In Her Wake

by Amanda Jennings

  ‘Elaine, I asked you a question,’ Henry said, his voice firmer now, his heart hammering in his chest. ‘Where is her mother?’

  Elaine covered the little girl with the bedspread. She leant forward to stroke her hair. She smiled again. And then she stepped back, a look of utter bliss on her face as she gazed at the sleeping child.

  Henry walked over to her and grabbed her arm, pulled her around to face him. ‘Elaine! For God’s sake. Where is her mother?’

  Elaine looked up at him, her eyes glistening with a film of tears, a beatific glow lighting her face. ‘Don’t you see, Henry? It’s me. I am her mother. She is my miracle. I am her mother.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  ‘I won’t have a coffee today, Phil.’

  ‘Blimey, love, hope you’re not thinking of giving up your morning stops here.’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m not sure I could get through my day without our morning chat. I’ve been practising my numbers. I can’t remember four, though.’

  ‘Peswar.’

  ‘Arghh,’ I say with frustration. ‘Why can’t I remember that one?’

  He laughs. ‘So what do you want if it’s not one of my legendary coffees?’

  ‘I feel like a fruit juice or something. I’ve been feeling a bit rough these last few days. Maybe time to start looking after myself a bit more.’

  ‘Have one of those orange and raspberry juices. They’re spot on.’

  ‘Perfect.’ I grab one from the chiller. ‘Come on then, tell me what’s the weather’s up to.’

  ‘Sunny today.’

  ‘Good, I’m going to the beach.’

  ‘Watch out for the howllosk.’

  I furrow my brow.

  ‘Sunburn!’ He chuckles and then says, ‘Anyhow, you enjoy the sun while you can, love, because I hear there’s hager-awal coming in.’

  ‘Hager-awal?’

  ‘Ugly weather. A monster storm, by all accounts.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘By the end of the week, they say.’

  FIFTY-SIX

  Dawn doesn’t look convinced by the walk down to the beach where we’d had the party. We walk slowly, taking little steps down towards the sea, supporting our mother between us.

  Although Mum has said a few things since she first spoke, her conversation is occasional and limited. The effort of talking, of heaving words down that dusty forgotten road from her brain to mouth, tires her quickly. She needs time. I know that, but I find myself impatient. My head pounds with questions I’m desperate to ask. Dawn says we have to be careful what we talk about though. She’s worried about discussing my kidnapping in case reliving the trauma sends Mum straight back to that place inside where she’s been hiding.

  Mum copes well on the way down to the beach. Every now and then we stop to give us all a breather, and she lifts her head into the onshore wind and breathes in like a dog smelling for the scent of sheep. We make it on to the sand and I ignore Dawn as she worries about the return journey, chewing her nails, glancing nervously back up at the narrow path we’ve come down.

  The beach is empty, but for a family who have tucked themselves into the rocks at the foot of the cliff on the far side of the cove. The parents are reading, leaning back to back, while their two children grub about in the rock pools not far from them. Only the father looks up at us as we step onto the beach. He stares for a moment, then checks the footpath, searching, I’m sure, for more arrivals who might threaten their seclusion.

  I have a flash of the party, of having sex with Greg on the sand, him touching his lips to my chest, his face dimly lit by the fading fire.

  I turn back to Dawn, who is standing beside our mother with a protective arm supporting her.

  ‘Isn’t this beach fabulous?’

  ‘Yes, it’s one of my favourites.’

  ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, rubbing Alice’s hand. ‘It’s a locals’ beach.’ She looks out towards the sea. ‘I’ve not been since Nan died though.’

  I have to hide an unreasonable surge of jealousy. I hadn’t considered she might know the beach. But she’s grown up in St Ives, with the sea and the seals and the sparrowhawks. Of course she knew it, just as I would have known it if I’d never been taken by the Campbells.

  We sit Mum on a picnic cushion on a rock and settle on the sand beside her. Dawn carefully unties her trainers and slips her socks off, then burrows her toes into the beach just like I do.

  I pick up a handful of sand and let the dry grains trickle through my fingers. ‘Do you think our father is bad?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘I know you don’t like him. I know Mum was going to leave him and that he was taking the Campbells’ money and didn’t give me back to you. But he’s an alcoholic, isn’t he? And finding out he was supporting you, that the money he took was going to you, has confused me. I wonder if we should feel more sorry for him?’

  ‘Sorry for him?’ she laughs incredulously. ‘You’re joking, right?’

  I shrug. I’m not joking, but I don’t want to push it.

  Then Dawn lifts the hair behind her ear to reveal a thick, jagged scar cut into her hairline like a carving in a chalk field.

  ‘He did this,’ she says. ‘Because I knocked his beer over. I was carrying a blanket for Mum from my room into theirs because it was cold and the gas had been cut off because he hadn’t paid the bills. I couldn’t see where I was going and I caught his beer on the table. He was blind drunk and hit me so hard my feet left the ground. I was nine.’

  I stare at the mark, transfixed, wanting to reach out and touch it, erase it with my fingertips. She lowers her hair and then points at my arm.

  ‘And that scar? The round one. The one I knew you had?’

  My stomach seizes and I touch my fingers to the rough, raised patch of skin.

  ‘You were about a year old, maybe a bit older, and you were crying in your playpen. Mum was out somewhere and he wasn’t stopping you cry. I told him you wanted to be picked up but he said babies need to learn to be good and that if we kept going to you every time you made a squeak you’d turn into a spoilt brat. But you didn’t stop so I started singing a lullaby to you to try and calm you down, and then all of a sudden he shouted and slammed his bottle down, and stumbled over to you – he must have been drunk – and pushed the tip of his cigar into your arm. I ran to my room and hid beneath my bed.’ She gently fingers the sand, then shakes her head. ‘Do I think he’s bad?’ she continues. ‘Yes, I do. But, you’re right, he has problems. The drink made him do bad things. When he was sober he was nice. You never knew what mood he’d be in. He wrote to us when he first sent the money. Nan read the letter to me. He said this was the best way for him to help us and we were better off without him. He even said sorry. And that was the last we heard of him. Just the money into my building society account every month.’ She kicks at the sand with her heel a few times.

  ‘I always wanted a different father,’ I say then. ‘I used to wish Henry Campbell talked to me more, hugged me even. There was so much missing and I never understood why.’

  ‘Is that why you married your teacher?’

  ‘What?’ I say, taken aback by her question.

  ‘That’s what they say, isn’t it? That girls who marry old men are trying to get a father figure or whatever. I saw it on the television once. They talked to this girl who married a seventy-year-old when she was seventeen. In the end they all decided it was because her dad never paid her any attention because he really liked football and wanted a boy or something.’

  I am quiet, wondering whether there might actually be some truth to her daytime television theory.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

  ‘No, I’m not annoyed. But not all people who have issues with their fathers marry old men and not all people who marry old men have issues with their fathers. Your dad left and Craig’s not old.’

  ‘Me and Craig aren’t together so it’s
not the same thing.’

  ‘You keep saying that but I know you feel something for him. I can see it.’ I hesitate. ‘And he told me he fell in love with you when you were children.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have said anything at all.’

  I have a sudden recollection of Craig and the blonde at the train station. ‘And you don’t mind he’s seeing that other woman?’ As soon as the words are out I wish I could haul them back inside me.

  Her face falls and her brow furrows. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business. I saw him with someone … he said you knew. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.’

  But she doesn’t look cross. Instead, she sighs and looks out to sea. ‘It’s complicated. I don’t have space in my life for a boyfriend.’

  ‘Of course you have space. And I bet he feels nothing for that other woman compared to what he feels for you. You’ve got a right to—’

  ‘For God’s sake. She’s not a woman. She’s a girl. And she’s … she’s his daughter.’ She fires the words like whispered bullets. ‘The girl you saw is his daughter.’

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘Blonde? Slim? Wears a ponytail. About sixteen? Does that sound like this other woman?’ She kicks her heel into the sand again. ‘You don’t know anything about us. There isn’t any other way. He can’t be with me because he has her. And I can’t be with him because I have Mum.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem fair on either of you.’

  ‘I stopped worrying about what was fair a long time ago.’

  ‘You deserve some happiness. And some fun.’

  ‘Fun?’ she snorts. ‘I can’t even spell the word.’

  ‘Well, it starts with an f…’

  She glances sideways at me and I smile, and she smiles back. ‘Smart arse,’ she says softly. She picks up another handful of sand and allows it to trail through her fingers like an hourglass.

  ‘Come on,’ I say then, batting her shoulder and jumping to my feet. ‘Let’s have some fun now. How about a swim? I’ve been dying to get in the sea. Shall we?’

  She looks up at me, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun. ‘But it’s freezing.’

  ‘I’ve seen children go in. If they can, we can.’

  ‘I haven’t got a costume.’

  I start pulling off my clothes. ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘You’ll be fine, won’t you, Mum?’ She doesn’t look at me; her eyes look out across the sea, to somewhere faraway beyond the horizon. ‘We won’t be long.’

  I pull my T-shirt over my head and drop it onto the beach, then I unzip my jeans.

  ‘It’s too dangerous. There’s a riptide here. Look, on the surface, that flat area, that’s a current beneath the surface.’

  ‘We won’t go far. Come on.’ I push my palms together, now feeling agonisingly self-conscious standing in front of her in my bra and pants. ‘Please?’

  Dawn hesitates for a second or two, which raises my hopes, but then shakes her head, so I spin around and begin to run towards the sea, rejected and embarrassed and now not sure I want to swim anymore. The waves look terrifying and the water, which had looked inviting from further up the beach, now appears cold and angry.

  Go on. Just do it.

  So I take a deep breath and dive into an oncoming wave. It’s brain-achingly cold and I am immediately tumbled by the freezing water, no idea which way is up and which way is down. Rolling around like a ball, I thrash my arms, trying desperately to find the surface. When at last my feet touch sand. I push upwards as hard as I can, and when I break the surface I take an urgent breath. Before I know it, another wave is upon me, but this time I duck beneath it and emerge the other side. I look back at the beach. Dawn is on her feet and watching me with one hand shielding her eyes and the other on her hip. I flip onto my front and swim a couple of strong strokes of crawl. I’m not the world’s best swimmer – Elaine reluctantly took me to private swimming lessons on Henry’s insistence, but only until I got my twenty-five-metre badge – and the waves are choppy, splashing me in the face as I swim, making it hard to see. I decide to turn back and take a couple of strokes, but rather than gain on the shore, I am dragged further away by the current that scared Dawn. Trying not to panic, I dive below the waves and swim as hard as I can underwater. When I surface I am only a little closer, and I’m already getting tired. Keeping my panic at bay, I close my eyes against the salt water and swim as hard as I can, not stopping to look at the shore or catch my breath. My legs and arms ache like mad, but when at last I open my eyes I find I’m finally making ground, and thankfully there is now less pull on me.

  And then I hear screaming.

  Piercing, guttural shrieks split the air. Mum is standing, her arms flailing. Dawn is trying to calm her but Mum is fighting her off. Out of the clutches of the current I am free to swim and am soon carried in on a breaking wave. I stumble onto the sand, legs like jelly, and clamber up the beach towards them.

  ‘What’s happened? What wrong?’

  Mum’s arms are outstretched to me. Her mouth is stretched into a silent scream.

  ‘She started screaming … when you disappeared beneath the water,’ Dawn says, her face drained of colour, her body shaking. ‘I told … her not to … worry, that you’d be fine, but … but … she wouldn’t stop screaming.’

  I hold Mum tightly against my shoulder, stroke her hair, whisper gently that everything’s OK. At last her body relaxes, just the odd shudder ripples through her.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ Mum whispers.

  ‘No, Mum. No, everything’s fine. I went swimming, that’s all.’

  ‘I thought I’d let you go again. That you went back to the sea.’

  ‘Just a swim, Mum. That’s all.’ I rub her shoulders, as if she were cold. ‘Just a quick swim.’

  Dawn doesn’t utter a word all the way back. Her face stays taut, her green eyes distant. When we arrive back the flat, she goes straight to her room and closes the door behind her.

  I feed, bath and dress Mum for bed. She seems fine, all trace of her panic now gone. I don’t put her to bed straightaway. Instead she sits in her armchair and I sit on the floor and lay my head in her lap.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Mum. I didn’t mean to make you scared.’

  And then I feel a soft caress on my hair. She is stroking me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m OK.’

  I don’t move, but lie still and listen to her mumbling. I think back over those years I’d been a stolen child, shut away inside that house with Elaine, when all along I should have been here, with my head in this lap, this hand on my hair. I will never know why the Campbells took me and it’s agonising to think I will have to live without knowing.

  I hear Dawn’s footsteps in the hallway. They pause at the door. I close my eyes and hold my breath, and pretend I don’t know she’s there.

  Nothing is said and the footsteps walk back towards the kitchen.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  In the days that follow our trip to the beach my sister is quiet, even more so than usual.

  I ask her over and over to tell me what’s wrong, but she won’t.

  ‘Talk to me. Please?’

  ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’ She looks at me and tries to smile. ‘Honestly, I am.’

  But I know she’s not. She’s spending more time in her room with her door closed, appearing only to watch her television programme, then traipsing morosely back when it finishes. She has stopped hovering nearby, looking anxious when I do things for Mum. I don’t like it. I want to share the joy of our mother’s improvement. And what an improvement it is. The staring, cadaverous woman I’d first encountered is a distant memory.

  ‘Do you remember much about me?’ I ask her tentatively.

  ‘Every last thing.’ Her voice is quiet but strong; it’s lost its rasping edge and is fuller and plumper, like h
er body.

  I pull the chair over and sit beside her, take hold of her hand in both of mine and stroke her.

  ‘You loved talking. You’d talk to anyone you met.’ A look of sadness comes across her face. ‘That’s probably why you went with those people. I should have warned you of people more. I should never have sent you out of the caravan.’

  I lean forward and kiss her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘Shush,’ I say. ‘I’m back now.’

  She is silent and I see that she’s fallen into a doze.

  I tidy around her while she sleeps, straighten the bedclothes, neaten the bookshelf, and then leave her room, closing the door quietly behind me. The cat is sitting on the threshold of the kitchen and hallway, her paws neatly together. She mews a greeting but doesn’t move.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. You can come out of the kitchen, you know. She’s shut away in her room and I don’t mind you out here.’

  She mews again. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and my hand outstretched, and rub my fingers together and making kissing noises. The cat inches herself forward a step.

  ‘Brave girl,’ I cajole. ‘A little closer and I’ll tickle your chin.’

  She takes another step towards me. Her tail twitches. Every now and then she pauses and flicks her ears.

  ‘Why are you so scared? It’s a bit dark, but it’s not that bad.’

  Step by step she makes it to me and I reward her with a stroke. She closes her eyes and stretches up her chin.

  Just as the rumble of a purr begins, Dawn appears at the kitchen door. ‘What the hell is that animal doing outside the kitchen?’

  She doesn’t give me time to reply, but runs at the cat, shouting and flapping her arms. The cat skitters away from her towards the front door, where she finds herself cornered. She cowers in the corner, her ears flat against her head. Dawn bends down and grabs her by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘You’re not allowed in the house!’ she shouts, only inches away from the animal’s face. Then she marches down the corridor and flings the cat into the kitchen.