by Kate Simants
Complicated wasn’t the word Mae would have used, but he let it go. His phone buzzed on the desk, and flipping it over he saw it was Nadia calling. He frowned – she never called him when she was at work – but silenced it anyway. Gestured for Cox to continue.
‘I told Jodie I was worried about something I’d found,’ Cox went on, ‘and she wanted to know what, obviously, and I decided not to tell her the details of it and she was so angry, said I was monopolizing the information on Ellie’s life. It was the last time I saw her. But then a few weeks later—’
‘Wait,’ Mae said. He didn’t ordinarily interrupt the flow like this, but this was news to him. ‘I don’t remember you mentioning this argument between you and Jodie Arden.’
Cox frowned. ‘No? I mean, you wouldn’t call it an argument exactly, more of a disagreement—’
‘Who knew about that disagreement?’
‘No one, I don’t think. But that’s not what I wanted to—’
‘Did Ellie know?’
‘No, of course not—’
‘Christine?’
‘What? No, I don’t think … actually, yes. I think so, I think I mentioned it. I was calling her a lot at the time, trying to get her to reconsider, to let me speak to Ellie. But here’s the thing, a few weeks later, I got a fax from Rana Filipovic, who I’d tried to meet when I was in Bosnia.’
Mae made a note. ‘And what did she say?’
Spreading his hands, Cox said, ‘She wanted to come clean. She did have some information: she sent over all the documents she had. But the big thing was … do you need to answer that?’
Mae looked down at his phone. It was Nadia, again. He got up, suddenly aware that something was wrong. ‘I need to take this, sorry. Stop the tape a second, Kit.’
The first thing he heard when Nadia’s call connected was enough to tell him that this was bad news. Properly bad. It was an ambulance siren, and she was shouting over it.
‘You need to get here right now,’ she was saying. ‘She’s hurt, Ben. I mean, she’s really hurt.’
‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘Slow down,’ he said, breaking into a run. Behind him, the door to the suite opened and Kit called out to him, but he didn’t stop. ‘Hurt how? What happened?’
‘Just come. The hospital.’
Kit, shouting now, ‘Sarge? What’s happened?’
Without pausing to turn, he hollered back, ‘Bear. She’s in hospital.’
He flew out into the car yard, sending a score of pigeons airborne. He chose a car at random, shook the handle. Locked. He tried another, jamming the phone between shoulder and ear.
‘Tell me what’s happened.’
But the voice he heard next wasn’t Nadia’s. It was from further away, and it just said, ‘Mama? Mama?’ And it had to be Bear, but it wasn’t possible because it was Bear’s voice from five, six years ago, a little girl’s voice, frightened and uncertain and very, very small.
‘Mama? Whev babby?’
Mae stopped. Dead centre of the car yard, with one arm through a jacket sleeve, the rest of it hanging behind him.
‘Why is she talking like that?’ he said.
‘He’s coming, baby,’ Nadia said, a sob catching at the end of it. Then, to him, ‘You are coming, right? I can tell her you’re coming?’
The double doors into the station swung open and Kit was there.
‘Keys,’ she said, holding them up as she ran. ‘Bay 7.’
They slammed the car doors in unison and were out of there in seconds.
‘We’ll get you there,’ Kit said as she flicked on the blues and twos and floored it up the Boston Manor Road.
68.
Ellie
The woman at the school was called Rana. She had been businesslike when she came to the phone, summoned by the person who originally answered because she was the only person in the building who spoke English. But then I’d told her why I was calling, although I hardly knew: my boyfriend had called her, and I thought his call must have been about me, but now he was missing. I didn’t even know what I was asking her: the whole story came out of my mouth in a tumble, disjointed and crazy-sounding. But she had listened until I stopped, then she asked me to Skype her instead.
She burst into tears the moment the video call connected.
And after that, across a crackly connection that cut out four times in the course of the five-minute call, her pace changed entirely. She wouldn’t talk on the phone, she said: I must go, straight away, to see them. She had to show me what she’d shown Matthew. She looked up the flight then and there, insisted on paying for it. I just had to get to Heathrow for 12.25. I’d wanted to tell her I couldn’t. Me, fly, alone? No way. I just couldn’t. You’d understand if you knew me, I wanted to say. It’s not possible.
But Siggy was there. She was listening. When I was almost too fearful to stay on the phone at all, she held my hand steady. When Rana told me what to do, Siggy fortified me. It was Siggy who agreed that yes, I could do that, I could go out there today, if that’s what was needed. It was Siggy who raised me from my chair and lifted my feet.
We were going to find the answers. And we were doing it together.
My mother, who I trusted above all others, had lied to me.
I waited for my stop, eyes defocused, my mind returning again and again to a single point. Not to Matt, not even to the police outside my home, but to my mother’s face in that picture of Bernadette’s. Holding that baby. So obviously, utterly in love with that little child. The edges of the two of them so permeable, like their meniscuses could touch and that would be it, they would be consumed back like mercury into one pure, complete, perfect whole.
The tube went into a tunnel and the window I had been staring through became a black mirror. I looked away.
*
The noise, the activity when I emerged onto the concourse of Heathrow almost broke my resolve. Hundreds, thousands of people, rushing and queueing. Fast, bright, loud. I shrank, frozen. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t fly, who was I kidding?
I turned on my phone, and two minutes later, Mum rang.
I let it ring, five seconds, and I saw the future. She would listen, she would explain. I would go back to her. I would stay the same.
I answered. ‘Mum.’
‘Oh thank fuck, Ellie! Where have you been? You have to come. We need to talk.’
‘No.’
She let out a laugh, before she realized I wasn’t joking. ‘Ellie. I’m not asking.’
‘Why didn’t you send our letters, Mum?’
She was silent for such a long time that I thought she’d hung up. ‘Mum?’
‘Because there are things you can’t understand, Ellie.’
‘Try me.’
‘We can talk about it. OK? If you really want to, we can. But you have to come. Now. I mean it.’
‘Well, I mean it, too. I’m not coming. I have to go somewhere.’
‘Go where?’
I didn’t reply.
She sighed. ‘OK. I’m going to tell you something and you’re not going to like it.’ She paused, and then, tenderly, ‘Please Ellie, can you make sure you’re somewhere quiet, for this? God! I really don’t want to do this over the phone.’
I didn’t know where she was, but I could feel that love, dense and enveloping. But it was a strange thing, like a thickness around my larynx, like concrete. I realized what I hadn’t seen before: that I was the one with the weapon. I was the child, and that I would grow up, and I would leave. I could never love her back the way she loved me, and that inequality would trail around after us, smearing its indelible mark on everything. The ledger could never settle, because the love between a mother and a child has a grain, a natural direction of travel. Like a bayonet.
And I realized that it didn’t sound like love at all.
‘What is it you want to say?’ I asked flatly.
‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘My baby. I’m so sorry. I lied to you; I shouldn’t have lied but I just didn’t want to see you suf
fer. But if we’ve got to this, there’s no other way.’
I watched a mother pulling a toddler along on a wheeled suitcase as he played a game on a screen, oblivious to his destination. The mother paused by the departures board and he jolted to a stop, and didn’t even look up.
‘When I went out, the morning we found the door broken, and your hand all hurt. I found something. I didn’t tell you because I thought maybe we could ride it out, like we did before.’
I closed my eyes and braced.
‘Baby, I did find him. I did, and I couldn’t tell you, because it was like before, with Jodie. I dealt with the … the evidence. To protect you, because I love you, and because it’s my job to keep you safe.’
I said nothing at all, just waited to hear the thing I already knew. The thing I’d known right from the start, when she’d come home muddy and in shock.
‘It was Siggy, my sweet lovely girl. Everything was like before, with Jodie. Strangled with a belt, exactly the same. It wasn’t you, but he’s dead now. He’s gone.’
There was a silence. I wasn’t going to cry. I would not do it with her there, even though my heart was breaking. I wasn’t going to be that person for her anymore.
‘But I’m here, sweetheart,’ she said, when I didn’t reply. ‘I am here. I will always be here. Come home. I need you. We need each other.’
I took the phone away from my ear, and I turned it off. I walked to the security queue, and from there to the departure gate.
And whatever she thought I relied on her for, that I couldn’t survive without: it turned out I could manage without it.
69.
Mae
Bear was asleep now. It was late afternoon, about the time that, if things had been different, she would be on her way home from school. Somewhere there would be a sunset, but not through this hospital room window, which looked onto a brick wall. Mae sat, still and silent, on a folding chair beside her, his fingertips resting beside the canula in the back of her little hand. He was watching her breathe. Grateful for every rise and fall of her chest.
What they’d thought might be a collapsed lung was actually just a very sudden, very acute asthma attack brought on by the chaos of what happened in the school toilets. She’d lost blood and needed a hefty transfusion and they still had tests to run for internal damage, but the doctors were happy enough with her progress to let her sleep for a while. The damage to her face – the split, actually, the trauma to it – would heal. Everything else would have to wait.
A quiet click from the door behind him, and footsteps, not Nadia’s, which stopped at the foot of the bed.
Mae looked up. Mike, thinner than Mae had remembered, back from dropping Nadia back home to sort out the toddler. He handed Mae a steaming, double-thickness plastic cup and Mae straightened, took it, and drank it mechanically even though it burned in his mouth and burned again as he swallowed it. He didn’t care.
Couldn’t say thank you. Couldn’t say anything.
What Nadia had told him, in stilted, tear-soaked segments, was this:
Bear had been in the girls’ loos when it happened. Another kid, younger, had watched the whole thing. Two girls and a boy had followed Bear in. They called things out to her while she was locked in the cubicle. Things about her dad being a Jap, an immigrant, and a pig. Things about her weight. At first she’d just shouted back at them, and then she’d lost it.
According to the friend, when Bear finally came out, she was screaming. Head down, barrelling out into the posse. After that, pandemonium. In the confusion, Bear had slipped, fallen hard, and there had been an almighty crash that caused all the teachers in the staffroom halfway across the school, plus half the kitchen staff, to come running. By the time the adults got there, Bear was unconscious on the floor, her lower lip and chin lacerated and bloody, the smashed remains of half a ceramic sink strewn around her like a debris field.
Under his fingertips, movement.
‘A-ee?’
Daddy. He dropped the empty cup and stood, leaning over her, taking her face in his hands. A trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth had dried along her cheek, above the dressing on her lower jaw. Both lips were swollen tight and discoloured to a whole spectrum of angry purples, blues and reds.
She tried to smile, but immediately winced and abandoned the effort, winced, and let out a pitiful groan.
‘Shhh, baby,’ he told her, smoothing her hair. ‘Shh, you’ll be OK.’
But she wouldn’t shush. The croaky sound from the back of her throat persisted as she kept trying to speak.
‘Dominica, you need to rest—’ Mike started, but Mae snapped round.
‘Leave us alone. Go.’
Mike took a step back, as if on instinct, but he didn’t leave.
‘I’m her dad,’ Mae told him, his voice breaking. ‘OK? Me. She doesn’t need you here.’
Mike, visibly hurt, chewed his lip for a moment before doing as he was told. ‘I’ll be outside, Dom, if you need me. Just outside, OK?’
She made a weak sound to confirm she understood, and Mike was gone.
Exhausted, Bear eventually quieted, her eyes fluttering shut. Seconds later, a soft knock at the door, followed by a careful click.
‘Hey,’ said Nadia.
He turned, expecting an earful about Mike’s abrupt dismissal, but what he got was her hand on his shoulder.
‘She sleeping?’
‘Yeah.’ He looked behind her to the door. ‘Where’s the baby?’
‘Mike’s sister’s got her. But listen, I just saw the consultant. She says the X-ray looks OK. No fractures, nothing deeper than the …’ she cut herself off, gesturing vaguely to the mess of their daughter’s face. ‘So. Guess it could be worse.’ That old exasperated laugh, an effervescent burst of optimism that she always managed to dredge up from somewhere.
He stood, faced her. Nadia blinked slowly, and gave him a small, sad smile.
And Mae saw a flash of who she had been at twenty, open-mic at the Troy Bar. Eyes closed, swaying like a willow to the Cassandra Wilson song she was covering, the only sober girl in the room. The whole place sat silent, entranced, and when her eyes had opened, they had been only for him.
For a while, things had been perfect.
Outside the door, a nurse rattled past pushing a trolleyful of medicines.
Mae gathered his strength, and he said what he’d known for ages – months, more than a year – but hadn’t been able to admit. ‘She’s not happy.’
Nadia opened her mouth to reply, but then her hand was over her mouth, and her shoulders were making short jerks. When she got it under control, he handed her a tissue. She dabbed at her eyes and tried to smile. ‘You could put it like that, yes. She hasn’t really been happy for a long while.’
They stood together in silence for a while.
‘I got that message from Mike,’ Mae said. He nodded at the floor. Pressed his lips between his teeth. Said, ‘About your plan. The move. I listened to it. A lot of times.’
‘Okay,’ she whispered. She dropped one handle of her bag from her shoulder and felt around in it with the opposite hand.
‘I got a hardcopy of the prospectus, if you want to see.’
She held out a glossy, folded card booklet. Lake View Elementary, it said on the front. A hundred bright-eyed kids waving at the camera outside a sparkling glass-fronted school flanked by palm trees. A yellow school bus parked outside. Sky the colour of a tropical lagoon.
He looked, but he couldn’t quite make his hands make the necessary movements to take what was being offered to him.
‘What if she hates it? I mean, if they’re going to give her grief here, what’s to say it’s going to be any better there?’
‘Nothing. But what if she loves it?’ Nadia countered. ‘What if it’s the best thing that ever happens to her?’
He sank back onto the chair, brushed away a stray thread of Bear’s jet-black hair from across her nose.
‘What if – I mean, what if there’s
a shooting?’
Nadia crouched beside him. Pleadingly, she held it out to him, closer. ‘Ben, please. The facilities are incredible. Out of this world, compared to what we can give her here.’
‘I know.’
‘And her cousins go there, and she loves them. Every time we visit she asks if we can stay. Look,’ she said, casting a glance at Bear, ‘I know it’s not perfect—’
‘It’s nowhere near perfect.’
‘… but she’s miserable here. It’s been getting worse. And now this.’
On her bed, Bear started to move her lips again, soft vowels creaking out from her throat. Mae ran the backs of his fingers softly up and down her cheek.
‘Just rest, sweetheart. Don’t need to speak,’ he said. He turned until the prickling in his eyes subsided, then gave her his best smile. ‘All going to be OK. Daddy’s here.’
There were things people said, Mae knew, at times like this. During his early days on Response he’d seen relatives arrive and put everything right with a single word. Or not even speaking, just being there. But Bear was still trying to speak, making vague sounds, frustrated, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Baby, it can wait, just calm down.’ He shot a look at the door, willing a nurse, someone to come in, put her at ease, because he couldn’t think of anything to say. I love you was all he had, and what use was that going to be?
Nadia, from the other side of Bear’s head, started to sing to her, but the distress was coming off their daughter in waves.
With no other ideas, he shushed her again, and thumbed her soft cheeks. She gave a shout, exasperation on her face. She looked exactly, exactly like him.
And he stopped trying to soothe her.
She didn’t want soothing. She wanted him to listen.