You PROMISED you wouldn’t. I dont remember much but I remember that!
Thought u liked me. If u just took advantage because I was drunk, at least tell me to my face.
21 March 2001
KARINP83 says:
I have to talk to u. In person. I don’t have a mobile phone. I can get to Ipswich this afternoon.
U CANNOT IGNORE THIS
26 March 2001
KARINP83 says:
I am pregnant.
27 March 2001
KARINP83 says:
U can’t keep ignoring me! I could get thrown out of my house if my foster parents find out. Please talk to me. Everyone at school is calling me a slut.
I have to talk to you. I have to talk to someone. I don’t know what to do.
I feel so alone.
6 April 2001
KARINP83 says:
I took care of our child. It was the worst day of my life. I want you to know that.
17 April 2001
KARINP83 says:
everyone knows i had an abortion
I wish you knew what this feels like
23 May 2001
KARINP83 says:
u said u liked Eels. maybe you were lying
iv been listening to this song on repeat
life is hard
and so am i
you better give me something
so I don’t die
THIRD TRIMESTER
* * *
ONE
‘What do you want?’
‘How are you going to get what you want?’
‘What will happen if you don’t get what you want?’
Sean Salinger’s dead. He doesn’t go to football. He doesn’t hang around nurseries looking after other people’s children. He doesn’t even work any more. ‘Charles’, the character I am for Uggy – couldn’t help myself using his name, something about the idea of Lord Charles Fallon screwing a nursery nurse just tickled me – he’s still going, but barely. I never put much work into him. Didn’t need to.
Who is Alexander Palmstrom? He’s someone who let his sister murder herself because of what that spineless piece of shit did to her, what they all did to her.
‘She was too good for this world.’ That’s what I said at her funeral. There weren’t many there. Clive and Julie, that bitch Eliza. Karin was too good, too special. Sometimes those sort of people get through, reach their potential and they’re the ones with all the success, all the money they could ever want. But some are like dolphins in a net of tuna. If she’d not been so smart she wouldn’t have got into the grammar school in the next town over, would have gone to the joke school I went to instead. The one on the other side of the park from the mighty Ipswich School. They never mixed with us. ‘Chavs’ they called us. If Karin hadn’t been so clever, so perfect, she would have never met him.
After she was killed, no one would tell me what happened. People knew. It felt like everyone knew but me. I looked through her room, turned Clive and Julie’s house upside down looking, but I couldn’t find her computer. It was Clive’s old laptop from work. She spent a lot of time on it, chat rooms, following bands on Myspace, we didn’t have mobile phones so it was her only way of talking to people once she stopped going to school. I knew it would have the answers. Took me two years to track it down. She’d given it to a drug dealer called Alan Chung, whose house she crashed at for a few weeks before she was killed. Amazingly it still worked, I had to try over four hundred different passwords to get into her MSN Messenger chats but that’s how I found out what happened to her. After that, I visited that snake Eliza.
I still couldn’t find out who ‘Chazinho’ was. I guessed it was a Charles or Charlie but there were four in Karin’s year, seven in the year above, nineteen at Ipswich School in total. I dismissed Charles Fallon early on. Everyone I spoke to said he was a bit of a geek who didn’t go to parties. I spent years trying to work out who it was, spent a long time watching the ten or twelve Charleses I thought it could be, made friends with a couple of the ones I suspected most to try to find out for certain, but nothing I did led anywhere.
After another two and a half years I realised I couldn’t do it on my own. I worked two, sometimes three, jobs for eighteen months until I had enough money to employ an investigator to track the email address linked to Chazinho’s profile. After a few more years, when I had saved more money to hire what was basically a hacker, I found out it was him. The man I’d dismissed at the start, Charles Fallon.
Naomi Fallon knows that Sean is a fictional character now. He always was for her in a way. If she’d known any more about Sean Salinger than that he was everything that her husband wasn’t, she would never have slept with him. I couldn’t believe it was her who had broken into my van but then, a week or so later when I found the registration papers jammed into the side pocket of the manual’s casing, I could see she’d surprised me again. She knows my name. Maybe she knows more. She’s changed the locks. The builders have been chucked out. The French window has been fixed. But it’s too late for all that, Naomi. On Christmas Day, when I slept in the sheets she sleeps in every night and relived that afternoon in the swimming-pool shower, I thought about us. We’re both broken. Perhaps the two parts of us could fit together like shards of a smashed mirror. She could be the mother of my child. It could be that we have created a life.
She said it was his, but I changed the app on his phone at football so there’s no way she can be certain. Perhaps she feels it is his. There was a draft of an email to Eliza that Karin must never have sent where she said that she felt that the baby was a girl, even so early. A little girl.
‘What will happen if I don’t get what I want?’ A perfect soul will never be redeemed.
‘How am I going to get what I want?’ By doing something I didn’t want to do. Nothing else has worked.
‘What do I want?’ For him to experience exactly what it feels like to have no idea why you’ve lost your whole family.
TWO
28 weeks
She walks back through the long, wood-panelled porch of the Bank of Friendship Nursery. Prue walks ahead of her, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she hasn’t been here for over a month. Naomi presses the doorbell and she’s buzzed in. There’s an external deadlock that has to be operated internally. They know all the parents by face and the receptionists ask anyone they don’t recognise for a password the parents have to set up for their child in order to access any of the rooms where the children are. She’s seen it happen when a grandmother who was doing the pick-up for the first time couldn’t remember the password and had to call their daughter. Naomi gives Lisa a knowing smile and, for the first time, notices a CCTV camera in the corner of the room behind her. She’s never really thought about the security of the place but she can see that it’s stringent.
Lisa talks to Prue, telling her how much she’s grown, how pleased they are for her to be back. Naomi’s been in for a meeting, explained how there haven’t been any other instances of Prue biting or misbehaving and that it must have been a one-off. She flattered Lisa, telling her that, having had a chance to spend more time with Prue, she’s seen how far she’s come since she started at The Bank of Friendship. She went on to say that, on reflection, she totally agreed with their policy and that it was good to know Prue was safe from being bitten or hurt by the other children herself. She’d had to say all this through her best fake smile because really Naomi thinks their policy is draconian, but she needed to get Prue back into nursery. The biennale is in a few days and Charlie has been going to London more frequently as his prototypes get close to being completed.
But her need to get Prue back into nursery is about more than their busy work schedules. Prue is no longer safe with her, she’s not safe with Charlie. That man did something to Eliza, and though Naomi has no idea what it was, the woman is terrified of him. And now he is in Naomi’s life, in Charlie’s life. And she knows that he has a motive.
He wants revenge. Naomi’s husba
nd impregnated his sister. She got an abortion and then, unable to deal with the guilt, she killed herself. When put like that it sounds awful but, as Charlie has got into bed with her every night since she visited Eliza, as he’s rubbed tummy butter into the bump that seems to have grown exponentially in the last week, a fragment of good news, she’s told herself the other story, the real story. Charlie had sex with a girl at a party when he was fifteen. That was all. He wasn’t the one who bullied Karin and she can’t believe he was the one spreading rumours about her. He’s frustratingly private and hates gossip; she can’t see how he was responsible for that poor girl’s death.
She rings the door for the baby-room and Uggy opens it to let Prue in.
‘Oooogy!’ Prue screeches and runs into the nursery worker’s leg. Naomi fakes a smile. The baby kicks her hard, she puts a hand out on the doorframe for support. Uggy reaches her hand forward, involuntary concern.
‘I’m fine. He’s just having a bit of a workout.’
‘When are you going to have the baby?’ Prue wanders off towards the breakfast table, leaving Naomi feeling awkward, exposed.
‘Three months.’ The two blonde curtains of Uggy’s hair fall forward as she looks down at Naomi’s bump, studying it almost. The baby kicks again and Naomi winces, then laughs the pain away. Uggy’s face wrinkles into a grin that seems devoid of sympathy.
‘Bye, Mummay,’ Prue says and both women turn round to look at her. The little girl is sat down on her tiny seat, fist full of two quarters of toast, waving wildly.
‘She seems to be at home again,’ Uggy says.
‘I wanted to say, Prue’s had a nasty cough for such a long time now and I’m just wondering if there’s any way you could keep her in this week, with it being so cold out.’
She looks at Naomi sternly for a moment but then brightens. ‘Of course.’
‘And maybe for next week as well. If someone can just stay inside with her. That’s OK, isn’t it?’ Naomi has no idea whether anyone else makes such requests but she needs Prue to stay indoors. It’s freezing outside and here, behind two deadlocked doors, with staff trained to the teeth in safeguarding, Naomi knows Prue is protected. Prue won’t like it, she hates being cooped up, but the alternative is unthinkable.
Naomi waves her daughter goodbye and heads out to the park. The frosted grass crunches under her shoes as she heads towards the Nissan.
THREE
‘He’s got a grudge against us, Detective.’
‘Call me Angie.’ The crunch of a crisp punctuates her words. It might be the distortion of Naomi having her on speaker phone, but she sounds far more Kentish than when they first met. ‘I agree that there is cause for concern. Sorry, just grabbing some lunch,’ DC Crawford says over the sound of chewing spit. Naomi’s sat on an inflatable gym ball, arms out straight on their dining-room table. Her back’s hurting and the Internet says this is the best way to stretch it out. ‘I’m really glad you got in touch again.’ The detective is a terrible liar.
Throughout their conversation there’s been the rustling of papers, the sound of footsteps and snatched conversations with her colleagues. The woman is overworked and under-caring about phone calls from melodramatic women. ‘It’s weird, Mrs Fallon; it’s definitely an odd one and once again, really important that you’ve reported it in case there’s any escalation in this man’s behaviour.’
‘I’m six months’ pregnant, I have a toddler. You can’t wait for things to escalate before you take what I’m saying seriously. He’s lied about who he is, wormed his way into our lives. He wants to hurt us.’
‘You don’t know that—’
‘His sister killed herself and he thinks it’s my husband’s fault.’ The woman at the other end of the phone sighs. Naomi stands up, indignant, letting the ball roll off into the kitchen.
‘Mrs Fallon, I agree, this man’s behaviour is very odd but he hasn’t given any indication that he intends to do anything to harm your family.’
‘He’s left baby things in my house, threatening my daughter—’
‘These items you mentioned, I’m really not sure why someone would—’
‘He’s been going into my house!’ Naomi slams her palm down on the table to make her point to the empty room. ‘He’s made friends with my husband and we— For God’s sake, we actually—’ but Naomi can’t say it. She can’t tell the detective that they had sex; that it could be his child that she’s carrying inside her.
‘What does your husband say? Have you confirmed that he had relations with Mr Palmstrom’s sister?’ Naomi leaves the line silent for a moment too long. ‘You have told your husband, haven’t you, Mrs Fallon?’ Naomi looks at the piece of A3 paper spread across the table. She’s plotted her conversation with the detective like she used to for presentations at work and has written dummy responses to over forty questions that she might be asked. She finds the corresponding answer – He’s working on a very important business deal at the moment – but it now seems redundant; the detective’s right. How can she involve the police if she can’t tell her husband?
‘Of course I’ve told him.’
‘And he’s confirmed it was him, with Miss Palmstrom.’
‘He thinks so.’ Naomi’s scrabbling, she doesn’t want to implicate her husband in some cold case but she knows that her story is unravelling as she tells it.
‘Thinks so?’
‘He’s pretty sure, but couldn’t remember if they’d actually …’
‘Had sex?’
‘That’s right.’ With every lie she knows she’s making their situation more untenable, but she needs the police to do something to stop Sean, not Sean, to stop him.
‘And what does he think about your theory?’
‘What do you think he thinks? For Christ’s sake! He wants the police to do something because we’ve both paid a hell of a lot of tax to this country and our family is in danger and we want some bloody protection.’ There’s a pause at the end of the line. The sound of another crisp being eaten, a slurp of a drink.
‘Mrs Fallon, I believe I explained to you when you came in, the issue for us is one of evidence.’
‘Harassment,’ she reads off the article she’s printed from the online solicitors’ forum, ‘is defined as any repeated behaviour that is causing alarm or distress.’
‘Mrs Fallon—’
‘It’s a crime. What he’s doing is a crime and your job is to catch criminals and protect the public from the actions of criminals. It’s in your annual “Roles and Responsibilities” report. 2016.’ The detective takes her turn to leave the line silent. Naomi looks outside to see the frost still not thawed on their muddy lawn. There’s a Siberian cold snap forecast.
‘Come in and make an official statement. Anything you can tell us about this man’s whereabouts would be especially useful. Then we can go and have a chat with him. How did you find out his real name, by the way?’
‘Facebook,’ Naomi reads off her cheat-sheet. ‘A friend of a friend still had an old picture with him.’
‘Can you get your friend to try and save the picture?’ Naomi knows she can’t because it doesn’t exist but she can’t come clean about breaking into his car; she still can’t believe that, in the eyes of the law, her actions are more criminal than his. ‘And we’ll need to go through all of your text messages. Written evidence is by far the best if we’re going to go to the CPS with this. We can discuss everything when you come in. Would you and your husband be available this afternoon?’
‘Charlie’s in London today.’
‘Perhaps you can come in this afternoon and I could pop round to talk to Charlie tomorrow?’ Naomi feels the child rotate in her belly, or is it the feeling of something being crushed inside her. She can’t go and see the detective. She can’t have the detective ‘pop’ in to talk to Charlie because Charlie doesn’t know anything and because she’s told her lie after lie. She tells herself it was to protect her husband, to protect her family. But she’s only ever been trying to protect he
rself. Protect the life she’s always dreamt of. Protect herself from the pity and judgement of her friends and family if they were to find out how weak she is, how pathetic and juvenile she is to believe that she deserves excitement, to be desired, affection and attention, as well as having a happy family and a beautiful home.
‘I can’t do this afternoon,’ she says, both fists pressed into the table, back stretching towards the wall again but this time in rampant frustration at how stuck she is in this mess that’s all of her own making. ‘Can I make an appointment when I’ve sorted out childcare?’
‘Er,’ the detective sounds unsure, confused as to why this woman who was so insistent is now being evasive, ‘of course. Just keep a record of everything and bring it all in. We’ll have a look to see if we can get this chap to leave you alone. Better doing things outside the courts as that process, restraining order, et cetera, can take for ever. We find most people will bow out of situations when a few panda cars turn up on their drive.’ And with that they say their goodbyes and Naomi ends the call. She rubs her eye until it’s sore. She looks down at her stapled sheaves of Internet research, her large annotated list of questions and answers, and feels like a fraud. Both hands sweep the papers up and crush them into a ball.
The truth. Perhaps the truth is the only way out.
FOUR
Naomi stands a few feet away from their bathroom unit and stares at herself in the mirror. She wears no bra and skin-coloured pants so she looks naked. Her breasts are engorged, plum-coloured veins showing through skin that seems translucent. The same tracks of blueish-purple run around her bump. It’s insane that in this thing, this beach ball protruding from her normally flat midriff, there grows another human being. A human being who will be perfect and yet possess the same potential failings as every other person on the planet. It could be his. She knows it could be his. She can’t tell her husband so she has to hope that the man is a coward. Everything about him so far tells her he is. If he wanted to hurt them he could have done it months, even years ago. He hasn’t got the balls.
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