Care For Me: A tense and engrossing psychological thriller for fans of Clare Mackintosh

by Farah Cook

  Chapter 6

  AMIRA

  Friday, 18 October 2019

  I wish my life could be normal again.

  Last week Mum slipped out of the house without me noticing. She forgot the name of our street and which house we’d lived in our entire lives. The elderly retired officer who lives across the street brought her home. Mum was apparently shouting, ‘Let go of me, let me go, you silly old fool.’ She tried to bite him.

  I’ve been in denial about her situation, our situation, for years.

  ‘No, Ami,’ I said. ‘No one is talking. No one thinks you’re crazy.’

  ‘Who will marry you now, Mimi? People don’t marry girls from defected families.’ Her conviction shocked me.

  I push the memory out of my mind and sit up to check my laptop for any incoming messages from Meena. We’ve not chatted this week and I am anxious to talk to her. I’ve deliberately not told Mum about Meena. Mum has always disapproved of my friends.

  When I was young, I used to sneak out to see my best friend without Mum knowing. It was such a thrill. The excitement of doing what I wanted when I wanted.

  I sigh. No new message from Meena. I put my laptop away.

  ‘Mimi, what are you doing?’ Mum asks climbing up the stairs. My bedroom door screeches open. Mano’s ears are sharp. He leaps from the bed with ease while Mum stands in the doorframe and watches him disappear, a frown on her face.

  She comes in and strangles the space between us and mumbles unrecognisable words in her Urdu dialect that I can’t make out, because lately she has started jumbling up the words. Mum and I find ourselves speaking two different languages these days. I talk to her in English and she will sometimes answer back in Urdu before switching back to English again.

  She draws back the curtains and gazes back at me.

  ‘How many times must I tell you that the stray cat is not permitted to sleep in your bed,’ she says in a scolding voice. ‘Look, he leaves his hair everywhere.’

  ‘Will you please make sure there’s food in his cat bowl?’ I fail to control my annoyance. ‘Do not feed him any of your leftovers. The dry mix is in the pantry, top shelf.’

  ‘Why are you sleeping so long today. Are you too lazy to get up?’ She opens the window. A cold draft wafts through and rattles the frame.

  ‘No, Ami.’ I cross my arms over my chest.

  ‘Then what’s the matter?’ Coming closer, her icy hand smacks against my forehead. ‘Is everything OK with you?’

  ‘I just told you, I’m tired. I want to sleep in.’

  ‘Can I bring you anything?’ she smiles. ‘A nice cup of Kashmiri chai?’

  ‘No Ami, I don’t need anything,’ I say as patiently as I can.

  She looks at the bookshelf in silence. Her gaze fixes on the wood carved frame. I can tell by the glassy look in her eyes she doesn’t recognise my father. ‘Why do you keep picture of that Hollywood actor?’

  ‘You gave me that photo, don’t you remember?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Areee, don’t be silly, Mimi.’

  Every day, it becomes harder to be around her.

  When I was little, she’d wake me up in the mornings and hum Urdu songs she’d learned from the cassettes she played. She would massage my shoulders before loosening my braid and brushing my hair with long, sweeping strokes. She floated back and forth with ease when she’d draw the curtains to let in the daylight. I would watch her admiringly, listening to the familiar clanking sound of gold bangles from her wrists. She was a beautiful woman with fair skin and an oval-shaped face, with a thick, black braid that sloped down the narrow back that still frames her thin figure.

  She would fold over my cover and brush my legs. Her fingers lingered in search for the spot under my calf that is my smooth scar, which she’d then rub gently with freshly slicked coconut oil. I’ve had that burn mark for as long as I can remember. Mum says she doesn’t know how I got it. Perhaps this routine was carried out to help bring back an old memory. She’d then give me a smile, telling me it was time to rise and shine. I don’t get to see that part of Mum anymore. The idyllic image of her past self is long gone and replaced with a woman I do not recognise.

  Mum detects my irritation and chooses to ignore it by nudging me roughly with her elbow. My patience has reached its peak. I think I’m going to lose my mind.

  ‘Why you in bed?’ Mum says, again ‘Get up. Late. Very late. Almost night.’

  ‘Ami,’ I look right at her. ‘How many times have I said—’

  I fall silent. Mum fidgets, bringing her nails to her mouth and biting some more. It pains me to see her do it. I don’t make a comment. I’ve lost count of all the times I had to stop her from biting her nails.

  The silence draws like an invisible line between us.

  ‘OK, OK,’ she says. ‘For supper, I make your favourite dish. Korma.’

  ‘Ami, no! Don’t attempt to cook when I am not in there with you, OK?’

  ‘But you like korma, Mimi. I make it for you.’

  ‘I’m not going to eat it so don’t bother cooking anything, please.’ I can’t remember how many times I’ve told her korma is not my favourite dish. But she keeps insisting it is.

  ‘Where did you put my poppy seeds and the cumin masala powder?’ she arches her brows. ‘Always putting things away where I can’t find them.’

  When I checked on Mum yesterday, she’d left a bundle of fresh coriander and mint leaves half chopped on the cutting board. Dirty dishes lined the sink and mincemeat sat smelly and grey on the counter. ‘I was only making a batch of samosas for lunch,’ she said. ‘Rest to save for rainy days.’

  Thank God she didn’t have another attempt at the gas hob. I still don’t get how she managed to put it on that day. She has forgotten to switch the hob off, leaving pots and pans to burn, which is unusual as fire makes mum nervous. The extra smoke alarms I had installed were of no use. She pulled them out of the ceiling to muffle the loud beeping sound. I found her sitting in the kitchen chair quietly looking out the window with no reaction to what was happening around her as if a part of her brain had stopped working. She simply went numb.

  ‘Please Ami, there’s no need for you to cook. I’ll order food from the curry house.’ I reach for my phone and pull up their app. I ignore her. She hates takeaway food.

  ‘But why pay someone when I can cook? And God knows what things they put on the food. Tasteless spices and dry herbs. No!’ she swipes at my phone. ‘No need to order takeaway.’

  ‘What would you like to eat? How about pizza or—’

  ‘Yuck!’ she sticks out her tongue and screws shut her eyes tight.

  ‘Fine,’ I don’t look at her. ‘Aloo palak, veg biryani or dhal?’ I keep the choice limited to vegetable dishes.

  ‘Then order me chicken tikka, extra hot, OK?’ she snaps. ‘I don’t want the firangi version without any proper desi flavours, so disgusting.’

  ’The doctor said you should be cutting down on meat. What do you want instead?’

  She folds her arms over her chest. ‘I want nothing,’ she says, and strides out of the room.

  Chapter 7

  Friday, 14th March 1986

  Dear Diary,

  Mum says dinner is ready and is calling me from downstairs. I’m not hungry. I don’t want to eat yesterday’s leftovers or any of the other traditional Pakistani dishes she likes to cook. Korma, saag aloo, tandoori chicken are all mum’s favourite foods. Just one time I told her I liked the Korma she made and now she thinks it’s my favourite. But it’s not. I want scream in her face:

  ‘WHAT ABOUT MY FAVOURITE FOOD?’

  I can hear her panting like an angry bull. Mum does that sometimes to show me she’s close to exploding. ‘Don’t let the food get cold,’ She says and leaves the door to my bedroom open.

  I hate having my bedroom door open. It is too loud with the little brat around. Why isn’t she back at Mrs Singh’s? Mum uses me to babysit the little brat, but since I told her I am very busy with homework, she
looks after her herself.

  I can smell the strong spices and it makes me feel sick. What I really fancy is a burger with fries from McDonald’s with a large chocolate milkshake! That’s what Naima sometimes eats. Her mum never cooks. They order take away most days. Chinese noodles and prawns, pizzas, kebabs with mint sauce. They have a large kitchen with a bar around the island where they sit and eat. It’s so cool. I love eating at their house. They always have cola and other fizzy drinks and one of those big American-style fridge-freezers with buckets of ice cream.

  When Mum found out I had eaten pizza at their house she went mental, and I know why. I wish she hadn’t done what she did to Naima’s mum, it’s sooo uncool. I mean, who does that?! Mum thinks I don’t know what she did. That I am just an ignorant little girl.

  ‘Silly ladki’ she calls me. She would never call me by my real name, she doesn’t like it. She told me that she had picked such a beautiful name for me but Dad decided to change it. Mum’s got me a nickname and I hate it.

  ‘I like it, Ami,’ I lied. ‘Call me whatever you want to. I’ll be a good girl.’

  She smiled then and began humming. There was this look in her eyes that believed me. And just for a moment, I almost felt bad for lying to her.

  Tonight, Naima wants to take me to the cinema and watch Thelma & Louise. She said her mum would drive us there and pay for everything. She’d even pay for the popcorn and a bag of pick and mix sweets. I told her to meet me around the corner of our house after eight so Mum wouldn’t see their car.

  I know, I’ll have to be very careful not to get caught when I sneak out.

  I wouldn’t want Mum to go mental again.

  Chapter 8

  AFRAH

  Saturday, 26 October 2019

  Creases gather on Amira’s forehead. She’s waving her hands rapidly in front of me.

  ‘Hello, Ami? Answer me,’ she shakes my shoulders. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I swallow a clump of air. ‘Did something happen?’ I wipe sweat from my forehead. My heart is pounding. I had a dream. Somebody called for me.

  ‘You’ve been blank. Are you awake or dreaming?’ Distress draws across her face. ‘Not the first time it’s happened. But you don’t remember, do you?’ Amira glares down at the main article in the newspaper strewn in front of me. ‘Promise me you’ll stop reading the garbage they write in the papers, OK? It’s messing with your mind.’

  I think I was reading about the young girl who went missing. It was front-page news. Everyone said it was a tragic accident. The police, the investigators all say she is probably dead. I turn the pages. Where is the article? It’s not in here. Gone. How can it be gone?

  ‘Mimi, have you read anything about the fourteen-year-old girl?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’ She grabs the newspaper without even looking at me and chucks it into the bin. ‘Nothing has been written about it in here. It’s pure fiction, something you must have read in an Urdu fairy tale. Do you get that?’

  I go blank. Feel the flush of embarrassment of not remembering what we were just talking about. I don’t tell her that. She’ll start telling me I am forgetful. But I am not.

  ‘A little boy nearly drowned in the lake in our neighbourhood,’ she says. ‘Terrible, can you imagine?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ I say. ‘Just terrible.’

  ‘You used to go there with Shafi all the time. We’ve not gone out in days. If only the rain would stop. It’s time I took you for a walk down to the beach again. What do you think?’ Her voice is kind and patient. She appears to be in a good mood.

  ‘No, it’s too far.’ In my mind, I see the broken seashells that she used to collect and store in her silver tin.

  ‘It is not,’ she smiles. ‘We were there last weekend, remember?’

  I don’t remember when I last went out. I feel like a certain kind of madness has come over me, as if I have been locked inside this house forever.

  Looking down at my left hand, I’m trying to make out the smeared words drawn onto my palm, that I think I wrote this morning. I remind myself: I do this so that I don’t to forget to ask Amira to get me what I need. I can still just about make out the words.

  ‘Mimi, listen . . .’

  Amira is not paying attention. She is buzzing around the sitting room searching for something. I can hear a beeping sound, and it is getting louder. She looks underneath the sofa, shoving the stray cat to the side. It meows and strides out, grumpily.

  ‘Bloody hell, where is it?’ she hunches over to move the pillows about and sighs. The beeping stops.

  ‘Badtameez ladki,’ I call out. ‘Listen to your mother, now!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ She’s not looking at me but at the device glued to her hand. One of her fingers swipes the screen while she nibbles at a shortbread biscuit. Crumbs dust the coffee table, but she doesn’t sweep them away.

  ‘Can you get me the newspaper? I want it, I want it now!’ If only I could remember the story I was reading. Something, someone. Someone is missing, presumed dead.

  ‘We talked about it – do you recall me saying you get it biweekly?’ She throws me a look that makes me feel like a dotty old village woman. ‘The answer to your question is no.’

  I bite my lip hard to stop it from trembling. ‘Silly ladki, when have I asked you?’

  Amira looks away as if I don’t exist. She walks right past me to the kitchen and comes back with a cloth to clean the crumbs from the table. Then she takes the tin with the shortbread and puts it in a drawer. I say nothing. I sit there, feeling the way I do when I’m around her. Redundant. She frowns at me like a wolf tormenting a lamb. What does my daughter think of me?

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly capable of going out and buying whatever I need for myself.’ Hot tears spill over my cheeks.

  ‘Ami, please! I’ll switch on the telly so you can watch the news, alright? No need to be so dramatic.’

  There’s no point in switching on the television, I can’t remember the programmes I watch. I keep the newspaper because I can highlight the articles to jump back and forth between stories in a sort of makeshift timeline, as I do with my diary.

  ‘I don’t want to watch the news.’

  ‘What do you want, Ami?’ she asks.

  ‘What I want is, I want . . .’

  She watches me go quiet again.

  Wednesday, 30 October 2019

  The armchair makes a creaking sound when I shift and adjust myself to a comfortable position. I turn the pages of the book in my lap and highlight words as I read. I forget everything almost instantly. I try to read the words once more. But I am distracted. I hear a voice – a child’s voice – coming from my memory, flickering by like a flimsy film. I listen to the tapping of footsteps getting closer. Then, someone is standing right next to me and leans in close, jabbing a finger at my arm.

  ‘Nano, tell me one of your stories, pleeease.’

  ‘Not now Shafi,’ I turn the page in my book, marked in bright yellow. Why don’t I remember anything I’ve read? I start all over highlighting the sentences again and again.

  ‘Oh, but pleeease?’ his voice is louder than before and he tugs my arm hard, but I pull it back, continuing to mark the page in a yellow mess. ‘Pleeease, Nano. Pleee—’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Stop saying pleeease, please.’

  He smiles, elbows resting on the arm of the chair, his little chin cupped in his hands.

  And so I leave the rest of the pages unmarked and place the book on the tufted ottoman. I start the tale about a boy named Joseph with eleven jealous brothers who want him dead. Halfway through I forget what I had been saying. Is Joseph a prisoner, a prince or both?

  Shafi remembers things.

  He picks up on the smallest detail, reminding me that I’ve been retelling the same stories to him ever since he was a baby.

  ‘Joseph,’ he says, ‘was the prisoner who became a prince. Just like in the tale of Aladdin.’

  ‘Who is Aladdin?�
�� I ask. Shafi scratches the wrinkles on his nose and watches me suspiciously.

  ‘You were the one who read it to me from One Thousand and One Nights.’

  ‘No I did not. Never mind.’

  He wants me to continue with Joseph. But I can’t get back to the knit of it and feel utterly lost in the tangled wires of my mind. Hot flashes tighten the muscles in my face and sweat dapples my skin.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Nano.’ His sleeve wipes my face. ‘Mum and Dad say it’s because you’re getting older, and . . .’

  Silence.

  ‘And what?’ I look for clues as to why his chin is now glued to his chest. ‘Wiser?’

  ‘Are you going to die soon?’ he asks in a low murmur.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  I tilt his chin up to gaze at him. A handsome boy with typical Kashmiri features, he watches me with a steady look, lashes long and curled. I stroke the thick hair sitting heavy on his head, and pull the strands back behind his ears. His cheeks are rubbed red.

  ‘You are, aren’t you?’ He shrugs, doesn’t look at me. ‘Going to die soon.’

  ‘Look at me,’ I smile. ‘I’m alive now, am I not?’

  ‘I never want you gone. I want you to stay with me forever.’ His arms curl around my waist. Soft fingers clutching tight. ‘Let’s go down to the lake. Pleeease, Nano. Pleeease.’

  Unclutching his hands, I nod. ‘Stop saying pleeease, please.’

  ‘Let’s go, now, now!’

  ‘Not a word to your mum about this or she will have a go at me.’ We have our secrets from Amira and she doesn’t like it.

  He gets dressed. Wears his wellies and yellow raincoat, and waits in the kitchen, his coconut brown eyes boring into mine. ‘Promise you will never leave me.’