His Kidnapper's Shoes (3 page)

‘Why does she drink so much?’ I remember asking you once, desperate to dig beneath the surface of the enigma that was my mother.

You sighed, at a loss to find the words to explain the truth to the unworldly eight-year-old who you loved. You were right; I was too young to understand the ugly reality of what had happened nearly ten years ago. I needed to be older and a lot wiser before I truly grasped the reason why Mum drank the way she did.

Sadness darkened your expression. You chose your words with care. ‘Sometimes, Laura, men can appear nice on the surface, even when they’re not. Especially when they want something from a pretty girl.’

‘Like what?’ I had no idea what you meant.

You didn’t answer directly. ‘Your mum was beautiful when she was younger. Too beautiful, Laura.’ Anger seeped into your voice. ‘She ended up attracting attention from a group of men, the type of men who aren’t so nice on the inside. She didn’t want to give them what they wanted, so they took it anyway.’

I had no concept of sex back then. I nodded, pretending I understood.

‘They hurt her so badly.’ Something in your expression told me you hadn’t meant to say that in front of me. You said she’d needed to go to the hospital; she’d begun drinking heavily as soon as she got out.

‘You see, Laura, my love, when your mum drinks, she’s able to forget what those men did; for a short while, the world becomes a better place for her.’

I nodded again. That part wasn’t difficult to understand.

‘Your mother was never the same afterwards, sweetheart. Although she didn’t want to let those men have what they were after, when she came home from the hospital, she started to give it to anybody who did. It can happen when women don’t think much of themselves.’

You told me how you tried to talk with her, but you two were never close and she’d already built a wall, high and impenetrable, around herself. Then she got pregnant by one of several possible men and nine months later, I arrived; for a while, my mother seemed to get better. She took care of me, stopped buying the wine and you hoped, really hoped, she would be all right.

Slowly, though, she slipped back into that dark place where only a bottle of cheap red could make her forget and then you knew she’d never get over what had happened to her.

By the time I turned twelve, I had you to be concerned about as well. I ignored the signs at first; how thin you’d become, how tired and frail. So long as I didn’t ask you, I reasoned, I wouldn’t hear the words I dreaded. You, being ever practical, didn’t let me get away with the head in the sand approach. You sat me down one day, doing your best to explain your illness so I wouldn’t get too upset. I was a young twelve, after all, still unworldly.

‘Laura, my darling.’ Your voice, calm as ever, contrasted with the words to come. ‘I know you’ve been fretting about me, my love, but there’s no need. There’s a lump growing inside me, something nasty that has no business being there. You mustn’t worry, though. Those clever doctors at the hospital are going to operate to remove it and then everything will be fine.’

I didn’t speak, too choked with terror. As ever, you were quick to reassure me.

‘Don’t fret, my love. I’ll need a course of treatment afterwards and then you’ll have your old Gran back, good as new.’

My twelve-year-old self sensed your need to comfort me was being sparing with the truth but I clung stubbornly to what you’d said, unwilling to let myself believe you could be wrong. I convinced myself the doctors would make you better, just as you promised.

I’d visit you as often as I could, both when you were in hospital and when you came home; it was a long time before I believed you might get better. There were days when you hardly had the energy to talk, when your skin was as dry and dough-like as my mother’s was, and your trademark batik blouses hung on you like curtains. Some days I’d visit and not be able to go again for a few days because I couldn’t bear to see you so pale and exhausted.

You were ill for a long time, Gran. During that time, Mum got much worse. I think she had come to rely on you being there to help and suddenly you weren’t. You were too sick and you needed to put yourself first. Although the two of you had never been close – that skipped a generation – I think she was terrified of losing you, her only living relative besides me. She drew comfort from the only source she knew – a wine bottle. Her drinking got even heavier and she started to pass out earlier and more frequently from the drink.

Soon it became harder for her to wake up in the mornings, or to wash and dress. Some days she didn’t manage it at all and she’d lie there on the sofa, either sleeping or drinking more wine. Guilt stabbed me on those days if they happened to be a school day and I had to leave her, but the truth was, Gran, I needed to get out of the house. I had to distance myself from her wine-pickled breath and the empty bottles, from her open-mouthed snoring and the sight of her skirt riding up her mottled legs. I wanted to go to school, to be with normal people and to forget for a few hours that I had a hopeless drunk for a mother.

Inevitably, she ended up being fired from her job and things started to get seriously bad, Gran. There was no food in the house and I remember rummaging through drawers trying to find money to buy groceries. I ate at your house as often as I could and I’m not ashamed to say I took money from Mum's purse as well. I did my best with the food, but the bills were another matter and soon angry letters started arriving, threatening court action and I grew scared, Gran. The phone had been cut off a long time ago but we still received letters demanding the arrears on the account. We had bills from the electricity and gas companies and Mum owed a couple of months’ rent as well.

I thought again about asking you for money but I couldn't, Gran. You needed to concentrate on getting well. Besides, I knew you didn’t have a great deal of money. You had enough to cope with and I wanted to sort it myself, to make you proud of me.

In the end, I couldn’t handle things any longer. I had no idea that day, seemingly the same as any other, would be the one where the pressure got too much for me. Mrs Davis, the maths teacher, asked me a question in class. I didn’t know the answer because I hadn’t been listening. I’d not eaten any breakfast and the urgent need to put food in my stomach, the growling pit at the centre of me, seemed a more desperate issue than solving algebraic equations. Tears pricked the backs of my eyes and suddenly I found myself crying. I didn’t care about the entire class witnessing my meltdown, or the fact I had no tissue and used my sleeve to wipe away the snot and the tears. I didn’t worry about the horrible sounds I was making. All I cared about was the hollow in my stomach and the overwhelming need to let go of the urge to be strong all the time.

I cried for my mother, for the torment she so desperately wanted to blot out and which even my birth hadn’t been able to diminish. I cried for you, Gran, for your loss of zest for life, for your pale unhealthy skin and dull eyes. But most of all I cried for myself, for the exhausted and hungry fourteen-year-old who didn’t have a life like her classmates, for the girl who had to stop her mother vomiting in her sleep and who stole from her purse to buy food. I wanted, more than anything, to crawl into bed, sleep for a week and wake up to find food in the house and Mum sober. Things had always been all right after the terror of a nightmare as a child. This time, I couldn’t wake up.

I‘m not sure what happened after that; it’s all a bit of a blur. Social workers came to the house. They looked at Mum, lying soused on the sofa. They saw her red-veined eyes, the raddled face, the empty wine bottles. They asked to read the threatening letters and I showed them. They fired off searching questions about what we ate and I told them there was no money for food.

‘Any other relatives?’ one of them, all brisk efficiency, asked.

‘Only my grandmother.’ The need to protect you whilst you were so ill battled with my longing to run to you, to seek comfort from you. ‘But she’s sick. Really unwell.’ I told them about your illness, how you were the best Gran in the world but you had to look after yourself and you couldn’t cope with me as well as with getting better. The two social workers exchanged glances.

‘If she goes to live with her grandmother, she’ll still be the carer. She’d merely be swapping a drunken woman for a sick one,’ said Brisk Efficiency.

The earnest people from Social Services had to find something to do with me, the solution being foster care. I ended up in a family placement. My foster parents meant well but I couldn't connect with them in any way. I’d never known real family life; their house always seemed too noisy, to have too many people, what with three children and relatives always visiting. I felt the weight of their kindness oppressing me; their apple-pie family life only served to thrust in my face what I’d never had, mocking me.

I visited Mum as often as I could bear. I’d go after school and most of the time she didn't even realise I’d arrived, being too drunk to notice me. The house, always a grimy mess, smelled foul and the bills were still piling up. It could only be a matter of time before the landlord evicted Mum. I thought about the homeless drunks, filthy and apathetic, who lived in tattered cardboard boxes under the flyover nearby. I was sure she’d end up like that if he threw her out and in a way, it didn’t matter. It would be one step closer to the final oblivion she craved.

It never came to that, Gran, as you know. At a time when you needed to concentrate on yourself, and when I should have been a carefree teenager, we lost the woman who had always been between us from a generational point of view. Now I didn’t live with her, nobody was around to make sure she didn’t vomit the alcohol back up and one night, she did, and choked on it. She lay there for a couple of days until the landlord came round and forced the lock. He’d hoped to collect the rent but instead found Mum’s dead body, dried vomit pooled on the carpet and in her lungs. She was thirty-four years old and when I last saw her alive, she looked fifty.

‘She finally has the peace she yearned for, Laura.’ Your comment echoed my thoughts, relief that her suffering had ended soothing my grief.

By then, I’d accepted I’d have to make the best of foster care. I tried to integrate more with my foster family, choosing to stay with them once I turned sixteen rather than try a supported living scheme. I saw you whenever I could, Gran. You were getting stronger and more like your old self, but, oh, so slowly. And when I saw you smile and tell me how glad you were I was happy and settled, with a good family to take care of me, it got a little easier for me. I’d have done anything not to give you extra worry.

Then I turned seventeen and met Matthew Hancock.

4

MAKE ME SCREAM TONIGHT

Maybe he’d have done things differently, given the gift of hindsight and the ability to wind back the clock, thought Daniel. Three weeks ago, he’d started to think things could turn out good for him at last, that he could forge a new life for himself, outrun his demons. Back then, the plain white envelope confirming his total lack of shared DNA with the woman who called herself his mother hadn’t arrived. Three weeks ago his life, and his bed, had had Katie Trebasco in it. Go back then and he’d been getting ready for a date with her, the hotter than hot piece of sex on legs who had his head – and cock – wound so tight he couldn’t think of much else.

‘You going out with your new woman tonight, Dan?’

‘Yep. Checking out a Thai restaurant we’ve had recommended to us. Katie wants to try gai pad prik. Normally, with her, she’d be talking about the Thai equivalent of the Kama Sutra, but this time it’s food she’s after.’

‘Jeez, mate. You’ve got me worried here. Who are you and what did you do with the real Dan? What’s been your limit before this – about three dates before you bail out?’

‘Sounds about right. What’s more, I’m not even considering bailing out. I can tell you’re impressed.’

‘Gobsmacked, more like. Talk to me, Dan. You’ve been with this Katie longer than you’ve ever been with anyone else and I’ve not heard you mention another woman since you started dating her. What’s so special about this one?’

‘Can’t put my finger on it. She’s not my usual type at all.’

‘You have a type? I thought you’d go for anything female and breathing.’

‘Ha, ha, you’re such a comedian. I’m not sure what it is about her. It’s not just that she has a brain between her ears unlike the gorgeous but not quite Mensa material I usually date. It’s more than the fact she’s pretty damn good in the sack…’

‘Whoa! Spare me the details.’

‘Sorry. I forgot how prudish you are about sex. The thing is - I simply don’t want to get laid anymore with some woman who may be hot as hell but whose name I can’t remember in the morning.’

‘Sheesh. You’ve got it bad for this Katie.’

Talk about an understatement. He’d started to think he was falling in love with her. They’d met when she came into the shop cum art gallery he managed and started browsing through the Balinese sculptures. He’d given her the once over, as he did with any decent-looking woman under forty. She definitely passed muster all right. Oh, yes. It was more than simple sexual attraction, though. Something about her seemed familiar, and yet if they’d ever met before he knew he’d have remembered her.

His first thought had been that she was one classy piece of ass. She was unusually tall, a shade under six feet, and sported glossy brunette hair reaching just below her shoulders, clipped to one side with a silver barrette. She teamed it with a mouth too wide for conventional beauty but which sat exactly right with her melted-chocolate eyes and longish nose. She was dressed in skin-tight jeans and a plain white man’s shirt, pulled into a tight knot above the waistband, simple but stylish at the same time. Her accessories were what gave her look an unusual twist. Large hoop earrings strung with blue and black beads; thick silver and turquoise bangles around both wrists; a chunky buckle on her belt. She’d taken the cowgirl next door look, added a touch of Eastern spice, thrown in a dollop of pure Katie, and created a wet dream on legs. They’d gone out that night, ended up having smoking-hot sex, and Daniel had been hooked ever since.