It fits. Playing, not harming.
Heat rushes through me. Please, no. Please let me not have given up my child for this.
‘After I confronted Mum she begged me not to tell Dad – not until she’d figured it all out in her head. She said she was sorry, and that she would sort it out, sort herself out. She went off to rehearsals, then didn’t come home. We haven’t seen her since.’
After what feels like hours, I turn to Jeremy. ‘And you never knew?’ I ask. ‘She didn’t even hint at it?’
Charlie looks at the ragged form of his father. ‘Of course he didn’t know. Look at the state of him.’
There’s an unbearable silence. Everything is imploding. Every single thing I told myself, every moment of torturous self-loathing: a story.
‘I sort of thought after the letter she sent us that she’d be OK,’ Charlie says. ‘That she really did just need some time out. She texted Dad a few days ago and she didn’t sound too bad ...’ His voice quakes. ‘But I’m scared, now.’
‘We came because I couldn’t allow you not to know about this for another second,’ Jeremy says. ‘And we’ll leave you in a moment, because, God knows, you’ll need time to let it all sink in. But we have one question we need to ask you first.’
Leo gestures for Jeremy to go ahead.
‘Janice mentioned a special place, in one of her diary entries a few months back. Her words were along the lines of “I’d escape to my breakdown bolthole if it didn’t make me think of Emma.” We wanted to ask if that meant anything to you?’
I try to unstick memories from the thick glue of shock. The places Janice took me for lunch in Edinburgh. The rock pools we explored on Alnmouth beach, the day I thought I was miscarrying. The train station later on, where I said goodbye to her. None of these feel like the sort of places she’d describe as special, less still would want to retreat to at her lowest ebb.
I relay this, and Charlie deflates further.
‘Nothing? You can’t think of anywhere?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t.’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please think. Is there really nowhere else?’
‘I am. I’m thinking. I ... No. Apart from a walk on Alnmouth beach we only went for lunch in Edinburgh. And of course she visited me a few times in the mother and baby unit, but she won’t be referring to that. I’m sorry.’
Charlie looks desperate.
‘OK,’ Jeremy says, standing up. ‘We should get going. Please ring us, any time of day, if you remember anything that might make sense.’
They make to leave.
I could have been your mother, I want to cry, as Charlie heads out of our sitting room.You could have grown up right here in this house.You could have been my baby.
But he’s already in the hallway, this full-grown man, then out of the front door. He starts walking down our path, ducking to avoid the tangled foliage, saying thanks and goodbye over his shoulder because he doesn’t want me to see how upset he is. I don’t know when, or even if, I will see him again.
Jeremy stops on the doorstep, and turns to me. ‘I will never be able to express how sorry I am,’ he says. ‘Never, Emma. I hope you believe me when I tell you I had no idea.’
I don’t say anything. Right now I don’t want to believe anything anyone tells me, ever again.
‘It does make so much more sense, now,’ he goes on. ‘Her paranoia, the obsession with you wanting Charlie back. She must have been terrified you’d remember what really happened.’
But of course I hadn’t remembered. I couldn’t remember. You could have told me I’d robbed a bank and murdered all the cashiers, and I’d have believed you. I’d have created that memory, just like I created the memory of a smothering, because when you’re that lost, your only anchors are the things people tell you.
After Charlie and Jeremy are gone, we sit in silence.
Yet again the world has shifted. My entire adult life has been nothing more than a story – and not even mine.
The story of a woman called Janice. A woman who allowed me to believe I had tried to smother my baby, because she wanted him for herself. A woman who took a restraining order out against me when I started following him.
She’d have had me sent to prison if she could. She had me sacked from my presenting job, knowing the humiliation it would bring; the financial loss. But worse than anything else, far worse, she stole my baby.
Leo shifts over, silently, to hold my hand, as I cry for all that could have been. For my baby Charlie, that smiling infant with his soft blonde hair, his simple, boundless trust in me. For his whole life, spent with someone else.
