The Wrong Mother

9

Thursday, 9 August 2007

I don’t remember sleeping, falling asleep, but I must have, because I know I’m awake now. Awake in a room I don’t recognise, long and thin with a low ceiling. I haven’t seen it before, and this is the first time I’ve had this thought: that I don’t recognise my surroundings. So I must have been asleep. My clothes are twisted, as if someone has twirled my body like a skipping rope. My skin feels sticky, especially my back and the backs of my legs. I stretch out my hands, pat the surface beneath me-material, thick and fleecy.

I try to sit up, to look around, but my head aches too much. Moving it sends streaks of fiery pain shooting down my neck and back. I lower it gently, inch by inch, until it touches the bed again, closing my eyes against the glare from the overhead light, which is already, after only a few blinks, making my brain throb just above the bridge of my nose.

My throat is so dry it’s sore. Where am I? What the hell happened to me? I’ve had hangovers in my time, but never one as bad as this. And I haven’t been drinking. Fear spreads quickly around the points of pain all over my body, submerging them the way an incoming tide fills the space around small islands. I can smell new paint and a heavy fruity smell that is familiar. I’ve smelled it recently, I’m sure.

The children. What time is it? I have to collect Zoe and Jake. This is more important even than knowing where I am. I picture their eager, bobbing heads at the nursery window, the leap of joy in their eyes when they see me, and yank my body into an upright position, not caring any more how much it hurts.

I look at my watch. The digital display reads 0010. Ten past midnight-oh, my God. My stomach and heart lurch in tandem, as if someone’s tied a thick rope around them and pulled hard. That’s when I remember: Mark. I fainted on the street, and he helped me. Not Mark, I correct myself. Mark Bretherick is somebody different.

‘Mark,’ I shout, because my voice is working more efficiently than my body. I know I can’t move quickly enough.

I haul my heavy, tingly legs over the side of the bed and see that it’s not a bed, it’s some kind of high bench with white towels draped over it all the way along. ‘Mark,’ I yell again. What else am I supposed to call him? The door is open. Why can’t he hear me? Ten past midnight. Nick will have got a phone call from nursery after I failed to turn up. By now he’ll be frantic.

I need my phone. My bag is on the other side of the room, by the small convex window. I shuffle off the bench and try to stand up. Why was I lying on white towels? I wobble, try to perch on the bench again and fall. ‘Ow!’ I groan, face down on the stripy carpet. Yellow, green, orange. Dizzy, I manage to roll on to my back. I stare at the light, a transparent bulb inside a bell-shaped pink glass lampshade.

It comes to me suddenly: I’m in his house. Not-Mark’s house. He brought me home.

I haul myself forward and up on to my knees. ‘Mark! Mark, are you there?’ I call out, but my voice has lost its power. My handbag might as well be a hundred miles away. A wave of nausea sweeps over me. I think about the ginger cat’s head, the blood around its ragged neck, and have to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from vomiting.

On all fours, I count to twenty and gulp in air until the sick feeling passes. There are balls of fluff on the carpet. Like on ours at home, after we replaced the red that was everywhere with a more soothing grey-green. This carpet is new. Yellow, green, rust, taupe. And orange, like the cat’s head. Stripes. Chosen by a woman, surely.

‘Sally?’ He is here: the man I spent a week with last year. The man from my adventure. He smiles hesitantly before coming into the room, as if reluctant to trespass on my territory. His red-brown hair is wet, three small curls plastered to his forehead. I recognise the red sweater he’s wearing; he wore it at Seddon Hall. I don’t buy that whole redheads-can’t-wear-red philosophy: that’s what he said. He’s holding a glass of water. ‘Here, have a sip of this. You’ll feel better.’

‘My kids…’ I start to say.

‘It’s okay.’ He helps me to my feet, supports me when he sees that I’m about to fall. ‘Nick picked them up from nursery. They’re fine.’

I gulp the water. It’s gone too quickly. I’m still thirsty. ‘You…’ He spoke to Nick. I close my eyes, see bursts of light that are quickly swallowed by blackness. ‘Who are you?’ I feel as if everything that’s precious to me is slipping away. I can’t let it go.

‘You need to lie down,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk later.’ He picks me up, carries me towards the bench.

‘I need to phone Nick,’ I say. ‘My head’s pounding. I need something to eat.’

‘I’ll bring you some food. And a pillow too-that’ll make you more comfortable.’ He makes a strange noise, as if he’s choking. ‘Sally, how did you get in such a state? What happened to your face? What’s… do you know what’s wrong with you?’

‘Who are you?’ I ask again, terrified because I can’t answer his question. I have no idea why I feel so bad, so weak. ‘Bring me my phone. Now,’ I say as firmly as I can.

‘You need to rest…’

‘I need to speak to my family!’ Adrenalin sets my brain spinning. ‘Who are you? Tell me! Did you leave a dead cat by my car?’

‘Did I what? You’re not making sense. Lie down. Take deep breaths.’

It’s easy to let myself fall back. For once, the deep breaths seem to work. I feel more solid, more aware. Aware that I’m starving. I’ve got to get something inside my stomach soon or my brain will shut down completely.

‘Lucy and Geraldine Bretherick,’ I whisper. ‘Dead.’

‘I know,’ he says.

‘You’re not Mark.’

‘No.’

I open my eyes, but he is looking away. Embarrassed.

‘You lied.’

He sighs. ‘Sally, you’re not strong enough to have this conversation now. Let me get you some food. Just lie here and rest, okay?’

‘I need to talk to Nick.’

‘After you’ve eaten.’

‘No, I…’ I try to sit up and nearly fall off the bench. He is walking towards the door, and has to run to catch me. My eyes are heavy and sore; I need to close them. I think a question in my mind: Are you sure Nick said the children were all right? I’ve used up my capacity for movement and speech. I’m being pulled away from myself. I struggle to stay in the room with the man who told me he was Mark Bretherick, but I’m too slow. My resistance breaks up, fades and flattens into calm.

From far away, I hear his voice. Soothing, like notes in a piece of music. ‘Do you remember what you said to me at Seddon Hall? You were talking about how drained and used up you felt at the end of every day, days spent struggling to attend to your family’s needs at the same time as giving a hundred and fifty per cent to your work, racing round like a maniac trying to pack it all in. Do you remember? And you said-it stuck in my mind-you said the hardest thing is being so exhausted you could collapse and at the same time having to pretend you’re not tired at all. Having to pretend you’re fine and cheerful and full of energy so that Nick doesn’t give you a hard time.’

Did I tell him that? It’s something I would normally only confide in my women friends, the ones with children. But it’s true. I want to explain, but my voice won’t start. Nick would worry if he knew how difficult I find my life, only because he cares about me. ‘Why don’t you go part-time?’ he would say. ‘Three days a week, or, even better, two.’ He said that once after Zoe was born, before I’d learned I had to pretend to be zinging with energy right up until bedtime and, more often than not, after bedtime as well. ‘I could cut down my hours too,’ he added hopefully. ‘We could both spend more time at home, relaxing as a family.’ I said no, refused even to discuss it because that would have meant telling the truth: I love my work too much. I don’t want to do even a tiny bit less, even if carrying on the way I am means I’ll wear myself down until there’s nothing left of me. I’ll take the chance. And the idea of Nick cutting down his hours and his salary in order to relax more sent chills down my spine.

‘Your body is telling you you’re not ready to go home,’ the voice continues softly. ‘Listen to it. Remember what you said, about the hardest part of going home after a work trip?’

But I haven’t been on a work trip. My mouth still won’t work. I can’t argue.

‘You’re ready to drop; all you want to do is walk through the front door, go straight to bed and stay there for twenty-four hours. But Zoe and Jake have missed you, and Nick has been on duty alone in your absence, so you have to take over. You have to spring into action like an entertainer at a children’s party, and Nick has to be allowed to have the rest of the day off, cycling, or meeting his mates at the pub. And because you feel guilty, because you often go away overnight and Nick never does, you put a brave face on it. You dread going home after every trip because you know you’re going to have to do even more work than usual to make up for the inconvenience of your having been away-as if you owe the family that extra effort, like some sort of penance.’

Is he still in the room? He’s saying words, but they are my words. They’re what I say when I’m at my lowest ebb. Not what I really think, not how I truly feel. No. It’s not like that. Stop.

‘I asked you why you didn’t say something to Nick. Remember? You said he wouldn’t understand. He genuinely believes he does his fair share. That’s because he doesn’t see all the other things that need to be done, the things that you take care of so that he never even notices them; they’re invisible to him.’

I try to think about this, but my mind feels as if it has been wrapped in tight material.

‘You take turns to get up with the kids at the weekend, but you’d almost rather get up early on Saturday and Sunday,’ says the voice. My words, his voice. He remembers every word I said. ‘You don’t enjoy your lie-ins. Nick enjoys his; when it’s your turn to do the early shift, he gets up at ten to find the house immaculate, the children dressed, fed and playing happily-teeth and hair brushed-and you still in your dressing gown, hungry, just starting to think about the possibility of getting some breakfast or a coffee for yourself.’

And when it’s his turn, I get up at nine and find the kids hungry and whining, still in their pyjamas, and every toy we own out of its box and scattered all over the carpet, and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and Nick sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper…

‘I remember something else you said at Seddon Hall.’ The man’s voice cuts into my thoughts. Now I know he’s still there. Through the fug, my brain jolts. What has he been saying? Bad things about Nick. I can’t trust him. Has he drugged me? Is that why I feel like this? ‘You said you’d never regret lying, never regret our week together. You said, “If you see that no one else is going to look after you, you have to look after yourself.” ’

His words drop into the narrow tunnel inside my head, which soon closes into blackness.

When I wake up, he’s gone. I look at my watch. It’s quarter to four in the morning. I have a bad stomach ache and I’m horribly frightened and confused, but I can move more easily than before. I jump down from the bench and hear a clink, the sound of metal rattling. What is this thing I’ve been lying on? It has one wide silver leg, in the middle, with a round base. Wheels. I remember seeing but not registering it when I was lying on the carpet before. I bend and look again, to check my memory isn’t playing tricks on me. It isn’t. I hear another hard, metallic noise, quieter than the first.

I pull away one of the towels, then another, and stare at the beige leather I’ve uncovered. I frown, trying to pin down a memory. A doctor’s examination table? Then my breath catches in my throat and I push away all the other towels at once. They fall in a heap on the floor. Something protrudes from one end of the long, thin leather table: a large horizontal loop, like a rigid noose, covered in the same beige leather. I knew it would be there. Still, my gut lurches.

If I didn’t know what this was, the noose shape would terrify me. Recognition does nothing to lessen my fear. Because this thing shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t belong here; there’s something horribly wrong. It’s a massage table like the ones at Seddon Hall, the ones I lay on for the three or four massages I had during the week I spent with Mark.

With someone who wasn’t Mark. With someone who lied.

I turn, run for the door, knowing that this time no offers of food and rest will stop me from leaving. Nothing will stop me from getting back to my home, Nick and the children.

Except that something does, and the wild scream that erupts from my throat when I remember the second metallic click, the sound I thought came from the bench-from the table-does nothing to alter the stark fact: the door is locked.

Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

Case Ref: VN87

OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 5 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

3 May 2006, 9 p.m.

One side-effect of being a mother is that I have lost some of my fears and some of my imaginative capacity. In some ways, this is quite liberating. I am so overpowered by my own feelings that I cannot believe anyone might feel differently. The perfect example: on Saturday, Cordy and I took Oonagh and Lucy swimming. On the way back we stopped at Waitrose. Both of the girls had fallen asleep. I suggested to Cordy that she and I run in and out quickly, leaving them locked in the car in the car park. I do it all the time with Lucy, but Cordy looked shocked. ‘We can’t do that,’ she said. ‘What if the car explodes? That happened once-I heard it on the news. Some kids died because they’d been left in a car and its petrol tank blew up.’

‘What if we take them with us and Waitrose’s roof falls in and crushes them to death?’ I said.

‘We can’t leave them alone,’ she insisted. ‘Some psycho might kidnap them.’

‘They’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave them to sleep. The car will be locked.’ This, I knew, was a weaker argument than my previous one. A psycho could smash a car window and kidnap two girls, easily. What I wanted to say, but didn’t feel able to, was that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why anyone who didn’t have to cart two five-year-olds around with them should wish to do so. I knew Cordy meant paedophiles when she said ‘psychos’. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a paedophile. It proved impossible, and not only for the obvious reasons. I find it hard to empathise with any adult who would seek out the company of children. I know people do it all the time, often innocently and with no evil intentions, but I still find it implausible. And what you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.

I have also, I discovered last night when Mark suggested we go abroad during Lucy’s half-term holiday, lost my fear of flying. I know with absolute certainty that no plane I am on will crash, because if I died in a plane crash then I would be exempt from all future parenting duties, and Sod’s Law dictates that I won’t get out of it so easily. If I died in a plane crash, I would not have to spend another ten thousand Saturday afternoons standing beside bouncy castles that smell of vomit and sweaty socks, or sitting amid the debris of a game of pass-the-parcel like a tramp on a bed of newpapers while Lucy spits lumps of wet, unswallowed sandwich into my hand. I’m not saying I want to die-I simply know that I won’t.

I told Mark I refused to be forced out of my home and forced out of the country at a time that’s not convenient for me, just because St Swithun’s has decided to award its teachers an extra long half-term. It makes me so angry: you pay a fortune for private education and they take longer holidays than in the state sector. I call that fraud.

Michelle has made it clear that I can no longer rely on her. She’s going on holiday with her fat, ugly boyfriend who never speaks-the trip is already booked. I offered her an exorbitant sum of money to cancel it, but she’s in love (Gart knows how and why, given the absolute lack of provocation from her love-object) and seems now to be immune to my financial incentives. If I get desperate, I might ask one of the mums from school to have Lucy for half-term; one of them’s bound to be planning to ruin those two weeks of her life by spending them doing child things, so she can have my child too. I’ll buy her a new vacuum cleaner or apron or something to say thank you, and Lucy can spend a fortnight picking up tips on how to sacrifice yourself and become the family slave, since life is so much easier for all females who learn this lesson well and do not think to question it.

Mum, who ought to be a great help to me, is out of the question. I rang her last night, but never found out whether she could or couldn’t have Lucy to stay for that fortnight because the conversation didn’t get that far. She told me I ought to want to look after my own daughter during her school holidays.

‘Ought I?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t. I can’t face a fortnight of not being able to do a single thing I want to do. I might as well spend two weeks bound and gagged in a cellar.’

Saying things I don’t mean, ‘barking worse than my bite’, is a necessary outlet for me, one way of exercising my power and freedom. Mum should be relieved that I’m dealing with my frustration humorously, verbally. I do it-I say these terrible things-to keep myself sane. If just once Mum would say, ‘Poor you, two weeks of being on mother duty, what a nightmare,’ I wouldn’t feel quite so negated. Or, an even cleverer response: ‘You need to start putting yourself first-why don’t you send Lucy to boarding school?’ I’d never do that, Gart forbid. I like to see Lucy every day, just not all of every day. The suggestion of boarding school would stir up my maternal fervour, which (anyone shrewd would by now have worked out) might be exactly what I need.

Sadly, Mum doesn’t understand about reverse psychology. She started crying and said, ‘I can’t understand why you had a child. Didn’t you know what it would involve? Didn’t you know it would be hard work?’

I told her I’d had no idea what it would feel like to be a parent because I’d never done it before. And, I reminded her, she had lied to me. She’d said, over and over again while I was pregnant, that being a mother was hard work but that you didn’t mind because you loved your child so much. ‘That’s rubbish,’ I told her. ‘You love them, yes, but you do mind. Why should loving someone mean you’re willing to sacrifice your freedom? Why should loving someone mean you’re happy to watch your life become worse than it used to be in almost every way?’

‘Your life isn’t worse,’ said Mum. ‘You’ve got a beautiful, lovely daughter.’

‘That’s her life,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s life, not mine.’ And then, because of an article I’d read on the train yesterday, I said, ‘There’s a “conspiracy of silence” about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth.’

‘Conspiracy of silence!’ Mum wailed. ‘All you ever do is tell me how awful your life’s been since you had Lucy. I wish there was a conspiracy of silence! I’d be a lot happier.’

I put the phone down. She wanted silence, so silence was what I gave her. I could have won the argument decisively by pointing out that I am only as selfish as I am, as reluctant to subordinate my own needs to someone else’s, because from the moment I was born she treated me as if I was made of gold. Never did I get even the slightest hint that she had needs of her own and wasn’t simply there to serve me. In Mum’s eyes, I was an infant goddess. My every whim was attended to instantly. I was never punished; all I had to do was say sorry and I would be forgiven, and indeed rewarded for my apology. Lucy will be a more considerate woman than I am, I have no doubt, because she has grown up knowing that she is not ‘the only pebble on the beach’.

My relationship with Mum has never fully recovered from the Big Sleep row. The Christmas after Lucy was born, Mark was away at a conference. Mum came to stay. She bought me an extra little present: a mug with a book cover on it, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I unwrapped it on Christmas morning after four sleepless nights in a row, four nights spent dragging myself round the house like a corpse with Lucy over my shoulder, patting her, trying to persuade her to close her eyes so that I could close mine. ‘The Big Sleep?’ I snapped at Mum, unable to believe she would be so cruel. ‘Is this your idea of a sick joke?’

She acted all innocent. ‘What do you mean, love?’ she said.

I lost my temper, started screaming at her. ‘Big Sleep? Big fucking sleep? I haven’t slept for more than an hour at a time for ten fucking weeks!’ I threw the mug at the fireplace and it smashed into pieces. Mum burst into tears and swore she hadn’t done it deliberately. Looking back, I don’t suppose she did. She’s not nasty, just thoughtless-too sensible to be sensitive.

I couldn’t help noticing that, having told me I ought to want to look after Lucy during half-term, Mum didn’t ring back and offer to do so herself, as many a doting grandmother would have in her position. I am increasingly convinced that she only worries so much about Lucy because, in terms of offering practical help, she is willing to do so little.