I heard the footsteps on the stairs; soft light footsteps and I straightened up, a rush of love thrumming through me. ‘Mummy?’ I was so ready to welcome her, my beautiful daughter. When the kitchen door pushed open, I saw blond hair, thin shoulders, bare feet.
‘Mummy?’ The shape wavered and blurred. ‘What’s going on?’ Not Abigail. Sam.
All right then. I made myself smile. ‘Come on, sit here.’ I pulled out a chair. ‘Doesn’t it look lovely?’
Sam rubbed at his eyes, a tiny frown-crease lining his forehead. ‘Is this for Auntie Lillian?’
I shook my head. Why say that? Just because I’d made it all look so perfect? ‘No. It’s for Abigail. A welcome home breakfast.’
I pushed him forwards and settled him into the chair. The clock on the microwave clicked over. Sam leaned his elbows on the table, his feet scuffing at the bare kitchen floor. ‘I was sleeping, Mummy. You woke me up.’
Outside it was only just growing light – too early for any reporters to have gathered – but already I could hear birds singing: blackbirds and the croak of jackdaws. The kitchen felt chilly though; I couldn’t understand why the boiler hadn’t come on. Sam fiddled with the knife at the side of his plate, his thumb making a smudgy print on the blade.
‘Sam,’ I said. ‘Leave that.’ He set the knife back down. The clock on the microwave blinked again: 5:41, ridiculously early, I know. Sam shivered, his fingers sliding from the knife, from the table. ‘Mummy,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m going back to bed.’
It was three hours later when the whole family finally appeared – Lillian and Fraser, Robert and the boys, Abigail yawning in the dressing gown I’d lent her, and a sleepy Jess by her side, pulling her jumper sleeves down over her arms.
Abigail sat down to eat with the rest of us and heaped up her share of cereal and toast. From where I sat at the other end of the table, she seemed happy enough – busy with milk and butter and jam – and I set to my own breakfast with a grateful sense of relief. It was only when I came to clear the plates that I realized, my heart twisting. She had hardly eaten a thing.
She spent the rest of the day wrapped in my thick pink dressing gown, watching TV, dozing. She was tired after the Bradys’ visit. From the couch, she received all my yes-or-no questions – Do you want a drink, have you had enough sleep, do you remember your flopsy, can you work the remote? – with a steady expression. I knew I was hovering, crowding her, but it was as though seven years of everyday mothering was now desperate to come out. She replied, yes, yes, yes to each one of my questions, but always with a pause beforehand, a tense little pause.
It was the same when she replied yes to Robert’s suggestion.
He had been set on the idea all week, ever since the first headlines got out. I knew what it meant to him. He wanted the chance to say: here we are, the family who never gave up, the family who never stopped trying and thank you for bringing her back to us at last. It wasn’t as though I didn’t understand. Hadn’t my breakfast been about the same thing? When he came into our lives, he’d made a promise to protect her. Hadn’t that been a condition of our love? And hadn’t he spent these last seven years wracked with guilt at how this promise was broken? Now she was found and safe and at home. He had every right to be overjoyed at that.
The twins crowded round him as he broached the subject with Abigail, clambering next to him on the armchair in the living room, and I watched them all from the doorway.
Under the dressing gown, she was still wearing the T-shirt and leggings she’d slept in last night. They needed a wash but we hadn’t got anything else for her yet. My daughter, home, and we didn’t even have clothes.
Robert looped an arm around Laurie’s shoulders and he spoke so gently and calmly to Abigail, explaining, reassuring – we’d only need to be out a few minutes, let them take a few photos, and she wouldn’t even need to say anything, he would prepare a statement for us all, one even DS McCarthy would approve of. He could arrange it all with one quick call.
‘What about it, Abigail? What do you think?’
Hugging a cushion, she looked at him. The little tense hesitation, a breath through her nose, a glance up at me and then: yes. Surely it was better this way, said Robert. It would stop them hounding us, get them off our front step, and yet I woke up the next morning with a pain in my stomach.
That afternoon, I sat on our rumpled mattress turning up a pair of my smart black trousers while Robert shaved at the corner sink. His electric razor was humming and the sound of it usually comforted me, but right now it felt like a needle against my teeth.
The trousers had been so long on her when she tried them on, whole inches pooling at her feet no matter how high up she hitched the waist. I’d measured the amount they’d need taking up but now the needle in my hand kept slipping, the thread twisting and tangling, making a knot that refused to pull through.
‘Some of the reporters will be the ones from before,’ Robert was saying over the buzz of his shaver. ‘I’ll never forget how they tried to help.’
I remembered too: how he had gone on and on calling up the news stations – at home and in London – begging them to provide fresh coverage, fresh appeals, even when the soundbites of information shrank to crumbs and every single lead dried up. He had done everything. He had never given up.
‘I’m not sure.’ When he didn’t hear, I had to repeat myself. ‘I’m not sure.’
Now Robert paused his shaving, looking at me through the mirror, the razor hanging in the air. ‘But I thought you were all right with it. All we’re doing is sharing good news.’
I wiped the damp pads of my fingers on my knee, rethreaded the needle. Lillian had tried when we were younger to get me to copy her own perfect efforts: stitches in rows like soldiers, each one alike, but mine had never come out like that.
‘I am – I was, but don’t you think we should wait? Why do we need to go out there right now, when we’ve barely even just got her back?’
‘Anne, this is a good thing. All we’re telling them is how happy we are. All they want is to write their happy ending. That’s the only reason they’ve been standing out there. The sooner they’ve got that, the sooner I think they’ll let us alone.’
I tugged at the trousers, pushing the needle through again, shaking my head. Robert set the shaver down on the shelf. The buzzing vibrations whined worse than ever. ‘What is this, Anne? What is it you’re so worried about?’
But how could I explain when I hardly knew myself, just had this feeling, a cold stone in the pit of my stomach, making sweat bead on my palms. How could I explain that it all felt so fragile, as though the slightest misstep would break everything apart?
In my panic, I found myself saying, ‘Why do we have to be all on show? Why does it have to be shared with everyone? Just what is it that you’re trying to prove?’
Straight away as the words came out, like catching my fingers in the slam of a door, I knew it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. In the mirror, it was written all over Robert’s face.
‘Robert,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I pinched at the hems of the trousers, trying to press the stitches flat. ‘I didn’t mean that at all.’
He reached out and carefully turned off the shaver. The silence flowed in like a cool sluice of water. He came and sat along from me on the bed, in a patch of May sunlight. I reached out my hand, a gesture we’d done a hundred times over the years: our olive branch that had got us through the very worst of times. As always, he took my hand in his but this time, in his fingers, I felt the tension.
‘Anne, it’s not like that. I’m not trying to prove anything. But why are you acting like we’ve something to hide?’
When I held up the trousers, miraculously the hems stayed in place. I gathered them up and went to give them to Abigail. Robert was right, we had nothing to be afraid of. I had read his statement, it made everything clear; it would give the journalists exactly what they wanted and if Abigail hadn’t said anything before, why should she now? Al
l right then – as soon as she was ready, we would go.
‘Abigail?’ Her door was ajar, her bedroom empty, and her bed was made with uncanny precision. It was as though she had vanished into thin air or climbed out of her window or run straight out the front door. ‘Robert,’ I called out, ‘where is she?’
‘I heard her go into the bathroom,’ he said from our doorway. By now he had his shirt on and was doing up the bottom button. ‘Just knock for her while I sort out the boys.’
Of course. After all, hadn’t we told her to get ready? At the bathroom door, I listened for her with the trousers bunched in my hands. She’d closed the door tightly and I couldn’t hear anything – no sound of taps running or a brushing of teeth. How long had she been in there? Five minutes, ten? A sickly thought rose up, like something with claws climbing up my throat. Wild thoughts, paranoid thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them stretching and thickening as I thought of the razor blades beside the bath, a dressing gown cord to loop from the shower rail and a whole box of painkillers in the cabinet over the sink.
I knew the lock on the door was loose and I lifted the handle up with a twist and shoved the door open – and there she was.
At first I couldn’t make out at all what she was doing. She jerked back from the mirror and out of some instinct thrust her hand behind her back. Still, I glimpsed what she was holding: something small, black, circular.
‘Abigail? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have barged in.’ I told myself to keep my voice steady.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have asked first.’
‘But what are you doing?’ Her forehead was pale where she hadn’t swept the colour yet and the front of my dressing gown was scuffed with powder. I told myself, you remember this from before, the way it can go, if she’s challenged, if you get angry.
She looked at her nose, her cheeks in the glass. ‘I’m just so white.’
The trousers slipped from my hand and I fumbled to catch them before they fell. I couldn’t escape it as my mind fitted the pieces together, showing me suddenly what this meant: so pale, so white because of how she had lived, in conditions no child should ever have to live in. The thought was sickening.
I shook my head. ‘Don’t apologize. You don’t need to apologize. Of course you can use my make-up if you want, I can even show you if you like, how to do it, how to get it right.’ It was the kind of thing a mother would do for a daughter, another of the thousands of things we’d missed out on. But somehow this time an edge had crept into my voice; I’d glimpsed that look I knew so well, the bottom lip pushing out, the stubborn flare of her nostrils and I’d felt the old, old feeling: that raw, painful discord between us. She set the compact down on the lip of the basin. It wobbled for a moment and then fell in, scraping down the enamel. I was ready for it; I knew what came next. I remembered her this way, this other Abigail; I remembered it and I braced myself.
Instead she turned away, a quarter turn back to the mirror, as though all the fight had gone out of her, or as though she’d had no fight at all to begin with. Seeing it drained my heart. Whatever I had expected, this was worse: this disconnect, this hollow gap. This closed-off, silent turning away.
I held up the trousers, right-sized now, filling up the space with my words. ‘I’ve taken these up now so they should fit, and come through to the bedroom when you’re done and I can quickly measure you for the rest.’
After a beat, she looked at me. ‘You don’t need to do that. I know my size.’
She must have seen the red climb my cheeks. She did. Of course she did. ‘Okay,’ I said when I could get my voice even. ‘Just give me a minute.’
She stooped to wash the make-up off.
Downstairs, Robert was pulling out shoes for the twins. He didn’t ask any questions as I went out of the back door and yanked open the bag by the wheelie bin. That’s what I’d done with them, on her very first night; she must have wondered. The clothes were inside, safely nestled in the clean plastic – the clothes he had bought for her. Of course the size was on the labels. I carried the whole bundle back upstairs with me, including the neat white bra. Up in her room, she took them from me and placed them carefully on the bed, right next to the trousers I’d laid out. I took hold of myself. They’re only clothes, I told myself, and she had to wear something. You needed the measurements and now you have them: size 14 and 36C.
Once she was dressed – in the black trousers and white bra and the blue acrylic jumper – we finally made our way up the road. As we walked, Abigail in between me and Robert, and the twins on either side, I thought to myself, we’re all right, we’re fine. We’re a family reunited, and it’s wonderful, a miracle that all five of us are here, walking down a sun-filled street together. Why should anyone think any different? Laurie slipped his small, hot hand into mine and I tugged him a little, to make him keep up.
We heard them before we even reached the hall, and when we rounded the corner, the grass was beetling with reporters, more of them than I think even Robert had expected. Beside me, Abigail fell back a step. The journalists had seen us now and were jostling for position. ‘On the steps? If you stand on the steps?’ The press officer, a petite woman with blonde hair in a bun, was coming towards us, all smiles. She reached for Abigail, curling one hand about her elbow, and this time Abigail let the woman handle her just fine.
She positioned Abigail on the top step and Robert climbed up to stand beside her. He was clearly waiting for me to get up there too.
‘And your boys?’ Against the sun, I could make out the faces of our neighbours and friends, this tight-knit community that had accepted me and Robert, a community that had supported us through the ordeal of all these years.
‘Mrs White? Anne?’ The press officer was gesturing to me: come along, stand here, your sons will be fine. I looked up at them: my husband and my daughter. They looked nothing alike, never had, but he’d been more of a father than her real dad ever was. From the start, their bond had been so loving, so strong, and there’d been a naturalness, such an ease in his relationship with her; I’d envied it and I’d loved him for it, the joy that he’d brought to both of our lives. Then all through this ordeal, we’d been a team together. He’d never allowed himself to be pushed to one side. Now he reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out his crisp sheet of paper. He smiled down at me and I felt myself smile back as I climbed up beside them. We were still a team here today and suddenly I wanted everyone to see it.
With a deep breath, Robert read out the statement and it was perfect. I put my arms around both twins and I managed to say my bit too. Abigail stood there all the while, bravely, and didn’t speak or add anything. The May sun was glinting in my eyes; I could hardly make out the reporters in front of us. It was only when the sun disappeared for a moment that I made out the cameras with their local and national and international logos, nothing at all between us and them, nothing hiding us at all. And suddenly I realized why I’d balked at bringing her here. Suddenly all the knotted ropes in my stomach made sense. All the eyes of the world were on us and like a bloated cloud passing over the sun, the thought bloomed across my mind:
He will see this.
Chapter 6
Friday 31st May:
Day 5
JESS
They aired the story on the evening news. They started with the other girl: Tonia Dillon, six years old, taken by a man with chin-length blond hair. The same man, they said. Then about the teenager who’d brought her to Southwark Police Station, who said the child had been brought to her house.
I gestured Dad to move up on the couch, make room for me between him and Mum. I’d already seen coverage all over Twitter, but Dad had wanted us to watch this together. For Abigail White’s family, just being together again is a joy, said the news anchor, and there they were – Auntie Anne, Uncle Robert and Abigail, up on the steps in front of some building, the twins cuddled in at my uncle’s side. Five days in and it still sometimes felt like a dream. I squeezed my arm, c
hecking the tender, sharp spots. Making sure I wouldn’t wake up and find her gone again, like all those other times I’d dreamed she’d come back. But this news broadcast was true, the real deal.
You could catch the flash of cameras, sense the dozens of reporters. It was like in the beginning, when Uncle Robert had to keep calling the papers, making sure they covered her story. I knew the guilt he felt for not being there. Because he’d stayed at the hospital instead. He’d gone over that story with us a million times in the months after Abigail went missing, like he couldn’t stop punishing himself. But even despite that, it didn’t make sense to him – why there weren’t witnesses with all those hundreds of people right there? He wouldn’t let the media give up. They’d even staged a reconstruction. A Tube platform, overflowing with rain-soaked commuters, all these people pushing, pressing to get home. The train carriages bursting, a crush for anyone to get on or off. They showed us a woman with infant twins in a buggy, trying to keep her eight-year-old in tow. And then a tide of passengers pushing to get out of the carriages, and how, in a split second, Auntie Anne and Abigail got separated – bodies buffeted, hands wrenched apart. And they said how in her confusion, my cousin left the platform, made her way up and out of the station. And then there was that shot. The one where it wasn’t an actress, it wasn’t the reconstruction, it was the CCTV footage of my cousin herself, holding the hand-rail and standing on the right, just like you’re supposed to, people packed in all around her. On the footage, they used a bright spotlight to pick her out. You know, in case you missed her. In another two shots, she drifts through the barriers and up the steps to the exit, and then that was it.
Dad turned the volume up on the TV. ‘Where are they?’ I said. ‘What building is that?’
Little White Lies Page 4