Her Perfect Family

by Driscoll, Teresa

  Which means he must have got into my Facebook account and read my DMs. Argh. Hacked the page? Or worked out the password (to be honest it wasn’t that safe).

  So yesterday I changed all my passwords (most of them were the same one, I’m hopeless at this stuff) and I told him I’d done this as I was worried someone had hacked my account and was looking at my direct messages.

  Well. He went mental! I thought he’d be embarrassed and even a bit ashamed (as it’s obvious it was him) but I never dreamt he would lose it like that . . . I tried to calm him down. A part of me felt guilty that I’d provoked him, like he’s always saying. I mean, I did send the group shot deliberately. But it turned into this massive fight about trust and him loving me so much more than I love him; him wanting to keep me safe. The hairs were literally standing up on the back of my neck because it all felt so wrong. So weird.

  Then he started crying – properly sobbing. And I didn’t know what to feel. I tried to leave but he said we needed to talk it through some more and work it out. He was still crying and he sort of grabbed my arm, not to hurt me, I know that, but just to stop me leaving. Anyway. I had to wrench it away.

  Oh. My. Word. The look in his eyes. It was scary.

  So that’s why I’m babbling here. Because he’s supposed to be coming with me next weekend to visit Mum and Dad again. We’ve got an expensive fancy afternoon tea booked as an early celebration for my birthday. And I don’t know what to do.

  He’s been bombarding me with texts today, apologising. Sending me pictures of us all loved up etc. He keeps saying that all couples argue, which I suppose is true (though I told him before that my parents aren’t like that). And that getting past this will make us stronger . . .

  I keep thinking about films and soaps, and rerunning TV dramas in my head. Is it normal to fight as badly as this? Can you get past stuff this bad? Do I expect too much? Is he right that I over-think everything?

  And the thing is I am always boring everyone about how great he is. The perfect boyfriend. And yet suddenly I don’t know what I think of him at all – and what does that say about me? About my judgement?

  So do I cancel the visit home? Do I confide in Mum after all?

  The problem is, she really hates any kind of argument. I don’t exactly know why. Gran said some difficult stuff happened when she was a kid but I don’t know the details. So if I tell her about this, she’ll probably worry herself sick. She was the one in the early days telling me I was way too young to be thinking about a serious relationship. I was the one trying to convince her how fab and special Alex is and how ‘serious’ we are. Argh.

  It’s all unravelling so quickly that I haven’t even told Maddy yet.

  I don’t even know what to think.

  I just . . . don’t . . . know.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FATHER – NOW

  Ed closes the front door behind him and hangs his waterproof jacket on one of the hooks on the wall. He throws his keys into the little wooden bowl on the narrow side table and listens to the familiar jangle as they settle.

  Next, he stands perfectly still in the hallway, taking in the silence. Not so long ago, he would have rejoiced to come home to this. An empty house. The rare treat of the place to himself. He would have made a large pot of coffee and taken it into the conservatory with Radio 4 on his phone, piped through the speaker on the shelf. He would have luxuriated in doing precisely what he wanted with no jobs allocated by Rachel and no pleas from Gemma to help with her new CV, which in recent weeks she has been changing almost daily.

  He’s walked through this front door a million times and thrown his keys into that same carved wooden bowl a million times and yet it is as if he doesn’t recognise the place. The bowl. The hall.

  It’s still Friday but late. His second trip home to pick up things they need. He stares at his coat, dripping water on to the parquet floor. He hadn’t even noticed it was raining. He checks his hands. Wet. Feels his hair. Wet too. He wonders how long this daze-like existence will continue. When he might start to feel human again.

  The problem, since the cathedral, is working out how he’s supposed to fit into the world around him. It’s not so bad at the hospital. There his purpose is clear. There Ed Hartley is the parent of a very poorly child. In Gemma’s small and oh-so-clinical cubicle, it’s all bleeping machines and nurses with tests and updates and his job is to listen, to watch the numbers on the machines, to press the doctors for information and above all to stay strong. His job is also to care for his wife who’s always been so much tougher on the outside than the inside. He runs errands for coffee and sandwiches and watches Rachel with all her hands-on care of their daughter, so tender and so patient that it’s almost unbearable to him.

  But back here in the house, collecting things for Rachel and checking the post, Ed has absolutely no idea how to be. The house is just the same but their life is completely dismantled. It’s as if there are two worlds and he has no idea how to transport himself between one and the other.

  He hears himself take in a long, slow breath and finds that he cannot bear the silence. You need to do something. The voice in his head sounds afraid. You need to get a grip and you need to phone Canada again. He glances at the landline and wonders if it’s safer to use his mobile this time. Will the police really check their phone records? He has no idea.

  All he wants is confirmation that everything in Canada’s OK. He’s already tried emailing her parents but the email bounced, the address no longer valid. His first frantic call to the unit – late that first night – was a complete waste of time. They couldn’t help him and told him to phone back in the morning. He couldn’t; he was back at the hospital.

  He watches more drips fall from his coat, pooling into a tiny puddle on the floor. If Rachel were here, she would appear with a cloth, worried about a watermark on the wood. He thinks of her earlier, before the scene with Alex, brushing Gemma’s hair – turning their daughter’s head from side to side ever so carefully.

  He realises that he should have said something to the police about Canada from the off but leaving it this long has somehow made it more and more impossible to find the right explanation.

  At last Ed takes his mobile from his trouser pocket and moves into the kitchen. A plate with toast crumbs is still on the side from his last dash home for toiletries and clothes. Rachel wants to stay at the hospital full time, using the little room provided for the family of seriously ill patients for rest. But the bed’s a single. They’ve tried taking turns but neither of them sleeps properly so Rachel says he should be the one to collect more things, check the post and grab some rest at home too.

  He didn’t want to leave, after what happened with Alex. But now? It’s a window to try Canada again. He scrolls through the contacts in his phone and then remembers he didn’t store the number. He googles the unit and dials, working out the time difference in his head. Five hours behind – the unit should be fully staffed.

  A female voice answers. ‘The Meridale Centre. Can I help you?’

  ‘Hello. I’m ringing, please, to inquire about one of your patients. Laura Berkley. I just want to know how she’s doing, please. Nothing urgent. A general call.’

  ‘And you are?’

  He pauses, his pulse quickening as he tries to decide whether to lie.

  ‘It’s just we can only share information with relatives. Are you a relative?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Can I take your name?’

  ‘Look, I simply want to know if Laura Berkley is there. And if she’s OK. Surely you can at least tell me that?’

  There’s a longer pause and some noise at the end of the line as if the woman is checking with a colleague or maybe a computer screen.

  ‘Excuse me. But are you a reporter?’ Her tone’s curt suddenly and Ed ends the call, aware of his pulse in his ear as he keeps the mobile pressed against it.

  Why did she say that? Why did she think the media might be
interested in Laura?

  He’s shaken and to steady himself he moves to sit on the high stool at the breakfast bar. Are you a reporter?

  Ed has no idea what on earth to do next. He thinks of his beautiful daughter in that hospital bed with the nasty frame shielding the stump which was once her leg.

  He thinks of the cathedral. The moment Gemma fell . . .

  And then he thinks of that other cathedral, all those years ago. The clock. The first sight of her.

  Is it possible it’s simply a coincidence? Two cathedrals? Is he deluding himself as he clings on tight, tight, tight to the hope that this could just be a terrible and horrible coincidence?

  CHAPTER 9

  THE MOTHER

  ‘That’s probably enough for today, darling. It’s late.’ I put the bookmark in place and close the novel, smoothing its cover with my palm. Ed found the book in Gemma’s room on his first trip home and I’ve been reading to her to try to restore a sense of calm after the horrible scene earlier.

  I still feel shaken and find myself gripping the novel too tightly. I stare at my white knuckles and loosen my grasp, turning the book over to examine the strange cover.

  It’s an odd book about a group of girls who find themselves alone on an island with the option to send only one three-word text message each day to the outside world. No incoming messages are allowed and no other connection to the internet. The cover of the novel has an oasis of palm trees in a sea ominously coloured red. It’s well written and certainly unusual but I’m a little surprised it’s to Gemma’s taste, to be frank, and am worried it’s turning too dark. Borderline horror, which is clearly not the right choice just now for her or me. I consider telling Gemma this but don’t want to sound preachy. I may just get Ed to look for a different book. I’ll message him in the morning before he returns.

  ‘I think I’ll just sit and doze for a bit,’ I tell her. ‘The nurses are changing shift. You just rest. I’m right here if you need me.’

  Each time I talk to her like this I still get this same flutter of disappointment when she doesn’t move. I try to be patient and pragmatic but the truth is I simply cannot help searching her face, her hands, her whole body actually, hoping that she will find some small way to signal that she can hear me. A flutter of her eyelids or a tiny movement of her fingers perhaps. But I scan and scan and there’s absolutely nothing.

  Always this complete stillness.

  At first in here, I held her hand almost constantly and told her that she could squeeze it ever so gently if she could hear me. I truly expected her to do this. It was a terrible shock to feel nothing. Just flesh on flesh. It was then I realised that in my head I had this absolute conviction that I was going to get my ‘moment’. Any minute. Any hour. I had conjured this ridiculous movie version of our situation; only now I’m slowly starting to dread that here in the real world there’s to be no Hollywood moment. I was simply creating too much pressure for both of us. Disappointment for me and, worse, possibly continual frustration for her. And so I stopped asking her to squeeze my hand. Now I just tell her that she’s not to worry about anything; I say that I know in my heart that she can hear me but it doesn’t matter if she can’t confirm this to me just yet. I don’t mind. She’s not to feel any pressure.

  Still, I find it hard to take my eyes off her in case I miss the first movement. The first sign.

  There’s a change suddenly through the glass on to the main ward – a dimming of the lights, signalling the night shift proper. The new nurses on duty have already been in to check on Gemma, logging all her readings on the little clipboard at the end of her bed. They know my routine.

  I tell Ed that at night, I’ll sleep in the little room they’ve provided for us on the floor below but this isn’t true. I only nap in there in the day when he’s here to watch her in my place. When I send him home to rest, I can’t bear to leave our little cubicle in case something changes so I just sleep in this chair. The nurses don’t seem to mind.

  I find I do a lot of thinking in this late-evening phase – when the lights first dim. I feel too awake to try to settle or doze and instead tend to just stare at different objects, one after another with my mind wandering through the silence. Through the years. In these shadows and in this stillness, I think a lot about the last time we were in hospital with Gemma, when she was sick with asthma as a toddler. It was terribly frightening but in a very different way. I slept in a chair alongside her that time too but it was not the same at all on the children’s wards. All the parents stayed over – some on camp beds set up in the playroom and others covered in blankets in tall-backed chairs. There was a kitchen where we could make hot drinks and I had long conversations with the other mothers in the early hours – each of us fighting different battles with different illnesses but all in the same horrible boat together, wearing the same dark circles under our eyes. A sad but comforting camaraderie in that kitchen.

  Here, there’s no camaraderie. Only this sense of shock that what’s happened has separated my whole family from the rest of the world.

  There are three of these single cubicles with windows looking out on to the wider ward, which has three additional open-plan beds. Patients seem to come and go and most have visitors only part of the day and evening. The majority seem to come in after road accidents and the like, spending a few hours here after surgery before transfer to the general wards.

  Everyone knows that Gemma was shot. I see it in their eyes as they glance towards our cubicle. The shock. The pity. I watch them take in our police guard and then keep themselves to themselves.

  Like I say, no camaraderie here and probably best that way. Safest.

  I find that I’m staring now at the controller for the bed – a grey plastic brick with little arrows to move the mattress up and down. My eyes blur, so I blink and move my gaze up to the window where I can just see our police guard has taken a seat right alongside the door to our cubicle. Good. I like it when he sits where I can see him, especially after the commotion earlier.

  I scratch my nose. Hospitals have such a distinct smell, don’t they? When Gemma was born, I had to spend five days on the ward after an emergency Caesarean. Initially I couldn’t bear it – that distinct mixture of antiseptics and polish and hospital food. Now? I am already used to it again. My new norm. I can’t imagine being at home. The scent of home.

  I stare at Gemma and wonder if she can smell as well as hear? For a moment, I consider asking her if she smelled the perfume I sprayed, but change my mind. I need to let her rest.

  You know the thing that really upsets me now? Ed’s not at all sure that Gemma can hear us; he’s said as much several times. I don’t challenge him because I don’t want an argument, but I can’t bear to think that he may be right. To imagine her in another place entirely out of reach. All quiet and lost. No. I reach out to smooth the corner of the blanket on her bed.

  Gemma can hear me.

  I am watching her breathe – in, out, in, out – when the police guard stands. I can make out that he’s talking to someone and am anxious but then there’s a knock at the door and I realise he would not allow this unless it was safe. I wonder if Ed’s returned for some reason but when I move to open the door, it’s DI Sanders. I feel my chin pull back towards my neck with the surprise of this. We were expecting to speak to her together tomorrow.

  I’m frowning. Good news? Bad news?

  ‘Please don’t be alarmed, Mrs Hartley. I’m sorry to call in so late but I was just passing the hospital on my way home and thought I’d check on you. After the upset earlier. How are you doing?’

  ‘Oh right. I see. Still very shaken but OK. I’m sorry – but I thought we were going to go over it all properly tomorrow. Has something happened?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing’s happened. But we’ve interviewed Alex now and I wanted to bring you up to date.’

  I feel for my phone. ‘Should I ring my husband? Ed’s desperate to know what’s going on. We both are—’

  ‘No, no. Please d
on’t disturb him. I’ll come back again tomorrow and talk to you both together then.’

  ‘Right. Sorry. Can we talk outside, please?’ I move through the door to the pair of chairs placed just outside our cubicle. I take one. The inspector sits alongside. I lower my voice and hope that with everyone sleeping, we won’t be overheard. The nurses are in their corner office.

  ‘So – was it him? The shooting? Was it Alex?’ Even as I ask the question, it sounds surreal. I picture Alex at our breakfast table, laughing on one of his weekend visits. I just can’t see it. Alex with a gun? Alex hurting Gemma?

  DI Sanders lets out a breath before speaking. ‘We’re still making inquiries. Alex is in custody. We’ve been unable to track his exact movements across all the photos and footage. It’s early days. I’m not going to lie to you. At this stage, he is a suspect. But we have no evidence yet.’

  ‘Don’t you test his clothing or something? For residue. I’ve seen that on the television—’

  ‘We’re doing everything we can. Everything’s in hand. But—’ She looks down at her lap and back up at me. ‘With everyone fleeing the scene, it’s been more difficult for forensics. People have washed their clothing, for instance.’

  ‘Right.’ All sorts of thoughts are swirling around in my head. ‘So the aggro earlier? What’s he saying about that? I really thought something terrible was going to happen again.’

  ‘We’ve charged him with breach of the peace and criminal damage. As I say, he’ll stay in custody for now while we make more inquiries. You’re safe here. He’s calmed down and he’s claiming to be very sorry for the scene here.’

  ‘You’re not expecting me to feel sorry for him?’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. But we have no hard evidence at this stage to suggest he was in any way responsible for the shooting.’

  ‘But he’s a suspect?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’