Blink of an Eye

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Naomi

I go to the cemetery. It’s huge. There are old graves from hundreds of years ago, and tombs too, smothered in green, some of the stones cracked and tilting.

There are roads and pathways. I don’t know where to start. There is the chapel. I remember vaguely coming here when Nana Baxter died.

I follow a woman who is carrying flowers into the office building with the clock tower. I’m holding a bouquet too, brightly coloured, red and yellow and purple and white. I didn’t write anything on the card. I don’t want to upset anyone. I shouldn’t think Lily’s family would want me here. I’m sure if they saw my name on the flowers they’d tear the heads off and shred them into little bits.

In the office I give Lily’s name. The woman checks on the computer and tells me it’s in the section on the other side of Nell Lane, and gives me a plot number.

It’s quite a walk and I’m sweating and my ankle is very sore. The trees on the way are vast and old and the air is full of flies and butterflies, and where the sun cuts through the trees, dust swirls round and round in long spirals.

There are no trees in the new bit, lots of new graves. The main road runs close by, the traffic loud and constant. My mouth is dry. I didn’t think to bring any water with me.

Lily’s grave has a marker but no headstone yet. I suppose they have to get it carved. There are lots of toys and flowers, cards and helium balloons that have sunk to the ground now.

There are three vases with flowers in. It’s hard to find space to lay my flowers down without disturbing anything, so I put them off to one side.

There is a lovely photograph of her in the centre in a white frame. She’s looking at the camera full on and laughing and she has a straw sun hat on. Perhaps it’s from a holiday.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, ‘I’m so sorry. I am sorry.’

The blare of a horn from the motorway startles me and my heart jumps in my chest.

I walk back to the bus stop and go home.

‘It’s good you’ve been out,’ Mum greets me when I get in.

I’m parched. I get a drink of water and gulp it down. ‘I went to the grave,’ I say.

She pauses. I can see she’s wondering what to say; she wasn’t expecting this. In the end she says, ‘All right then,’ and gives a nod.

They say she died instantly. That she didn’t suffer. But the people left behind, the people who loved her, they must be in agony.

I keep thinking of prison, being locked up, and the sort of people who’ll be in there, and the bullying. It frightens me. But everything feels scary these days. Most of all the inside of my head. I have these horrible thoughts, like a commentary scrolling on a loop, like the way on the news they have a running stream of headlines at the bottom of the screen. And it never stops and it continually distracts you from what the newsreader is saying.

My commentary goes on and on. It’s even worse when I’m with other people and I’m trying to act normally but I’m worried that they can tell what I’m really thinking. And see what an awful person I am.

Like Becky and Steve come over and Becky talks about stuff at work or a band they saw or the latest on the wedding, and I look like I’m interested but in my head I’m like, And why do you think I care? You with your happy face and your dull, pretty boyfriend and your safe little lives. Why are you here? What are you for, exactly? Awful, nasty thoughts.

I hate myself for being like this. I am such a fake. I am full of poison. Pathetic. You think they’d have noticed by now.

My last regular visit to the surgical consultant. The person who deals with me I’ve never met before. They ask the usual questions and I don’t have to undress or anything. I’m still losing weight but I tell them it’s because I’m eating more healthy food. It’s what they want to hear and it doesn’t really matter. I’m still a size ten, hardly fading away. I like the thought of fading away. Nothing drastic or sudden but a slow decline. So I’d go from like I am now to slightly see-through like a ghost and then eventually drift into thin air.

The doctor says, ‘And how are you in yourself?’

‘Not so bad,’ I lie.

In myself I am a total fuck-up.

Mum brings me tea and toast if I’m not up in the morning. She tries to talk to me, invites me to go shopping or offers to treat me to a haircut. She goes on and on, like a fish on a hook, flapping this way and that until I want to push her out of the room. Push her down the stairs. And then I feel so horrible for even thinking like that.

The only escape is sleep, but I can’t sleep enough, not as much as I want to. I wake too early, still tired, when the house is cold, and I lie there trying to force myself back under, but my mind won’t be quiet. Or I go to bed and lie awake for hours, the tension setting in my arms and back like concrete, my skin itching, the sheets mashed up as I toss and turn. I did try listening to music on my iPod, but so much of it makes me cry.

I miss Alex. It was the right thing to do: why should he be saddled with me after all that has happened? Besides, it could have tainted his reputation at work, too, couldn’t it? Like when we first got together and I wanted to put him on my Facebook page. He was okay with that but he said if there was anything dodgy there like drunken pictures or stuff about drugs it’d be better to take it down because he has to be squeaky clean if he wants to be a solicitor. It’s like those teachers who put totally inappropriate stuff up there and then their kids at school find it and they end up being disciplined or sacked or whatever. Alex needn’t have worried – I’d nothing scandalous on there. But if we’d stayed together? Status: it’s complicated – partner in prison:-(

Carmel

Naomi’s behaviour was getting worse and I was more and more worried. I tried to broach it with her again. ‘Evie’s given me a number, someone you can talk to.’

‘Mum…’ she began to object.

‘Try it, please, one session. If it’s crap, you don’t have to go back.’

‘No,’ she said. There were tears standing in her eyes, and her hand shook as she picked up her phone.

‘What are you frightened of?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she shouted and walked out. I don’t know if she meant she didn’t want to explain her refusal to me – or that she didn’t want to talk to a therapist about her feelings.

On the Saturday night, the shop alarm went off. There were sporadic outbursts of attempted break-ins; sometimes Phil’d be called out three times in a week, then things would calm down.

I always hated it when the call came. Worrying about him, what might happen if the burglars were still there. If he might be ambushed and forced to let them into the shop.

I lay awake, my mind circulating round our troubles, rolling them over in my mind like a millstone, a great lump of granite, dense, unyielding. Then I heard the sound of the car and him coming into the house. In our room, he shucked his clothes off in the dark.

‘Hi,’ I said quietly. ‘What was it?’

I heard him expel air, then a hesitation that made my senses prick up. ‘Phil?’ I saw the security grilles, the windows smashed, the walls bare, stripped of guitars and saxophones and clarinets.

He grunted. ‘They’d kicked the shutters enough to trigger the alarm, bent one corner.’

‘They didn’t get in?’

‘No. Graffiti, red aerosol.’

‘Great. I suppose you could paint the lot red. Would it still roll up?’

He didn’t answer. The air in the room felt heavy, as if a storm was coming and the pressure had surged. I switched on my bedside light. He winced in the glare, stretched his neck as though trying to ease the exhaustion. He said in a tired voice, ‘They’d written: Guilty – rot in hell.’

I was half a beat, half a breath behind. Naomi, a message about Naomi; someone had made the connection between Naomi Baxter, charged with causing the death of Lily Vasey, and Baxter’s the shop.

‘Oh, Phil.’

He held out his hands. ‘What can we do?’ Climbed into bed.

The fallout was pervading everything, corrupting everything. Even the shop, a place I still thought of as a haven, a little nursery of creativity, now sullied and made dirty by association.

Phil and I made regular visits to Suzanne and Ollie, even though her moralizing stance was so hard to take. She was nearing the end of her maternity leave but faced her return to work with equanimity. They’d been viewing nurseries and interviewing nannies and I was shocked when she told us how much they’d have to pay for either. Wouldn’t a childminder be cheaper and just as good?

‘No,’ Suzanne set me straight, ‘the nurseries are better, more structure. Though if we went for a nanny we could expect her to do a little light housework too.’

‘A little light housework?’ Phil’s lips twitched.

‘Like your dad does?’ I said.

A moment’s levity. After a lurch of guilt, I realized it was okay, it was healthy. Whatever happened to Naomi, we had to function, to stick together and not crumble. And perhaps a little bit of normal banter was a salve for our wounds.

Naomi

It’s hard to keep warm. I’ve moved my bed up to the radiator, and when it’s on, I can lie there with my back and bum pressed up against it and my skin gets hot, but it never reaches the cold, shivery core deep inside.

‘Just go up to the shops,’ she says, ‘or round the park. Exercise will help, or I’ll drive you to the gym, if you like.’

I can’t face the gym.

‘You need to get out.’ She is really pushy.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not. Are you frightened of going out?’

She thinks I’m becoming agoraphobic. ‘No,’ I tell her quickly, so then I sort of have to prove it. ‘I’ll go to the park,’ I say. ‘Satisfied?’

She gives me a cross look. I can tell she’d like to shout at me for being awkward, but she holds back. ‘I can come with you if you like,’ she says.

I shake my head.

It’s horrible outside. The sky’s a shitty grey and there’s a wind blowing and it’s spitting rain and there’s dog shit on the pavement. At least I don’t see anyone I know, and the old man I pass ignores me. At the park the ducks are all noisy, swiping at each other with their beaks and squawking. The pond has scum on top and by the railings some crows are pecking at a piece of meat. Who feeds meat to ducks? Then as I get closer the crows fly up, flapping their wings, making me start, and I see it’s a cat, torn apart, its guts like revolting sausages and its teeth bared so it looks like it’s yowling. Sickening.

I go straight home, but I wait in the garden for a while so Mum will assume I’ve been out longer.

I can’t stop thinking about the cat. It’s like I was meant to find it. A message for me.

Carmel

My mother sits off to one side in the lounge, away from the row of high-backed chairs, as she no longer watches television and her interaction with the other residents and staff is minimal.

In the early days we used to visit in her bedroom and have some privacy, but as her mobility deteriorated along with her personality, I gave up on that. The nurses use medication to buffer her agitation and the accompanying aggression. It makes her sleepy. Now and again there’ll be flashes of lucidity of a sort, when she’ll wake and speak; nothing illuminating, though, more like the static of a dicky fluorescent strip light than a ray of sunshine, usually accompanied by a nasty retort.

I pulled a chair up to sit beside her and spoke in a low voice. There was nothing wrong with her hearing. ‘Hello, it’s Carmel, your daughter, Carmel.’ I reached out and put my hand on hers. At eighty-one, her hands were lined but not deeply wrinkled, not shrivelled like those of the oldest residents.

She was dozing, her head down. I talked a little bit but she kept her eyes closed. I told her again about Ollie and her being a great-grandma. Knowing she retained no new information and had lost most of the old too.

A string of drool spooled from her chin to her arm. I took a tissue from the tray table in front of her and dabbed at her chin.

She woke, her eyes unfocused. Her hair was still done every three weeks, when a hairdresser visited, and she had a short grey bob, which suited her. The clothes hung off her now; she was steadily losing weight, indifferent to food and drink, on a special diet that included supplementary drinks expressly designed to help with that. There was one of the little bottles on the table. She could really have done with someone there to feed her more often, though I knew the staff did their best. I lifted the drink to her lips and tipped it, careful not to give her too much and risk her choking. She had two mouthfuls then stopped swallowing, letting the drink flow back down her jaw and on to her bib.

I’d brought a photograph of Ollie to give her, in a frame. Once I’d cleaned her up, I got it out and held it up for her. ‘This is Ollie, Mum, your great-grandson. Suzanne’s baby.’ I could have been showing her a tax return form for all the interest she showed. She only spoke once while I was there. ‘Hopeless,’ she said bitterly. One word. I’d no idea what was hopeless: me, her, the situation, the future?

I was thankful she hadn’t been nasty to me. ‘Go away, vulture,’ she used to say. ‘You make me sick. I hate you, pathetic, disgusting.’ She would pinch me, when she still had control of her movements, or stick her nails in my arm or my face, stabbing them like a fork. She was stronger then. Nowadays the drugs helped. A liquid cosh. I missed my mum. This was not her. This drooling harridan who looked at me with loathing when she looked at all. There was someone else under her skin, in her bones, in her gaze. And I wanted her dead.

I left the picture of Ollie in her room on my way out. Next to the photograph of Suzanne as a baby in my arms. Looking at that plunged me straight back there. Suzanne was born in St Mary’s Hospital one blustery March night. I still find it hard to describe those early days. The elation, the worry, the exhaustion, the piercing moments of joy and fear. My breasts hard as rocks and leaking milk, the awful backache the labour left me with, as though my pelvis had been dislocated. The tiny being we’d made, with her huge wise eyes, face crumpling in hunger, the fuzz on her head pale thistledown. Raging thirst and ravenous hunger and weeping at the beauty of the way the sun sliced through the trees. Times when I wanted it all to stop for a bit, so I could rest, retreat, worn down by the incessant calls on my energy. My fingers clumsy on the tiny buttons, eyes itchy with fatigue, resentment in my own throat as her cries grew louder. The overwhelming weight of the love I had.

Later, in my working life, at the times when I had to take the weighty decision to remove a child from a family, I knew that they had experienced all that. And I understood in my bones and my blood that there is no worse thing in the world than taking a child from its mother. Except leaving it to suffer in her care.

Taken a child, that was what Naomi had done. Not with legal documents and papers outlining risk assessments and medical reports. And not to give the child a better life, a safer world, a chance to heal. There was no greater good in Naomi’s story. No redemption. She had snatched the child, stolen her life, all the hope and love and promise, and condemned her parents to the hell of a future without her. To the purgatory of what might have been.