The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine (29 page)

I sat down in a pew and I thought about Heja having the keys to my flat. She must have come to my flat and been around my things; maybe gone through my things. I had this intense revelation that for these last few months she’s been digging tunnels under every aspect of my life. There was that photograph of Eddie left where Markus would find it. Then I remembered my lost presentation notes and my bungled appearance before the board. She must have taken my notes. I shivered. That was months ago. She has caused real trouble between Philip and me and she has driven a wedge between Markus and me, and because of her actions I have been feeling shaky for months. Now the killer blow; she came to our flat when she knew we would be out at the launch and she took Billy. Her malevolence towards me is boundless.

I am no believer but I got up and knelt on the prayer stool in front of the Golden Lady and I prayed that I had made the right decision about the photographs and had not endangered my Billy.

OCTOBER

I woke early. Billy was asleep on the other side of the bed. I bent over him and listened to his breathing. It was calm and regular. His breath is pure. His skin is new. I thought of my dead brother Tomas then and of my mother, when she woke from the nursery floor after falling asleep that night he was ill. She would have got to her knees and looked into his cot. He was pale, still breathing, and unresponsive. She knew at that moment just how ill he was. Then there was the panic and the rush to the hospital. He died suddenly. He did not have a slow death, like Tanya’s.

My death will creep up on me day after day, month after month, year after year, as it crept up on Tanya. I may have ten more years of dying ahead of me. First my legs will go. I will need a wheelchair. My arms will become weaker and weaker until I will not be able to turn the wheels. I will need a full-time nurse to wash me and dress me and feed me. Then my neck and my throat muscles will start to waste until I cannot swallow or breathe. Difficult to be noble when your body walls you in.

Solange did not want them to bury Tomas. When they told her he was dead she demanded to be left alone with him in the hospital room. They left her sitting there, holding her dead baby in her arms. Hours passed and she would not come out of the room, or let Tomas go. Rigor mortis had started to set in. There were purple livid patches on his body and he was cold and stiff. My father tried to take Tomas away from her. She clung to her son, screaming at him.

‘He just needs to be kept warm.’

Still she rocked him and whispered to him. In the end three nurses had to hold on to her while my father took the baby’s body from her frantic, clawlike fingers.

On the day of Tomas’s funeral she was in the secure unit of a mental hospital. She did not see the small coffin being lowered into the earth. How do I know this? My father did not tell me. He would feel it was a betrayal of Solange. I was a journalist and I found out the truth. I discovered that Solange Vanheinen, my mother, suffered an acute psychotic reaction to the death of her son. Billy is almost exactly the same age as Tomas was when he died. I looked at him and thought how different a living baby is from a dead one.

When he woke up I gave him a bath. It was difficult because he was slippery and wriggly and splashed his hands up and down. If it is your own child maybe you have reserves of patience that I did not have. Maybe you are hardwired to cope with the baby’s constant demands. I dried him and dressed him. The only way to do it is not to hurry. If you take time and let him roll and kick on the bed, it is easier. There was a knock on the door. I moved to the front window. I looked down onto the path. Wayne was standing there. His car was parked in the road. He stood there for a minute. I knew he would look up so I drew back. When I looked again his head was bent. He was writing something. He pushed something through the letterbox and walked away. I heard his car reverse and drive off up Cremers Drift.

I waited until my heart had settled. Then I went down the stairs carrying Billy. Wayne had left a piece of folded paper on the mat. I read his rather childish handwriting.

Just checking you arrived safely and everything OK after big storm. Call me if you need anything. Best Regards, Wayne’

All my life men have paid unwanted attention to me. Arvo Talvela said I should look on it as a sort of tribute. I do not see it that way. I do not want these unknown men to intrude into my life.

During breakfast I listened to the news. There was no mention of Billy. The police will be involved by now and she will be demented. She will have named and accused me of course. They will have spoken to the caretaker at my flat and probably to Philip Parr and to Robert too. One thing I do regret is the pain this will cause my father when they track him down. He will be so shocked, and so worried about me.

I have to be careful yet I would like to get out of the house for a few hours at least. I cannot tolerate another day cooped up inside with the incessant crying. I tied a scarf around my hair, put Billy in the buggy and locked the cottage up. It was another calm, clear day. As I pushed Billy along the path he stopped crying and kicked his legs up and down.

We reached Deal. I pushed him along the paved path that runs parallel with the beach. How I would like to be able to run over those pebbles and sit at the water’s edge as I did as a child. We got to the lifeboat station. There were seagulls circling the water’s edge and their raucous cries filled the air. A profound and mournful weariness was creeping over me.

I will never forget the last time I saw Tanya alive. It was the holidays and we had gone to grandfather’s house in the country, as we always did. These holidays were very adult affairs. I was the only child in the house. There were lengthy family dinners with talk about books and music. My mother would go on long walks with her two dogs. Sometimes I went with her. She made it clear that she preferred to go on her own. She said she could walk further and faster without me. I had packed my new pink satin ballet shoes, which were my pride and joy. I practised my dances in Grandfather’s large sitting room.

My father liked to go fishing and would always ask me if I wanted to go with him. He said he liked to have me along. I sat by his side on the riverbank while he cast his fishing line and it plopped into the water, making concentric circles that moved outwards. He would hunch forward, as if entranced by the sight of the water’s surface, and I would play with my glazed pottery mouse. They were peaceful afternoons.

On this particular day I was skipping through the hall. Aunt Tanya had been moved into a ground-floor room that looked out over the garden. I had already been in the house a week and had not seen her once. Usually I spent some time with Tanya. She was patient with me and would teach me songs or read to me. This time I was told she was too ill to have visitors to her room. It was lunchtime and the door to her room was open. I looked in as I reached it. Tanya was in her wheelchair. She was thinner than the last time I had seen her. A nurse was bending over her. The nurse held Tanya’s head back against the headrest of the chair with one hand and with the other she was feeding Tanya with a spoon, like a baby is fed. Tanya looked over the nurse’s shoulder and our eyes met. She did not acknowledge me or smile at me, as she usually did. She just looked at me and her eyes were the saddest eyes I ever saw. Then the nurse became aware of my presence in the hall and she closed the door. I could never be like Tanya. I could never be their gentle suffering angel.

It has been such a long lonely journey since I first heard I was ill. I have spoken to no one about my illness since Arvo died. The time has come to tell Markus. He needs to know that I am dying. And he needs to know about our baby. I
must
see Markus so that I can die in peace.

I pushed the buggy towards the parade of shops until I found a phone box that worked.

OCTOBER

I lay in bed, waiting for Nick to call. He said he’d ring and let me know when the appeal was being broadcast. Markus had gone out and I can’t understand how he can function normally when my Billy may be dead already. The pain was overwhelming. I could see no point in getting out of bed to get washed and dressed yet bed was a place of torment too.

My breasts were so painful, swollen and hard with the milk Billy would have drunk over the last two days. I ran a hot bath and squeezed the bath sponge over my breasts again and again then squeezed at them till the milk came out, and it eased the physical pain a bit.

After my bath I sat at the kitchen table draped in towels with no energy to dry or dress myself. It was a very old table. I traced the lines on the wood. My aunt Jennie had it for years and so many dramas had been played out around that table. I’ve seen a few since I’ve lived here. I remembered the morning we confirmed my pregnancy and Markus and I sat at this table, stunned at the news and, in my case, filled with a tremulous happiness.

And I thought that what was happening now was the most profound drama of all, because if anything happened to Billy I would never be the same person again. Would I even be able to go on living? I’m not the same person I was just two days ago. I thought that I was suffering then because things were so tense and unhappy between Markus and me. That was nothing, nothing at all; how could I have made such a fuss about that? I could have got over him not telling me about his relationship with Heja.

I should have known that Heja would not be satisfied with just making me wretched. She wants to destroy me. There must be something else behind this monstrous hatred of hers. It is abnormal and it must come from some deep disturbance. It can’t just be because Markus left her. Could something else have happened to her; could she have had a miscarriage?

It suddenly occurred to me that Robert might know something. I helped him once so perhaps he might help me now. I rang his practice immediately and a woman said he was with a patient and would be out in twenty minutes. I said it was urgent that I speak to him as soon as possible and I gave her my name and number. She said she’d get him to call me as soon as he was free. I got dressed and I waited. My phone rang and it was Robert, and I asked if I could come and see him straight away. He said he was so sorry, he had a patient waiting for him and he couldn’t cancel. He would be free in an hour and a quarter. He was very precise about that, pedantic almost, and he gave me the address. His practice is at Belsize Park.

Robert’s consulting rooms were in a white stucco, double-fronted house. There were a number of practices there with a shared waiting room on the first floor. The receptionist told me to go straight in and buzzed open a door on the left. I looked into his room and saw the couch, where all his patients must lie down. He led me into the room, closing the door behind us.

‘Can I get you some water or tea?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘Have the police been in touch?’

‘Yes, a detective called Nick Austin. Please, sit down, Kathy.’

I perched on the edge of a chair.

‘Heja has taken my son Billy,’ I said.

‘He didn’t quite say that...’

‘She has. And I know she’ll hurt him.’

The unshed tears were pushing up my throat and behind my nose. Then they started from my eyes as if they had a life of their own. I rubbed hard at my eyes.

‘Don’t push the tears back in. Let them come out,’ he said.

I let the tears out and it was a relief to sit there and sob. He handed me a box of Kleenex.

‘I don’t think she will harm Billy. I really don’t...’

‘How can you say that when she’s taken my baby?’

‘Why do you think she took Billy?’

‘Because of Markus.’

‘Markus...’

‘Because I’m with him now; because we have a son; because of Markus! I know you recognized him when you came to my office.’

‘Yes I did recognize him. I met Markus, just the once, at Heja’s flat.’

‘When was this?’

‘In July. I guessed they had been lovers once.’

Another stab of pain; Markus told me he had seen her when I was in Lisbon, and that was in June.

‘They were together for nine years. Markus left her suddenly, about seven years ago.’

‘I picked up there was something powerful between them.’

I discovered that the pain of jealousy, however sharp, was as nothing compared to the pain of losing Billy.

‘Markus told her he wouldn’t see her again. She resigned and told me she’s going back to Finland. She didn’t go. She stayed here all the time because she wanted to take Billy and destroy me. And you don’t think she’ll hurt him!’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘And I’m sure you’ve lost your professional detachment!’ I said it angrily. How could he still believe in her? My angry comment stung him, I could tell.

‘I came here because I hoped you’d try to help me. She didn’t love you, you know. She’s only ever loved Markus!’

‘That is possible,’ he replied calmly.

‘Then help me; please help me. Tell me what’s going on in her head.’

He stood up then and walked up and down his room and it was as if he had moved into analyst mode.

‘I’m sure Heja has been through some kind of trauma. And I’m certain she was in analysis for a long time, though she flatly denied it. She also has a difficult relationship with her mother. I was struck by how she called her mother by her first name. And her mother is cold towards her too.’

‘She is very cold.’

‘She is a profoundly reserved person. Whatever trouble she has had, she keeps it locked within herself. Can I ask you a question, Kathy?’

I nodded and he sat down now, opposite me.

‘How long have you been with Markus?’

‘Just over two years...’

‘So Billy came along quickly.’

‘Yes, we’d only been together six months when I got pregnant.’

‘That is fast; a new relationship and a baby. You are rather different people, aren’t you? You seem a very open and direct person, Kathy.’