Eighteen, nineteen … I clutched at her arms. It had never been like this, she had never held me so far, so long. Was this honestly still a game? I was tipping backwards, like in my nightmare, there was nothing to hold onto, and she wasn’t pulling me back, she wouldn’t lift me! I was sliding backward, my weight pulling her over the girder too. ‘Abigail!’
‘This feeling deep down, ever since I came home. This is what it is!’
I was hanging nearly upside down. It wasn’t red in her hair any more, but green.
‘I need you to feel it, Jess,’ she cried above the train’s warning siren. ‘I need just one person who can understand! Please, I need you to know how it feels.’
I clutched at her as the world upended. But I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, all that I knew was that I was slipping and a train was coming and she didn’t realize, or she did realize it and … ‘Please, Abigail! Stop, stop, STOP!’
Chapter 40
Friday 27th September:
Day 124
ANNE
I was trapped in a dream in which all I could see was the long slow arc of a judge’s gavel coming down, dropping onto me from above like a hammer or a guillotine blade, down, down until it smashed on the crown of my head with a bang and I sat up, slick with sweat, trussed in the covers.
I had woken so many times before like this, heart scrambling, listening to some noise in the house, or outside, some untoward feeling: Abigail’s sleep-talking, the creak of the loft ladder, all those other moments of drama.
As though moving along such familiar grooves, just like every other time, I pushed back the tangle of covers and slid my legs from the bed, leaving Robert to sleep his deep sleep. Like an automaton, well programmed, I unhooked my dressing gown from the back of the door and slipped it over my goose-bumped shoulders. I knew the drill by heart: out onto the landing, stop and listen. No movement, no sound, nothing yet out of place. The sound that had woken me seemed to have come from below, but I trod quietly, not startling anyone. It might still be nothing but a dream.
I listened at the twins’ door but there was no sound or movement from there. Now softly, gently, I pushed open Abigail’s. Her little Mickey Mouse lamp was on, casting a warm glow of light across the rose-pink walls. Everything in her room was in its place, except Abigail’s bed was empty and Jess’s sleeping bag sagged from the camp bed. Their mobiles both lay, abandoned, on the desk.
I turned off the lamp and pulled the door to. I was still perfectly calm; no need, I kept telling myself, to panic yet.
I went quietly downstairs. In the kitchen the fridge hummed. I checked the downstairs bathroom: maybe Abigail had taken ill and I would find her huddled, green-skinned, over the toilet with Jess crouched beside her holding back her hair. But the moonlit bathroom was cold and silent. Out of habit, I twisted the tap that had a tendency to drip. In the living room the red light glowed on the Skybox, a programme recording, some series link that Robert must have set. On the couch, the cushions were plumped and neat and the moon peeped in at the window, reflecting in the mirror that hung above the hearth. The hearth where red rose petals had once scattered.
I stopped. Through the French windows, I saw the garden gate – shut but not latched. The bang that had woken me – that was what it had been.
They weren’t in the house, I realized. They’d gone out.
Without waking anyone, I got myself into my boots and coat, armed myself against the dark with a torch. I told myself they wouldn’t have gone far, only into the street maybe to look at the stars. After the trial, after everything had come right, I couldn’t believe that they weren’t anything but fine. I would find them, lying somewhere on their backs on a patch of grass, two silly teenagers, immune to the cold. I would find them, bring them in, make them hot chocolate and put them safely back to bed.
I pulled open the back door – unlocked, more proof – and went outside. Standing in the empty back garden, I fought the fear that rose up in me: stomach, chest, throat. Stop it, I told myself. You need to work out where they are. Stop it, think and be sure.
I remembered how many times I had warned her, how many times I’d caught her trying to slip off that way. Now in my marrow I sensed that she had gone to the one place she had always been drawn to, a place that had always held such a fascination for her. The railway line.
I didn’t wake anyone else; I didn’t let them know. It was as though I knew I had to do this on my own. And yet as I set off up the street to the path, I thought I saw in the house behind me a single upstairs light come on.
Twigs and thorns caught at me as I pushed my way through the tangle of bushes. Something was caught, wrapped on a branch and when I pulled it free and shone my torch upon it, I immediately recognized Jess’s scarf. So they’d come this way after all. I pushed the scarf into my pocket and prayed that they had gone no further than the embankment.
In the dark, the stretch of grass was muddy. I stood on the embankment panning my torch across the thick black. In its thin beam something appeared, disappeared. I steadied my hand, trained the light on the bridge and then the figures on it, wavering, dancing, but I could hardly make sense of the shapes they made; the placement of those figures was all wrong. Behind me, up the track, I could hear a distant rumble and then I thought, oh my God, the signal light is green.
I pushed my way back along the embankment, to the hole in the fence that I knew the girls had slipped through, the only way up to the bridge. Somehow Abigail had discovered this place for herself and all its secret ways, its danger games and teenage dares, a place I’d tried so hard to keep her away from.
I slithered after them down the bank, the air dense with the scent of torn grass and mud. I heard the distant train hooting as I reached the steps and above a voice was shouting, Stop, stop, stop!, and whether it was Abigail or Jess I couldn’t tell, but either way I was coming for them. Whatever wild game they were playing, it would end.
I hauled myself up the twisting staircase, my hands raw in the cold and when I finally clambered up to the top, I realized immediately what was so horribly wrong. They weren’t on the bridge. My God, they weren’t on the bridge, they had climbed right over the safety railings, to the walkway beyond and the girder that hung across the tracks, like nothing but a tiny shelf with no safety, nothing at all to prevent them from falling. I pulled myself along the railing towards them, choked for breath.
‘Abigail?’
‘Auntie Anne!’ Jess’s voice.
My God, my God, what were they doing? My daughter, my beautiful daughter. This was no game, no make-believe. I could see the weakness of my daughter’s arms; Abigail was unable to pull Jess up.
Four yards away from them, three, I tried to shine my torch without scaring them. When Abigail craned at me over her shoulder, her eyes had the glaze of a dream, like those times before when I had seen her sleep-talk, unknown to herself. ‘Abigail!’ They hung frozen; Jess wasn’t struggling now. She hung from the girder, almost upside down, her thin legs clutching at Abigail’s waist, fingers hooked at Abigail’s wrists, but not struggling. If she struggled, I realized, she would fall.
I edged closer, another foot, another inch, and the train was still coming. I was almost right next to them now, but the railings were a barrier between us. ‘Abigail, please, what are you doing? You love Jess, she loves you!’
Abigail’s breath was thick and laboured. She was still holding Jess, but for how much longer? ‘But nobody feels it! I only want her to know how it feels!’
‘What do you mean? Abigail, feel what?’ I couldn’t stop my own voice rising. From the corner of my eye I thought I could see a ball of torchlight wavering on the embankment. ‘Abigail, this is crazy, this is madness, there’s a train!’
‘It hurts and it scares me!’ Abigail cried over the rumbling of the train. ‘It doesn’t matter if they were only stupid moments, just mistakes! It’s worse, that makes everything worse. Robert should have been there and on the train you shouldn’t have left me an
d Auntie Lillian met him and Preston should have known.’
‘Abigail, stop. You have to stop!’ I couldn’t climb over, I didn’t dare when the railings were so thin and the walkway below so narrow. There wasn’t time, there wasn’t room when the train was coming. Jess was slipping, slipping and any wrong move I made could trigger her fall, but if I stretched, if I leaned over and reached—
‘Please,’ cried Jess. ‘Please!’
‘It’s worse to say you never meant to. You were my parents, I should be able to trust you—’
I couldn’t hold the torch, I needed both hands. I let go and it fell, whirling away somewhere and now we were lit by the train’s headlight only. I leaned over the railing, my jacket catching on some jagged, twisted metal prong, holding on with one hand, grasping for Abigail with the other.
‘You were my parents, the grown-ups, and I was your child!’
Every word of Abigail’s was like a hammer blow. I was so close, but I still couldn’t reach them and each time I leaned further I felt the jagged spike bite my flesh. ‘Auntie Anne, please!’ Jess screamed above the shriek of train brakes, her hands clutching at nothing, her body slipping, her weight dragging both of them down.
‘It makes it worse if you didn’t mean any of it,’ Abigail shouted, her body slipping further still, ‘it makes it worse because the truth is, the truth of it is that I was your child and your one job was to protect me. The one single thing you were meant to do if you loved me! But you didn’t! If you loved me, then you were meant to protect me and you failed, and that’s what I’m most scared of and this is how it feels!’
I went deaf in the roar of the train crashing up to us and the train was the horror of her words, a great rushing mass that I couldn’t escape. Time slowed right down, the night became silent, the train moving only a centimetre at a time and it was as though I had stepped right out of myself and had all the space in the world to think. In that slow arc of time, it was as though I saw myself from far above, a mother who had so horrendously failed and I thought, how could I have pretended anything else all this time?
With Abigail’s words, the guilt poured through me, guilt I’d blocked and hidden from and lied for, guilt that I’d always assumed would break me. Instead, its scorching pain was like purification, releasing me, filling me with a strength I had never known before. I was no longer blind and no longer frozen and for once in my life I was going to act as I should have from the very start, not holding back and not caring if she pushed me away or was angry or stubborn or pretended not to care, trusting myself because this was the truth, she was my daughter, my child, my responsibility through the entire of space and time, and if I couldn’t protect her now, how would I ever live with myself and how could I ever be forgiven?
And so I hooked my legs round the railings’ posts and leaned right out, feeling that spike of metal tear a deep gash through my flesh, stretching myself so far that if I slipped I knew it would be my end. I reached both my arms, my whole self out to my daughter and my niece, leaning into the abyss, risking my whole life to stop Abigail committing a mistake we could never recover from. I clasped my hands under my daughter’s arms and I pulled, a cantilever, somehow finding the strength to do the impossible and lever them both up. I felt the deep weight of my daughter in my arms; I heard Jess’s cry of relief from below.
I heaved Abigail back from the edge of the girder, until Jess was close enough for me to grasp too. I pulled them back together, my daughter and niece, levering them to safety, a hand on each of them, ignoring the pain from the wound in my side From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed torchlight on the embankment – glimpsed Lillian watching it all. I felt the world righting itself as I pulled them up, warm blood spreading at my hip, the train rushing through beneath us.
My daughter flung an arm around me, crushing herself to me, unbalancing me with the sheer force of her embrace. I had her safe in my arms, cradled against me and for the lightest moment Jess hung there with us—
Then my fingers slipped—
And I lost my hold.
Chapter 41
Friday 27th September:
Day 124
JESS
In those moments the stars were bright, brighter than I had ever seen. I saw my cousin, my twin, my soul mate, the person I’d have followed to the ends of the earth. Abigail hung above me against the black pit of the sky, and for a moment it seemed to me we were both falling – her up into the black stars and me down into the deeps. Then she was lifted away and I was alone and there was nothing but the cold, the black and the empty air.
I saw it then like never before. How different we were, how far apart we’d fallen. How blindly, how naïvely I had clung to her. Following her, refusing to see danger, blindly walking straight into this. Because I’d refused to accept the traumas she’d been through, too needy, too frightened to let her be changed.
Well, now I was feeling everything she had gone through. There was no escape from the danger now.
I opened my eyes to the blackness as I fell.
Chapter 42
Friday 22nd November
ANNE
Who could have thought it would end that way? How could any of us have imagined we would reach such a point? We thought what we had been through when Abigail was missing was the worst. I had thought that once Abigail came home there couldn’t ever be any more pain. How wrong I had been. How wrong about it all.
The rest of that night had been a blur of shouts and dark, mud and torches. There were sirens, paramedics crashing down the banks. They took her away in an ambulance with its blue lights flashing, Lillian riding with her.
On the embankment, Lillian had been there and witnessed it all.
Sometimes in my mind, I confused that terror on the bridge with another night, when Abigail had turned away from us and there had been such terrible, awful danger. Sometimes it was as though everything had stopped up there on the girder and time was stuck and hadn’t restarted since.
Two weeks after, we came abroad, here, to Morbihan in Brittany. Robert was recruited for a renovation project, and we all had come out with him. When Robert presented the opportunity to leave Lincolnshire, it had taken no time at all to decide. Now we were renting a cottage – a gîte – by the week and we had been here for over a month: me, Robert, Abigail and the twins.
There was a stretch of water that flowed not far from the cottage: a slow-moving, graceful curve of the Nantes-Brest canal. Since discovering it a few days after our arrival, I often came for walks along its peaceful towpaths. It reminded me of the canal back home, familiar and yet so different. We were in a whole other country now. I was here, I had my daughter, but after everything that had happened, I still had no idea what would become of us. There had been so much upheaval in the weeks since that night, so many things had come to an end, and Abigail was still struggling, I could see that. All I could do now was try to keep loving her; keep that at the centre and pray it would hold.
Today, for the first time, she had agreed to come on this walk with me. We had left Robert and the twins at the gîte, settled down in front of a gentle French cartoon. It was a late, mild autumn here, and even towards the end of November there was bright sun, blue sky. Abigail and I traced our way beneath the tall trees that lined the banks, our boots making a clumping sound on the tramped earth, hers like the second pulse of a heartbeat to mine. As I walked, I felt the skin across my hip pinch and twist. I had needed a multitude of stitches. When I looked in the mirror, the raw line that ran from my waist to inner thigh was like some strange Caesarean scar. Abigail had been reborn to me that night, but there on the bridge a whole edifice had collapsed. We were revealed as a family broken like that vase – a family that had failed in its singular duty, a family that had allowed their child to come to harm. All of us, and me especially. Not deliberately, never intentionally, but we had.
Abigail had needed us to see that and did she know now that I finally understood?
As we walked, she tilted
her face up to meet the sun and pushed a few strands of hair from her eyes. The exercise had brought a flush to her cheeks, cheeks that were rounder now; she had been eating better since we’d come out here. She was picking up the rudiments of the language too; learning had always come easily to her. We’d talked about her going to school here, if we chose to stay long enough for that. Robert and I had talked about not going back and I knew for myself I didn’t want to return.
Abigail and I were approaching a lock now, one of the few manual ones on the canal. I wondered if the lock renovations back in Lincolnshire had ever been completed; I wondered what volunteers Martin and Cory were doing now.
Cassingham was sentenced to fifteen years in the end. That was his punishment to live with. I hadn’t seen or spoken to DS McCarthy since the trial. I knew he was still working for the Lincolnshire police and I hoped he was doing well, that quiet detective with the cool grey eyes. For so long, he had been an enemy to me, but perhaps in the end he had seen our little family, with all its sorry histories, more clearly than anyone.
Faintly, we could hear the rushing of water, the steady waterfalls from the overspill weir. As we climbed the gentle incline, I pointed out to Abigail a boat coming up from downstream, low in the water, only the top of its flat roof visible until we reached the top. The lock was set for them; they would only need to close the downstream gates and crank open the panels above. We stopped to watch. As they came closer I could make out two children, a boy and a girl, tucked in the prow. One nine, perhaps, the other ten. The little girl waved at us. Of the two of us, it was Abigail who waved back.
This morning, I’d received an email from Lillian, one of the infrequent communications we had now. I remembered a time when I’d called her every day. She wrote with snippets of news and it wasn’t hard for me to read between the lines: she and Fraser weren’t doing well. I knew their marriage had been under strain a long time, with problems that went far beyond what happened with Abigail, or with Jess, and perhaps the realities of that were finally coming to the surface. With this new distance between us, perhaps we were both seeing things more clearly.
Little White Lies Page 27