Another Mother: a gripping psychological family drama

by Amanda James

  The officer in charge says they have nothing so far, but they would like me to make a quick statement. The quick statement takes over two hours and leaves me battered and bruised. Even though I told it all to Val last night, this time Mellyn’s vile secrets are out and in the hands of the authorities, and for the first time it all feels completely and horribly real.

  Val’s flip-flops slap down the corridor, leading me back to the waiting room and their owner. I have to get in the cottage and get my clothes. This T-shirt made me feel like a virgin prostitute. The desk sergeant looks up as I push the double doors open and Val and Rosie hurry over.

  ‘You okay, sweetheart?’ Val slips her cardigan around my shoulders. I frown at her but then I realise I’m shaking.

  ‘Yes. I just need to ask the sergeant here if someone can take me back to the cottage to get some things.’ I send a smile to smooth the furrow from Rosie’s brow.

  The sergeant opens his mouth, but the phone rings and he holds a finger up and answers it.

  An expectant silence fills the room as we wait for him to finish the call and into it Rosie says, ‘If Mellyn’s still on the boat they have a good chance of finding her, we think. The coastguards do a grand job and given that she was pissed out of her head, she won’t have got far. Mind you, if she fell off somehow, then—’

  Val rolls her eyes at her daughter. ‘I’m not sure that’s something we want to be talking about at the moment, Rosie. I mean …’ Then her voice tails off at the sound of the sergeant clearing his throat, and when I turn from her to look at his sympathetic eyes and set mouth, I’m right back in my parents’ living room on the day my mum was killed. I’m glad of Val’s arm through mine.

  He clears his throat again and says, ‘That was the coastguard. I’m sorry to tell you that the Sprite was found a few minutes ago washed up on the beach at Godrevy.’ His heavy sigh must have shaken the floor because my legs tremble. ‘It’s matchwood, I’m afraid. The rocks around there are lethal.’

  ‘And Mellyn?’ Val speaks for all of us.

  ‘No sign as yet. The coastguard’s organising a search right now.’

  35

  I expect Seal Cottage to feel cold, barren and resentful as I walk through the door an hour later. It doesn’t. It feels just as calm and peaceful as always. The officer makes himself comfortable at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a newspaper and I go upstairs to pack.

  It’s nice to be alone. My head’s stuffed with puzzles and other people’s conversations. I need to time to breathe … to think for myself.

  Rosie has gone back to work in case the Pomp explodes and finally sacks her, and Val has gone back to Rosie’s to phone her husband. I stuff my things into cases and wander over to the window. It wasn’t very long ago that I looked out of it on to my bright new future. Impossible to think that the woman I’d hoped to share it with, my long-lost mother, might have gone, disappeared … Okay, to be realistic, according to the coastguard, given her condition last night, most likely dead. The rip tides around here take no prisoners and if the ocean made matchwood of the Sprite, what would it do to a human body?

  How do I feel about that? Sad? Yes, of course. I would feel sad for anyone that died in that way, let alone my … my mother. I can’t just turn my feelings off completely, and even though she was a very dangerous woman, had done vile and despicable things, she’d needed help. Help that I couldn’t get her in time. It will take me a long time to come to terms with arguably her most despicable act, however: taking the life of my mum.

  What to do now? My future looks cloudy and unsettled and I wish I had a crystal ball. I walk away from the window, pull another bag from under the bed and feel something heavy shift to one side. I smile. It’s the travel iron I have never used.

  I heave it out and it turns into a crystal ball right there in my hands. It says go back home. That’s where your decisions are waiting. You can’t think here, suffocated by the ghost of Mellyn. Go back home to your dad, Adelaide, and the comfort of their love, their genuine love. Go back home to the calm, order and certainty that you desperately need after so much madness.

  Go back home to heal.

  Just then the phone rings. I answer it and then run to my car.

  The entrance to the beach has been cordoned off with yellow tape and a lifeguard vehicle is making its way to an ambulance parked nearby. Rosie had called to say she’d seen on social media that a body had just washed up a mile down the coast. It had to be Mellyn. I need to see with my own eyes, though, macabre as that sounds. I recognise a few of the policemen from earlier milling around and speed over to them. ‘It’s her isn’t it?’ I ask one of them, panting.

  ‘How did you know about this?’ He frowns, obviously annoyed. I tell him. He sighs and says more gently, ‘Damned social media has a lot to answer for. We haven’t contacted you yet because the body hasn’t been formally identified.’

  ‘It’s her.’ I know it is, how could it not be?

  ‘Okay, you’d have to do this sooner or later anyway. She’s over here in the ambulance.’

  Unexpected late-afternoon sunshine strips jumpers and coats from beach walkers and an accomplice breeze strokes fingers through tousled hair and kisses roses into cheeks.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind, Lu?’ Rosie says as she rolls her jeans up over her knees. She joins me at the water’s edge and turns her freckled face to the sun.

  I walk a little further into the waves and then stop as an errant breaker soaks my cotton trousers up to the thigh. ‘Bugger!’ I say, and harrumph when Rosie laughs. I back up to her more sensible approach in the shallows and have a sudden and unwelcome thought of Mellyn struggling for her life far out at sea in the black depths.

  ‘So, are you?’ Rosie nudges me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sure, you won’t stay for a while. I get that you need calm and quiet, but you might need someone to talk to as well, you know? Someone to discuss things with?’

  I glance at her hopeful face and part of me wants to say yes. But that part isn’t nearly big enough or influential enough to have much of an impact on the rest of me. ‘I can call you if I do,’ I say. ‘And yes, I’ve made my mind up, I really am going home. I need to go home. I called Dad this morning and he was so happy. I didn’t tell him what had happened, of course. I’m not sure I could have found the words. It all seems so …’ I sigh and look out at the blue horizon.

  ‘Surreal?’ she asks, and I nod. ‘I still have trouble believing it’s all happened to be honest.’ She bends and pulls a pebble from the foam. It’s black and wrapped in grey stripes. ‘I was busy at work this afternoon, folding towels, not really thinking about anything and wham! There it all was in my head playing out like some scary movie. You know?’ She hurls the pebble into the waves.

  I do. ‘That’s one of the reasons I need time away. The memories are all so relentless here. Mellyn in the streets, the pubs, shops, the harbour … cold and dead, snow-white face with seaweed in her hair on the trolley in the ambulance.’ I swallow. ‘I had to walk past her shop earlier and it really freaked me out, I can tell you. And something I love, just standing here looking out at the ocean, is spoiled.’

  ‘You sound like you’re not coming back,’ Rosie says to her toes in the wet sand.

  ‘Hey, of course I’m coming back. Just not for a while.’ I slip my arm through hers and feel her stiffen. ‘I will miss you, you know.’ I speak to a dog walker in the distance.

  ‘You’d bloody better.’ She squeezes my arm against her side and I can feel her heart pounding. ‘When are you going?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  She turns to face me and puts her hand to her eyes as a shelter against the sun slanting over my shoulder. ‘That soon? What about giving notice at work?’

  ‘I phoned the Vulture earlier. He was more than happy to let me go straight away. He said bookings were pretty slack for the next few weeks.’

  Rosie sighs and walks up the beach and into the shade of rocks.
I follow her until she stops and folds her arms. ‘I have something on my mind and now seems as good a time as any to say it,’ she says, and turns serious eyes to mine.

  Oh dear. I don’t like the sound of that. I can’t hear anything serious … be expected to juggle my battered emotions into some sort of coherent response. ‘Okay, what is it?’

  ‘I know you might think it’s a weird thing to come out with, but as you’re leaving I want to give you something to think about while you’re gone.’ Rosie finds a smile from somewhere. ‘Might take your mind off all the misery too.’

  My heart throws itself against my ribcage and my head tends towards giddy. I nod and bite the inside of my cheek.

  ‘How do you feel about you and me … you know, in the future … you and me starting up that business we mentioned? I know we said it only in fun, but we work well together and I’m sure we could do a better job than Pomp and Vulture!’

  I hadn’t really known what to expect, but this wasn’t it. I laugh and shrug my shoulders. ‘Well, it’s certainly an idea. I promise I’ll give it some thought.’

  Two hours from home, I think about Rosie and Val. We’d had a goodbye meal of takeaway fish and chips at Rosie’s and a very tearful parting on her doorstep at the end of the evening. Val gave me a bear hug and made me promise to keep in touch, and then left me and Rosie to say our goodbyes. We shared a goodbye hug and a kiss on the cheek and then Rosie looked deep into my eyes and the atmosphere turned into something else. Something else that I couldn’t define and something I have to run away from right now. I will have to face it sooner or later though, this much I know.

  I step out of the car and the front door opens even before I get halfway up the path. Dad comes out, and when I see his wobbly smile and swimming eyes, a sob I didn’t know was there escapes before I can stop it. I run into his arms so fast that he nearly falls over, and then we’re laughing, crying and trying to talk all at the same time, but of course neither of us is making any sense.

  Dad puts his arm around me and guides me through the front door, the familiar smells and sounds of home wrapping me in a welcome hug. Another welcome hug is waiting in the kitchen. ‘Adelaide!’ I say, and step into her awumah.

  ‘It’s so good to have you back, Lu!’ she says. ‘So glad you changed your mind. I hated leaving you there.’ She glances sidelong at Dad. ‘Um … what with things not being as great as you’d hoped with your birth mother.’

  ‘Not as great as you’d hoped? Were you having problems then, love?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Oh yes. You could say that,’ I say, and then hysteria bubbles in my chest and I have to sit down.

  Adelaide’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Things got worse after I left?’

  ‘You have no idea, Adelaide … no idea.’

  36

  Three weeks later

  From the top of a hill, I can see that October in St Ives has shrugged off the muted smokiness of September and presents a crisp tableau courtesy of a coin of a sun in a blue sky. I can’t go straight into town though. I need time to collect my thoughts.

  In the National Trust car park at Godrevy, I get out of my car and walk to the cliff edge that overlooks Godrevy beach and the lighthouse. A wide sweep of beach leads to St Ives on the left, and to my right, the lighthouse, so much closer than I have ever seen it. Oddly, close up, it looks smaller than before, though it’s still formidable. I watch it fearlessly command the waves at its feet and encourage seabirds to sail their reflections past its windows.

  A week after I had returned to Sheffield, Rosie called to ask how I was and told me that she missed me. I told her I missed her too, very much. I was shocked by just how much. I listen to the ocean shush the sand and look at the St Ives tableau again. Somewhere behind the dark outline of the first buildings and up a ridiculously steep hill is Seal Cottage, just waiting for me to walk through its door. I think about all that might mean. I think about turning the car round and driving straight back home. I think about all the questions swimming around my brain and what would happen to it if they were never answered. I say goodbye to the lighthouse, go back to the car, and set out along the coast to St Ives.

  On the scrap of a drive outside Seal Cottage, I turn off the ignition and déjà vu slips onto the passenger seat beside me. I’m here to see someone very special … again. I place my hands on my jeans and am glad of the warmth of my thighs under my cold fingers. All of my upper body’s cold, and I realise that my heart is the source. I had put it in cold storage just before I left home this morning. It made sense. It’s fragile and battered and has to be protected from unexpected and sudden emotion.

  The touch of the stone seal head feels rough and cold this time under my fingers, and I can hear no one singing inside. Even if there was, the pounding of my heart in my ears would have made it hard to detect.

  Why am I doing this?

  Nobody forced me to.

  I turn and take a few steps back to the car and I hear the door open and a woman’s voice say, ‘Lucinda?’

  The sound of it wraps around my heart and pulls me back round.

  There stands my mother. My real mother.

  Nobody could argue otherwise, because apart from her dark blonde hair, it’s as if someone has held up a mirror – reflecting me, sixteen years ahead. She puts a hand to her mouth and I watch tears well in her moss-green eyes.

  I walk back towards her on legs that feel as if I’ve borrowed them from a newborn foal. My mouth opens, but words slide back down my throat.

  ‘My baby, my darling,’ she says so quietly that I wonder if I’ve misheard. She grips the side of the door for support and says again as if in disbelief, ‘My beautiful, beautiful baby … my darling girl.’

  My heart comes out of cold storage. Her words have melted it, because they aren’t false, contrived – just full of love.

  I start to sob. Big, embarrassing, unexpected, racking sobs and then her arms are around me and I hold on tight. For her, my love doesn’t have to grow; it’s there immediately, as is the name ‘Mum’ impatient with waiting on my tongue.

  ‘Come inside, let’s sit down before we fall down,’ she says, and leads me to the sofa. ‘I’ve just made coffee. Would you like some?’ I nod and accept the bunch of tissues she hands me. She wipes her own eyes and we both laugh a little self-consciously.

  ‘My God. It’s been a while since I cried like that,’ I say, and picture the police officers in our living room with my broken dad.

  ‘Mine are tears of happiness, but yours must be mixed and coming from a place of turmoil with everything Tamsyn put you through.’

  That was it, exactly. I smile and nod. ‘It will take a while to get through, I think. You must be in shock too … Mum,’ I say, relieved to have ended the waiting.

  I watch her face crumble and having caught my bout of sobbing, she sinks to the edge of the sofa. ‘Thank you for calling me that, it’s so wonderful, and so much more than I deserve.’

  ‘Believe me, I don’t use that name lightly,’ I say, and hand her more tissues. ‘My heart told me it was the right thing to do.’

  We sit and talk about how wonderful Val is and, if it hadn’t been for her, we might have had to wait much longer to find each other; we might never have found each other in fact.

  I had been right that Val wasn’t telling me the truth that night I’d run to her. When I’d mentioned that Mellyn had wanted to change her name to Tamsyn, Val’s face had drained of colour, but she’d denied anything was wrong when I’d pressed her. She’d kept what she suspected from me until she could be sure she was right. But she had told the police.

  Two weeks ago, I received the phone call from them that had brought me here today, about a matter that had sent waves of shock crashing against my stomach walls just as forcefully as the ones I’d watched smashing on Godrevy rocks. They said they had reason to believe that the woman who called herself Mellyn wasn’t my birth mother at all, in fact her name was Tamsyn. She was the half-sister of my birth mother, Mellyn Ro
we, and they were tying up a few loose ends but would be back in touch very shortly. They also said that they had acted on information from Val about something Mellyn had told her a few years ago. Val had almost forgotten it because of everything else that had happened, until I’d mentioned the name Tamsyn to her. When I finished the call to the police I immediately called Val and she told me all about it.

  ‘Well, I asked Mellyn once if she had any children, but she deflected my question by talking about her family instead,’ Val said. ‘When my Rosie told me about you, I imagined that Mellyn had never mentioned you to me because she’d been ashamed of having you adopted, perhaps. But I did think it was really odd, though, because of two of them in one family doing the same thing. Then all the other stuff that happened buried it all in my mind, until now …’ Val trailed off.

  ‘Two of them in one family doing what? What do you mean?’ I asked.

  Val sighed. ‘Sorry, I’m not making much sense, am I? The thing is, Mellyn said that she had this half-sister called Tamsyn who she hated. Said she was the golden girl and Mellyn had always felt second best … but Tamsyn had fallen from grace when she got pregnant as a young girl. Their parents had been ashamed and forced her to adopt. She got to be the golden girl again, though, because she’s a doctor now, apparently, working with the Red Cross abroad. Then I remember Mellyn just changed the subject, and that was all she ever said about her.’

  I could hardly process what I was hearing. ‘The half-sister got pregnant early too, was forced to adopt … a bit of a coincidence to say the least. So, the truth is that the woman who pretended to be my birth mother was called Tamsyn and she stole Mellyn’s whole story? Just swapped the names round?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Seems like it.’