by Sophie Duffy
I pull my coat tighter and ring the bell. It doesn’t seem to be working. So I knock on the door. It needs a good lick of paint. Dorota and I look at each other. It is quiet within, very quiet. But then we hear a small child’s voice. Followed by a low urgent hush. I bang again, annoyance bubbling up within me. How dare she do this to my family? How dare she hide? I am about to bang again, harder, when the door creaks, slowly opens, slightly, and we squint into dead space. As our eyes adjust, and we look down, we see her: Natasha. She says nothing, stares up at us with those mournful eyes.
‘We’ve come to see your mumia, Natasza,’ says Dorota. ‘Can we come in?’
The little girl says nothing, turns her blank face away from us and walks off down the corridor. But she has left the door open so we take this as an invitation to come in, whether it was offered or not. We follow her to the sitting room. It hasn’t been cleared up since my last visit. If anything it’s worse, a stale smell hanging thickly in the heavy air.
‘It is pig sty,’ Dorota whispers to me, as we hover on the threshold. ‘Karolina is dirty slut.’
Natasha has sat back down in front of the telly, close up as if she needs glasses. And there is her mother, lying there on the sofa, like a dead woman. Though of course she is not dead – that’s not what the smell is. The smell is last night’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. Does she even know we are here? Should I say something?
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Karolina says, beating me to it. ‘I have complaint against your pervert husband.’
I feel Dorota flinch next to me and put my hand on her arm, to keep her from launching herself onto Karolina and squashing the life out of her, tempting though it may be to let her try.
‘A pervert is someone who strays from what is acceptable,’ I hear myself say, matter-of-fact. ‘Everything my husband does is good and honourable and from the best will in the world. What you are doing is perverted. You are trying to disrupt a family with lies and fabrications. You are living in a fantasy world and dragging us into it. You are the pervert.’
Karolina continues to watch some film or other and doesn’t appear to have listened to one word though I have been speaking loud and clear. ‘I don’t understand you,’ she says, at last, slowly, her eyes finally open and aimed in my direction. ‘I have very bad English.’
At which point I look at my mother-in-law. Dorota strides over to the TV and turns it off. Then, in her mother tongue, she repeats what I have just said, I presume, though she could be adding all sorts.
Karolina shrinks as she lies there on the sofa, so she looks hardly older than her daughter and I have to fight this ridiculous urge to feel sorry for her.
Dorota has no compunction. ‘You are crazy woman and yet not so crazy you can’t listen to us talk sense to you. We know your game. We know you tell stories to make trouble. I don’t care why you do this but I want you to stop. I want you to think what you are doing to my daughter-in-law. She is best daughter-in-law I have. When you hurt her, you hurt me. We have had enough hurt in our family. Maybe you have had hurt in your family but that doesn’t mean you lash out at us.’ Dorota takes a deep breath and sits herself down on a chair, after sweeping a mound of papers to the dirty floor.
This is where I decide to wing it, looking at her struggling for breath, puffing on her inhaler, seeing her upset. Her hurt. It is my turn to do something. And actually once I start speaking I know exactly what I want to say, what I want to happen. And I can make it happen. I can insist it happens.
I take a step closer to Karolina, to the sofa where she still languishes, eyes tight shut once again. ‘I want you to go to Desmond and tell him the truth.’
A pause.
Natasha turns the TV back on but all I can hear is my heart beating. I feel this enormous surge of power boiling up in my guts, but I don’t know if I am in control. I don’t know if I can do this. I am looking so hard at Karolina’s closed lids that I wonder if the force of my stare will make her eyes ping open.
And they do. They hold my gaze for a second and then they turn to the ceiling. Then she speaks. In a tired voice. In Polish. Dorota listens and then Dorota laughs, theatrically, and puts her hands on her ample hips, before replying in a steady voice. The conversation goes on for a while, quite a while, and I feel the old familiar frustration build inside me again. I wanted to do this. I wanted to sort this out but Dorota is the one with the knowledge, with the steering wheel in her hands. Eventually, as Karolina drags herself from her lair and staggers to the kitchen, Dorota turns to me and translates. ‘She says if I weren’t old woman, she would throw me out of the window. I said she should try it. She wouldn’t get very far. Then she offers me vodka and I say okay, if she listens. And I tell her. I tell her about the effect she has had on my family. I tell her about Thomas.’
Dorota reaches out to me but all I can do is collapse onto the sofa, still warm from Karolina who is now clanking around in the kitchen, emerging with a tray, a bottle and three glasses. She balances the tray on top of her mess on the coffee table and begins to pour. As she pours, she sniffs and I can see that she has been crying, that she is still crying, tears sliding down her face, into the corners of her mouth. But her tears leave me cold. They mean nothing. They are a drop in the ocean of my grief. Then she hands me a glass of vodka.
I pick up the glass slowly and smell the vodka. I swill it around, taking in the clear liquid, and then I knock it down in one and feel the warmth of glorious relief spread up from my toes to my brain.
‘We’re going to see Desmond now,’ I tell Karolina.
And she nods.
Finally, I have winged it.
The vicarage. Amanda takes Natasha to the kitchen for a glass of milk, while Desmond, Dorota, Karolina and I sit together in his book-lined study. It smells of old dust and heavy learning.
‘In your own time,’ says Desmond, spidery hands clasped together in a prayer-like grip. ‘No one wants you to feel pressurised to say anything other than the truth.’
Oh, yes, the truth. That’s what we’d all like to hear.
Karolina juts out her chin and the gesture makes me scared that rather than giving us the truth, she will return to her fantasy world. I hold my breath while she begins to speak.
The story according to Karolina: I always want to be dentist. I like teeth. It is first part of body I look at when I meet somebody for first time. My mother died when I was twelve-years-old. When my father goes away to work, I go to live with my aunt in Kraków. Very small flat. I cannot wait to leave there and have my own life. My own flat. But it will take very long time. I study hard for six years at medical school. For the last two years I work with patients under supervision. Then I can register with Polish Chamber of Physicians and Dentists. I get a permit and so I am allowed to practise.
But then I find out that I am pregnant.
I do not want to marry my boyfriend. He is not the one. He is dental student too and not yet grown up. My father and aunt are not happy with me. I cannot afford to leave home but the idea of staying is too horrible. I get fat. I get stretch marks. I have baby, Natasza. My aunt looks after her when she is only a few weeks old so I can go back to work. I want to be able to look after Natasza, not my aunt, but what can I do?
I get depressive.
I see doctor who says dentists are often depressive, but it could be post-natal depressive. She gives me pills and I am okay for a while. When Natasza is one-years-old, I hear about England. UK need dentists and they come to Poland to recruit. It is 2006. One third of all new dentists who join NHS are Polish trained. So I think it will be good opportunity for me. Somebody needs me. So I go on visit and have interview and they want me. I go on language and adaptation course. Then Natasza’s father gets back with me. He wants to come to England. So we come to London, together, a family. A new life.
I stop my pills.
We have good job and flat and Natasza goes to nursery and speaks English. And then my boyfriend decides it is not such good idea and he wants to go ba
ck to Poland. But I will not go. I stay with Natasza. But then I get depressive again. I get new pills but I think they do crazy things to my head. I start dreaming about home. About Polska. About my mother and the church where she took me when I was a girl. Where I felt safe. The candles. The incense. The black Madonna. I want to go somewhere like that and I find St Hilda’s down the road, near my flat. Ugly building. Not like a church. No statues. No candles. No incense. But it has same feeling. I feel safe.
And then I meet the priest.
He smiles at me and shakes my hand. He is kind. He asks me questions like he wants to hear my answers. He explains he is curate, what this means in his English church, and I wonder if he could be the one to cure me from my sickness. And I see his wife with all her girls and she tries to be nice to me but I don’t want her to be nice. It is okay for her with her family, her easy life. She has husband. She has church. She has everything. And one day, during Alpha, he talks about suffering. How the world is not the perfect place because we are not perfect. After, when they stand around drinking tea, always drinking tea, I see his mobile phone on a chair and it is so easy. I take it and I put it in my bag.
Over next few days I make calls to my phone. Then I leave phone here in your house when you ask me for mother’s lunch. I go upstairs to put your baby in her cot because she is tired and no-one seems to notice her in the busyness, this Melanie girl making trouble. I put the phone in next to baby. She likes it. She holds it in her hand and falls asleep. It is easy. I know it will be found. But I didn’t think about the baby boy. Or how Vicky has worse life than me. Dorota – she is so like my aunt – makes me put on Vicky’s shoes but I do not want to walk around in them.
I make it all up. Stefan never touched me. Never spoke to me. Except as a priest should speak.
I am sorry. I am sorry for your Thomas and I ask you to forgive me.
Karolina has been addressing the ceiling (have they never heard of feather dusters in this house?) while the rest of us sit still, open-mouthed, holding our collective breath. A public confession with no confessional box to hide away in. But Karolina is looking at me when she asks for forgiveness, me alone, and it is within my power to give it to her. So I do. It is free. I let go of my anger and it floats out the crack in Desmond’s window, up the garden path, where it can cadge a ride on the bus that is trundling past, away from Penge, out of my life.
And then what do I do? If I was at home, I would go and put the kettle on. But I am not. So I get up and, ignoring Desmond’s gob-smacked mucky face, and Karolina’s empty one, I kiss Dorota on the cheek, telling her: ‘You’re my favourite mother-in-law.’
Later, back home, I sit in the quiet of my kitchen and breathe deep while Pat and Dad, Dorota and Roland toast a happy outcome with tea and biscuits. Martin and Claudia suddenly appear. I am so engrossed in re-living the morning’s developments that I barely noticed the usual banging and crashing that accompanies Martin or the gock-gock of his wife’s stilettos. He is treated regally, people jumping up to offer chairs and make tea while Dad sits quietly, contemplating his son. Martin sneaks a cock-eyed glance at him and earns a small, encouraging smile and a tilt of the head. Claudia asks after Jeremy and I tell her he must be next door with Jessica. Martin says, ‘That’s my boy.’ Claudia goes to wallop him but remembers at the last moment that her husband is an invalid, which wouldn’t necessarily stop me. Then Martin and Dad disappear to the garden for a man-to-man, more handshaking and back-slapping. Pat announces their intention to stay a couple of days in the camper outside. I try not to think about this. The double bed. The very small rickety pull-out double that looks like it’s seen some action over the years. But... why begrudge Dad some company in his old age?
Then, while Claudia jigs Imo up and down, with some effort, on her petite lap, while Pat quizzes Dorota on what it is like to be the mother of a priest, while Roland disappears to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers with Olivia and Rachel in the front room and after I have checked everyone is alright, praying (am I praying?) for Steve to get back from the Good Friday service and help me hold this strange band of people together, I head out into the garden. My garden.
Much later, with a mound of mouldering garden waste and a mug of tea in my hand, I survey the last two hours’ work and revel in the fact I’ve been left to it. No children. No family. No annoyances.
I try to enjoy my relief. But it is spoiled by this nagging feeling, wriggling around my gut like a case of threadworms. I can’t quite work out the cause of this worry: is it Dad and Pat canoodling in the campervan? Is it Martin and Claudia who have shut themselves in the back room ‘to talk’? Is it Melanie or Geoffrey Chaucer, both of whom could still scupper these delicate marital negotiations? Or is it Karolina and the way she duped us? The friend I lost before I even had her... It could be any number of the holes in my life.
As I stoop to pick up a stray football – Jessica’s – I get a flash of memory: Martin trying out his card tricks on me. Shut your eyes and pick one. But I’m still none the wiser to what exactly the niggle is.
Then I hear Bob calling out in his soft baritone: ‘JESSICA!’
Jessica?
Bob pokes his fat bald head over the loose fence panel (must-get-Steve-onto-it). ‘Have you seen her? Is she with you?’
‘I thought she was at yours. With Jeremy.’
‘Haven’t seen either of them for a couple of hours.’ He checks his watch. ‘At least.’
Tamarine appears next to him, barely visible over the fence. ‘You better see this, Bobby,’ she says, eyeing me up sideways so my heart goes cold and the nagging feeling springs right up out of my body and hangs there in the Penge air in front of me. Why didn’t I acknowledge it earlier? ‘I found it under Jessica’s pillow.’
Tamarine hands Bob an envelope. One of my blue Basildon Bond envelopes that my children are always pilfering to play post offices. The ones I spotted earlier in the shed. On the vacant camping chair.
Bob holds the envelope in his hand like it’s a letter bomb. I can make out the word ‘Dad’ in bubble writing.
‘Open it, yeah,’ says Tamarine gently.
So Bob opens it and scans the letter inside. He says nothing but the letter floats to the ground as he spins on his foot, as deft as an ice-dancer, and runs off in a way I have never seen him run until he disappears inside, leaving Tamarine scrambling on the other side of the fence to retrieve it. Tamarine’s hand quivers as she hands the letter over for me to read and in that movement I can see how much she loves Jessica.
Dear Dad
I am going to find Mum. I didn’t ask you if I could go becurse I knew you wold say no I cant’. I will be OK. Jeremey is coming with me. Dont’ worry. I will phone you soon.
Love Jessica XXX
It is a few moments before I realise that Tamarine is urging me to tell Martin what’s happened. Before her Bobby goes round and hits him. Because her Bobby will blame his Jeremy for leading Jessica astray. Because her Bobby has no sense when it comes to Jessica’s mother. Tamarine goes in then, after the man she loves. And I go inside to face Martin and Claudia with this news. If ever a prayer was needed it is now.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Saturday 22nd March Easter Saturday
It is quiet and peaceful in St Hilda’s, barely any traffic outside as it’s so early, but I can still make out the rain falling, tapping on the roof like fingers drumming on a table. Fingers battering a laptop. In this sacred place, on your own, it can be possible to forget the world. You can leave your troubles in the porch, as you wipe your feet, and pick them back up on your way out. For a while it’s like you have fallen through a crack in time and space and ended up somewhere... other.
But not today. Today it is all pervasive. I look at St Hilda, her blue gown exquisite, too outwardly beautiful for a nun. But it is symbolic, I suppose. The beauty on the inside reflected on the out.
Reflection. That’s what today is supposed to be: a day of waiting and reflection. The end of Holy Week though this holey week
is far from over. For Jessica and Jeremy have still not been found.
The police have searched our houses, under beds, in attics, the garden shed, the cutting, but they are taking Jessica’s letter seriously, that she and Jeremy are trying to find her mother. They’re searching the airports and ports, the coach stations and train stations, anywhere they can think of that Jeremy and Jessica might go. Their passports are missing but how the pair of them thinks they’ll get to Lanzarote without adults is a mystery. And a worry. There are those out there who would gladly offer their ‘assistance’.
Poor Bob. He’s beside himself, taking the blame for everything. And Claudia, just sitting there in a trance. Martin meanwhile is surprisingly calm, even apologising to Bob for the fight. And Tamarine’s quiet presence, making herbal tea and offering morsels of food to tempt us to eat.
I had to get out. I felt sick with tiredness, up all night with a police officer, waiting for phone calls, an echo of The Bill, but this is real life.
But no news yet. No CCTV images. No mobile phone tracings; Jessica doesn’t have a phone; Jeremy has left his behind. They have some money, pilfered from Tamarine’s latest car boot takings, and two packets of Penguins, smuggled from my larder. They even thought to pack their toothbrush and pyjamas. It would be sweet if it wasn’t so heart-breaking, so... devastatingly worrying. A whole night. I thought they’d show up as it got dark, at teatime. But no. Not a word. It’s some comfort to know they left of their own accord; they weren’t taken. But it is awful, this not knowing. I feel sick and faint with it all. Who knows what will happen to them out there?
I never had the chance to worry over Thomas. Everything was fine, sitting in the box room with him, listening to Steve and Rach cheer on Tiger Tim. Laying him down in his cot as soft rain started to fall. I touched a kiss to his forehead, thinking how a cooler evening would help his skin, and crept out the room. When I got downstairs, Tim Henman had come off court. Rain stopped play, just as he was in the zone, on the verge of beating Goran Ivanisevic and getting to the final. There’d been hardly any rain that Wimbledon. So when it came, at such a moment, Ivanisevic believed God had intervened. Henman was steaming ahead and this was the Croatian’s chance to alter the rhythm of the match. It was his destiny. He came off that court and he got himself together. On and off they played over three days of rain stoppages. But Ivanisevic crawled his way back and finally he won. And Henman lost.