by Eve Chase
Then another. No one knows where I am. I’ve got scratchy mobile reception. I’m not entirely sure where I parked the car. This stuffy room is fogging my brain, trapping me in 1971 by means of its swirly green carpet and peeling wallpaper, the colour of horses’ teeth. The cluttered house’s desolate air is made worse by the cardboard boxes stacked against the walls, the bin liners, slumped, half full of rubbish: an imminent move into sheltered accommodation. ‘Won’t go,’ she’s already told me defiantly, and I felt for her, knowing she will, and the heartbreak involved in packing up a home, dismantling memories. In the end our houses are furnished less with tables and chairs than these.
I flinch as Fingers touches my back, and catch the tang of his bodily odour, almost an animal scent. Like how I imagine an old badger sett might smell. ‘I’ll see you out, Sylvie.’
‘Thanks.’ I grab my bag, relieved to be going. Caroline’s right. I should never have come. What am I doing? I should be with Annie, googling secondhand Bugaboos and debating silly celebrity baby names, not pressing my nose against the past, peering at the horrors inside.
‘Oh, but she’s Big Rita’s girl. Big Rita, remember, Fingers? You had a mad crush on Big Rita once.’ Marge winks. ‘You peeping Tom, you.’
Fingers’s greyish-skinned face blazes. Rain starts to grease the living-room windows.
Marge nods at me. ‘Now, your mother could keep a secret.’
And don’t I know it.
‘Big heart.’ Another sip of sherry. The alcohol is loosening her. ‘And feet! Gordon Bennett, those feet. What a lot of trouble they caused.’
Again Fingers tries to manoeuvre me out of the room. But I stand firm, sensing the undertow of a different story. ‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Her boot mark on Don’s cheek.’
Christ. Was Mum a suspect? No wonder she never wanted to speak about it. Then a new possibility, unimaginable seconds before, wheels towards me: did Mum shoot the man?
‘She lives in the past this one.’ Fingers bends down to my ear. His breath is damp, dank as soil. ‘But can’t remember it right.’
Marge rolls her eyes and turns to me, her tone conspiratorial. ‘Take no notice. I’m all he’s got. When you don’t have real family, like we don’t, you find your own kin. You’ve always been scared of losing me, haven’t you, my little Green Man?’
Fingers bows his head, unexpectedly submissive and boyish all of a sudden. This is not a normal carer/patient relationship, I begin to realize. Something else is going on here. She pats his hand, a maternal gesture and yet, also, an assertion of dominance. ‘Settle down or I’ll dock your supper,’ she murmurs, under her breath. And for a moment he just stands there, chastised, silent, swaying like a tall tree.
‘Anyway, I call a spade a spade,’ she says, turning back to me, seeming to pick up our conversation about Armstrong again. ‘Only cared about that truncheon dangling between his legs. Ruining things for that baby he was.’
‘Jo’s baby?’ I test, sure they must be able to hear my heart thumping. My tiny unknown self slips into the conversation, silk over glass.
‘Aye.’ She looks at me, confused, frowning, trying to place me, or something I said. Her gaze grows milkier, clouded by age.
She walked away. I can’t get beyond this. But I still must ask: ‘Do … do you remember her surname?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ Fingers asks, springing back to life and widening his eyes at Marge, some sort of warning.
‘I …’ Part of me, I realize, is asking because I think I should, because you’re meant to want to know. We’re told that’s how adoption tales play out, the long-lost mother, the tearful reunion …
‘Did you know Jo?’ Marge stares at me, frowning. She taps a yellow thumbnail against her front tooth. ‘What’s the connection again?’
‘I …’ Cringing inside, I whisper out the rarely spoken truth: ‘I was found in the forest that summer.’
Fingers’s leg starts to bounce feverishly in the corner of my vision.
‘What?’ Marge’s face scrunches, uncomprehending. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I was the abandoned baby, Marge,’ I say more loudly, stripping the words of their talismanic power. ‘It was me.’ Louder still.
Her face chalks. ‘You’re lying!’ she hisses.
Fingers mutters, ‘Codswallop,’ under his breath.
I’m so taken aback, struck down by the absurdity that it’s taken me this many bloody years to speak the truth out loud – and sober – to a stranger, to claim it as my own, only to be accused of making it up, that for a moment I don’t know what to say, and teeter on the verge of hysterical laughter.
‘I’d recognize Jo’s baby.’ Her voice breaks. Her rage ruptures, like a wound. Tears spill down the creases of her cheeks. She turns to Fingers, her voice desperate. ‘Wouldn’t I? Even all these years later.’
‘Of course, dear.’ Fingers splays his hand on her frail shoulder protectively, talking over her wispy head. ‘This is all very distressing for Marge. Quite unnecessary.’
I’m baffled and frustrated. After years of burying my story, rejecting it, I feel the urgent need to own it. Because it’s mine, I realize. Running through my veins. Part of me. My own beautiful damage. ‘But …’
‘Lies!’ Marge throws her fig roll at me and starts to sob. ‘A cruel trick! Out! Out!’
‘Well, Sylvie.’ Fingers claps his huge white hands together with a twisted smile. ‘I believe we’re done here.’
44
Hera
Outside the bedroom window, two fuzzy headlights, like glowing eyes, wind their way through the trees towards us. More police? The ambulance? The two police constables who found Mother and Rita in the woods are now on our sofa, their torches on the coffee-table, notebooks on their laps. They’re ‘taking us through the evening’ and asking questions, in hushed voices, like people in a library. I feel distant, like I’m watching from the ceiling.
The woman wears serious glasses with magnifying lenses. There’s a ladder in her tights. The policeman looks flushed. Their radios constantly hiss and buzz. I worry the noise will wake Teddy and he’ll stumble downstairs to discover what’s happened. What has happened? I want to ask the police for details. Or at least to check my version of events against Big Rita’s. My brain is a big blank space, like an ice rink, cold and skiddy. Thoughts can’t stand up on it properly. Everything slides about. The policeman keeps staring at me.
A member of the public called the station, he’s saying, glancing back at Mother. An anonymous tip-off. He can’t quite hide the squeaking thrill in his voice. I guess if you’re a policeman finding a murdered man counts as a good day at the office, especially in this sleepy sort of place. I’m not sure they visit many houses like this either. The policewoman is staring around the room, her gaze sticking to the grandfather clock, the oil paintings, and then, of course, the terrarium, the sparkling wreck on the floor. I wonder if it’ll look like my motive for killing Don. I hope it doesn’t look like Big Rita’s.
Problem is, Big Rita is acting guilty. A bag of nerves, her knee bounces up and down. Sobs crackle up in her throat, then she swallows them. The baby dozes over her shoulder, wrapped in the yellow blanket, and Rita clings to her little body, like she’s expecting the police to snatch her out of her arms at any minute. But the police haven’t even asked about the baby. They’re asking about other things. Big Rita keeps tripping over her words, especially when the policewoman mentions the boot print on Don’s face, the boots Rita wore earlier and the police have now slipped into a special plastic bag. ‘So they belong to Robbie Rigby?’ the policeman asks intently. ‘Correct?’
‘Correct,’ Rita mumbles, and wipes away a tear with the sleeve of her pink cardigan.
‘Can you confirm this, Mrs Harrington?’
‘Yes, Officer.’ You’d never know that she and Don were having one of their ‘naps’ a few hours ago. She looks like a mother again. Her legs are crossed at the ankle. She’s covered her floaty b
lack dress with a long cream cardigan – a good idea, since some of the tiny mirrors embroidered into it are pink with blood – and tucked her hair behind her ears so she doesn’t look deranged, just sad and shocked, like a woman might be to discover ‘a family friend’ dead in the grounds.
There’s a sense of mission about her too. Her jaw is set. Her gaze steady. And when the police aren’t looking, her eyes burn into me, as if they’re desperately trying to tell me something. But I don’t know what. Only that she hates me and always will and her hate is part of me now. I worry the police can see it, too, because when I look up from my feet, I find them both staring, as if there’s something about me they find unsettling. Finally, the policeman clears his throat and glances down at his notes. ‘So Heerr.’ He stumbles over my name, like everyone does. ‘Hera.’
I nod. My heart starts to kick in my ears. I realize it might help if I started crying, like normal girls are supposed to, but I can’t. My feelings are all stuck.
‘It’s important you tell the truth, you know that, don’t you?’ he says, speaking slowly, as if I were stupid.
‘Nothing but the truth.’ I’ve heard this on the telly.
Mother chokes back a small sob, and shakes her head at me like the truth is the last thing I should be telling. This is confusing because all my life Mother’s said, ‘Just tell the truth, Hera. I’ll be less cross with you if you just tell the bloody truth.’ And who else could have shot Don but me?
Also, there’s a relief in being caught. I know what happens next. I’ll be taken away from Teddy to live with other bad, dangerous children, somewhere harsh and lonely, like the school in Jane Eyre. Aunt Edie will likely visit, just not every weekend because she’s so busy and abroad all the time. Big Rita will come and arrange her face into a smile. Will Mother? Probably not. Why should she forgive me? She’ll go back to Daddy, and Baby Forest will take my place. Teddy will love his new sister just as much. Daddy will be grateful Mother’s happy. And I can’t blame anyone but myself. Everything’s been leading to this point, I realize, from the moment I draped the curtains across the lamp’s scorching light bulb in Primrose Hill. I didn’t burn down the house, not completely. But I ended up destroying everything just the same, like I always feared I would.
‘So Hera went out with her brother Teddy and the deceased and a …’ he clears his throat ‘… gun?’ The policewoman flicks Mother a sideways look of disgust, as if to say, What sort of mother are you?
‘It was Don’s idea,’ says Big Rita. ‘He said they were in safe hands.’
The policeman raises an eyebrow. ‘Go on, Hera.’
Upstairs, the sound of the cuckoo clock. It makes me think of the woodpecker, the one that lives outside Big Rita’s bedroom window, and I wonder if I’ll ever hear it again, if they’ll take me now or in the morning.
‘Can you try to tell us, Hera?’ the policewoman says, more kindly.
‘I thought I saw a deer, something moving …’
‘Stop!’ Mother leaps up, her hands scrunched at the fabric of her dress. ‘Officer, this interrogation of my traumatized daughter is unnecessary. The poor girl is barely cogent. It’s far too soon. And we need a lawyer.’
‘Mrs Harrington, please sit down. Your daughter seems quite able to cooperate. We have to establish the sequence of events. We’ll all need to do an official statement at the station.’
The station? Tonight, then. I go tonight. I feel a surge of terror. Big Rita starts to sob on to the baby’s fluffy hair.
‘You’re wasting your time.’ We all turn to look at Mother. Something in her voice commands attention. ‘It was me. The shotgun is still in the woods somewhere. If you look, you’ll find it. Now, if you please, I’d like to call my lawyer, and my husband.’
What? What’s Mother doing? I catch Big Rita’s shocked eyes, rolling, enormous, full of white.
‘The medication for my … condition.’ She taps her temple and winces and lets out a mad little laugh. ‘It affects my vision, Officer. Doesn’t it, Rita? So I shouldn’t have held a gun, any gun, knowing this. It was an accident.’
I’m no longer sure what’s going on. The room cracks and splits with my raggedy breaths and tears. I see Big Rita looking at me, mouthing, ‘It’s okay.’ But it can’t be. Bright car headlights are already sweeping through the living-room windows. The sound of a car pulling up on the gravel.
‘You can put your hands down, Mrs Harrington. I won’t cuff you.’ And I beg them not to take her.
‘Get the girl something sweet,’ I hear the policewoman say to Big Rita.
Big Rita has to hold me back and pull me against her and the baby, who has woken up and started to cry. As the police walk Mother between them, out of the room, she grabs my hand and squeezes it. And, for the first time in months, I feel her love flow through my skin, into my body, like a colour, pink and warm.
Foxcote’s front door bangs. We whip around. ‘Jeannie darling, I’m home.’ A gust of fresh air. Footsteps. Daddy appears in the doorway, hands frozen in the act of loosening his tie. ‘What sort of welcome party is this?’
45
Sylvie
I’d planned to drive straight home to London. Not looking back. But after the profound weirdness of Marge’s house, I find myself unable to do so. Half an hour after Fingers slammed the front door, my hands are still unsteady. I feel fuzzy-headed, pixilated. So I sit in the car, listening to Nick Cave, collecting the scattered bits of myself together, as the rain patinates the windscreen. I roll the name ‘Jo’ around my mouth and wonder why I’m actually relieved not to have found out her surname, too. Is this a normal reaction? Or just cowardice? Further evidence that I can’t face up to my own pedigree. I taste mascara. I’m crying. The windows fug up.
Then the rain stops. Sun slices through the cloud, hot and irresistible, and I feel a bit silly. Getting out of the car, I inhale the sweet grassy wet. My head clears. My mood lightens. And I suddenly know what I need to do before I leave this place. See it for myself. Alone.
A forest, I realize, stepping into it, succumbing to it, only reveals its true nature to the solitary walker. And it’s indifferent to me. I’ve got no more right to exist here than a bramble or a fox. I decide I like this. Liberating. Which way?
The path forks. One side leads to a narrow lane, shadowed by the trees that lock over it in an emerald-green canopy. A shortcut back to the village, perhaps. Lanes always lead somewhere.
Five minutes on, set far back from the road, a high wall. A roof rises above it. Intrigued, I walk back into the woods and around its perimeter until I can get a decent view of the house through its garden gate. Gorgeous. Ridiculously so. It is, I realize, with a dissatisfied pang, a Farrow & Ball house from a fantasy life, the one where I got richer, had a flock of charming, feral children and married the actor Dominic West. My next life, then.
The sign above its main gate reads ‘Wildwood House’. If I owned a house like this I’d call it that too.
As I stand there, gawping, I mentally style a seventies scene: children running barefoot through the trees, owl feathers in their hair; a young nanny chasing, calling their names. I lean back against the girth of a vast yew – hundreds of years older than me, with more lines. I feel a wave of affection for this tree – and slowly sink, so I’m squatting above the ground, which is springy and comfortable, still dry, like rush matting. The birds start chattering, alerting each other to my alien presence.
I check my phone: no signal; one missed call from my agent, Pippa, likely wondering if my compassionate leave will ever end; another from a worried girlfriend, who has started to say, slightly gratingly, ‘You really must look after yourself now,’ every time we speak, as if leaving a long marriage is a reckless act of self-sabotage, the gateway drug to the dangerous state of not-giving-a-f***, and uncontrolled body hair. I’m glad to have the excuse of no signal since I can’t square my London life with this. I can’t inhabit both at the same time, I realize. I can’t function and be both people. So I rope off part
s of myself. Which is why I could stay married to Steve for so long, I guess.
I yawn. My body feels catatonically heavy. It’s exhausting keeping all the disparate bits separate, the endless collating of self. Am I defeated by such a process, or starting to relax? Both, perhaps. I wonder if this is why forest bathing is a thing.
A memory bobs to the surface. Dad and me walking along the beach near the cottage. Dad bending down and picking up driftwood, pale and smooth, hollowed inside. ‘Like a skull,’ I said. Dad saying, ‘Yes, exactly, Sylvie, just like that,’ and telling me that if you cut open a human brain, slice it really thin, like salami, and peer at it under a microscope, you’ll see trees. Dendrites, they’re called. And all your thoughts, all the tiny electrical messages, shoot from branch to branch. ‘We have woods inside us, Sylvie,’ he said, then hugged me and kissed the top of my head.
His words feel wise and true today. It feels as if I might even be reconnecting with a lost part of myself, the little girl who’d climb trees to feel the sway of the top branches, her head crowned with leaves. I close my eyes and spin out to the aurora borealis wavering across my eyelids. The ground seems to rock. And then it happens. A shadowy shape emerges, like a grainy ultrasound image. Me. A baby. Lying on a tree stump. Crying.
‘Excuse me, are you okay? Do you need help?’
The noise stops. Oh, God, it was coming from me. I open my eyes, look up and see dazzling white teeth. A beard.
‘The forest always gives one rather wild dreams.’ The man is looking at me askance, possibly trying to work out if I’m high. He’s very handsome, I register slowly. Blue eyes. ‘Not local?’ he asks, trying to place me.
‘London.’ Long story.
‘Ah.’ He smiles knowingly, and nods back at the house. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? If you need to come in, you’re welcome.’