by Paula Daly
The door opened and care assistant Jackie Wagstaff, who had been at Applemead for a couple of years now, welcomed Verity in her usual manner. ‘Afternoon, you. Come to see Mum? She’s outside, being read to. Do I need to take you through or can you find her yourself?’
Verity told her she could find her on her own and wouldn’t be staying long.
‘How is she?’ Verity asked.
‘Same as. Same as. Shaking’s worse than ever. We gave up trying to get her into her trousers this morning. She’s in that dress you like. The one with the stripes. Madeleine Kramer’s with her. Reading some historical nonsense. I told her your mum prefers thrillers, but that woman always acts like she can’t hear a word I say.’
Verity’s mum did like historical fiction. It was Jackie Wagstaff who preferred thrillers.
Jackie walked off in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Verity to her own devices. Verity signed in, printing her name in the leather-bound book next to the bowl of boiled sweets that the lady with early-onset dementia liked to offer to visitors. Then she made her way to the back of the building, nodding and smiling at the residents, who, for reasons Verity didn’t fully understand, were always exceptionally pleased to see a young person about the place. They practically keeled over from pleasure if someone brought in a baby. Or a dog.
Outside, Verity said, ‘Good afternoon,’ to two residents, one of whom was accusing the other of wearing her cardigan, before spotting her mother’s wheelchair, partially hidden by the rhododendron. She approached slowly. Madeleine Kramer had caught sight of her but continued to read in her melodious voice, and Verity could see that her mother had her eyes closed and was enjoying it. Verity could not make out the title of the book but she could see a sliver of white, white skin and some tightly curled red hair. So Verity assumed they were back with the Virgin Queen again.
Madeleine was one of the regular volunteers. Her mother’s favourite. She was tall and elegant with bobbed silver hair and always wore a vivid shade of plum on her lips. Verity thought she was quite beautiful; she looked like Helen Mirren. As well as Applemead, she helped out at the Save the Children charity shop, delivered meals on wheels, listened to primary-school children read, walked dogs at the animal shelter and ran elderly folk to hospital appointments. ‘Hey,’ Verity said softly, and Madeleine paused in her reading. Her mother opened her eyelids, a smile ready in her eyes upon hearing her daughter’s voice. Her mouth didn’t smile too well any more, such was the cruelty of MS, and she could form a few words only after a struggle.
Madeleine closed the book and touched Jennifer’s clasped, quaking hands. ‘I’ll come again tomorrow,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll continue then.’
‘I’m only staying a few minutes,’ said Verity. Turning to her mum, she said, ‘I’ve left Brontë over at the rec alone. I just wanted to see you. I can’t stay.’ Then she turned to Madeleine, who was standing, smoothing her skirt, placing the book inside her straw bag, hurriedly, as if she suddenly had somewhere she needed to be. ‘Perhaps you could come back in a little while?’ Verity said. ‘Ten minutes?’
Madeleine shook her head. ‘I was almost finished. I can’t stay myself today either. And we’ve read this one before, haven’t we, Jennifer?’
Jennifer couldn’t respond, just quaked hard in her chair, her knees lifting with what Verity knew was excitement at seeing her daughter. She would have to strap them down in a moment.
Madeleine Kramer leaned over and planted a kiss on the top of Jennifer’s head. ‘See you soon, dear,’ she said.
When she was out of sight, Verity reached over and braced her mother’s legs with the Velcro strap, whispering into her ear, ‘Got something for you. Come on.’ She released the brake and tipped the wheelchair back a little on its rear wheels so she could spin it on the spot. Then, pushing her mother to the bottom of the garden, she headed towards their secret place.
—
Verity stole the joints from Ewan.
Every couple of weeks, when she knew he was out she would sneak up to his flat above the garage, using the key her father kept in the front of the cutlery drawer – along with the fuses, pen lids, old batteries, rubber washers and paperclips. Ewan liked to have his weed ready-rolled. Verity had turned up once when he was really bombed and Ewan had taken a joint from his secret stash, warning Verity not to tell anyone where he hid it. He clearly didn’t remember this – damaged short-term memory, and so forth – because he didn’t change his hiding place and Verity was able to help herself whenever she needed to.
Ewan had modified the three DVD cases holding the Godfather trilogy, and each one housed around thirty joints, packed together neatly, like in an old-fashioned cigarette case. Verity would remove one from each case and shuffle the rest around so there were no gaps left. She didn’t take more than three or four joints – any more, and he would have noticed. But occasionally, when she’d stockpiled, she would sell them back to Ewan and Dale. She said she got them from a kid at school, and Ewan would pay her less than they were worth – though she could tell he felt pretty guilty about this afterwards.
Verity poked her head out from behind the large, ornamental barrel positioned towards the back of the gardens to check no one was heading their way, and asked her mother if she was ready. Jennifer closed her eyes once in response. Then, in one swift movement, because she had to be quick, Verity held the joint inside her mother’s lips, keeping it steady as her mother trembled, and lit the other end, instructing her mother to ‘Inhale now.’
Before Reid’s had discovered drugs inside her locker and decided that weekly urine tests were the way forward, Verity would light the joint herself, because it was easier. She never really inhaled much, because she didn’t care for the feeling of being stoned and the stuff played havoc with her lungs when she ran. But she couldn’t take the risk now and so getting the thing to light could be tricky, sometimes taking three or four attempts.
Today, her mother managed it the first time. Verity watched as she took a shaky inhalation, her eyes closing and the corners of her mouth lifting just a little as the drug hit her brain.
Verity withdrew the joint for a moment while her mother exhaled, before replacing it between her lips again.
Typically, it took around ninety seconds for her mother’s tremors to subside, and Verity thought it was one of the most beautiful things she was likely to see in her lifetime.
Three more long drags and her mother’s eyes, now a little bloodshot, would dance into life and she would be able to form words. Not many – she was pretty stoned, after all – but some.
‘You’re a good girl,’ her mother whispered.
‘Aren’t I just?’ said Verity, smoothing down her mother’s hair. Her mother tended to sleep fixed in one position, as her limbs locked totally during the night. In the morning, her hair would stick right up on one side, even after a thorough wetting and combing (which was often accompanied by a lot of cursing) by Jackie Wagstaff.
‘You know I love you,’ her mother said.
‘I know because you tell me. How are you feeling today?’
‘Life is good,’ her mother said, and she smiled.
One of the unexpected symptoms of her mother’s MS was the passivity that had developed alongside the illness. After she was first diagnosed, and in the early stages, her mother had railed against it, fought with everything she had to impede the physical decline. And then, one day, she just stopped. Verity didn’t think it was a conscious thing. She hadn’t given up. It was as if her body had taken over and decided it knew what was best. When Verity questioned her father about this, he told her that it happened. MS patients became passive, as if they accepted their fate – perhaps it was nature’s way of helping them manage the disease long-term.
Verity replaced the joint. ‘Take another,’ she instructed, and her mother inhaled, blinking a couple of times.
‘It’s strong,’ she said.
‘I thought it might be,’ replied Verity. ‘It’s been stinking out my cup
board. I had to put it inside two of Karen’s Tupperware containers.’
Her mother took a sideways glance. ‘How is the lovely Karen?’
‘Making Brontë’s life hell. The usual.’
‘And your life?’
‘She could be worse.’
When her mother was first institutionalized, as she liked to call it, she would ask about Verity’s life with her dad and Karen, following it with ‘It kills me that you have to live with that woman.’ Verity felt guilty about living with them, and her mother felt guilty about not being able to look after her daughter any more. Of course, Verity, being only eleven, couldn’t articulate any of this to her mother for some time, and it was only when she was mean to a child in school and her father was called in, after the child’s parents had accused her of emotional bullying, that her dad had taken the trouble to ask, ‘What the hell is going on with you, Verity?’
‘You all done?’ Verity asked, and her mother nodded.
Verity spat on her fingers and extinguished the joint before hurling the evidence high over the fence at the bottom of the garden.
There must be quite the collection on the other side. Verity wondered who might live there. She’d heard once of a stoner who chucked dimps out of his attic window, only for his father (a keen horticulturist) to discover a new species of herb growing right outside his back door. Verity supposed this was probably an urban myth, but then, those Russian scientists did find a fir tree growing inside a man’s lung a few years back. So it might be true.
As Verity turned around she saw that her mother had angled her face towards the sun and was wearing an expression of pure contentment. When Jennifer was first diagnosed, sunbathing was not recommended for MS sufferers, and this had come as a terrible blow to her mother, who positively withered in the Lake District’s appalling winter weather. For the first few years she avoided it, doing as the leaflets said, doing anything she could to prevent the forward march of the disease. Now, if there was even a hint of sunshine, Verity would find her mother outside. Jennifer had always had her doubts about the sun thing anyway. Vitamin D had been proven over and over to boost the immune response and, since MS was basically a total fuck-up of the immune system, sunshine was now considered a ‘good thing’. Science had eventually caught up with what her mother had known all along.
‘Wheel you back?’ Verity asked, and her mother shook her head.
‘I’m staying out here.’
‘Where’s the electric chair, anyway?’
‘Charging,’ her mother said.
‘If I leave you all the way down here, they might not find you.’
Her mother didn’t bother to open her eyes. ‘They’ll find me,’ she replied. ‘It’s not as if I can get very far.’
‘Your bladder okay?’ Verity asked.
‘Near empty,’ her mother said.
So Verity kissed her mother goodbye, leaving her there in the sun, face tilted towards the sky, and went back across the road to the rec to collect Brontë.
8
KAREN CHECKED HER watch.
How long had they been gone? It was definitely over an hour. Probably closer to ninety minutes, in fact.
What had she been thinking, allowing Verity to take off with her child like that? On finding the note, she should have marched down the street and insisted they return at once.
This was all Noel’s doing. Before he’d left for wherever it was he was going that morning, he’d told Karen she needed to show Verity that she still had some confidence in her.
Naturally, Karen had gaped at him. Confidence? Had he completely lost his mind?
‘You need to meet her halfway, Karen,’ he’d said, reasonably, as if what Verity had done could be chalked up as normal adolescent behaviour. As if Karen should be rolling her eyes, saying, Bloody hell, teenagers, eh?
‘You need to do your bit to rebuild the trust between the two of you,’ Noel said.
And Karen had replied, ‘Do I?’ while Noel did what he always did when she wasn’t playing ball: sighed, pulled his fingers through his hair, gave her the kind of strained, pleading look which, frankly, made her want to throw a tantrum. A great big, spectacular tantrum – as a toddler might do in the confectionery aisle of the supermarket.
When had she last thrown a tantrum? Karen wondered. Whenever it was, it had been far too long ago.
Karen didn’t believe in keeping a lid on things, picking your battles, and all that other claptrap parents were advised to do. When did people stop being parents, exactly? Karen knew when – when they were scared to death their kids wouldn’t love them any more if they scolded them, that’s when. When they’d fallen out of love with their spouses and so the thought of conflict with their child, the thought of saying a simple ‘no’, panicked them beyond measure. For Christ’s sake, people didn’t even scold their dogs any more.
Karen harboured no such fears. She didn’t mind playing bad cop. Didn’t mind being the one to implement the rules. Children needed rules. Of course they did. They needed boundaries and routine. They needed to know that the person in charge was exactly that. In charge. That’s where their sense of security came from. Children certainly didn’t need a parent as a friend. Good God, no. Karen was Brontë’s mother. She did not need to be her friend. And, anyway, Karen already had enough friends. Five, to be exact – and she was doing her utmost to get rid of one of those.
She checked her watch again. Should she be worried? Yes, she should be. Because Brontë was with Verity. How could she not be worried?
She dialled Verity’s mobile. Straight to voicemail.
‘Back in an hour,’ the note said, and Karen had fought the urge to go to the rec. And she hadn’t. She’d heard Noel’s voice in her head, prattling on about a new start and rebuilding relationships, and had made herself a cup of redbush tea and worked at steadying her nerves. Now, she was regretting it.
She would play hell with Verity when they returned. Her anger was building steadily as the minutes passed, and she was almost looking forward to them coming through the door so she could unleash it.
Suppressing emotion was bad for you. Everyone knew that. If it didn’t come out one way, it would come out another – as illness, or disease. Karen suspected (though she never actually aired this view to anyone) that this was what had happened to Noel’s ex-wife. That woman had been so full of hate when Noel left her. Ding-dong – it didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on.
‘See you on the way down,’ Jennifer had said to Karen the day Noel left her, and Karen had never forgotten it. What a thing to say. Jealousy. That’s what that was. And look where it had got her. In a wheelchair, that’s where.
Also worth mentioning was the fact that Karen’s uncle had suffered from MS for thirty years now, and he seemed to manage his illness perfectly well. He did it with a combination of clean living and keeping active. He even played the occasional game of tennis.
Or did he have ME?
She could never remember. She readjusted the painting the cleaning woman left perpetually crooked. She did this to prove to Karen that she’d cleaned the thing. Rosa, a fifty-something Filipina, had a number of these quirks, which irritated Karen. But since good cleaners were thin on the ground, she ignored it. She shared Rosa with another family – the Haworths. Well, perhaps ‘share’ was the wrong word. She borrowed Rosa for four hours, two days a week, and paid Jeanette Haworth direct. There was probably something illegal about this arrangement – subletting your Filipina was almost certainly improper – but after losing cleaner upon cleaner Karen was prepared to go along with almost anything. Noel didn’t know the intricacies of the arrangement. He never asked, so she never told him.
Karen straightened the magazines on the ottoman. She got on her hands and knees, retrieving a balled-up pair of socks which belonged to Noel from beneath the couch. She heard the back door fly open. It was done with such energy, such force, that the handle banged hard against the wall. Karen blew out her breath in annoyance. Ther
e would be a mark there now, perhaps even a hole in the plaster. Karen lifted her eyes to the ceiling – Give me strength – and walked through to the kitchen, ready to blow.
What greeted her there made her stop dead in her tracks.
Verity: hair wild, eyes wild, breathing hard and ragged. Verity, who ran every day. Verity, who ran like a gazelle and barely seemed out of breath, ever, because she was capable of running a half-marathon rather fast.
Verity’s face was tear-streaked and she had blood seeping down her arm from a scratch that ran the full length of her right bicep. Her vest was mud-smeared, her knees grazed and she was covered in grass stains.
For perhaps the first time in Karen’s life the words would not come. She stared at Verity and could feel the strength leaving her legs.
She was going down.
Karen knew it but was powerless to stop it from happening. Fleetingly, the image of the bouncy castle they’d hired for Brontë’s birthday popped into her head; the thing collapsing in on itself at the end of the day as its air supply was shut off.
Verity said, ‘Brontë’s gone.’
And Karen was just about able to whisper, ‘Gone?’
‘Gone,’ said Verity.
9
DS JOANNE ASPINALL stared at the computer screen in front of her. The drug dealer Sonny O’Riordan was giving her a headache, and she was starting to think that her detective skills were on the blink.
She wondered if it was possible that the neural pathways within her brain, pathways that had always been so good at forming connections – connections where there had been none – had suddenly dried up.