by B P Walter
We lay together afterwards, our naked bodies entwined, tangled up with the duvet, half of it falling off the bed. Eventually we let it fall, so there was just us, lying there in the afternoon sun. The sound of Jessica watching Disney’s Return to Neverland downstairs in the lounge. Rob’s hands gently stroking my arm, making me feel more loved, more wanted than my husband had in years.
It was only when we heard Jessica downstairs shouting, ‘Movie’s finished! Ice cream time!’ that we sat up. Without saying anything, I got off the bed, pulled on some clothes and walked out onto the landing. ‘OK, darling. Give Mummy two minutes, I just need to sort out some things with Uncle Rob for next week. Get all your things together and shoes on, then I’ll be down.’
‘OK!’ she shouted back. Always happy. Always content with whatever explanation she received.
Back in the bedroom, I saw Rob had shifted forwards and was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes worried once more.
‘Don’t say this was a mistake,’ he begged, ‘I couldn’t bear it if you say that again.’
‘It wasn’t a mistake,’ I said, folding my arms, making my decision. ‘But we need to be careful.’ I saw his eyes widen with interest as I continued. ‘I think we could come to an arrangement that works,’ I said, speaking slowly, thinking it all through. ‘Maybe you could have Jessica like this on Friday evenings, after school. I really enjoy having this afternoon to work on my writing. Just having the house to myself and setting aside some time is a dream. Maybe we could make this a regular thing, seeing as you don’t work on Fridays and Alec doesn’t get back until late. Jessica likes you, she tells me constantly at home. And then, when I finish… I could come back here and…’
He smiled, and I was relieved. I was worried he was going to ask me to leave Alec, to get a divorce, that he’d decided this was a star-crossed lovers situation. But his grin told me he was more than open to trying out my plan.
‘I think it might work out rather well.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
The hours after I read the truth of what Jessica has been through at the hands of her uncle, Rob MacLeod, pass before me in a blur. It’s as if they belonged to those drunken hours when you’re a teenager – when you dimly become aware you’ve staggered home alone when you shouldn’t have and there’s vomit on your dress and you’re not quite sure what time it is or if you’re supposed to have school or work in the morning. It’s been years since I experienced that. But it all comes back to you, very quickly. And there’s vomit. A lot of vomit.
I look at the mess of it on my mother’s bathroom floor. I’d run along the corridor into her bedroom – the master bedroom – and ended up in her en suite. I’m rather impressed I had enough in me to throw up so spectacularly, considering the small amount of food I’ve had in the past twenty-four hours.
If I make any noise during my upset, my mother has either not heard or chosen to ignore me. I get up off the floor and go over to the sink, and splash cold water into my mouth and onto my face. I expect the woman looking back at me to be some grisly, terrifying zombie. A rotting, animated corpse standing where a professional, wealthy, middle-class, middle-aged woman once stood. But it’s still me. Maybe looking slightly more tired than usual – although any notions of ‘usual’ were abandoned in the wake of Jessica’s death. I haven’t really bothered with any baselines of normality since then.
‘Rob MacLeod.’ I say the name out loud. Seeing what it does to me. Feeling the pain ripple through my brain as I say it. ‘Rob MacLeod. Rob MacLeod.’ It’s like saying ‘Candyman’ into the mirror, and part of me hopes some evil spectre will come out through the glass and slaughter me where I stand. But nothing happens. I just stare back at myself, that man’s name still reverberating around my mind.
I fucked him, I think. And if I hadn’t fucked him, and hadn’t wanted to fuck him again and again and again, maybe he wouldn’t have been in a position to touch my little girl. Or perhaps, if I hadn’t stopped…
There had come a point, after a few months of us spending our Friday afternoons shagging away on his bed like rabbits, when I knew I couldn’t carry on. Knew I couldn’t continue doing what we were doing. I’d become aware he was getting way too invested – he kept telling me that he loved me. Kept saying we were made to be together. I’d never wanted that. I had felt something for him, but it wasn’t proper love. Nothing that could have survived past that honeymoon period of constant sex. Enjoying the slight riskiness of it. Enjoying it being taboo. And the guilt had started to get worse. Even though Alec started to get less and less good at covering his affairs, even when he knew I knew and didn’t seem to care. The guilt still weighed me down. Because I knew, if there was one thing that would obliterate the family life I so desperately wanted to achieve, it was him finding out I had slept with the brother he had resented since boyhood. So I’d stopped it. And Rob had cried. Got angry. Withdrawn away from me. And then, to my surprise, offered to continue looking after Jessica on those afternoons. Just because we can’t go on doesn’t mean Jessica has to suffer, he’d said. She’d got used to their routine, he’d told me. They would go to the park or swimming or play in the paddling pool in the garden. He enjoyed spending time with her, he said, and he knew I enjoyed my time writing.
I jumped at the chance. The free childcare. Someone Jessica knew. I was getting more work done since Jessica’s birth than ever before, more scripts were being commissioned, I was making a name for myself within the industry. It was an arrangement I didn’t want to lose.
I gave my daughter over to a paedophile.
The shock of that sentence reverberates around me. I feel it like it’s a bomb blast. I feel as if I’m breaking apart.
There’s a rumble in my stomach and I’m worried I’m going to throw up again, but instead of going over to the toilet I race out of the bathroom, back out through my mother’s bedroom and along the gallery landing to the room that used to be mine. With a mounting sense of rage, I see she’s completely stripped the room of anything to do with me. It’s been newly wallpapered, with countertops installed, running all around the room, stopping only for space for the door to open. On them are row upon row of animal figurines – her precious Sylvanian fucking Families. Always, through my childhood, I’d found her toy collection one of her more disturbing eccentricities, and now, looking at them all, I feel repulsed. There are even little houses for them, interspersing the neat ordered lines. Some of them have creatures placed in the weird little bedrooms. Others are empty. There’s something deeply unsettling to me about the way the rabbits and cats are all lined up. It looks army-like. Dictatorial. As if I’ve wandered in on some elite race, ready to take over our chaotic world with their special manufactured brand of logic and order.
In the centre of the room is a camp bed with an old-looking duvet and pillow on top, along with a small jumble of clothes. This is where her pool boy occasionally sleeps, it seems. ‘It’s all so fucking weird!’ I shriek, and kick at the bed, sending everything flying across the carpet, the duvet crumpling as my foot comes down again. I don’t stop there. I march across it to the far end of the room towards a row of hedgehogs and bring down my fist, smashing my way through them, breaking up their perfect lines, some of the front row falling onto the floor. Not satisfied with this, I sweep my arm across the countertop, sending animals flying in different directions, the pain in my shoulder stabbing at me, telling me to stop, but I carry on. I spin over to my left and seize one of the little houses and throw it with all my strength so that it hits the wall and shatters in a spectacular, satisfying way, its roof caving in and the sides splitting.
‘What the hell?’ A low male voice sounds from the doorway. It’s the boy. He’s standing there, watching the devastation. He gestures to the wreckage around him, but I don’t stop.
‘Fuck off!’ I shriek at him, and grab one of the other houses – one that’s inhabited by more little creatures, and
fling it at him. He ducks and it hits the side of the door with a crunching sound.
‘You’re bloody insane,’ he mutters weakly, then leaves the room. I hear him running down the stairs and then him talking quickly somewhere on the ground floor. I know what’s coming next. With the few moments I have, I throw my arms out madly and gather up a load of the remaining cat figures, lurch over to the window, pull it open, then fling them outside, watching a couple of them splash into the pool below. I snatch up some more and start lobbing them, one by one, into the pool, watching them soar through the cool evening air.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ My mother rasps at me from the doorway. Seconds later, I feel her hands clawing at me, pulling me back. The pain in my arm and shoulder catches up with me and I scream. She backs away at the sound, but I keep going. I scream and scream and flail and cry and end up in a small ball on the floor.
My screams become cries. My cries become sobs. My sobs become steady streaming tears and, eventually, deep breathing. And my mother stands there. Throughout all of it. It could be minutes, it could be hours. Until, finally, I manage to make myself look up. Only then does she speak. ‘I think you’d better come downstairs. We’ll talk this through.’ She talks calmly, although there’s an edge to her scratchy voice.
‘I can’t talk it through,’ I say, the sob rising again in my voice. ‘It’s the worst. The very worst thing. And it has fucking ruined me. Ruined everything. Forever.’ More tears stream from my eyes and I look away from her to wipe at my face. When I look back at her, I’m shocked to see she’s crying too. Without a sound. Without any noticeable sobs or fast breathing. Just a single tear, making its way down her face. Then she slowly lifts up her right hand and holds it out, palm upwards. It’s for me. I stare at it for a moment, then back up at her. Then I take it.
Chapter Fifty
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
I tell her my story while we sit on the veranda outside. The burnt front of the house towers above us, occasionally sending down a floating flake of ash or charred wood. Under other circumstances, I’d have been afraid of it all falling down upon us. Today, I would welcome such devastation. So long as it killed me.
My mother listens silently while I start at the beginning. What it was like to hear about the Stratford attacks. Knowing my daughter was there. That horror when I couldn’t get through to her. Then being told of her death. And spending the next few months living a strange half-life. Somewhere in a hellish in-between. Then how my discovery of Michael Kelley seemed to reignite a sense of purpose in me again. For the first time in months, I had finally been reminded of what it was like to live. I was angry with him, furious with him, I wanted to hurt him. Show him somehow what he’d done. I told her about my crash, my memory loss. And then how, through a set of events that still feel blurred and jagged in my brain, I came to be on Southend Pier with him at five in the morning. And how only one of us walked away alive.
I start crying again when I tell her about what I’d found on Jessica’s phone. How my desperate need to find someone to blame had led me to Southend, with tragic consequences. And how, for years, my beautiful little girl had suffered abuse at the hands of her own uncle. A man I was sleeping with behind my husband’s back. My mother interrupted me briefly to ask if I’d loved him. I told her the truth: I didn’t and never had. I’d just loved the fact he wasn’t my husband. I loved the fact that he made me feel safe and wanted rather than tolerated or resented. I loved the sense of escape he brought with him. Something that seems so trivial now, after everything. As I near the last part of my story, I tell her about how desperate I am for closure. For an end. For something to finally put a stop to the hellish rollercoaster the past half-year has been. That’s all I wanted. Now I’ve ruined even that. But I know one thing. That I will not stay silent about what Rob has done. I may have to answer for my crimes, but my God, he will too.
My mother is silent for a number of minutes after I finish speaking. She stares out over the front lawn and the trees that line the winding driveway. It’s growing dark now and she shivers slightly, pulling a cardigan from off the back of her chair and wrapping it over her shoulders.
‘I’ve lived through hell,’ she says, still not looking at me. ‘And it isn’t a pretty place.’
I start to mutter how I don’t really think any hell she’s been through compares to mine, but she silences me with a movement of her hand.
‘I think you know what hell I’m referring to, Caroline.’
She looks at me now. And it doesn’t take long for me to comprehend what she’s referring to.
‘You mean… you’re talking about… Dad.’
She nods. ‘I’m talking about Dad.’
I’m quietly terrified now. I’ve never thought I’d go down this road with my mother. Always thought it was a sinister rabbit hole best left unexplored. But she seems to want to tell me something and, in spite of myself, I know I need to hear it.
‘And I’m talking about the guilt, and the confusion, and the anger at the world and at oneself.’
I hold her gaze. ‘When I said we were both murderers, earlier, you didn’t object or try to correct me.’ I pause, take a breath, then I ask the question. The ultimate question. ‘Did you kill him, Mum? Did you kill Dad?’
It’s like I’m a little girl again. It’s like I’ve never run away. Like the years of mistakes don’t stretch between us.
‘Of course I did.’ She says it simply but firmly. And she doesn’t look away from me.
I let out the breath I’ve only just realised I’ve been holding.
‘Oh God,’ I whisper, and look away. I spend a few moments rubbing my eyes. Then it’s my turn to stare off into the darkness. And her turn to stare at me.
‘I tell you this, Caroline, so you know that we all have our demons. We all fight the good fight and then realise there was no fucking point to it after all. And then there’s something wonderful in standing back and watching it all go up in flames.’
An image swims into my head. Her standing out here, on the lawn, facing the house, and watching the fire rage as it starts to destroy a home built of bad memories.
‘I know what you mean about closure,’ she says. ‘And it’s something I’ve never managed to attain.’
I transfer my gaze to the floor. ‘Because you’ve spent years hiding away.’
She sighs. Not an impatient sigh. Almost wistful. ‘Perhaps. But I don’t think you’re going to have that problem. And I’m envious of it. I think you’ll get your day of judgement.’
I turn to look at her, and as I do I sense the flicker of light from the corner of my eye. ‘You don’t mean… in a religious sense?’
She smiles. A small smile. ‘No, not in the religious sense. Something a bit more tangible. That I can be sure about.’
I don’t understand what she means. ‘Then… why are you so sure?’
‘Because,’ she says, lifting a hand to point, ‘there’s a police car making its way up the drive.’
I follow her hand and I see it. The flashing lights. The car coming fully into view. Pulling to a halt in front of us. Then the door opening and the sound of people getting out.
‘I think,’ my mother says, ‘it’s time to call it a night.’
Epilogue
The nice police officer – Kathy, the woman who sounds a bit northern – sits down with me. I’ve worked out her expressions now. She’s about to tell me some news.
‘I just wanted to tell you, Evan: we’ve found her. We’ve found Caroline Byrne.’
I try to speak, but my voice is hoarse. ‘Where?’ I finally croak out.
‘In Australia. At her mother’s house. She’s going to be brought home for further questioning. It’s almost certain she’s going to be charged.’
I just nod.
Kathy sits down on one of the sofas in this strange police ‘family room’ they’ve brought me to. ‘We’re going to need to ask you a few more questions,
Evan. You haven’t really told us much – and we completely understand that, we really do. But for us to do the right thing – for us to properly get to the bottom of what happened to your brother on Southend Pier – we’re going to have to go over some things you might find difficult. OK?’
There’s a long silence. The other cop, DS Gracie or something like that, shifts a bit, like he’s getting pissed off but knows he shouldn’t show it. But Kathy doesn’t seem impatient like him. She seems nice.
‘How about we have a proper chat now, OK, Evan? It will be recorded. And Maxine, who you met before, will be there, as your appropriate adult. She should really be here now for this little chat, but she’s running a bit late and I didn’t want to keep you waiting. Is that all OK?’
I just nod.
It takes a while to get everything set up. Then Maxine comes in and greets me with her ‘Hello, love’, like she did the first time I met her. And then we go into one of their interview rooms.
Kathy says a load of stuff quite quickly for the recording, saying our names and nodding at us as she does, then she starts off her questioning.
