The Good Mother (24 page)

Suze is staring at me, stunned. Even though I’m lying on the floor and I’m convinced she’s broken all my ribs with her kicking, and that my internal organs will burst, I’m somehow in charge again. We’re back in the hospital again, realising how much we hate each other. The moment before the moral truth reaches me that yes, she’s right, I’m more to blame. I’m the one who drove when I’d had a drink. The one who took the opportunity to take Cara that little bit further to see Craig to get him off my back. Drove a little bit faster to get there and back in the time we had. But I wasn’t over the limit. Suze was. She was over the limit of what I should have been asked to do.

Suze is attacking me again. Does she hate me more because now I’ve made her hate herself too? There are hands in between us, pulling us apart. Craig. Maybe he didn’t want to witness a murder. Suze killing me, of course. Because I forgave her. I had to. At the time. I understood why she needed the time. Her fragility, ever present. The spectre of that weak mental health. That she’s played upon? Maybe. But look at what’s happened. It’s true. She clearly does have ‘mental health issues’. And I’ve had to look after her. Because I can see all of her and still love her.

But it doesn’t mean that she is absolved of the guilt of that decision she made. I cannot take all the blame. Can’t be made to, by her.

‘Susan, Susan, shh.’ Craig is trying to comfort her. What’s his game now? Does he want her back? Or just to expunge years of guilt? I try to stand up, but I’m too bruised, inside and out. He keeps talking. ‘I’m sorry. I should have asked you to see Cara. Made it up to you, slow-time. But I’d missed our little girl. Wanted to see how she turned out. How you’d turned out. Susan, if you’ll believe me, I’m sorry I walked out, it was all too much, it was selfish, I couldn’t—’

Suze is shaking her head and pursing her mouth. She looks like she’s about to explode. Craig sees it too. ‘Anyway, look, so when I moved back to the area, after the business went bad, I tracked Paul down at a client’s office. Did some digging. Saw her a couple of times. Didn’t say much to me, but she would have done in time, understood that she was truly my little girl. But Paul, he robbed me of that. So I wanted those things. I still want them. We can share them. If he hadn’t given them to me, I’d have instructed my solicitor to try to get the police decision not to charge Paul reversed. But I wanted her things more. Getting Paul locked up won’t bring her back, but seeing her things, it—’

I shake my head from my heap on the floor. ‘Rubbish, Suze. He wanted money. He blackmailed me with some notion that he could get my decision to “drink-drive” reviewed, challenge the police decision not to arrest me, use his “contacts” to trump up some charge. Or just that he would tell them what he suspected about you being here against your poor confused will, and they’d take you back to that institution again. He would use your liberty, your mental health, as a pawn to get our money. All the money that we have, that we built up, that’s what he wanted. And I bet … I bet if she hadn’t died, he would have blackmailed me so that he didn’t tell you I’d let them see each other. It’s only ever been about the money. Now he’s had a payment, I guess he’s just being a shit.’

I can see Suze begin to wriggle free from Craig.

‘No,’ she says. The head shaking has started again, and she has her hands raised now too. ‘No, no, no, no. We’re not doing this. This little spat. You don’t get anything. Neither of you. You get nothing.’ She grabs at Cara’s belongings. ‘These are mine. They’re mine.’

‘Susan—’ Craig tries to control her, but Suze pushes him back with a force that sends him flying into the coffee table. He stays were he is; I guess he doesn’t want to end up like me. Or he doesn’t value Cara that much after all.

And Suze falls to the floor. She starts picking up the sequins one by one, then, when they cling to the carpet, she makes these big sweeping gestures, trying but failing to scoop them up into her fingers. She stays like that, grabbing at the sequins, crying, until she has picked up the few that she can. She pours them gently into her shirt pocket, then grabs up the other box-files and bags, and drags them down the corridor. I hear the sound of a slamming door.

Craig turns to me. Looks down at me on the floor where I still lie curled.

He’s going to say something. Something nasty. One of his smug, callous, offerings. Special Craig one-upmanship. A new reminder of how pathetic I am. Of his notional brilliance as a father and a husband. Had he been boring enough to stick around. I tense, ready.

But no. Instead he kicks me in the ribs on his way out of the front door. Not enough to break them. Just enough to hurt.

Chapter 62

Suze

I have it all now. In front of me, behind me. All the knowledge that I need. To assimilate, understand, digest. The key was Paul’s breath. That has unlocked it all for me. The hate. The sheer blinding hate anger rage despair grief terror I felt at the hospital. How I arrived after the Visit, the ring on the front door no mother wants to receive. The police told me what had happened. An accident, they said. Your daughter in a critical condition. Your husband uninjured but being treated for shock. Sinking to the floor.

I’d been expecting a delivery. Cupcake cases. The ones Cara likes. Liked. I’d opened the door smiling with fresh relaxation, straight from the tub.

Not that.

And so. Police. Doorbell. Like the other day. Except that time they were never there. A flashback so real it felt real, and, if not real, then like a hallucination. Oh hello again my illness; how I’ve missed you.

But I mustn’t wallow. Because my mind is taking me back. Arriving, distraught but hopeful, at the hospital. Seeing Paul wrapped in a silver sheet. Too distracted to kiss him at first. Being shown to Cara’s bedside. Little, eight-year-old Cara. Still covered in blood and glass – my child! My child, like this! And the tubes, and the monitors and—Oh! It’s too much. It’s still too much. Sitting behind that curtain with her, holding her hand, life invisible through a veil of tears.

Her hand is so fragile, so tender. If I squeeze it, will she squeeze back? Please let her squeeze back.

A mother shouldn’t have to do this twice.

Then Paul appearing beside me. Putting his arm round my shoulders. Kissing me. Then me knowing. Knowing he’d been drinking. Understanding, what he’d meant about his client lunch. Not questioning, then, because he was ‘in shock’ and because Cara was alive. She was alive for seven days. I was awake for seven days. In that one room, in that one chair, staring at her. Keeping one finger on her wrist so I could just keep feeling the pulse. Talking to her and begging her to hear me, to respond. Praying that her eyelids would flutter. Offering all kinds of sacrifices and deals to a God I usually only meet at weddings and – funerals. That I would give up my business. That I would take her to and from school every day. In a sedan chair rather than a car, if I had to. That if she had any residual brain damage – please, God, no, take my brain instead – I would sit with her day in day out to recover what I could, that I would get her into the best special educational needs school in the world, re-re-mortgage the house to pay for it, start a charity in her name. Anything, anything, everything. I doubt I ate as fluid was dripped into her by tubes.

And then. And then.

The end.

I can’t – I don’t think I can go back to that. It’s not really a memory. It’s more bursts of images, colours, emotions and horror and noise and silence. Holding her hand one final time as she drifted into a permanent sleep. The sheet pulled up to cover her face, a veil for death’s bride. And turning to Paul. Seeing him for the first time ever. As a drunk who killed my daughter. How was this possible? My two most loved people dead to me. It cannot be possible, said my brain. For those next few days – it cannot be possible. I won’t let it be possible.

And of course I remember the guilt. Now Paul has told me. That awful terrible guilt. That if I had been there collecting her, if I hadn’t told a white lie, if I had asked him what I suspected – ‘Have you had much to drink?’ – but conveniently decided not to question his judgement, just so I could have an indulgent soak in the tub, then she wouldn’t be dead. If I’d remembered that ‘me-time’ is something that really, if you thought about it, you’d never really want because it means ‘me without child’ time. Which is something you should never ever ever want because it might happen. It did happen.

Then, here. My poor ill brain’s solution. An alternate reality. Total disassociation. Cara here but not here. Paul responsible but not responsible; unrecognisable to me other than a figure of hate who has separated me from my daughter (and from himself). A ball of hate surrounding his face, obscuring him, so I couldn’t really see him at all. Turning his features from the most familiar and loved man to a hideous stranger, while my Paul, my safe good Paul lived elsewhere in my brain, his features intact, and could come and rescue me. Rescue me from himself, and the apparent kidnap, but really the whole situation. The death, the drink, the hate. That kidnap reality had hope – my other reality didn’t. All the while Paul trying to drug me out of it as I desperately sought to rescue unreal Cara into a false reality. For both of us to escape the evil we were in, a blessing compared to the true evil of her death and absolute separation. And then, of course, the flashbacks, slight recollections, once the medicine for psychosis began to kick in. The questioning of why the Captor, still anonymous to me, seemed familiar. A déjà vu creeping in with every hot drink he drugged. My mind allowing me to think separately of Paul, my rescuer, and the Captor, my curious nemesis, without linking the two.

How boring for this mental creativity to be a simple clinical case. Am I ‘better’ now, then? Is it all over? Now that I have finally, actually, lost her. Not like I imagined that I lost her when she was an imaginary teenager then brought her back to me through treats and temptation – actually lost her. Now that I know that, do I get to be just an ordinary mother whose child has died? Oh, privilege, oh luxury, oh lucky me. Can I unmedicate myself back to a place when my daughter was alive? Any of them – Belle, Cara, Belle-Cara? Worth a try, surely?

Or can I rationally deal with this reality that has been forced upon me? Can I think that, as Paul says, it was just one drink? If the police had thought he was at fault, it would be him who was locked up now, as he says, right? Can I ignore the other, alternate truth, that everything might have been different if he hadn’t had that drink? And even if I can ignore that, can I ignore that Paul was driving somewhere he should never have been headed? That my Cara was being taken to the father who had forsaken her? Do I rationally and empathetically analyse that, do I understand in an objective way that Paul was doing what he thought was best for Cara, and also best for me by not telling me? Do I forgive?

Am I still ‘ill’ if I refuse to do so, if my insides scream that it was all Paul’s fault, that I should spend the rest of my life making him suffer for my loss? For Cara’s loss? Or if I will blame myself, and blame him for having to make me blame myself, for ever? Like I questioned for years whether I should blame myself for Belle’s death. All those questions. Did I eat the wrong thing? Do the wrong thing? Somehow commit little Belle to her neverness? Did I not cook some blue cheese well enough, rinse out the soil from spinach thoroughly enough, quiz and re-quiz waitresses about what was in the meals intensely enough? That’s why it’s so important, you see, to always watch what you eat.

As for Craig, he’s an irrelevance. I have hated him ever since he left me, fragile still, even years after the stay in that institution – sorry, mental health unit – with only my new little daughter, barely a toddler, to cling to. How weak for a man to leave someone for their weakness. His words, not mine. I would not say weak; I would say poor mental health. A lack of ‘resilience’. But for him, daytime crying, night-time insomnia, the guilt, the fear of relapse, the reliance on my medication, they were all weaknesses. Boring. Unliveable with. Not the sort of ‘sickness and health’ he’d meant when he said his wedding vows. A wheelchair he could have coped with. Not a refusal by an able-bodied person to get out of bed. Not their night-time crying. Their daytime crying. Their all-time sadness. And always his threat that if I didn’t ‘snap out of it’, he would call the mental health team again. That they would take Cara way from me. That he would take Cara away from me. Like Belle, and my vision of Belle, had been taken away from me all those years before. Taken from him too, but he didn’t seem to care. The surface of his testosterone didn’t even seem to be scratched. Perhaps he’s even used it as a ‘sad story’ over the years to get women into bed. His ‘sensitive side’. Paul’s right. Craig’s a shit.

Well, he made good his threat about taking Cara away, didn’t he? All these years later. Even though back then he didn’t care enough about either of us to stay, or even to kidnap Cara. Only Paul cared enough to kidnap. Too bad Cara was already dead.

So yes, I have all that. I have love and hate and guilt stretched out behind and before me. How to blot out Craig. How to deal with Paul. How to deal with myself.

But perhaps all that is just noise. Because what I also have now is all of Cara. Bones fleshed out by the books, drawings, games, ribbons, loom bands, sequins, magic kit, recorder and all the other components of her eight-year-old world. Here a well-thumbed copy of The Witches; there a pencil drawing of a cat. Here a set of Frozen Top Trumps; there a rainbow of plastics and embroidery threads and macramé and beads. And all her clothes – tops and skirts and trousers and pants and pyjamas. All Cara’s. All familiar. I lay out an outfit on the floor: a pink T-shirt with a smiling white unicorn; pale-blue jeans with little purple bows embroidered on the pockets; a white cardigan with buttons shaped like cats’ faces (oh, I remember how she loved that, treasuring the buttons in her little hands). At the top of the outfit I place a hairband – one of those black ones with the name written in colourful paint across the top, beloved of teachers so they can remember kids’ names. I didn’t like it. I thought that if she was having a dim day, a stranger could approach her and pretend he knew her by reading ‘Cara’ from the top of her head. But it turns out strangers weren’t what we needed to be afraid of.