My Sister's Bones(5)

I hear a camera click and its flash illuminates the room. The shock of the light makes me lose my footing and I fall, face down, into the fluid. Looking up, I see a pile of stones, a small shrine amid an ocean of blood, and I crawl towards it, sensing what lies beneath. I feel his heartbeat vibrating beneath my hands and I begin to dig. I am a burrowing animal as I pull away the rubble, clawing at it with my fingernails. Spots of crimson dot the stones and I realize it is coming from my hands though I feel no pain. Then I see him, lying on his back, eyes wide open, arms raised upwards; a baby looking for its mother.

I try not to look at his face as I bend down to pick him up. Behind me, the camera flashes and the boy is illuminated in a harsh white glare. I can’t see him; he is dissolving into the light. Stop it, I cry to the man with the camera, you can’t photograph this, and as my voice echoes against the shattered walls the ground shakes. The boy looks at me, pleadingly, and I try to grab hold of his hand but it slips through my fingers. He is dust and I watch as he returns to the earth. But in the final moments he calls out.

‘Help me!’

It’s the last thing I hear as the camera’s flash blinds me and I blink myself awake.

I am lying crouched on the floor, scraping my nails against the carpet, and though I know that I’m safe, that it was just another nightmare, my mouth still tastes of dust. Hauling myself up from the floor, I see that the room is full of a cold, bluish light. I’d been so tired I’d forgotten to close the curtains.

I go to the window. The sky is clear and cloudless. Such a contrast to the polluted skies I see each night in London. I stand for a moment looking at the moon and the twinkling marine stars and I think of Syria. There, darkness came down fast. Like a guillotine, Chris used to say. And I feel myself disconnect. It seems as though all of that – Syria, London, Chris – is another life, and this life, this town on the edge of the sea, is the only one that exists. I’m no longer a fearless journalist, I’m a scared teenager crouching once more behind the curtains, scared of the nightmares that come when I close my eyes.





3


Herne Bay Police Station

10 hours detained

‘Perhaps we should go back a bit,’ says Dr Shaw, ‘to when you first arrived in Herne Bay.’ She looks down at the paper in front of her. ‘I understand it had been some time since you were last here. What made you return?’

I sit and watch as Shaw crosses and uncrosses her legs, as she sips tea from a polystyrene beaker, wipes the dregs from her mouth and places the cup on the floor beside her feet. The large, oval clock that hangs on the wall behind her head ticks rhythmically as we sit in silence, one pondering the question, the other awaiting its answer. An answer I am sure she already knows.

I will be forty years old in a couple of months and as I sit in this tiny, strip-lit room I see a cake with lemon icing and buttercream filling. I see my mother flitting about in a tiny kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl that is as big as her head. And I see myself, four years old, balancing on the edge of the kitchen counter watching her every move. ‘I want a cake the colour of the sun,’ I had told her. And my mother grants my wish, for after everything we have suffered together she can’t bear to let me down. If I want a sunshine cake then she will make sure I get one.

I hear Shaw clear her throat and I look up, my mother’s face disappearing into the woodchip wall.

‘I fancied a bit of sea air,’ I reply.

Shaw leans forward and takes a cardboard file out of her bag.

‘We’ve spoken to Paul Cheverell,’ she says, taking a piece of paper from the file. ‘He’s your brother-in-law, yes?’

I nod my head. My chest tightens. What has Paul been telling them?

‘He told us that you came back because there’d been a family bereavement,’ she says, reading from her notes. ‘It was your mother, I believe?’

‘Yes.’

I stare at the wall behind Shaw’s head, desperately trying to erase the image of my mother’s grave from my mind, but it’s all I can see.

‘Were you and your mother close?’

I look back at Shaw and tell myself that the sooner I answer her questions the sooner I can get out of here. I shall pretend this is work, that I’m sitting in a meeting room not a police cell, and the subject under discussion is someone else: an abstract mother; a person who doesn’t make cakes or call her daughter ‘lovey’ or cry at Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems. If I imagine this other person and not my real mother then I can get through this.

‘Yes, we were,’ I reply, smiling. Smile at the difficult ones, get them onside.

‘You visited her often?’

‘Not as much as I’d have liked.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Well, my job means I’m not often in the UK for more than a few days at a time, and when I am here it’s non-stop.’

I know how lame it sounds as the words come out but I can’t tell Shaw that I found it all so difficult; that the thought of seeing my beautiful mother in a nursing home, her mind gone, was too much to bear.

‘She was suffering from dementia?’

‘Yes.’

I try to hold on to the image of the abstract figure, the hypothetical mother, but it fractures and I see Mum bending over the kitchen table with a pile of scrap paper, trying to find out where she’d written my aunt’s phone number. Those scraps of paper were her memory, her lifeline, but then she would lose them and get even more confused. At one point I sent her a Dictaphone and I remember her sitting on the sofa trying to work out the buttons, confusion etched on her face. She had no idea what to do with it.