Blink of an Eye (2013)

by Staincliffe, Cath

I’d brought a photograph of Ollie to give her, in a frame. Once I’d cleaned her up, I got it out and held it up for her. ‘This is Ollie, Mum, your great-grandson. Suzanne’s baby.’ I could have been showing her a tax return form for all the interest she showed. She only spoke once while I was there. ‘Hopeless,’ she said bitterly. One word. I’d no idea what was hopeless: me, her, the situation, the future?

  I was thankful she hadn’t been nasty to me. ‘Go away, vulture,’ she used to say. ‘You make me sick. I hate you, pathetic, disgusting.’ She would pinch me, when she still had control of her movements, or stick her nails in my arm or my face, stabbing them like a fork. She was stronger then. Nowadays the drugs helped. A liquid cosh. I missed my mum. This was not her. This drooling harridan who looked at me with loathing when she looked at all. There was someone else under her skin, in her bones, in her gaze. And I wanted her dead.

  I left the picture of Ollie in her room on my way out. Next to the photograph of Suzanne as a baby in my arms. Looking at that plunged me straight back there. Suzanne was born in St Mary’s Hospital one blustery March night. I still find it hard to describe those early days. The elation, the worry, the exhaustion, the piercing moments of joy and fear. My breasts hard as rocks and leaking milk, the awful backache the labour left me with, as though my pelvis had been dislocated. The tiny being we’d made, with her huge wise eyes, face crumpling in hunger, the fuzz on her head pale thistledown. Raging thirst and ravenous hunger and weeping at the beauty of the way the sun sliced through the trees. Times when I wanted it all to stop for a bit, so I could rest, retreat, worn down by the incessant calls on my energy. My fingers clumsy on the tiny buttons, eyes itchy with fatigue, resentment in my own throat as her cries grew louder. The overwhelming weight of the love I had.

  Later, in my working life, at the times when I had to take the weighty decision to remove a child from a family, I knew that they had experienced all that. And I understood in my bones and my blood that there is no worse thing in the world than taking a child from its mother. Except leaving it to suffer in her care.

  Taken a child, that was what Naomi had done. Not with legal documents and papers outlining risk assessments and medical reports. And not to give the child a better life, a safer world, a chance to heal. There was no greater good in Naomi’s story. No redemption. She had snatched the child, stolen her life, all the hope and love and promise, and condemned her parents to the hell of a future without her. To the purgatory of what might have been.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Naomi

  ‘You need a shower or a bath,’ Mum says.

  I stink. It doesn’t bother me, but she’s not having it.

  She gets one of her tablets from the cupboard, something to help with anxiety. She makes a point of taking it in front me. I think I’m meant to learn by example, ask to see the doctor.

  ‘I’ll run it for you, if you want a bath,’ she says. ‘There’s some smelly stuff left over from Christmas.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  In my mirror I can see the scars from the operations. A line red and knotted across my belly. I’m still supposed to do physio; the instruction sheets are in one of my drawers, I think. The place on my cheekbone where it was grazed has shiny thin skin; they don’t know if it will grow back properly. I may need a graft in future. I am marked. That seems fair, really. You hear about people walking away from a car crash without a scratch. But I’m well and truly scratched. Inside and out. I have no spleen. Before all this I’d no idea what a spleen did, where it was. Now I know it helps with cleaning the blood and is a major part of the immune system. They stuck me full of inoculations afterwards to stop me getting pneumonia or septicaemia or meningitis (I remember when Suzanne had meningitis, being scared she wouldn’t get better). I’ve been advised to get a flu jab each winter. Every day for the rest of my life I’ll take a low-dose antibiotic. We also have a stash of high-dose ones to be used at the first sign of fever.

  The bathroom is full of steam and smells of mandarin oranges and pine leaves.

  The water is milky and really hot. When I climb in, my skin prickles. I bend my knees and lie right back, my head resting on the lip of the tub.

  The water covers my stomach and my breasts, slippery and so warm. I would like to melt away in it, to dissolve. To drain away down the plughole.

  Sliding in further, I wet my hair and water fills my ears. There is shampoo on the side and conditioner. But this will do. I’ll be clean enough to satisfy Mum.

  I think of Alex, wonder how he is, what he’s doing. Whether he’s met someone else yet. I haven’t touched myself, haven’t wanted to, since the accident. It’s like that part of me is dead. Another reason for breaking up with him. Like he’d want a frigid girlfriend.

  There are drops on the tiles like tears, and mould along the edge of the bath, black spots on the sealant. My legs are hairy, something else I’ve neglected. My razor’s on the shelf.

  I see blood in the bath, a soupy red, and me floating, lips blue, and Mum screaming. I scramble out of the bath quickly, water slopping over the side. My heart is bumping painfully in my chest, my head giddy. Frightened at the possibility. Frightened at the temptation. It would be so easy.

  She calls up to me on her way out as I’m towelling dry: ‘See you later.’

  She’s changed my sheets, opened the window. The air is quite cold in my room. There’s a vase of mini sunflowers on the desk. I start to cry. The yellow hurts my eyes. It will always feel like this, always.

  I can’t bear it.

  Carmel

  There was knocking on the door, persistent, impatient.

  When I answered it a lad was there, a teenager. He was casually dressed and wasn’t carrying a folder or a bag with goods for sale, or wearing any ID.

  ‘Is Naomi here?’ he said, and there was something in the quake of his voice and the brightness of his eyes that put me on alert.

  ‘No, she’s out,’ I lied.

  ‘Well, you tell her she’s a fucking bitch,’ he said, his face creasing and reddening, eyes blazing. ‘You fucking tell her. Right? You tell her!’

  I stood my ground in spite of the rush of adrenalin that prickled my skin.

  ‘And who are you?’ I said as levelly as I could.

  ‘Robin Vasey.’

  Lily’s brother. ‘Robin,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry—’

  ‘Don’t fucking bother.’ He jabbed his finger my way. ‘It’s too late, it’s too late. That fucking bitch—’

  ‘Mum?’ Naomi called from the hall.

  ‘Go in, go upstairs!’

  Naomi

  He’s shouting and Mum’s telling me to go upstairs but my feet are glued to the floor, fused to the ground. My legs won’t move.

  Hot shame floods through me and the pressure is back, the heavy weight, something lodged over my heart, squeezing and pressing. A cloying taste as saliva bathes my mouth.

  His face is all screwed up and bits of spit fly out when he yells, and I wonder if he’ll hit me, if he’ll push past Mum and thump me.

  I think that would be right.

  He keeps jabbing his hand at me, pointing, accusing, looking past Mum. All the dirty names, raining like stones: bitch, cow, slag.

  He’s boiling over with rage, like he’ll explode.

  Mum is trying to talk and calm him down, but he just keeps shouting.

  I feel dizzy, like I’m going to fall over, then he turns and walks away a few steps and runs back again. ‘You’re dead,’ he shouts at me. ‘You’re fucking dead.’ And he picks up one of the big white cobbles at the edge of the drive and hurls it at the house and runs. I can’t see it hit from where I am, but there’s a clang as it strikes the lounge window, no smashing sound, and then I see it roll on to the path.

  I wish he’d broken the glass.

  Carmel

  My legs were weak. I shut the door and said, ‘Ignore him, he’s upset.’

  ‘He’s right, isn’t he? That’s what people think.’ Naomi went
upstairs, despite my calling her back. I sat down, waiting for my heart to stop racing.

  Lily’s brother. The poor kid. He’d have looked us up in the phone book probably, trudged around the houses where Baxters were listed until he found the right one. Full of rage and hot grief and missing his little sister. Screwed his courage to knock each time. To ask his question. Deliver his message. Was it him who daubed the shop?

  Phil wanted to tell the police, but I talked him out of it. ‘It’s hardly a crime. He loses his little sister, the family’s torn apart, and what can he do? Nothing but this.’

  ‘Turn vigilante.’

  ‘Come on, he called Naomi a bitch; it’s not exactly a cat nailed to the door, is it?’ I had a moment’s vertigo, the missteps that came every so often when I would think, How did we get to this? How surreal is this conversation?

  Phil winced and bent forward.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Indigestion,’ he muttered.

  ‘You never get indigestion. Do you want a Rennie?’

  ‘No.’ He straightened. ‘It’s going off.’

  ‘Perhaps you should see the doctor?’

  ‘Don’t fuss, Carmel.’

  Bloody cheek. ‘I’m not fussing, but it might be a good idea.’

  ‘Well, I’ve my next lot of blood results next week, so I’ll be there then, won’t I?’

  What if it was serious? I thought of my dad, a squirt of panic in my chest. ‘It’s great that they can pick these things up nowadays,’ I said, trying to reassure myself as much as Phil.

  ‘Don’t tell Naomi,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Naomi came in. She was so very pale. I had to get her outside more. She’d get rickets at this rate. Neither of us said anything.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Your dad’s got high blood pressure, he’s having it monitored.’

  ‘He’ll be all right, though?’ she said.

  ‘Course,’ Phil said.

  Naomi was four months old when my father died. Dropped dead, literally. A heart attack that felled him like a tree. Left him prone on the petrol station forecourt. He’d gone to refuel and use the automated car wash. A foggy October afternoon. He was only fifty-nine. Looking forward to retirement in the next few years. I suppose nowadays he’d have been on aspirin or statins already, his high risk identified in the annual check-up. Given advice on diet and exercise. Perhaps they’d have inserted a stent to widen the artery.

  I’m glad he never lived to see Mum get ill. And I’m glad I don’t have to tell either of them what Naomi has done and see the expression in their eyes.

  Naomi

  I keep thinking about Lily’s brother. I wonder how he felt about his sister. He’s much older, and a boy. Would he have played with her, given her piggybacks or taught her how to use the Xbox, or was he too busy with his own mates? Maybe she got on his nerves, always wanting him to watch her dress up and sing like Lady Gaga or whatever. Perhaps she was a spoiled, whiny little kid who told lies and got him into trouble. Or a tomboy who kicked a football about and did martial arts. Did he boss her about?

  Suzanne always had to be in charge. Whatever we did, it had to be her idea or she’d refuse to play. And if I carried on anyway she’d stop playing. Once there was a gang of us on holiday; we were camping by the coast on Anglesey, and Suzanne and I met a bunch of other kids and made a den for ourselves in the dunes. And we had this game where we all had to go and hide and when Suzanne blew her whistle we had to race back to the den like we were under attack, like we were in a war or something.

  Then I said we should take turns with the whistle. That’s all.

  And she just went back to the tent. We tried playing without her but the other kids said it wasn’t as good. They liked her bossing them about.

  And if I ever stood up to her and said, ‘We always do your ideas, why can’t we do mine?’ she’d just say hers were best and mine were stupid. And I’d hit her and she’d be glad because then she could go and tell on me.

  The things I see when I am awake are almost as bad as the things in my dreams.

  But it’s not just in my head; it’s real, it’s out there. You’ve only got to look at the TV, people being blown up and tortured, streets with rubble and lost shoes and dead bodies, bloody. Starving kids, and women being raped, and everyone just acts like that’s normal. The way of the world. Which is going straight down the toilet with global warming and animals losing their habitat and the ice melting and people without enough water to drink.

  The headlines in the paper are the same: no work, economies collapsing, murders, terrorist attacks. You have to walk round like you’re in a shell, sealed off from it, or you’d go barmy. It gets to me. It scalds like hot oil on bare skin. I try and avoid it now. But I can’t escape my own thoughts. This witch in my head, gloating, obscene. Cackling at me and forcing me to see all the dirty, sick things in life. And she’s got her nails in my brain, skittering against the inside of my skull.

  I’ve stopped trying to remember. I don’t think it’ll ever come back.

  The dreams I remember too clearly. They coat me like dust or tar. Last night there was me and this dead body, a woman, naked, and her skin all waxy and purple. I’ve killed her. I’m begging Suzanne to help me hide her before I’m found out, and Suzanne’s shouting at me, ‘How could you?’ And I know there isn’t much time and I’m digging with my hands, tearing grass out in cold lumps, breaking my nails and gouging the ground. Dread coiling through me like a snake. I roll her into the grave and I’m shovelling soil over her with my arms and she starts climbing out. I’m pushing her down, my hands on her face and her shoulder. She’s very thin and very strong. She has mottled white eyes like hard-boiled eggs and blood in her mouth.

  All day today I’ve had her in my mind. This dead woman. I should be thinking about Lily Vasey, about her being dead, not some zombie I’ve invented.

  Mum calls me downstairs. I go down because if I ignore her she comes up to fetch me. Ollie’s there. Suzanne’s gone to have her hair done. I don’t know if she realizes that whenever she leaves him here, Mum encourages me to play with him. Probably not.

  He’s a bit different every time he comes. He’ll be holding his hands or trying to grasp things, or making sounds he’s just discovered. He likes it if I get on the floor and let him lie on my stomach. He reaches for my hair.

  But I look at him today, lying there and chewing on this plastic dinosaur he has, and I don’t feel safe with him. The witch is whispering in my ear. I’m not to be trusted. He’s so small and vulnerable. A moment’s madness and his skull could break, crushed like an eggshell.

  ‘Pick him up,’ Mum says.

  What if I just snap, lose control? The possibility jolts through me. I shake my head. ‘I don’t feel so good.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Headache,’ I say. My hands itch. ‘I might go and lie down.’

  She sighs. ‘Can’t you just make an effort?’

  It is an effort, this is an effort, everything’s a fucking effort. Standing and blinking, breathing and keeping my thoughts hidden.

  Ollie bashes himself in the eye with a fist and starts to whimper. Mum scoops him up. ‘Take some paracetamol,’ she says to me, then she shushes him.

  I do as she says, swallowing the tablets with water as I look out of the kitchen window.

  There’s a sudden movement in the corner of the garden, shaking a bush there, and my skin tightens. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my bowels turn to water. It’s the corpse coming to find me, climbing out of the grave. The shock hurts my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and look again. A squirrel darts across to the back gate.

  I hold on to the sink, trembling.

  Mum’s getting Ollie’s lunch out. ‘You want to feed him?’ she asks.

  ‘No. I’m going to bed.’

  I don’t look at her, I don’t need to. I can imagine she’s exasperated with me again. Her lips’ll be pressed tight together. She m
ight even roll her eyes. But I can’t explain it to her. If I said it out loud – I might hurt him, Mum, there’s these awful pictures in my head, the things I could do – it would just make it all more real. I just want it to stop. I just want some peace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Carmel

  Almost three months after the accident and five weeks after Naomi had first appeared in the magistrates’ court, we returned there for the committal hearing. She was withdrawn for much of the time, barely responding to the scene around her, or even to us when we asked her something. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.

  At one point she stood up suddenly and said she was going outside. She looked panicky and her face was ashen. I got up too and she grabbed my arms.

  ‘We need to stay inside the building,’ Don said apologetically, ‘in case they call us.’

  Naomi was making a sort of rocking motion, like someone preparing to bolt.

  ‘I feel dizzy,’ she said.

  ‘It’s warm in here.’ I tried to downplay her reaction. ‘Let’s go to the ladies’.’ I was thinking she could wash her face, put cold water on the back of her neck and cool off.

  She continued to rock, looking to left and right.

  Phil stood up. ‘Come on.’ He put his arm around her. ‘Stretch your legs.’ He edged her along and they walked off down the corridor.

  Don shot me a sympathetic look and said, ‘It’s a stressful situation.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll get her some water.’

  By the time Phil had walked her round the building, she was calmer again. Back to being quiet and distanced. She drank some water.

  When she was finally called in, she gripped the sides of the dock so hard her knuckles were white. She confirmed her name and address and date of birth and the magistrate asked Don if he consented to the case being heard at Crown Court. That was about it.

  Afterwards Don had a quick meeting with us. He had a file which he patted as he spoke. ‘Now that we’ve got the full case papers, my job will be to see how we challenge their case. That means questioning everything. Can they prove Naomi was driving? Can they demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that her driving was dangerous? Can they present evidence that shows that her driving was the sole cause of the cyclist’s death? And on all those points we look for gaps, for absence of evidence, for weak areas. We introduce uncertainty, we query everything. Given what you’ve told me about the state of the vehicle, there will be very limited forensic evidence.’ He put his hand on the papers. ‘And there is no CCTV coverage included in here. The road traffic investigation unit estimate the car was doing forty-six miles an hour.’ In a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. ‘We will get our own experts in to consider that. Speeding of itself is neither dangerous nor careless. No evidence has been recovered indicating any mechanical fault.’