by Paul Burston
‘Hello, Mother,’ I said. The sound of the word stirred something deep in my stomach as she turned to face me.
‘Evie,’ she replied. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’
She was even drunker than I thought, her eyes glassy and unfocussed. As she turned, she stumbled slightly, unsure of her footing but too inebriated to sense the danger she was in. The heels of her shoes were inches from the top step. Behind her, the light on the empty stairwell flickered ominously.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to give your mother a hug?’
My skin prickled in anticipation of her touch. Holding me. Hurting me.
Suddenly I was a child again, performing the part of the loving daughter for the benefit of visitors.
I didn’t say anything. I simply went to her and folded my arms around her skinny frame. I swear there was nothing of her. She was all skin and bone. I could smell the booze on her now. And there was something else, too – the smell of decay. Whatever shred of pity I may have felt turned to disgust. I gripped her firmly by the shoulders, looked her straight in the face and pushed. A moment in my arms and she was gone.
I’d love to say that I saw the panic in her eyes or smelt the fear coming off her as she plummeted to her demise. I wish there’d been a blood-curdling scream. But there was none of that – none of the horror-film clichés. Even in death she was a dreadful disappointment. A gasp of surprise escaped her as she fell. Hands that used to enjoy inflicting pain reached out helplessly, grasping at air. Seconds later, there was a dull thud as her body landed on the stairwell below. I didn’t need to inspect my handiwork to know she was dead. There’s no way a woman in her condition could have survived a fall like that. I pictured her head cracking open like an egg. I imagined I could hear every bone in her brittle body break, and it was music to my ears.
There’s a scene in Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the protagonist is so overcome by the sickly-sweet sense of alienation, he is unable to recognise his own hands. I had no such problem. The hands that killed my mother were the same hands that fought her off as a child. They were mine and I felt no disassociation from them whatsoever. If anything, I felt more attached to them than ever before.
An icy calm descended on me as I took the lift down to the ground level, left the shopping centre and made my way to Piccadilly Station, where I bought a return ticket for the first train to London. I needed to be with my dad. I needed an alibi.
A few days later, the police knocked on my father’s door and informed us that a woman matching my mother’s description and with a purse containing a credit card bearing her name had been found dead. My father turned white with shock. I did my best to comfort him, placing a reassuring arm around his shoulders as he heaved and wept. I’m sure our reactions were those of any normal family. I’d already disposed of the coat I wore that day at the Arndale Centre, tying it up in a black bin liner and dumping it in a skip half a mile away on the borders of East Dulwich and Peckham. It was pretty nondescript, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
I needn’t have worried. As far as the police were concerned, the day my mother died I was in London visiting my father. There were no witnesses or CCTV footage placing me at the scene. The camera on the stairwell wasn’t even working, so there was no record of her fall, no film clip to capture her final moments. Someone found her shattered body on the stairs and called the police.
Their questions to us were pretty perfunctory. When did we last see or hear from her? Were we aware of her history of drug and alcohol abuse? Did we know of her last known address? Had she tried to contact me when she was in Manchester?
I pleaded ignorance on all counts but the first, saying I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother in years. They seemed satisfied – and why wouldn’t they be? Twelve thousand people die in accidents every year in the UK. Traffic accidents account for around a quarter of these, but the number of fatalities from falls is even higher. Add to this the fact that there are almost nine thousand alcohol-related deaths per annum, and it’s easy to see why my mother’s demise failed to arouse much interest or suspicion. The coroner’s report showed high levels of alcohol in her bloodstream, and after a brief investigation the cause of death was recorded as accidental. She was drunk. She tripped, fell and died. End of story. For me, there couldn’t have been a more fitting ending.
My mother’s funeral was a quiet affair. There are no prizes for guessing who footed the bill. Savings my father could have spent on home improvements or a well-earned holiday were squandered by a woman who never showed him the slightest appreciation or even a modicum of respect. I attended as a show of support for my dad and to avoid any suspicion that I was somehow implicated in my mother’s untimely demise.
Though it bothered me that my dad was paying for her sendoff, the one consolation was that her will stipulated that she wished to be cremated. Not only was this cheaper than a burial, finally I had the satisfaction of knowing that her flesh was really burning, the way I’d fantasised about all those years ago. Sitting in the crematorium, I pictured her skin blackened and blistering, and had to bite the insides of my cheeks to stop myself from grinning. It isn’t the done thing to smile at someone’s funeral, however little kindness they may have shown you during their lifetime. And I was the grieving daughter, after all. A certain level of solemnity was expected. I couldn’t fake tears. I’m not one of those women who can turn on the waterworks at the drop of a hat or an unkind word. But I retained my composure and sat stoically, with my father sobbing gently beside me. Whether his tears were for her or me I never found out.
Something in me changed after my mother died. I stopped cutting myself. I no longer felt the need to manage my rage the way I’d been compelled to when she was alive. We all have our own coping mechanisms and this was mine. A small incision, a moment of pain, a little blood-letting and the pressure was off. But now there was the possibility of a new beginning, free from her and all the damage she caused. Watching my broken skin heal, I could almost convince myself that my body was regenerating, that I was somehow on the verge of being reborn. I would rise like a phoenix from my mother’s ashes and take on the world.
Remember how, in Now, Voyager, Charlotte Vale blossoms after she escapes her tyrannical mother? I love that film. Given my name, people often assume that my favourite Bette Davis film must be All About Eve. But Now, Voyager gets me every time, especially when the mother has a heart attack and dies, finally releasing poor Charlotte from her evil clutches. I thought that would be me. I didn’t expect Claude Rains to come and sweep me off my feet and onto a luxury cruise liner. I didn’t wish for the moon or the stars. But I expected a newfound sense of freedom, a feeling of liberation.
Instead the opposite was true. My world seemed to shrink. I lost my job on the magazine in Manchester. They said I failed my three-month probation, that I wasn’t really the kind of person they were looking for, that I lacked focus. Six weeks after my mother’s death, I started having nightmares – vivid dreams in which her blackened, blistered corpse kept rising from the dead and crawling under the bed covers to torment and torture me. I’d smell her burning flesh and wake up choking, with blood on the sheets and wounds on my wrists where I’d scratched the skin raw during the night.
It was my father who suggested that I move back home, ‘so we can keep an eye on each other’. I thought he was humouring me at first, until it became apparent that he needed my help as much as I needed his. He wasn’t the man he used to be. I don’t know when the decline had set it, but he wasn’t looking after himself properly. He lived on takeaways and microwaved ready meals and frequently fell asleep in front of the TV. I’d hear it burbling away late at night and either wake him gently and show him to his bedroom or simply cover him with a blanket and leave him to sleep on the sofa. I made it my mission to get some decent food down him and would welcome him home from work with healthy stir fries, fresh fish and plenty of vegetables and salad.
I also gave the entire house a much-needed spri
ng clean – dusting, vacuuming, shampooing the carpets, cleaning the oven, scouring the bath and removing years of grime from the kitchen tiles and work surfaces. Some days I’d start straight after breakfast, forget to stop for lunch and still be hard at it when Dad returned home from work. He’d say I was overdoing it and urge me to slow down a bit. But if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well – and the harder I worked, the sooner we’d both benefit. Sorting out the room Dad once shared with my mother, I was horrified to find some of her personal possessions still tucked away at the back of one of the bedside drawers. Nothing of any value, of course – just a balled-up pair of tights and a necklace he once gave her, which she never wore and obviously saw no point in selling. I bagged them up and put them where they belonged – out with the rest of the rubbish.
My own room was exactly as I’d left it. The mattress still had the indent of my teenage self, but a new mattress topper made all the difference. My books were still lined up neatly on the shelves – Penguin classics rubbing shoulders with Michel Foucault and Jean Genet, old Stephen King novels next to my well-thumbed copy of Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. My posters still hung on the walls – Suede, Placebo, The Libertines, Radiohead, an old image of Madonna channelling Marlon Brando in a biker’s cap during her gender-fucking ‘Justify My Love’ phase. Madonna is everything my mother’s generation of feminists hated about female empowerment. It didn’t take me long to justify my love for her.
The desk where I’d once studied for my exams still stood next to the window. But my studying days were over. I had no need for my books on film theory, cultural studies, poststructuralism and all that queer theory bollocks. But I still had my computer. I still had my novel. I know a lot of people say they have a novel in them, and for most it’s just a way of making themselves sound more interesting. But mine was no longer simply in me – it was down on paper. I’d completed the first draft and was busy working on the second. I was buzzing with energy and ideas. I may have been out of work, but I still had plenty of reasons to get up in the morning.
Remember when people used to sneer about bloggers? Some still do, of course. But as the traditional media has shrunk and the opportunities for professional book reviewers have become fewer and far between, publishers have embraced the blogging community like never before. By the time I started my blog, most of my former colleagues on the magazine in Manchester had been made redundant, their jobs lost to a brave new world of automated systems and user-generated content. One day you’re a journalist, the next you’re replaced by a ‘content provider’. How fucking insulting is that?
I blogged daily, mostly about books but sometimes about music or whatever else took my fancy. Some mornings a particularly smug feminist column in the Guardian would set me off, and since they’d blocked me from commenting on their website, I’d respond by writing a column of my own, demolishing their argument paragraph by paragraph and posting it on my blog. I’d tag the offending columnist when I shared my blog on social media. My reputation soon spread.
I increased my social-media presence mainly as a means of promoting my writing. I never really took to Facebook. It’s far too cliquey for my tastes. But I found a natural home on Twitter, where pithy comments are rewarded and shared, and you can create your very own Twitter storm if you know how to play the game correctly. I was never looking for anything so petty as approval. I wanted to provoke thought and spark debate. My computer became a window into a world far wider than any I’d inhabited before, filled with unlimited opportunities for dialogue and the exchange of ideas. I made more friends on Twitter than I ever made in what some people refer to as ‘real life’, as if social interaction is only ever ‘real’ if it’s experienced face to face.
I laugh when I think of how my therapist suggested that moving in with my dad was some kind of step backwards. On the contrary, it was a step forward. It gave me opportunities I never thought possible. Writing my blog gave me daily discipline. It gave me a voice, unmediated by the personal prejudices of commissioning editors or the tyranny of political correctness. It gave me the freedom to write, which is the one thing every writer truly needs.
And ultimately, of course, it gave me you.
21
‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot I can do,’ Detective Inspector Sue Grant says. ‘There’s no proof that what Ms Stokes posted on Twitter is directed at you. She hasn’t named you or tagged you, so legally speaking it can’t really be described as harassment. Unless she’s in breach of her restraining order, she hasn’t broken any laws.’
‘I appreciate that,’ Tom says. ‘But statistically speaking, there’s a strong possibility that she will, isn’t there? Plenty of people do.’
‘There’s always that possibility, yes. But we can’t go around arresting people for crimes they might commit at some point in the future. That’s not how the law works.’
More’s the pity, Tom thinks. Judging by the tone of the detective’s voice, he strongly suspects that she feels the same way – though of course she’s hardly going to say so. ‘But what about the woman in Wales?’ he asks. ‘Surely that shows that she’s still harassing people?’
‘That’s for the local police to decide. And from what you’ve told me there’s some doubt about the reliability of the witness.’
Tom falters. He’s not sure what he was expecting, but he’d hoped for better than this. He hardly slept a wink last night, and it’s taken him the best part of the morning to get Sue Grant on the phone. Now that he has, he thinks he detects a note of irritation in her voice.
‘Is there anything else, Mr Hunter?’ she asks briskly, confirming his suspicions. ‘Only, I am rather busy.’
‘I think I saw her,’ Tom blurts.
‘By “her” I take it you mean Ms Stokes? And was this in Hastings?’
‘It was in London, before I left. I was out for a run.’
‘And you say you think you saw her?’
‘I was pretty certain at first,’ Tom says, knowing how unconvincing this sounds. ‘But when I looked again, she’d gone.’
‘So it’s possible that you were mistaken?’
Grudgingly, he agrees. ‘It’s possible, yes.’
The detective’s voice is muffled, as if she’s placing her hand over the receiver. Tom hears her call out to someone, telling them she won’t be long. Then she’s back. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hunter. It’s not uncommon for people who’ve been harassed to continue to experience a sense of being followed. The after-effects of a crime can last for quite some time.’
‘So I keep hearing.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Nothing. Could you at least speak to the private investigator?’
‘I’ll have a word with my colleagues at South Wales Police,’ Sue Grant says. ‘And if you are approached by Ms Stokes, or she tries to contact you in any way, please don’t hesitate to call me. Now, I’m sorry but I really have to go.’
Tom knows there’s no point in arguing. He can tell when he’s being palmed off, but without sufficient evidence he has no further claim on the detective’s time. He thanks her and ends the call.
Standing at the window, he gazes down at the seafront. The tide is out and the morning sun is high in the sky. A small group of men and women in steam-punk outfits are walking in the general direction of the pier. Tom watches them as they pass – the men in silk waistcoats, tall hats and motorcycle goggles resembling giant fly’s eyes, the women in leather corsets and lace petticoats over skinny jeans, or long ruffled skirts with fishnets or striped leggings. As they disappear from his line of vision, his eyes are drawn to a young lad crouched on the concrete groyne directly opposite his building, taking pebbles from a carrier bag he obviously filled earlier and arranging them to spell out the words, ‘I love you, Karen’.
Tom wonders if Karen feels the same way and whether she’s staying in the apartment next door and will see this declaration of affection when she comes to the window. Maybe she and the lad are lovers and have recently had a tif
f. Perhaps her parents disapprove. Even from this distance, Tom can see that the lad is shabbily dressed. A lock of thick black hair hangs low on his forehead, glistening in the sunlight. Tom’s imagination runs riot, conjuring up romantic images of Juliet and her Romeo, of Cathy and her Heathcliff.
Then another interpretation presents itself. What if Karen barely knows this lad? What if he’s taken a shine to her and won’t leave her alone, following her back to the apartment she and her parents have rented for the week and insisting on making his presence felt? What if this is a clear case of harassment? Tom pictures Karen holed up in the apartment next door, peering nervously through a gap in the curtains, her parents hovering protectively behind her, afraid of being seen or leaving the building lest she’s accosted by some lovestruck loser she only spoke to out of politeness a few days ago but who hasn’t left her alone since. He imagines her fractured state of mind, the sense of self slowly unravelling, constantly looking over her shoulder, anxiety levels spiking. He hears her father threatening to call the police, her mother pleading with him not to overreact and make matters worse. What if the boy is mentally unstable? What if this tips him over the edge?
That’s quite some story, Tom thinks, and one which probably says far more about his current state of mind than someone he hasn’t even met.
He tears himself away from the window and strides purposefully into the kitchen, where he fills a glass with Diet Coke. Returning to the living room, he sits down and opens his laptop. One last push and the book will be complete. Time to channel his wild imaginings into something creative.
There are days in every writer’s life when the words flow and everything falls into place. Today is not one of those days. Try as he might, Tom can’t get the thought of Evie Stokes out of his mind.
He wonders what she’s doing now and whether it’s worth checking his phone to see if she’s posted anything else on Twitter. He wonders if Sue Grant is right and he’s experiencing some kind of aftershock where he imagines he’s being followed or that Evie is waiting for him around every corner. That day at the Southbank he was so sure he saw her. But when he looked again she’d vanished into thin air. Either she possesses supernatural powers, or he’s in danger of losing his grip – not just on his writing but on his sanity.