Motherlove (5 page)

She stood, equally rigid. ‘I did not.'

‘1990. It was you? The papers—'

‘The papers got it wrong.'

‘I know!'

It wasn't what she was expecting. Mostly, when she was recognised, her accosters said, ‘Liar! You murdered her. We know the truth.'

She waited, her fingers twisting the key back and forth, something to concentrate on.

The girl lifted her arms, not to strike, but to reach out. ‘I'm her! I'm your daughter. I was the stolen baby.'

Such insane eagerness. Of course, now it made sense. It was another of those deranged fantasists, or the heartless con artists. Every so often they popped up. She had given up trying to fathom why. Mad fixation, or some idea of wringing money out of her, or maybe just a hope of notoriety. Once, years ago, she'd have felt a wild lurch of hope, a racing pulse and a catch in her throat as she stupidly dared to believe. Now she knew better.

‘No.' She spoke coldly, tired of the situation already. ‘You are not my daughter.'

‘But I am!'

The girl came forward, crowding in on her, as she fumbled and finally succeeded in opening the door. ‘Get away from me. I know you're not my daughter, you understand? I know. I don't know what sort of freak you are and I don't care. Just go away.'

Mrs Parish shut the door in the girl's face. Through the panels, she could hear her, voice raised almost to a scream.

‘Why? How can you know? Because you lied? Was that it? I wasn't snatched, you really tried to kill me.' She was thumping on the door. Would the lock hold? ‘It didn't work! I didn't die!'

The hammering slowed, like a failing heartbeat. ‘I didn't die.'

Mrs Parish waited for the silence to settle. It would pass, this episode of insane misery. She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out cleaner and a scrubbing brush, then put the kettle on. When she was sure the mad girl had gone, she'd deal with the graffiti.

iv

Kelly

‘Just leave that for a moment,' said Kelly.

Roz laid the knife on the chopping board.

‘Doc wants us to try this,' said Kelly, holding the cotton bud ready. ‘A new way of testing blood sugar levels they want to check out. Might as well give it a go.'

‘If you think so,' said Roz with comfortable unconcern, opening her mouth to let Kelly swab the inside of her cheek. ‘It's all voodoo if you ask me.'

‘Quack experiments,' Kelly agreed, with a shrug. ‘But what the hell, if it keeps them happy.'

Keep everyone happy. Especially Roz, who trusted her implicitly. It was fine with her that her daughter was in charge. Control was something Roz had never been comfortable with.

Prompted by guilt, perhaps, Kelly's mind pictured her mother's face, thirteen years ago. A face so rigid with purpose that it had seemed to belong to a different person. Eight-year-old Kelly had been more disturbed by that look on her mother's face than by the cause of it. She could recall her mother treating the bruises on her cheek, but she could only vaguely recollect being hit.

She'd known that the shadow of violence lurked in the small terraced house in Milford Haven, although she had never witnessed it. She'd only seen her mother weeping occasionally, or dabbing make-up on a bruise. Until that day, Kelly had never been the recipient of Luke's drunken fists.

Luke Sheldon was a well-meaning man on good days. Even affectionate. Catch him in the right mood and there was nothing he liked better than to take Kelly to the swings, buy her ice creams, promise treats, everything a father was supposed to do. But when he drank there was no holding him. Everything irritated him and then the violence would begin.

Kelly, looking back, could understand her mother. Each time, afterwards, Luke would apologise, and each time Roz, incapable of contemplating a life alone, would accept his promise that it wouldn't happen again. But when he hit Kelly, then the tigress inside Roz woke. While Luke went raging back to the pub, she packed a few things, bundled Kelly into her coat and walked out for good.

It had only been a brief moment of decisiveness, but it had been enough to wash mother and daughter onto a new track, first to a battered wives' refuge, where someone had helped Roz find a job at a supermarket. A proper job, with regular hours, fixed pay days and National Insurance stamps. Something so normal that Roz had always believed it utterly beyond her.

Kelly knew that her mother, after walking out on her husband, had desperately longed to return to the safety of their commune days, before Luke; those gilded days when they had lived first in tepees on the hills, then in an old farmhouse, with Roger and Mandy and Bo and Tig and Pete and Ieuan and Gish and all the others. It had been a glorious time for Kelly, thriving in the messy crèche, and it had given Roz all the reassurance and support she'd needed.

Roz's yearning to recreate the magic of the commune had been their eventual salvation. The commune had kept animals; Roz would do the same. To begin with there were three chickens in the backyard of their new council house. Kelly took charge of them, selling the eggs. Roz had helped with the commune's herbal remedies, so she started brewing them again, and thanks to her daughter's brazen salesmanship, found herself supplying some of the more quirky local shops. She had practised yoga with Mandy; Kelly urged her to take a proper course. When the instructor retired, Kelly prompted her mother to volunteer as teacher. Kelly set her up as an aromatherapy consultant.

It all worked perfectly. The adolescent daughter advertised, booked halls, paid the bills and took the money, and Roz serenely held her classes and consultations. Finally, Kelly guided her, step by step, through all the complications of getting the lease on Carregwen. Roz Sheldon might never be able to own property, but she longed for a home, not just accommodation provided by the council. A patch of Planet Earth to make her complete.

Leaving Luke had paid off. And it had been for Kelly.

Kelly understood her mother better now. That fantastic suspicion planted by the nurses talking of mixed-up labels, explained Roz's anxieties. Roz had always nursed a paralysing fear of the ‘Authorities', the men in suits, the women with thin lips and sharp eyes who were waiting to take away the only thing that really mattered to her. Only when they were finally installed in Carregwen, with their herbs and hay, and their sheep, two goats, three ducks and a dozen hens, had Roz at last begun to believe that the State might not snatch Kelly away.

By then Kelly had been old enough to resist any snatching. A girl who knew her own mind, who could organise without being bossy, who could keep the peace without rolling over.

Roz had even offered to let go, urging Kelly to try for university as her teachers had wanted. Urging with most of her heart and soul, and the little part of her that had hung back had rejoiced in a very shamefaced way when Kelly refused.

Kelly wasn't ambitious. She wanted what she already had – liberty, food to eat, enough money for today, time for tomorrow, friends and lovers, and a home so lost in the hills that no one was ever going to bang on the wall and tell her to turn the music down. To appease her mother and teachers, she had gone to the local college and taken a course in marine biology, on the strength of which she now worked part-time with the National Park. Reasonable money by local standards, supplemented by work as a barmaid at the Mill and Tuppence, occasional demonstrations of willowcraft and help with a few boat trips in the summer. Why would she want more?

The problem was, she didn't want less either. She didn't want to lose her mother. Which was why she was determined to go to any lengths to sort this thing out. Solve once and for all this riddle of the switched labels.

Leaving her mother chopping parsley, she carried the precious swab up to her bedroom and slipped it into a plastic bag, pushing it, with the forms, under her bed. One down.

It was odd, considering how open and honest and forthright she was, that Kelly found it remarkably easy to lie.

v

Vicky

Nearly dinner time. Vicky had been out all day. Gillian breathed an explosive sigh of relief when she heard the door open. She'd been nursing the worry all afternoon that Vicky wouldn't come home at all. Now she had, and one good thing had come of her absence: it had given Gillian time to prepare. She was going to explain everything, put it right.

‘Vicky!' she called up, as her daughter was on the point of disappearing into her room.

Vicky looked down at her over the banister, her face a mask of loss and misery, and, worse than either, hatred. Gillian's stomach tightened.

‘Yes?' That cutting politeness.

‘Can you come down, please. I want to talk.'

Vicky paced down, slowly, till she was eye to eye with her mother. ‘You want to talk.'

‘I want to explain. About the adoption.'

‘Do you?'

‘Yes, I know I've left it far too late. I was wrong. I should have told you, years ago, from the start. I wasn't trying to deceive you. I was just waiting for the right time, and it was always, always the wrong time.'

‘I'm sure it must have been very difficult for you.'

‘I didn't want Gran to upset you.' The bitterness Gillian felt for her own mother burst out. ‘I didn't want her poisoning things, if I tried to explain!'

‘Joan has been poisoning things all my life. I don't recall you ever stopping her.'

‘I tried! I did try. I know things haven't been ideal.'

‘
Ideal
.'

‘If we could have afforded a place of our own, we'd have kept you right away from her. But we couldn't, and we had to make the best of things.'

‘Joan isn't the best, she's the worst. She's evil! And you. Everyone. You're all evil!'

All civility was forgotten now. Vicky was shaking as Gillian had never seen her shake. What had happened? The mention of adoption seemed to have triggered a tidal wave of resentment.

Vicky breathed deeply, each breath a shudder. Then she ran back up the stairs.

‘Vicky?'

The bedroom door slammed.

Gillian returned to the living room, sat down on the couch and rocked, her head in her hands. She wanted a cigarette. Never, in the last twenty-five years of abstinence, had she wanted a cigarette quite so much.

She should phone Terry at the garage. This was a family crisis, he should be here. But what was the point? Terry wouldn't know what to do. He had never understood any of it.

Tea. She needed tea and a Disprin. Put the kettle on, make a pot. Vicky must need one and it would be an excuse to speak to her.

She stirred the pot slowly, pushing tea bags round and round, when she heard Vicky's bedroom door open again. Gillian nerved herself and went to the hall.

Vicky was standing there, jacket on, suitcases at her feet, mobile phone in her hand, thumbing the keys.

‘Vicky? What are you doing?'

‘I'm going back to my digs in London.'

‘But you've only just got here. I thought you'd be here for a month.'

‘I can't stay here. Not with that evil bitch Joan. Not with any of you.'

‘I'll speak to Gran, I promise. I'll make her—'

‘You won't make her do anything. You'll curtsy round her like you always do. But she's not my Gran, just as you're not my mother, and I don't have to stay here anymore!'

Gillian floundered. This wasn't about adoption, this must be something more. She had to understand. ‘Please, Vicky, don't go. You can't go like this. Let's talk, please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we can talk it through.' She followed her out.

‘We had twenty-two years to talk it through. But you never talked. Just like you never listened and you never saw. Excuse me. I've got work to do. I need to concentrate. Goodbye.'

‘No, wait!' Gillian followed as Vicky dragged her suitcases along the street. ‘You don't want to go by bus. Your father will be home soon. If you really want to go back, Dad can give you a lift.' If she could keep her here, please God, another hour, two, surely she'd change her mind.

‘I'm fine with the bus.' Vicky was almost at the bus stop and already a bus was heaving into view over the brow of the hill, ready to sweep down Drover's Way and scoop her up.

‘Please, Vicky!'

‘Just go home, Mum.'

‘Come back with me, please.'

‘No. I need to get away, okay? Go home.' Vicky sounded so bitter.

The bus drew up and the doors hissed open.

‘I saw her.' She looked at Gillian just once, her face blank. ‘My real mother. I saw her.'

Hiss. Doors closed. Gillian was left standing.

Vicky found a seat. She sat, back rigid, hands gripping the handles of her bags as if she would snap them off.

All that she'd kept bottled up for the last five years was roaring around inside her, ripping her apart. ‘Get over it.' That was a phrase she'd adopted as her motto, cruel but intelligent. But it was a joke: she hadn't got over it at all. It had been waiting all this time to eat her up. Quiescent before, because there was nothing she could do, but now…