by Clare Boyd
Twenty minutes or so away from my stop, I heard an unintelligible announcement on the tannoy and noticed that we had been at the same station platform for longer than we should have been. I asked the lady in front of me what the guard had announced.
‘Might be stuck here for a while.’
‘How frustrating,’ I said, feeling the delay as a personal attack.
School pick-up time was an hour away; I felt impatient and twitchy, eager to surprise Rosie at the school gates.
More than that, the stationary train seemed to have portent, a message in its refusal to carry me where I wanted to go.
The newspaper lost its appeal and I turned on my phone to call Harriet to ask her to be home, on standby, just in case.
‘No problem, Gemma,’ she replied, efficient and loyal as ever. ‘Anyway, Rosie promised to show me a special acrobatics routine she’d been practising today and I’d hate to miss that!’ she laughed.
I knew Harriet meant well, that she was showing me how dedicated she was to my children, proving to me that she was a nanny of excellence, which she was. But envy spread through me. She was referring to fun times with my daughter that I was not part of. And again, if this train didn’t move soon, she would be the first one to hug my daughter after school. I felt wretched for all the hours Harriet had spent with her that I had missed. And even worse, I knew that I hadn’t been psychologically capable of spending all those hours with Rosie performing those repetitive, thankless, relentless tasks of motherhood.
‘One more thing, Harriet. Rosie definitely said she was going to Beth’s yesterday afternoon, didn’t she? And not some other friend?’
‘Yes, she definitely said Beth. Why?’
‘No reason.’ Another phone call came through. ‘Sorry, Harriet, I have to get this, it could be work,’ I said.
‘Hello?"
Above my head, yellow letters moved across the information board with no information.
‘Hello, is this Mrs Bradley?’
‘Yes, speaking?’
‘Hello, this is DC Miles from Child Protection at Greyswood Police. Are you in a convenient place to speak?’
‘Child protection?’
I noticed the old man in the anorak look up from his phone.
‘Sorry, could you hold on for a second?’ I asked.
I stood up, leaving my seat to move to the corridor where I wouldn’t be overheard.
‘Hello?’
‘Yes, sorry to alarm you, Mrs Bradley, but we’ve had a call from one of your neighbours that we’re duty bound to follow up on and I’m afraid we’re going to need to speak to your daughter at school today.’
My mind blanked.
‘Hello, Mrs Bradley?’
I managed to make words come from my throat. ‘Sorry, we must have gone through a tunnel.’ I stared out at the platform, watching a man bite into a large Cornish pasty. ‘Could you repeat what you said?’
DC Miles repeated what she had said. Her words spun around my head and I tried to order them into a sentence that made sense.
‘Are you telling me we have to go through all this again?’
‘I understand that when the response officers visited your home on October sixteenth no further action was taken, is that correct?’
‘What has Mira said this time?’
‘We are not at liberty to give you details at this time.’
‘Does my husband know about this?’
‘We have been unable to reach your husband.’
I imagined his indignation.
‘Mira must have a vendetta against me.’
‘You understand that we have to follow-up on all referrals.’
‘I don’t give you permission to speak to Rosie at school without me there.’
‘I’m afraid, the allegation concerns you, so, myself and a social worker will be speaking to Rosie alone or with one of the teachers depending on what Rosie feels most comfortable with.’
This stranger had just called Rosie by her name. She didn’t know Rosie. How dare she call her Rosie?
‘I don’t give you permission to speak to her at all.’
‘Please let me reassure you that we’ll make her feel as comfortable as possible. We’ll just have a quiet word with her before she pops off home. It won’t take longer than fifteen minutes or so.’
‘No. This is not going to happen.’
Two young teenagers in school uniform pushed open the door from the platform. I thought of little Rosie being interviewed alone with her tartan skirt pulled over her knees, about how scared she would be.
‘I understand this must be very worrying for you, Mrs Bradley, but we only have your daughter’s safety in mind.’
‘That’s what PC Connolly said when she barged into our home the other week. But what about all the stress you are causing for Rosie? If you care so much about her, how can you put her through all this?’
‘With regards to the allegations that have been made, to be honest, we don’t need your permission to speak to your daughter,’ DC Miles said. She spoke softly, as though tired, her power cumbersome.
I knocked my head back, as though knocking back a shot, and blinked up at the ceiling of the train to stop the gathering tears. I was not going to be weak. I was going to fight this all the way.
‘This is outrageous.’ I kicked at the train door with my foot, feeling the pain shoot up my leg and into my teeth.
‘We will be in touch shortly.’
‘You know my husband and I’ll be making a formal complaint after this is all over. You are making a terrible mistake and after you speak to my daughter, you’ll realise that.’
‘As I said, we will be in touch, Mrs Bradley.’
DC Miles hung up.
My hands were shaking violently. They were barely coordinated enough to grip my phone.
My handbag and my newspaper were on the seat as I had left them.
The two teenagers who had jostled past me had joined our carriage. They whispered and giggled at the far end.
When the man in the blue anorak glanced up at me again, I guessed he would see a change in me.
The world and everyone in it felt like an enemy. I gathered up my belongings and went out into the corridor again to call Peter.
As I listened to Peter’s ring tone repeat, I remembered he would be out on site today.
Giving up, I called the school. I was matter-of-fact with Clare the receptionist. ‘There’ll be a couple of police officers coming in to talk to Rosie after school today and I just wanted to confirm that this has been cleared by me,’ I said.
When I hung up, I put my palms to my cheeks and felt the hotness.
Humiliation pushed through my body right into my fingertips, hot under my nail beds.
Please train, move, I thought, please start moving. I need to get to my daughter. I need to protect her. Please, if there is a God up there, please help me.
The tannoy fired up again, the response to my pleas ignored: ‘Due to an electrical fault on the train, please could all passengers move off the 14.02 train to Hazelway and wait on the platform for further information. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to your journey.’
I wanted to scream. Who could I talk to about the delay? Might there be a guard who could shed some light, get things moving? Might there be a complaints line for me to call? Was there a manager I could shout at?
I piled off the train with the rest of the passengers, who began to sigh and text.
The guard I found to complain to ignored me as if I was invisible. The message board delivered no news in response to my insistence that it should. The other passengers stared blankly at my gesticulations and ‘can you believe this?’ eye-rolling. The complaints line put me on hold until I gave up. The rail website flashed me a red exclamation mark. It dawned on me – more slowly than it had on many of the other passengers seemingly – that there was nothing I could do.
I leant against a cold wall and I stared across the tracks, at nothing in partic
ular, deciding that perhaps this delay was fate. My heart thumped; the rumble of a panic attack. The bustle of an over-packed train platform was like a buffer, like the padding on the walls of a cell, protecting me from myself. What would I be doing at Rosie’s school? Shouting at everyone, pacing outside the door? Exacerbating the situation? And if I was at home? Would I be cleaning and organising? Using the time to get started on the nursery? Pacing some more? Smashing Mira’s windows? Wherever I was in the world, I was utterly powerless until they had finished talking to her. The tension of the wait for the train stretched every minute into some unbearable endurance test. I focussed with tunnel vision on staying sane, on keeping it together, so that I could get home to Rosie in one piece. She needed me and I berated myself for not being there.
Chapter Thirty
Mira put two pieces of bread in the toaster. She didn’t notice the smell of burning until it was too late and Barry’s arm shot around her and pressed the release button. Two blackened slices popped out.
‘Whoops. I forgot to turn it down after the potato farls last night,’ Mira said.
‘Mind on other things?’
‘The foxes got in last night,’ she said bitterly. ‘Hancock’s gone.’
Barry sighed heavily. ‘I’ll fix the coop, again.’
‘They come in through the Bradleys garden you know.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do, it’s that gap at the bottom of their hedge. They come in through the woods.’
‘Do you want me to fence it up?’
Fearful it would stop Rosie coming in too, she quickly stamped on that idea. ‘No, no. You’re right. They’d come in somehow anyway.’
‘The less we have to do with that lot next door now the better, I say.’
‘You’d have been happy to leave Rosie to suffer, I suppose, would you?’ she muttered tetchily. The toast burnt her fingers as she removed it from the toaster.
Barry opened the window that backed onto the Bradleys’ hedge to let the smoke out. ‘I never liked that you were messed up in their business, that’s the truth.’
Aggressively, Mira scraped at the charcoal layer. Black speckles sprayed over the work surface until she was left with four brittle broken pieces of toast. They were still edible. She was not going to waste two fresh slices from the loaf.
‘If Gemma’s arrested, it’ll prove I was right.’
‘That’d be a terrible shame, love,’ he tutted.
‘Can’t take it back now, can I?’ she asked doubtfully.
Barry continued crunching loudly on his burnt toast. A few of the black crumbs had made it onto his lips. She watched them suspended there as he chewed. They made him look foolish.
And then he said, ‘My dad used to chuck books at my head when I got my spellings wrong. Every word. Clunk.’ He mock-hit the side of his own head, and scrunched up his nose, twice, which shifted his glasses up and down, like he was pressing the arms behind his ears for comic effect. He was not laughing. This facial twitch of his was becoming more frequent, like a nervous tick. Mira felt guilty about sniping at him. She wanted to tell him how cruel his father had been.
‘Times have changed,’ she said instead.
Barry poured his tea from his cup into his saucer and back again to cool it. He hadn’t done this in a while. Ironically, it was something his father had done when he was alive.
‘It can’t be hot, it’s been sitting there ten minutes,’ Mira said.
Barry took a small sip, and then gulped the tea down as though it was water. ‘Rosie is a strange child, I’ll say that for her.’
This offended Mira. He didn’t seem to understand how connected she felt to Rosie now. Rosie’s disclosure had made her feel special, as though Rosie had trusted her, chosen her above everyone else to confide in.
‘Gemma’s the problem, not Rosie.’
‘So you keep saying, love.’
‘Don’t be fooled by her nice appearance.’
‘Appearances make no difference to me.’
A pang of doubt shot through her. ‘You really think I did the wrong thing?’ she asked meekly.
‘Don’t you worry. Any decent citizen would have done as you have,’ he stated flatly.
‘Thanks,’ she sighed, relieved.
She took a napkin and wiped away the burnt bits from his lips. ‘Rosie will thank me one day,’ Mira said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Minutes after I had boarded a new train, finally, after over an hour of fraught waiting, DC Miles’ number flashed up on the screen.
‘Hello DC Miles,’ I said, haughtily, waiting for the grovelling apology.
I stopped in the cyclists’ carriage, letting the throng pass me into the Quiet Zone of this new train.
‘Hello Mrs Bradley. Are you home yet?’
‘My train has been delayed but I’m on my way now.’
‘Well, okay, we’ve spoken to Rosie,’ she paused, ‘and because of what she’s said, we want to do a video interview right away.’
‘What has she done to her?’ I demanded, immediately assuming that Rosie had implicated Mira. Is that where she had been yesterday? With Mira? Was that really possible? My heart began to race. It was all happening too fast. I couldn’t keep up.
‘Rosie’s told me some things that I’m concerned about and we need to get a bit more information from her.’
‘Why can’t you tell me what she’s said?’ My stomach was turning over and over with fear.
‘Again, I’m very sorry, but because it concerns you, that isn’t possible.’
I froze. ‘What do you mean it concerns me?’
‘As I said, we can’t give you more information at this time.’
What did Rosie say? She must have got muddled and said something wrong by mistake. ‘She can’t go through this without me. You have to wait until I get home. I need to see her. She needs me.’
‘Your nanny is here and has kindly offered to take her to the interview room and then return her home and wait for your husband’s return.’
‘But I haven’t been able to get hold of Peter!’ I cried desperately.
‘Harriet has offered to stay with her as long as necessary and wanted me to tell you that Noah is staying at his friend’s house tonight.’
Something inside me collapsed.
‘Oh my God. It’s going to be horrible for her. Oh my God.’ I clamped my hand over my mouth. I didn’t want this woman to hear my distress.
A young cyclist began to stare. My focal point became his blue eyes, as though he and I were friends, as though his steady attention might provide some stability.
DC Miles voice spoke to me from some faraway place, ‘Are you okay, Mrs Bradley? Are you with anyone right now? I feel it is important you get hold of someone who can support you, is that possible? To call someone? A friend or a family member?’
‘Oh my God. I don’t know. Oh my God. I feel a bit faint. I just can’t believe that I’m stuck here like this.’
The cyclist disappeared into the next carriage.
‘Please focus. I think it is important that you call someone. Can you think of someone to call?’
The electric doors beeped open and the cyclist returned with a plastic glass of water. I wanted to hug him for his kindness. My grateful smile was probably more like a grimace as I took the cup from him. The cool water soothed me.
‘Yes, I’ll call Peter. I’ll call Peter. He’ll know what to do. I’ll call Peter.’
Peter answered straight away in his clipped I’m-an-important-property-consultant tone of voice. ‘Hello. How can I help?’
‘Peter, you’re not going to believe it...’ I stopped to expand my chest as far as it would go to find enough air to talk. There didn’t seem to be enough air.
‘Gemma?’
‘Sorry, I’m finding it difficult to breathe.’
‘What’s happened, Gemma? Is the baby okay?’
‘Yes... It’s not that...’
I tried to recount DC Miles
’ information to Peter, but I was barely coherent. He asked me again and again to go back and fill in the gaps before he finally understood what was happening.
The train pulled into the next station. The cyclist lifted his bike out of the carriage. I smiled at him, wishing he could have stayed with me.
‘It’s okay,’ Peter said. ‘I’m at the Surbiton site today so I can get home quickly. I’ll get hold of Harriet and meet her at this interview room place and bring Rosie home.’
‘Mira must’ve accused me of something terrible, I just know it.’
‘Well if she has, then Rosie will put them straight, won’t she?’
‘What if she gets confused and says something she doesn’t mean?’ What if she tells them she can see rage in my eyes? What if she’s the one who senses my notional hand raised and poised to strike? What if she is calling out to them for help?
‘You’re getting ahead of yourself.’
‘Peter, I’m not feeling too good and there’s nowhere to sit.’
‘You’re pregnant, Gemma, you need to find somewhere to sit.’
‘Yes, no, I don’t know. The train is full.’ I slumped down to the floor and rested my head on my knees. ‘I’m okay now. Honestly. I’m okay.’
‘Darling, you’re almost home. Get a cab from the station, promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘We’ll sort this out. I love you. See you at home. I love you,’ he repeated.
‘Love you too,’ I said vaguely, wondering if I said it before or after I had hung up.
* * *
When I returned home forty-five minutes later, Peter and Rosie were not there.
Like a lost old lady who has been told to wait until her relatives rescue her, I sat in silence, with my handbag on my lap, willing them to come clattering through the door, desperate for my phone to ring with news of their imminent arrival.
I didn’t hear the knock, but somehow I was at the door.
I didn’t open it, but somehow it was open.
‘Hello, my name is DC Miles, we spoke on the phone? And this is DC Bennett. Myself and my colleague need to come in if that’s okay.’