Helen gripped the phone so tightly her hand ached. ‘Everything OK?’
‘They’ve released her without charge.’
The relief was immense. Helen almost wept with it. ‘Thank God,’ she said.
Annie was too exhausted to talk when she came in and Helen had to try not to push her. She said, ‘Why don’t you have a bath, love? Recover from your ordeal. I’ll make you a brew.’
‘Alright.’
She couldn’t help herself. ‘Annie,’ she said, ‘before you go upstairs, just tell me: what do you think is happening with this case?’
‘I think,’ she said, ‘they’re going to get Ace Clarke.’
49
Annie
More than anything now, I hate that first moment in the morning. Before my eyes have even opened, before I’m properly awake, I’m aware of the ache in my chest, the wrench in my gut telling me again and again that she is gone. Sleep is my only escape and even then I dream about her. I see her face rising through the water, angry and betrayed, and wake up breathless, wishing I’d had the chance to reach in and save her. For a long time all she’d wanted was for her life to end, but not anymore, not after the baby. I try and think of how she’s in a better place now, somewhere her suffering is over; but it’s hard to grab hold of a faith you’ve never had and believe in it with all your might, even though you’d like to.
Besides that, there are still times when I feel sure she’s haunting me. Angrily, not with love.
I wonder what my mother would say, if she were here.
For the first time since it happened, I reach into my bedside drawer for the knife and hold it in my hands. I remember the way she dragged that blade around the swell of her belly, and over her arms. The splatters of blood are still there, like tiny red jewels. I stare at them, the last parts of her I will ever have, then run my tongue over them, harder and harder until they’re gone.
I could never get her to plan for the future. Once, I said, ‘If they close this place down and separate us, you know it won’t be for long. They reckon it’ll shut in March and that’s only four months away from your birthday. You’ll be sixteen. You can do what you want. We can live together.’
She didn’t protest. She just said nothing, and I knew why. It was because she didn’t trust me to stay with her. ‘You’ll meet some boy eventually,’ she said. ‘Some nice lad who’s not fucked up and who’ll get a decent job and a house and give you babies. I can’t do that.’
The thought of being with anyone who wasn’t her was impossible. I shook my head and smiled. ‘No, I won’t,’ I said. ‘Not ever.’
‘You will. Or you’ll find some other girl who’s beautiful and normal, and you’ll realise what life could be like without this old teenage whore in your life.’
‘Stop it,’ I snapped. ‘Just stop it.’
She fell silent then. I turned away from her and kept my eyes fixed on the window and the summer view beyond – the sun rising high above the peaks, the valley grasses whitened with wildflowers, the diamond glint of the tarn – and I thought, Why am I not enough for you? Why don’t you want all this? Why do you have to run back to Ace and your mother?
‘For fuck’s sake, Annie,’ she said at last. ‘Will you speak to me? What is wrong with you?’
Without turning from the window I said, ‘You’re what’s wrong with me. I wish I’d never met you.’
I heard her suck in her breath, as if I’d punched her hard in the gut. ‘Why are you saying this?’
‘Because it’s true. Because I met you when I had no one and you made me love you – even though I’m not even a lesbian – and just when I was thinking we’d live together forever, you ran off back to Ace Clarke and nothing I can do will ever—’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.
I stared at her, dumbstruck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I didn’t know how to react.
‘It’s his. It happened when I ran away and met up with him.’
She sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for me, forcing me to look at her. She took my face in her hands and planted a gentle kiss on my lips.
I turned away. ‘You’re too much for me,’ I said.
I sleep again, then wake, then sleep. Images come to me, half formed, in dreams. I see them all the time: Hope and my mother, both of them angry. They say I destroyed them. I see myself lying beside Hope in bed, our arms and legs entwined, holding on tight. ‘Come with me,’ she’s saying. ‘We’ll go together. If there’s heaven, we’ll find it. If not, it will all have stopped.’
I agreed to it once. When I could see no reason to stay here, alone in the world without her.
‘If you go,’ I’d said, ‘I’m coming, too.’
But when she had a baby on the way, I wondered if she would still want to die.
Significant Moments in My Life with My Mother
By Annie Cox
Part Five
None of the houses on our street had gardens, just small squares of concrete surrounded by brick walls. Sometimes, I’d see photos of them when I walked past estate agents’ windows, and they would be called ‘courtyard gardens’, which made them sound quaint, and much more attractive than they were, although a woman a few doors down had made the best of hers, by putting gravel over the concrete and painting the brick wall white, and arranging some plants around it. Our yard was grey and neglected. You opened the back door from the kitchen and there it was, littered with cigarette packets and crisp wrappers the wind had blown in, or sometimes the wheelie bins had been overturned and the crows would be there, scavenging whatever they could find.
It was spring now, and I was fourteen. I’d just chosen my GCSEs. English was a struggle, but I was doing well in other subjects. My teachers were looking out for me, trying to keep me ambitious. It was hard, though, I found, to believe there was a life beyond this. It seemed so out of reach, so impossible.
One morning, I went down to the kitchen to get her breakfast, and found my mother outside in the yard. She was hunched on all fours, her arm held out in front of her, making soft tweeting sounds.
I opened the back door. ‘What are you doing, Caitlin?’
Caitlin turned and faced me. ‘Ssh,’ she whispered. ‘Look.’ And she leaned forwards and I saw, there by the side of the wall, an injured robin.
Caitlin eased it on to her finger. ‘There!’ she said triumphantly. Softly, she stroked its head. ‘Be not afraid, little bird, for I am here to care for you. Find me a box, Annie,’ she said.
I went back into the kitchen and riffled in a cupboard for an old ice-cream tub. I lined it with a few sheets of kitchen roll and took it outside. ‘Here,’ I said. In my mother’s hand, the bird’s feathers were ruffled with fear.
She wouldn’t put it down. Instead, she took it through to the living room and sat down with it on the sofa. ‘There, there, little bird,’ she murmured. Then she looked up at me, her eyes glowing with happiness. ‘It’s not afraid,’ she said. ‘It has come to me.’
I said, ‘It looks like a cat’s had it.’
My mother ignored me and went on stroking its head with her fingers.
She kept the bird for two days before it died. She slept in the kitchen with the ice-cream tub beside her, as though it held a newborn baby, and every hour she fed the robin water through a doll’s bottle. Never in my life had I seen her tend to anything as devotedly as she tended to that dying bird. It would have been touching, had it not carried the unmistakable whiff of absolute madness.
I said, ‘Shall I phone the RSPB? They might have a better idea of what to do.’
My mother shook her head. ‘No, Annie,’ she said. ‘No. The task is mine.’ And she made a gesture that appeared to take in the whole world, and not just their kitchen.
There was no hope. The robin’s wing was broken and it died on the second night.
I expected Caitlin to be heartbroken, but she wasn’t. She simply covered it in a flannel, put the lid on the ice-cream box a
nd said, ‘I’ll take it to church with me. It needs a proper burial. You can see from its face how the soul has already departed.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Its spirit is in heaven,’ Caitlin said. ‘The bird is with our father.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Caitlin. It’s a bloody bird…’
She stopped short and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Father, forgive her, for she doesn’t know what she is doing.’
And then she gasped, as if taken aback by her own words.
I stayed late at school that day, for science club. When I came home at 5.00, my mother was kneeling on the living-room carpet, head bowed deeply, her hands wrung in fervent prayer. Words flew from her lips like flies.
‘Teach me thy love to know, and I shall climb to thee by a beam of light. Oh, my father. With thee, let me rise…’
I slammed the front door to try and break her prayer. It didn’t work. She went on.
‘Oh, what is a heart? I cannot open my eyes, but my heart is split apart and you are ready there to catch me. Come to me, Father, and show me your sign.’
She stopped then, suddenly, and darted her gaze around the room, her eyes wide and fearful. She seemed not to see me.
That night, I lay awake for hours, listening to her. She was pacing the floors, murmuring and occasionally shouting. Four or five times, she recited the Lord’s Prayer and then at 3.00 am, she reached her peak.
‘Oh, Father. Help me!’ she wailed, and for hours after that, she wept.
In the morning, I found her asleep on the kitchen floor, palms upward. I didn’t wake her. I stepped round her to make my breakfast, then showered and got ready for school. It was all I could think of to do.
Every day after school, I dreaded going home. My mother was always lost in prayer, or writhing in religious ecstasy or agony. On this particular day, I came in to find the living room filled with all my mother’s clothes in carrier bags, as if she were going away again. My mother herself was perched on the edge of the sofa, hands neatly folded in her lap, staring straight ahead.
‘What are you doing, Caitlin?’ I asked.
‘I am waiting for a sign from the Lord, my father.’
‘What sign?’
She kept her eyes fixed forwards and didn’t look at me. ‘I am the Lord Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘I am come to heal the world from all its grave ills. I am not yet in the right place. I am waiting for a sign from my almighty father to show me where I need to go.’
‘What sign?’
‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Annie. I will know the sign when I see it. It hasn’t happened yet, but I sense it will be soon. My devotions have pierced his silent soul.’
I left her to it, and went upstairs.
May. The evenings were light and long. The sun set late. I shut myself in my room every night, knowing my mother was mad. I listened to her wailing and murmuring her fervent prayers and thought, Shall I call an ambulance? But I didn’t do it because I was afraid of seeing her carted off, like some poor Victorian madwoman. And what would happen to me, then? There was no one I could go to. I’d end up in care, the way my mother had always threatened.
But then, I thought now, would a children’s home or a foster home really be worse than this? I wasn’t sure.
I sat at my window and wondered what sort of sign Caitlin was looking for. Outside, it had been raining and there were two rainbows in the sky above the street. I wondered if she’d seen them, and if that were enough to make her leave.
It wasn’t. She was still there the next day.
‘What signs are you looking for, Caitlin?’ I asked.
My mother looked anxious and earnest. ‘I don’t know. Feathers, I think. He sends white feathers. They are gifts from the angels. Messages.’
I said, ‘And where will you go?’
‘The Lord will show me the way.’
My mother slept that night, for the first time in weeks. While she slept, I took the scissors from the kitchen drawer, then went upstairs and cut open my pillow. Hundreds of white feathers tumbled out on to the floor. I scooped them into my hands and scattered them all over the house.
But the next day, she was still there.
I had no idea how to get rid of her.
50
Hope
The world was closing in on us. The home was being shut down, we were being separated, Ace had reappeared, and now there was a baby I had no idea what to do with.
Annie blamed him for all of it. She tried to hide her fury from me, but I could tell. She’d lie in bed beside me and I could feel it, this white-hot rage radiating from every inch of her. Once, she told me, she’d dreamed about the two of us marching to 5 Crescent Avenue – that building where he rented out children to grown men – and setting the whole place on fire.
‘I wouldn’t care,’ she said, ‘if I ended up in prison for it. I wouldn’t care. I want him to fall off the face of the earth, straight to hell.’
In a way, I did as well. But it was complicated. Annie tried to get me to hate him. She said he ought to die for what he’d done to me, but he was the only person in all my life I’d ever been able to rely on.
‘Don’t you see?’ she persisted. ‘Don’t you see it was fake? All he wanted was to use you for what he could get.’
‘I know. I do know. And I didn’t want my sister to grow up with him, which was why…’ I couldn’t finish. Thoughts of Jade still overwhelmed me. The sorrow and the guilt. I couldn’t bear it.
Quietly, I said, ‘I do know what he did to me.’
The trouble was the shame. It had become a part of me. I used to try and detach myself from my work – to leave my body behind on the bed and watch myself, as if it was someone else doing those things, not me – but the shame still snaked its way in. I had this one client – a skinny little bloke with a balding head and a pointed face like a rat’s – who requested me because I was young. He could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. The memory of him still made me feel sick.
‘Come on, you darling little thing,’ he’d said, taking off his clothes with his back to me. ‘Let me at you.’ When he turned round, I saw the swell of his hard-on like a plucked turkey neck. The sight of it, pointing optimistically towards me like that, made me want to sob suddenly. But there was no getting away.
Silently, I removed my own clothes and draped them over the back of the chair beside the bed. Often, the men wanted to undress me themselves, but not this one. He only had half an hour. He needed to get straight down to business.
Which was exactly what he did. I lay flat on my back and did what I was supposed to do while he hammered away on top of me. As he did, he murmured breathlessly into my ear:
‘You dirty, disgusting little whore.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school, my filthy little one, instead of here?
‘Such a pretty face. Such a pretty, pretty little face. You ought to be a virgin, you know, not a hooker. No man’ll ever want you now. There’ll be no husband, no lovely little babies for a girl like you. You appal me, you disgusting tart.’
And then he let out a moan like a bull and rolled off me. I reached for the towel on the floor beside the bed and covered myself up with it while he got dressed. When he turned round, he looked at me with such hatred, it made me cry.
He’d been the worst one, the one I couldn’t drive out of my memory, however hard I tried. And he was the one I couldn’t even tell Annie about, but I often had flashbacks to that afternoon.
Annie did her best to love the shame away from me, but it was too late by the time we’d met. She didn’t have a chance.
It was impossible to make her understand why I went back to Ace. I hardly understood it myself, except that it wasn’t a decision so much as a compulsion. I had to do it, because for months I’d been anxious and uncertain about my mother, and then finally she sent me that letter and it was nothing like the letter I wanted. There was no love in it and reading it left me with a cold feeling in my chest, as though
someone had just shovelled ice inside me. My need to ease that feeling was overwhelming, and even Annie couldn’t help. Her love wasn’t enough. I hurt. It was wild and deep, and only the person who’d done it to me could make it better.
But she was in prison. I couldn’t see her, but I could see Ace. I knew he’d have been in touch with her. He’d know how she really felt about me, and whether that letter was meant to be as cold and damning as it felt.
So I went. I took my allowance, walked to the village, hailed a taxi to the train station and caught three trains to the seaside town where Ace lived. Stepping out of the station, breathing the sea air and seeing the old sights of the pier and the beach and the parades of shops made me want to sob with relief. The warm embrace of coming home, where everything was familiar and where I knew what was expected of me, and how to do it.
I knocked on the front door of 5 Crescent Avenue. It was Ace who opened it.
‘Hi,’ I said.
For a moment, he just looked at me. Then he opened his arms and I stepped into them, soothed and protected.
‘I wish we could kill Ace Clarke,’ Annie said.
I stared at her, shocked. I could tell she meant it.
‘We can’t do that,’ I said, lying on the bed beside her and running my hands over my still-flat belly. ‘We’d end up in prison, and besides, you want him to suffer. There’s no suffering in death.’
‘Does he know you’re pregnant?’
I nodded.
She sat up. ‘So you’re still in touch with him?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t know what to do. He says he’ll help me.’
‘Jesus Christ, Hope. You know what his kind of help means, don’t you? It means trapping you and forcing you to carry on working for him. Is that what you want? Is that what you want for your child? You didn’t want it for your sister…’
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