I stand back now, chastened. ‘Mum – I didn’t mean . . .’ What did I mean? The apology is automatic but the words peter out.
In the privacy of my hall, she gives me the look that says there is no room for negotiation.
‘Don’t you dare try to stop me going.’
She fumbles with the Yale lock, increasingly irate as it fails to open.
‘How do you do this fucking thing?’ Her voice cracks, on the edge of tears.
There’s a trick to it but I know better than to offer to help. Eventually she manages to yank it. Sunlight streams in, and with it comes relief that she can go now.
Without another glance, she heads off down the road.
JESS
Thursday 25 January, 2018, 9.30 a.m.
Thirty-seven
The interview has been going for an hour and a half, and Jess’s brain is starting to ache with the strain of not implicating herself further when DC Rustin’s phone buzzes against the table. The detective glances at the text message and shows it to her colleague.
‘Shall we take a comfort break? Fifteen minutes?’ Her expression inscrutable, she suspends the recording and escorts Jess from the room.
Given some privacy, Jess runs the hot tap, the water chafing her palms, a cloud of steam rising up from the chill basin. But the shock of the scald does nothing to distract her from her looping fears.
They know she left them but has Frankie told them something? Or perhaps the text was from the hospital and something has happened to Bets? Panic claws at her as she imagines another seizure: her baby’s eyes rolling back, her limbs stiff. Perhaps the anaesthetist has intervened and induced a coma, as they’ve been warned he may do. She sees Betsey lying in paediatric intensive care, ringed and wired with tubes. Is this how she dies? Is this the ultimate complication? She leans over the toilet bowl to retch.
‘What happens now?’ she asks her solicitor, when she is led back to the interview room twenty minutes later. A white polystyrene cup of tea with a sheen of scum sits in front of her, untouched.
‘We wait,’ he says.
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something’s happened to Betsey?’ Or perhaps it’s happened to Kit: perhaps she’s been too dismissive of his fracture and he’s suffered a concussion no one detected? She can’t mention Frankie. Can hardly bear to think of him, cocooned in his distress.
‘I’m sure it hasn’t.’ Liam glances at his watch. Her chest constricts, her breath becoming shallower until she is light-headed. Her throat is dry, her mouth bitter with fear.
The door opens abruptly. DC Rustin looks flushed and DC Farron almost angry: she hasn’t seen him look like this before now. Beside her, Liam sits upright, his expression more alert. DC Rustin scrapes her chair across the floor with a sharp grate and presses the button on the DVD recorder, stating the date and time and introducing them once more.
‘Why didn’t you tell us the truth from the start, Jess?’ she begins.
‘About?’
‘About what really happened.’
She is cornered. Glances down at her twisted fingers, automatically reaching for her absent rings. Her hands feel naked and she sits on them. You’re a mother who neglected her children and told one of them to lie for her. There is nothing she can do to make things better; nothing she can say.
‘Our duty sergeant has just taken a call from your husband which puts a different slant on events. We’re about to go and interview him and Frankie. But we wondered if you could tell us what happened, before we hear what your son has to say?’
They mustn’t put Frankie through this; she must continue to protect him. What was it he said, in the bathroom? ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was only trying to help.’ You’re a bad, bad mother. But she must have done something right to bring up a child this intuitive and sensitive; a child who can empathise like this.
‘It happened like I said,’ she lies, and she winces at the flimsiness of her explanation. ‘She must have banged her head after pulling herself up on the side of the fridge.’
‘Why don’t you stop playing games, Jess?’ DC Rustin’s voice is cruel. ‘We know you left your children alone together while you went to the shop. We have the CCTV footage and your receipt to prove you were there. According to your husband, it was Frank who was involved. It was a genuine accident that you’ve lied about from the start.’
‘I . . .’
‘Your husband’s just told us that’s what happened. We need to keep you here while we go and talk to him and Frankie. I’m going to ask you one last time: is there anything you’d like to tell us first?’
And all Jess can see is Frankie’s concern as he tried to protect her, suggesting she took a break from him and his screaming sister; and his extreme wariness, his body cowering when she shouted in that cloying, claustrophobic room. She thinks of how she can’t bear him to look at her like that again; and how she needs to shield him from being interviewed by the police. Because, despite there being a specialised child protection officer, he will still find it terrifying; an experience, in a week of disorientating experiences, that will rip him out of his comfort zone as forcefully as a digger hurling rubble. And she knows that if there is anything she can do to mitigate the ordeal, to make it easier for him, she must do it now.
‘Yes.’ She bows her head, the word slipping from her like a sigh. She is broken; can sink no lower; her maternal failings will be picked over and judged as she listens in shame.
A mother who left her children to go out and buy wine; who was slow to take her to hospital; who lied to doctors, her husband, her sister, even the police, until the lie – told for the best of reasons, to protect her boy, and the less noble one, to protect herself – became too big to row back from. Became so big she had long crossed the point at which she could admit what really happened and say: ‘I am so sorry.’
But though she feels intense shame, the relief is overwhelming. Her voice is a murmur and she makes herself repeat it. ‘Yes,’ she says.
‘You’d like to change your account?’ DC Rustin asks, leaning forward to catch what she says, but really there is no need.
Jess looks up and meets the detective’s eye; forces herself to speak clearly.
‘I’d like to tell you what happened,’ she says.
LIZ
Saturday 3 February
Thirty-eight
‘I need to talk to you.’
Nine days after her variceal bleed, my mother is lying propped up in her bed in the hospital. She’s in the gastro ward but it’s relatively quiet for a moment: the neighbouring bed is empty and the other patients preoccupied or asleep.
I think she is going to die. She might not, of course. It’s possible she could recover if she stops drinking, though both of us know that isn’t going to happen any time soon. She’s always been cavalier about her health: first the fags, then the sugar, and now this. One way or another, my mother has been killing herself for as long as I can remember. And if I sound flippant, I’m not. I’m so saddened that if I dwell on it I’ll start crying. My mother won’t want to see my tears, though. They are a waste of time, and she may not have much time.
She isn’t speaking: is just lying back, breathing heavily. It doesn’t make for an easy silence, knowing that death may be near. And so I start talking about Jess: about her arrest, and her release now the truth has emerged. I tell her about how I rang yesterday, and how Ed told me she isn’t talking to anyone, though I suspect he was being diplomatic and she’s only reluctant to talk to me. And I tell her of my guilt for not realising she was struggling; for being so stupid I didn’t consider that she could be one of those mothers who claim to be fine only to shed tears in private. ‘All good,’ they say at the baby groups – until they’re pushed to crisis point.
Of course I’m apologising to my mother, too, for being blind to the bleeding obvious; for not asking the right questions. ‘She seemed so competent. I didn’t realise she might be finding parenthood so tough,’ I say.
/> My mother rasps something. I didn’t think she was listening but her eyes flicker open and she searches for my gaze. ‘It is tough,’ she manages. ‘I made mistakes.’
‘You don’t need to talk about it,’ I say, suddenly apprehensive. There’s nothing like a sense of an ending to clarify what’s important. To voice the stories left unsaid. ‘You don’t need to say anything,’ I add because there’s a peculiar tension like that moment on a diving board when you’ve committed to plunging forwards but wait, almost suspended – and I sense that what she might say will change everything.
‘I do,’ she insists and then she’s gripped by a racking wheeze. I ease her forwards, one hand circling her back, and feel how the weightiness that made her so formidable when I was a child has melted away, leaving a woman who is vulnerable. Her cough subsides and I hold her hand. It’s thin, with liver spots and raised veins, and a faint scar across the top, the trace of a burn caused when she caught the back of her hand on the grill. It was when Mattie was in hospital and I suddenly wonder if she branded herself on purpose. It’s nothing, she said at the time, compared to what he’s gone through.
I won’t try to placate her again, or to fob her off. I owe it to her to listen. I squeeze her hand then release it immediately. She won’t want to be encumbered by my desire for affection. I must let her tell this in her own way.
‘What happened . . . with Clare . . . wasn’t as I said.’ She pauses and her dark eyes fix me like pins holding fast a butterfly. A cold sensation creeps up my spine.
‘The policeman who came to the house was so callow. Not the sharpest tool in the box. I don’t think he had a clue. It was his first death. He was overwhelmed, embarrassed, too, by Pete’s crying; by the extent of his grief . . .
‘The doctor was trusting, as well. A cot death: that’s what he put on the death certificate. There was a post mortem but it wasn’t forensic. People didn’t probe then like they might now . . .’
She pauses, apparently exhausted by this torrent of words that hint at a truth without grasping it by the neck.
‘Should someone have probed?’ I make myself ask.
But she ignores my question. Her eyes are rheumy and her breathing’s light. ‘I felt so very alone. Pete was out so early, working on that farm, and he didn’t want to listen. Thought I should just get on with it. Day after day, it was just me and the three of you. And she cried all the time . . .’
Her eyes rest on something in the middle distance as if she is watching her life, thirty-five years ago, her expression one of utter bleakness before a sheen of horror passes over her face. She snaps back to the present and turns to me, her gaze characteristically direct. It’s a look that demands I pay attention; that I understand her.
‘Do you remember her crying?’ I nod, tentative, but I’m not sure if it’s Clare’s cries I recall or those of my own children: that relentless wailing that’s irrational and inconsolable and once made me put Rosa down and walk away, convinced I was a deficient mother.
‘I just wanted to make her stop.’
Her words pull me up short. Is this some sort of confession? An acknowledgement of a truth I’ve been shuffling towards but avoided admitting? My stomach roils, my body sensing the truth before my mind.
A cot death. That’s what he put on the death certificate. I just wanted to make her stop. She cried all the time.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That Clare’s death wasn’t an accident?’ I want her to say the words. I want her to take responsibility if she is telling me – and I can hardly believe I am thinking this, though it seems the only credible explanation – that she killed her baby girl.
She refuses to look at me but her mask starts to slip and her face convulses with sorrow. She presses her bottom lip tight, as if to keep any confession in place.
‘She cried all the time,’ she repeats, shaking her head. ‘She wouldn’t stop. On and on and on she went . . .’
But some babies do, I want to say. Perhaps she was hungry or ill, had reflux or a neurological issue. It’s their means of communication. They don’t intend to antagonise. They’re in distress.
But I stay silent. I mustn’t judge her, daren’t risk her not talking now we’ve finally managed the most honest conversation of our lives. I imagine her, isolated and without support, in that damp, dark cottage. And then I see her screaming at us: a torrent of abuse I told Mattie she couldn’t possibly mean as his expression became pained, and he seemed to diminish in front of my eyes.
She is exhausted and yet she still wants to be understood. ‘She wouldn’t stop . . .’ Her voice drops to a whisper. Her eyes are moist and I think I spy humility in them. I didn’t mean to do it. That’s what her look seems to say.
Or perhaps I am desperate to read this because the alternative is too horrific to contemplate.
‘All I wanted was to make her stop.’
JANET
Saturday 22 January, 1983
Thirty-nine
The cry builds. At first it is pitiful. A creak and a crackle. Tentative, tremulous, just testing how it will be received.
The doubt quickly flees. The whimper becomes a bleat; the catch hardening as the cry distils into a note of pure anguish. ‘Shh . . .’ Janet pleads, reaching into the cot and holding Clare at arm’s length as the sound buttresses the space between them. ‘It’s OK, baby. Mummy’s here now. Mummy’s going to make it OK.’
Clare stares at her. Eleven weeks old; in the fierce grip of inconsolable colic; her eyes two beads that glower, incredulous and intense. Don’t be ridiculous, these eyes say. I am livid and I’m livid with YOU. Her face folds in on itself and her Babygro dampens as if the rage that is turning her tiny body into a white-hot furnace is so intense it must escape.
‘Shh, shh. It’s OK,’ Janet repeats. She is suddenly wary. Sweat licks her baby’s brow and her fontanelle pulses like some alien life form, golden-red just beneath the surface of her skin. Evidence of her pumping heart, of the blood that courses through her veins and could burst through this translucent spot, as delicate as a bird’s egg, so fragile, she daren’t touch it in case it ruptures. The beat continues, insistent, unrelenting. Like Clare’s uncontrollable rage.
The cry cranks up, the sound now brazenly assertive. Nought to sixty, in two seconds. She draws her baby close and feels stifled: only wants to thrust her away.
‘Shh, shh. Mummy’s here for you.’ One hand presses Clare’s padded bottom close; the other splays up the back of her neck. She cradles her head, trying to convey her tenderness but the baby arches her back so that she writhes against her, fists balled, torso rigid with anger or pain.
Why does she hate me so very much? The thought consumes her as she tries to jiggle the child to sleep while pacing the damp, chill bedroom. The early afternoon light seeps through the thin cotton curtains: cruel, since the rest of the cottage is dark. Shadows pool in the corners, mould festers on the walls, and the furniture is oppressive: iron beds, a stained oak dresser and table. The ceilings are beamed and the wood chipped walls are painted not just white but rusty terracotta and turquoise in a warped distortion of a hippy’s dream.
She craves light and brightness: summer days when the washing can blow on the line, not steam inside, turning the room damper and colder; when the older children can potter in the garden and not make constant demands on her time. When she can stand with the sun on her face, and just for a moment feel that things might get better at some point. Where she can laugh off the self-loathing that blankets her so that she can’t see a route out of this life with its narrow lines, its drudgery, its endless washing and feeding and cooking, its constantly screaming baby – because Clare, through gasps of breath, is still sobbing. And, oh dear God, surely she must be close to giving up soon?
‘Shh, shh,’ she soothes her but it’s counterproductive. The baby ratchets up the volume and redoubles her cries. Janet’s pacing becomes more frenetic, her rocking fevered, as Clare tries to spring from her, wriggly as an eel. ‘I
t’s OK.’ Desperation creeps into her voice, as she grips her more fiercely. ‘It’s OK, really. It’s OK.’
But it’s not OK. Clare flails at her and Janet can’t help but take it personally. I hate you, her daughter’s lashing body says.
‘Shh, shh,’ she pleads but she’s wracked with self-doubt. You’re a hopeless mother for letting her cry like this. For letting your baby suffer. ‘I am trying.‘ Her voice fractures into a scream. She presses her damp face against the top of her baby’s head but Clare just wriggles and strains away.
‘Shh, shh.’ Her tears are flowing now, of self-pity and an exhaustion so extreme sometimes she just wants to lie down and never get up. Please be quiet, just for a minute. Just SHUT UP! she wants to say. Somehow, the thoughts become words and she is shouting. And in this act of rebellion, she finds her voice and it feels good to respond like this: to fight a cry with a cry.
And then some sense of self-discipline kicks in. Mattie’s having his lunchtime nap and won’t stir, but Lizzie’s downstairs: she mustn’t hear her. And yet the outburst has shocked her baby girl. Clare stares and for a wonderful moment, the crying stops: a tiny reprieve. She holds her, hoping her pounding heart will reassure her, rather than betray her fear. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to shout. There, that’s better. That’s better, isn’t it?’ Her daughter wriggles, and she realises she is pressing her too tight.
She releases her grip, and as she does, Clare’s lungs expand and the noise resumes: a blast of fury that turns her body rigid, fierce energy pulsing up from the tips of her toes. And she knows she can’t do this any more. She can’t deal with this continual, soul-destroying noise that wakes her each night, that dominates her days, that summons her from sleep so that her mind-fogged body stumbles from the dark bedroom where Pete is dead to the world and she huddles in the cold, letting this parasite of a baby drain the spirit from her as she sucks her dry.
She isn’t the mother she thought she would be when she agreed to swap the busy coastal town she grew up in for this rural hovel. She isn’t even a competent mother: just one who bitterly regrets having three children because Clare, and she has always known this, was a mistake. A baby conceived in a rare moment of optimism that fizzled out by the time a crying Mattie woke her. She remembers going for a wee and praying, as she douched herself, that the sperm hadn’t taken; that she wouldn’t be pregnant this time.
Little Disasters Page 25