I was a murderer. I had allowed them to kill my baby. how could I have been so cruel, so full of sin? God, in His infinite wisdom, had created new life inside me and I had thrown it away. I had shamed myself, my family and my religion. I was worse than sinful – I was evil. Among the worst of the worst.
The numbness lifted and I cried. Bawled, in fact. For hours. Francesca was beside herself, alternately remonstrating, rationalising and weeping alongside me. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. If only my tears could wash away the stain on my soul. But I knew in my heart that I would carry the scars of my crime with me for the rest of my life.
As, indeed, I do.
It starts to rain outside the café, drips trickling down the window by our table.
‘Can you think where Perry might have had Ruby taken?’ The urgency in Francesca’s voice brings me back to the bustle and steamy heat of the café. ‘Do you think she could be in Lanagh? Or would he try and keep her away from anywhere he’s connected with?’
I shake my head, feeling helpless in the face of her anxiety. ‘I don’t know.’
Francesca’s face crumples. ‘What about who he’s using. The actual kidnapper. Can you think who that might be?’
I look away, unable to meet her eyes. You.
‘I don’t know what to do, Lucy.’
I look back at her. For the first time ever I feel like the big sister. It’s not a role I have any idea how to play. Francesca is usually so sorted and capable. Even after Caspian died she kept it together. But right now I can see she’s on the verge of disintegrating. What is it about having a child that does that? What is it that Francesca feels for Ruby that, for all my shame and sense of loss, is a world apart from my own feelings for my own lost baby?
‘I think,’ I venture timidly, ‘I think we need help.’
‘But we can’t go to the police, I already told you. If I go to the police PAAUL will kill Ruby.’ Francesca raises her hands in desperation. The gesture reminds me of Mummy.
‘I didn’t mean the police,’ I explain. ‘But what about Daddy? We could ask him to talk to Uncle Perry for us. I know he didn’t believe you earlier, but that was because I was too scared to speak up . . . and before he knew about Ruby.’
‘I don’t know.’ Francesca groans. ‘You said yourself you don’t even know where he is. Oh, Christ, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should go to the police after all.’
I nod, trying to show support, but fear swirls in my chest. What on earth will you do if Francesca goes to the police?
‘Maybe we should think about it,’ I say. ‘Um, I’d like to say a prayer. Will you pray too?’
Francesca shakes her head.
Which is fair enough, I guess. There’s no reason she should suddenly find a long-lost faith just because she’s in extremis. Maybe that will come later, once Ruby’s safe. I haven’t given up hope. The café is so stuffy and I tell Francesca I need some air. I go outside, and lean against the cold brick wall. I close my eyes. Prayer is harder here, outside an ugly café with traffic roaring past instead of in my bedroom or on the plushly cushioned pews at St Cecilia’s. But I need to pray: for strength, for Francesca, for Ruby, for my faith.
My phone rings, breaking the fragile peace inside my head. My hand shakes as I look to see who is calling. Because I know before I see the name on the screen – it’s you.
FRAN
Thank goodness Lucy is with me. I don’t think I could handle this alone. I stare through the café window. She’s out there now huddled over, sheltering from the rain against the café wall. Her head is bowed. Is she praying?
She’s probably praying.
If I can’t call on the police for help I’m almost ready to try praying myself. I put my head in my hands, trying to take in what has happened, but my mind reels, too traumatised and overwhelmed to process anything except my fears for Ruby.
Lucy’s suggestion to call Dad penetrates my panic. Maybe it’s worth a shot. I try his number but there’s no reply. Rain drips slowly down the windowpane. I rock backwards and forwards in my chair, trying to contain the helpless fear inside me. I sense the waitress, the other customers watching me with wary, curious faces and I’m suddenly claustrophobic. The texts, I suddenly realise, didn’t say anything about staying in the café, just that I mustn’t talk to anyone. I jump up and hurry outside to where Lucy is leaning against the wall, trying to shelter from the drizzle. her face is paler than usual, the strain showing in her eyes. Raindrops have settled on her hair and her lashes.
‘Have you heard anything?’ she asks. ‘About when you get Ruby back?’
‘No, they’re still making me wait.’ Anger rises alongside the nausea and the fear. ‘It’s not fair. I’ve done what they asked.’
‘What do you want to do?’ Lucy clasps her hands together and twists the fingers anxiously. ‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I snap.
‘We could try praying again?’ Lucy suggests.
I stare at her. For Pete’s sake. She shrinks away and closes her eyes.
Ignoring her, I huddle against the wall and look at the video of Ruby on my phone again. My poor girl. I’m filled with misery and sickness and terror and fury. The car park spins around me. I focus on the film, playing and replaying it. And then, all of a sudden, the vague sense of memory I felt before coalesces around the tiny bit of fabric just above the sofa. It’s only in shot for a couple of seconds but that white-and-purple criss-cross pattern is definitely familiar.
‘I know this material.’ I frown. ‘It’s got to be a wall hanging or . . . or a curtain. I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere. Look.’ I pass the phone discreetly to Lucy, in case I’m still being watched.
Lucy peers intently at the fabric. ‘I don’t recognise it,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Maybe I should tell the police after all, tell them I recognise the material,’ I mutter, though of course I know I can’t. That if Perry knows I’ve gone back on my promise to keep quiet, Ruby will be killed.
‘How will the police be able to help if you don’t know where you saw it?’
She’s right. But if I can remember . . . I keep looking at the video. Surely if I stare at the fabric hard enough, often enough, I’ll be able to work out where and when I saw it.
‘Er, Francesca, I had an idea . . .’ Lucy suggests timidly. ‘Maybe we should talk to Auntie Sheila?’
I look up. ‘Why?’
‘Well, for one thing she might know where Daddy and Jacqueline are. Maybe we could even get her to talk to Daddy with us.’
‘Auntie Sheila won’t listen to anything I have to say.’ I grimace, thinking of our heated exchange earlier.
‘She might if we both talk to her,’ Lucy suggests.
I visualise mild-mannered Auntie Sheila, her normally gentle presence, her adoration of my father. ‘She was just so adamant that Dad couldn’t be behind anything violent or criminal. She got really angry with me, to the point where I thought she might be covering up for him.’
‘She’s just very loyal. And after all, she was right to stick up for him.’ Lucy wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it? Sheila would want to help us if she could, she’s a good person.’
Typical Lucy, always seeing the best in people. In spite of everything, I smile.
‘Apart from anything else, Auntie Sheila really cares about Daddy,’ Lucy goes on. ‘He’s like a brother to her. They’ve been close forever. I think he’d listen to her more than to us on our own.’
I hesitate. Maybe enrolling Sheila is a good idea after all. And at least it means we’re doing something and getting away from whoever is watching me. After all, they haven’t told me to stay put. And if I stand here much longer just staring at this video I will go insane.
Sheila lives in Fulham, on the way from Mariner’s in putney to Dad’s house in Kensington. It’s not a long journey, but the traffic is gnarly. At least that hopefully means I’ve lost whoever was watching me at the café. My mi
nd flickers constantly to Ruby. Will whoever Perry has got to kidnap her think to feed her? Give her a drink? I can’t bear to imagine her like she is in that video: barely conscious. She’ll be scared and disoriented.
‘Francesca?’ I realise Lucy is speaking and glance across.
‘I was just asking if you’ve told Ayesha about Ruby being taken?’
‘No, though she knows something awful is happening, that I’m scared.’
I see Ayesha’s face, confiding her long-kept secret about Mum being frightened of someone just before she died. I wasn’t at home much at that time, but Lucy was living there. Could she have picked up on Mum’s fears?
‘Just before Mum passed away . . .’ I venture, ‘. . . did she ever seem scared of anyone?’
‘No.’ Lucy stares at me. ‘Where on earth did that come from?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ All that matters is getting Ruby back. Once I have my daughter in my arms I can start working out everything else.
Lucy gazes out of the window. We’re nearly at Sheila’s now. ‘If anything, Mum seemed angry before she died, rather than scared,’ she muses.
‘Angry?’
‘With Daddy. They weren’t very happy, not in the last few months.’ She looks at me, a small crease between her eyebrows. ‘They used to argue all the time just before Mummy died.’
I drive on, letting this unexpected admission settle.
‘What did they argue about?’
‘Mostly me,’ Lucy says with a sigh. ‘The rows were connected to my . . . my episode. It was my fault.’
Irritation rises inside me. Trust Lucy to make it all about her. ‘You mean your abortion?’ I ask. She winces. She doesn’t like the word. Well she’s just going to have to deal with my plain speaking for once. ‘Because I don’t see how you having a termination at fifteen that they find out about when you’re nineteen explains them being at each other’s throats years and years after that.’
‘I’m not saying they were only angry about my episode, but that was the beginning of it. That was the beginning of the end.’
LUCY
Don’t think I’m being heartless, telling Francesca the truth about the past when she’s so upset about Ruby. But it’s important she knows there’s more to our family and the relationships between us than her own version.
I watch her face, the emotions rampaging across it, as I talk. She knows some of what I’m saying already, of course. For instance, she knows that I became withdrawn and depressed after my abortion. At the time every adult in my life knew that, though no one apart from my sister knew the reason why. I was discussed and dissected both at home and at school, where the range of possible reasons and solutions for my worryingly lacklustre attitude were many and varied. My teachers – and this was an old-fashioned Catholic school, remember – thought that I was mostly bored and possibly hormonal. The headmistress got all strict with me and urged me to reconnect with my studies and to put in greater effort to fulfil my potential.
Francesca, who, of course, knew that it was my abortion which had prompted this change in me, told me, in her typically forthright way, that I needed to see a therapist.
‘I’ve been seeing one at uni, Luce,’ she told me earnestly. ‘It’s been so good to talk over all the ways Mum and Dad oppressed us. I think you’d find it really helpful to do the same thing, away from their brainwashing.’
She meant that she imagined talking to a therapist would help me reframe my response to my abortion. The fact that I didn’t feel in the slightest bit oppressed or brainwashed or in need of reframing anything didn’t seem to register with her.
Mummy also reached out for help for me, though of course she turned to the church rather than a therapist. Naturally, this deference to our religion riled Francesca no end, but Mummy was in charge and I was hauled off for an excruciating half hour with a visiting priest at St Cecilia’s: Father James. To the rest of the family he was young (about thirty) and hip (in that he wore jeans and designer shirts). Plus he’d been open about his own battle with homosexual yearnings, not that I was aware of that at the time. He would, they were all certain, find a way of communicating with me that might get to the bottom of whatever was causing my two-month-long slump.
To me, Father James seemed phony as well as intimidatingly handsome, in an older-man sort of way. I stared at his chiselled cheekbones and bright white smile and it just reinforced my view that he was the very last person in whom I could confide what you did to me, or the abortion that followed.
Instead I resolved to try harder to hoist a happy, engaged mask on my face whenever I was at school or around my family. It was, in all honesty, a strain. I sought refuge in self-harm for a while but the cuts on my thighs no longer gave me the same level of release I’d once experienced.
I ached for that sense of liberation. I hurt, all the time, without it. And I soon found something that at least dulled my pain. We had a party at home where June and I sneaked several sips of Mummy’s pink cocktail while she was chatting with guests.
It was sweet and delicious. The first alcohol I’d ever tasted that I’d properly enjoyed. Which wasn’t saying much. As you well know, I was a dutiful child who rarely broke any rule. But late one night – I think it was after a horrible evening where you didn’t seem to notice me because, at least in my imagination, you felt so terrible about what had happened between us – I snuck down to the kitchen, emptied a small water bottle from the fridge, and filled it up with a little bit from every alcoholic drink in the house. It tasted disgusting, of course, but suffused with bitter shame as I was, that only made me more determined to drain the bottle to the bottom. I remember almost revelling in my gluttony: it made me feel special, that whatever I did I would take to an extreme. I did the same thing the following night – though with a smaller selection of drinks: just the white ones, then just the brown. And again. And again, experimenting with tastes until I worked out that I really didn’t like the dark liquors at all, that I’d drink gin and vodka if they were all that was available, but the purest drink, the one that seemed to fit me best, was tequila. Of course after a week or so the diminishing levels of liquid in the drinks cabinet were noticed. Poor Francesca – who was visiting for a few days – got the blame, which led to her being lectured on the evils of drinking and exploding in another furious row.
After that I decided I would buy my own booze. The next day everyone was out. I’d found a little off-licence a few streets away where the staff were young and male then I ‘borrowed’ Francesca’s tightest top and squeezed my feet into a pair of her highest heels. I unbuttoned the top so that my (to my eyes hideously large) cleavage was on display, then I applied a dusky smudge of eyeliner and some of Francesca’s lip gloss. I tottered out of the house, desperately hoping no one I knew would see me. A house along the road was having building work done and the workmen stopped what they were doing to call after me as I passed. Embarrassed to the core, I almost turned back, but I knew that when night fell I would want that drink, so I gritted my teeth and kept going.
My heart was beating like a drum as I walked into the off-licence. I had no fake ID, and no idea what I would say if I was challenged about my age. I needn’t have worried. That was the one question the spotty-necked youth behind the counter didn’t ask, though he wasted no time in demanding to know my name (Ilsa, I said, attempting to channel the elegance of the Ingrid Bergman character in Casablanca, which I’d watched with Mummy a few evenings before) and if I’d like to go for a drink with him that evening. Flustered, I politely said ‘no’ and scurried home, clutching my two bottles of tequila in their plastic bag.
I hid the bottles at the back of my wardrobe, under an old ski suit. I washed off my make-up and returned Francesca’s shoes and top – though not before Francesca noticed they were missing and accused me of stealing them. I denied it of course, in tears, then secretly returned them as soon as Francesca’s back was turned. Mummy took my side, entirely convinced Francesca had simply mislaid
the items. My sister insisted I’d taken the clothes out of spite. I’m sure she never guessed why and how I had actually used them.
My success at deceiving her and Mummy reinforced my excitement that I’d actually carried out my plan and got away with it. The tequila was mine! On top of which the guy in the off-licence had wanted me. And I’d been brave and resourceful to achieve my goal.
I felt, for a few moments at least, special again.
Of course the bottles I’d bought soon ran out but I saved my allowance, which just about managed to cover the amount of alcohol I was now drinking. When Francesca came home again for the summer holidays I wondered if she’d be able to tell I was secretly necking down tequila almost every night when I went to bed. After all, she’d sensed when I was in trouble before.
But Francesca was preoccupied with herself and her uni life and still rebelling against everything we’d been brought up to believe in. She spent August and early September in a whirl of arguments, loud music blaring out of her bedroom at all hours of the day and night. Meanwhile I sank further and further into misery, while trying harder and harder to appear the normal, hard-working, biddable schoolgirl that I also essentially was.
My agony reached its peak on the nine-month anniversary of your terrible sin against me which was, of course, nine months on from the date I’d got pregnant. I wasn’t aware at the time that nine calendar months from conception do not give a precise due date; in my head this was the day my baby would have been born.
Alcohol blotted out the pain I felt but, as I said, had never brought me release. I turned back to self-harming again for a while, cutting tiny slices on my thighs after bad days that brought a small and temporary relief from my shame. But it wasn’t enough. I developed a horror of my own body, a deep desire to rid myself of the flesh that had proved so evilly tempting for you. It was my developing body, I reasoned, that had caused all my problems and I resolved to punish it.
After learning about St Agatha on her saint day the following February, I bound my breasts with bandages in an attempt to contain them. Later I took a solemn vow not to eat between breakfast and dinner, a neat way of denying my body the fuel that made it grow while avoiding Mummy’s stern gaze at mealtimes.