And Abigail.
Abigail bringing her hands together, grasping at the shining plastic bangle on her wrist. She twisted it, dragging it up over the width of her thumb, drawing a dark rash across the skin.
She set the bangle down on the table, the plastic edge clacking sharp against the wood.
‘Abigail?’ My dad’s voice was uneven with surprise.
She looked up at me, her eyes loaded, hooded. ‘Never mind then,’ she said, ‘about the posters.’
I looked round the table, at all the clueless mouths. They had never been able to read her like I could. I could tell at once what she was thinking, as easily as knowing my own mind. That shifting thing in her now all made sense. I shoved back my chair and reached straight across to her, just like when she’d reached out to me in the dark on our first night. I locked my hand around my cousin’s wrist, where only a moment ago my aunt’s bangle had been.
‘No. No! Listen to me, Abigail.’ The skin of her arm was hot in my grasp, but I didn’t let go. ‘I’m telling you – it isn’t like that. This is forever. You aren’t ever going back.’
Chapter 11
Friday 7th June:
Day 12
ANNE
Robert lay beside me in the bed. I was exhausted but we were both awake. When cars passed by outside, growling up the road, their headlights swung beams across the ceiling like search lights.
‘How, how could she think that?’ I said. Our bed felt like a box, a coffin. I was still so stiff with shock. In the darkness, all the contours of our room seemed alien, filled with shapes and objects I didn’t know.
For over a week, DS McCarthy had told us, their suspect had hidden out in the attics of the school where he worked. I couldn’t stop picturing him, squatting, crawling around up there above the unknowing children. Then he’d tried to get away and escape out of London but a cleaner at Euston station had spotted him. When he glanced at her, that face on TV had done its job; the cleaner left her bucket and mop in the middle of the concourse, went straight to the office and dialled the police, and they’d come and arrested him on the spot.
They’d arrested him, and then Abigail had said that.
‘She was talking-’ I took a shuddering breath, ‘as though he has a right to her. As though she is supposed to be living with him.’
And now I thought again of what the officers had told us at the start: that not once in the police station, even when she was safe, even when a dozen people were there to help her, not once did she mention us, her family, not once did she talk about wanting to come home. I’d assumed she was only overwhelmed, in shock; I had never, never imagined this.
‘I know, I know,’ said Robert. ‘I can’t understand either.’
The pain of it lay on me like an iron sheet. I sat up, trying to lift the weight, shook my head, pressing my palms to my eyes. ‘Maybe … I don’t know … is this what it’s like? Hasn’t this happened in other cases? Stockholm syndrome, isn’t that what it’s called?’
‘I read—’ said Robert and then broke off. He was always reading, always researching. We’d fallen out over that over the years. These other victims, I would tell him, they’re not our daughter, how is some hostage article meant to help? But now I needed an explanation – any explanation – for what Abigail had said, so this time I needed him to go on.
He lifted himself up in the bed beside me, the springs creaking. ‘They say kidnappers can be very good at those things. Mind games, brainwashing, creating dependency …’ It felt as though we both needed to believe this. ‘And maybe because -’ I winced as another headlight swept through, ‘at the start, she was so young.’
He didn’t need to add the other sickening details we’d learned piece by piece from DS McCarthy. Robert didn’t need to say, she was locked in his attic, and I ignored the voice in my head that said, yes, but not the whole time. He didn’t need to say, you know he had sex with her. He didn’t need to list the ways this man had wreaked his abuse.
‘All right then,’ I said, lowering my shoulders. ‘He frightened her, he hurt her. No wonder her world’s been turned upside down.’
I heard Robert take a deep breath through his nose. He was silent for a moment, hesitating too long, and suddenly I felt more than ever the desperate longing for someone who could tell us how to manage all of this, how to navigate this territory that was so frighteningly strange. Someone who could explain the landscape we had found ourselves in – not some detective, not Lillian, but someone who could see right into my heart and know the truth and love that was there, who could understand Abigail and everything she’d been through, and see beyond all the muddled relationships of our family and tell us clearly, now, where we stood. But I had known from the start that there were no protocols for this, a missing child found alive after seven long years. So here I was with Robert in the darkness of night, trying our best, the blind leading the blind.
A noise from next door. Laurie or Sam.
‘You’re right,’ Robert said at last. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘So what now? What do we do now?’
‘Anne—’
‘I know. I can hear him.’
‘Wait.’ In the dark I felt him grasp my hand. ‘What if—’
‘Laurie’s calling.’
‘Listen, Anne, what if there are other reasons Abigail is so confused, doubts in her mind that her abductor played on?’
It felt as though all the air had disappeared from the room. His tone – I knew he didn’t mean all that happened with Preston, he didn’t mean how many times she’d moved house as a child. But the other thing – he couldn’t know. How could he know? He wasn’t there, he didn’t see it, but what if someone, somehow had told him? I tried to pull away. ‘Robert, Laurie’s crying—’
‘Anne, I’m saying, I should have been there, I never should have argued with you. The children were upset, Abigail was upset, I should have chosen to come with you. I never should have let you all leave on your own.’
I went still; my hand was still in his. For a moment, I wished he had blamed me instead. This was worse. This was a slippery slope and I knew what was waiting for us at the bottom. All Robert’s remorse, all Robert’s guilt; guilt that he had been left to carry because I’d never had the chance to shoulder my own. If only, if only at the start I’d been able to tell him, but Lillian was the first person I had been able to get hold of and when Robert arrived, hours and hours later, by then I was trapped, I had already lied.
Laurie’s whimpers were louder than ever. ‘Robert. Don’t,’ I said. He thought he was sharing to make me feel better, to make me see I wasn’t the only person with regrets. I couldn’t let him go down this track. I freed myself and snapped on the light. ‘Why are we making this all about us?’
In the glare of the light, my husband’s profile was like a hollowed rock. ‘We’re not.’
‘Then why are you saying any of this?’ My eyes were stinging from the lamplight. ‘Listen, Robert. He did this to Abigail. He got into her head, we can’t let him into ours. She needs us to be strong. We have to be strong.’
‘I’m trying, Anne. What more do you want?’
I sat there in our rumpled bed, our son crying in the next room, and I wanted to say: For you to love me to the ends of the earth and for nothing ever to break your love. Instead I let my hand drop, feeling so cold in my thin nightdress and so exposed in the bright light. ‘Just for us not to tear ourselves apart.’
Eventually I got Laurie settled and managed to get to sleep myself. Two, maybe three hours later, I woke to find Robert’s side of the bed empty. The sheets were still warm, the mattress still dimpled. When I sat up, I heard a sound that I recognized: a heavy slide with the soft thunk at the end, out there in the street. But why now, in the middle of the night?
I pushed back the covers and got up quietly. On the landing, I listened at the twins’ door. Silence now. The door to Abigail’s room was open a little way; we’d taken to leaving it like that, and a low lig
ht on the landing, as for a young child. Her room was silent too, with no sound of sleep-talking; despite everything this evening, there was none of that to log in the notebook tonight. Downstairs, I heard the front door open and shut. In just my nightdress – Abigail still had my dressing gown; I’d forgotten to order her one of her own – I went down.
Robert was in the kitchen and the table was strewn with paintbrushes, paint trays, wallpaper scrapers, symbols of my life with him. Safe and loving and good and stable, a home and a family for Abigail. All I’d ever wanted for her. In that moment, as I stood looking at him across our shining kitchen, with the beautiful worktops he’d fitted for me specially, I was overwhelmed by the pressure of living up to his goodness, of not letting him down, of deserving his love and the happy family he’d given me. I stood there, fighting desperately to block out the thought: you’ve still no idea of the mistake I’ve made.
‘Robert?’
He started at my voice. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘I was up anyway.’ I surveyed the equipment he’d brought in from his work van outside.
He gave me a tired smile. ‘I think it was a good idea of your sister’s,’ he said. ‘It might actually help.’
I switched on the kettle and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs; no point in going back to bed to lie awake and stare at the ceiling. I lifted a paint-flecked scraper and ran a finger along its edge. Well, all right, maybe it would help and if there was any way to bring us all closer, then God knew we needed that now. There were bigger questions, bigger things I knew we needed to address: what to do about all Abigail’s missed schooling, whether we should be organizing counselling, how on earth she would deal with any trial. Yet it only felt possible to take such small steps at a time and the risk of going wrong always felt so large. So if we could first just make it right within the walls of our home … The tightness gave a little in my chest. ‘I’m sorry about before,’ I told him. ‘And I’m up for doing this.’
Robert nodded. ‘Something to try at least.’
The next morning, I woke Abigail early, her bedroom bright with clear June daylight. I sat down carefully at the end of her bed, ignoring the weakness I still felt in my limbs, the aftermath of last night’s shock. We had to move past that, we had to look forward, and she had already agreed to this, hadn’t she? I laid out our plan. ‘We can use whatever colours or wallpaper you like … You can make it completely your own.’
What better way to make it clear this was permanent? What better way of starting afresh?
The first job, once she was up and dressed, was to put all the knick-knacks and toys away. She didn’t seem sad to see them go, though I kept the flopsy there on her bed. When the walls and surfaces were all clear, and the furniture covered with dust sheets, Robert handed us each a scraper, the twins too, and we brought the radio up from the kitchen. I was slow and clumsy to begin with, but it came back to me soon enough, my muscles remembering how to catch the edge of the paper and release it inch by inch with a steady shucking movement.
I took hold of a loose piece of yellow and peeled it away. In the motion, I was overcome again by a rush of memories, the history that wouldn’t leave me alone, the path backwards through time, everything that for so long I had tried to ignore. The dingy flat in London with Preston, where walls stayed unpainted while the money went on other things. That flat that never felt like home, the flat where the three of us clashed time and again. My life with Preston, that misguided attempt at a family, it had brought out the worst in all three of us, all the worst sides of ourselves. We kept trying though, me, him and little Abigail. I knew he and I were young, but I’d always thought we could get there and, honestly, we tried so damn hard. But there was something in us we couldn’t get past. It made fault lines that we could never mend and instead there was so much anger that kept building: his anger, my anger, and within Abigail too. Her crying, her tantrums, would go on for hours, so fierce that I could hardly bear to go near her, or else she’d turn so stone-cold silent it scared me.
In the mess, in the chaos, it felt like something was invading our house, bringing out the worst in all of us. There were times when I’d be so overwhelmed and upset I couldn’t seem to keep anything straight. Things would go missing or I’d find them out of place – spare keys, my pocket diary – and I’d say to Preston that someone must have been there, invading our lives and tampering with our things, until I ended up sounding as though I was the one on drugs. And even after we stopped living together, for as long as we had contact, it was always the same. Those fault lines, that anger. Until Lillian finally got me to stop.
With Robert, though, it was different. Here, now, I held onto that. With Robert, it all got better; I saw her become her best self, a smiling, bright, contented child, the child I had always wanted her to be. There was laughter instead of anger; fun, silliness, easy-going joy. I remembered ballet classes, family days out, everything a normal family would do. Finally I felt like a good enough mother; finally I felt I was getting this right.
I remembered moving into this house only a month after we got engaged – a rush job all round and Abigail would have been barely five. It had been a fixer-upper, but I knew this time we would make a home to be proud of. And we did. We made a family to be proud of. In the new house, I got carried away, not waiting for Robert, and he was mad at me for pasting new paper straight over the old, but the vibrant yellow I’d chosen looked so lovely that he couldn’t stay mad at me for long.
Across the room, Abigail fumbled her scraper and it fell with a clatter, cutting through the radio’s adverts. Robert crouched and lifted it back into her grasp. ‘Here. Turn your wrist a little. Do you see? All right then. Gently.’ He was good with her. He had always been so good with her, this child who wasn’t his but whom he loved like his own.
She jabbed at the wall, her grip firmer now on the scraper’s handle, digging her way beneath the layers. Over time, the bold colour had faded and it was a paler yellow we were peeling off now. In the same way, in the morning’s bright light, the events of last night seemed to be fading, no worse or more real than Laurie’s bad dream. And look, here the paper underneath was pristine: plain white with a diagonal blue stripe.
‘Abigail?’ It seemed so important suddenly that she should see this. ‘Abigail? Come here a minute.’ I shucked away a little more of the yellow, separating the layers to show the design underneath.
‘Abigail?’ said Robert. Over the radio, she didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘Go and look for your mum.’
Clumsily, as though she’d forgotten how to programme her legs, she got to her feet. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Your room had this paper when we first moved in.’ I could feel her standing right behind me, the heat of her. On my knees, I pressed a hand to the wall, smoothing the old pattern. ‘You were so delighted that we were moving in with Robert. You were so excited that this would be your home.’ I was so aware of my need to convince her: we are your family, here’s where you belong; you and me and Robert and the twins, no one else. This is a place where you were happy. I felt her leaning down over me to look. ‘Do you remember?’
But when I turned, her expression wasn’t at all what I’d expected. She was staring at the wall as though it would bite her, the scraper clutched in her hand like a blade. The words blurted out of her: ‘That paper.’
I pushed myself to my feet. ‘Abigail, what is it?’
‘That paper. That wallpaper, it matches. I remember it now. I remember, I do.’ But she looked as though she was going to be sick. She sat down hard on her covered bed, the scraper dangling. ‘Please – I can’t to do this any more.’
It felt like whole minutes that we were frozen like that: Abigail rigid on the bed, me looming like a shadow above her. It was Robert who stepped forwards, turned the racket of the radio down and gently released the scraper from her hand. ‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘if you’d rather leave it for now. I can carry on here, with the boys.’
‘Let’s go out,’ I sa
id to Abigail. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ She needed sunshine, space, fresh air to bring the blood back to her cheeks. Anything to stop her looking like that. After all the confusion of last night, we had moved too fast. What had we been thinking? Before anything, we had to set her straight, get those distorted thoughts from her head.
I dug the trainers I’d ordered for her out of the wardrobe downstairs; they were still in their box and I had to thread the new laces through the eyeholes before they were ready for her to put on. They weren’t quite the right fit, half a size too big, but with two pairs of socks she would manage okay. I watched her pull the laces tight, her fingers clumsy as she tied the bow. She followed me down the stairs with the trainers and a jacket on – her own jacket this time, finally arrived.
‘Ready?’
Outside, it was gusty with a whipping breeze and the sky was grey again, the sunshine of the morning hours disappeared. The cars on the road bridge seemed faster than ever. I could tell she still wasn’t used to the wind and I kept wanting to tell her to fasten her new jacket properly, not leave a gaping gap where, even in June, it might get into her chest.
I walked briskly as we reached the towpath, to try to get some strength to my limbs. Since I’d last walked out along here, the grass and trees and bushes had burst forth and now stray fronds and branches snaked across the path. ‘Don’t trip,’ I said. ‘Here, mind your feet.’ The wind made my throat dry and the words seemed to get snatched away. As we walked downstream she kept her hands stuffed in her pockets. I realized now where I was leading her, along my familiar route towards the lock. I should have taken her the other way and let her walk with her back to the wind, but we had set off in this direction now and it would only confuse her if I suggested turning back.
Little White Lies Page 9