‘What the fuck is going on?’ Cassie’s shrill Manchester accent hits me as soon as we get out of the car. ‘What’s he doing here? Why’s there red paint all over your doorstep?’
I fill her in on the night before, her face darkening with every word she hears.
‘You need to drop this,’ she warns me, her finger close to my face. ‘This is serious now, Suze. Being watched? Spied on? People in your house? Give. It. Up.’
I shake my head. ‘I can’t give up, I just can’t. Even if it’s some kind of hate campaign by locals, how can I live just waiting for the next person to break into my house, or attack me in the street?’ We’re still outside and I’m trying to keep my voice low. Cassie isn’t.
‘If this is some sicko out for revenge, you don’t have to go through it on your own! You can come stay with me, or I’ll stay here. Let’s just forget that photograph and go back to normal.’
‘What’s normal? Normal for us is . . .’ I can’t say it. I can’t say that normal for us is three square meals a day served on a plastic tray still encrusted with part of yesterday’s meal. Normal is sharing a room the size of my old laundry room with a woman who talks about bodily functions as easily as my old friends compared Yankee Candles.
Now that I’ve started, I can’t give up that easily. The part of me that has always wondered – that tiny inch of me that remembers making it all the way to the bus stop while my baby screamed relentlessly inside the house –
has
to know the truth. I have to wade back into my past, knee deep in crap, to see what’s underneath. Do I deserve this?
Am I crazy?
When I enter the front room with drinks, Cassie and Nick are sitting in silence. I hand Nick his mug of coffee and take my place on the sofa next to Cassie. I get the feeling they’ve been arguing.
‘What?’ I ask, looking between them. ‘What?’
‘The journalist wants to poke his nose in where it’s not necessary.’ Cassie’s voice isn’t so much tinged with venom as saturated with it. I look at Nick.
‘I was just wondering if it would help if I were to, um, if I saw some, if you have any . . .’
‘He wants photos of Dylan.’
My throat fills with bile. Photos? I have them, of course; they sit in the bottom of the pine dresser, encased in a brown leather album that has remained unopened for nearly three years. My father brought the album on one of his visits to Oakdale, but I have never had the courage to lift the cover. I took almost three hundred photographs of my newborn baby in the weeks following his birth: Dylan with his first teddy bear, Dylan’s first windy smile, Dylan on a Wednesday. I guess from the size of the album that it doesn’t hold all three hundred; I never wanted to find out which ones my dad had chosen to include.
‘Why? They won’t tell you anything; we know it can’t be him. Besides, all babies look alike.’
That’s a lie. My baby didn’t look the same as other babies; other babies were screwed-up, wrinkly little things that barely resembled anything. My baby was beautiful, a perfectly smooth face and huge eyes that had changed from darkest blue to the deep brown I had fallen for in his father years before. A fine sprinkling of dark hair that grew so fast in those first few weeks that I’d had to brush it lightly with a soft-bristled white brush every morning, a present from my brother and sister-in-law. His tongue so adorable, even while it trilled its shrilling war cry deep, deep, deep into the night.
‘You’re right, I’m sorry, it wouldn’t help anyway.’
But I know he thinks it will. Nick thinks it will help, and if I’m going to put myself through this ordeal, if I’m going to relive the twelve short weeks of Dylan’s life one day, I may as well start here. I stand, Cassie takes in a sharp breath.
‘You don’t have to do this, Suze,’ she warns. ‘You’ve had enough shocks for this lifetime.’
‘But if you do want to, it’s better to do it when we’re with you,’ Nick presses.
‘It’s OK, Cassie, I want to.’
Both of them watch silently as I slide open the door at the bottom of the dresser and lift out the pristine album. I pass it over to Nick, but as he reaches out to take it I can’t let it go.
‘You don’t have to.’ Nick echoes Cassie’s words gently.
I pull the book back towards me slowly and sit back down next to Cassie with it on my knee. She places a hand on mine and together we ease open the front cover.
On the first page, under the shiny transparent stick-down paper, is a single photo. In it I am sitting in a hospital bed, pillows propping me upright, looking more exhausted than I have ever been in my entire life. I’m wearing not a scrap of make-up, my blonde hair is slicked back and my son – by the time this was taken, I’d at least admitted he
was
my son – lies wide awake in my arms. I remember it as though it was this morning: our first family photo. He wriggled so much, like a slick little fish unused to being handled, that we struggled to get a picture, Mark beaming and saying, ‘That’s my son,’ over and over again. My eyes fill with fresh tears at the memory, and at the questions it causes. Was I already depressed when this photo was taken? The nurses told me not to worry about the baby blues – that was what they called it, but it felt so much worse. Shouldn’t they have done something?
Cassie’s hand squeezes mine. I don’t have the strength to squeeze back.
After what feels like an hour, my hand reaches out and turns the page. The absence of a photograph shocks me almost as much as the photo on the first page did. A sheet of notepaper sits under the adhesive sheet. Printed on it, in my dad’s spidery handwriting, are the words
I hope this will make you see
. I read them out loud and they don’t make any more sense when they are floating in the air than they do in my mind.
‘Make me see? What does that mean?’ I ask no one in particular. ‘What does it mean?’ My voice rises to somewhere between hysterical and a pitch that only dogs can hear. ‘Why would he say that?’ I’m on my feet holding the album away from me as though it might burn me.
‘Calm down.’ I’m not too hysterical to see the look Cassie throws at Nick, a clear ‘now look what you’ve done’. Three years of hard work in Oakdale and I’m right back to a volatile shaking mess again.
‘He probably means see how much you loved Dylan,’ Nick offers. My heart slows down slightly. That does sound like something my dad would say. Make me see how much I loved my son. That has to be it.
‘You don’t think he meant see what I’d done? See what I’d lost?’ My voice is almost a whimper.
Cassie shakes her head vehemently. ‘No. No way. It has to be what
he
said. Your dad stood by you all the way through the trial. He came every day to see you in the hospital before you were arrested. He adores you; why would he send you something malicious?’
I nod numbly. They’re right. Cassie puts her hand on the page to turn it and looks at me to check that I’m ready. When I don’t respond, she slowly flips it over.
On the next page is a photo of Dylan dressed in a pure white babygro and lying serenely in my arms, the only thing visible of me an elbow and a forearm. That’s the way things go when you become a mother: you’re always there in the background, a pair of legs or a hand, but you’re not the focus any more. Did that bother me? Was it the fact that I wasn’t the centre of attention in my husband’s or my father’s life any more? Mark had no family close by; all we’d ever wanted had been the two of us, until we’d made the decision to become three. Did I wish that Mark would stop staring at him sometimes and do the washing-up? Yes. Was I jealous of my baby? I never thought so.
‘Do you still love me?’ My words made Mark’s eyebrows lift slowly, scared of being tricked into saying something wrong, no doubt.
‘Of course I do, baby.’ His words were slow and he reached out to pull me close. I flinched when his fingers found soft flesh where a taut, toned stomach used to live.
‘More than Dylan?’
I felt his body stiffen. Was he wondering what kind of mother could ask that question? All I’d wanted was to know I was still wanted, needed.
‘I love you both the same, sweetie.’
Nick is still staring at the album, studying each photo so intently I wonder if he’s looking for similarities between the recent photo and old ones, or if he’s just trying to gauge my reaction to the pictures of my son. I turn the pages faster as the album goes on. A black and white picture of my baby’s tiny hands against my giant fingers, a shot that took me seven attempts to get right. On the fifth page are the black ink footprints, no longer than two inches. A full-colour 7×5 picture of my little boy in his bouncer, Big Ted sitting at the side twice the size of the sleeping baby. One of the last pictures I ever took. If my dad chose these pictures to make me see how much I loved my son, then mission accomplished.
It is when we near the end of the album that we find it. After a page of photos showing Dylan being proudly held by my dad and Mark. Nick and Cassie have started to take turns turning the pages to save me the effort, and it’s on Nick’s turn when the photographs suddenly show a different subject. Lots of different subjects, in fact. Five different dark-haired toddlers stare up at me from the album, a space where one has been taken out. Taken out and posted through my door two days ago. And folded up in the pages is a newspaper article with the photograph carefully clipped out. The headline:
MOTHER GETS SIX YEARS FOR SON’S MURDER
.
The blood drains from my whole body and bile rises in my throat. My head rushes as I struggle to make sense of what I’m staring at; the pictures swim in and out of focus. Confusion knits Cassie’s brow, and when I look at Nick for answers or reassurance, he doesn’t meet my eyes.
‘I need air.’ Somehow I make it to the back door, my knees shaking perilously. I rest one hand against the door jamb, holding myself steady. The cold, fine rain is a welcome antidote to the heat of my face.
‘Susan?’ Cassie’s voice is low and calm.
Don’t make any sudden movements or loud noises. Don’t want to frighten the crazy lady.
‘I don’t know how they got there, Cassie. I’ve never seen them before in my life.’
A hand rests lightly on my shoulder. ‘I know that. Come inside, you’ll get soaked.’
The front door opens and slams closed. The two of us freeze, waiting for the sound of Nick’s car, but it doesn’t come. Is he leaving? Running away from the mentally unstable woman in the back garden? Instead, his voice carries over the fence and I catch three words: ‘more to it’. He’s on the phone to someone, unaware that we’re so close.
I make a move to walk inside. Whoever he’s talking to, I have no interest in listening to him saying I’ve lost the plot. Cassie grabs my arm.
‘Wait.’
His words float in and out, as though he’s pacing the doorstep. All I catch is ‘I promise’, then a lower ‘you too’. The front door opens again and there’s silence.
‘There you go.’ I jerk my head towards the front room. ‘He knows what it means. Those photographs are
in my house.
The picture I found on my doormat came from a photo album only I’ve had access to. How could I do that? Collect those photographs of little boys and send one to myself without remembering? I don’t even remember killing my own son, Cassie! What makes you so sure I couldn’t have done this?’
‘Because I know you, Susan. You’re better now, you’re not crazy.’
I laugh without humour, a short, bitter sound. ‘You never even knew me. You never saw me crying myself dry at three in the morning because I couldn’t express enough milk to make my son’s next feed.
I couldn’t even feed him.
Do you know what that feels like? Do you know how alone you can feel, in the dark, the TV playing reruns of
Special Victims Unit
on silent so the rest of the house doesn’t wake up? I’d finally get him back to sleep and I’d have to sit with my freezing naked tit stuck to a milking machine so that I had enough for two hours’ time when he woke again. Sometimes it would take forty-five minutes to make an ounce and I would sleep on the sofa, not wanting the comfort of my own bed because it would kill me to have to drag myself out again in an hour. It’s finally time for me to face what I did. I’m ill. It’s not my fault I got ill, but I still have to live with the consequences. I killed my son and now I’m trying to convince myself that I’m innocent and Dylan’s still alive. I’ve been so convincing that I’ve even persuaded myself it’s true! I just wanted, I needed . . .’
I needed to believe I wasn’t capable of harming a baby, my baby, even though deep down the most horrific thing has been knowing that that’s exactly what I was capable of. The mind has funny ways of making you face up to things too hard to admit to.
I sigh, scared and defeated. ‘That’s not just the most probable explanation, Cassie, it’s the only one. The sooner I come to terms with what I’ve done, the more likely it is I’ll get better.’
But I don’t believe myself. I don’t believe I’ll ever be better again.
16
Today, Wednesday, is parole day. I have to keep in regular contact with my parole officer, Tamara Green: a visit every two weeks, a phone call every other fortnight. This week is phone call week, a fact I’m very glad of given the fact that I’ve spent the last hour cleaning up after last night. I don’t think I could face her today. I’m taking the call from the same position on my tatty brown sofa where I’ve been sitting all night, staring at the photographs in the album, pleading with myself to remember putting together that last page. I think I slept, for a short while at least, because I don’t remember how the clock got from 2.45 to 3.52, but the rest of the time I just sat.
I thought of calling Tamara when I first received the photograph. She’s nice and I felt sure she’d help me if she could. Now I’m relieved that I never got around to it; nice as she may be, I’m not sure she’d be able to overlook me putting together some sort of morbid album of current-day Dylans, taking one out, putting it in an envelope and printing my own name and address on the front. The kind doctors at Oakdale would be preparing my old room before I’d even hung up. The best thing I can do now is keep my head down, answer her questions and try not to scream.