A Trick of the Mind (31 page)

‘Ellie, sweetie!’

‘Mum, I really need to talk to you. It’s about Aunty May. Please, could I have some attention?’

‘The workshop’s nearly over, darling,’ she said. ‘Give me five minutes. We’re just learning about this terrific app where you can scan in the barcode of a food and
learn exactly what its nutritional value is. Look, poppet, you go over to the Eagle, get yourself a glass of wine and I’ll meet you in the courtyard. Get me a large Sauvignon too. We can walk
home, can’t we?’

The Eagle was buzzing with tourists and students even at this time on a weekday morning but I managed to find a table outside, and sat waiting for Mum, May’s bib in my
bag, Pepper on my lap. My palms were damp; I was impatient to do this and get back – I didn’t want to risk upsetting Patrick. I knew what he was capable of and I knew my life was in
danger.

‘Darling,’ Mum said, her face already pink with the wine she’d knocked back in almost one mouthful. I wondered what good all her supplements were doing when
she mixed them with such large doses of toxins. ‘Now. I’m all ears. What is it?’

‘It’s this,’ I said, pulling the crumpled bib from my bag. It was made from towelling material with a plastic back and the painting on the front was faded, but the words of the
nursery rhyme were clearly embroidered around the edge.

‘Now that’s a typical bit of Aunty May artistry,’ she said. ‘She was always making things for the kids in her care. Actually,’ she said, taking it, smoothing it out
on her lap, ‘do you know, this makes me really quite sad.’ She wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Oh no. I’m going to cry. Poor May. She tried so hard with you all.’

‘Mum, the picture looks like a little boy, not an old man, but the words of the nursery rhyme are “There was a crooked man”. It seems odd.’

‘So it is. Yes. As I say, typical May. Look, come back to mine and we’ll go through some photos and things, and we can talk a bit more about May. Dad rang and said you wanted to know
the whole story and that he’d told you. So there are things you can see now, things I’ve kept from you over the years.’

She finished her wine.

‘I think I might just have another glass. There’s nothing else happening this afternoon and I need to oil the wheels a bit if I’m to get all this out. It’s been under
wraps for so long it feels odd to air it. Do you want another?’ She had stood up, and was delving for her purse.

‘No thanks. Mum, I haven’t got long. I’ve got to work.’

‘Paint, you mean?’

‘Yes, but it’s work for me. I don’t have my teaching job any more and . . .’ The implications of this were hitting me. No regular income, no flat. ‘The
painting’s my only source of income now. I’ve got to finish the commission so I can get to New York. I need to hurry. I can’t drink at lunchtime anyway. And I have to drive
later.’ I was feeling edgy.

‘OK, OK. Relax, darling. The alcohol would have worn off by the time you get back to work. But you were always so very law-abiding,’ she said. ‘Unlike me.’

She came back with her next glass of wine and sat down again.

I looked at my watch. Mum began to talk.

‘OK. I’m going to say it. It’s true that May blamed you. And Daddy and I were determined you shouldn’t be allowed to find out. You were only six years old, a little girl.
Doing what you had been told to do. What I’d asked you to do, to watch Ben, to guard him with your life. But May had
told
you, by the time I came to pick you both up after that
weekend, it was all your fault! What a thing to tell you! You were so cowed by it. Such a changed child.’

I felt tears come to my eyes, tears of betrayal and dismay as we began at last to walk back to Mum’s, through Cambridge’s crowded streets and along the river. Mum talked as we
went.

‘It was after that you began to have those obsessions. Checking over your shoulder three times every time you left a room. It was understandable – you hadn’t checked on the
child and had been told you were to blame for what happened to her. But then it escalated, you started asking me to say goodnight the right number of times, switching lights on and off, tapping
things, and other things, I forget what now. May never got over that child drowning, though she tried to blame you. And eventually the guilt, I think as much over the fact she had used you as a
scapegoat as the loss of the child herself, drove her mad and she tried to take her own life and that was when she was sectioned. By the time she came out of hospital the first time, she had
forgiven you and you and she were quite close again for a while.’

‘Yes, I know.’

We had reached Mum’s front door. She talked as we went into her front room.

‘But I couldn’t forgive what she’d done to you. So that’s why, when she left you the house, I didn’t want you to have it. I felt it was a deliberate reminder. That
might sound irrational now, darling, but all I could think of was how I wanted to put that episode out of our lives forever.’

So! My mother’s desire for me to sell May’s house was her way of protecting me. I wanted to go to her, hug her, but she was speaking, rifling through her shelves.

‘Listen, Ellie, now you know all about this, I have some photos you might like to see. There are some of May’s paintings too. I kept them from you, but now it’s all out in the
open we may as well have a look at them and then I can throw them away once and for all.’

I looked at the time. I had an hour and then I
must
get back or who knew what Patrick would do to me? I thought of the speedboat again, Stef not knowing what was about
to hit her as she set off in an attempt to get away from Patrick. How it had come out of the blue, the trap that killed her.

We sat in Mum’s courtyard garden, flicking through her albums. It was soothing.

I wished I could stay forever, be a child again.

I wished I didn’t feel the clock ticking away, my life hanging in the balance.

Here was a whole book of my life that had been kept from me. Pictures of me, a serious look on my six-year-old face as I clutched Ben to me. A little girl who I remembered now quite clearly,
with blonde curls, sitting on the jetty over by the estuary, where riptides and ferocious currents meant lifeboat men had put up warning signs, and here she was sitting right on top of a sign
saying ‘Do not climb on the gantry’, laughing.

All three of us, Ben, me and Daisy, leaning over this structure with buckets and strings catching crabs. Days that were warm and glowing with summer, with freedom, with being children in an
idyllic setting. Amber days. But the menace of those red ‘Danger’ signs, to which we were oblivious, all around us. The flies caught in the amber.

I turned the pages, feeling the past fall into place.

And then I stopped. I looked at the photo, and looked back at a previous one, and a previous one. In each of the photos, in the background, there
was
a small boy looking on.

A small, dark-haired boy with amazing pale blue eyes.

Wearing shorts. Just like the boy on the hand-painted bib.

A boy whose sweet face was so familiar to me that even seeing it here, pre-adolescence, slightly pudgy, sent a bolt of fear through me.

But the biggest shock was that he was holding crutches.

One of his legs was missing from the knee downwards.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I felt numb on the train back to London.

‘Who’s that boy?’ I’d asked my mum.

‘Oh yes. He’s the little boy who lived in foster care nearby. He was born with his lower leg missing. Look! He is definitely the one she painted here on this bib. I think May tried
to foster him once but gave up. He was very troubled. Patrick, his name was. His mother was young, troubled herself, couldn’t cope with his physical disability on top of her own drug problems
– she rejected him. No wonder he was so full of anger. He went at Daisy with a knife one day and threatened to pull the tail off her pet mouse. What a thing for a child to do!’

I got back to East London at five, praying I had beaten Patrick to it. As I walked across Trinity Buoy Wharf, on this balmy summer’s afternoon, people stopped to fuss
over Pepper, to throw him the odd titbit as they made their way to and from the café, or sat about on benches chatting. Planes took off and came in to land at City Airport. The cable cars
moved in perpetual motion up on their high wires, and far beneath them the river lay, barely moving, lit in places by streaks of reflected sunlight. There was nothing to be afraid of.

Bright daylight and a perfect blue sky above the heat haze of London. I got to my studio. No sign of Patrick. Yet. The studio walls seemed to have soaked up all the heat of the summer so far,
and I had to throw the doors right back to let air in.

I stood and looked at my painting for some time. It was right, but there was something missing and I couldn’t work out what it might be. I had booked the shipping company for Tuesday
– the first day that they could do it – and they would expect it to be packed up and ready to carry to Heathrow. I would already have flown out to New York by then! I only had a day to
add the last touches.

I felt on edge, unable to concentrate. I wanted to get away from Patrick
now
. He had let me believe, all this time, that I had caused his horrific injury – what else was he
prepared to put me through?

The two days until I was due to fly to New York felt like an eternity. But there was nowhere I could go. I couldn’t go to Aunty May’s. Patrick would find me there – it was,
after all, where he wanted to be. He believed, it was quite obvious, that he deserved to live in the house he was denied as a child. He felt my Aunty May owed him something. A life he perceived
other children to have had, that had been denied him.

I knew what I would do. I would phone Chiara. She would let me stay with her and Liam until I got on the flight to New York, and Patrick wouldn’t find me there.

‘Hi, Ellie! This is a surprise!’

‘I know, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch lately, Chiara. How are you?’

‘Good, I’m good.’ Her tone was distant though, and I couldn’t blame her, I had been a terrible friend.

‘Chiara, I need to talk. I’ve things to explain.’

‘Now isn’t a very good time, Ellie. I’ve got the midwife here, discussing home birthing options.’

‘Oh.’ My heart sank.

‘I feel a little hurt too, Ellie, that you’ve taken so little interest in my pregnancy since I asked you to be godmother.’

‘I’m sorry, Chiara. It wasn’t intentional.’

‘Look, let’s talk another time. I’ve got to go now.’

She put the phone down. I stared at mine for a few minutes. She was right, I had been far too preoccupied. But who else was there? Ben and Caroline were away. I thought about asking Dad if I
could stay with him. Just until I could get on the plane to New York. I knew he couldn’t cope with constant company but I could convince him that I needed him to look after me, and hope he
was able to put his own demons aside for me just until I left. But Patrick had found me at Dad’s once, he would find me there again. He would find me wherever I went!

It would be safer to stay with him, in the Wapping apartment, to continue to play along with him just until I could get away. It was only two days till New York, I told myself, and then I would
be gone for good. Somewhere Patrick wouldn’t be able to follow me.

I hoped.

There was no choice that night but to go back with him to Wapping.

Back at his apartment, I behaved as though nothing had changed. I smiled as much as I could at Patrick, and did everything he asked me to do. I acted as if I knew nothing about
his childhood and the fact he had been born with his leg missing.

I tried.

But I couldn’t sleep that night.

The picture of the small, lopsided boy on the bib haunted me, and the photos my mum had found, Patrick with a leg missing since birth. Then I remembered Patrick leaning over me hissing,
‘You owe me a whole fucking leg.’

I owed him nothing!

Yet here I was, trapped in a relationship I no longer wanted to be in, with someone who had consistently lied to me. Someone who had wanted his previous wife to die when she realised he was
dangerous and had tried to get away.

I couldn’t bear it any more. I lay awake all night, in a state of paralysis. Terrified of the man who slept like a baby next to me.

I had to get away.

I got up at dawn, remembering the words that had come to me the evening I’d driven down to May’s when I’d tried to finish with Finn, that loving someone and
needing to get away from them was a paradox I couldn’t explain.

Now the
needing to get away
had taken on a stronger, more urgent meaning.

I tore a sheet of paper out of my sketchbook and wrote a note to Patrick telling him I knew all about his leg. That I couldn’t stay because he had let me believe I’d done this to
him. Did he have any idea how distressing this had been for me?

That I wasn’t telling him where I was going.

It was better this way.

That we had to split up.

He was sound asleep, and I tiptoed across the room to prop the note up on his pillow.

I took one last look round the apartment, picked up my bag, and gathered Pepper in my arms. I made for the door. I opened the main door quietly, and stepped out into the vestibule. Pepper
growled.

I swung round.

‘Where are you going?’

Patrick was in the doorway, in his boxers, no prosthetic, holding onto the doorjamb to steady himself.

‘Nowhere, Patrick. Go back to bed.’ I began to back down the stairs.

‘You’ve got a bag with you!’ he said. ‘You can’t go. It’s not an option.’

‘I can. This isn’t your apartment. I can’t live in someone else’s apartment.’ I kept my voice steady, firm.

‘
I’m
the one to decide that. You’re staying here until we move to your Aunty May’s.’

‘It’s not going to happen, Patrick.’

‘You owe me! You have to do as I say.’

‘I don’t. I don’t owe you anything. I know that now! I’ve left you a note. Read it!’

‘I’ll go to the police, I’ll . . .’