by Cathy Kelly
‘How’s Poppy?’ asked Brenda.
‘I left her lying on the bed on the Wi-Fi looking at her phone.’
‘You need to keep her off social media,’ Brenda said. ‘They are saying some pretty vicious things.’
‘Oh, like what?’
‘Like Jason Reynolds defrauded friends and charities, and that he’s on the run from Interpol.’
‘He’s not on the run from Interpol,’ Callie said and then she thought about it because she didn’t really know if he was or not. She guessed she’d find that out.
Fiona McPharland’s office was big, airy and it had a huge table at one end of it. Fiona’s desk was covered with files and her assistant brought tea and coffee into them in takeaway cups.
Criminal law was a whole different arena, Callie thought, noting that there were no copies of the broadsheets lying around, nor glossy magazines.
Fiona, glamorous in a dark suit, sat at one end of the table and gestured for Callie to sit beside her.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s go over exactly what happened.’
Callie went through everything the night of the raid and what she had done since.
‘And there has been no contact from your husband since?’
‘No,’ Callie said. ‘I’ve rung him but the number is now disconnected.’ Saying it out loud made her sound so pathetic.
‘Right,’ said Fiona, ‘we need to see what this detective superintendent has to say and we can figure out our strategy from there.’
‘I don’t want a strategy,’ said Callie. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘But you are going to need money to live on,’ said Fiona, ‘and these white-collar-crime cases take a very long time to come to fruition. You could be looking at years of trying to survive.’
‘But the house,’ said Callie. ‘There’s a law about it belonging to husband and wife together, right?’
Again, Fiona faced her straight on.
‘The house should belong to both you and your husband, but it’s highly likely that it’s in the company’s name and tied to the fraud. That is not uncommon in fraud cases. You should own half of it, but you possibly don’t. You may own absolutely nothing.’
Callie stared at her new lawyer, the one she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to pay unless she sold something taken from her old home, something she felt sure she wasn’t entitled to take. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated.
‘If your husband doesn’t come back with a bag of money and a very plausible story, what are you going to live on? Until they can bring him to trial, this is all up in the air and it will take a lot to unfreeze those bank accounts with him still on the run. Unless he comes back, you’re looking at years waiting for something to resolve this for you. Do you have any property you brought to the marriage? Any savings?’
‘No,’ breathed Callie. She’d never been good with money and since she’d been with Jason, he’d paid the bills. She’d stopped modelling when she met him and had never gone back. She’d thought she was safe. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘Brenda said you were good for cutting the legalese.’
‘Yes,’ said Fiona, ‘that’s me. I deal with people who are on the edge, Mrs Reynolds, so there’s no point in sugarcoating it. I’m not doing my job properly if I do. The bottom line is that you could sue your husband in a Civil Court, but if he doesn’t have anything to give you because it’s all been taken in the criminal case, you don’t really have a leg to stand on. There’s no point suing someone for money when it’s all gone.’
‘Good luck with getting any money out of a court,’ Brenda said grimly as they walked down the back steps of Fiona McPharland’s building. ‘I’ve heard of people trying to unfreeze assets before and if the assets are the proceeds of any sort of crime, you have no hope. You have no assets and you’re perceived as a wealthy woman, a member of the glitterati, who watched her husband rob people blind. That’s how it will look. The media will turn it into a witch hunt. You will be everything that is wrong with the world, you with your beauty and your nice clothes. Your only hope is to get away. Hide.’
Brenda stepped over a used condom.
‘Romantic spot,’ she said drily.
She began walking quickly away from the courts’ complex where so many of the criminal lawyers had their offices.
‘At least they won’t find anything with my name on it,’ Callie said, desperate to find something cheerful to cling to. ‘We can manage for a bit,’ she added, thinking of the jewellery, although they’d have to sell some of that to pay Fiona’s fee. The diamond earrings and the tennis bracelet, she thought.
She couldn’t subject her daughter to the hideous publicity Brenda had described if she tried to get the money from out of Jason’s estate. Poppy was a kid, nothing more. This would break her.
‘I should have watched Jason more, Cal, for your and Poppy’s sake,’ said Brenda as she drove home.
For the first time since it had all happened, Brenda looked like she might cry.
‘I can’t imagine a life without him, you know,’ said Callie, staring out the window.
‘Even now?’ Brenda reached around for a tissue.
‘When I’m with Jason, I feel so loved, so secure . . .’ began Callie and then she wondered if it was the Xanax speaking.
Negotiating a tricky junction, Brenda didn’t look at her.
‘I’m going to say it now, love,’ she began. ‘Jason is not a fucking mirror. You don’t have to look at him to see your reflection. You have to be your own mirror and like what you see without anyone else’s help.’
‘We’ve been married so long, it’s not easy. How do I do that?’ said Callie
‘I don’t know. But he’s in it all for himself. Not for you, not even for Poppy, poor kid. She’ll learn that the hard way.’
‘He adores Poppy,’ protested Callie.
Brenda looked at Callie: a pitying look, the way people looked at commercials of abandoned dogs in dog homes. Callie flinched from it.
‘He adores himself, first and foremost.’
‘He’ll phone, it’ll be fine,’ said Callie, urgently, as if saying it made it true, as if they hadn’t spent hours with a lawyer where it was very much not fine.
The other woman held a hand up.
‘Stick on a CD. Better if we don’t talk till we get home.’
As soon as they turned into Brenda’s road, they saw them: a great crowd of people standing outside the gate of Brenda’s tiny house. There were news photographers, people with TV cameras, sound booms, all talking, idling and yet watching all at the same time. Journalists. People who wanted to write about the big financial case of the week, people who wanted to write about the only person left to answer any questions about the big property investment scheme which had been the subject of the most outrageous fraud.
Brenda’s road was one-way only so there was no backing out. Callie could feel her heartbeat race and the pain in her chest increase. There was nothing for it, short of abandoning the car in the middle of the road and getting out and running, they would have to drive past. Callie grabbed her sunglasses and stuck them on as they passed the house, but it was no good. They were waiting for her, guys leaning forward with cameras, snapping almost dangerously as they drove by – anything to get a picture. It was horrendous, so frightening. How had they found out where she was?
‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Callie had never seen anything like this, even in the early years with Ricky and Tanner when the band were on the up.
‘Let me think about it,’ said Brenda, easing the car through the path of photographers towards the garage, where at least they’d be secure.
If she ran the gamut of the press now, maybe they’d leave her alone.
‘I’m going in the front door,’ Callie said. ‘It might stop them.’
‘You sure—’ began Brenda, but C
allie cut her off.
‘I’m sure – you get inside and check that Poppy is OK.’
Callie stared up into the sky as if looking for something magical to come and fix it all.
But there was no fixing this. She and Poppy had to leave Brenda’s house – that was the only option, she had to go somewhere else. Somewhere they couldn’t find her.
Somewhere like home. As she pushed past the reporters and photographers, all shoving tiny recorders or cameras in her face, she barely breathed and said nothing.
Nothing she could say would help. Only Jason could fix this and he had run away.
Home, her real home, suddenly felt the like only place she could run to.
Sam
Ted kept leaving the radio on in the kitchen and it was driving Sam insane.
Joanne had claimed that babies raised in total silence would only be able to sleep in total silence, so she insisted that vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and street noises were vital in making sure the mother didn’t go insane.
‘Joanne’s so good at this stuff,’ Ted said the night before, while India slept upstairs and he roamed the internet looking for more information on this baby-living-in-noisy-households theory.
Sam gritted her teeth and kept folding small baby things. Ten more minutes and she was off up to bed. She was awake only due to sheer willpower and it was dying by the moment. With luck, crossed fingers and prayers, India would sleep till one, when Ted would feed her a bottle of breast-pump milk.
Once India woke, Sam woke anyway and she couldn’t help herself listening to the sounds of Ted picking her up, talking loving nonsense to his daughter and asking the dogs to be quiet.
Sam felt as if she had two moods these days – irritation towards Ted, which he was aware of but said nothing about, and fear around India.
Sometimes her hand shook as she measured out the formula for the bottles. She was combining bottles with her own pumped milk because she had never managed to get India to drink from her breasts and she didn’t seem to be producing enough milk. One more thing to feel guilty about. When her hands shook, she tried to still them: what if somebody saw them and said she was a bad mother and took India away from her?
Most of the time, she knew this was crazy, but still, there were fragments of every day when she felt so strongly that she knew nothing. Someone would be able to tell. She’d be exposed as a bad mother and her baby would be taken from her.
There were times when she sat with India on the couch, the dogs gathered fascinated at her feet, and there was peace. India would sleep and Sam would examine the tiny little face with pure love: that button nose, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, the softness of her skin. But those moments of calm seemed like oases in a long day of worrying.
She was lying on their bed watching afternoon TV one day while India slept and Ted was making them both sandwiches when she heard a faint ring of the doorbell. The dogs barked and Sam hoped India wouldn’t wake up.
‘Where are my special girls?’ she could hear her father ask Ted and she smiled weakly, thinking how wonderful it would be to throw herself into her father’s arms and sob: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
All of which might have been a possibility if he was on his own, but then she heard her mother’s voice.
‘Ted, hello.’
She could hear the voices in the hall and all thoughts of sobbing in her father’s arms vanished.
Not with her mother anywhere near.
Her mother had never admitted to any sort of failure in her life. Failure was not one of the words in her vocabulary.
She could say things like, ‘Goodness, you’re not going out dressed like that? It makes you look cheap.’
Sam had long since got over her mother’s unfortunate way of explaining things to her.
‘I think,’ said Joanne diplomatically, ‘that what Mother was trying to say was that she feels uncomfortable with us leaving the premises wearing short skirts or tight jeans.’
‘Who died and made you a saint,’ Sam used to snap.
But over the years she’d come to accept that her mother was different from lots of other mums. It didn’t have to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, she reminded herself. Joanne was nothing like their mother had been as a parent.
‘It was the way she was brought up, Sam,’ Jo would say, ‘just get over it.’
Sam had done her very best to get over it.
In fact, up to ten months ago, she would have said that she was entirely over her mother. She had no mummy issues whatsoever. She was a cool, calm woman who understood that people were different and reacted differently in different situations, and yet now . . . now that she was the mother of a small baby and was not sure what she was doing half the time, it was different. Now that she was exhausted and failing at breastfeeding, now, she did not want to see her mother.
Her mother seemed to stand for all her fears and insecurities. Her mother had made her this way.
She stayed upstairs for a few moments, not wanting to endure Jean’s supercilious glance as she looked around the small house and found baby clothes draped over every radiator and the clothes horse laden with little vests, cushions askew on the couch and the dog bones – proper bones from the butchers’ given to the dogs to keep them calm because they weren’t getting the love and affection they were used to – all over the place, smelling like hell. Sam was not ready for her mother to stare coldly at any of that.
She wanted to stay in bed and pretend to be asleep until her mother left.
But this would not be an option. Her mother had only visited once before to see her new granddaughter.
So she plastered a fake smile on her face, went downstairs and wished she could pull in her stomach, the doughy stomach that had strangely not gone away with the birth of her baby. Many weeks had passed and she still felt as if she was carrying something inside her. Darling India may have emerged but a big load of splodgy-spongy stomach was left, so that Sam was still wearing her maternity clothes.
‘I thought you said I’d burn it all off breastfeeding,’ she’d said to her sister on the phone, trying to sound like her old, amusing self. She was so scared of Joanne realising something was wrong with her. She’d never been this insanely anxious before. It must be sleep deprivation.
‘You will,’ Joanne said. ‘Anyway, you don’t have time to be worrying about your belly – it will go. Come on, sis, bellies aren’t important in the grand scheme of things.’
‘Ah, Sam love,’ her father was upon her as she got to the bottom step and he hugged her tightly and then, aware in a way her mother was not that she had mastitis, because in a rather tired phone call she’d let it slip, he pulled back. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘The savoy cabbage leaves are not working,’ muttered Sam, knowing she sounded a little nuts and not able to help it. Her father did not want to know.
She couldn’t quite believe that modern women with distended painful breasts were urged to stuff savoy cabbage leaves down the front of their nursing bras.
Ted had gone on a big mission looking for savoy cabbage leaves, but there were none in the corner shop, none in the local supermarket and he’d finally tracked down one measly, dead-looking savoy cabbage in the vegetable shop four streets over. It was now all used up.
‘Your father said you needed this: savoy cabbage,’ said her mother, coming up behind them, smiling and holding out a beautifully wrapped little gift, along with a plastic grocery bag containing said cabbage. ‘You’re not having a dinner party, Samantha? It’s probably a bit too early, you know, entertainment is quite difficult with small children and—’
‘No, I am not entertaining,’ said Sam, doing her best and somehow failing to hold her temper in. ‘I have—’
She couldn’t bring herself to say the word mastitis in her mother’s presence, in
the same way she hadn’t been able to say things like periods or tampons or menstrual cramps. Sam had taught Jo all about those things, but nobody taught Sam. Dear Mrs Maguire next door had helped her, she thought bitterly. Not her mother. Never her mother.
Blind anger at this state of affairs suddenly ricocheted into Sam’s mind and she felt furious.
‘A present, too?’ she said frostily, taking the gift and ignoring the cabbage.
‘A little dress. I thought it would be sweet. In the photos you send your father, the baby is always in these Babygro things and I thought it would be nice to have some proper clothes,’ said her mother.
Ted, sensing danger, whisked the present away.
‘Jean, you are so kind,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you all sit down in the living room and I’ll make us a cup of tea. I’m sure India will be awake soon.’
‘Can’t wait to see her,’ said Sam’s dad. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I know you’d kill me, I’d go up and wake her.’
‘Please don’t,’ said Ted, laughing. ‘Her schedule is all over the place.’
‘Totally,’ groaned Sam, forgetting for a moment that she was so angry with her mother. ‘I read this book where it said that you needed to establish a routine and we were trying to have a night-time schedule. But then it turns out that if you want a night-time schedule, you have to have a daytime one too. We apparently have no schedule at all and are exhausted.’
Her mother moved some clothes off a dining table chair and sat down neatly and precisely. She was dressed as if for playing golf, in a colourful sweater, little blouse and casual perfectly creased chinos. Pearls glinted at her collar and her hair had obviously been done beautifully in the hairdresser’s the day before.
Sam knew what she looked like stuffed into her pregnancy jeans, wearing a T-shirt that had baby sick on it. She was wearing no make-up, hadn’t washed her hair for at least three days, and the only co-ordinated parts of her were the bags under her eyes, which were soon going to be joining the hollows under her cheeks. She sank down into an armchair, determined not to sit beside her mother.