Never Go There

by Rebecca Tinnelly

  Not another soul walked the street. The cows were quiet, so too the cars on the road, the sheep on the hill. Even the crowscarer couldn’t be heard.

  Ahead rose the church’s steeple. As they reached the church’s door Maggie moved to open it, but Jennifer stopped her.

  ‘Where are you going, Mags? It’s this way.’ She pulled Maggie’s arm, tried to lead her away.

  Maggie dug her heels in. ‘What do you mean, this way? Why aren’t we going inside?’ Her knees felt weak; had she failed Emma again? ‘Are we too late?’ she asked, voice panicked. ‘Did we miss it, the service?’

  ‘Maggie.’ Jennifer’s eyes dropped. ‘There’s no service.’

  ‘There’s always a service,’ Maggie said, feeling in her pocket for the speech she’d prepared a week ago, writing down everything about Emma, every good little thing until her heart broke again and she could write not a single word more. ‘It’s her funeral,’ she said. ‘There’s always a service first.’

  ‘It’s not a funeral, just a burial.’ Jennifer stepped closer, resting her hand against Maggie’s back.

  ‘But Arthur was paying for the funeral! I wanted to arrange it myself, you remember. I wanted to do it and he said no, pulled the kinship card, took control. He said he was paying!’ Her voice was high, anxious.

  She knew there was to be no procession, no hearse driving slowly through the streets. She knew Arthur hadn’t arranged a wake, a remembrance … but no service? No prayers for his daughter, no hymns?

  ‘Arthur didn’t pay for a service; just to have Emma buried in the yard.’ Jennifer guided Maggie forward, away from the church to the graves at the side.

  Maggie’s clutched the piece of paper in her coat pocket.

  At the back of the church there was Toby, blond hair bright in the sunlight. Beside him was his father, Jon. The vicar stood in dark robes, bible to chest, surreptitiously peeking at his watch.

  There was nobody else. No drinkers from the pub, no friends, no old teachers. Even Emma’s own father hadn’t bothered to attend. How could he do this?

  And there was the grave prepared for Emma. Maggie closed her eyes, felt for her friend’s arm and held tight to it.

  A hole in the earth, six feet long and so dark, so deep, a mound of soil beside it.

  The vicar looked up, ‘Shall we begin?’ he asked in soft tones, his face solemn.

  Maggie stared at the hole, at the gravestone next to it. She would have organised a funeral. She would have chosen hymns, prayers, readings. She would have made them all come, everyone who had known her, would have stood in front of them all and told them who Emma was, really was, the difference she had made to Maggie. She would have given her goddaughter flowers, music, would have made everyone come back to the pub afterwards to raise a glass to her name.

  Beside the hole in the ground was the coffin, waiting in the cold.

  It wasn’t enough, none of this was enough.

  ‘Like as a father pitieth his own children: even so is the Lord merciful unto them that fear him. For he knoweth whereof we are made …’

  Maggie’s ears felt like they were full of water. She couldn’t see the vicar, or Jennifer, or the pile of soil at her feet.

  Instead, she remembered Arthur, neat black suit and black shirt beneath, drunk after burying his first wife.

  ‘She was born bad,’ Arthur had said, his drunk gaze fixed on the infant daughter he still couldn’t bear to hold. ‘First thing she did was kill her mother.’

  Maggie had tried to talk him down, but she was drunk herself and made a hash of it.

  Emma wasn’t born bad, quite the opposite. She grew up to be so very good.

  Emma had saved Maggie’s life when she moved into the pub, stopped her drinking herself to death on neat gin, limiting her to a capful per cup of tea. All that, on the shoulders of a girl so young, just fourteen, who had already lost so much. ‘I can’t lose you too, Mags,’ she had said, ‘I can’t lose you too.’

  ‘… But the merciful goodness of the Lord endureth,’ the vicar continued, his thin, tired voice battling the cold breeze, ‘for ever and ever upon them that fear him …’

  Jennifer sniffed, a tissue held to her face.

  ‘Not a good bone in this girl’s body,’ Arthur had slurred to Maggie at the wake of Emma’s real mother, twenty-one years ago, knocking the bassinet she was sleeping in with his foot. As Emma grew older and found out what had happened, how her poor mother had died, Arthur never hugged her or reassured her it wasn’t her fault, that of course it wasn’t her fault. She’d been a baby, an innocent baby and he loved her. Instead, he took her to the grave on her birthday every year, showed her the place her mother was buried and reminded her of her part in it all.

  The vicar touched Maggie’s shoulder, signalling to the mound of soil by his side. Maggie took a handful, her arms like lead, hands numb to the touch of the earth.

  ‘We commend unto thy hands of mercy, most merciful Father, the soul of this our sister departed, and we commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes …’

  But Maggie still wasn’t listening. She barely felt the cold, granulated soil move through her fingers, or the wind pick up and ruffle her hair.

  The only sound she heard was the earth hitting the coffin, a dry, hollow patter as it landed on the chipboard lid.

  The coffin was gradually covered, Jon, Jennifer, Toby each throwing in a handful. Emma’s final resting place was a coffin made from unvarnished chipboard, the nails splitting veins in the lid.

  It was too much for Maggie, too much because it wasn’t nearly enough.

  Beside Emma’s grave was Tom’s. Maggie brushed her thumb over the inscription, knew he would look after Emma, laid to rest in the plot by his side, the plot Maggie had bought and insisted on Emma being buried in.

  It was the sole concession Arthur had granted to Maggie.

  The thought of Arthur was like a vile taste in her mouth.

  So much of this mess was that man’s fault and no one had ever held him accountable. Not yet, anyway.

  She turned on her heel, staggered back through the graves, against the cold wind that bit at her skin.

  She didn’t stop to say thank you, God bless, to the vicar in his stark robes, ignored Jennifer’s call to her.

  Her tongue burned with the words she needed to say, her pulse quickening the closer she got to him.

  Arthur.

  The man at the root of it all.

  Maggie

  Monday, 11th December, 2017

  When she got to the house the curtains were drawn even though it was the middle of the day. His Land Rover was parked outside.

  Maggie knocked on the door with her fist, stepped back. She could feel her heart thudding, chest aching from the rush of adrenaline. She heard the shuffle of slippers on carpet, the progress painfully slow.

  ‘I thought you’d come,’ Arthur slurred when he finally opened the door, the sun catching the day-old stubble on his chin like fresh frost.

  He didn’t meet Maggie’s eye. Head bent, he turned and shuffled back into the house, the door left open for Maggie to follow.

  He’d lost weight, just as Maggie had, but now he looked like a skeleton, wrapped in clothes a few sizes too big. He hadn’t got dressed, was still in pyjamas. He looked less like the bully Maggie knew him to be and more like a broken, white-haired old man.

  Maybe he didn’t come to the church, arrange a proper funeral, because he couldn’t bear to bury his daughter, couldn’t face choosing flowers for her, hymns, prayers. So he hid at home, wearing last night’s pyjamas.

  Maybe this was why he had refused to discuss Emma’s death with Maggie, at all, until now.

  The house hadn’t changed in seven years, since the last time she’d been invited inside. The rug was the same, a little worn down the centre line. The chairs were all covered in dust sheets.

  Arthur shuffled his way into the study at the end of the hall, Maggie following. His hair was quite white now, his neck wri
nkled. The man was in his seventies but looked older, much older.

  ‘I presume you’re here,’ Arthur said, turning around with a piece of paper in his hand, ‘for this?’

  He held it out to her.

  ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he said as she read it. ‘After all, what choice do you have?’

  ‘What choice do you have?’ That phrase again, making her think of the phone call from Arthur the very night that Nuala arrived, Maggie hiding downstairs in the cellar at home, the phone pressed to her ear whilst she listened to Arthur’s latest demand to buy her land, Emma in the bar above her, still alive, gloriously alive.

  ‘What is this?’ Maggie said, staring down at the cheque in her hand, the sum of money insulting, nauseating. Only worth half of his last offer. ‘You think I’m here because of this? Because I want your money?’

  ‘You need my money.’

  Her cheeks burned, her scar too, and she glared at him. ‘Is that what you said to Edward when he kept your little secret safe? What you said to Jim? To Lois?’ She expected him to baulk, look up in shock, in horror at having been unmasked. She expected him to be as frail and broken as he looked.

  He wasn’t.

  ‘Well?’ Maggie said, but Arthur shrugged carelessly, arrogantly. ‘Is that what you said when James was born?’ Maggie went on, shifting her weight from hip to hip, her left side hot from the fire. ‘Did you offer her money to keep the fact that you were his real father quiet?’

  ‘Are you trying to increase my offer, Maggie? Trying to wring my pockets dry? Because you can’t prove anything, you know. Not a thing. But I’ll tell you what,’ he said, leaning forward, the sides of his mouth crusted with stale spit. ‘I’ll give you another hundred if it’d make you feel better.’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’

  He laughed a coughing hack of a laugh. ‘You need my money,’ he said again. ‘You need to sell that land or you’ll lose everything else that you own. How else are you going to keep your pub running, keep your home, keep food on the table?’ He looked up at her, eyes glinting, the left corner of his mouth twitching back a smile. ‘How else are you going to keep gin in your tea?’

  Maggie’s skin tingled. She crumpled the cheque in her fist.

  ‘How dare you,’ she hissed. ‘You think I want your money? You think I want anything from you? A rapist? A paedophile? Look at yourself! You’re disgusting, pathetic!’

  ‘Call me all the names under the sun, it won’t change a damn thing. I’m not the one with a failing business, with no money, no investment. Who’s the pathetic one, Maggie?’

  His voice was calm, level and low, making Maggie sound high pitched and strained.

  ‘Where were you today?’ Maggie asked him. ‘Why didn’t you come to the church?’

  He looked away, his face blank of emotion. She remembered again him kicking the bassinet, telling Emma what a bad little baby she was. Why didn’t Maggie do something then? Why didn’t she take Emma away with her, then?

  Because that was when Arthur met Elaine, at the wake of his dead first wife, and Maggie had let herself believe it would all be OK, that Emma would be in safe hands.

  A photo caught her eye, sitting on the edge of the desk, a photo of Emma at twelve or thirteen. Pretty and young, blond hair pulled back from her face, her blue eyes looking up at the camera as she sat on the garden wall.

  ‘How could you not come?’ She thought of the pub, her home, how little it all meant without Emma. ‘How could you do that to her?’

  Arthur didn’t reply, his head turned towards the log fire.

  ‘She deserved more!’ Maggie shouted, planting herself in front of Arthur, making him look up at her, take notice. ‘You’re her father, for God’s sake! You should have been there! You should have seen her off properly, given her flowers, given her a decent fucking coffin to lay down in!’

  ‘I’ve done more than enough for that girl,’ he growled, his dark eyes shooting a warning to Maggie.

  ‘You’ve done nothing but hurt her,’ Maggie cried in despair, ‘physically, emotionally—’

  ‘Who do you think paid off the fire chief?’ Arthur leaned forward in his chair, the light from the fire making his face look red. ‘Convinced him that Lois’s house fire was an accident? I may not have wanted that girl in my house but I didn’t want her in prison, either.’

  ‘You did that to keep Lois quiet!’

  ‘Quiet about what?’ Arthur asked coldly, his face infuriatingly calm.

  ‘About you raping her as a teenager!’ Maggie shouted, ‘About you beating her up on the day Emma lost the baby! About the fact that you were James’s real father!’

  ‘Don’t get me started on that boy.’ Arthur sat back in the chair, folded his arms and stared back at Maggie, defiant. ‘I saved Emma from him, too, not that she knew it.’

  Maggie opened her mouth to contest him, but how could she? There was no defence for James, nothing that righted his wrongdoing.

  ‘And how did Emma repay me?’ Arthur said in the same sour voice. ‘By growing up to be a waste of space.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Maggie pleaded, ‘She was a wonderful girl, a brilliant young woman—’

  ‘She was a girl who threw her body around, first with James, her own brother, and then with anyone who’d look at her.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She didn’t know who he was and she’s only had three boyfriends since then, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘She was sleeping with the Hill boy, last I heard. A farmhand, a nobody.’

  ‘She was twenty-one, a grown woman, she could see whoever she liked, do what she liked!’

  ‘No!’ He spat the words out, spittle landing on his knees. ‘She was a murderer, an embarrassment and a whore.’

  ‘She was my daughter!’ Maggie cried, and then stopped herself, realising the mistake she had made.

  Arthur laughed at her. ‘No, she wasn’t. She was my daughter, not yours. You were her godmother, a figurehead, nothing more, nothing at all.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Maggie said, though she knew that it was, that she’d always felt that way about Emma, always. ‘I meant I loved her as if she were my own. I loved her and you pushed her away!’

  ‘The only way that girl could have turned out any worse,’ Arthur said, squaring his thin shoulders, ‘is if you had been her real mother.’

  ‘How dare you,’ Maggie said, but her eyes stung at the words.

  ‘How is your son doing, Maggie? Did Lee ever forgive you for the mess of a mother you were?’

  ‘Don’t you—’ But it was true and Maggie knew it.

  ‘You call yourself a mother, but your own son won’t go near you. You call Emma your daughter but you didn’t see this coming! You missed it, all those signs, missed the despair she must have felt, the depression! How did you fail to realise she’d dropped so low, Maggie?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, stepping back. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Arthur said, leaning forward again. ‘Blind, were you? Drunk?’

  She hadn’t been blind, she hadn’t been drunk, she hadn’t, not once whilst Emma had lived under her roof. Emma had saved her from all that.

  There was one reason alone Maggie had missed all those signs, one truth she believed in more than anything.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ Maggie said, ‘because Emma didn’t do it. She didn’t kill Lois, she didn’t kill herself!’

  Arthur laughed at her again, loudly. ‘You’ve lost your mind, Maggie. You’ve lost all sense of reason.’

  ‘She didn’t!’ Maggie balled up the cheque, threw it straight at his face. ‘She didn’t do it!’ She turned to go.

  ‘You’ll be back,’ Arthur said, smoothing out the cheque on his knee and flattening his palm upon it. ‘You need this, Maggie!’

  But she had gone, left the room, the door slamming closed in her wake, each step onward fuelled by her fury. She would see to it that Arthur was punished for his past, his treatment of Lois,
Elaine and his daughter. But more importantly than that, than anything else, Maggie would clear her goddaughter’s name.

  Emma didn’t do it.

  Maggie would prove it, somehow. Maggie would show them all.

  She would show them how far she was willing to go.

  Maggie

  Tuesday, 12th December, 2017

  What had she been thinking?

  Why had she come?

  ‘For Emma, I came for Emma,’ she said to herself. Her throat prickled.

  She sat on the bench at the far end of the platform. She was shaking.

  She didn’t want it to show, draw attention.

  But it could be too late for that. A fat old woman with a scar down her face, wearing her dead husband’s mac and clutching a pink rucksack to her chest, faded pony stickers peeling from the sides, Emma’s name written in childish scrawl along the strap.

  Why had she thought she could do this, alone?

  In Bristol, the platform had smelled of engine oil and stale coffee. But here, in Paddington, she couldn’t define it. Petrol, bird shit, sweat, cloves, feet, cigarettes and stale beer.

  Two girls in matching velour tracksuits laughed. One pointed a purple-painted fingernail at Maggie.

  Pointed at her mullet of short curls, her scarred face, the androgynous clothes she wore.

  She staggered on, but the passengers behind were eager to pass, pushing her this way and that, the occasional ‘sorry,’ thrown back behind them.

  Then there was the guard in uniform, staring at her.

  The sweat built up at the nape of Maggie’s neck. She could feel them all staring at her.

  Once she found the right platform she sat with her head hanging low, hands wringing the pink rucksack.

  A memento of Emma. A reminder of why she was sitting in Paddington station, less than an hour from Nuala Greene’s front door.

  Because she knew now, she knew where she lived. She had found her.

  What was that noise?

  Footsteps.

  Maggie looked up, down the platform, watched the clicking step of a woman wrapped up in a quilted jacket, impossible heels on her feet. The other woman didn’t look at Maggie, not once, nor at the bag held tight to Maggie’s heaving chest.