The Other Child

by Charlotte Link

  And she had thought: Don’t tell me, just don’t tell me! For a split second she had sensed that it could only be something that would change her whole life. She had felt it and wanted to stop it, but it could not be stopped, and until this day she had sat in the ruins of that evening and still could not believe it.

  She drank the glass of water. You’re drunk, Leslie, she told herself, and that’s why you’re so sentimental. Stephen didn’t go. You threw him out. It was the right thing to do. Anything else would have been a slow death. You’ve been living alone in the flat for two years now, and coping, so you’ll be fine going back tomorrow. Not tonight. In the state you’re in, you’d smash into a bridge.

  She came out of the bathroom and tiptoed past Fiona’s bedroom. Once she had dosed the door of her own room behind her, she breathed out with relief. The room was turning a little, and she had some difficulty in focusing on individual objects.

  The final whisky had definitely been one too many, she thought sleepily, and maybe I should have had those chips.

  Somehow she managed to get her clothes off, dropping them on the floor carelessly. She slipped into her pyjamas and under the covers. The sheets felt cold. She pulled her knees up, like an embryo.

  Dr Leslie Cramer, a thirty-nine-year-old divorced radiologist, lay three sheets to the wind in an ice-cold bed in Scarborough with no one to give her warmth. No one.

  She started to cry. Then she remembered her empty flat in London and cried even more. She pulled her sheet up over her face, as she had as a child. So that no one could hear her crying.

  2

  He hated scenes like the one tonight. He hated it when feelings boiled over, when emotions went haywire, when women cried, when his daughter locked herself in her room, when people went in all directions, and when on top of everything he had the impression that people were looking at him accusingly, because they had obviously expected him to do something to contain the chaos. It was an expectation he could not live up to, but perhaps he had never lived up to expectations, and that might be the real problem with his life.

  Chad Becket was eighty-three years old.

  He was unlikely to change now.

  It was five o’clock Sunday morning, but that was not an unusual time for Chad to get up. When it had still been a working farm, his father had often got the whole family out of bed at four, and Chad was no longer able to change the rhythm by which his whole life had run. Nor did he want to. He liked the hours before daybreak, when the world was quiet and sleepy and seemed to belong to him alone. He had often used the time to wander down to the beach in the half-light, sometimes in the thick fog that pressed inland from the sea. On those days he had been forced to go down the steep cliff almost blind, but it had never been a problem. He knew every stone, every branch. He had always felt safe.

  Now he could no longer risk it. For the last three years his bad hip had made every step painful. He still refused to go to the doctor – he was not against doctors per se, he just did not believe that anyone could help him with it. At least, not without an operation, and the thought of hospital filled him with dread. He had a feeling that if he ended up in one, he would never return to his farm, and as he had the firm intention of dying in his bed, he was not going to leave his own patch of land now, not on the final stretch.

  He preferred to grit his teeth.

  The day was going to be sunny and bright again. That meant that his hip would not play up too much. The wet days were bad, when the clammy cold crept into his bones. The house was hard to heat and the rooms were always damp in the winter. His mother used to heat bricks for hours in the range in the kitchen, before putting them in the beds in the evening. At least that way you could warm up, seeing as the sheets were normally damp too. But his mother had been dead for ages, and Gwen had never known that trick. He himself thought, as did so many others too, that for his pleasure alone it was not worth reviving the habit. He found the damp linen unpleasant in the evening, but you would fall asleep in the end, and then you did not notice any more.

  He listened carefully. Everyone seemed to be sleeping. Not a sound came from Gwen’s room, nor any sign of life from the Brankleys or their dogs. Just as well. After a night like last night they would only get on his nerves.

  He shuffled into the kitchen to make himself a coffee but did a double take when he saw the mess in the room. As Jennifer had been taking care of Gwen all evening and then later gone out with her dogs, it must have been Colin who had cleared the table. He had obviously seen his job as done once he had put the dishes, glasses and food in the kitchen. The crockery was piled high on the table, sideboards and in the sink. No one had covered the leftover soup, the roast or the vegetables stuck to the pans. It did not smell good.

  Chad decided to do without a coffee for now.

  He slowly moved over into the little room beside the living room, which served as a kind of study. Not that the farm required an actual functioning study or office, but they had the computer here. In spite of Chad’s refusal to move with the times, it had found its way into the house in the end at Gwen’s insistence. Files from years past, when the Beckett farm had still made modest profits, lined the wooden shelves along the walls. A few catalogues lay on the desk. Fashion, as Chad saw it, the stuff that Gwen ordered now and again. He lowered himself with a groan into the office chair and booted up the computer.

  Unbelievable that he had learnt to use the thing! He had fought against it for long enough, but in the end Fiona had convinced him to set up an email address. In fact, she had set one up for him, and a password. ‘Gwen often uses the computer. She doesn’t have to read your mail, now, does she?’ Fiona had said. He had replied, ‘What mail? Don’t even get normal post. Who’s goin’ to send me news by computer?’

  ‘Me,’ replied Fiona, and then she had explained slowly and patiently how it worked: how to open his mailbox, how to enter the password (Fiona, of course), how to open each email, and how to reply. Since then they had corresponded via this strange medium that Chad was just as suspicious of as before, although he could not help being fascinated by it. It was nice to get a letter from Fiona now and then. And then to answer with a few meagre words. Not that he had dared to explore this modern madness, as he referred to computer technology, in any more depth. It would never have occurred to him to surf the internet. In any case, he would not have known how, nor did he want to know.

  Fiona had been pretty nervous yesterday. Probably that was why she had not stopped until she caused a scandal. The attack on Dave Tanner had allowed her to let off steam, although Chad was convinced that her aversion to Gwen’s fiancé was genuine enough, and that she harboured serious reservations about him. She might well be right in what she suggested about his motives, but Chad could not get worked up about it. It was Gwen’s life. She was over thirty. If she got hitched now, it was none too early, and maybe she would be happy with Tanner. Chad did not think that love should be the only reason for people to marry. Perhaps Tanner was trying to change his life, so what? At the end of the day, it would do the Beckett farm good. Perhaps he and Gwen would have children, and Gwen would blossom in her new role as a mother. She was a very lonely person. Chad took the pragmatic view on things: better to have Tanner than no one. He could not really understand why Fiona was so worked up about this.

  After she had completely ruined the evening, she had sat here on a folding chair next to the desk and lit one cigarette after another. He had known her since her childhood. He knew her better than anyone else in the world, and he had known something was worrying her. After she had moaned a good deal more about Gwen’s marriage plans, she had finally come out with it.

  ‘Chad, I’ve been getting strange calls lately,’ she had said quietly and hastily. ‘You know … anonymous calls.’

  He did not know. He had never received such calls. ‘Anonymous calls? What kind? Threatenin’?’

  ‘No. No. I mean, the caller doesn’t say anything. He – or she – just breathes.’

&n
bsp; ‘Is it …?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Not that kind of breathing. Not dirty, I’d say. It’s very controlled breathing. I think the other person is just listening to me getting bothered, and then hangs up after a while.’

  ‘An’ how d’you get bothered?’

  ‘I ask who’s there. What he wants. I tell him – or her – that staying silent doesn’t get us anywhere. That I want to know what it’s all about. But I never get a reply.’

  ‘Maybe you should do summat like ’im. Not speak. Just hang up when you hear ’im breathin’.’

  She had nodded. ‘I should never have reacted. I’ve probably done exactly what he expected. Still …’ She had lit her next cigarette. Chad asked himself, not for the first time, how someone could smoke so unrestrainedly for decades and still be in such rude health.

  ‘I can’t get away from wondering who the caller is,’ she said after a few nervous drags on her cigarette. ‘If you do that, you have a reason. Why have they targeted me?’

  He had shrugged his shoulders. ‘Chance maybe. Found a name in t’ phone book and called up. Probably got lots of victims. Maybe ’e do it all day, one after another, and ’e do it a lot with you because you get so bothered.’

  ‘That’s sick!’

  ‘Aye, suppose so. But it might be ‘armless. Just a hopelessly uptight person somewhere on end of line, someone who don’t dare go out and would never dare talk t’ a stranger. Feels powerful when ’e makes the calls, nowt more than that.’

  She chewed her lower lip. ‘And you don’t think that it has … something to do with the stuff back then?’

  He knew at once what she meant. ‘No. Why d’you think that? That’s ages ago.’

  ‘Yes, but … that doesn’t mean it’s over, does it?’

  ‘Who’d phone up ‘bout that now?’

  She did not reply, but he knew her well enough to know that she was thinking of someone in particular. He could guess which name was knocking around in her head.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Why now? After all these years … Aye, why now?’

  ‘I don’t think she ever stopped hating me.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘I think so. Up in Robin Hood’s Bay …’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ he warned her.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied as gruffly and sharply as she could, but the hand holding her cigarette had shaken a little.

  Then she came out with what she really wanted to ask. ‘I want you to delete the emails. All the ones I wrote to you. The ones I wrote about that thing.’

  ‘Delete? Why?’

  ‘I think it would be safer.’

  ‘No one can read them.’

  ‘But Gwen uses the same computer.’

  ‘Thought that’s why I got that thing, that password. Not any good, is it? Rubbish it is, all this computer technology … Anyroad, don’t think Gwen would nose around in me things. She’s not that interested in me.’

  For the first time in the conversation Fiona had smiled, not happily so much as wryly.

  ‘Then you judge her wrongly, I’d say. You are second to no one in her eyes. But you never did have much of a feeling for the subtleties of human interaction. Still,’ she was serious again, ‘I’d appreciate it if you would delete the emails. I’d feel safer.’

  The computer was ready now and Chad opened his mailbox. Fiona had sent him five emails over the course of the last half year – five, that is, with an attachment. Between each of them there had come a flurry of her usual messages.

  She would write something to pep him up when the weather was bad and she feared that he was in pain; something sharper when she was annoyed that he had not been in touch for a while; something ironic when she had once again met someone they both knew and she could be nasty about the acquaintance. Sometimes she wrote about a film she had seen. Sometimes she complained about growing old. But she never mentioned old times, the past which they shared.

  Until March of this year. Then the first file arrived, along with her instructions on how to open it.

  ‘Why?’ he had asked in his reply – nothing else, just Why, in bold italics, followed by at least ten question marks.

  Her answer had been: ‘Because I have to straighten things out for myself. I have to tell someone. And as no one else can know about it, it can only be you.’

  His reply: ‘I know it all anyway.’

  And she in turn: ‘That’s why you’re no danger.’

  Then he thought: She can’t handle it.

  He remembered asking her the previous evening what had triggered her writing it all down, all the things that no one was supposed to know, only him. Though he knew it anyway, he was not keen to be reminded of it.

  She had considered his question as she smoked, then said, ‘Maybe what triggered it was realising that my life won’t last much longer.’

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No. But old. It can’t be too long now. No need to pretend.’

  He had read some of what she had written, but not all of it. Often he had felt it was asking too much of him. He would get angry at her for bringing it all up again, for picking at the scab. She was unearthing something dead and buried.

  He clicked on the first email. It was dated 28th March. It was in Fiona’s typical style.

  ‘Chad, hi, how are you? It’s dry and warm today so you must be doing well! I’ve written something that you should read. It’s just for you. You know the story, but maybe not every detail. You’re the only one I trust. Fiona.

  PS: Double-click on the file. Then just click on Open!’

  He opened the file.

  The Other Child.doc

  1

  At least we did not have to look after a relative back then, at the end of the summer of 1940, when all our lives changed. Many of my girlfriends’ fathers were at the front and their families were trembling at the thought of receiving bad news. My father, on the other hand, had already died before the war, in the spring of 1939. He got into a fight with another drunk on one of his infamous pub crawls, in which he would drink away the little money he earned as a street cleaner. It was impossible to tell afterwards who had started the fight and what it had actually been about. Probably nothing in particular. In any case, my father was badly injured and had to go into hospital, where he contracted tetanus – a disease that people were not really able to deal with in those days. He died very soon after. Mum and I were left on our own and had to get by with the widow’s pension from the state. Actually we were better off financially than before, because no one took all the money down the pub. And Mum found two jobs as a cleaning lady, so increasing our income. We managed as best we could.

  In the summer of 1940 I turned eleven. We lived in London’s East End, in a little flat up under the roof. I remember how stiflingly hot that summer was. Our flat was like an oven. Germany was getting the world involved in the war. France had been occupied, and the Nazis had pocketed our Channel Islands while they were at it. People here were getting nervous, even if the government was exhorting us to remain firm, appealing to people’s fighting spirit and talking of an imminent victory over Nazi Germany.

  ‘What will we do if they come here?’ I asked Mum.

  She shook her head. They won’t come, Fiona. You can’t take an island as easily as that.’

  ‘But they occupied the Channel Islands!’

  ‘They were small, and undefended, and they’re right off the coast of France. Don’t worry, darling.’

  The Germans themselves did not come, but from September they sent their bombers. The Blitz began. Night after night London was attacked. Night after night the sirens wailed, people gathered in air-raid shelters, houses collapsed and whole streets disappeared under ash and rubble. The next morning a previously familiar area could look completely different, because a house had been flattened, a pile of bricks, smoking away. On the way to school I would see people searching in the ruins for belongings that might have survive
d the inferno. One time I saw a dirty, thin young woman who was burrowing around like a madwoman among the stones of a collapsed house. Blood ran down her hands and arms. Tears streamed down her face and left bright, shiny tracks in the layer of dust.

  ‘My child is down there!’ she screamed. ‘My child is down there!’

  No one seemed to be concerned. That shocked me deeply. When I told Mum about it that evening, the colour drained from her face and she took me in her arms. ‘I’d go crazy if anything happened to you,’ she said. I think that was the day the idea started to grow in her that I should leave London.

  Evacuations had started before then. On 1st September 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland and two days before England declared war on Germany, evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people from the large cities had begun. There was already a fear of attacks from the air, especially the fear that the Germans might launch poison gas attacks. Every citizen had to carry a gas mask at all times, and everywhere in the city there were warnings reminding us of how real the danger was. Hitler will send no warning, they said in giant black letters on a bright yellow background. In other words, we could be the victims of his cunning at any time.

  Most evacuees were children, but pregnant women, the blind and people with other disabilities were also evacuated. Mum had asked me in passing if I wanted to leave, but I had objected violently and so she had dropped the idea. I was extremely relieved, because the whole thing flooded me with fear, almost horror. For some odd reason the first evacuation had been named Operation Pied Piper, and like most children I knew the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the rat-catcher who led a long train of children into a mountain, never to be seen again. That was not exactly reassuring. Somehow I had the idea that we were all to be taken away, never to return.

  In addition, from what we heard it was pretty chaotic. England had been divided into three zones: evacuation zones, neutral zones and zones where the evacuees were to be received. There were reports of chronically overcrowded trains, of traumatised young children who could not cope with being separated from their parents, and of a lack of organisation when it came to receiving the evacuees in other towns and other families. East Anglia reported it was full to bursting, while in other areas hundreds of families who had offered to take someone were left waiting. People cursed the government for not having allocated enough money for the whole operation. And then the bombs did not fall as expected. At the end of the year most of the evacuees returned to their families and their hometowns.