Whatever You Love (12 page)

The tabloid appears twice a week and the free sheet is every weekday. Their coverage is so brief it is barely literate but I get more of a day-by-day account from them. Two days after Willow died in the District General, a group of youths went up to the caravan park on the cliff and threw bricks through the windows of one of the mobile homes. An altercation between the youths and a group of men ensued. Several men are helping police with enquiries. The following night, in the small hours, someone threw a metal bin through the window of Mr Yeung, the chippy.

Mr Yeung the chippy has been on the esplanade for as long as I can remember. The family who run it now are Korean but they are the third owners in recent years, nothing to do with Mr Yeung, whoever he was, who opened the chippy decades ago. On the same night, another bin was thrown at Ranmali’s shop. The window was damaged but did not smash. That explains the corrugated iron.

Now I understand Toni’s solicitousness. Now I understand how the rest of the world is viewing what has happened to my girl through its own particular prism. The reports make the attacks sound co-ordinated but I doubt it. I have seen the lads who hang around, the same bunch you get in every town, too old to be taught anything, too young to learn. It was probably the same ones who punched the bonnet of my car.

I am avoiding what I don’t want to see but eventually am forced to face it. I turn a page, innocently enough. It is an edition of the broadsheet that appeared three weeks after Betty was taken away from me. There, relegated to page two, is the same photograph of my girl, wearing the same strained expression she always adopted for school photos. And next to it, right next to it, is him, the man who killed my daughter. Underneath, the caption reads.
Hit and run: girls to blame
. He has a heavy-set face, large-browed – the photograph is black and white and his eyes are strangely pale and bleached-looking. He is dressed in a jacket over a thick jumper. He has a slight smile. His name is Aleksandar Ahmetaj; I think of him immediately as Mr A. He was driving a black Toyota land cruiser, with bull bars.

I close my eyes. What I cannot bear is that the photographs are equal size.

*

As I leave the building, I scrabble in my handbag for my mobile phone. When my fingers locate it, they close around it and turn it over a couple of times, confirming its shape. I lift the phone out and turn it on. It plays me a merry tune as I cross the car park. I am so impatient, I don’t even unlock my car and get into it. Instead, I sit on the low wall at the back of the library and flick through the contacts list on my phone. I dial Jan H.

I am expecting her voicemail but she picks up the phone herself.

‘Jan,’ I say, ‘it’s Laura.’

The briefest of pauses, then, ‘Hello,’ she says warmly. ‘How are you?’

Of course. Poor Jan. This is the first time I have spoken to her in person since what happened. It must sound odd to her that my voice is so bright, so normal. ‘It’s okay,’ I say quickly, ‘it’s not, I mean, I’m ringing for a favour, a practical favour. Thank you for the card. All of them. I’m sorry I haven’t – well, I know you won’t mind about that, I’m okay. How’s everything going?’

‘Well it’s going,’ she gives a false little laugh. ‘Fucking awful, if you want the truth.’ Her voice becomes low, simple. ‘We miss you, hon.’

‘I know,’ I say, looking down at the toes of my boots, then up at the sky, ‘I miss you too.’ It comes to me that that is true. I do miss my workmates, and I don’t mean I am just missing them because they were part of the life I had before Betty went away. They were, are, a good bunch, a gang. Work was the one thing that sustained me through David and Chloe. My husband and his shiny new love: to Jan H and Jan M and Maurice and Andrew and Sunita they were nothing more than a cliché, a sick little soap opera, something I must be consoled about in the same way I would be consoled over a nasty bout of flu. My husband’s infidelity, so all-consuming, so painful to me, was no more than a story to my team, fit for mockery, derision: but what perspective can they offer me now? The routine tragedy of my marriage could be tumble-dried by gossip, emerging clean and shrunken, but the loss of Betty cannot be reduced without insult. They will know that as surely as do I. It is why I have been avoiding them, why I avoid everybody.

‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about coming back…’ This is not true, but under the circumstances, I don’t feel guilty. Jan H would not blame me for the lie.

‘Really?’ I hear the frown in her voice. ‘It feels soon.’ I can picture her at her desk, windmilling a biro between her fingers, a habit we shared.

‘I know, I know it is, I’m not sure at all, actually. I’ve just been thinking about it, I was just wondering, how would you feel if I came by one day, after hours? I know it sounds a bit strange. I just want to come and see how I feel about the unit. I don’t really want to come when people are around…’

‘You mean visit, visit the building?’

‘Yes, when it’s empty, just to see how it’s going to feel, like a rehearsal.’

‘Of course, don’t be daft. When do you want to come?’

I feign vagueness. ‘Don’t know really, soon, so’s I can think about it over the weekend. Later on, tonight?’

‘Tonight?’ Her voice is startled. ‘Tonight’s not good to be honest, hon. Team B are having a late meeting, I mean, you’ll be bumping into people. You know what Team B are like.’

The Rehabilitation and Therapies Unit is behind the main hospital building. Most of our offices close at 5 p.m.

‘What about tomorrow?’

She makes a dry sound, ‘Tomorrow’s fine, Friday night, you’ll have the place to yourself. Might be a bit bleak though.’

‘What time do you finish?’

‘God, if I’m not out of here by six I’ll cut my throat.’

‘Can I meet you at six, at the front? Would you mind leaving me with the keys, I can bring them round to you later, if you like? And would you mind not mentioning this to anyone? It just feels a bit weird.’

‘You can leave them at the porter’s lodge, if you like. Laura, are you sure this is the best way of doing it? There’s an awful lot of people here would like to give you a big hug when you step back in the door.’

About this, I am able to be completely honest. ‘I know. I just need to brace myself a bit before I go for that one.’

‘Fair enough.’

As I unlock my car, I think that I now have an insight into my own power, the way in which my distress gives me leverage over others, how their solicitude bends them to me.

*

On my way back home, I drive down the esplanade. I want to see if Mr Yeung’s have repaired their window – they have, and appear to be open for business again. A moment later, I see there is a parking space on a meter on the beach side of the road. I have a sudden desire for cold air. Swerving the car inexpertly, I pull in to the space, and then spend forever manoeuvring to and fro. I need to walk to process what I know, as if the mechanical process of moving my leg muscles will allow me to think about the information I have and project forward, towards the information I do not yet have, to try and link the two. The beach became my chosen venue for walks after David filled me in on a few choice details about him and Chloe. I don’t go up to the cliffs any more.

I lock the car and walk down the steps, stumbling slightly on the shingle. There is a little tea-coloured sunshine. It gives the beach an apricot glow, softening the wet pebbles, making the slowly rushing waves appear benign. It is busy for that time of day: dog walkers, the unemployed, retired people – everyone seems to have seized the chance to convince themselves that winter’s grip is loosening. I stride and stagger across the rough shore, hardly looking at the sea, all the way to the far end of the esplanade. At that end, the beach slopes sharply – to go back up to pavement level, you have to climb a tall flight of steep stone steps with an iron handrail. I pause for a moment, wondering whether to go back along the beach or climb upwards. I am cold. I walk over to the stone stairs.

Halfway up the stairs, I pause to fumble in my pocket for a tissue, the same pocket into which I crumpled my coffee cup at the library. As I extract the tissue, shreds of polystyrene escape from the pocket and the wind snatches them up. They look like snow. I watch the shreds swoop upwards once, loopily, then tumble to the beach. Beyond them, close to the water’s edge, is a family of four; two parents, a young boy and a baby. The baby is in his father’s arms and the young boy is lifting stones up to show the baby, as if he wants the baby to take one and throw it into the sea. The mother is laughing. The father takes the stone from the young boy and hands the baby to the mother, then reaches back with his arm, way back, and throws as hard as a professional cricketer. The young boy jumps with glee, mouth open, then stumbles on the pebbles and lands on his backside. The mother and father bend simultaneously to help him up. The young boy is my son, Rees, playing on the beach, happy with his family.

*

When I get home, I make myself more coffee, even though I am still hollow and speedy from the last one. Coffee has been my staple diet for the last few weeks – I have a piece of bread occasionally. If I am feeling really strong, I will attempt a Cup- a-Soup. The loss of appetite seems so insignificant to me I find it odd that people keep asking me about it. I am not avoiding food. It just doesn’t register. I make myself a piece of toast with marmalade now, for instance, then leave it on the plate on the kitchen countertop, not deliberately, it just doesn’t seem important. As I am about to leave the kitchen with my coffee, I remember the toast, return to the counter-top, take a single bite and lose interest before I have even swallowed. I leave the rest on the plate, knowing it will still be there, cold and congealed, when I come back down later.

I take my coffee up to the bedroom. Our computer, a cheap old PC, is on a small desk in the corner. The kids’ stuff always took up so much room downstairs that our bedroom was the only place for the computer to go. I have not turned it on since Betty went away and in truth I didn’t even use it much before, using my work email address and Internet access for most things. I open Google, then type in Betty’s name.

The news stories from the nationals do not tell me anything new – they are more in-depth and sensitive elaborations of what has appeared in the locals. A couple of pieces investigate the local unrest angle. There is a long article in one broadsheet that uses the accident as a peg to hang a whole piece about cultural clashes between different migrant groups who have settled in coastal towns. Before I lost Betty, I might have been interested in such a debate but now I find it offensive. These articles are missing the point. The point is Betty. Eventually, I find the picture of him, my Mr A, the same one that the local papers used. I print it out.

Outside, the light begins to fade. The sky deepens swiftly from white to grey to grey tinged with purple… indigo, black. The day closes. A winter’s evening descends as surely as rain. I do not draw the curtains, or turn on the light, and soon the room is lit only by the square glow from the computer screen. I might be any office worker, unable to leave until a task is finished, or a student hard at work on an essay – I can remember the days of that absorption, the shrinking of the world to an individual task, the way the world flips open again when you draw away and turn on a light.

I reach down to the printer, pick up the sheet of A4 paper with the printed photo of the man who killed my daughter, one movement, down and up – foolish: the caffeine has drained from my system and there is nothing in its place. The movement makes me dizzy.
I hear you’ve gone quite mad
. Malevolence outside my window, in the dark, I feel it pressing in upon me. Betty is gone. Rees is absent. I picture him as I saw him on the beach, missing his step and plumping down on the pebbles, David and Chloe bending simultaneously to help him up, laughing. The white square of light from the computer screen on the table is just enough for me to be able to regard Mr A. He is staring out of the photo at me, with that half-smile; boxer’s nose, large earlobes. This is no callow boy, dumbstruck by the horror of what he has done. This is a man.

I stare at the photo. I try to read his gaze, each fold on his face, the slight frown. He arrived here four years ago. Last year, he was prosecuted under labour welfare laws. On the beach, once David and Chloe had lifted Rees from his sitting position on the pebbles, Chloe brushed down his trousers with her hand, still laughing, her corkscrew curls falling in front of her face. I study the photo in the same way that a spy might study the face of a counterpart in a rival organisation. I am calm as I make this promise: I am going to find out what you love, then whatever it is, I am going to track it down and I am going to take it away from you.

David got to hold her first. Sheena the midwife checked her over, pronounced her a sparkling ten on the Agpar scale, swaddled her and handed her to her father. I was on my back on the high bed; dazed and disbelieving. Sheena and the trainee midwife were seated on stools at the foot of the bed. The delivery room was high-ceilinged, echoey. I heard Sheena say quietly, ‘Now, I don’t really like putting stitches here because there’s a lot of nerve endings but I think we better had.’ I’m not going to like this much, I thought, and I didn’t.

‘In all directions then, is it?’ I called down to them, when I could speak again.

‘I’m afraid so, but don’t you worry, we’re going to sort you out now.’ Sheena lifted her head and beamed at me. ‘You’re going to be just fine now.’ Sheena and I worked together for three years before I had my daughter and she delivered half the babies born in this town during that period. She walked on water as far as I was concerned.

I turned my head to watch David who was sitting in the chair next to my bed, holding her, our girl, smiling down at her while they worked on me. His face glowed as though lit by a campside fire. It took a lot to render David speechless but he was silent now, lips pressed together, gaze locked so firmly it would have taken a crowbar to shift it.

I had had 50 mg of Pethidine but was learning the hard way that that didn’t help much when it came to stitching torn muscle – another pain stung through me, so sharp and hot I could not locate its starting point, knew only that it finished somewhere deep inside. I gasped out loud but David did not lift his gaze from his daughter. I didn’t mind. She was too swaddled for me to see her but watching David’s face as he stared and stared at his new baby girl was almost as good, as though his face was a reflective pool. Eventually, I was allowed to raise myself. Sheena sent the trainee midwife out to make me tea and toast and then leaned forward and took Betty from David’s reluctant grasp. ‘Let’s give Mum a turn, shall we?’ she said firmly. She handed Betty to me. At last. I lifted my T-shirt, the one I later discarded because it was bloodstained, loosened the swaddling a little and placed my new baby girl at my breast. She stared up at me with midnight-blue eyes and latched on. There was still a little blood on her forehead. Sheena, watching, gave a broad smile. ‘Sure, you’re not going to have any problems with that little person.’

*

Sheena was right. We never did. It was as though Betty had spent her time in the womb flicking idly through textbooks on what was expected of a newborn baby. She fed every four hours. She smiled right on cue, at six weeks. She held her head up nicely at three months. David and I were the smuggest parents on the planet, which, considering how smug all parents of newborn babies are, is saying something. We had only two topics of conversation, in those early months. The first was the utter superiority of our baby to all other babies ever born, and the second was the utter superiority of our parenting to that of all other parents. In the post-natal classes, I would listen with a small smile to the tales of other mothers – how their babies were awake all night, how they just wouldn’t latch on, how the antibiotics they had taken for mastitis had given the babies thrush. When I got home, I would relate every detail of these conversations to David and we would sit together over dinner and unpick each one of their complaints, shaking our heads. Why did other parents make such a meal of it? What was their problem?

*

Betty was eighteen months old when I got the phone call from the home. I had been expecting it for so long that I didn’t expect it any more and when it happened I experienced a strange sense of vertigo, similar to the one I felt when David dangled me over the clifftop: a weak, hollow sensation. ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the doctor who made the call. ‘I’ve got some very bad news.’ My mother had been frail for years. It was a chest infection got her in the end.

My mother was not part of my daily routine – she had never been able to bathe my baby daughter with me, or babysit. I missed her absence more than her presence. I missed the mother who died in her sleep after many years in a nursing home but also the mother I would have had had her illness not taken a grip when I was so young. In that sense, my mourning had a level of self-indulgence quite startling in its purity. I had been called brave so often during her illness that I handled her death with a degree of cowardice to which I felt quite entitled, as if I had been storing up self-pity all those years, only liberated to indulge it when my mum was no longer there as a living example of how much worse her situation was than mine. I mourned the person I would have been had I been raised by a healthy mother.

*

Three weeks after my mother’s funeral, David came into the bedroom one evening, where I was sitting up in bed reading a book called
A Good Innings
– Sunita at work had lent me her battered paperback copy. Her father had died of motor neurone disease. As long as you got past the chapter on learning to rebirth yourself, she said, it had some interesting things to say. I had just read the line, ‘It can be hurtful to realise that others around you regard grief for an elderly parent as excessive or self-indulgent.’

David was standing by the bed, working both shoulders backwards. ‘I think I’m going to have to get health and safety to look at my chair again,’ he said. He had tried any number of different designs of chair in front of his desk at work, nothing helped. It was David that needed redesigning, his tall, poorly constructed frame.

I glanced up at him, over the yellow oval of light that fell on the book from the reading lamp clipped to the headboard behind me. My reading glasses were perched on the end of my nose, so I looked at him over them, a level look. Seeing he had my attention, he took a step towards me and turned around. ‘It’s here,’ he said, ‘lower than before, right down here.’ He prodded at his lower back, then arched backwards, wincing.

‘Take a Nurofen,’ I said, and returned to my book.

*

Then there was Betty and all the glorious shapes of Betty; Betty who clambered into our bed each morning and huddled down between us for all of thirty seconds before she decided it was time to stand up and use my pillow – over which my hair was still strewn – as a trampoline; Betty who would wear nothing but her purple dungarees with the appliquéd dog on the bib front. Dog trousers, she called them. She would have slept in them if we let her. If I put them through the wash, she would howl as if she was being tortured. After she had started school, I came across a video cassette of her at eighteen months and went to the trouble of extricating the old video and TV from the pile of junk in the box room in order to watch it. She was lumbering in her tiny fashion around the sitting room of Aunt Lorraine’s house, at some large gathering with adults seated on sofas, bashing people’s knees with an inflatable hammer. Although the adults in the scene were off-camera, it was clear from the shrieks of laughter on the tape that we all considered this to be exceptionally clever and amusing behaviour. Every now and then, Betty turned to the camera and waved the hammer gleefully. It took me a few minutes to work out what was bothering me about the scene. It was only when she pointed a finger at the camera, then at something the camera couldn’t see, turned back and said, ‘Shoosh!’ that I worked it out. She wasn’t talking. Why wasn’t she talking? I thought, momentarily baffled. Ah, of course, she was only eighteen months old. She couldn’t talk. How strange that there should have ever been a time when she couldn’t talk, when even ‘dog trousers’ was a distant and unimaginable accomplishment. This was something that always amazed me. Each successive Betty erased the Betty that preceded her – yet they were all still inside her, like a Russian doll, or one of those paper strings of figures you make by folding a sheet many times and cutting it, then unfolding it again.

*

Lorraine’s house was the usual venue for these get-togethers. It was a large, red-brick semi, vaguely Edwardian, on the very edge of Eastley, the next town along the coast from ours. I felt warmly towards it, remembering that I had been a hit on my very first visit there – as a result I was close to Lorraine in a way I wasn’t to David’s reserved mother. David’s mother and father were quiet, pleasant people who gave me the distinct impression that I wasn’t quite good enough for their beloved only son – nearly, but not quite. Lorraine, on the other hand, was easy to please. She liked people who laughed at her jokes and helped her carry dishes from room to room. It wasn’t much to ask and I joined in with alacrity. I thought of her as my ally.

If anyone knew in advance which way my marriage was likely to go, it would have been Lorraine. We were washing up in her kitchen one Sunday afternoon – or rather I was washing up while she loaded the dishwasher. David’s sister Ceri was in and out taking orders for tea or coffee from the half-dozen relatives in the sitting room. ‘What’s the chance of that brother of yours mowing my lawn while he’s here?’ Lorraine said to her. ‘Or are the boys glued to the armchairs for the rest of the day now?’

‘Not much,’ Ceri replied coolly. ‘Uncle Richard is showing him the paint stripper.’

‘Oh hell…’ muttered Lorraine. Uncle Richard, her husband, had a merry laugh and angina. Lawn-mowing and DIY were both out, but that didn’t stop him purchasing labour-saving devices as if he was opening a museum dedicated to them. David was always required to admire the new labour-saving device when we visited, on account of how he designed such things himself. He probably would rather have been mowing the lawn.

A little female solidarity was called for. ‘I can’t get him to do even ours,’ I said to Lorraine as Ceri bustled out of the room again. ‘The weekends are always so busy and he’s never back from work before half past eight these days.’ In fact, I didn’t mind that he often worked late and missed Betty’s bedtime. It was easier to put her to bed alone than to have her over-excited by David’s return just as we were on the final page of
No Roses
for Harry.

Lorraine did not respond immediately, but continued loading the dishwasher. ‘Off down the boozer with the boys, is it?’

There was something about the way she said it, a dryness in her tone I had not heard before, that made me pause in what I was doing, my hands still in the foaming suds – she used a different brand of washing-up liquid from mine and I had put too much in. It was frothing up over the sides and on to the countertop.

‘No, no… well, not that often I don’t think…’ David went to the pub after work sometimes but recently he had been too busy, I thought. I realised I didn’t know which it was: the office or the pub. He didn’t volunteer the information and I didn’t ask. I never asked David questions, after all, it was always the other way around. This was pre-Chloe, when as far as I knew, David and I were happy together and my life with Betty was absorbing enough for me not to question that.

I still didn’t know any different, there in Lorraine’s kitchen, but what came to me then was an awareness that I didn’t know any different – knowledge that my ignorance existed.

Aunt Lorraine lifted the door of the dishwasher awkwardly – her bulk made her stiff when she bent. She twiddled with the dial, pushed two buttons with jabs of her plump forefinger and the dishwasher made a
je-jung
sound as it bounced and ground into life. She picked up a tea towel from the countertop and wiped her hands. Still without looking at me, she said thoughtfully, ‘Well, there’s a price to pay with a boy like our David, I suppose.’ She looked at the door, towards where her sitting room was full of her husband and her relatives. Her expression was clouded. ‘I should know that as well as anyone…’ she muttered.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. A price? What price was I paying for having David? What price had she paid for Uncle Richard? It seemed an odd way to refer to a relationship – was there always a price to be paid? If so, I wasn’t aware that I was paying one.

We finished clearing up, then took coffee for ourselves and went into the sitting room where Uncle Richard was playing a board game with the older of Ceri’s two boys – the youngest boy was upstairs with Betty. Everyone else was sitting on chairs around the room. The paint stripper sat, admired and then discarded, amongst half-finished wine-glasses on the dining table. ‘They are playing weddings,’ David informed me, referring to our daughter and her cousin, and pulled a face. I sat down on the arm of the sofa and leaned towards him, reaching out a hand to smooth down his hair where it was sticking up and crinkled, towards the back of his head. He moved his head away. I had only meant to be affectionate but the sharpness of his movement suggested irritation, as if he thought I was trying to infantilise him.

The door from the hallway opened; in walked Betty. She had an old net curtain round her shoulders and was using one hand to clutch it in place. In the other, she held a sink plunger, thrust before her like a ceremonial mace. On her head, she was wearing a yellow T-shirt that she had helped herself to from Lorraine’s laundry basket and which I knew to be in lieu of a gold crown – in Betty’s mind, the line between brides and princesses was blurry. Both got to dress up and be worshipped and that was fine by her.

We broke into spontaneous applause. All the adults gave their own, particular sort of exhalation – vocalised in my case, a long ‘Aaah…’, a sigh from Aunt Lorraine, a grin from David, an explosive chuckle from Uncle Richard, who reached out to grab her, destabilising the yellow T-shirt. Whatever the different quality of those reactions, they all meant the same thing to Betty as she pushed herself free of Uncle Richard, replaced the T-shirt on her head and stood in the middle of the room, clutching the rubber plunger and beaming round at us all.
All I
have to do is walk into a room, she was saying to herself. That’s
all I have to do.

I leaned over and kissed the top of David’s head and this time he did not move away but reached out a hand and squeezed my knee in acknowledgement of our shared pride. In that respect, nothing had changed. We were still the smuggest parents in the world.