The Mother's Lies

by Joanne Sefton

  August 2017

  Helen

  Somehow, after everything that had happened and the hullaballoo among the St Aeltha’s staff about accommodating a visiting consultant (albeit for only half an hour), the much-anticipated meeting itself seemed flat.

  ‘The surgery confirmed what we had suspected regarding staging,’ began Eklund, once the pleasantries had been dispensed with. ‘It’s Stage 3, but not a bad Stage 3, if I can be a little less scientific.’

  ‘So, now it’s chemo?’ asked Barbara.

  Eklund nodded, then went on to explain the drugs involved and the cycles of pills and injections that Barbara would have to go through.

  ‘And if I decide not to take it?’

  His brow furrowed. ‘Most people ask about that after we’ve discussed the side effects. It might not be as bad as you may be imagining from TV and the press, Mrs Marsden.’

  She shrugged. ‘So tell me about the side effects and then answer my question.’

  He elaborated for a few minutes on white blood cell counts, sickness and diarrhoea, hair loss and so on. It was a well-worn speech, but he had the grace to look uncomfortable when explaining that a drop in platelet levels could cause her to bruise and bleed more easily. She merely nodded.

  ‘There is no evidence of metastasis,’ he went on. ‘There is a chance …’ and here he gave a shrug that seemed more Gallic than Scandinavian ‘… that you will make a complete recovery, even without treatment. It is, however, a small chance. It’s much more likely that microscopic colonies of cancer cells remain in your body, and that without intervention they will develop – whether slowly or quickly – into further tumours. Chemotherapy will certainly slow that process and may well, if we’re lucky, prevent it altogether.’

  ‘I see,’ said Barbara.

  Eklund hazarded that she was considering alternative therapies instead and launched into another well-rehearsed lecture on how they could be beneficial for quality of life but should be viewed strictly as complementary to the Gold Standard medical approach.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Eklund, I’m not a tree-hugging veggie loon.’

  A thin smile flitted about his lips. ‘You put it so succinctly. I’ll tell my secretary to book you in for the chemo clinic then.’

  But Barbara shook her head. ‘Not just yet.’

  She didn’t elaborate, not when Mr Eklund asked her, and not after he’d left.

  Afterwards, Helen and Neil talked about it in the car. They were both shocked that she’d think of turning down treatment.

  ‘We should phone Eklund and tell him to set it up anyway,’ said Helen. ‘Every day might matter. What if she’s not thinking straight?’

  ‘I’ll try to talk to her tonight,’ said Neil. ‘I don’t think the hospital will do anything without her say-so, but I’m sure I’ll manage to convince her. She’d be mad just to walk away now.’

  ‘I suppose it might be a way of feeling in control,’ Helen wondered aloud. ‘All that’s been taken from her, she just wants to show them she can put her foot down and make decisions.’

  When they reached the house, Helen planned to switch to her own car to go and pick up Barney and Alys – it would have been too much of a squash with them all in Neil’s. She sent Julie a text to tell her she was (just about) on the way.

  She was relieved to get the reply – Thnks 4 lettin me know. Kids having a ball. She hadn’t been sure how they would settle with a relative stranger. Given what Julie said, Helen decided she could afford five minutes in the house to change her sandals – one of her heels was rubbing red raw – and to send another quick stalling email to her boss. Hassling Helen about when she would be back had evidently been the number one item on her Monday morning to-do list. Neil said he’d come too – he wanted to pick up a few bits from the little Tesco nearby.

  As they drove to Julie’s house, Helen’s mind was still chewing over Barbara’s comments about the chemo. She could vouch for the absence of any tree-hugging veggie loon tendencies in her mother, and, although she hadn’t said anything earlier, she was worried that Barbara’s ambivalence about treatment was somehow tied up with those bloody notes. She remembered Barbara saying something about cancer not being the worst way to die. Perhaps it had been more than a throwaway remark.

  The estate that Julie’s house was in turned out to be a bit of a maze. Helen turned the corner into her cul-de-sac, half looking at the satnav to check she’d got the right turn. When she looked up, she could see Julie on the pavement with Alys in her arms. One of her own girls was beside her, the other a few steps away on a front lawn that was presumably theirs. She couldn’t see Barney. It could be a nightmare trying to get him to come home after playdates. He was probably hiding from her.

  Even as Helen slowed the car, though, her mind started to register that something was wrong. Subconsciously, she began to process the anguish on Julie’s features and the anxious poses of all three children. Julie hauled the door open before the car had fully come to a stop, and Helen’s heart was already hammering – the hummingbird from yesterday turned into a scrabbling flock.

  ‘It’s Barney,’ Julie said, her voice panicked. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ There was a desperate note in her own voice now. The question rose to a screech.

  ‘I can’t find him, Helen. We’ve been looking for ten minutes. Barney’s gone.’

  *

  Helen had fainted once in her life. On a visit to a pig farm with Guides. It was high summer and she was hot and dehydrated and the stench in the airless pig sheds was too much for her. She could still remember the sensation – it was almost more than a memory. When she thought about it, it was as if she was back there. If she didn’t catch herself she could feel herself breaking into a sweat and her breath getting too quick and shallow.

  What she remembered from fainting was that her vision went dark from the edges; she could only see through a fuzzy circle that was getting smaller and smaller all the time. The noise around her – the sounds of the pigs and happily chattering voices (nobody had realised she was unwell) – had faded too, like someone was turning down the volume control. She was terror-struck, and falling, slowly, into a deep, deep well.

  That was exactly what it felt like when Julie told her Barney had gone. The darkness and the underwater noises. She didn’t faint, though for a moment she thought that she might. This time she fought back the blackness and clawed her way out of the well. She had to; Barney needed her.

  Helen and Neil jumped out of the car and joined Julie searching the street. Barney had been with her in the front garden not ten minutes ago, she told them. Again and again, she told them that as they called his name and looked under every car, in every bin, around every clump of shrubs.

  Helen looked at her watch – 16.09 – it was more than ten minutes now, whatever Julie said. They must have pulled up at 16.04 or 16.05, and she’d said ten minutes then. It must be closer to twenty now. Twenty minutes could mean fifteen miles in a car. They were close to the motorway here. He could be almost anywhere in an hour or two.

  She called and called, but it quickly felt hopeless. Barney wasn’t silly in that way – if he could hear them he’d know they were worried. He’d come to them if he possibly could. He wasn’t one for wandering off, either. Helen couldn’t believe he’d just taken himself into another garden or away from Julie’s house. She was choking down acid, fighting physical panic, clinging to Alys as she searched.

  ‘No like!’ The toddler wriggled. ‘Too hard, Mummy!’

  The three adults met up at the end of Julie’s drive once they’d covered the length of the short street between them.

  ‘God, I can’t believe this. Do you think we should call the police?’ Julie asked. Her face was ashen, her hands constantly reaching out to touch her own children.

  Neil nodded his head. ‘You two do that. I’ll keep looking. I’m sure we’ll find him soon.’

  ‘Another part of the estate?’ Julie suggested.

 
; ‘Is there anywhere he could have got trapped?’ asked Dad. ‘Ponds, grit bins, sheds – we need to check those first.’

  ‘Perhaps in some of the gardens. We could knock on the doors,’ Julie said. ‘Most of the back gardens have side access; maybe he’s caught sight of something interesting and wandered in.’

  Helen didn’t have any words, so she let them talk. This wasn’t really happening, she told herself. He’ll be back in a minute.

  Then a door opened across the street. The movement caught Julie and Neil’s attention at the same time as Helen’s. An elderly woman emerged and all three of them turned towards her, expectantly.

  ‘Are you looking for a little boy?’ she called, making her way down her own drive and towards the road.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ said Neil. But whatever she had to tell them, it seemed she wasn’t for shouting it across the street.

  They walked to the edge of the pavement, each second elongating as the woman picked her way towards them. Bizarrely, Helen noticed she had Hello Kitty slippers on her feet. They looked pristine; she clearly didn’t make a habit of walking the streets in them. Why was she noticing slippers? Helen almost laughed. She was giddy with desperation.

  ‘About this high?’ the woman gestured as she came towards them.

  ‘A bit smaller,’ Helen said. ‘He’s just turned five.’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m not good with ages these days. Wearing a blue-striped T-shirt?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The seconds seemed to slow to hours. Helen willed the woman to spit out whatever she had to say.

  ‘I saw him get into a car,’ she said. ‘On the corner.’

  No. No. No. No. No.

  Anxiety turned to sheer panic and Helen heard a wrenching sob that could only have come from her own mouth. Once again, black clouded the edges of her vision and she had to fight just to stay standing. The old woman turned to her, her features etched with a pity that Helen didn’t want. Neil and Julie were both frozen themselves, but the neighbour reached out and took Helen’s hand.

  ‘No one grabbed him,’ she said softly. ‘He just got in. Could it be someone you know?’

  ‘What kind of car?’ said Neil, and Helen knew that, like her, he was thinking – praying – that it might be Darren’s hire car.

  But suddenly she was running on rocket fuel. Her mind was whirring, and she knew they had to assume the worst, not the best.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, pulling out her mobile. ‘Tell it straight to the police.’

  *

  The next hour was a blur. The local police took it seriously, and soon they had three patrol cars out specifically looking for Barney, and an alert on all their vehicles as well as on local news. It turned out that Mrs Tilbury, Julie’s neighbour, had only the vaguest description to give. The car was pale grey, white or silver, she thought, and was a ‘family car’ size. She didn’t recognise makes or models generally and hadn’t glanced at the registration. As she had said, it didn’t seem untoward until she noticed the search in the street.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she told Helen for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time Helen had to remind herself to thank God that Mrs Tilbury had put two and two together because they could easily still be checking the bins around this sprawling estate as whoever had taken Barney sped off to God-knows-where to do God-knows-she-couldn’t-even-think-about-it-or-she’d-be-sick. Eventually, one of the police officers guided Mrs Tilbury off and Helen watched from Julie’s front window as she shuffled across the street in her Hello Kittys, still, from the looks of it, apologising.

  The description she’d given might have been a match for Darren’s hired Astra – amongst a zillion other cars. Helen had called him as soon as she’d hung up on the 999 call handler, but it had gone to voicemail. She’d left a message and called him back five or six times since, and also called both Chris and Adam’s mobiles, and their home phone, but all to no avail. She’d not been able to give the police a registration plate for the car, but she had noticed the name of the hire company on a window sticker, so they hoped they’d be able to get the details quickly.

  One of the police officers had introduced herself as Veena and had produced tea for them whilst they’d sat in the living room listening to Mrs Tilbury saying the same thing over and over again to the other two male officers.

  Julie had put her cup to her lips and immediately taken it away again. ‘It’s sweet,’ she’d said.

  Veena had smiled. ‘You’ve all had a shock. It’s one of my skills, you know, finding the sugar in anyone’s kitchen.’

  Helen hadn’t had a shock, she thought, she was having one. And what would help was the police finding Barney, not feeding her sweet tea. But she didn’t say anything. After a moment, out of habit, she took a sip from her own cup. The flavour of weak, sweetened tea took Helen back to her childhood, to being in the greenhouse with Neil, or in front of the telly watching early evening sitcoms.

  Veena gently suggested, after Mrs Tilbury had left, that Neil and Helen could go back home, that the police would do everything they could to find Barney as quickly as possible, but she could explain the process to them there, and they could wait for news ‘more comfortably’.

  Helen realised then that she was in a stranger’s house, that she’d never before sat on Julie’s stiff matching leather sofas or drunk from her polka dot china mugs. They took their leave awkwardly. Julie kept telling them it would be okay, reaching out to pat Helen’s arm or squeeze Neil’s shoulder, in between seeing to Evie and Lexie, who were buzzing about her, high on the drama. She was sniffling a little, dabbing at her nose every now and again with a tissue, but in contrast to her neighbour, she didn’t apologise once.

  Helen wondered if she was thinking of what people say about car accidents. Don’t apologise. Don’t admit liability. Why had the kids been playing in the front garden instead of the back? Helen had glimpsed patio doors from the kitchen-diner, a trampoline and sandpit. That was where they ought to have been. And what had Julie been doing when Barney was getting into the back of an unknown car?

  ‘Did you not—’ Helen started to ask her, after she’d got Alys’s shoes back on, and when Neil was holding out her handbag. But Veena put a firm hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Not now, Helen,’ she said softly. ‘We’ll speak to Mrs Hendricks in due course. Let us do our job. Now, do you feel okay to drive?’

  Back in the car, Alys wanted to know where Barney was. Helen opened her mouth once or twice, but only a strangled noise came out. Neil came to her rescue.

  ‘There’s been a bit of a mix-up, sweetheart, about who should be looking after Barney. But don’t you worry about it – us adults will get it sorted. He’ll be back right as rain before you know it.’

  Of course he was right, Helen told herself. He had to be.

  When they arrived home, Veena made yet more tea, then she became businesslike; there were lots of questions about the family, about Barney, about why Helen was staying with her parents and who she knew in the area. Veena got her to email some photos so they could start to be circulated amongst the patrol cars looking out for him and asked her to write down as much as she could remember about every item of clothing Barney had had on.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s got Rabbit,’ Helen cried, suddenly stricken in the middle of describing his little cargo shorts.

  ‘Rabbit?’

  ‘His favourite toy – it goes with him everywhere. He took it to Julie’s.’

  ‘I’ll make a note, get someone to check if it’s at Julie’s house, and add it to the description. Thank you.’

  Helen sent up a silent prayer: Please let him have Rabbit.

  ‘I have to ask you, Helen,’ she said, after they’d gone through an exhaustive description and she’d relayed it back to her team. ‘Do you have any inkling, any suspicion, anything you want to tell us about?’

  Of course she didn’t hesitate for a second over keeping Barbara’s confidence now that Barney’s safety was in the balance. ‘
My dad should hear this,’ she said.

  Neil had been putting Alys to bed. She still liked a song before she went to sleep and Helen paused on the stairs to listen to him finishing a chorus of ‘Scarborough Fair’. His gruff voice creaked and her throat and chest tightened. A minute later he slipped out of the door.

  ‘Asleep already,’ he whispered. Helen was astonished. How could she be? But then Alys’s trust in Helen, in all of the adults in her life, was so complete. Helen realised that even with Barney missing little Alys couldn’t imagine that everything was anything other than okay. She hoped desperately that Alys would never have to learn how drastically they’d failed her brother.

  It was almost seven p.m. now. Helen didn’t know how; it was as if the clocks were against them, racing to separate her from her darling boy. Eight hours since she’d touched him, since she’d heard his voice. Three hours since he’d gone … missing. Missing. Missing. Missing. Once she’d formed it, the word echoed round her head like a curse. She took a deep breath, trying to shut it out, then went back to the living room and Veena.

  ‘My mum has been receiving threatening notes,’ she started.

  Veena took a few details about the notes, how Helen had found out about them.

  ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘Give me a minute, I’ll get them.’

  When she returned from the bedroom and handed the notes over, Veena read them in silence. ‘I see,’ she said, finally, setting her pen down with a sigh.

  Neil, reading over Veena’s shoulder, had gone pale and still. ‘The heparin, Helen – was she poisoned?’

  She went towards him, looking to put an arm around his shoulders, but he shook her away.

  ‘Was she poisoned?’ Now his voice was gruff, demanding.

  ‘I don’t know, Dad, I don’t know.’

  ‘But you knew about this!’ He gestured towards the green papers now stacked in an evidence bag Veena had produced from her belt.

  ‘I promised I wouldn’t tell you – she knew you’d worry.’