The Sacrificial Man (24 page)

The night is dangerous for me. It’s an infidelity to the past, to Smith’s sacred plan, too much a cosy illusion of love.

At the very least, Lee gives me this.

1981

Alice had another mother who was older and didn’t cry so much but didn’t laugh so much either. She made Alice wear different clothes. The special lilac cardigan had disappeared and she wouldn’t help Alice look for it. She bought her other things to wear: dresses with lace and bows at the back. And Alice mustn’t climb trees, mustn’t stroke strange dogs. New rules for a new life.

The new mother tried to tell Alice why she had a different mummy. Alice was learning Bible stories, which she read to her every night. No more
Cinderella
or
Little Red Riding Hood
.

“It’s like Jesus,” New Mummy said. “He had two daddies: God, who was his real father, but also Joseph, who raised him like his own son. Who was there for him every day.”

“So I’m like Jesus?” Alice was thinking of other parts of the story, the bits she didn’t like, with the soldiers killing the babies after the Three Wise Men spoke to Herod.

“Yes – well, no – but you do have two mummies. The one who had you in her tummy, who’s in heaven. And me. And I love you as much as if you came from my tummy.” It was getting confusing and New Mummy was getting teary. Still Alice couldn’t quite grasp the idea. “So my real Mummy, she’s like God?”

But New Mummy started to set out the dolls’ china tea set. “Let’s have a tea party, Alice. Which of your dollies would you like to invite?”

Alice arranged her teddies and Barbie in a line, still thinking of her real Mummy who was like God. Who she couldn’t see, but whom she felt every minute, watching her. Especially when she prayed.

When Alice was five she started school.

She wore a stiff shirt and stood in a playground, counting seconds until she returned to the dusty classroom where the chalk scratched the board and made her shudder. Until she must sit in the plastic chair with a hole in the back, through which the boy behind poked her with a sharp pencil, breaking the lead on her new white shirt, gurgling that dreaded word into her ear. Over and over, that same word, ‘posh’ which she didn’t really understand, just that it was what New Mummy called other people, and what Real Mummy had called nice places. I used to live somewhere posh, Mummy would say, in a beautiful home for the perfect family. Then she’d laughed like it was a joke, which Alice hadn’t understood. Some jokes were just for grownups.

The boy said ‘posh’ like it was a bad word, making Alice feel ashamed without even knowing why. She looked down at the thick, hard cuffs of her new shirt, the red tie on the desk like a dragon’s tongue. She wouldn’t cry. She bit her lip until it bloomed.

In the cold playground she watched other children kick balls and skip ropes and tangle elastic with new shoes, and wondered if that was why they wouldn’t let her play. But she didn’t feel posh, like the new clothes, like the big house in the photo. She felt cold.

Another girl stood on the edge of the playground. They were solitary together. Her tie wasn’t a sharp tongue but a floppy thing, and her shirt was baggy on her narrow shoulders, no longer the white of new clothes. Everything about her looked used.

The poor girl smiled, an uncertain crooked thing, and Alice dared a smile back. Are you my friend? She wanted to ask in this place where everyone shouted and everyone wore the same colours and everyone was a child, but no-one was like her. Where no-one liked her. Are you my friend?

And the girl still smiled. A miracle. They stood together, faced the other children, shoulders touching.

“I’m Alice,” she whispered, shy with her gift.

The other girl coughed suddenly into her thin hand. She turned to Alice. “My name is Lee.”

Alice had a friend. Had someone to smile with. Their teacher, Miss Giddyhoo, was a kind lady, teaching her last class before she retired. She explained that this meant she wouldn’t work anymore, but would have more time for gardening. She dabbed a pink hanky to her eyes as if gardening was a sad thing. Miss Giddyhoo knew that Lee was Alice’s friend, that the boy behind her wasn’t, and made them change places. Soon it was not a pencil in Alice’s back, but Lee’s nudging foot, the shoe abandoned on the floor, secret whispers from behind as they chatted through the days and weeks to Miss Giddyhoo’s gardening leave.

Lee was allowed to come to Alice’s home after school, and New Mummy preferred that. “I like you where I can see you,” she told Alice, “besides, it gives Lee’s mother a break.” Lee had three brothers, two of them babies.

“Twins,” Lee stuck out her tongue, “both as horrible as each other.”

They laughed at that, and Alice wished Lee could come and live with them forever. Or that she had a brother or sister, so she would never have to be alone. She told New Mummy this, who rubbed her flat stomach sadly and said, “I’m afraid that won’t happen.” Then she started to clean the kitchen.

“Can’t we play something else, Alice?” Lee pushed out her lower lip.

“No. We’re playing my game.”

“It’s boring!” Lee looked ready to cry but she wouldn’t leave. Lee knew what to do. It was a game they’d played many times. She lay back on the bed. “Not the bed,” said Alice, “on the floor,” she whispered, knowing New Mummy was downstairs. She didn’t want her coming up to see what they were up to.

Still sighing, Lee dropped to the floor, as stiff as a plank, “It’s cold,” she complained, but Alice was soon next to her, her head on Lee’s flat chest. Her arm was over her waist and Lee said, “Mmm. Better,” snuggling her face into Alice’s hair.

Alice told her, “You’ve got to lie still, remember. Only I can move.”

Lee closed her eyes, lying straight, and Alice placed a leg over her leg, stomach against waist. Lee was firm and bony, and that was good. It made the memory come back easier. Alice felt the heat under her, and listened to Lee’s heart, wishing her friend understood the game. Lee was weary, she sighed; she was only still when Alice kissed her. Her cheek was soft with warm skin, like dough.

It was cold outside, and the floor was drafty but they remained, the two girls, as the weak sun died behind the clouds and the smell of steaming vegetables rose from the kitchen below. Lee’s stomach grumbled and Alice nipped her, hard.

“Ow!”

“Well, be quiet then.”

Alice closed her eyes, but she didn’t smell the food, she didn’t feel the cold. She remembered the smell of clean skin. Of fresh nail polish and old carpet. She smelt cheese ripening in the sun and bread crusts. She remembered love.

Alice knew that no-one else noticed Lee, with hair the colour of dishwater and big brown eyes like a pathetic puppy. Alice liked that Lee was so invisible. It meant Lee was all hers. That she wouldn’t leave.

“I had a heart murmer when I was a baby,” Lee whispered proudly, “it didn’t beat right,” like it was a wonderful secret. Alice looked at her thin chest as if she could see through the second-hand clothes to Lee’s heart. As if she could see what hadn’t worked properly.

At night, when Alice was in bed, she listened to her own heart, its strong beat in her ears, going quicker if she thought about it too hard, until she got scared that she might faint, like a jogger who had run too far. She wondered if her heart didn’t work properly and that was why it hurt so much.

New Mummy tried to hug her, but Alice pulled back from her thin, sharp body. Real Mummy had always been soft, but Alice couldn’t say this. Who would she say it to? She had a different home, a different family. But her heart, caged in her chest, was still the same.

Cate Austin is here. I prefer her seeing me in my own home. Like a cat, I can adapt, but only within limits. At St Therese’s I was a singular, exotic flower amid rubble, but here I’m dominant. It’s better this way. I know she hopes to find the crack in the glass; she needs to make a breakthrough if her report is to have substance. She understands the weight of the questions she asks, but carries on asking, picking over old scabs to see if they bleed. She wants to know if I’m so very different from her.

“Alice, are you clear on why the case was adjourned?” I hate it when she talks to me like this, as if I’m a fool. “More time was needed to see if the drugs can keep me stable since, apparently, I wasn’t stable a few weeks ago. If I can’t cope in the community, a hospital order will have to be considered, and that takes time to assess.”

“Well, that’s one reason. But, I needed more time too, Alice.”

“You’re still not sure what to propose?”

“I’m still not sure I’ve heard what I need to know.”

She bites her lip, and I wonder what it is she expects me to say.

“I saw your parents at the courthouse. They looked pretty frail, up in the public gallery. It must be very hard for them. How do they cope with knowing their daughter helped someone to die?”

“I explained it to them, as much as I could,” I say, as if it was a simple thing to be explained. “I did it the day after Smith died. I’d been bailed from the police station. I hadn’t been charged yet. The police hadn’t a clue what to do with me, so I was released and asked to return in a week. I knew I had to talk to my parents before someone else did.”

“Did you tell them the truth?”

“The truth,” I reply carefully, “is always a matter of interpretation.”

As I’ve already said, I didn’t want my parents to find out from gossip or the local papers about Smith’s death, and I knew it was just a matter of time before word got out. After all, nothing much happens in Suffolk, so Smith’s death was bound to cause a stir. I was worried about Mum and Dad. I didn’t want to hurt them. It’s not that I was ashamed, but I knew they wouldn’t understand. How could they? Their lives are so ordinary.

I always visit my parents one evening a week, just for an hour. Dad is usually in the front room, watching TV or reading the daily paper, and Mum will be in the kitchen, bleaching an already immaculate surface or polishing the teak table in the tiny dining room. When I arrive we always go up to my old bedroom, and she sits by the window to smoke. Dad doesn’t approve, so she has to lean out of the window like a disobedient teenager. If she forgets and smoke seeps into the room, she wafts it like mad and sprays some of the floral air freshener she keeps under my bed. It’s a tiny bed, smaller than a single, and Dad made it with a built-in shelf underneath. He’s handy like that, as you’d expect for a woodwork teacher. He’s good with wood, but not so good with people, and when I was at school I was ashamed by how easily the kids bullied him. He should have been a carpenter by rights, working alone in a workshop, but he didn’t have the motivation. Preferred the security of a pension.

In my parents’ house we stick to our own rooms. It was always like that even when I was living with them. For all the dining table is polished daily it’s never used except at Christmas, and when I lived there Mum would bring up breakfast and tea to my bedroom on a tray, after giving Dad an identical one. She never ate much, just leaned against the windowsill talking. I think she was happiest then. I know it was hard for her when I left, with no-one to talk to. With Dad at work all day what has she to do but clean? Not just our home, but other people’s too. She’s good at it, of course.

So when I visited them on the day of Smith’s death, the stench of the police station still on my clothes, my mother insisted on making up my tray, mashed potatoes with a vegetarian cutlet, and a bowl of ice cream, and we sat in my room. Though the blood was no longer on my hands its memory lingered in my senses and I couldn’t eat. I watched her smoking, thinking for the millionth time that she was too skinny and I really should say something. I knew I should have gone straight home: Smith had only been dead for nine hours, and I’d spent most of that time in a cell. I needed to go home and shower, but I couldn’t bear returning to that empty house. Not yet.

“Why don’t you move back here for a few days, love?” Smoke was in the room, but she wasn’t reaching under my bed for the air freshener. That’s how I knew that she’d heard about Smith’s death.