by Sam Hayes
Unspoken
SAM HAYES
headline
www.headline.co.uk
Copyright © 2008 Sam Hayes
The right of Sam Hayes to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law,
this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted,
in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing
of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production,
in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the
Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 7661 2
This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MURRAY
MARY
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
JULIA
MURRAY
MARY
JULIA
MURRAY
MARY
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
MURRAY
MARY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
MARY
MURRAY
JULIA
MURRAY
JULIA
Sam Hayes grew up in the Midlands, and has lived in Australia and America. She now lives in Warwickshire with her husband and three children. Her first novel, BLOOD TIES, was highly acclaimed and is also available from Headline. For more information about Sam Hayes, visit her website www.samhayes.co.uk
For Joe, my brother, with love.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Huge thanks and respect must go to my agent and my editor, Anna and Sherise – two talented, insightful and hardworking women. Heartfelt thanks also to the wonderful Becky at Headline for getting me ‘out there’. And, of course, I am eternally grateful to the entire team at Headline. Thanks, guys!
As ever, my love to Terry, Ben, Polly and Lucy. Couldn’t do it without you! A special thank-you to Audrey for Wednesday tea; Gwen Richard at SARDA Wales for invaluable search and rescue advice; Vicki for insightful chats about the human mind; the White Watch crew – you know why; and Sandra – your magic goes on.
PROLOGUE
As a child, there are things you learn not to talk about; that the very utterance of certain words sends some people into a flat spin.
I was four when I first spoke of my father, having just started nursery. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ I asked my mother. It appeared that all the other little girls had a father, and until I discovered this fact, the absence of my own had meant nothing to me. It was simply never spoken of. As if he never existed.
That first day at nursery, we’d been asked to paint a picture of our family. I’d done one entirely of him; just my daddy standing tall and proud and gazing at me with handsome blue eyes, exactly the same shade as mine. He was smiling, his arms outstretched, as if he was beckoning to me to run into them, knock him back a few paces as I hurled myself against his body.
‘Look, it’s my daddy,’ I told my mother, waving the paint-wetted paper at her. We were walking home. She suddenly let go of my hand. I squinted up at her, the brightness behind her protecting me from focusing on her fierce scowl.
All my life, she only ever said one thing to me about my father and it was then, the sun flashing on our backs that September day, completely alone down the lane that led to the farm. ‘You do not have a father, Julia. Never, ever speak of him again.’ And she pressed her forefinger to her lips and whispered a firm shhh, silencing me eternally.
Now, grown up and with children of my own, I am left wondering, from that brisk walk home with my mother all those years ago, how you can speak of something you’ve never had. How do you know which words to use when they simply aren’t there?
It’s the very nature of language, the shape of the syllables, how they slide off the tongue and linger in the air, that makes each of us unique.
But it’s when those words take on a life of their own that the real story begins to unfold. When the unspoken past collides with the present.
JULIA
I discovered her completely by accident. She was lying in the field, twisted on her side in the brittle iced grass. Her lips were violet and her eyes wide open, drilling holes in the winter sky.
She lay perfectly still, her pale skin sparkling from frost and her red nails spread like a broken string of beads.
‘Grace!’ I fell to my knees, fumbling in my pocket for my mobile phone. I tore my jacket off my back and made her into a parcel. Her bare legs protruded, askew of their natural position. ‘Grace, what happened to you?’ I still wasn’t sure that she was alive.
She turned her head and a tendon in her neck snapped against my wrist. Her mouth opened, revealing a salty crust on her lips.
‘What happened, Grace?’
Last time I saw her she had dropped her English essay on my desk and left the classroom in a flurry of teenage urgency. It was the end of term and everyone was full of Christmas excitement.With everything going on in my life – with Mum, with Murray – I’d not even marked her work yet.
‘Doc . . . tor,’ she rasped without breath to force out the word.
‘I’ve called for an ambulance, Grace. Sit tight.’ I pulled her broken body closer and encased her in my arms, my legs, my hair. Milo bounded across the field and instinctively slumped on her legs, panting, his breath falling in bursts of steam on her knees. Warming the life back into Grace.
It was twenty minutes before the paramedics crowned the rise that splayed from the end of the footpath. Everyone walked their dog down Lightning Lane but not all got as far as the unnatural quarry bowl of amphitheatre-like proportions beyond. As a kid, I used to run down, my knees buckling, my hair a mess, our dog barking at my madness as we descended into the man-made hole. Murray always pretended to race me and always let me win.
‘Can you hear me, sweetheart?’
Grace was levered from me by a paramedic. There were three of them, two men and a woman, while a couple of police officers left staccato prints on the white-green grass.
‘I just found her like this,’ I said, fumbling for an explanation. Nothing seemed real. ‘I was walking my mother’s dog.’ I wasn’t shivering, even though Grace was shrouded in my coat; even though the breath fell from my mouth in icy clouds. I was already used to being numb. ‘I thought she was plastic.’ A mannequin, dumped. A useless shop dummy, fly-tipped.
‘What’s your name, love?’ the f
emale paramedic asked.
‘Grace. Grace Covatta. Her father’s Italian,’ I said when Grace didn’t reply.
‘Grace, can you hear me, sweetheart?’ While the woman coaxed her to talk, the other paramedic wrapped her in foil blankets and opened a small case containing portable monitors. She was hooked up to a mini oxygen canister and a machine beeped, registering her barely alive. ‘Has she told you what happened?’
I shook my head. ‘I was walking my mother’s dog. He started to chase a rabbit and I turned to call him off and that’s when . . .’ That’s when my eyes had blurred, squinting through the morning mist, disbelieving. ‘That’s when I saw Grace. Will you take a look at her feet? They’re hurt.’
‘She’ll be looked after in hospital. She’s not bleeding now.’ The paramedic turned to Grace and spoke to her as if she were deaf. I should know. People do it to Flora all the time, as if she’s stupid. ‘We’re going to put you on a stretcher, Grace. We’re taking you to hospital.’ His mouth was big and wide, a goldfish trying to communicate.
Grace said nothing. She stared. Her tongue, swollen and dry, tried to lick her lips as if she was about to speak. She didn’t. ‘Oh God,’ I cried and turned away, yanking on Milo’s collar. It was something familiar, purposeful, reminding me of the reason I was out in the fields early on a freezing December morning.
The crew moved fast while the police cordoned off the area and called for backup. Grace was loaded on to a fold-up stretcher and I followed beside as they carried her down the footpath. She said nothing, just jolted in time with the steps of the paramedics, her tongue caught between the roof of her mouth and her dry lips.
‘Grace, your English essay was fabulous. I gave you an A.’ I touched her foil shoulder, hoping I might register a link of normality. I’d got the class to write a two-thousand-word essay on their interpretation of evil. It was a broad-spectrum assignment, a shot at inspiring my lazier students. I hadn’t marked them yet but I already wanted Grace to have an A.
‘Do you have any idea what might have happened to her?’ I asked as we headed back to the village. ‘Is there any evidence of . . . ?’ I couldn’t say it. I panted, half running to keep up, pulling hard on Milo’s lead so that every breath rasped in his throat. I wanted him close.
‘The doctors will examine her. Are you a relation?’
‘I’m her English teacher.’
Lightning Lane eventually dissolved into the road at the edge of the village in an estuary of mud and frozen leaves. It’s always been called that, since way back when I was a child and beyond. Mum said it was because for three winters on the trot an oak, a beech and a chestnut were taken down by storms.
Mum said.
Mum also once said that bad things come in threes. Neat triangles of trouble. In all that mess, I was reminded of her, of Murray, of me. Our own triangle of pain.
An ambulance and a police car barricaded the lane, their blue lights ticking through the murk. The sight had drawn a crowd of curious onlookers and I knew that the ripple of news would already be reaching neighbouring villages, towns, journalists, front pages. Within hours the local presses would be rolling, Grace’s name at the top.
We marched up to the vehicles like a team of Arctic explorers and just the very faces that I would have expected to be there came hustling forward for news. They reminded me why we had moved from the small village with its tittle-tattle and messaging system faster than email. Had Grace not been on the stretcher, I would have walked on, thankful not to be a part of it any more. Eight miles wasn’t much, but living in Ely provided enough anonymity.
I ushered the onlookers back – I was a storm wall against the tide, protecting Grace from their invasion – but because of this, I didn’t see the medics get her into the ambulance. I didn’t wish her well or bon voyage or let her know I hoped to see her at school soon. Just what are you supposed to say when someone’s like Grace?
Within seconds, the vehicle was pulling off down the lane with a single blast of its siren to clear the gathering. Extra police had arrived. As I slumped on to the frozen grass, they asked me to make a statement. I told them what had happened and they wrote it all down, including the single word Grace had spoken.
That was Friday and I’m still here, staying at Mum’s farm, coping on her behalf. It’s what you do, isn’t it? Walk the Labrador, discover the victim of a brutal attack, come home and read the paper. A nightmare threaded through normality.
‘Mum,’ I say gently. I clasp her hand in mine; bring it to my lips. ‘Grace is still in hospital.’ Four days she’s been there. She can’t walk or talk. She has head injuries and the tendons in her feet were damaged. They don’t know how long it will be before she recovers. No one likes to hazard a guess about Grace.
Mum stares and I wonder if there was a slight turn of her head, a glimmer of interest. She doesn’t know Grace but I’ve told her that she’s one of my pupils. Over the last week I’ve told Mum lots of things – mostly light-hearted babble and stuff about her grandchildren and the two teens she fosters. For now, because of what’s happened, I’ve temporarily taken over their care.
I thought perhaps the shock of finding Grace down Lightning Lane would elicit a reaction, but there’s simply nothing in her. Mum is empty. Her eyes are drained and her lips thin and unwilling. Only when I pass her a cup of tea or slide a plate of food in front of her does she move. I’m sure I hear her bones creak while she’s eating, as if they are whispering behind her back.
‘They say poor Grace will be in a wheelchair for ages and have months of physiotherapy. They’re very worried about her head injuries.’ I sigh and wonder if that is a mini sigh in Mum’s chest too; an echo of mine; a tiny heave of sadness beneath her brittle breastbone. ‘I’m going to visit her soon.’ I plant another kiss on the top of her head.
I put the children’s sandwiches on the table just as my two come bowling into the kitchen. Alex curls his mouth around the soft bread before he is even seated. I trail my fingers through Flora’s hair and tuck her chair under the table. The teenagers make a slower appearance for their food.
Orange juice? My hands form the words for Flora. She nods and smiles, cheese poking from her mouth. I prepare more plates of sandwiches for the foster children and they slip out of the kitchen with their lunch. They’ve kept out of the way these last few days, wisely avoiding all the fuss that revolves around Mum.
‘Thank you,’ the girl says as an afterthought. She gives me a nervous glance, a half-smile. Her brother is silent. I am concerned about him. He disappears for hours at a time, often coming home filthy.
I clatter glasses on to the table and stop, looking around the kitchen. Nothing much has changed in this house over the years. The window still rattles from the wind, and if the rain comes from the north, a bowl is still needed to catch the water on the window ledge. Old pine cupboards and dressers line the room, insulating the walls with a vast stash of family crockery, glassware, chipped dinner sets, children’s paintings, lace tablecloths, drawers full of string, glue, tape, broken pens and ancient bills. The flagstones are perhaps a shade darker than I remember, the walls more yellowed, but the whole place smells the same: of wood smoke, cooking and love.
‘Why don’t you wrap up warm and take Flora down to the rope swing after lunch?’ I say to Alex, but then I stop, halfway to the sink. ‘Actually, it’s probably too cold. Why not watch a movie?’ Someone did that to Grace. Someone bent and cut her body and left her naked in the field. I embrace each of my children. They will not be playing outside while we are staying at Grandma’s house.
‘No, we want to play in the fields. It’s not cold.’ Alex doesn’t whine but rather states his case. Did he learn that from his dad? Like his father, he knows it won’t do any good. When things are final, they are final. I shoot him a look.
‘Mum,’ I say gently. ‘Cheese for you, too?’
I know she won’t answer but I feel I have to ask. I’m finding it hard to remember her voice, even though it’s only been
a week since she fell silent. No one knows why.
I put the sandwich on a tray and rest it on her knee. ‘If you sit any closer to that fire, you’ll turn into toast.’ I realise I’m talking to her in a voice fit for a kindergarten class. ‘Anyway, Alex, your dad’s taking you out later.’ I say it like it’s good reason for them not to play outside. ‘He’s coming at five.’
Alex grins and immediately turns into a little Murray, his face broad and alert, his eyes filled with more anticipation than the situation warrants. He is a memento of the husband I thought I knew. Flora pulls at my arm and signs, What? Her finger is an annoyed scribble in the air, her eyebrows tucked together.
Dad, I tell her. He’s coming to fetch you at five. Flora abandons her sandwich and runs to nestle on her grandma’s lap, competing with the tray for space. It seems she doesn’t want to go.
I sigh and snap on rubber gloves to tackle the dishes. Mum doesn’t have a dishwasher. Neither does she have a washing machine, a tumble dryer, a television or even an electric kettle. When we visit Grandma’s house, we put on an extra sweater and the children bring their portable DVD player.
‘Where’s Dad taking us?’ Alex asks, chomping on the last of his sandwich. He drains his milk.
‘I hope to God not anywhere on that boat. Not in the dark.’ I plunge my hands into the soapy water and imagine Flora slipping off the side of the narrow boat, her mouth unable to do anything but drink the River Cam. ‘He’ll probably take you bowling or to that nice pizza place.’ I comfort myself with the thought of them having an evening in the city. Surely nothing can go wrong there.
‘Or to his friend’s house,’ Alex adds.
‘His friend?’ I know I said it too quickly. I hope Alex didn’t notice. Male or female? I find myself wondering. Our lives are already diverging.