by Tammy Cohen
‘I’ve gone through and cleaned up what I can and installed a spyware protection program to detect any suspicious activity and get rid of it. But I’ll need to take your phone, too, I’m afraid.’
‘My phone?’
‘To see if that’s been breached as well.’
‘You mean he could have been listening to my conversations?’
Frances scrunched up her face in sympathy and nodded.
I handed over my phone and my passcode, feeling once again sick and violated.
Frances seemed to understand how I felt and didn’t try to give me false reassurances, for which I was grateful.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she said, disappearing back into the house.
When she emerged some forty minutes later, she was smiling.
‘Good news, your phone is fine,’ she said.
I was suffused with relief. It was horrific enough knowing Stephens had been in my computer, but for some reason my phone felt so much more personal.
Frances seemed nervous. Tentative. I was filled with remorse for having been so tetchy.
‘Thanks, Frances. You’ve been really kind. Listen, I’m sorry I was so short earlier. The pressure of this whole situation—’
‘You don’t need to explain. I understand. I really do.’
Acting on impulse, I asked Frances if she’d like to come for a walk with me and Dotty. The dog had been curled up in her basket since Frances arrived and seemed generally out of sorts, but she recovered once she saw her lead in my hand. As Frances had the car, we could drive up to Highgate Woods, which boasted a café in the middle, where I offered to buy us both brunch as a thank-you for all her technical help.
Frances drove the ten minutes to the woods, which were, anyway, practically on her way home. You can tell a lot by the way someone drives, I always think, and Frances was calm and confident, considerate but also assertive, pushing out into a gap in the traffic when we were turning right on to the main road, ignoring the furiously tutting woman in the SUV who’d had to brake to let us through.
The woods were glorious in the spring sunshine, full of dappled shadows and lush green leaves and odd clear pockets where golden light pooled on the grass and the ridged mud.
‘You’re so lucky, Tessa,’ said Frances, bending to pick up a stick to throw for Dotty, who retrieved it then brought it straight back to me. ‘You have so much love around you.’
I stopped still then, too surprised to carry on. Since Phil had moved out, it had seemed to me that the idea I’d long held in my heart of our tight, loving family had been exposed as being as hollow and as easily shattered as a Christmas bauble. So to hear Frances talk about love in the context of me and my life took my breath away.
And yet, might she have a point?
True, I didn’t have the life I had expected. I’d had to say goodbye to the career I’d spent thirty years building, the home I’d thought I’d grow old in, but I had my daughters – well, I would have, once I’d made peace with Rosie. I had my friends. Even Phil was still around, though admittedly not quite in the capacity I’d thought he’d be.
‘But you have love, too, Frances, don’t you?’ I asked her. ‘Your mum sounds wonderful.’
‘Oh yes, she is. I know I’m lucky too. It’s just that it’s only the two of us, really. Friends and boyfriends have had to take a back seat over the years. It was different when Claudia was still here. She lived in the flat downstairs. But she moved away and now life can be quite lonely.’
It was what I’d suspected, and I was touched that she’d entrusted me with the truth. We walked on in silence for a while, the only noise the birds tweeting in the trees overhead and the distant shouts of the children that carried on the breeze from the playground on the other side of the woods.
‘Tessa, you can tell me to mind my own business if you like, but what happened between you and Rosie? I can see you adore each other, but I also sense there’s been some sort of a rift.’
My first instinct was to deny it or tell her to mind her own business, but then I stopped myself. I’d spent the last few months in denial, and look where it had got me. My daughter in danger, and me unable to reach her.
I took a deep breath.
‘I don’t normally talk about it.’
‘Oh goodness.’ The sweet, old-fashioned exclamation left me unexpectedly moved. ‘If it’s painful, please don’t say any more. I’d never have asked if I thought it would upset you.’
‘I’m not upset, I’m ashamed.’
Frances glanced over and I was glad we were walking side by side so I didn’t have to meet her eyes. I felt hot and sticky suddenly, way more than the April weather warranted.
‘After Phil left, the girls missed him more than I can say. I could see how upset they were, and how hard they were trying not to show it, out of concern for me. And that just made me feel worse, the idea that my children were worrying about me when they ought to be grieving for themselves and what they’d lost. And I suppose I over-compensated. I took them out all the time, though God knows I shouldn’t have been spending money at that point. I was constantly waking them up in the mornings with stupid, bright suggestions. “Let’s go to Brighton for the weekend.” “Who fancies a day in town, shopping, then lunch?” “Shall we move all the furniture round and repaint your rooms?”’
I glanced at Frances, who had a strange, faraway look on her face.
‘You’re a good mum, Tessa,’ she said.
I shook my head.
‘Not really. I was all over the place emotionally. Bursting into tears for no reason, drinking more than I should. Playing Coldplay at full volume.’
It was meant as a joke, but Frances didn’t crack a smile.
‘What I’m trying to say is I wasn’t consistent. At a time when they probably needed consistency more than anything. I was too desperate to please. We’d just moved to the Bounds Green house and I knew the girls were upset at moving away from all their friends. Oh, I know it’s not far, but they’d been so used to being able to walk round to call on their mates and now they had to negotiate night buses and make advance arrangements. They both had important exams and I was so worried about how all the upheaval would affect them.
‘Then, on top of that, I was still reeling from Phil moving in with Joy, just a couple of roads away from our old home. I got it into my head that the girls would decide to go to live with him because he had the big house back in the same place where all their friends were. And it just poleaxed me, you know. The thought that I could lose everything.’
We had arrived by this time at the clearing in the middle of the woods where the café was. Dogs weren’t allowed into the garden area, so I tied Dotty to the fence just by the gate, where there was water and shade, well away from a Great Dane dozing on its side, and nabbed a table nearby where we’d be able to see her. I wasn’t taking any more chances.
I left Frances sitting outside with strict instructions not to take her eyes off the dog while I went in to order our food.
When I returned to the table I was half hoping she might have forgotten what we were talking about so I wouldn’t have to continue, but she fixed her warm brown eyes on me expectantly.
‘You were saying, Tessa?’
I sat down heavily, weighted by my own sinking heart.
‘It was a Friday night in the September after we moved, not long before Rosie was due to go to Manchester to start uni. Both girls were out. Em was with Phil. Rosie had chosen to go out with her friends instead of seeing him.’
I didn’t tell Frances how I’d been quietly smug about Rosie’s decision or about how I’d turned down the chance to go out with Kath and Mari so I could stay home and play the martyr, hoping to win points with my girls by being the perfect mother in contrast to their home-breaker dad.
Sometimes, now, when I look back at the way I behaved, I can’t blame Phil for leaving.
I explained to Frances how I’d stayed home to watch something on Netflix and treated mys
elf to a bottle of wine and a pizza. Rosie rang about eleven thirty. She and her friends had gone to a party in Stoke Newington which turned out to be really boring and needed a lift home. Two of them had Uber accounts but one was overdrawn and another didn’t want to be the last in the cab on her own. It was raining and horrible out, and they just wanted to get back. “Please, can you pick us up, Mum?”
‘I know I should have just said no, but I hadn’t drunk that much,’ I said now. ‘Just three or four glasses. And it wasn’t far. I knew the route like the back of my hand.’
Frances paused, fork in hand.
‘Plus, you wanted to make her happy.’
‘Exactly. Which is ironic, given what happened.’
Frances waited expectantly. I took a deep breath.
‘I picked them up. Rosie and two of her friends, Kaz and India. I’d known them since they were all small. I knew India’s parents, Anna and Joe Cunningham, a little bit, socially. The girls were on good form, glad to be escaping from the boring party, full of excitement about starting their new university lives. I was just so pleased to feel useful, and to listen to them chatting about the evening and who had had too much to drink and who had copped off with whom. Glad that they felt comfortable enough with me to be able to do that.
‘We drove back up Green Lanes. Rosie was in the front seat, the other two behind. It was raining really heavily, so I had my wipers on full, which made it hard to see properly. We got to the junction by Wood Green station just as the lights ahead turned orange. I didn’t feel drunk. You have to know that. Or I’d never—’
Frances nodded, but stayed quiet.
Shame beaded on my skin like sweat, and I felt unbearably hot, despite the cold breeze.
‘I wasn’t speeding, but the rain made the road slippery so I made a split-second decision.’
‘Not to stop.’
I nodded, unable to meet her eyes.
‘But I misjudged the timing and by the time I went through the lights were red. And, just our luck, the driver at the head of the queue of traffic coming from the right was in a tearing hurry and anticipated the lights.’
I remembered the terrible noise of metal crunching and the loud thud of something hitting the back of the driver’s seat.
‘It took me a few seconds to realize that noise was India, who hadn’t had her seat belt on. She’d been flung forwards by the impact and had landed half on, half off the back seat with her arm bent behind her. There was blood coming from her head and she wasn’t moving.’ My voice tailed off to a whisper. ‘I thought she was dead.’
‘And the others?’
Frances was leaning forwards over the table, her food quite forgotten.
‘The man in the other car hit his head and was taken to the hospital, but he was okay, thank God. And the other girls just had cuts and bruises, like me. But they were in shock. Kaz was screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” over and over. It was the worst thing, you know, the very worst. Sometimes, even now, if I close my eyes, I can still hear her. Rosie was deathly pale. She had her hand over her mouth. I reached for her, but she shrank back as if I was going to attack her. I asked her if she was okay, but she was just staring at India and then she looked at me, and said, “What have you done, Mum?”
‘And then the police were there – the policewoman who’d recognized me at Em’s ID parade – and the ambulance, and I was being breathalysed and I knew before they even said anything that it was going to be bad. And I was taken away, and still Rosie wouldn’t even look at me.’
‘And was she dead? India?’
The question was so shocking, I blinked, momentarily disoriented.
‘No. I mean, thank God. She had concussion and a broken arm.’
‘But she was okay.’
Frances had relaxed again, gone back to her food, and I felt strangely deflated. True, nobody died, thank God, but this was still the worst thing that had happened to me in my life.
‘It was a bad break on her right arm. So it was a big setback. She ended up deferring her university place until the following September. I was prosecuted and fined and banned from driving for a year.’
I didn’t tell Frances about the savage jolt of pleasure I’d felt after the conviction, how I’d welcomed the punishment, wished only that it had been harsher.
‘And Rosie wouldn’t speak to you afterwards.’
‘Only through Phil. She said she felt ashamed and embarrassed in front of her friends and their parents. She felt that I couldn’t love her if I was willing to risk her life and her friends’ lives.’
‘Teenagers can be quite sanctimonious.’
‘Yes, but she was right. I deserved it. And more. She started uni not long after the accident and spent most of the Christmas holidays in Italy at the home of one of her new uni friends, so this is the first chance I’ve had to make amends. And now I wonder if I’ve just made everything worse.’
I glanced over to check on Dotty, as I had done periodically throughout this difficult conversation, reassured to see her familiar black-and-white shape through the fence of the café, although she was sitting in an odd position, pressed up against the wood. There was a woman standing next to her, tall and upright with strong features and a mouth set into a line, who seemed to be staring at us quite intently over the top of the fence. She was wearing an orange silk scarf looped around her neck.
‘Do you know that woman?’ I asked Frances.
‘Which woman?’
Frances looked around blankly.
‘The one over … oh, never mind.’
The woman had disappeared.
‘Now I can see why you’re so protective of Em,’ said Frances. ‘But you know, Tessa, what’s done is done. You can’t go on punishing yourself for ever. And going after Stephens won’t make your daughters forget about the car accident. The two things won’t cancel each other out.’
She was right. I knew she was. On some level, I’d allowed myself to see this thing with Stephens as a chance to make amends and prove myself worthy as a mother. Wipe the slate clean. Ridiculous, when I looked at it like that.
Still, now it had gone this far, and Rosie might be involved, I couldn’t back out.
Back home, I sat at the kitchen table and called up Facebook Messenger.
Please, I wrote to Stephens. Please don’t hurt my daughter.
I hated begging, but if it made him think twice about involving Rosie in all this, then I didn’t care. Hell, I’d prostrate myself at his feet to protect my daughters. A part of me almost welcomed the idea of that kind of abasement. At least then I’d be doing something. It was this passive limbo that was so impossible to deal with.
From nowhere, I heard Phil’s voice in my ear: This isn’t about you galloping in to save the day. In actual fact, it isn’t about you at all.
After that I sat motionless for half an hour or more, waiting for a reply that never came.
31
The night after my conversation in the woods with Frances, I lay awake for hours. I’d bottled my shame up inside me for so long that, now it had finally been released, it felt like it had burned a channel through me on its way out, leaving behind a trail of singed and painful tissue.
Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw India in the back of my car, blood matting in her blonde hair from a gash in her head, arm bent at a ghastly angle behind her, unmoving. I heard Kaz screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ And worst of all, Rosie’s ashen, terrified face: ‘What have you done, Mum?’
So when I got up the following morning I was like a ghost person, my body functioning with negligible input from my brain. I felt hollowed out, as if someone had scooped out the contents of my head with an ice-cream spoon.
The only thing I could think about was Rosie. She still wasn’t answering my calls, so in desperation I called Phil.
‘She’s fine,’ he said coolly. ‘She’s upstairs in her room.’
Stupid how much it still hurt that my daughter had a room in a house that wasn’t m
ine.
‘Well, can you ask her to call me?’
‘Tessa, this is between you and Rosie. I’m not getting involved.’
In the end I sent a text.
Please look at this photograph and tell me if it’s your new man. This ‘Steve’. Then I cut and pasted a link to Stephens’s Facebook page.
It wasn’t ideal. I’d wanted to be there with her when she saw the picture, so I could give her support if she needed it. I knew she’d fallen hard for this new man, and I also knew what it took for my eldest daughter to make herself so vulnerable, how deep the hurt would go.
There was no reply. I waited five minutes. Ten.
I tried to do some work. After the disastrous interview for Silk I knew I was unlikely to get more work from them, and the last of my redundancy money had now gone.
A newspaper had commissioned an idea I’d suggested, inspired by Dotty’s disappearance, on the emotional toll of pet-owning, but I was finding it hard to concentrate for long enough to come up with a decent opening. Finally, I got started, and was just getting into a rhythm when the doorbell shattered my focus.
From the silhouette through the frosted diamond-shaped glass panel of the hideous front door, I could see it was a woman, dressed in dark clothes. Irritation bubbled up inside me. We got a lot of God Squad callers, standing on my doorstep thinking it was perfectly acceptable to interrupt whatever I was doing in order to ask the kind of personal questions you wouldn’t dream of asking even members of your own family. Are you afraid of death? What do you believe in?
So invasive.
I flung open the door in an accusatory way.
‘Oh. It’s you.’
Joy stood on the doorstep, wearing a fitted jacket in the softest black leather and a pair of black trousers with high-heeled boots in a buttery suede. Her ash-blonde hair was twisted up so that the ends tumbled adorably over the clip, the front section falling just so over her face.
The woman my husband left me for.
‘I’m sorry to intrude like this, Tessa. I know I probably should have called you first, but I knew you wouldn’t want to see me.’
