thank you.
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