The Wrong Mother

13

Friday, 10 August 2007

I hear a clinking sound, like two glasses banging together. Cheers. A noise I’ve heard before. I’m not dreaming. Opening my eyes rearranges the chunks of raw pain in my head. I have to close them again.

He held the gun to my forehead and made me swallow a pill. When was that? Last night? Two hours ago or twelve? He said it was a vitamin pill and would do me good. I thought at the time that it tasted familiar and safe. I didn’t mind taking it, not as much as I mind everything else. It must have knocked me out.

My feet are tied. I can’t move them. I open my eyes more slowly this time and find myself face down on the leather massage table. I prop myself up on my elbows, turn to look at the rest of my body and realise what’s restricting the movement in my feet: it’s the hard loop at the end of the table. I’m lying the wrong way round, with my head at the bottom. He must have put me like this, with my feet threaded through the stiff noose. Why? Is there a reason for anything he’s doing to me?

Zoe and Jake. I have to speak to them. I have to persuade him to give me my phone again. I see them clearly in my mind, tiny and far away, two little flares of colour and hope in the darkness: my precious son and daughter. Oh, God, please, please, get me out of here.

The clinking noise… Thinking about the children brings my memories of home into focus: it was the sound of a milkman putting down bottles, I’m sure of it. Zoe and Jake are milk addicts, and we have three pints a day delivered. Our milkman comes later than most, between seven and seven thirty. When Nick and I hear the glassy jangle of bottles banging together-the same sound I’ve just heard outside the window of this room-we grin at one another and say, ‘Whose turn?’ On my days, all three bottles are brought in together and put straight in the fridge. On Nick’s, he goes down for one bottle at a time, as and when he needs them, because carrying one bottle upstairs is easier than carrying three. In winter, for added annoyingness, he says daily, ‘It’s as cold outside as it is in the fridge, so the bottles might as well sit out there. It’s not as if anyone’s going to nick them.’ Once he added, ‘This is Spilling, not… Hackney.’

‘Why Hackney of all places?’ I snapped.

‘Didn’t you know? It’s the milk-bottle-theft capital of the UK.’

I swivel my body into a sitting position, trying to quell the storm of panic that’s raging inside me. I love Nick. I love our flat, with its too many stairs. I love everything about my life, even every bad experience I’ve ever had-apart from this, what’s happening to me now.

Across my shoulders and the top of my back, there are three distinct centres of pain. Did I fall on to some railings, something with sharp points? It seems unlikely. Ludicrous. I can’t move or think quickly, and I know I must do both if I’m to have a hope of escaping. My chest is itchy beneath my shirt, and my clothes are as twisted and uncomfortable as they were the last time I woke up in this room.

I pick up the towel that’s draped across the massage table, bring it to my face and inhale. That fruity smell again, but stronger. And-oh, God-now I recognise it: orange blossom. My masseur at Seddon Hall used it on me. I told Mark… I told the man who has locked me up that I loved it.

And he remembered, and he bought some, just like he bought the massage table…

I jump to my feet, pull off my shirt, losing a button in the process, and smell the inside of it: orange blossom. No, no, no. I reach over my shoulder and touch my back. It’s oily; my fingertips skid. He has given me a massage. That’s why there are sore patches across my shoulders. While I’ve been unconscious, he has been kneading and pressing my skin with his fingers. And… the itching on my chest. I look down. My bra is on the wrong way round: the semicircular lines of sewn-on pink roses have been rubbing against my skin.

I stifle a scream. I don’t want to wake him up. The darkness is still lifting outside, the milkman’s just been; it must be between 4 and 5 a.m. Which means he might well be asleep. If he doesn’t wake until, say, seven, that gives me two hours.

To do what?

Crying hard, I take off my bra and check the skin beneath for oil. I find none. Next I take off my trousers and run my hands up and down my legs, front and back, over the scabs and bruises on my knees. No sign of any oil, but… My knickers are also on the wrong way round. I press my clenched fist into my mouth so that no sound escapes. Tears drip over my fingers and down my arm. What has he done to me?

Eventually, I force myself to move. I put my clothes back on and start to walk up and down the room, try to clear my head. Nick is always accusing me of working myself into a state if I can’t solve the whole problem in one stroke. What would he do?

He would bring in the milk bottles one at a time.

I run to the window and pull back the yellow silk curtains. Nothing has changed.

I see no milk bottles, only the plant-pots, the thick hedges, the gate with the padlock on it, the elephant fountain. How would a milkman have got into the yard? Unless… maybe there’s access from the street to another part of the garden, round the corner, and the milkman walked round the house. On the concrete of the yard there are wet patches near the wall, a cloudy liquid that might be milk. The rest of the yard is dry. Opaque patches, then smaller drops leading to a point I can’t see because it’s right under the window.

Breathing hard, I grab one end of the massage table, drag it over to the far wall and climb up on to it. Holding the curtain pole with one hand to steady myself, I plant one knee on the massage table and the other on the narrow window sill, and press my face hard against the glass. ‘Yes,’ I hiss, seeing two semicircles of shiny red and silver. Semi-skimmed milk bottle tops. There must be some sort of hole or recess cut into the wall.

I climb down and start pacing again. Tomorrow. The milkman will come again tomorrow. If I could hear the bottles clinking, that must mean he would hear me if I screamed for help. All I have to do is make sure I’m not unconscious. I mustn’t swallow another pill…

I frown. If the man is using pills to knock me out, how did he do it the first time when I passed out on the street? I hadn’t taken any pill…

The room closes in on me as another detail clicks into place: the pill he gave me was a vitamin-that’s why it tasted like one, like something I’d tasted before. The drug was in the water he gave me to wash it down. ‘Rohypnol.’ I say the word aloud, a word I’ve heard on the news but never imagined would be part of my life.

I walk over to the door and stick my little finger into the lock. Only the tip goes in. I grab my bag, pull my Switch and credit cards out of my wallet. Neither is anywhere near thin enough to slot into the gap between the door and the wall. Idiot. It’s the wrong sort of lock anyway. Pathetic, Sally, trying things you know won’t work because you’re terrified of admitting there’s nothing you can do. Why don’t you try the handle while you’re at it? I slam my closed fist down on the metal. There’s a click, and the door opens with a protracted creak. I cover my mouth with my hands. He hasn’t locked it. I blink to check I’m not hallucinating, unable to believe something good has happened.

As quietly as I can, I leave the room and walk down the hall. The door to the porch is slightly ajar, though the front door is closed. If he forgot to lock me in, could he also have forgotten to lock the front door?

Is it a test? Is he waiting outside in the yard with the gun?

I look up and see that something is balanced on top of the door, a small grey object. Metal. The gun. No, it’s my mobile phone. Anger makes me shake. The sick bastard has booby-trapped the door to the porch. He deliberately left my cell door unlocked-he knew I’d try to get out. I bet he laughed at the idea of my phone falling on my head as I ran to the front door. Which is locked; it won’t budge.

I reach up for my phone. He’s removed the SIM card. Of course. Stupid. Ashamed of having believed I might free myself, I put my mobile back where I found it. If I can’t escape, I don’t want him to know I tried and failed.

I walk from room to room in search of another telephone, a land line. There isn’t one, at least not downstairs. I look in the lounge, dining room and hall for bills or envelopes that might have his name and address on. I find nothing. In the lounge there are some novels, and lots of books about plants and gardening. There’s a whole shelf devoted to cacti, the only one in the room that’s full. I pull out a few books at random, in case there’s a name written on the inside cover of one of them, but I find only blank pages.

The framed poster I saw yesterday but only half-remembered shows a map against a bright yellow background, with a country highlighted by a green line. Two cartoon-like arms are reaching out, as if trying to take the country away from its neighbours. ‘Hands off El Salvador ’ is printed in big red letters at the bottom. I assume the green-edged country is El Salvador; I was always hopeless at geography.

The shelves in the lounge make me think about the tiny study upstairs and what I saw in it. Something wrong. A row of Joseph Conrad novels, a row of serious-looking hardbacks with complicated titles, too complicated for me to take in in my panicked state, and then… empty shelves, lots of them. And the desk was completely bare. No computer on it, no pens, no coaster or roll of sellotape, nothing. Who has a desk without a computer on it?

The dining room… I race back down the hall. One whole wall is covered in shelves, good quality ones, probably oak. All empty. Feeling cold all over, I run to the kitchen, pull open the six narrow drawers beneath the work-surface. I find some cutlery in one, but apart from that, nothing. If someone opened my kitchen drawers at home they’d find crayons, unpaid parking tickets, string, aspirins-just about everything.

I force my mind back to the grand tour, as he called it. In the bedrooms upstairs: no lamps, no rugs, nothing on the window sill. No photographs, clocks, pictures on the walls, combs or hairbrushes, glasses for water.

Nobody lives here.

The man hasn’t brought me to his home. Maybe he lived here once, with his family, but not any more. He’s brought me to an immaculate deserted house and laid out a few objects here and there to make it look as if this is where he lives: that wrought-iron letter-stand in the hall… did he imagine it would be enough to fool me?

If he doesn’t live here, where does he live? Where are the rest of his possessions? Perhaps he’s not here now, asleep upstairs. Did he drug me and then go back to his wife and children? Maybe this is a second home, one his family don’t know about. One he bought to keep me locked up in for ever.

The recipe book that he used to make that disgusting meal with the grey sauce is still open on the kitchen counter, still with the bookmark laid across it. I look around for other cookery books but see none. The open pages are glossy, unstained by spillages. He bought the book in order to cook for me. That was the first time he used it.

The kitchen window sill is pristine, uninterrupted white. I get down on my hands and knees and start to open the cupboards that run along the bottom of one wall. There’s nothing in them apart from three saucepans, two Tupperware containers and a colander. Inside the colander there’s a clear plastic syringe with measurements printed on it along one side.

My heart goes wild. I tear the lids off the saucepans, looking for a bottle of whatever he’s been using to knock me out. Rohypnol. Does it even come in a bottle? Surely he’d keep it close to the syringe. The measurements chill me more than anything: the idea that he leaves nothing to chance. He knows what he’s doing, knows exactly how long he wants me to be unconscious for, how much of the drug he needs to achieve it.

I hate him more than I thought it was possible to hate. I scramble to my feet, sweep the recipe book and bookmark off the counter on to the floor, panting with rage. The book slams shut as it lands. I read the title on the cover: 100 Recipes for a Healthy Pregnancy.

‘Which one do you fancy this evening?’ says a voice from the hall.

At gunpoint, he marches me back to the room with the stripy carpet. He is wearing dark green paisley pyjamas. ‘Lie down,’ he says, pushing me towards the massage table. ‘On your back.’ His voice is stern. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks.

‘What have you done to me?’ I whisper, afraid to raise my voice in case it makes him angry.

He wheels the table over to the wall. ‘How am I supposed to have a clear head for work if you wake me up at quarter past five in the morning?’ he says.

I hear myself apologise to him. I need to know, need to be told. However bad it is.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘Shush. Stop crying, there’s no need to cry. Now, shuffle along and down-this way, that’s right-and put your legs up against the wall, so that your body makes a right angle. That’s good. Now, stay in that position. Get as comfortable as you can. I want you to stay like that for an hour or so.’

Tears pour down my cheeks, collect in my ears. I can’t speak.

He walks over to the window, tapping the gun against his open palm. ‘I suppose, since you’ve obviously worked it out, there’s no point in my being secretive any more. You saw the title of the recipe book.’

‘I’m not pregnant!’

‘You might be. You might be already, if we’re lucky.’

The vitamin pill: it was folic acid. That’s why the taste was so familiar. I took it throughout both my pregnancies.

‘Have you raped me? How many times?’

He makes a disgusted noise. ‘Thanks,’ he murmurs. ‘Thanks such a lot for that vote of confidence.’

‘I’m sorry…’

‘I’m not an animal. I used a syringe.’ He lets out a small laugh. ‘I didn’t have a turkey baster, not being much of a cook. You’re the only person I’ve ever cooked for, in fact.’

‘You drugged me and undressed me and injected me with… with…’

He picks up my hand and squeezes it. ‘Sally, I want us to be a proper family. I’ve got a right…’ His voice wavers. ‘Everybody has a right to have a proper happy family. I’ve never had that, Sally. I don’t think you have either.’

‘That’s not true, it’s not true!’

‘I know you need time to adjust. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting we sleep together, not yet. Never, if you really don’t want to. I’m not a brute.’

I dig my fingers into my legs. If I could, I’d rip out all my insides until there was nothing left of me.

‘I know I should have told you about the baby but… well, I was eager to get the ball rolling. I’m sorry.’

‘How many times have you… injected me?’ I manage to say.

‘Just twice. And I’ve got a good feeling about this last time.’ He crosses his fingers, holds them in front of my face.

I cry while he strokes and pats my hand and makes soothing noises. I have no idea how much time is passing, how much of my life I am losing in this room: half an hour, maybe longer, since he last spoke. When I run out of tears, I say, ‘Why did you give me a massage?’

‘To make you feel good. You love massages.’

‘I was unconscious!’

‘I thought it might relax you, subconsciously. Sometimes the body knows things the mind doesn’t. The more relaxed you are, the more likely you are to conceive.’

I feel a surge in my stomach, nearly choke on the bile that rises to fill my throat.

‘Do you think I want this to be horrible for you, Sally? I don’t. I truly don’t.’

‘I know.’ I’m going to get that gun off you and I’m going to kill you, you sick fuck.

‘You have to try to want what I want. Do you remember, at Seddon Hall, you told me you were sick of always being the one who had to arrange everything: Valentine’s Day dinners, even treats for your own birthday?’

‘You make it sound as if I hated my life!’ I blurt out, sobbing. I can’t bear to listen to him. ‘I love my life-I was just complaining!’

‘With good cause,’ he says, tapping the gun against the side of the massage table. ‘What about the Christmas when you chose and bought your own present from Nick because you didn’t trust him to get the right thing: Boudoir eau de parfum by Vivienne Westwood. You even wrapped it yourself and wrote “To Sally, love Nick” on it. Do you remember telling me that? Because you were sick of wondering if Nick would remember to wrap it in time for Christmas Day.’

Why did I tell him so much?

‘Can I… please could I have my phone, just for a few minutes? I need to speak to Zoe and Jake.’

I have said the wrong thing. He drops my hand. His eyes harden, his face as close to a portrait of pure evil as anything I’ve ever seen. ‘Zoe and Jake,’ he repeats in a wooden voice. ‘The trouble with you, Sally, is that you never know when the party’s over.’

Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

Case Ref: VN87

OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 7 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

17 May 2006, 5.10 a.m.

A brilliant thing happened tonight-I thought for a while that it might be the key to everything. Well, last night, I suppose you’d have to say, but I haven’t had any sleep. I’m going to end up like that man I saw on that ‘shock-doc’ documentary, who was so sleep-deprived for so long that he ended up with a permanent headache. When he went to the doctor, he was told that by not sleeping enough he’d done irreparable damage to the nerve endings in his brain. The doctor gave him a drug to stop the headache, but that made him shake as if he had Parkinson’s disease. The documentary said only that he was a contract lawyer in the city, not whether he had small children, but I’m certain he did. I think he had three children under five and a wife who also worked full-time.

I took Lucy to the theatre last night. Not to a matinee, not like the awful time we went to see Mungo’s Magic Show and we were surrounded by brats, and Lucy screamed because I wouldn’t let her eat two Cornettos. No, this time I took her in the evening, like an adult. I wondered if she might be more bearable if I treated her more like a grown-up. So I booked two tickets to Oklahoma ! the musical at Spilling Little Theatre. Mark was away at yet another conference. I told Lucy that she and I would be going out together for a special treat evening, but only if she was very good. She was so excited, happier than I’ve ever seen her, and she really did try hard. I told her we would go out for dinner first, and she was even more excited about that. She’d never been to a restaurant in the evening before, and she knew it was something grown-ups did, so of course she wanted to do it.

We went to Orlando ’s on Bowditch Street, and Lucy had spaghetti bolognese. For once she ate everything on her plate. Then we held hands and walked to the theatre, and she sat through the whole performance transfixed, as still as a statue, eyes as wide as plates. Afterwards she said, ‘That was great. Thank you for taking me to the theatre, Mummy.’ She said she loved me and I said I loved her and we held hands again all the way back to the car. I thought it was a turning point. I decided to do grown-up things with her whenever I could, try to treat her more like a twelve-year-old than a five-year-old.

I must have been stupid or desperate or both to think that would work. An hour ago, when I was tossing and turning in bed and wondering what Lucy and I might do together next-a manicure, the National Portrait Gallery, the cinema-I felt someone tugging on my hair. I thought it was an intruder and screamed, but it was Lucy. Normally when she wakes at night, she doesn’t get out of bed; she yells for me and expects me to come running. But there she was, and she wasn’t upset. She was smiling. ‘Mummy, can we go to the theatre again?’ she said.

‘Yes, darling,’ I promised. ‘Very soon. But you’ve got to go back to sleep, Lucy, it’s not morning yet.’

Could I have handled it better? No doubt my mother would say so. If Lucy had asked her, she would probably have leaped out of bed, even at four in the morning, and searched on the Internet for suitable shows, bleary-eyed but insisting she was full of energy. I’ve asked her, often, how she managed not to feel permanently exhausted when I was little. She puts on a smug little smile, waves her hand dismissively and says, ‘Being tired has never killed anyone. You don’t know how lucky you are!’ Then she tells me an anecdote about someone she met in town whose daughter has triplets, no husband and seventeen low-paid manual jobs that she must do simultaneously in order to feed her family. And I envy this down-trodden labourer that my mother has almost definitely invented for the sole purpose of shaming me, because it sounds as if her life has probably always been appalling. Whereas I had a brilliant life before I became a parent: that is why I find it so hard to cope.

‘I want to go to the theatre again now,’ Lucy insisted. ‘I want to go out for dinner again, with just you.’ I repeated that it was night-time, that no theatres or restaurants were open. She began to scream and howl, hitting me with her fists. ‘I want to go NOW, I want to go NOW,’ she wailed. In the end the only way I could shut her up was by threatening her. I said that if she didn’t quiet down and go back to sleep that instant, I would never take her anywhere again. She stopped punching and yelling, but I couldn’t get her to stop crying, no matter how patiently I explained the situation. In the end I had to sit by her bed and stroke her hair while she cried herself to sleep, and I cried too because my stupid special treat had ended up causing her more pain than if I hadn’t bothered.

Still, at least now I know. Whether I’m kind or utterly selfish makes absolutely no difference. Even if I try my hardest, I cannot avoid the misery, inconvenience, frustration and futility that make up nine-tenths of the experience of having a young child. It is simply not worth it. Even from an investment point of view, for the sake of having grown-up children who visit you when you’re senile and lonely, it’s not worth spending the best years of your life entangled in put-your-coat-on-I-don’t-want-to-put-my-coat-on-but-it’s-cold-I-don’t-like-that-coat-I-want- another-coat-you-haven’t-got-another-coat-well-I-want-one-but-we-have-to-go-out-now-get-into-the-car-I-don’t- want-to-sit-in-the-back-seat-I-want-to-sit-in-the-driver’s-seat-well-you-can’t-sit-in-the-driver’s-seat… That, or a version of it, is the conversation I’ve been having ever since Lucy learned to talk. Why can’t she simply say, ‘Yes, Mummy,’ and do as I ask? She hates it when I’m angry, and I’ve told her over and over again that this is the way to make Mummy happy.

I have never hit her. Not because I disapprove of hitting children-I have pinched and flicked Oonagh O’Hara several times without Cordy noticing-but because sometimes I want to hit Lucy so much and I know I would have to stop almost as soon as I started, so what would be the point? It would be like opening a box of delicious chocolates and only being able to eat one.

In an ideal world, parents would be able to give their children a good, satisfying kicking-a really thorough, cathartic battering-then snap their fingers and have the effects of their violence disappear. Also, it would be good if children, while being beaten, didn’t feel pain; then there would be no need for guilt.

Instead they are delicate and vulnerable, which of course is their most effective weapon. They make us want to protect them even as they destroy us.