Before I Wake (22 page)

“I should have been there.” I dissolve into tears, my face buried in the crook of Brian’s neck. It’s the third time this morning I’ve broken down, and it’s only 9:00 a.m. “I should have been the one to hold her hand, not a stranger.”

Brian wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me close. “It wasn’t a stranger,” he says softly. “It was Mary. She looked after her for a very long time.”

“But I’m her daughter.” I barely recognize the sound of my own voice, it’s so thin and wretched. “And I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most.”

“Shhh.” He strokes my hair and lets me cry onto his shoulder. “Shhh, shhh, shhh.”

Sobs continue to wrack my body, but I’m soothed by the pressure of his hand on my head and the soft sound of his voice in my ear. It reminds me of scooping Charlotte up when she was a toddler and had a nasty fall or bump. I’d press her to me and stroke her hair until her tears dried up.

“That’s it,” Brian says as I shift in his arms so I can press a tissue to my nose. “We don’t want to upset Charlotte, do we?”

We’re in the hospital. I asked Brian to drive me straight here after I’d visited the care home. I was terrified of leaving Charlotte alone in case she died too.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Brian says as he helps me into the chair next to Charlotte’s bed and presses a box of tissues into my lap. “It was too sudden, Mary said.”

She said the same to me. One minute, Mum was right as rain, shuffling her way from the dining room to her bedroom with Mary at her side, propping up her elbow, and the next she was a crumpled heap on the floor. “She just collapsed,” Mary said. “There were no signs, no warning at all; she just went.” A doctor was called, but even though he arrived within ten minutes, it was too late. She’d already gone.

I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it. Mum was lying on her duvet in her gray tweed skirt, white blouse, and beige cardigan. When I gently stroked her cheek, I was shocked to find she was still warm.

“Quick!” I stared up at Mary. “Get the doctor back. There’s been a mistake. She’s still warm.” I stood up and put a hand on my mother’s chest. “Do you know CPR? It might not be too late.”

“Sue.” Mary put a hand on my shoulder, her voice a whisper. “She’s dead. I’m sorry.”

“But…” I looked at Mum’s cheek, expecting it to twitch in her sleep, to see a thin line of drool winding its way down from her open mouth to her jaw, but I saw nothing. She was utterly still. That’s when I accepted that she was dead. Not because her mouth was closed and her hands were crossed over her chest, but because the room was too still, too quiet, even with Mary and I talking. Mum wasn’t snoring. I’d never seen her so peaceful before.

“She’ll be warm for a little while longer,” Mary said softly. “They don’t go cold until about eight hours after they’ve passed.”

“Can I hold her hand?”

She nodded her head, and I lifted my mother’s hand from the duvet, cradling its sparrow’s weight.

“I’ll leave you alone,” Mary said. “I’ll be in the office if there’s anything you need.” And then she was gone.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that room—ten minutes or ten hours—but it wasn’t long enough. Even after I’d said my good-byes, even after I’d told Mum everything I wished I’d told her when she was alive, even after I’d run out of things to say and sat there with my head nestled into her side, her hand still in mine, it still wasn’t enough time. I wanted to stay there forever, because I knew the second I stepped out of that tiny eight-by-six room that I’d never see her again.

At some point, Mary appeared with a cup of tea. She pressed it, wordlessly, into my hands and made to move off, but I called after her.

“Yes?” She turned back.

“She didn’t have any visitors, did she? Mother. Her…nephew didn’t come back after the last time?”

She shook her head. “Your mother hasn’t had any visitors since you were last here. Were you expecting someone?”

Relief flooded through me. “No. No one.”

***

“Have you told her?” Brian presses a polystyrene cup of tea into my hands and glances at Charlotte. “About her Nan?”

“No.” I take a sip of my boiling tea, my eyes on my daughter’s sleeping face. “I want her to wake up thinking the world is a beautiful, safe place, not somewhere dark and sad.”

“It’s not all darkness and sadness,” Brian says, “though I understand why you’d say that, given what’s happened, but the world doesn’t have to be…”

I stop listening. Charlotte’s too afraid to wake up. I know she is. I’ve felt sure ever since I was told about the accident, and now I know why. I was
so
close
to finding out more about her blackmailer last night, but then Mary rang and I sped off in my car, leaving Keisha peering out through the front room blinds. I couldn’t tell if she was relieved I was leaving or scared.

I’ve texted her four times since I left yesterday and called twice, but I haven’t had a reply. I tried again, about five minutes ago, but her phone went straight to voice mail. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation—the heel, an extended trip to the emergency room, changing her mind about going to the police—but it doesn’t matter which excuse I feed myself. I still can’t unknot the tight twist in my stomach. Something’s happened. Something terrible.

“What’s up?”

I jump at the sound of Brian’s voice.

“You’re not still blaming yourself for what happened to your mum, are you?”

I shake my head, but I’m astonished at how insightful he can be. Right sentiment, wrong person.

“I need to go,” I say. “There’s something very important I need to do.”

Brian nods and reaches for his newspaper. “Your mum would be proud of you, Sue.”

***

“And you’re quite sure?” I say into the phone as I park outside Keisha’s flat and turn off the engine. “You’re quite sure that’s she’s gone to Ireland?”

“You tell me.” Danny sounds irritated. “You were the last one to see her. What the hell did you say?”

I can’t work out if he’s genuinely concerned or worried that I told her about his infidelity with the blond.

“Nothing.”

“You promised me, Sue. When I gave you Keisha’s address, you promised me you wouldn’t say anything.”

“I know, and I didn’t.” And not because of any misplaced sense of loyalty to him. “How did she sound the last time you spoke to her?”

“We didn’t speak. She texted about midnight last night to say she was going back to Ireland for a bit because she was homesick. I was asleep and didn’t get the message until this morning. I tried ringing her but she wouldn’t pick up. I’ve rung three more times since…” He tails off. “I’ve tried the bar manager, her mates, and her flatmate, but no one knows anything. None of them have seen her since you did. Are you sure you didn’t accidentally let something slip?”

“No.” It comes out curter than I meant it to. “You weren’t even mentioned, Danny.”

That’s a lie, but I’m not about to tell him
why
Keisha mentioned his name or what it was in reference to.

There are no lights on in her flat and the blinds in the living room are still drawn. I crouch down, holding onto the flower pot by the front door for support, and peer through the letter box. The concrete makes my knees ache.

“But—” Danny says.

“I’m sure she’ll be in touch,” I reply as a shadow crosses the hallway and my heart leaps with relief. “And if I hear from her, I’ll let you know.”

“Will you?” He sounds genuinely desperate. “I’d appreciate that.”

I tuck my phone back into my handbag and peer through the stained glass panels in the door.

“Keisha?” I knock heavily. “Keisha, it’s Sue again.”

There’s no reply.

I wait a few seconds then knock again. I’m just about to duck down and shout through the letter box when the door opens an inch and a face I don’t recognize peers out at me.

“Hello?” says a woman with a violent red bob and a blunt fringe, and I immediately recognize her from the photograph in the front room. She stares up at me with big, critical green eyes, her long tangerine-colored fingernails wrapped around the door. “Can I help you?”

“You must be Keisha’s flatmate?” I glance into the hallway. “Is she in?”

She shakes her head. “She’s gone.”

I detect something unusual about her accent, an intonation that isn’t English. Polish perhaps. “Do you know where?”

“Ireland.”

Maybe Danny was right. Maybe she has pulled a disappearing act. “Do you know when she left?”

Her flatmate shakes her head. “No. She left a note. On the fridge. It just says ‘Gone to Dublin,’ that’s it.”

“Would you mind if I popped into her room before I go?” I say as a thought strikes me. “I lent her a book that I need back quite urgently.”

She gives me a look. “You tell me the name. I find it.”

“Well, the thing is, I also need…” I don’t know what to say. I need to see Keisha’s room. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see, but no matter how many people tell me she’s gone back to Ireland, I can’t shake the feeling that something has happened to her. “…to look for another book,” I finish weakly. “There was one she recommended to me but I can’t remember the title. She did describe it to me though, so I’m sure I’ll be able to find it really easily. I’ll be in and out in less than a minute, I swear.”

The flatmate looks me up and down. “Who are you?”

“Sue. Sue Jackson.”

She shakes her head and closes the door ever so slightly. “Keisha never mentioned you before.”

“That’s because we’ve only recently become friends. She knows my daughter better. Charlotte, perhaps you’ve met her?”

“Charlotte?” Her face lights up. “Pretty Charlotte who got hit by a bus?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s my daughter.”

“Oh gosh.” Compassion floods her face and she throws the door open wide. “Of course you must come in. Anything I can do to help, you let me know.”

***

On first glance, Keisha’s room doesn’t look all that dissimilar from Charlotte’s. There are photos of half-naked men on the walls, the chest of drawers is crowded with perfume bottles, hair products, and makeup, and clothes are strewn over every available surface. Unlike Charlotte’s room, there’s a clothes horse in the corner, decorated with drying lingerie—bras, underwear, corsets, garters—in every conceivable fabric, color, and cut. It makes my drawer of M&S five packs and lace-trimmed black and white bras look positively pensionable.

“She’s so messy,” her flatmate, who introduced herself as Ester five minutes ago, comments from behind me. “She never do the washing up, always leaving cups and plates in living room, but I like live with her.”

Keisha’s room looks like an explosion in a clothes factory, but there’s a suitcase and several overnight-type bags stuffed on the top of the wardrobe and her hairbrush, deodorant can, perfume bottles, and black satin makeup bag—with pencils, lipsticks, and concealers spilling out—are fighting for space on the top of her chest of drawers.

I look at Ester. “Is her toothbrush still in the bathroom?”

She raises her eyebrows. “You want to borrow that too?”

“No, but it doesn’t look like Keisha has packed anything for her trip home, and I was wondering if she left her toothbrush too.”

The look on Ester’s face changes from bemused to worried. “I check the bathroom.”

While she’s gone, I step through the magazines, bills, bank statements, and clothing on the floor and approach her chest of drawers. I glance back toward the hallway then yank open the top drawer. More paperwork and bills. I slide them to one side and discover a rabbit-shaped vibrator, several tangled necklaces, a broken watch, and a pair of hair straighteners. I feel like a burglar ransacking her things but I need to…ah! I swoop down on something maroon and leathered, peeping out from beneath an old Christmas card.

“What you doing?” Ester stares at me from the doorway, a blue toothbrush in her hand, a horrified expression on her face.

“It’s Keisha’s passport.” I pull the book from the drawer and flick through it, looking for the date stamp and photo, then hold it toward Ester. “Look, it doesn’t expire for three years. How would she get back to Ireland without it? You can’t get in with just a driver’s license these days.”

“But…” She shakes her head. “Why say she go home in her note?”

“I don’t know.” I look at the toothbrush in her hand. “But wherever she did go, she went there in a hurry.”

“All right, Mrs. Jackson.” Ella doesn’t look the slightest bit surprised to see me as she opens her front door. “Mum’s in the back. Want me to get her?”

I shake my head. “Actually it was you I was hoping to talk to. Is there somewhere we can go?”

“Let’s go to the park.” She glances back into the hall. “I’ll just grab my coat.”

The front door closes and I hear her shout something about popping to the corner shop, and then she reappears in front of me, a crisp ten pound note in her hand.

She grins. “Mum asked me to get her some cigs while I was out.”

***

“If this is about the phone,” Ella says as we sit down on a weather-worn bench on the edge of Queen’s Park, “then you’re wrong if you think I stole it. I didn’t. I only had it because me and Charlotte had a row at school, in the changing rooms after a games lesson. It was a couple of days before, you know…”

“Her accident?”

“Yeah. She left it behind on the bench when she called me a jealous cow and stormed off. I thought I’d keep it for a bit and make her freak out that she’d lost it, but then she got hit by a bus.” She peels the cellophane off her mother’s Marlboro Lights, tears off the foil, and pries out a cigarette with her fingernails. “I didn’t want to give it to you because everyone would think I’d stolen it, so I kept quiet. But then the stuff you said to me made me feel really guilty so I, you know…”

“Posted it through our letter box?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you, Ella.” I smile. “Really, thank you for telling the truth and giving the phone back. But that’s not why we’re here.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yes, I need to know who Mike is.”

“Mike?” She blinks as the wind changes direction and her exhaled smoke is blown back in her face. “How’d you know about him?”

“Keisha told me.”

“Oh.” She rolls her eyes. “That figures.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” She puts the cigarette to her lips again and inhales. She smokes like a fifty-year-old grandmother on forty a day.

“Come on, Ella, it’s not nothing.”

She tips back her head and exhales. “They’re just dicks, that’s all. Both of them. No wonder they hang around together.”

I frown. “He’s her friend?”

“That or her minder.” She laughs. “The only time they’re not together is when Keisha’s with Danny, and that’s because he refuses to have him anywhere near him. He thinks Mike’s a creepy gay, which he is.”

“A gay?” I assume she means that in the derogatory sense.

“Yeah.” She glances at me. “You know, he likes men.”

What? That contradicts what Keisha told me last night. How can Mike have used a female prostitute and be a gay man? It doesn’t make sense. I look at the packet of cigarettes in Ella’s hands. There’s nothing I’d like more than to spark one up. Instead I cross my arms against the wind, tucking my hands under my armpits. “How well did Charlotte know him?”

“Pretty bloody well!” She gives me a sideways look. “You know, don’t you? That’s what this is all about? You’re pretending like you’re clueless but actually you’re trying to catch me out.”

“Something like that…” I say tentatively, knowing my lie could be discovered in a heartbeat.

“Oh thank God!” She throws her spent cigarette at the ground then slumps back on the bench. “I thought about telling you, after what we talked about the last time you came around, but Charlotte made me swear not to tell anyone. I mean, I know we’re not friends anymore, but I’m no rat.”

“I think this is a pretty unique situation, don’t you, Ella? Ratting on someone to their parents is a bit different if they’re on life support, right?”

“Yeah.” Her head drops and she fiddles with the toggles on her coat.

“Tell me what you know,” I say softly.

“Neither of us liked Mike the first time Keisha introduced him to us,” she says. “He was old and overly friendly and there was something really sly about his eyes.”

I nod for her to continue.

“But after Keisha went off to find Danny, Mike offered to buy us some drinks. We thought he was on the pull, dirty old git, so figured we’d get the most expensive cocktails we could out of him before we did a runner. I had a…” She dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand. “Doesn’t matter what we had, but while we were drinking them, Mike started telling us how he was new to Brighton. He said he’d moved here from London to make a fresh start after splitting up with his boyfriend and losing his niece Martha to cancer. He said he really loved her, said she was like a daughter to him, and that Charlotte reminded him of her. I thought that was a bit creepy, but Charlotte thought it was sweet.”

That’s my daughter, always thinking the best of people.

“So.” Ella licks her lips then pops another cigarette into her mouth. “Once we’d finished the cocktails, I gave Charlotte a look like ‘let’s get out of here,’ but she ignored me and kept on talking to Mike. He bought us some more drinks and they kept talking—about his niece and his job as a photographer, which Charlotte thought was way cool—for ages. I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night chatting to his Royal Gayness.” She shoots me a look. “Sorry, but he wasn’t bothered about talking to me, just her. Anyway, I only managed to drag her away when ‘Love It When You Lie’ came on and we went for a dance.”

“Did you see him again?”

She shakes her head. “Not that night, no. But he was there the next time we went. Keisha wasn’t there that time, and he just strolled up and said hello.”

“So Charlotte and Mike became friends?”

“Yeah.” She shrugs. “That’s part of the reason why we fell out, the fact that she was getting all these new friends and hanging around premiership footballers in Grey’s, and I felt like I wasn’t good enough for her anymore, like she was really up herself. I called her on it, but she said she was just living her life and that it was cool to have a gay friend and that Mike was funny and gave her good advice on clothes and stuff.”

“Clothes?” A sick feeling rises from my stomach as I imagine my daughter in a changing room, parading around half naked in front of a man she barely knows. “What do you mean, he gave her advice on clothes?”

“He took her shopping.” Ella pulls a face. “I know, I was totally jealous. I’m not even going to lie. He must have spent hundreds of pounds on her and got her all designer stuff—the proper labels and everything, not reject stuff from TJ Maxx. It wasn’t just clothes either—he got her sunglasses, CDs, DVDs, loads of shit. Said it made him happy, like he was still buying stuff for Martha.”

Ella’s face is animated as she continues to describe, in minute detail, everything Mike bought for my daughter. I recognize some of the descriptions—I saw them in Charlotte’s room and bought her explanation that they were fakes from a market stall or a car trunk or love tokens from Liam—but others I’ve never seen. The story is plausible enough, a recently bereaved single gay man in a city where he knows no one spots the doppelgänger of his dead niece and showers her with presents in return for her company, and yet, why do I feel like the temperature just dropped twenty degrees?

“What does Mike look like, Ella?”

She shrugs. “Old.”

“How old? As old as me?”

Ella screws up her eyes and scrutinizes me. “Probably, yeah.”

“What else?”

“He was just a bloke, an old bloke with gray in his hair, like any old bloke you see in the street.”

“Think…please, it’s important. How tall was he? Was he fat or thin? What kind of clothes did he wear? Did he wear any jewelry? What were his shoes like? Did he have a mustache, beard, glasses?”

“Like I said.” She twists in her seat and gazes across the park at a bunch of teenagers swinging back and forward on the children’s swings. “He just looked normal, apart from being really tall.” She looks back at me. “He was probably about the same height as my dad.”

So he was about six-foot-four. “What else?”

“He always looked smart—dark trousers and a shirt, that sort of thing. I never saw him in jeans. I don’t remember what shoes he wore.” She glances back at the teenagers. “He had a watch, I think.”

“And his build?”

She sighs. “Medium. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t thin. And he didn’t wear glasses or have a mustache or beard,” she adds before I can ask. “Oh yeah…” She puts her feet up on the bench and hugs her knees. “His eyes were a really odd color, kind of grayish, and he had quite a big nose and a strange accent. Birmingham? Liverpool? I’m rubbish with accents, but he definitely wasn’t from around here. That okay?” She looks back at me, but I can’t meet her gaze. I can’t tear my eyes away from the teenagers at the other end of the park. She’s just described James, twenty years after I last set eyes on him.

“Sue?” Out of my peripheral vision, I can see Ella unclasping her legs. “You okay? You look weird.”

I was wrong about the school teacher Jamie Evans, but I’m not wrong about this. I can feel it in my bones, the marrow-deep certainty that, somewhere in Brighton and Hove, my ex-boyfriend is watching and laughing, proud of his newest role—bereaved gay man—delighted that he managed to wheedle his way into my daughter’s life right under my nose.

“Did he ever touch her?” I snap around to look at Ella. “Did he hurt Charlotte in any way?”

“Why would he? I just told you, he bought her loads of stuff. He treated her like a princess.”

“What was he blackmailing her about?”

“Blackmailing her?” She shakes her head. “Charlotte never said anything about that. Mike acted like he worshipped the ground she walked on—little miss ‘my dead niece.’”

“Have you got his number? Or his address?”

“No. Liam will though.”

“Liam?”

“Yeah.” She looks at the surprised expression on my face and laughs. “Charlotte wasn’t going to have sex on her own in Mike’s flat, was she?”