The Nightmare Place (26 page)
Afterwards, I could never remember the call.
I have no idea why – whether the trauma of what I was undergoing pushed the memory into the same nightmare place where what happened to Jemima had gone, or if I was simply too woozy from the assault to take it in.
There is no transcript, but Jane has been interviewed, and I’ve been told how the conversation went, at least as far as she remembers it. Upon answering the phone, the first thing I said was:
He says to tell you that I’m going to die.
I said that over and over again, apparently, without any emotion in my voice at all.
He’s going to rape me, and he’s going to kill me.
He wants you to know that.
He wants me to tell you.
I don’t remember any of that. I’m glad there’s no recording of the phone call – that the conversation is gone now – because I’d hate to hear myself say those words. I do have one vague recollection, though, albeit more of a hint at a memory than an actual one: I was struggling to hear Jane while she was talking to me. Not because I was disorientated, but because it sounded like there were other people on the line. There were women talking over each other, all at the same time. I couldn’t make out their voices, as they were too far away, but sometimes they dovetailed with what Jane was saying, and sometimes they obscured it. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it hadn’t just been the two of us on that line. That we hadn’t been alone.
From her testimony, I know that Jane began panicking, and obviously had no idea what to say. She understood what she was listening to: that she was talking to a woman who was about to be murdered, that help was far away and wouldn’t reach me in time, and that there was nothing she could do about it. All those things were clear. For a few moments, she said, her head went blank.
But then the training kicked in. If she couldn’t do anything else, she told the police afterwards, she wanted to console me. So using her natural empathy, and without even thinking about it, she put herself in my position, and in that moment she regressed to her own abduction. She recalled exactly how she’d felt when Johnson had taken her, and everything that she’d seen, and suddenly she realised that there might a way she could help me after all.
So she blurted something out.
That’s the only bit of it I really remember.
Zoe, there’s a hammer under the bed.
She was confused, of course. A moment after she said, it, I realised she was thinking about
my
bedroom – that she must have seen the hammer when Adam Johnson abducted her and took her there, and presumed that that was where I was right now. There was no way she could know what Sharon Hendricks kept in her bedroom.
Even so, the urgency with which she said it was compelling.
I have suddenly remembered something important
was the tone,
and it’s vital that I tell you.
I sensed a thin, impossible web of connections, an interlacing of voices and history, and even if Jane couldn’t possibly know what she was saying, I still believed her.
Cooper had moved back over to the wall while I’d been on the phone, leaning against it with that vacant expression on his face. Now he unfolded his arms and walked back towards me.
I threw my phone at him as hard as I could. There wasn’t really time to aim, or even try to, but the distance between us was so short that I was bound to hit him somewhere. Some unconscious instinct took the projectile straight into his face.
‘Fuck!’
The contact was only solid enough to slow him for a moment, not to do any real damage. I scrambled backwards across the bed, turning as I went, knowing I had a second or two at most. As I did so, I caught sight of Sharon Hendricks, her back to me, and then I half fell off the far edge, my forearms landing hard on the carpet, blood pattering down from my nose, head full of stars and close to passing out.
Stay with us!
I pressed my chin to my chest and looked backwards under the bed.
It was there.
Not like mine at all. This hammer was a professional DIY tool, made of moulded black and yellow plastic.
I scrabbled for it, knocking the handle and setting it turning. My legs were still on the bed, though, and I felt Cooper’s hand encircle my ankle – and then he was dragging me backwards across it. My arms lifted off the floor, but I clung to the underside of the bed with one hand, concentrating on finding the hammer with the other. I couldn’t even see it now. It was just my fingers stroking at the carpet, searching, searching, and then closing around the plastic handle as my grip on the bed gave out and he hauled me back towards him.
I turned over as I went. The momentum took me to the far side of the bed, close to him, and once again I didn’t have time to aim: just punch up and out with the hammer as best I could. The head landed firmly, straight in his mouth, and I knew it was a solid blow from the way he jerked backwards, half falling away from me, hands flying to his face.
I felt a burst of exhilaration as I got to my feet, still unsteady but
shrieking
at him now. I don’t know if it was from desperation, or fear, or if it was an attempt to summon some last thread of strength, but it was there. And I was still shrieking as I stepped forward and swung the hammer as hard as I could into the side of his head.
For Miriam Field, it’s the waste ground.
It’s a real place, and it’s one she is forced to see every day, so to some extent she has become inured to it over the years. Miriam is a practical woman, after all – some say hard, even cold, as though she has no reason – and she knows deep down that it’s only a patch of ground. It is
where
the thing happened to Jemima, not
what
happened. On their daily walks, Miriam manages to close her mind to the latter – and of course, nothing lingers here. There are no ghosts. Perhaps that’s even sad in a way, because ghosts would imply an afterlife of a kind, and at least then there might be something for them both to look forward to.
She does dream about the place, though.
They are on their way back from the shops now, and it lies ahead of them. But first they must make their way through the small copse of trees where the attack occurred. The Edith Copse, they used to call it, although some of the locals remember and call it something else amongst themselves. For some reason, this part of the journey bothers Miriam less than the waste ground, maybe because the latter is the place where Jemima might have been stopped and saved.
Even so, she grips Jemima’s hand a little tighter.
‘Come on, love. Don’t hang around.’
Miriam speaks to her daughter in an abrupt, authoritative tone, and anyone overhearing it would think her harsh. But over the years, she has learned that it’s what Jemima responds to best. Cajoling rarely works. Her daughter needs firm direction in the same the way a three-year-old does, and she harbours any resentment at the abruptness for about as long.
Jemima is staring at the copse of trees, not with fear but curiosity, as though it is a harmless puzzle she can’t understand. At her mother’s words, though, she turns away from it, then keeps an awkward but eager pace along the footpath. It is heartbreaking for Miriam – it always is – but she doesn’t show it. Emotion is a luxury she can’t afford. This is just one more small sadness, and she stores it away out of sight with all the others.
Hard, even cold
, they say.
Harsh.
But, really, how could she not be? For the best part of two decades, her days have been regimented blocks of bathing, clothing, feeding. She washes Jemima’s hair and stubbornly applies make-up. There is this daily trip to the shop, and then the daytime television shows. The spooned food. The evening’s careful outing. Miriam still loves her daughter, but it is an existence they have now, not a life, and time is something to be survived, for no real reason other than to reach more time. When the two of them first moved here, all those years back, it was a blow, but it felt like there was still time ahead of them – that the separation and downsizing had just been the temporary dimming of a bulb that could be made to blaze again. It was astonishing to discover how much harder life could make it for you, with just one sudden, awful snap of its fingers.
As they reach the top of the embankment, the waste ground opening up ahead of them, Jemima is dragging back again.
‘
Come on
.’
Miriam gives her a harder pull, and then immediately feels bad. As much as she loves her daughter, it is sometimes difficult not to think of her as an object that won’t stay put – one that topples over however hard you try to balance it. But she remembers sitting with Jemima in the hospital, begging her to survive those terrible injuries, to come back to her no matter what, and it’s hardly fair to blame her now for having listened.
‘Come on.’
She says it more softly this time, and even turns and gives her daughter a smile.
I love you. I love you still. More every day, in my own way.
But there is no sign on Jemima’s face that she has registered the impatience, or the repentance. She registers so little. More heartbreak, then – and again, Miriam stores it away with the rest. The place it all goes to must be infinite in size. It contains the enormous thing that happened to Jemima behind them, and then a thousand tiny moments from every day since. Every time someone has done a double-take at her daughter’s beautiful, ruined face, or made fun of her. The pebbles they sometimes throw at the windows late on. The wrestling and the hardship. The fact that after all this time, they are
still here
…
Enough.
With the bag of shopping in one hand and Jemima’s hand grasped firmly in the other, Miriam begins walking across the waste ground.
‘Come on, love.’
In reality, it’s only a place, of course. Just dust and rubble. Bleak and dirty, yes, but given time and opportunity, even the most bereft of spots can acquire a kind of beauty. Some evenings, Miriam has watched the setting sun split its colours through the copse of trees behind her, and now she sees it rising in front of them, making it easy to imagine that the estate ahead is ablaze in the morning light. If only.
They’re about halfway across when it happens.
Jemima stops suddenly, the jolt from it hurting Miriam’s arm. She turns to look at her daughter, who is staring vacantly at the estate ahead of them.
Oh God
.
Because this has happened before.
‘Jemima?’ she says, but as always in these circumstances, her daughter doesn’t respond. The concentration on her face is fierce but utterly still. It is like looking at a photograph.
Then, without warning, Jemima starts moving again, much faster than before, and quicker than Miriam is used to. Her daughter overtakes her, and then Jemima is the one urging
her
on for a change.
‘Hold on, love. You know I can’t go that fast.’
Miriam struggles to keep up. More heartbreak. The first time this happened, she thought a memory must have surfaced, and that Jemima was fleeing the trees behind them. But when they reached the estate, she saw that the smile on her daughter’s face contained a trace of joy, albeit one that faded quickly, and she understood. A memory had surfaced, but not an unpleasant one. Jemima’s body wouldn’t obey her properly any more, but a part of her had remembered what it used to be capable of, and her daughter had been trying to run.
Hold on, love
.
She doesn’t say it, though. It’s heartbreaking, yes, but the smile always lasts at least a few seconds. It’s sad when it goes, not when it’s there. Let her run.
As they stutter awkwardly across, Miriam looks towards the estate and sees that someone is standing there, silhouetted against the orange glow behind. They draw nearer, Jemima still leading her, and Miriam sees that the figure is a woman, dressed in jeans and a short black leather jacket. She is in her early thirties, with long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, and her face is disfigured. Certainly not as badly as Jemima’s, but obviously more recently. One of her eyes is bruised, and her nose has tape over the bridge. As they reach her, Miriam notices more bruising around one corner of her mouth. Whoever the woman is, she has been in a serious fight.
And she is clearly waiting for them.
They come to a halt close to her, and the woman stares at Jemima’s face with an expression Miriam finds hard to read. For a moment she feels indignant and protective, because even though her daughter is unaware of her appearance, strangers can be rude and mean, and she does pick up on that. But this woman’s own face doesn’t contain a trace of pity or disgust. Jemima, for her part, is looking off into the middle distance, oblivious to everything. The faint smile fades slowly from her face.
Miriam lets go of her daughter’s hand and takes a step forward.
‘Can I help you?’
‘No.’ The woman, who is still staring, shakes her head, then turns to look at Miriam instead. ‘I’m sorry. I tried your house first, but obviously you were out. So I came here on the off chance.’
‘You tried our house?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ She takes out her wallet and shows Miriam a badge of some kind. ‘Detective Inspector Zoe Dolan.’
The name means nothing to her, but the title generates a thrill of panic, and she starts to run through a short mental list of relatives, friends, acquaintances …
‘What’s happened?’
The woman – Zoe – puts her identification away.
‘Nothing. I didn’t mean to alarm you.’
‘Then …?’
‘I went to school with your daughter.’ She turns back to Jemima and smiles at her. ‘Hello, Jem. Do you remember me? It’s Zoe.’
Jemima doesn’t say anything, but it’s strange, because she also doesn’t react the way she often does towards strangers. When she’s approached like this, she will usually turn to Miriam and almost press herself against her, the way a shy child might. Now, she doesn’t respond at all, which is the way she acts around people she’s more comfortable with. The silence pans out.
‘Jemima doesn’t talk much,’ Miriam says.
‘No.’
She says it plainly: a statement of fact. Clearly, she knows what happened to Jemima, and the way she is looking at her makes more sense now. She is a policewoman, so she wouldn’t be fazed by the sight of such extensive injuries, but she also went to school with her, before the attack, so she is searching for traces of the girl she once knew, and perhaps wondering how much of that girl is left.
Miriam is about to say something, but she’s distracted by a sudden burst of laughter a short distance away, and she turns to see three young boys on bicycles. They’re a familiar enough sight, and her heart sinks a little. Every few days she sees them, untethered and roaming the estate, and it’s always the same. If it’s not these ones that throw stones at their house, it’s others like them. Right now, two of them are laughing while the third is clawing at his face, pulling the bottoms of his eyes right down and making grunting noises.
Miriam stares blankly back at them, putting this moment away with all the others. There is nothing she can do about it. She wishes she could make them both invisible, that they could get from place to place without being noticed, but that isn’t—
And then she realises that Zoe is walking slowly and steadily towards the children. They fall silent as she approaches, but of course they don’t ride away. When she reaches them, she crouches down beside the nearest and begins talking quietly to him. They are far enough away that Miriam can’t hear what is being said, but she sees Zoe gesturing behind her, and then angrily to her own injured face. A moment later, she leans in a little closer, pulling the bicycle at an angle, and whispers something to the boy with such ferocity that for a moment Miriam actually feels scared for him.
Zoe nods and stands back up again, then looks down at the children, who don’t look back at her. A few seconds later, the three of them cycle away, and Zoe stares after them until they are gone. Then she walks back over.
‘Just children,’ Miriam says sadly.
‘It happens a lot?’
She nods, although there doesn’t seem any real point in answering. It happens a lot. But there are a large number of painful things that happen a lot.
‘Yes. We used to call the police, but they said there’s nothing they can do. Just children.’
Zoe looks at her for a moment, and then at the estate itself. Finally she turns back to Jemima. If her daughter has noticed the exchanges, she doesn’t show it. She is just standing there. Waiting.
‘Is that right?’ Zoe says. Although she’s still looking at Jemima, it sounds more like she’s talking to herself. ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’