The Stepmother (29 page)

I shut my eyes. I think I’m praying.

There’s a scream, and…

She fires the bloody thing.

A
bout thirty seconds
later I open my eyes, and very gingerly I look around me.

Scarlett is half sitting, knocked back by the force, the gun between her feet on the floor, her face paper white, two high spots of colour in her cheeks.

Kaye is slumped on the floor.

The shot hit the mirror I realise. That hideous curly-edged gilt mirror. It’s shattered into a million tiny pieces.

And Kaye is still breathing. Still crying. Not hurt, it seems. No blood I can see.

Sweat has started properly beneath my arms.

‘Scarlett.’ Matthew’s voice is very calm and sure, and he stands over her. ‘Give me the gun right now.’

And finally she does what she’s told. She passes it to her father, and he pulls her up to stand and hugs her, and it looks like the normal embrace of a father and daughter to me; though, like I said before, what do I know? Scarlett sobs into his shoulder.

What the hell do I know about fathers myself?

A
fterwards I think
Scarlett only fired because she wanted to feel the power she was wielding – she’d been impotent in the situation for so long.

She was wielding a whole lot of power, as it turned out.

L
ike Jeanie said
: so often things aren’t what they seem.

I mean take that photo of Jeanie and Otto, uploaded by the kid who wanted to hurt Otto. The photo that started everything. It was all about the angle. From the angle it was taken, it looked like Jeanie was about to start kissing her pupil.

I guess you could say it was the photo that ended it too. And I mean really ended it. With a bang so catastrophic it shook us to our very roots.

And in-between, what was there? If that even matters any more.

It matters a bit, I guess, looking back.

There was love: a spark of hope – a belief that things could be put away into the past, tidied and boxed up. That life could move on; that that was what was right and just.

But in the end it was still there, wasn’t it? Always there: malevolent presence and irrefutable evidence, that photo – in black and white if you like. And if you looked at it just so – well yes. Perhaps you could be forgiven for thinking that it was evidence of something.

And it was Jeanie’s word, wasn’t it? Only her word – and was that enough?

Apparently not.

A
s I make
my way to the M1, I’m trying to tie up the ends in my weary head – but they won’t quite go.

Because of this: you realise Jeanie only wrote what she wanted to be seen, don’t you?

She didn’t want everything to be there in black and white – but it took me a while to work that out.

S
topping
for coffee somewhere near Leicester, I receive a text from Sal, the stringer. It says:

It’s no great surprise.

A
t the hospital
I see two things.

Hurrying through the main reception, the headline of the local paper outside the shop:

And I think of the brief conversation I had yesterday with Ruth, Jeanie’s Ashbourne neighbour.

I hurry up to the second floor in the lift.

The second thing I see is Frankie, before he sees me. He’s sitting in the corridor outside Jeanie’s room, desolate, drinking a can of pop, staring down at his dusty trainers.

My heart clenches.

‘Frank!’ I wave, and he looks up – and barely bothers to wave back.

Oh God, what does that mean?
I sprint down the rest of the corridor towards him, my soles squeaking on the lino.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Well’—he stands now—‘they’re waking her up.’

‘Oh God.’ I feel the tears spring to my eyes, hot and sharp. ‘Are they? How amazing, oh, Frankie, how amazing, oh thank God, thank God…’

And I’m sobbing now, and he’s hugging me.

Frankie, my son, who I couldn’t look after, who I gave to Jeanie when he was just three months old, because I was scared I’d hurt him, like our mother hurt me.

Because I knew Jeanie could do a much better job than I would. And she took him, and she didn’t argue, not after she’d understood that I was buckling. She said, ‘It can be temporary,’ but I knew it couldn’t. Only seventeen myself, I didn’t want to mess him up. I didn’t want him to feel he’d been rejected. I loved him, of that there was no doubt. But I was too scared of my own black feelings; the post-natal stuff, the savage dog of depression that was hauling me down into the pits, its jaws clamped around my head.

I look into Frankie’s freckly face – he gets those off his dad, those freckles. His dad, Sammy, a freethinking musician who didn’t believe in bonds, whom I loved fiercely. And whom I could never trace after I told him I was pregnant.

He went to America, I think, Frankie’s dad. Vanished. Me, who could trace anyone; I’ve never found him. Sammy really didn’t want to be found.

And I see Frankie is crying too. Tears on his cheeks, sparkling in his eyes, which are so very like mine.

I wipe them away, those tears, from my boy’s face, and I think,
However much I want to, however much I’m tempted, I can’t tell you the truth.

I owe Jeanie that much; I can’t ever tell him now. I’ve left it too late.

But I’ll love him till the day I drop dead – I’ll love Frankie with every tiny sinew, with every cell and vessel of my being.

Take love where you find it I say, if it’s the good and pure type.

We hold hands, and we walk into Jeanie’s room to see her eyelids flutter for the first time in days.

I
t took
me a lifetime to understand that, all too often, people are just plain nasty. They can’t see beyond their own stuff. They’re scarred forever, and they want to take you down too.

I refused to believe it for so long – too long – and it was painful to accept, but I know now absolutely that it’s true.

Marlena
always
knew, of course, and it was natural she would. We are so very different, my sister and I.

She was too hard, sometimes, maybe. It was just a layer of protection. And I was always, no doubt, pretty naïve.

I’d believed in the fairy tale. I’d subscribed to the myth. A bit like – before Otto – the daft way I believed in all the smiling faces on Facebook, all the snaps of blue skies and turquoise seas. The cuddling, kissing selfies; the couples that couldn’t live apart. Families having brilliant times.

I missed what lay beneath: I just saw the fantasies and sucked them up. I believed it all and aspired to it.

But when it happened to me, the ‘fantasy life’, it wasn’t long before the beautiful idyllic stuff fell away, shiny and unreal. It all fell apart.

How daft could you be?

As daft as me apparently.

Though I wouldn’t have said daft or naïve back then. I would have said… optimistic. Always looking for the best in people.

But actually I always had ‘unrealistic expectations’, as the doctor in Hove said after I resigned from Seaborne; as he breathed too loudly and, not meeting my eye, prescribed pills I couldn’t pronounce the names of.

And I had hidden them away, those pills, a secret stash, and my descent had started again, for a while.

When I got off them that time, I kept the leftovers for a rainy day – just in case. There’s always a just in case I think.

W
hen I open
my eyes and see Frankie, I am overcome. He comes into the room, which I understand to be a hospital room, as the nurse and the doctor with me explain.

I’m so groggy, I can’t speak; my lips are so cracked and dry – but the sight of Frankie’s face is enough, the warmth of his hug is more than enough, as is the kiss he gives me as I see the tears in his own eyes.

The guilt is enormous, but the relief is bigger. I love this boy so much; how could I think I’d let the devil take me down?

M
atthew wants
to give it another chance. He came to see me just as I left the hospital, took me out to lunch in a nice Derby pub called The Silk Mill. We had fresh pies and thick chips and cider, and spoke little really.

I would never ever go back there again, to the horror of Malum House. Matthew wasn’t ready for a relationship when we married; I doubt he’s ready now – but I’m sure it won’t be long before Mrs King number three is bowled over by the fairy-tale house. Hopefully he’ll clear the spare room for her and keep it unlocked this time. Less Bluebeard, more real.

It turned out the stuff in there wasn’t Kaye’s – it was that poor girl Daisy’s.
The maid is in the garden.
Daisy, who Luke may or may not have tried to destroy deliberately. Apparently he swore blind he didn’t see her when he backed the car up – and it could have been the last dog that he was aiming for anyway.

I don’t know why Matthew didn’t sort the room out. Largely because he couldn’t bear to admit what had happened I think.

L
uke has been signed
up for psychoanalysis – the tough sort: an hour a day for weeks and months and years. Maybe there’s hope for him. He’s not intrinsically bad I’m sure. He’s just a confused, lost boy, hoping for his mother’s love. I think he’ll always be less than – never enough for her expectations.

But maybe now less of a threat than Kaye’s gorgeous daughter – whose sheer youth and vitality was driving her mother slowly mad.

Marlena told me what happened and what had been discussed. But I never really understood how much he did of his own accord – because some of it Kaye seemed to know about, and other things, like poisoning the poor little dog Justin and, in the process, accidentally poisoning himself, were all his own ideas, it seemed.

Classic trait of a sociopath – or, worse even, a psychopath: inflicting the pain you feel yourself on something else helpless.

Some time after it all, Luke wrote me a letter. I imagine he was forced to, but I was glad to receive it, all things considered.

But I would dispute all of those claims. He made me think I was going insane, and he scared me badly, however misguided his motives were.

Still, he was only a kid – and his mother was filled with such jealousy, undoubtedly she corralled him for her own ends.

Jealous of her own daughter’s youth and beauty. That’s a terrible place to be. There’s no way forward from that, no magic elixir of youth.

Only mirrors, to keep reminding you the clock’s ticking on.

And Scarlett?

She came to see me one day in London, when Frankie and I were staying at Marlena’s – before I moved back up to Derbyshire.

We went to a very cool restaurant in Spitalfields, all square tables and no pictures. I bought her a ‘gastro’ burger, whatever that was – and I had bangers and mash. We chatted about school. Scarlett told me about living some of the time with her godparents, Alison and Sean, and some of the time with her dad. She was also getting counselling she said.

Scarlett asked about Frankie, and I told her that he was too old for her, and it was too complicated – better they be friends. She picked at her nail varnish and didn’t mention him again.

I understood from Matthew that he’d got his police inspector mate, Kipper, to put the fear of God into Scarlett over the gun incident. Kipper ‘arrested’ her, locking her up in the local police station for a few hours. Then he interviewed her about the shooting. She understood she was on a ‘caution’, though I don’t think it was ever an official one. After all she hadn’t actually committed a crime.

But she knew that if she ever did something like that again, it would be far more serious.

I wanted the best for her. I felt sorry for her, and I’d grown quite fond of her – but I couldn’t see how our relationship could pan out.

We didn’t talk about her mother really that day – she wasn’t seeing Kaye much yet – but looking at her shovelling her fries in with alacrity, I remembered what it was I’d seen in those home movies that had bugged me.

Initially I’d read it as admiration for Kaye – but when I’d looked again, I’d seen it wasn’t.

It was a look of fear on her face when she looked at her mother: fear and hostility.

I realised that Scarlett’s act of violence came from her rage at not being heard. At having her voice and her feelings stifled by the woman who was meant to love her above all else.

I felt sorry for the girl – for both the kids. They had everything they wanted materially, and their lives were still a mess. I hoped that Matthew would be able to be a better father if women were out of the way – for the time being, anyway. There was no doubt he loved his children dearly; they had that security.

‘I know you’ve been cutting yourself,’ I said quietly as we waited for our pudding, and Scarlett flushed like her name. ‘You can’t deny it this time. I saw the blood in Ashbourne, on the carpet. I saw it in Malum House too that time.’

I’m pretty sure she wanted me to see it – in Ashbourne at least. It’s usually a cry for help in my experience, leaving a clue.

I’d told Matthew at the time in Malum House, and he’d ignored it; I’d told Kaye before. If I’d not moved out, maybe I could have done something directly, but now I made sure I told Matthew again, told him he needed to watch out for his daughter’s mental health. It was his responsibility.

Frankie was mine.

Over chocolate cake and ice cream, I told Scarlett I was learning tai chi and karate, and she grinned.

‘You gonna be a superhero then?’

‘Hardly. Just keeping fit and learning to defend myself,’ I said primly. ‘You never know who might be round the next corner.’

I didn’t tell her I’d also signed up to a ‘self-assertion’ course – to learn to speak my mind in the correct way.

It had taken me a long time to learn I had the right to speak. It was something that Scarlett would have to learn too.

It had taken me a lifetime to know it was all right to assert my needs.

B
efore Frankie returns
to France to continue his job for a short while, we go to Brighton for a night.

I want to see the sea; he wants to visit his best mates.

After I drop Frank by the Pier, I drive past Seaborne on the way to Lewes for a drink with some old colleagues.

And I think I see Otto, in his green parka, cycling along the Downs.

My heart is in my mouth – but I don’t stop.

I always think I see Otto. Maybe it’s because I
want
to see him so much. He has such a pure soul, that boy – despite his dreadful parents and too much skunk. He needed a friend, and in the end that wasn’t me. I was his teacher, not a lover, not a mother, and I told him so. I sent him on his way – as you can see in the photograph. I’m sending him on his way.

Ah. You want to know what
really
happened, when the camera wasn’t on?

It was a mistake that
could
have happened, but I didn’t let it. And it was no one’s business – no one’s apart from Otto’s and mine.

We understood each other. He needed sanctuary; I took him in one night. He slept on the sofa. Two lonely souls.

He was so lost. But I didn’t see him like the papers said. I saw him like another child. Another lost boy.

I saw something in him I recognised. Because Marlena and I, we were the proverbial lost girls ourselves.

I saw myself.