by Daisy Pearce
‘Yes.’
‘Samantha?’
‘Mmm?’ I’m falling asleep. Everything is losing shape, softening. I struggle to sit upright.
‘You were saying you were frightened of your daughter.’
‘Yes. Yes, I was. I kept Mace in a drawer by the bed. Some nights she’d sneak into my room and wake me up by pulling my hair. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was nervous all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to live like that. Not knowing what mood she would be in. Not knowing if she was hiding somewhere to jump out at me. It used to make her laugh, my fear. That’s not right, is it?’
Mimi shakes her head. Now I can definitely hear footsteps walking round the front of the house. I can hear keys jingling, the click of the front door. Fear rises in my chest. I can’t think straight. Everything is falling away from me.
‘Samantha, keep talking. It’ll keep you awake.’
‘I couldn’t admit it to anyone. Imagine that. No one’s going to take me seriously. “She’s fifteen, for God’s sake, just ground her,” they’d say, but how can you explain what it’s like? I couldn’t ground Edie. I may as well have tried to hold back a tide.’
Mimi brushes imaginary crumbs from her lap. There is a soft knocking at the door. She says ‘Come in’ without taking her eyes from me. The rooms tilts suddenly. It’s a nauseating, violent movement, like the heaving of a ship on rough water. I close my eyes, steady myself. I need to get to the hospital. I should tell her, I think your son has done something to my brain.
Instead, I hear myself still talking. ‘I was pleased when she started dating, going out more. It meant I didn’t have to see so much of her. She was distracted. I could start getting my own life in order again.’
‘You were relieved?’ Mimi says.
‘Yes.’ I sigh, and I feel it, even now, here in this room where I’m bound to a chair while a dent in my skull seeps blood and my ears ring like Alpine bells. I remember the relief I felt, as short-lived and bright as a firework.
A movement in the corner of my eye. I turn my head carefully. In the doorway stands a short man with dark hair and eyes, clean-shaven, polite-looking. His gaze skims me before he turns to his mother.
‘Do you know Alex? Alex, this is Samantha Hudson. We’re just talking about what she did to her daughter.’
I open my mouth to protest – I didn’t do anything! – but nothing comes out. My throat is shrinking, becoming a blowpipe. You want to know what happened to Edie, don’t you? that voice in my head asks. After all this time, maybe you should keep going. Maybe there are things about yourself you don’t know.
Alex nods, unsmiling. I can see he is nervous. His hands are in constant motion, tugging at his clothes, his hair, his lips.
‘We’re talking about forgiveness,’ Mimi says, pointedly. ‘How important it is to forgive yourself when you’ve done wrong. Mahatma Gandhi himself said, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”, after all. Do you think you’re strong enough to forgive yourself, Samantha?’
‘Forgive myself for what?’
‘For killing her.’
I can feel myself drop like a stone into the pool of silence. I open my mouth and hear someone laughing, wetly. It sounds almost like a sob. It’s me.
‘I didn’t kill my daughter.’
‘Samantha—’ Mimi says.
‘What? I didn’t kill her! I loved her!’
‘No one here is suggesting you didn’t love her.’ Mimi sweeps her hand around the room as if it were full of people. ‘But until you forgive yourself, you’ll always be like this.’
‘Like what?’ I croak.
‘Desperate and hollow. Always looking for someone else to blame. Edward, William, that poor man Liverly. Driven out of his home.’ She leans forward in the bed, skeletal and spidery, her skin rustling like paper. ‘Forgiveness is going to set you free.’
Alex’s face is set like a stone, something torn from granite and rock. He is watching his mother with a faint smile. I have to get out of here. I don’t want the truth. I don’t want forgiveness. Let me be blind and ignorant, always.
I turn to Alex. ‘Alex. Alex, I’m hurt. Please. I need to get to the hospital.’
‘She doesn’t want to see it, Alex,’ Mimi says, sighing. She picks up the television remote again. ‘There’s none so blind, I suppose.’
‘Alex, please untie me.’
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t even look at me. He’s looking across the room to the French windows.
‘Bird’s back, Mum, look.’
‘I see him. “The little red robin goes bob-bob-bobbin’ along.” Off he goes! He loves those seeds, doesn’t he?’
Alex nods. His face is so still but his hands, in and out of his pockets, smoothing the front of his jumper, they are in almost perpetual motion.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ I say quietly. ‘She just never came home.’
‘She was in trouble, wasn’t she?’ Mimi says, and it takes me a moment to understand the euphemism.
‘She was pregnant, yes.’
‘Dear God. You must have been in pieces.’
‘I didn’t know. I only found out a few days ago.’
She looks at me carefully. My throat is so dry my voice is cracking. The condensation on the glass jug is beautiful; sparkling, slow-moving crystals rolling down its fattened sides. I lick my lips. I am so thirsty. My head pounds.
‘You think you know your children,’ I say, trying to hold her gaze with my own slippery one. ‘You grow their bones inside you, you think you know who they are, but you don’t. Not really. Not ever. They keep their secrets close because it would cost you too much to look at them.’
Mimi’s eyes slide towards the door, to where Alex is standing. He has jammed his jittery hands into his pockets.
‘Alex,’ she says, and although she is smiling I hear the frost on that word, the way it sounds so brittle it might crack. ‘What do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘Secrets,’ she says, and tilts her head to one side. ‘Forgiveness. The things we keep to ourselves.’
‘I don’t know th—’
‘It’s funny,’ Mimi says, turning back towards me. I am not looking at her. I am only looking at that water. I have to have a drink. My tongue is as cracked and swollen as a blister. ‘When I think of my two boys it was always William I thought I’d have trouble with. When he started courting your Edie, I didn’t know what to make of it. What did he see in this girl, all lipstick and ripped tights and snarling? It was a match made in hell. Then, after his father died, I thought he would go off the rails entirely. I could imagine him winding up in one of those detention centres, doing community service in the parks in Brighton. I was so afraid for him and I watched him so closely I almost missed what was happening right under my nose. Didn’t I, Alex?’
He stares at her, his jaw tense. A sweat has sprung out on his brow and beneath the armpits of his grey T-shirt. A small gold chain, wire-thin, hangs around his neck. He looks at his mother with such acute discomfort I wish I could turn my back.
‘Mum, please.’
‘Forgiveness. That’s what we’re talking about. But I can’t expect Samantha to forgive herself if we can’t demonstrate the same. So we’ll start with you. We’ll start with the night you pushed me down the stairs.’
The silence is as thick and heavy as velvet. I want to scream but the inside of my mouth is rustling sandpaper.
‘Mimi. Please, can I have some of that water?’ I manage.
‘I’ll do it,’ Alex says automatically. He lifts the jug with a shaking hand, making the ice cubes chatter against the glass. Mimi watches him, smiling that tight, mean little smile. He brings it over to me, using his other hand to steady it, which is trembling so violently now I’m worried the water will spill into my lap. I open my mouth, feeling as vulnerable and helpless as a baby bird. As he pours a dribble on to my tongue I can smell the outside on him; the warmth of the sun like baked clay, green shoots, damp eart
h like a hole dug deep. His gaze is as cold and dark as Neptune.
‘You think I don’t know these things, Alex, but I do,’ Mimi is continuing. ‘I felt your hands in the small of my back in the empty house. I heard your breath behind me on the stairs. In the dark.’
Alex says nothing. He stands, water jug in one hand, the other hanging limply by his side. He’s cowed, like a scolded dog. Mimi switches her attention suddenly back to me, a sea change so abrupt I feel the room sway.
‘What did you use, Samantha? Did you use the knife? Did you push her down the stairs, like Alex here, so you could tell yourself it was a misstep in the dark?’
‘No, no—’
‘Was it about her boyfriends? Her behaviour? Her outbursts? What was it that finally tipped you over the edge, Samantha?’
I stare at a mark on the floor, say nothing. No comment, I think, and that voice again, unsure now, almost whispering, speaks up in my head. Are you sure you didn’t do it, Sam? Are you positive?
‘Memory is a funny thing,’ Mimi says calmly, ‘because we create it ourselves. We can bend it to our whims, sometimes without even realising. Your memory can trick you.’
‘I would remember hurting Edie. I know I would.’
‘Would you? Are you sure? Are you remembering right?’
‘Yes!’
‘So what’s your memory of the last time you saw her?’
A single bright light like a flashbulb in my head. I can almost taste the electricity, the hum of the static.
‘You had an argument, didn’t you?’ she prompts. ‘Said some terrible things to each other, maybe?’
‘Yes. It was just – it was just a stupid necklace.’
‘That’s right. The one with the dragonfly. Did you shout at her? Did you hit her, Sam?’
‘No, no,’ I say, shaking my head despite the bright pops of pain it causes. People talk about the ‘glimmer of doubt’ but it isn’t like that, it’s not a fleck of gold on a riverbed. Doubt, real doubt, has teeth, long and needle-sharp, and they sink into the soft matter of your brain slowly, inch by delicious inch. Did you hit her, Sam?
‘I loved her,’ I say, simply. I look up at Mimi, who has tears in her eyes. I’m just trying to help you, she is saying; you’ve suffered for so long.
‘I know you did. We love our children despite seeing the worst of them sometimes.’ Her eyes slide over to Alex, who stiffens. ‘When she left that morning, did you say goodbye to her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say miserably. Doubt, the predator. The carnivore. I feel my stomach rise and fall like seasickness. ‘I must have done, I suppose.’
‘She never made it to school, did she, Sam?’
I shake my head.
‘Did she even leave the house?’
I stare at the carpet. There are drag marks in the deep pile from the doorway, clots of mud from my shoes. I wonder what I did to my little girl. The cellar below our house was old and damp and out of bounds since before we moved in, a dirt floor prone to flooding. Some nights I would hear rats scratching at the walls. There was no light. The bulb had blown and I never replaced it.
Why?
I don’t know.
What have you been keeping down there in the dark?
Shut up. Shut up.
‘You need a hobby, Mum,’ Edie said to me that morning, the last time I ever saw her. ‘You’ve started to imagine things.’
‘Is it possible that you just wanted her to sleep?’ Mimi asks. ‘Just wanted some peace and quiet? Just wished for a break from it all?’
‘Yes,’ I sniff. ‘I did want a break.’
‘And how did you get one?’
I look up at her with round, glassy eyes. ‘Did I do it?’ I ask her, the pain in my head a cleaver. ‘Did I? I don’t remember any more.’
I keep seeing her, the last morning. Edie, dashing her face against the plaster, the look in her eyes mean and hungry. I didn’t know she was pregnant then. She’d hidden it from me.
‘I think this is going to be painful for you, Samantha, but I hope you can forgive yourself,’ Mimi tells me sweetly. Her eyes shimmer with tears held back.
Edie and I on the landing, her shrieking at me, the trickle of blood from her nose, me shouting back, angry and hurt and frightened, our voices intertwined like climbing vines, up and up and up. I wish I could take it back. It was only a necklace. It was only a—
‘How do you know?’
‘What’s that?’ Mimi says.
I grit my teeth against a fresh wave of agony. ‘The dragonfly on the necklace. The one my mother gave me. You mentioned Edie had it. How did you know?’
She watches me a long time. It’s a thoughtful, considered gaze and it makes my skin crawl. Finally, she unwinds the scarf she is wearing and hands it to Alex. He approaches me and I shrink away as far as I am able but the ropes have pulled so tight around me that I can barely move at all. I’m shaking my head, no, no, no.
‘Those are constrictor knots,’ Mimi tells me, settling back against the pillows. ‘They get tighter the more you struggle. Alex was in the Scouts. He won awards for his knot-tying.’
Alex’s blank, distant face is terrifying. He doesn’t even flinch when I kick him in the shin, spitting at him, pulling the ropes into my arms so deep it burns.
‘Get away from me!’ I scream. ‘I didn’t kill her! I didn’t kill her! I didn’t kill her!’
My head seems to split like an overripe peach; a fresh gout of blood in the newly opened wound spatters on to Mimi’s fancy carpet, coin-sized drops of scarlet. The bells ring, clamour, a flock of crows lifting off from the base of my skull, circling the little bone dome; I close my eyes, breathe. In. Out. I want a memory, a real memory, fleshy and true, not fed to me piece by poisoned piece by this woman.
Something is nagging at me. I can feel it, as insistent as a flickering neon sign. Nosebleed. The phone calls in the night, the breathing. That one word, in a voice so familiar I can almost grasp it. Nosebleed.
Alex shoves the scarf into my mouth and I gag against it, tasting the bitterness of Mimi’s perfume on the fabric.
I hear Mimi, to Alex. ‘Pass me the phone. Sadly, I think it’s time for Plan B.’
I open my eyes, making a concerted effort to see. My vision is blurred and seems to be skipping, as if on a time delay. Breathe in. Mimi has a handset pressed to her ear. Breathe out. Now she is talking calmly into it. In. She looks across the room at me. Out. Alex turns to her and says, ‘I’ll make you that cup of tea now, Mum.’
In. Out. In. I open my eyes. The television is back on, playing quietly in the background. Alex is no longer in the room. I look over at Mimi, who has her arms folded.
When she speaks, she doesn’t look at me. ‘You implode without forgiveness. That’s what happens. It’s what happened to Edward. He drove into an icy river. Never ever struggled. He let the car fill up with water, all the way to the top. Just sat there, hands in his lap. He couldn’t forgive himself for not going to the police when he had the chance. He couldn’t live with the guilt of knowing. Now the same thing will happen to you. Because you can’t forgive yourself.’
I make a muffled bleating sound through the scarf. She doesn’t even look at me.
‘William left your car by the side of the road. Later, Alex will take it to the Kissing Bridge, where – as it happens – my Edward drove into the water. This evening, after dark, the guilt and the depression that has been building up inside you will cause you to throw yourself off the bridge and into the water, where the head injury you suffer will cause you to drown.’
No, no. I shake my head.
Mimi smiles kindly. ‘I wondered if anyone would believe it. “Grief-stricken mother takes own life” is a bit – well, it’s clichéd, isn’t it? But then I realised. Nancy Renard will believe it. Peter Liverly’s son will believe it. Your brother will believe it. They’ve all seen how you’ve been behaving. The slow chipping-away of your sanity. You’ll be surprised how little impact the loss of your life will have.’
I’ve never been so frightened in my life, such sheer, unending panic; I can feel it crawling all over me like a swarm. Even the pain in my head is muted, suffocated by fear. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me, all bloodied face and round eyes and sweat, the shoulder of my shirt torn at the seam, the skin already mottled with purple bruising.
‘I’ve already spoken to William. He’s taking Frances now. He’s going to show her something. Something awful. But she’ll forgive him. Because forgiveness is strength and Frances is not strong unless William is beside her. It’s what he likes best about her. And she’ll forgive you, too, in time. She’ll understand.’
Frances – Now
He’s driving too fast. My fingers dig into the car seat until the tips turn white. A car blasts its horn at us as we speed past, missing it by a whisper. The lanes are too narrow for this. I can’t look. I can’t look at the road, I can’t look at the hammer in his hand. Red and black and wound with tape. It makes my blood turn cold.
‘Slow down. You’re going to kill us,’ I whisper, pleading.
He looks at me and eases off the accelerator, but only a little. Good old William, the man who could be relied on to intuit a speed limit within a ten-mile radius, who never drove fast, not even when late for our honeymoon flight. What has happened to him? This man, my man, usually so composed and inanimate, is suddenly full of a fierce and frightening energy, kinetic with it, laying his hand on the horn as we narrowly miss a truck coming the other way, forcing it into the side of the hedge as we pass. I catch sight of the driver’s face, slack with shock, then it is gone.
‘You know why I started gambling, Frances?’
I shake my head. Our trivial little life together in Swindon feels like a lifetime ago.
‘You made me go to those meetings, didn’t you? Gamblers Anonymous. This man there told me I was addicted to the thrill of winning. A chemical in my brain shot like ejaculate when my numbers came up. I don’t know how I didn’t laugh in his face. It wasn’t the thrill, the winning or losing. I wasn’t like the other hopeless sad sacks in there craving their little dopamine release. I liked the control.’