by Emily Gunnis
He had not seen her coming, so was caught off balance and didn’t have time to put his arms out to save himself. Just before he hit the ground, he managed to get his hand between himself and the concrete, and his entire weight crashed onto his wrist resulting in a strange cracking sound. The group went completely silent, the whole mood entirely changed with that one gesture: the hunter become the hunted. Then the boy looked up at Kitty with a look of bewilderment in his eyes and started to scream.
Kitty had ignored him, walking over to his victim and holding out her hand to pull her up. As the eleven-year-old girl uncurled herself and looked up at her, Kitty’s blood had run cold. She knew instinctively that this was Rose, Ivy’s baby. She couldn’t have looked more like her. As Kitty stood in stunned silence, the girl had smiled shyly, wiped her nose with the back of her hand and run off in the direction of the bell for lessons.
In the weeks that followed, Kitty discovered that her gut instinct – that the red-headed, blue-eyed girl was Ivy’s daughter – was right. She was adopted, she told Kitty, and not only that, she was miserable. As they walked side by side on their way home, Kitty taking a huge detour every day in order to be with her, Annabel Rose slowly revealed her unhappiness. She tried so hard to be a good daughter, but nothing was ever good enough for her parents, and she felt constantly like a square peg trying to force herself into a round hole.
She had reminded Kitty of Ivy so much, the memories that now returned felt so vivid, it was as if Ivy had found a way back to her. When Annabel smiled in the same way that Ivy had, all in her eyes with her mouth closed; when she played with her hair when she was unsure of herself; when she turned her head and her long red corkscrew curls fell in front of her eyes. It could have been Ivy herself.
Of course, none of this she could share with Annabel. She had never been able to admit the truth to anyone, and it ate away at her. But what she did share was something they both felt. Loneliness, and an overwhelming grief they carried with them every day for the people they loved and had never known. Kitty for her twin sister and Annabel for her birth mother.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Kitty showed Annabel a side of her character that she had never revealed to anyone. Slowly and carefully at first, she had tested the water. Waiting for Annabel to reject her as everyone in her life had done up until that point, she told her the story she had told her father: that she had seen Elvira behind a gravestone, that Elvira had taken her to an outhouse, that she had been too scared to leave. That Elvira had died because Kitty had got lost finding help.
Annabel had listened and comforted her, and confessed that she pined for the woman who had given birth to her. She thought of her birth mother often. She craved knowing who she truly was and why she had chosen to give her up. And so together they had found Maude. And that was when it had all begun to unravel.
Kitty had expected to sit in the background at Maude Jenkins’ house, to be there for Annabel as she met her grandmother for the first time, but instead she had felt herself shaking with hatred as soon as the old lady answered the door.
In the box of Ivy’s things had been a bundle of letters, and despite the old lady’s protests, she had sat in the corner and read them.
She remembered very little after that, other than telling Ivy’s mother that it was her fault her daughter was dead. She had blurred memories of dragging Annabel out into the street, giving her Ivy’s letters and telling her to read them. Maude should have rescued Ivy, Kitty remembered telling Annabel Rose as she clutched her by the shoulders, and that if Annabel ever saw Maude again, she’d kill her. She didn’t recall getting home that night, but when she woke in the morning, it was with a feeling of overwhelming panic.
She waited for Annabel at the school gates as usual the following morning, but she wasn’t there. In the weeks that followed, Kitty tried to talk to her, but Annabel shut her out. There was a coldness behind her eyes, an emptiness in her smile, and Kitty felt as if she had lost Ivy all over again.
She tried to stay away, but she felt as if her heart were breaking in two, and her nightmares, from which she had experienced some respite since meeting Annabel, returned with a vengeance.
At two o’clock one morning, she had walked round to Annabel’s house and knocked on the door. Annabel’s adoptive father had answered in a highly agitated state.
‘I’m sorry to wake you, Mr Creed, but I need to see Annabel.’ Kitty had tried to smile at the man, to soften the dislike radiating from him.
‘This is getting out of hand. I’m not sure why a girl so much older than my daughter would take such an interest in her, but Annabel hasn’t stopped crying for a week and I suspect it is something to do with you.’
‘Please, I just need to talk to her, and explain.’ Kitty had felt the tears coming, and angrily brushed them away.
‘Get away from here, and if I find out you’ve been bothering my daughter again, I shall call the police.’ He was flushed red with fury but his skin was white as he had stood with his boney fingers pressed into his hips, his narrow ankles sticking out from the bottom of his silk pyjamas.
‘She’s not your daughter,’ Kitty spat. ‘You stole her. And she hates you for it.’
As she had walked away from the house, she had turned and looked up to Annabel’s bedroom, where the young girl stood at the window looking so much like Ivy it was as if she had come back to life.
Over the following weeks, the rejection began to take hold of Kitty. She felt as if she was losing her mind. The letters haunted her; a desire to hurt those responsible for Ivy’s death became overwhelming. Violent images ran repeatedly through her mind, following her around day and night like a silent film. No words, only pictures, of her taking revenge for Ivy’s life.
Visits to her mother in hospital, once a part of her daily routine, became an unbearable grind and one that she started to dread from the second she woke up. The smell of death in the corridors, the weak smiles of the nurses, Helena lying in her bed, swollen and useless. She was tired of the ugliness of it, the tubes, the pain, the never-ending, drawn-out death of the woman who was ultimately responsible for her being abandoned at St Margaret’s.
She had spoken to her so many times about Elvira, but it was obvious from Helena’s clipped, short answers, from the way she turned her head away and changed the subject, that she felt no remorse.
Kitty was tired of being beholden to a woman who didn’t care for her.
She was tired of waiting for her mother to die.
She needed to be free to focus.
Chapter Forty
Wednesday 3 July 1968
Helena Cannon came to with a start. Her small hospital room was dark, save for the narrow beam her bedside lamp cast onto her sweat-soaked pillow. It was unusually hot for July, and the room was stifling, even though the sun had recently set. The thick humidity from the day lingered in the air. She could hear the faint sound of babies crying on the maternity ward below, but other than that, all was silent.
Helena’s dialysis machine had apparently long since finished its work. Its dials were still and in the dim light the machine had the appearance of a robot whose eyes were watching her. The night nurse had been very slack of late: rarely there to unhook her from the tubes when they finished and wheel her back to the ward. Her nightie and bed sheets were soaked with sweat, in stark contrast to her mouth, which was dry as a desert storm.
A wave of nausea hit her as she turned her head to the window, but it remained steadfastly shut despite her repeated pleas to the nurses to open it. Though her body was being assessed, cannulated, catheterised and injected seemingly without respite, her mind did not appear to be of interest to any of the doctors having endless conversations over her head. She tried to be patient, knowing there were others more in need than her, but she was desperate to feel heard to keep herself from going insane. She dreaded her daily visits to the dialysis room. Chained to the churning machine day after day, she felt the walls closing in. Before long, all four wa
lls would be pressed up against her swollen limbs, the ceiling of her coffin lowered and its catches shut into place: click, clunk.
She looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table to find out how long she had been asleep, but its face was turned away. It was impossible to reach while she was still hooked up to the machine, as was the red call button, which she stared at longingly. Her crawling skin and increasing need to vomit led her to believe she had slept more than the allotted hour between blood-pressure checks. Either that or she had been too exhausted to stir from her increasingly harrowing dreams. Dreams of George that were so real, she could touch him, smell him. Their life before all the pain and the hospital appointments and the endless needles, when they were happy and madly in love. Dreams so vivid that when she woke, she felt as if she had lost him all over again.
As she lay in her bed on the ward, trying to shake the fresh grief from her groggy head, she would watch with gut-wrenching jealousy as husbands came and went, collecting their mended wives, happy that their one-off visit to the hospital was behind them and all was well with the world again.
She wanted to scream at them: ‘That should be George and me, we should be growing old together.’
He had been dead for over seven years, and they had lied: it didn’t get easier. All that the passing of time meant was that friends stopped asking, stopped mentioning George for fear her tears would start again. She knew everyone expected her to have moved on. Moved on to what? Time hadn’t healed; her grief had just slowly evolved into a rage that had stayed trapped in the pit of her stomach like an unexploded bomb.
Her eyes scanned the room for anything that could help her reach the call button, and fell on a fan on the counter that Kitty had brought to cool her down during the long dialysis sessions. It had only been a few hours, but she missed her daughter desperately. If Kitty were there, she would have gone to find someone, chastised the nurses, made sure they returned her mother safely to her bed on the ward.
Helena lay in the dimly lit room, thinking about Kitty. She had been subdued of late, asking her about Elvira again. Helena was so tired of the subject, so tired of being made to feel bad. It had taken an enormous amount of forgiveness to allow George to bring even one of the twins home from St Margaret’s, and the choice of which it should be was obvious. Elvira had struggled to breathe when she was born, Father Benjamin had said himself that she had needed special care as a baby which George wouldn’t have been able to give her. It was hard enough to bring up one baby on his own.
‘Did you ever think about Elvira when I was growing up?’ Kitty had asked that morning, her eyes stony as they always were when she talked about her sister. ‘I just need to know if you cared about her at all.’
The room spun and Helena found herself swallowing the vomit rising in her throat. At that moment she had just wanted Kitty to leave, but now that she had gone, she was desperate for her to come back.
‘Nurse,’ she croaked. Her liquids were being kept as low as her body could endure to stop further build-up of fluid in her lungs and legs, but cutting back day after day on the water she was allowed, so that her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak, was having little effect. She was still barely able to catch her breath, and her legs continued to swell so that now they were impossible to move and no longer looked like hers, the skin so stretched and raw it felt as if it would tear at the slightest pressure.
Helena’s ears throbbed with the silence, and the slightest movement made her nausea return in forceful waves. Soon she would vomit, she wouldn’t be able to stop it, and when she did, her dehydration levels would become desperately low. Stay calm, someone will come soon. She was thirsty, so thirsty: they hadn’t given her any water since the small cup at breakfast, and she was sweating profusely. The itching on her skin had escalated to a new level; she felt as if the insects crawling on it had burrowed down to her bones. However much she tore at her skin, there was no way for her to reach them.
Suddenly, and without warning, liquid filled her mouth and she began to vomit, letting out a sob as it poured down her front, the acid burning her throat.
Barely able to lift her hand to wipe her mouth, she prayed for the sound of anyone in the corridor. But there was nothing; just her own heart throbbing in her chest. She looked down at the thick needle lodged in her arm. She couldn’t remove it herself; she was completely trapped.
As she lay fighting the second wave of nausea, she heard the faint cries of the babies again on the maternity ward below. She often heard them crying in the night. Some nights the screams of a woman in the throes of labour would travel up through the floor, louder and louder as the hours went on. Then finally silence, followed by the sound of a newborn’s cry.
To most it was the sweetest of sounds, but to Helena it was like sharp nails down a blackboard. An unwanted reminder of the hundreds of ashen-faced girls who had knocked on Mother Carlin’s office door. Girls who had sat in silence watching her pen scratch the surface of the contract that would seal the final details of their baby’s fate. And then she would give her speech about it being for the best, and the sensible ones would sign. Others put up more of a fight, but they all gave in eventually, thanks to Mother Carlin’s powers of persuasion.
Helena couldn’t begin to imagine the agony of giving up a child; the pain of not being able to bear one of her own was excruciating enough. And the girls just kept on coming, younger and younger, paler and thinner. She had tried so many times to stop, to hand the job over to someone else, but Father Benjamin had insisted she continue. She had a knack with the girls, he said; they trusted her. She was a young trainee solicitor in a man’s world, and she didn’t want to get fired from her first job.
Suddenly she heard the sound of a key turning. She had no idea why the door was locked: perhaps she’d been forgotten and this was one of the cleaning staff. It didn’t matter why she’d been left; for now, all that mattered was that she had been found. She felt a flood of overwhelming relief as the door creaked open and the light from the corridor momentarily lit up the room. The head of her bed had its back to the door, so she couldn’t see who it was that had entered, but she could hear them moving around behind her.
‘Hello?’ she croaked, dried vomit cracking at the sides of her lips.
The person didn’t say a word. Helena listened to their shoes on the floor, waiting for them to appear by her bed and comfort her.
‘Hello?’ She strained her voice, but only a whisper came out. ‘Please answer me. For God’s sake help me.’
Still nothing as the person stood completely still somewhere behind her.
‘What are you doing?’ Helena pleaded. ‘I can’t move. Please help me.’
As she twisted her head, desperately trying to see who was in the room with her, she felt warm breath on her neck and looked down to see a hand reach out for the light next to her bed and switch it off. Immediately the room was plunged into darkness.
She felt a sudden tug at the needle in her arm and a shooting pain soared up her hand. She gasped with the shock of it, trying to lift her other arm to feel what had happened. Tears stung her eyes as her fingers fell upon the torn tape around the needle to her fistula, which was now dislodged.
As her swollen fingers fumbled clumsily in a panic, she tried her best to push the needle back in but only managed to dislodge it still further. She let out a silent scream from the agony of her bruised skin tearing around it. Shoes clicked across the floor, the door quickly opened and then closed again. Helena felt liquid running down her hand and over her swollen fingers, forming in a pool underneath her palm.
Blood: suddenly so much blood. She pushed as hard as she could on the hole where her fistula had been, but she knew it had been fitted directly to an artery and she was haemorrhaging uncontrollably.
As the pool of blood became bigger and bigger, it poured over the edge of the bed and dripped onto the floor below. Helena started to sob, pleading for someone to help but knowing that her fading voice would never be heard
at the end of the long corridor. Weak and disoriented, she reached out for the call button, but her arm was so heavy it barely responded. Desperately she pushed the bedside lamp over, hoping it would smash to the floor and raise the alarm, but it just tipped onto its side, rolling backwards and forwards out of her reach. Nausea built up in waves and she was sick again, this time over the side of the bed as she slumped over, unable to support herself any longer.
As the seconds ticked by, the room began to spin, and images of George flashed in her mind’s eye. The night of their first date, her yellow dress, dancing on the beach under the stars, sun-kissed from the sweet summer sunshine, melting into him. She could still smell the salt in the sea air.
She tried to roll over, knowing the fall from her bed might kill her, yet thinking perhaps the noise of it would bring someone running. But her swollen legs were too heavy: she heaved and sobbed and begged, but soon she was too dizzy and weak to continue. The room started to spin out of control, over and over, round and round so that she felt it would never stop.
‘Help me, George,’ she cried as she clung to her soaking sheets, praying that he would be on the other side waiting for her.
A heavy pain began to move down one side of her body: her leg, her arm, and then her face, a creeping paralysis. Then she could no longer move at all.
And as she closed her eyes and cried pitifully, waiting for the end, she prayed to God over and over to forgive her.
Forgive me, please, dear Lord.
Forgive me for my sins.
Chapter Forty-One
Monday 6 February 2017
Kitty walked slowly along the graffiti-covered hallway towards Annabel Rose’s flat, the sound of televisions blaring and babies crying coming from under the front doors she passed. Eventually she reached number 117 and looked up and down the corridor before pressing the bell.