A Trick of the Mind (35 page)

Finn had turned back after the accident, helped me call an ambulance, though we both knew it was too late.

He had come down to find me that night, he told me later.

‘I saw the words you hid in the painting,’ he said. ‘The day I came down with the beer and crisps and you were so determined to keep me at bay.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. You’d put “I’m afraid”.’

‘I know.’

‘You were too frightened to tell me out loud though, so you used our old messaging system.’

‘Yes.’

‘And earlier, after you came and found me with Louise, I knew something was up. I sensed it. I tried and tried your mobile and when you didn’t answer all evening I knew to come and
see what had happened. You’d left your keys in the ignition of your car.’

‘Because I had no idea I wouldn’t be coming straight back to it when I returned to the studio to put the lights off.’

Finn was charged with reckless driving, and in court, where I was a witness, I tried to argue that I’d seen Patrick step in front of the car – and that if I’d
never got involved with him in the first place Finn would never have driven into him, but it didn’t hold up and Finn was given a six month sentence.

Louise gave up on him, but I wrote to him regularly, reminding him that I was the real culprit, not him.

But in the end we can trace everyone’s actions back to another source, Patrick’s, Aunty May’s, my own, Finn’s.

In the end we only have ourselves.

I decided to sell the blue clapboard house, when I returned from a two-year sabbatical painting in New York. Just as my mother always thought I should.

It was summer again when I went down to see the house for one last time.

Having my daughter Rebecca here brought my own childhood slap-bang up in my face. Aunty May’s back, only slightly stooped, moving down the rickety jetty in sun hat and bare feet, jeans and
a checkered blouse, my certainty that she would return with treats – chocolate-covered raisins or ice-cream cones. The sting of the salt wind as it must have felt on my newer, tender skin.
Images: a child, only a little older than Rebecca, a green nylon fishing net lying beside her on the boards of the jetty, hauling out crabs on a string. A little boy, in the corner of my eye,
looking on.

I came out of the house for the last time, ready to set off, with the last bits and pieces packed in the car,

I shut and locked the door with the big brass key and Rebecca ran out onto the sand. I dropped everything and ran after her, resisting the urge to tap the gatepost three times, because if she
kept on running she would come to the sea, where riptides could grab a human body – especially one so small – and carry it away in seconds and then there was no knowing how things would
twist about and take us back around again on some perpetual loop. I knew now that the obsessive compulsions I had always performed to keep myself and others safe were the opposite. They tricked you
and veiled you from the truth and sometimes they caused the very accidents you were trying to prevent.

I caught up with Rebecca and scooped her compact weight up in my arms and put my nose into her impossibly soft hair, and the wind lifted a lock and it brushed my cheek and then blew for a moment
in front of my eyes, blurring with the bleached sea grass beyond.

The beach was empty but for the tiny squirming figures – rather like the sperm-like marks on a Miro – of a dog and its owner at the sea’s edge. We stood and listened. To the
waves slamming on the shore, to the plaintive mewl of the gulls, and the beginnings of the church bell pealing up in the town. Beyond that – beyond that was the massive, unsettling silence of
East Anglia, miles of woodland and field and hedgerow between us and our new home in London.

I rubbed my nose on Rebecca’s cheek, and turned back to the car.

‘She your daughter?’

It was Larry on his bike, pointing at my child.

‘She got that man’s face,’ he said. ‘Same face as the man with one leg.’ And then he turned and wobbled away on his bike towards the town.

I fastened Rebecca into her car seat and got in. Glanced round to check she was comfortable. She was engrossed with the pop-up toy I’d rescued from May’s, her head down, her feet
crossed over, humming gently to herself. I set off over the shingle, towards the road. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw my Aunty May’s house.

A blue clapboard house, stark against the grey evening sky, diminishing in size as I drove away, a beacon of my past, my childhood, growing smaller by the minute until it was just a dot on the
horizon. I imagined all the children who had come and gone inside its walls.

And I vowed that I would give Rebecca, Patrick’s little daughter, with his cheeky blue eyes and his long child’s lashes, the childhood he should have had.

And then I looked ahead and drove into the magic hour.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to John Burton for the residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf in my own steel container!

Thank you to Steve Wright, captain of one of the Thames Clippers, who took me on a trip up the Thames and gave me a personal commentary on its geography, its history and its secrets.

Thank you to crime writer Sara Cox for your information about police procedures in hit-and-run incidents.

Thank you to Stephanie Glencross and Emma Lowth for all your work on the early drafts, Carla Josephson and Jo Dickinson for your work on later ones and Angles writing group for feedback on the
first chapters.

As usual, thanks to Jane Gregory, and to the team at Simon & Schuster for their continued belief in me!

Thank you to Emma for reading, and for giving me your young person’s perspective, and thank you so much Polly, Jem, and Andy for your continued support, contributions, and tolerance. And
massive thanks to Susan Elliot Wright.

Enormous gratitude also goes to my mother and late father for providing us with a place to stay in Southwold when my children were little and for some very special memories.

Last but not least, Tilly, upon whom Pepper was based.