A Different Kind of Happy

by Rachaele Hambleton

  Being back with Kitty and Joseph has been amazing, despite the circumstances. It’s made me see how I want them in my life; how I need them. They make me me again. Even Jamie said he has seen a side to me that he didn’t know – and he got on so well with them too. Saying goodbye to them broke me. I have emailed Kitty a load of local teaching jobs, which I know she will giggle at when she opens, in the hope she might move back over and be with us.

  And now I have to try to work out what to do when Pat leaves on Friday.

  I’m wondering about giving up my job at the café. I love it, but with everything that’s going on with Will and Ruby, and with the money from my house and my dad’s house about to come through, financially I can afford to be at home more. I’ve been lucky of late, as Pat just picks all of that up, but the reality is, without her here – and with five children who all need individual love, time and attention – I’m not sure how fair it is on them.

  I popped down to the café to speak to Lou and fill her in on everything that had happened and my thoughts about giving up my job. But one of the Saturday girls was working and said that Lou had been off sick all week again.

  I texted her to see if she was OK, but she didn’t reply so I decided to pop over to her house with some flowers and check on her. I knew where she lived because you can see her house from the café, it stands alone – on top of the hill overlooking the whole town. It was really odd when I got there. The house is something else. It’s huge and looks like it should be in the middle of a celebrity street in LA or Hollywood. It’s really modern, all white – mainly glass, no blinds – odd. The grounds that surround it are pristine, with tennis courts and a pool and hot tub. I could see Lou through the upstairs window in the distance as I made my way up their driveway – you can’t miss her with her wild mane of red hair – but when I rang the bell, she didn’t come to the door. Her car was there and I one hundred per cent know she was in. I shouted through the letter box so she knew it was me but still nothing but silence. It made me feel really uneasy. I left the flowers on the doorstep and sent her another text, but it’s now 10pm and I haven’t heard anything. She probably just feels like shit and maybe didn’t want to pass on her lurgy but it just seemed very strange. Hopefully she will be back in work tomorrow …

  Thursday

  I needn’t have set an alarm today as I woke up at 7.20am to my mobile ringing and vibrating on my bedside table. It was David. Again.

  ‘Hi Jo, me again. Sorry to do this – again – but Lou is still off-colour and really not well enough to be in. Are you OK to hold the fort for the next couple of days?’

  ‘Of course, anything to help.’ I paused, wondering how much I could pry. ‘I am worried though, David. Are you able to tell me what’s wrong?’

  David explained that Lou is suffering really badly with migraines and hasn’t even got out of bed for almost three days.

  Weird.

  I asked if she had got my flowers and he sounded surprised – it was clear he knew nothing about them.

  ‘I left them outside yesterday as there was no answer at the door.’

  ‘Oh, in that case our cleaner must have picked them up and put them in water. Thanks so much for doing that, I know you’ve had a tough time recently too – we were both so sorry to hear about your dad – and we really appreciate it.’

  He said Lou would call me when she’s feeling better and we finished the call. I’d have to hurry even more now that I was opening up alone.

  I spent twenty minutes multi-tasking getting ready with googling migraines and trying to find out what I could get her to help. They sound pretty dreadful when they’re that severe and there is literally nothing you can do other than lie in a dark room and wait for it to pass. Bless her …

  The café was fine, really busy but manageable. I feel better for being at work, not thinking about Pat leaving, how much I’m missing Kitty or questioning everything about my dad and what I could have done differently. Joseph sent us loads of pictures of his kids on the WhatsApp group and we’ve been chatting all day, which has been nice. He’s home for another three weeks so he and his wife are going to come down and stay for a weekend with their boys before he goes back on tour.

  Jamie has told me that if the café is too much now that his mum is leaving, we can get by OK without my income. He knows it’s not just about the money though, and he tells me he’ll support my decision either way. That is the problem; I really enjoy working there, and it makes me feel like I’m someone other than just a mum who has no one but her kids and her crazy dog for company.

  I do like earning my own money; even though it’s not a huge amount it’s still a bit of independence and it’s great to not only be relying on the house money for my contributions to our family. I think I’ll just see how things are over the next few weeks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Ruined Flowers

  Friday

  I woke up this morning and immediately felt shit as I knew Pat was leaving this afternoon to catch her train back home. I’m going to miss her so much. The kids said a tearful goodbye before school, which made me feel worse, and Ruby had to be dragged into class by her teacher, which hasn’t happened for so long that it made my heart break after everything she’s been through. Pat as always was amazing – kissing the tops of their heads while whispering reassuring words into their tiny ears. But they know, like me, that we are losing more than a grandma for a while. She has been so much more than that to all of them.

  After the school run, I went and opened the café and discovered the entire kitchen was flooded. The ceiling from the flat above had collapsed and it was a total shitstorm. I called Lou’s mobile, which was switched off. I called her landline – no answer. I called David’s office but was told, before I could even give my name, that he was in a conference out of town and unavailable all day, even for emergencies. I had no clue what to do.

  I left the closed sign on the door, locked up and decided to drive up to Lou’s house, in the hope I’d get an answer. I didn’t know what the situation was with the flat upstairs, and who was responsible for what, so I didn’t want to start making the situation worse by calling people I shouldn’t.

  I parked the car on the road and went round to the side gate, which was locked, so I pressed the buzzer, and I pressed it again – but nothing. I decided to take my chance and hop over the side gate to see if I could get up to the house and knock on the front door.

  As I walked up the driveway, I could see Lou through the kitchen window, she had her head down and, as I got closer, I could see she was doing the dishes. Weird, but maybe the buzzer wasn’t working. I approached the house and could see part of the bouquet of flowers I had bought her hanging out of the industrial-sized wheelie bin; the heads of some of the flowers had been ripped off and scattered around their beautiful red-bricked driveway.

  I felt sick and wondered if I had done something wrong? It was clear she was now avoiding me and had obviously hated the flowers I’d brought her. I wanted to turn round and walk back down the drive but there was every chance that she would look up and see me, and the thought of that made me feel even sicker. I got to the kitchen window with her still washing up, not noticing me, and tapped gently on the glass. She must have jumped two foot in the air in shock and, as her face met mine, I thought I was going to vomit …

  Her left eye was totally closed over – purple and misshapen – her right was black with bruising but still open. Her nose was fat and the left-hand side of her jaw was yellow and black and swollen. She looked like she had been in a car accident and I don’t know out of the two of us who was more shocked.

  I pointed to the front door, to gesture her to let me in, but she shook her head from side to side and pointed back down the drive as if to tell me to leave. I could feel I was going to cry, and a genuine prick of fear sprang up in my throat. I had no clue what I had just walked into and I was scared. Really scared. I said in a firm, loud voice, ‘Let me in now or I will call the police.
’ She began shaking her head and crying, but I walked around to the front door, still feeling like I was about to be sick, and waited for her to open it.

  When she did, she immediately started begging me to leave in a whisper. Begging. Like an addict begs on the streets for money for more drugs. It was a frightened, desperate beg.

  I asked her what had happened, but she was in such a state she wasn’t even taking it in. She just kept saying, ‘Please, Jo, please go.’ Her desperation was now screaming at me from every inch of her body.

  I whispered to ask if there was anyone else in the house and she shook her head to tell me no.

  I had no clue what to do here. Her sleeves were rolled up from washing up and the bruising round her wrists looked fresh – purple and raw. I took her hands in mine and she quickly pulled her sleeves down and looked back at the floor. She was trembling.

  ‘He did this?’ I asked. She didn’t answer.

  It was enough.

  Enough for me to almost fall to my knees. All the obvious signs I’d missed! I thought back to all the times I’d felt a pang of jealousy at David rocking up to the café with beautiful bouquets and mistaking her fear for shyness. The amount of times her wrists had been bandaged, and I’d taken the piss that she wasn’t allowed to use the coffee machine any more because I’d believed her when she’d said the burns were from the steam. The constant calls where she was sick, the injuries to her body … I wanted to eat my own fist in anger at my sheer naïvety and the fact I had totally missed that this beautiful woman was being subjected to horrific abuse by a man who’s held in such high regard as a pillar of our community.

  It was all a bit of a daze as adrenaline kicked in. I remember just repeating the words ‘Oh, Lou’ while my head was reeling, trying to catch up, but I felt so nauseous.

  Then the sickness came.

  As all the little incidents and injuries kept flashing into my memory, the bile rose in my throat, and I ran back to the front door and vomited on the perfect red-bricked drive. I pointed to the flowers in the wheelie bin, and she whispered, ‘I tried to hide them from him yesterday so he wouldn’t know you’d been here, but then you told him on the phone and he found them.’

  I had caused this. That bouquet of flowers I thought would make her feel better had caused the fresh black eye and the lacerated wrists, as well as god knows what other injuries that were going on underneath her tracksuit.

  How does this stuff even go on without us seeing it? How have I spent most days with this woman for the past few months, yet I had absolutely no idea she was in an unhappy relationship let alone an abusive one?

  Lou spent the entire time I was there in a state of panic that he’d catch me. I have never felt so much rage, devastation and genuine disbelief at a situation in my entire life. I told her we needed to go to the hospital, but she kept assuring me she was fine. Her jaw looked like it was broken to me, but the worst thing was she kept saying, ‘No, it’s been worse before, it will go down in a few days.’ It was totally as if she knew the drill.

  Seventeen years they’ve been married for.

  Seventeen years.

  How many beatings has she had in almost two decades?

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to call the police but she begged for me not to, again, just like she did when I asked her to let me in the house. I told her she could stay with us, and her boys too. Her boys. I can’t stop thinking of her boys and when I asked her what they thought of all this, she told me that she’d told them she’d fallen. I thought that they’d never believe that, but then I look back on all the times I’ve believed her stories about her injuries and sickness over the last few months. David has forced her to be convincing with her lies.

  She begged me to leave. Again.

  I begged her to come with me.

  She refused.

  As I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, she became utterly hysterical, screaming for me not to call anyone, tell anyone. She was like a frightened, injured wild animal locked in a cage who was being prodded with a stick by a big scary human.

  I made a deal with her – I would leave and keep it secret if she let me photograph her injuries. I swore to her, on my children’s lives, that I would not take them to the police but I wanted them there in case she ever changed her mind or in case he killed her.

  She told me that won’t happen, that he wouldn’t ever do that, and I looked at her face, the fact she can barely see out of one eye, that she only just managed to talk because of the damage to her jaw and the fact her nose is mangled across her whole face – and I wondered how one human who is supposed to love another can ever inflict such devastation and pain upon them. And then I wonder how the human who was stood there, in front of me – with their entire body broken and battered – can defend the person that did this and say the words ‘he wouldn’t kill me’.

  I took sixteen pictures in all; her face, her scalp where there are fresh lacerations and whole chunks of hair missing, her wrists. I asked her to lift her top so I could see her back and chest. The begging started again, and I knew from her reaction it would be bad. I told her unless she did it, I would call the police. The entire time I was doing it I was holding more vomit down, in shock. She unzipped her tracksuit top, naked underneath – I imagine trying to put a bra on would have been too painful.

  I sobbed. I couldn’t hold back the tears. ‘My god, Lou. This is …’ Actually there were no words. Her breasts and shoulders were covered in bite marks. Angry, red, bite marks. Bite marks so bad you could see the indentations from his teeth. What human bites another human? There are more cuts and deep bruises that cover her, and she looks back to the floor again, utterly ashamed at what she is being forced to show me.

  Now it was my turn to beg. I begged so hard. I repeatedly begged through heaving sobs that my knees ached from falling to them on the expensive, gleaming, hard, cold tiled floor.

  Two women, sobbing together; the occasional desperate wail from Lou and the reassuring lies of, ‘It’s all going to be OK’ from me.

  Neither of us have a clue how it will be.

  I left.

  I had to.

  He was due back and it was too risky. I didn’t want him to hurt her more because of me. She wouldn’t leave with me and I didn’t want to force her for her then to reject me and have him get away with it all. She closed the front door quietly while repeatedly whispering, ‘I’ll be fine,’ as if I’m somehow going to believe that.

  I walked down the drive to my car, crying like a child that had just been dragged out of their own birthday party before it had finished. I was dripping with sweat. I immediately drove off but as I got a short distance down the road, my hands and legs began shaking uncontrollably and I had to pull over and open the car door to be sick again.

  I realise I hadn’t even told her about the leak at the café.

  I needed to tell Pat. Jamie would just call the police – and I was worried. Lou’s husband works with the police all the time. What if he talks them round? What if he gets away with it? Pat would know what to do.

  I got back to the house just before 12pm and she knew something was wrong as soon as she glanced at me. I couldn’t speak. I was trying to let out a sob but was just breathing in, then in, then in like I was going to combust in panic. I handed her my phone, open on my camera roll, on ‘those’ pictures.

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ She must have said those three words one hundred times, while her other hand was over her mouth and the look of shock and devastation spread across her face.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ were her next words. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere …’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Behind Closed Doors

  Saturday

  I’ve stopped crying, just, but I feel utterly broken. I feel like my heart has snapped and I have no idea how to make it better.

  Pat called a plumber yesterday about the leak. She went to meet him at the café and when she arrived, so did David. The ice cream shop next d
oor had called him to check on things because we were closed. I have no idea how Pat managed to act normal and stay civil to David, but I was so glad I wasn’t there. There was no way I’d have been able to do that.

  Pat explained to him that I’d tried to call his office but was told he wasn’t contactable. She said he had asked if I’d spoken to Lou, she told him she didn’t know. Thank God. He hopefully couldn’t trip her up with an ‘I don’t know’ answer. Pat told me what concerned her the most is that if she hadn’t have seen the pictures, or spoken to me, she would have thought what a nice man he was. A man who loved his family, was attractive and kind, business-like without being stuck up about it.

  She asked David how Lou was with her migraines and he stuck to his story, she’d had one today and she had ‘worsened’ so was having tests at the hospital to rule out it being anything more ‘sinister’ so, most likely, she wouldn’t be back next week as planned.

  Totally convincing, Pat said. If she didn’t know what we know, all she would have seen is a husband who idolises his wife and was pushing for hospital appointments to make her better.

  He knew full well she wouldn’t be back in the café next week. Those bruises he caused weren’t going to heal over the weekend. Those cuts and burns and bite marks he had inflicted over her entire body weren’t disappearing within the next two days.

  I have no idea what to do. What if he’s found out that I’ve been to the house? What if he’s hurt her again? What if he’s killed her?

  Pat is also out of her depth on this one.

  She wanted us to call the police to start with but then after meeting with David she agreed that the reality is that Lou would most likely cover for him. Then what if there was a chance, even if Lou did speak up, that the police wouldn’t believe her because of who David is – how much danger would she be in then?