Just What Kind of Mother Are You? (31 page)

I look at the registration.

Kate’s car.

42

I
’
M NOT SURE HOW
long I’ve been standing here for. It can only be minutes, but it feels longer. Mel Frain has disappeared inside to get back to her wine, and the rear windows of my car are beginning to steam up from Diesel’s panting breath. I open the driver’s door, put the key in the ignition and lower the back windows down an inch. Dogs die in hot cars is what I must be thinking.

But my eyes are on that house. The end one in the line of four.

Why is Kate’s car here? She’s only just got out of hospital.

I walk over and stand outside the front door. It’s an odd feeling. Like the calm before the storm. I could turn around now and not face this. I could get in the car, drive back to the shelter and pretend like I never saw. And maybe the person I used to be would do exactly that. Because she avoided confrontation, she didn’t challenge authority.

I go to knock but, at the last second, I stop. Instead I move a couple of steps to my right and peer in through the window. I see Kate and Lucinda on the floor with a big cardboard box. They’re unpacking decorations for the Christmas tree. For a moment I think that Kate and Guy must have a Christmas booking – people don’t like arriving with the place not looking festive.

And then relief floods through me, almost knocking me
sideways. Lucinda is here. Alive. I stifle a sob as I watch her. She’s safe. Thank God she’s safe.

Then my eyes move to Kate and my blood runs cold.

I move away from the window and back to the door. Silently, I try the handle.

It’s locked.

My breath’s coming out in raggedy gasps. I try to calm myself but, as I rummage through my memory of the last four days, the anger’s building. I feel like the fool I’ve been taken for, and I now know I have to stop thinking and
do
something.

I walk around the side of the house and try the back gate. It’s open. Gently, and without sound, I push against it.

I’m in the garden. It’s been paved for easy maintenance with the odd pot here and there. In the corner is a barbecue covered up for the winter, and a picnic bench painted in a stupid duckegg colour that’s classic Kate. It’s her trademark. She’d paint everything in that colour if she could.

The back door is a split stable door. It’s unlocked, so I slowly go in and look around the kitchen, stunned. There’s a freshly bought baguette out on the worktop. Kate must have picked it up from the bakery on her way over here. The smell of the bread fills the room. It’s their lunch, to be eaten when they’ve finished the Christmas tree, and I can just picture them, mother and daughter –
best friends
, as Kate always told me they were – eating happily.

I hear voices. I can’t make out the actual words, but the tone is light, happy, normal. The hatred I’m feeling now is almost paralysing.

Next to the baguette is a bread knife. I pick it up. It feels light in my hand. It’s cheap. The type you’d buy from Poundstretcher or B&M Bargains because you begrudge spending on an expensive item if it’s not going to be for you. I waggle it around in the air. For a moment I’m the mad woman. The woman who’s come to take revenge.

I close my eyes for a second, steadying myself, then I hear movement from behind the door to the front room. Stepping forward, I open it fast.

Kate is on the other side. She doesn’t speak when she sees me, just stares.

She’s no longer the haunted vision of the past few days. Now, she seems healthy, robust, and I wonder how that’s even possible: how could you fake that kind of grief?

Her eyes move to the knife at my side and she blinks rapidly.

Lucinda is still unaware. She’s got her back to us and is threading baubles on the branches of the tree, chatting to her mother. Her movements are slower than they ought to be though, her speech dragging somewhat.

She’s dressed in a hoodie and pink sweatpants. Her neatly bobbed hair swings forwards as she bends.

Kate speaks without turning around to her daughter. She doesn’t want to take her eyes off the knife. ‘Lucinda, sit down on the sofa, sweetpea.’

Lucinda turns and gapes when she sees me standing in the doorway.

I glare at her.

‘Did your mother tell you it was
me
they blamed for your disappearance?’

Lucinda doesn’t answer, looks to her mum for guidance.

‘Did she?’ I demand.

Lucinda nods. Her face registers fear, but her eyes are glassy; she’s not quite with it.

Kate tries to take a step towards me, but I raise the knife. ‘Don’t,’ I warn her, and she retreats.

I’m shaking. I know I’m shaking, but this is what I have to do. I’ve been seized by the certainty that if I don’t stop this woman, she’ll go on to destroy others. I hold the knife out in front of me, brandishing it like a machete.

‘Lisa,’ Kate says, ‘what are you
doing
?’

And I laugh.

‘Why me?’ I ask her. ‘Why did you think you could do it to me?’

She stays silent. Still staring at the knife.

‘Answer me!’

‘Because I knew you would blame yourself. I knew you would blame yourself and I—’ She stops, smiles lightly in my direction.

‘And?’

‘Anyone else would have fought it,’ she explains. ‘They would have picked holes in it, but I knew you wouldn’t. I knew you’d blame yourself without question … and you were always so pushed for time, you could never really attend to things the way you needed to.’

I look past her to Lucinda, who’s rolling the hem of her hoodie between her fingers. ‘You know your mother is fucking deranged, don’t you?’

‘Lisa!’
Kate admonishes sternly. ‘Language, please.’

‘You know she’s mad?’

Lucinda won’t look at me.

‘Who the fuck kidnaps their own kid?’ I shout at them both.

Kate spreads her hands wide. ‘Someone who’s desperate to save her marriage,’ she replies earnestly.

‘And you went along with this?’ I snap at Lucinda. ‘You just went along with it?’

‘I thought it would make Daddy come home.’

‘From where?’

‘Daddy has another family,’ Lucinda says. ‘It makes us all so sad. We thought that if we could make him see, then he would stop.’

‘What family?’ I ask, thrown. ‘What other family?’

Neither of them answers so I turn back to Kate. ‘This is fucking child abuse. Look at what you’ve done to her. She thinks this is normal. She thinks this is—’

‘She wants her daddy back – what’s so wrong with that?’

‘What’s wrong
is that they’ll put you away for this, so she won’t have a mother
or
a father. And why’s she speaking like that? All slurry? Have you drugged her or something?’

‘Lisa, calm down. I can see you’re angry. I understand that, I would be angry in your shoes. But we really didn’t have a choice. We tried to get him to stay with us, and he wouldn’t.’

I can’t take in what she’s saying. I can’t believe she’s actually done this on purpose.

‘How could you?’ I say, confounded. ‘How could you stand there crying when I begged for your forgiveness, knowing what you were doing to me?’

She shrugs as if to say there was no other option. She did what she had to do.

‘But we were friends,’ I say to her, and she turns away.

I think about how broken Sally became over this, blaming herself for Lucinda’s disappearance.

I think about how guilt-ridden both of us were at what transpired from our mistake. A mistake we never actually made. Both of us feeling like failures – me as a mother, Sally as a friend.

Suddenly I can see myself clearly. I see how easy it must have been for Kate to pin this on me. Because she’s right.
Of course
I wouldn’t question it. Of course it would be
all my fault
. The woman who spreads herself too thinly, the woman who doesn’t feel good enough, who acts
less than
. She will always be an easy target.

I look at Kate now and I’m embittered that I allowed this to happen to my family. Then a thought occurs: ‘How were you going to bring her back home?’ I ask. ‘There are two police forces out looking for Lucinda. What were you going to do, smuggle her back in and pretend that it never happened?’

‘Lisa, why don’t you put the knife down so we can talk properly?’

‘Fuck off.’

Lucinda speaks up from the sofa. ‘I was going to say I’d run away.’

‘To where?’

‘Here,’ says Kate. ‘Lucinda knows this house. She comes along with me and Guy when we’re checking the properties. She could hop on a bus outside school and get here unnoticed – if she knew where the keys were kept. Which she does. On the hooks in Guy’s office. We have over ten empty properties at the moment; because of the time of year, Guy wouldn’t notice if one set of keys wasn’t where it should be.’

‘Would probably have his mind on other things,’ I say sarcastically, ‘what with his daughter missing, and his wife—’ I don’t finish the sentence.

Studying Kate’s face, I say, ‘What about the overdose? Why would you do that? What mother would leave her children alone … regardless of whether she has a marriage or not—’

‘I knew you’d find me.’

‘What?’

‘I knew you’d find me,’ she repeats, and my mouth drops open.

‘How?’

‘You sent me a text,’ she says simply. ‘You sent a text saying you were on your way over. And I thought it’s either now or never … I didn’t take as many pills as you thought. It wasn’t as risky as they made it out to be—’

‘You did that to get Guy back?’

I’m dumbfounded as she nods her head as if to say
It’s what anyone would have done, Lisa. Really, it is
.

‘You’re insane.’

‘We all have secrets, Lisa.’

I swallow.

‘Every one of us is hiding something we don’t want the world
to know about. Remember? We all want everyone to think our family’s perfect, that we got it right. Well, I
did
get it right. I did everything right. And it still went wrong. And I’m sorry, Lisa, but I just wasn’t willing to accept that. I fought for my family. I did what I needed to do.’

‘You need locking up.’

‘Is that what you really think?’

‘’Course it’s what I think – do you think this is
normal
?’

She sighs out as if she can’t believe I’m finding this so difficult to comprehend.

‘Why didn’t you tell Joe about the affair you had?’ she asks.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

She repeats: ‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Because, in so many words, you told me not to.’

‘I’m not your mother. I’m not your conscience. You didn’t tell him because you looked at what you’ve got and you knew that, even though it was wrong, you’d do what you needed to do to keep your family together.’

‘Yes, well, it’s not a secret any more, so—’

‘Yes,’ says Kate gravely. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘About what?’

‘I had to give Adam the nudge he needed. I told him to tell Alexa, or else I would. How did Joe take it, by the way? I felt bad about that. I’ve always liked Joe.’

‘You did that?’

She sighs. ‘I needed something to take your minds off Lucinda for a while, something to buy me some time.’

I stand there, stunned. I go to speak but find I can’t.

And it’s then that she goes for the knife. She reaches out so fast that her hand is on the blade in a second.

I pull back and feel the resistance on the serrated edge. It’s cutting her. It’s cutting through the flesh on her hand, but she keeps with it.

‘Kate, stop!’ I say, mortified at what is happening. But she doesn’t.

I jerk, hoping to get the knife away from her in one quick movement, but still she holds on.

‘Jesus, Kate!’

I’m staring at her, not believing she’s doing this, but she stares right back at me. Her eyes are white and bulging.

‘I won’t let you take her,’ she screams at me. ‘I won’t let you take Lucinda.’

‘I’m not going to take her, you mad bitch! Let go of the knife!’

She must be bleeding. She has to be bleeding.

‘Mummy!’ Lucinda’s shouting, crying. ‘Mummy, stop, you’re getting hurt. Please—’

Kate, keeping her eyes on me, shouts, ‘Mummy has to do this. Just give Mummy a minute.’

She’s strong. So strong. Where has she got this strength from?

Incensed, I scream at her, pulling at the knife wildly, ‘Why do you always do that? Why do you refer to yourself in the third person? She’s thirteen, Kate. She’s not a baby! Stop treating her like a bloody baby, it won’t make her
love
you any more!’

And I can’t say what this triggers, but all at once her eyes well up with tears and I feel her grip slacken. It’s as if, just for a second, she doubts herself. It’s as if she can see who she is from the outside and her strength withers.

So I kick her. I kick her hard in the shin.

I’ve got my boots on and I kick her viciously, like I really mean it. And she yelps.

She stumbles backwards and falls. She starts scrabbling away, blood pouring from her hand, and I’m transported back to that winter when I was eight. My father’s wife slicing at her wrists. The irony isn’t lost on me. A second family. Another second family that’s screwed a woman up to the point of madness.

Kate is staring up at me, anticipating another kick. Lucinda is
taking off her hoodie so she can wrap it around her mother’s hand. And that’s when my phone rings.

Each of us stares at one another, unsure of what to do.

‘Don’t move,’ I warn them. ‘Move, and I’ll stab you.’

I pull the mobile out of my back pocket and take a step away.

‘Mrs Kallisto?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cumbria Police,’ the voice says. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident—’

Christmas Eve

43

T
HE SNOW IS BACK
, bang on time. Windermere village is bustling with people as Joanne makes her way to the butcher’s to pick up the turkey.

Jackie’s at work this morning, but because of the way Christmas has fallen this year – on a Sunday – Joanne has the day off. And suddenly she’s feeling all Christmassy. This year it’s not just going to be
another day
. This year she’s looking forward to sharing a proper Christmas dinner with Jackie, all the trimmings, the two of them falling asleep on the settee after the Queen’s speech, bellies full of chocolate Brazil nuts.