The Daughter

by Jane Shemilt

  This has the ring of truth and I believe him.

  “Then I got Beth’s call. She was distraught and frightened. The flat had been trashed. They had even set fire to the kitchen.”

  A faint memory of the scent of burning floats past me, how Ted had stood in the hall thirteen months ago and I had smelled burning on him. I’d thought it was the diathermy he’d used in the operation, then I’d forgotten that instantly in the overarching fear of that night.

  “They? More than one, then?”

  “The police apparently thought it was a gang of some kind, maybe kids. Even when they knew about my connection with Beth they didn’t think it was in any way related to Naomi’s disappearance.”

  “What did they take?”

  “Nothing seemed to have been taken.” Ted shrugs; he has accepted the strangeness by now. “Her laptop, television, camera, jewelry—­it was all there, jumbled up but there.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, the night that Naomi disappeared?” I look at him, but he shakes his head.

  “Break-­ins happen all over Bristol every night.” Ted sounds weary.

  A thin child with bruises and tiredness. That combination hadn’t been a coincidence either, or even child abuse. Jade had had leukemia.

  “Did Naomi really never see you and Beth together?” It’s getting difficult to sit still; I get up and rinse the cups, turning my hands in the water to warm them.

  “No. I just told—­” Then he stops as if a memory catches him. “Actually, now I think back, that’s not strictly true. Beth came into my office once, but she saw Naomi and left again. Naomi didn’t even register.”

  He was wrong. Naomi would have smelled Beth’s lavender scent as she came in; she would have lifted her head and might have been puzzled at its familiarity, until she remembered she had smelled it on her father’s skin. She would have looked out of Ted’s window, the narrow one above the desk with the peacock-­pattern curtains that I sewed years ago. At the same time she would be watching Beth out of the corner of her eye, so she would have caught the tiny glance between Beth and Ted. Naomi would have registered almost instantly.

  “I’ll need to phone Michael to let him know.”

  “Are you still in touch?”

  I thought of his warm hands and serious eyes. Touching his mouth with my mouth.

  “Yes.” I look down, then away. Why should I tell him about Michael? I owe Ted nothing now. “You’ll need to stay and see him, if he agrees to come here.”

  “Of course. Look, Jenny . . .”

  I do look at him then, and beyond the known shape of him, the new stubble and unfamiliar nicotine stains on his fingers, the longer hair and the reassuring smile, I see a middle-­aged man grown older, tired, and bitter, as if he knows he has made mistakes and wishes he hadn’t.

  “I meant what I said. It’s really over with Beth now.”

  “They do food in the pub,” I say. “Come back when you need to sleep.”

  AFTER HE LEAVES I try to phone Michael but he doesn’t pick up. I go to the shed. It feels cold and looks messy; usually I don’t notice the mess. I haven’t the heart to start painting, so I tidy jumbled seeds and rose hips. But I don’t dream about them that night. Instead in my dreams I see Naomi throwing broken glass at the walls of Beth’s burned kitchen and laughing. The laughter wakes me, and changes into the cry of a gull, calling in the night from its perch on the roof. I lie in the dark. The landscape of the past has changed. Ketamine. Beth’s break-­in. My mind goes round and round. How had I missed so much? But I know how easy it is to miss things. I hadn’t seen what was happening to Ed. It could easily have been too late for him as well.

  I give up the attempt to sleep again; I get up, go downstairs in the dark, and make tea. My sketchbook is on the side, but it’s facedown, left open. Did Ted flick through it quickly, or study each picture in turn? Perhaps he was disappointed there are none of him. His wet coat is over the chair; the sleeves have dripped a little pool of water on the floor. I didn’t hear him come in from the pub and go upstairs. I open the door to the garden and look into the black quietness. The storm that came in from the sea has already gone again. I shut the door and sit on the floor with my back to the wood burner, the mug of tea beside me. Scalpels are easy to draw; harder to capture the holding fingers, impossible to show how they were trembling.

  BRISTOL, 2009

  ELEVEN DAYS AFTER

  Ed pulled his arm back and shook his sleeve down. He turned his head away and in the downward curve of his thin neck I saw how far away he had gone. I put my arms around him. I could feel him shivering.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  He shrugged and moved away.

  “I’m not angry.” But I didn’t think he heard. It was true, though. “I want to help.”

  He walked into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa, put his head back and stared at the ceiling. I sat beside him.

  “Can you tell me what’s been going on?”

  His head lowered suddenly, brown eyes staring hotly into mine. “Don’t you fucking dare tell Dad.”

  “Were you using drugs from my medical bag?”

  No answer.

  “There aren’t enough in there to do this.” I touched his inner elbow lightly as I spoke, but he gasped and wrenched his arm back. I had felt a swelling under my fingers, hot through the cotton of the shirt.

  “I’m going to make a sandwich and a cup of coffee for both of us.” Perhaps this was how you did it, by pretending to be calm and sensible, although when I saw his face drawn with pain I wanted to weep. “There might be an abscess there, Ed. I could take a look in a while.”

  We ate in silence, which didn’t seem to bother him. He stared blankly out of the window as he chewed. Then, as we drank coffee, I began carefully.

  “How are you feeling now?”

  He glanced at me quickly, contemptuously. “Like shit, what do you think?”

  “How long?”

  “Dunno.” He shrugged.

  “How often?”

  “Whenever.”

  But his shoulders went down as though talking was loosening something in him.

  “What have you been taking?”

  “Different stuff.” A pause, then a low mutter that I had to lean in to catch. “Ketamine, mostly.”

  The danger he’s been in makes me feel sick. “Where from?”

  He looked sideways at me and then smiled scornfully: “Man in a club.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Why drugs, Ed?”

  He screwed up his eyes. “Because of all the other shit.”

  “What other shit?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Like?”

  “Theo.” He said in a low voice. “Naomi.”

  “Theo?” The drugs might help with the guilt he felt about Naomi, although some scars looked old, so he must’ve have been taking drugs even before she disappeared. How did Theo fit in?

  “Leave it, Mum.” He started jigging his leg up and down.

  I looked around the room as though the tools to unlock this were there somewhere, lying on the sideboard or just out of reach on a high shelf.

  “It wasn’t your fault she was taken. We told you that; even if you’d waited—­”

  “I said leave it.”

  “The money?”

  He was silent.

  “Ed, where did the money come from?”

  The jigging got faster and faster, then he got up suddenly and went to the stairs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The fucking North Pole.”

  I waited until his bedroom door shut, then I sat down and the room seemed to lower itself around me. There was a quiet ringing in the air like after an explosion, but it
was inside my head. I looked at my hands on the table. The tendons shone through the skin in pale ridges; they were thinner hands now, but still strong. I had delivered babies, inserted catheters and drips, sewn torn skin, held the foreheads of my vomiting children. I clenched them tightly. I could grasp this. I had to.

  HE WAS SITTING with his back against his headboard, earphones in. His bent knees supported a book, and as I came in he began turning the pages quickly.

  I sat on his bed and he moved his legs sharply away.

  “Some parents might involve the school. Some might involve the school and the police.” The pages stopped turning but he didn’t look up. “Lots of parents would insist on being told the details of what’s been happening; I’m offering a deal.”

  He pulled out his earphones and waited.

  “If you agree to go to a rehabilitation unit, then we won’t involve the school or the police, and as long as you talk to someone and you stop, then you needn’t tell us anything about where the drugs came from or the money I saw.”

  He stared at me silently. Then he looked down at the book on his lap, but his eyes weren’t moving.

  “Just leave school?”

  “Yes, so you can go to a rehab unit.”

  He lay back and closed his eyes.

  I gently took his arm, pushed up his sleeve and looked at the scars. Now I could see it clearly; there was a swelling the size of a small plum tensely stretching the skin.

  “Ed, this needs draining. We need to go to the emergency room.”

  “You do it.”

  I didn’t argue; it might make him retreat from the bargain I had held out. I got a sterile set from the locked box in my car. Lynn used to joke that I carried an operating unit around with me, but I’d found it useful over the years for patients who needed very minor procedures and who couldn’t get to the hospital. It was often very satisfying, but this would be different. I found antibiotics in my bag. The thought of cutting my own son’s skin made me feel weak as I walked back upstairs. I washed my hands in the bathroom in water as hot as I could stand. I knew I would hurt him. I had to find a way to deal with that so I could do this properly. I dried my hands on the paper sheet in the pack and slipped on surgical gloves; as I did so, I felt myself crossing that line, mother to doctor. This was just a problem to be solved. It was straightforward; I could do it. I cleaned his arm with an iodine swab, spread the paper above and below his elbow, positioned the cardboard receiving tray, and sprayed freezing anesthetic around and over the abscess.

  “This will freeze it, but it will still hurt. You’d get a better anesthetic in the hospital. You sure, Ed?”

  “Do it.”

  Doctor, not mother . . .

  I took the scalpel and cut down sharply through the skin as it thinned over the bulging abscess.

  Ed shouted as the skin split neatly apart and thick yellow pus spurted out from between the cut edges, streaming over his elbow into the tray.

  “Jesus. Fuck.” His forehead was beaded with sweat as he watched the lumpy mess curdled with blood rise in the tray. “Fucking hell. That hurts.”

  “Nearly done.” I felt cold sweat trickle from my armpits, and with hands that I couldn’t quite stop trembling, I carefully pressed the last pus out and syringed in antiseptic. Then I packed the wound with a soft yellow wick, bound it with a dressing, and watched while he swallowed a loading dose of antibiotics, penicillin and metronidazole. Acetaminophen. Tea.

  Afterward I sat on the bed and pinned my trembling hands tightly between my knees. Ed was white-­lipped.

  “Don’t tell Dad,” he muttered between clenched teeth.

  “Of course he needs to know. He’ll have to know why you’re leaving school, if nothing else. He won’t like it, but he’ll understand. He struggled to stop smoking himself, years ago.”

  “I didn’t know Dad used to smoke.”

  “More than cigarettes, sometimes.”

  “Yeah?” Ed glanced up at me, his eyes briefly curious.

  “Everyone’s fallible. We all screw up sooner or later.”

  “Yeah? Even perfect Theo, the perfect son?”

  Ah. He looked down at the bed cover, I couldn’t quite see his face, but his words were bitter. I waited for more but he didn’t talk about Theo again.

  “I sold them,” he muttered, his voice becoming indistinct. “For ketamine.”

  He’d been selling the drugs from my bag to buy the ones he wanted; there would probably always be someone willing to exchange Demerol and temazepam for ketamine. I leaned closer as he mumbled something else. I couldn’t catch what he said and then his eyes closed and he slept.

  I closed the door quietly and took the tray and gloves downstairs. My cell went off.

  “It’ll be on the news.” The warning tone of Michael’s voice put me on my guard. Ed’s drugs. Someone must have found out, told a journalist. Thank God he’s asleep or he’ll think it was me. Michael was still speaking, and it took me a few seconds to understand that what he was telling me had nothing to do with drugs.

  “They’ve found a blue pickup van, abandoned in the woods.”

  Chapter 26

  DORSET, 2011

  THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER

  When the bath water empties it leaves behind a line of small stones that had worked their way into my shoes on the beach and pressed marks into my skin. I scoop them toward the drain; tiny residues of sea-­sharpened rock, their wet edges glint black and brown.

  After my bath I go outside to phone, my voice small in the white space of the icy garden. I keep the cell phone cradled close to my mouth. Ted’s window is open; he might wake and hear. As I wait for Michael to answer, the black body of a spider, suspended by a thread from the coping, swings like a beady pendulum toward the stone of the garden wall. Michael’s voice lifts with surprise when he hears me.

  “Ted’s still here.” I push the spider with my fingertip toward the wall, and it clings to the rough surface.

  “Ah.”

  “He was ill after he arrived, so . . .”

  “So you’re looking after him,” Michael finishes.

  “I’ve let him stay. He told me things about Naomi I didn’t know. She had stolen drugs.”

  There is silence for a few seconds.

  “Right,” he says quietly.

  “It was when she was doing an internship in Ted’s animal lab. She left her bag behind one day and Ted found some vials in it.” The words come out smoothly enough, but I feel breathless as I say them.

  “Why didn’t he tell anyone?”

  “He told a policeman at the station, but it wasn’t followed up.”

  The spider scuttles over the stone, searching for somewhere to hide.

  “But he didn’t tell you,” he says factually.

  “Apparently he didn’t want to burden me with something that seemed irrelevant.”

  A pause, then his calm voice again: “Okay. What drugs?”

  “Ketamine.”

  As if on cue the air fills with the ordered fall of pealing bells. Early morning bell-­ringing practice spills innocently into the gaps and empty corners of the village, bringing with the sound a world of holidays, sunshine, striped lawns, and Sunday lunch.

  “Ted used it to anesthetize experimental rats. Naomi was in the lab and had access to it. It’s not a controlled drug and they trusted her.”

  The spider has vanished; I must have missed the moment when it dived into a gap between the stones.

  “There’s a big trade in ketamine,” Michael says slowly.

  “Naomi wouldn’t have been involved in that. It was Ed who traded drugs, not Naomi.”

  Michael continues as if I haven’t spoken: “I can get a list of users.”

  “A list of users? Ted says she just took a few vials for friends—­”

  “Users of ketamine are us
ually older than Naomi,” he interrupts. “Less likely to be schoolchildren. She may have had other contacts.”

  That word opens a crack into the world that Ed had visited, where shadowy figures live in a network at the dark edges of life, organized and predatory. Contacts. The word for the partners of a patient who has chlamydia or gonorrhea; someone unknown, with the power to maim in secret.

  “At least now we know what the K in her diary stands for,” Michael says.

  I’d thought it was shorthand for coursework. How naive I’ve been; Naomi must have thought so too, as she hugged her secrets to herself.

  “I’ll come to you.” Michael’s voice is decisive.

  “Can you?” Tears sting my eyes.

  “I’ll be there in two hours. It would be helpful to talk to Ted too.”

  “Thank you.” I want another word that says more, something bigger, but I can’t find it. I remember to warn him: “He doesn’t know about us.”

  “No, he mustn’t know.”

  Perhaps he could be withdrawn from our case if it’s known we are together, or he might be dismissed. This secrecy puts a weight on our relationship, flattening it somehow. Sometimes when I’m alone I think I have imagined it completely.

  After our conversation finishes, I put my hand on the wall. The surface is rough and cold. The dark crevices must be full of spiders you never see, thick with webs and trapped things. My feet leave hardened patches in the stiff white grass as I walk back to the cottage. The air is clear and cold; it will be a day of sun and ice underfoot. I let Bertie out and he rolls in the frost. His body melts the ice when he stands and shakes himself, leaving a large uneven patch of green on the white lawn. The difference in the garden excites him; he seems to like the cold penetrating to his skin. He runs in circles like a puppy.

  In the kitchen Ted is making a cup of coffee. He looks different from when he arrived, slightly fatter maybe, and he stands more upright. He is wearing his coat and a small case is by his feet. His eyes slide away from mine, then back again, like those of a guilty child.