44
Annie
They called the police, but she came home of her own accord two days later. Helen welcomed her back with a hot bath and a good meal, then a firm but gentle speech about why she was here, the importance of staying safe and the distant threat of being returned to a secure unit if it ever happened again.
But I was furious with her. She knew that and spent the first few hours after her return avoiding me. I just sat in my room, fuming, imagining her having sex with Ace Clarke and him trying to charm her into returning to her old ways.
Eventually, I heard footsteps coming slowly up the stairs and knew it was her. There was a knock at my door and before I could answer, she edged it open.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’
She flung the door wide and stared at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Where’ve you been?’ I said again.
‘Nowhere. I had to go out.’
‘You should have told me. I’ve been out of my mind. I thought … I thought…’
She sat on the edge of my bed and put her head in her hands. I looked at her, an image of despair in her black dress, her hair bedraggled, and filled with a sense of hopelessness so strong it filled the room.
How could I stay angry with her?
I moved over to her, took her hand and said, ‘Where did you go?’
She wouldn’t answer me.
After a while, I said, ‘Have you been back to Ace Clarke?’
She nodded. Then for the first time, I saw her cry.
She needed to know, she said. She needed to know what the letter from her mother meant. ‘It was driving me mad. You know I’d been waiting so long to hear from her, and then there was just that cold, horrible note. It felt like a threat to me. So I went to see him. It was the only way I could find out. I knew he’d know.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
She sighed. ‘He said she loves me.’
‘Right.’
‘But she’s really angry and I should take no notice because she doesn’t mean it. He said she’ll have calmed down by the time she comes out and not to worry because he’ll look after me.’ She looked up at me then, her face filled with hope.
‘He won’t look after you. You know that, don’t you? He’ll hurt you.’
She was quiet.
The question I hadn’t wanted to ask formed on my lips. ‘Did you…?’
She nodded.
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
For a long time, I was quiet. Then I said, ‘I think Ace Clarke ought to die for what he’s done to you.’
Slowly, she turned to face me. ‘Do you think I’m disgusting? I don’t mind. I know it’s hard not to.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Then I said, ‘Do you still love him?’
She sighed deeply. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t. I know what he did was wrong, but when I was back at his flat, it was all so easy, like it used to be. He was kind and generous. He took me out for dinner, gave me money, talked to me about my mum, stopped me getting upset. I don’t know, he was … nice.’
‘But he’s not genuine. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about what he can get from you – the money he can make.’
I could tell from her face that my words hurt her. Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
I said, ‘No normal, decent bloke would—’
‘I know. Stop. Stop it. I know.’
But I could see now that there was a gulf between what her head knew for a fact and the way she felt about him – and about her mother.
‘I hate him for doing this to you. For making you question whether he’s truly evil. He’s truly evil. Really.’
She shook her head. ‘He isn’t. If you met him, you’d understand.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said, my voice rising in anger. ‘Of course he’s fucking evil. Look at what he did to you. Look what he made you do so he could get money. And then he made you love him so you can’t see that he’s a total evil bastard. You know you could have him done? You could have him sent down.’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘There’s no way. The judge would just say I consented.’
‘Never.’
‘He would. There’s loads of cases where kids have consented so the bloke’s got away with it. I saw one on the news last week.’
‘In most cases, though, they believe the victim.’
‘I wasn’t really a—’
‘You were. I wish you’d think about it.’
‘No way. Never. There is no fucking way in the world I could stand up in court and tell some posh judge and a load of strangers what I’ve told you. It’s like … I dunno. It’s like someone saying to you, “Think of your worst secret. The very worst thing you’ve ever done in your life.” Actually, Annie. Do that. Do that now. Think of your worst secret.’
I thought.
‘Right. Think of it for a bit longer.’
I thought.
‘Now, go downstairs and tell it to everyone you see.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But you didn’t do anything. It was him.’
‘Oh, tom-ay-to, tom-ar-to. That’s not how people see these things. It’s not how he sees it, and it’s not how any twat of a judge will see it.’
It wasn’t how she saw it, either.
But it was how I saw it, and I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer for what he’d done to this wonderful girl, for turning her into someone who could hardly bear to think about the life ahead of her.
I wanted him locked up forever, rotting away until there wasn’t a trace left of him on Earth. And then I wanted Hope to get well.
Significant Moments in My Life with My Mother
By Annie Cox
Part Four
Things went on more or less the same way until I was eleven and had to go to secondary school. Then they got worse, or seemed to. My primary school had me flagged as one of those children: impoverished, neglected, at risk. This meant teachers fell into two camps around me – those who kept me at arm’s length for fear of what they might end up unearthing – and all the overtime that would involve – and those who longed to be the ones I confided in, whose big, bleeding hearts wanted to reach out and save me.
I avoided all of them. My mother had been called in to my primary school a few times over the years to discuss my troubles, and hadn’t taken kindly to it. She saw it as criticism. ‘I have done my very best to be a good mother, and all you do is get the school on to me to say I haven’t been good enough and that you’ve got all these problems. You need to stop it, Annie. Just stop it. You should be grateful that you’ve got me. If you keep this up – all this running away, acting like your life is so bad – they’ll start listening to you and take you into care. Then see how you like that. In fact,’ she said once, the summer before I went to secondary school, ‘why don’t you just go?’
And she made me follow her into my room, where she flung open the drawers and hurled everything on to the floor. ‘Pack your things and go!’ she said, then disappeared, stamping down the stairs to the kitchen. When she returned, she tossed two old carrier bags at me. ‘Now, get out!’
I always ended up crying when she was like this. It was impossible not to under the weight of all that shame and guilt. Now, though, I was slowly beginning to understand: my mother was the problem, not me. Dimly, as I stuffed everything I owned into those two bags, I became aware that scenes like this were the reason for the behaviour that made my teachers worry about me, and that dim understanding was going to grow over the next few years until it shone above me, as bright as a moon, and I let myself get away.
My grandmother was dead now, but I’d never forgotten the words she’d spoken one awful day when my mother lost all control and threw everything from the kitchen cupboards all over the room and ma
de me clean it up – bags of flour had gone everywhere and for weeks, we were still stepping in gritty mounds that had escaped the vicious scrub of the broom. She’d said, ‘School will be your way out, Annie. Work hard, and you’ll be able to leave her.’
So that was what I did. Every day, I dressed in the long black coat I’d bought for three quid at Oxfam. It had a fur collar I could hang my head in, and it came all the way down to my ankles. It was the closest I could get to invisibility. People looked at me, but they didn’t come near. I had no friends. Everyone else went off in packs, or so it seemed to me. There were the cool, posh, clever girls; the girls who wore loads of make-up, badly applied, who smoked and weren’t clever at all, but who people were afraid of; and then there were the girls like me. The weirdos. The ones no one would come near, not even to bully.
I was in year eight when my mother met a man in the pub where she was working. His name was Dennis. Dennis the Dickhead. He was about fifty. He had broad shoulders and grey hair, and entered the room as if he expected everyone to stop what they were doing and gaze at him in fear and wonder. From the moment he met her, he called her Miss Cox. ‘I’m an old-fashioned man,’ he said. ‘I believe in treating young ladies with respect.’ My mother glowed with happiness when he said this, but it didn’t feel like respect to me. It felt like a game of authority.
When she wasn’t with him, my mother talked about him. She went on and on, like this:
‘I’ve never met anyone in the world like Dennis. He’s so different from your father. He pays attention to me. He talks to me. He loves me. He’s amazing. He’s such a hard worker. A real grafter, and good at what he does. He’s clever as well. Understands politics and all those things that are going on in the world. He’s educating me, Annie. Imagine that, your poor mother getting an education.’
Sometimes, she would stop talking about him and just stare into the distance, saying nothing, completely devoured by her thoughts, which were clearly all about him. A smile would play about her lips now and then, or she would laugh, or suddenly become very serious, as if rehearsing something she wanted to say to him.
She adored him, worshipped him, was entirely obsessed by him, and I couldn’t understand it. I thought he was an idiot. Pretty much everything about him got on my nerves, including but not limited to:
He was a dickhead.
He thought he was clever.
He told stupid jokes.
His clothes were dirty.
He was rude. (He grunted when he saw me, instead of speaking.)
He came to my house and acted like he owned it.
He made me feel like I shouldn’t be there.
I didn’t trust him.
He was entirely, absolutely unexceptional, and it depressed the shit out of me to see my mother fixated by such a loser, such a nothing man. And then it made me angry because for some reason, she thought I ought to worship him, too.
‘Do you know what he thinks about your rudeness, Annie?’ she asked, as though I were expected to give two shits about what he thought of her. ‘He thinks it’s awful. He says he has never met a teenager so horrible to her mother.’
Whatever.
I wasn’t even a teenager. I was twelve. Maybe my mother’s medication had made her forget that.
After she’d been with Dennis a few weeks, my mother went round every charity shop on the Oxford Road and bought herself a whole new wardrobe. Usually, she wore jeans or leggings and jumpers. Now, she bought all sorts of things she decided were sexy: leather skirts, crop tops, a see-through black dress. It was the dress I hated most. She wore it with nothing underneath, so you could see everything, and when Dennis knocked on the door on a Friday afternoon while I was watching TV, she flung it wide open and stood there, hands on hips, posing.
He stared at her, eyes bulging. I went on watching TV. He grabbed my mother and they started snogging, right there in front of me, getting more and more breathless by the second, both of them making horrible noises, like animals. Caitlin took him by the hand and dragged him upstairs to her room and seconds later, there it was: the sound of the bed creaking above my head, Dennis’s fat groaning, my mother squealing like a pig about to be slaughtered. I turned up the telly, but nothing could drown it out. I put my fingers in my ears. It went on and on, then suddenly stopped.
There was a chill in my stomach and I felt unable to move, as though someone had cut me off at the root. A minute later, my mother came down in her dressing gown, hair stuck to her neck with sweat, a huge smile on her face. ‘Forgot my ciggies,’ she said brightly, and picked up the packet of Lambert and Butler and a lighter from the arm of the sofa.
I said nothing, just stared straight ahead.
My mother looked at me. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
I went on saying nothing.
‘Well, fuck you, Annie,’ she said. ‘I am allowed to be happy.’
Then she went upstairs and after a while, it all started again and I felt sick, listening to it.
That night I dreamed they both died. I went to their funerals, and didn’t care.
A few days after that, my mother went away. Dennis the Dickhead gave me twenty quid. ‘That should see you through till she gets back,’ he said. ‘If she comes back.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘He’s whisking me off into the sunset,’ my mother said, and laughed.
That was all they said about it, and then they went out the front door, my mother taking her things in a plastic Co-op bag because she didn’t own a suitcase.
I stood in the living room, fuming and frightened, but also feeling free, as if the whole world had just opened up to me. I was twelve years old and knew my mother shouldn’t be doing this. It was irresponsible and wrong and selfish, and of course it meant she didn’t love me enough, despite everything she said when she was angry and sorrowful. ‘All I’ve ever done is love you. I’ve always loved you so much, and all you do is treat me like shit.’ That sort of loving I could have done without.
Anyway, she was gone and a burden had been lifted. I knew how to look after myself, I knew how to get to school, and now I could eat whatever I wanted as well. I went into the kitchen and inspected the cupboards. There wasn’t a lot there, so I took myself round the corner to the Co-op and bought all the ingredients for a cake. I loved making cakes, though I was hardly ever allowed to because of the mess it made.
At home, I spooned the butter into the mixing bowl and poured over the caster sugar, then beat it till my arms ached. The mixture became pale yellow and fluffy as duck down. I dipped in my finger, licked the soft buttery sweetness and thought, not for the first time, how much nicer cake mixture was than cake. Then I thought, I can do whatever I like, and so I decided not to bother mixing up the rest of the cake and instead I carried the bowl and a spoon through to the living room, turned on the TV, then sat on the old brown sofa and slowly ate every mouthful.
Caitlin stayed away for nearly two weeks. I told no one she was gone. On most days, I got up and walked to school, just like I always did, and then I came home, watched TV, made my tea and went to bed, just like I always did. A few times, if I’d overslept or didn’t feel like it, I didn’t bother with school, but then the hours in the day stretched out before me, long and empty, like hungry bellies I couldn’t fill. The money Dennis had given me ran out after the first week. There was hardly any food. I slept a lot.
When Caitlin came home, she came home without him. Her face was pale and worn and bruised. She took herself to bed and stayed there for weeks.
I went back to the community café for my meals.
Part Three
45
Helen
The police had taken everything they needed from Hope’s room: her iPad, the one letter from her mother, any scraps of paper that might be classed as evidence. She wasn’t even meant to have an iPad, or not one with any Internet connection, but Helen supposed she must have found the code that night she’d broken into the office. That was a point of
neglected care they might be able to get the home on, she thought now. She was torn between hoping the evidence that Ace Clarke had done this would be right there on the iPad, and desperately wanting the Internet to have played no role in it at all.
Hope’s room needed to be cleared out now. It was no good for Annie to keep everything just as it was, like a shrine. She’d let her choose a few of Hope’s things she’d like to keep but otherwise, it all needed to go. The home was going to be shut down in the spring. Helen wasn’t sure if they’d be taking another child. Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be ethical to offer a placement to someone else, but there was no money and hundreds of children out there needing care. It wasn’t going to please Annie – but Helen had to make space for the next child to come in if that was what higher management decided.
There was also a funeral to arrange. They were expecting the coroner to release the body any day now. Hope’s mother was in Holloway and her father unknown, so the funeral was falling to the home to sort out. ‘The budget will be tight,’ the director said. ‘A standard half-hour service, followed by cremation. No flowers. A single rose for the coffin, perhaps. Anything staff or children want to offer will have to come from their own money, I’m afraid.’
They weren’t sure yet whether her mother would be there. If she was, she’d be on the arms of prison guards, rude and hysterical and angry.
Helen sighed and headed through the kitchen to the living room. Lara was in there alone, blocked into a corner between the fireplace and the bookshelf, curled up with her head against her chest, not looking at anyone or anything. This wasn’t the right place for her, Helen was certain of that. She needed to be in a community dedicated to children’s mental health, but they were so expensive and there was no funding these days for what was seen as a drain on the taxpayer. Lara had already taken her place among the debris. She was part of the litter of the world, and one day the wind would simply blow her off the face of it, and that would be that.
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