Behind the Lie

by Amanda James

  ‘Oh, Holly. Please don’t get upset.’ I curse the moisture in my eyes as Jowan places a hand on my shoulder, a sympathetic look sweeping my face. He is older, broader, more of a man than a boy now, and the nearness of him is taking my breath away.

  I take a step back. How dare he? How dare he think he can be so familiar – call me by my old name, put his hand on me? ‘Is there any wonder, Jowan?’ I fling my arms up. ‘You leave without a word – fuck off to the army – and now you expect me to be all calm and collected. It might have been a long time ago, but I can remember it all as if it were yesterday!’

  He pushes his hands through his hair and shakes his head. ‘Oh God. Believe me, this was the last thing I wanted. I am so, so sorry for everything I put you through. I was an idiot back then and I wish I’d never gone.’ A heavy sigh. ‘This is the last thing you need with what you’ve had to put up with recently…’

  ‘What? Who told you?’ I try to calm the rage pulsing through my head but I fail – this is too much. He’s not allowed to know the private details of my life, not any more – he doesn’t have the right!

  ‘Demi… I saw her the other day in the shop and…’

  Damn her! How could she? ‘Go away, Jowan. I don’t want to see you or talk to you ever again.’ My voice is surprisingly calm, but cold. Ice cold. For a moment I think he’s going to cry. His wide mouth that used to kiss me all over, lips I can almost taste he’s so near, opens and then closes again – becomes a thin line. He nods as if in acceptance, turns and runs off back to the beach.

  I don’t know how I am managing to walk up the drive to my house; my legs are trembling so much and my heart is threatening to tear apart. Once inside, I lean against the kitchen sink for a few minutes to get my breath, splash water on my face. How can he have such an effect on me after three years? Oh yes, I knew I resented him, despised him, hated him for ripping my heart out. He made me run away, become someone I wasn’t; he turned me into a desperate junkie. But what I hadn’t known, and can’t get over the shock of… is the strength of my feelings for him.

  Chapter Seven

  Late spring is pretending to be autumn. Perhaps it gets bored of being all full of promise, burgeoning new life, and needs a break from all that cheerfulness. I feel a bit like that at the moment as I watch a huge barge make its way along the gravy-brown Thames in the sheeting rain. Iona is sleeping and the radio is on in the kitchen, playing a song about summer holidays. I think I would like one of those; after all, I have been back in this place for nearly four weeks and the grey weight of London is crushing me, killing me little by little.

  I take a breath and remember that I did try to be upbeat and positive with Simon. But that lasted about a week and then I started crying unexpectedly for no reason, or at least not one I could articulate. Of course, it was all to do with Ruan, but in a way I didn’t expect. I think again about the night I woke suddenly, covered in sweat, shaking with the certainty that Ruan wasn’t dead after all. I’d woken Simon, told him he wasn’t dead – couldn’t be, because he was so real to me. Simon comforted me, told me it was natural to have these ideas. Grief did strange things to a person’s state of mind… but I could tell he was worried about me. Then, in the morning, I reasoned that I must be on the edge of losing it, because my baby was dead. Of course he was. I’d seen his photo – we’d sprinkled his ashes into the Atlantic the day we left Cornwall. I had sobbed my heart out.

  Iona cries and I hurry into the bedroom. There she is, my beautiful girl, pink from sleep, bright-eyed, a smile already forming when she sees mine. I pick her up and breathe in that indefinable baby scent on her hair, her skin, and the darkness in my head shrinks a little. If it wasn’t for this baby, God knows where I’d be. Simon’s still on about the happy pills, at least just for a while, but I have refused so far. That’s not the answer – but I’ll be buggered if I know what is. I’m afraid my telling him I’d been convinced that Ruan was alive helped him make more of a case for antidepressants. I told him that if I went on those I’d feel numb. I don’t want to feel numb, even though reality is so painful sometimes. So hard to accept. On the whole, he has been so lovely, but I can’t respond… Jowan has much to answer for. I wish I’d never set eyes on him again and whenever my thoughts open up to him, I slam the door shut on them.

  Iona loves her play mat and all the brightly coloured dangly things just out of her reach. I kneel and extend the cord on a soft, squeaky toucan and touch it to her hand. Her little fingers immediately wrap around it, and she makes a contented coo as the bells above the toucan’s head jangle. I wonder if Ruan would have liked the play mat. I imagine him lying next to Iona, kicking his feet at the blue-legged, green-bodied spider hanging at the other corner. Is all this thinking about Ruan really a good idea? Why can’t I just let it go…

  The doorbell rings and I tell Iona I’ll only be a second. Silly really, she’s not going anywhere and doesn’t have a clue what I’ve said. I think I say it to reassure myself that I’m being a good mum – whatever that is. There’s a man outside who looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him really. He is tall, balding, mid-forties. My mind puts him in the supermarket behind a till, but no… that’s not it. He smiles, though his eyes won’t engage with mine.

  ‘Mrs West?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have a letter here for you. I was under strict instructions to give it to nobody but you. Mrs Holly West?’

  I sigh. ‘Yes.’ Is he some kind of a charlatan who’s about to say I’ve won loads of money, if I just give him all my personal details? God knows how he got past security.

  ‘Okay then.’ He hands me a brown envelope. ‘Bye, now.’

  I watch him hurry towards the lifts and look at the envelope. No stamp? Across the middle in capital letters and red ink is:

  HOLLY WEST – IMPORTANT AND CONFIDENTIAL.

  I go back inside, lock the door and kneel back down beside Iona. I stroke the down on her cheek. She’s still yanking the toucan’s legs and seems fine. I look at the envelope and don’t want to open it. It’s all a bit mysterious and if it’s bad news I’m not sure I could take it right now. The whole thing is unsettling me. Why was it hand-delivered? No point in wondering, just open it. After a few more minutes dithering, I quickly slide my finger under the flap and pull out the letter:

  Mrs West, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just say it. Your baby boy didn’t die.

  The letter slips from my fingers and I put my hand over my mouth. There’s a scream in my throat and I can’t let it out because it will scare my baby. Perhaps I have imagined it – perhaps my brain is playing tricks on me due to the trauma I have suffered, just like it did the other night when it woke me and convinced me Ruan was…

  I watch my fingers pick up the letter and turn it over but I don’t read the rest yet. I direct my eyes at the wall and inhale through my nose and out through my mouth a few times, as Simon has taught me to do when I’m feeling anxious. Then I look back at the letter and the scream builds again.

  I was paid for my silence, and I kept it until now. But I couldn’t live with myself, or look at my face in the mirror any longer. So there it is. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, because I don’t know anything. Though I do know that your boy is safe with new parents.

  I had a reason. A very important reason for doing what I did. Please know that I am very, very sorry.

  Two hours later and I’m watching Iona sleeping. I keep coming back into her room every five minutes to check on her. It is all I can do to function normally, because the letter in my pocket keeps making me take it out to read it again. I have to keep doing that, because that’s the only way I can believe I haven’t imagined the whole thing. I have to see that it’s still there, that the writing hasn’t disappeared, and it’s actually just an old shopping list or something. I need to keep checking on Iona too, to make sure she’s still there. I am beginning to worry that I have imagined her.

  Worry and anxiety ar
e growing with every thought. In fact, inside my head there’s an ocean of worry and confusion, a storm of darkness. I want to calm it down, make the sun come out, have a smooth crossing to some logical answers. There are no logical answers to these questions though, are there?

  My boy is gone, so why would someone write a letter like that?

  What would they get out of it if it wasn’t true?

  Is it a cruel joke from someone who has a grudge against me? Against Simon? I shudder, rub my arms briskly. Unthinkable.

  My mind goes to the time when we’d said goodbye to Ruan. He and I stood hand in hand, me in hysterics, him shedding a tear at the water’s edge as we watched the waves take the ashes out to sea.

  But if the letter is true, they weren’t ashes. If he isn’t dead, how could they be? So the letter can’t be true, can it?

  In the end I’m convinced that the person who wrote the letter is some sick bastard who just wants to hurt me – us. Is she someone Simon was having an affair with who wants revenge because he ended things?

  Was he sneaking out to see her those nights when I’d woken to find him gone, around the time I had the scan and he told me Ruan was on the small side.? Had Simon blamed me for it all because of the way I’d abused my body in the past? Had he taken his revenge on me by sleeping with someone else behind my back?

  The blue bear on Iona’s coverlet looks too cheerful. Bears don’t grin inanely, do they? This one does and I can’t be around grinning things. I need to act. I need advice. I need to talk this through, because the storm inside my head is raging so hard that my thoughts can’t hang on for more than a few seconds before they’re tossed to the four winds. I can’t make sense of any of it. Who do I talk to? My mum? No. That would be a disaster. She would say I was overwrought, imagining things, like she said last week when I stupidly let slip that I thought my boy was still alive. She might even phone Simon and that is the last thing I want.

  *

  ‘Demi, I know how it sounds… It’s mad, I know, but…’

  ‘And you say this man who gave you the letter looked familiar?’

  ‘Kind of. I can’t place him though and he’s my only link to the truth. I’ve racked my brains for the last few hours. Well, what brain I have left, it’s been such a huge fucking shock!’

  ‘Well, yes! It must have been… It just beggars belief, the whole thing. Why on earth would anyone do that? It makes no sense!’

  ‘God only knows.’ I flop onto the sofa and try to stop picking the skin at the edge of my thumbnail because I’m making it bleed. I suck the blood away and look at the letter again on the coffee table.

  ‘I think your theory about a spurned lover might be the most feasible,’ Demi says with a sigh. ‘I know it’s not something you want to hear, but it’s better than the alternative.’

  ‘What, that Ruan’s alive? My God, what I wouldn’t give…’

  ‘No. That somehow someone has your baby. It’s such an unspeakably evil thing. To let you think he was dead… nobody would be so cruel, surely?’

  My nail worries at the broken skin and I suck blood again. I’m very close to saying something I might regret, given my mother’s reaction last week, but I need to talk it out. ‘Demi, you might think I’m nuts but I woke up the other night convinced Ruan was still alive. You know when you get this unshakable gut feeling? I could smell his skin, touch him almost. Yes, I was just coming out of sleep, but… oh, I don’t know. It was just so real.’

  Nothing from Demi apart from a sigh.

  Then I remember something odd from the day I had the C-section. I heard the wail of one infant and the surgeon, Jonathan, Simon’s friend and colleague, told me we had our baby girl. You remember him from the wedding? She does. ‘But then a little while later I heard another cry but very weak, just before the nurse put my daughter in my arms. I assumed at the time it had been Iona again, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was Ruan?

  I quickly blurt it all to Demi but she still says nothing. Is she doubting me? I take a breath and say, ‘Now I get this letter and… well…’ Well, what? My words sound desperate, unreal.

  ‘Look. I know you’ve been struggling, who wouldn’t be? And of course you want to believe that Ruan is still alive. But, Holly, can you imagine that anyone would ever do such a thing? And to what end? And what about the photo of him you saw, love?’

  I don’t like the way Demi’s tone has become soothing, as if she’s trying to talk someone down from a high building. That’s how I feel. I feel like I’m on a high building looking down at the tiny, insect-sized cars crawling past, and instead of wanting to jump, feel I’m being pushed. Pushed over the edge into madness. But I’m not mad. I know I’m not. It is suddenly important to tell her that.

  ‘Demi, as I said, I know how this sounds, but I am totally sane, you know? The letter exists. And you said to what end and about the photo?’ My ravaged thoughts gather themselves. ‘Perhaps Ruan’s heart hadn’t stopped like Simon told me and he actually survived, was sleeping in the photo, not dead… But maybe the poor sweetheart was disabled, sick, because of what happened to him in the womb… and Simon thought I wouldn’t be able to cope with him? As I said before to you, the photo was pretty hard to look at. And Simon wraps me up in cotton wool, always has. I mean, for goodness’ sake, he’s constantly hovering over me asking about my state mind, suggesting I go on antidepressants. He often says he doesn’t want me to go back to how I was when he met me. Says I’ve come so far. Perhaps he thinks I’ll go back on the coke…’ I wrap a tissue around my thumb and just for a second wish I was back on it. I could do with getting out of my head, because it isn’t much fun being inside.

  ‘But you can’t possibly think Simon would have anything to do with it. And who would want a disabled and sick baby?’ she asks.

  ‘What? Me, of course; I’m his mother!’ She’s the one that’s gone fucking mad.

  ‘No, of course you would. I don’t mean that.’ The calming tone is getting a bit strung-out. ‘I mean the letter said that he’d gone to new parents.’

  ‘Ah right. Sorry, yes it did.’ There’s no answer to that. I walk to the picture window, rest my head on the cool glass. ‘Maybe they think they can give him a life? Maybe they’re medics, friends of Simon? Shit, Dem, I don’t know.’ There’s silence and I picture Demi in the camper van looking out over a blue ocean, wind in her hair, her elfin face screwed up in contemplation. Outside the window the barge has gone and smaller boats have taken its place, battling the gravy waves. I’m battling too. I close my eyes.

  ‘Look,’ Demi says, authoritatively, ‘I think the best thing to do is show Simon the letter and see what he says. You’ll soon find out if he’s been having an affair or not…’

  ‘No!’ The force of my voice shocks me. Even though I don’t know what to do about it all, I do know that would be a major mistake. ‘There is NO way Simon is getting to know any of this, do you hear me?’

  ‘Hey, don’t get upset, Hols. I just thought it would be best to know the truth, even if finding out that he’s having an affair…’

  ‘I don’t give a shit if he’s having an affair; just promise me you won’t tell Simon about any of it, Demi.’ My voice trembles with a mixture of fear and anger.

  ‘Of course not. That’s your call – but can you explain why not? Surely you’d quickly get to the bottom of it, one way or another.’

  ‘The less he knows about it the better. If it’s true Ruan is alive, Simon would be in some pretty big trouble, wouldn’t he, having lied to me? Telling me our baby had struggled to take his first breath, that he died? But, instead, allowing someone else to have him because he was ill and he thought I’d be unable to cope, that I’d crumble? Then going to the trouble of organising a ceremony, sprinkling fake ashes; God only knows what else he would’ve had to do to cover it all up…’

  ‘Yes. But, like I said, that scenario is SO far-fetched. Simon isn’t my favourite person but I can’t believe this of him. Of
anyone. Even if he did it to protect you, it’s still “out there”. I think the spurned lover is much more likely.’

  I can’t believe it of him either. Not really. I’ve seen him drink himself into oblivion to blot out the grief. Got up in the early hours to find him curled up in a ball on the sofa, sobbing his heart out when he thought he I was sleeping.

  And if he had taken a lover, could I blame him? Not really… I haven’t been as attentive as I should have been to him. He’s always had to be the strong one – rescuing me from my life, the mess I’d allowed myself to get in, putting a hundred per cent into our marriage while I…

  ‘Holly? You okay?’

  ‘Yes… just thinking. Of course I know Simon’s not involved. It’s just all so hard to get my head around. It could be someone else at the clinic… Someone might have taken him, and instead showed Simon someone else’s dead baby?’ Demi mutters an expletive under her breath, and I must admit that sounds ridiculous, even to me. ‘Oh God, I don’t know… And the spurned lover… it might be. But I need to think, sort out a plan.’ As I say the words I feel stronger. Ideas of a way forward are already forming. ‘Promise me you’ll say nothing of this to Mum, to anyone, and especially not my husband. I don’t want to worry him, or raise his hopes if it was someone else who took Ruan… or most likely make him think I have totally lost my mind. I daren’t have him think I’ve lost my mind.’

  ‘Okay, Holly.’

  ‘I need you to say it.’

  Demi sighs again. ‘Okay. I promise that I will tell no one. I just wish I was there with you, love.’

  ‘I wish you were too. But I’ll be in touch and don’t worry about me, okay?’

  ‘I can’t promise that. Though I must admit, you do sound a bit more like yourself at the moment.’