After Anna

by Alex Lake

  ‘Good. Fine. You know Mum.’

  ‘I do. Not as well as I used to.’

  Brian shrugged. ‘She hasn’t changed. Same old dear; bossing everyone around.’

  Their conversation was an odd mixture of familiarity and distance. They shared so much – they were the only people in the world who knew Edna as a mother, for starters – but there was so much that they did not know about each other. And then there was the fact of Simon’s leaving. It hung between them, an unspoken accusation of betrayal on Brian’s part and an unspoken reply of self-defence on Simon’s. As she listened, Julia wondered exactly what had happened when Simon left, what had made it necessary, and – even more intriguing, this – what had driven Edna to such profound hatred of Laura?

  ‘Will you see her?’ Brian said. ‘Go out to her house?’

  ‘She hasn’t invited me,’ Simon said. ‘And I don’t feel much like turning up unannounced. That might not go down so well.’

  ‘You two have plenty you need to talk about,’ Brian said.

  ‘We do. But I’m not sure Mum’s the talking type.’ Simon smiled. ‘Unless she’s changed, of course.’

  ‘She hasn’t.’

  ‘Then I suspect all she would want to say to me would be to remind me of my folly in marrying Laura and leaving England. I don’t imagine we would have a productive conversation about how we both might have made mistakes but it all happened a long time ago and why don’t we just forgive and forget and move on.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Brian said. ‘But she is your mum, after all.’

  ‘She is,’ Simon said. ‘But I’m not sure whether that’s important anymore. Or whether I want it to be. I’ve done pretty well without her in my life the last ten years, and it was hard enough getting her out. Bringing her back in … well, it doesn’t exactly appeal. I’m here for you, Brian, here to give you whatever support I can. That’s the only reason I came.’ He picked up his bag. ‘I’m staying at the Apple Tree Hotel. I need to check in, get some rest after the flight. Call me whenever you want and let me know what I can do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Brian said. ‘I will.’

  Julia stood up. ‘I’m going to get a drink,’ she said. ‘See you soon, Simon.’

  In the kitchen, she poured a glass of water. She wasn’t thirsty but that wasn’t the point; she wanted to leave Brian and Simon alone. She felt as though she was intruding on something she had no right to witness. She’d known there was something ugly in the past, but she hadn’t understood how big it was, how it had destroyed the bond between Brian and his brother. It was obvious they loved each other – Brian’s devotion was plain to see, and the mere fact of Simon’s presence was proof of his – but something had gone badly wrong.

  And, as she heard the front door close, Julia wondered whether she would ever find out what it was.

  6

  The Fourth Day

  i.

  So the truth about the mother is coming out. About her neglect of her daughter. You can imagine her, sipping wine with her friends or lying back while a white-coated manicurist picks at her nails, chattering about how her daughter is the most important thing in her life, the thing that gives meaning to her pitiful existence.

  And yet she did not bother to pick her up on time.

  Did not bother to pick her up on time. It sounds so slight, almost like nothing, just a simple error. Hardly a crime, is it, to be a little late? But it is. It is when you are late for something so precious, so perfect. When your lateness puts such a delicate flower at risk.

  There is great responsibility in being a parent. Responsibility that the mother failed to fulfil. And this is her punishment. You are the instrument of her punishment. You will not fail the girl, as her mother did.

  The girl is sleeping. Her eyes fluttered open when you went in this morning, but that was all.

  You got it right this time. The drug kept her asleep through the night and another dose this morning meant she has not been awake for twenty-four hours, not since the mistake you made yesterday.

  Well done to you. You don’t like the memory drug, not for one so young, but the sedative presents no problem. You can keep giving her that for as long as you like. But you won’t need to. Because it’s nearly time.

  You can sense that the time is coming for your plan to bear its final fruit.

  Not yet.

  But nearly.

  ii.

  Julia sat in the kitchen at her laptop. She had a headache and her vision was blurred. She had slept for maybe two hours. Two troubled, nightmare-haunted hours. The rest of the night she lay in the darkness, checking her phone for emails, waiting for it to ring, waiting for some news of Anna or of that damn janitor who she knew had taken her daughter and who the police still could not find, who had disappeared so thoroughly that he must have taken her daughter, or why would he have gone? So all they had to do was find him and then they’d find Anna, and call her, but the phone didn’t ring.

  And so, early in the morning she got out of bed and read the news. She was aware that it was the worst possible thing she could do, that she was going to find nothing but heartache and trouble along this path, but she did it anyway. It was, she thought, almost a form of penance.

  It was worse than she could have imagined.

  NEGLIGENT ANNA MUM PLANNED TO DESERT DAUGHTER

  It emerged yesterday that the mother of vanished child Anna Crowne had been planning to leave her family in the coming weeks. This revelation followed earlier reports that she had failed to pick up her daughter and also failed to inform the school that she would be late, a failure that was a key element in her daughter’s disappearance.

  Mrs Crowne is fast becoming a figure who provokes a mixed response from the public. On the one hand, she is suffering the disappearance of her daughter. On the other, it is hard to avoid concluding that she is in some way at fault for this tragedy, both in the sense that she was not there for her daughter on the day, and in the sense that she was planning to desert her family.

  Julia’s hands shook. It was bad enough that she was accused of negligence; now the press had got hold of the information that she had been planning to divorce Brian, and they were claiming that she had also been planning to leave her daughter.

  Which she hadn’t, but who cared about the truth in a case like this?

  She carried on reading. The first story, it turned out, was relatively measured. The rest of the press was not so restrained, and hinted that she might be deranged – as one put it, what kind of mother chooses to leave her husband and five-year-old daughter? The kind who doesn’t bother to pick her up from school, the kind who might take extreme and unpredictable action to resolve whatever personal difficulties she was having, which seemed to be a hint that she had something to do with Anna’s disappearance.

  And it was a hint that had been picked up by the commentariat, by those brave warriors on the battlefield of Twitter, who had no problem indulging their most salacious fantasies. It was hard to ignore the conclusion that their tweets were what they wanted to have happened, as much as what they thought had happened:

  shes fucking mad. she killed the kid #JuliaCrowne #Madmum

  This was replied to by someone called @DB2FCT, who opined:

  Any woman who would leave their kid could KILL their kid #JuliaCrowne #notfittobeamum

  It was this hashtag – #notfittobeamum – that was trending. It drew a lot of hits:

  people like that should be sterilized. #JuliaCrowne #notfittobeamum

  I can’t have kids. It’s crime that people like her can #JuliaCrowne #notfittobeamum

  This bitch is everything wrong with Britain today #JuliaCrowne #notfittobeamum

  It seemed the commentariat were particularly incensed that she planned to leave Anna. It was ironic; the crime they were most agitated about was the only one she was innocent of. Added to the grief and guilt, Julia felt a sense of mounting injustice. She had plenty of things to feel bad about, but this wasn’t one of them.


  It wasn’t the only untruth doing the rounds. As she clicked through the stories, another theme began to emerge: reports of an affair she had been having. Most of the newspapers steered clear of it, but one of the bolder – or better equipped with lawyers –tabloids ran the story. It too was an instant hit on Twitter, but with a different hashtag, this one – #mumslut – even more charming than the others:

  Fucking around while her daughter was taken #JuliaCrowne #mumslut

  It was too much to bear. She closed her laptop. She stared at the painting above the fireplace. It was a large oil of a golden beach under bright blue, cloudless, Cornish skies, one of many thousands sold in the hundreds of art galleries down in the beach communities of Cornwall. The artist had little skill and less imagination, but for all that it captured something of the essence of holidays by the sea. It was the way you remembered them, rather than the way they really were. When you were sitting in a drab midwinter office staring at the walls of your cubicle, listening to people mutter half-heartedly into their phones, or tap on their keyboards, the summer seaside holiday seemed like that painting: golden and bright and flawless and endlessly enticing.

  She would like to disappear into it now. To stand on the warm sand then walk into the bracing waters of the sea and keep on going until it swallowed her up. She never wanted to come back, didn’t want to face the storm.

  Had she done this when other, similar, news stories had broken? Had she watched the news reports and read the articles on the internet? Had she felt a shudder of prurient glee at the sight of someone else’s suffering, while also thinking that the press were animals who intruded without a shred of moral decency into people’s private lives and exposed them, all in the name of enriching their rapacious owners?

  Probably, she had. But she had felt that she was not part of it, because she didn’t buy their papers and didn’t subscribe to their websites. She felt blameless because she didn’t fund them; but she fed them nonetheless. She only read the free content, but her clicks and comments added to the weight of public interest – public rubbernecking, that is – which was the raison d’être of the whole sorry media circus.

  And she was now at the centre of it, facing the full force of its scathing, moralistic force, a force that made her – a mother whose daughter had disappeared and was maybe dead – into a villain. It was hideous, a modern version of a public execution, but people wanted stories, and the villainous, neglectful, slutty mother was a good one. What better than a grieving mum? Why, a grieving mum who was also a slut and a home-wrecker.

  Except she wasn’t.

  She hadn’t been having an affair, and she hadn’t been planning to leave Anna. But that didn’t matter now. That was the story, and it had enough truth in it – the fact she wanted a divorce – to give all the allegations the ring of truth. Add in the fact of her negligence, and she was public enemy number one.

  But how did they know this? How did they know about her twin failures, both to pick up her daughter and to be a good, dutiful wife? There was only one way they could have found out. There was only one person who would have told them, although why he thought it was a good idea was beyond her.

  She slid the laptop onto the pine countertop, and went upstairs to talk to her husband.

  iii.

  The guest bedroom was fetid. From the rankness in the air and the stillness of the form in the bed she guessed that Brian was asleep. On one of the occasions she’d heard him up in the night, around dawn, she’d heard the clink of glasses and then the thud of a cabinet door closing. When she’d come downstairs that morning she’d seen the empty glass by the sink, still sticky with cheap bourbon, his lip prints smeared on the rim. It had made her feel sick.

  No wonder he was asleep, then, but even though it wouldn’t last – sleep was a fragile state for both of them, even when drink-induced – she couldn’t wait. He could get his rest later. There’d be plenty of time.

  ‘Brian!’ she called. ‘Brian! Wake up!’

  He didn’t move. His leg, pale and thin, dangled over the edge of the guest bed. A wave of regret washed over her, not, this time, for what had happened to Anna – although she regretted that plenty – but for what had happened to her and Brian, to their marriage, to the life they had set out to make together. She couldn’t fathom how it had ended up like this, how they had let it get so bad. The only explanation she could think of was that, as they had grown up in the years since they met, they had grown apart instead of together. Whatever had happened, they were different people now, and they were no longer compatible.

  ‘Brian! Wake up!’

  Her tone was urgent, and Brian stirred, then mumbled. She couldn’t make out what he said; she guessed it was something along the lines of go away or leave me alone.

  ‘Brian,’ she said. ‘Wake up. I need to talk to you.’

  Suddenly his eyes snapped open and he sat up, fully alert, his face poised in a moment of pure anticipation.

  Oh shit, she thought, and, even though she was furious at him, she felt a wave of sympathy for him. What she was about to do was the worst thing she could have done. She could see in his face that he thought she was waking him to give him news of Anna. Good news, too, because she wasn’t wailing.

  He propped himself up on his elbows.

  ‘Have they found her?’ he said. ‘Did they find the janitor?’

  Shit. Julia shook her head. Shit, shit, shit.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I need to talk to you.’

  His expression – the transition from hope to desperate, utter disappointment – was like a mirror to her soul. Her anger dissipated.

  ‘Later,’ he said, and lay back in his bed.

  ‘Now,’ Julia said; her voice softer. ‘I’m sorry.’ He ignored her. She stayed in the doorway. ‘Brian,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Was that deliberate?’ he said. ‘Making me think there was good news?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It wasn’t. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. And we may be having some difficulties – serious difficulties – but you’re not my worst enemy. Far from it.’

  ‘So what is it?’ he said. ‘What do we have to talk about?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Why did you do it, Brian?’

  ‘Do what?’

  For some reason she thought that giving him a chance to confess might help. It wasn’t going to repair the damage, but it might at least allow them to have an adult conversation about it. If he denied it then they would end up having an argument about whether he had done it or not, and that would be a complete waste of time.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Brian,’ she said, ‘now’s not the time. Let’s just be honest with each other.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s. Why don’t you start by telling me what it is you think I’ve done, and I’ll tell you whether I did it? I’ll be totally honest with you, I promise. After all, I haven’t got much to lose have I? Not after what you’ve done.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Why did you tell them? Who did you tell?’

  ‘Are you talking about the press?’

  She nodded, a sense of triumph glowing at what she took for a confession. It didn’t last. There was something not quite right about it. It was too nonchalant, too matter-of-fact, as though it meant nothing. As though his treachery and lies were obvious, expected almost.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Why did you tell them?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d talked about this yesterday. One of the parents must have told them, or one of the school staff. Either way, it wasn’t me. Who’s saying it was?’

  ‘Not that,’ she said, exasperated at his denial. ‘The other stuff.’

  ‘What other stuff?’ he s
aid.

  And then she understood that he didn’t know what the press were saying today, that he thought she was talking about yesterday’s story. He wasn’t a good enough liar, or actor, to pretend so perfectly that he didn’t know, which meant that he really hadn’t told them about their failed marriage, or made up the lies about her affair or her leaving both him and Anna. He was not one of those people who could lie with a straight face, or keep calm under interrogation. Even if he wanted to lie, Brian would give away his secrets at the first hint of pressure. When they were first together she had been able to guess what he had bought her for her birthdays or at Christmas by simply asking him: is it jewellery? Is it clothes? Is it a pass to a spa? Eventually, when she hit on the right category, his denial would take on a different, more sombre tone and she would know she had it, and then she would get more specific. Is it a ring? A necklace? A bracelet? Diamonds? Silver? Gold? It was a fun game. A game that was now over for good.

  ‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘In the press. A lot more.’

  ‘A lot more what?’

  ‘A lot more in the press. About me.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like, our marriage was over because I wanted out, and I was planning to leave Anna with you—’

  ‘Were you?’ he said. ‘It’s fine by me.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not at all. We would have had – will have – some kind of shared custody. You’re a good dad and she needs you. She needs me as well. And I wasn’t planning to leave her.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really matter now.’

  ‘And they said I was having an affair, which was why I was leaving.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘No.’

  She stopped. She could see that he wasn’t really concerned, that he was thinking sorry to hear it, but it’s not really my problem. And he was right, it wasn’t. It was her problem. She would have to face the destruction of her reputation alone, the sideways looks from colleagues and clients, the muttered remarks about her suitability to work as a divorce lawyer when she had made such a spectacular mess of her own life. It didn’t matter that it was all a lie. She couldn’t prove that it was. How do you prove a negative, that you weren’t having an affair? You could prove the existence of an affair, with photos and cameras and DNA evidence, but proving the absence of one was impossible. All you could do was deny it.