by Nicole Trope
Alice folds her arms and stares.
‘Fine.’ Margaret sighs. It would be so much simpler if Alice were an easy child but she’s stubborn and angry and each day just the thought of having to deal with her exhausts Margaret as she opens her eyes.
‘A little bitch’ is what Vernon calls her, and sometimes she agrees with him and then is hit by a wave of terrible guilt. She should love her daughter more. Why doesn’t she love her more? But emotions require energy and she doesn’t have any. What she mostly feels is blank – a deep, blank nothingness.
She manoeuvres the pram out of the front door.
‘You need your bag,’ says Alice, her voice flat with disappointment.
‘Oh, of course,’ replies Margaret, scuttling back to the kitchen.
Once they are outside in the sunshine, she manages to pretend that this is usual for her, that she is someone who thinks nothing of taking her two daughters down to the local store. She doesn’t have a car. It broke down weeks or months ago and he said, ‘No point in getting it fixed since you’re always fucking wasted.’
‘Why aren’t you in school?’ she asks Alice without thinking about it.
‘It’s the summer holidays, Mum,’ says Alice with a sigh.
‘Oops, silly me. It’s really hot, isn’t it? Maybe we can have an ice cream from the shops.’
‘Really? Really?’ asks Alice, hopping up and down, her worries disappearing with the promise of a treat. She is a child again for a moment, not the jaded little adult she seems to be most of the time. Margaret thinks occasionally of asking her daughter what’s wrong but then she realises that she doesn’t want the answer. She has enough trouble getting herself up and out of bed. Being a mother is an impossible task. She can remember when this wasn’t the case but that was long ago, so very long ago.
‘Ice, ice,’ says Lilly, interrupting her thoughts, ‘weally, weally.’
‘Yes, really.’ Margaret laughs and tilts her face towards the hot sun. She resolves to be a better mother from now on. She will get up and make breakfast and she will do the laundry and she will stay away from the bottle. But even as she thinks these comforting thoughts she yearns for the bright metallic taste of the vodka.
At the store they meander slowly up and down the aisles, enjoying the blasting, cold air from the air conditioners. ‘We need bread and eggs and milk,’ Alice says, continuing to point out things they need. Margaret does as she says. She has no idea what her children require. She has no interest in food herself. ‘Just like a stringy piece of meat,’ says Vernon when he touches her. ‘Ugly as fuck.’ She shakes her head to get the words to disappear. She knows he’s right.
She can almost feel Alice holding her breath as they pass a freezer containing ice cream. ‘Go on then,’ she says to her daughter.
Afterwards they sit in the sun in the park across the road from the supermarket, watching other families, and Margaret feels the joy of simply blending in. Alice eats her strawberry-flavoured ice cream neatly, catching drips with her tongue before they fall, savouring every precious drop. The baby is soon covered in chocolate but so happy about it that Margaret doesn’t worry about being judged. Her own ice cream melts in her shaking hands. She has chosen an ice lolly in lurid green and red, sure she had something similar when she was a child, but one lick tells her it will be too much for her stomach. ‘Finish mine,’ she says to Alice. ‘I’m full.’
‘You’re always full,’ says Alice, grabbing the ice cream away. But then she sidles a little closer to Margaret, sighing happily as she makes her way through it.
‘Tell me about my dad, Mum,’ says Alice in between licks of the lolly.
She only asks about her father when she feels safe, when she feels happy, and Margaret tries to calculate how long it’s been since she’s mentioned him. It could be weeks or it could be months. Time disappears into the black hole of her despair. She can feel the exhaustion creeping up on her now. The sun is too bright. The noise of children in the park is like a screeching siren in her head. Oh, how she longs for the acid taste in her mouth, longs for the moment she can close her eyes and sleep.
‘He was my first love,’ she says tentatively.
‘But he died in an accident,’ continues Alice.
‘If you know the story, why do you want me to tell it?’ she snaps. She cannot help herself. Why is it so hot? It shouldn’t be this hot. Sweat creeps down her back and her whole face is damp. She would like to climb out of her own skin. She scratches at her arm where the sun is burning it red.
‘Sorry, Mum, sorry I’ll be quiet.’ Alice’s eyes widen, her lip trembles.
Margaret wants to feel sorry for her, to feel anything at all. ‘Let’s get home,’ she says, and it takes everything she has to make it into the house. Her feet wade through tar. Alice pushes the pram, back to being silent and resentful. Don’t I even get any credit for trying? Margaret wants to ask, but children don’t give you credit for anything. They take and they take and they take and then when you have nothing left, they take some more.
She leaves the baby in the pram and the shopping bags hanging off the handles. All she wants is the cool burn from the bottle and some rest.
As she begins to drift, she hears the sound of smashing glass from the kitchen. ‘Clumsy child,’ she mutters. ‘He’s going to be so angry.’
She wants to get up, to help prevent the blow-up that will inevitably come later when he walks through the door, but she cannot move and very soon she cannot think either. He doesn’t care about broken plates really. He simply needs an excuse. Alice shouldn’t keep handing him excuses. The child needs to grow up and figure out how to keep herself safe.
Margaret doesn’t let the thought form that keeping her children safe is her job. Instead she takes another drink, rubbing out any thoughts at all.
She floats on the surface of her dreams for a while before sinking into the deep sleep that she craves.
Seven
Now
Alice
* * *
I check my email constantly over the next few days. I think about telling Jack or even about showing Isaac and asking him if he can trace the email address to its owner. Isaac can click through pages on the computer faster than I can breathe. He throws technical terms at me and rolls his eyes and smiles when I don’t understand.
I suppose he is typical of his generation. I’m sure he would be able to trace the email but he would have questions. Anyone I ask to help will have questions.
There are no more messages, and my inbox fills up with reassuringly boring missives about school and sales at various clothing stores. But I still find myself struggling to concentrate on anything. I tidy the boys’ rooms and reorganise my pantry and chat with another mother about the school bake sale that I have somehow found myself in charge of this year, but I feel like I’m doing everything at a distance. The words from the email repeat on an endless loop in my head.
The Alice thread, the thoughts and feelings that are always there, runs constantly. Alice is worried. Alice is afraid. Alice has been found out.
Just a joke, I keep repeating to myself as I poke my tongue into the gap in my mouth.
‘Is something wrong?’ Jack asks over dinner.
It takes me a second to register his question. ‘No, nothing, why do you ask?’
‘You’ve been staring into space for the last few minutes.’
‘Just thinking about visiting my mother,’ I say because it’s an easy excuse for everything.
‘Do you want to go on Sunday so I can come with you? It might help if I’m there as well. It might… make things easier.’
‘No, love… thanks but I’ll be fine. Now how about some dessert? I bought a tub of chocolate ice cream and there may just be some left if the kids haven’t realised it’s there yet.’
‘Sure, sure.’ Jack smiles but he can’t hide the worry he’s feeling. He moves the salt and pepper shakers back and forth across the table.
I know what he’s thinking. He’s reme
mbering the few dark months after Isaac was born when I became hypervigilant and constantly distracted at the same time. That time feels so long ago and the person I was feels like someone else. I suppose it was inevitable, given how I was raised and my fears about having my own child. But I thought that if I could just read enough, learn enough, prepare enough for his arrival, then I would be fine. I didn’t sleep after he was born, but I assumed it was because I was in the hospital where the noise was constant and the nurses came in at odd hours. Isaac didn’t sleep either. We spent a lot of time crying together in the middle of the night, me and my baby boy.
Once we got home, I thought things would improve but I couldn’t sit still for even a few minutes, leaping up to constantly go and check on the baby. If I did sit, I couldn’t concentrate on even the simplest conversation. I didn’t sleep at night. I would lie in bed, clutching the baby monitor to my ear, listening to him breathe, waiting for him to stop. When my body was too exhausted to continue, I didn’t so much fall asleep as drop into nothingness. Then I would jerk awake and, my heart racing, I would leap out of bed and run to his room to check on him. I thought that something would happen to him if I slept. I thought he would be taken from me if I rested. If Jack was home, I would beg him to sit next to his cot so I could sleep for an hour, watching every breath Isaac took so I knew he was safe.
‘You need help,’ Jack said after a few weeks. ‘You can’t go on like this, Alice. You don’t sleep and you barely eat. Please, please let’s get you some help.’
‘I’m fine, I’m just tired, but all new mothers are tired. When he’s a little older I’ll rest. Now I need to make sure he’s okay.’
Jack asked his mother to come over and stay. Ida, bless her, slept on the very uncomfortable fold-out couch in the living room of our small flat, promising to watch Isaac all night, but still I couldn’t sleep.
‘Enough of this now,’ said Jack eventually. ‘Something is wrong and we need to fix it. There’s medication that can help. This happens to lots of women, Alice, especially women who’ve had a difficult time as children… I think—’
‘I’m fine,’ I yelled. I can remember the terror I felt at the word ‘medication’, at the idea that my brain chemistry would be altered, at the horrifying thought that I would not be fully in control of myself, of my thoughts. If you lose control of yourself, you lose everything and terrible things happen to your children.
I would not perpetuate my mother’s legacy. Regardless of how different a person I was to her, I still feared that more than two glasses of wine, more than a few puffs of a cigarette, more than a couple of headache pills would send me spiralling into an addiction I couldn’t recover from. I believed if I started taking medication, I would never stop. I was not going to be that kind of a mother. I was not going to blur reality until I had no idea what was going on in my house. I never wanted Isaac to question my love or the safety of his home, and if that meant never sleeping again, I was fine with that.
Jack grabbed me by the shoulders and propelled me over to a mirror. ‘Look, Alice,’ he said gently, ‘look what you’re doing to yourself.’
I studied my gaunt face and my sunken eyes and then I hung my head. ‘Please don’t give me drugs,’ I begged.
Jack pulled me to him, held me tight. ‘My love, I only want the best for you. We’ll find a way to get you some help, I promise we will. Maybe you just need to talk to someone. We can find someone for you to talk to.’
‘I can talk to Ian,’ I whispered. ‘I would like to talk to Ian.’ And as I said those words, I felt a profound sense of relief. Ian had helped me put myself back together once before, surely he could do it again.
I remember Ian arrived at the flat in a thick jacket and I had been unable to understand why he needed it. In my sleep-deprived state, I had not noticed the season change. I had not managed to leave the flat since I had returned home from the hospital.
‘Tell me what you’re afraid of, Alice,’ Ian said while I chewed on a piece of skin on my thumb.
‘I’m afraid something will happen to him,’ I told Ian.
‘But he’s perfectly healthy, isn’t that true?’
‘Of course, but what if something happens when I’m asleep? What if he gets a high temperature or throws up and chokes or smothers himself in one of his blankets?’
‘There’s a baby monitor in the room and you have a monitor under his mattress that will detect if he stops breathing.’
He leaned forward and gently pulled my thumb away from my mouth. It was only then that I noticed I was chewing on it, that I had drawn blood as I tore at the skin with my teeth.
‘If you sleep,’ I whispered to him, as though I was sharing a great secret with him, ‘you don’t take care of your children. I have to take care of my child. I’m afraid to sleep,’ I admitted, feeling tears on my cheeks. ‘I’m afraid if I let myself sleep, I won’t want to wake up. I’m so tired, just so tired.’
‘You’re not her,’ said Ian, leaning forward. ‘You’re not her, you just need some help.’ He nodded his head as he spoke.
I found myself nodding along with him. ‘I’m going to get help,’ I agreed.
Isaac and I had a week’s stay at a mother and baby unit where the staff all spoke in soothing voices and I had time to see a therapist. I got better sooner than I expected to but I realised months later it was because Ian had zeroed in on my one terrible fear. I didn’t want to be my mother.
‘I’m fine, Jack,’ I say, tearing myself away from that dark chapter, handing him a bowl with the scraping of ice cream that had been left in the tub, Isaac having obviously discovered it hidden behind some frozen meat. ‘I’m fine, let’s watch a movie.’
I cover us both with a blanket, sitting close to him on the sofa. I focus my thoughts on the spy thriller we’re watching, immersing myself in the character’s dilemma of a stolen briefcase, and when it’s time for bed I have almost convinced myself to dismiss the email. Mysterious messages about things you’ve done in your past only happen in the movies.
I check my phone after I start the dishwasher, making sure there’s nothing on at school tomorrow that I may have forgotten.
There is one new email. My hands shake so much I have to try twice before I can open it.
* * *
I know what you did.
* * *
I bite down on my lip, stung by the salty metal taste of my own blood. Who can this be? The message gives nothing away and the email address is just some random letters and a Gmail domain. It could be spam. It has to be.
Ignore it, I think as I listen to the comforting swish and whir of the dishwasher. I look around my kitchen, at my safe space with its dark stained timber doors and white marble countertop. I hate that those words are in my home, hate that someone is tormenting me.
I need to go and see my mother. I need to ask her what she knows, how much she knows. I have never told anyone the truth because I spend every day trying not to think about it, trying not to see her trusting little face, trying not to feel her little hand in mine. I could never have anticipated what would happen. I was trying to help, not hurt. The twisted metal wreck appears in front of me. I poke my tongue into the gap as the lead-like sadness I carry with me all the time takes over my body, and I sink to the floor of the kitchen. Alice did a bad thing. Alice did a terrible thing. I didn’t help. I didn’t help at all.
It’s been decades now. Surely if someone knew something, they would have confronted me or told the police. Why contact me now? Why now?
There are only two people I can think of who might hate me that much – and one of them is my own mother.
I look at the words again.
Alice is being hunted. Alice has been caught.
I know what you did.
The words are innocuous and ugly at the same time, and my finger hovers over the button for only a moment before I press delete, and the sentence is gone.
Eight
Molly
* * *
Mol
ly opens her eyes, her heart racing. Next to her Peter shuffles and mutters, ‘Column A,’ before emitting a light snore. The bedside clock reads 2.30 a.m. She hadn’t felt Peter slip into bed and she curls herself around him now, trying to force the nightmare from her brain.
She was walking alone on a road, covered in small black stones. The tarred road was divided by one thick white line and was completely empty. There were no houses she could see and no cars either, just a long barren stretch of emptiness. There was nothing but the road in front of her and nothing but the road behind her, and she was consumed by a loneliness so profound that all she wanted to do was close her eyes and disappear.
When she looked down as she walked, she saw small bare feet, slightly chubby and rounded. Soft tiny feet padding over stones, maybe not stones but pieces of tar loosened by long-disappeared cars. They would have hurt the delicate skin, she knows that. Now, she touches her hand to her chest as her heart rate slows. She wants to reach out to her child self in the dream and scoop her up, hold her tight. She closes her eyes again, attempting to worm her way back into the dream so she can rescue her little self, but the threads of the image scatter and she is wide awake.
After a few minutes she gets up and goes to the kitchen for some water. The dream refuses to disappear. She places her hand on her stomach. Was the dream telling her that she will lose this baby as well? She goes to the bathroom and checks for the tell-tale signs of blood, the little spots she is so familiar with, relieved and terrified when she finds none. Blood is how it always begins. She knows from all the reading she’s done that light bleeding during pregnancy is a common thing and it may mean nothing at all. In the past she believed that and continued to hope despite the dark, relentless stains on her underwear with the first one and the second one. Now she knows that if she sees even the tiniest spot, her body has failed her yet again.