by Rosie Fiore
My parents have been amazing; they looked after the girls through the summer, but then my mum fell over in the garden and broke her leg, and I had to make other childcare plans. We still go to see them most weekends, though, and they never fail to lift our spirits.
Tim has done his bit too, in his own, inimitable Tim way. He turns up some nights, about once a fortnight, usually without warning. If he finishes early in the restaurant or isn’t working, he’ll sometimes just get in the car and drive over from Bristol. He always brings an expensive bottle of spirits – good vodka or whisky – and we sit together and drink and talk until the early hours. He crashes on the sofa. In the morning he delights the kids with a fancy breakfast and then walks them to school before heading back to Bristol. It’s with Tim I feel most able to be myself. I can swear and rage and fall apart. With everyone else, I have to keep playing the part of someone who’s keeping it together. Tim is also the person I’ve talked through my finances with. He may look like a trendy lightweight, but he’s surprisingly prudent with money, and good at financial planning. When it became clear that there was a gap between my reduced income and our expenses, and not in a good way, I turned to Tim for advice. At his suggestion, I sold the Range Rover and the Prius and bought a ten-year-old Ford Focus. With depreciation, I got next to nothing for the two cars, beyond being able to pay back what I still owed on them.
So we are limping along, but it’s a very different life to what I had before. I used to travel all the time for work, all over the UK and Europe. It was glamorous and jet-setting, with a lot of socializing, pressing the flesh, and winning clients over with bottles of champagne and charm and bullshit. I loved it and I was good at it. It had its perks too – bright, shiny, professional women who hung on my every word, laughed at my jokes and were sometimes keen for a little post-meeting fun. And I never had to worry about what was going on at home, because Helen kept all that humming along seamlessly.
Now I spend my evenings going over lists of spelling words and ironing little pleated skirts. I find myself digging through piles of wet washing in the machine first thing in the morning to locate socks, and 80 per cent of the text messages I get are from the school, reminding me about flu-vaccine forms or homework policy. I feel snarled in domestic detail, like I can’t take a step without some banal, ridiculous problem to do with the girls or the house tripping me up. But at the same time, if I ignore that stuff, the whole structure comes tumbling down and we end up living in chaos. To be honest, it makes me want to punch someone, but, as we know, that hasn’t worked out too well for me in the past.
I was lucky that I didn’t get sent to prison for assaulting a police officer. I was let off with a caution, and they were much kinder to me than I deserved. They put me in contact with Missing People, who have been amazing and have given us boundless support. They suggested that the girls and I might benefit from some family therapy. So I dutifully drive us all to see our counsellor every few weeks.
We sit in a room and Tana, a well-meaning and kind woman, tries to get us all to talk. Marguerite goes over immediately to the toy corner and plays with the family dolls. If Tana tries to engage with her, she reverts to baby talk. Miranda sits in silence, arms folded, and glowers at us all. I can’t be upset with Miranda for her anger. Because however angry she is, it’s nothing compared to my all-encompassing, crippling rage. In the beginning, I used to babble on, trying to get them to start talking, but it made things worse. Now I answer Tana’s questions about how things are going with practical, impersonal responses. Yes, they seem settled in after-school care. No, we haven’t planned a holiday this year (I can scarcely pay the gas bill, let alone buy flights to Greece). Yes, Marguerite is sleeping a little better. But as for talking about Helen? About how I feel? No chance. Not in front of the girls, and not to this nice, middle-aged woman, who probably isn’t qualified to deal with my detailed fantasies of murder and humiliation.
She suggested to me that it might be helpful to keep a journal.
‘Write down what you feel,’ she said in that soothing, condescending therapist tone, ‘it’s valuable to keep a record of how you feel in the moment. You can look back on it then, and see how you’ve moved on.’ She recommended the same thing to Miranda, who nodded, but gave no indication if she planned to do it. I haven’t pressed the issue with her. She can write if she wants to.
The next week, Tana asked me how I was getting on with the journal.
‘Good,’ I said guardedly, ‘it’s helping, I think.’
She looked delighted. ‘You can bring it to our sessions for discussion, if you like.’
I don’t like. I see the value of writing down what I’m thinking and feeling, but I’m certain that what is in these pages is not for Tana’s genteel eyes.
You see, I want to kill Helen. No. That isn’t enough. I want to torture her, and humiliate her, and torture her some more, and then kill her. She took my broken little family and put it back together, and then she smashed it to pieces again. And this time I have not a hope of repairing it. How can I make the world safe for two little girls who have lost a mother not once but twice?
But to kill someone, you have to know where they are, and she is gone. Vanished off the face of the earth. In the days and weeks following her disappearance, I searched her computer with forensic care. I checked every email, every web search. I read every single document. Nothing. I went through everything in her recycle bin. I became convinced that she must have deleted websites off her search history, so I rang a guy I knew from school, Clive, who had his own computer-security consultancy. I paid his astronomically high rate and he came round to the house and ran a file-recovery programme on Helen’s PC. Still nothing. However she’d planned her escape, she hadn’t done it from that PC, that was for sure.
I logged into her Facebook profile on my phone and set it up to bleep for any kind of notification and alert me if someone logged in from another device. Every time my phone trilled, I jumped, but it was always someone tagging her in a post (‘Miss you, Helen. Xxxx’). There were no new posts from her at all.
But then I woke up one morning from an alcohol- and tear-sodden sleep to discover that her profile had disappeared. It had been deleted in the night and I hadn’t heard the bleeps of the alert. With it I lost five years of posts and memories, pictures of us together, of the girls, of parties we had attended. They weren’t images we’d taken ourselves (those, naturally, were filed in strict date order and impeccably labelled, on Helen’s PC and in our Cloud storage). The pics that were gone were the chance ones others had taken – the eye-witness snapshots of what I had believed to be our happy family. It felt like another death.
It took a few days for it to dawn on me that I had been using Helen’s Facebook profile to spy on her, setting alerts to see if she logged in. She had probably done the same to me. Wherever she was, she’d have known I was obsessively checking it, and she’d deleted it in the middle of the night to snap that last possible thread of connection. It was the first, incontrovertible contact from her, if you could call it contact. Was it the opposite of contact? It was so callous. Yet what did I expect? I rang Tim and told him. He was the only person I had told about my Facebook snooping.
‘It’s for the best, mate,’ he said gently. ‘You know it is. There was no way you were going to learn anything that would make you happy.’
‘I know. But it was all I had.’
‘You didn’t really have it though, did you? It’s not like you were supposed to be on there. She knows where you are. If she wants to contact you, she will. But she seems to be making it clear she doesn’t want to. I know there’s no point in saying “move on”, but, well. . . move on, Sam. What you were doing was very fucking unhealthy.’
He was right, of course, but that didn’t stop my obsessive online searching. I trawled through hundreds of pages of searches for Helen Cooper, Helen Knight (her maiden name), H Cooper, Helen Rosemary Knight, and every possible variation on her name. About 90 per cent of the
returns were for other Helen Coopers and Helen Knights. Of the ones that referred to her, I found little to help me. There was some work stuff from when she first joined Superhero Inc., the company where we’d met and where I still worked, the odd fundraising page for a fun run she’d done, and a few mentions in the local press for events she’d organized. She’d left Australia in 2009, and I found almost nothing that pre-dated her move to the UK. All there was was a listing on the alumni page of the university in Brisbane where she gained her degree, and a blurry photo from a school sports day of a long-legged Helen in brief shorts, aged maybe fifteen or sixteen, grinning at the camera and holding up a medal. That photo was on the school’s website and had been posted as part of a larger batch from school sports days through the decades. She didn’t appear in any others on the site. I set up Google alerts so I got an email every time someone posted online about a Helen Cooper or a Helen Knight, but I got so many emails, all irrelevant, that I deleted the alert after a while. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she wasn’t making a new digital trail as Helen Cooper or Knight.
In those early days I also tried talking to the women Helen would have considered her close friends – other school-gate mums, a few people from her yoga class she mentioned frequently. These were all women I thought I knew; we had socialized together, visited one another’s homes, even in a couple of cases taken holidays together. But every one of them reacted with coolness. They all said the same thing: that Helen had been perfectly normal up until her disappearance. They had had no cause for alarm and had not thought she was stressed or behaving out of character in any way.
The oddest thing about those chats with Helen’s friends was that none of them had known her well, or at least they weren’t admitting to having known her well. They talked of lunches and play dates, of shopping trips and planning meetings. None of them could offer me any insight into her emotional state. Perhaps they knew more than they were letting on, but I didn’t get a sense of that at all. The anecdotes they shared showed a version of Helen I recognized: the public Helen – polite, perky, efficient, but always, somehow, separate. I couldn’t imagine her curled up on a sofa having a good cry or a bitch, or admitting a weakness. God knows, she had never done it with me.
It hadn’t struck me so forcibly at the time, but she came into my life without any of the usual baggage – no old friends, family or acquaintances, no old boyfriends or favourite local haunts. Of course she hadn’t been in the UK long when I met her, but most people coming to London have at least someone they know, and they certainly have people back home that they are in contact with. Helen seemed serenely independent and became so swiftly and seamlessly absorbed into my life with the girls that I didn’t give it much thought. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t sociable – she collected people everywhere she went. We had a full and busy social life, but all the people we were close to were either friends of mine whom Helen had adopted, or friends she’d made through the girls’ school.
And I think it was at that point, pondering Helen’s lack of a past – on my thousandth-millionth-infinityth go through the facts, as Marguerite would have called it – that I fell asleep, with the ticker tape of the twenty-four hour news, rolling endlessly across the screen. Which meant that when Miranda woke up on the morning of her ninth birthday, she found her father asleep, sitting slumped and fully clothed on the sofa with a beer bottle in his hand. That’s how precious and unique memories are made. There’s another jewel for you, Miranda, my darling. One to remember forever. My pleasure.
I had, thank God, had my shit together sufficiently to arrange all the wrapped gifts on the coffee table in an impressive pile of guilt and money, so Miranda came in and gave me one look of undisguised loathing before falling to her knees and ripping the paper off the biggest gift in the pile. As I struggled to my feet and headed for the bathroom, I couldn’t help remembering Helen’s birthday rituals of ceremonial present opening at the breakfast table: cards first, paper opened and folded, not ripped, and each gift savoured, with the giver carefully thanked.
I splashed water on my head and rinsed my mouth out, combing my hair and avoiding my own eyes in the mirror. I grabbed a fresh T-shirt from the bedroom and returned to the living room with my most cheerful grin plastered in place. Miranda was tearing the paper off each present as if she was searching for something. Once she’d opened it, she’d glance at the object and then cast it aside, as if it definitely wasn’t what she was looking for, then she’d grasp the next one and the process would begin again.
Marguerite came stumbling down from her bedroom, her curls in abundant disarray. She blindly pushed against my thighs until I sat down in an armchair, and then climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms around her and rested my cheek on the top of her head. ‘Ouch, Daddy,’ she said fuzzily. ‘Scratchy chin.’
‘Sorry, poppet,’ I said.
We sat together in silence, watching Miranda lay waste to her presents. At one point Marguerite leaned forward off my lap and reached out a finger towards a Monster High doll and Miranda whipped around and snarled at her.
‘Miranda. . .’ I said mildly.
‘They’re not hers,’ she said fiercely. ‘They’re mine. She can open her own stupid presents when it’s her birthday.’
With this, she tore the paper off the last gift, a carefully chosen sparkly top, which I had hoped she might want to wear to her party in the afternoon. The look on her face was pure scorn when she held it up, and she flung it behind her on the carpet.
She surveyed the carnage around her of ripped paper and tumbled gifts. ‘Where’s the DVD of Into the Woods?’ she said coldly.
I could have said, ‘Granny and Grandpa have got it for you. You’ll get it at their house at the weekend,’ which was true, or I could have tapped my nose conspiratorially, recalling an old, shared joke. But I was exhausted. I smelled like a sweaty brewery and I found everything about this scene so wrong and so sad that I stood up, tipping Marguerite off my lap, and said, ‘As if all these presents weren’t enough! You ungrateful little cow. You haven’t even managed to say thank you. I don’t think you deserve a party.’
The problem is, she acts so grown-up. Helen and I always used to joke that she was eight going on thirty-nine. But of course she isn’t. She’s a little girl who lost the only mum she really remembers. And now she was being told off on her birthday morning by her old soak of a dad. Miranda looked at me, her face white and her eyes big and afraid. It was in that moment I realized I hadn’t so much said those words as bellowed them. I had really shouted at her. She scrambled to her feet and ran to her room, slamming the door, and Marguerite, who had been sitting where she had fallen at my feet, let out a siren wail and began to cry. I had to fix it all, somehow, before the party in the afternoon. I had to rescue this, or it would end up being the worst birthday of Miranda’s short life, and she’d already had a couple of awful ones. I was so tired and suddenly also hot and claustrophobic. I went over to the window, ignoring Marguerite’s sobs, and opened the curtains, wanting to fling the windows wide and breathe some fresh air. Outside, it might as well still have been the middle of the night. The clouds were low and black, and rain fell in unrelenting grey sheets. I rested my forehead on the clammy windowpane. Fantastic.
Lara
It’s all about logistics, isn’t it? Frances had to go to Miranda Cooper’s party, even though she didn’t really want to (‘She’s not very nice anymore, Mum,’ she’d said carefully). It was at the big cinema complex off the ring road, and I couldn’t face trekking all the way there on the bus, then home, then back again a few hours later, especially since the heavens had opened and we’d have been better off in an ark rather than a bus. Frances was definitely too old for me to come to the party with her, and even if that hadn’t been the case, you don’t invade a nine-year-old’s party with a boisterous three-year-old in tow. I decided that even though it would be hell on earth, I’d take Jonah to the indoor soft-play place in the same complex. He could tear around and bur
n off some energy.
I dropped Frances off in the cinema foyer and smiled at Sam, who was looking pasty and puffy around the eyes. Miranda was equally pale, and she was glowering, although she managed half a smile when Frances handed her her present. ‘Thank you,’ she said carefully and clearly. It made my heart ache.
‘Six o’clock at the pizza place?’ I asked Sam, who nodded. I hesitated for a second. I felt bad leaving him to the mercies of a herd of small girls and wondered whether I should offer to stay and share the responsibility. But then Jonah went off at top speed across the foyer, heading straight for the exit, roaring like a jet engine as he went.
The soft-play place was every bit as awful as I had thought it might be. Overcrowded with cabin-feverish toddlers, it was like one of those brawling taverns in a Western film. After a few near-misses and one particularly tense stand-off with a nasty older child and his bullish father, Jonah and I escaped out into the fresh air.
The rain had abated and we played happily in the muddy park until the big fat drops began to fall again. I looked at my watch. The film would be coming out shortly and they’d be heading to the pizza restaurant. Perhaps we wouldn’t embarrass Frances too much if we ate at another table. It’d keep us out of the rain and I could get the chefs to give Jonah a lump of pizza dough to play with.