The Date: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist (16 page)

‘Thanks for helping me,’ I say again to James. My hands are pink and raw in the bitter morning air, stinging from the turps that is seeping into the cracks in my dry skin. I’d scrubbed at the door late last night, but ‘murderer’ had been sprayed in paint, not blood, and hot,
soapy water couldn’t wash it off.

After a restless, disturbed sleep I’d woken from a nightmare at 5 a.m., pyjamas drenched in sweat. I’d switched on my light to reassure myself blood wasn’t streaming down my walls, as it had in
The Amityville Horror
I watched last year through splayed fingers, Matt’s arm heavy and reassuring around my shoulders. I’d made a mug of hot chocolate and huddled
back under the duvet, Branwell at my feet, the photo of Mum on my lap. Her face my anchor in this unfamiliar world I’ve tumbled in to. I’d traced her features and tried to second-guess what she’d have thought of Dad’s letter. His release. Would she have forgiven him?

The period after he was arrested, or ‘went away’ as Mum called it, was difficult for us all. Mum wafted from room to room, clothes hanging from her ever-shrinking frame, the shadows under her eyes so pronounced it looked as though someone had punched her. The guilt I felt clogged my throat, burned behind my eyes and, little by little, I was disappearing inside
myself, until, one day, I might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben. He was only six and too little to understand what was going on, let alone express how he felt, but it was apparent from his behaviour that he was hurting just as much as we were. Rather than playing for hours, as he used to, building brightly-coloured Duplo towers, racing around the garden on his bike, short legs pumping,
stabilisers wobbling, he’d trail Mum or me around the house. Ollie the Owl scrunched in his tiny fingers, a fearful expression on his small, pale face. It was as if he was scared we would leave too. The sound of him whimpering at night floated down the landing and I’d lie quietly, waiting for the creak of Mum’s footsteps, but increasingly the house lay still and silent and it was me who’d comfort
Ben. Folding myself into his narrow racing car bed. Brushing his damp hair away from his forehead as he cried. I’d read the nonsense poem he loved. ‘The Owl and The Pussy-Cat’ and as he drifted off I’d whisper soothing words, sometimes speaking of nothing, sometimes pouring my heart out. Because despite trying to be strong for Mum – for Ben – I was aching for all I had lost and scared of what was
to come. It became our nightly ritual, these one-sided chats, and after Ben had fallen back into an uneasy sleep and his pillow was saturated with my tears I’d try to extricate myself from his room. Inching closer and closer to the door, all the while watching him for signs of stirring. Sometimes I wouldn’t make it back out onto the landing before his wailing sliced through the heavy night air but,
more and more, it was me he cried for, not Mum, and I was happy to pitch in. Do my bit. Thinking it was only temporary until Mum felt better. Stronger. I hadn’t known then, of course, that my childhood wasn’t on hold. Effectively, it was over. I hadn’t known then that the worst was yet to come.

Still undecided as to whether I should reply to Dad or not, first light had shimmered at the edge of my curtains, the black sky turning gloomy grey. Shaking myself out of my thoughts, I had slipped into a tracksuit and banged on James’s door, wanting something to clean away the graffiti.

But already we’ve been rubbing at the paint for forty-five minutes
as it dissolves painfully slowly, grateful for the tree shielding the house from prying eyes.

‘Sorry, I can’t help,’ Jules calls over the fence, dropping her keys into her bag. ‘Can’t be late for our grand reopening.’

‘Can you talk to Chrissy?’ I ask. ‘Find out why she’s ignoring me.’

‘We’re not kids, Ali. Can’t you ask her yourself?’ A note of irritation has crept into her
voice.

‘I will when I see her.’

Jules must catch the quiver in my voice because she sighs and tells me she’ll do what she can, before she waves goodbye.

‘I don’t think this is strong enough.’ James holds his cloth over the neck of the bottle and tips it upside down, before once more rubbing at the fading letters staining my front door. ‘I’ll nip to B&Q later, see what they’ve
got. But at least you can’t read what it says anymore.’

The scarlet accusation has transmuted into a pink smear but ‘MURDERER’ still doesn’t have to be sprayed across the white uPVC for me to see it. It’s carried in the sharp, frigid breeze; drummed by my heart that’s beating too fast.

Murderer
.

‘Hey.’ James lightly touches my shoulder, and I realise I’ve been staring vacantly
into space. ‘Don’t worry about it. It will have been some pissed-up tosser on his way home from the pub last night.’

‘What if it’s?…’ I trail off.

‘What if it’s what?’ James urges me to carry on.

‘What if it’s not some pissed-up tosser?’ But what I really want to say is: what if it’s true? Would he still be standing by my side then? Would anyone? But James doesn’t know about
the bloodied gloves, my damaged car and, although I’m desperate to confide in someone, my trust has splintered. The less people who know the better.

‘Coffee?’ James asks. I’m about to say no when he says: ‘I can hardly feel my hands anymore.’ Making him a hot drink is the least I can do. He’s been standing outside, on this viciously cold morning, for over an hour now and it acts as a reminder
that some people are genuine and kind.

We carry our drinks through to the lounge, Branwell close at James’s heels, and as we perch at either end of the sofa, an awkwardness settles around us that wasn’t there before. I can barely look at James, and he is stiff and uncomfortable in my company, not sprawled back on the cushions, the way he would have been before.

‘Who are the
photos of?’ he asks scanning the lounge.

‘My mum, Marsha.’ I watch as he crosses the room and studies her.

‘You can see the resemblance. You’ve her eyes. She’s beautiful too. Is it…’ He fumbles for words. ‘Is it different looking at a photo? Do you… you know?’

‘Know who she is? Yes. But not because it’s a photo, features are still jumbled in pictures. With prosopagnosia you
can sometimes recognise about one face in a thousand. For me, it’s Mum. I’m not likely to recognise anyone else but…’ I fumble for the right words as James sits back down, crosses his legs, more relaxed now we’re talking. ‘If there is only ever to be one face that makes sense to me, I’m glad it’s her.’

‘Because you love her more than anyone else?’

I think about this carefully before
I answer.

‘Because she’s not here anymore, I suppose.’

‘You never talk about her.’ It’s a statement, not a question.

‘No.’ A knot forms in my chest. I never talk about Dad either; and even though he’s been at the forefront of my mind since the letter, I’m definitely not telling James about
him
. ‘Fancy another drink?’

‘I’ll make them. You’re still supposed to be recuperating.
Shall I whip up some sandwiches for lunch?’

‘Please.’ I hold out my cup for James to take, and when he’s clattering around the kitchen I keep my gaze fixed on Mum. Remembering why I never speak of Dad, the knot tightens.

There was a period of adjustment for us all, living without Dad. ‘Children are resilient’ was an overused phrase muttered by Iris, our teachers, the kindly family therapist who kept referring to us as ‘victims’, spending every session kneading a tissue as though she was the one who might collapse into tears at any moment, and it was true, partly. We’d moved
to a new house, new school, used our new identities, tried to pretend we were a normal family. Ben bounced back, as though he were made of rubber; although, at home, he was still my shadow-me, and the relief on the faces of the professionals who, other than offering platitudes and too-bright smiles seemed at a loss to know how to help us, was clear. ‘You see? We told you!’ And I was brushed under
the carpet, along with the dust and the decomposing spider with stiff, stick legs, at twelve still a child but not quite. ‘If you act like a victim, people will treat you like a victim,’ Iris said, and I tried to be the girl I was before, but it was impossible. Mum wasn’t the same either, irritable and tearful. She seemed to forget Ben and I were there half the time and, far from time healing, she
seemed to be getting worse.

Life felt like the neon yellow spinning top Ben had with the zoo animals on, whizzing faster and faster until you could no longer see it clearly and were longing for it to stop. Mum wasn’t coping, increasingly tired, frequently waking in the night. The doctor prescribed antidepressants for stress but she stopped taking them when her headaches became frequent
and fierce. She’d press the heels of her hands against her temples as though trying to push the pain away. One night she pulled the tray from the grill with her oven-gloved hand and stabbed a fork into fishcakes with more force than was necessary. The clatter as the grill pan hit the kitchen floor caused my head to snap up from my homework.

‘Mum,’ I slid out of my chair, ‘have you burned
yourself?’

Mum dropped to her knees but made no move to clear up the mess. Instead, she lifted the bottom of her black-and-white butcher’s apron, buried her face in the fabric and cried uncontrollably, shaking off the hand I rested tentatively on her shoulder. Silently, I led Ben into the lounge and flicked on
Cartoon Network
for him. Back in the kitchen I helped Mum onto a chair, before
I carried the bucket, speared with a mop, from the utility room and swished warm citrus water over the golden breadcrumbs and flakes of fishy mashed potato. The kitchen was clean and tidy, but Mum was still in a state and so I scraped alphabet spaghetti into a plastic bowl and, while it spun circles in the microwave, I buttered toast and made a cup of Ribena. It was only when Ben was settled on
the sofa, his tea on a plastic tray on his lap, I could turn my attention once more to Mum. She was still crying, her face red and blotchy, her breath hiccupy gasps.

‘Mum?’ I crouched to her level, as she used to do when I was little, and I clasped her hands in mine. ‘Mum.’ But she was still sobbing. Lost to me. Everything spinning again, faster and faster; Ben’s top. Elephants into giraffes.
Rhinos into kangaroos. Nothing making sense. My socked feet slipped on the wet tiles as I turned and ran, skidding into the hall, snatching up the phone and jabbing numbers so forcefully the tip of my index finger stung.

‘Auntie Iris.’ Now it was me who was crying. Me who couldn’t catch my breath. ‘You have to come. Something’s wrong with Mum.’

And it was at that point my already
fragile world irrevocably transposed into something else.

Something worse.

‘Mum had motor neurone disease,’ I blurt out, as soon as James has one foot over the threshold and, as though shocked by letting the words escape, my throat constricts to grain-of-sand small and is just as dry.

‘Oh, Ali.’

James puts the tray down and kneels in front
of me, resting his hand on my knee. ‘How old were you?’

‘About twelve when it started.’ It’s hard to pinpoint the exact timeframe. For such a long time Mum’s odd behaviour was attributed to stress. It took almost a year to get a firm diagnosis and, during that time, MND was something her and Iris whispered about from behind closed doors but, unlike Ben, I was old enough to understand. To
google. On the school computer I’d read accounts of how bad it could be, how bad it would get, with a sense of rising panic. I’d fled the library, squeezed through the broken fence at the bottom of the sports field and pelted home, my satchel banging against my thigh as I ran straight into the kitchen, into the arms of Mum, where, for the first time since Dad was sentenced, I cried and cried and
allowed her to comfort me like the child I was but pretended not to be. Iris was in denial, even when Mum was finally diagnosed. I remember walking into the house that day sensing a change. The threads of the fabric holding our family together unravelling.

‘She’ll be fine. She’s a fighter,’ Iris had said, refusing to believe her younger sister would do anything but get better. But I knew.
I knew from the websites I’d read at school. I knew from the weighted feeling on my chest. Mum was going to die. Despite Iris’s denial, the way she always told Ben that Mum was ‘under the weather’ but she’d be fine, she moved in with us that same day; so I suppose on some level she must have accepted the inevitable.

‘So Ben was?’ James mentally calculates ‘Six?’

‘Yes.’ Too small
to understand why Mum gradually stopped taking him to the park, running around the garden.

‘He’s too young to be told, Marsha,’ Iris had said firmly when Mum suggested it was better to prepare him. but I think not only was Iris protecting Ben; she was, in her own way, trying to protect us all, Mum included, as though if Mum didn’t acknowledge her condition out loud, it wouldn’t be true.

‘And your dad? How did he cope?’

The pain in my heart is searing. ‘Three hot meals a day and nothing to worry about,’ Iris had scathed. But he had written ‘even now I can’t get my head around what happened to my darling Marsha’, and I think for the first time how hard it must have been for him, inside, feeling helpless, not knowing we were feeling just as helpless on the outside.
‘That is my biggest regret. That I wasn’t there for her. Part of me wants to ask if you blame me but it doesn’t really matter. I will always blame myself’, and I wonder if he knows we blamed him too. If perhaps he’d have welcomed the vitriol Iris spoke of him.

Once, we went to a support group, in a community room, in a medical centre where decay and depression seeped through the dank and
dreary walls. Open-mouthed we’d listened to numerous cases where MND had developed after a particularly stressful episode. ‘Of course you’d have to already be genetically predisposed,’ the chairman had said, ‘but many of us here believe that stress could be a contributing factor.’ We’d sat, mute with shock, unable to rip our eyes away from those in motorised wheelchairs, unable to move, speak, communicate,
learning about the vastly different experiences of the families there. The varying rates of progression of the disease which would ultimately rob us of our mother. Sometimes speech was the first to go. Sometimes movement. Sometimes the ability to swallow. Despite the brave face Mum tried to put on – her cup rattled so hard in its saucer, tea drenched her wrist – it had all sounded so hopeless.

‘Stress,’ Iris had muttered under her breath at the end of the evening when we gathered our belongings along with our blame and our hate for our father and swept out of the centre. ‘I knew it was his fault. I just knew it.’

‘That’s just a theory,’ Mum had said. ‘I don’t believe it. Don’t you either.’ She had squeezed my arm. I’d known Iris was being irrational but I ’d understood
why. It was hard to rage against a disease, against science, against God. Dad was a living, breathing person and it was easier to channel our frustration, our despair, our hurt onto him. I think it’s human nature to want someone to blame, because if we start to believe for a single second that there are circumstances out of our control, life becomes a brutal enemy rather than the gift it is.

At home, Iris had scrunched up the leaflets we’d been handed and tossed them in the bin. ‘We’ll never go back there,’ she had said. ‘We’re not like them. We’re not.’

But we were.

‘Dad was… He wasn’t around.’ Is the best that I can tell James.

‘I’m so sorry,’ James says. ‘About everything you’ve been through.’ I put my hand on his, and Branwell runs his rough tongue over
my fingers as though he too wants to offer his comfort, and we sit like that, quiet. Unmoving. Until a thick skin has formed on the top of the cooling coffee and the doorbell causes us both to break apart as though we’ve something to feel guilty for.

I meet his unfamiliar eyes.

As if he can sense my trepidation, James unpeels himself from the floor. ‘I’ll get it.’

My guilt
isn’t alleviated when I hear Matt’s voice in the hallway, the footsteps heading towards the lounge. I smooth down my hair, my top, as though I’ve something to hide.

‘It’s Matt,’ James says, something underlying in his tone I can’t identify. ‘I’d better go. Thanks for the coffee, Ali.’

He’s out the door before I can answer. We never did eat our sandwiches.

‘I brought
your car key back.’ Matt spins my key ring around his forefinger. ‘It’s all fixed. What’s happened to the front door?’

‘Dad wrote to Iris.’ The words slip from my tongue. It’s been so long since I talked about my parents, today I can’t seem to stop. ‘He wants to see me.’

‘How do you feel about that?’ Matt asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Not everyone leaves you because they want
to. Sometimes it’s because they have to.’ There’s a subtext to his words and the room is filled with the things he doesn’t say.

‘You should go.’ I stand. I can’t cope with this today. The toing. The froing. He inhales sharply, as if there’s something else he wants to say, but instead of encouraging him I walk towards the door, pull it open and welcome the rush of cool breeze against my
hot skin.

I’m still thinking about words left unsaid when the doorbell rings again. Matt’s changed his mind and scenarios whip through my mind. What he might say. How I might respond. I arrange my features into an expression of nonchalance as I open the door wide. The sight of the police uniforms before me causes reality to fall away, my fingers wrapping themselves around the doorframe
for support. All I can think about is Dad. I’m back at the theme park. Back in the Fun House. Clinging on to the handrail as we navigate the shifting floor. My left foot moving forward. My right backwards. Unable to coordinate my movements to do anything other than stand frozen with uncertainty. The safety of the solidity beneath my feet nothing but an illusion.

‘It’s okay,’ Dad had murmured
behind me. ‘I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.’ And his words had sounded as sweet and comforting as the sticky pink candyfloss we’d feasted on, nothing like the lie they were.

Now I feel the same sensation: of moving while standing still. Of falling.

The policeman’s lips form words I cannot, will not, listen to. ‘Justin Crawford?’ He had barked in the past. But that was another
time, another policeman, I think, although I can’t be sure. I’m transfixed by his sharp, white teeth. My stomach rolling. The excitement of crunching through hard toffee. The disappointment of the bland, white, apple I was left holding, on a stick. His eyebrows furrow as he speaks again but my ears are full of the past. Music almost deafening. Cher urging me to ‘Believe’; kids, shouting ‘hurry up’,
eager to climb through the revolving barrel. ‘You’re safe.’ Dad’s mouth against my ear. Mustard-and-onion hotdog breath against my cheek. ‘Let go.’ And I had. Scrambling through the rotating drum, whooshing down the slide, arms raised, screeching my delight. That sense of freedom.

Let go.

Now, I allow my fingers to uncurl.

‘Mrs Taylor, are you all right?’ I am asked, and I
give the answer I am expected to: yes. I take the ID handed to me and study it intently as though I would be able to discern a fake. As though I would be able to tell whether the face in front of me matches the one on the card. My hands are shaking violently, and I tell myself whatever Dad has done this time won’t affect me, but inside I am the same twelve-year-old girl watching her birthday cake
tumble to the floor, to be ground into the carpet by black-booted feet.

‘Mrs Taylor,’ says the policeman taking back his wallet and by the slight rise of his eyebrows I know he has noted my shaking hands. I stuff them into my pockets. ‘I’m PC Hunter and this is PC Willis.’ He gestures to the woman next to him, with a long, dark ponytail. ‘Is it okay if we come in and ask you a few questions?’

‘My dad isn’t here.’ There’s a break in my voice as I utter the words I perhaps should have said all those years ago but didn’t.

‘It’s you we want to speak to.’ He takes a step onto the doormat, and I feel the blood drain from my face.
You don’t want to go to the police, Ali. You’ve got blood on your hands. Perhaps the police will be coming for YOU
.
And I realise they are not here
for Dad, after all.

They are here for me.