by B P Walter
Chapter Twenty
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
I while away the next morning trying not to think about Michael Kelley. I had a difficult, unsettling night, tossing and turning. Each time I moved, I dreamt I could feel someone next to me – a boy’s body, with a handsome face, whispering things in my ear. That it was my turn now. He’d taken my daughter, and now he was here to kill me. Take me into his darkness, his evil, quiet midnight whisperings, leading to a place from which I’d never return.
I kill a few hours of the morning by eating a big breakfast platter I order to my room, followed by a third of Agatha Christie’s autobiography. By 11.30am the light from my window has grown weak and I have to turn my bedside light on to see the words on the page. By 12.30pm, I get up and have a stretch and journey over to the window. The unusually dull light for midday is in stark contrast to the gorgeous sun and blue skies the South East has been basking in for the past few weeks. The day is still dry, but ominous grey clouds now completely cover the horizon. I don’t know if it’s the actual temperature or just the sight of the darkening sky, but I can’t help shivering slightly and I bend down to fish the cardigan I bought yesterday out of its shopping bag.
When it gets to lunchtime, I realise I can’t stand the idea of staying in my room all day. Afraid of where my mind will lead if I sit on my bed, ruminating, I set off downstairs. The old ladies who usually sit near the entrance are absent today, and the lobby feels emptier than usual. I step outside and, although not winter-level freezing, the temperature has certainly dropped a little and there’s a closeness to the air that you get before a storm.
‘I wouldn’t head out without an umbrella and coat, if I were you,’ the man at the desk says. ‘It looks like it’s going to chuck it down.’
I give him a quick smile. ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I say, and head out of the main doors. Once outside, and walking down the steps towards the seafront pathway, I begin to think the desk clerk was right. This is probably foolish; it’s obviously going to rain, and the wind is already starting to whip my hair up around my eyes. I don’t really want to admit defeat straight away, so I decide to do a short circuit up past the seafront, around the side of the apartments and B&Bs to the left of the hotel, then snake back round, hopefully before the first raindrop falls.
About fifteen minutes later, I’m sheltering in an upmarket pub, and the young man who shows me to my table is clearly alarmed at how drenched I am. ‘Got caught in the rain,’ I say, with a little shrug.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he says, passing me the menu.
I tell him I’m not. ‘Just me today,’ I say, with a smile, and he shuffles off quickly as if I’d told him I have Ebola.
Halfway through my half roast-chicken, chips, and side salad, my iPhone lets out a little ping. It’s a message. From him.
I’m sorry about yesterday. I can’t stop thinking about it. Can we meet?
The words more than take me aback; they cause me to leap up, as if I’ve been physically attacked. Waving at the waiter to tell him I’m fine, I sit back down and look back at the phone, wondering if I imagined it, but I didn’t. It’s there. An unread message, joining the twenty-five unread messages from Alec. Then another ping sounds and a new message appears before my eyes.
I feel bad I upset you. Please. I’d like to see you.
Though I stay still this time, the words hit me even harder the second time. There it is, plain as day, the ultimatum. The invitation to carry on with this dangerous game I’m playing. The niggling voice inside me is telling me to stop, but another louder part is screaming out for something far harder to resist. Retribution. I type back a reply.
Certainly, we can meet if you’d like. When are you free?
Another ping.
This afternoon? I finish school at 3.15.
I want things to be different this time. Deciding to keep things away from the strange hotel setting, I message back:
I’ll come to your house. 4pm.
I turn off my phone after this. I don’t want any more discussion, at least not by text.
I race back through the rain to the hotel as soon as I’ve paid, feeling a little sick when I arrive from running on a full stomach. I see the receptionist raise an eyebrow at my soaked appearance, but he doesn’t say anything. I shower, blow dry my hair, apply make-up, and brush my hair. Then, when it gets to 3.40, I gather up my keys and head out of the room.
The weather’s transformation is rather astonishing. The dark black clouds that have been threatening to move in throughout the first batch of rain are now dominating the landscape entirely, like a big black rug thrown over the sun. It’s like I’ve slipped into a different world: dark, moody, and dangerous, everything in motion, the trees gusting about, sending leaves falling everywhere.
Downstairs in the lobby, an old lady I haven’t seen before is sitting by the fireplace. She smiles at me and says, ‘I wouldn’t go out there, my dear. It’s the worst storm we’ve seen for years. You could be swept away.’
I smile and tell her I’ll be fine and carry on out the door, though by the time I’m down the steps and heading towards the back to the car park, I’m thinking she may have been right. I was foolish to come without even a raincoat after my soaking in the rainfall earlier, let alone an umbrella. Drenched and with my hair flailing around me wildly, I throw myself into the car and try to turn the heating on. Cold air hits me in a blast and I scrabble with the controls to stop it. I decide to get going, hoping the engine will warm up quickly and encourage the heating to get a move on. I’m shivering as I reverse out of the space and head onto the road, climbing the hills away from the seafront and towards the mass of large houses that sprawls along this part of the coast. Before long, I’ll be pulling into the road where all those run-down council properties are. One of them home to the Kelley family.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Boy
After the bomb attack on Piccadilly, I’ve had trouble focusing. I try my hardest to act casual, confident, to smile, or at least behave as normally as possible, but it’s more than difficult. It’s like a dull ache is spreading throughout my whole body.
I try not to look at the news on my phone during the days after, but I end up giving in. The main headline hits me hard as soon as I see it. The final death toll has increased to twenty-seven.
The stronger the dull ache inside me gets, the more I press my nails into my thigh, digging deep, letting the discomfort give me strength. I deserve to hurt and when the blood starts to drip into the bath as I’m showering before school, somehow it makes me feel a tiny bit better.
At school, two days after the Piccadilly attacks, Ms Phelps, General Studies teacher and all-round nagging witch, asks us to debate how the growing frequency of terror attacks in Britain could have an effect on public behaviour. She goes round the class, picking on people. Some give vague shrugs; others try. I used to be a tryer. Never loudly or in a way that would make anyone notice me, but just in my own way. Now I don’t give a fuck. The girl next to me tells Ms Phelps that hate crime may rise because of it, leading to people feeling scared and religious communities becoming isolated.
‘That’s a very good point,’ Ms Phelps says, nodding. ‘This may certainly lead to people exercising their prejudices. They may exercise them through criminal, undemocratic, and violent means, such as hate crimes, as you mentioned, Sayeeda, or they may start voicing opinions through social media or on the TV.’
Ms Phelps has been impressed with Sayeeda, and this isn’t a good thing, since it now falls to everyone else to match this or do even better. She eyes me expectantly and I avoid her gaze. She bobs her head, clearly trying to get my attention without actually speaking. Eventually I give in. ‘Er… guilt.’ It’s the first thing that pops into my head and I feel myself turning red as soon as I say it.
‘Guilt?’ Ms Phelps says, sounding taken aback at first, then she catches on. ‘Oh, you mean survivor’
s guilt?’
I nod. ‘Guilty that we’ve survived.’
She’s satisfied with this and I would be glad too if the nausea hadn’t returned, along with the need to start scratching at my leg. I’ve had to curb the habit in class in case someone thinks I’m playing with myself under the desk.
‘Very good example. Of course, this frequently can affect family members or friends of the deceased or injured, especially those with them at the time of the attack. This is true for all tragedies, whether they’re terrorist attacks or natural disasters or even smaller-scale, but still devastating murders like gang-related knife-crime.’
Ms Phelps likes gang-related knife-crime. Well, I’m sure she doesn’t like it, but she chooses to talk about it wherever possible ever since she watched a Channel 4 documentary on the subject (which she made us watch clips of, giving a loud running commentary, talking over it, using words like ‘disaffected’, which made the interviews with reformed thugs rather fucking pointless when we couldn’t hear what they were saying). She’s gone off on one now, talking about how gangs don’t realise that, as soon as one of them carries a knife, they are all putting themselves at risk of prosecution.
I start to stare out of the window and slowly lower my ruler so that it’s digging into my lap, pressed up against the wound on my thigh. Nobody notices the tears that follow.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Mother
December. Six weeks to go.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with parties, and I really wasn’t in the mood for a Christmas gathering that evening. It started out fine, with lots of drinks and huddles of people talking, but as the night went on Jessica started acting like a spoilt, moody teenager and Alec spent his whole time pretending not to notice. I didn’t approve of this parenting act of his, but I had to admit there was something tempting about the path of least resistance. I, meanwhile, had been trying my best to be both the charming host and the disapproving mother. At one point, irritated by the sulky way the girl was huddled in a corner, I took her phone out of her hand, resulting in a yell of protest.
‘You’re being antisocial,’ I snapped.
‘So what? These aren’t my friends.’ She scowled at me as I stood over her.
‘It’s you who wanted to have a New Year’s Party,’ I hissed.
‘Yes, when I thought my friends would be at home. Now they’ve all gone away and I’m the only person in my whole group with a mother who won’t let her go to Paris for New Year’s Eve.’
‘I’m not getting into this again. You know why I don’t want you to go.’
‘God, you don’t want me to go to London because you think I’m going to be blown up! Where can I go, Mum? Surely Paris is no different. There’s an attack practically all the time now, in nearly every city across Europe. Is every teenager going to be imprisoned until they stop?’
People had started to stare, but Jessica showed no sign of stopping. ‘It’s like you want there to be a constant crisis so you can keep me shut up in here.’ She gestures around at the party going on in her family home as if it were a jail cell full of rats.
‘There is still a crisis, Jessica,’ I said, trying to keep my voice low, steering her away from our friends the Richmonds, who are showing every sign of eavesdropping. ‘They’re still under a state of emergency in Paris, Jessica, since the explosion near the Louvre.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, we’re at Threat Level Critical. Again. And there will be another bombing or massacre and we’ll all have our hashtag-pray-for-London moment or pray-for-Paris moment and then it will all go back to normal for a couple of weeks until it happens again. Don’t you see, this is our lives now. This is normal. So we might as well enjoy what we want to do while it lasts and not let the terrorists win.’
This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. And part of me desperately wished I could go along with her attitude: sod the terrorists – let’s just carry on with our lives, difficult as it may be. But that was for an adult to decide. Not a teenage girl.
With the quick run of recent terror attacks weighing heavily on the mind of everyone in the country over these past few months, especially the bombing of a Eurostar train at Ebbsfleet, it should have been obvious why I didn’t want my only child to hop on a train to Paris with her mates. Much as I admired her spirit and enthusiasm to live her life, she couldn’t understand what it was like to fear for your child’s safety. She wouldn’t find that out until she became a parent herself.
I tried to bring the subject back to the party: ‘Go and talk to someone,’ I said, casting my eyes over the drinking, laughing guests – or at least, the ones who weren’t trying to listen in on our conversation. My eyes then fell to Rob, sitting by the small thin shelving unit holding travel books.
‘Talk to your uncle. He could do with one of your lively debates about refugees or the EU or something.’
He acknowledged my words so quickly, I suspected he too had been listening. With a smile, he shuffled his chair over to Jessica.
‘It’s quite likely you’ll be educating me on these matters,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been one for politics.’
I smiled at them both, encouragingly, but Jessica avoided eye contact.
‘Or,’ I continued, in semi-desperation, ‘go and talk to Ms Parker. She’s just in the dining room – I think your dad’s boring her about some book he’s read that he thinks should be on the English Literature syllabus.’
Jessica rolled her eyes at this. ‘I’m not going to talk to my English teacher at a party at my house. It’s weird. Why the hell did you invite her anyway?’
I could feel my patience waning. ‘Because she was lovely enough to come to one of my events at the Radio Times TV festival at the BFI and we got talking – she’s very nice.’
‘I know she’s nice! She’s my bloody teacher.’
‘Well go and say hello then.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ she spat back, getting up out of the low armchair she’d been nestling in and stalked out of the room, pushing past clusters of people.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Rob, once she’d gone. ‘Difficult phase. Can I get you another drink?’
Rob accepted more than one extra drink from me as the clock ticked closer to midnight and the big countdown. Jessica hadn’t returned, and I didn’t bother going looking for her. My mood didn’t improve when Alec and I ended up having a muttered argument in the kitchen. He’d been serving people champagne in some scuffed old glasses we keep at the back of the cupboard and never use, and I was trying to show him which ones he should be using. I got so annoyed with him that I decided to step away from the gathering altogether and went out into the garden. It seemed we weren’t the only couple having a quiet marital – so too were two of our neighbours who lived a few doors down along Oak Tree Close, Janet and Richard Franklin. Janet was berating her husband in a hushed voice – something about how she was ‘sick of it, just sick of it’ – and although my interest was piqued, I didn’t get to hear the end of the discussion. The two of them noticed me at the same time, their heads swinging almost comically over to where I was standing in the freezing night air.
‘Goodness, you both must be cold,’ I said, making a show of pulling my cardigan closer to me and shivering.
‘Cold?’ Janet asked, as if she hadn’t ever heard of the word. ‘Oh yes, very. Richard, go indoors before you catch a chill.’ She spoke to her husband as if he were a child. He didn’t seem happy about this, but obeyed, leaving me alone with Janet. I’d only invited her and her husband to be polite; I found her an insufferable busybody, but she’d asked Alec and me over to one of their garden parties in the summer, so I thought it would seem rude not to include them. Over the painful minutes that followed I listened as she tried to make small talk with me, she apparently unaffected by the cold and me doing my best not to let my teeth freely chatter.
‘Such a lovely… um… party,’ she said, awkwardly.
I replied with a polite smile.
‘It’s nice to be able to mark Christmas in some way. We were going to go up to Oxford Street and do a bit of shopping, but… well, now we’re back to dodging terrorists…’ She shook her head. ‘Terrible, isn’t it? So many awful things in the news this past year.’
After my conversation with Jessica about Paris, this was the last subject I wanted to tackle. ‘Yes… I suppose… awful,’ I said. With anyone else I’d have been embarrassed about how inarticulate I was being, but Janet didn’t seem to notice.
‘Does your husband have to go into London every day? Gosh, how you must fear for him on the tube.’
I started to explain that Alec didn’t use the tube, but walked from Charing Cross to his office, but I’d barely got three words out before she cut across me. ‘Who was that pretty little thing your husband was talking to earlier? Colleague of his? Or… close friend?’
There was something about the little pause before ‘close friend’ that made my eyes snap to her face with renewed attention. ‘What?’
‘Very pretty, yes,’ Janet said, and there was a cruel glint in her eyes that suggested to me she’d been working up to this little nugget of info. ‘I actually thought it was a bit inappropriate, how familiar she was, but I suppose that’s what it’s like in the world of advertising. I mean, I’ve seen Mad Men, of course, so I have some idea what those high-flying types get up to. I don’t know how you stand it.’
