Kind of Cruel (36 page)

Let me move into the third person, because this isn’t an attack. I’m just asking questions. Amber explained why she didn’t challenge Dinah: after years of putting up with Jo, she dislikes the practice of telling other people what they ought to think and how they ought to feel. Also, she holds Dinah and Nonie dearer than any principle. She didn’t want Dinah to feel guilty for having made what might seem to an eight-year-old to be a logical assumption.

I’m not convinced. It’s possible to explain to a child that she’s wrong without making that child feel guilty. You say it without anger or reproach, you say, ‘I can understand why you might have thought that. It’s an easy mistake to make.’

Looking at these two incidents together – suggesting the hide-and-seek game to William immediately after he’d expressed his forbidden fear of Kirsty, and failing to tackle Dinah’s misunderstanding of the implications of Kirsty’s disability – it seems pretty clear to me that Amber identified with both William and Dinah when they made these comments. My guess is that Amber herself has forbidden thoughts about Kirsty, ones she feels guilty about.

It’s unlikely that she would be scared of her, like William is. She wouldn’t suspect Kirsty of being mutely evil, like Dinah does. What, then?

Incidentally, Amber has referred to Jo describing her brother Ritchie as the baby of the family, but she hasn’t said anything about whether Jo or Kirsty is the older sister. I’d bet a thousand pounds – not that I
have
a thousand pounds – that Kirsty’s the middle child, born two, three, maybe four years after Jo. Narcissistic personality disorder is caused by emotional trauma, usually around the age of three: the shock of safety or love suddenly being ripped away, like a rug being pulled out from under you. When Kirsty was born, assuming she was born the way she is, there must have been a huge amount of emotional upheaval in the family. That trauma is likely to be at the root of Jo’s narcissism.

Kirsty can’t speak. She probably can’t understand much either. She’s so severely handicapped that there’s a danger of people treating her as if she’s a cushion, just something that’s there in the room. Jo had a private conversation with her family of origin on Christmas Eve night, so private that her husband Neil wasn’t party to it. Jo thinks it’s normal and acceptable, at an extended family gathering, to conspire with one’s mother, brother and sister against one’s husband, whom one has sent to bed alone. She thinks it’s acceptable to wake Neil in the middle of the night, demand that he join her in an escape without telling him what it is they’re escaping from. Most women confide in their partners, but not Jo. Like all narcissists, she’s a control freak. She knows what she wants to do, and can’t allow any opinion of Neil’s to prevent her from meeting her own needs.

Kirsty, on the other hand . . . Who could possibly be a better confidante, from Jo’s point of view? She can’t disagree, she can’t spill the beans. Around Kirsty, Jo would feel no need to lie about anything, to hide anything.

I’m going to go out on a limb here: Amber didn’t correct Dinah’s misapprehensions about Kirsty because they’re too similar to her own. Every time Amber looks into Kirsty’s eyes she finds herself wondering,
What do you know? How do I know you haven’t got all the information I want? All right, you can’t talk, but who knows what goes on behind those eyes? I don’t even know what’s wrong with you
.
And then Amber would feel guilty, because of course she knows Kirsty doesn’t know anything.

Or maybe she looks at Kirsty and thinks,
You must have seen and heard things that, if only you were normal, you’d be able to understand and tell me about
.
In which case, Amber would feel even more guilty. Imagine being resentful of poor Kirsty. What kind of terrible person would that make you? Imagine being jealous of Kirsty; what’s wrong with you, that you’re jealous of someone so much worse off than yourself?

But it’s entirely understandable. Remember earlier I said Amber’s desperation to know why Jo, Neil and the boys disappeared must have been kept alive all these years by something, some force? One of the possible explanations I suggested was that she might be convinced that someone else knows the truth, someone less deserving than her.

Kirsty is that person. It infuriates Amber that Kirsty might have the secret information stored somewhere in her damaged brain in the form of never-to-be-understood data that she’s taken in through her eyes and ears, while she, Amber, who is more than capable of listening and understanding, is left out in the cold: an outsider who knows nothing.

I also said earlier that perhaps Amber believes Jo owes her a secret. Which would mean that, at some point before they went to Little Orchard, Amber told Jo a secret – a big one, is my guess. Narcissists spend much of the time selling themselves to others, being charming and seductive to reel you in, to make sure they’ve got you there, close by, for when they need someone to lash out at. Amber might easily have been fooled into thinking she could trust Jo, before she knew her well.

How she’s suffered since. That’s why she puts up with Jo’s regular attacks: because Jo has something on her. That’s what she can’t bear to think about, and why she’s putting all her energies into impossible mysteries, which are stacking up. Have you noticed? We’ve got two of them now. Kirsty can’t know anything, yet Amber can’t shake the suspicion that she does; Amber didn’t see the words ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ in the locked room or in any other room at Little Orchard, but she knows she saw them at Little Orchard.

As I said before, I’m not against impossible mysteries. Their impossibility doesn’t make them nonsensical. On the contrary, they’re highly meaningful. They’re what’s keeping you out of your own personal locked room, Amber, at the same time as offering you a way in. Their impossibility, and the extent to which it frustrates you, is your subconscious trying to signal to your conscious mind that it can’t bear this much longer. Things need to come out.

9

Thursday 2 December 2010

‘You said you’d tell us as soon as we were in the car,’ says Dinah. ‘We’re in the car now, so you have to tell us.’

‘I
want
to tell you, Dinah. I just didn’t want to do it surrounded by teachers and . . . whooping posh girls dressed as tortoises and hares.’

‘They were rehearsing for an
Aesop’s Fables
assembly,’ Nonie says. The inside of the car smells of chlorine. Today is the girls’ swimming day; their hair is still wet.

‘You never come and pick us up on a Thursday. We always come home on the bus.’

I realise what is so unusual about the way I feel: I have the energy I need for this conversation. As soon as Simon left me alone at Hilary’s, I lay down on the sofa and clocked out of the waking world. I woke up two and a half hours later, at three o’clock, feeling clearer in my mind than I have for a year and a half, and knowing that I had to go to Little Orchard.

Have to
. I have to go back.

‘We’re going to a house in Surrey,’ I tell Dinah and Nonie. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’ Snow is falling on the car. It started a few seconds ago, but it’s the thin kind, the kind that isn’t going to stop me. I’m not sure anything could, in my present mood. I would heave giant boulders out of my way if that was what I had to do to get to Little Orchard. I haven’t given myself a chance to think about why. I don’t care why.

‘But there was only five minutes of school left to go,’ Dinah protests. ‘If you were going to pick us up early, why didn’t you pick us up properly early, so that we could miss a whole lesson?’

‘I came as soon as I could,’ I say.
And I brought biscuits
.

‘What house in Surrey and why?’ Nonie wants to know, not unreasonably.

‘It’s called Little Orchard. It’s a holiday home, like the one we went to in the summer, in Dorset. Luke and I stayed there once, years ago.’

‘Are we going to stay there now?’

‘Has it got a trampoline?’ Dinah enquires warily, as if I’m bound to have overlooked this crucial consideration. ‘Is Luke meeting us there later?’

‘No, we’re not staying there. I just need to check something with the owner.’
Who’s unlikely to be there
. What do I plan to do if she isn’t? Break in?

‘We’ll stop somewhere for a nice dinner on the way back.’ I try to make it sound like fun, aware that I’m going to have to compensate the girls for four boring hours in the car.

‘I can’t miss school tomorrow,’ Dinah says. ‘It’s the first proper
Hector and His Ten Sisters
rehearsal.’

‘You’ll be there,’ I tell her.

A few seconds later, I become aware that whispering is taking place behind me – contentious, not collaborative. Dinah and Nonie need to learn how to mouth words silently. I listen to the tutting and hissing, imagining facial expressions and frantic hand gestures that I can’t see. As always, I appreciate the girls’ efforts on my behalf. It is usually me and not themselves that they’re trying to protect when they carry on like this. Eventually Dinah blurts out, ‘The cast list for
Hector
has changed. Two girls who were going to be Hector’s sisters aren’t any more. But it’s okay, I’ve told them they can have even better parts in the next play I write. Even though I’m
never
going to write another one because it’s so stressful. But they don’t know that. Anyway, it’s all arranged now and everyone’s okay about it, so it’s fine.’

I know spin when I hear it.

‘You can’t promise them main parts in a play you’re never going to write.’ Nonie sighs. ‘I’ll have to write it if you won’t. I won’t make it good. I’ll just write any old thing, so that they can be in it.’

‘Write the worst play you can,’ Dinah advises. ‘That’s what they deserve, now that they’re—’

‘
Dinah!
’ Nonie sounds scared.

‘Now that they’re what?’ I ask.

‘Nothing,’ Dinah says firmly.

Am I going to insist she tells me? How bad can it be? Or perhaps the question I should be asking myself is: how convincingly could I pretend to be interested in the theatrical wranglings of eight-year-olds at the moment?
Not very
. I’ll ask another time. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe it’s okay and not at all negligent of me to assume that Dinah has not been tying up unsatisfactory cast members in the PE changing rooms and beating them with skipping rope handles.

‘What do you need to check at Little Orchard?’ Nonie asks patiently. She wouldn’t get impatient even if she had to ask me a thousand questions before I told her what she wanted to know.

‘Why don’t you ring the owner, or email him?’ says Dinah. ‘No one goes all the way to Surrey to check something. You’re not telling us the truth.
Again
.’

‘Dinah!’ Nonie mutters.

‘It’s okay, Nones. She’s right. You deserve to be told the truth.’

‘At last!’ says Dinah. ‘She’s going to stop treating us like stupid little kids.’

It’s hard to know where to start. ‘There’s too much I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Someone set fire to our house. I don’t know who or why . . .’

‘And we don’t know who set fire to our old house,’ Nonie says matter-of-factly. ‘Mum’s house.’ When she mentions Sharon, the sadness in her voice is more prominent. Before Sharon died, Nonie never sounded sad. Dinah has always been bossy, but there’s a steeliness in her now that never used to be there. I blink away unhelpful tears. Thinking about how all of us have changed isn’t going to bring Sharon back.

‘I feel as if I don’t know anything at the moment,’ I try to explain to the girls. ‘I need to find some answers. The more I know, the safer we’ll all be.’ I hope that this is true, and try not to think about how easily it could be the opposite of the truth.

‘Aren’t the police supposed to find the answers?’ says Nonie.

‘They’re rubbish,’ says Dinah. ‘They’ve had two years to find out who killed Mum and they still don’t know.’

This is a big step forward, and I know I have DC Colin Sellers to thank for it. He was heroic last night. Dinah and Nonie both liked him; he made them laugh, and didn’t pressure them for information. For a long time, neither of them would say the word ‘police’.

I think about Simon Waterhouse. I want to tell the girls that a better, cleverer detective is now taking an interest in what happened to Sharon, but I’m afraid to raise their hopes.

I carry on with my explanation, for my own benefit as much as theirs. ‘This morning, I tried to book to stay at Little Orchard – I thought we could maybe go there for a weekend some time. The owner told me it wasn’t available to rent any more, but I didn’t believe her. She said she and her family were living there. I want to see if that’s true. If it isn’t, I want to know why she lied to me. The only thing I can think of is that maybe when we stayed there before, she wasn’t happy about the way we left things, or . . . I don’t know. But I want to try and find out.’ I hope I’m not telling them too much. What would Luke think?

He’d think that racing off to Little Orchard was a crazy plan. Which is why you didn’t ring him before you left, why you left a note instead, knowing you’d be in Surrey by the time he got back from work and found it.

‘Oh, no,’ Nonie mutters.

‘What’s up, Nones?’