‘I asked you why you didn’t say something to Nick. Remember? You said he wouldn’t understand. He genuinely believes he does his fair share. That’s because he doesn’t see all the other things that need to be done, the things that you take care of so that he never even notices them; they’re invisible to him.’
I try to think about this, but my mind feels as if it has been wrapped in tight material.
‘You take turns to get up with the kids at the weekend, but you’d almost rather get up early on Saturday and Sunday,’ says the voice. My words, his voice. He remembers every word I said. ‘You don’t enjoy your lie-ins. Nick enjoys his; when it’s your turn to do the early shift, he gets up at ten to find the house immaculate, the children dressed, fed and playing happily-teeth and hair brushed-and you still in your dressing gown, hungry, just starting to think about the possibility of getting some breakfast or a coffee for yourself.’
And when it’s his turn, I get up at nine and find the kids hungry and whining, still in their pyjamas, and every toy we own out of its box and scattered all over the carpet, and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and Nick sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper…
‘I remember something else you said at Seddon Hall.’ The man’s voice cuts into my thoughts. Now I know he’s still there. Through the fug, my brain jolts. What has he been saying? Bad things about Nick. I can’t trust him. Has he drugged me? Is that why I feel like this? ‘You said you’d never regret lying, never regret our week together. You said, “If you see that no one else is going to look after you, you have to look after yourself.” ’
His words drop into the narrow tunnel inside my head, which soon closes into blackness.
When I wake up, he’s gone. I look at my watch. It’s quarter to four in the morning. I have a bad stomach ache and I’m horribly frightened and confused, but I can move more easily than before. I jump down from the bench and hear a clink, the sound of metal rattling. What is this thing I’ve been lying on? It has one wide silver leg, in the middle, with a round base. Wheels. I remember seeing but not registering it when I was lying on the carpet before. I bend and look again, to check my memory isn’t playing tricks on me. It isn’t. I hear another hard, metallic noise, quieter than the first.
I pull away one of the towels, then another, and stare at the beige leather I’ve uncovered. I frown, trying to pin down a memory. A doctor’s examination table? Then my breath catches in my throat and I push away all the other towels at once. They fall in a heap on the floor. Something protrudes from one end of the long, thin leather table: a large horizontal loop, like a rigid noose, covered in the same beige leather. I knew it would be there. Still, my gut lurches.
If I didn’t know what this was, the noose shape would terrify me. Recognition does nothing to lessen my fear. Because this thing shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t belong here; there’s something horribly wrong. It’s a massage table like the ones at Seddon Hall, the ones I lay on for the three or four massages I had during the week I spent with Mark.
With someone who wasn’t Mark. With someone who lied.
I turn, run for the door, knowing that this time no offers of food and rest will stop me from leaving. Nothing will stop me from getting back to my home, Nick and the children.
Except that something does, and the wild scream that erupts from my throat when I remember the second metallic click, the sound I thought came from the bench-from the table-does nothing to alter the stark fact: the door is locked.
Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723
Case Ref: VN87
OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra
GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 5 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)
3 May 2006, 9 p.m.
One side-effect of being a mother is that I have lost some of my fears and some of my imaginative capacity. In some ways, this is quite liberating. I am so overpowered by my own feelings that I cannot believe anyone might feel differently. The perfect example: on Saturday, Cordy and I took Oonagh and Lucy swimming. On the way back we stopped at Waitrose. Both of the girls had fallen asleep. I suggested to Cordy that she and I run in and out quickly, leaving them locked in the car in the car park. I do it all the time with Lucy, but Cordy looked shocked. ‘We can’t do that,’ she said. ‘What if the car explodes? That happened once-I heard it on the news. Some kids died because they’d been left in a car and its petrol tank blew up.’
‘What if we take them with us and Waitrose’s roof falls in and crushes them to death?’ I said.
‘We can’t leave them alone,’ she insisted. ‘Some psycho might kidnap them.’
‘They’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave them to sleep. The car will be locked.’ This, I knew, was a weaker argument than my previous one. A psycho could smash a car window and kidnap two girls, easily. What I wanted to say, but didn’t feel able to, was that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why anyone who didn’t have to cart two five-year-olds around with them should wish to do so. I knew Cordy meant paedophiles when she said ‘psychos’. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a paedophile. It proved impossible, and not only for the obvious reasons. I find it hard to empathise with any adult who would seek out the company of children. I know people do it all the time, often innocently and with no evil intentions, but I still find it implausible. And what you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.
I have also, I discovered last night when Mark suggested we go abroad during Lucy’s half-term holiday, lost my fear of flying. I know with absolute certainty that no plane I am on will crash, because if I died in a plane crash then I would be exempt from all future parenting duties, and Sod’s Law dictates that I won’t get out of it so easily. If I died in a plane crash, I would not have to spend another ten thousand Saturday afternoons standing beside bouncy castles that smell of vomit and sweaty socks, or sitting amid the debris of a game of pass-the-parcel like a tramp on a bed of newpapers while Lucy spits lumps of wet, unswallowed sandwich into my hand. I’m not saying I want to die-I simply know that I won’t.
I told Mark I refused to be forced out of my home and forced out of the country at a time that’s not convenient for me, just because St Swithun’s has decided to award its teachers an extra long half-term. It makes me so angry: you pay a fortune for private education and they take longer holidays than in the state sector. I call that fraud.
Michelle has made it clear that I can no longer rely on her. She’s going on holiday with her fat, ugly boyfriend who never speaks-the trip is already booked. I offered her an exorbitant sum of money to cancel it, but she’s in love (Gart knows how and why, given the absolute lack of provocation from her love-object) and seems now to be immune to my financial incentives. If I get desperate, I might ask one of the mums from school to have Lucy for half-term; one of them’s bound to be planning to ruin those two weeks of her life by spending them doing child things, so she can have my child too. I’ll buy her a new vacuum cleaner or apron or something to say thank you, and Lucy can spend a fortnight picking up tips on how to sacrifice yourself and become the family slave, since life is so much easier for all females who learn this lesson well and do not think to question it.
Mum, who ought to be a great help to me, is out of the question. I rang her last night, but never found out whether she could or couldn’t have Lucy to stay for that fortnight because the conversation didn’t get that far. She told me I ought to want to look after my own daughter during her school holidays.