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Christ, I need a drink. I can’t remember the last time I went this long without one.
After a non-stop day of broadcasting – seemingly endless two-ways outside the school, then at the police station, as well as filming and packaging for various outlets – I am longing for my bed. I call to find out what time early bulletins want us on-air tomorrow, then scribble the requests down with a black felt-tip pen I found in my handbag. I don’t remember where I got it from, but it’s come in handy more than once today.
I’m cold, and my feet are killing me from standing for so long. I think I’ve got a little too used to presenting the lunchtime bulletin, sitting behind a desk in a nice warm studio. I don’t really understand where the day has gone – one hour rolling into the next, like a series of mini reruns stitched together. Life sometimes seems like a hamster wheel we can only step off if we know to stop running.
Time has changed too, and turned into something I can no longer tell. It started the night my daughter died. As soon as I left Charlotte – asleep in her travel cot at my mother’s house – it felt as though I had been separated from her for hours, not minutes. I didn’t want to leave her there at all, but Jack insisted we should go out for my birthday. He didn’t understand that after what happened on my sixteenth, celebrating a birthday was something I’d never really wanted to do again.
He kept insisting that I needed to get out of the house, something I hadn’t been doing too often since Charlotte was born. Motherhood doesn’t come with a manual, and it was a shock when we first brought our daughter home from the hospital. I’d read all the books they tell you to read, been to all the classes, but the reality of being responsible for another human being was a heavy burden, and something I wasn’t prepared for. The person I thought I was disappeared overnight, and became this new woman I didn’t recognise. One who rarely slept, never looked in the mirror, and who worried constantly about her child. My life became only about hers. I was terrified that something bad would happen if I ever left her alone, even for a minute. I was right.
Since she died, time stretches and contracts in ways I can’t fathom. It feels like I have less of it somehow, as though the world is spinning too fast, the days falling into one another in an exhausting blur. I was not a natural mother, but I tried to be the best I could. Really tried. My own mum said that the first few months were always the hardest with a baby, but those were all I had.
People use the expression ‘heartbroken’ so often it has lost its meaning. For me, it was as though my heart actually broke into a thousand pieces when I lost my daughter, and I haven’t been able to feel or really care about anything else ever since. It didn’t just break my heart, it broke me, and I am no longer the same person. I’m someone else now. I don’t know how to feel anything anymore, or how to return affection. It is far easier to borrow love than it is to pay it back.
Richard has had to drive me everywhere today, as a result of the police holding on to my car. Although it’s completely normal for a correspondent and cameraman to spend this much time together, I don’t like it. Something feels strange between us. A little off. I don’t know whether it is because Jack told me about his criminal record, or something else.
I had some free time in the afternoon, when the engineers insisted on having yet another proper meal break – there was talk of the union as soon as I raised an eyebrow – but the truth was, I didn’t mind skipping a slot. There had been no new developments in the story since early that morning. I knew that the News Channel could easily rerun my live from the previous hour, giving me almost two to myself.
I was secretly glad when the rest of the team drove off in search of food. We had been doing lives from the woods for hours, and I needed some time by myself. I told them that I wanted to go for a walk. Richard offered to go with me, but I didn’t want to be alone with him in a secluded corner of the forest, or anywhere else for that matter. Eventually he got the hint and went with them.
Once they were gone, I took a familiar footpath through the trees towards the high street. All the other roads and footpaths in Blackdown spread out through the woods from there, like the veins of a twisted leaf, with the high street for a stem. The whole town seems to exist beneath a canopy of leaves and unspoken lies, as though the oaks and pines that make up the forest clawed or climbed or crawled out from under its boundaries at night, stalking the people that live here, and setting down roots outside each and every home in order to keep watch over them.
I found myself standing behind the house where Jack now lives with Zoe. I never saw eye to eye with my sister-in-law, and my husband never knew the real reasons why. He doesn’t know her the way I do. Families often paint their own portraits in a different light, using colours the rest of us can’t quite see. Zoe was dark and dangerous as a teenager, and probably still is. She was born with the safety off.
When Jack and I met as adults in London, I was a junior reporter, trying to get on-air with a story about a murder he was investigating. I didn’t remember him at first, but he knew me instantly, and he threatened to make a formal complaint to the BBC about my conduct if I didn’t have a drink with him. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered by his flirtatious blackmail at first. I found him attractive – as did all the other female reporters – but men came second to my career, and I had little interest in relationships.
In the end, I agreed to one date – thinking I might get some insider information – but instead I woke up with a huge hangover and a detective in my bed. Knowing who his sister was, and what she was capable of, almost put me off seeing him again. But what I thought might be a one-night stand led to another date, which led to a weekend in Paris. I sometimes forget that Jack used to be spontaneous and romantic. Being with him made me happy, and loving him made me dislike myself less.
Zoe did a bad job of hiding her feelings about our relationship. She’d avoid eye contact with me at all family gatherings, and was the last to congratulate us when we got engaged. She didn’t come to our wedding, either. She sent Jack a text saying she had norovirus the day before, then posted pictures of herself in Ibiza the day after. When our daughter was born Zoe sent us lilies, a well-known symbol of death. Jack said it was an innocent mistake, but there is nothing innocent about his sister.
I stared up at Jack and Zoe’s house, filled with loathing and disgust for the woman inside it. Then I noticed that the kitchen door was slightly ajar.
A little later, back on track but having lost some time, I walk past all the familiar shops and quirky old buildings which make Blackdown so unique. I hurry along what is often described as one of the UK’s prettiest high streets, knowing that I’m running out of time to get the things I need. I make a quick pit stop at the cheap-and-cheerful clothing store that has been here since before I was born. Thanks to my missing overnight bag, I need something to wear tomorrow. I grab an inoffensive white shirt and some very unfashionable underwear, then pay without trying anything on. Clean clothes aren’t the only thing I’ve run out of, and I need a drink now more than ever after my visit to Zoe’s house.
The supermarket doors slide open – as though the place has been expecting me, just waiting to swallow me inside – and the air-conditioned aisles aren’t the only thing to make me shiver. It feels like I’m walking down old familiar lanes, and the alcohol section looks exactly as it always did. There are no miniatures sadly, but they do sell mini bottles of wine and whisky, which I hold up against my handbag, trying to decide how many I can fit inside and still close the zip.
