People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  “You know, if you ask me, there was always something a bit odd about that girl.”

  Westfield was a trial run. A test for myself, to see how far I was willing to go. How far I would be capable of going.

  I could have taken her. Just like that. One of the things that surprised me was how smoothly the whole thing went. I followed them from the house to the station, down the stairs to the platform, onto the Tube. We were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage. He, the dad, Dan, was reading a copy of Metro. She was watching something on his phone. At one point, she glanced up, caught me looking, and frowned slightly. I gave her a broad, friendly smile. She returned her attention to whatever she was watching.

  I guess if you are Coco Jackson, you are used to people giving you funny looks, recognizing you, doing a double take. Being a woman in her sixties, of course, I get exactly the opposite treatment. For three days I ensconced myself in a corner of the Lord Napier with a cup of coffee or a pot of tea or a sandwich, watching them come and go—Emmy struggling to get the pushchair over the front doorstep, one of them taking Coco to nursery in the morning and the other bringing her back in the afternoon. Seeing the parcels come in, all the deliveries. Nobody gave me a second look. People came and sat at the table next to me and laughed and talked and drank their pints and ate their lunch and left, and I doubt half of them even noticed I was there.

  Dan didn’t notice either.

  While he and Coco waited in the queue at Starbucks for his coffee that day, I was two people behind them. As they wandered around Foyles—he checked to see if they had his book in stock; they didn’t—I was never more than one aisle over. I was pretending to check out the pirate ship in the window while he and Coco looked around in the Lego shop. When they paused for a pretzel and a sit-down in the food court, I was one booth away.

  By their third shoe shop, Dan was visibly flagging. He had been checking the time on his phone about every five minutes all day. Now he was doing so even more frequently. In his defense, it did seem to take the person who went down to the stockroom an age to come back with shoes in the right size, and then there was some business with the card reader not working properly the first time they tried it . . .

  Coco was standing near the door of the shop, beside a display of those trainers with the heels that light up when you walk or jump or run in them.

  “Those are lovely,” I commented.

  She didn’t look up.

  “Hey,” I said. “I found this lying around, just over there, and I thought to myself, Some little girl has been playing with that teddy and dropped it. Is it yours?”

  She looked from me to the teddy, then back at me again. Then she thought for a bit.

  “I think it might be,” she said eventually.

  Grace really used to love it, that teddy. You can see from the state of the thing how many times I had to wash it over the years. How many times it got dropped on the floor of the bus or dragged through a puddle or it managed to fall out of the front basket of her bike and end up covered in muddy tire prints. Even after she had grown up and left home, I always used to leave it on her bed when she was staying at mine for the night. We used to joke, she and I, about how one day she would have a son or a daughter and it would be their teddy. I can’t claim that I had originally intended it that way—not consciously, anyhow—but it did strike me seeing Coco with it in her arms, holding it just the same way Grace always used to, the same way I could imagine a three-year-old Ailsa doing, that there was a certain horrible irony, a certain grim appropriateness, to that particular choice of stuffed toy, this particular use for it.

  No one gave either of us a second look as Coco and I proceeded hand in hand along the gallery or when I picked her up in my arms to go down the escalator. The only person who did catch my eye was a gran wheeling a pushchair with a sleeping baby in it, and she gave me a little smile of solidarity. I smiled back, but even as I did so, it occurred to me once again—with the same abrupt, thumping sense of loss, anger, and pain as ever—that I am never going to get to do any of this. I am never going to get to spend the afternoon looking after my granddaughter, never going to get to watch her toddling about the playground, never going to get to push her shrieking happily on the swing, never going to get to see her boldly going down the slide on her own for the first time. I’m never going to get to do any of those things. And neither is my little girl.

  I left Coco standing, with the teddy, outside the bookshop window. I figured if I left her there, her father was bound to find her eventually.

  Originally, right at the beginning, that was the plan. Just to take her for half an hour, an hour maybe, to give them a scare. To walk off with her, go somewhere safe, and leave her for them to find, eventually. To make them experience that feeling, that sudden, sickening knowledge that someone you love is gone. The panic. The self-recrimination. The gut-twisting dread. That was all I wanted. For them to experience what I had experienced. What Grace had experienced.

  Then I changed my mind.

  As we were going down in the escalator, I could feel Coco relaxing in my arms. She rested her head on my lapel, playing with one of the buttons on my coat, chattering away about the different places she’d been that day, all the things she was getting for her birthday.

  “You sound like you are a very lucky girl,” I told her.

  She has no idea. Another time, in a darker mood, I’ll admit I have had thoughts about taking her and not leaving her somewhere safe to find. I know. Once upon a time I would have been as horrified by that confession as you are. Horrified that I could even consider it. Horrified that I was not a big enough person to rise above my own suffering and see that revenge solves nothing, that causing pain to someone else, someone innocent, would do nothing to put things back as they were, would probably not even stop my own hurting in the end. Maybe I have changed. I’ve been feeling for a long time that with what happened, something has come loose in me, that I am no longer the same person I was. I remember talking about it ages ago with one of the grief counselors my GP referred me to. I can remember telling them that I felt I was not a whole person or a real person or a person in the same way as everybody else was anymore. That it was like grief had blasted a hole in me and something had flowed out and I had not been able to stop it and maybe at the same time something else had flowed in.

  Holding that child in my arms, feeling the gentle flutter of her pulse against me, her head close enough to my face for me to smell her shampoo—the same shampoo I can remember washing Grace’s hair with—I found myself asking myself if I could really do it. If I could truly hurt an innocent human being. And the honest truth is, knowing who she is, knowing who her mother is and what she’s done to me, I felt myself fully capable in that moment of chucking that child over the side of the escalator, dropping her off a balcony, hurling her headlong into traffic, without a second thought, without a moment’s remorse. And the truth is the only reason I didn’t do any of those things, the only reason I did leave her standing unharmed where I did, was not because I had a moment of stage fright or compassion or even doubt.

  It was because I have something much worse planned for Emmy Jackson and her family.

  Chapter Seven

  Dan

  We get back home from the party to discover our house has been broken into. As we’re turning onto our road, I can hear an alarm going off and I say something like, “I hope that’s not ours.” Emmy looks up from her phone.

  “What’s that?”

  I turn the radio off. In the back, both Bear and Coco are fast asleep in their seats. As we get closer to our end of the street, the alarm gets louder. I can see the bloke from across the road standing in his doorway as we approach. A couple of the other neighbors from farther down are out on the pavement.

  “I’ve already called the police,” one of them shouts as I am getting out of the car.

  There are no signs of attempted entry at the front of the house. The frosted glass panes in the front door are still
intact, all the windows closed. I go around to the side return and test the gate and find that’s also still locked, so I hop up and look over it to see if I can see anything. I can’t. “How long’s it been going off?” I ask one of the people standing around.

  He shrugs.

  “Half an hour maybe?”

  Once we’ve turned off the alarm and dispelled the cluster of concerned yet curious neighbors, it doesn’t take us too long to put Coco and Bear down and work out what happened. The house was untouched when Winter left it, having retrieved the spare T-shirts for Emmy, so we know it happened after three p.m.—Emmy checked the time on the Uber receipt. The intruder came in through the back door, probably climbing over the gate and in via the garden. Having taped a bit of cardboard over the missing pane of glass, I secure the back doors as best I can with some twine around the inside handles and a footstool from the living room pushed up against them. Then I start wandering around the house, checking once again for anything that might have been moved or taken. Nothing seems to be missing. There are no muddy footprints, nothing disturbed in the living room or the kitchen.

  There’ve been a lot of these sorts of opportunistic burglaries in this area recently, the police tell us, when they eventually show up. Just kids, a lot of the time. Looking for electronic goods, cash. Had we noticed anything missing, anything like that?

  I tell him that as far as I can see, nothing’s been taken at all. I mention I have taken photos of the back door, with its broken window, the glass on the kitchen floor, and pass him my phone. He thumbs through them without great interest.

  “You were lucky,” he says. “The alarm must have spooked them.”

  I ask him what he thinks the chances are of catching whoever did this. He tells me the police do not normally even bother investigating burglaries like this these days. Probably the best thing to do, if we’re worried, is to get a camera installed; that tends to put them off. Make sure we don’t leave our valuables lying around. Then he gives us a crime reference number on a slip of paper and leaves.

  THE THOUGHT I KEEP trying to suppress is that this might not be just a random break-in. That whoever did this knew exactly whose house it is and what we were doing all afternoon. It wouldn’t have been late when they were jumping the gate and creeping around the back garden, and putting a flowerpot through one of the panes of glass in the back door. It was still more or less light when Emmy and I were putting Coco and Bear in the car to come home.

  What I keep telling myself is not to be so paranoid.

  I remind myself of the rules, and how careful Emmy is to stick to them; how obsessive she is about never writing anything or posting any pictures that might give away the exact location of where we live. I tell myself to get a grip. That kind of thing might happen to a premier league footballer, their mansion cleared out on match day, but I can hardly see the average burglar having heard of Mamabare or seeing our home as an especially tempting target—unless, that is, they fancy a load of plastic toys smeared with yogurt, a bunch of beauty products, a not-very-big TV, and three laptops, none of them particularly new, mine so old and crappy I caught someone sniggering at it in a coffee shop the other day. Not a fancy hipster coffee shop, either. A Costa, I think.

  Emmy scans the rooms after I’m done, trying to work out if there’s anything glaring I’ve missed. What quickly becomes clear is that—obvious electronic goods aside—she has very little idea of what she actually owns, perhaps because she paid for so little of it. Some of the unopened bags of freebies, which may or may not have included a NutriBullet, she thinks, could have gone. A handful of the gifted jewelry she leaves tangled at the bottom of a bowl, maybe? A pair of Burberry boots that she vaguely remembers leaving by the front door to be reheeled, although she can’t recollect whether she ever took them or not, and if she did, where, and a two-thousand-pound Acne sheepskin jacket that, now she thinks about it, she may have left in the back of a cab six months ago.

  While she starts looking into our insurance situation online, I drift around the place, unable to settle, doing all sorts of pointless things, like checking the burglar is not still lurking on the premises in the closet under the stairs or behind the door in the downstairs bathroom. It would be horrible knowing someone has tried to get into the house at the best of times. Having a four-year-old and a newborn here makes it infinitely worse, and I feel I ought to go around washing everything, wiping it down.

  There’s a small part of me that would have loved to catch the bastard in the act, would have loved to get my hands on them—a part of me that, as I’m moving from room to room, is working out how I could barricade the rest of the house, planning all sorts of traps.

  I decide not to mention any of this to my mother. From the very start, when I told Mum about the Instagram thing, her immediate response was to start listing all the things that could possibly go wrong. Was I sure it was safe? Was I sure it was not something we would later regret? What would happen if Coco wanted to go into politics one day? What if she resented our posting all these pictures of us when she got older? I pointed out that lots of people posted pictures of their families on Facebook. When I was a kid, I remember her always getting out books of photos of me when people came around. What if . . . ? “Enough, Mum,” I had to tell her eventually.

  We always used to joke about our mums, Emmy and I—that you could not get two more different people if you tried.

  My mum, Sue, is thoughtful and infuriating, kind and somewhat bumbling, careful not to impose on us but always keen to offer a hand if we need one. I can see why she gets on Emmy’s nerves sometimes. She gets on my nerves sometimes. She always seems to call at inconvenient times, and even after you’ve told her you’re right in the middle of something, she keeps on telling you whatever she’s telling you, right to the end. Sometimes I put the phone down and wander off into the next room and come back and pick it up and she hasn’t even noticed. She’s very bad at hiding when she disapproves of something or when the way we’re doing something with Coco isn’t the way she’d have necessarily done it.

  Emmy’s Mum is a complete fucking nightmare.

  Emmy

  It’s always the mother’s fault, isn’t it?

  But if you’re going to point the finger at anyone, really it should be my dad. He was the one who made pretending and twisting the truth an integral part of who we were as a family. He turned lying into an art form, hiding his sexual misdemeanors with such panache that it was impossible not to be impressed. He was smart, though, funny and magnetic. I wanted to be like him, so I kept his secrets, told his lies too.

  Was he crossing his fingers behind his back when he promised to be with my mother for richer and poorer, till death do us part? I doubt he’d see it like that. He was just doing what I’d watched him do time and time again: saying what he knew the person he was with wanted to hear. Better to lie and be liked than be hated for telling the truth—that’s his general approach to life. He’s a shape-shifter, my father. A people pleaser. Until he gets caught out. Able to be anything anyone needs him to be. Apart from a decent dad or husband.

  When my mother suspected he was shagging his secretary, he managed to persuade her that she was paranoid. I knew different, as I’d been dragged on secret Saturday-morning shopping trips to buy sexy underwear and perfume, my silence bought with Barbies and Haribo. When she suspected him of having an affair with a recently bereaved family friend, he spun her a story that he was just a shoulder to cry on. I, on the other hand, overheard the breathy late-night phone calls that strongly suggested other body parts were involved too.

  So the drinking isn’t really Ginny’s fault. Perhaps she would have been a better mum if she’d married a doctor or a teacher. Or if she’d used her law degree, and her impressive but woefully underused intellect, for anything other than checking over the divorce settlement. But when you’re as beautiful as she was and marry a banker as rich and arrogant as he is, I guess you understand that contract too. Maybe you make a conscious choic
e to swap an actual life, one where your husband wants you to be happy, one where you have a right to complain when things aren’t okay, for a lifestyle—the cars, the clothes, the holidays. Maybe she went into it knowing that it was her job to stage-manage us all into playing the perfect family—and that she could never let the act slip, even with me.

  I used to study the way my friends’ mothers acted with them, would consciously commit to memory all the hugs and kisses and family conversations over dinner at Polly’s house about the adventures they’d had that day. I don’t think I was jealous exactly, more an interested observer. I used to mentally file the best bits and construct a sort of Frankenstein’s mama in my head—one who booked ballet classes and drove me to piano lessons, who didn’t mind when I reached for her with grubby hands. Who was home every night to tuck me up in bed and kiss me on the forehead.

  Even when Dad finally left Mum for a younger model, she couldn’t bear to tell anyone—even me—that life as we knew it was over. We just moved house and started again somewhere else. I suppose the cash helped ease the pain for her. I think she was probably happier without him. Was he happier without her? Who knows? I never saw him again.

  I realize I have barely paused for breath.

  “And how does that make you feel?” asks Dr. Fairs.

  “I’m not sure it makes me feel anything,” I say breezily. “That was twenty-five years ago. I’m sure my dad’s fine. My mother seems to be having a perfectly nice time, what she remembers of it.”

  “Would you say it was a happy home? Would you say yours is a happy one now?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “Absolutely. Obviously it is never nice, being burgled, and knowing that someone has been through all your stuff and touched your things, but we’re insured, and it happens to everyone, doesn’t it, sooner or later? It just makes you a bit jumpier for a few days, a bit more aware of what a fragile little bubble it is you live in. I’m just thankful none of us were at home when it happened.”