The Lives She Left Behind (3 page)

‘What’s going on?’ Fleur demanded, and Jo was too carried away to observe her usual silent discretion.

‘He was killed,’ she got out between sobs. ‘They killed him. He did it to save him.’

‘Who did it to save who?’

‘He did. Her son. Her brave, brave son.’

‘Whose son. Who is
her
?’

But before Jo could find a way not to answer that, they both became aware of a mumbling from behind them. Fleur turned sharply to find Justin Reynolds’ wife, Leah, making the sign of the
cross over and over again as she recited an incantation in a language Fleur did not recognise at all.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘Asking the help of the Lord for your poor daughter in her affliction. The Lord will come to her aid.’

Fleur remembered just in time that she needed the Reynoldses and choked back her words.

Leah Reynolds, warming to her task, gesticulated ever more violently, then knelt and put her hands on Jo’s head. Jo twisted to escape but the woman wrapped one arm right round her and held
the girl’s head back against her chest with the other hand. Her husband watched with an expression of pride on his face.

‘She’s done this before,’ he said. ‘Casting out. She has special powers.’ Fleur thought hard about his position on the Planning Committee and did her best to smile,
as Leah Reynolds continued to intone.

‘Let me go,’ said Jo quietly. Leah Reynolds ignored her. ‘What?’ said Jo. There was a silence, then she said, ‘You have no right to restrain me. Please take your
hands away.’

Leah Reynolds went on speaking in a monotone. Fleur thought perhaps it was Latin and then Jo started to laugh and laugh, not hysterically but in adult amusement. ‘Oh you silly
woman,’ said the child. ‘Go on. Just get it over with.’

Next week, her mother took Jo to a new person in a new office – a woman this time who was far less quiet and told her more than she asked her. After she saw the woman, her mother started
to give her tablets and Jo could hear her friend telling her not to take them, to hide them in her mouth and spit them out later, and that worked for a week or so until her mother caught her and
then she was forced to drink a whole glass of water and it was impossible not to swallow. The tablets made her feel sleepy and dull and not at all herself. The worst thing was that they pushed her
friend away so she could only feel her, waiting anxiously, too far off to talk – her friend Gally.

They left the house in York when Jo was twelve years old. She got up when the alarm went off on a perfectly ordinary Friday morning. There was no milk in the fridge, just two
half-empty bottles of white wine and a carton of apple juice. She looked for bread to toast but had no luck there either, so she poured the apple juice over her cornflakes. It wasn’t good.
She searched the ironing pile then went upstairs. Fleur was in the bath with the door ajar.

‘I can’t find my gym clothes,’ Jo said quietly.

‘Where did you leave them?’

‘In the washing. That’s what you told me to do.’

‘Did I? Look in the machine. You should get yourself sorted out. I did my own washing when I was your age.’

Downstairs, Jo found them, twisted in the middle of the sopping wet load. There was only ten minutes to go before she had to leave and she could think of no way to dry them in time to avoid all
the trouble she’d be in if she didn’t have them. She squeezed them out as hard as she could but they were still completely and defiantly wet. She put them in the tumble dryer on full
heat until the last possible minute and all the difference that made was that they were very hot and just as wet and the steam made her eyes wet too – unless she was crying, which she thought
she might be. Somehow she had managed to annoy her mother almost every time she had opened her mouth that week, but when she cried Fleur got angry so Jo had saved her tears for when she was alone
in her bedroom. The tablets didn’t stop the tears – they just made them seem to come from off to one side.

She put the hot, wet clothes in a plastic bag and tucked them in her backpack, imagining what the others would say in the changing room when she tried to put them on. They called her
‘Dopey Driscoll’ at school. Despite that, when she went to the front door she was relieved to be leaving the house. She enjoyed the moment of opening it, like a cork letting the
pressure out of a bottle. The door was a wooden eyelid, blinking open to a street of old brick houses and parked cars, a street that smelt different every day, a quiet street with sometimes just a
silent passer-by. Until that morning it had been a predictable process, that passage through the door, but as it started to swing open, before she could even see outside, Jo heard a noise like a
mass intake of breath and a shuffling as if some large animal was preparing to pounce. A crowd of men were clustered around their steps, the closest of them actually standing on the bottom step.
There were cameras pointing at her and a tall, bald man near the back shouted, ‘Is your mother in, ducks?’

Jo stepped back, stunned, and slammed the door. The wet clothes didn’t matter because she didn’t go to school that day and Fleur told her not to go near the front windows and not to
answer the phone which rang all the time.

That evening they climbed the fence into the Robinsons’ back garden then squeezed through the hedge into the driveway beyond that, coming out into the supermarket car park and then walking
and walking until they got to a small hotel on the Fulford road. All Fleur would say was that she would tell Jo when the time came.

At breakfast next morning the time did come when the newspaper arrived with the pallid scrambled eggs. It had a big picture of her mother on the front page.

‘Developer Accused in Planning Scandal’ was all Jo had time to see before Fleur folded it inside out and sat on it – that and a smaller photo of her mother and Justin Reynolds
cutting a tape with a pair of scissors and a big smile.

‘Is it bad?’ Jo asked. It was the first time she had ever seen her mother look uncertain.

‘Nothing that won’t blow over.’

‘That was you and Mr Reynolds in the paper?’

‘Some shabby little journalist has got the wrong end of the stick.’ Fleur looked around and lowered her voice although there was nobody else in the room. ‘I build houses for
people to live in and nobody’s grateful. Nobody at all.’

Jo tried to feel sorry for her but nothing much came. Surely there should be a connection between us, she thought to herself, but the old familiar voice whispered in her head.
‘You’re not really hers,’ said Gally’s voice and tears came to her eyes – tears of relief that Gally was still there. Jo’s tablets had been left behind at the
house, along with almost everything else. It was a whole day since she had taken one. She didn’t like her tablets. They wrapped part of the inside of her head in a fuzzy blanket that stopped
her talking to Gally, stopped the parade of thoughts and pictures in her head, stopped her wanting to write stories. The tablets painted her whole life grey and made her heavy. ‘You’re
not really hers.’ It felt a harsh judgement but she knew it was right.

Mr Reynolds’ wife came to the guest house that morning for a huddled conversation in the bedroom while Jo had to sit downstairs reading. Mrs Reynolds came into the room half an hour
later.

‘Hello, Jo,’ she said. ‘Your mother asked me to give you some more spiritual cleansing. I’ve got a minute or two. Just kneel by my feet, will you.’

‘No,’ said Jo. ‘Thank you. There’s no need.’

‘Oh, but there is. That’s the Devil speaking. We must drive him out.’

‘Now listen to me,’ said Jo firmly. ‘You have very little understanding of these things and it is quite possible, though not absolutely certain, that you have a genuine wish to
help me, although it is equally possible that you enjoy the power you can wield over less forceful people, but I have a different understanding of the way the world works. I believe there is no
evil, only an absence of good from time to time. Nothing in me needs driving out and if it did, I would not choose you as the driver.’

Mrs Reynolds listened to her at first in surprise, and then in some kind of growing horror.

‘That’s not you speaking, Jo. Don’t you see? That’s the voice of the Old One. There is darkness inside you. I have to do what I have to do. You must be saved.’

She lunged forward and wrapped her arms round Jo, squeezing hard.

‘Let me go,’ said Jo, then louder, ‘Let go of me right now.’ Leah Reynolds put one hand over her mouth and began to intone ‘In nomine Domini, Gloria . . .’
ending in a scream as Jo bit her hand and burst out of her grasp.

‘I warn you,’ said Jo. ‘I don’t like hurting people unless I have no choice, and I’m smaller than you, but if you come any closer I shall hit you so hard that it
will really hurt,’ and the voice in her head, the old one who was not at all the same Old One that Mrs Reynolds meant, cheered her as the other woman rushed out of the room.

There was a period after that when they lived an uncomfortable life in a chilly guest house in Scarborough. The only good thing about it – though it was a very good thing
– was that her mother entirely forgot about the pills in her preoccupation, so colour came back into Jo’s life to liven up the grey, and her private friend came back to her completely.
It wasn’t quite the same. Mostly, when Jo needed her advice or her support, she knew what Gally would say without needing to hear the actual words spoken in her head. Every now and then it
was just like old times again and she would feel her friend really was right there, in her old place. Those were the times she liked best.

One day, when she was feeling queasy after a breakfast of undercooked fat sausages, she found a familiar plant growing at the far end of the guest house garden. She picked a leaf and was
crumpling it in her palm, ready to chew the pieces, when an urgent voice spoke in her head – Gally’s voice.

‘No,’ it said. ‘Look again.’

So she inspected it and though it looked almost exactly like Holy Rope, she saw that perhaps it was not quite the same, so she threw the crumpled leaf away, took another one carefully from the
plant and walked to the library to find a book that might explain her mistake. She could not find Holy Rope in the index, but after looking at all the pictures she had just identified it as
Eupatorium when the young male librarian walked up to the table where she was bent over the book, took the leaf from her with a tutting noise and whispered, ‘I think I’d better throw
this away, don’t you?’

Jo looked up at him in clear surprise and he whispered again, with a smile, ‘Oh, come on. You and I both know what this is. You’re a bit young for the weed, aren’t
you?’

Jo’s blank expression made him stop smiling. ‘It’s cannabis, dear,’ he said. ‘All right?’ When he left her alone, she studied the pictures and noted the
differences.

The effect of the pills was finally completely gone and she knew she had come back to life. Her old, secret friend now dwelt nearer Jo’s centre, usually silent but always there with a
nudge, a thought or a different way of looking at things – more like a memory bank of wise advice now than an older sister. That left Jo a little lonelier but there were compensations. There
was more acceptance at her new school, even people who were almost like friends, though she was not allowed to play with any of them outside school – for fear, her mother said, of drawing
attention to themselves.

‘We’re like spies, you and me,’ said her mother. ‘We have to stay undercover for a bit. Don’t say where you lived before. Don’t answer any of those sort of
questions.’

More than that, there was the rich harvest of imagination that filled her head. She only had to close her eyes to see pictures of places and people, and around them she found she could spin
stories that became more real for her than the alien seaside town they inhabited. At first the sea itself featured in none of them. Looking east across grey waves she had a sense of dangerous
people far away, but these waves were as alien as the town itself. Just sometimes, when the wind was kind and the sun shone, she was reminded of a different sort of sea, a wide bay with headlands
and a narrow strip of land separating the long beach from a lake at its back.

The other compensation was that her mother had less power over her. For a quiet life, she did what Fleur asked her to do but she knew, because she had been told, that she did not really belong
to Fleur and that made it possible to endure. The only time she really put her foot down was when her mother told her that they might go to live in Greece, where the sun shone and there were more
of what she called ‘development opportunities’. The idea appalled Jo so much that she flatly refused to consider it and her mother was so unnerved by the icy obduracy she displayed that
she let the subject drop.

For all that, Jo was yearning for something and she thought at first that it might be the old house in York, though that didn’t quite seem to be it. There was another blessing. They were
further away from the field at Stamford Bridge and that suited Jo, because on the occasional times when they had driven past it, she always had to force her mind closed against a wave of
sadness.

Her mother spent a lot of time talking to lawyers. After two months they moved into a rented bungalow full of the sort of furniture that wobbled and squeaked halfway to splitting when you sat
down on it. One day her mother came back to the bungalow late in the evening and told her to stop reading. ‘You’ve always got your nose in some book,’ she said. ‘You should
watch more TV. Anyway, I’ve got something to tell you.’

She sat down dangerously, heavily. Jo thought her mother had put on a lot of weight since they left York. She brought cakes home every day and ate most of them herself.

‘We’re going to have a fresh start,’ said Fleur with a bright smile. ‘I need to go somewhere else – somewhere where I can do the sort of things I do best and not
have to argue with small-minded people all the time. They’ve got it in for me round here.’

‘Where are we going?’