Two things happened after I called out Neil’s name.
The first was that a splinter needled through my trousers into my backside. The second was that I hit my head on a cross-beam.
Both of those things caused me to stop my panicked retreat from my mother’s exercise book. They also made me curse Neil.
I rubbed my head with my left hand, then squeezed the splinters out of my right hand. The one in my backside turned out not to be a splinter at all. Instead I had backed onto the point of a bent nail that was sticking out of a floorboard.
The noise I had heard downstairs was actually the rattle of the metal loft ladder as I moved across the loft floor. The noise in the loft had been the sound of my mother’s bicycle scraping against the bare loft wall as it slid to the ground. I must have unbalanced it when I touched it. Unbalanced seemed to be a theme.
I made my way back to the book lying on the floor. It was still open at the pages that had caused my panic. They still caused my heart to tremble now.
On each page, a newspaper cutting, both from different dates. I couldn’t tell if they were from a local newspaper or a national daily. The headline on the first read “Missing”. The headline on the second from nine days later read “Missing Girl — Body Found”.
I turned the page. Two more newspaper cuttings, less than a month after the first two: “Another Girl Missing”; and “Second Tragedy As Girl’s Body Washed Up”.
The tears poured from my eyes, I had to wipe them away to read the articles. These were the girls from my dreams. Both of them. No doubt at all.
According to the articles, each girl had died while walking on Rame Head near Cawsand, notorious locally for sudden changes in the weather. It was thought that on each occasion the girls had been caught out by the incoming mist and strong winds and had fallen to their deaths onto the rocks several hundred feet below. Their bodies hadn’t been found for over a week. One of them fell still holding her dog’s lead. The dog was still missing. Both papers were dated almost twelve months before I was born.
But surely this wasn’t the truth. It hadn’t been an accident, had it? Hadn’t I killed both of these girls? Hadn’t it been me, with my mother’s madness running through me, guiding my hands, making me do what I hadn’t wanted to do? Just as it had made her do it all those years earlier.
No wonder the writing in her book was tortured. No wonder she had written so much, trying to rid herself of what she was. What she had become. I put my hand to my stomach and tried to breath as deeply as I could. It churned like never before, rolling waves of nausea as it tumbled over and over. I grabbed the photograph of my mother and father, raised it above my head, ready to bring it crashing down to the floor. My mother, the murderer. The killer of young girls. The person I had felt sorry for just a few minutes earlier, taking the lives of two innocent girls.
That was when the full horror hit me. It was reparation. Her girls had been taken from her. An eye for an eye. She was only doing what was right. She was only doing what any mother would do. What I would do if Michael and Rose were taken from me. Retribution was an honourable thing. Putting the balance right again. Making the world fair. How can it have been wrong? The noxious toxin of the insanity made her do it. It skewed her world so that everything that was wrong was made right. Evil deeds became glorious acts. Showing how much she loved her girls. What she would do for her innocent girls. How can that be wrong?
But I hadn’t been born yet. I hadn’t been taken from her yet.
So why had she done it?
The realisation of what I could become hit me. First hand I could see how the madness might take me and change me, even more than it already had. If Michael and Rose weren’t taken from me, I would surely be taken from them. There was no doubt that I would be sectioned. If not in a few days time, then certainly in the future. Unless medicine had advanced so much since then that my worsening condition could be treatable. But how long for? At what point would it take me over completely?
The girls’ injuries were all consistent with falling onto rocks. It wasn’t unusual for the bodies to take a week or more to come ashore. The tides around Rame Head were as uncontrollable as the weather. Pushing flotsam into the mess of rocks at the base and slowly working it around to the beaches of Cawsand and Kingsand, or around the west to Porwellham Bay.
The girls didn’t know each other, they weren’t friends, didn’t go to the same school. There didn’t seem to be anything to link them. One girl had obviously been walking her dog. But the other, her parents couldn’t understand why she had even gone up on Rame Head. They didn’t have a dog. They would walk up there as a family occasionally, but there was no reason for her to go up on her own.
I thought about the library. Would they have both been members of it? Was that how my mother knew them. One of the girl’s names looked familiar. Barbara Stannard. The other girl Laura Evans didn’t ring any bells. I had no idea why Barbara did.
I put everything back in the box. Apart from the photograph and the exercise book. I tried to make everything look just as it had. Although I was going to tell Richard that I had found these things, for some reason I felt like had to cover my tracks in the loft. I arranged the boxes how I thought they had been and went back over to the bicycle. I stood it up and touched the handlebars again. Then I swung my leg over the centre frame. I sat on the saddle and supported myself against the loft wall. My feet found the silver pedals and my thumb found a chrome bell on the handlebars. I flicked it. The sound echoed around the loft space. Had my mother been the last person to make that sound?
I climbed off the bike and laid it back against the wall, then I grabbed the photograph and the book and struggled down the loft ladder. I washed the blood and dust out of my splinter cuts before risking the shaky step ladder to close the loft hatch back up again.
I was amazed at how late it was. I must have been in the loft for over two hours. It was gone 11pm. I texted Neil to see if he was still awake. My phone rang a few seconds later.
‘Is everything OK?’ he said.
‘Everything is fine,’ I said. ‘Apart from a couple of splinters and a bang on the head.’
‘What happened?’
‘I was up in Richard’s loft. It was a bit naughty of me really. But he had said there might be a photo of my mother up there, do you remember? Well, I found one.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘What was she like?’
‘She does look a bit like me. He was right. Or I look like her. But I found something else too.’ My voice choked a little as I tried to keep it together. I tried to detach myself from what I was saying, tried to imagine I was just reading it, from a book or something. Neil waited for me to speak. ‘I found a book. A journal, I suppose. Written by her. It’s all in French, but there are some newspaper cuttings in there. They are about the girls. The girls in my dreams. I recognised them both from their pictures in the newspaper. They both died, years ago, they went missing and were found dead, washed up on the beach near where they lived.’
‘Christine,’ Neil said.
‘It was them, Neil. I know them so well by now, I see them every day. It was them. But the newspaper said it was an accident. They both fell from the cliffs near Cawsand, near where my mother and father lived. And I know it wasn’t an accident. I know that she did it, that she killed them. And I think the madness was telling her that it was alright. After my sister was taken from her, it was alright to kill two other innocent girls to somehow make up for it. It was definitely them, Neil — they even mentioned the dog.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I was thinking I might take the journal to show Richard.’
‘Is that wise? If he’s just recovering from a heart attack, showing him that could be the worst thing to do. He obviously doesn’t know about it. Does he?’
‘Of course he doesn’t.’
My tummy trembled. I hadn’t considered that. Was it possible that he did know what she had done? Might
he have protected her?
‘It was reported as a tragic accident,’ I said. ‘There would be no reason for him to think anything different. I’m sure he didn’t know.’
‘So maybe it was an accident, Chris. Maybe she didn’t kill them. Dreams are unreliable at the best of times. If the paper said it was an accident, and everyone else thought that too, the police, the families, then maybe that’s really what it was.’
I blushed. My face burned.
‘My dreams,’ I said, ‘these ones … they are real. And not just in dreams. I see them during the day too, like they are a part of my mind. They’re there all the time. I replay it over and over in my head, I live it, smell it and hear it. It has to be real. Where else would they come from? How could I have made it all up? And I know it’s those girls. I recognised them. Even one of the names seemed familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen her name somewhere before.’
‘Can you make out any of the journal? The bits in French?’
‘Not really. I was going to ask Richard if he could read it, but perhaps that’s not such a good idea now. The other thought I had was Cathy at school. She’s fluent in French. I’m sure she’d have a look at it for me.’
‘When are you going to come back?’ he said.
‘I think I’ll see how he is in the morning and decide then. If he’s really bad or if he’s about to come out then I might stay down here. But otherwise I’ll maybe come back.’
‘What about Janice Ward?’ he said.
‘I’ll just have to try to fit that in when I can. I’ll call you in the morning. Are you going to be OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘We just miss you. Take care of yourself, won’t you. Don’t go getting any more splinters.’
‘You know I love you, don’t you?’
‘I know that you’re mad,’ he said.
‘Bastard.’
In the morning my hand ached. I couldn’t believe just a couple of splinters could be so bloody uncomfortable. I ate breakfast and showered and then fed Ernie. I decided not to let him out, but I did manage to sort out his litter tray. I was almost sick doing it, but I cast my mind back to changing the kids’ nappies when they were babies. It was a walk in the park after that.
As I got ready to go to the hospital there was a ring on the doorbell. A lady with white hair and expensive jewellery stood on the doorstep. I noticed she wore blue slippers on her feet. They looked a few sizes too large for her.
‘My name is Thelma,’ she said. ‘From next door. Is everything OK? We saw the ambulance the other night, and there was no reply when we rang. Is Richard alright?’
I invited her in and explained what had happened.
‘He’s always struck me as such a healthy man,’ she said. ‘With all that golf he plays. Are you … a friend?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I just came down for a day or so, to make sure the cat was fed and to make sure Richard was OK?’
‘Well if we can help?’ she said. ‘We normally come in and feed Ernie when he’s away at a golf event. We have keys.’
‘Would you mind?’ I said. ‘That would be so helpful. I may have to go back home for a few days anyway.’
Thelma gave me her phone number and insisted that I ring to ask for help.
‘He’s such a lovely man,’ she said. ‘You never get to choose your neighbours, do you? So we’re very fortunate to have him.’
I was at the hospital by 9am. I had the photograph and the journal in my overnight case, but I wasn’t going to show them to Richard.
He had made some progress in his recovery but was sleeping.
‘These first few signs are encouraging,’ the doctor said. ‘But he’s not out of the woods yet.’
‘I may have to go back up to Bristol,’ I said. ‘And I might not be able to come back down for a few days. Will you contact me if there’s any change?’
Despite apparently making progress he looked worse to me. Grey stubble made his face messy. He looked a bit grubby. I sat with him for an hour while he slept. For much of the time I talked to him, not sure if he could hear me or not — it didn’t matter.
I didn’t mention what I had found in the loft. I didn’t mention the loft at all. But I told him that I loved him and that I was proud of him for what he had done for my mother. How he had been there for her and tried to help her through her illness. I told him how much I admired him for his strength of character and how I knew he was going to get better.
In my heart I prayed that he hadn’t known what she had done, that he was as innocent as those girls.
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