by Jane Shemilt
‘The women will have helped her when the baby was born.’ I try to speak calmly, but I want to shout and sing and dance. She’s alive. Alive. He didn’t kill her. They are lovers. He might have sought her out for revenge, and then something unexpected must have happened. He fell in love, despite his plan. During the months of secret meetings he must have crossed some invisible line from using her for revenge, to loving her; maybe even after his visit to me. He offered her a different world, he made her smile; she would have loved him back. He didn’t abduct her; she went with him. He gave her that ring, he loves her, she’s all right. My tears are streaming. I walk quickly around the room, smiling, pushing my hands into my mouth to stop myself laughing; I can be glad later. Right now Michael must understand that Yoska is important.
‘Naomi, the baby and Yoska. They could be a family of three now.’
It’s Michael’s turn to stand up. He puts his mug down.
‘He’s committed crimes. Sex with a minor, abduction, imprisonment. Anyone who knew will be complicit.’
‘He may not have known her age. She looks so different with make-up on. She might have lied about how old she was.’ I hold out my hand to him, make him sit down again next to me. ‘If she’s there, it could be because she wants to be.’
He is silent, watching me.
‘Don’t … romanticize this, Jenny,’ he says after a while. ‘He’s a criminal. He belongs in prison.’
I search for words that will make him understand. ‘She met him in the hospital in July two summers ago. She left in the November. Four months. Long enough to work out what she wanted. She left James in that time; she chose a man, not a boy. Michael, she might have thought leaving with him meant she could have her baby.’
Michael gives a short impatient sigh. ‘She might well have had her baby, but it wouldn’t have been in the best of circumstances. The kind of people who live like this, well, they’re not like us.’
Is this what he thought when he was policing townships in South Africa? I haven’t heard him speak like this before.
‘Meaning?’
‘They live in a different way.’
I thought that was the point. I look around me at my books and paintings, the antique rugs my father loved. Echoes of life, not life. ‘She gave her necklace away. Perhaps she wanted something different.’ And all the while I am talking, my heart is beating faster and faster; I can let myself think of her face, I can let myself think of her child.
His voice gets louder and slower, as if that might make me understand better. ‘They live in squalor, on land they don’t own. They steal everything.’
I look at his familiar face; perhaps after all I hardly know him.
In my heart I am speaking to her.
I feel sure you have a little girl. She will be six months by now; soon you will tell me her name.
‘If she’s there, it will be because she will be useful in some way. Remember that he deals in drugs. Naomi was stealing ketamine for him. There are drug gangs in Cardiff, and other rackets he’s mixed up in.’ He doesn’t say prostitution but the word is somewhere between us.
When Yoska had smiled at me in my surgery he hadn’t looked like a dangerous criminal. Perhaps the dangerous people are the ones you think you can trust, like Michael. Men who make judgements, men who need power. Could Ted have been right about him? That he has attached himself to me because I have been so vulnerable? I don’t care if he has exploited the situation, or if he wanted power over me. It only matters if he brings her back safely.
‘I have to go.’ He drains his mug, stands up. ‘It goes without saying that it’s all completely confidential, but even so it might find its way into the news. I wanted you to know before that happened.’
He shrugs into his thick black coat and says quietly, ‘Ted should know. I’ll phone him.’
‘Let me,’ I say quickly. ‘Better if I do.’
His expression softens and he cups my face in his hands.
‘Of course, Jenny. Tell him soon, though. As her father he needs to know now.’
‘Thank you,’ I remember to say. ‘For coming to tell me. Be careful of … her.’
‘I’ll let you know. Jenny, don’t –’
‘What?’
‘Don’t do anything.’
I sit looking at my hands as the sound of his car gets fainter down the lane. I haven’t done anything for a long time. I won’t tell Ted yet. I’ll wait till she’s safely here. Michael will bring her back with him. I open the window to let the fresh air inside the hot room. She will run towards me. The tears start again, cold on my cheeks as the wind washes over me. I will hold her. My face will be against hers – will her skin smell the same? Her hair may be longer. She will be taller. She will bring me her little girl.
I have waited fourteen months; I can wait a few more days.
But it isn’t a few days. It’s just a few hours.
I wake gradually to insistent knocking, confused by the cold and dark, my neck aching from where I have been lying awkwardly on the sofa. The flames have gone, the grate is ashy. The porch light has switched itself on outside and I see Michael through the glass. He must have left something behind and has had to come all the way back. I open the door. He looks down at me, and though I always thought I would know immediately, I don’t. He looks exhausted. His mouth moves and I watch it closely because he is saying words which don’t make sense. He is saying the same thing over and over and the words come closer and closer until I understand.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
He catches me as the room tilts and he puts me down carefully on the edge of the stairs.
‘… months ago,’ he is saying.
If I don’t listen she might still be there in the dark beyond the open door. She might be standing outside, uncertain of her welcome, waiting with her baby in her arms. I stand up and try to push past him, but he stops me and holds me still.
‘It was after the baby.’ He is dark against the light, and I can’t see his face. ‘She had an infection.’
‘But you said she was there.’ I am screaming the words in his face. ‘A girl with fair hair, you said …’
‘I shouldn’t have told you that. It turned out to be a mother of two in her twenties. I spoke to her. I’m sorry, Jenny.’
‘Get him. He will have run away. You must find him.’ It was Yoska’s fault. He let her die.
‘Yoska’s dead, Jenny. He was shot. He died just after midnight.’
Michael holds me and he starts to talk. The words fly about my head like black crows.
‘He came out of a van, shooting. We don’t know why; he may have thought the camp was being attacked by a drug gang. There have been gun fights over drugs at the site before. He didn’t give us a chance to negotiate. He kept firing at us; we gave him warnings.’ He shakes his head. ‘He just walked towards us, firing. It was as though he was asking to be shot. We had no choice.’ He pauses. ‘He was hit in the chest and died instantly.’
Yoska killed. Naomi dead months before.
Michael lifts me as my legs weaken, and carries me through to the sofa in the sitting room. It’s dark but it doesn’t matter.
‘The baby, Michael.’ I grip his jacket. ‘Where’s the baby?’
He holds me tightly so I am crushed into his chest. I feel his words through the bones of my face.
‘The baby died with Naomi. They had the same infection.’
The words have lost their power; they don’t even make much sense. His voice reminds me of the way he used to talk to us in the kitchen in Bristol when we first met him. Slow and careful, he pauses often.
‘Yoska’s sister, Saskia, told us what happened. His parents are in police custody now.’
The buttons on his jacket are hurting my cheek, but I stay completely still.
‘The baby was born in the caravan. You were right; the women in the family helped.’
Naomi would have gathered up the slimy little body in her slim child’s hands and held
her, the pain fading already, love sluicing through her. Would she have thought of me? Would she have understood in that moment how I must have felt about her?
‘It was a girl, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ He sounds surprised. ‘Yes. It was.’
Naomi’s world would have become the small sleeping face, the little sucking mouth, the tiny perfect toes curling and uncurling in her hands.
Michael is still talking. ‘… and after five days she felt unwell, restless and tearful. They thought it was emotional.’
‘She never cries.’ It sounds like an echo from a long time ago.
‘The baby got hot,’ he carries on. ‘That’s when they realized Naomi was also burning hot.’
I always knew when she had a raised temperature, laying my lips on her forehead, I knew to within half a degree. It could have been post-puerperal fever. Streptococcal, deadly without rapid treatment.
Michael shifts on the sofa. ‘Do you want me to tell you all this now?’
Outside there are streaks of light already. I stand and hold the arm of the chair.
‘Of course.’
‘When she began vomiting Yoska called the doctor. They waited for three hours and in that time she became unconscious.’
There must have been a lot of people in that caravan; it would have been stuffy. The fan they kept for summer nights would thump round and round like the beat of a nightmare. Naomi would be lying motionless in a sodden bed, the mottled baby sticking to her skin.
‘Yoska was beside himself. He decided to take them to the hospital himself. When his uncle said someone would recognize her in A&E he smashed his nose. Just as he picked her up, Naomi stopped breathing. The baby died minutes afterwards; they’d left it too late.’
Too late. The words hang between us like the click of a door shutting.
Michael gets up to stand next to me, puts his arm round me. ‘Saskia said Yoska wrapped them in the sheet and very carefully laid them on the back seat of the car.’
He pauses. ‘Then he took everything out of the caravan, all her stuff, all the baby’s things, the bed, the table, everything. He piled it up outside, doused it in petrol and left.’
A funeral pyre. The roaring flames would have leapt high into the air. No one could have gone near. There would be nothing left. No hairbrush with long golden hairs tangled in it, no bracelets or scrunchies. There could have been a diary or the start of a letter to me. She might have gathered autumn leaves again, and put them behind a mirror. There will be no photos of the baby, no baby clothes.
‘Where did he take them?’ I ask Michael.
‘It’s a tradition among travellers to bury their people secretly. No one admits to knowing where he took them.’
Their people? Naomi was mine.
It’s still quite dark in the room but as I watch the streaks of light getting wider, a little flare of hope hisses in the silence in my head. ‘How do you know this is true? Why do you believe everything his sister said? Maybe she wasn’t even there …’
He doesn’t reply but reaches into his jacket and pulls something from a pocket; he puts it into my hand, cupping my fingers round its curved surface.
‘Saskia said you should have this.’
I feel the handles and though I can’t see it in the dark, I know there is a pattern of leaping frogs round the rim. At the very bottom, on the inside of the cup, there is a raised, painted, smiling frog.
‘Drink up, sweetheart.’ Naomi’s eyes were so blue as she watched me over the rim of the cup. ‘The little frog is waiting …’
Her baby cup for her own baby. I didn’t even notice it had gone. I wonder what she did with all the buttons I kept in it.
Michael has his arm tight round me now; his breath moves my hair as he speaks.
‘Even the children could tell us how she had died. Everyone said the same thing. They showed us the scorched grass and the empty caravan …’
His voice continues. I hear him more faintly, talking about fingerprints and swabs, keeping a high level of suspicion, digging at the site to start tomorrow. The caravans have been searched already. Some of the key travellers are in custody; others can go providing they stay in the locality. They will have to keep investigating.
There is a pause, then Michael says, ‘We need to find her body. Sooner or later someone will let slip the burial site.’ I tune his words out.
So that was her home. Theirs. Just an empty box now. The moonlight will slant through the windows onto a bare floor. Perhaps it’s shining on a little toy that has rolled away into a corner.
Michael’s voice gets louder. ‘Yoska was away for two weeks and silent when he came back. He sat in his sister’s caravan for hours every day staring into space –’
I interrupt him quickly. ‘I want to go to the camp, Michael.’
Yoska’s sister told the police she wasn’t sure where he had buried them; but she might tell me.
‘I’ll take you over there as soon as we’ve finished our investigation. I promise. We need to cross-examine all witnesses, dig up the site and search every vehicle again.’
Michael goes into the kitchen, pulling a flask from his pocket. I hear the kettle bubble, the clink and clash of cutlery. He comes back and watches me while I drink the coffee laced with whisky. This morning, when he made me hot chocolate, she was still alive. Or was that yesterday? No, how stupid. She died months ago.
In the growing light Michael’s face is white with fatigue and after a while he goes upstairs to sleep. I hear his shoes drop to the floor, the little noises of effort as he pulls off his clothes and then the bed creaking. After that there is quiet. The silence is so deep it’s as though a faint tune that had been playing in the background has now stopped.
Ed said I didn’t have a bloody clue.
But I did. I had a lot of clues. They had been all round me for a long time. I close my eyes and remember the last time I was in her room. Even then I could have seen the clues.
BRISTOL 2010
NINE MONTHS AFTER
Ted went for a long walk in the morning. He told me he didn’t want to be in the house when I left for the final time. It was a Sunday. I remember that, because for years I had been used to him leaving every day of the week except for Sundays. When he had gone I went upstairs to Naomi’s room. The removal men were coming at midday. I had packed up what I needed to take to the cottage. The rest would stay in the house for Ted.
It was already hot. The sun was bright in a high cloudless sky, one of those perfect summer days children are supposed to remember all their lives. The room was empty apart from the bed and the curtains, which were closed. The air felt stifling. I opened the window and pulled the curtain back a little. Below me, the street was empty. The journalists had long gone, drifting away to other tragedies where the pickings were richer. As I watched, the air warm on my skin, a woman in a summer dress came round the corner, leaning forward with one hand on a pushchair. She held a mobile clamped against her ear and her head was moving. From here she looked like the little nodding doll that I’d loved when I was small but lost years ago. The pushchair was deeply padded and I couldn’t see the child at all. I watched until the woman disappeared from sight, her head still moving up and down.
The curtain beneath my hand felt edged with dust, heavy and soft. The material was striped gold and scarlet. We had chosen it together, Naomi and I, in John Lewis three or four years before. But we hadn’t been together, not really. I had picked out a roll of leaf-patterned cotton in grey, white and lemon yellow, imagining how the diffusing light would paint the room in fresh colours. There was another I liked with tiny flowers. I had turned to ask Naomi to decide but she was already walking to the till carrying a bolt of exotic-looking cloth in a roll that was taller than she was. It was richly coloured with shiny bands of gold and red. It looked gaudy with its big stripes. I told her it would stop the light coming in and how different her room would feel to the other rooms in our house. It would be dark and enclosed. Like a hidden
cave, with no light, full of secrets. She had smiled. A forerunner of the little half smile. ‘That’s exactly what I want,’ she had said.
31
DORSET 2011
FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER
Into the silence of the kitchen at daybreak comes a sudden noise of tearing or burning; in a second the sound resolves itself as rain falling fast and hard on the thatch. The water against the window is the colour of the grey sky. I must hurry with my letters. I want to start the journey and it will take longer in the rain. As I rip out the blank pages in my sketchbook for paper to write on, the flimsy binding comes apart in my hands and the pictures fall, fanning out as they hit the floor: the drawing of her shoes, the little hooded top, a toy giraffe, a magpie. Other pages flutter down on top of them and I leave them where they have fallen.
Ted,
As I write this you are sleeping, but by the time you get it I will have spoken to you and you will have told the boys. I thought if I sent letters as well, it might help. I used to wonder whether knowing would be better than hoping. I can’t tell. It doesn’t feel real yet.
It wasn’t your fault or, if it was, it was mine as well. I should have been more careful when Yoska came to see me. He might have forgiven us. He must have been unsure even then; he belonged to a family so would have known how we would suffer. In the end, I think he took her because they were in love; we couldn’t have changed that.
I’m leaving for Wales. I’m hoping someone at the camp may tell me where he buried them.
Please tell Anya.
I’ll come to Bristol as soon as I can.
Jenny
The scrape of my nib is tiny against the relentless rain. The kitchen feels warm and enclosed, but where will he be when he reads this? The boys will be with him; maybe Anya quietly moving in the background. I see her face, streaming with tears.