This Little Piggy (36 page)

“Back to hospital you go,” Joe said. “I knew you shouldn’t have come. At least I know you won’t try to write this up and get it in the paper.” Joe started wheeling Clare towards the door, waiting patiently while she stopped to chat to Geoff Powburn and the regular lawyers and clerks. “If I can get you away from your fan club.”

Tina was hovering, waiting to speak to the social workers.

“I’m sorry,” Clare said. “For the way things turned out. I didn’t want this to happen.”

Tina nodded. She looked as if she didn’t quite grasp what was happening.

“Can I just ask something? It’s a little thing. The other week, Amy told me it was her tenth birthday, but everyone keeps saying she’s still only nine.”

Tina gave Clare an odd look. “She is still nine. Her birthday’s not till November. November the fifth, easy to remember.”

“Right.” Clare smiled to herself as Joe turned the wheelchair around. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” When it came to little lies, Amy was pretty expert. But she couldn’t carry the big lies around as well as she wanted to. And that was something that she’d spotted in Clare. Something they had in common.

She asked Joe to take her for a coffee before they went back to hospital. “Somewhere that’s not very nice. Somewhere that it wouldn’t matter if you never went there again.”

“O-
kay
. I’m assuming there’s some method in your madness.” He took her into a greasy spoon near to the court. “This place is so awful I’d recommend you stick to the coffee and don’t eat. Now what’s this about?”

“I didn’t want to be anywhere that we like, because I have to tell you something awful and I didn’t want it to spoil any of your favourite places.”

“Oh, god, what have you done now?”

“Shut up and listen. But you’re going to hate me.”

Joe was quiet and waited.

“Remember your birthday, back in May?”

Joe’s face gave just the slightest hint that it might mean something to him. “Yes. Or I should probably say, no, I don’t remember a hell of a lot. It was one of the booziest nights we’ve ever had in our long and sorry history.”

“That’s right, it was. We were… a bit stupid.”

Joe breathed in. “We were. I haven’t forgotten that. You know I haven’t. But I guessed you didn’t want me to bring it up again.”

Clare chewed the edge of her thumb. “What made you think that?”

Joe smiled. “When we woke up the next morning, you said something like, ‘well, that was fun, but now we have to return to our own planets’. That kind of sent a message.”

“Right. The thing is, Joe, and I know I should’ve told you this – I got pregnant.”

Joe sat forward with a jump and swore.

“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to tell you. And while I was still working things out in my head, I lost the baby.”

“You had a miscarriage? When was… oh. That was round about the time you were supposed to have the job interview, right? That explains a lot.” Joe put his hand to his head and closed his eyes, trying to take it in. “Were you okay? No, dumb question, of course you weren’t okay. You haven’t been okay since. Jesus, Clare.”

“I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you.” She leaned towards him. “Are you crying?”

“Nope.” Joe wiped a hand brusquely across his eyes. “But yes, you bloody well should’ve told me.”

“Sorry. Again. Don’t tell anyone else, obviously.”

“Who would I tell? There’s only you.” He sniffed. “I could’ve been there for you, that’s all.”

“I didn’t know I needed that.” She paused. “If I had told you I was pregnant, what would you have done?”

“Anything you wanted me to.” He gave Clare half a smile. “I always do anything you want me to. I thought you’d have worked that out by now.”

Sunday 3rd March, 1985

Outside, Joe’s car horn beeped three times. Clare wiped her eyes quickly and went to the door.

“You okay?” Joe looked at her and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

“Yes.” Clare sniffed. “No. I’ve been watching the news.”

“I’m sure I’ve told you that’s bad for your health.” Joe followed Clare into her living room. On the TV screen was an image of a miner, weeping on the steps of Congress House, after the narrow vote for the men to return to work.

“All that effort. For nothing,” Clare bit her lip. “It’s heartbreaking.” She swallowed. “I should go and see Mary. She worked so hard to see everyone through.” And she’s lost a son because of it. Nothing will be the same for her again, Clare thought.

“It is heartbreaking. But remember what the counsellor said? You need to try to be more detached. Good time to start.” He glanced at the half-packed case lying still open on the floor. “Do you need more time to get ready? We should get going in the next hour or so, if we’re going to get to London early evening.”

Clare looked at her feet and said nothing.

Joe blinked. “You’ve changed your mind.”

Clare sat down heavily on the sofa. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

Joe flung himself down beside her. “For god’s sake. We’ve talked this through a hundred times. You know what’ll happen if you stay. You’ll wake up one morning and realise you’re just like Sharon Catt. Angry, thwarted, jealous of anyone new. Let’s leave all that behind, Clare. We’ve got the loan of a flat for the next couple of months and we’ve got shifts on the nationals. Let’s go and be little fish in a big pond. It’ll be more fun, I promise.”

Clare shook her head. “No. I can’t go and work for the papers that told all those lies about the strike. I’m sorry.”

“So go and write something better for them.”

“I can’t change the system. I want to be somewhere where I can make a difference. I’m not ready to leave.”

Joe sighed hard and got up. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Probably.”

Clare held out her arms and Joe held her tight, for just a few seconds. “You know where I am if you change your mind.”

Clare nodded, her eyes pressed tight shut to stop herself crying.

Joe stepped back to look at her. He gave a slight shake of his head and walked out without saying anything else.

Clare waited until she heard him closing the car door. He’ll be back, she thought. I know he will. Then she pulled out of her bag a letter, written on rough grey-white paper. The envelope was addressed to Clare in untidy writing but the letter itself was written in a neat, near-perfect Teeline. Amy had clearly been practising hard.

Dear Clare,
the letter said, in shorthand outlines.
I hope your leg is all better now. I am reading your columns in the paper to see how you are doing. I am sorry for hurting you. The doctors say I was sick in the head after the accident with Jamie and ’cos of some other stuff that happened at home. Mickey said I was a bad person and I believed him. They said it would be good to write to you and say sorry. I wrote to Jamie’s dad too.

It’s really bad here. The other kids pick on me all the time. I told them they should watch out because I can kill people. So now they have put me on my own and I can’t go out.

I still want to be a journalist. Do you like my shorthand now? I wish you would come and see me.

From Amy x

Clare folded up the letter and placed it on the table. Then she picked up the phone and dialled the number of the care home. There was only one thing she could change about the last few months and she meant to do it. It didn’t have to be the end.

acknowledgements

Huge thanks to everyone who helped with
This Little Piggy
. Former DCI John Halstead’s information on police procedures in the mid-1980s was invaluable, as were my daughter Naomi’s reminiscences about growing up during that decade.

Special thanks to Lauren, Lucy, Tom and all at Legend Press for their wise input and for being such a pleasure to work with.

As always, thanks and love to Mark, Naomi, Patrick and Mary for their faith, love and support, which means everything to me.

If you enjoyed
This Little Piggy
, here’s an extract from Bea’s debut novel,
In Too Deep
.

Two paramedics are lifting the body of a young woman out of a large, wooden tank of water and carrying her, quickly and with surprising smoothness, across the market square to their ambulance. I am watching them through the dusty window of the office, my hand across my mouth in case I vomit, my back to the wall and my head turned to the side. The window is so small I can’t see what happens next. But what I do know is that Kim is dead. And I know this, too, that I helped to kill her. Kim, my lovely, only, best friend.

This memory is five years old. So is the photo of Kim in today’s newspaper. I am staring fixedly at the page. I have, as they say, seen a ghost. The newspaper’s computer has touched up Kim’s face so she has unnaturally dark eyebrows and outlined lips. But, as Kim might have said, not bad for five years dead. When the photo was taken, she was just twenty-seven years old and beautiful. And I was Maura.

I say I was Maura, because I haven’t answered to that name for a long time. After her death, I ran away and became another person. It worked. Or I thought it did. I convinced myself I’d become invisible. I should’ve known it wasn’t really possible. I thought I’d done a pretty good disappearing act. It’s surprisingly easy to do the thin-air thing, if you really want to. Five years ago I was Maura Wood. A bit plain, a bit non-descript. I’m still ordinary; my hair is mousy blonde, not mousy brown. I wear glasses in public, glasses I don’t really need. And of course I use a different name. But you’d never spot me in a crowd.

So how has Kim found me and managed to haunt me, after all this? The newspaper says there are plans to revive Dowerby Fair. It was cancelled after Kim’s death. A respectable five-year period has elapsed, or I guess that’s how they’re looking at it. After a little time, it no longer seems callous to celebrate an event where, once, someone tragically died.

It’s easy to find Dowerby, and lots of tourists do, every summer. Dowerby, like every other little market town in England, has its castle, its haunted pub and its gift shops. It seemed to me that everyone I ever met had been there at some point in their lives, usually as a child. They would say: ‘There used to be a tea shop on the corner - oh, but I’m talking about fifteen or twenty years ago.’ And I would reply: ‘It’s still there.’ ‘And a clock tower, with a funny sounding chime?’ ‘Still there, still sounding tinny.’ And they’d be delighted and launch into misty-eyed stories about their childhood holidays. When Kim died, the place was full of reporters and photographers from London, Manchester, even one from America. It was amazing how many of them found they’d been there before.

To get to Dowerby, you come off the trunk road they still call the new road, and it’s very well signposted for such a little place. When you’ve driven in a straight line for miles, probably stuck behind a tractor or two, it’s very tempting to turn off, following the big brown road sign with its storybook pictures of the castle, the bed and the teacup.

But I’m telling you, up close, Dowerby is a huge disappointment. The service in the tea rooms is always sullen and the cakes are always dry. The ghost in the haunted pub hasn’t actually been seen since 1862. The castle is remarkably well-preserved, but that’s because it’s still lived in, so you have to pay £9.50 for a ticket only to come across a large TV squatting in the grand Regency lounge. Everyone laughs at that.

When I first went to live in Dowerby, I was always being taken for a tourist. And in a way, I was, because you don’t qualify as local here until you’re about fourth or fifth generation.

I wasn’t very good at making small talk and getting to know people. It was my husband, Nick, who was the talker. Nick brought us to live there, because it was where he’d grown up, although his parents had since moved abroad. Some old friend of Nick’s dad had got him a job at the local pharmaceuticals factory, and it seemed that within a few weeks of moving in, Nick was a member of the Rotary Club and on every social committee. He sort of forced people to make us welcome. If it had been left to me, Nick complained, we would never speak to anyone for years. I’m just like that. Closed. It’s been a useful trait, recently.

Funny, looking back, that Nick and I ever got it together in the first place. We were so very different. But it made sense at the time and I was really happy, at first. Totally in love. We had a little girl, Rosie, who was just a year old when we first came to Dowerby. She was a naturally undemanding, good child and I spent my days decorating the cottagey house we’d bought, reading, walking, listening to the radio, feeling blissful. Nick made me laugh and we made love every week. Ordinary, you see.

I didn’t really want anything else, not even friends of my own. I thought I didn’t need any. It was quite enough for me when, eventually, people started to nod at me in the street. I didn’t even mind not working, which seems strange to me now, even though I’ve only reached the dizzy heights of bar and waitressing jobs. It still means I don’t have to ask anyone else for money. And there’s only me to spend it on. Not exactly Businesswoman of the Year, but good enough for me. It’s so hard to remember that, once, I lived off Nick’s wages and it didn’t feel old-fashioned or demeaning. It would now. The new me.