by Clare Boyd
The enticing lights of a city nightlife outside of the taxi window was a world I had no desire to be a part of while I had my daughter nestled next to me.
‘That was literally the best day of my whole life,’ she said. My stomach flipped over with surprise and love.
* * *
The train station was peppered with drunks and rowdy groups of revellers, and that same sense of insecurity came back to me about Rosie’s safety.
‘Keep up with me darling,’ I said, pulling her arm. ‘Come on, or we’ll miss the eight o’clock.’
‘Can I get a magazine?’
‘No, no, darling, we don’t have time.’
‘Please, Mum, I can get it with my own money?’
Feeling the creep of tiredness, I relented, knowing it would give me some time to read the newspaper if she was occupied.
‘Okay, quickly, we only have ten minutes.’
Just before we got to the checkout, she said, ‘Actually, Mum, I think I want the National Geographic one instead.’
‘Go on, then, quickly.’
I watched her go while I kept our place in the queue. She disappeared into the aisle where the children’s magazines were shelved. The seconds were ticking by towards eight. I let a suited man go in front of me.
And then a couple more minutes went by. I left the queue, my heart began to flutter out of rhythm as I made my way to the magazine aisle, expecting to see her knelt down, sifting through the bottom shelf, indecisive. The aisle was empty. I ran to the end, looking left and right frantically, right along the soft drinks section, left along the bestseller shelves. She was nowhere to be seen. My pulse throbbed in my throat and my head spun.
‘Rosie!’ I screeched. Strangers stared at me with a mixture of concern and suspicion.
‘Rosie! Rosie!’ I ran outside. ‘I’ve lost my daughter!’ I cried helplessly as I scanned the criss-cross of humans.
I ran back into the shop, and rushed towards an official person in purple uniform and described Rosie to him.
‘I didn’t see anyone.’ He rubbed at his a fuzzy moustache and looked at me blankly.
‘What do I do? Who do I talk to?’
‘Err.’ He looked to his equally gormless colleague.
‘I could check in the storeroom?’
‘What? Oh Jesus, what the hell would she be doing in the storeroom?’ I shouted, losing my composure. I ran out of the shop.
The various signs dotted around the train station blurred as I looked for an official person to talk to.
The information desk was at the other end of the station. By the time I got there, I was panting and I breathlessly bombarded the young woman with my garbled description of Rosie. Immediately she was on the tannoy. An echoey, electronic voice ricocheted around the station.
The wait was almost unendurable. A few minutes later, the crowds pushed out little Rosie. She ran towards me smiling, holding two magazines in the air.
‘I lost you, Mummy!’ she cried. A young woman in a purple uniform waved her away.
Relief didn’t register immediately.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ I yelled, gripping her shoulders.
Her face crumpled, ‘The girl in the shop got me another one from the cupboard. It’s for Charlotte.’ The pages of two National Geographic Kids magazines flopped open from her fingers.
‘Never ever, ever leave me like that again. Do you hear?’ I shouted, shaking my finger right up to her nose. A woman passing us frowned at me.
‘But you said...’
‘I didn’t say you could go wandering off without telling me, did I? You silly, silly girl!’ I was overreacting. She had been out of my sight for seven minutes. She was back safe. Let it go, I thought.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Oh, Rosie,’ I said, squeezing her too tightly to me. ‘It’s okay now,’ I said. ‘It’s over. You’re okay. Sorry I got cross. I was just in a panic.’
During the journey, the mood between us was forced. I was feeling low, although I was trying hard to hide it. I willed the train to go faster.
On the cold and foggy walk from the platform to the car park, I held her hand, which was floppy in mine.
‘Can I have my iPod?’ she asked as she belted herself into her seat at the back. Usually she would sit up at the front with me.
‘No, darling.’
‘Please?’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s only five minutes until we’re home.’
‘So?’
‘So, you don’t need to play a game.’
‘I promise to switch it off as soon as we’re home.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Please,’ she pleaded, edgy, antagonistic.
Like a dog about to fight, I bristled. ‘No.’
My nerves were frayed. The effort of our day came down on me like a ton of bricks. The surface of our moods had been glassy smooth, but our ongoing troubles lay deeper, churning underneath like a riptide beneath our smiles.
I turned the ignition.
‘Don’t start the car!’ she screeched. ‘Don’t start the car!’
‘Drop it. The answer is no!’ I barked.
‘Please. I just want five minutes. That’s all. What’s the big deal?’
I was entrenched. There was nothing she could say to change my mind. ‘Don’t ruin the lovely day we’ve had together.’
‘I’m not! I just want to play a game. That’s all.’
I clutched the wheel to quell the intense resentment that was worming like a parasite through my flesh. I couldn’t concede defeat. ‘No. And don’t ask me again.’
‘You’re so stupid!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs.
In an aggressive, unsafe manoeuvre, I swerved into a small driveway and slammed on the breaks. The car behind me beeped angrily. I didn’t care. My hands shook as I scrabbled frantically in my handbag for her iPod and I chucked it at her.
‘There you go! There you go, you little brat! I hope it’s worth it.’
‘Ow! It hit my leg.’
‘I try my best. I really do. I try my best to give you everything you want and it still isn’t good enough, is it? Why are you being like this to me? Why? Why?’ I ranted, hitting the steering wheel with one hand over and over again. I hated her. I hated myself. I hated us. There were no tears, just hot-faced loathing.
‘You look funny,’ she laughed.
It took all of my willpower to hold back the venom, to methodically push the handbrake down and pull the car out of the lay-by, to continue home.
‘Do you want to upset me? Is that it?’ I whined, a lump of desperation in my throat. I clicked on the indicator into Virginia Close and the feelings of inadequacy and regret clawed at my insides.
‘I don’t care.’
‘You are insatiable. I give and give and give and nothing is ever good enough.’
‘La, la, la, la, shut up, shut up, shut up,’ she sang from the back.
Anger flooded my bloodstream. In a split second, a mindless, animalistic ferocity took me over. Flipping, I rasped in a deep guttural booming voice, hurting my throat, ‘Go on then! You carry on like that and I’ll never take you on a day out ever, ever again!’
‘I don’t want to anyway. I wish I had a different mummy,’ she yelled, her voice nearer to my ear.
A surge of raw, reciprocal hatred rose up from my gut. My wrath knocked away barriers of intellect or reasoning. I stopped thinking, stopped feeling, stopped pretending, stopped holding back. Uninhibited malevolence shot through my clenched teeth, ‘That’s lucky then, because I’m not your real mummy!’
There was a hefty, savage silence.
My whole body quivered with shock and I grabbed at my throat with one hand as if strangling away the foul words that had already escaped, the car wobbled.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said quietly.
I pulled up outside our gates by the roundab
out, too stunned to speak again, too cowardly to turn back to look at her. I wished I had struck her instead. It would have been a lesser blow.
Neither of us moved to get out; an excruciating purgatory.
What had I done? How long I had kept the secret, how successfully, and now the spirits of that secret were howling around my head as though I had opened a chest of demons.
Eleven years ago, the hot flushes, the mood swings, the night sweats and the irregular periods hadn’t been considered abnormal symptoms of coming off the pill. When my periods had stopped completely, the doctor with the ear hair and untrimmed eyebrows had delivered his news, informing me of my diminished ovarian reserve and FSH count of over fifteen, informing me that I would never be able to conceive my own child.
‘There we go then,’ I had said to him across his wide desk.
‘It’s a lot to take in,’ the doctor had said, glancing over at the box of tissues on the mantle as though someone had died.
I had held my breath, holding in the desire to shout at this tweed-suited old man, irritated by his sad smile. Why was he sad, when I wasn’t? I had thought.
The memory was paralysing. Why had I not been sad? My hands were glued to the steering wheel.
Rosie’s deathly whisper punctured my eardrum. ‘It’s not true is it, Mummy?’
Powering my reluctant limbs into action, I climbed out of the car and round to open her door. The ghastliness of her whitened face was as dreadful as anything I had ever witnessed before in my life.
‘Of course it’s not true. I was just angry.’ I bent in to scoop her out of the car, just as I had when she was a baby, her face upturned to mine, the mass of me oppressive. Me, the vile mother. She, the frightened child.
‘You promise?’ she asked, her wide eyes rimmed red in horror.
‘It’s not true! Of course I’m your real mummy,’ I stuttered, the half-truth breaking my heart.
I lifted her up, and her legs encircled me, the weight of her almost bringing me to my knees.
Rosie’s chest heaved against my body in quiet sobs. ‘Why did you say it then?’ she asked, sounding utterly baffled.
‘I was just angry. So, so angry. You know when you’re angry you say things you don’t mean? Like when you say “I hate you, Mummy”, do you mean that when you say it?’
‘No, of course not!’ she cried.
‘And listen,’ I said, burying my head into her neck. Her hair smelled the same as it had from the first ever moment I had held her. ‘I should not have shouted at you like that. It was totally wrong and I am truly, truly sorry. Nobody should ever shout at you like that, whatever you might or might not have done. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded gravely, adding, ‘And I’m sorry for screaming, too.’ And she broke down again. The poor child would have no choice but to believe me. I was all she had.
Chapter Twenty-Two
TOP SECRET
* * *
I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. I’LL LEARN YOU A LESSON FOREVER. I DON’T CARE THAT YOU SAID SORRY. I WISH IT WAS TRUE. I HATE YOU MORE THAN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘Don’t eat this, will you?’ Mira said to Barry.
‘Why are you keeping it?’
‘Just in case.’
‘In case of what?’
‘In case we fancy it.’
‘You hate Battenberg cake.’
Mira couldn’t look at Barry. She knew he would be blinking wildly through his thick lens.
‘You’re not up to something are you, Mira?’
‘What could I possibly be up to?’
‘I don’t know, love.’ Barry kissed his wife on the top of her head as she read the newspaper.
‘Bye,’ she said, adding, ‘Don’t forget my glue-dots and the hoover bags.’
‘They won’t have any glue-dots in the hardware store.’
‘Go to the newsagents then.’
He left without responding. Mira knew he was unimpressed when she spoke to him that way. She didn’t really care. She wanted him out of the house so that she could get ready into her running kit.
Initially, she had been offended by Rosie’s rebuff, but in the four days this week that Rosie had run from her Mira had rationalised it. It was a hard thing for a child to admit that their mother might be hurting them. It wasn’t a rejection of Mira, per se, it was a natural reaction. Rosie was bound to be defensive, and Noah was just a silly little boy who followed his big sister without thinking for himself. Interesting, too, that neither of them had told their parents of how they ‘bumped into Mrs Entwistle’ every day.
So, Mira regarded her afternoon task as another part of her routine. She’d get there in the end – if there was somewhere to get to – and today might be that day.
They weren’t out of school until five o’clock on Thursdays. She regarded the other children’s outfits and chatter and random cartwheels, and she guessed the afterschool club had been gymnastics. In a world full of vulgarity and ugly sights, this vision of innocence was always a delight.
She noticed that the majority of children released from this club were girls. Noah would surely feel out of place. Mira thought it was rather strange that this strapping six-year-old boy would do gymnastics, and assumed Gemma used it as childcare rather than a response to his burning desire to do handstands. From her experience at Woodlands, this was typical of this sort of mother.
Rosie and Noah were last out. Their rucksacks bounced on their backs as they ran out of the gate. How pretty Rosie was, she reflected, surprised by this rise of affection for her.
As Mira jogged towards the point where they would meet, at the corner of the rugby pitch, she noticed that her breathing was less laboured when she said hello. It made her smile to herself, that the by-product of her do-gooding was added fitness. What goes around, comes around, she thought.
‘Come on Rosie, let’s go,’ Noah said quietly, frowning at Mira.
Rosie’s arm was being pulled by Noah, but her body didn’t follow, and Noah jerked back as though on elastic.
Mira stopped jogging and fell into step with them. ‘How was your day at school?’
Rosie looked up to Mira briefly. There were black rings around her eyes and her expression seemed guarded and suspicious. There was a change in her, Mira sensed.
‘Not good?’
‘School was fine,’ she said, almost shouting it, and then she hung her head. She twirled a section of her hair at her scalp, twisting it into a knot.
‘I wouldn’t do that, pet. You’ll only have to brush it one hundred and one times at bed,’ Mira said. Mira’s paternal grandmother would say this to her when she and Deidre visited her in Wales once a year.
‘I don’t ever brush my hair at bed time. I do it in the morning.’
‘You don’t do it. Mummy does it for you,’ Noah jibed.
‘Shut up,’ she snapped back, elbowing him.
‘You should do it yourself. You’re quite old enough. It makes all the difference in the morning. One hundred brushes at bedtime. One hundred brushes in the morning.’
‘You’ve got short hair.’
‘I do now. But when I was younger I had long hair down to my waist.’
‘Mummy won’t let me grow it any longer.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Mira said, although she knew that having waist-length hair was impractical for children, and the only reason she had been allowed to have it long when she was young was because her mother couldn’t be bothered to take her to the hairdressers.
‘My mum is super mean,’ she said, glancing up to Mira, checking for a reaction.
‘Is she?’
‘She’s not mean,’ Noah cried.
‘Why did the police come round then?’ Rosie asked.
Noah shrugged, but his little face was filled with fear.
Rosie jutted her head forward at her little brother and pulled her hand free of his. ‘She isn’t mean to you,�
�� she spat.
Mira sucked in her breath. Something had definitely happened. Not that Mira had heard any screaming since the weekend.
‘How about some Battenberg cake at mine?’ Mira asked, looking from Noah to Rosie, her heart racing in anticipation of Rosie’s reply.
‘No!’ Noah cried and ran off.
‘Yes, okay,’ Rosie said casually, and she took Mira’s hand.
The child’s touch sent goosebumps rippling up her arms.
‘I’ll just have to tell Harriet that I’m going over to Beth’s at number two,’ Rosie said.
‘What a sensible little girl you are,’ Mira said.
Rosie tugged her hand free, crossed her arms and hunched her shoulders as she walked. ‘But you can’t come into my house,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ Mira said. ‘I’ll meet you round at mine then in five minutes.’
‘Okay,’ she said and charged off through the hedge.
* * *
The cellophane on the cake shone on the table like a slab of gold. Mira didn’t want to unwrap it yet in case Rosie changed her mind. She wondered if Rosie’s nanny had believed Rosie’s lie.
Although the thought of Rosie lying sat uncomfortably with Mira – who believed herself to be an honest soul and encouraged it in others – she felt the end justified the means. A ribbon of thrill wormed through her insides at the prospect of Rosie opening up to her and confessing something that would confirm her suspicions.
The stripes of the tea cosy matched the pastels of the cake. With the smart plates, forks and tea cups laid out neatly, the table was a pleasing sight. The only niggle was whether it was right to serve tea in the kitchen, or whether the dining room would have been more appropriate. The piles of photographs were suddenly a potential embarrassment to her, and she jumped up to make sure the door was tightly closed. She had made slow progress with her album this week.
It was half past four. Barry would be back in an hour and a half, roughly. It still gave her time. Not that it mattered hugely if he found Rosie at his kitchen table. He liked children. He wouldn’t scare her. And Mira could tell him a little white lie about how their little tea party had come about.