Читать книгу The Lies We Told: The exciting new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of Watching Edie - Camilla Way, Camilla Way - Страница 8

Cambridgeshire, 1986

We waited such a long time for a baby. Years and years, actually. They couldn’t tell us why, the specialists. Couldn’t find a single reason why it didn’t happen for Doug and me. ‘Unexplained Infertility,’ was the best they could come up with. You think it’s going to be so simple, starting a family, and then when it’s taken from you, the future you’d imagined snatched away, it feels like a death. All I ever wanted was to be a mum. When school friends went off to university or found themselves jobs down in London, I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to be a career woman, didn’t need a big house and lots of money. I was content with our cottage in the village I’d grown up in, Doug’s building business; I just wanted children, and Doug felt exactly the same way.

I used to see them when they came back to our village for holidays, those old classmates of mine. And I’d see how they looked at me, with my clothes from the market and my lack of ambition, see the flash of superiority or bewilderment in their eyes when they realized I didn’t want to be just like them. But I didn’t care. I knew that what I wanted would bring me all the happiness I’d need.

Year by year, woman by woman, things began to change. They began to change. As we all neared our thirties, baby after baby began to make their appearance on those weekend visits. Of course, I’d been trying for a good few years by then, had already had many, many months of disappointment to swallow, but nothing hit me quite as hard as seeing that endless parade of children of the girls I used to go to school with.

Because I could see it, in their faces, how it changed them. How overnight the nice clothes and interesting careers and successful husbands which had once defined them became suddenly second place to what they now had. It wasn’t the change in them physically; the milk-stained clothes or the tired faces, it wasn’t the harassed air of responsibility or the being a member of a new club or even the obvious devotion they felt. It was something I saw in their eyes – a new awareness, I suppose – that most hurt me. It seemed to me as though they’d crossed into another dimension where life was fulfilling and meaningful on a level I could never understand. And the jealousy and despair I felt was devastating. Plenty of women, I knew, were happily childfree, leading perfectly satisfying lives without kids in them, but I wasn’t one of them. For as long as I could remember, having a family of my own was all I’d dreamt of.

So, when finally, finally, our miracle happened, it was the most amazing, most joyful thing imaginable. That moment when I held Hannah in my arms for the first time was one of pure elation. We loved her so much, Doug and I, right from the beginning. We had sacrificed so much, and waited such a long time for her, such a horribly long time.

I don’t remember exactly when the first niggling doubts began to stir. I couldn’t admit it to myself at first. I put it down to my tiredness; the shock and stress of new motherhood, or a hundred other different things rather than admit the truth. I didn’t let on to anyone how worried I was. How frightened. I told myself she was healthy and she was beautiful and she was ours, and that’s all that mattered.

And yet, I knew. Somehow I knew even then that there was something not quite right about my daughter. An instinct, of the purest truest kind, in the way animals sense trouble in their midst. Secretly I would compare her to other babies – at the clinic, or at Mother and Baby clubs, or at the supermarket. I would watch their expressions, their reactions, the ever-changing emotions in their little faces and then I’d look into Hannah’s beautiful big brown eyes and I’d see nothing there. Intelligence, yes – I never feared for her intellect – but rarely emotion. I never felt anything from her. Though I lavished love upon her it was as though it couldn’t reach her, slipping and sliding across the surface of her like water over oilskin.

At first, when I voiced my concerns to Doug, he’d cheerfully brush them aside. ‘She’s just chilled out, that’s all,’ he’d say, ‘let her be, love,’ and I’d allow myself to be reassured, telling myself he was right, that Hannah was fine and my fears were all in my head. But when she was almost three years old, something happened that even Doug couldn’t ignore.

I was preparing breakfast in the kitchen while she sat on the floor, playing with a makeshift drum kit of pots and pans and spoons I’d got out to entertain her with. She was hitting one pan repeatedly over and over, the sound ricocheting inside my skull, but just as I was mentally kicking myself for giving them to her the noise suddenly stopped. ‘Hannah want biscuit,’ she announced.

‘No, darling, not yet,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘I’m making porridge. Lovely porridge! Be ready in a tick!’

She got up, said louder, ‘Hannah want biscuit now!’

‘No, sweetheart,’ I said more firmly. ‘Breakfast first, just wait.’

I crouched down to rummage in a low drawer for a bowl, and didn’t hear her come up behind me. When I turned, I felt a sudden searing pain in my eye and reeled backwards in shock. It took a few moments to realize what had happened, to understand that she’d smashed the end of her metal spoon into my eye with a strength I never dreamed she had. And through my reeling horror I saw, just for a second, her reaction; the flash of satisfaction on her face before she turned away.

I had to take her with me to the hospital, Doug not being due back for several hours yet. I have no idea whether the nurse in A&E believed my story, or whether she saw through my flimsy excuses and assumed me perhaps to be a battered wife, one more victim of a drunken domestic row. If she did guess at my shame and fear, she never commented. And all the while Hannah watched her dress my wounds, listened to the lies I told about walking into a door with a silent lack of interest.

Later that evening when she was in bed, Doug and I stared at each other across the kitchen table. ‘She’s not even three yet,’ he said, his face ashen. ‘She’s only a little girl, she didn’t know what she was doing …’

‘She knew,’ I told him. ‘She knew exactly what she was doing. And afterwards she barely raised an eyebrow, just went back to hitting those damn pots like nothing had happened.’

And after that, Hannah only got worse. All children hurt other kids, it happens all the time. In every playgroup across the country you’ll find them hitting or biting or thumping each other. But they do it out of temper, or because the other child hurt them, or to get the toy they want. They don’t do it the way Hannah did – for the sheer, premeditated pleasure of it. I used to watch her like a hawk and I’d see her do it, see the expression in her eyes as she looked quickly around before inflicting a pinch or a slap. The reaction of pain was what motivated her. I knew it. I saw it.

We took her to the doctor’s, insisting on a referral to a child psychologist – the three of us trooping over to Peterborough to meet a man with an earnest smile and a gentle voice, in a red jumper, named Neil. But though he did his best with Hannah, inviting her to draw him pictures of her feelings, use dolls to act out stories, she refused, point-blank. ‘NO!’ she said, pushing crayons and toys away. ‘Don’t want to.’

‘Look,’ Neil said, once the receptionist had taken Hannah out of the room. ‘She’s very young. Children act out sometimes. It’s entirely possible she didn’t realize how badly she would hurt you.’ He paused, fixing me in his sympathetic gaze. ‘You also mentioned a lack of affection from her, a lack of … emotional response. Sometimes children model what they see from their parents. And sometimes it helps if the parent remembers that they are the adult, and the child is not there to fulfil their own emotional needs.’

He said all this very kindly, very sensitively, but my fury was instantaneous. ‘I cuddle that child all day long,’ I hissed, ignoring Doug’s restraining hand on my arm. ‘I talk to her, play with her, kiss her and love her and I tell her how special she is every single minute. And I don’t expect my three-year-old to “fulfil my emotional needs”. What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ But the seed was set, the implication was clear. By hook or by crook it was my fault. And deep down of course I worried that Neil was right. That I was deficient somehow, that I had caused this, whatever ‘this’ was. We left that psychologist’s office and we didn’t go back.

That day, the day she killed Lucy, I stood looking in at my five-year-old daughter from her bedroom door and any last remaining hope I’d had – that I’d been wrong about her, that she’d grow out of it, that somewhere inside her was a normal, healthy child – vanished. I marched across the room and took her by the hand. ‘Come with me,’ I said and led her to my bedroom. Her expression, biddable, mildly interested, only made my fury stronger. I dragged her to the bed and she stood beside me, looking down at Lucy’s head on my pillow and I saw – I know I saw – the flicker of enjoyment in her eyes. By the time she’d turned them back to me they were entirely innocent once more. ‘Mummy?’ she said.

‘It was you,’ I said, my voice tight with anger. ‘I know it was you.’ I loved that bird. I had inherited her from an elderly neighbour I’d once been close to, and during those years of childlessness Lucy had become the focus of all my attention; a pretty, defenceless little creature to take care of, who needed me. Hannah knew how much I loved her. She knew.

‘No,’ she answered, and tilted her head to one side as she continued to consider me. ‘No, Mummy. It wasn’t me.’

I left her standing by the bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen. And there was Lucy’s cage, its door swung open, the tiny headless body lying on the floor beside it cold and stiff. I looked around the room, my eyes darting wildly about. How had she done it? What had she used? She had no access to the kitchen knives, of course. Suddenly a thought struck me and I ran back up the stairs to her bedroom. And there it was. The metal ruler from Doug’s toolbox, lying on her table. I’d heard her asking him for it the day before – for something she was making, she’d said. It lay there now, next to her craft things and I stared down at it as nausea rose in me.

I hadn’t heard Hannah follow me from the kitchen until she slipped into the room and stood beside me. ‘Mummy?’ she said.

My heart jumped, ‘What?’

Her eyes fell to my belly. ‘Is it all right?’

The slight lisp, that pretty, melodic voice of hers, so adorable – everybody commented on it. I bit back my revulsion. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Is what all right?’

She considered me. ‘The baby, Mummy. The little baby in your tummy. Is it all right? Or is it dead too?’

I put a hand to my belly as defensively as if she’d struck me there. Her gaze bored into me. ‘Why would the baby be dead?’ I whispered. ‘Why would you say that?’ There’s no way she could have known of course that she’d touched upon my greatest fear – that this new baby, our second miracle, would not survive, would not be born alive. It was the stress of my relationship with Hannah that caused this paranoia, I think. I almost felt as though I would deserve it, because I’d made such a mess of everything with her. My unborn baby would be taken from me, as penance.

As I gazed into her eyes, fear stroked the back of my neck. ‘Stay right here,’ I said. ‘Stay here until I say.’

That night I described to Doug what had happened. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked him. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

‘We don’t know it was Hannah,’ he said weakly.

‘Who the hell was it, then?’

‘Maybe … God, I don’t know! Maybe it was a fox, or one of the neighbours’ kids mucking about?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘We have foxes in the garden all the time,’ he said. ‘Are you sure the back door was closed?’

‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘It was open. But …’

‘We’ve had to tell Hannah before about leaving the cage door unfastened,’ he added.

This was also true, she loved to feed Lucy, and though she knew she wasn’t allowed to open the door without me there, it was possible she had fiddled with the latch. ‘OK, but what about what she said about the baby?’ I demanded.

Doug rubbed his face tiredly. ‘She’s five years old, Beth. She doesn’t understand about death yet, does she? Maybe she’s feeling anxious about having a new sibling.’

I stared at him. ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this! I know it was Hannah. It was written all over her face!’

‘And where were you?’ he said, his voice rising too. ‘Where the hell were you when all this was going on? Why weren’t you watching her?’

‘Don’t you dare make this my fault,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t you dare do that!’ On we argued, our worry and distress causing us to turn on each other, sniping and defensive.

‘Mummy? Daddy?’ Hannah appeared in the doorway, looking sleepy and adorable in her pink pyjamas. She held her teddy in her hand. ‘Why are you shouting?’

Doug got to his feet. ‘Hello, little one,’ he said, his voice suddenly jolly. ‘How’s my princess? Got a cuddle for your daddy?’

She nodded and edged closer, but then said in a small, sad voice, ‘Is it because of Lucy?’

Doug and I exchanged a look. He picked her up. ‘You know how it happened?’

She shook her head. ‘Mummy thinks I did it, but I never did! Mummy loves her birdy and so do I.’ Tears welled, spilling from her eyes. ‘I would never, ever hurt Lu-Lu bird.’

Doug held her close. ‘I know you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. It was only somebody playing a nasty trick, that’s all. Or a fox. Maybe a naughty fox did it. Come on, sweetheart, don’t cry, please don’t cry. Let’s get you back to bed.’ I knew he was fooling himself, too scared to admit the truth, but I’d never felt so lonely, so wretched, as I did at that moment. As they left the kitchen I looked up and caught Hannah watching me over her father’s shoulder, her expression impassive now. We held each other’s gaze before they turned the corner and disappeared from view.