by Phoebe Locke
The plastic layer over the first page had bubbled with heat or age, or was never even laid flat in the first place, and blisters had formed over the image. A picture of herself, heavily pregnant, sitting up in bed. She remembered Miles behind the camera, lying on the mattress beside her, the camera angled up so that her belly looked mountainous, her face unflatteringly wide. So young; so young. She couldn’t get over it, tracing those round cheeks with a fingertip again and again. Twenty years old but in her shapeless T-shirt, her unmade face, she could have been even younger. One week overdue! was scrawled beneath the image in her own handwriting, although she couldn’t remember sticking this in, labelling it. She found herself looking into the corner of the picture even though she knew that nothing had lived there then, that her hopes were still alive and that the flat had been theirs, just hers and Miles’s, for a few sacred days longer.
She turned the page and her breath caught in her chest. Her own face again, that same smile. A paper gown, hair in a plastic cap. The bed a hospital one; her arms, held in front of her in a double thumbs-up, laced with tubes, cannulas, medical tape. An emergency caesarean after thirty-six hours of contractions and yet she was smiling. Stupid, she told the photo. You had no idea.
And then, on the opposite page, as if by magic, was Amber. On her back in her hospital cot, legs frogged up by her sides. It took her hours to unfurl, Sadie thought. Hours to accept that she was no longer in the womb, that she was open and exposed and could move. Her face in the picture was pink and clean, eyes closed and fists balled up by her ears, dressed in the pale yellow baby-gro Sadie remembered picking out for her. No immediate post-birth shot for them; no arty black-and-white images of the surgeon pulling her free, gore-streaked and screaming. None of Amber, purple and fuzzed white, against Sadie’s chest. Just her, tiny and alone in the plastic cot.
The Tall Man takes daughters, she thought. And then: Stop.
She looked at the photo on the opposite page, taken a day or two after they had come home from the hospital. Miles and Sadie walking through the meadow near their old house, the riverbank behind them. Amber in a sling on her front, Sadie’s hand protectively cradling her tiny head. Miles facing the camera, hands clasped in front of him, that photo face he made sometimes – a small, thoughtful smile, chin tilted slightly up. Sadie was half-turned away, her arm obscuring the baby, her face glancing back over her shoulder with her hair caught in a sudden gust of wind, revealing the grey collar of her fleece, a slice of sun-starved neck.
His mother took that one, she thought, or perhaps his father; they had shown up uninvited the minute Miles had pulled the car up outside. Looking at the photo, she was sure she could remember the irritated call – Smile! – the wind whistling past them and the baby an unbearably light weight against her chest.
The Tall Man takes daughters.
That little girl voice whispering close beside her in the dark. Warning her.
She turned the page and kept on turning. There was Amber, legs finally flexing out, feet kicked stiffly up, her body tiny in the swamp of their bedclothes. There she was balanced on Miles on the sofa, her back against his chest, her tiny fists held out in a cheer by his huge hands. And there – Sadie’s fingers, slick with sweat, traced the page – on her belly on their terrible threadbare old carpet, palms pressed down, eyes wide and goggling at the camera.
She was gone by then, she knew. She was gone, taking the shadows and their voices with her, just as she always had, leaving Miles to take these pictures, to care for this hopelessly small person all alone. The only shot of him after that was one taken at a party somewhere, Amber in the sling on his front now. His face drawn and shadowed, a hollow sort of panic in his eyes. She turned the page quickly, afraid to look at him for too long.
The last photo in the album was of Amber on her first birthday. Standing up, her hands gripping the edge of the coffee table, a cake in the shape of a 1 in front of her. Sadie remembered that day. She remembered sitting in the mildewed bedroom she had rented, crying, turning out the lamp to let the shadows claim her. She looked again at the daughter in the photo, and then she closed the album and brought her knees up to her chin, pressing her forehead against the cool linen. She breathed in the dusty smell of it again as if there might be something of her left there.
Around her, the shadows began their whispering once more.
8
2018
Greta shifts uncomfortably in the motel chair, her laptop balanced on the arm. Headlights from the freeway outside flicker through the crooked blinds and across the wall, the air-conditioning humming irritably to itself. It’s 3.45 a.m. and the first streaks of blue are appearing at the base of the dark night sky, the motel blissfully quiet.
She clicks on to another page, downloads another interview from the shared drive. She picks up her headphones and pushes one pod in, reaching for her beer with the other hand. Just this one, she tells herself. One more and then bed.
The woman’s voice that fills her ear is soft, though it catches on some of the consonants. Smoking or a cold; maybe crying unrecorded. Federica conducted this initial interview herself too, which is unusual – it means she probably thought the chances of it being included in the final cut were high. There is some introduction, though not much, and the clip is currently audio only, which means the woman does not want to have her image included in the film. Federica might make Greta or one of the other women stand in; film them in shadow, their faces turned away, and add in the audio later. More likely she will have filmed the woman’s hands, perhaps her feet, and she will fill the screen with them and all their tells; the small movements and tensions that will underline or belie a sentence.
‘And that’s when you started to have the thoughts?’ Federica asks, her voice closer to the microphone but respectfully low.
‘Yes.’ The sound dips; then there’s a scraping noise, as if Federica is adjusting the position of her recorder. ‘At first I’d catch myself thinking about the bad stuff that could happen, you know? I’d imagine myself dropping him or forgetting him.’
‘And then they escalated?’
‘Yes. I started thinking that he would be better off without me; I was sure of it. There were voices there, all the time, telling me to do the right thing and leave both of them behind.’
Greta clicks back on to the tab where she has the team’s shared drive open, looks at this folder with its list of similar files, video and audio, named simply after their interviewee. All of these women, all of these stories. All of these beginnings that unravelled.
‘And when were you diagnosed with postpartum psychosis?’ Federica asks, and as she does, Greta’s phone vibrates; real-time Federica requesting an update. It’s 11 a.m. in London; Greta can picture her with her second grande Americano of the day, her wide, flat feet up on the desk, shoes kicked off under it. She sent a message five hours ago, to Tom and Luca as well as Greta, announcing that she wouldn’t be boarding a flight today either. Have to sort things out here. Am totally confident you guys have this under control x
Greta isn’t so sure. And by the number of instructions and requests for updates Federica keeps sending, neither is she. Greta flips the phone over on the tiny side-table, tucks her own feet up under her.
‘Right then,’ the woman is saying. ‘As soon as my partner persuaded me to go to the hospital. They knew right away. They got me the help I needed.’
Greta closes the file, looks again at the unedited footage of Amber that Tom has uploaded from today. That wry look; the weathered reaction to her mother’s abandonment of her – to the way Sadie re-entered their lives and everything that came after that. The simple, flat way she spoke about it. Can’t say I blame her, Federica had written, and Greta had thought she agreed. If she were in Amber’s place, she imagines her own barriers might be on lockdown – the reality of what has happened too huge to process, the blame and the guilt too big to assign or accept. Federica sees Amber’s blankness as something sinister but Greta is starting to wonde
r if it is instead deeply sad; a teenage girl failing to come to terms with the terrible legend her mother has left for her, with the dark and dreadful one she has created for herself.
Greta has always been resistant to the idea of analysing Sadie Banner’s actions in their film, sees only danger that way. As the days pass, Federica is increasingly eager to dig up everything she can about her. About the things she said she saw, about the places she went after she left her family behind – and what might have made her decide to finally return. Greta knows that Federica is only doing this because they aren’t getting enough material from Amber herself; the no-holds-barred, all-levels access they were promised so far amounting to being allowed to film Amber getting ready in the morning, being driven places, occasionally watching herself on pre-recorded TV appearances. Amber seems to imagine the documentary as her very own reality show, an exploration of her newfound infamy, and has so far shown little interest in exploring the story that brought her to this point (why would she? the needling voice at the back of Greta’s mind asks her. Would you?). Federica has made it clear over her last few calls and emails that the team have to push her harder, get her to give them more – and yet Federica has no suggestions as to how Greta might do that.
Federica has given herself the task of privately researching Sadie Banner online and in libraries; no paparazzi, no autograph-seekers or talk-show hosts in sight. Greta trusts the instinct – she has to. Federica is an award-winning filmmaker, a woman famous for finding the story others cannot. But Greta can’t help feeling guilty each time Amber offers her a chip or a sweet, each time Amber asks what Greta thinks of an outfit or her nail colour. Amber thinks their attention is on her but behind the scenes, across the Atlantic, the team are digging around in things they expressly promised they would not.
And yet as the morning draws closer, Greta can’t stop herself from leafing through the photocopied pages that Federica has marked up, the things people have had to say about Sadie Banner and her voices. She listens to the stories of other women, she reads the notes on postpartum psychosis from therapists and physicians. And she thinks: How could anyone ever have thought it was that?
‘Don’t be such a baby.’
‘Yeah.’ This, from Helen, was particularly hurtful. ‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.’
The trees lurched out of the dusk again, their fallen leaves shivering in the breeze. Autumn had come early and the girls’ visits to the woods had become more frequent. Sadie looked around at the creeping dark and wondered if she should go home.
She often wondered this. She never actually did it.
The things that the Tall Man wanted seemed to vary. Marie had heard that the Tall Man liked gifts, and so each afternoon after school, they gathered at a small clearing in the scrappy woods which Justine said was one of the Tall Man’s special places. They buried pennies and sweets and Helen, who was particularly afraid of the Tall Man, buried her Kylie Minogue cassette.
And each time, they turned to Justine. ‘Is it enough?’ they asked.
And Justine would yawn or scratch at an elbow or fiddle with her hair. ‘For today,’ she would say.
But on this day, she simply shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s enough. I think the Tall Man will be unhappy with us.’
And Sadie saw the way that Marie glanced at Justine, that tight smile of hers disappearing.
‘I want to go home now,’ Sadie said, glancing around at the darkening woods.
Justine looked her in the eye and then leaned closer, her breath a warm blast of Peaches and Cream, the lollipop in her hand sucked down to a pip.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she said again. ‘Don’t you want to be special?’
Sadie bit her lip and didn’t reply. She hadn’t told the others about what had happened in the art cupboard, or about the voice that had begun to speak to her. Justine had told them proudly that the Tall Man had visited her one night, and Sadie had felt a pang of jealousy. She had thought she was the only one.
Helen sat down on the edge of a tree stump, her breath wheezy. She’d been off school for two days that week after a bad asthma attack and had only been able to persuade her mother to let her out to play with the promise that Marie would be there ‘to keep an eye on her’.
‘Do you think the Tall Man will take Yasmin Hunt if we ask him?’ she said. ‘I hate her.’
‘Jenny Hunt’s little sister?’ Marie wrinkled her face. ‘There’s no way he’d want a spod like that.’
‘Isn’t that the whole point?’ Helen asked, arms crossed. ‘He takes the rubbish ones away, and he makes the good ones special?’
‘He takes away the ones who are bad,’ Marie said. ‘But he’ll hurt the people who hurt his special ones, too.’
‘Look at this,’ Justine said, crouching down to open her school bag. ‘I bought it off this boy in Year 9.’ She pulled out a rolled-up magazine, its back page torn. She smoothed it out and Sadie caught a glimpse of the cover – an illustration of a woman in old-fashioned underwear running down some stairs, glancing over her shoulder at a figure in silhouette behind her. ‘It’s a couple of years old,’ Justine said, flicking through the pages. ‘But it’s really cool.’ She found the part she was looking for and handed it to Marie, the others crowding round to see.
The double-page spread was creased, another tear in the corner of one side. There was a second illustration, this time of a girl in bed, the covers pulled up under her chin. At the foot of the bed, a jagged black figure loomed up, sharp fingers reaching out for her. Terror Comes to Town read the title, but Helen pushed closer, her elbow knocking Sadie out of the way, and she couldn’t make out the smaller print of the article itself.
‘It’s about some town not that far away from here,’ Justine said, watching her. ‘In the seventies, a load of kids all started having the same nightmare. Well, all the adults thought they were nightmares. The Tall Man visited them in the night and asked them to come with him. But get this, right? Sometimes when he visited them, he had other children with him. And this article says that the kids they saw fit the descriptions of actual missing children.’
‘“One of them was twelve-year-old Pauline King,”’ Marie read aloud. ‘“Several of the children of Stow-on-the-Wold described seeing Pauline in their dreams, hand in hand with the Tall Man. Pauline had been missing since the previous Christmas, when she was last seen by a member of the public leaving her school with an unidentified man. Pauline has never been found.”’
Sadie shivered. Where did he take them – and would he take her? Or was she good enough to be special, to be protected? She glanced down at the rough pile of earth and leaves where they had buried their latest offerings, and then back at the cartoonish illustration in the magazine. Suddenly they seemed silly and small and not nearly enough.
‘That’s so creepy,’ Helen said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. ‘Maybe I don’t want him to take Yasmin Hunt after all. Even she’s not that bad.’
Justine shrugged. ‘I can think of plenty of people who are that bad. I’ve got a whole list of people I’m going to ask him to take.’
Helen had taken the magazine from Marie and brought it close to her face, eyes flicking back and forth across the words. ‘I don’t want him in my dreams,’ she whispered. ‘How can I stop him from getting into my dreams?’
And even though Justine was answering her, she looked at Sadie again as she spoke.
‘Isn’t he already there?’
9
2016
Sadie hadn’t expected it to be this way.
Her daughter was indifferent to her and her husband was keen to pretend that nothing had ever happened. There was all of this making up to do, yet no one seemed keen to figure out where and how that could begin, other than for her to just, well, be there. Play her part. Wait for the cracks to gradually dissolve by themselves. She was good at waiting, she’d had to be. But this, suddenly, felt entirely wrong.
In the months – the year – after she
had left, she had rented a cottage on the coast. The deposit had been almost all of her meagre savings, and she had had to seek help from an old friend, but it had been isolated enough and far enough from Miles and Amber, and she had tried to feel relieved. At first, she had spent hours each day walking to the nearest town and its library, searching through newspapers for any story about a missing baby. The Tall Man takes daughters. As the weeks passed, again and again, her fear began to dissipate.
It was only later, much later, when she looked at the date and realised Amber’s tenth birthday was approaching, that she began to think of other ways in which the Tall Man might reach her. It began to occur to her that he might not take Amber, but that Amber might be one of his special ones. That perhaps it was her replacement she had given birth to all along – and then left unattended and alone.
She hadn’t risked going back then – she couldn’t risk leading them there herself. She had only hoped that Miles, all of the goodness that was in Miles, would have been enough to protect Amber, to keep the shadows at bay. She remembered sitting in another cottage, this time on Skye and a full decade after she’d left, her laptop open in front of her. Remembered the years after that too, the way she would spend hours studying Amber’s Facebook profile, her twelve-year-old daughter’s privacy settings woefully lacking, and then, later, her Twitter and Instagram too. Searching for some sign, some expression on her daughter’s face, some strangely worded status that would tell her that it had happened, that he had found her.
And now she was back, she watched Amber when Amber talked, laughed, slept. But it was difficult to really know, when the only Amber she could say for sure was untouched had been cut out of her with a scalpel.
