From the Cradle (35 page)

Chapter 44
Helen – Day 7

Helen pushed open the heavy revolving door leading into Grant’s Hotel. Even before the door had finished the half-revolution necessary to spin her into the interior, she smelled the difference in the air inside: lilies, furniture polish, wood panelling, expensive luggage. This was the hotel where she came to the gym, but she hadn’t stayed in a hotel like this for quite a while. It reminded her of her old, pre-Frankie life, of romantic weekends away with Sean in exotic European capital cities, enormous king-sized beds with nothing comprehensible on the wall-mounted TV except Sky News, going to sleep sated with sex and the monotone lullaby of the air-
conditioning
. Although she wouldn’t want to do it again, not without Frankie. When they got her back, Helen thought, she would book another of those weekends, and this time they’d take Frankie with them. Vienna, perhaps, or Madrid. It could be just as romantic as when they’d first courted. More so.

Helen sat down on a vast square chocolate-brown suede sofa near the hotel lift. Its seats were too deep for her to be able to lean against the back of it, not without her legs sticking straight ahead of her like a child’s. So she perched on the edge and waited, her palms flat on her knees to try and stop them trembling. She was five minutes early, and still not entirely sure why she was there.

That moment, up in the attic, when she had found the
photographs
. . . it had been unreal. Like she had suddenly developed Alzheimer’s or something – just utter, total
incomprehension
.

She had climbed gingerly across the exposed beams of the loft, yellow loft insulation covering the floor between the beams like mashed potato on a pie – boarding it up had been on Sean’s To Do list for years now – over to the box of Frankie’s paintings that Sean had chucked to the back of the attic next to a baby car seat and another box containing her wedding dress. The boxes bobbed about on the sea of insulation like cargo out of a
sinking shi
p.

She’d crouched down on her haunches and opened the box, flicking through them all, but nothing else had leaped out at her, no more ‘naps’, no more faces peering through windows.

She had been folding the flaps of the box back in, and about to swing her legs through the loft hatch to descend the ladder again, when the corner of something unfamiliar had caught her eye. It was a photograph album, one she didn’t recognize, almost completely hidden by the insulation. She pulled it out and opened it up
curiously
– and thought she was about to have a heart attack.

Sean had always told her that he’d got rid of all the photos of his ex-wife Penny after she died, that it was ‘just too painful’ to keep them. Of course it was possible that he had overlooked this one album, had forgotten he’d stuffed it under the insulation, perhaps to spare Alice from hurt – although no, that was bollocks. Helen herself had heard Alice expressing sorrow to Sean that she didn’t even have any photographs of her mum, and Sean
apologising
.

No, what was absolutely, blood-drainingly even more inexplicable than the continuing existence of this album of pictures of Sean and a woman who, at the age she was in the photos, bore a startling resemblance to Helen herself, laughing and kissing and then, later, holding the bundle that was baby Alice – was that Sean’s supposedly dead wife was her own friend, Marion. The woman she’d trained and chatted with at the gym, the woman she’d almost confided in about her sex life. She’d only known ‘Marion’ for a few months, but had quickly come to think of her as one of her be
st friends.

What a
mug.

Helen had sat in the stuffy yellow heat of the loft for half an hour, her breathing shallow as though the insulation was asbestos, choking her, gazing at the photographs.

Could she be wrong?

No. It was definitely Marion. What the fuck was going on? Did Sean know she was still alive? Did
Alice?
Maybe that’s where Alice had disappeared to. Helen remembered how Marion had once acted oddly when Helen told her Sean was picking her up from the gym, how she had suddenly announced that, instead of leaving, she was going to try out the sauna. It had suited Helen to have a friend who didn’t know her husband, but on any occasion when the two of them could have encountered each other, Marion had made he
rself scarce.

It also explained how Marion’s Facebook profile was so
minimalist
– no photos, very little background, hardly any friends. Marion had called herself a Luddite and a technophobe, and claimed she only joined Facebook so that she could communicate with her brother in Africa . . . a brother who probably didn’t ev
en exist.

It seemed inconceivable, but it was true: Marion was her
husband’s
first wife. Alice’s
mother
. And yet she hadn’t seemed particularly interested in talking about Alice with her, or expressed any interest in seeing her. She’d encouraged Helen in her moaning about how awful teenagers were. She’d been far more interested in Frankie, cooing over photos on her phone and asking lots of
questions
.

Back in the hotel, Helen sat for seven minutes, according to the big station clock on the wall across the lobby, her nerves increasing with each slow steady sweep of the big hand. What good would it do, to talk to Marion now – she tried to start thinking of her as Penny, but kept defaulting to Marion – with Frankie and Alice both missing? She bit her lip, and thought about leaving again, going home, to see if there was any news. Frankie was her only priority now. She pulled her phone out of her handbag to check it, but the screen was blank. Damn – she’d forgotten to charge it last night, yet again. Or rather, she’d plugged it in, but not noticed that the switch was off at the wall.

And yet she knew she wasn’t going to wimp out now. She couldn’t. There were questions she had to ask: why had Sean lied to her, and to Alice, all these years? Since Penny wasn’t dead, had they ever even got divorced? Was Sean a bigamist? When the registrar had asked he’d said he’d never been married before, and they hadn’t checked up. Helen twisted her wedding ring around her finger and gulped. If Sean could lie to her about something this important, what else was he hiding? She had to talk to Penny, or Marion, or whatever she was called now, to get the facts before
confronting Sean.

As soon as she’d come out of the attic the night before, she’d checked to see what Sean was doing. As she suspected, he was passed out on the sofa. She had stared at him like he was a stranger. Then she’d gone to the computer and sent Marion a message telling her she knew who she was.

She’d sat at the computer until the early hours, awaiting a reply, but none came. But when she’d got up this morning and checked Facebook, there it was, a reply, just a single line asking Helen to meet her here at the hotel.

She was brought out of her reverie by a strange popping sound from somewhere in the building, then sudden movement caught her eye across the lobby. The fixed door to the left of the revolving door was flung open with a bang, and two dark-suited security guards ran, fast, across the lobby, shouting into walkie-talkies. One disappeared straight up the stairs. Everyone’s heads shot up, including Helen’s. The other guard ran over to the reception desk and spoke quietly and urgently to the two receptionists, who both clapped their hands across their mouths in horror. One of them immediately got on the phone, a plump young woman in her early twenties. Helen could see her trying not to cry as she forced the words out. Helen lip-read ‘police’ and ‘gun’ a
nd ‘Grant’s’.

A short bald man who had been standing at the reception desk with a large suitcase next to him, presumably a guest checking in, walked towards her, his eyes wide with shock. Helen jumped up off her sofa and approached him. ‘Excuse me. What’s going on? What did he say?’ She gestured towards the security guard, who had followed his colleague up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

The man leaned towards her as though telling her a secret. ‘Awful. Someone’s got a gun . . . top floor . . . The roof . . . There’s been a shooting. Police are on their way . . .’

Somehow, Helen knew what he was going to say next before he said it. And she wondered, before he’d said it, how she could have been so stupid as to not make the connection before, when she was sitting in the loft like a bird on an empty nest, staring at those
photos
and wondering why Penny had come back.

Now she knew why Penny had come back, and why she’d wanted to meet her at the hotel. Why she always asked about Frankie.

‘. . . it’s a woman. And she’s got a little girl with—’

Helen had run for the stairs too, before the man had even finished the sentence.

‘Come on Frankie,’ I say. ‘Time to wake up.’

Her eyes flicker open for a moment, before she closes them again and tries to slip back into the sleep, the tranquillizer that I emptied into her bedtime drink heavy in her blood. Warm milk with sugar – the same drink Mum always gave me before I went to sleep. My adoptive mother, that is. Not the jackal who gave birth to me.

‘Frankie. Wake up . . .’

She stirs, opens her eyes, looks confused, probably wondering why we’re outside, why the sky is so close.

I lift her onto the bench, stroke her hair. She’s so pretty. She looks so much like Alice when she was three, frozen in time, as if she was waiting for me to return. It’s as if my Alice is here. Three years old. Exactly as I left her. She never turned into the scowling, slutty teenager I’ve seen coming and going from Sean’s house.

‘What are we doing?’ little Frankie asks, looking around. ‘I want Mummy.’

‘I’m your new mummy.’ I try to hug her but she beats at me with her little fists, catches me in the tit, making me gasp. I raise a hand to slap her but restrain myself.

‘We’re waiting,’ I say.

‘What for?’

I could tell her we’re waiting to say goodbye. But I really don’t want to see her cry again. So I sit beside her and think about the past, letting my life flash before my eyes in a way I can control. Starting with The Mistake.

The Mistake changed my life. Reeling from the truth about who I really was, about everything, I fled. I erased myself – the only thing I could do, scorching the earth upon which I stood.

I travelled to the other side of the world, to a nondescript suburb of Brisbane, Australia, where I set about living the most nondescript life possible. I changed my name to Marion, I met a nice man called
Howard
, who was thirty years older than me, with enough money to compensate for his tubby gut and stubby dick. I told him I was an orphan, that I had no family, that I was all alone in the world. He liked that. He wanted to be my world. Like most men, he had Handsome Prince syndrome.

We got married. Nobody asked about my past, so I didn’t tell them. We moved into his house. It had a pool in its big garden, a succession of state-of-the-art barbecues and, not having to work, I passed a decade swimming and sunbathing, stoned out of my mind on anti-depressants and cannabis, staring at the flat blue surface of the pool, day after day, nothing to do except suck Howard’s stubby dick at night, until it stopped working properly, and prepare meaty dishes for him and open his beer.

I forced Alice and Sean from my mind. Did everything I could to forget they existed.

The only thing I wanted was a baby. But I couldn’t get pregnant, no matter how hard we tried. Later, Howard blamed his impotence on my constant nagging desperation. Later still, I went out looking for young studs in local bars. One afternoon, Howard came home to find me riding a twenty-year-old called Chesney, trying to fill myself with his sperm. I continued to fuck young Chesney even as Howard writhed on the floor, the heart attack killing him right there in our bedroom while Chesney tried to get out from under me.

I still wasn’t pregnant.

With Howard’s money – some of which I had to give to Chesney to keep him quiet about the circumstances of Howard’s death, in case his family tried to contest his will – I was able to pay privately for IVF. But it didn’t work. After the third attempt the doctors told me I needed to accept it, that I should get on with my life, which could be rich and fulfilling without children.

I went home, stocking up on booze from the supermarket and pills and weed from my dealer on the way.

Six weeks later, I awoke from my solo bender on the patio beside the pool. I was naked. My inner thighs were bruised and there was blood in my hair. The booze and drugs had run out. I couldn’t remember the last six weeks at all, just fragmented snapshots of flesh and water and the taste of bourbon and weed.