Not cold blood, no. That’s not right. Helen understood that Patrick saw things in very black-and-white terms, and that he believed, genuinely believed, that Nel Abbott was a threat to their family, to their togetherness. She was. And so he acted. He did it for Sean, and he did it for her. That’s not so cold-blooded, is it?
But every night she had the same nightmare: Patrick holding her tabby under the water. In the dream, his eyes were sealed shut but the cat’s were open, and when the struggling animal twisted its head around towards her, she saw that its eyes were bright green, just like Nel Abbott’s.
She slept badly, and she was lonely. A few days previously she had driven twenty miles to the nearest garden centre to purchase a rosemary bush. And later that day she was driving to the animal-rescue centre over in Chester-le-Street, to select a suitable cat.
January
JULES
It’s an odd thing, to sit across the breakfast table every morning from fifteen-year-old you. She has your same bad table manners, and rolls her eyes as hard as you did when this is pointed out. She sits at the table with her feet tucked up underneath her on the chair, bony knees sticking out to either side, exactly the way that you used to do. She adopts the same dreamlike expression when she is lost in music, or thought. She doesn’t listen. She is wilful and annoying. She sings, constantly and tunelessly, just like Mum did. She has our father’s laugh. She kisses me on the cheek every morning before she goes to school.
I cannot make up to you the things I did wrong—my refusal to listen to you, my eagerness to think the worst of you, my failure to help you when you were desperate, my failure to even try to love you. Because there is nothing I can do for you, my atonement will have to be an act of motherhood. Many acts of motherhood. I could not be a sister to you, but I will try to be a mother to your child.
In my tiny, ordered Stoke Newington flat, she wreaks havoc on a daily basis. It takes an enormous effort of will not to become anxious and panicked by the chaos. But I’m trying. I remember the fearless version of myself who surfaced the day I confronted Lena’s father; I would like that woman to return. I would like to have more of that woman in me, more of you in me, more of Lena. (When Sean Townsend dropped me home on the day of your funeral, he told me I was like you, and I denied it, I said I was the anti-Nel. I used to be proud of that. Not anymore.)
I try to take pleasure in the life I have with your daughter, since she’s the only family I have, or will ever have now. I take pleasure in her, and comfort in this: the man who killed you will die in jail, not too long from now. He is paying for what he did to his wife, and to his son, and to you.
PATRICK
Patrick no longer dreamed of his wife. Nowadays he had a different dream, in which that day at the house played out differently. Instead of confessing to the detective, he took the paring knife from the table and put it into her heart, and when he was done with her, he started on Nel Abbott’s sister. The excitement of it built and built until, finally sated, he pulled the knife from the sister’s chest and looked up, and there was Helen, watching, tears coursing down her cheeks and blood dripping from her hands.
“Dad, don’t,” she said. “You’re scaring her.”
When he woke, it was always Helen’s face he thought of, her stricken expression when he told them what he’d done. He was grateful that he did not have to witness Sean’s reaction. By the time his son returned to Beckford that evening, Patrick’s confession had been made in full. Sean came to visit him once, on remand. Patrick doubted he would come again, which broke his heart, because everything he had done, the stories he had told and the life he had constructed, it had all been for Sean.
SEAN
I am not what I think I am.
I was not who I thought I was.
When things started to fracture, when I started to fracture, with Nel saying things she shouldn’t have said, I held the world together by repeating: Things are the way they are, the way they’ve always been. They cannot be different.
I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man. When I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man, I became a police officer; I married a decent and responsible woman and lived a decent and responsible life. It was simple, and it was clear.
There were doubts, of course. My father told me that after my mother died, I didn’t speak for three days. But I had a memory—what I thought was a memory—of speaking to kind, sweet Jeannie Sage. She drove me back to her house that night, didn’t she? Didn’t we sit, eating cheese on toast? Didn’t I tell her how we’d gone to the river in the car together. Together? she asked me. All three of you? I thought it best not to speak at all then, because I didn’t want to get things wrong.
I thought I remembered all three of us being in the car, but my father told me that was a nightmare.
In the nightmare, it wasn’t the storm that woke me, it was my father shouting. My mother, too, they were saying ugly things to each other. Her: failure, brute; him: slut, whore, not fit to be a mother. I heard a sharp sound, a slap. And then some other noises. And then no noise at all.
Just the rain, the storm.
Then a chair scraping across the floor, the back door opening. In the nightmare, I crept down the stairs and stood outside the kitchen, holding my breath. I heard my father’s voice again, lower, muttering. Something else: a dog, whimpering. But we didn’t have a dog. (In the nightmare, I wondered if my parents were arguing because my mother had brought a stray dog home. It was the sort of thing she’d do.)
In the nightmare, when I realized I was alone in the house, I ran outside, and both my parents were there, they were getting into the car. They were leaving me, abandoning me. I panicked, I ran screaming to the car and clambered into the backseat. My father dragged me out, yelling and cursing. I clung to the door handle, I kicked and spat and bit my father’s hand.
In the nightmare, there were three of us in the car: my father driving, me in the back, and my mother in the passenger seat, not sitting up properly but slumped against the door. When we rounded a sharp bend, she moved, her head lolling over to the right so that I could see her, I could see the blood on her head and on the side of her face. I could see that she was trying to speak, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, her words sounded strange, as though she were talking in a language I didn’t understand. Her face looked strange, too, lopsided, her mouth twisted, her eyes were white as they rolled back into her head. Her tongue lolled from her mouth like a dog’s; pink, frothy saliva oozed from the side of her mouth. In the nightmare, she reached for me and touched my hand and I was terrified, I cowered back in my seat and clung to the door, trying to get as far away from her as I could.
My father said, Your mother reaching for you, that was a nightmare, Sean. That wasn’t real. It’s like that time you said you could remember having kippers at Craster with your mum and me, but you were only three months old then. You said you remembered the smokehouse, but it was only because you’d seen a picture. It was like that.
That made sense. It didn’t feel right, but at least it made sense.
When I was twelve, I remembered something else: I remembered the storm, running out into the rain, but this time, my father wasn’t getting into the car, he was putting my mother into it. Helping her into the passenger seat. That came to me very clearly, it didn’t seem to be part of the nightmare, the quality of the memory seemed different. In it, I was afraid, but it was a different sort of terror, less visceral than the one I felt when my mothe
r reached for me. It troubled me, that memory, so I asked Dad about it.
He dislocated my shoulder knocking me against the wall, but it was what happened afterwards that stuck. He said he needed to teach me a lesson, so he took a filleting knife and cut cleanly across my wrist. It was a warning. “This is so you remember,” he said. “So you never forget. If you do, it’ll be different next time. I’ll cut the other way.” He placed the tip of the blade on my right wrist, at the base of my palm, and dragged its point slowly towards my elbow. “Like that. I don’t want to discuss this again, Sean. You know that. We’ve talked about it quite enough. We don’t mention your mother. What she did was shameful.”