Hide and Seek (27 page)

“Mummy, I had some news. You’re a grandmother. I have a son.”

“Hmm,” she says again.

Right. CPR. I put the heel of my hand on her chest and I pump. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. No Max. Not now. Not this rhythm. Don’t make me kill her. I need a different rhythm now. I need just to count to thirty. I can do it. I do it. I sweep back that dark hair, made darker by blood. I place my mouth on those pouty lips and give her two rescue breaths. Come on, Mummy, mother, mum,
maman
. Come on, so I can go home to my boy.

“I’m sorry,” I say, as I pump, to my own rhythm now. “I’m sorry for everything. I understand. I understand why you had to go.”

She doesn’t respond. I do two more rescue breaths, then keep pumping.

“But I have my own son now. I need to look after him. He’s in England. He may die.”

And then, it seems, she can get her breath. Because she says, “You should hope that he does.”

I move back from her. The old anger starts to return. How can she say that? How can she say that about my son?

“Look how you turned out,” she whispers.

And I can see, of course, what she means. I am the son who killed his father. Her husband. I am the son who may have killed her, if the ambulance does not arrive soon. But she can’t wish I was never born, can she? She must still have some motherly love for me? After all, it was not my fault. I was four. It was not my fault. I press on.

“And the thing is, my son, if he lives, he needs a father,” I say. “He needs a father, and a mother. He needs me not to be in jail.”

I let me words hang. I need you to protect me, is what I mean. I leave the CPR position. Very gently, very very gently, I put my hands on her wound. She gasps. I rub the blood that I have on my hands onto the edge of the sink. Then I splash some water on the floor. I take off her shoe, and I run the sole through the water. Then I put it back on her foot. If anyone looks closely, they won’t be fooled for a moment. But if she plays along – maybe.

“Mummy, Mummy, I think what happened is that you slipped. And hit your head, on the sink. I am so so sorry that it happened. I am so sorry – so sorry – about Max. But for my son, I think you slipped. Didn’t you?”

There is a silence. I think maybe I have lost her. Maybe now it is murder. But her lips part and her eyes flutter. I lean close to her.

“Get out,” she breathes.

That’s it. Nothing else. I want to ask her if she means ‘I hate you, get out’ or ‘I’m releasing you, run.’ Is she protecting me, or herself?

But I don’t have time to ask. Because I hear the intercom buzz. The ambulance, or Alain, or both, must be here. I grab the hammer. Should I rinse it? No, they’d find the blood in the u-bend, if they looked. I must just put it back in my jacket, and hope the blood won’t leak through, then throw it in the Canal outside The blood on my hands, I don’t need to explain. It’s obvious – I’ve been trying to help her. I go to the intercom and buzz in whoever it is. She slipped, she slipped, she slipped, I say in my head. She was at the sink and she slipped.

The ambulance crew come in, flanked by a worried-looking grey-haired man in a pinny. He must be Alain.

“
Sophie!
” he cries, when he sees her. “
Qu’est-ce qui se passe?
” he asks of no one in particular. And he collapses on his knees in front of her.

“She slipped, and she fell,” I say. “I’ve given her CPR.”

The ambulance crew look me up and down. I start to say again that she slipped, but it will be too much. I must just go. I must go to my son.

“I have to go,” I say. “My wife, has just given birth. My son, he’s premature. He may die. I have to go.”

I don’t know if they understand me, but I’m not sure I care. I write my details down on a bit of paper and give it to Alain. “Call me,” I say. “Or email me. Anything. Let me know how she is.” There is blood on the paper, I see, as I hand it to him. He stares at me, and I can still feel him staring at me as I run out of the door.

Chapter Twelve

-Ellie-

“Your daddy will be here soon,” I tell little Leo as he lies in his incubator. “Yes he will, yes he will.”

That’s how you’re supposed to talk to babies, isn’t it? Coochie-coos of untruths. Does it make a difference if daddy is a man who kills other daddies? His own daddy? Or that he may now have killed other mothers? Should I, as a mother, be frightened? As a wife? He didn’t say much on the phone. But from what he did say, it sounds like the hammer struck its target. That she may still be alive, just.

“Like little Leo, hey? But you’re going to stay alive, aren’t you, my sweet little one?”

Because it seems impossible that Leo couldn’t stay alive. We’ve made him now. We’ve given him the Reigate nose. He lives and breathes (OK, with some assistance) and exists. I am a mother. I feel it now. Something extra, not something removed from me. I am Ellie-plus. I can’t just stop being a mother. That’s not possible. And so I will go on, as I have for the past two hours, looking at his little hatted head as it struggles with the world outside my womb. Offering him my breast when the doctors say I should – my bathrobe shed, my milk is accessible to him whenever he needs it. And of course, I am trying to avoid Gillian, when she appears without warning, still clutching that pillow.

“You’ve got a mummy, haven’t you, Leo? You don’t need this other lady to hang around, do you? No you don’t.”

I turn to face Gillian. “He really doesn’t need you, you know. My little boy. You should go.”

Gillian glares at me. “My other little boy still needs me though,” she says.

“Umm, not so sure,” I say, in a way that shows I am totally sure. That she is wrong. “Particularly as he’s not even your little boy.”

She looks at me intently. “He will always be my little boy. And I will always protect him. Always.” She takes a step closer to me. “Whatever, whenever, however.”

I feel the same shiver as I did when I saw the child-size coffin Will brought into the garden. I’d love to take a step back, away from Gillian. But that will give her a little victory. Which she is not getting. We can’t end this argument, though. We are both too used to knowing best. Or in Gillian’s case, thinking we know best.

“Fine, think what you like,” I tell her. “But you have to go when he gets here. We need some time alone with Leo. While we have him.”

Gillian looks at me hard. Her eyes narrow a little. “He’s on his way, then?” she asks.

Fuck. Own goal. She’ll know I spoke to him. Part of me wants to say, of course he’s bloody on his way, of course I spoke to him – his son is here, he needs to see him! But she’ll suspect then that I told him other things too. And her mention of the vow earlier is creeping me out. Even though she cannot do anything. She is not, after all, fate.

“I asked one of the midwives to call him,” I say. “So yeah, hopefully, he’s on his way.” Hopefully, my husband who attacks people with hammers will be home soon. Oh good.

She continues to stare at me. But then she just says “How nice. He’ll be able to see his son.”

One of the doctors comes into the room, to check on Leo.

“He’s doing his best,” he says. “He’s stronger than he looks, this little chap.”

“Like his father,” I say, thinking of the hammer. When he was just four. Four! He is going to need some counselling. Maybe professional counselling, not just mine.

“Is his father…?”

“He’s on his way,” says Gillian. “The midwives called him.”

Good. She seems to have bought my lie. I excuse myself while the doctor fiddles around with the tubes and the monitors. I could really do with a loo-break, but I hadn’t wanted to leave Gillian and Leo alone. I don’t know why. I just don’t. But I’ll only be quick. I don’t even bother putting my robe back on as I flit along the corridor. OK, maybe not flit. The old belly is still a bit postpartum. And the stitches a bit store. But I move as swiftly as I can.

It’s only as I’m washing my hands after using the bathroom that I realise I left my mobile in the pocket of my robe. And that Gillian may find it.

I tear back along the corridor as quickly as I can without ripping my stitches. If she finds the phone, if she looks at it, she will know from the French number that I called Sophie. She will guess that I spoke to Will. That I told Will the truth. And then she will do whatever she thinks she can do to Leo, armed with that stupid pillow she has been lugging around.

Oh God. The pillow.

A sudden chill comes over me. I don’t want to think what I am thinking. Sod the stitches – I run back along the corridor to Leo. I must defend Leo. I must earn my SuperMum cape.

The doctor has gone. Gillian is alone in the room. Alone, with Leo. And she is holding the pillow over the incubator.

Chapter Thirteen

-Will-

I will not hear Max’s rhythm. I will not join in with the train. That must go now. I must focus on the future, maybe, I think – but the past… I killed my father. How, how, how do I start to accept this? But more, how do I accept that I do not really remember this? I mean, now I am told, the pieces, they start to fit together. But how can I not have remembered it for so long? How can there be this whole huge important murderous thing in my life, part of my own fabric of being, and me not have known about it? A tantrum, Ellie said. Was I so enraged, then, by not being given enough attention, that I didn’t know what I was doing? Or did I know full well, by the age of four, that taking a hammer to someone’s head is bad, naughty in the extreme? I must have known afterwards, because of the slaps, and the shouts, from Sophie. Is that the bit I found traumatic? Is that what made me repress the memory? And then, after he died. Did four-year-old me connect it to the hammer-blows? Did I understand what I’d done? Have I buried that guilt?

Do I feel guilt now?

It’s me, four-year-old me, that is to blame. That’s another person. Someone separate from me, thirty years ago. In a totally different life. A life I robbed myself of. A life with a fantastically talented father, following him around the concert halls of… But no. That is a fantasy. I must stop that. Fantastically talented pianist he may have been, but talented father he was not. Said Sophie. I can imagine, now, the obsession of a genius. Interested only in his music, not in the mewlings of a child. Not surprising, then, that there were tantrums. Not surprising about the hammer.

So – what? Am I blaming Max now? It was his fault that I killed him? Maybe I am saying that. But Sophie. Whose fault was what I just did to Sophie? The mother who ran from me, who couldn’t bear to look on the son who had killed her beloved genius. That is my own fault. Nobody else’s fault – just mine. Understandable, maybe. Or is it? Was that me, too, who took a hammer to France to smash in the skull of a woman whom adult me had never met? Is that understandable? And if it is, does that make it excusable? To kill a woman who has spared you death, who has spared you the truth? Because you are so obsessed with the father you hardly even knew? Is it genetic? Do I have a predisposition to kill? Have I passed it on to this son of mine?

This son. Train, stop playing Max and move faster, will you? Put Paris behind me and just move on, move on back to England, back to Ellie, back to Leo. I will not – please Sophie, please French police – I will not be the absent father that Max was. I will be there for you, Leo. I will do for you, well, I will do for you what I guess John tried to do for me. Give me stability. Give me normality. Give me ice-lollies from Sainsbury’s and stickers from the zoo. Be always, always there. Even though he always, always knew, that I was a little boy who killed fathers. And Gillian, too, she must have known. She must have wanted to protect me from this – from myself – for a lifetime. Even my own memory tried to protect me, finding ways to blame other people, not me. Would I have wanted to know? Would I rather never have followed hammers and water and pianos to where they led me? Would I rather the pretence had continued forever, that I would never have known about Max, about Sophie?

No. No. Because they are who I am. I am who I am. I am William, wife of Ellie, father (still, I hope) of Leo, adoptive son of Gillian and John, son of birth father Max who I killed, and of birth mother Sophie who I (may, I hope not) have killed. I am all these things. I have to move forward with that knowledge and just accept it. Accept it and focus on what I do have, for now, but have so nearly destroyed. A life with Ellie and Leo. They are key.

Because Ellie. Ellie protects more than anyone. Ellie, who found out my thoughts, my plans, I don’t know how, and phoned to warn me, to tell me. Ellie who hasn’t renounced me. Ellie who still wants me home to see Leo, despite what she knows I was doing. She will be a good mother, if when I arrive we still have a son. She will find out his secret desires without him knowing, and help him safely through. I can only hope those secret desires don’t include… Well, why would they? Like father, like son? Lesson number one of parenting: do not put hammers within easy reach. Lesson two: do not allow tantrums. Lesson three: do not allow either parent to be alone for too much time with the child. Lesson f— no. I can’t be paranoid about this. Can I? No. I must go to that hospital as an already talented father. I must return home with some fatherhood instinct in myself. I must put my child first at all times. I must not be frightened of its power over me, when it grows. I must just hope that it does.

Finally, the train is out of the tunnel and speeds on, on, on towards London. Sights that must have been there on the way out begin to appear. But I didn’t see them, then. I was going in a different direction, I suppose. Now, I see them fully. Not just for the first time on this journey, but for the first time in months. Where have I been? How have I missed the birth of my first child? I begin to cry. I don’t care who sees me, who hears me. Apart from Ellie. She will not see any of this when I arrive. I will be strong, I will be protecting. I will be what I have not been since the day I found out I was adopted. The last two months of her pregnancy, I have been elsewhere. My own private made-up world of blame, of anger, of resentment. Following the false trail of a type of fatherhood that never existed. But I must find my own fatherhood now. That nursery, I will need to repaint it. Or else, I will need to let the zebra become zebra again, not walking pianos. The piano itself, my old new best friend, I will try to think of as a commodity, learning from Sophie. And I will sell it, to pay for Leo’s – well, whatever it is that small babies need. I haven’t even read any parenting books, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know what they need, what to do! Apart from that you have to be present. Always present, and always noticing things, them, what they do. For self-preservation as much an anything.