The Lost Child (25 page)
Brodie sat at the kitchen table with her shoulders hunched and her head low, giving the impression of a dishevelled starling. She nodded, ‘Yeah Mum could be like that, one minute happy, one minute sad. Puts you on edge. Do you think she loved you?’
Elaine thought about it as she poured pasta into a pan. ‘Yes, I think she did, as much as she was able to. She was fiercely protective, I was never allowed out of her sight and she wouldn’t allow anyone to interfere with our life. School was a nightmare; she wouldn’t even speak to a teacher. It made life hard. When I very first met Dan she sent him packing without a thought and I never did manage to keep a boyfriend once they had met her.’
‘But that’s not about love, that’s about control. She was just frightened someone would find out who you were and take you away,’ Brodie said.
Elaine watched the bubbles in the pan rise and pop with increasing regularity as the water began to boil; sometimes Brodie’s insights were painfully accurate. The kid astounded her. She could see her reflection in Dan’s shiny glass splash back, her image fading and dulling as the steam began to rise and billow. When she looked at herself she always saw the scar first whether it was covered or not. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. It was an inappropriate quote for the occasion, but it summed up how she felt. Jean had patched the wound with Germolene and bandages, she hadn’t taken Elaine to a hospital or even a doctor, but had dealt with it herself – not to protect Elaine, but to protect herself.
She was saved from any further exploration of the subject by Dan coming in through the kitchen door. ‘Something smells good,’ he said.
Elaine’s attention was dragged back to the food she was cooking. ‘It’s a pasta thing, I’m not even sure it’s a proper dish, I just used what I could find.’
He dropped a kiss on her head, ‘I’m starving, I don’t care what it is as long as it’s food.’
The dinner was a quiet, contemplative affair, each one caught up in his or her own thoughts. Other than a couple of requests for more Parmesan, or more pepper there was little conversation. After they had cleared the dishes, Brodie sought permission to play games on Dan’s laptop and disappeared upstairs to entertain herself. Elaine thought she could sense a slight tension in Dan, an almost imperceptible distance that hadn’t been there before. It was hardly surprising she reasoned, given what he’d taken on he was entitled to some reticence. But when he poured her a glass of wine and led her through to the sitting room she was wary of relaxing too much as they settled on the sofa. A tiny web of fear was forming in her mind and she couldn’t ignore it.
The phone call came at five-thirty in the morning. Elaine was already awake, having spent a restless night next to Dan with a space between them that she hadn’t had the courage to broach. Brodie’s talk of Jean had brought her back, and it felt to Elaine like her mother had been present in the bedroom, tingeing her intimacy with Dan with Jean’s familiar brand of shame and disdain.
Her instinct was to answer the phone, but it wasn’t her house and whoever might be ringing might not be aware of her presence in Dan’s life. So she ignored its shrill ring while Dan, wrenched from sleep by the intrusive noise, fumbled for the receiver. His greeting was less than courteous, and his reaction to the caller proved anxiety provoking. He didn’t say much, just asked what had happened, thanked the caller and ended the call.
‘That was Tony,’ he said, all trace of sleep vanished by the intrusion of the phone. ‘Shirley is dead. She killed herself last night. The staff found her a few hours ago.’
Elaine felt a wave of horror and dismay wash over her, it pulsed and writhed and pulled at her consciousness like a bird of prey making a kill. She couldn’t articulate a response, there had been a disconnect between her brain and her voice that felt like white noise, static and impenetrable.
Dan patted her hand and gave her a look that spoke volumes to her about a man who was fast reaching the end of his rope and who was wondering how much more life wanted to throw at him. ‘I’ll go and wake Brodie, she won’t thank me for not telling her straight away. You put the kettle on,’ he said, rising from the bed. His movements seemed dogged by overwhelming weariness, and Elaine felt the weight of them settling on her conscience.
Brodie took the news surprisingly well, saying it was bound to happen sooner or later, but nevertheless she sat hunched and unhappy in her onesie. Nursing an undrunk, rapidly cooling cup of coffee she looked like the epitome of misery. Dan was his usual capable, reassuring self while Elaine stood apart, consumed by inadequacy and failed by instinct. She had no idea how to reach out to Brodie and felt tremendous guilt now that the static had cleared. Scared to even admit it to herself, she also felt relief. Shirley was gone and was one less problem to deal with. Horrified by her own lack of compassion, she said nothing and hung back, letting Dan look after things as he always did. It was becoming a habit.
She took her coffee and made her way into the lounge, standing by the window and peering through a crack in the curtains as if the creeping dawn could provide insight and sanity where age and experience could not. Dan followed her.
‘Brodie’s gone upstairs for a bath, I think she wants to be on her own for a bit. You OK?’ he asked.
Elaine couldn’t even look at him as she nodded. Her instinct was just to keep looking at the world outside and hope it would give her answers.
‘She wants to go back to their flat today, get her things. I think she’s frightened that Fern will get there first and she won’t have a chance to take what she needs. I said we’d take her,’ his voice was dull with resignation.
Elaine nodded again, ‘OK.’
There was a long pause, she knew that Dan was still there. She could sense him.
‘This might change things, Shirley was her legal guardian. I don’t know whether Tony will step up to the plate now, but she might not be able to stay with us.’
This was one subject Elaine felt confident of being able to discuss. ‘He won’t. He cares about her, but not enough to stick his neck out and do what’s right. He’s not like you Dan. She has no one, only us. Whatever happens I’ll keep her with me – besides she’s sixteen soon, she can make her own choices.’
She heard him sigh, and it made her wince, ‘OK, we’ll see how it pans out. I’m going to phone Jack in a minute, I think the press will liven up again in light of this so I’d like his advice on how we proceed.’
Elaine finally turned to him and nodded, wondering how Jack, the man who’d spent half his life trying to find Mandy, felt now that he had found her. She doubted he was finding much gratification in the event.
*
Dan parked the Aston in the courtyard that constituted parking for the three tower blocks that surrounded it. The dull concrete blocks purported to be homes, evidenced by the fluttering laundry that flourished on the balconies and the litter of neglected toys, rusting bikes and rubbish bags that flanked the rank of huge wheelie bins. It was a depressing, miserable place and it summed up how he felt. Oppressed. Given that their arrival had aroused significant attention from the locals, in particular a group of youths, Dan was reluctant to leave the car but felt obliged to accompany Brodie and Elaine on their quest. One of the lads had called out ‘Nice car mate.’ So figuring he would catch more flies with honey Dan offered him twenty quid to keep an eye on it, praying the bribe would do the trick and that his pride and joy would be intact on his return. He should have brought the van, or driven Elaine’s car through the reinvigorated throng of reporters who were cluttering up the road outside his house. This cloak and dagger existence was beginning to grate on him. All he wanted to do was wrap Elaine and Brodie up and spirit them away to a better life. Though it seemed that fate had other plans.
They managed to run the gauntlet of concerned neighbours expressing their less than heartfelt condolences to Brodie. Not to mention the curious stares, which Elaine drew from those familiar with who she must be and the story attached to her. It wasn’t pleasant, but they coped with it fairly well. They managed to reach the worn and uninviting flat relatively unscathed.
An odour of stale air and rotting food greeted them in the hallway. Embarrassed, Brodie explained that when Shirley had been sectioned everything had happened quickly and they were forced to leave in a hurry. Dan gathered that the contents of the kitchen had been happily rotting and fermenting ever since, not helped by the lack of electricity. The flat had a key meter, and the money had run out.
The whole flat was tainted with squalor and indifference and he had to wonder how Brodie had survived at all in such a place. No wonder she was such a defensive little thing, she would have had to do something to keep the desolation at bay. It clutched at his heart to think that she had grown up in such awful surroundings.
Brodie went off to her bedroom to gather her things and he and Elaine were left in the lounge. He watched Elaine as she took in the shrine to her unknown self. Every surface bore an image of Mandy; even the television was topped and dominated by the face of the smiling, happy toddler. That particular picture sported a dusty plastic rose that had been taped to its corner. That single relic seemed to embody and emanate the interminable sadness that hung around the room, as cloying and penetrating as a damp fog. Dan could feel the desperation reach his bones and it made him shiver in a vain attempt to shake it off.
Elaine moved towards the picture and extended a hand, as if she wanted to stroke the face of the child who had been perpetually suspended in time by the photographer. She withdrew her fingers at the last moment as if the action might acknowledge her sorrow. It seemed as if she was searching the images in the room for something familiar, something of herself that had been lost. The niggling doubts that Dan had been experiencing about the troubled woman in front of him disappeared as he watched her move around the room. In that moment he would have lain down and died if the action would have brought her happiness. The gap between them suddenly felt too great and he stepped across the sad room and put his arms around her, bringing her back where she belonged.
Brodie came in dragging two black bin liners that obviously contained her worldly goods. ‘Isn’t there anything else you want to take?’ he asked.
Brodie scanned the room, ‘Nope, I’ve got what I came for. This is all hers, Tony and Fern can do what they like with it,’ she said, dismissive of the place that had been her home.
Dan sensed the anger that was brewing for what Shirley had done. Brodie may not have cried yet, but it would come. Grief was a strange bedfellow at the best of times. He and Elaine followed her out of the flat, and stood like mourners at a graveside as she shut the front door on her old life. Like a bearer Dan hoisted one of the bags onto his shoulder and carried it down to the car, which was mercifully still in one piece.
*
As Dan and Brodie wedged the bags into the car, Elaine moistened a tissue with her tongue and dabbed at the remnants of Jean that lay in the foot-well. Elaine knew that Dan loved the car, and hated to think that she might have sullied it in any way, much like she hated the fact that she was sullying his life. The pity hug in Shirley’s lounge had been unbearable, it seemed like everything was being filtered through the actions of the two people who had called themselves her mother. In fact the only thing that did feel bearable was the love she felt for Brodie, who seemed to her more lost than Mandy had ever been. As she thought about the little girl and tried to relate what she knew about herself to the angelic image, it occurred to her that she didn’t know how to be loved. Shirley had obsessed, Jean had cleaved, and every man she had known before Dan had treated her as if they were doing her a favour in accepting her flaws. She didn’t know how to be loved, and consequently had never learned how to love. Yet she was mastering it with Brodie. Despite their age difference it felt like there was an equality between them, each was happy to accept what was available from the other. Brodie did not demand self esteem as Dan seemed to, neither did she demand unquestioning devotion as Jean had. Elaine wasn’t sure what Shirley would have wanted from her, but judging from the shrine to Mandy it would have been something extraordinary and ungiveable.
Realising that Dan and Brodie were waiting for her, she wiped her hands on the Jean-sodden tissue and climbed into the car. As they pulled away she looked at Dan, wishing she could be the woman she thought he wanted, the woman he had been imagining for all the years they had been apart. Jean was having none of it.
Fern arrived the next morning in a cloud of cheap perfume and indignation. Her entrance was accompanied by a flurry of excitement from the press who still thronged the road. Both Brodie and Elaine winced when flashbulbs fired as Dan opened the front door and Fern pushed her way in, demanding to see Brodie.
Dan stood by looking affronted as the blowsy woman clutched Brodie in a fume-laden false embrace, to which Brodie objected most strongly. After the child had extracted herself, scowling at the assault, Fern turned her eyes to the adults and, hands on hips, demanded ‘So which one of you fuckers thinks you’ve got rights to keep her here against her will?’
Both Elaine and Dan were struck dumb by the assertion.
‘I’m not here against my will, they’re looking after me,’ Brodie said in a tone laden with contempt for the woman.
‘Oh, is that right, well, there’s no need now is there? Get your stuff, you’re coming with me,’ Fern said, moving to the door and indicating that Brodie should do her bidding without argument.
Before either Dan or Elaine could speak Brodie interjected, ‘No chance, I’m not going anywhere with you!’
‘Now listen here Brodie, I know you know the score, Tony told me. So, get your stuff. I’m your mother, you’re coming with me.’
Brodie looked at Elaine helplessly.
‘I don’t think we should be forcing her to make any decisions at the moment, do you? She’s been through enough. She’s welcome to stay as long as she likes,’ Elaine said, her words more assertive than the look on her face.
