by B P Walter
So many of Janet’s words were so clangingly preposterous, I would been tempted to laugh at her – if she hadn’t just hit upon a weak spot. A very sensitive weak spot, one which had been pricked earlier when I too had seen Alec flirting with no fewer than three other women. Any of them could have been the one Janet was referring to with evident relish. I felt a sudden need to get away from her, get away from everyone. With a sick feeling in my stomach that I was giving this awful woman exactly what she was after (proof she’d been right in her suspicions), I told her to excuse me and walked away quickly, back into the house.
I scanned the room, looking for Alec, listening out for his voice, his laugh. I didn’t know if I wanted to confront him or just see for myself if he was still embarrassing himself – embarrassing both of us. He was nowhere to be seen.
It was when I tried to climb the stairs that Rob stopped me. ‘Caroline, stay down here and have a chat,’ he said, trying to steer me away and stop me going upstairs.
‘I just need to—’
‘No, I think you should stay down here for a bit,’ he said. There was something in his face that made me go all shivery again, as if I was still standing in the cold night air. That was when I knew. I pushed past him, marching up the stairs, not caring who saw me acting oddly. I could hear him as soon as I reached the landing. Him and whoever he was with.
The whoever part became clear very soon. The lovely English teacher, Ms Parker, came out of our guest bedroom looking dishevelled and a little flushed. Alec followed a few seconds later in time to see the face-off between me and the terrified-looking young woman, who didn’t know what to say. In the end, I didn’t have to say anything. Because that was when the screaming started. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Jessica was shouting wildly and lashing out, arriving like a ball of fury as if from nowhere. She pushed round me and struck Ms Parker across the face, messing up her recomposed hairstyle, her clip ricocheting off the walls, deep-red folds cascading across her face. Her make-up was smudged and she looked like a state. Jessica stood over her, shrieking like a banshee. ‘Get the fuck out my house!’ she shouted. Ms Parker shot a terrified glance my way and ran down the stairs, apparently in a bid to escape the fury of my daughter.
‘What’s going on?’
Rob was at the bottom of the stairs and watched as Ms Parker struggled to pull her coat on, then looked between me and Jessica, the latter trying to get past me, presumably to continue shouting at her teacher.
Jessica didn’t answer, nor did she continue her assault on Ms Parker when she reached the bottom of the stairs. As the embarrassed woman fled the house, leaving the front door swinging open behind her, Jessica collapsed on the stairs and cried. Cried and cried and cried. I tried to comfort her. I tried to make her stand, coax her away from the worried onlookers, our friends, our neighbours, people I’d have to see again and feel the burning embarrassment of this whole horrid ordeal. But Jessica couldn’t be comforted.
‘Her! That… bitch… and him!’
She spluttered as she pointed at her father.
‘Do you need any help?’ Rob was stepping around anxiously, as if he wanted to help take control of the situation, to clear up his brother’s mess, but unsure where to start. Meanwhile, another of our busybody neighbours, Angela Stoke, made her way through the guests and over to me, laying an oh-so-understanding hand on my shoulder. ‘Is everything OK, Caroline?’
‘Yes!’ I snapped at her, and she instantly looked wounded. I tried to soften my voice, ‘Thank you, Angela, just… just give me a minute.’
I needed to either get the party back on track or ask them all to leave. I decided on the latter. Mortifying as it was, I needed to be with Jessica rather than faking merriment. Alec was still standing halfway up the stairs, useless and ineffectual, his face still sporting a vague look of shock. I turned to Rob and said, ‘Could you take Jessica up to her room? I’ll be up in a sec.’
Rob nodded and put his hand out to Jessica, crouched on the bottom step, but she flinched and said, ‘Get off me.’
‘Jessica, please darling,’ I said, trying to sound calm and soothing, but she didn’t stay to listen. She picked herself up and ran up the stairs, disappearing off in the direction of her bedroom.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Rob. He gave me a weak smile. ‘Don’t apologise. She’s upset; it’s fine. Please… just go.’
I turned round to the guests watching, some staring openly, some milling around in the lounge awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry, everyone, for this, but we’re going to have to draw the party to a close.’
Of course, that evening wouldn’t become the worst night of my life. But it still killed me a little inside.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Boy
The wound on my leg is starting to hurt when I walk. It’s a good kind of hurt. Reminds me it’s always there, and if I forget it’s there for a moment, there’s always that sting of a reminder as my other thigh rubs up against it when I sit down.
A rumour has been going around the school that the Piccadilly bombers’ network started in Southend. It’s bollocks, of course – the whole story was started by a local journalist on Twitter who decided to make a connection between a drugs raid in Rochford (cocaine hidden in cuddly unicorns, according to Dexter in my maths class) and the searches that the anti-terrorism cops are doing in East London. Total shit, but even so, everyone’s talking about it, with one boy even claiming he could smell gunpowder coming from his mate’s neighbour’s house. ‘They don’t even use fucking gunpowder,’ I said to him. I was feeling tetchy anyway. The whole thing at Piccadilly had shaken me badly and I was only just about managing to keep a calm and quiet front. Some lunchtimes I went into the toilets and just cried in one of the cubicles, staying in there the whole fifty minutes until the steady flow of boys going in and out stopped. I’d just sit there, letting the tears fall. Sometimes I’d listen to what the other guys were saying. It’s a myth that only girls travel to the bathroom in packs. Boys do it too, and most of the time they’re talking about the same things – they moan about their parents, their brothers and sisters, their homework, their teachers. They bitch about each other or the member of their group that isn’t there. Quite often I just tune out and let everything around me become background noise. I sit there and sway, sometimes scratching at the cut on my leg so it goes red and feels raw for the rest of the day.
At home, the subject of the terror attack in Piccadilly has gone off the radar, not that it was ever really on it. Mum likes to gossip and moan about things going on in the world she doesn’t really understand, but never stays on one topic for very long. When she bothers to cook – when she’s not getting off her face with drug-dealing pricks in the lounge – she spends the whole time laying into some reality star she ‘can’t fucking stand’, or blaming the government for her ‘fucking shit life’. Sometimes I try to escape, but she points at me and tells me how useless I am and to clear the fucking table of all my shit so we can sit down like a proper family for once in our miserable lives. If I’m feeling angry, I tell her all the stuff on the table is her stuff – an ugly mixture of Hello magazines, cigarette boxes, bags of weed and stale bourbon biscuits – but usually I don’t bother. I’ll only end up getting a smack round the head or she’ll start crying and disappear off upstairs for hours, leaving the frozen pizza she’s thrown into the oven in there until it’s full-on cremated.
I had to go through one of her ‘breakdown nights’ about a week after the Piccadilly attack. My brother was out and Mum didn’t have anyone round, but the quiet in the house unnerved me. It’s never a good sign. I’d spent most of the evening playing Minecraft in my room, but at around 9pm, with my stomach crying out for food, I went out onto the landing and I could just hear her quiet sobs coming from her bedroom.
‘Mum,’ I said, careful not to make her jump. She flipped off if you made her jump.
She was sitting on her bed, a large joint alight in her hand. She was puffing on it between sobs, coughing sli
ghtly with each breath. In her other hand she had a photo frame. I knew which one it was before I got a proper look. Its glass was smashed – clearly she hadn’t replaced it since the last time she’d thrown it against the wall. When she saw me, she jerked upright, looking startled, then relaxed back into her slump, her eyes down towards her lap.
‘What do you bleeding want?’ she muttered, taking a big sniff and dabbing at her nose with the sleeve of her jumper.
‘Er… do you need anything?’ I asked.
She laughed. A horrible, screeching cackle. There’s no smile on her face when she stops though. Just a curled lip and dead, dark eyes, dulled by the weed. ‘Need? What do I need? Christ, you’ve got no fucking idea, have you?’ She threw the frame on the floor. The glass finally disintegrated and came away from the wood, the flimsy photo flopping out onto the carpet.
‘Pick that up and put it back over there.’ She gestured to the chest of draws over in the corner of her room.
I stared at the photo and the frame on the floor. I could just make out his grin filling most of the picture, the light from her cold fluorescent bulb distorting the rest of his features.
She looked at me then, and her curled lip stretched into a sneer. ‘What? You scared? Still scared of Daddy?’
I felt the blood rushing to my head, the deep, quickening pounding of it pushing against my cheeks. I was going red, I knew it, but she probably couldn’t see. She was only a few puffs of that shit away from passing out. I tried to ignore her as I bent down to pick up the photo, trying not to look at his face. I went and put it in her knickers draw, then went back to pick up the frame and glass. That’s when she said, ‘Do you miss it?’
I froze, bending down to scoop up the sharp fragments. ‘What?’
‘All the attention. All the fucking love he poured on you. His two boys. His two little men. You were his favourite though, weren’t you? Do you miss all that love? Love I can’t give you.’
I stood back up and looked straight at her. ‘It wasn’t love,’ I said. I was trembling, but I got the words out. Then I turned and walked out of the room, leaving the broken glass scattered round the floor. Let them cut her, I thought. Let them rip the soles of her feet to fucking shreds. She deserves it.
That was nearly a week ago now. Last time I looked in, the glass was still there.
The storm causes a power cut at school and we are sent home. When I get in, Mum says back in her day they’d have just lit a fucking candle and carried on. I could say I’m surprised to hear she’d been in school long enough to witness a power cut, but don’t fancy one of her outbursts.
I’ve been moping around since I got in, lying on the sofa watching videos on my phone, trying not to let my mind start to spin into upsetting directions. I’m just starting to drift off to sleep for an afternoon doze when I hear a screech. Mum’s been going in and out of the kitchen, getting first a cup of tea, the some vodka, then coffee.
‘Door!’ She screeches at me from over at the kitchen table where she’s slumped reading some gossip magazine, her spliff sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she says, when I don’t respond. ‘Get off fucking Facebook and answer the door.’
‘I’m not on fucking Facebook,’ I shout back at her. It’s true, I wasn’t on Facebook. Although of course I’ve used the Messenger app, I’ve never liked the idea of sharing stuff on there or Instagram or any of the other sites. I don’t even look at what others post about. Like my brother says, most of it’s for ‘total show-off pricks’, especially Instagram.
My mother screams again. ‘You’re doing my fucking head in these days,’ she says, going to get up.
‘OK, OK,’ I shout, pulling myself off the sofa and going to the front door. It’s a courier delivery – the guy was turning away to leave when he saw me just in time. He hands me a parcel and I sign for it. He turns to go, looking at the broken sofa outside the front and muttering ‘Christ’ under his breath. I bolt back inside and start to climb stairs.
‘Here, hang about, who was that?’ Mum calls out. ‘Is it my stuff?’
She has a habit of spending the little money we have on bulk batches of make-up and hair stuff, sent over from China via online sellers at a fraction of the cost you’d pay for them in Boots.
I hear the thud of something coming from my brother’s room and he sticks his head out. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ I say and walk past him into my room.
‘Hey, I asked you, is that my stuff?’
‘No it’s not your fucking stuff,’ I shout back at her, and slam the door.
I put the package down on my desk. It’s small, and the little wrapped-up parcel inside is even smaller. I pull away the wrapping and take out the metal heart. I thought a heart-shape might be a bit tacky, but it seemed appropriate and the shape was perfect. It barely cost a thing – the next-day postage cost more than the little photo frame itself – but I don’t care. I quickly go over to my bed and pull out a shoe box and retrieve the bit of paper I was looking for. I saved it from a copy of the Daily Mirror I found at a bus stop. Her face is splashed large across the front, along with other victims of the Stratford attacks. The front-page one is too large for the little heart-shaped frame, but the one inside is just right. I cut it out neatly when I saw it and saved it. Now, at last, I have something I can do with it. After a bit of snipping at the edges, I have the photo in the perfect shape and inside under the glass covering of the little frame. Jessica’s face stares out at me, smiling, almost laughing. I don’t know where the photo was taken. I’ve seen it though, on her Instagram feed, so I presume the paper just took it from there.
I sit and hold the photograph for nearly an hour as the rain and wind smash into my bedroom window. Then, as I wipe away my tears, I pull my pants down and position the frame so that the point of the part that finishes in a spike rests against the red, sore mark on my thigh. And I press. The pain feels white hot and as good as a cold drink on a hot day. It sends shivers through me and I realise I am crying again, but they aren’t normal tears. They just slip out of my eyes without the need to properly cry. I keep pressing and pressing until I feel something wet and see the blood dripping down the side of my leg, soaking the grey material of my tracksuit bottoms with a dark red stain. I can’t help but cry out a little as I pull the sharp point of the heart out from my skin, seeing the small flap of the wound peel back as I remove the frame and put it on my desk. The pain is both terrifying and welcoming, beckoning me in, offering me something else to focus on instead of the thoughts in my head – or at least it can stop them hurting when I think about them. I sit back and properly cry; sob, like a small child. For a minute, while the pain is running through me, it’s like she is here. Like she hasn’t died. Like tomorrow I will get a message from her checking we are still on to meet at Stratford station and we’ll discuss what we’re going to do when we finally meet each other.
I could sit here thinking about her for hours, but a noise pulls me back. It’s a shout, coming from the road outside. It sounds like a woman has shrieked, ‘Fuck!’
Shouting in the street isn’t unusual around here, but I get up and go to have a look outside. It’s getting very dark now, even though it isn’t yet properly evening, and it takes me a while to see who’s made the noise. A woman is in the middle of the street. She’s flailing around, trying to pull herself up on the open car door. She must have slipped getting out. I watch her scramble up, her clothes and hair completely soaked. Then she brushes her hair out of her eyes and looks up. Directly at our house.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
The road is being pummelled with rain so hard it looks like a carpet of fireworks. I drive the car faster than I should down the street until I get to his house. The broken sofa is still there, its material clearly soaked through, darkened by the weight of the moisture.
I inch the car carefully into the only s
pare space, aware it would be tight if any of the neighbours opposite tried to get theirs out, then turn off the ignition and get out. I’m halfway across the road when I remember Jessica’s phone. It’s in the glove compartment. I turn back and just manage to get my hand under the handle of the car door when the throb of cramp hits my leg, causing me to lose my balance. I grab hold of the door as it swings open, and the change of angle twists me back and I’m sent toppling into the middle of the road, landing on my side with a horrible jolt that I feel reverberate across my body. ‘Fuck!’ I shout; I can’t help myself. The whole thing is so awful. I shouldn’t be here. I’m out of my depth. I don’t know what I’m doing. I scrabble around, trying to get into a position to pull myself up, my right hand scratching on a small fallen tree branch that’s presumably been thrown to the ground by the storm. The wind is still raging, making it hard for me to straighten up, looking towards the house I had planned to enter. Once I’m steady I lunge forward into the car. Eventually I’m in and reaching for the glove compartment. I scoop up Jessica’s phone, then pause. Should I just go now? I have a chance. Another chance, one of countless chances I’ve had to put an end to this strange, dangerous game. But a small voice inside me keeps telling me that to leave now would be giving him another chance. Giving him the permission to carry on living his life as if my daughter never existed, never mattered, never died.
‘Are you OK?’
The voice can just about be heard over the roaring wind. I turn round and close the car door. He’s standing there. Michael Kelley. I stay completely still and for a while there’s just the two of us, standing in the rain. We both must look a sight. He’s in a vest-type sports top and grey tracksuit bottoms that are steadily growing darker as the rain hits them. One of his feet has a sock on it, the other is bare. I, on the other hand, am coated in water and dirt from the road. I can see my wrist is bleeding and I’m dimly aware of a leaf stuck in my hair, fluttering in the corner of my vision.
