The Wrong Mother

17

Friday, 10 August 2007

Once I’ve knocked out all the glass with the leg of the massage table, I hoist myself up on to the window sill and scramble out into the yard. I run back and forth blindly, whimpering like a wounded animal, hitting the hedge and then the wall. My body feels ice cold in spite of the sun. I stop, wrap the flimsy stained dressing gown around me and tie the belt tight.

I am trapped. Again. This yard is an outdoor cell that goes round the house on two sides. There’s a second wooden gate, one I couldn’t see from the window, also with a padlock on it.

Three wheelie-bins stand against the wall-green, black and blue. I grab the green one and drag it over to the hedge. If I could get up on to it… I try, but it’s too thin, the sides too smooth. There’s nothing to help me get a foot-hold. Once, twice, I yank myself up, but lose my balance. Think. Think. Beating in my head like a pulse is the idea that the man will be back at any moment, back to kill me. I scream, ‘Help! Somebody help me!’ as loudly as I can, but I hear nothing. No response. The air all around me is still; not even a rumble of traffic in the distance.

I put my full weight behind one of the large, terracotta plant-pots and shunt it towards the bin. It scrapes along the concrete slabs, making a horrible noise. Panting with the effort, I finally manage to up-end the pot. Its base is wide and flat. I stand on it and climb up on to the bin lid, landing on my knees. For a few seconds I am rocking in mid-air, arms flailing, certain I’m going to lose my balance. I lunge towards the hedge, grab hold of it and manage to stand, leaning my upper body against the thick slab of twigs and leaves.

Looking over the top, I see an empty road, three street lights-the twee, mock-antique lantern kind-and the loop-end of a small cul-de-sac, around which stand several identical houses with identical back gardens. I turn and look at the house I’ve escaped from. Its flat beige stone-cladding façade tells me nothing. I have no idea where I am.

I’m not high enough to climb from the bin on to the top of the hedge. If the bin were two or three inches higher, or the hedge more uneven so that I could use part of it as a ledge… I try to stick my bare foot in, but it’s too solid. I stare at its flat top, unable to believe I’m this close and still can’t get up there.

What can I do? What can I do?

The milk bottles. I could take some paper and a pen from my bag, write a note and push it into an empty bottle. Could I throw a bottle far enough so that it lands in one of those back gardens? How long would I have to wait for help, even if I could?

I jump down from the bin and run round the house, back to the smashed window. Directly beneath it, a small, square alcove has been built into the wall. There are two full bottles and one with no milk in it, only a rolled up sheet of white lined paper sticking out of the neck.

The man who kidnapped and violated me has left a note for his milkman. He still belongs to the ordinary world, the one I can’t reach.

I pull the note out and read it. It says, ‘Hope you got my message saying not to come. If not, no more milk until further notice please. Away for at least a month. Thanks!’

Away for at least a month… I would have died, if I hadn’t got out. He planned to leave me to die in the room. But… if both gates to the yard are padlocked from the inside, how can the milkman…? Oh, my God. You idiot, Sally. I haven’t even tried them. I saw two padlocks and assumed…

The one on the back gate that I could see from the window is locked, but the second one isn’t, the one round the side of the house. The padlock has been pushed closed, which is what I saw, what misled me. But it hangs only from the gate itself; it hasn’t been looped through the part that’s attached to the wall. I pull it, and the gate swings open towards me. I see another quiet, empty road.

Run. Run to the police.

My heart pounding, I push the gate shut as violently as I pulled it open. He’s not coming back. Not for at least a month. If I can get into the rest of the house somehow, I can clean myself up; I won’t have to run through the streets with nothing on apart from a dressing gown that’s covered in my own blood. If the police see me like this, they will know William Markes made me take my clothes off. They will ask questions. Nick will find out… I can’t face it. I have to go back inside the house.

A heavy plant-pot would break a double-glazed window. I try and fail to lift the one that looks heaviest. Three smaller pots stand against the wall, lined up side by side on a long, rectangular concrete plinth. I move the plants and strain to pick up the base. I can lift it, just about. Holding it under my right arm like a battering ram, supporting it with both my hands, I run as fast as I can towards the kitchen window, panting. The glass cracks the second time I hit it. The third time it breaks.

I climb into the house, cutting my hands and legs, but I don’t care. The recipe book has been put back on the counter. Beside it is the gun. He hasn’t taken his gun. He’s given up. Given up and left me to die. I back away, bile rising in my throat when I see the syringe lying neatly by the sink.

I can’t stay in the room once I’ve seen it. Gagging, I run upstairs. Clothes. I need clothes. The wardrobes in the blue and pink rooms are empty. There are a few clothes on wooden hangers in the one in the master bedroom, men’s clothes. His. A suit, a padded coat with paint stains on the arms and lots of keys in one of the pockets, two shirts, a pair of khaki corduroy trousers.

The idea of putting on his clothes is unbearable. I cry, wanting my own clothes. Where has he put them? Two ideas come to me at once: the locked bathroom door. A pocket full of keys…

I shake them all out on to the landing carpet. Some are obviously too big, too small or the wrong shape. I push these to one side. There are five left. The fourth one I try opens the locked door. The bathroom is large, almost as big as the master bedroom, with a sunken bath in one corner. In the middle of the floor, like a pyre-some kind of sacrificial mound or a bonfire waiting to burn-is a heap of somebody’s possessions. Clothes, shoes, bags, school exercise books, Barbie dolls, a watch, a pair of yellow washing-up gloves, a bottle of Eau du Soir by Sisley, gold and pearl cuff links: hundreds of things. Things that once belonged to a woman and a girl. All their possessions, heaped up in this one room. And, on top, my clothes and shoes. Thank God.

I push my way through the pile, hear things from the top falling into the bath and basin. The loudest crash comes from a black anglepoise lamp with a chrome base. It scares me until I realise what it is. It looks like a little creature-black head, silver spine. Its bulb has fallen out and smashed in the basin.

My heart thuds harder when I find two passports. I open the first one, flick to the back page. It’s her: the girl from the photograph. Amy Oliva. The other passport belongs to her mother, and her face is as familiar to me as her daughter’s for the same reason. Encarnación. A Spanish name? Yes. I flicked through a book a few seconds ago that was written in a foreign language.

Amy Oliva’s father. But he told me his name was William Markes.

In a plastic bag that has been loosely tied at the top, I find something slimy and green. It’s a uniform: St Swithun’s. Amy’s school uniform. Why is it wet? Why does it smell so bad? Did he drown her?

I can’t stay here surrounded by dead people’s things. I know Amy and Encarnación are dead as surely as if I’d found their bodies. I grab my clothes, run downstairs, turn on the shower in the tiny shower room and pull off the dressing gown. There’s a large dark red patch below the waist. It looks as if it’s been used to wrap a severed head.

I wash as quickly as I can, watching the water around my feet turn from red to pink to clear. Then I take the blue towel that’s neatly folded on top of the radiator, dry myself and get dressed.

Now I can leave, go home, call the police. I can bring them here, and they’ll find… No. There are things I can’t let them find. I have to be able to carry on living once I escape-the life I want, the life I used to have-or else there’s no point.

Nobody can know what he did to me.

I go back to the upstairs bathroom. Retching, I shake Amy Oliva’s foul-smelling uniform out of its plastic bag. Then I walk slowly round the house, collecting all the things I can’t risk leaving: the dressing gown, the syringe, the book written in Spanish.

I begin to shake violently as I walk across the yard and out on to the street.

Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

Case Ref: VN87

OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

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

18 May 2006, 11.50 p.m.

Tonight, while I was reading in the bath, trying to relax, I heard breathing behind me. Lucy. Since she’s slept with her door open, she’s felt freer to climb out of bed at night and come and find me. I ask her every day if she’s still scared of monsters. She claims she is. ‘Well, then, you’re obviously not a big girl yet,’ I say. ‘Big girls know monsters are made up. Big, clever girls sleep with their doors shut.’

When I turned and saw her in the doorway of the bathroom, I said, ‘Lucy, it’s half past ten. Go back to bed and go to sleep. Now.’

‘You shouldn’t do that, Mummy,’ she said.

I asked what I ought not to do.

‘Put the night light on the edge of the bath like that. It might fall into the water and then you’d be electrocuted and killed until you died.’ She is too young to understand what this means, but she knows it’s something bad. She probably imagines it’s the same as being hurt, like the time she fell in the garden and scraped the skin off both her knees.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m careful. It’s the only way I can get enough light to read in the bath without having the fan whirring away, and I need to read in the bath because it relaxes me.’

Why did I bother to explain? Reason doesn’t work with a five-year-old, or at least not my five-year-old. Logic doesn’t work, persuasion doesn’t work, just-because-I-said-so doesn’t work, begging doesn’t work, lenience doesn’t work, sanctions and the confiscation of toys don’t work, diversion and entertainment don’t work, ignoring doesn’t work, and even bribery doesn’t always work, or rather it only works for as long as the chocolate incentive is still being mashed in the mouth. Nothing works: the golden rule of child-rearing. Whatever you do, whatever techniques you choose, your child will reduce your soul to rubble.

In response to my attempt to answer her as I would an adult, Lucy burst into tears. ‘Well, I’ll be fine too!’ she shouted at me. ‘I never read in the bath, so I won’t get electrocuted! And I won’t go to heaven because you can’t go to heaven until you’re a hundred-Mrs Flowers told me!’ She ran back to bed, satisfied she’d ruined my relaxing bath beyond all repair.

Gart knows what rubbish they’ve been pumping into her at that school. Lucy asked me once what heaven was. I told her it was a good thriller and a six-star hotel on a white sandy beach in the Maldives.

‘Is that where Jesus went when he died?’ she asked me. ‘Before he came back to life?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘From what little I know about him, I think Jesus might prefer to go camping in the Lake District. ’ Let no one accuse me of neglecting my daughter’s spiritual education.

‘So who does go to the heaven hotel?’ Lucy asked.

I said, ‘Has anyone at school mentioned the devil yet?’