Motherlove (29 page)

‘No. I'm not staying with Gary. I got family, in Barking. I'm going to them, going to take Kelly with me.'

‘Ah. I see.' The woman was scribbling notes. Would it stop her asking questions? She went on, wheedling, and Lindy went on prevaricating. It wouldn't work, not in the long run, but at least it would get rid of the woman today.

The Rothsay woman went at last, with her notes, and her smile, leaving Lindy alone with her baby.

She stood looking down on the Moses basket, at the baby, her baby, asleep so peacefully. It was like Peter Pan and that fairy. You just had to believe. If you believed hard enough, then it would be true. Everyone would believe it was true. But if you stopped believing, then it would die.

All she had to do was believe.

vi

Heather

There was no baby. The world had stopped moving. Clouds were frozen in the sky. The noise of everyday life was switched off – drowned out by the roaring in her ears. Heather shut her eyes, gripping the pram handle, knowing that she was having a stupid nightmare. When she opened her eyes, she would find the baby there, safely tucked up under her blanket.

She opened her eyes. No baby. Just a rumpled cover.

It wasn't possible. It was not physically possible for Abigail to have wriggled her own way out of the carrycot. She was only three weeks old. What had happened? A gust of wind, sharp enough to tilt the pram, and throw the baby out?

Pushing Bibs aside, Heather fell to her knees. It would be all right. Abigail would be down here, under the bush, lying happily. Please, don't let her be injured by the fall.

There was no Abigail under the bush. Nothing but an empty cigarette packet. No sign, anywhere, of the baby.

This was stupid. She would be kicking herself in a minute, laughing at her own stupidity. She hadn't looked properly in the pram, that was it. Abigail had somehow jiggled around, under the blanket. Heather got to her feet, pulled the blanket off. Nothing. A bare mattress. She pulled up the mattress, revealing the bottom of the carrycot. Nothing.

She couldn't breath. It wasn't happening. She was confused. There was something here she wasn't understanding.

Bibs tugged at her sleeve.

‘Not now, Bibs!'

‘I want a biscuit.'

‘Not now! Be quiet! Please be quiet.' She was having to gulp for air. Her shins were turning to jelly, collapsing under her. She had to cling to the pram for support. How could Abigail just vanish?

Someone had taken her. It was the only explanation. Heather stared around. Nothing would focus properly. The nearby trees were swimming, boughs moving in the breeze. She blinked hard. No one in sight. No one anywhere. Just a couple of dogs running wild on the far side of the lake.

Dogs! Dogs could have taken her baby. Like dingos. She let out a scream. A small scream already stifled in her throat. She wanted to shut her eyes again. She wasn't really here in the park with an empty pram. She was at home asleep and dreaming. A nightmare.

‘I want a biscuit,' whined Bibs.

‘Shut up, Bibs! Shut up, shut up, shut up!'

What could she do? She wanted to run, shouting and screaming, to search the entire park, find her baby, find the person who took her baby.

But what if she had it all wrong? What if Abigail were around here somewhere? She had to be. Somehow she had fallen. If Heather moved she would be leaving her.

She couldn't cope with this. No one could cope with this.

A man. There was a man coming her way. Big black overcoat, hurrying through the park towards the Buckingham Road gate. Brisk walk, eyes fixed ahead, deliberately not seeing her. That was how people behaved in public. No eye contact, no need to share this universe. He would pass without a word.

‘Please.'

He was almost on them, preparing to skirt them without altering his stride.

‘Please. Help me.' She lurched to grab him.

He recoiled. His hostile eyes glance over her then he hesitated.

‘Help me,' she repeated. She mustn't be hysterical, mustn't scream and sob. She must be calm. ‘Help me please. My baby's gone.'

And then she couldn't help herself.

CHAPTER 9

i

Kelly

Roz was sitting at the kitchen table, crying.

Kelly was supposed to rush to her, hug her, comfort her at the first sign of her tears. Every instinct told her to do so now, except that this monstrous knowledge swept away everything.

‘Don't cry. Stop it. Tell me what happened.'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Yes, you do. Don't go all vague. You stole me. You stole a baby from another woman. Who was she? What happened to her?'

‘I don't know,' wailed Roz. ‘Truly, I don't know. I never saw any woman. I just saw you. I took you away, we left Lyford, I don't know what happened. I never meant to hurt anyone.'

‘No.' Kelly forced herself to be reasonable. Of course Roz hadn't meant to hurt anyone. But someone had been hurt. Horribly tortured, in a way that couldn't just be brushed aside. ‘I'm going upstairs. Okay? I need to think this through.'

Roz was up, groping for her, pleading, but she would just have to cope. Kelly needed space. She shut her bedroom door and slid down onto the rug.

Why couldn't it have been a hospital mistake? A slip-up, two mothers left in blissful ignorance. But this— So much hurt. Everyone was hurt. That bereaved mother, surely. And that hard, angry, accusing girl. Yes, Kelly could see she had been hurt, because this should have been her home, her life, Roz should have been her mother, and she had been denied it all. It had been Kelly's instead.

It was so confusing. What was she supposed to do? Until now, there was one person who had not been hurt – Kelly herself. But now it turned out that all that she loved, the mother she cherished, the life she had drifted through in charmed contentment, was not hers. She'd stolen it from that girl, just as Roz had stolen her. She should have had another life, family, mother – and she didn't want any of them. The only emotion left was guilt. Guilt that she had grown up loving not the woman who had borne her, but the woman who had stolen her away. She could not undo that love, redirect it on command. She loved Roz. They were mother and daughter in every way that mattered; but it was all wrong because it hadn't been about loving, but about stealing and hurting.

What now? Roz was her mother, and Kelly had to help her, forgive her even. She couldn't just lash out. However wrong their relationship had been in the start, neither of them were complete without the other. Kelly had to try to understand.

Roz had been seventeen. Girls could be so vulnerable at seventeen, still children. Kelly herself had been mature and confident, but then Kelly had a home, a mother she could always turn to. Roz had been an orphan, in care, living rough, lost. Kelly had heard that much from Roger and Mandy, though Roz never spoke about it. A sad life. Kelly knew girls who had been through much the same and had emerged hard and strong, but not Roz. Crushed or on top of a wave, she had always been the sort to be swept along, used and abused so easily.

But the trouble with wisdom and understanding was that it was two-edged. Kelly understood just how vulnerable Roz was, how adrift, but it dawned on her now that this vulnerability was not just a weakness, it was a weapon. There was manipulation in there somewhere, a deliberate helplessness. Things just happened that Roz could not be responsible for but somehow they were what she had wanted to happen. Her mind could rearrange itself to block out what it didn't want to know.

If Kelly followed that line of thought, she would find herself hating and despising Roz. Was that what she was supposed to do? Was that just? Crap. Whichever way it turned, there was no justice in a situation like this, so there was no point in punishing Roz.

What was she to do? She didn't have Roz's capacity to rearrange her feelings to order, even if she knew what her feelings were. She needed to find out the unadulterated truth. Not from Roz. She knew better than to try and screw facts out of her mother. It was all in the
Lyford Herald
, Victoria had said. Well then.

The loathsome
Lyford Herald
…

Kelly had a goal again, pumping strength into her legs, lifting her from the floor.

Roz was still in the kitchen, no longer crying. But staring out of the window. She looked like a woman, not like the half-child she could so easily be when it suited her. That was good. She was going to have to be a woman now.

‘Kelly.'

‘You're going to have to cope for a day or so, Mum.' Kelly grabbed her bag, her purse, her phone. ‘I've got to go, to Lyford.'

The look of infant panic on Roz's face would normally bring Kelly quickly to her side. Then it vanished. Roz nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.'

‘You'll be all right? Take care of things? Take care of yourself?'

‘Yes.'

Kelly opened the front door. Why wait?

‘Kelly…'

She turned.

‘It was in the park,' said Roz. ‘You were in the park.'

Her eyes begged forgiveness. And Kelly would have to forgive. Just not yet. She nodded. ‘All right,' she said, and left.

ii

Vicky

A motorway service station. An oasis of stillness, as the daylight faded and the shapes of cars began to disappear behind the brightness of their headlights. Across an ocean of tarmac, the warm cluttered service area glowed yellow, intensifying the gloom outside.

Vicky sat, staring out. She had needed to stop. She'd needed the toilet, she'd needed food, the right food, because she would always have to take care. She needed her medication. The rational part of her brain had put itself to work sorting out those needs. Simple problems that could be resolved, neatly and efficiently. Now she sat back in the car, alone in her little metal bubble, a hot drink on her knee and miles of motorway before her. Stretching away into infinity.

There was a tightness in her chest, an ache in her head. It had gripped her all the way across Wales. Would she ever be free of it?

She looked out at other people, milling in the car park, and caught her own reflection, a flicker of a ghost in the windscreen.

‘I am not a victim!' she had shouted at Gillian, and she had been shouting it at herself for so long now. But that was precisely what she had let herself be. Something had damaged her, five years ago. It wasn't the physical thing – she refused to call it rape – the bruising, humiliating unpleasantness of the moment. It was her family's betrayal. She was trapped in it, with no hope of escaping it, because it was the way things happened in her family's world.

That was how she'd have always felt, if she hadn't discovered, through one chance overheard remark, that she didn't belong in this family after all. That changed everything. The lead seal of her coffin had melted away. The sticky strands of Joan's web had snapped. She'd been dragged into this family. If she had been the one stolen, she could have made a triumph of all this. But she wasn't the prize. She was the one cast away, so that Gillian could pluck her up like a toy and inflict Joan on her. Misery and anger. How she'd wanted to hate them, to punish them all, mothers, betrayers.

She was their victim.

‘No!' She slammed the steering wheel. Her fist tightened on the paper cup, sending scalding tea flying sideways, towards the open road atlas on the passenger seat. She lunged, and the tea-soaked atlas toppled to the floor, pages fanning and crumpling as it wedged itself under the seat's metal framework. She grabbed a page and it ripped from the binding.

‘Can't anything bloody well go right!' She threw herself back in her seat, fighting back tears. She mustn't cry. She would not cry!

Taking a deep breath, she reached again for the atlas. Smoothed the ripped page. Where did it fit? She studied its confusion of meandering roads connecting the scattered villages and towns. Wroughton. Ogbourne St. George. Winterbourne Bassett. Each isolated place woven into the whole by the threads of those roads. Swindon. The torn page fitted under Swindon. You had to see the whole to make sense of it.

All those little places on the map – none of them existed in isolation. Winterbourne Bassett was not a mythical point on a shred of paper. It was on a road coming from somewhere, going somewhere. Like her. Like everyone.

It was what she should have grasped long ago, if her determination not to be a victim had not locked her in. She had been damaged, but they had all been damaged, all the women whose roads connected with hers. There was really no point in hating them.

That Roz Sheldon woman, who had left her in a cardboard box. Seventeen years old. Vicky had been seventeen when the thing had happened. It was young, seventeen. Terrifyingly vulnerable. Roz wasn't some wicked witch, just a pathetic child. And now she was ill. Possibly quite seriously ill. The medical student in Vicky, the girl who could speak so compassionately with patients, writhed uncomfortably, remembering her bitter outbursts. She should never have let her pain explode in such callousness.