The Cry (12 page)

Instead Chloe’s kneeling at the foot of the loo with the door open. Social Work Boy, whose suit does not have the desired effect of making him seem older and cleverer, is holding her hair back while she makes such terrible heaving noises that I fear the contents of her feet might come out her mouth.

Once she’s emptied, I put her to bed like he ordered me to, as if I wouldn’t have done this without being prompted in an irritatingly right-on way. (Would I have? Maybe not. Maybe I’d have put her on the couch.) ‘Have some sleep,’ I say, tucking her in. ‘And we’ll talk about this after.’

‘Mum?’ she garbles.

I stop at the bedroom door. ‘Yeah?’

She holds out her hand but I’m too angry to walk back over to the bed and take it.

‘Mum, come here!’ she says loudly enough for Social Work Boy to hear from his position in the kitchen.

I go over, hold her left biceps with my thumb and fingers more tightly than I mean to, and whisper: ‘You know I could lose you? Do you know that? I’m so fucking mad with you, Chloe Robertson.’

When I release my grip she starts crying in a way that I’ve never seen her do before. A drunk, twisted, loud, scary cry. ‘Ow!’ she screeches. ‘Mum, I love you, don’t be mad at me! Mum!’

Social Work Boy has come to the bedroom door and is looking at us.

‘I’m not mad at you,’ I say to Chloe.

‘You said, “I’m so fucking mad with you, Chloe Robertson,” and you pinched me!’

I grab her hand. ‘Shhh, shh honey. No, no. You’ve had so much to drink, and you’re not used to the feeling, are you? It’s horrible. I’m not mad with you. This is a terrible time. You’re going through an awful, awful time. You need to cry it out, cry it out. I’m not mad. You’re my baby girl. I love you.’

‘You’re my baby girl too, I love you too,’ she says.

Social Work Boy is now standing beside me, raising his eyebrows as he gazes down at Chloe’s left forearm, which has a red thumb mark on it from what must indeed have turned into a pinch.

She conks out ten minutes later. The social worker stays put the whole time, watching as the thumb mark fades to a very light pink, but does not disappear.

When we go back into the kitchen, I notice him noticing the half-full bottle of wine beside the unwashed dishes. By now, I’ve almost resigned myself to the fact that this toddler in a suit will hand my daughter over to Alistair or some children’s home as soon as she wakes up and I want to empty said wine into my mouth and then bash myself over the head with the bottle till I die. I resist, take a deep breath, and offer him tea or coffee. He’d prefer tea, thanks, white no sugar. The kettle seems to take about an hour to boil.

He has a sip, places the mug on the kitchen bench and leans forward. ‘How’s the depression?’

He’s obviously got all the information he needs about Chloe’s neglect and abuse, and has moved on to the causes. I’d been to the surgery twice for anti-anxiety medication – two years ago and six months ago, I explain. Both times I went because I was sick of arguing with Alistair in my head, sick of thinking about what he’d done to me, all day, all night. I wanted something to take the hate away. I wanted something to make me indifferent. ‘It wasn’t depression.’ I can tell I sound defensive. ‘I was anxious, after the separation. Neither prescription agreed with me so I just worked through it myself.’ In fact, I’d only taken one pill each time. In both cases, they’d made me feel crazier than I had ever felt in my life.

‘What about alcohol?’ He nods towards the wine on the bench.

‘I try to keep it within the fourteen units a week limit.’

He raises an eyebrow.

‘Often I don’t succeed, but I rarely have more than three glasses a night. I used to drink a bit more in Scotland. I was lonely over there.’ I tell him this because it will come out in the hearing anyway. Better to be up front. ‘That’s twenty-one, still too much. I know it’s not great for my health, but I never drink to the point of getting drunk, not since I’ve been on my own with Chloe.’ I wrack my brain – did I tell the doctor the same thing? It’s the truth, so I assume I did.

‘You were charged with drink driving in January.’

‘I’d had two glasses of wine with lunch. It’s no excuse, but I was only just over the limit. I thought I’d be all right. What I think happened is I didn’t eat enough.’ Could I sound like more of an alcoholic?

He’s not taking notes but I can almost hear the marks against me going
ker-ching
in his head.

He asks about Mum and Dad and I tell him we see them at least three times a week and that Chloe’s their only grandchild. They’re in a small retirement flat now, older and a little less active, but they dote on her. He says he might give them a call if that’s okay. He looks around the house next, nodding disapprovingly at things like the two DVDs on the coffee table, which are rated eighteen, and the vodka and gin bottles on the dining-room shelf.

Thinking on my feet, I grab the scrapbook from my bag and hand it to him. ‘Chloe and I have been making this together for years,’ I say, ‘a kind of mum–daughter journal.’

I watch his face as he leafs through the pages, moving on from birthday cards with sweet messages to the pages with photographs of us doing various activities together. There’s one of us roller skating, one of us with shopping bags on a tram, one of us baking cupcakes, one of us playing basketball in the park, one of us walking Phil’s dog, one of us getting our nails done. I can hardly breathe I’m so pleased at my creation.

‘I like the silver zig-zag on the black,’ he says, pointing to a close up of Chloe’s nails.

I look at the nail photo. We both had the same – only Chloe’s were black and silver, mine white and silver.

He flicks through the other photos. ‘Funny how your nail polish didn’t wear or chip through all these activities.’ He goes through each one, pointing at our nails, all identical and perfect.

‘And how Chloe had the same stain – is that chocolate cake mixture? – on the same white T-shirt every time?’

I’m mortified to have been caught out. All those activities were done the day after Alistair’s lawyer rang to say he was filing for custody. I dragged Chloe around the city, snapping like mad while she complained that this was the stupidest idea I had ever had in my life.

‘Ah, that stain just won’t come out!’ My attempted cover-up is feeble. We both know it. I shut the book and put it back in my bag.

‘Yoohoo!’ Mum and Dad are here! ‘You here, honey bunch?’ With all the commotion, I’ve left the front door open and they’ve let themselves in. Please God, let my mum and dad salvage this.

Social Work Boy talks to them in the living room for over half an hour and I can hardly stand it. I check on Chloe, who’s snoring like an old alcoholic. The thumb mark is gone. I do the dishes, I look in the fridge so I can cook something a good mother would cook. There are some ready-made meatballs. I take them out of the packet, toss the wrapper in the bin, then realise he might see it there, and turn it upside down. I grab icing sugar (damn, no flour) and sprinkle it on the bench, then scrunch the preformed balls into one meaty heap, add some dried rosemary, and begin rolling them again and coating them with icing sugar. When they surface, the kitchen is satisfactorily messy, and I’ve re-made half the meatballs. Mum, Dad and the boy are all smiling. I have no idea yet if this is a good thing.

He holds his hand out to shake mine.

‘Sorry, she’ll need to eat when she wakes. I’m covered in mince!’

He glances at the meat on my hands: ‘Your mum says Chloe’s a vegetarian.’

‘Oh . . .’ I eyeball Mum, who’s turned as pink as her cardigan. ‘These, um, they’re for me.’

Fuck!

On the third day, Joanna went to the desk in Elizabeth’s bedroom. Elizabeth and/or Alistair had compiled a file of letters and printed out emails. Most were from strangers, sending prayers and money, but one was from her school.

And one was from her ex-boyfriend, Mike.

Lovely Mike. If only they’d stayed together. She could have gone with him to Japan, or she could have waited for him. They could have made good decisions together for the rest of their long, happy lives.

She couldn’t stand hurting the people she cared about like this. She sat down at the desk and began writing a letter of confession. She’d only written: ‘Everyone, do not pray for me, please . . .’ when she heard the back door opening. She ripped the note she was writing into small pieces, took a handful of papers to read later, raced to her bedroom, and hid them under the mattress.

On the fourth day, Joanna took her phone into the toilet and went online. When she read blogs or news reports from people who were compassionate, she smashed the wall with her fist, making it bleed on more than one occasion and cracking some of the plaster a little more each time. When people were being mean or suspicious, she smiled. Please, people, be suspicious, she prayed. Wonder about the dirt under his nails. Wonder about what kind of parents we are. Suspect me of being the murderer that I am.

She couldn’t follow Alistair’s instruction to forget the Chloe situation either. She hadn’t asked about it, but Alistair hadn’t mentioned postponing the hearing. If anything, he’d probably use the situation to his advantage and go ahead. She would talk to him about it soon. She would tell him to cancel it. It was ridiculous to pursue this now. How ludicrous to imagine she’d be capable of looking after someone else’s child.

Most of all, Joanna couldn’t stop thinking about Noah’s grave. She longed to go there. She knew she couldn’t, so instead she went across the road in the early hours of the morning and touched the leaves of the neighbour’s tree with her fingertips. ‘Hello, baby,’ she’d whisper. ‘Hello, little boy. I can hear you. I can hear you, Noah.’

On the fifth day, she and Alistair spent several hours at the police station. As she repeated her statement again and again, the fictional events became like a prayer to her, a chant. She fed him at the cottage, she expressed milk, she forgot she needed tampons, she ran into the shop, etcetera etcetera, Holy Mary, Amen.

After they were both interviewed separately, she watched Alistair look at pictures of Japaras and Utes on the internet, two officers over his shoulder as he said
No, no, yes, yes, that’s the one, just like that.

She watched as Alistair looked at photographs of sex offenders. Did the person in the Japara look at all like him from the back? The shape? Big? Small? Thin? Like him?

No, um, can’t be sure, maybe.

God this man was good.

She watched Alistair scrutinise a photograph taken on CCTV of a man holding a baby in a service station in Ararat. The baby was crying.

‘You must know that’s not him,’ Joanna said. ‘Noah was smaller, and more beautiful than that. He had dark, dark lashes!’

The police asked about enemies again. Did they have any? Political opponents, for example?

No.

‘Are you sure Alexandra wouldn’t do something like this? For revenge?’

‘I couldn’t imagine it,’ Alistair said, with a worried look on his face that made the female officer raise her eyebrows and ask again.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ Joanna said for him. ‘She’s not a bad person. And she has an alibi, doesn’t she? She was home in Melbourne with Chloe.’

Her answer made Alistair raise his eyebrows. Which made the female police officer raise hers again.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Joanna snapped in the car. ‘Trying to frame her for it? Leave the poor woman alone. As soon as we get home, I need to talk to you alone.’

Joanna was furious and took him straight into the bedroom. ‘Sit down,’ she said.

‘What? What is it?’

‘The police were asking me about enemies again when I was in on my own. They showed me a photo of you and a red-haired woman, smoking out the front of the hotel in Harrogate where that conference was last November. Your arms were almost touching.’

She could tell he felt worried, something about the shape of his mouth. He came back with this: ‘And they asked me about a secret bank account of yours, with forty thousand pounds in it. Forty thousand pounds, Joanna. You saving for something you don’t want me to know about?’

The account wasn’t a secret exactly, but she liked knowing it was there, all hers, just in case. She didn’t want to talk about this. ‘Who the fuck is she, Alistair? A bit on the side, or are you in love with her? Is she the next me?’

He put his hands over his face. ‘Oh my God, we have to stop this. We’re going crazy.’

‘Who is she? And when did you start smoking?’

‘It’s tearing us apart. You’re doubting me? You don’t trust me? I have the occasional cigarette at boring conferences. I don’t remember some redhead having a fag nearby last November! After everything we’ve been through together, knowing how much I love you, how I’d give up everything for you, again and again, you doubt me? I can handle anything. I can even learn to cope with losing Noah. But I can’t handle that.’

He cried easily these days. She softened as the tears came. ‘Okay, okay. I don’t doubt you.’

Alistair dried the tears with his hands, and embraced her, waiting a moment before saying: ‘To get through this, we have to stick together. And we have to remain calm.’

She kept her fever a secret for a couple of days, welcoming the distraction of shivers and heat, relieved that nothing but head pain seemed real. But a week after Noah had died, she woke at 8 a.m., drenched in sweat. ‘I didn’t hear his cry,’ she said to a frightened looking Alistair.

By the time Alistair caught up with her, she was already across the road, clawing at the trunk of the Lilly Pilly tree. ‘Noah!’ she sobbed. ‘Mummy’s here! Your mummy wants to talk to you!’

Alistair scooped her up and carried her home. ‘Darling, darling, you’re burning up. Shh . . . Let’s get you back to bed. Let’s get the doctor out.’

‘Here, take these,’ the GP said later. She heard the word fever, the word shock, the word delirious, and a disjointed discussion about post-traumatic stress disorder. Her temperature had soared to 104. She was sweating and shaking.

They thought she was asleep, and left her alone for several hours after the neighbours carried her home. Hiding under the mattress like some ten-year-old who’s scared of the dark, she searched Google on her phone, drinking in the speculation. There was a new blog post since she’d checked last time.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been feverish, Joanna would not have set up another email account and contacted the blogger immediately.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Blogger

Her thumb was sweaty and shaky. It took a long time to write the message.

An email popped back three minutes later, during which time Joanna curled herself into a ball under the duvet and moaned into her knees.

Joanna thumbed back:

‘What you doing under there, honey?’ Alistair was standing beside the bed, and moving the duvet down.

When had he come in? She put the phone under her bottom and answered, ‘Nothing.’

‘Everything’s going to get better, I promise.’ He kissed her boiling forehead. ‘Oh honey, you’re burning up. Rest darlin’, rest. Everything will get better. You know I adore you?’

The fever was worse the following day and she had no idea what was going on outside the bedroom. Alistair and Elizabeth took turns to give her water and spoonfuls of soup. They passed on messages from Kirsty and colleagues and estranged relatives.

Alistair gave her medicine. ‘No, it’s not penicillin, honey – shh, stay still, stay still – this is Valium and this is an antidepressant and this is co-codamol,’ he said, putting pills on her tongue, spooning liquid into her mouth.

She had no energy to argue, but she knew the liquid was antibiotics. Every time he administered it, the memory of what she had done made her gag and convulse.

Alistair ran her a bath in the en-suite that evening, helping her into it, sponging her, helping her out, towelling her dry.

When he left her alone to sleep for the night, the fever made her hallucinate. Whenever she opened her eyes, she saw lines connecting objects – from door to box to window; from chin to pillow to chest; from table to bookshelf to lamp. Even when she closed her eyes, the imprint remained. She was too weak to wonder why, but she was seeing triangles, everywhere.

Flashbacks, too. Vivid, colourful, and with texture she could feel: Noah’s Babygro soft against the crook of her arm in seat 17H, his lips soft too as she prised them open to kill him with the poison on her spoon.

Perhaps she
was
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She certainly felt unhinged. In the middle of the night, she emailed the blogger again.

I have word she’s in bed
, she messaged.
There is talk that she is hallucinating. She is seeing things!

Thank you for your message
, the blogger replied.
Please let me know anything else. I promise I will not disclose your email address to anyone
.

Joanna still wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed two days later. She lay there, noticing things, examining the room. It was painted royal blue, with a large window overlooking the back garden and neat white blinds that had been closed since she collapsed. It was Alistair’s childhood room, still filled with his things. Cricket and football trophies were arranged with perfect symmetry on the chest of drawers. Books on politics and history and a collection of Stephen King novels filled the shelves. The Robertson clan crest was framed in thick brown oak –
VIRTUTIS GLORIA MERCES
– whatever that meant. Alistair’s father emigrated to Australia from Stirling at the age of twenty-three – hence the family crest and Alistair’s permanent UK residency and the red, blue and green kilt he wore to posh events in Edinburgh. They had lots in common, she’d thought when they met – the Scottish thing, the interest in politics, being only children, their family background.

What else? His grade-seven school shirt was pinned to the door, covered in the signatures of his classmates. There was a framed school photo on the wall behind the bed – Alistair must have been about fourteen years old, the same age as Chloe. He was identical to her, in fact: brown eyes with the same fierce intensity. Beside that was a shot of his father on a tennis court: a stern, traditional looking man – light brown hair and dark eyes. He was a GP; died of skin cancer when Alistair was thirteen. There was a lot of father-memorabilia – his medical qualifications, framed; photos of him giving a speech somewhere important; shaking hands with someone important. Based on the information in this room, a detective would surmise that Alistair’s father was significant and masculine, and that his son revered him.

Joanna and Alistair had bonded over their fatherlessness, because Joanna’s also disappeared off the face of the earth when she was a teenager. She came home from Kirsty’s one evening to find his bags and his guitar gone, her mother crying in the bathroom, and a note that read
Joanna, I’m sorry. I’ll be in touch, Daddy, xxx
. Being in touch turned out to mean three birthday cards:
You’re thirteen! Happy fourteenth! I can’t believe you’re fifteen already!
He never phoned her back after that one call she made with Kirsty’s encouragement. And she didn’t even have his address, somewhere in Canada with ‘that young cinematographer from the Iceland shoot and her two brats’, her mother said. She blamed her mother at first, as daughters do. Her mother took it on the chin, as mothers do. When Joanna’s mum died of lung cancer – six years ago now – her dying words were: ‘Find your father. Forgive him.’ She held her mother’s hand as she groaned her way through an un-peaceful death and thought, screw that, he can go to hell.