Why Don’t You Come for Me (23 page)

‘I think I can understand where she was coming from – at least, a little bit,’ Jo said. ‘Everyone always drums it into you that you have to love your family, even when they’re not doing very lovable things. Children are supposed to love their parents, and parents are supposed to love their children, but suppose you just can’t? When I was little, I sometimes used to wish I could have someone different for my mother, someone who was more like the other mothers, I suppose. But then I used to feel that even thinking something like that was very wicked and that I must be a very bad person. Other times, I used to just wonder why it was so unfair – you know, what had I done to deserve a mother who was so different from all the others?’

‘In your case, pet, it wasn’t a wicked thought, it was an understandable one.’

The kindness in Beryl’s voice encouraged Jo to go much further than she would normally have done. ‘After she killed my dad, I really began to hate her. I felt bad about it sometimes, but how are you supposed to go on loving one parent when they have murdered the other parent?’

Beryl brought her bent fingers down to rest on top of Jo’s slim ones. The sympathetic pressure stimulated Jo to continue. ‘I was thinking about it the other night. I mean, how can anyone expect a child to get over that? Walking into the garage one day after school, and finding your father dead on the floor?’

‘But luvvie, you didn’t find him.’ For the first time in their conversation, Beryl registered surprise. ‘It was a neighbour what found him.’

‘It was me. I came home from school and found him on the garage floor.’

‘No, love. I know for sure that isn’t right, because it was me and your Uncle Geoff who came to fetch you out of school.’

‘I thought that was the other time – when I was very little and I waited and waited outside the school, because Mum had been taken to hospital after she cut her wrists.’

‘We came that time as well. No, it was definitely a neighbour, a man who lived a few doors down, who found your father. This chap hadn’t gone to work that day because he couldn’t get his car to start and he was standing outside his house, waiting for the AA to turn up, when he heard a commotion – shouting and screaming and what not. He thought there must be something up, so he went to your house and knocked the front door. When no one answered, he noticed the garage door was ajar, so he opened it. I think he just meant to shout through and ask if everything was all right, but of course as soon as he opened that door he saw your father.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Well, so far as I remember – we had to sit through it all at the inquest, of course – this neighbour, Radcliffe or Ratcliffe his name was, he ran back home and phoned the police.’

‘And what about Mum?’

‘She was in the house the whole time. I think the police must have found her. She’d taken some tablets, but they got her to the hospital in time and pumped her stomach.’

‘So I wasn’t there at all?’

‘No – and to my knowledge you never went back there. We went and got all your things, your Aunty Joan and I, once the police would let us in to take stuff.’

‘I thought I found him. That’s how I’ve remembered it for years and years.’

‘You must have heard people talking about it.’ Aunt Beryl did not appear to think there was anything extraordinary in writing yourself into scenes in which you had taken no part. ‘Folk will talk in front of children, even when they shouldn’t. And your Grandma Molesly would have been no help. I wanted to take you in myself, but we didn’t have the room, with Geoff’s mother needing nursing and us in that little house in Longfellow Road. Your Aunty Joan would have had you, but they wouldn’t let her, her being a maiden lady and having to be out at work full-time.’

Monica rejoined them. ‘Have you had much rain up in the Lakes?’ she asked. ‘It always seems to rain when we go up there.’

‘The weather hasn’t been very good so far this year,’ Jo said, but while she indulged in inconsequential chit-chat with Monica, her mind was already racing elsewhere.

False Memory Syndrome. Construction. Confabulation. She found them all on Google when she got home.

False Memory Syndrome: a condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships are centred on a memory of a traumatic experience which is objectively false, but which the person strongly believes to be true.

Construction: when an event is mistakenly recalled which only accords with the gist of what happened, because a person has acquired memories from a combination of internally and externally derived sources, subconsciously adapting or adding to the story, to make it more consistent.

Confabulation: the spontaneous narrative reporting of events that never happened. A falsification of memory occurring from organically derived amnesia.

None of the definitions seemed to be an exact fit, although all of them were close. At first she had wondered if her aunt was the one who had got it all wrong, because her own memory had always seemed so solid – but the more she went over it, the more sense Beryl’s version seemed to make. Beryl placed the episode in the morning, which was far more logical because that would mean the attack had taken place between her leaving for school and her father leaving for work a few minutes later; so that unlike her own version, there was no mystery about her father’s being unexpectedly home in the afternoon. Then there was what she now recognized as the dreamlike quality of her memory; the way she had hopped – almost flown – over her father’s body to gain entry to the kitchen. Would she really have gone into the house without a word or a second thought? Wouldn’t she have shouted, or screamed, or run for help, instinctively shying away from such a horrible sight, rather than skipping over it? In her version she approached the garage doors with trepidation, as if in her heart of hearts she already knew what she was about to find. Similarly, during the search for her mother and her eventual discovery on the stairs, she was like a cold, dispassionate onlooker, not a hysterical child who has just seen her father’s butchered body. Moreover, she had no recollection of phoning the police or fetching a neighbour, which was strange when the rest of it had always seemed so crystal-clear. The memory finished with her standing over her mother, as if it was the final frame at the end of a reel of film and, try as she might, she could not locate the next reel.

No. She was as confident as she could be that Aunty Beryl’s version was the right one. Although her own memory of the event still seemed as solid as ever, she knew that it was not real. Not, she told herself, that there was anything abnormal about the tricks her mind had played. The information about False Memory Syndrome and Confabulation might be full of references to psychologists, but it was clear that you did not have to be ill to fabricate a few memories. Perfectly normal people did it all the time. One control group after another, asked to relate a story they had been told a short time before, invariably adapted it with omissions and embellishments. There was even something called the ‘Lost in the Mall’ technique, in which a group of adult volunteers were told a purportedly true story by another family member, of their being lost in a shopping mall at the age of five or six years old. At least a quarter of the people fed this story not only claimed to be able to remember this entirely fictional event, but many provided additional details which they had not been told in the first place. Everyone – or at least a high proportion of people – was suggestible.

Yet at the same time it was frightening. How many of her accumulated memories were real, and how many fantasy? If you could not rely on one memory, what did it say about all the others? It was like going into an exam on your life, but discovering on the way in that you had been revising from the wrong textbook.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Another postcard arrived in June. After weeks of dull, chilly weather punctuated by regular downpours, the ‘barbecue summer’ predicted by the Met Office had finally arrived with a vengeance. Jo was taking advantage of the unaccustomed sunshine to cut the grass and drag some weeds out of the flower beds, so she happened to be in the garden when the postman arrived. She saw the van draw up in the gateway and went to meet him.

‘Another nice day,’ he said, as he handed her the little pile of letters.

She carried them over to the wooden bench beside the sundial, which had been her gift to Marcus on his fortieth birthday. The postcard was the second item down the pile, a standard plain white card with the address printed directly onto it in Times New Roman, and Jo recognized it immediately for what it was. The postman’s demeanour on handing it over had not conveyed the slightest suggestion that he was aware of bringing anything out of the ordinary, but then she assumed that he did not understand the significance of the card or notice anything exceptional about it. She turned it over, expecting to find the same old picture of Lauren printed on the other side – and so it was – but this time it was not the same old words. Jo stood up without realizing that she had done so, then sat down hard again on the garden bench, staring at the card in disbelief. For almost eleven years she had been reading the words
I still have her
. This time the statement had been replaced with a question.
Do you still want her?

She continued to stare at the card for a long time. The taunt of a cruel hoaxer? Or was this something else? Of course she still wanted Lauren, of course she did! But how was she supposed to reply?

In the past, she had always taken the cards straight to the police, but not this time, she thought. It was not as if they had ever managed to obtain a single clue from any of the cards – and anyway, this one was special. The message marked a new turn in her relationship with Lauren’s captors, the words potent with the suggestion that things were moving forward, that something was going to happen. She was being asked a question, and there had to be some way of responding, but in the meantime she would tell no one about the card.

She stood up again, steadying herself with a hand on the sundial. What about Marcus? She knew that deceiving him was wrong, but if she told him about the card, he might insist she hand it over to the police. He was not due home for hours, but all the same she took the card straight upstairs and hid it in the drawer where she kept the shells. Didn’t this latest development vindicate her faith in the shells, which she had always interpreted as the precursor to something else? Moreover, when she opened the drawer and saw the shells sitting inside, she was suddenly seized with a solution. She could not send a message using shells, but the garden was full of stones, and they would make a perfectly good substitute. After positioning the postcard so that Lauren’s picture would look up at her whenever she opened the drawer, Jo went down to the garden and began to gather stones, which she spread across the newly cut lawn, sorting them into different sizes, shapes and colours as she went.

She gradually realized that it would take a lot more stones than she had initially envisaged. As the day wore on her collection extended to include everything from modestly sized pebbles to large lumps of brick and slate. Once or twice she made a foray out into the lane, so that she could look back into the garden and view her handiwork work from a distance. Neither the heat nor the fact that she had skipped lunch distracted her from her objective. When Sean came home from school she was still working with a kind of frantic energy, filling in the gaps with smaller stones, adding and removing others in a bid to neaten the edges and make the letters clearer.

She had seen him coming up the lane and called across from the lawn: ‘Sean – can you see what it says?’

Sean was sufficiently nonplussed that for a moment he couldn’t say anything at all. Eventually, he said, ‘It says “YES”.’

He continued to stand out in the road for a moment or two, as if waiting for permission to move on, but when Jo said nothing further, he turned in at the gate and walked up the drive. As he drew level with her, Jo smiled at him. ‘It’s a modern sculpture, giving a positive message,’ she said.

‘OK.’ Sean’s tone mimicked the asylum keeper, humouring an inmate who has just hoisted a chair above his head. ‘Whatever.’ He continued on his way into the house.

The modern sculpture explanation was less readily acceptable to Marcus. It was dark when he got back from the hospital visit he had tacked on to the end of Tennyson Trails, but he saw the stones next morning, when he strolled into the garden with his mug of coffee after breakfast.

‘Has Sean done that?’ he asked Jo, who had followed him outside.

‘Of course not. Since when did Sean do anything to help in the garden? It was me.’

‘You?’

‘Me.’

Marcus approached the newly arrived message on his lawn with caution, as if he thought it might conceal a basking adder or two. ‘What’s it for?’

‘It’s a modern sculpture. A positive, life-affirming message.’

Marcus circled the stones, perhaps thinking that all would become clearer if he viewed them the right way up. ‘Is this something out of a self-help book?’

‘No. You know I don’t read self-help books – and there’s no need to be sarcastic.’

‘I wasn’t. Just exactly what are you saying yes to?’

‘To life … the universe. Everything. I’m being positive, looking forward, as you have consistently told me I should.’

‘Don’t you think people will find it a little bit strange? I mean, did you have to put it right here, facing the lane? Couldn’t you have it round at the back where you can still see it, but every passing car can’t?’

‘It wouldn’t work there.’

‘Why not?’

She had not anticipated this line of questioning. Sensing her hesitation, Marcus repeated the question, but Jo could only mumble that the sculpture had to be just where it was, facing into the lane.

‘Are you planning any other sculptures on the lawn, because I really think we ought to discuss it first. You wouldn’t be too pleased if I popped down to the garden centre, came back with a concrete Venus de Milo and stuck it right in front of the house, now would you?’