Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘Ah, you don’t trouble me, Mrs H. Anything for you. I’ll be along in a jiffy.’

  Margaret sat watching ice crystals form on the windscreen. She had been unable to sleep last night, wondering why Maxwell Brown had the telephone number for her school in his pocket. She wondered if he was a parent of a child in the school, or if he was on the supply teacher list. She wondered if she had met him before.

  Harry arrived within ten minutes. He had a bad leg and his gait favoured one side. Margaret got out of the car to meet him.

  ‘I’m so sorry to call you out on a night like this,’ she said, a hand on his upper arm.

  ‘Anything for you, Mrs H. To tell the truth if anyone else’d asked I’d’ve told them to get to…’ he nodded instead of swearing, ‘but seeing as it’s you.’

  Margaret waited until Harry went inside and switched off the alarm. The lights came on in the lobby and then he held the door open for her.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ said Margaret.

  ‘You take all the time you like. I’m here if you need me.’

  Margaret took the stairs to her office and switched on her computer before she shrugged off her coat. She stared at the photograph of Ben and the children on her desk. Ben was at home, wrapping more Christmas presents. Stop shutting me out, he had said to her last night. Margaret had not known what to say to him. She was not aware of shutting him out. She felt as if she were falling, into herself, into her own past, as if down a well, and Ben was simply becoming further and further away from where she was. He thought that he was losing her, but that was only because she felt lost.

  Margaret opened up the database and searched for pupils named Brown. Out of eight hundred and ninety-five pupils there were thirty-two with the surname Brown. As quickly as she could, Margaret checked each record for a parent called Maxwell, but there were no matches. Finally, she checked the supply list, but there were no male teachers with Brown as a surname. Considering, Margaret also checked pending applicants to the school and the list of visiting specialists, such as drama teachers and speakers. She could find no mention of Maxwell Brown.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said, out loud, then turned off her computer as she heard Harry’s footsteps at the bottom of the staircase, jangling his keys.

  When Margaret returned to Loughton, she stayed sitting in the car outside her house. She was dispirited that she had not found any matches for Maxwell on the school computer.

  The darkness of the car was a relief. She was glad to be alone. She didn’t want to go inside yet. It was such an effort to pretend that she wasn’t falling apart. If only she could find some answers, she felt she would begin to recover. What she had found in the box suggested that she had been abducted and molested as a child. She had been sexually assaulted, and that was the reason her parents had encouraged her to forget.

  The memories that had been unearthed were dreamlike and defined by fear. She remembered running, out of breath, in a forest of dark trees. She remembered her mother shaking her, to make her speak. She remembered feeling empty and wordless and, beyond that, a potent, unfathomable ache inside her that no one could assuage. She remembered crying in bed once the light had gone out, making sure that no one heard her.

  Tears wet her face.

  Ben knocked on the side window and Margaret was startled. She wiped two hands over her face. He opened the door and got into the front seat.

  ‘Well? How’d you get on?’

  ‘It was good. I made it,’ said Margaret, trying not to sniff, putting her hands back on the steering wheel and staring straight ahead, as if she might drive off again.

  He didn’t reply and after a moment she turned to him. He was looking at her, his brow wrinkled and his right eyebrow raised. Through the living-room window she could see the Christmas tree lights.

  ‘Have you been crying?’ he said.

  She put a hand over her mouth.

  ‘C’m’ere.’

  He pulled her into him. The gear lever was sticking into her side and it hurt because he was pressing her so tightly. She cried hard in his arms, as she had after her mother died. She had met Ben and then lost her mother; grieved and fallen in love at the same time.

  ‘It’s OK. You’re all right. I’m here,’ he was whispering, smoothing her hair and kissing the top of her head.

  She broke away from him, gulping, trying to catch her breath. ‘The kids, we should… The kids…’

  He pulled her into him again. ‘They’re fine. It’s you I’m worried about.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said, into the wool of his sweater.

  ‘You’re so not.’

  When she caught her breath, they sat in silence for a few minutes. She knew she owed him an explanation. The smell of him relaxed her.

  ‘The crash,’ she started, haltingly, not sure what she was going to say, ‘it’s had a big effect on me, but not just… driving… or… dealing with school or… It’s made me remember things.’

  ‘What things?’ He reached across and took her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so grumpy…’

  ‘You have, but you know I love you even when you’re grumpy, so…’

  She tried to smile. ‘It’s just my head hurts with it all. I’m trying to work it all out. There’s memories and there’s this…’

  He turned to her. ‘What do you mean, remembering? About your mum? Is that why you wanted that box from your dad’s?’

  She and Ben had spoken often about her mother in the early days of their relationship. ‘I wish you could have met her,’ Margaret had said to him. ‘I feel like I know her,’ he had said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Margaret said, resting her head against the window. ‘Not just her – a lot of things. Things that happened when I was small.’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘Things you’ve not told me about?’

  ‘Things I don’t even know.’ She turned to him. ‘That’s the thing. And then there’s… you know I told you there was that man who saved me, who was very badly…’

  ‘Burned, yeah.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what it is, but he saved me and I keep going back to visit him. I found him, and… he’s in a coma and… I want to know who he is.’

  ‘He’s in a coma?’

  ‘Yeah. He had a head injury from the crash. He was hurt himself but he managed to save me. The hospital put him in a coma to try and stop the bleeding. His life’s in danger now… and no one visits him. I’ve been going and sitting with him. I don’t know why, but that’s what I’ve been doing. He saved my life and I don’t know who he is. Maybe I want to know why he saved me? Why I was worth saving.’

  Ben reached over and put a hand on her face and took hold of the back of her head. ‘Of course you’re worth saving. You are the most important thing in the world to me.’

  There were tears in his eyes. She put a hand on his thigh.

  ‘I drove to the school. I was checking the computers. The man… Maxwell is his name… he had the school’s phone number in his coat pocket. There could be a million reasons for it, but I wanted to check that he wasn’t a parent or a supply teacher or…’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘No. I can’t find him on any of the databases. I mean it’s a public number – there’s no reason why he wouldn’t have the phone number… It’s just that it was my school’s number and he saved me. I convinced myself that I must know him… that I had met him before, but now I don’t know.’

  ‘What do the doctors say? Is he going to make it?’

  She sniffed and shook her head.

  ‘He saved my life, when my car was going to… explode. It was dangerous. He didn’t just save me. He risked his life. He broke his hand punching through the car window. And now he’s in a coma and he…’ Margaret let her voice drop to a whisper, ‘might die.’

  Ben held her. Tears burned her eyes again and she pressed her face into his neck.

  ‘You’ll get through this,’ Ben said. ‘Just give yourself time.’

&
nbsp; Margaret nodded into his chest. He was right, but she still didn’t know what it was that she needed to get through.

  24

  Big George

  Friday 4 October, 1985

  They drove through South Yorkshire and Derbyshire before George stopped.

  They had left the hotel in York just after eight. Moll had eaten well: porridge and fruit, toast and eggs. George had enjoyed just watching her eat. With her lazy eye and her lips smeared with jam and fruit, she had seemed like a goblin. Now they had been on the road again for over two hours and she had fallen asleep. Her head lolled against the seatbelt, her small soft palms turned upwards, resting on her thighs.

  George rolled the window down an inch and smoked a cigarette. It was his first nicotine of the day and he enjoyed the hit, leaning back against the headrest. He turned on the radio, keeping the volume down low. The Beach Boys played and George tapped the beat on the steering wheel. It was Friday and the day felt new and free, the sky a sheer cloudless blue, the roads clear of traffic. It was easy to speed in such conditions, but George made sure that he kept under the speed limit. The Derbyshire hedgerows were full of berries and the fields with cylindrical bales of hay. Moll slept right through the Peak District – they drove past a majestic sweep of bare mountain on one side and fertile lowland on the other. George might have stopped here. The place felt good – felt as if it could be home – but he was set on Penzance. He wanted to be as far away from Glasgow as he could get before falling off the edge.

  He felt hopeful for the first time. He was almost halfway there already. Moll was getting used to him; they were almost friends. A few things worried him, such as the incident in Newcastle when she told the waitress she wasn’t a boy, but there had been few real concerns since then and they had attracted less attention than he had expected. He was keeping a low profile, but those people they had met seemed to accept them as father and son. He had expected to feel more hunted. He had stolen one hundred thousand pounds and got away with it and then, two days ago, he had taken his daughter from her school. He was glad that Moll was with him, but he still wondered what it would have been like had Kathleen come away with him too. He had dreamed of the three of them together again – the family he had always wanted. He was with his wee Moll now and that felt precious, but if Kathleen were with them it would have been perfect.

  The Beach Boys ended and the national news came on. The hills meant that reception was patchy and the station scratched into and out of frequency as George drove. He finished his cigarette and flicked it out of the window.

  A national manhunt is on for the abductor of seven-year-old Molly Henderson, who was taken from the northern town of Thurso in Scotland on 2 October. The man witnessed abducting Molly was tall with dark hair and blue eyes and was wearing a suit. He was driving a dark-coloured vehicle. Molly has long dark hair, often wears an eyepatch and was last seen wearing her school uniform.

  The report paused to play the tape of Kathleen begging for her daughter’s return. George winced as he listened to it again and reached for another cigarette.

  There have been no sightings of Molly since her disappearance and police are urging members of the public to come forward if they have any information.

  Despite his hopeful thoughts earlier, the report unnerved George. He exhaled, accidentally letting his foot rest more heavily on the accelerator. He thought about the people they had encountered. There had been the couple by the park who had seen him and Moll fighting before they left Thurso, and then the schoolgirls who had taunted Moll before she rode in his car, but George felt that none of these witnesses would have been able to identify him.

  Nevertheless, he was uneasy. He felt exposed and wondered if he and the bairn would do better to hide away somewhere for a few days. The hotel had worked in York but it was too dangerous to keep going out together in public. Moll needed a good rest and a chance to play and George had no idea what state the Penzance cottage would be in when they got there.

  There was a girl he knew from Glasgow. They had been close for a while and then she had moved to England. She lived in Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent and had asked George to visit many times. She had told him she loved him, and he knew that he could trust her. George took a deep breath and held it. They were only one hour from Stoke.

  He turned the dial on the radio to find some music, then tried to put the worries from his mind as he thought about whether or not to drop in on Bernie.

  He was close to finding happiness, and he didn’t want to let go of that dream just yet. He turned to the sleeping Moll and smiled to himself, remembering her patient teaching from the night before.

  ‘George McLaughlin, stand up and face the class,’ said Sister Agatha, gently slapping the leather strap against her palm.

  George’s desk legs sounded loudly against the floor as he pushed it away and got to his feet. He felt the familiar sense of the whole class looking at him: their attention a singular blaze, like a bonfire. His cheeks burned and he made fists with both hands. It wasn’t the belt that he feared so much as the humiliation. Sister Agatha seemed to want to break his spirit and in that sense she was like his father: it was not about the pain she would inflict but the bad thoughts she would put in his head. Long after the welts had healed George would still feel the sense of worthlessness she had bestowed swelling up inside of him.

  George walked to the front of the class and looked down at his fingernails.

  ‘Stand up straight,’ said Sister Agatha, whacking the strap across his shoulder blades.

  George did as she asked.

  ‘Now, I want you to say the alphabet. You’re in primary three, you should know it back to front.’

  Breathing heavily, accented, unable to breathe through his nose, George said the alphabet: ‘Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.’

  The heavy strap flapping impotently at her side, Sister Agatha took a fresh piece of chalk and gave it to George.

  ‘Now, write that on the blackboard.’

  George took the chalk into his right hand. The sweat of his palm immediately mixed with the chalk powder so that the stick was pasty and slippery in his hand. He turned towards the blackboard, which had been wiped clean.

  ‘Hurry,’ said Sister Agatha. ‘This should come naturally to you. This is baby stuff. Anyone in this class could do it with their eyes closed. If we went to the nursery school I could find you children who could do this… so go ahead, write the letters. I want the whole alphabet written on the blackboard.’

  George turned to her, knowing that he couldn’t do it, feeling the fear of failure thick in his throat. He licked his lips to speak.

  ‘You do it,’ she whispered to him, the spit stretching between her lips, ‘and be clear you’ll get one stroke of the belt for each incorrect letter.’

  George swallowed and turned to the blackboard. He took the chalk in his left hand and managed to form a shaky a, b and then c. He felt cold and hot at the same time, as if there was a layer of frost on his skin that was burning him. He tried to form the letter d, but it looked strange, like a wheelbarrow. He changed the chalk over into his left hand, but Sister Agatha intervened:

  ‘No! You will do it properly.’

  George tried again. He made a circle but couldn’t close it up and then his downward stroke did not meet the circle. When he looked at it, he wondered if it was back to front.

  He tried for an e but could only manage a squiggle on the blackboard. The figure of f he couldn’t recall, but tried all the same, sure that it resembled a bird or a cross in some way. When he had finished, he turned to Sister Agatha.