A Daughter's Secret (32 page)

‘All right.’ Those two syllables make me shiver. Lorcan hates plainness in all things. I’d expected some scorching put-down at the ludicrousness of my question, or an impassioned rant about his plight, but not this. I feel a flash of anger towards Mum. Whatever he’s done, we should never have left him to get into this state: we know how fragile he is. His artistic temperament – it makes him feel things more deeply than other people. I’m blindsided by the sense that I’m all he’s got, the realization making it almost impossible to suck the fetid air of the visitors’ room into my crumpled lungs.

‘You’re not, though, are you, really?’ I say, putting a hand out and then pulling it back, like a mouse after the kitchen crumbs spying a stalking cat. I’m way out of my depth, the blinding clarity of a few minutes ago nothing but a joke.

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ he says, flashing an awful, unexpected smile at me, his teeth protruding, fang-like, from his thin face.

‘It must be so horrible in here. Not being able to play your guitar, or watch films . . .’ The look he throws me, through narrowed eyes, is a targeted missile, designed to precisely convey the utter stupidity of my observation. It’s a look he’s given me so many times in my life, and it echoes and reverberates through all those jagged bits of our shared past like a gust of air hitting a wind chime. Anger whooshes up inside of me – I’m all ready to roar at him, to tell him that he wouldn’t be in here if it wasn’t for his own self-destructive death wish, to remind him that he’s not the only one who’s paying the price. But as soon as the words start to rise up in my throat, they skitter straight back down again, just like they always have. ‘At least you’re halfway through. You’ll be out by Easter.’

‘I’ve missed you,’ he says, his eyes softening, and I fight to keep myself safely walled up behind the anger. His gaze is a seducer’s gaze, tempting me into feeling guilty for abandoning him. This is
us
, it says. We understand things no one else understands.

‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ I say, my voice low and measured. ‘You do know you shouldn’t have done it?’

Mum has these old-fashioned green metal tins she’s always kept on the kitchen shelf above the counter – salt, flour, sugar, tea, coffee. When I was little I would hate it when they got out of alphabetical order, would beg her to restore them to their rightful places. Maybe we can get through this if we can at least agree on the order of things. Lorcan stares at me, his eyes colder now.

‘Yes, Mia, I do know that,’ he says, looking around the room a trifle theatrically, and then down at his sorry self stuck on the orange plastic chair.

‘Not just for you, Lorcan! You could have left him with serious brain injuries. It’s a miracle he’s all right.’ And me, I think, but I can’t get that part of the story out. It’s almost like, because I was going to have an abortion anyway, I’ve got no right to feel sad. And yet I do feel sad. What does that mean? When the sadness creeps up, I need to tell it firmly that the net result was the same. It needn’t lurk around.

‘And I’m sorry for that. But there was a child involved.’ His eyes are intense again. ‘A baby.’

‘Not now,’ I say more quietly, not trusting myself. Not trusting him. I need to go, and yet my legs won’t obey me.

‘I only wanted to protect you.’

‘Protect me? How the hell was that protecting me?’

‘I’m telling you what the core of it was, Mia. I’m not defending what I did. It was primal. You won’t understand until you’re a mum.’ He stares at me. ‘If you’re ever unselfish enough to live up to the job.’

A wave of nausea surges up inside me, my anger so huge, so blinding, that I can barely see him.

‘Don’t you dare tell me about being a parent. The way you’ve treated me and Mum—’

‘You’ve always known, from the day I first held you in my arms, that you’re the most precious thing in the world to me. I’m in
prison
thanks to . . . the blindness of my love for you. My American career’s finished, do you realize that?’

A fierce-looking warden, his hair cut in a blunt grey bowl, turns towards our raised voices. I hiss out my next words, low and violent.

‘Don’t twist things to pretend you attacked Jim for me. You just can’t control yourself. You can’t grow up! You’re not a partner or a father – you’re just a horrible selfish brat of a child.’

Lorcan’s even paler, his long hands trembling, his eyes dark. My words have hit home: I can see them burning their way into him like I’ve thrown acid. I want this to stop, oh God, I want this to stop: I wish Bowl Cut would throw me out.

Lorcan’s calm now, his meticulous precision reasserting itself.

‘You were willing to murder your
own child
for the sake of your precious ascent to the dreaming spires. I don’t know what happened to you, Mia, how we bred such a cold little ice cube of a girl, but somehow we did.’

I shove my chair backwards, the legs making a gruesome screeching sound as they scrape the floor, and stand up.

‘You won’t need to give it any more thought. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a dad any more. You’re not worthy of the name. You never were.’

Lorcan gives a slow, superior smile.

‘I’m dead to you? Don’t make a habit of it, Mia. You’ll have a very unhappy life. Try and defrost that heart of yours before it’s too late.’

‘Trust me, you won’t be around to see it.’

And with that, I turned on my heels, and left a whole chapter, a whole book, of my life behind.

At least that’s what I thought I’d done.

Chapter Twenty

It looks at first like the new normal. Mum’s on her ancient desktop when I get back, the streaks of silver more visible than ever as she distractedly pushes her hair out of her face, her bottom lip pinned by the jut of her front teeth. I know what she’s doing without even seeing the screen: trawling endlessly through estate-agent websites, hoping that her very own Manderley will have somehow have come on the market at a knock-down price. I hug her hello and go to the kitchen to make us both a cup of tea, ignoring the doorbell when it peals out. She’s nearer, I reason. Besides, it might break the unhealthy spell. I hear the door open.

‘What is this?’ she says, her voice rising like smoke from a blaze.

‘What’s happened?’ I say, racing through, nearly spilling boiling water on myself in my haste.

‘Mia . . .’ she says, a shaking hand thrust towards me like a stop sign, her face blanched white. A bulky, uniformed man is framed in the doorway, his van parked on the kerb, hazards flashing.

‘Madam, can you try to . . .’ His voice is no more than noise. I can’t breathe now, so faint I’m surprised I’m still upright. It’s odd how calm I feel, all at the same time, almost as if I’m soaring overhead, observing what’s going on. I scan the three letters, the flowers they’ve so skilfully woven together. There are chrysanthemums in there, roses and tulips too. MIA, it says, each letter large and ostentatious, pink and purple and white.

‘Just go, OK?’ says Mum, trying to push the door shut, the man still immovable, struggling to compute.

‘So you don’t want me to leave it then?’

‘That’s Mia,’ she says, gripping my arm too tightly. ‘My daughter, the one you’ve just delivered a funeral wreath for. Just get out.’

I hate the smell that hospitals have, that mingled stench of industrial disinfectant and sweaty bodies. It hits the back of my nostrils as soon as I get through the big revolving door of the monolithic white building and almost makes me gag. The reception area is thronged with people; apologizing profusely, I dodge my way past an old lady who’s being pushed in a wheelchair, my eyes trained on the front desk.

‘I’m looking for a Patrick O’Leary,’ I say, breathless. ‘He’s on Carroll Ward.’

I sprint for the lifts, then race down a maze of corridors, sticky with panic. Finally – finally – I find the door.

‘You know visiting hours are over in less than a quarter of an hour?’ says the battle-weary Ward Sister, clocking my flushed face.

‘So I need to see him immediately,’ I say. But as I set off behind her officious, uniformed backside, I suddenly long for nothing more than to gobble up her excuse whole. It’s all got too real. Even when Patrick’s been vulnerable he hasn’t been vulnerable – he’s felt complete in his Patrick-ness. If he’s broken, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it back.

I called him before I’d had any time to calm down, my words a gibbering stream of anger and terror. ‘Slow down, Mia, slow down,’ he said, and then, as he grasped what had happened, he started to swear. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I took you too close.’ That’s when I heard it: it was more than distress, his words were a dull croak.

The night before, he’d been grabbed from behind as he put his keys in the lock, beaten so badly that he was delivered here in an ambulance. The raid itself was a dead loss, revealing no more than a twisted little manipulator drilling through her scales, and a few short hours later, the wreath pitched up at our door, underlining the point. Stephen Wright is taking no prisoners, and he won’t be kept a prisoner either.

‘I’m coming now,’ I gabbled, yanking my coat on. Mum was staring up at me from the sofa, her eyes wide and glassy, the manic energy she’d had on the doorstep drained away.

‘Listen to me, Mia,’ he’d said, a stern-sounding nurse in the background telling him to hang up. ‘You have to stay where you are.’

He rushed around a team of detectives from the investigation, and they sprang into action, bagging up and photographing the wreath, dispatching more officers to question the florist. He had nothing for them: the flowers were paid for in cash by a man with a baseball cap tipped low over his face; there was no CCTV in the shop. Mum and I weren’t much better. Most of what I could tell them had already been diligently logged by Patrick over the preceding weeks. ‘I’ve stopped seeing her.’ I trotted the phrase out again and again, like a mantra, like it would ward off the evil spirits. I wanted to keep them from Mum most of all, couldn’t bear the way the shock had made a mask of her face, even though Nick had come back and held her tight against the solid wall of his chest.

I watched them together, shock still telescoping me in and out of that icy detachment. At least I would see Patrick. I would see him in a matter of hours, and then the scattered pieces would cohere into some kind of whole.
I
would feel whole again.

But now I’m here, I realize that the looping thought was no more than a dummy popped in the mouth of a screaming baby. Things might be about to get a whole lot worse.

And there he is, purple bruises like squashed blackberries decorating his face. His lip is split, a bandage around his head, and his right arm is in a cast.

‘Patrick!’ I say, rushing to him. He attempts to lift his bandaged arm, then winces. ‘Don’t move.’

He tries to smile, but that too is agonizing. I want to lie down next to him, to somehow suck the pain away and melt his bruises – but instead I stand there, useless, hoping the horror in my expression won’t add to his distress. ‘
Mean Girls
doesn’t cover it,’ he croaks. ‘We really pissed her off. No, actually . . .’ He pauses, gathers strength. ‘
You
really pissed her off. Jeez, Mia, are you like, the world’s worst therapist?’

And there he is, utterly Patrick under the bloody blanket of savagery. I don’t care any more. I rush forward, put my head against his chest, my tears soaking his horrible green hospital gown.

‘I was so terrified of what they might have done to you.’

He tucks my hair behind my ear with his free hand, his split lip brushing against it for a second.

‘And another thing, you’re rubbish at playing hard to get.’ I look up at him, my face a freeze frame of everything that’s flooding into me, nothing held back. I don’t want to be anywhere but here: I can’t imagine when I’ll ever start wanting to be anywhere but here. And I haven’t felt that since – since then. Muffin love! says Lysette loudly in my head, and I try to hug him without causing more injury. I feel him tremble with pain, but he doesn’t make a sound. I loosen my grip, but he pushes his bruised ribs back against me. ‘Looks worse than it is,’ he says, mouth still close to my ear. ‘They’re probably gonna let me out tomorrow or the next day. Give me your news.’

‘I’ve ended it with Marcus.’

‘Now you tell me,’ he says, something that sounds a little like delight in his froggy voice. ‘Course I’m in hospital.’

‘And I’m probably going to have to get a job in McDonald’s.’

‘Stop whingeing. You’ll rock that uniform.’

I take his bruised, clawed hand in mine. As if any of that stuff matters right now.

‘It’s my fault for trusting her.’

‘Come on,’ he says, smiling his disagreement. ‘They’re not messing around, these guys, and I took my chances with Gemma’s information.
Information
,’ he repeats, rolling his eyes. ‘I should’ve stopped you seeing her, not encouraged you to try and get more.’

Now my anger’s flooding back. I think of her sly little upward glance as she told me that I could redeem myself by becoming her mouthpiece.

‘She seemed so – so
real
– when she told me.’

‘She was weeping like a baby, apparently, but she totally denied she’d seen him. So did the teacher, and she’s got absolutely no criminal connections as far as we can work out.’

‘I just couldn’t help myself.’ Shame trickles through me – as if I need any more reminders of my shortcomings. ‘She reeled me in every time.’

‘Come on, Mia, enough of that chat. Stop whipping yourself. You know what you’re doing.’ He looks thoughtful. ‘It’s just possible that, despite my unparalleled genius, I’m the one who’s missing something.’

I shake my head at him, teasing him with my eyes. I remember what he said the day of the vegetable Apocalypse, how judgemental I was. I get it now: I get the fact that you have to grab every split second you can find on the sunny side of the street.

‘Patrick. For the love of God, leave it, at least for today!’

‘Fair point.’

We sit there for a moment in silence, his good hand intertwined with mine, our fingers criss-crossing. He gently strokes the wells between mine, then reaches up to stroke my cheek. How can quiet feel this full? I’m the one who breaks it.