A Daughter's Secret (6 page)

When I’m in bed she comes to tuck me in, but I turn my face away because I want to have an adventure with my dad and now I can’t.

‘Night night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ she sing-songs, stroking my hair, which is brown, not at all the right colour for a girl. Normally I like it when she does that, but not tonight. I keep my head very still so she won’t feel like she’s forgiven.

It’s much later when my dad comes in. I’m asleep, but I wake up when I feel the weight of him pressing down the mattress. He’s sitting on the end of the bed, and he smells the way he smells late at night. Roll-ups and something sweeter. If it’s wine, then perhaps I smell of it too. My mouth is dry, and I drink from the tooth mug of water on my bedside table.

‘Hello,’ I say, reaching out my fingers so they wrap around his.

‘Shsh,’ he hisses, very loudly, putting his other fingers up to his lips, holding on tight. ‘I came to say goodnight. And to tell you something.’

I’m wide awake now: I sit up straight. ‘What?’ I whisper.

‘It’s all a game of tennis. Of mad tennis.’ He stands up, mimes swiping at a ball with a racket. ‘Don’t ever let them tell you it’s you who’s the mad one. It’s always them.’

I giggle, because he looks so silly and funny. I don’t really know much about tennis. He suddenly swipes at me, instead of the imaginary ball, gathering me up close to him. I snuggle in. It’s the best place in the world, here against his chest. He is so thin that I can feel the ladder of his ribs.

‘Night, D—’ I wish I could call him ‘Dad’, or ‘Daddy’, but he hates it. He says ‘Daddy’ in a horrible voice which tells me I must never say it unless it’s to make a joke about other people and how silly they are. ‘Night, Lorcan,’ I whisper quite loudly.

‘Goodnight, my angel,’ he says, and walks out of the room, his silhouette long and tall, like a skyscraper.

I won’t see him again until the lack of him is like a boulder inside my chest that I can’t roll away.

Chapter Three

She’s already there when I arrive, patiently standing on the street, a still sliver amongst the teeming mass of commuters who casually push past her. I hurriedly shove
The Times
deep into my handbag: I shouldn’t have looked, but Marcus had left it lying open on the kitchen table and my eyes couldn’t help but skim a couple of paragraphs. It was a broadsheet, I reasoned, not a gossip rag.
Sources close to the Stephen Wright case are claiming that important breakthroughs have been made in recent days. With the deadline for the trial approaching, the authorities are under mounting pressure to ensure Wright does not go free, but are reliant on the evidence of key witnesses.
It sounded nebulous to me, particularly when I thought of the desperation in that pushy lawyer’s demeanour, but I forced myself to stop speculating.

‘Gemma! We’re starting at 8.30. It’s only eight. Your mum did tell you that, didn’t she?’

‘We’ll be there’ is what she said, but there’s no sign of her. I take in Gemma’s outfit: it’s like Annie’s parcelled her up in shiny paper and sent her to me. She looks like she’s going to her first ever job interview. She’s wearing a black skirt – falling loosely over her skinny, boyish hips – paired with a dark blue top, sleeves long, a silver cross hanging at the point where her cleavage will eventually spring up to meet it. I see a lot of grown-up skinny women who live in a permanent state of ravenous hunger for all kinds of complicated reasons, but teenage skinny is a very different thing. Looking at her slight form I wonder if she’s even started her periods.

‘I was late last time.’

‘I noticed.’

‘And I left early.’

I unlock the door. No one’s here yet, not even Brendan: is she trying to catch me off guard? She looks towards my room.

‘That’s not how it works. We’ll be starting at 8.30, as planned.’ I smile at her, trying to take any sting out of my words. I don’t want to add to any sense of rejection. ‘Shall I get you some water?’

‘It’s all right. I’m gonna go and get myself a coffee.’ Her accent trips around, I notice: London one minute, then somersaulting back to the private-day-school girl she was until a couple of weeks ago. Is that how it feels inside too, like she’s chasing after a sense of herself, now the gaze that so defined her has been turned away? ‘I’m coming back though!’ she adds, a certain cheekiness to it.

‘I believe you!’

She’s as good as her word. This time we follow protocol, with Brendan buzzing through, and me emerging, like a royal personage, to lead her into my lair. She perches on my sofa, no trace of the sprawling insolence of the last session. She’s holding her knees together, chewed fingers nervously smoothing down the plain black cotton skirt.

‘It’s good to see you again, Gemma. I’m glad you came back.’

‘Yeah, I wanted to.’

Has she been drilled to say that? I pause, feeling it out.

‘And what made you want to?’ She turns her gaze upwards, looks at me.

‘Cos you’re ama-zing!’

‘Well thank you. I’m glad it’s so patently obvious,’ I say, smiling. ‘But it’s a real question, Gemma.’

‘Dunno.’

‘I know your mum’s told you about the police coming to see me,’ I say, watching her face, turned to look intently at the floor. I have to acknowledge it early, not least so I know that she’s not here under false pretences. ‘I wasn’t sure if that would put you off. They still want to know if you’ve told them everything, and it is possible they’ll insist on hearing what you say to me.’

Her head jerks up, cheeks splashed red.

‘They don’t get to tell me what to do. They think they know about Dad but they don’t.’ That phrase again. Contempt for people’s assumptions. ‘They can’t make me say anything.’ She looks straight at me, her gaze unwavering. ‘You can’t either.’

‘Is that what you think? That I want to make you say things?’

‘That’s basically what your job is, isn’t it?’ she says, words tumbling out of her. ‘If you were like, a lorry driver, you couldn’t just stay in the car park smoking fags and watching porn.’

I go to reply, but then I stop to unknot what it is she’s saying. Is that how men seem to her, base and corrupted, or is it just designed to shock?

‘You’re right. If I sat here all day and no one ever opened up to me, I’d probably be a pretty useless therapist. But they talk because they’re parting with their hard-earned money to explore issues that are hurting them, not because I’m interrogating them. Anyway, I’d make a terrible lorry driver. No sense of direction.’

‘Vee have vays of making you talk?’ she says in a silly voice, but when I search her face there’s no silliness there. There’s something false about the way she says it too, like she’s borrowed the clunky-sounding phrase. She looks back at me, vulnerable for a second, and I risk a leap.

‘Is that how it felt with the police?’

‘I . . .’

She pauses, looks out of the window. She’s marooned on that sofa, so alone. If we’d had more sessions I might have gone and sat down next to her, but I won’t risk it yet.

‘I think I’d find it pretty frightening.’

I didn’t plan to land here straight away. Perhaps there’s some part of me protecting us both. I’m sure Judith’s right, that it’s no more than a fantasy, but if there’s any chance she’s come back to tell me what she couldn’t tell the police, it’s better we go straight to the heart of it.

‘They’re not
really
like the Nazis,’ she says contemptuously.

‘I know that. But it’s a big deal, to be formally interviewed. And it was about your dad. I know from how you talked last time how much he means to you.’ She bites her bottom lip, a tear escaping down her left cheek. She scrubs at it angrily with a knuckle, like it’s betrayed her, hard enough to leave a red welt on her translucent skin. I feel a sudden twinge inside me, a memory that twists my gut. Hurting yourself to stop the hurt, like one will overwhelm the other and give you back control. Long sleeves in a heatwave: I try not to stare at her wrists. We’ll get there gradually.

‘If Dad was here, he’d be asking
you
the questions.’

I stared at the grainy picture of him in
The Times
this morning, trying to get a fix on him. It was from some charity benefit, him in a dinner jacket, no warmth or charity visible in his coldly handsome face. He’s got the same sharp, jutting chin that Gemma has, better on a man. I couldn’t find much in his eyes: if they’re a window on the soul, I’m not sure he has one.

‘What do you think he’d ask me?’

‘He’d wanna know what makes
you
so qualified,’ she says scathingly. ‘Why’s it you asking us?’

Us.

‘What’s your favourite thing about your dad?’

She pauses, eyes dancing. She’s trying to grab something, like a baby extending a chubby hand to a spinning mobile.

‘You can’t guess what he’s gonna do. Like, one time he came to school and just – he kidnapped me!’ That aliveness in her face, like an addict in easy reach of a fix. ‘It was Monday morning, break time, and he texted me and got me to meet him out the front. And he’d stolen my passport from Mum’s special documents drawer, and used his air miles, and he just took me to New York with him on his business trip!’

‘Did you worry, Gemma? Did you worry about school, and your mum, and if you’d be in trouble?’

‘You only live twice. Mum doesn’t get it.’

These phrases she keeps coming out with, awkward in her mouth. I can feel a heat building up in me, an anger that’s maybe not about today. I damp it down, feel my feet on the fringes of the rug.

‘Can you see why she might’ve been worried? He “kidnapped” you. He “stole” your passport. They’re quite big, scary words you’re picking there. You make it sound like a John Grisham book, not a holiday.’

She shrugs the bony peaks of her shoulders, affecting a nonchalance I don’t buy.

‘They’re just stupid words. I can miss a bit of maths. I could’ve had chicken pox, same difference. Mum knows that, she was just getting her knickers in a twist.’

‘Was she?’

‘He even took me to his business dinners. I had oysters.’ She pauses for a second, a trace of guilt in her voice now. ‘We got her some jeans. They were like, $300.’

‘Did she like them?’ I say neutrally.

‘Dad said they made her bum look really nice.’

‘Do you think
she
thought they made her bum look nice?’

‘Yeah, well, they did. She should’ve said thank you.’ This time I let it stay silent. Gemma watches me, her eyes crisscrossing my face like she’s waiting for me to break. Eventually she continues. ‘It’s no wonder he got so mad.’

‘Mad?’

‘She pushed him and pushed him.’

‘What, and then he got angry?’ She nods. ‘What’s it like when he’s angry, Gemma?’

‘He just goes,’ she says, her voice low. She looks down at the floor. ‘Thing is’ – the challenge is back in her voice – ‘even if I told you about my dad all day, you wouldn’t really understand. He’s not the same as other people.’

‘You’re dead right. But that’s true for everyone, isn’t it? You’re not like anyone else either. There’s only one Gemma Vine.’

You’re
important is what I’m trying to say to her. You’re not a glove puppet that he takes out of the toy cupboard on a whim: you live and breathe without his animation. There’s that tightness in my chest again, that anger that I want to be rid of. It’s getting bigger, not smaller.

‘Yeah, no, you don’t get it.’

‘So help me. When you say he just goes, how does he go?’

She gives a smile that’s not a smile at all, just a taut piece of string stretched tight across her face.

‘He tells you about yourself. Every single tiny thing that’s wrong. Then you’ve got . . . you’ve got the chance to make yourself way better than you were. Tough love.’

A memory, a fragment of the past that streaks across my consciousness. Lorcan – drunk, high, out of control. His face pushed up close to mine, in the middle of that packed nightclub, me rooted to the spot. ‘You stupid bitch,’ he hissed, his spittle sprinkling my cheek. Even now I can feel the shame spreading through my body, the absolute certainty I wasn’t the daughter he deserved. I think of those tender wrists, the pain on the inside painted on the outside.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you!’ I say. ‘None of us are perfect. We’re human beings, not machines that need tuning up. You don’t have to make yourself worthy of his love: it’s your birthright.’

‘I’m moody,’ she says, her voice small. ‘I answer back, even when his people come round. I don’t work hard at school.’ She looks at me intensely. ‘You wouldn’t like me if I let you really know what I’m like. I’m not – I’m not
nice
.’

‘Nice’ – the world’s most anodyne word – is anything but in her mouth. It sounds like a bullet of self-hatred shot from a gun. My hand reaches across the space between us and hovers. She gives a tiny nod, and I let it cover her small white one. I wonder if she’ll turn it upwards, expose the flesh again, but she doesn’t.

‘I think I would like you. I like you now.’

‘Why?’

I think about it. I don’t want to come up with something that sounds like it’s filched from a newsagent greeting card.

‘You’re funny. You’re good company. You think about things in an interesting way.’ She examines my face, scanning it for truth. We sit there a moment. ‘I was very concerned about you when I saw the cuts on your wrists. What made you want to do that?’

‘I just – I dunno, I just did it,’ she says, her voice high and thin, like a top note from a badly played flute. ‘I was bored. Won’t do it again, cross my heart, hope to die.’

Hope to die.

‘You were bored.’ I cock my head, but she doesn’t give me anything back. ‘What else were you feeling, Gemma?’

‘Dunno. I don’t always have, like . . .’ She mimes taking something out, examining it. ‘A FEELING!’

‘Or you have a feeling, but there isn’t a word for it? It’s just a feeling?’

She nods, a spark of recognition in her eyes.

‘How about we look for some clues.’ I make my voice gentle. ‘Where were you when you did that?’

‘School. My real school.’

As soon as the words leave her mouth, her face switches, a Venus’s flytrap snapping shut. School: the last place she saw her dad.