Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

  I watched my father’s corpse over her shoulder.

  At the end of those precious moments, she concluded: ‘We need to call the police.’

  Yes, I thought, because that would fix things.

  ‘The police, and an ambulance – maybe an ambulance, I don’t know, I think it might be too late, too late for a…’ She fumbled, as if she’d forgotten the word. ‘It was an accident, it all just happened so quickly that I – Christ we just need the police here.’ Another pause, this one a fraction longer. I heard her shifting her weight from one foot to the other. ‘How long do you think it will take? What should I do until then?’

  My mother’s half of the conversation came tumbling out from the living room, disguised as white noise now. I couldn’t concentrate on her chatter; I was preoccupied with the body that was lying in front of me, its face now covered with a tea towel.

  ‘They’ll be here soon, love, not long to wait now.’

  Her speech cut through my concentration. She hovered in the doorway as she spoke. ‘Gillian, love, do you think you can talk to me now? Explain what happened? I’m going to need to know. I’m going to need to know what I should tell them.’ She moved closer to me as she spoke and it occurred to me that she might be about to comfort me, although out of the two of us she was clearly the more agitated one.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I started. I thought it was best to try this out on my mother first. ‘He lost his temper with me. I don’t even know why, I can’t think. I only pushed him away.’ I didn’t have to admit to it, no. But the best lies are inspired by true events. ‘I just pushed him. I never thought… I just didn’t think, and when I knew he’d fallen–’ The further into the explanation I ventured, the more prominent my tears became. My mother shushed me – in that patronising yet maternal way – and pulled me close towards her.

  ‘I went out to get your father something to drink. You stayed upstairs and started to unpack your things. When I got home, he–’ She paused for thought.

  I pulled away to observe her. A crease had formed between her eyes and two teeth were now tugging on her bottom lip; thinking appeared to be a painful process.

  ‘When I got home he was angry. He said that I’d taken too long and he lost his temper with me, not with you. I was scared, you were in the house and I didn’t want it – no, I didn’t want you to be involved. So, when he came towards me, to hit me, I pushed him away, and that’s when he lost his balance.’ She paused again as she finished piecing together this reimagining. ‘You heard raised voices and so you stayed out of the way, but when it went quiet that’s when you came to see what had happened. Do you understand?’

  One point for believability.

  One point for feasibility.

  Two points for effort.

  I had never seen her so controlled.

  I nodded in agreement, although I tried to appear tentative before asking: ‘Why don’t we just tell them the truth?’

  It was a potentially dangerous question but still one that I had to ask. If I hadn’t, then it would have come to her at a later date, when this was all over and the shock had worn off. I had to ask it because at some point in the future it would occur to her that I hadn’t thought telling the truth was even an option; it wasn’t, of course, and it never had been, but my mother couldn’t know that.

  The doorbell rang. Before she moved away from me she threw back: ‘Because I can’t lose the both of you.’

  And for the briefest time I wondered how much of my explanation she believed.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ I heard her say, presumably to the police officers waiting behind the door, hidden from my line of vision. It seemed a strange thing to say, given the

  circumstances. ‘It’s been – I can’t explain, it all just happened so fast and, God, I can’t believe this has happened at all.’ My mother’s new role: traumatised woman meets accidental murderer.

  ‘Okay, miss, I need you to tell me: is there anyone else here?’

  ‘My daughter. My daughter, yes, just through there.’ She opened the door a little further and stepped to the side, allowing the officers a half-view of me, and regrettably an even clearer view of the body on the floor in our hallway.

  My inappropriate desire to laugh returned as I watched, but lodged in my throat like a piece of popcorn determined to ruin the best scene of a film.

  My mother delivered a comprehensive explanation for the mess that currently occupied the hall, stuttering intermittently throughout, as if that was somehow valid evidence of her shock and bereavement. The officers listened, although one occasionally shifted his attention to me, prompting my deliberately wide eyes to look right past him, which seemed a convincing expression to adopt at the time.

  ‘Mrs Thompson, we’re going to need to call this in – do you understand? A senior officer will need to come out to the house, and they will arrange for crime scene investigators to inspect things, and for a coroner to remove the–’ He wavered on his phrasing. ‘Your husband. Do you understand that?’

  My mother nodded her confirmation, prompting the officer to continue.

  ‘Both yourself and your daughter will need to come down to the police station. You’ll both need to answer some questions and make a statement. Do you understand that as well, Mrs

  Thompson?’

  In response my mother spat out a blunt and confused ‘No.’

  A short silence followed this. One officer delivered a troubled look to the other.

  ‘What is that you don’t understand, Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘Why we have to go, why you need us both. Why not just me?’

  ‘It’s procedure, Mrs Thompson, we have to do this.’

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘Because someone has died,’ he explained, as if maybe she hadn’t realised.

  Chapter 3

  There was nothing particularly interesting or enlightening about the investigation or the inquest that followed. I thought it might be useful, that I might learn something beyond what textbooks had offered me. In reality it was a tense handful of weeks to acquittal; the first third of my summer was spent with my mother and I both watching each other, waiting for signs that the other was about to crack. From years of dipping in and out of journals I had developed a rough timeline for how my hypothetical trial would go, and, fortunately, my mother’s own trial followed a similar format. An array of unfamiliar neighbours elbowed their way into the proceedings (they would eventually invade our home as well, brandishing deepest sympathies and unappetising meals), and were paraded through the courtroom, holding up their polished opinions like honourable medals. They fought both for and against us, almost alternately, until time was called on the proceedings. The prosecution ran out of words long before my mother’s defence did. We were, after all, two women who had lived in a violent household.

  When the proceedings were finalised my mother didn’t talk for four days. She had driven home in silence while I had made repeated phone calls regarding ‘basic funeral packages’. However, after learning the outrageous costs associated with the whole thing, I gave some serious thought to the idea of boxing him up and burying him in the garden myself. The cardboard options offered by the likes of Compare the Casket were tempting, but I was unsure of the dimensions required for such a hole. Nor did I think I would be able to convince my mother that this was a fine idea.

  ‘We’ll pay whatever it takes to get rid of him,’ she said. That was her only input.

  For two days after that their bedroom became her tomb. At meal times she would peer out of the door, casting a cautious glance along the hallway before taking a step into it. I felt perturbed; surely the only person she was at risk of running into was me. Before venturing into the kitchen – at meal times that she had silently set and I had reluctantly adhered to – she allowed herself five minutes in the hallway, scrubbing at stains on the floor that only she could see.

  Macbeth. 1599/1603/1606 (I can never quite decide). Lady Macbeth. ‘Out, damned spot! Out
, I say!’

  And then my mother would retreat to her bedroom, clutching a meal that had grown cold during her cleaning.

  ‘I can heat that up again for you.’

  ‘You could eat that down here with me.’

  ‘We can even eat in silence, if that’s what you’d like.’

  I had never been so accommodating before.

  Alongside cooking, and a host of other household duties, the funeral arrangements made their way onto my to-do list. My mother didn’t handle these early stages of grief particularly well, which a number of strangers assured me was quite normal. There were many days when my main source of conversation was provided by Bethany from Co-Operative Funeral Care. The house was silent and unloved, particularly by comparison to the ritualistic cleaning that took place prior to all of this. However, when the day of the funeral arrived, my mother lapsed into a state of complete uselessness that left me mourning her silence. Although I did try to be sympathetic towards her plight.

  I shouted a thirty-minute warning ahead of leaving in the hope that this would be ample time for her to navigate her way into the dress I had ironed and hung out for her. It wasn’t. When I went upstairs I found her perched on the edge of her unmade bed clutching the cup of tea I had taken up forty-eight minutes earlier. The dry toast – to settle her stomach – sat on the bedside table, untouched. An old shirt of my father’s fell loosely off her shoulders, as if she had made an effort to remove the garment but had admitted defeat two buttons in. There were stains scattered over the fabric and I wondered which one of them this mess belonged to.

  I checked my watch. We needed to leave in ten minutes.

  In silence I dressed her. I rolled one leg of her nude-coloured tights up to her knee, before bunching up the other leg and repeating the process. I tugged the fabric up her thighs as far as I could before nudging her, to indicate that now was the time to move. I stretched the fabric a comfortable amount to lift it entirely over her buttocks before pulling my fingers around the elasticised edges and snapping the waistband against her skin.

  ‘Mum, you need to lift your arms above your head now.’

  She followed the instruction unashamedly, while I held a breath of panic inside my mouth; this was the closest I had been to a bare person before. With her arms raised in the air, I lifted the shirt over her head – avoiding the intimacy of buttons – and quickly replaced the shirt with the dress. One arm at a time, I fed the fabric over her until the loose-fitting garment hung about her on the bed.

  ‘When you stand up this will fall better, I think.’

  ‘I’m not ready, though.’

  I must have missed something. Something obvious and crucial that another girl could never possibly have missed.

  ‘I can’t do this, love.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re allowed to miss it. Or are you? I don’t…’

  ‘Gillian, what if I tell someone?’

  ‘What if you tell someone what?’

  ‘What if I tell someone what really happened?’

  It was the first time that night had been mentioned since the inquest.

  ‘What really happened, Mum?’

  She shook her head and angled her face away from me. I knew she wouldn’t answer.

  ‘Have you told someone, Mum?’ I asked, trying a different tactic.

  ‘No, but I’m asking what if. What if it just slips out?’

  Then I would have to kill them too.

  She used the mirror as a means of watching me, scared of staring me directly in the eye.

  ‘You’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t, won’t you?’

  I smiled at her through the mirror and although she matched this with a smile in return, it was obvious that she didn’t mean it.

  Throughout the day I kept my eyes on and around her; she had developed the look of an erratic woman on the verge of some sort of breakdown, which in many ways was appropriate for the occasion, but it still unsettled me. Her eyes refused to sit still, even when she was in mid-conversation, and her mouth straddled the line between a smile and a grimace for much of the event. By the time the funeral itself was concluded, her cheeks were so reddened and her hair sprang out with such enthusiasm that I wondered why I had gone to such lengths to make her look presentable before leaving the house.

  At the wake – a party to celebrate the fact that the deceased was now six feet below ground level and was perhaps the only part of the day’s events that I could lend my support to – the room was packed full of people who I had never seen before in my life. I assumed that they were customers, drinking associates, neighbours who had recently developed an inappropriate interest in my family. They took it in turns to approach my mother and me, as if perhaps they had drawn up a rota beforehand. After the first chorus of ‘We were so sorry to hear the news’ and ‘If you need anything, you know where we are’ the condolences became generic and the faces became a blur. In amongst all of this I lost my mother and became plagued by relentless imaginings of her confessing our shared sin to whoever would listen.

  I tried to raise my line of vision over a mass of gravity-defying hair.

  ‘Are you okay, my love?’

  It was the favourite question of the day; the hot topic.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, I just need to find my–’

  ‘How did you get on with that casserole?’

  It transpired then that this woman – this stranger – had been one of many women to deposit food on our doorstep. Despite having no memory of having eaten her casserole specifically, I told her that the food had been well-received. She introduced herself as Anne Westburn from Number 34, and introduced the man-child, the overgrown Augustus Gloop slumped behind her, as her son, Timothy. The boy looked as unenthusiastic about attending my father’s funeral as I was.

  ‘I just want you to know that we are absolutely here for you, whatever you need, and your mother. Where is your mother? I’ve hardly had a glimpse of her what with this, well, this bustle of strangers,’ Anne said, applying a tone of distaste to her final words. When she stepped back to scan the room my mother appeared across the room again, damp-eyed and in mid-conversation with a gentleman who looked horrified by whatever she had just said.

  ‘I’ll go and say a quick hello to her.’ Number 34 disappeared and joined the queue that was forming around the room.

  Little did I know that there was a queue forming around me too. Drama-hungry women in their mid-forties onwards flocked to me while their husbands maintained a safe distance, unsure of how to approach the emotionally fragile twenty-something girl that they perceived me to be. Twenty-eight minutes later, when this attention had settled, I found my mother again, enthusiastically sobbing on the shoulder of Number 34.

  ‘He was my husband, for God’s sake, it should have never, never have turned out this way. This just wasn’t – it wasn’t ever my plan.’ Her speech was staggered around sobs that showed no signs of dissipating. The words were mostly inaudible as they soon intertwined with shoulder-shuddering sobs, while my mother’s face became an image of the crying theatre mask. And the whole room, while trying to shoot sly glances in the direction of the grieving widow, willed her to continue.

  Initially I had thought a small breakdown would be harmless, that it may have even added some authenticity to the event. However, as my mother’s exclamations continued, I soon realised that she was treading dangerously close to a confession.

  ‘He wasn’t happy. God knows I wasn’t happy, but this – this, I mean… how could this make anyone happy?’ She spoke with the slurred incoherence of a drunk and I wondered whether perhaps she was.

  ‘Sssh, pet, you did what you had to do.’ Number 34 comforted her, blissfully ignorant.

  Before she could deliver a slice of lukewarm comfort, my mother unleashed another wave of emotion, wailing with a ferocity that I had previously only heard emerge from animals. I admit now that I had underestimated the abusive bond shared between my parents during their marriage; I had no idea that t
heir heartstrings had been so intertwined that this sudden pull would cause such an uncomfortable snap.

  ‘I’ve been with him all my life. All my life, I haven’t known anything different.’

  I fought my way through the crowd and lowered myself down to her level; there was a flicker of something in her expression – fear, discomfort. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gillian, I’m so sorry. I thought that I could, but I just can’t.’

  The possibilities for her apology were endless but I nevertheless felt the need to stifle it.

  ‘Mum, you don’t have anything to apologise for. You’ve done so well today.’

  Accompanied by occasional cooing and shushing that went some way towards steadying her sobs, I removed my mother’s tangled limbs from around Number 34 and placed her arms around my neck instead, steadily lifting her away from her seat as I stood. She moved with caution; a chimp changing handlers.

  ‘Gillian, is there anything that I can–’

  I cut Number 34 off before she could finish. ‘Could you just explain to people? We’re grateful to them for coming and providing their support, but it’s been a taxing day and we thought it was perhaps best for us to slip away quietly.’

  Star Trek. 1968. Leonard Nimoy. ‘Oh, yes, you humans have that emotional need to express gratitude.’

  I quickly added: ‘Make sure you express our gratitude, won’t you?’

  As we tumbled out of the door of the building, my mother mumbled into my neck: ‘Where are we going now then?’

  ‘We’re going home.’

  ‘Why?’

  A strand of saliva chased the question out of her mouth as her head dropped back against the passenger seat’s headrest. For the majority of the journey that followed she remained slumped with her head against the window, a smudge of make-up following her along the glass whenever she shifted. Her breathing was heavy, relaxed; for the final ten minutes of the journey I couldn’t decide whether she was even conscious. Then the wrench of the handbrake stirred her.