Kim is shaking her head, tears rolling down her face. ‘Not now, Grace. I know you’re angry with me and I totally understand that, but this is painful for me too. Talking about it brings it all back.’
Another fire rekindles itself beneath my breastbone, flames flickering, scorching me. How dare she? How fucking dare she deny me what I need to know? Deserve to know. Painful for her? How the hell does she think I feel about it? Does she even care?
As if sensing my rising fury, she sighs and taps her fingers on the steering wheel, a soft hammering that booms in my ears. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say here is that what I tell you might not be what you want to hear.’ Her words are a desperate attempt to deflect the blame elsewhere, to sneak under the radar of my anger. Even at this moment, this pivotal moment in our lives, she portrays herself as the victim. I am the aggressor for daring to question my own identity. She is shameless, her arrogance breath-taking.
‘I’m a grown woman, for fuck’s sake, Kim, not a petulant ten-year-old. I have two adult children of my own. Don’t tell me what I am and am not capable of handling.’
I hear her sigh, swallow hard, can almost hear the cogs whirring in her brain as she tries to placate me. To tell me yet more lies. It’s an easy task for her. She is a past master at it now, an expert. She has had over forty years of practise. Nothing she can say will evoke any sympathy from me. This misery is mine and mine alone.
‘Please, Grace. I’m begging you. Not now. Let’s meet up tomorrow when things have settled down a bit, when we’ve both had time to come to terms with this.’
The slowly burning fire in the base of my belly suddenly combusts, flaring through my veins. ‘Come to terms with this? Christ almighty, Kim, you’ve had all your life to come to terms with it! Why does everything always have to be about you? For once in our miserable little lives, just this once, let’s not dance around your sensitivities, eh? Just for once, let’s consider me and how this makes me feel!’
I grab her shoulder, swing her round to look at me. She loosens her grip on the steering wheel, drops her gaze and sobs. ‘I was raped, Grace. I never ever wanted you to find out about it. And this is why. I knew the misery and hurt it would cause. My only aim in life was to protect you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’
My hands drop. I let out a groan, dip my head to stop more tears from falling. I am freezing. My teeth begin to chatter, my flesh prickles with dread. I envisioned some teenage romance, a spotty, callow youth or an older man from the village, somebody who wooed Kim, taking advantage of her stunning looks and maturity. I didn’t expect this nasty little scenario, a grubby, savage situation that resulted in my entry into the world.
‘No. No, no, no!’ A thousand thoughts crowd my brain, questions jumping around, legions of them, too many to utter. Only one escapes. ‘Who?’
She shakes her head, brings her hands up to cover her face, Tears leak through her fingers, running down her arms, soaking the fabric of her cotton jacket.
‘They were never prosecuted.’ Her sobs fill the car, sliding off the interior, bouncing off the leather upholstery.
And here we are once more, Kim, my sister, my mother, exposing another layer of herself that I didn’t know existed. I have lived in ignorance for so long. Another tough coating of Kim being torn away to reveal a damaged, frail woman underneath. Seconds ago, I had no pity for her, only deep hatred. Hatred at being betrayed and once again, she has turned it around, shown me that people are multi-faceted, the depths to their character immeasurable.
My parents were not my parents at all. My father is a rapist. My mother is my sister.
‘I had to keep you. There was never any other option. I want you to know that. I loved you more than anything else in the world. Still do.’
And now it is my turn to cry, to let it all out – the torment and hurt and despair I have tucked away in the last hour, the last year, the last decade – it all comes pouring out.
I need more time to come to terms with this. More time to rebalance my life, my relationships with Kim and Mum. My poor old mum who is currently attempting to work her way through her own set of problems, her damaged brain too diseased to ever understand. But not my mum. She is my grandmother. Kim is my mother.
‘I can’t call you Mum. It doesn’t feel right.’ I try to sound casual, not cruel or insensitive but I’m tired and everything is so hard to control. I don’t have the energy to temper my reactions. Everything is still so raw, my emotions a bloody, open wound.
She pats my hand and smiles and I feel more of my anger begin to ebb away, anger I thought would eventually consume me. It’s subsiding. I suddenly feel lighter, everything easier.
I open the car door and take my keys from Greg, who looks like a man who would like nothing better than to be spirited away from this situation. I bat away Kim’s requests to accompany me inside. I tell her that I’m fine, that I need some space, a couple of minutes alone. She nods, smiles. Understands. We have recalibrated, Kim and I, our lives meeting and merging once more. For every divergence, there is convergence.
The air inside is thick, warm, carrying undertones of Gavin’s aftershave, Gemma’s perfume, the aroma of toast and coffee. I lock the door and lie on the sofa, closing my eyes against the headache that clamps itself around my skull, a combination of relief and shock meeting and fusing, exploding in my brain. My eyes are heavy, weighted. I close them, and everything slips away.
It’s cold out here. I’m cold, my arms and legs rucked with goosebumps. I shouldn’t be out here. Not like this. Not in my nightdress when it’s dark. I rub at my eyes, unsure how I got here. Did something or somebody wake me? I thought I heard somebody crying but I’m not so sure. I do remember the bolts on the doors were slid back and the door was unlocked. I don’t think we should go to sleep with our doors unlocked. It’s dangerous. Anybody could get inside and that frightens me. I don’t want strangers coming into our cottage while we’re all asleep. It’s not right. What if somebody who wants to hurt us gets inside, or worse still, a murderer breaks in? I shrug away that thought. We don’t know any bad people. Our neighbours and friends are all nice people. Nobody is going to hurt us. At least I hope not.
I stare down at my bare feet and wiggle my toes, trying to dislodge the bits of dirt and grit wedged in between them. I look around, squinting to see properly in the darkness. Why am I here? There’s a reason, I just can’t remember what it is. And then it comes to me, the memory, rushing at me like a rocket. I definitely heard somebody crying and I saw them too. They sent me back inside, told me to get back into bed. I did get back in but now I’m here again. I don’t know how I got here. I just know that I am outside once more and it’s cold and something is going on at the bottom of the garden. Something scary. It has to be scary if it’s happening in the middle of the night and it made Kim cry. She didn’t like me being out here, seeing her upset. She wiped her eyes and sent me back to bed, wouldn’t tell me what was happening.
I walk towards the shed. That’s where I saw her last time. I wonder if she is still here? Why is she outside? I want to call her name but then everyone might hear me and I’ll get into trouble. Mum and Dad don’t like it when I do this, wander about in the middle of the night, half awake, half asleep. I don’t do it on purpose. It just seems to happen without me knowing about it. I go to bed as normal and wake up in a different place. It doesn’t frighten me but I am often cold and tired when I wake up.
Sometimes, Kim takes my hand and leads me back to bed, telling me to stay there as she tucks the covers under my chin. But then at other times, she has Simon in her room when he is meant to be asleep. I saw them once. He was hiding under her bed. She wouldn’t tell me what he was doing there. It wasn’t a game. He looked scared. His eyes were all big and glassy, like huge marbles staring out at me. So why is he allowed to be out of bed and I’m not? Maybe it’s because I’m the youngest and they still think I’m the baby of the family. I’m not. I’m sensible, quiet. Everybody says so.
All of a sudden, I am a bit frightened. I want to go back inside and see Mummy, to climb in bed next to her and feel her lovely, soft arms around me as she cuddles me in. But I can’t. I can’t do that because as I stare down to the bottom of the garden, my eyes slowly allowing me to look at things properly, I can see who is standing there. And it isn’t a burglar or a bad man or somebody trying to break into our garden shed; it’s my mummy who is down there, her back to me, her nightgown wet and dirty as she bends over, drops to her knees and starts to cry.
I wake up. My eyes snap open. Heat floods my body, circling around my head, dampening my hairline. My throat is dry, coarse like sandpaper. I cough, clamber off the sofa where I have been lying, curled up foetus-like, and grab at a glass, filling it with cold water. I glug it back. An icy trickle trails down my throat, landing in my stomach with a punch, cooling me.
My palm is clammy as I place it across my forehead and press hard to alleviate the pressure and pain building there. I was dreaming. Something about Woodburn Cottage and my childhood. Fragments of it float in and out of my brain, disconnected, jagged, like lost pieces of a puzzle that don’t slot into place as they should.
I sit down, my limbs leaden. I try to think back to the dream, to what it meant. Was it a dream or was it a memory, a childhood recollection? Another fleeting thought that I can’t pin down.
Gavin and Gemma will be back later. I need to get myself together, be the welcoming, capable mother they expect me to be, not some hollowed-out shell of a woman who can’t cope and is unable to carry her own emotional baggage. I can carry it with ease. I can and I will. It’s who I am, who I will always be.
The words, Kim is my mother, Kim is my mother rattle around my head as I rinse my face with cold water, open the fridge door and get ready to prepare our evening meal.
26
The next few days see me going through the motions, being the genial host to Gemma, the perfect mother to Gavin. I smile and chat and cook and clean, making sure the house stays tidy and they are given a warm welcome when they come home every evening. I don’t call Kim even though she leaves half a dozen voicemail messages for me to contact her. I need more time. Time to assimilate my thoughts, to think about and come to terms with who I really am. She doesn’t call around uninvited. She understands my need for space and for that I am grateful.
By the Friday of the following week, I’m ready to face her. We arrange to meet at a layby on the moor road. I take a flask of coffee to appear civilised. We can meet, sit in my car and talk, something we should have done a long time ago. Why is it those closest to us are always the farthest away? We spend a lifetime of keeping each other at arm’s length, batting away questions, shielding our insecurities, widening the gap until it is a yawning chasm. I have always felt like the mistake of the family, the error that needed correcting. And now I know why. Not an error. An accident. Unexpected. But loved all the same. It’s now time to bridge that gap, to heal our self-inflicted wounds, to tend to the cuts and bruises we have given one another.
The journey is smooth, the roads quiet. I can see Kim’s car parked up ahead. I pull in behind her, kill the engine and step out into the brisk wind that blows freely over the moorland. A carpet of lilac sways back and forth, a sea of coarse heather caught in the breeze.
Kim’s car is warm, sweet smelling as I slide into the passenger seat. She squeezes my hand and I let her. No more pulling away, no more acrimony or anger. I am tired of it. Exhausted by my own perpetual fury. It’s time to put an end to it, to extinguish my burning anger and direct my energies elsewhere. Somewhere more positive, more rewarding.
I pour out the coffee, the aroma adding to the easy atmosphere between us, our previous feelings melting away. It’s time to start again. I’ve had time to think, time to come to terms with what happened, with who I am. Griping won’t change anything. I am who I am and no amount of complaining and crying will alter that.
‘Everything okay? You sleeping any better?’ Her voice is soft, encouraging.
