The Good Mother

by A. L. Bird

  She’s shaking her head. Not the rational shaking you do when you disagree with someone. Shaking it enough to make her brain ricochet. Shaking it to free herself of my existence, of any existence.

  ‘You were drinking. You were driving my Cara and you were drinking,’ she tells me.

  Craig is climbing up from the floor. I consider punching him again but it’s too late. And I think he’d win.

  ‘Suze, listen – if that drinking had affected my driving in any way, I’d be in prison now, wouldn’t I?’

  Craig is rubbing his jaw. I’d expect him to be ready to punch me back, the old security guard in him ready for a fight. But no. Words are his weapon this time. He’s opening his mouth to speak.

  ‘Like before, you mean?’ he says.

  I don’t know if Suze has heard. But I need to act as if she has.

  ‘Balls, Craig! You know that’s rubbish! I never went to prison. I got a caution. That was all.’

  ‘For drink-driving,’ Craig says. ‘You got a caution for drink-driving and then you did it again and our daughter died.’

  Suze has stopped shaking and stands completely still. She is staring at me. ‘What?’ she whispers.

  ‘It’s time you knew the truth, Susan,’ says Craig. ‘You’d never imagine the lengths Paul went to so you wouldn’t know.’ He spreads his hands out, indicating Cara’s things. ‘Gave me all this, for a start. And I bet he didn’t let you see this particular newspaper article.’

  Craig hands Suze an old newspaper, the same vintage I’ve been looking at with her. I can see he’s highlighted a sentence. I don’t need to read it. I know what it says: ‘The police breathalysed the girl’s father and, although he had been drinking, he wasn’t over the limit.’

  ‘Kind of set me thinking, you know?’ Craig says. Laconically.

  I want to kill Craig. I want to find the gun, reunite it with the bullets, wherever Suze has put them, and I want to kill him. How dare he turn up here with his ‘truth’? I wasn’t drunk when I drove Cara. I wasn’t. I sometimes wish I had been, those other times. The first time was the worst. When I had to explain to Cara where we were going. That horrible conversation in the car, my hand on her knee, explaining to her that she wasn’t to me what she thought she was (by blood, anyway – I still loved her just as much). It wasn’t the drink that distracted me on the last visit. I’m sure it wasn’t. I’ve lain awake night after night thinking about whether it was because I’d had a glass of wine. A large glass of wine. Remembering what I saw, how I felt, before I hit that wall. Were my reactions slowed? Was my vision wavering from the straight line at the centre of the road? No. No. If my mind wandered – if – it was the thought of how I was betraying Suze by taking Cara to Craig. Questioning whether I was doing the right thing. Knowing that I wasn’t by Suze. But that I might be by Cara. Plainly, I wasn’t. If it was the right thing, she would still be alive.

  And I wasn’t even supposed to be seeing Craig that day.

  It was Suze who made me. Indirectly.

  Suze is moving her hands up and down her face, pulling in her cheeks so that I can see the red tissue under her eyes.

  ‘So, Paul – let me get this right,’ Suze demands, her voice cracking. ‘You have a drunk-driving record you didn’t tell me about? Then you drink while driving Cara, which kills her—’

  ‘I wasn’t over the limit!’ I tell her again.

  ‘Which kills her,’ she continues, ‘and then you give away all my mementos of her to my shit of an ex-husband, who you’ve been letting Cara see, so that he won’t tell me your disgusting little secret, thus robbing me of my daughter two – no, wait, three – times?’

  ‘If I might just add,’ Craig says, putting up one hand. ‘He was driving her to see me that day.’

  Then Suze flies at me. Nails, hands, teeth – in my face, my hair, my groin. And I’m bent double beneath this flurry of hate. She hits me and hits me and hits me, and I don’t defend myself because I deserve it, do I (even though I wasn’t, I wasn’t over the limit)? All I can do is curl up on the floor as she kicks and sobs and hits and shouts over and over again, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’

  I can’t take this. I can’t be the martyr. I have to defend myself.

  ‘You knew, Suze! You knew I’d been drinking, and you sent me to get her!’

  She flinches and pauses in her assault. Is that a memory returning?

  ‘What?’ she asks me.

  ‘You knew. You phoned me, and you asked me to collect Cara because you’d had a last-minute booking at the studio. A hen party, their other plans had fallen through, you said. Great for business, you said. And I told you, I’m at a lunch with a potential client, he’s just buying me another drink. Another drink. And you said it would be fine. You knew.’

  She is almost spitting at me. She shouts down at me from her elevated height. ‘Don’t you dare blame me! You were the one who was driving! You were the one behind the wheel. And I thought you were just collecting her, not taking her off on some other journey to Craig!’

  ‘But you lied to me, Suze! You told me you had clients. You didn’t. You didn’t. You confessed it, in the hospital, don’t you remember? You made up the clients. You just wanted some me-time. A soak in the tub. Your hair was still wet at the ends when you arrived, from where you’d been reclining in the soapsuds. You let me go and kill your daughter because you wanted a bath!’

  Suze is staring at me, stunned. Even though I’m lying on the floor and I’m convinced she’s broken all my ribs with her kicking, and that my internal organs will burst, I’m somehow in charge again. We’re back in the hospital again, realising how much we hate each other. The moment before the moral truth reaches me that yes, she’s right, I’m more to blame. I’m the one who drove when I’d had a drink. The one who took the opportunity to take Cara that little bit further to see Craig to get him off my back. Drove a little bit faster to get there and back in the time we had. But I wasn’t over the limit. Suze was. She was over the limit of what I should have been asked to do.

  Suze is attacking me again. Does she hate me more because now I’ve made her hate herself too? There are hands in between us, pulling us apart. Craig. Maybe he didn’t want to witness a murder. Suze killing me, of course. Because I forgave her. I had to. At the time. I understood why she needed the time. Her fragility, ever present. The spectre of that weak mental health. That she’s played upon? Maybe. But look at what’s happened. It’s true. She clearly does have ‘mental health issues’. And I’ve had to look after her. Because I can see all of her and still love her.

  But it doesn’t mean that she is absolved of the guilt of that decision she made. I cannot take all the blame. Can’t be made to, by her.

  ‘Susan, Susan, shh.’ Craig is trying to comfort her. What’s his game now? Does he want her back? Or just to expunge years of guilt? I try to stand up, but I’m too bruised, inside and out. He keeps talking. ‘I’m sorry. I should have asked you to see Cara. Made it up to you, slow-time. But I’d missed our little girl. Wanted to see how she turned out. How you’d turned out. Susan, if you’ll believe me, I’m sorry I walked out, it was all too much, it was selfish, I couldn’t—’

  Suze is shaking her head and pursing her mouth. She looks like she’s about to explode. Craig sees it too. ‘Anyway, look, so when I moved back to the area, after the business went bad, I tracked Paul down at a client’s office. Did some digging. Saw her a couple of times. Didn’t say much to me, but she would have done in time, understood that she was truly my little girl. But Paul, he robbed me of that. So I wanted those things. I still want them. We can share them. If he hadn’t given them to me, I’d have instructed my solicitor to try to get the police decision not to charge Paul reversed. But I wanted her things more. Getting Paul locked up won’t bring her back, but seeing her things, it—’

  I shake my head from my heap on the floor. ‘Rubbish, Suze. He wanted money. He blackmailed me with some notion that he could get my decision to “drink-drive” review
ed, challenge the police decision not to arrest me, use his “contacts” to trump up some charge. Or just that he would tell them what he suspected about you being here against your poor confused will, and they’d take you back to that institution again. He would use your liberty, your mental health, as a pawn to get our money. All the money that we have, that we built up, that’s what he wanted. And I bet … I bet if she hadn’t died, he would have blackmailed me so that he didn’t tell you I’d let them see each other. It’s only ever been about the money. Now he’s had a payment, I guess he’s just being a shit.’

  I can see Suze begin to wriggle free from Craig.

  ‘No,’ she says. The head shaking has started again, and she has her hands raised now too. ‘No, no, no, no. We’re not doing this. This little spat. You don’t get anything. Neither of you. You get nothing.’ She grabs at Cara’s belongings. ‘These are mine. They’re mine.’

  ‘Susan—’ Craig tries to control her, but Suze pushes him back with a force that sends him flying into the coffee table. He stays were he is; I guess he doesn’t want to end up like me. Or he doesn’t value Cara that much after all.

  And Suze falls to the floor. She starts picking up the sequins one by one, then, when they cling to the carpet, she makes these big sweeping gestures, trying but failing to scoop them up into her fingers. She stays like that, grabbing at the sequins, crying, until she has picked up the few that she can. She pours them gently into her shirt pocket, then grabs up the other box-files and bags, and drags them down the corridor. I hear the sound of a slamming door.

  Craig turns to me. Looks down at me on the floor where I still lie curled.

  He’s going to say something. Something nasty. One of his smug, callous, offerings. Special Craig one-upmanship. A new reminder of how pathetic I am. Of his notional brilliance as a father and a husband. Had he been boring enough to stick around. I tense, ready.

  But no. Instead he kicks me in the ribs on his way out of the front door. Not enough to break them. Just enough to hurt.

  Chapter 62

  Suze

  I have it all now. In front of me, behind me. All the knowledge that I need. To assimilate, understand, digest. The key was Paul’s breath. That has unlocked it all for me. The hate. The sheer blinding hate anger rage despair grief terror I felt at the hospital. How I arrived after the Visit, the ring on the front door no mother wants to receive. The police told me what had happened. An accident, they said. Your daughter in a critical condition. Your husband uninjured but being treated for shock. Sinking to the floor.

  I’d been expecting a delivery. Cupcake cases. The ones Cara likes. Liked. I’d opened the door smiling with fresh relaxation, straight from the tub.

  Not that.

  And so. Police. Doorbell. Like the other day. Except that time they were never there. A flashback so real it felt real, and, if not real, then like a hallucination. Oh hello again my illness; how I’ve missed you.

  But I mustn’t wallow. Because my mind is taking me back. Arriving, distraught but hopeful, at the hospital. Seeing Paul wrapped in a silver sheet. Too distracted to kiss him at first. Being shown to Cara’s bedside. Little, eight-year-old Cara. Still covered in blood and glass – my child! My child, like this! And the tubes, and the monitors and—Oh! It’s too much. It’s still too much. Sitting behind that curtain with her, holding her hand, life invisible through a veil of tears.

  Her hand is so fragile, so tender. If I squeeze it, will she squeeze back? Please let her squeeze back.

  A mother shouldn’t have to do this twice.

  Then Paul appearing beside me. Putting his arm round my shoulders. Kissing me. Then me knowing. Knowing he’d been drinking. Understanding, what he’d meant about his client lunch. Not questioning, then, because he was ‘in shock’ and because Cara was alive. She was alive for seven days. I was awake for seven days. In that one room, in that one chair, staring at her. Keeping one finger on her wrist so I could just keep feeling the pulse. Talking to her and begging her to hear me, to respond. Praying that her eyelids would flutter. Offering all kinds of sacrifices and deals to a God I usually only meet at weddings and – funerals. That I would give up my business. That I would take her to and from school every day. In a sedan chair rather than a car, if I had to. That if she had any residual brain damage – please, God, no, take my brain instead – I would sit with her day in day out to recover what I could, that I would get her into the best special educational needs school in the world, re-re-mortgage the house to pay for it, start a charity in her name. Anything, anything, everything. I doubt I ate as fluid was dripped into her by tubes.

  And then. And then.

  The end.

  I can’t – I don’t think I can go back to that. It’s not really a memory. It’s more bursts of images, colours, emotions and horror and noise and silence. Holding her hand one final time as she drifted into a permanent sleep. The sheet pulled up to cover her face, a veil for death’s bride. And turning to Paul. Seeing him for the first time ever. As a drunk who killed my daughter. How was this possible? My two most loved people dead to me. It cannot be possible, said my brain. For those next few days – it cannot be possible. I won’t let it be possible.

  And of course I remember the guilt. Now Paul has told me. That awful terrible guilt. That if I had been there collecting her, if I hadn’t told a white lie, if I had asked him what I suspected – ‘Have you had much to drink?’ – but conveniently decided not to question his judgement, just so I could have an indulgent soak in the tub, then she wouldn’t be dead. If I’d remembered that ‘me-time’ is something that really, if you thought about it, you’d never really want because it means ‘me without child’ time. Which is something you should never ever ever want because it might happen. It did happen.

  Then, here. My poor ill brain’s solution. An alternate reality. Total disassociation. Cara here but not here. Paul responsible but not responsible; unrecognisable to me other than a figure of hate who has separated me from my daughter (and from himself). A ball of hate surrounding his face, obscuring him, so I couldn’t really see him at all. Turning his features from the most familiar and loved man to a hideous stranger, while my Paul, my safe good Paul lived elsewhere in my brain, his features intact, and could come and rescue me. Rescue me from himself, and the apparent kidnap, but really the whole situation. The death, the drink, the hate. That kidnap reality had hope – my other reality didn’t. All the while Paul trying to drug me out of it as I desperately sought to rescue unreal Cara into a false reality. For both of us to escape the evil we were in, a blessing compared to the true evil of her death and absolute separation. And then, of course, the flashbacks, slight recollections, once the medicine for psychosis began to kick in. The questioning of why the Captor, still anonymous to me, seemed familiar. A déjà vu creeping in with every hot drink he drugged. My mind allowing me to think separately of Paul, my rescuer, and the Captor, my curious nemesis, without linking the two.

  How boring for this mental creativity to be a simple clinical case. Am I ‘better’ now, then? Is it all over? Now that I have finally, actually, lost her. Not like I imagined that I lost her when she was an imaginary teenager then brought her back to me through treats and temptation – actually lost her. Now that I know that, do I get to be just an ordinary mother whose child has died? Oh, privilege, oh luxury, oh lucky me. Can I unmedicate myself back to a place when my daughter was alive? Any of them – Belle, Cara, Belle-Cara? Worth a try, surely?

  Or can I rationally deal with this reality that has been forced upon me? Can I think that, as Paul says, it was just one drink? If the police had thought he was at fault, it would be him who was locked up now, as he says, right? Can I ignore the other, alternate truth, that everything might have been different if he hadn’t had that drink? And even if I can ignore that, can I ignore that Paul was driving somewhere he should never have been headed? That my Cara was being taken to the father who had forsaken her? Do I rationally and empathetically analyse that, do I unde
rstand in an objective way that Paul was doing what he thought was best for Cara, and also best for me by not telling me? Do I forgive?

  Am I still ‘ill’ if I refuse to do so, if my insides scream that it was all Paul’s fault, that I should spend the rest of my life making him suffer for my loss? For Cara’s loss? Or if I will blame myself, and blame him for having to make me blame myself, for ever? Like I questioned for years whether I should blame myself for Belle’s death. All those questions. Did I eat the wrong thing? Do the wrong thing? Somehow commit little Belle to her neverness? Did I not cook some blue cheese well enough, rinse out the soil from spinach thoroughly enough, quiz and re-quiz waitresses about what was in the meals intensely enough? That’s why it’s so important, you see, to always watch what you eat.

  As for Craig, he’s an irrelevance. I have hated him ever since he left me, fragile still, even years after the stay in that institution – sorry, mental health unit – with only my new little daughter, barely a toddler, to cling to. How weak for a man to leave someone for their weakness. His words, not mine. I would not say weak; I would say poor mental health. A lack of ‘resilience’. But for him, daytime crying, night-time insomnia, the guilt, the fear of relapse, the reliance on my medication, they were all weaknesses. Boring. Unliveable with. Not the sort of ‘sickness and health’ he’d meant when he said his wedding vows. A wheelchair he could have coped with. Not a refusal by an able-bodied person to get out of bed. Not their night-time crying. Their daytime crying. Their all-time sadness. And always his threat that if I didn’t ‘snap out of it’, he would call the mental health team again. That they would take Cara way from me. That he would take Cara away from me. Like Belle, and my vision of Belle, had been taken away from me all those years before. Taken from him too, but he didn’t seem to care. The surface of his testosterone didn’t even seem to be scratched. Perhaps he’s even used it as a ‘sad story’ over the years to get women into bed. His ‘sensitive side’. Paul’s right. Craig’s a shit.