The Broken Ones (6 page)

The cold bites my skin the first time I pull the duvet down. My naked arms are freezing cold. Mum won’t put the heating on until December. We’re not made of money, she says.

“Sophie?”

I shrink back under the covers at the sound of her voice. The shrillness is a clear warning bell. She’s woken up in one of her moods.

“Get up! We’re going out.”

I hurry out from under the covers, shivering as I rush to my drawers to pull out underwear and clothes. Her footsteps come up the stairs, each one a stark prospect as she gets nearer and nearer. I’m pulling on trousers as she bursts through the door. It’s not a school day today, which comes with a unique set of difficulties. I don’t need to wear a school uniform, and Mum is particular about what I wear. As soon as she’s in the room, she strides over, pushes me onto the bed, and yanks the trousers down my seven-year-old legs.

“Not those ones. Here.” She tosses me clothes from my drawers.

Thick woollen tights, a corduroy skirt, and a woollen jumper with a high neck.

“Mummy, they—”

“What?”

“They make me itch, Mummy.”

“Nonsense. Put them on. They’re your favourite clothes.”

I’m almost in tears as I pull on the tights over my knickers. The roughness of the material is harsh against my sensitive skin. The outfit is too small. The crotch of the tights sags down my thighs.

Mum picks up a brush from the top of my drawers and begins to brush my hair. “There! Don’t you look nice in your outfit?”

“It’s too small,” I say.

She pulls my hair back, and I cry out. “Stop being silly, Sophie. This is your favourite outfit. Don’t you remember? You always used to wear it. Every winter, you’d wear this jumper.”

“I suppose so,” I say. Maybe I do remember wearing it. It does seem familiar, at least. When I stroke my fingers over the sleeves, the gesture brings with it a memory of finding strands of hair stuck to the material. Then I think of the same strands of hair caught in my fist. My stomach flips. I don’t like that memory. I push it back down.

Mum tuts. “I can’t do anything with this hair. What have you done to it?”

I stay silent.

“You need to look nice. We both do. I’m meeting Roger today.” She parts my hair and begins to braid the left side. “He’s our key, Sophie. He’s going to get us out of this mess. He’s rich, you know. He’s going to help us.”

“But… I don’t understand, Mummy. I thought Roger was your boss. How is he going to help us?” The question is innocent. I don’t understand why Roger would want to help us. He has his own family to help.

Mum’s hands stop moving. She tugs on the braid, pulling my head back.

“Ow! You’re hurting me!”

“You’re such an idiot, Sophie. You don’t understand anything.” She lets go of the plait and pushes me away. “He’ll never help us, not when I’m burdened with an ungrateful child like you. Look at you. You’re a mess. You look awful. No wonder your father left us. I bet he was trying to get away from you when he put his head through that noose. It’s all your fault. If I’d never had you…”

I have tears in my eyes. Her face is bright red with anger. Her dark eyes flash. She throws the comb to the floor and stands up, clenching her fists at her sides.

“I’ll just have to leave you here when I go to see him,” she says. “I can’t risk you messing everything up. I have to get this right, or he’ll never leave his wife. There’s bread in the cupboard. You can have that for your tea. Not too much, though, or you’ll get fat. No one likes a fat girl.”

It’s in a taxi, six hours later, that I take Mum home. She’s disorientated, but not agitated. The doctors have administered medication to keep her calm. I appreciate the break from her distressed state, yet at the same time I’m wary of her new impassiveness.

“Why didn’t you love me like a normal mum would?” I whisper. “Why is it that all I get from you is either nastiness or nothingness?”

She can’t answer me. I wonder if she ever will. I regard her, then; I study her intensely. I examine her wrinkles, the curl of her hair, the flecks in her eyes. I see the sagging chest beneath her top—a long-sleeve t-shirt brought by Erin—the thinness of her legs, the veins on her hands. I see at it all, and I remember every argument, every harsh word.

Until I scrutinise even deeper. A shiver runs up my spine. There’s a niggle in the back of my mind. I stare at her, and I get the strongest feeling that she’s hidden a part of my past from me. Why do I think that?

“Mum, why did you drink the bleach?” I ask.

Her eyes move in my direction, but there’s only the faintest glimmer of recognition.

“Mum? Why did you drink the bleach?” I know she’s in there. I know it. A woman like Maureen Howland never goes away. She’s endurance itself. Even in death her spirit will be within me, criticising me, keeping me from reaching true happiness. “Tell me. Tell me why you drank it!”

Her eyes open and close as though she’s trying to focus on me. Her mouth begins to move. Her hand twitches. I lean across the seat, angling my ear closer to her lips. The expelled air from her lungs wafts against the hair by my ear. I hear her trying to form the words. I hear her lick her lips and swallow, as though her throat is dry.

“Tell me,” I prompt. “Tell me now.”

I can’t help it. The hardness is inside me. I want to be better, but my resentment towards this woman will always be there and I can’t stop it. It’s only the fear of her that keeps it in check. I try to love her. I’ve tried over and over again.

“The…” she starts.

After a pause, I prompt her again. “The what? Mum?”

“Shadow.”

I sit back up straight. The driver glances up to watch us through the rear view mirror. When his eyes meet mine, he turns his head away.

“Mum, what is the shadow? You need to tell me.” Again, there’s that niggle at the back of my mind. Some sort of recognition. Someone from my past. But who? They’re all dead, our other family members: Dad killed himself when I was four, and my grandparents never featured in my life, but they died several years ago. There’s no one else. There were my mother’s boyfriends, but they never lasted long. They were usually married and wealthy. We often survived by selling Mum’s jewellery from past lovers. She says that’s how we managed to afford to move from East London to Eddington. I’m not sure how much of that is true, though. I’ve never been sure where Mum got the money to move. We were so poor, we were living on bread and butter at that point. Mum worked as a cleaner. She wasn’t trained for much. In Eddington, she managed to get a few jobs as a secretary or a receptionist. We struggled in a freezing cold flat for a while as she slowly saved up enough to buy a house. Roger came along at the right time. She swindled him for enough to get us on our feet.

Roger… He’d be in his sixties now. I still vaguely remember his fat hands and thick-rimmed glasses…

“Shadow,” she says again. She blinks a few times, as though waking from a deep sleep. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going home, Mum,” I say. “Can you tell me who the shadow is?”

“Sophie, why are you wearing that horrible outfit? I didn’t raise you to not understand that you have to comb your hair in the morning.”

“Mum, listen to me. Who is the shadow?”

The driver pulls onto our street. I can see the cat from across the street pooing in the front garden of three doors down.

“But where have we been? I don’t understand.”

“We’re on our way home from the hospital. You drank some bleach and hurt yourself.”

“Oh, yes, the shadow told me to do that.” She nods to herself.

“But who is the shadow!”

“Sophie, don’t shout. It’s not ladylike. Fancy going to a hospital dressed like that. Doctors work in hospitals, you know. They earn a pretty penny. Oh, I don’t want to go home. Can we stay in the car? I don’t want to go into that house.”

The taxi driver eyes me from the front of the car. He pulls in by the kerb. “Everything all right, love?”

“Yes,” I say. “My mother has Alzheimer’s disease.”

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I went through it with an uncle. Nasty business. Five-fifty please, love.”

I dig into my purse as Mum stares out at our house.

“Please, Sophie. I don’t want to go in there.”

The note of desperation in her voice gives me chills. Though the Alzheimer’s has rendered my mother intermittently weak, I’ve never heard her beg me like that. I find a five-pound note and a pound coin for the driver.

“It’s going to be fine,” I say, forcing cheer into my voice. “This is our house. You’re safe here.”

She shakes her head. “No, we’re not.”

I ignore the way my blood runs cold, and the way my hand shakes as I open the car door. The taxi driver tries to give me change, but I tell him to keep it. I make my way around to Mum’s side and help her out. Still, she continues to stare at our house—a normal, semi-detached house on a very boring street—as though the thought of setting foot inside fills her with dread. I take her bag in one hand and her elbow in the other and guide her to the front door. She’s pale as a ghost as we go inside. I close the door behind us, and we’re alone in our home.

*

I’m running on empty.

I haven’t quite managed to repair my relationship with Erin after accidentally accusing her of hurting Mum, but she feels sorry enough for me that she makes me a strong cup of tea the next morning. She’s ten minutes early and offers a weak smile when I leave for work.

I’m exhausted from the emotionally draining day, but I have responsibilities. As hard as I try to focus on work, all throughout the morning, my mind drifts back to the conversation in the taxi. I can’t stop thinking about this shadow. It’s as though I’m being haunted. At lunchtime, when I tell Alisha about the weekend, she suggests I actually am haunted.

“My nana had a ghost, you know,” she says. “An old man who used to stand in the corner of the guest bedroom. I saw him once. He stood there, staring, and didn’t say a word.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a coat hung up, or a wardrobe door left open?”

“I swear on my little boy’s life that it was a ghost. I woke up in the middle of the night. My eyes adjusted to the dark. There he was, standing straight at me. He wasn’t smiling. I remember the whites of his eyes like it was yesterday.”

We’re both on playground duty. It’s a warm day but with a blustery wind. Her dark hair is whipped up around her head. She rubs her arms through her shirt.

“It frightened you,” I reply.

“I nearly pissed myself, Soph. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life. I’ll never forget it.”

I purse my lips, quelling the desire to tell her it was probably a nightmare. There are times to correct people and times to be quiet. This is one of those times where silence is the best option. Besides, who am I to say her experience wasn’t genuine? I don’t believe in ghosts at all, but does that mean they don’t exist? Who knows what’s out there in the world intangible to humans.

“Hey, what happened to Peter?” she asks suddenly.

“I get the odd missed call from him. But not much else. Right after I deleted my profile, I received a prank call on our house phone. I assumed it was him, and it shook me up a bit. Then all this stuff happened with Mum, and I didn’t really think about it anymore.”

“Be careful. It’s all too coincidental that your mum mentioned a shadowy figure hanging around
and
you’re getting bombarded by calls from an internet weirdo. Make sure you keep your doors locked at night.”

I shake my head. “It can’t be anyone getting in at night. There’s no sign of anyone breaking in, and I check all the windows and doors before I go to bed. I think it’s a figment of Mum’s imagination. It’s probably the Alzheimer’s.”

“Do you think she’s hallucinating?” Alisha tilts her head in my direction, her attention piqued. I’ve noticed how people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about Mum’s disease in general terms, but if I mention any odd or erratic behaviour, they’re all ears.

“No… I don’t know. The word ‘shadow’ is so familiar to me. I suppose it’s this new context of using the word—as though I’m being followed. I get this sense of déjà vu every time I think about it, and I’m almost certain it’s to do with my childhood.” I take a side step to avoid a football. The kids wave at me before the regular raucous playground activities continue. “I’ve never known how we managed to move to Eddington when I was little. I know this doesn’t seem related, but for some reason it’s been on my mind a lot.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, we were dirt poor in East London. I wore the same clothes for years, even though they didn’t fit. We ate bread and broth most days. Some days we went without both. Mum worked as a cleaner to pay the mortgage after Dad died without leaving us any life insurance.” I pause, suppressing a shudder at the thought of those years. They’re such a blur, but I can still remember the itch of the wool jumpers I layered up to stay warm in winter, and the ache in my belly when it came to dinnertime. “Then we moved to Eddington, a pretty wealthy little corner of England. For the first few years, we were as poor as we were in London. I remember the tiny flat Mum used to rent. But it was
Eddington
. The house prices are touching the sky. Even after a few years, and after Mum managed to save up somehow, we were never as well off as the rest of the people here, but we still found a small house to buy.”

“She managed to find half the married men in the village, too.” Alisha raises her eyebrows.

“She told me that she sold jewellery from an old boyfriend to move here. But I don’t remember any boyfriends around that time, or any jewellery. Having said that, I don’t remember a lot from those days. I barely remember Dad.”

“A deposit for a house was a substantial amount of money, even in those days,” Alisa says.

“Exactly. So, what the hell is going on?”

The bell tolls to mark the beginning of the afternoon lessons. As always, my eyes are drawn to Chloe as she wanders into the school building alone. She’s wearing a pink dress today, with white tights and black shoes. It’s a little young for her, I think. It makes her stand out against the jeans and t-shirts of the other kids.

“Soph.” Alisha pulls me back from my thoughts. “Take one problem at a time, yeah? Chloe has a psychologist to help her, and her parents are cooperative.”

I smile. “Are my thoughts that obvious?”

“Written all over your face, love.” Her expression softens and she places a hand on my shoulder. “Plus, I know you. I know that you have a soft spot for the girl. But there’s too much on your mind to take on anything else. Concentrate on your mum, get through this particularly tumultuous period, and things will start to seem brighter.”

“You think I’m going to get through this?”

She meets my gaze with her deep brown eyes. They’re so kind, I would believe anything she says. “I know you’ll get through this. You’re pretty strong, you know.”

We make our way towards the school. “Hey, maybe this is what you should do,” she says. “You should set up some sort of recording device in your mum’s room. Maybe it’s not a ghost. Maybe there’s a mouse in the attic or a loose floorboard. It could be frightening her so much that she’s making up this shadow thing.”

“You’re a genius, ’Lish!”