A Daughter's Secret (31 page)

Soon there’s a steady stream of mothers dropping off present-wielding little girls in uniformly pink party frocks (no purple, no green). I smile politely – I hope not coldly – hanging back as Lysette hugs her tribe hello and catches up on gossip. This is emphatically her life, not mine: I feel a little twinge of shame at not having my own pink-frocked treasure to steer and cajole. Saffron is hysterical with excitement, the floor littered with torn-up wrapping paper and ribbon, no neat stack of presents kept for later. Would I be a total control freak of a mum? I don’t think I ever really believed Marcus’s half-hearted promises about ‘being open’ to more children, a phrase that gives a big fat V sign to ‘wanting’. Maybe that suited me. I’m not sure it would any more.

Little kids are loud. They start with a round of pass the parcel, which obviously ends in hysterical tears, and then Lysette sits them in a circle so that Ged, dressed in a pointy hat and cloak, can perform some highly dubious ‘magic tricks’. Saffron’s entranced – it’s her dad after all – but the other ten or so kids seem more engaged in picking their noses and stuffing Rice Krispie cakes in their dribbly faces.

‘Let’s leave them to it,’ says Lysette, grabbing my arm and pulling me towards the kitchen. For now the older boys have got it covered. It’s sweet how they want to help out, determined to make their sister’s birthday special. I bet Gemma’s brothers love her far more than she ever notices: we hardly got to talk about them. I almost text Patrick to find out what’s happening, but I stop myself: it’s no good building a wall and then constantly peeking over the top. My part in the trial is, hopefully, over. If I’m very lucky, I’ll be allowed to go back to listening to Ben and Isobel droning on about whether porn would spice things up or demean her. This much I know – I’ll never risk going near another criminal case.

‘Oh, my mum gave me this for you,’ I say, scrabbling around in my handbag for a plant cutting that she thrust on me as I left. ‘She said to send you loads of love.’

‘Bless her for that,’ says Lysette, filling a glass and popping the cutting in. Lysette’s garden is beautiful, a perk of living out of London, and she and the kids get a real satisfaction from growing fat, misshapen tomatoes and muddy carrots. ‘How the hell is it? I kind of want to come round and sit on your bed while there’s still time.’

‘No need for that. I mean, obviously I feel like the world’s biggest loser.’

‘Don’t feel like that!’

‘Er, no job come Monday,’ I say, ticking off menu items on my fingers. ‘No boyfriend, let alone husband slash children, and now the
pièce de résistance
, I’m back in my teenage bedroom.’ As I say it, I feel my shoulders hunch inwards like a bird curling in its wings. It’s the strangest thing, even though my Matisse prints and piano grade certificates are long gone, it feels like stepping through the looking-glass. ‘It’s nice to be with Mum though.’

It is. She can’t keep up the Stepford act now I’m there to stare her out, and she’s at least started to talk to me truthfully about how difficult it is to have had so many of her certainties swept away. Perhaps the one positive to come out of my personal tsunami is that Mum can actually believe I understand. It makes me realize how much time I’ve spent breezing through, gaze welded to my iPhone, airily saying ‘My treat’ at some fancy place that probably made her toes curl inside her sensible shoes.

‘And they’ve got a buyer?’

‘Yeah, I think it’s going to go through this month. Then I really might be on your camp bed.’

‘Hurrah! So no chance you can get your flat back?’

‘Nope.’ The primary school teacher ‘adores’ it, and definitely wants her full six months (thank God I only agreed to six, although what does it say about my attitude to commitment?). Until the consequences of my suspension become clearer, going home feels like the most sensible stopgap. So hello, Loserville. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not serious about the camp bed.’

‘You could, you know.’

‘I know,’ I say, grateful. ‘I’d pay rent though.’ I get the Prosecco out of the fridge, top Lysette up. ‘Seriously, I’m bored of listening to myself moaning. And I’ve got a plan.’ I open up my iPad, show Lysette the links I’ve downloaded for her. ‘Garden design, you can do most of the course online. You’d be amazing at it!’

Her finger swoops across the screen, her attention totally focused.

‘I don’t know if we could afford it . . .’ she says, but I can tell she’s considering it.

‘Look, I’ve got more time at the moment. It might not be this, but there’s loads of stuff you’re brilliant at. What are they called – transferable skills?’

Just then, a child appears at her elbow. She’s slightly bigger than the others, her dress – whilst pink – slightly less puffy of sleeve and balloon-skirted. I can’t put my finger on it, but even her entrance into the kitchen suggests a certain self-possession.

‘Auntie Lys, Saffron dropped Ribena all over Peppa and now she won’t stop crying. I told her Peppa could go in the washing machine but’ – she shrugs nonchalantly – ‘she doesn’t get it cos she’s only four. Today.’

I look at her, shock filtering through me; those sea-green eyes, her full pink lips. ‘Auntie Lys’ is more than an affectation. Lysette darts a look at me.

‘I’ll be right there. Sorry,’ she says to me, as she hurries through. ‘I was gonna warn you, but I thought you didn’t need anything else to think about. He’s not coming, I promise.’

That child. Jim’s child. Jim’s child and not my child. I try not to think how old she’d be (why do I always think she’d have been a she?) but I can’t help it. Twenty – I could be the mother of a twenty-year-old.

I think back to what must have been Jim’s wife, a harassed-looking woman with frizzy hair and nondescript jeans, slurping loudly from a Starbucks bucket of something. In fact, her volume setting seemed high for everything. Her laugh was loud, and when she said goodbye to – Violet? – her voice boomed from the back door like a ferry tannoy. It’s not how I’d pictured her at all: I thought the woman who’d finally succeeded in taming Jim would be some ethereal, unknowable beauty who had effortlessly popped out their three children like petits pois from an organic pod. I chide myself for being such a judgemental bitch, my point-scoring far more unattractive than her untamed hair.

I look at my bag hanging on the back of the door, seriously tempted to make a run for it. But maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. I’ll go before going-home time – I’m not a total masochist – but I can get through this.

Saffron’s tears are drying by the time I go next door. She’s safe in Lysette’s arms, a sausage roll half hanging out of her mouth like Jim’s fags used to hang out of his, crumbs spraying everywhere.

‘Auntie Mia’s here!’ says Lysette, throwing me a concerned smile. I smile back properly. ‘Which means it’s time to cut the cake!’

Saffron automatically – chokingly – holds out her arms, and I swing her up, leaving Lysette free to light the four candles on Peppa Pig’s sponge incarnation. We sing our hearts out, cut the cake, and then I say my hurried goodbyes, give in to my desire to disappear.

I thought the danger lay there. It didn’t.

December 1995 (seventeen years old)

The tube judders down the line, wheezy and uncertain, almost as if it’s colluding with my jelly of a heart. Rampant egotism of course – London’s blanketed in three inches of snow, has ground, hysterically, to a halt as if we’ve accidentally house-swapped with Antarctica. I count my breaths as I count down the stops, forcing myself not to spring through the doors, run over the bridge and high tail it for home.

The building springs up before I’m ready for it, a brick monster, ready to gobble up anything in its path. Again, I nearly falter. It’s consumed Lorcan, but there’s still time for me to dodge it, to keep myself intact. As soon as I’ve stepped through those dark metal gates I’m a prisoner’s daughter. There’s nothing noble about it: it’s not like he’s a freedom fighter or a government whistle blower. If you look at the charge sheet, he’s no better than a football hooligan or a mugger. I don’t want to feel ashamed, but shame feels like it’s my blood, pulsing through every last crevice of my body. I can feel it, or I can not feel.

I’m late. The queue for the visitors’ centre already snakes halfway across the front yard, people stamping their feet and blowing on their hands in a vain attempt to keep warm. A small brother and sister are having a snowball fight, their mum smoking fag after fag, forced to grind one out under her heel when the little girl wails with fury as she suffers a direct hit, right in the middle of her chubby face. An elderly couple stand in front of me, clad in matching beige anoraks that look like they’re from the back page of the
Telegraph
, their gloved hands tightly entwined, their gaze never venturing beyond each other. I can see what they’re doing: they’re trying to exist on a different plane, where ‘the thing’ never happened. I’m sure my grandparents will have made an appalled visit by now, done their duty. They’re not speaking to us now Mum’s thrown him out – I get the feeling they blame us for the whole sorry mess – but they’re still scribbling angry cheques to cover my school fees. A couple of off-duty prison officers, callow and spotty, snort with laughter and shove snow in each other’s hoods as they head for the exit.

Eventually I’m inside the visitors’ centre. I give them my passport, with its scant stamps, sign the form and wait to be called, like I’m going to take off on the world’s worst holiday. I’m stretched thin between wanting the wait to go on forever, and wanting this all to be over, to be gulping the clean air of a life lived outside these grim walls. We’ve been told that, if he keeps his unpredictable temper tightly buttoned, he’ll only serve six months, and he’s already done three. Perhaps this could be my one and only visit? I agonized about it, but I couldn’t quite stand the idea of him spending Christmas locked in a prison cell, wings not clipped but sawn clean off, deprived of everything that gives his life meaning.

‘Are you sure?’ Mum kept saying. Mum, the patient priest who’d always give Lorcan two Hail Marys and her forgiveness, has well and truly cast him out into the wilderness. He didn’t live with us whilst he was out on bail, and she point blank refused to attend his sentencing. I went because he rang up and begged me to, but the sight of him in the dock, pale and spaced out, Gordon and Gloria glowering at him from the other side of the public gallery, was almost too much to endure.

I saw them in the lobby afterwards: for one crazy moment I wanted to run up and hug them, erase the last few months with the force of my longing, throw myself on their mercy and tell them that our holiday had been the best two weeks of my uneventful little life. I’d loved Jim, no question, but in a funny way I’d loved them – what they represented – just as much. They were a foreign language, passionate and vivid, I was desperate to learn and one I’d have never stopped speaking if I’d been given the chance. I attempted a smile, hoping they’d see in my face how terrible I still felt about what Lorcan had done. I’d written to them to say as much, a letter that the prosecution had bandied around in court to try and increase his sentence.

Jim had recovered well, mercifully, off now on a gap year that was starting in a Bondi Beach bar: I wasn’t expecting a postcard. We hadn’t seen each other since that gruesome day. Lysette was kind enough to keep me posted on his progress, but made it absolutely clear I wasn’t to come near the hospital. Poor Lysette, the faithful messenger, always taking the risk of getting shot for the sake of what was right. She’d been the one to tell them that the baby was lost. I couldn’t help obsessing about how that had made Jim feel, secretly hoping that his reaction had contained a trace of something sweeter than relief.

He was never going to tell me, I knew that now. Thank God my love for him had evaporated, replaced by a deep shame at my puppy-dog naivety. I was cleverer than that. I didn’t plan to put down the shield it provided any time soon.

The little girl throws out her arms for the stout female warden, a big grin on her face at the adventure of it all. ‘You’re a very good aeroplane,’ the warden tells her, gently putting her down and reaching into her pocket for a mini Mars Bar. I almost wish I could be an aeroplane too, but instead I keep my face neutral as she checks me for contraband, then waves me through to the barren visitors’ room. Why am I doing this? I don’t know.

I see Lorcan before he sees me, a pale comma curving over the Formica table, skinnier than I’ve ever known him to be. He’s still got that glazed look in his eyes that he wore in the courtroom, like he’s dumped real life in left luggage and sped off on a train somewhere far more exotic. It fills me with an unexpected surge of righteous determination. I’m going to bring him back, restore some kind of normal so we can all move on with our lives. He’ll come out of prison, bloodied but unbroken, his recent success still there for the taking. Mum will begin enjoying her life, no longer dragging around the dead weight of their broken relationship, and I’ll go to Oxford, push myself so hard that a First is an inevitability. I’ll debate things fiercely and row boats and star in plays and none of this will matter one jot.

‘Hello, Lorcan!’ I say, sailing up to him, the energy still pulsing through me.

Lorcan’s rheumy blue eyes rise slowly, drinking me in. The other visitors all seem to be hugging their loved ones – crying and clinging – although if they hold on too long the wardens tell them off or prise them apart, like prudish teachers at a sixth-form disco. My flame starts to dim. I’m slightly repulsed by it all. I don’t want to hug him, the anger I’ve been suppressing suddenly rising upwards like a grizzly bear that’s been poked with a stick, and yet I desperately wish I did. I look around the room, envy and judgement shaking themselves up into a toxic cocktail, and then slide myself into the uncomfortable plastic chair.

‘You came then,’ he says, voice drained of enthusiasm.

‘Yes. Here I am.’ My voice sounds high and staccato, like a children’s TV presenter’s on a piece of crackly archive footage. ‘How are you?’ I remember a play that me and a friend wrote at primary school, the ‘dialogue’ as we learnt it was called so bad it was almost impossible to say, however many times we tried to make it read like two people talking. That’s how I feel right now.