Fresh Flesh

by Stella Duffy

  “Oh, hi. I know your sign says ‘No Vacancy’, but we are desperate, and I just wondered … well, maybe …”

  Saz didn’t know what she wondered. Patrick had insisted she go to the door but he hadn’t come up with a clever reason for asking for a room at a B&B that clearly indicated it had none. An interminable ten seconds later Saz’s basic lying skills returned, and with them her manipulative ability. Baby. Mother. Adopted babies. Young mothers. Saz put the lot together in a heart-string tugging story. They’d come this far, found Lillian only through deceit and subterfuge. Patrick was right, it was a bit late for her to start going all social-worker-conscience on him now.

  “Yeah, and um … I’m having a baby.” Not a huge lie.

  “Just over three months.”

  Saz rubbed her too-fit tummy and hoped the woman in front of her hadn’t been one of those women who looked five months pregnant from two months onwards.

  “And I haven’t been well, so we thought … well, actually,” Saz shrugged her head back towards the car where Patrick was sitting staring at the woman. “He thought, we should go away for the weekend. Only there’s nowhere to stay. I mean nowhere. And I’m shattered.” Also true.

  “So … do you have anywhere at all? Even a single room? Or know of somewhere else we can try? Please?”

  The older woman assured Saz of their great good fortune, “As it happens, love, I do keep a room back. You and your chap look like you could both do with a bit of a rest. It’s nothing special, but it is a room, and that’s more than you’re likely to get anywhere else. Now you park the car round the back and come on in.”

  Mary, Joseph and not-Jesus were in luck.

  Saz saw a dangerous silence fall on Patrick when they left the car on the gravelled courtyard at the back of the house. She had initially been concerned that he might blurt out what they believed to be the truth the minute he set eyes on Lillian. Worryingly, his reaction was just the opposite. Patrick’s mouth was tightly closed around grim, thin lips, his clenched teeth delineating an even stronger jawline than usual. After his voluble rantings all the way down the A30, this hushed calm was disconcerting to say the least. Patrick retrieved their bags from the boot and started to walk round to the front of the house.

  “Patrick, I can take my own bag, it’s not heavy.”

  “Hell no. You’re three months’ pregnant. What would she think of me?”

  “She’ll think I’m three months’ pregnant like I told her, not a bloody invalid. Give it here.”

  Patrick shook his head, “I’ll take them.”

  Saz didn’t understand the sudden development of a sense of chivalry. Not until they stood in the hallway of the house and she felt him flinch as the woman came towards them, her hand held out to shake his. He nodded his head at the tall woman, shrugged his shoulders and indicated the bags. As if they were glued to his hands. The woman was evidently used to taciturn husbands, because she winked at Saz with a conspiratorial half-smile and led the two of them up the stairs – which Saz was delighted to see were carpeted in a dark blue runner. In fact, as far as she could tell, the decor of the whole house seemed quite distant from the usual garish pinks and oranges so favoured by most British landladies. Perhaps Patrick’s mother had his good taste as well as his eyes.

  They were shown into a tiny twin room in the attic of the house, painted an easy cool blue, just enough space for two narrow beds, a half-sized sink and a waist-high wardrobe with a tea tray perched precariously on top of it. The woman indicated which of the beds had a firmer mattress for Saz and then told them to take a look out of the little window. “Best view in the house, that is.”

  The window looked out past the tiled roofs of Carbis Bay down to the coast, a wide stretch of golden sand. The rolling waves and green shoreline to her right reminded Saz of the beaches she’d seen a couple of years ago in New Zealand. She shuddered at the thought and turned away. The view was wonderful, the memory was not. The woman went on to tell them about breakfast, the bathrooms downstairs, the closest shops, the nearest restaurants. Saz could feel Patrick’s hackles rise beside her and knew it was time to get this woman away from him if he wasn’t to explode. Ferment was probably inevitable, but she’d rather it was in a time and place she had a little more control over, if at all possible. Feeling frightened and exhausted herself, she knew she wasn’t up to handling a full scale investigative row just yet.

  “OK. Brilliant. Thanks. Look, I might just have a lie down first. Before we go out for dinner. If that’s OK with you, love?”

  She placed a cool hand on Patrick’s arm. Cool and very firm.

  “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

  The woman spotted her cue to leave. She could see this warring couple needed a little time to themselves. “Well then, you’ve got your keys. As I said, the front door is locked at eleven; if you’re in after then, make sure to double lock it behind you. Anything else, just give me a yell. If you shout loud enough, I’m bound to hear you. There’s not any other Lillians stopping with me.”

  Saz had to ask, “So you are Lillian?”

  “Lillian Hope. Definitely not Lily. So don’t go shouting that or you’ll get no answer. Good. I’ll leave you to it then.”

  She held out her hand to Patrick who stared at her a half second too long, then took her hand in his.

  “Yeah. Great. Thanks Lillian.”

  Saz wondered if Lillian could feel his shaking hand.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Saz and Patrick decided to take their landlady’s advice and drive into St Ives to find somewhere for dinner. Except that wasn’t quite how it worked out. Instead they found themselves driving round and round a one-way system looking for an elusive parking place. With Patrick getting nastier by the minute. The one-way system was obviously designed to be impenetrable to foreigners and clogged still further by hoards of barely-dressed teenagers lining the pavements and spilling out into the narrow cobbled roads. Saz had hoped that getting Patrick out of the tiny attic room, dinner perhaps on the shorefront, with a shared bottle of wine over which they could plan their next move, might calm his mounting agitation. She hadn’t counted on the pretty seaside town she’d happily holidayed in with her parents taking the intervening twenty years to turn itself into a cross between Alton Towers and the Ministry of Sound. Saz felt old just looking at the thronging youth and Patrick wanted to mow the lot down. Except he kept following arrows that directed them into steep winding lanes too narrow for the wide new car and he had to reverse and try again. Patrick was far from happy. Saz was nervous. And bloody hungry. The shortbread biscuits in the room had done little to soothe her grumbling stomach, even though she’d eaten both packets the minute Lillian had closed their door.

  An hour later they finally parked the car, found a restaurant with a stunning moonlit view of Porthmeor Beach and the night-lit Tate. Two hours after that they’d eaten a meal that even Patrick admitted was well above passable. Saz thought it was bloody fantastic. Patrick may have sneered at her ordering sausages and mash when they were within spitting distance of the sea, but he happily forked a good half of her mashed potato down his face. All in the name of research, of course. It was good mash. He wanted to know what potatoes they’d used. Saz said he should leave her bloody dinner alone and ask in the kitchen. Patrick told her to shut the fuck up, he was paying. He may not have been in a great mood, but at least he was using his mouth to eat and speak, not to grind his teeth to a jawline of powdered enamel.

  They also shared a bottle of champagne.

  As Patrick said, “It’s not every day you shake hands with your mother for the first time. Hell, let’s really push the boat out.” Celebratory words, voice fat with bitter irony. Patrick would be driving them back to the B&B later and Saz knew things were going to get a hell of a lot messier before he was calm again so, much as she would have loved to get completely slaughtered and use the pale straw bubbles to forget the whole reason for them being there, she insisted on a half bottle. It didn’t help her client’
s mood any, but it did save him from shooting his mouth off too unpleasantly when the chef came out from the kitchen and asked for his autograph. On his apron. And the napkin. And the tablecloth. Saz thought he might be getting Patrick’s handprint on his face if he pushed it any further, so she explained as politely as possible that they had an early start in the morning and hurried Patrick out to the car. It took them only four wrong turnings in dark country lanes to get back to Carbis Bay and on the way Patrick gave Saz her first compliment.

  “You’re brilliant, you know that?”

  Expecting sarcasm, Saz asked a wary, “Why?”

  “The way you got me out of that restaurant.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, Katy would have kept me there until that sycophantic wanker really fucked me off. She actively pushes me into the punch-ups, she doesn’t try to save me from them.”

  “Patrick, I wasn’t trying to save you from a beating, I was trying to save him from one.”

  “That bloke was an arsehole.”

  “Good mash though.”

  “Yeah. Bastard. But anyway, good work.”

  “Thanks. It’s always been my aim to be someone’s minder.”

  They sat in the little upstairs room for half an hour trying to decide on their next move. It was no clearer than it had been over dinner. If anything, the proximity to Lillian made Patrick’s pressing need to confront her even more urgent. Finally Saz knew she could put it off no longer. There was no way Patrick would allow either of them to sleep if they didn’t deal with it that night. She did at least manage to persuade him to allow her to go downstairs alone.

  “Patrick, you’re so bloody hyped up I just don’t trust you. Either you let me do this my way, or we don’t fucking do any of it. I’ll walk out and leave you here by yourself. Then you can shout at her as much as you want, only you won’t have me beside you making it OK. I mean it. My way, or not at all.”

  It was midnight, Saz was tired, the line between persuasion and threat was even more blurred than usual. They sounded remarkably similar. The main problem being that Saz’s “my way” didn’t exist. She had no idea what she was going to say to Lillian. The walk down four flights of dark stairs didn’t provide her with any astonishing insights and Saz knocked on Lillian’s door half hoping that her hostess had scuttled off for a rampant night out with the youth of St Ives.

  It was quarter past twelve when Lillian opened the door to her private part of the house. She looked smaller and softer in the pale blue dressing gown she’d hurriedly pulled around her. Saz felt sick. Tense nerves and exhaustion and irritation at Patrick and concern for this woman. Concern for them both.

  “Um, Lillian, I know it’s late and I’m really sorry to bother you …”

  “Is something wrong with your room?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  Lillian frowned, “I can’t do midnight snacks, you know.”

  “No. Look, I really need to talk to you. Do you think I could come in?”

  In answer Lillian pushed the door further open, turned and walked ahead of Saz down a short passage into a sitting room. These rooms had evidently not been redecorated when Lillian had done up the rest of the house. Her own domain was landlady-traditional. Yellow-flowered wallpaper, red-flowered carpet, a heady selection of well dusted china ornaments and a blazing coal-effect electric heater, coals glowing merrily though the heating itself was turned off.

  By way of explanation Lillian waved her arm around the room, “I inherited this house, from the original landlady. I did the rest of it up as best I could, but I didn’t have the heart to change her part of the house. And I’m pretty much used to it now.”

  Saz sat on the gold velour armchair and as she did so the one absence in the cluttered room came into clear focus. There were delicate ornaments and dried flowers and lace doilies crammed onto every surface. But the family photos were glaringly absent. There were no posed portraits, hair-combed perfect from the ’60s, no sweet children grown into unruly teenagers in the ’70s, no proud mother at the firstborn’s nuptials, latest grandchild, happy couple on their silver wedding anniversary. Nothing at all on yellowing photographic paper in a gilt-edged frame. It might just have been that Lillian didn’t care for family photos. Or that she had none. Saz felt the knowledge she held in her clamped-shut mouth was choking her. She was going to have to spit it out before the intestinal knots looping themselves in her stomach ended her dining-out days forever. Lillian was sitting, calmly waiting for her to speak. Almost too calmly. Even in her state of heightened tension, Saz found herself thinking that Lillian’s detachment was a little weird. She couldn’t imagine herself waiting this patiently as a stranger forced her way into her sitting room and demanded to have a talk in the middle of the night. Then again, she couldn’t imagine what it might be like to open your home to complete strangers for nine months of every year. Perhaps Lillian’s guests often insisted on midnight conversations. Perhaps Lillian knew what she’d come about. Maybe she’d been waiting for this moment for nearly forty years herself. Maybe it would all be OK after all. Saz’s mouth opened and, as so often before, she heard herself speaking before she’d even decided what she was going to say.

  “It’s about your son.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Saz opened her mouth again and the words fell out, “I need to talk to you about your son.”

  “What son?”

  “Patrick Freeman. Sweeney. The guy from the telly.”

  Lillian continued to look at her as if she were speaking a very foreign language.

  “The man I’m here with. Patrick. He’s your son.”

  Lillian shook her head, “I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.”

  “But you’re the only Lillian Hope.”

  “Other than my great-aunt Lily who’s been dead for twenty-five years.”

  “Well, then Patrick is your child. I mean, he’s your adopted son. Your birth son, who was adopted.”

  This time Lillian spoke very slowly, as if Saz were particularly stupid, “But I don’t have any children.”

  Saz didn’t know what to say. Maybe Gary was right and all the things that seemed to prove she was the right woman were just coincidences. Or maybe she was the right woman but Lillian had blanked her son from her memory, had spent so long convincing herself that she didn’t have a child that now she actually believed she’d never even given birth. Then Saz had a very worrying thought, what if Lillian really hadn’t wanted the baby? What if Patrick was waiting upstairs for a made-for-TV reunion, soft focus tears and welcoming hugs, but the reality was the exact opposite? She didn’t think she could bear to deal with Patrick’s reaction if that really was the case. Except that Lillian didn’t look like someone who’d just had her deepest secret revealed. She looked like someone who honestly wanted to help. And didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

  “I’m very sorry if this upsets your husband, love …”

  “He’s not. He’s my friend.”

  “Well, whatever. But the two of you must have made a mistake somewhere along the line. Your friend can’t be my child. It’s not possible. I don’t have any children. I did have a baby. Years ago. Or at least, I gave birth to a baby.” Lillian’s speech wound down to a slow staccato. She spoke quietly into the middle distance. “But I didn’t have the baby adopted. I couldn’t have. I mean, there was that option, to adopt, before I gave birth, but I didn’t want to have it adopted anyway. I was going to keep it. I wanted to keep the baby. Only that’s not what happened. My baby was stillborn. I don’t have a son.”

  THIRTY

  The birth was to have been Lillian’s beginning, a hand-made genesis, and she had decided for herself that it was possible. She would show them her cool sanity and perfect demeanour. Lillian had planned to be a model of exceptional behaviour, the paragon of dark corridors and bright, white rooms. The child would go, after the first couple of days with her as quiet mother, to her aunt in Falmouth. Lillian woul
d allow the child to be taken with no fuss and no tears. It was right. This transfer would be carried out just as she had agreed with Doctor Lees. He would be amazed at her surrendering calm. Days and weeks would follow and through all of them Lillian would be the good girl, so that at her December review the board would have no choice but to agree to her sanity. Quiet perfection flowing from herself to all the others and then she would be free and healthy and welcome to return to the world. It would be nearly Christmas by then and the baby would still be small enough to forget the time of separation. Lillian was to be the good girl and all would be right with the world. It was her birth plan.

  But then the pains came and it was so much more than she could ever have expected. But not simply the hurt as the child began the first separation from the mother. Lillian knew something was not right. Felt that they were not talking to her as they should. Where were the reassurances that it would all be fine in the end, the cajoling coercion that this was a pain worth breaking through, breathing through? And from inside the circle of her terror she realized they did not mean to let her keep this baby. Her aunt might take the child, but Lillian would not get away in time for this Christmas or the next, they would never believe her to be neither mad nor bad, there would be no rebirth. They would not be convinced of her reason, because it did not suit them to change their minds. The changing of her mind did not suit them. All this she knew from their whispered words and stilted walk, the uneasy gait of the silent nurses, the mother nurses most of all, those who had children of their own at home looking at her in pity and timing her contractions unwillingly, each new pain stretching their baby-bond sympathy.