The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  Elise lay down. She thought she might weep. ‘I’m going to hypnotize you to not go to work,’ Connie said.

  Elise scrunched her eyes. ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘Yes. I never did get my O-level in hypnotism.’

  Elise felt revolting but she laughed anyway. Connie was looking at her gently. ‘Would you like me to make you a bacon sandwich?’ she said.

  ‘Please,’ Elise whimpered.

  Elise watched Connie disappear, and heard her speaking on the telephone. Soon the smell of frying bacon wafted up the stairs, along the corridor, under the door crack, into Elise’s nose. She closed her eyes and wished for a new body. She really wanted a hot bath.

  *

  Connie returned with a bacon sandwich and two mugs of tea on a tray. ‘There,’ she said. ‘My finest work.’

  Elise had managed to sit up. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘How long to Pimlico from here?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Connie. ‘I called them.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Seedling. What a name! Told them I was your flatmate and that you had a virus.’

  ‘They believed you?’

  ‘Of course they did.’

  ‘Was it Gabe?’

  ‘It was a man. I don’t know if it was Gabe. But he said for you to get well. I said it would take a few days and the doctor said you shouldn’t over-exert yourself.’

  Elise stared at the sandwich. It was an alien feeling, to have someone else work your life out for you. ‘Right. Thank you.’

  Connie sipped her mug of tea. Elise read the words round it: I ♥ BIRDWORLD. ‘Should I not have done it?’ Connie said. ‘Sometimes I can cross a line—’

  ‘No. There’s no line. Work would have been nearly impos-sible. I just – I wasn’t expecting you to call them.’

  ‘I think I did you a favour.’

  Elise wondered if she still had a job. She wondered if she really cared. She reached towards Connie’s mug and their fingers brushed. ‘Did you really go to Birdworld?’

  ‘With my friend and her son. It was for the boy. But I ended up really enjoying myself. Flamingos, penguins, tits. The works.’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine you at Birdworld.’

  ‘I was perfectly at home at Birdworld.’

  ‘You’re too glamorous.’

  ‘Elise, no one is more glamorous than a flamingo.’

  They laughed. This was flirtation, Elise knew – wired, worried, hungover flirtation. What step to take next, what to do. Did anything happen last night? It didn’t feel like it did. ‘Would you like a bath?’ Connie asked, as if she knew.

  ‘I would,’ she said, so quickly the two of them laughed again. ‘I just feel so awful,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, god. You look absolutely fine.’

  ‘You’re lying. My skin!’

  ‘You’re beautiful. Don’t worry. I’ll run you one.’

  Connie left Elise alone, eating the bacon sandwich. John’s flat didn’t have a bath and the front door to Connie’s house felt so far away. The greasy bread was manna, a restoration of some sense of flesh to Elise’s bones, but she knew the day was unwinding beyond her control.

  Suddenly, she thought: Connie’s going to keep me prisoner. The paranoia of her hangover almost fed this quasi-wish to be absolved of any self-dominion, a little girl in the bosom of this powerful, talented person who didn’t let stupid things like dehydration prevent her ability to impersonate someone else and get Elise off work, to keep her warm in the house on a cold November morning, to run her a bath, to give her a fresh, clean bed.

  When the bath was run, Elise slid into it and thought she might cry with the purity of the hot water.

  ‘Going to clear my head on the Heath!’ Connie called.

  Elise was astonished that Connie trusted her enough to just leave her in her house. I could be a thief! she thought. I could have weaselled my way in here to nick some ornaments and her handbag. But then again, look at me. I can’t even string a sentence together.

  She thought of Connie like a witch in the wood, going to look for more Gretels to bring back home, luring them with gingerbread and sweets. But an hour later Connie was back, pink-cheeked, the Sunday paper under her arm, saying, ‘If there’s one group I would happily see massacred, it’s the people who let their dogs shit anywhere and never pick it up.’

  Connie was fizzing with something that day – she was softer, more open than she’d been in the restaurant in Soho – and she was gentler with Elise. She sat on the sofa with her in the front living room, and as November’s early darkness fell, Elise still didn’t leave the house. They watched an episode of We, the Accused on BBC2, because Connie liked the 1935 novel and wanted to see what they’d done with it. Elise drifted, her head in Connie’s lap, and eventually she fell asleep with Connie’s fingers stroking her temples with a tenderness that she could not, in her adult life, recall.

  2017

  2

  I was fourteen when I killed my mother. Before that, I’d always kept her in the wings, where she was doing something more interesting than everybody else’s mum, only waiting for me to send her the cue to walk into my life. But she was never ready, she never appeared. Between the ages of ten and eleven, I told my classmates that she’d run off with a Russian circus, and was living in a tent made of yak pelts. I wrote postcards of mountain scenes in her handwriting and brought them into school. ‘See? She’s there. I told you!’

  ‘The cards don’t have stamps,’ said a child called Hamilton Tanner. I hated him.

  ‘They came in envelopes,’ I said. ‘My dad threw them away.’

  I was always prepared to dig the next layer of fiction and entrench myself. From childhood onwards I went through every tale, but my mother was a story with no answers. According to my dad she left before I was one, but I only began to feel her absence more keenly when I started primary school. It was when all the other mums came to the gates, chatting to each other with their arms folded, swinging from side to side as their children tugged the hems of their puffa jackets. At birthday parties, these same mothers organized such smooth afternoons of games and food and fun, making sure I was always given extra attention, which made the other children hate me. It was nice to be looked after, but I always wondered: Where is she right now? What is she doing? Why isn’t she doing it with me?

  I used to love stories about babies coming out of plants, or turning into humans from animal form. I pored over the Greek myths – how a baby could be born from a ray of light, or a thunderbolt, or from a swan. I felt an affinity with these babies, these other kinds of humans – a dangerous affinity, I should add, for in fact I was simply a very normal human being. Ovid would not write about me. I was not a god. But where had I come from, out of whose body? Whose heart had beaten for my father?

  I didn’t find any answers, and I began using my unseen mother to make myself seem mysterious and unusual rather than pitiable. I offered inconsistent drama, romance, wild supposition. I tried hard. From what I can remember, there was the Russian acrobat story, the criminal-on-the-run story (she’d stolen a priceless diamond necklace, but it wasn’t her fault) and the ship story – her being the captain of a trading vessel that moved around the Bahamas. But children are suspicious, and fond of order, normality. My classmates thought I was weird, even careless. What kind of creature was I, that my mother would not even stick around – even if it made it difficult for her as a jewel thief? When we read those myths and fairy tales at story time, Hamilton Tanner, for whom my feelings of hatred were mutual, said to me, ‘Your mum made a pact with the Devil. She’s been turned into a beast.’

  *

  All I knew about her was what my dad had told me: her name was Elise Morceau, and she had me young, when they were living in New York. And she had left, thirty-four years ago, before I turned one. There were no photos of us together; my father had none. No trace of her on paper, or in the heft of objects once in her possession, left behind. As far as I wa
s aware, my father had never managed to find her after her flight – either he gave up, having no inclination to chase her, or she had told him not to. He wouldn’t say. I would wait for opportune moments – these were rare – to ask about her, and occasionally Dad would cede information. She had short legs. (Short legs! How does that contribute to a personality – or indeed, an ability to flee quickly?) She had hair your colour. (I liked that one.) She was difficult. She was positive. Once, when he’d drunk too much: It wouldn’t have worked. She had a temper.

  Dad would tell me that he didn’t remember enough, or that it was so long ago – and so much has happened to us since, Rosie – and you’re OK, aren’t you? So I did not know the circumstances of how he met Elise, and I didn’t know why he’d been given custody of me. I knew the stay in New York had been relatively short, because he had brought me back to England before my first birthday. He wanted to protect me from hurt, I suppose, and he threw himself into being both parents, asking me just to think of myself and of my life, not what had come before. He was always loving. He wanted to spare me. But I can’t help feeling that this refusal to find the words caused more damage than anything.

  It’s hard for him to talk about, my Grandma Cherry, Dad’s mother, would say before she died. I thought it was harder not to talk about, but it seemed a consensus had been reached, and I was not privy to the reasons why. Grandma Cherry was also tight-lipped about Elise, as if to talk about her was to unleash a curse.

  When I asked my grandma if she’d ever met Elise, she said that she had not. ‘She was a tricky woman,’ my grandmother said, which I thought was an unfair thing to say about someone you’d never met. But to my grandma, how could Elise be anything other than a tricky woman, a woman executing this sleight of hand, a disappearing act where she climbed into a box and cut herself in two.

  So in the end, I killed her myself. My fictional adventures for her became as embarrassing to me as they had been for my schoolmates. By fourteen, I didn’t need the Hamilton Tanners of this world to tell me what had happened to my mum. She did not snap her neck on the Russian trapeze, nor waste away in a jail for emerald thieves, nor wreck her ship on Bahamian rocks. She was not a beast. She was just . . . dead. And my dad was in agreement: in fact, he seemed to think it was better just to pretend she’d never existed, a fairy tale to be forgotten by adulthood. He’d maintained this pattern of behaviour when I was tiny, and as I grew up the only way I can describe it is that he didn’t know how to break the spell. Not having learned the mother tongue, he couldn’t teach me. Absolutely better she was dead.

  But as I entered my twenties, I began to know people who had real parents – people who they’d lived with their whole lives – who’d really died on them. I witnessed their devastation, the reeling disbelief, the feeling that the pain would never end. I went to a funeral of a friend’s mother and watched her coffin disappearing behind a curtain, my friend watching it too, her face unrecognizable in grief. The loss of my mother was to me a palpable but different kind of pain. My version of grief was a locked box, a house to which I did not have a key, a place on a map I could not pronounce. One day it might be revealed to me, and duly overwhelm me, but I never told anyone about this fear. I didn’t have a mum, and I’d never had her, so how could I miss something I’d never really lost?

  I don’t tell people about the yearning. The wonder. I tell them, You can’t miss what you never had!

  *

  There were swathes of time when I didn’t think about her. There were other periods of my life when I felt her absence intensely. Once search engines on the Internet became a thing, I used their shrinking nets of existence to trawl for her – but I could never find an Elise Morceau, during long nights alone when all I had for company was one bottle of wine too many and irresistible rabbit holes of family tree sites. My guess was that Morceau was not her real surname. Morceau is French for bit or part, and I think this must have been a joke – on her part. It was all fruitless. Nothing ever came of my virtual journeys.

  I don’t think she gave my father the full pieces of her puzzle – lover to lover, who does? But in her case, maybe she gave him even less. A borrowed name from a list of characters. She gave my dad only the littlest crumbs, he passed them on to me, and there seemed nothing I could do with them at all.

  3

  My boyfriend Joe and I spent the last week of the summer of 2017 with my dad in France, where he now lived. My father had recently recovered from prostate cancer, and had tasted his mortality; his wife, Claire, was originally from Brittany, so they’d gone there to live permanently, in a small cottage that had belonged to her parents. These days, our visits were too intermittent, sustained only by text message – and this fact, together with the remission, had made this particular trip seem important. Joe thought that me and Dad were ‘constipated’ with our feelings – but then again, Joe came from a family who made you feel you were in an amateur production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  My dad loved the ocean. He’d always liked being near water, and for him, in the end, the Thames didn’t really cut it. Joe and I had put most of our money into Joe’s burrito business, Joerritos, so when they offered us a holiday in the spare room in their cottage, we said yes, despite Joe’s reservations. It was a mistake in the short term, and in the long term it wasn’t. We were all cooped up together, staring through the windows at leaden skies. The sea was dark with changing bands of grey; I yearned for sun and golden beach visions. And from the beginning of the week Dad was strange, veering between conversational and despondent. I felt almost physically ill at the thought that the cancer might have returned. ‘Is he OK?’ I asked Claire the first morning after we’d arrived, when he was out at the market with Joe, fetching bread.

  Claire, small in the darkness of her Breton kitchen, drew her bifocals away from her head and rubbed her eyes. ‘Matt is fine – if you mean with the cancer. But I think he is worried about you,’ she said.

  ‘Worried about me? Why?’

  ‘You will have to ask him.’ Claire sighed. ‘I think also he is a bit depressed.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It happens to old men.’

  ‘We came all this way!’ I said, as if we’d used a caravan of camels over six months to find them in a desert, rather than two drives with a P&O ferry in the middle of it.

  ‘I know,’ Claire replied equably. ‘Just talk with him, Rose. I think he would like you to try.’

  Dad got lucky with Claire. As for Claire, I don’t know if she feels lucky, particularly, but I’m glad for her existence. They met in their mid-fifties, at a friend of a friend’s summer party, and got married when I was twenty-six. Of course it does not escape me that my father has ended up with a Frenchwoman, given my own mother’s surname, but I don’t say anything about that to him. Claire is far from an evil step-mother. Claire understands my dad and she loves him, plain to see, but always with her terms intact. I think this is because Claire has been married before. She’s made mistakes and learned, and I expect she chose a different type of man the next time round. She wields self-assurance over Dad – demonstrated by her composure, her long-sightedness about their future – but she does it cleanly, and kindly. I admire that. Dad needs that. I have come to realize he needs to know where he is.

  I often wondered what he’d told Claire about his past, about how he was a man before he was my father. She never asked me anything, that’s for sure. In their spare room there’s a framed photo of Dad and me on the dresser. I must have been about two, a little top-knot on my head, done up with a technicolour bow. Slightly scuffing my foot, I’m holding his hand as we stand in what looks like a petting zoo. He was muscular, then. Dark-haired, legs far apart in a combative stance. Of course I’d wondered who’d taken the picture. I must have asked, until I knew not to. No one had taken it. We’d taken it ourselves.

  *

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I said to my dad that afternoon.

  He did his customary head dip, looking through the low front window of the cottag
e, towards the water. ‘The beach?’ he said, as if there was anywhere else we could go.

  We went down to the pebbled shore below the house, side-stepping crab carcasses, reaching down for a razor shell or a faded oyster, the debris of marine life that could not survive once out of water. The gulls wheeled above our heads, mewling. I thought: Claire’s got it wrong. This is the conversation where he tells me it’s come back, terminal.

  ‘Do you start back straightaway?’ he said, lowering himself to the pebbles.

  ‘Yeah. Soon as we’re home.’

  My dad stared out at the unending line of the Atlantic Ocean. I looked at his profile, the slim angles of his face, the large nose, the cheekbones sharp as the edge of a cuttlefish, the scruffy grey hair. He was sixty-four, and I was thirty-four. It had always been just us. I knew that he hated how I worked in a coffee shop, even though it was a nice, popular one, called Clean Bean. How many times had I heard the phrase ‘first-rate brain’ when he talked about me. I suppose I did have a good brain in many ways, and I should be doing more, even though I could never say what ‘more’ was. Even my best friend, Kelly, had started to say something about this, hinting that I’d outgrown Clean Bean. You can do anything, Rosie! You’re so bloody clever. Just believe you can do it. Please.

  Dad couldn’t seem to understand how things had gone, even though he’d been my longest, closest witness. I’d given up defending myself, but I still defended Joe. We were going to make Joerritos a success. We didn’t talk about Joerritos to Dad. It was something of a touchpaper.

  ‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘I could – give you some money, you know. Not much, but some. Isn’t there a course, or something you’d like to do? A language? Or a skill?’

  ‘Dad.’

  He put his hands up. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He paused. ‘And you already have a degree.’

  ‘Yes, I have a degree,’ I said. We’d been having this conversation on and off for a decade. Ten years can go fast when you’re not looking. After graduating in my early twenties with an English degree, I’d worked in a mainly secretarial capacity at quite decent, interesting companies. But I never pushed myself. I was essentially an enabler, a facilitator, an administrator of other people’s plans and ambitions. When Joe had suggested the burrito venture two years ago, I decided to resign from my job and join him in planning our own business. I figured: I’m a good cook. And I was scared of being a subordinate for the rest of my working life.