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FIFTY-SIX
I wonder now how differently our lives might have panned out if we’d been at Matty’s trial. If we’d been able to look into his eyes. If he’d seen us looking?
How much easier it may have been if his lawyers had prepared us for what to expect rather than leaving us to discover all the terrible facts of the crimes along with the rest of the watching world?
No day was the same. Sometimes I found I could hold it together, other times I felt like throwing up. Everything was a blur. Only my nightmares seemed real, so ghastly I was afraid to go to sleep.
I never wanted to go to court. I was too afraid of what I’d find out, too ashamed. If only I’d known sooner, if only I could have stopped him, I thought. And then always on the tail of that, what if they got the wrong guy? What if this was an awful mistake?
I drowned in ‘what ifs’.
My mother was conflicted too, but unlike me, she had every intention of sitting in the gallery and supporting him. I remember her flicking through her wardrobe the day before the trial started, trying to find something suitable to wear. An outfit that strikes the right note.
‘You’re not serious?’ Linda asked, horrified. ‘You’re not actually going to stand by that man after what he’s done?’
‘You don’t know he’s guilty.’
‘I know he might be. Ten murders at least, one of them a child half Sophie’s age.’
‘Everyone’s entitled to a defence.’
Linda’s hand went to her mouth.
‘Oh my God, Amelia. Tell me you’re not. . .’
My mother shuffled her feet, looked at the floor.
‘You are, aren’t you? I don’t believe it. Paying his lawyers! What are you thinking?’
‘I’m just helping out a bit. Do you have any idea how much these things cost?’
Was that the real reason Matty kept calling my mother, to tap her for cash? And then following my outrage, a fresh wash of guilt. Always there, just beneath the surface.
‘Jesus, Am. Standing by him is bad enough, but. . .’ Linda grappled for the right word ‘. . . funding him? It’s crazy.’
‘I have to,’ my mother said quietly, eyes trained on the floor. ‘Don’t you see? If there’s even the slightest chance he’s innocent. . .’
They went at it a while longer. Linda said she didn’t know who my mother was any more. My mother said she was going to take a pill and go to bed. She’d started taking a lot of pills by then. To help me sleep, she said. But she didn’t always take them at night. Nor did she always go in to work. I might have to call in sick again. . .
It was around this time she graduated to gin. Wine just doesn’t do it for me any more. This from a woman who until only a few months ago hadn’t been able to drink alcohol without sweetening it first.
‘Still think she’s the bravest person you’ve ever met?’ I asked Linda.
‘More than ever,’ she said.
Linda must have got through to her eventually because although she continued to defend Matty to anyone who’d listen and send money to his legal team, she didn’t end up going to court.
‘He’s upset,’ she told me. ‘He says it would show him in a good light if we were there.’
What about us? I thought. Would light would it show us in?
I was still persona non grata at school, although you’d never have guessed it from the crap the newspapers printed. They were forever quoting this or that ‘unnamed source, a close friend of Melgren’s daughter’, who claimed to have the inside scoop on my life with a serial killer. Never mind that I had no friends now, that Matty wasn’t my father. That a jury hadn’t decided he really was a serial killer.
Although she didn’t go to court, my mother kept the radio on all the time, even while she slept. She drank steadily, went to work sporadically. I took to making our supper in the evenings, cleaning up the flat when I got home from school. By morning, it was always a tip again.
I read the papers, watched the news, sobbed over the details. Pored over old photographs, trying to cling onto the man I was losing, to find in them the man I’d known. But the murders cast a veil over everything, so I no longer knew what was true and what was a lie. Even now, twenty years on, I still struggle to reconcile the memory of the man I’d loved with the picture the prosecution painted.
I couldn’t bear that so many lives might have been destroyed by him. Didn’t know how to deal with the shame. When Sally Sniders goaded me, I kicked back, but my heart wasn’t in it and she could tell. It was like being back in Miss Bacon’s class, only now I didn’t give a hoot what people thought of me or whether my mother was married to Ronald McDonald.
