A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  At last we turned off the main road onto the single road into Southwold.

  I felt sick.

  ‘This is where it happened, Ellie, right here, do you remember now?’

  Patrick took my hand and placed it on his thigh, where it was cut off at the base.

  ‘This is where you were responsible for the loss of my leg.’

  I couldn’t reply, my jaw felt rigid. Jammed shut.

  He had told me so many lies. Now I wondered, suddenly, could he possibly be lying about this?

  There had never been any proof, other than his own memories, to say I had been responsible for the accident.

  It was a hot evening, even the wind that came in through the car windows felt more like the hot blast of a hairdryer. It was growing dark when we arrived at May’s house.

  Warm air blew in from the sea.

  I stood for a moment when I got out of the car, breathing the briny air deep into my lungs. It was OK, I told myself, it would all be OK. I would play this carefully, keep my wits about me. I had a car, I could drive away if I had to.

  I moved round to the boot, about to drag our bag out, but then I felt Patrick’s iron grip on my upper arm.

  ‘We’re not going in. We’re going to swim.’

  ‘No, Patrick. Not in the dark. It’s dangerous, and I’m not a strong swimmer.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. And I want to swim, so you have to help me. You have to do as I say, Ellie. I feel as if you’re somehow trying to slip away from me.’

  These words frightened me more than any.

  ‘No, Patrick. I’m not. Of course I’m not.’

  And there I was, helping Patrick silently down to the shore, holding his arm, helping him hobble with his crutch to the edge of the water.

  ‘Come here. You’ve had to do things for me, now I’ll do stuff for you.’

  He began to undress me slowly, without speaking, a tenderness in his touch that was utterly convincing, utterly overpowering. I flinched as his fingers brushed my skin, tried to make it look as though it was a shiver of desire.

  His mouth was on my neck, his hands moving up over my back and under my arms, removing my clothes. I wanted to resist, my whole body shrank from him now, but, I thought, it is better just to do as he says. It’s safer this way.

  Patrick had removed his prosthetic. He was holding a crutch in one hand and he took my hand with his free one and pulled me, his strength and balance remarkable, so that I had no choice but to let him tug me into the water. Once he was in, diving through the waves, he moved so freely it made my heart ache.

  The last rays of the sun disappeared over the horizon and the stars were thick in the clear sky above us.

  I gasped at the bite of the water but quite soon the cold seemed to diminish, and felt almost soothing, a balm.

  Patrick was a strong swimmer, no longer hindered by the uselessness of his damaged leg. He swam fast out into the darkness, beyond the end of the groynes. I followed at a distance. I was a slow swimmer, afraid of getting out of my depth, and used the groynes as a marker. If I kept within them, I would be able to get back to the shore easily.

  The mist appeared with a swiftness that was shocking, rolling in over the sea, snatching away the stars, veiling everything in a thick white blanket.

  ‘Patrick!’ I was afraid. I could feel the beginnings of panic that I wouldn’t make it back to the shore now it had vanished under the white mist and I turned, flailing my arms though they seemed to make no impact on the strength of the current. I turned, shouted again. He didn’t reply.

  ‘Patrick, I can’t swim in this, come back!’

  Pepper was on the shore, barking.

  I needed to feel the shore. I pedalled my legs but the seabed had vanished beneath me. I moved my arms in breast stroke, though it felt as if they were getting me nowhere, until at last, when they ached with exhaustion, I regained the feeling of stones beneath my feet, and it was then that an arm grabbed me from behind and pulled me back out into the invisible water.

  ‘Patrick. Please! Gently.’

  He was turning me round and I was helpless as he positioned me so I was facing him. He took my hair in his hands and he was pulling it and my head was yanked backwards so I was staring through beads of salty water, my eyes stinging, and I had to shut them tight, and then my whole face was under the water. I opened my mouth and it filled so that I spluttered, struggling for breath. I pinched him hard and he let me go and I came up gasping for air. He was laughing. His arms clamped about me, looking down into my eyes. I could no longer feel the seabed beneath me again and gasped for breath.

  ‘You know what, Ellie. We are now at the exact spot where Stef died.’

  ‘Don’t, Patrick.’

  He was going to kill me!

  He had somehow realised I had been thinking of leaving him and he was going to kill me!

  I tried to swim back to the shore but he caught hold of me and turned me towards him again.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. His voice had that high-pitched tone it had adopted in his bedroom when he’d first told me that Stef had tried to leave him. When I first wondered whether he was completely sane.

  ‘I remember which groynes she was driving between when the boat went out of control,’ he said in his singsong voice. ‘I remember she was parallel with that post! It was almost exactly here.’

  The sea fret was dissolving as quickly as it had come, and the dark groynes were just visible now, waves smashing against them. My legs were exhausted with treading water.

  ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

  ‘There was such a lot of blood, the water changed colour. Oh, I already told you. They found her face up, floating like this—’ And he turned me over so I was staring up at the sky, which had cleared again now. Water sloshed over my face.

  ‘Please!’ I was gasping for air. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘It’s good to have you though, Ellie. It’s good to feel a warm, live, body here now. It’s so healing for my poor leg that you damaged.’

  ‘Please! I don’t like being out of my depth!’

  ‘You’re already out of your depth, don’t you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  And I was sinking beneath the water, struggling against his arms that had clamped mine behind me so I could only kick my legs to no avail.

  ‘You’re out of your depth getting involved with me, aren’t you? Coming to visit me in hospital, letting me believe we’d already met, playing me along when I was vulnerable and had lost my memory.’

  He yanked my hair again. ‘Just say, “Yes, Patrick. I’m out of my depth”,’ he commanded.

  ‘Yes, Patrick, I’m out of my depth.’

  ‘So I’ll do as you say.’

  ‘I’ll do as you say.’

  ‘I’ll live with you in the house where you always belonged.’

  ‘I’ll live with you.’

  ‘I won’t ever leave you.’

  ‘I won’t ever leave you.’

  ‘Or I’ll regret it the way Stef regretted it.’

  ‘Or I’ll regret it . . . please, please, let’s go back now!! I’m here for you. I’m yours. You know that!’

  At last he released the pressure, let me go, and I turned and thrashed my way back to the shore.

  Pepper leapt up at me, barking, and I picked him up and kissed his ragged fur.

  I dried myself roughly with the clothes I’d left in a pile on the shore, pulled on my knickers and my T-shirt and walked back up the dark beach to May’s house. I was trying not to cry.

  Patrick followed me in.

  I was shaking with cold, or with the shock of his taunting me in the water with his wife’s horrible death, the conviction he was about to kill me.

  He said he wanted alcohol, and I went straight to the kitchen. There was still some whisky left in the bottle on the shelf. I took down two tumblers. I didn’t usually like whisky but I needed it, to ease the shivers and to warm me up. May had an old spirit measure somewhere in
one of the drawers. I rummaged about and as I looked my eye fell on the bib I’d found between the floorboards when I’d first come down to sort her house.

  I lifted it and looked at the funny hand-painted picture she must have done on the front of it for one of her children and the nursery rhyme.

  ‘There was a crooked man.’

  I looked at the picture, a tiny figure beside a stile. Lopsided, crooked.

  I put it in my handbag.

  I handed Patrick his whisky, then I found old flat towels in the bathroom and dragged them out of the cupboard and chucked one round Patrick.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Ellie,’ he said. ‘You work hard to atone for all the harm you’ve done, don’t you? That little girl who died here when you were meant to be watching her. Your kid Timothy at school. And me. But you’re making amends by doing all this. It’s good. You’re doing the right thing. Now, I need food. You cook and I’ll build the fire. We can play at houses.’

  He began to sing ‘Our house is a very very very fine house’ again, a song about home-building, about comfort. It felt wrong hearing the words coming out of Patrick’s mouth, in my Aunty May’s cottage.

  Not a comfort at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ‘We’ve got another month here then we have to move on,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s so lucky we’ve got your Aunty May’s lovely place by the sea.’

  We were back in London in the Wapping apartment.

  My painting was almost complete. I didn’t remind Patrick it was only a few days until it was due to be shipped out to New York. Or that I had booked a flight to go out there too.

  ‘I’m going to the studio,’ I told Patrick on Thursday morning.

  ‘OK, babes. I’m making us bouillabaisse tonight. I’m popping over to Borough Market this morning, want to treat you. I’ll come and get you this afternoon and we can drive back together. Work hard.’

  And he leant over me, pulled me harshly to him and kissed me fiercely on the lips, taking my lower one between his teeth and biting it.

  I was working extra hard at the studio. Powered on by the approaching deadline.

  New York. There was always New York. Once I got there, I thought, I would be safe.

  I didn’t have long. Patrick was coming to pick me up from the studio at five, he said, so he could travel back with me. I knew what he was doing, he was keeping tabs on me. He was terrified I would do a runner. But where would I run to? Nowhere was safe after what I had done to him, and never confessed.

  All I had was the little bib in my bag and the germ of a theory that was forming like a faint light glowing in the murk in my head. But I had to see my mother.

  Ask her if she remembered a little boy who had stayed with Aunty May, ask if she remembered his name, what he looked like? If I took the train from King’s Cross I could be in Cambridge in an hour, see Mum and be back by the early afternoon. Patrick was going to Borough Market, so he wouldn’t be coming to the studio this morning. He would never know he’d lost track of me for a few hours.

  I found Mum at the Apple Store, of course. She was sitting up on a stool at a large table among other middle-aged to elderly women bent over iPads and listening intently to the workshop leader, a man with golden skin and long bronze hair who looked as if he had been moulded out of metal like a football trophy.

  ‘Ellie, sweetie!’

  ‘Mum, I really need to talk to you. It’s about Aunty May. Please, could I have some attention?’

  ‘The workshop’s nearly over, darling,’ she said. ‘Give me five minutes. We’re just learning about this terrific app where you can scan in the barcode of a food and learn exactly what its nutritional value is. Look, poppet, you go over to the Eagle, get yourself a glass of wine and I’ll meet you in the courtyard. Get me a large Sauvignon too. We can walk home, can’t we?’

  The Eagle was buzzing with tourists and students even at this time on a weekday morning but I managed to find a table outside, and sat waiting for Mum, May’s bib in my bag, Pepper on my lap. My palms were damp; I was impatient to do this and get back – I didn’t want to risk upsetting Patrick. I knew what he was capable of and I knew my life was in danger.

  ‘Darling,’ Mum said, her face already pink with the wine she’d knocked back in almost one mouthful. I wondered what good all her supplements were doing when she mixed them with such large doses of toxins. ‘Now. I’m all ears. What is it?’

  ‘It’s this,’ I said, pulling the crumpled bib from my bag. It was made from towelling material with a plastic back and the painting on the front was faded, but the words of the nursery rhyme were clearly embroidered around the edge.

  ‘Now that’s a typical bit of Aunty May artistry,’ she said. ‘She was always making things for the kids in her care. Actually,’ she said, taking it, smoothing it out on her lap, ‘do you know, this makes me really quite sad.’ She wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Oh no. I’m going to cry. Poor May. She tried so hard with you all.’

  ‘Mum, the picture looks like a little boy, not an old man, but the words of the nursery rhyme are “There was a crooked man”. It seems odd.’

  ‘So it is. Yes. As I say, typical May. Look, come back to mine and we’ll go through some photos and things, and we can talk a bit more about May. Dad rang and said you wanted to know the whole story and that he’d told you. So there are things you can see now, things I’ve kept from you over the years.’

  She finished her wine.

  ‘I think I might just have another glass. There’s nothing else happening this afternoon and I need to oil the wheels a bit if I’m to get all this out. It’s been under wraps for so long it feels odd to air it. Do you want another?’ She had stood up, and was delving for her purse.

  ‘No thanks. Mum, I haven’t got long. I’ve got to work.’

  ‘Paint, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s work for me. I don’t have my teaching job any more and . . .’ The implications of this were hitting me. No regular income, no flat. ‘The painting’s my only source of income now. I’ve got to finish the commission so I can get to New York. I need to hurry. I can’t drink at lunchtime anyway. And I have to drive later.’ I was feeling edgy.

  ‘OK, OK. Relax, darling. The alcohol would have worn off by the time you get back to work. But you were always so very law-abiding,’ she said. ‘Unlike me.’

  She came back with her next glass of wine and sat down again.

  I looked at my watch. Mum began to talk.

  ‘OK. I’m going to say it. It’s true that May blamed you. And Daddy and I were determined you shouldn’t be allowed to find out. You were only six years old, a little girl. Doing what you had been told to do. What I’d asked you to do, to watch Ben, to guard him with your life. But May had told you, by the time I came to pick you both up after that weekend, it was all your fault! What a thing to tell you! You were so cowed by it. Such a changed child.’

  I felt tears come to my eyes, tears of betrayal and dismay as we began at last to walk back to Mum’s, through Cambridge’s crowded streets and along the river. Mum talked as we went.

  ‘It was after that you began to have those obsessions. Checking over your shoulder three times every time you left a room. It was understandable – you hadn’t checked on the child and had been told you were to blame for what happened to her. But then it escalated, you started asking me to say goodnight the right number of times, switching lights on and off, tapping things, and other things, I forget what now. May never got over that child drowning, though she tried to blame you. And eventually the guilt, I think as much over the fact she had used you as a scapegoat as the loss of the child herself, drove her mad and she tried to take her own life and that was when she was sectioned. By the time she came out of hospital the first time, she had forgiven you and you and she were quite close again for a while.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  We had reached Mum’s front door. She talked as we went into her front room.

  ‘But I couldn’t forgive wh
at she’d done to you. So that’s why, when she left you the house, I didn’t want you to have it. I felt it was a deliberate reminder. That might sound irrational now, darling, but all I could think of was how I wanted to put that episode out of our lives forever.’

  So! My mother’s desire for me to sell May’s house was her way of protecting me. I wanted to go to her, hug her, but she was speaking, rifling through her shelves.

  ‘Listen, Ellie, now you know all about this, I have some photos you might like to see. There are some of May’s paintings too. I kept them from you, but now it’s all out in the open we may as well have a look at them and then I can throw them away once and for all.’

  I looked at the time. I had an hour and then I must get back or who knew what Patrick would do to me? I thought of the speedboat again, Stef not knowing what was about to hit her as she set off in an attempt to get away from Patrick. How it had come out of the blue, the trap that killed her.

  We sat in Mum’s courtyard garden, flicking through her albums. It was soothing.

  I wished I could stay forever, be a child again.

  I wished I didn’t feel the clock ticking away, my life hanging in the balance.

  Here was a whole book of my life that had been kept from me. Pictures of me, a serious look on my six-year-old face as I clutched Ben to me. A little girl who I remembered now quite clearly, with blonde curls, sitting on the jetty over by the estuary, where riptides and ferocious currents meant lifeboat men had put up warning signs, and here she was sitting right on top of a sign saying ‘Do not climb on the gantry’, laughing.

  All three of us, Ben, me and Daisy, leaning over this structure with buckets and strings catching crabs. Days that were warm and glowing with summer, with freedom, with being children in an idyllic setting. Amber days. But the menace of those red ‘Danger’ signs, to which we were oblivious, all around us. The flies caught in the amber.

  I turned the pages, feeling the past fall into place.

  And then I stopped. I looked at the photo, and looked back at a previous one, and a previous one. In each of the photos, in the background, there was a small boy looking on.