Good Me Bad Me(68)

Do I?

I fall asleep fast, two nights without does that, it forces your eyes closed, takes you to places you don’t want to go. A little boy at the end of my bed, eyes wide and frightened. I can’t breathe, he says, I can’t breathe.





Up eight. Up another four.


The door on the right.


I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth.

And nothing but the truth.

This, along with the birthday plans you had for me, is the other reason I left when I did.

You were at work, I was alone in the house, not through the peephole but inside the room.

A spare key, I knew where you hid it.

His tiny body curled up on the bed, in the corner.

He stirred as I came in, I closed the door behind me.

Skin pale, a lack of fresh air. Black circles under his eyes, he asked for his mummy. Yes. You’ll see her soon, I told him.

His brown eyes, wet with relief.

I held him close to my body, warmed his blood through.

Your voice in my head, the things you said to his mummy so she would give him to you.

What if your husband comes after you, Susie? What if he hurts your son? Worse even. I have a contact in America who works in adoption.

A loving family awaits, a better life for Daniel.

Tell no one.

I gave him a teddy to hold, one of mine, name sewn in the ear.

Close your eyes, I told him, make a wish. I held him tight through the worst, as the air left his lungs.

As I suffocated him.

You were outside the room when I opened the door, back earlier than expected, your turn to watch through the peephole.

You looked at me in a way I hadn’t seen before.

That’s my girl, you said. Proud.

I never told you, Mummy, that I did it to save him.

Not to please you.

When I said I told the police everything, almost everything.

I meant it.





29


It was the way she said it yesterday, when we’d finished Sunday brunch with Mike and Saskia and we were going up to our bedrooms. So how was your little procedure anyway, she asked, what actually was it? It was fine thanks but I’d rather not talk about it. She smiled, nodded, said, must be difficult for you, not being able to talk about things, lots of things. The emphasis on ‘lots’. An uneasy feeling, a seed planted in my stomach. Pandora’s Box being nudged open. She knows. What does she know? How can she? Mike and me have been so careful, haven’t we?

Today is the last day to enter our portfolios for the art prize, the winner is to be announced next week. The first thing I do when I get to school this morning is send MK an email. We arrange to meet at the end of the day and when I arrive she tells me I’m a little behind.

‘The other entrants finished last week, while you were … away.’

I don’t want to be paranoid but it was the pause, the gap she left before finishing her sentence, as if she harbours doubt as to where I was, what I was doing. Imagining it, I must be, just as I am with Phoebe. Surely.

‘Why don’t you lay out all of your sketches in the order you did them and we’ll whittle them down to the five you need.’

As I lay out the sketches of you I think of the trial still going on, you sat in a chair, handcuffed, facing life in prison, no contact with me. You don’t cope well with loss. Losing Luke changed everything, your desires turned darker, more fatal. You got bored of it just being me and you, took Jayden, the first boy, less than a year after Luke left. Love is a lubricant and, though it was warped, you got it from us. Who will you get it from now? You might make the woman in the cell next to yours swallow her tongue. There’s always possibilities you said, opportunities for mischief.

MK’s voice interrupts my thoughts.

‘Wow, when they’re laid out like that you can really see.’

‘Really see what?’ I ask her.

‘The journey, as if each one’s a piece in a puzzle.’

Then she asks me something strange.

‘Are you feeling more secure now you’re staying with the Newmonts?’

The sketches are heavily disguised, face smudged, eyes a different colour from yours. It’s not possible to recognize the subject, I’m certain.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

She shakes her head and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’d go with those two for definite, that one at the end, and you choose the other two, perhaps some that demonstrate a real depth of shading.’

Somebody says goodnight as they pass the door. MK says, hang on, Janet, is that you? But the corridor door opens and closes again, she can’t have heard.

‘Give me a second,’ she says. ‘I need to catch her about something.’

The room feels empty, less appealing, when she leaves. I choose the last two sketches, find myself walking over to her desk, her diary, open. A Post-it note – order more clay. Her writing’s glorious, all loop di loops. Loving. The y in the word clay is drawn long, wraps round the other letters, an inky hug. A thick piece of card is sticking out of the back page of the diary. Cream. Gold calligraphy on the front. I slide it out. A wedding invitation, names I don’t know, but it’s not the names that interest me it’s something else, the envelope behind the invite. I turn it over, an address, an address for MK. I know where her road is, I’ve walked along it with Morgan. I replace both the card and the envelope, hear the door at the end of the corridor open and walk back to my sketches.