Till We Meet Again (10 page)

It was just before Christmas of that same year that she realized that with or without Beth, she was trapped at home for good. That afternoon she had battled through the crowds of Christmas shoppers in Stratford just to get some new lights for the tree, as the old ones were broken.

Mother was distraught when she got back. She’d wanted to go to the lavatory, but the door handle which Father had promised to fix had jammed again, and she wet herself sitting in her wheelchair. She made it quite clear, even if her speech was laboured, that Susan was responsible, because she’d been gone for so long.

As Susan hadn’t so much as stopped for a cup of coffee, let alone chat for a minute with anyone or even look in the shops, she was very hurt. She couldn’t help thinking as she mopped up the urine and changed her mother, that before long this might be a regular thing, the way it had been with Granny.

Father didn’t come home that night until after nine, yet again, and used the same old excuse that he’d been working. But as she put his warmed-up dinner in front of him on the kitchen table and smelled whisky on his breath, she knew he’d been in the pub.

After he’d left the kitchen, she began to cry at the unfairness of it all. Her day began at seven in the morning when she got her mother up and cooked breakfast. Every minute of the day was accounted for, and it was now after ten and she still had to help her mother into bed before she could sit down and put her feet up.

It wasn’t right. Father might at least come home straight from work and share a meal with them, sit and talk to Mother in the evenings. He should have fixed that door handle and it should have been him that got the Christmas tree lights. It wasn’t right that he left everything to her.

‘What’s the matter?’ her father asked from the doorway. He must have come back to the kitchen to get something.

Susan looked up at him, but there was no concern in his once kindly eyes, only irritation.

‘I’m fed up,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t have any life or friends. I can’t go on like this, it isn’t fair. I want to leave and get a job in London like Martin.’

‘What sort of job could you get?’ he said scornfully. ‘GCEs in Domestic Science and Geography won’t get you far.’

At the time when she got her disappointing results Father had only laughed and said it didn’t matter about maths or science, and she would still make a first-class secretary anyway. Now it seemed he was taking Martin’s view, that she was stupid. ‘I could go to secretarial college like I always wanted to,’ she sobbed out.

‘And who do you imagine would pay for that?’ he said curtly. ‘I’m working every hour God sends just to keep a roof over our heads.’

‘I could get any job then,’ she said wildly. ‘I could be a waitress or a filing clerk.’

‘You’d see your mother put in a nursing home just to be a waitress?’ he said, his bushy dark eyebrows rising in shock. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘Get someone else in here to look after her, then,’ Susan cried. ‘I can’t do it any more.’

‘I can’t afford it, nursing care doesn’t come cheap,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’ll tell you how it is. If you insist on leaving your mother, then she’ll have to go into a nursing home. Can you imagine what that would do to her? Not only stuck in a home filled with sick old ladies whose minds have gone, but knowing that her only daughter was so selfish she preferred waiting on tables to taking care of her.’

‘You don’t expect Martin to give up his life,’ she bleated out plaintively.

Martin had always been a thorn in her side. The ten-year difference in their ages meant they had never been playmates. In fact by the time Susan was five or six she had learned to keep well away from him. He was cruel, delighting in hiding or breaking her favourite toys, slapping her for no reason, and hissing abuse at her out of their parents’ hearing.

She had been overjoyed when he went off to university, and that was the same year Father began teaching her to shoot. She was too young to realize then that that made Martin even more jealous of her. She was receiving the attention and admiration from their father that he felt he should be getting. She couldn’t ever forget that day in winter when Martin crept up behind her as she was standing looking at the river, and pushed her in. She almost died of shock and cold, and she knew that was what he intended, for he ran off back indoors. Unknown to him she could swim a few strokes, and she managed to get out, but she was smacked for telling lies and saying her brother pushed her. Her mother never believed anything bad of Martin.

From then on, he never let up. Each time he came home on a visit he was nastier, belittling her, suggesting she was too dim to get a real job. He said she was fat, ugly and a parasite. He joined Father in making her wait on him hand and foot. But her father never noticed.

‘Martin has an important job in the city,’ Father said now, and he gave her a steely look which meant that if she dared say anything detrimental about his son, she would be sorry. ‘He’s worked hard for his position. Now, stop being so stupid and get your mother ready for bed. If she was to hear what you are saying she might very well have another stroke.’

Looking back, Susan saw that she should have realized her father was trying to blackmail her and called his bluff. He did have the money for a nurse, but not only did he not want to spend it on his wife, he didn’t like what a nurse meant. She’d insist on regular hours, she wouldn’t do the cleaning, cooking and everything else. He’d have to do that, or pay another person too, and he wouldn’t be able to go off to the pub, play golf and go shooting.

But at the time Susan was too naive and trusting to see all that.

It was 1973 before she lost any trust she’d had in her father when she discovered he had a mistress. She had seen lipstick marks on his shirt collars several times while she was washing them, but she refused to think it was anything more than him giving one of the women in his office a hug, until she found a note from Gerda in his jacket pocket.

Gerda was the typist Father had taken on when Mother first had her stroke. Susan had met her once when she called at her father’s office to get a lift home. She was about forty, red-haired and quite attractive in a common, busty sort of way.

The note was brief but very telling, as it was an apology for Gerda being grumpy with her father the previous evening. She said she couldn’t help it because she was afraid the time would never come when they’d be together for always. But she did love him and she was prepared to wait.

‘You bastard,’ Susan said aloud, forgetting that Julie was up on the top bunk.

‘Who’s a bastard?’ Julie asked. Susan looked up to see the other woman’s face upside down, she was leaning over the edge of the top bunk looking at her.

Julie was thirty-five, a hard-faced bleached blonde who had been in prison dozens of times for both prostitution and theft. She had three children who were living with her mother while she awaited her trial for robbing one of her customers. While she didn’t seem to be as nasty as some of the women on the wing, Susan still thought she’d better explain herself.

‘I was thinking out loud,’ she said. ‘About my father. Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

‘What did he do to you?’ Julie asked.

‘Nothing much to me, but he got himself a mistress after my mother had a stroke,’ Susan explained. She wasn’t going to go any further and admit her feelings for her father turned to hatred after that. Just the thought that he was carrying on with another woman, waiting for his wife to die so he could be with her, killed all the love she once had for him.

‘All men are bastards,’ Julie retorted, but her tone was friendly, and she climbed down from her bunk and sat down beside her, moving Susan’s legs over on the bunk. ‘Did you do him for it?’

Susan had the impression that Julie had been a victim of abuse from men for her entire life. ‘No,’ she said, and smiled at the woman. ‘I didn’t have any murderous instincts in those days.’

Julie grinned back, and Susan caught a glimpse of the very pretty girl she’d once been. ‘Why did you shoot those people?’ she asked.

Susan had said nothing to anyone about herself up till now, and she had intended to keep her silence for ever. But now, after the incident in the dining room, she desperately needed a friend.

‘Because they were responsible for my daughter’s death,’ she said simply.

She knew Julie loved her children, even if she was absent from them for long periods, and seeing the shock and sympathy on her face, Susan suddenly wanted to tell her the entire story.

‘But why didn’t you get them for it right after your kid died?’ Julie asked, when Susan had finished, wiping tears away from her eyes.

‘I was too stunned at first,’ Susan said. ‘I just wanted to die myself. I moved out of Bristol, I didn’t come back until two years later. Then one night I was walking to my cleaning job up on the Downs and I saw the doctor and that bitch of a receptionist. They were snogging in a car. That’s what really got me, they were both married with kids, and there they were carrying on like that. It was just like my father and his woman.’

Julie smirked. ‘Good for you. Where’d you get the gun though?’

‘It was my father’s service revolver,’ Susan said, and told her how she’d been taught to shoot as a girl.

‘So you just went down to that surgery and blasted them out?’ Julie asked, her expression incredulous. ‘Why didn’t you track them down and do it somewhere secret? You’d never’ve been caught then.’

‘I suppose I wanted to be caught,’ Susan admitted. She suddenly saw the absurd side of that and began to laugh. ‘I must be mad,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want to end up here?’

‘You going to plead insanity?’ Julie asked, and grinned when she saw the look of horror on Susan’s face. ‘It don’t mean you get locked away in a place full of loonies, not unless you’re really out of it still. They call it Diminished Responsibility, you just make the shrink see you couldn’t help what you done, like you was so upset that something pushed you into it. A mate of mine who killed her old man pleaded that. Didn’t even have to be tried, the lawyers just decided it between them. She only got five years.’

‘I don’t think the doctor’s wife and the husband of the woman I killed will be satisfied with me getting anything less than life,’ Susan said. She’d had time to think about them and their children now, and although she wasn’t exactly sorry for what she’d done, she did feel guilty about the children.

‘Huh,’ Julie snorted. ‘When they get told their other halves were ‘aving it off, they won’t feel quite so bad about you.’

‘I couldn’t bring that up!’ Susan exclaimed.

Julie laughed. ‘You are a loony if you don’t. Just think, you’ll get your revenge every way up. You’ve done away with the people that let Annabel die, cut off all the sympathy for them, and what’s more you’ll be out of ’ere in a few years.’

Susan had been absolutely certain she wanted to be put away for life when she was first arrested, but just nine days in here had already eroded away that certainty. By dismissing Beth she hadn’t had any further legal advice, and hearing Julie’s opinion was like finding she had a parachute strapped to her back as a plane went down.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, of course I am,’ Julie said. ‘So no more arseing about, you tell your brief when he comes next that’s what you want. Lay it on thick about what a bad time you’ve ‘ad. All that stuff about yer dad, and anything else you can think of. Next thing you know you’ll be outta here.’

Susan felt more cheerful then. ‘Do you think I can get some glasses while I’m in here?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I can’t see well enough to read any more.’

‘Yeah, just ask to see the doctor,’ Julie said. ‘While you’re there, you start tellin’ him stuff about yourself. He’s a nosy bastard, likes to think of himself as a shrink. Tell ‘im you’re depressed an’ all while yer at it, and he’ll give you some pills. It helps to have something to take the edge off the day.’

By lights out that same day, Susan felt just a little better. She guessed Julie must have passed on at least some of what she’d told her, for there had been sympathetic smiles from several women at tea-time, and she’d been saved a chair by the television during the evening’s association time. While it was impossible to concentrate on the programme because of the noise all around her, it was preferable to being excluded.

Julie had asked her earlier about Annabel’s father, and her question came back to Susan as she lay there hoping that tonight she’d be able to sleep. So much had happened to her since that she’d virtually shut Liam out of her mind.

She could see his face so clearly tonight, his dark eyes always creased up with laughter, snub nose, curly dark hair tumbling over bronzed shoulders as he worked in the garden. Her father called him a ‘Didicoy’, his word for someone lower even than a gypsy. But Liam wasn’t a gypsy, he was well educated, he’d even been to college. He was just a free spirit who moved from town to town, sleeping in his old camper van, doing whatever gardening or odd jobs he could get.

He had knocked on the door one day in early March 1985. He said he’d been doing some tree-felling for one of their neighbours and he’d been told they had some dead trees that needed cutting down too.

Any new face at the door was a welcome distraction to Susan. She even welcomed canvassers when the local elections were on, for any company was better than her own. She’d been stuck in that house for nineteen years, seeing no one but the district nurse or the odd neighbour. The highlight of her week was going to the supermarket. Sometimes she felt she would go mad with the sheer monotony of her life.

She would have invited Liam in even if there hadn’t been three dead fruit trees in the back garden needing attention, just because she hoped he’d stay for a while and chat. But she was very glad she had a good excuse, because she certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to realize how desperate she was for company.

He sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and chatted to her mother. Susan was touched by how patient he was with her poor speech, how he seemed instinctively to know that she still had a sharp mind and needed to communicate with new people.