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‘I likedher.’ She jerks her wheelchair closer. She’s like a shark, scenting blood in the water. ‘Gone back to his wife, has he?’
There’s no point lying, not to her. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I shrug. ‘He returned tome.’
‘Ha!’ she jeers. ‘Poor Carol. Still love him, don’t you? Even though he ain’t never loved you.’
Despite myself, I flinch as the barb finds its mark.Love him, hate him, hate him, love him.I’ve never really forgiven Andy for making me love him so much more than he loves me. He’s an anchor, weighing me down. His narcissism, his neediness, his children, his baggage, his ex-wife.My life would have been so much simpler, so much cleaner, without him.
‘Ain’t why you’re here, though, is it?’ my mother says, narrowing her eyes. ‘There’s more, ain’t there? There’sworse.’
‘There’s worse,’ I acknowledge.
Her malicious gaze pins me in my seat like a butterfly beneath the glass. ‘Spit it out, girl. What’s the real reason you’re visiting a poor, senile old woman?’
We both know she’s not senile. There was a time, after her suicide attempt, when she chose to withdraw into a world she found more bearable, when depression and medication confined her to a twilight limbo where she was unreachable. And it suited me to keep her there. I couldn’t have Caroline’s shiny new world muddied by my vicious, over-medicated mother. So I got her committed and stuck her in a private nursing home until I met Andy and the money ran out. Now the government puts a roof over my mother’s head and food on her table. And no one cares enough to ask inconvenient questions, like whether she should even be there.
Of course she hates me. It’s my fault the world thinks she’s mad. But after what she allowed to happen to me, it’s no less than she deserves.
Her expression suddenly changes. It’s like she has a satanic sixth sense for rooting into the darkest parts of the soul. ‘He’s like your dad, ain’t he?’ she says abruptly.
I want there to be another reason for Bella’s cutting, for the pregnancy test in our bathroom bin. For twenty-four hours my mind has fought like a rabbit in a gin trap; I’dbite through my own leg to be free of the truth.
I stare at my hands. ‘He’s nothing like Dad.’
‘Don’t lie to me, girl.’ Her stringy grey hair falls across her face as she looks away, reinforcing the witchy resemblance. ‘I should’ve stopped him,’ she mutters. ‘I knew. I told myself I didn’t, but I knew. I heard him creep out of bed. I knew where he was going, what he was doing.’ She sucks her teeth. ‘But I didn’t care, because it meant he stayed. Till you got toooldand he left us.’
‘Dad died,’ I say. ‘He didn’t leave me. Hedied.’
She jerks her chair forward suddenly and grabs my hands, gripping my fingers like steel. ‘Enough,’ she says roughly. ‘You’re not a child anymore, Carol. Your fatherleft. He could’ve taken you with him; I wouldn’t have fought him. I was adrunk, girl. He could’ve taken you, and I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop him. But you got too old for him. Too old for histastes.’ I snatch my hands back, and she laughs mirthlessly. ‘It was the only good thing he ever did for you. You’ve made a success of your life, girl. You shook the dirt off your feet, and you moved up in the world. He ain’t fit to lick your boots. Never was.’
My father loved me. Helovedme long before I was old enough to understand this wasn’t the way most fathers loved their little girls.Our secret,he whispered in my ear, as he stroked me in places he wasn’t supposed to touch.We can’t tell anyone, not even Mummy, or they’ll spoil it. They’ll take you away from me, because they won’t understand how much I love you.
I don’t know how old I was when he raped me the first time. Seven, perhaps? Eight? So much of my childhood is a jumble of repressed images, it’s hard to recall. There was a big storm that night, I remember that much, the lightning illuminating my bedroom in horror movie snapshots. I woke up to my father in my bed, on top of me, crushing the breath out of me. I didn’t stop him, because I thought my daddy was perfect, so perhaps it was meant to hurt. He looked into my eyes with an expression I’d never seen before, and then he smiled.You’re such a grown-up girl,he said.I love you so much.
I never said a word to anyone, not once. Daddy would never hurt me, I told myself. He loves me. This must be my fault. Sometimes, I’d catch my mother’s eye at breakfast, and she’d look away, and pour herself another vodka.
Then a month before my eleventh birthday, I got my period. A week later, I came home one day from school, and my father had gone.
He left you behind.
Daddy wouldnever—
He left you.
The ten-year-old child inside me covers her ears with her hands. Easier to believe he died than that he abandoned me. If he left me, he couldn’t have loved me. And as warped as it sounds, I have to believe he loved me for the horror to be bearable.
My mother lunges forward. For a brief moment, as she pushes her crazed face close to mine, her eyes widewith fear, I see the woman she was, the mother she could have been. ‘You have to stop him,’ she says fiercely. ‘Do what I was too weak to do.Stophim.’
There’s no point pretending anymore. I came to her for a reason, because she’s the only person to whom I can unburden my scarred soul. ‘If I go to the police, I ruin Bella’s life too,’ I say. ‘Exposing her to that kind of scrutiny. A court case. Who knows what that would do to her—’
‘Not the police. Stop him yourself.’
A sudden silence falls. I’ve seen her worst and she’s seen mine.
‘You know what has to be done, Carol,’ my mother says slyly. ‘You know what you have to do. You come here so I’d tell you. You’re stronger than I was.’ Her hands tremble as she clutches the arms of her chair, and there’s a tiny drool of spittle at the corner of her mouth. ‘You need to do what I couldn’t.’
It’s crossed my mind. Fleetingly, hypothetically. The thought dismissed as quickly as it occurred. Almost as quickly.
‘I can’t,’ I say sharply.
