‘Why are you being so easy on him?’
She chooses her words carefully. ‘Sorry, Annie, I thought you were going to say that your date had hurt you. God forbid. I suppose I’m used to Reg being the local weirdo. I remember who he used to be when he was married and his son was young – he was such a fun, lively, gentle man. If he bothers you again let me know and I’ll go and talk to him.’
‘I will do.’ Still a bit disgruntled, I change the subject. ‘Is Mother asleep?’
‘Yes. I managed to get her to drink some water and she kept it down. It might be worth you ringing the doctor’s surgery tomorrow to mention what’s happened. It may be a reaction to the drugs she’s on.’
‘OK. You go home now, Lena. Thanks for coming.’
She puts her coat on, kisses me goodbye and leaves the house to walk the very short distance to her own.
I wonder if Reg watches her walk down the street.
When I go upstairs to go to bed myself I look outside and see a glow in the road to the right that’s coming from his bedroom window.
In the safety of my own room, I relax and feel a bit of a twit for how I’ve reacted. Aunty Lena has a good point: Reg is a sad old harmless alcoholic who probably just wants someone to talk to. Everyone else on the street has given up on him. He must see me as a face who remembers the old him, before he turned into a walking can of Special Brew. I shouldn’t be scared of him, I should pity him, maybe even try to encourage him to join an alcohol support group if he hasn’t already. Perhaps I can pick up some leaflets for Reg from the hospital next time I’m there. If I want to work with lots of different kinds of people with various illnesses I’m going to have to toughen up a bit.
My mind drifts back to the couple of acquaintances I had in the Leeds social group who spectacularly fell by the wayside. Who knows? There but for the grace of God go I.
16
I’m in the middle of eating my breakfast when I get the call from the hospital offering me the job. It’s a zero-hours contract that the HR manager explains will entail me filling in for permanent staff’s annual and sick leave. At the moment that suits me fine because it means I can turn down any shifts that clash with taking Mother to the hospital. There will be training sessions on the job that will lead to my earning a vocational qualification in health and social care. The hospital runs day-long induction sessions once a month, she says, and the next one is in two days’ time. Would I mind attending that? Once new employees have completed their induction they can be called on anytime to work.
Will I attend? Will I ever. Mother doesn’t have any doctor’s appointments that day. They’ll pay me for the induction – finally I’ll be earning some cash again. I don’t want to have to wait until next month’s induction day to start work.
The woman asks me to bring along my passport, P45 and bank details to the induction day to speed things up. I’ll be given my staff uniform then. She hangs up and I do a little victory dance round the kitchen, with toast hanging out of my mouth and a cup of coffee in one hand.
Two days later, after I’ve taken Mother to see her GP to discuss her sickness episode, the good news keeps on coming. DI Glass calls me to tell me that Ian’s solicitor’s letter has arrived. After speaking to me originally, DI Glass explained the situation to his DCI, giving her a heads up. The Chief Commissioner immediately passed the solicitor’s letter on to her when it arrived and, whether it be for PR purposes or because she thinks it’s a genuine new lead, gave her permission for DI Glass to interview Toby Smith in prison.
Gareth texts me back a big thumbs-up sign and Priti is ecstatic when I call her with the news. She’s much easier to get hold of in the day than Gareth is what with his high-up management job. ‘That’s fantastic!’ she gushes. ‘That man is going down – again!’ I don’t point out that maybe Smith had nothing whatsoever to do with Gemma’s disappearance because I don’t want to break the good mood.
When I was a young child I was good at hiding in shadows, pressing my back against the wall with hot breaths held in so as not to make a noise. It was this way that I picked up on pieces of information the adults didn’t tell me, them thinking that I was too young and stupid to make sense of snatched words, secret visitors and the heavy atmosphere in the house that pressed down on all of us unbearably. I’d be told to go upstairs/outside to play or be given a packet of sweets as if brightly-coloured sugar could cure all the ills in the world. Here, have a lemon sherbet and go away, this is adult time, not for your ears. I’d suck the sweet so as to savour the taste as long as possible and secrete myself somewhere, being careful to wait until the sherbet tickled my tongue and not give in to temptation to crunch its saccharine surroundings, and listen in, hugging my knees to fold myself up as small as I could to go unnoticed.
Sometimes the adults thought they were talking quietly but their voices would become louder, more animated, and from where I was hiding, behind the sofa, on the stairs or wedged in between the staircase alcove and the telephone table, I could make out snippets, my ears keened to pick out words I could recognise. Now and then different people, the police lady, the neighbour from down the road, or the tall man with thick black glasses whom I didn’t recognise when he came in the house, said the same things even though they contradicted themselves, such as, ‘It’s the not knowing that’s worst,’ and, ‘No news is good news’. I’d sit there in my hidey-hole until I got cramp or needed a wee, at which point I had to show myself. When I did, nobody seemed to care where I’d been. The return of my presence would barely raise an eyebrow and I’d soon be swatted aside like an annoying black fly to leave the room and the adults to it.
One day in the holidays when Father was out, summer was at its peak and Mother had one of her visitors, I crept out of the house with a Kit Kat and can of Coke stolen from the fridge. There was a four-pack in there for Gemma and Father said I was too young to drink it: if I did my teeth would turn black and fall out. Our garden is long and narrow with a gate at the bottom leading on to the snicket that runs along the back of all the houses on our side of the street. The patch of back garden nearest to the kitchen window was laid out as a lawn, on top of which stood the mucky white rotary washing line, and by each fence next to the grass was a flower border, now looking unruly with weeds fighting the faded flowers that needed deadheading for precedence. Behind that were Father’s bountiful vegetable patches, laced with potatoes, carrots and runner beans, and further back still his greenhouse containing numerous red-fruited tomato plants.
I let myself in to the greenhouse, bathed in the reflected sun and picked some of the small, bright red tomatoes, feeling the pressure of their skin resisting my teeth as I bit in and released their delectable juiciness. Father usually picked them as soon as they were ripe but now the green stems were hunched over with their abundance of fruit and their leaves, deprived of water, were turning crepey and brown. I picked as many as I could, counting each one as I went, and shut them inside the greenhouse in a pile.
Behind the greenhouse there’s an apple tree whose boughs hang over a shady patch of concreted path next to the back fence. I knew from watching my father go down the garden from my bedroom window that whoever stands behind the tree can’t be seen from the house. To shelter from the sun I sat there, hearing footsteps and voices in the back alley and drinking my fizzy pop for what seemed like hours. The chocolate soon melted when I unwrapped it from its silver foil in my palm. I licked it off hungrily for my tummy was complaining about, apart from the tomatoes, not having had any other food since a bowl of Frosties at breakfast.
Someone would notice I’d gone and come and find me for tea, surely?
Eventually I must have dozed off, for when I was awoken by an apple dropping off the tree and missing my head by a few centimetres the bright daylight was gone, replaced by a languid dusk. The sun fading low on the horizon had let in a nippy breeze that fluttered amongst the leaves above my head. I didn’t have a cardigan with me. In the musty shade under the tree I felt chilly
and alone. It must have been well past my bedtime and I began to cry, feeling scared and wanting the comfort of my bed and the soft teddy bear hiding within it. It wasn’t yet too dark for me to find my way back to the house so I ran into the back door and threw it open only to be greeted by silence. On the clock in the kitchen the big hand was at twelve and the little hand pointed to nine. No lights were on, I couldn’t quite reach the switch anyway, but I knew my home well enough to be able to run upstairs in the shadows.
On the landing, Mother’s bedroom door was open far enough for me to peer in. She was sprawled on top of her bed, fully clothed in a yellow summer dress, snoring quietly.
She hadn’t even noticed I was missing.
Half-sobbing and half-snivelling, I put myself to bed on an empty stomach, still wearing my white patent leather buckled sandals that chafed against the back of my heel. I only realised I had forgotten to take them off when I woke in the morning and saw a smear of grass and soil across the tangled bed sheet.
When Aunty Lena came the next day to take me to the park she helped me change clothes, stripped my bed with a look but not a word, and bundled the laundry into the washing machine. Father had gone to work – later I overheard Mother shouting something at him about a pub and beer – and Mother was still locked away in her room.
In the park, Aunty Lena bought me a Mr Whippy ice cream from the van parked by the entrance. Whilst I bit into the chocolate flake and licked the creamy drips from the side of the cone she explained that Mother was very sad at the moment. The police came to tell her yesterday that the sighting of Gemma in London a member of the public had told them about turned out not to be her, and that I needed to be a big girl for my mummy who loved me very much.
I was five.
So many sightings, so many leads that led to nothing, so many members of the public who thought they were being helpful but just raised and then dashed hope. Should I have raked it all up again? Was I right to have got involved, breaking my decades-old policy of staying well clear?
At the back of my mind also is the dark thought – if the police do find proof that Gemma was murdered, apart from my having closure from solving the mystery, would I really care?
Thursday 4th May 1989. 8.50 a.m.
Diana and Annie hovered by the school gates where other mothers kissed their children, told them to eat all their school dinners and chatted with each other about the minutiae of parenthood.
Diana deliberately stood apart from them. Although she’d made a specific point to remember to wear a jacket and make Annie put on her light summer coat, Diana looked down with horror to see that protruding from her feet were the fluffy bedroom slippers she’d put on this morning when she got out of bed. The other mothers were looking, gossiping, too polite to say something to her face but not too polite to bad mouth her to each other. Diana could see them whispering. Laughing. She’s the mad mother, the bad mother, the one who hardly ever brings her child to school and when she does doesn’t get dressed properly. She could feel her anxiety levels rising, clutching hold of her, pushing near to her limit. She cracked her knuckles to centre herself, bring her back to the present moment, and clutched her handbag close. Her pills were in there. She was safe: it doesn’t matter if she has to take more than the doctor had told her to, the pills would block out the world and give her a slow-motion kind of peace. A few minutes more, then she would be back home.
A voice interrupted her ritual. ‘Diane, long time no see. How are you?’ Diana froze. She thought the brown-haired, stocky woman talking to her and who got her name wrong was the parent of a boy in the same class as Annie. They’d come across each other in the maternity ward after giving birth within a day of each other.
‘Hello!’ she replied, rather too brightly, her voice an octave too high, her eyes shiny and glassy.
‘Can I go in now?’ Annie asked. She was standing a foot away. Diana was conscious that Annie wasn’t holding her hand like most of the other little girls did with their mums. She’d tried to take Annie’s hand when they had left the house but Annie had swiftly pulled it away as if her mother was too hot to touch. Was it possible to scald your own daughter with your presence? She’d certainly done enough scolding of her over the years.
‘It’s time to go in, nice to see the kids keen to get to school, isn’t it? My Johnnie went through a phase of crying when it was time to walk here.’ That’s because you’re a good mother, thought Diana. Your son doesn’t want to leave you. My daughters can’t wait to get away.
Diana forced a smile on her face. She curled the edges of her lips unnaturally. ‘Yes, it’s good they like school. Go in, Annie, don’t keep your teacher waiting. I have to get back home.’ Annie bolted towards the playground without looking behind her. Diana broke eye contact with Johnnie’s mother and scurried off back down the road, head down, adamant to avoid the whispers, the looks and the judgements she felt sure were raining down on her. She counted every step it took to take her back to her house. Three hundred and forty-five.
In the safety of her home, behind the locked front door, the curtains closed, she began to feel a little soothed, aided somewhat by the little white pill she washed down with a glass of milk. Diana sat down on the sofa. She shut her eyes and timed her breaths to coincide with the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Tick, breathe in, tock, tick, breathe out, tock. Her heart began to beat less erratically but her mind was still in deep distress.
She had hit her child, her darling eldest daughter, and didn’t know if she would, should or could be forgiven. Her youngest had flinched under her touch. How could she repair this, be the mother she wanted to be and that the girls deserved? A headache began to rear up behind her temples. Her pain was physical. Elaine was due to pick Annie up from school this afternoon as per usual. The thought occurred to Diana that she could ring Elaine and say she’ll go instead. Show Annie she cares. Ask about her day and maybe stop off at the ice cream café on the way home, but, but… Diana felt so tired. The simple act of moving her limbs seemed to forsake her. Within moments she was asleep, her cheek pressed against the piping of the sofa cushion causing a red dented line to appear.
17
DI Glass calls to say that he has arranged with the prison to interview Toby Smith on Friday morning. It’s an informal interview, he stresses, and Smith is under no obligation to co-operate.
If he knows anything and has a smidgeon of decency then he will tell DI Glass, I hope, but then speedily acknowledge that convicted attempted murderers aren’t usually renowned for their public spiritedness.
My job induction focuses my mind on other things for a day. It’s an eight-hour whirlwind of tea, biscuits, forms to fill in, presentations from staff, a whistle-stop tour of the hospital and videos about basic hygiene and health and safety. The others attending are a mixed bunch of university leavers, career changers and two mums (plus a dad) who are returning to work now their children are school age. There’s so much information to take in that we confide in each other we’ll never remember it all; but by the end of the day there’s a great sense of camaraderie amongst us, other than the man in his twenties who didn’t return after the lunch break, and I’m looking forward to starting the job for real. Even the polyester uniform isn’t too bad.
Looking forward to going to work is pretty much a first for me. Usually I have to haul my carcass out of bed and bribe myself with wine and chocolate later on to make it to the call centre on time. Every work day brought the Monday morning blues.
I’m so knackered from the day’s full concentration that I pick up a couple of pizzas on the way home instead of cooking. In the kitchen I load all the slices onto one plate then carry them through to the lounge, along with a couple of sheets of kitchen roll for napkins and two side plates, where Mother is reading a magazine. Whilst we are eating she asks me lots of questions about the day and seems genuinely pleased at my enthusiasm. She asks me how long I’m planning to stay and I realise that it’s not something I’ve thought throu
gh, what with not knowing how long her cancer treatment will take or how well she will recover. If she does that is. It strikes me that I’ve found it much easier to treat her as a sick adult in need of help rather than my mother, firmly delineating the past from the present.
I still have nowhere else to go but living here hasn’t been as bad as I’d imagined. Then I remember the missing box, the secrets she is keeping from me and once again I feel like an angry, frustrated teenager. I tell Mother I don’t know how long I’ll be here but that I’ll pay her rent when I’m earning if that’s what she wants. At that she looks hurt and I almost feel guilty for saying it.
I reach for the television controller that’s perched on the sofa arm by my side and press the on button, shutting off the possibility of any further conversation.
Whilst Mother watches a game show, my thoughts turn to Gareth, our date at the party tomorrow, and whether he has had luck with his social media hunt for the frizzy-haired girl on the photo. Priti texted to say that as yet she hadn’t found anything out about her. It occurs to me that the girl may have moved away or even be dead herself.
As promised, Gareth picks me up on Saturday evening in his fancy grey company car and greets me with a lingering kiss. I’m wearing my skinny faux leather black trousers and a long silky-grey top. It’s a tried-and-tested outfit that always gives me confidence, something I feel I need after spending the morning wondering how DI Glass’s interview with Smith went. Seeing Gareth again makes me wish I were free to go home with him tonight instead of having to get back to check on Mother. No way will I invite him back to my single bed that’s only a few flimsy walls away from Mother’s room. For me, knowing my mother can hear everything we get up to is the ultimate passion killer.
My Perfect Sister Page 11