Am I Guilty

by Jackie Kabler

  ‘Thea? No, this isn’t a good time … what?’

  I rolled my eyes. Great timing, Greg’s baby mama, I thought, with a flash of anger. On the floor, Oliver was still muttering, still apologizing.

  ‘I’m so sorry, so, so sorry. It wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t …’

  Still feeling sick and shaky, I moved Olaf gently to my lap and pulled Sienna closer, trying to listen to both Greg and Oliver at the same time.

  ‘Thea, you’re not making sense. Nell said what? She did what?’

  ‘I would never have done it, I would never have thought of doing it, Mum; it was supposed to make me feel better; she said it would …’

  ‘She said who made her do it? What the fuck, Thea, are you serious?’

  ‘I like cats. I liked Hamish, I like Olaf, but it’s just when I get mad and I don’t know how to deal with it, she said it would help …’

  What? What did he say? I released Sienna suddenly, handed Olaf to her, then stood up and walked to where Oliver was huddled on the floor, still rocking.

  ‘Oliver, what are you talking about? Who said it would help?’

  ‘Gosh. What’s happened here?’

  Flora, her voice cheerful, face still flushed from her run, trainers dangling from her right hand by their laces, was standing in the lounge doorway, looking from one of us to another, her smile fading as she took in the scene.

  ‘Is … is everything OK?’

  Her tone was hesitant now, a puzzled frown creasing her brow, and she dropped her trainers on the floor, her left hand moving to her right wrist, her fingers rubbing at the flesh.

  ‘Hang on, Flora,’ I said. ‘Oliver—’

  ‘Annabelle. That was Thea. I need to talk to you, urgently …’

  Greg interrupted, stepping towards me, looking from me to Flora. He had a panicked, frightened expression on his face that I couldn’t understand, and I looked at him for a moment, perplexed, then decided he could wait.

  ‘In a minute,’ I said fiercely, then turned back to Oliver.

  ‘Olly – are you saying that hurting Olaf … killing Hamish too, was somebody else’s idea? Whose, for goodness’ sake?’

  My son raised his head, his eyes pink and puffy. And then he lifted a shaky hand and pointed. Pointed straight at Flora.

  PART THREE

  40

  FLORA

  Three months later

  I didn’t realize I was probably a psychopath until I went to university. I’d always known I was a little bit different to other kids I knew, never really had close friends growing up. But I didn’t realize I was that different until I started at Northampton Uni, doing my English and Psychology degree, and there it suddenly was one day, on the big screen in front of me in a crowded lecture theatre – a checklist of psychopathic personality traits. A checklist of my personality traits.

  Superficial charm

  Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

  Pathological lying

  Cunning/manipulative

  Lack of remorse or guilt

  Lack of empathy

  Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

  The list went on, but by then I was no longer listening to the lecturer, that weedy little man with the oversized glasses and bad breath who had just opened my eyes to what I was. I had all of those traits, to some degree or other, and while this realization might have horrified some people, it didn’t really bother me at all. It was a relief, more than anything, an explanation of why I was the way I was, why I’d done the things I’d done. My reaction was more like: ‘Ohhhhhhhh!’ – another sign of my psychopathy, maybe.

  After that lecture I went online, read more about it. Apparently, about one per cent of the population has psychopathic tendencies, but not all become criminals, murderers, social outcasts – far from it, many control and channel their personality traits, using them in careers where having a lack of morality and little empathy could be a bonus for those wanting to get ahead in tough businesses like finance, the military, or politics. All psychopaths are different, after all, just like ‘normal’ people. It isn’t one size fits all.

  I started thinking back, then, trying to analyse my childhood, to pinpoint when it had first started to show itself. As a child … and I can say this now, after the therapy I’ve been having over the past months, the counselling sessions, the healing conversations … as a child, I was abused. I can’t think too deeply about it, not yet, maybe not ever. But I’d opened up about some of it. Told them about the times when as a seven- or eight-year-old my father, on one of the rare times he was actually home, would handcuff me to a bed, and then bring his friends in.

  They would hurt me, those men, as they took their turns, as they huffed and humped on top of me, causing me such unimaginable pain that I could still feel it sometimes, even now, when I woke in the dark in the early hours, sweating and aching. I tried, so hard, to stop them, always fought back, despite their size and strength; and the scar on my right wrist was testimony to that, my badge of honour, my reminder that I never gave up, the handcuffs digging in as I struggled against them, the cold metal cutting into my skin.

  My therapist asked me why my mother didn’t know what was going on, why I didn’t tell her. But the fact was that I think my mother did know. She just chose to ignore what was happening to me, her career and life outside our home far more important to her. She didn’t care, my mother. Didn’t love me. Neither of them did. Maybe they were psychopaths too, who knows?

  And so I didn’t love them either, and as soon as I could I made my escape. After I left for Northampton, I simply never went home again. I used to tell people I made an annual trip home, to catch up with ‘the olds’, but it wasn’t true. I never saw them again. I never asked them for money either, from the day I left, working my way through university with bar jobs and waitressing, leaving my childhood behind me.

  I thought about going back, once or twice. Thought about punishing them, for what they’d done to me. But by then I’d moved on, mentally as well as physically. Started to heal, maybe. What good would it have done, going back, raking up the past? And I’d caused enough damage already, over the years, because of them.

  I’d coped, you see, with the abuse, the lack of love, in what I later realized was an extremely psychopathic way. I started to hurt people, like my father had hurt me. Not sexually, I don’t mean that. I’d never do that, not to anyone. Even psychopaths have standards.

  But because my abusers were too strong for me to control, I began to control what I could. Smaller, weaker things. Insects at first – what a cliché of a psychopath I was, I now realized, pulling the wings off butterflies! Crouching in the back garden, toying with my prey, loving the sense of power it gave me. Then a hamster, given to me by a well-meaning neighbour who always saw me playing alone and was worried I was lonely. It lasted a week, before being crushed under the wheel of my mother’s car as she left for work one morning – a double whammy, that one, a carefully crafted ‘escaped’ pet, its life beautifully snuffed out, and the horror on my mother’s face as she heard my screams and was forced to scrape the furry mess from her rear wheel, the spatters of it from her bumper, creasing her perfectly tailored black suit and smearing her powdered cheek with blood.

  I even enjoyed the planning, the thought and care that went into hurting, into killing these animals. The knowledge that I’d planned so well that nobody would ever know I was behind it. Another psychopathic trait, I later discovered, and why I was a psychopath and not a sociopath – they were messier creatures, emotionally unstable, impulsive, lacking in patience. Psychopaths make fewer mistakes. I looked down on sociopaths, and even as I realized this I was amused by it. It was a bit like an alcoholic looking down on a drug addict, wasn’t it?

  The sexual abuse stopped when I got to sixteen. I was stronger then, fitter, less easy to control, and, of course, by then I was legal too, wasn’t I, so where was the fun in that for them? But the damage was done.

  I managed to suppre
ss the memories, the fear, for months at a time, as I finished secondary school and moved on to uni, but then something would happen, a scene in a film, a throwaway comment from a friend, and I would be back there, shivering on that bed, kicking and squirming, rubbing my wrists raw as the next one forced his way into me.

  And so, somebody, something would have to get hurt. An anorexic found her power by controlling everything she put into her body; a self-harmer did it by cutting. For me, it was about controlling – not myself, but others.

  After the hamster, though, things changed. As I watched my mother trying to pick the remains of the squashed, dead animal from her pristine paintwork, I realized that this was what gave me the real sense of power. Who cared about a hamster’s life, after all? What I’d done that day was to make my mother into a killer. It was she who had driven over it, after all, not me.

  After that day, whenever I felt the panic, the compulsion, the need to hurt, I simply got somebody else to do it for me. At seventeen, babysitting for a neighbour, I got the nineyearold son to break his younger sister’s legs. She had these angel wings, left over from a school nativity play, and he persuaded her they were magic – that if she put them on, and jumped out of her bedroom window, she’d be able to fly. I was good with kids – that old psychopath charm, I suppose, they always adored me – and it was so easy to tell him what to do, and then to act horrified when he did it perfectly, and she jumped.

  I still remember the delicious snap of bone, the rush of power it gave me, the panic on his face as he tried to explain what he’d done to his parents, the fear as he looked at me, remembering how I’d threatened to kill him if he ever told the truth. I was good at that too, the threats. They never told, not ever. Well, not until now.

  I wondered for a moment what had gone wrong. I’d changed tactics in recent years, stopped the threats, used charm instead. Made them love me so much they’d do anything to protect me. But had I gone too far, with Nell and Oliver? I pondered that for a moment, then shrugged. What did it matter now, anyway? I’d had more than enough successes, inflicted more than enough pain for one lifetime, hadn’t I?

  It had gone on and on. At uni, I persuaded a desperately unhappy fellow student to commit suicide, an almost comically easy one to pull off, for everyone knew he was on the edge. Why would they suspect pretty, distraught little Flora of – metaphorically, of course, he died of an overdose – pushing him off it? Pathological liar – big tick on the psychopath list.

  By the time I left Northampton, though, and started working, I was pretty much in control. A couple of years and I began to wonder if my past could actually be left behind me. I was happy, probably for the first time ever – work that kept me busy and interested, money in my pocket, casual boyfriends, a social life when I wanted it.

  When I got the job with Thea I was in a good place, and I stayed there for nearly two years. Thea was good to me, and good for me. I was, for the first time in my life, part of a family. Valued, respected. Loved, even. Even a psychopath can love. Well, I could – a form of love, anyway. Children, especially, were so easy to love, and so loving in return, and Nell and I became … buddies, friends. She trusted me, trusted me implicitly, and her love for me was so sweet and pure that it stirred something inside me. I loved her back, in my way, and even though I ended up using her, using her horribly, that love never went away. So yes, Nell, Thea, even Isla, eventually. I was part of something.

  It was the same later on, at Annabelle’s. More love, more friendships. I’d never thought it would happen, that someone like me could have a life like that, have those feelings, and it made me feel almost normal. Made me feel happy. I even had Rupert, for a while, although now that I looked back, I realized he’d probably only started sleeping with me to hurt Thea. He didn’t love me, did he? He used me too, just like all the other men, the ones I’d tried to forget. The ones I had forgotten, to an extent. Strange, how it was only older men who turned me on, though, when it was older men who had damaged me so badly, wasn’t it? I still hadn’t got to the bottom of that one.

  But in general, back then, I was content. Things were good. And then they all turned bad again.

  One morning, when Zander was about eight months old, a letter from my father arrived. A letter, to tell me that my mother had died, cancer taking hold and killing her in the space of six months. Immediately, everything flooded back, the old pain searing through my veins. I had cut off all contact with my family when I’d decided to cut them out of my life, and I had no idea how he had tracked me down to Cheltenham. I destroyed the letter, of course, didn’t attend the funeral, never replied to my father’s plaintive appeal to put the past behind us, and I thought I could carry on as before, carry on being happy, carry on with my new life, where I was good and useful and valued.

  I couldn’t, of course. And so, yes, I did what I did. I did what I needed to do, to heal my pain, to regain control. I needed to hurt somebody, and Zander was the obvious choice, the easiest target. It sounds sick, to others, I know that. I couldn’t help that though – others would always react how they would react. That wasn’t my problem. It was just something I had to do, the only way to get back on track.

  So I planned it, and it worked, so beautifully. I waited until the next time Thea was drunk, and then I made Nell put Zander back out in the car, and then I went running out to find him, to bring him in, and pathologically lied my little socks off about the whole thing.

  But this was the thing, the thing that made me feel like I was maybe not such a bad psychopath as I had been before. The thing that made me think my time at Thea’s had somehow healed me a little, if that was even possible. We’re not supposed to show remorse, you see, or guilt, us psychopaths. Or to have empathy. We’re not supposed to care. But after I found Zander, after I carried that tiny corpse inside … it killed me.

  When I saw him, when I picked up his little dead body, and felt its heat, and knew that he was gone, I would have done anything, anything, to bring him back, to turn the clock back just a few hours. Anything to take the grief and agony away from Thea, from Nell. It was like a physical pain, a pain that no painkiller could touch. And it had carried on, that pain. It was still there even now. And that was remorse, wasn’t it? Or guilt? Or something?

  ‘Miss Applegate.’

  A nurse had slid unnoticed into my room, wheeling her little trolley with its dishes of coloured pills.

  ‘Claire. How are you?’

  I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and as she checked her list, scribbling something on it with her silver pen, I turned to look out of the big bay window to the left of my chair. It was nearly five o’clock, the weather warm for May, the sunshine still streaming in. Outside, a couple of residents were playing boules on the lawn, and their laughter drifted in through the open window.

  ‘You should join them, sometime, Flora love. Weather’s been glorious today,’ Claire said, as she held out a little paper cup of water along with my bowl. ‘Do you good. Perk you up. These happy pills will help, definitely. But your depression needs other things to help it too. Fresh air, sunshine. Nature’s medicine. You should go outside. Promise me you’ll think about it?’

  I nodded, but there was a hollow sensation in my chest now, my body sore and stiff, my scar throbbing. I was tired, so very, very tired, but Claire was smiling at me, and I suddenly didn’t want to let her down, wanted to give her the answer she needed to hear. Wanted to please her.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow, Claire. Maybe tomorrow,’ I said.

  41

  THEA

  ‘Daddy will be here in a few minutes, Nell. Run and get your things, darling.’

  Nell looked up from her iPad, on which she was playing some sort of fashion, dressing up game, and grinned.

  ‘OK. What are you going to do tonight?’

  ‘Annabelle’s coming round. I’m going to cook, and then we’re going to talk about the show.’

  ‘OK. Sounds nice.’

  She put the tablet carefully to one
side, jumped up and ran from the room, high-fiving me as she passed, making me laugh. I was doing a lot more laughing recently. Loads of it actually. Everything seemed brighter these days, colours more vivid, music sweeter, the sunshine warmer. It was as though I’d been trapped in a long, dark tunnel for so many months, with no prospect of anything but more darkness ahead, and now suddenly I was out in the world again, and it was a joyous place, full of promise.

  Nell was a different child these days, the burden of guilt finally taken from her slender shoulders, her angry, tearful outbursts a thing of the past, for good I hoped. After that dreadful day – dreadful, and wonderful in equal measure, I often thought now, because it was the day everything finally made sense, the day the truth was finally exposed – she’d gone into a residential mental health care unit for six weeks, a wonderful, transformative centre near Oxford where she stayed Monday to Friday, going to school classes and undergoing treatment and activities, and coming home to me at weekends.

  Rupert and I had been terrified at first that she’d be prosecuted, forever labelled a child murderer like the killers of James Bulger, but after the police had carried out their investigation, they’d decided that she hadn’t been in charge of her actions that day – that she had been coerced, forced to do something terrible, but that it hadn’t been her fault. She was so young, and so vulnerable, a victim too, just as much as Zander had been. The revelations had been enough, though, for the charges against me to be dropped, and for the newspapers and social media to go crazy yet again, my status changing overnight from the worst mother in Britain to the victim of a psychopathic monster.

  That’s what they dubbed Flora, now. Annabelle had described in great detail to me, to the police too, what had happened on that last day– how Oliver had turned to Flora, pointing at her, just as I was telling Greg on the phone what Nell had said. And how Flora had literally crumpled, slowly collapsed onto the floor, ‘like a teddy bear that’s been dropped’, Annabelle said, and had lain there silently for a full minute, and then had begun to scream.