by Cathy Kelly
Jason wouldn’t commit fraud. He was honest. He was no white-collar criminal.
But he was gone, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that proof of something?
‘We will need to talk to you over the next few days,’ the detective had said.
‘We can’t get one now, but she’ll have a lawyer present,’ said Brenda.
‘Good plan,’ he said evenly.
‘She doesn’t know anything about any of this, you know,’ Brenda said, ‘but then I guess you know that.’
The policeman said nothing.
Callie stood mutely as Brenda asked one final question: ‘Are the bank accounts frozen?’
‘Yes.’
Brenda had played the radio in her car on the way to her home, and she’d shoved in a Carol King CD when the news came on.
‘I hate this music,’ said a voice, the old Poppy resurfacing for a moment from the back of the small car where she sat surrounded by black plastic bags and cases.
‘I love it,’ said Brenda cheerfully, then whispered to Callie: ‘I can’t turn on the radio in case of a news report.’
‘Is it on the news already?’ Callie was stricken.
Brenda shrugged as she turned a corner, driving them away from the glamour of their part of the city to the bohemian style of her own. ‘Who knows. It won’t take long for some smart-arse to connect the dots and find you at my place, though. You need a bolt-hole or else you’ll be facing the press.’
Callie didn’t answer. Where was Jason? What had happened to make him run?
At Brenda’s, the three of them hauled in the bags and cases, then Brenda brought Poppy up to the office-cum-box-room at the front of the house. From downstairs, Callie could hear them.
‘If we push the desk against the wall, you can turn the sofa into a bed,’ Brenda had said.
From Poppy, there was nothing: no anger at the size of this room which was the size of her en suite bathroom at home.
‘I don’t have Netflix, I’m afraid, but there’s reasonable Wi-Fi and there’s Sky on the TV downstairs.’
Then, there was sobbing and Callie imagined Brenda holding Poppy in her arms and murmuring comforting things.
Callie should be doing this, but Poppy hadn’t even so much as glanced in her mother’s direction since they’d left the house. Refused to hug her. It was as if she blamed Callie for everything. And why not? Callie thought. Callie had not stopped this happening.
‘You OK in here? I’ve got camomile tea downstairs,’ Brenda said to her, appearing at the door to the spare room, which was marginally larger than the study.
‘That would be lovely,’ said Callie, stopping her search. ‘I can’t find my creams or stuff. I want to . . .’
‘Yeah, take the face off.’
Brenda shoved things around and found a small suitcase. ‘In here. I brought as much as I could. Even got the retinol cream. Dermalogica will go out of business if you stop buying. Plus,’ her eyes twinkled, ‘I got some of your jewellery.’
‘You did what?’
‘Hey, you’ll need every penny,’ Brenda said. ‘I doubt if Jason ever paid anything but cash up front for anything in his life. No trail of receipts.’ She opened the case and handed a black leather case to Callie. ‘Here. The pearls, the gold Cartier tank watch, some diamonds. The big stuff is in the safe, but fuck it, you need some collateral, things to sell at some point.’
‘It’s going to be sorted out, Brenda,’ said Callie fiercely. ‘I won’t need to sell anything. Jason will fix it. This is all a—’
‘Mistake? Yeah, right,’ said Brenda, her voice as caustic as acid. ‘If it’s a mistake, why isn’t he here fixing it now? Because this is no mistake, Callie. You and Poppy are on your own. You’ve got me, and Evelyn too, I imagine, because she’s decent to the bone, and Mary Butler in Canada, but that’s it. So get used to it and start thinking clever. Tomorrow, we’ll find out if you can take stuff from the house – you need a lawyer for when they talk to you. But right now, we’ve got enough.’
Alone again, Callie wiped off her face, tears mingling with the cream. She felt strangely numb. There was a dreamlike quality to this whole evening. Like a bad movie that had somehow stuck in her brain to be replayed in her REM sleep. Yet she didn’t want to think too much about it because, if she did, she would come back to the inevitable: if Jason was a fraud, how had she not known?
When she’d rubbed on moisturiser, pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt and tied her hair back with a band, she stood outside Poppy’s room and knocked, but there was no reply. She might bring up a cup of hot chocolate to her daughter and try again in a few minutes.
‘I’m sorry, Brenda,’ she began when she reached the kitchen.
‘No, I am. I’m giving you the tough-love treatment right now and it’s probably too much.’
Everything that had happened was too much, Callie thought, but no point in saying that.
Brenda sat at the small table in the kitchen, her three cats in three different cat beds. There was a scent of tobacco in the air, a small Japanese teapot and two little cups on the table, along with an opened wine bottle and two glasses. Soft jazz music played in the background.
‘Seriously,’ said Callie, ‘thank you for everything. I’m still a bit shell-shocked. Maybe sleep will sort me out.’
There was silence. Neither of them believed a good night’s sleep would do much, but still, it was something you said, Callie thought. Sleep. Hot tea with sugar. Kindness. None of which could take away the fact that Jason had run off, leaving her with this trail of disaster.
‘Is Poppy coming down?’
Brenda shook her head.
‘She blames me,’ said Callie, pouring herself some tea and trying not to let her hands shake too much.
Joe, the marmalade cat, uncurled from his bed and began to weave around Callie’s bare ankles.
‘You’re the only one who’s left to blame,’ Brenda said, shrugging. ‘Shitface went off and left you both, so there’s nobody else to pin it all on.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ Callie said automatically. ‘We don’t know what’s happening.’
‘He left when the police were at the door – that’s what happened. You and Poppy would have been on the street tonight if I wasn’t there. Your bank accounts have been frozen. You couldn’t have rented a hotel room with credit cards attached to frozen accounts. So yes, I think Shitface about sums it up.’
Callie was too shocked to be angry, but clearly Brenda was channelling enough anger for both of them. She abandoned the camomile tea and poured herself some wine.
‘What do I live on if our bank accounts are frozen?’
Brenda shrugged. ‘They want Jason. He’ll be on an arrest warrant now and they have to track him down. Freezing the accounts is what they do.’
‘But what about Poppy and me?’
‘I’d love to ask fucking Jason that,’ said Brenda.
‘I still don’t believe it,’ said Callie staunchly. She finished her glass of wine, went to the sink and rinsed it out. ‘He wouldn’t do this to us!’
Brenda closed her eyes. ‘He has, Cal. He has. I am so sorry for both of you.’
‘But why?’ Callie knew she was about to cry and she didn’t want a tear-stained face, not when she had to go into Poppy’s room. ‘He loves us.’
‘People are complicated, Cal. He loved the lifestyle, didn’t want to give it up when the economy tanked. Went over to the dark side? Who knows.’
‘But us? What about us?’ Callie said.
‘I don’t have an answer.’
Callie finally said it out loud: ‘How did I not know? You seemed to know.’
‘Jason adored you and he protected you,’ Brenda said finally. ‘I’m wiser, I saw between the cracks. I’ve had my suspicions for the past couple of years, but what could I say to you? “Do you think the busin
ess is no longer legitimate?”’
Callie shuddered. She wouldn’t have believed it, and if she’d talked to Jason, he’d have fired Brenda.
There was silence. Brenda lit a cigarette and Callie got to her feet.
‘You have hot chocolate anywhere?’
Brenda opened the correct cupboard, and Callie made speedy hot chocolate in the microwave.
She couldn’t talk anymore. Didn’t want to hear anything else that could hurt. To imagine that her husband would just abandon her and Poppy to the police was too hard to bear because it meant she’d been wrong about him all along. That he hadn’t been a safe harbour.
And if he wasn’t, what sort of idiot did that make her? Because she should have known.
Upstairs, Callie knocked on Poppy’s door. There was no answer. She pushed in past the suitcases and found her daughter curled up on the sofa bed with her headphones on and tears dried on her face.
Callie put the mug of hot chocolate on the floor, sat down on the sofa bed and Poppy allowed herself to be pulled into her mother’s embrace.
‘Mum, what’s going to happen?’ sobbed Poppy.
Callie held her tight, relieved that Poppy had let her guard down finally. ‘I don’t know, honey, but I know Daddy’s going to fix it. He loves us, loves you so much, like I love you. It’s going to be fine. You wait and see.’
‘Promise?’ said Poppy, hiccupping because she’d cried so much.
Callie hesitated a beat. She couldn’t say that she really had no idea if things would be fine. She was terrified things would be the opposite, but Poppy was just a kid. She had to be handled gently, not hurt with a lightning bolt of harsh reality. ‘Promise,’ she agreed, scared she wasn’t telling the truth.
She found her daughter’s make-up remover and gently cleaned away the layers of make-up until, once again, Poppy’s fresh fourteen-year-old face was revealed. Sorting through the bags, she found pyjamas and the small cuddly toys that Poppy still kept on her bed. Callie arranged them carefully, then pulled the covers back.
‘I’ll fix your pillows, sweetheart,’ she said softly, ‘and then have your hot chocolate.’
Like a small child, Poppy dutifully got into bed, held on to her favourite soft toy, a much-loved and grimy bunny with a once-pink velvet ribbon round his neck, and hugged him.
Callie leaned down and, taking Poppy’s face in both hands, kissed her daughter on the forehead. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘It will be fine.’
Was she lying? she wondered as she left the room, turning off the light.
In the spare bedroom, Callie took out a Xanax and swallowed it with some water. She needed to be able to sleep, and if she didn’t have some help, she’d just lie there thinking, imagining the worst.
Although, the worst had already happened, hadn’t it?
Sam
Sam watched Ted hold their baby daughter cradled close to him and she could hear him crooning, almost purring at India.
‘What do you think of India as a name?’ he’d said that first night in the hospital when they both sat there blinking, astonished, watching the baby sleep for what felt like a few blessed minutes. Sleeping did not appear to be something that babies did.
In fact now, after a night and a morning in the hospital listening to the roars and the screams of what felt like every child in Ireland, Sam decided that sleeping like a baby was a concept that had been badly misnamed: babies did not appear to sleep at all.
They dozed, then woke at the slightest noise to shriek at the top of their tiny lungs. And wow, the noise that came from those lungs.
‘We’d always planned to visit India,’ went on Ted. ‘It’s such a beautiful name . . .’
‘India, I like it,’ said Sam truthfully, although she knew her mind was still hazy: giving birth to India – yes, India – she’d been so fearful that something was going wrong. She still hadn’t recovered from that fear. And as for the pain. Wow.
In no way could childbirth be compared to breaking eleven bones in the body. A mere eleven? More like twenty-two, she decided. Yet perhaps such a miracle needed pain because it was a miracle: she had produced this living being from her body. The enormity of it was staggering.
‘Yes, India, it’s the perfect name,’ Sam had said, ‘because it’s totally unknowable. The great mystery of the glorious, beautiful subcontinent we are not going to be able to visit for quite a while now,’ and Ted had laughed with her as they stared down at their tiny baby daughter. Unknowable summed up the whole baby experience pretty well.
She loved looking down into the small bassinet attached to her bed and staring at the tiny baby, their baby. India seemed so fragile, as if her skin was only a filament thin and anything could break her. When she’d been lying down earlier and a nurse had put India on her chest to try to get her to breastfeed, the nurse had been called away suddenly and in that precious moment Sam had gloried in the sense of her tiny baby lying on her, this tiny form on her breastbone, skin to skin, heartbeats melding. Despite the crazy noise all around her, Sam felt calmer than she had since India had been born.
This she could do: this lying with India on top of her, like mothers since time immemorial. It felt peaceful and natural.
She loved the feeling of her darling daughter; loved the glorious softness of that baby skin, the scent of a tiny baby, the beauty of those big eyes.
‘You know everything, don’t you, darling?’ she crooned as India looked up at her wisely.
Sam wanted time to stand still so that this moment of perfection could be hers forever.
Then, the nurse had returned for the breastfeeding session. There was a lactation expert, Zendaya, but she was sick, the nurse said, looking tired and harried.
Instantly, Sam’s anxiety racketed up. From thinking she knew how to be a mother, she descended into thinking she had no idea whatsoever. What had happened to her? It was like she’d morphed from a woman utterly at peace into a bundle of nerves in an instant.
The nurse manoeuvred one then the other nipple into India’s deeply uninterested little mouth.
India made little mewling noises like a kitten but refused to drink.
‘Oh India, it’s all my fault,’ murmured Sam, feeling tearful.
‘Zendaya would kill me if she knew,’ said the nurse, ‘but let’s make up a bottle until we have more time. We’re so short-staffed today. You should express some milk if you can for her next feed. She’ll get it next time.’
Sam nodded. She’d failed at the first hurdle.
As India gulped the milk from the bottle, Sam swallowed back feelings of hopelessness. She knew nothing. All the nurses and the other women on their second and third babies knew it all. But not her.
The nurses whizzed in and out of the ward, whisking back the curtains on her cubicle, checking her and the baby, handling India with ease.
Apart from that time when India had lain on her, Sam still wasn’t sure how to hold her daughter. Her arms ached from desperately trying to protect India’s fragile head. Why had nobody told her babies’ heads looked so fragile? She could recall how the bones had not fused totally in the baby’s skull, which meant she could be hurt so easily.
How had nature let such a thing happen? How could so many animal babies be born and be able to run immediately, while baby humans were so delicate that their tiny skulls were a risk to themselves?
She said this to Ted.
‘It’s because humans have such big brains,’ he said. ‘Human babies wouldn’t be able to pass through the pelvic canal if their skulls were fused.’
Sam stared at him.
‘You knew that?’ she said, looking at India in anxiety. ‘I didn’t. When does it fix? It must be so dangerous . . .’
She felt overpowered with anxiety until one of the nurses calmed her down and told her it was normal.
‘Babies are hardy little thi
ngs, you know,’ she said.
‘No,’ whispered Sam, ‘they’re not.’
She whispered all the time now. Ted did too. Even now, he was murmuring incredibly quietly to Sam because they were both afraid that the slightest noise would wake India up.
They had both read that it was important to make lots of noise so the baby got used to it, but neither of them could bear to do it. Sleeping, India felt manageable.
Awake, Sam was terrified of what needed to be done. The initial joy she’d felt at her baby’s birth was overcome with the fear of her own inadequacies as a mother.
Why was the baby crying? Were her nappies OK? Surely this colour of baby poo wasn’t right?
There was an enormous gap between the concept of reading something in a baby manual and then trying to put it into practice.
A head poked itself round her cubicle curtains and in marched her sister, Joanne, beaming and holding her arms out: ‘Show me her! I can’t wait to see her. She’s been out in the world since late yesterday and I can’t wait to see her. The hospital visiting rules are murderously cruel.’
‘Shush,’ said Sam automatically.
Ted looked proud, but Sam stared at India in her tiny crib beside the bed as if waiting for her tiny blue-veined eyelids to open.
‘Ohh . . .’
Sam turned to watch Joanne staring at India and start to cry.
‘She’s beautiful. I’m so happy for you both.’
Jo launched herself at Sam and hugged her tightly, making Sam’s breasts – engorged with milk – ache.
‘Thank you, hon, but whisper,’ said Sam. ‘She’ll wake up.’
‘I hope she does.’
Joanne stood and peered into the crib again. ‘Your auntie wants to hug you, little baba,’ she said in an entirely non-whispering voice. ‘People, I have told you, you need to start doing the hoovering when the baby is in the house, there is no point doing this tiptoeing around, because if you don’t make a noise so the baby can sleep, trust me, you’ll never make another noise again. The baby will only be able to sleep when there is complete quiet, so you’ll never be able to get on and bring her in the car or to a restaurant, or do any normal stuff.’