Silent Child(69)

If Peter had been alone for the longest amount of time out of all of them, maybe I couldn’t trust my son’s grandfather after all. I felt sick. I’d felt sick all throughout this process, but especially now. I ran my finger along the rim of the glass and tried to piece everything together. After a few minutes I called Rob, but there was no answer; then I tried Jake but was sent straight to his answering machine.

I got up from the chair and paced around the kitchen. My hands were red-raw from where I’d continued to rub them; hand lotion was doing nothing for me now.

This was all going on far too long. There’s only so much pressure the human mind can take. I was reaching breaking point. I had been ever since that woman keyed my car. I’d been walking along a razor-sharp edge, barely keeping my balance. I just needed to hold on for Aiden. It was strength he needed, not weakness.

I decided to make something. Perhaps using my hands would help. So I went to the kitchen cupboards to take out a loaf of bread and make us both some sandwiches. I highly doubted either of us were hungry, but at least I’d be doing something. That was when I noticed the stack of letters on the end of the kitchen work surface.

We had a letter organiser, but with everything going on, the mail had ended up piling on the edge. Denise and Marcus hadn’t been around as much, so Aiden’s fan mail was going neglected. There were letters from all over the world telling me how sorry they were for what had happened to Aiden—though I also got letters from all over the world telling me I was a terrible mother and that I deserved to go to hell.

What caught my eye was the card from the post office. It was one of those cards that informed you that the incorrect postage had been placed on the letter. I would have ignored it—I didn’t particularly want to pay for postage for another letter of abuse—but the card had the postcode of the sender written on the card. It was local. I put the post code into Google and it came up with the York College of Lifelong Learning. That was where Jake taught art history every Tuesday and Thursday. It was also where I’d requested a prospectus from, to check that Jake actually worked there. The woman on the phone hadn’t known the instructor’s name, only that he’d taken some leave, and the website had only listed the courses, not the names of the tutors.

I’d forgotten all about requesting the brochure, and now it seemed the incompetent woman on reception had underpaid the postage when sending it to me. I snatched up my bag and car keys and hurried through to the next room.

“Get your coat on, Aiden. We’re going to the post office.”





35


Though there were dark clouds hovering above, the temperature remained unseasonably warm for October. As I drove through the narrow streets of Bishoptown village, I sweated in the thick jumper I’d worn over elasticated jeans. Aiden sat quietly next to me with his hands on his lap. Between us, 90s pop blasted out of the radio. I didn’t ramble to Aiden like I used to. There was a pile of letters addressed to him in the drawer of the desk in the bedroom, but as far as us chatting went… it didn’t.

When I think about this part of the ordeal, this moment in the crazy weeks that led up to my second child’s birth, I wonder whether I’d lost hope. I think about it like that in a way to challenge myself and who I believe I am. Did I give up on Aiden? Perhaps I did, however briefly. Sometimes I think that giving up on a victim is unforgivable. Other times I consider the term ‘lost cause’ with more weight than I used to.

Since Aiden’s reappearance, I’d avoided the post office. It was run, as all post offices seem to be, by middle-aged women and men so camp they’d fill the stereotype quota on a sitcom. In Bishoptown, though, I knew the names of all the post office workers. There was Sandra, with a son at Cambridge University. Everyone in the whole village knew Sandra’s son was at Cambridge, bless her proud mother’s heart. And Sam—a young guy in his twenties—who once gave me a recommendation for a good beautician to sort my eyebrows out. I hadn’t experienced that level of passive-aggressive criticism since my mother was alive, but I took the damn number anyway. The two of them called themselves collectively ‘San-Sam’ as though they were two celebrities who had married and thus merged their personas into one behemoth of infamy.

Though San-Sam were kind at heart and generally pleasant, up until this point I had always sent Denise to the post office to sort out the mail, partly because the police were worried about any unpleasant hate mail, and partly because I knew they’d fuss over me and I wasn’t sure if I could cope with that. However, I soon realised that I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I stepped into the post office with Aiden next to me, the place went deathly silent.

I joined the back of the queue and tried to pretend that I hadn’t noticed how the usual chatter of the shop had ceased as soon as I’d walked in. The stuffiness of the small shop made me sweat even more, and I felt a trickle run down my temple. I wiped it away with the sleeve of my jumper and hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long. San-Sam were both at the counter, serving a customer each. I was third in the queue behind two OAPs I didn’t recognise. If there was ever a group of people who were forgotten about in Bishoptown, it was the elderly. They rarely left the house, but when they did, it was as a pack. Strength in numbers. Unfortunately for them, we tended not to really see them unless they were in the way, like they were today. It was sad, and it was something I was aware of, but I had too much on my plate to worry about it any further at that time.