At night Helen groaned and couldn’t hide the pain in her belly, the slow pulling-apart of things inside. Theo tried to calm her, and when that didn’t work, he lay awake with his hands over his ears and prayed that she’d stop, that the nightmares would pass, that she’d exhaust herself into slumber, and at some point this must have happened. They slept too long, and woke when the sun was already high and their trousers still damp from scrubbing the night before, and their shoes squelched as they settled into them, and they walked.
“He was a terrible child really. At the time you don’t think of it that way, you just say he’s got high spirits—that’s what you call it. If you call him terrible you have to ask yourself why, you have to blame yourself and no one wants to do that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to say ‘I am a bad mother, and he is a bad father,’ it is impossible, it is devastating it is…
because if I am a bad mother then I am… there is nothing worse.
So of course Philip’s not a bad child, because I’m not a bad mother. I’m not. I know this as much as I know anything, and the only thing I know more is that I love him.
Then he was a teenager, and I suppose he was well behaved as a teenage boy. He was always careful to hide the worst from me. He was indulged. He knew he could get away with things and I thought well in a way if he gets away with it I suppose…
It’s very hard to deny your child in these circumstances. It’s very hard to say ‘I’ll show you the stuff of life’ if you don’t really have the stuff of life in you. And I did not. Then when he got into a duel at university, I managed to tell myself that it was probably Simon Fardell’s fault. He told me that the boy had done something awful. Hurt a woman or something. I didn’t really believe it, but you make yourself believe because the alternative is much worse.
You’re going to tell me not to blame myself, aren’t you, Mr. Miller? You’re going to tell me that it’s not my fault, the way Philip turned out.
Aren’t you?
Aren’t you?”
They walked a while.
Then Theo said, “I honestly don’t know.”
They walked a while longer.
“I think… some of it probably is your fault. I think it probably is. I think it has to be someone’s fault, at some point. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it isn’t. There was a time when he was a child, but then there was a time when he was a man, and when he was a man… there must be a moment when you take responsibility for your own actions, and stop blaming the past and stop blaming… so maybe I don’t. I don’t think I can. But I think it’s my fault that Lucy is in prison, and if it’s my fault that the daughter I’ve never met is in that place, then it’s got to be someone else’s fault too. You have to be a bad mother, you see, if I am going to spend the rest of my life knowing that I failed as a father. It’s not right. It’s probably not even true. It’s just the way I feel about it. Sorry.”
A forest of falling leaves, slippery underfoot. Yellow and spotted browns and greys, brilliant crimsons and faded ochres, black-tinged curling auburns and vein-riddled purples, frost in the morning, a herd of deer looking up, startled from a field, before realising that the people passing by were no threat, and returning to their chewing.
A path down to a river, round stepping stones over the running water, green moss and yellow lichen, white foam caught in whirlpools, a perfect hollow carved out at the bottom of a waterfall, a place where tiny fish played in the winter light.
Theo helped Helen wobble across, and for a while they sat by the water, listening to the wind through the trees.
Then Helen said, “Or maybe we’re just both totally fucked in our own delightfully unique ways.”
Theo considered this a while, then shrugged, and they kept on walking.
From a farm halfway up a yellow, treeless hill they stole two rusted bicycles that had been left behind an iron barn. Theo’s bicycle didn’t have any brakes. Helen’s was stuck in third gear. They pedalled down the country lanes until Helen could pedal no more. Then they sheltered from the wind beneath the silent spire of a concrete plant, sand and dust blowing in their faces, and ate pork pies purchased from a corner shop in a village where they used to make pottery and now made nothing at all, a population of seven still hanging on, hanging on, and didn’t talk, and didn’t sleep.
“So how ill are you?” asked Theo when Helen threw up without warning, a vomit with no matter in it, just clear acid and yellow slime.
They sat on the side of the path, morning frost melting beneath them, breath puffing thick in the air.
Helen thought about the question for a while, then smiled, shrugged, murmured, “Some things they don’t make a pill for.”
On this she had nothing more to say.
On the third day they came to a statue of an angel set in the middle of a treeless, stone-pocked landscape. The angel was carved from white stone, and stood four or five feet taller than them, its wings spread out in thin spires of cracked lime to catch the wind, its face turned downwards in sorrow at the sins of men. Tears of red paint had been daubed onto its eyes; names had been scratched into the hem of its robe. T♥P. LAUREN & J 4EVR. THE DOOGLES. K, L * W WER ERE.
A few hundred yards further on, a cairn of flat, faded stones, barely knee-high, grown a little taller over the years, built by travellers who paused to pick up stones and lay them on top of the uneasy structure, constructing a thing that might one day be ancient.
A sign stood next to it.
They kept on walking.
At night, as they huddled down on the edge of a treeless moor, they heard the sound of a single voice raised in rage from a village below, which was soon joined by the barking of a lone dog, somewhere higher in the valley. The screaming went on for nearly an hour, before whoever it was ran out of breath or stopped to make a cup of tea.
Chapter 59
“Helen?”
Theo’s voice was distant, carried away by starlight.
“Theo?”
He stared up at the sky, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so many stars. Not in Shawford, not by the English Channel, where light from both sides of the water blurred everything to an orange-stained muck of factory shite. Not in London, where the sky was an eclipsed line between grey houses. He half-closed his eyes, and tried to remember, and couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a figment of his imagination.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” he murmured, and was surprised to hear himself speak so calmly. “I think I can destroy them. I think I can destroy your son. But I might have to put you in danger to do it.”
“Yes. And?”
“You might be hurt.”
“My own son was poisoning me, dear.”
“It might be bad.”
A slight sound of movement in the dark as Helen shifted, uncomfortable and cold on the ground. “Well,” she mused at last, and thought about it a little longer. “Well. I am a grown woman who knows the things to be said, and the things best left unsaid. I make my own choices, and that is all that can be asked. What did Dani say to you?”
“What?”
“When she died. Your friend Dani, you said she told you…”
“She said that Lucy was my daughter.”
“And?”
Theo cast his memory back, struggling to find a thing from a very, very long way away. “She said ‘Don’t fuck it up.’”