Kim takes her child, her sister back up to bed, tucks her in, hopes that by the morning this will all be over. Whatever this is.
34 NOW
The DNA results didn’t take long to confirm what we already knew – that they were the remains of Simon, our beautiful, beautiful boy. The boy we lost all those years ago. The boy who vanished from our lives, from this house, without ever actually leaving home.
The investigation is still ongoing, Kim providing them with as much information as she is able. And she hasn’t held back. Everything has been fully disclosed, our family’s dirty linen hung out for all the world to see.
It was a relief in the end, she said. A relief to unburden herself, to open up and let it all out. She had lived in a world of filth and murkiness for most of her life, she said afterwards, always creeping around, worried about being found out. Deceit is a festering wound. It never heals, infection after infection setting in, rotting the surrounding areas of flesh, charring and scarring, ruining and corrupting forevermore.
I only know what she has told me. Sergeant Duffield has been careful, discreet, keeping our conversations separate. I have had to rely on Kim for information but am sure that it won’t be long before everything is revealed. I am looking forward to it and dreading it in equal measure.
Gavin and Gemma have been unbelievably supportive. And then yesterday, a visitor arrived. Lucy standing in the living room as I came downstairs after a mid-morning shower was enough to stop my heart. Relief and love bloomed within me. All together. My family was all together. A poor set of circumstances in which to meet, but we are all here under the same roof and that is enough for now.
Later today, I am going to be interviewed at the police station. I will tell them all that I know. Not that it is much. Fragments of a disordered childhood is all I have: snatches of a past blurred by time and distorted and dulled by somnambulism.
But before that happens, I am meeting up with Kim. She insisted we speak beforehand. There’s something she wants to tell me. Something important. She wants me to hear it from her rather than from a stranger in a police station. I am all out of ideas as to what it can be. I’m not sure I have any more room for nasty surprises but I will do my best to not react disproportionately, to try to keep my emotions in check and not cause any further upset. We need to stick together, us Goodwills, not do something that will drive a wedge between us. All we have is each other.
I tell Lucy and Gavin that I am going to be a couple of hours, that I am meeting Kim to discuss the case and that time dependent, we will visit Nana afterwards. I pray they don’t try to accompany me and am more than a little relieved when they nod and wave me goodbye, the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking, chatting, drinking tea and eating cake. It’s a fine old sight and makes me as happy as I can recall feeling for the longest time. A splash of colour in my life. No more shades of grey. Only rainbows and sunshine after a long and powerful storm.
Kim is sitting at our usual table. She gives me a cursory wave and a warm smile as I enter and head towards her. She stands, takes my hand in hers when I sit down and it’s then that I know this is going to be serious. I brace myself, sucking in chunks of air in readiness for what I am about to hear.
I think I’m prepared for this, after what we have endured over the past few weeks.
I’m not.
Once again, she blindsides me, knocking all the air out me, leaving me faint and breathless.
‘Grace, what I’m about to tell you isn’t easy. All I ask is that you don’t get up and walk out of here without hearing the whole story. When I said you needed protecting from yourself, it wasn’t an insult. You’ve always had an active mind, been inquisitive. You have always been keen to get to the bottom of any situation and I was scared that you would probe a little too far, discover things that were best left undiscovered.’
I shake my head, jut out my bottom lip to indicate my mystification at her words.
‘Our dad was an abusive man. A horrible, cruel man.’ She looks away, her eyes filling up at the memory, her mouth and chin trembling.
‘He wasn’t my dad really,’ I say, hoping to distance myself from his actions. Hoping to distance myself from him. I am almost certain now that Sylvie did nothing wrong, that he was the one who did the damage, that he was the one who killed Simon. She was trying to save him. It was him all along. It was always him.
Kim glances back at me, her expression veiled, anxious. My insides tighten. I don’t want to hear this. I promised I wouldn’t walk out. I have to keep that promise. I can’t keep on running from the past. It will chase me for forever if I don’t stay and face up to it.
‘That’s the whole point. Grace. This is what I wanted to tell you. He was your dad. And he was my dad too. He raped me. I was thirteen years old; a naïve, quiet teenager and he raped me. His evilness, his depravity knew no bounds. I am so sorry, my darling. I am so very, very sorry.’
I feel no rage, no desperate, growing anger. Instead, a deep sense of calm settles within me. Maybe I’ve always suspected this, since Kim first told me about our real relationship, about who we really are. I don’t need to get up and walk out. I don’t need to do anything at all. Nothing has changed. I am still me. My identity hasn’t altered. My provenance isn’t something of which I am particularly proud. I won’t be shouting about it from any rooftops, but it doesn’t alter who I am. It’s experience that shapes us. Experience and being loved and nurtured. And despite growing up with somebody like him in our household, I was both. You can’t kill love. You can try, but we hung onto ours. Even amidst the terror and the trauma, we always knew that our mother loved us even if he didn’t. Regardless of his physical strength and all-encompassing temper, her bond, the wealth of love she had for us was always the greater, more powerful force, as was Kim’s. She tried. She really tried. She was strong mentally. He was stronger physically. It wasn’t her fault.
Kim stands up, moves around the table and puts her arms around me, holding me close. We stay like that for the longest time until she sits back down, dries her eyes and smiles at me. ‘I wish I could say that’s all there is to say but unfortunately, there’s more.’ She takes a sip of her coffee. ‘I know that you’re robust enough to stomach it. You have the tenacity and strength of a thousand-strong army and to be honest, it’s a huge relief to speak openly. I’ve had years and years of staying silent, not speaking, being terrified of letting it all out.’
I reach across the table and place my hand over hers. The café is almost empty. Two elderly women sit in the corner, their conversation loud and rapid. We are not in their line of vision. They are too engaged in their own talk to take any interest in ours.
‘Mum tried to take Simon away because of the abuse. She couldn’t prove that Dad was actually abusing Simon, but I saw him sneaking into his bedroom on more than one occasion and did what I could to protect him, hiding him in my bedroom with me. He’d abused me for years. Simon wouldn’t have been immune to it.’
She stops and I swallow, thinking back to those memories – Simon skulking under Kim’s bed, the terrified look on his face. I feel a stab of dread, a knife twisting in my gut. That vile man. That poor, poor boy.
‘She was going to take him to Grandma’s house in Northumberland but he caught her. She panicked, made mistakes, made it too easy for him to catch her out. She knew that he had raped me and feared for Simon. Even if he wasn’t abusing him sexually, Simon certainly met with Dad’s fists on plenty of occasions, as did Mum. That monster had no redeeming features or qualities, certainly none that I can recall. An odious little man through and through.’
‘And he is our dad.’ I rub at my eyes, my shoulders hunched, a streak of misery roaring through my veins.
‘But we’re not him, Grace. You are part of me and I am part of you and that is all we need to know. We’ve survived thus far. All we need is each other.’
‘And Mum,’ I murmur, smiling as I think of her sweet, little face, her tiny, frail body perched in a chair at the care home as she watches out of the window, waiting for our visits. The past rearing its head in her poor, demented mind, continually biting at her.
‘And Mum,’ Kim replies. ‘She has always been there for us.’
‘How did—’
‘How did she get away with passing you off as her own child?’
I nod, tears building, a lump wedged in my throat. I want to weep for an eternity – tears for me and Kim, tears for Simon and tears for the mother who sacrificed everything for her children. We owe her so much. A thousand kisses, the promise of an eternity in heaven wouldn’t be enough for the woman who risked her life to save ours.
‘As soon as she realised what had happened, she packed me off to Grandma’s house under the pretence that I was asthmatic and had bronchitis, saying the clean air would do me good. She hardly ever ventured out of the house, lying low and then pretended that she had given birth, telling anyone who asked that she didn’t realise she was pregnant until she was six months gone. I think there were those who suspected – the likes of Janine Francis – but nobody could prove anything. Things were different back then – no visits from the midwife or health visitor. It could be done and was done. You’re living proof of that.’
‘And this is why you didn’t want me to move back into Woodburn Cottage?’
She shrugs and smiles. ‘Maybe. I kind of guessed what had happened to Simon and that was why Mum would never sell the place. I couldn’t prove anything and would never have attempted to. Mum would have been tried as an accessory to murder when all she had tried to do was save her son from a monster. That night, after it all happened, Dad made sure everything looked normal in the garden, no obvious disturbances to the soil. He cleaned the patio down, both he and Mum bathed, washed their clothes and went to bed, then the next morning – well, you know the rest.’
Something jars in my head, a distant memory. A memory of Kim peering out of the window and pointing to Mr Waters’ house. I don’t ask her her reasons for doing such a thing. She was young, frightened, wanted to deflect the blame elsewhere, away from Mum. She didn’t want to admit that so many terrible atrocities could happen in our own family. She had an image of Mr Waters as an abusive man when all the while, the monster lurked in the heart of Woodburn Cottage, the place we called home.
‘After Dad died, why didn’t Mum go to the police? Tell them what had happened?’ I bite at my nails feverishly, a habit I thought I had shaken.
‘Because how could she prove that she hadn’t done anything wrong? She was put in an impossible situation. Damned if she didn’t and damned if she did. At least we’ve now got Simon back and Mum is too ill to recall what went on. It’s the best way really. The only way.’
‘The only way,’ I murmur, nodding my head sagely. ‘Did you always suspect that Simon was buried there?’
