‘Emma, how are you?’ Tamara’s voice is warm and friendly. How can she sound so normal when my world is falling apart?
‘I’m good, thanks.’ I force myself to say the words but my voice betrays me. Tamara ignores this and carries on with her script.
‘How’s the job search going?’
We go around on the meaningless carousel of questions as usual, only this time I’m waiting. Waiting for her to announce that she knows what I’ve done, she knows what I’m capable of. But she doesn’t. Is this what my life will be like from now on? Always waiting for someone to suddenly announce that they know my secret? Always wondering what I’m going to find I’ve done next?
Before I even realise it, I’ve answered all of Tamara’s questions, obviously satisfactorily, because she tells me she’ll see me next week and says goodbye.
I’m not going to do anything today. Cassie hasn’t called and neither has Nick.
When they left last night, I barely spoke to either of them, just nodded my goodbye. Nick told me he was going back to the Travelodge to stay another night, and that he’d be in touch, but I know he won’t. His story is gone, his interest in my plight over now that he knows the truth.
He felt sorry for you, that’s the only reason he agreed to help
in the first place. He knew all along you were the one responsible.
And if I’m truthful with myself, so did I. My eyes may sting with tiredness and the burden of last night’s tears, but my soul almost feels lighter. There’s no worrying, no wondering, no lying to myself. In the last two days I’ve managed to face the memories of how difficult those early days with Dylan were for me, something even three years in Oakdale didn’t force me to do, and I’m still alive, even if I do hate myself for it.
I can take that. Self-hatred is something I’ve lived with since the day my son died.
When the doorbell goes at 6 p.m., I expect it to be Cassie. Pulling aside my front room curtain, I’m surprised to see Carole from the Deli on the Square staring nervously at the door. She’s got something in her hand; it looks like a brown paper bag. Has she brought me cheese? I can’t even think about food right now.
Uh oh Len, I think we have a problem.
Still, I can’t leave her standing on my doorstep, so I swing open the door.
‘Carole, hi, how are you?’ I don’t want to engage in conversation, today of all days, but I don’t want to be rude either. I just hope that her witnessing my outburst in the street the other day doesn’t make her think she can pop over whenever she likes. I feel a little tricked, really, that I never even knew she lived so close yet she must have. Why didn’t she mention it one of the many times I’ve been in her shop? I step out on to the front step rather than invite her to come in. I know. Rude.
‘Emma, I’m so sorry to just turn up on your doorstep. I don’t want you to think I’m being pushy or anything . . .’
‘Of course not.’ That’s exactly what I was thinking.
‘It’s just that this was left for you in my porch this morning.’ She holds up a brown box. ‘I was in a massive rush to work and I completely forgot to bring it round before I went. I hope it isn’t important?’
She looks as if she’s expecting me to explain, but my eyes haven’t left the box. When I don’t speak, she hands it to me awkwardly.
‘Did you see who left it?’ My tone is sharp; she’s got her answer – yes it is important. It’s very important.
‘No, it was inside the porch when I got up this morning, bloody stupid delivery man put it in 33 instead of 3 – I know it was early but how stupid can you be?’
I turn the box round and my heart stops.
‘There must be some mistake. This isn’t addressed to me.’
Carole looks at the box in my hands, at the name Susan Webster printed in black, and then back at me. There’s pity in her eyes and she reaches out to touch my arm.
‘But it is for you, isn’t it?’
‘I think you’d better come inside,’ I say.
Carole is sitting on my ugly brown sofa, picking at the edge of the brightly coloured throw I put on there to cover up whatever dubious stains the previous tenants left behind. I’m standing, too agitated to take a seat. Neither of us has spoken for a few minutes.
‘How do you know who I am?’ She looks up at my tense words.
‘When I saw the name on the parcel I did some Google searches and eventually I found pictures of you when you were Susan Webster.’
And that’s how easy it is. I knew it would be possible for people to find out who I was, but I’d never imagined my neighbours trawling the internet to find grainy pictures of me. I’ve been so naive, so stupid to think people would be too busy with their own lives to care about mine.
‘I’m not going to tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about. What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ The revelation that my cover has been blown has made me all but forget about the package Carole came to deliver.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be prying. I just want you to know that your secret is safe. I’m not going to take out a full-page ad in the paper or anything.’ She makes to rise from her seat.
‘Stay.’ I realise I don’t want to open the box yet, and I don’t want to be on my own. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea.’ She’s not going to say yes. Now that she knows who I am, she’s probably going to run as far and as fast as she can.
‘That would be nice, thanks.’
She stays for almost an hour and we talk. I tell her how I still can’t remember anything of the day Dylan died, although I don’t tell her how it terrifies me to think that I can’t remember because my mind is protecting me from the fact that I’m guilty. I do confide in her my fear that I might never get the truth about what happened to my son. I don’t tell her about the photograph, or any of the other things that have happened to me since last Saturday. In return, she tells me a story of her own.
‘I suffered from post-natal depression too.’ I lift my eyes, but hers are averted. She’s not talking to me; she’s talking to the uplighter, the vase on the corner shelf, anything but me. ‘When my daughter was born. I looked at her and I expected this rush of love, like you read about. She was sleeping, and she didn’t look beautiful, she looked all wrinkled and her head was a cone shape from the suction cap. I didn’t want to hold her, like a proper mother would. I thought she looked horrendous.’ Finally she looks at me and there are tears in her eyes.
‘I’ve never told anyone that. Even though I got help, and I got better, and I love my little girl so much, I still never told a soul that I thought she was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen.’
‘Did anyone notice?’ I whisper.
‘My husband.’ Her hands work furiously at a stray thread on the throw. ‘But not at first. She was perfect for everyone else; they all said what a chilled-out baby she was. But for me . . . every time I picked her up, she just cried and cried. I found out afterwards that she could smell my milk; she wanted food whenever she was near me and that’s why she cried. But at the time I just thought she must hate me. She’d look at me with her huge blue eyes and I felt so guilty that I couldn’t just love her like everyone else did.’
‘What happened?’
She looks away again, takes a sip of her tea. ‘My husband left us on our own for the day, and from the minute he left, she just screamed. Nothing I could do would make her stop. I was so tired – I’d been up all night feeding her every two hours – and I couldn’t take it. I put her in the nursery and just listened to her cry as I sat on the floor in a heap at the front door. When my husband got home he couldn’t even get in; I was lying in a ball against the front door. He had to kick the back door down because I’d left the key in it. He took me straight to our GP, who diagnosed me with post-natal depression.’
Her eyes fix on mine. ‘Was that how it was for you?’
‘I can’t really remember,’ I admit, sitting down, careful to avoid looking at the box on the edge of the table. ‘Afterwards the doctors asked me all sorts of questions: had I been tired, irritable, nervous? The answer to all of those questions was yes. I’d been exhausted and snappy a lot of the time. We had so many visitors after Dylan was born, my aunties and neighbours, that I felt like I was the first woman on earth to give birth. They would turn up at all hours, without calling, and I felt like screaming at them to fuck off, leave us alone. I felt like I hated everyone. But I never once remember feeling like I hated Dylan. It seems strange, because I said it a couple of times – “Won’t you just shut up! I hate you!” – but I never really felt like I meant it, even as the words spilled out.’ This is the first time I’ve told anyone this, maybe because Carole has just told me one of the worst things you can say about yourself. I feel like if anyone can understand, she will.
‘It was one of those times when he wouldn’t go to sleep. He’d sleep in my arms, so peaceful and angelic, but as soon as I put him down he’d wake up screaming. All I wanted was a shower; I’d been up all night. I cried, I pleaded, nothing worked. That’s when I said it: “I wish you’d never been born.” But I don’t feel like I ever really meant it. Does that sound silly?’
‘No.’ Carole shakes her head. ‘I always felt like that afterwards too.’
‘But then there were times, when we were playing together, or when he was sleeping soundly, I’d sit by his crib and stare at him like if I wasn’t looking at him he might disappear like a dream. Those times I loved him so much I felt it might stop my heart.’
‘Bipolar.’
‘Yes, that’s what they said. But not just bipolar,’ I admit. ‘Puerperal psychosis. An illness so bad that you start to hallucinate. You’re high one minute, low the next; you feel paranoid, suspicious, as though you’re in a dream world.’ I sound like I’m quoting from a medical website, because I am. I can spout this stuff backwards.
‘Did you feel any of that?’
‘Not that I remember. But there’s another symptom. You can believe your baby is the devil, evil and out to get you. You harm him because you believe you have no other choice; if you don’t, he will harm you first.’
‘And you felt like that?’
‘I didn’t think so. Not until afterwards. I remember all the stuff you talked about – wishing someone would just take him away, feeling guilty because I couldn’t even make my own son love me, stupid, fat, inadequate, lazy . . . I felt all those things but I don’t remember wanting him dead. Wanting him not born isn’t the same as wanting him dead, is it?’
Is it?
17
The box is the size of a shoebox, wrapped in brown paper. My heart speeds up, my chest tightens and my face gets hot.
I’m torn between wanting to rip the paper off as quickly as my fingers will allow and wanting to hurl the box on the fire and watch it burn. I do neither. Instead I walk into the kitchen and switch the kettle on.
My mother once told me that there was nothing that didn’t look clearer after a cup of tea. I believe at the time I was nursing a broken heart; one of the few boyfriends I’d had before I met Mark had cheated on me with a girl in the year above who had bigger boobs and would put out. I’m just glad my mum isn’t here to see me find out that there are some problems that can’t be fixed by a cup of tea or a ‘stop for a kiss’.
When I was little – I can first remember it at five or six, but Dad said it started much earlier than that – my mum and I would slide down the stairs together on our bums. After every step I would say to her, ‘Stop for a kiss’, and we’d have to freeze, have a kiss and bump down on to the next step. If we were in a rush, Mum would carry me quickly down the stairs then look at me in mock horror. ‘But we forgot to stop for a kiss!’ she’d exclaim, and smother my face in kisses, one for each step, while I laughed and squirmed and tried – not very hard – to escape.
It always amazed me how different my parents were to those of my friends.
My
mum and dad still kissed each other goodbye every morning, and held hands when we went to the park, me clinging on to my mum’s other hand, swinging it back and forth. My dad still brought home flowers, even when he hadn’t done anything wrong, and Mum got up – in the middle of the night, it seemed – to do Dad’s sandwiches for work.
The day I told Mum that Mark and I were trying for a baby, we were sitting in the garden, flicking through the Sunday papers. She just smiled and said, ‘Not a moment too soon, love.’ It wasn’t until much later that I found out she’d already known about the illness that would take her life.
We tried for two years before admitting that something might be wrong and going to see the doctor. By that time Mum had already had two rounds of treatment and seemed to be doing really well. She got out in the garden three times to tend her tomato plants and came shopping with me for a couple of new dresses for the trip they were planning. Dad took her away to Italy the weekend I went into hospital for my egg harvest. Three months later we found out I was pregnant, and the month after that we were back in the same GP’s room to be told that Mum’s cancer was back.
She fought harder than before, but I knew this time that she wouldn’t live to see our baby born. The only thing I cling to now is that at least it meant that she never had to experience his death either. My father, on the other hand, has had to live through the loss of his only wife, his only grandson and his only daughter, all within a space of two years.
Dad sat in the dock every day of my trial. On the first day I made the mistake of glancing over, to try and catch a glimpse of him. The moment my eyes found him, sandwiched in between my brother and his wife, he looked up and saw me staring. His jaw was clenched and he was forcing himself not to cry, not to show how upset he was. For a moment I imagined him running down the steps from the gallery, gathering me up in a hug and refusing to leave my side until I was allowed home. This was the first time that he couldn’t make everything better for me. I couldn’t bear to look at him again for the entire four-week trial, not until the jury read out their guilty verdict. The eyes of the press were trained on me and my husband when the jury returned; mine were fixed on my father. The last time I saw my dad, he was sobbing like a child.
A quick check of the hallway: the package is still there, on the table where I left it. As I stand staring stupidly at the inanimate object, trying to decipher its exact contents by psychic energy, a pounding on the front door makes me cry out.