Why Don’t You Come for Me (22 page)

And even when things did not go so catastrophically wrong as they had in her own mother’s case, it did you no good to have eccentric-looking parents. That had been halfway to explaining Gilda’s problems. Her parents had been old enough to be her grandparents, and their ideas were rooted in the 1950s and early 1960s. They had dressed her in hand-knitted berets and cardigans, cut her hair clumsily at home, kitted her out in pleated skirts and knee socks when everyone else wore trousers. They encouraged her to keep apart, to despise modern music, to be ignorant of any kind of popular culture to the point where, like an elderly judge or university don, she thought dubbing was something with which to treat football boots, if she thought of it at all.

Jo understood how important it was not to be different: she had battled against it all through childhood, endeavouring to look and behave like everyone else, even in the face of Mum’s persistent oddities; trying to keep her mother as invisible as possible at school events, never inviting the other children back home. But some things you can’t conceal. The familiar wooden doors loomed ahead of her. The paint was peeling in places, and one of the doors caught at the bottom. It needed to be taken off, sanded down and rehung, but somehow it never got done so it always scraped across the ground when it was opened.

Her mother used to annoy her father by calling it the lean-to. ‘You can’t call it a garage,’ she said, ‘because you don’t keep a car in it.’

He almost never argued with her, certainly not about household terminology: he just kept on calling it the garage, while she continued to call it the lean-to. Jo trod a narrow line, depending on who she was talking to, trying not to antagonize either of them. It was not that her father would have become annoyed if she had said ‘lean-to’, in the way that her mother might have done if she had said ‘garage’; he might not even have corrected her, but his eyes would have implied betrayal.

In a way, of course, her mother had been right. The car was always parked on the drive, or more often on the remnants of the worn grass verge between the road and the pavement, because it was a nuisance having to squeeze between the car and the line of rose bushes which separated their narrow drive from the small front lawn. The garage itself was too full of other things to fit a car inside. The lawnmower lived in there, standing next to her father’s seldom-used workbench, which had forks, spades, a big old crowbar and an axe propped up against it; the washing machine stood against one wall, where it was convenient for the side door which opened directly into their small square kitchen.

Dad’s car had been parked on the verge
that
day, when she came home from school. She would have seen it as she walked up the road. She must have known then that there was something wrong because it should not have been there. It was a Thursday, so Dad should have been at work.

She always entered the house through the garage. She didn’t have a front-door key, but the garage doors were left unlocked in the daytime. She had never really liked going through the garage. It was always dark in there, and the light switch was right inside, next to the kitchen door, so on a winter afternoon you had to run the gauntlet blindfold. Once, she tripped over a broom handle which had fallen across the part where you walked, coming down hard, scraping her hands and knees on the concrete floor. Even in summer the light which came through the lone pane of glass in the door to the back garden was barely enough to penetrate the shadows. Apart from a narrow space on one side which was left clear to walk through, the interior was a jumble of cardboard boxes, with here a pile of discarded light fittings draped with an old curtain, and there a clumsily reeled stack of garden hose, which tilted crazily atop a broken kitchen chair waiting to startle the unwary by overbalancing and slithering to the floor like an outsize green python. If the kitchen door happened to be open that would let in a bit more light, but otherwise the garage was a place to traverse as quickly as possible, lest some bogey man grabbed at you from out of the gloom.

But not that day – not when she had stood outside the garage door for what must have been the last time. That day it had all happened in slow motion, starting with the age it took her to pluck up enough courage to put her hand on the door. In her mind’s eye the garage door stood just ajar. That must have been a warning signal, too. The doors were always kept shut, in case the wind blew them back on their hinges and they slammed. Mum screamed if that happened. Sudden loud noises alarmed her, and she must not be alarmed.

Reach up for the door handle – she had just turned twelve, but she could not have been very tall, not if the handle seemed high up. It was cool to her touch; the sun had gone from the front of the house by late afternoon, leaving the garage doors in shadow.

Pull the door towards you … nothing to see at first. It was September, a bright day outside, your eyes have to get accustomed. But then you see. You see his feet first. His feet are nearest to you, and for a split second you think he’s lying down to do something, maybe trying to fix the washing machine, which must have broken down again. But it isn’t the washing machine. It isn’t the washing machine which has leaked all over the floor; it’s your father’s blood, and there is the axe which spilled it lying on the concrete floor beside his head, showing you how it was done – and although you’ve never seen a dead body before, you know without a shadow of a doubt that you’re looking at one now.

The kitchen door is open a crack, and Mum must be inside. You have to find Mum. You don’t know how this terrible thing has happened in the garage, or why your father came to be lying on the floor with his blood splattered from the pile of old newspapers stacked on the redundant television stand, to the front of the washing machine beside the kitchen door, where it has trickled down in pale, uneven stripes. What you do know is that it is around 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and that means Mum will be somewhere in the house.

So you step around him, very carefully, not touching anything, not treading in anything, almost having to jump over him, in order to reach the kitchen step because he takes up most of the space – much more lying down than he used to standing up. This will be a feature of the coming days: the way until he died Dad took up so little space that people had almost stopped noticing him, whereas Mum, of course, had always managed to be noticeable.

It’s so quiet in the kitchen that you can only hear two things: the tick of the clock and a fly, buzzing against the window, frantically bashing against the glass until more by luck than judgement it finds the open top light and is abruptly gone. You don’t want to break the silence, so you don’t call out. Mum doesn’t like it when you shout; although, of course, she doesn’t like it if you take her by surprise either, which she calls creeping up on her, even though you didn’t mean to.

The door between the kitchen and the hall is half closed, but the door handle has dried blood on it. Hook your fingers around the side of the door and open it that way. Mum isn’t in the living room, although there’s evidence of her presence, a puzzle book open at an incomplete Word Search, a pencil with a very frayed piece of string tied around one end, a plate on the coffee table containing a half-eaten sandwich and surrounded by toast crumbs from some earlier snack. There’s also a mug with some tea left in the bottom. The remaining liquid looks pale against the tannin-stained interior. The door to the front room is open, but there’s too much junk in there for anyone to be inside, unless they are hiding – and Mum hasn’t done that for ages.

Then you turn the corner and see her sitting on the stairs. She’s got the pills and the sherry bottle beside her, but she hasn’t managed to kill herself because the stupid, stupid, stupid woman never managed to get anything right.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Aunty Joan’s funeral took place at the local crematorium. It was a standard one-size-fits-all Church of England service taken by a priest who had never met the deceased, but managed to get all the names right by referring to his notes. The singing of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ was greatly enhanced by the presence of several ladies with whom Aunty Joan had once upon a time sung in a choir, and the coffin went out to the strains of ‘Que Sera Sera’, which had apparently been her favourite song. There was little obvious emotion: Aunty Beryl was seen to wipe her eyes a couple of times, but the general ambience was one of calm acceptance. Joan had been unwell for some time; it wasn’t a shock. There was no grieving partner or children, and everyone said it was a blessing that she hadn’t suffered.

Jo had approached the occasion with some trepidation, but the cluster of black-clad figures, standing on the pavement outside cousin Monica’s house (chosen for its convenient proximity to both Aunt Joan’s sheltered-housing complex and the crem), had greeted her warmly, Aunt Beryl enveloping her in a warm hug and Monica planting a kiss on her cheek before saying that they had saved her a place in one of the funeral limousines.

During her journey south down the motorway, Jo had built herself up to expect a much cooler reception. Was she not the daughter of the evil changeling who had brought so much shame and distress to the family all those years ago? Of course, if Grandma Molesly had been right, then she was not really their relative at all. She didn’t look much like them, although family resemblances between cousins were not always strong. And if she was not of their blood, then neither was Lauren. She wondered if her mother had been aware of the doubts cast upon her parentage when she was growing up. Lauren too must be growing up in alien soil. Jo had generally taken the repeated message
I still have her
as a taunt, but just occasionally she wondered whether the abductor’s motive in sending it was a misguided attempt at reassurance, letting her know that her daughter was still alive and well and safe. The seashells might simply be more of the same, a secret code meant only for her – except that she could not decipher it.

It was possible that Lauren never even suspected she did not belong with these people. Suppose she was happy where she was, and did not want to leave. The idea of Lauren loving her captors more than herself was heartbreaking. In her oft-replayed vision of Lauren’s eventual homecoming, the scene always ended with the child running into her arms, but lately this version of events was sometimes rudely interrupted by another, in which a girl who looked very much like Gilda’s daughter shied away from her, as from a stranger. So many years had gone by. Lauren would recall nothing now of the monkey mobile which once hung above her cot, the musical box with the dancing bears, the home-baked biscuits in the kitchen … and her mother’s face.

Suppose she
was
better off with this other family. At least with them, she would never have to know about the mad grandmother, the tainted blood she carried in her veins. Were there circumstances in which it would be to Lauren’s advantage, if she – Jo – were to give her up? Although not religious, Jo had prayed many times after Lauren disappeared. Sometimes she had promised God that providing He made sure no harm came to Lauren, He could if He wished take Jo instead, by whatever terrible means He chose to devise. In the long silences which followed, Jo had been forced to conclude that God was not up for trade-offs. What was it she had once read?
God always answers prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.

Maybe this was the deal. She would have to give Lauren up in exchange for the knowledge that she was safe and happy. Lauren might very well benefit, said the treacherous devil’s advocate in her head, from not growing up in the shadow of her dubious genetic inheritance.

‘No!’ Jo startled herself by speaking aloud. How could any child-stealer be a better parent than she was? How could anyone who would kidnap a child possibly be suitable to raise one? A person capable of such a dreadful act must be unbalanced, dangerous. She noticed that she was getting too near to the car in front, eased back a little and tried to concentrate on the road.

‘It’s always better for a child to be with its own mother,’ she said as she steered the car into the centre lane, to overtake a slow-moving motorhome.

‘Always?’ asked the devil’s advocate, slyly tossing snapshots of her own mother on to the table like a louche poker dealer.

And now she was in Accrington, back in the bosom of what was left of her mother’s family. She could not recognize any of Aunt Beryl’s grandchildren, all of them in their late teens and early twenties, who raided the buffet table in Monica’s dining room then stuck together in a corner, the boys with their borrowed black ties loosened, the girls – who must surely have compared wardrobe notes beforehand – pretty much uniform, right down to their carefully applied eyeliner.

‘We haven’t seen you for ages,’ Monica was saying. ‘You and your husband run a travel agency now, don’t you?’

‘A tour company,’ Jo corrected. ‘We run specialist coach tours, themed to famous people and historical events.’

‘That must be interesting. Do you get to go on these tours yourself?’

I used to, Jo thought sadly. Aloud she said, ‘I’m one of the guides.’

‘That must be great. Do you hear that, Mum? Joanne gets to travel round on these tours they run. Mind, I don’t suppose it’s much of a holiday for you,’

Jo confirmed that it was not.

‘Excuse me,’ Monica said. ‘I think the choir ladies are on their way. I must just say goodbye and thank them for coming.’

Jo found herself temporarily alone with Beryl. An adjacent armchair had just become vacant, and Jo sank down beside her aunt. It was now or never.

‘Aunty Beryl, you remember what Grandma Molesly used to say, about Mum not really being her daughter?’

Her aunt did not appear to be taken aback by Jo’s abrupt enquiry. ‘Of course I do – she said it often enough.’ There was something comforting about Beryl’s no-nonsense, Lancashire voice, with its matter-of-fact conveyance of information.

‘Do you think she really believed it?’

Beryl pursed her lips in momentary consideration. It made the wrinkles around her mouth more pronounced. ‘Do you know, in the end I think she did. It started off as a bit of a joke, because your mother had these hazel eyes – well, not hazel exactly – more of a flecky grey really, although your grandmother always had it that they were hazel. Anyway, there was no one else in the family with eyes quite like them. Mind you, we never knew much about Dad’s family, with him coming from such a long way off. There were a lot of his side we never met at all, and he was dead by the time your mother was born, so we never got to hear his opinion. Then, of course, me and your Aunty Joan were blondes whereas your mother’s hair was a browny colour, and she was always skinny whereas we were on the plump side even as little ’uns.’ She paused to glance down at her ample bosom, before continuing: ‘Your grandma would look at your mother and say she wasn’t one of us at all, you know, joking like. I’m sure that’s how it started, but later on, after your mother began having her problems, well, your grandmother couldn’t seem to understand that it was an illness – that it might happen to anybody. Perhaps she worried that people would blame her – I blame those doctors myself – saying these things are all to do with what happened to people in their childhoods. We went all through the war as children, and it didn’t do us any harm. Anyway, after … it happened, I think your grandmother just wanted to believe it was as she had said all along – that your mother wasn’t really hers. I used to get annoyed with her. “How can you deny your own flesh and blood?” I’d say, but your grandma was a hard woman, God rest her – and once she’d made her mind up, there was no shifting her.’