Her eyes open and close as though she’s trying to focus on me. Her mouth begins to move. Her hand twitches. I lean across the seat, angling my ear closer to her lips. The expelled air from her lungs wafts against the hair by my ear. I hear her trying to form the words. I hear her lick her lips and swallow, as though her throat is dry.
“Tell me,” I prompt. “Tell me now.”
I can’t help it. The hardness is inside me. I want to be better, but my resentment towards this woman will always be there and I can’t stop it. It’s only the fear of her that keeps it in check. I try to love her. I’ve tried over and over again.
“The…” she starts.
After a pause, I prompt her again. “The what? Mum?”
“Shadow.”
I sit back up straight. The driver glances up to watch us through the rear view mirror. When his eyes meet mine, he turns his head away.
“Mum, what is the shadow? You need to tell me.” Again, there’s that niggle at the back of my mind. Some sort of recognition. Someone from my past. But who? They’re all dead, our other family members: Dad killed himself when I was four, and my grandparents never featured in my life, but they died several years ago. There’s no one else. There were my mother’s boyfriends, but they never lasted long. They were usually married and wealthy. We often survived by selling Mum’s jewellery from past lovers. She says that’s how we managed to afford to move from East London to Eddington. I’m not sure how much of that is true, though. I’ve never been sure where Mum got the money to move. We were so poor, we were living on bread and butter at that point. Mum worked as a cleaner. She wasn’t trained for much. In Eddington, she managed to get a few jobs as a secretary or a receptionist. We struggled in a freezing cold flat for a while as she slowly saved up enough to buy a house. Roger came along at the right time. She swindled him for enough to get us on our feet.
Roger… He’d be in his sixties now. I still vaguely remember his fat hands and thick-rimmed glasses…
“Shadow,” she says again. She blinks a few times, as though waking from a deep sleep. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going home, Mum,” I say. “Can you tell me who the shadow is?”
“Sophie, why are you wearing that horrible outfit? I didn’t raise you to not understand that you have to comb your hair in the morning.”
“Mum, listen to me. Who is the shadow?”
The driver pulls onto our street. I can see the cat from across the street pooing in the front garden of three doors down.
“But where have we been? I don’t understand.”
“We’re on our way home from the hospital. You drank some bleach and hurt yourself.”
“Oh, yes, the shadow told me to do that.” She nods to herself.
“But who is the shadow!”
“Sophie, don’t shout. It’s not ladylike. Fancy going to a hospital dressed like that. Doctors work in hospitals, you know. They earn a pretty penny. Oh, I don’t want to go home. Can we stay in the car? I don’t want to go into that house.”
The taxi driver eyes me from the front of the car. He pulls in by the kerb. “Everything all right, love?”
“Yes,” I say. “My mother has Alzheimer’s disease.”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I went through it with an uncle. Nasty business. Five-fifty please, love.”
I dig into my purse as Mum stares out at our house.
“Please, Sophie. I don’t want to go in there.”
The note of desperation in her voice gives me chills. Though the Alzheimer’s has rendered my mother intermittently weak, I’ve never heard her beg me like that. I find a five-pound note and a pound coin for the driver.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say, forcing cheer into my voice. “This is our house. You’re safe here.”
She shakes her head. “No, we’re not.”
I ignore the way my blood runs cold, and the way my hand shakes as I open the car door. The taxi driver tries to give me change, but I tell him to keep it. I make my way around to Mum’s side and help her out. Still, she continues to stare at our house—a normal, semi-detached house on a very boring street—as though the thought of setting foot inside fills her with dread. I take her bag in one hand and her elbow in the other and guide her to the front door. She’s pale as a ghost as we go inside. I close the door behind us, and we’re alone in our home.
*
I’m running on empty.
I haven’t quite managed to repair my relationship with Erin after accidentally accusing her of hurting Mum, but she feels sorry enough for me that she makes me a strong cup of tea the next morning. She’s ten minutes early and offers a weak smile when I leave for work.
I’m exhausted from the emotionally draining day, but I have responsibilities. As hard as I try to focus on work, all throughout the morning, my mind drifts back to the conversation in the taxi. I can’t stop thinking about this shadow. It’s as though I’m being haunted. At lunchtime, when I tell Alisha about the weekend, she suggests I actually am haunted.
“My nana had a ghost, you know,” she says. “An old man who used to stand in the corner of the guest bedroom. I saw him once. He stood there, staring, and didn’t say a word.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a coat hung up, or a wardrobe door left open?”
“I swear on my little boy’s life that it was a ghost. I woke up in the middle of the night. My eyes adjusted to the dark. There he was, standing straight at me. He wasn’t smiling. I remember the whites of his eyes like it was yesterday.”
We’re both on playground duty. It’s a warm day but with a blustery wind. Her dark hair is whipped up around her head. She rubs her arms through her shirt.
“It frightened you,” I reply.
“I nearly pissed myself, Soph. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life. I’ll never forget it.”
I purse my lips, quelling the desire to tell her it was probably a nightmare. There are times to correct people and times to be quiet. This is one of those times where silence is the best option. Besides, who am I to say her experience wasn’t genuine? I don’t believe in ghosts at all, but does that mean they don’t exist? Who knows what’s out there in the world intangible to humans.
“Hey, what happened to Peter?” she asks suddenly.
“I get the odd missed call from him. But not much else. Right after I deleted my profile, I received a prank call on our house phone. I assumed it was him, and it shook me up a bit. Then all this stuff happened with Mum, and I didn’t really think about it anymore.”
“Be careful. It’s all too coincidental that your mum mentioned a shadowy figure hanging around and you’re getting bombarded by calls from an internet weirdo. Make sure you keep your doors locked at night.”
I shake my head. “It can’t be anyone getting in at night. There’s no sign of anyone breaking in, and I check all the windows and doors before I go to bed. I think it’s a figment of Mum’s imagination. It’s probably the Alzheimer’s.”
“Do you think she’s hallucinating?” Alisha tilts her head in my direction, her attention piqued. I’ve noticed how people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about Mum’s disease in general terms, but if I mention any odd or erratic behaviour, they’re all ears.
“No… I don’t know. The word ‘shadow’ is so familiar to me. I suppose it’s this new context of using the word—as though I’m being followed. I get this sense of déjà vu every time I think about it, and I’m almost certain it’s to do with my childhood.” I take a side step to avoid a football. The kids wave at me before the regular raucous playground activities continue. “I’ve never known how we managed to move to Eddington when I was little. I know this doesn’t seem related, but for some reason it’s been on my mind a lot.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, we were dirt poor in East London. I wore the same clothes for years, even though they didn’t fit. We ate bread and broth most days. Some days we went without both. Mum worked as a cleaner to pay the m
ortgage after Dad died without leaving us any life insurance.” I pause, suppressing a shudder at the thought of those years. They’re such a blur, but I can still remember the itch of the wool jumpers I layered up to stay warm in winter, and the ache in my belly when it came to dinnertime. “Then we moved to Eddington, a pretty wealthy little corner of England. For the first few years, we were as poor as we were in London. I remember the tiny flat Mum used to rent. But it was Eddington. The house prices are touching the sky. Even after a few years, and after Mum managed to save up somehow, we were never as well off as the rest of the people here, but we still found a small house to buy.”
“She managed to find half the married men in the village, too.” Alisha raises her eyebrows.
“She told me that she sold jewellery from an old boyfriend to move here. But I don’t remember any boyfriends around that time, or any jewellery. Having said that, I don’t remember a lot from those days. I barely remember Dad.”
“A deposit for a house was a substantial amount of money, even in those days,” Alisa says.
“Exactly. So, what the hell is going on?”
The bell tolls to mark the beginning of the afternoon lessons. As always, my eyes are drawn to Chloe as she wanders into the school building alone. She’s wearing a pink dress today, with white tights and black shoes. It’s a little young for her, I think. It makes her stand out against the jeans and t-shirts of the other kids.
“Soph.” Alisha pulls me back from my thoughts. “Take one problem at a time, yeah? Chloe has a psychologist to help her, and her parents are cooperative.”
I smile. “Are my thoughts that obvious?”
“Written all over your face, love.” Her expression softens and she places a hand on my shoulder. “Plus, I know you. I know that you have a soft spot for the girl. But there’s too much on your mind to take on anything else. Concentrate on your mum, get through this particularly tumultuous period, and things will start to seem brighter.”
“You think I’m going to get through this?”
She meets my gaze with her deep brown eyes. They’re so kind, I would believe anything she says. “I know you’ll get through this. You’re pretty strong, you know.”
We make our way towards the school. “Hey, maybe this is what you should do,” she says. “You should set up some sort of recording device in your mum’s room. Maybe it’s not a ghost. Maybe there’s a mouse in the attic or a loose floorboard. It could be frightening her so much that she’s making up this shadow thing.”
“You’re a genius, ’Lish!”
Chapter Eight
It takes a bit of digging around in the attic to find it. I’m covered in cobwebs by the end, and my nostrils are clogged with dust. At the back of the small space is a box of Mum’s old belongings. There are old clothes, broken jewellery boxes, and some notebooks she used when she was a secretary in the late eighties before computers became the norm. Right at the bottom of the box is an old jumper. I pull it out, and a few strands of light mousy-coloured hair fall from it. I pick them up and examine them.
My heart beats faster, and I toss the hair onto the attic floor. A light sweat breaks out on my forehead. What’s the matter with me? They’re just hairs from when I was a child. I lift up the jumper and remember its itchy feel against my skin. It seems like an odd thing for her to keep. Mum could never be accused of sentimentality. She threw away all my baby teeth, my school projects and Mother’s Day gifts. Why would she keep this horrible, itchy thing made from cheap wool?
I set it aside and rummage deeper into the box. My hands find cold metal in a familiar shape. This is what I’ve been hoping to find. The device is in the shape of a small USB stick with a hidden microphone that can record for up to twenty hours. It was Jamie who bought it. He wanted to catch Mum out when I wasn’t in the room. He tried recording her saying nasty things to him. I was gobsmacked when I found out what he’d done. I threw it in a box of old stuff and forgot all about it until my conversation with Alisha.
I slip it into my pocket and climb down the ladder onto the landing. Later, I experiment by leaving it in the kitchen as I’m making dinner for the two of us. After dinner, while Mum is sat watching her soaps, I put the USB stick into my laptop and listen to the MP3 file through a pair of headphones. There I am, chopping away, humming along to the radio. It works.
“Mum, you okay?” I call through to the living room.
“What do you want?” she snaps back. “I’m watching Eastenders.”
“All right, Mum. I’m nipping upstairs for a shower.”
There’s no reply. She’s probably lost in her drama by now. I collect the recording device and take it upstairs. Going into Mum’s room without her there feels weird, like I’m a teenager breaking a boundary. Mum was always very private about her room, not that I ever wanted to go in there. I heard the noises that came from her room and they frightened me when I was little. First there were the strange sobs at night. Then there were the boyfriends who came for dinner and left before dawn. Now I’m older, I understand everything. I know why there were nights when she left me tucked in bed at night and didn’t come home until the morning. At the time, I thought it was because she didn’t love me. Perhaps it was both.
I need a good hiding place so that she won’t find it, and where the microphone won’t be obscured. I choose to place it behind a photograph frame on a high shelf. I can’t imagine why Mum would want to look up here, so I think it should be safe. The photograph is a black-and-white picture of my grandparents and great-grandparents. They’re stern and straight-backed, standing in front of a brick wall. An old dog lies at their feet, on top of what seems to be a pavement. It has to be outside some terraced house in London. The women are all boxy and tough, with their arms folded and their feet planted apart. I’m from strong stock, Mum would say. I believed her.
Perhaps I got all Dad’s genes. I got his eyes. I got his habit of delving inwards and thinking too much. My only memories of him revolve around him never sticking up for us against her.
I pause.
Why would I think that?
Never sticking up for me.
I shake my head. I’m overtired.
The microphone is hidden. Now I wait to see what it picks up.
*
While Erin is downstairs with Mum the next morning, I remove the recording device and slip it into my handbag. There’s no way I can wait until later tonight to listen to it. I’ll have to find a few hours at work. There’s a test I’ve been meaning to give the children.
“Sophie?” Erin calls from downstairs.
I hurry down the steps. “What is it?”
“There was a call, but they hung up without saying anything. Didn’t you say that’s happened before?” she asks.
“It’s okay. I think it’s that guy I met up with for a date a few weeks ago. He’s been calling me a lot, too.”
“What? Oh my God, is he stalking you?”
I pause. I guess I hadn’t thought about it like that. Not with everything that’s going on with Mum. “No, it’s not stalking, is it?”
“If he’s calling you, it’s stalking. Does he know where you live?”
“I don’t think so.” I think back to our conversations online. Did I ever mention the area I live in? The street? How hard is it to track down where a person lives? I know that people who are much more competent at using Google than I am can figure things out on the internet. Maybe Peter has found out where I live. A cold sensation spreads over my skin. “If he figured out the phone number, maybe he figured out my address, too.”
“Maybe you should go to the police,” she says. “These things can escalate. Didn’t your mum complain about something in the house? The shadow thing?”
My flesh crawls at the mere mention of it. “Yes, she did. Listen, don’t tell Mum, but I put a recording device in her room last night. I want to make sure that there’s nothing there. She’s been so spooked about sleeping at night. I’m almost 90% sure that this shadow thing is
her imagination running wild, but I thought I’d check.”
Erin frowns. “So, you’re worried too. Should I be worried about being here in the house all day? What if this Peter guy is stalking you?”
“If I hear anything on the recording that sounds suspicious, or if anything else happens here, I’ll go to the police, I promise. And you can call me at any time and I’ll come home.” I glance at the time on my phone. “I’d better get to work. Call me if Mum gets agitated.”
“I’m going to watch her all day,” Erin promises. “I still can’t believe what she did with the bleach. I know she’s deteriorating, but it still seems so out of character.”
Hearing her say it only highlights the grim reality of the situation. Mum is losing her mind. She’s coming undone, and her character is slowly slipping away. She’s nothing like the person she used to be.
“I’ll see you later. Bye, Mum.” I wave to her, but she’s lost somewhere in her mind, staring out of the kitchen window.
“Bye, Becca.”
“That’s a new one,” I say with a laugh.
“Sophie, not Becca,” Erin says, pronouncing each word as though she’s teaching a child to spell.
“That’s what I told them. They got it wrong, and I paid for it.” Mum shakes her head.
I bite back tears as I leave the house. Now she doesn’t even know who I am.
*
A collective groan swells across the room.
“It’s a two-hour test,” I tell the children, raising my voice over the squeaking of chairs, the shuffling of pencils, the whispers between friends. “And it’s only going over all the subjects we’ve covered so far.”
“But, Miss, it’s boring,” exclaims Noah. There are smudges of mud on his face again. No amount of sending him to the bathroom to clean up actually seems to work.
“It’ll help you for your test at the end of the year.” It’s not strictly a lie, but I have tested them more than is necessary so far this year. I usually throw in a lot more practical activities and, well, fun lessons, but I’m itching to listen to the file from the recording device. I can only get through two hours at work, and then the rest I’ll have to listen to while I’m at home.
The Broken Ones Page 6